Beatrice and Benedick (12 page)

The stage itself, a vast flat paved hemicycle, was presenting a
logistical problem for the Aragonese; Don Pedro had come up with a conceit that we were to recreate an old Roman sea battle between the provinces of Iberia and Albion. There were to be two actual fleets of wooden ships sailing on a baby ocean, but there seemed no easy way to flood the basin with water. Many barrels, drawn from the sea and pulled here by bad-tempered mules and worse-tempered muleteers, had been poured on to the stones only to disappear into the Sicilian sand. Even now, from my perch on the topmost tier of the stones, I could see the Spanish engineers pacing the stage below me, like fretful players who had forgotten their lines, stroking their beards and scratching their heads.

Don Pedro was to join us later, but without the water we could not rehearse and there would be nothing to show him, and the angelus chiming from nearby Taormina reminded me that time was shortening. The engineers had sent for some great seaman to join us to give us the benefit of his advice – a Venetian admiral, a local man who lived just outside Messina – I was to greet him when he arrived but there was no sign of him yet. Until he came I could, I supposed, take my ease.

I saw Claudio, sitting a few tiers down from me, also taking his ease, the wind blowing his curls back from his face. He looked very carefree, a boy today, not the stiff young man I had seen emerging in Syracuse and Palermo, a little statesman trying to understand the great affairs of which, it seemed, he was to be a part. Although I had delivered him safely to the stewardship of his uncle, and was no longer – Lady Beatrice's jibe returned to me – his nursemaid, I still kept an eye on the lad, and tried as much as I could to make him merry, and allow him, as much as I could, to be an ordinary young man.

I wanted him to cast off, sometimes, the purple that he wore and wear a different colour. A cassock of Florentine cloth had arrived for him and the seamstresses had been about him all week, clipping and sewing his finery for tonight, for he was to
play a major part in this pageant. Tonight he must be a count, but today I'd found him a tunic of fustian and fashioned him a
fionda,
a catapult, such as I'd had when I was a boy, from a forked stick and a bootstrap. A small smile had crept across his face as I'd demonstrated how far the thing could fling a stone, and all morning the count had been wandering about the tiers, finding stones that the careless Greeks had dropped, and firing these ancient missiles at the unsuspecting gulls. I smiled to see him thus.

The sun was hot, a bee droned in the broom flowers and I felt my eyes begin to close. Moments or hours later I heard the scrape of a boot above me and felt a slab of shadow fall across me, cooling the sun. I opened my eyes, thinking this would be the admiral come, but it was not; a stranger apparition I have never seen.

The fellow was approximately fifty years old; his complexion weathered, his face gaunt. He wore armour that was stained with rust and covered with mildew, as if it had spent many long years stored and forgotten in a corner. He had evidently misplaced most of the helmet, though, for he had only a simple headpiece from the original hulme, but had compensated for it with his industry by fashioning a kind of half-helmet out of pasteboard which, when attached to the headpiece, gave the appearance of a full sallet. I took him for one of the players, already dressed in costume, for he had the bizarre appearance of an antique knight. The impression was assisted by the fact that he was deficient in the full complement of arms – he only had one. I closed my eyes again; but the apparition addressed me.

‘Are you Signor Benedick of Padua?'

I squinted up at him. He had a thicker Spanish accent than Don Pedro, the archbishop and the viceroy put together, but I understood him well enough.

‘Yes,' I said, but did not rise, for he was not of my rank. His
years, though, secured my compassion and I asked him to sit and take his ease, for he breathed heavily, and his lungs made a strange wheezy music as if a mouse had chewed through a squeezebox.

He collapsed heavily beside me with a clatter of his accoutrements, and I could not help staring at the place where his left hand should be. He did not seem disposed to give his message, nor to leave, so I made conversation.

‘It looks as though you have fought some bar brawls in your day, old-timer,' I said. It was meant for a joke, but the fellow bristled and skewed in his seat.

‘
Qué?
' he queried, prickly at once.

‘I meant no offence.' I held up my hands, then put them down again – I did not wish to be seen to be boasting that I had a pair. ‘It is natural as a man gets old that he might sustain injuries such as his travails and scrapes might afford him. Do not take it amiss.'

‘What I cannot help taking amiss,' said the old man, ‘is that you charge me with being old and one-handed, as if it had been in my power to keep time from passing over me, or as if the loss of my hand had been brought about in some tavern, and not on the grandest occasion the past or present has seen, or the future can hope to see. I'll have you know that I sustained these injuries at the great battle of Lepanto, when the countries of the Holy League stood up against the infidel Turk.' He bristled, and sat a little taller, but the touchy knight ruined the dignity of his expression by scratching the sweaty hair under his makeshift helmet with his filthy nails. ‘If my wounds have no beauty to your eye, they are, at least, honourable to those who know where they were received.'

It was my turn to stand now, for his rank exceeded mine, and respect was due; here was an honourable knight. I bowed. ‘Forgive me. I took you for a brawling peasant, and it seems you are a hero.'

He smiled at me with his snaggle teeth, and waved me to be seated again. ‘Perhaps I am both,' he said, ‘many soldiers are.'

‘You are the admiral, then, whom I have been told to greet?'

‘I am not,' he said, ‘but I can give you word of your admiral. He is not here, he is not coming; nor is he ever coming.'

‘He is delayed?'

‘In perpetuity. He is dead.'

I was shocked. ‘You seem very sanguine about it.'

‘It is not my habit to wear a sorrowful face. But believe me when I say that I am very sorry for it. For he was the best of men, and a veteran of that very battle of Lepanto I told you of. I fought beside him then, and in the Holy League since.'

‘Well,' I said. ‘I am sorry that the world has lost such a soldier. And now I do not know what to do, for he was to tell us where to put the ships, and form the battle, in as authentic a formation as possible.'

The strange knight clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Your master Don Pedro sent for me to help instead. I settled on the island for a time, for I was in the hospital in Messina for some while after Lepanto.'

I looked down to the stage. ‘Our greatest problem may be that we have not even a puddle, let alone a millpond.'

‘They have solved it,' he said, clambering to his feet. ‘They are running a conduit from the river, and are constructing a tank. Someone with sense told them that as water wants to run down and not up, it were better to divert the water from the river that runs off the volcano, than tax the poor mules further with emptying the sea, which has always seemed to me to be an impossible task.'

I stood too and headed slowly down the stone steps behind the strange knight, letting him set the leisurely pace.

‘I imagine the Greeks had the idea first,' he said, ‘for the muleteers found an existing conduit and an aqueduct beneath
the column drums. Those Greeks seem to have had all the good ideas centuries before the rest of us.'

I gave him my hand down from the little wall into the cavea.

‘But when the tank is full, I have been charged to help you with the formation, and besides this I have written a verse or two for the chorus to say. He is a windy actor, but for a theatre of this size, it is just as well. And what is your role in all of this?'

‘When the ships meet, there is to be a mock battle, and I am to lead the charge and organise the fighting.' I knew it was my performance in the tourney which had bought me this role, for I had never been on a ship bigger than a gondola.

‘A mock battle, eh? Ever been in a sea battle?'

I tired of this question. ‘No.' I sighed. ‘Nor a battle of any sort.'

‘But you must be a pretty swordsman, I suppose?'

Pretty enough, as I had proven at the tournament, to put down any Spaniard, but I did not say as much. ‘Just so much as to give the impression of the great sea wars of Albion and Iberia,' I replied carefully.

‘Albion and Iberia, eh?' He kicked at the yellow sand of the arena with his ancient sabatons. ‘Well; some will swallow it.' He looked about him, at the swarm of engineers filling the tanks, then to sea, volcano and stones, as if these elemental beings were eavesdropping. He lowered his voice. ‘Do you know the true purpose of this pageant?'

I did not fully understand this enigmatical comment, but passed my instructions as I had received them to this strange little man. ‘I know only that the forces of Albion are to appear to be utterly crushed, and I am to lead the battle and jump ship to ship, sword in hand.' The last thing I wanted was a wetting, in front of Beatrice; but I did not mention this foible, and merely said, ‘I have been instructed to look heroic.'

‘Aah.' It was a long, drawn-out syllable. ‘To
look
heroic. Looking heroic is half of the battle. Do you think when a
soldier leaps into the jaws of death, he is not terrified? His knees knock, his cod shrivels, and his bowels open. Every time, yes. But the
secret
,' he held one filthy finger up in front of his face, ‘is to
look
valiant, to change your lamb's heart to the heart of lion.'

I think I understood him. ‘Well, we will have some brave costumes – the prince's tailors have been about them all week.'

He shook his head. ‘Your apparel, armour and finery, all of these are as nothing. You do not take my meaning. You could go to war with an old kettle as your hulme and a tin dish as your breastplate. Look at me.' He swept his one hand before his ancient armour with a flourish. ‘You do not have to be striped like a tiger to imitate the action of a tiger. No, knighthood lives in
here
,' he banged his breastplate where his heart lived, ‘and here.' He knocked at his shabby helmet till it clopped like a cowbell. ‘Even if you fight in sackcloth, your imagination may aid you. Think of the weight of Italian chivalric history – your Marquis of Mantua, your Orlando Furioso. Embody them. In every bar brawl you have with a cheating landlord, who has taken two
reales
instead of one for a quart of beer, you are a knight suppressing a cheating castellan. Every stumbling whore you must set right upon her feet as if she is a
princesa,
and say, “How do you, lady, I hope you are not injured?” And you may do all this dressed in your everyday clothes.'

We stood together watching the tank fill, and the engineers pushed one of the prop ships on to the water. It looked troublingly rickety.

‘When you stand on that nutshell made of cork and canvas tonight,' continued my new companion, ‘imagine yourself at the head of a vast fleet in the Straits of Patras, as I was then, with the Turk ululating from their golden forecastles, waving their curved swords. Smell the acrid gunpowder in your nose,' he cried, drawing the gazes of the engineers as if he was an actor, ‘feel the cannon boom in your ribs, hear the screaming timber
as the ships crash together, and you know there is no way back but to draw your sword and leap.'

I turned to look at him, trying to imagine him in battle. ‘What were you thinking, at Lepanto?' I asked.

He considered, the strange helmet shading the expression of his eyes from me. ‘That the soldier shows to greater advantage dead in battle than alive in flight. When I jumped from a friendly ship to an enemy one, I did not think to ever come back.'

For the remainder of that hot afternoon we rehearsed painstakingly for the pageant that night. To say honestly, I did not truly understand the burden of the play, nor know any other part but my own – I was too concerned with the sea battle to concern myself with the rhetoric or allegory. I have never been a man for the classics – give me a good play at the
commedia dell'Arte
any day – good fun about a master and a servant or a Harlequin and his Columbine, not this antique posturing.

I did know, however, that there was a horse involved as well as a sea battle, for I saw a great white destrier cavorting around in the tunnels below the cavea, pulling his handlers around on his leading reins like puppets on strings. I knew too that Claudio had a greater part to play than I, and that the chorus who began the play seemed to be spouting nonsense, but was no wiser as to the drama we were to transmit to our audience.

The little ships, built in Taormina and pulled up the incline by mules, were set upon the lake and made a fine sight. Despite my initial fears they were sturdy things of wood and canvas, and held our weight admirably, though we had some to do to trim them and fight at the same time. The ships of Iberia were rendered in glossy varnished wood and silken scarlet sails, but the boats of Albion, while practically just as sturdy, had been given the appearance of rotten, old-fashioned vessels – here and there there was even a dragon prow such as were once in fashion with the northmen.

Claudio, it transpired, was to be the king of the Hispanic forces, and stand in the prow, but he was not to take part in the fighting. I was to o'erleap him and land on the wooden forecastle of the rickety flagship of Albion, painted in blue, in order to engage with the enemy forces, which seemed to be led by a red-headed Amazon queen. Again, I was not so troubled by the meaning of this allegory as the leap I was supposed to perform. A couple of times I had a wetting, when the ships were not close enough to jump the difference, and one time I was left clinging to a cannon, feet trailing in the makeshift sea, as my mentor, the ancient Spanish knight, laughed aloud. Pride bruised, I prayed that I should not fail so publicly in front of Beatrice.