Lovesong, page 9
He half-ran, half-threw himself at the ungainly animal, flung himself full length across the broken saddle and sank his fingers and teeth in the mane. So when the horse found its feet again, Oriole was astride it. It hardly seemed an advantage, but his only thought was to be up off the ground, up out of the dead and the caking earth. Now, not just green cactus heads were pushing up from the ground, but handfuls of fingers and facefuls of eyes. Hell’s magma was welling up red through the soil.
The ground receded to an immense distance. The destrier stood twenty hands high – so tall that there was an illusion of being separate from events below him, superior to them. But with his legs stretched like a wishbone to breaking point by the huge girth and his brain jarred by the clumsy gait, he had no control. The horse took him back the way he had come, blundering through spinneys of unclaimed lances, cutting through Gordian knots of infantry, prancing sideways without the least regard for what was underfoot. Its head sawed up and down, up and down, so that the reins wrenched on Oriole’s arms as the rope had done. Stupid for its safety, it plunged down into the river and raised a curtain of drenching spray, a bow-wave that set the corpses in the river rolling over and over.
No sooner was the horse out of its depth than it recollected its honour. For it seemed to want to turn back for the shore rather than drift aimlessly on the current. The light on the water was all knives, cutting Oriole’s vision to shreds as he looked about him for a bolt hole. He could see the selfsame willow which had stood near Ida’s tent. Or perhaps it was another, for only the trees remained stationary while the two armies heaved to and fro beneath them.
Archers began shooting at him. What? Did they suppose, because he was on horseback, that he warranted costly arrows fletched from coloured birds? They hummed through the air like rare breeds; they sped through the water like lampreys. He wanted to stand up on his saddle and show himself for what he was – not worth the expense of a rusty penknife. But he could not see the archers who had him in their sights: the river was too bright. All he could see was the green willow tree, hunched over the water, hunched perhaps over the Lady Ida.
He ought to return to her. In loco Foicelles, he ought to go to her aid. But it was the notion of hiding among those dense green leaves that in fact made him desert his horse and flounder neck-deep towards the shore, spitting and gasping and sobbing for breath, just touching bottom with his toes, just staying upright by snatching at desperate handfuls of water. He tiptoed across the slimy river. What things were in the water? What unholy leeches, contagions or monsters? What venomous snakes or tentacled plants hungry for Christian blood? By the time he reached the shallows, even the willow leaves were green fingers in the water congealing onto his skin. He would have scrabbled up on to the bank and shaken himself like a dog if the bank had not been busy with the traffic of war. Instead he crouched in waist-deep water, the fingering willow dangling round his shoulders and his head entirely still.
The Lady Ida stood a short way off, against the trunk of the tree. She too had crawled there, hoping that its tent of shadow and leaves would hide her from the Turks. But as each paroxysm of battle sent men running by, then horses in pursuit of them, they brushed off leaves. A glint of sun on metal and a seldjuk turned aside to make the kill. Oriole saw it all.
She stood so close to the willow, her long wet hair stuck to its bark, her forearms and calves dark brown with mud, that she looked like a nymph half-translated into tree. The rider paused to adjust his eyes to the shade, his mind to the novelty. He was not in mail or armour, simply baggy, dirty clothing and sandals, his head bound up in a turban, a square or two of hide strapped on for protection.
‘Ich bin ein frau!’ she screamed at him. And she drew her sword – her silly imitation of a sword, with hollow tin blade – and threw it aside into the river. Though the splash entered his eyes, Oriole did not move. ‘Ich bin ein frau!’ she shrieked and ripped open her wadding to show her breasts.
The seldjuk reached back and drew from his saddle a stout little throwing spear. He drove it in, underarm, just below her sternum, urging his horse forward until its wagging nose was nudging Ida’s face. Until then, her wet hair clinging to the bark held her head upright. But now it lolled forward, as if to inspect the wound in her stomach.
The Turk was unable to withdraw his spear: it had sunk too deep into the willow’s trunk. He dismounted rather than give it up. Besides, a mail byrnys was too valuable a prize to forego. He grunted slightly as he struggled to peel it down over the dead woman’s hips.
‘She was a woman! She told you she was a woman!’ yelled Oriole, bringing the tin sword down repeatedly on the back of the seldjuk’s neck. First it bent, finally it snapped in two, but he went on driving the broken end in, between hide and turban, until he had no more breath. The river water in his clothes ran down, trickled down, soaked down his body from head to foot, and made his boots too heavy to lift. He knew that he was as brown as an Infidel, silt-blackened and smelling of slime.
After the tide of battle had swept by, drowned half the German army, and shifted ground, Oriole climbed down from his hiding place in the topmost branches of the willow. He took the boots off the seldjuk he had killed and set them down beside the Lady Ida. He could not think of any other tribute. He might have sung one of Jocelyn’s lovesongs, but the words, when he looked, had entirely gone from his head.
Plague or camp fever could have achieved the same as the Turks. There was no outrage of grief, no puzzlement at the slaughter. There was maybe just the smallest surprise that God, having bothered to summon so many men to take up the Cross, should not have even let them get as far as the Holy Lands. First the landslide, then the massacre. And they were barely into Outremer. Perhaps God, like the French, hated Germans.
The two armies rejoined back at Nicaea and set off again taking the more cautious coastal route. The remnants of the Germans (nine-tenths were dead) fell in behind and were jeered and denied rations by the Franks and Alsatians who wagged obscene gestures and shouted, ‘Fuck the Germans,’ all the way to Ephesus.
So the French knight, driving his horse against the flow of traffic, through the limping German ranks, was cursed and grabbed at, and his boots spat on. But Sir Jocelyn was oblivious to all but his panic. He asked after the Lord Uc but no one could give him a civil answer. He asked after his jongleur, but what was one jongleur among seven thousand dead? Jocelyn’s unshaven head, his pink livery, his unbloodied sword all invited derision, but he only pushed on through them, his grey taking reprisals with its big, shag-hocked hooves.
Oriole saw him coming long before he was himself seen. He saw the grey bumping and boring its way towards him. But Oriole did not immediately wave his livery over his head and shout.
What news had he got that Jocelyn could possibly want to hear? Ida’s death and the manner of it? Oriole was a go-between now from beyond the grave, and he knew just what gratitude he would get for delivering such news.
‘And what did you do? What was your part in my lady’s death?’
‘I stood in the water up to my neck and watched her stuck like a pig.’
It would not do. It would not do at all. After making up his mind to that, Oriole pulled off his liveried tabard and raised it aloft on a borrowed spear. The dirty Foicelles escutcheon was barely recognisable, flagging down its owner.
Sir Jocelyn de Foicelles kicked off his stirrups, leapt off his horse and caught up his jongleur in his arms. Onlookers assumed it was father and child, but had they had the interest to look closer they would have seen barely six years between the two. ‘Tell me! Tell me, boy! Tell me! Is she here? Is she safe? Have you seen her? Did she come through?’
‘No, sir.’
‘You mean you haven’t seen her! Did she split off with the pilgrims, then? Did she go the safe route with Freisingen?’
What a temptation there was in that! To say that she might be safe, and postpone the sorrow.
‘No, sir. She didn’t go with the pilgrims.’
They stood in the lee of the mare, the moving stream of survivors parting and passing by to either side. They were not barged or buffeted. There was a strange stillness in that slack water behind the horse.
‘What then? Is she gone? Have I lost her? Has God taken her?’ The hard rim of his open mouth trembled as he lifted his wilting forelock of hair over and over and over again. He lifted his face towards the sky as though he were below water, a drowning man without hope of swimming up to gasp another breath. The tears poured down his cheeks: a phenomenon of tears so sudden and free-flowing as to rouse thoughts of miraculous springs. With unprecedented presumption, Oriole took hold of Jocelyn’s face between two hands and looked him in the eye.
‘Yes, master. She’s gone. She’s lost to you … But in such a way! The angels will stoop like eagles to scavenge for tokens of her.’ He had decided on the nature of his lie.
‘The last time I saw her she was unhorsed, twelve lances all broken and her mare’s heart burst with the vigour of the fight. But she’d found herself a high place – a rock – a kind of bluff. And with none behind and her buckler in front, nor archer nor horseman could find a mark. Still, there was no escape. Around her was a sea of sabres slicing through the sunbeams till the place was black as night. And only she the moon. All white. Her sword made of some stuff – I never saw the like – for though it must have carved through fifty heads of hair and pierced a half-hundred hearts, there wasn’t a shred of gore to show for it. They thought they were seeing a knight, or the ghost of a knight.
‘Over the heads of the cavalry she saw one rider, taller than the rest, and all in black. We all saw him. Afterwards I heard his kingdom was a thousand miles of desert sand in Egypt. I heard the title – “sheik” – but as for the name, well, I was at such a distance…’
‘Go on,’ said Sir Jocelyn. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor of his Ephesian billet, while his jongleur stood balanced precariously on the sill of the window to illustrate the last plight of the Lady of Bamberg. Here was no private lie; no lie made in confidence between consenting friends. The knights of King Louis were crammed into some long, dormitory cavern: the kind of place Saint Paul might well have used to harangue unbelievers. The large audience both terrified and incited Oriole to greater extravagancies.
‘When they saw him, this sheik, a kind of quiet settled – like when a king enters court. And when she saw him, it was as though a dart of lightning passed from her eye and rocked him in his saddle. She threw her sword high in the air and I swear every eye was fixed on it! She whirled it by its hilt till she was nothing but a blaze of light, like Catherine on her fiery wheel! Then she cast it aside, saying no man should take it from her … No! Didn’t hear. I saw her lips move. But I swear my soul was in such thrall to her that I read the words in her face.’
Sir Jocelyn nodded. He too was able to read the words on the lips of the lady besieged, even though the distance between them was ever so far. The other knights, sitting on their cloaks, their faces occasionally turning away, might not have quite such vision, but they were listening, none the less.
‘When he saw her show-of-arms, I swear the sheik was so filled with the passion of envy that he swore no one but he should despatch the knight on the bluff. And the ranks parted for him – like Moses through the Red Sea – and he levelled a lance and he kicked up his horse to a charge!’
Sir Jocelyn threw himself full length on the floor, his forehead on the tiles.
‘That was when she did it. Unmanned a thousand men. For she opened her doublet and showed them her breasts – white as the milk within, with nipples as pink as her livery. A thousand men caught their breath and cried out – they had not realised it before – ‘This is a woman!’
Oriole sank down on the edge of the sill, crouching with his knees round his ears and his hands outstretched. Foicelles’ face emerged from the rushes. The rest of the room held utterly still.
‘Then the black lance shattered against the rock at her feet and splintered into a thousand pieces. And the sheik said, “This woman’s death would be burning of Baby Ion’s gardens! The fall of the Alhambra! This woman I must have, to breed me a race of heroes and to seer my body like the sands at noon. These breasts shall be my pillows and I shall give my sword into her keeping!” Then he pulled her down and had her covered with a veil, and swore an oath that none but he and the eunuchs of his harem should ever glimpse her again.’
Oriole counted to ten. Then he counted to ten again. He was a musician, after all, and instinct told him how many bars of rest should separate crescendo from coda.
‘So. The lady is gone into the harem of the Black Sheik. Naked forever, and forever forced to yield the secrets of her body to a blood soaked infidel,’ said Oriole.
Foicelles began to retch, quietly and restrainedly at first so that a boy was able to run for a basin – then with greater and greater momentum, ignoring the boy and the basin because he was unwilling to take his eye off Oriole.
‘Ah, but the secret of her heart – that’s different. There are grilles raised up around that which the sheik will never break down – not though he live to be as old as Abraham and father whole tribes on her!’
The boy brought a hot wet cloth, and Foicelles buried his face in it and wiped and wiped until it seemed he would wash away all his features. When he looked up at last there was a rosy redness to his cheeks and he looked healthier than he had for years. His voice was level, too, and calm. ‘What were the secrets in her heart, Oriole? Did she trust them to you? Was I there among them? Or did I come too late?’
Oriole counted to ten, to twenty, this time to thirty, taking the tempo from his own heartbeat. ‘Oh, you were there, sir. Between her honour and her Lord. Like Christ on the mountainside. Transfigured by Love.’ He slipped down off the sill and received Foicelles’ embrace like Thomas embracing the risen Christ after all shreds of doubt had been dispelled. The unbearable was made bearable. She who had been dead was alive again. Oriole had bound up the broken-hearted.
And how was the Lady Ida any the worse off for that?
Then, at the rear of the room, a pair of hands began to clap – such explosive, resounding cracks that Oriole flinched from the noise before he flinched from the implication: sardonic, mocking, derisive applause, like axe blows to the foundations of his story.
Heads turned in the direction of the noise. Oriole searched for it, scanned and scoured the sea of faces. By the time he actually picked out the red hair, the bristling beard, the green eyes, Oriole had already guessed that it was Amaury of Herm. Amaury winked at him, grinned broadly and called out, ‘A tale well told. Bravo. Bravissimo! I wish I’d kept you with me now, to tell me stories on a winter’s night.’
Oriole looked between the two knights – Jocelyn weeping into his shirtsleeves, propped against the wall; Amaury, smug, complacent, pitiless. There was a faint hope that Foicelles would be too grief-stricken to hear the implication of lying.
‘Seems I lost myself a talented raconteur when I let you go, Songbird. Any chance I can buy him back, Foicelles? I know I’d be forcing my luck to hope you’d give me the same gift twice over – or do all your gifts home like pigeons?’
‘You cast me off, sir!’ protested Oriole, though it felt futile: to defend the truth having just perverted it.
‘What are you saying, sir?’ Jocelyn emerged slowly from his cocoon. ‘That you have claims on my minstrel?’
‘Don’t listen to him, sir! Don’t listen. He’s joking. He’s always joking!’
Amaury seemed to toy with the idea of staking a claim to the jongleur, then to toss it aside in a surfeit of ennui. ‘No, no. Oriole and I parted good friends, didn’t we, Songbird? Well, I even found him a jolly little black wife out of my household to keep him … company. How is she these days? Karima. Kardoma.’
‘Kadija, sir. A good Christian, sir and a varied talent. Thrifty, too.’
Amaury broke off from what he had been going to say and looked at Peter Oriole with genuine astonishment. He had never for a moment imagined it persisting – that pantomime marriage mounted for the sake of an afternoon’s laughter. It seemed to inspire a kind of admiration … and thus to remind him and bring him full circle to the reason for his applause. ‘Well, Songbird, if you ever tire of that flamingo livery, I’ve always got room for a man who can tell a fine fiction. You put a shine on that piece of tin, you truly did.’
Jocelyn’s mailed fist shot out and rapped him on the breastplate. Amaury looked down and let his eyes connect the blow incredulously with the three-pronged hand. ‘Come in?’ he said, condescending.
‘Have a care, sir. You’re on dangerous ground.’
‘Am I?’ said Amaury ingenuously. ‘Oh, then I must find myself a lady crusader to frighten off my foe by baring her breasts.’
‘I warn you, sir!’ Jocelyn’s was the reflex fury of a man already on the edge of hysteria. But Oriole felt only a howling, uncomprehending bewilderment: that anyone could be so wicked, so devoid of pity, so lacking in brotherhood towards a stricken knight! That anyone could demolish such a harmless, necessary lie. How he hated those wide opened green eyes, that ear turned with such affected attention to hear how he had offended.
‘What? Are you telling me it was true – that excellent piece of prose?’
Amaury asked in tones of amazement. ‘An eye-witness account? No! God strike me! That history should so oblige the cause of poetry! These are truly wonderful times we live in, aren’t they?’
