Lovesong, page 1
By the same author
FOR ADULTS
Vainglory (1991)
Fires' Astonishment (1990)
The Maypole (1989)
FOR CHILDREN
Plundering Paradise (1996)
Gold Dust (1993)
A Pack of Lies (1988)
A Little Lower than the Angels (1987)
Lovesong © 1996 Geraldine McCaughrean
First published in Great Britain in 1996 by Richard Cohen Books.
Published in 2017 by Romaunce Books.
Geraldine McCaughrean has asserted her right under the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Romaunce Books
This book is a work of fiction and except in the case of historical fact any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover, other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN: 978-1-86151-580-3
For John with my love
Contents
PART ONE Two Masters
1 Two Knights
2 Languedoc
3 Juec d'Amour
4 The Conversion of the Heathen
5 Empty Handed Jugglers
6 A Married Man
7 Ida
8 The Lie
9 Jerusalem
10 Treachery
11 The Queen of Hearts
12 Ascesis
13 The Embrace
14 Adultery
15 Trial of Love
16 To Hold and to Have
17 Bridegrooms
18 Trial of Strength
19 Master of the Man
Transition
PART TWO The Liar's Daughter
20 Princess of the Harem
21 La Belle Aude
22 The Clap-Net
23 The Crystalline Cave
24 The Assais
25 Barral in the Dark
26 Ordeal
27 Transported to Hell
28 Ships of the Desert
29 In the Hejaz
30 The Enemy
31 Godsends
32 Engines of War
33 A Love Returned
34 Perfect
35 The Endura
36 Newness of Life
37 Telling the Truth
Aftermath
Glossary
PART ONE
Two Masters
I love because I live, I live in order to love.
Saint Bernard
CHAPTER ONE
Two Knights
Amaury of Herm arrived like the End of the World: a thing much talked of but, in the event, beyond all expectation. He and his entourage swept into the Castle of Lilies in a dazzle of chased armour. A dozen tourney lances standing in the stirrups of his squires flew white pennons – a bird, a cross, a lion couchant embroidered on them in wire. His troubadours came behind on foot, playing harp, trumpet, cymbals, bagpipes and rebeck. Gitterns and gigues, an organistrum and a Spanish penola, fiddles and viols, psaltery and rote were all borne on a litter by two pages, pillowed on cushions, like women, against the jarring.
‘Are you sad? Are you sick in soul or body? Then make way for a sobiran trobar – doctor of the Gay Science! Make way for Sir Amaury of Herm, knight-troubadour and bringer of a cup of comfort! Drink deep, good people, and let your sorrows be salved! His elixir is music and his cup is song! Make way for Sir Amaury of Herm!’
‘Out of a tedious landscape of unmoving trees and monotonous silence, this flourish of colour and noise and extravagance burst like sheet-lightning. It had gathered a following of astounded peasants. It set the dogs barking and the horses cantering in the fields. Everything was light – white metal reflecting white banners; white horses with oyster saddlecloths scallop-edged; white dustclouds trailing in the road way. Amaury also arrived at four o’clock, out of a low sun: a man capable of making stage scenery out of the cosmos.
Across the neglected gardens with their sea of blown flowers, the noise reached Oriole the jongleur. It reached his master, too, whispering, eyes closed, on his knees; Sir Jocelyn flinched like a sleeping dog.
For four months he and Oriole, the boy who sang his poetry, had knelt in the garden of the Castle of Lilies, praying and singing at the tomb of a lady. The lady was Jocelyn’s lost love, his perfect, chaste, irreplaceable inspiration, his beloved. And the aim was to raise her to life again through sheer persistence of prayer.
A thrilling plan, but highly monotonous in practice. Prayer after plahn, day in, day out, come rain, come sun, come fatigue, come boredom, Sir Jocelyn and Oriole had prayed. Now, the noise from the roadway.
The newly arrived knight was conducted through the house by the dead girl’s mother, to the garden where its resident knight troubadour knelt beside a painted wooden sepulchre. When he reached it, Amaury fell on his knees and kissed the effigy of the dead Lily. Jocelyn, who had just risen to his feet, was left to wait a minute, two minutes before the newcomer stood up and embraced him. Finally Amaury held his brother troubadour at arm’s length and searched his face for signs of transfiguration. ‘Dear saint,’ he whispered, and clasped Jocelyn again to his metallic breast.
‘These men have bigger souls than me,’ thought Oriole.
‘And was she very fair, your mistress?’
‘Never one fairer,’ said Jocelyn.
‘And do you truly mean to raise her from the dead with a million prayers?’
‘If God will grant them.’ But Jocelyn looked jangled and uneasy. Amaury’s jongleurs had spread out to encircle the grave, jostling him and his boy. One was a giant over six feet tall; one had no arm below his left elbow, another no eye to fill the right socket. One had a hare lip and one – most fearful of all – was a Spanish female as black as Unbelief Beside them, naturally, Sir Amaury looked handsome.
‘Friend, I beg you,’ said Amaury, ‘let me hear you sing a plaint to your dear, dead domna!’
A childlike happiness lit Jocelyn’s face and he thanked Amaury repeatedly and allowed himself to be led indoors.
The house had been a present from Jocelyn to Lily and her family a token of his love. But since the girl’s death, Lily’s mother had rather sickened of Sir Jocelyn maundering on in the back garden. She had used up her own stores of grief weeks before, and found the dismal tableau around the girl’s grave slightly embarrassing and excessive. One only had to look at the splendid Sir Amaury to see that the once immaculate Sir Jocelyn had let himself go. He had grown shabby during his graveside vigil. There were stains on his clothing, and laces and fastenings which hung by a thread. His knees were muddy and his hair needed cutting. Amaury, by contrast, was without speck. His coppery hair sprang from two distinct crowns so that it swirled about his big skull like not one Caesar’s crown but two, and he had thrown his cloak back over his shoulder to hang like couched wings down behind.
The boy Oriole was following both knights into the house, when one of Herm’s men tripped him from behind. ‘Was she worth it?’ he asked. Two more closed in and jostled him between them. ‘Well, was she?’ demanded One Eye.
‘Was she what?’
‘You know! Giving! Did she grant him the Last Favour!’
It sounded civil enough. Oriole would like to have understood the question well enough to answer it. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said helpfully. ‘She didn’t give him much happiness. Well, she couldn’t she was dead so soon.’
‘Didn’t give out? Don’t say much for your man, does it? … Good to look at, was she?’
‘As beautiful as the crescent moon full of stars,’ said Oriole reflexly. It troubled him, in fact, that he could recall nothing beautiful at all about Lily, only a thin, brown, hollow eyed child with sloping collar bones and no breasts.
‘He good, your man? Truly?’ said the black girl. Oriole closed his eyes and told the truth as he knew it. ‘He’s a saint. Like your master said’.
One eye looked him up and down. ‘A saint, eh? That must be a stone in the plum’.
‘He prays and fasts, and he can go about naked in the snow and wear furs all summer! And he gives and gives and gives…!’
‘Not to the likes of us, I’ll bet,’ said One eye.
‘He gave me this coat and a horse and a rote just for singing!’ They stared at him, incredulous. For a moment, they were silenced.
‘So he’ll do it then, will he? Raise her up? Bring her back to life?’ They sneered as they said it.
‘Of course he’ll do it! My master can do anything!’ And Oriole ran on ahead, giddy with pride, wanting to cut himself off from their jeering disbelief, wanting to recover the marvellous simplicity of his daily routine.
***
That evening the great hall of the Castle of Lilies was awash with jongleurs, cluttered with musical instruments and property chests. A pot of flowers had been placed on Lily’s empty chair, and in the heat from the oil lamp nearby grew equally brown and round shouldered as the hours wore on. While the meal was in progress, Sir Amaury’s jongleurs performed tricks balancing acts and juggling with plates, tumbling and conjuring. It was all a wonder to Oriole. He stared with wide, round eyes.
Given into the Church by devout, unsentimenta
It was the Moor who gripped Oriole’s imagination tightest: a heathen burned black for her sins by a bigger, hotter sun than God had set over the heads of honest Frenchmen. There were those big white teeth, those pink soled feet. That evening the girl wore a garment like a nun’s habit, but with her wild, woolly, luxuriant hair unfastened, and lips as swollen as bruises. It was not so much what she did but the way she made him feel which made Oriole so afraid of her.
Clearly there were two breeds of jongleur: those trained up, like him, by a virtuous, pious knight, and these others dogs held in check by a different manner of man altogether. Oriole began to taste the sin in the air, oily like the black smoke from the lamps and candles, and shut his lips tight against it so that he looked prim and womanish.
After dinner, Jocelyn began, white faced, to sing a plahn of his to the dead Lily. It was a great while since he had sung. He had been fasting to increase the efficacy of his prayers, and his mental acuity was blunted by the diet of water and crushed beans. He faltered once or twice, then found a pea still lurking in his mouth from dinner and in trying to be rid of it, set himself coughing.
So, like King David reaching for his harp, he reached for Oriole, his jongleur, his songbird. ‘You know my plahn, don’t you, boy?
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Sing it, then, to the glory of my lady.’
Oriole sang. He was proud to sing. A mixture of fright and pride tightened his vocal cords and piped out the music in creamy whorls of sensuous purity. He believed Foicelles’ lament to be marvellous, a work of genius.
Amaury listened with one elbow resting on the arm of his chair and his face covered by his hand. At one point the boy looked across and saw that the fingers were parted and the eyes open, watching him, watching, watching, looking out. It made Oriole’s stomach lurch. The room was so full of people that he felt his music soaked up and deadened by their bulk. By the time he finished, his throat ached with the strain.
Now Amaury got up and moved slowly down the room. His rich clothing swayed on him like the hay on a great wain-cart. His eyes were a soft, swelling green across which his lids never encroached, and his beard entirely hid his mouth. He came and lifted up Oriole bodily, as high as his arms would reach. He suspended him there, as a sheep farmer suspends a new born lamb to check its weight, its meat, its hips; then he set him down again without a word and knelt down on one knee in front of Sir Jocelyn.
‘Sir. Today you have made a man fall in love, through sheer example, with a woman he has never seen.’ Amaury had no difficulty in making his voice carry.
Sir Jocelyn made no attempt to hide his delight. ‘My boy Oriole flatters a poor song,’ he began self-effacingly.
I all the while distributing gold coins among every servant and jongleur in the room. ‘But now you must give the assembly a taste of your poetry, sir. Far better than mine, I’m sure!
Amaury tossed his big head on its short, muscular neck, laughing, protesting. ‘God forbid I insult the lady’s memory with my humble efforts when God knows! She may walk through that door, raised to perfection at any moment … Oh very well, since you insist … A song, then! To your ladylove! To the divine Lily!’ Amaury’s crew took their places, as though they could sense what was required of them. Or had been rehearsed.
He’s churning out some old thing he’s used before, thought Oriole, feeling grownup in his cynicism. But Amaury’s plahn was not some second hand, all-purpose funeral dirge.
It began in the dark – small and unpromising, like the seed of a mustard tree, then grew towards the light, doubling and redoubling, reaching out in questions, balancing the questions with answers. All the while images flocked to its branches as varied and colourful as the birds of the air. Then outdoor imagery gave way to a bed, and a dark place under blankets … there were breasts and hands and tongues and knees all rising soft as smoke out of the angular skeleton of a bonfire. There was a crusade of lances rising in the cause of Love, troop upon troop, until God, moved to pity, raised not one but all the Dead to life. There were stars and planets, spangling with sweat the union of sky and earth, Living and Dead.
His voice was nothing – as rough and brown as unplanted timber – and he made little attempt at singing, merely spoke in time with the music. And while he spoke, his jongleurs performed a dumb show graceful, with movements akin to dancing accelerating at the same pace as the verse, into something strenuous, inciting, immodest. The anachronism of the voluptuous Moor with her big breasts and thick, glossy wealth of hair representing the thin, sickly Lily shocked and enthralled Oriole. He could not look away.
That a man could hold such pictures in his head! thought Oriole. That he should make his fellow knight look so small and talentless, and smile as he did it! It was astounding. It was monstrous.
But Sir Jocelyn displayed no resentment. Unthinkable that a man of honour should entertain such a mean emotion. Instead, he danced about Sir Amaury, thanking him. He vowed Lily would rise all the sooner thanks to Amaury’s song. He enlisted the girl’s mother to help heap praise on Sir Amaury. He said the debt was unrepayable. ‘In fact you must let me make some paltry token of my admiration. You must have my castles at Pontdoux and that one at Toit-Tourtelle … No, no, don’t argue! Besides, what does a knight-errant like me need with more than one house? All I need is a roof to keep off the rain while I relearn my art. To think that the Gay Science has advanced so much while I’ve been at my devotions!’
And all the time he deflated, like a pricked bladder. What God would incline His ear to the chants of a Jocelyn de Foicelles when He could hear the like of Amaury of Herm? Oriole watched his master wilt like a spent daffodil: still gaudy in his yellow troubadour splendour, but shrivelled, shineless, dead.
‘Your song was a feast to the senses,’ said Amaury, dismissing his own as something nothing, a bauble. ‘And what a singer! Such a soprano! What an asset! What I’d give to have my songs sung by a voice like that!
‘My Oriole, yes. He’s a good boy. My Oriole. God’s given him a good voice.’ So plain. So stark. So functional. Foicelles laid the words down as if they were the last coins in his purse and small and worthless. ‘You must have him too. Of course. It stands to reason.’
Have him? Like a coat, or a cat or a kindness?
Oriole heard the words, but he did not believe them. To be given away? To be thrown like a ball into that rabble of fearful strangers? Better to return to the cloister and the choir stall except that it was too late: he had become a jongleur, and the gates of Mother Church were shut against his kind.
‘He won’t take all those things you offered, will he, sir?’ he said, holding a corner of Sir Jocelyn’s half cloak as they both stood and stared at the painted booth in the garden. Oriole would have stood by such a man for ever, rote in hand and ribbons blowing. ‘You only offered out of courtesy, didn’t you? I mean, it was only offered in chivalry? Sir Amaury won’t take any of it! Your castles. Me.’
‘Jocelyn was powerless to stop looking at the tomb, turn away his eyes, powerless to tear away his life from this one spot. ‘The substance is, you see, boy – I’m mad. Well, that’s what happens, often. Plenty cases documented. A knight’s lady dies and he runs mad. His wits can’t hold together, you see.’
‘But you’re not mad, sir! I used to think so sometimes – when you did wild things. Took off your armour in the tourney. Rode around half naked in the snow. But now I understand better. And what about your lady? I mean, what will the Lady Lily say when she rises up again and you’ve got no soprano to sing for her? And who’s going to bandage your hand?’
