The Lute Player (35 page)

Had Richard been wise or tactful or even ordinarily cunning he would have sent men running to bring out the other commanders or made the gesture of taking the emissaries to the tent where Philip nursed his little fever. As it was, he beckoned to Hubert Walter and to the old Count of Algenais and thus, companied by the two men he most trusted, stood in the sun and personally accepted the garrison’s surrender and personally dictated the terms. The man in the cloak stood up, straight and arrogant, and acted as interpreter. It was arranged that the garrison of Acre, about twenty-four hundred men, were to go unharmed in return for a similar number of Christian prisoners; until the Christians were brought in the garrison would be held as hostages.

It was the briefest, most straightforward bit of bargaining and when it was concluded one of the emirs drew a piece of cloth from his sleeve and signalled towards the tower that overlooked the city gate. Immediately two mounted men, each leading another horse, magnificently caparisoned, came out. The Saracens, with a final obeisance and some speech which the fair-haired man translated scornfully, stepped back, mounted and, accompanied by their grooms, galloped away to carry the terms to Saladin whose camp lay in the hills. As they left the man ripped off his bright cloak and flung it after them in a gesture of final repudiation. He stood for a moment quite still. He was naked save for a piece of cloth about his loins and his body was beautiful, slender, muscular, sun-tanned—and yet delicate, capable, in some strange day, of conveying things other men need words for. At this moment it spoke of pride and triumph, release, repudiation, scorn. Then he fell to his knees again and I saw his shoulders move as he sobbed.

Richard, looking a little confused, stretched out his hand and then touched him on the shoulder. ‘Sir,’ he said courteously, ‘I know not your name nor your degree but I bid you welcome in the name of all Christendom.’ The man sobbed on and Richard’s confusion became embarrassment.

‘Come, man,’ he said, ‘tears on such a joyous day!’ And ‘Come,’ he said, ‘you must be clothed and fed.’ And then, ‘Be of good cheer, sir; you shall come with us to Jerusalem.’

But the man went on kissing his hand and sobbing and I could see impatience prick the King. He looked about and saw me.

‘Boy, take this good man and make him welcome to our own tent. Give him of our best.’ To the man he said:

‘There, there, weep your fill—and this evening we will make merry together. You are the first of the many! We will all rejoice in due time. At the moment I have much to do…’

He turned away to complete the taking of Acre which he did with as little fuss as he would have brought to the plucking and eating of an apple.

So I was left to deal with Raife of Clermont while Richard went on to make the first of his deadly blunders.

It is true that he had laboured like a serf on the road-making, true that he was actually exchanging blow for blow when the garrison hauled down its flags, true that he was out in the sun glare and the dust when the emirs walked out to make the surrender. And nobody could deny that at that moment Philip of France lay on his bed and that Leopold of Austria was with him, eating peaches and pomegranates. But there had been Frenchmen on the storming towers and Austrians. And one would have thought that Richard, with his curiously tender consideration for the common soldier’s feelings, would have refrained from tearing down the Austrian flag which those who had fought had proudly set up on the section of wall they had captured. But moving round, satisfied, triumphant, on the evening of that day, he said, ‘What is that flag doing there? Take it down.’

Leopold never forgot the insult; never forgave it.

The ordinary men-at-arms, oddly enough, did. And both French and Austrians began to try to sidle into Richard’s company. Leopold and Philip spoke of desertion and of bribery but I, moving about amongst the men, heard other words. ‘I joined the crusade and I follow the man who most ardently leads the crusade,’ reasoned the man capable of lucid statement. ‘He fights, they don’t, and he’s the leader for me,’ said others.

And I would think of William of Tyre, who had preached this crusade in Europe, and of His Holiness, who had blessed all wearers of the Cross. To them the crusading army was just one great closely welded company where individual nationalities, preferences, talents, achievements and ambitions were melted down into the common cause. But men never are thus melted into a mass. Out of the womb they come, separate and dissentient, and until the greedy grave engulfs them, separate they remain. Even the cause of the Holy Sepulchre can hold them together in spirit for no longer than it takes to make that evening call.

One day when all the idealists are discouraged, an army of mercenaries under a single leader—But I digress.

VII

After the taking of Acre the ladies were moved from their wretched lodging by the harbour into a small white palace beside the blue-minareted mosque in the centre of the town. Hubert Walter found time to make a formal visit to the Queen, whom he had never seen before, and Richard sent her kind messages but he was too busy to go himself. There were three days, loud with recrimination, insult, explanation and excuse and then old Algenais suggested that there should be a feast—in honour of the victory, in honour of the ladies and in honour of the first released prisoner, Raife of Clermont.

During these three days I had been much in this man’s company for he slept and ate, as I did, in Richard’s tent and had been entrusted to my charge. I had heard his curious history. He had been taken prisoner when he was an esquire fifteen years old and had spent ten years in captivity. He had been circumcised against his will and sent as slave to the Sultan of Iconium—the man who was reputed to have fallen in love with Eleanor of Aquitaine when she was on crusade. He had been set to work as a gardener. Once the Sultan’s second wife had walked in the garden and desired a certain flower. Raife had cut it for her, trimmed off its thorns and put it into her hand. The Sultan had seen him, been moved to jealousy and had ordered that he should be castrated. ‘But the man who was to do the job was a—friend. There was some mutilation and I suffered the pains of Purgatory but he spared me.’ When the Sultan’s daughter married the Emir of Damascus, Raife had gone with her; and although he hated all Saracens and had never a good word for one of them, I gathered from one or two things that he let slip, and also from his omissions, that his new master was reasonable and humane. In his service Raife had risen from groom to steward, an office which in included some secretarial work, and in that capacity he had come to take part in the defence of Acre.

Although he was so little older than I and had spent so many years in circumstances little conducive to the development of personality or the cultivation of intelligence he was, compared with me, mature, worldly-wise, immensely gifted, confident, complete. The Count of Algenais who, after the first flush of sympathetic enthusiasm, came to regard him with slight disfavour, once said that he had lived so long in the East that he had become as subtle and wily as a Saracen.

‘And that,’ Raife had retorted in an easy, unabashed way, ‘accounts for my long survival and my early release.’

Richard had laughed. He liked Raife of Clermont both for himself and for what he represented. He was the first fruit, an earnest, a token of the deliverance that this crusade would bring. And he had many things to commend him to any leader—he knew the enemy; he spoke and wrote Arabic; he knew the Saracen way of life, customs, prejudices, trend of thought. He would be very useful.

And as Richard doted on Raife as his first recapture, so Raife doted upon Richard as his deliverer. With everyone else he was almost fantastically proud and touchy, insolent, sharp-tongued and hasty-tempered. Once I mildly expressed astonishment at the disrespectful way in which he answered some question asked him by the Duke of Burgundy. He had laughed in his bitter fashion and said, ‘I have lived, Blondel, where the flicker of an eyelash at the wrong moment could result in torture you never dreamed of. What could Burgundy do to me?’ But towards Richard, who would avenge his lost years, his many wrongs, he was different. Not meek, not subservient even there for many a heated argument, many a sharp exchange of verbal buffets took place between them; but he did regard Richard as a person apart; he was prepared to be the lion to Richard’s Androcles.

On the evening of the celebratory feast the tables—and again I detected old Algenais’s tactful hand—were arranged in a great circle, without head or foot, and the most important guests were spaced out with considerable discretion. No one had refused the invitation and everyone had donned his best clothes and finest jewels. It was a high coloured, a magnificent scene; a little awesome if you chose to see it as the gathering of the very flower of Western chivalry, apparently united. I took my place behind the Queen, ready to play at a sign from her; and to keep my thoughts from straying I worried deliberately about my broken nails and the fact that I had not touched my lute since we landed. Her hair, now that she was married, was gathered into a great knot that seemed to tilt her head pridefully. She was lovelier in her hyacinth-coloured gown than even I remembered her. All the old hungers woke and stirred.

Resolutely I turned my attention to the conversation at the table.

Somebody had mentioned the Old Man of the Mountain. By this time we were all familiar with the name and dreadful reputation of this mysterious potentate. He ruled in a mountain fastness in the Lebanon and his subjects were murderers by profession. They were known as Assassins and the word was beginning to make its way into the everyday polyglot language of the crusading army. ‘A real old assassin, you are,’ one man would say to another, or to a mule or even to an unhandy tool. In the same way the title Old Man of the Mountain had crept into common use. ‘Savage as the Old Man of the Mountain,’ as a measure of ferocity, or: ‘Oh, tell that to the Old Man of the Mountain,’ as an expression of incredulity.

Yet despite his penetration into our consciousness and our talk, the Old Man was wrapped in mystery, in legend, in doubt. Nobody had even seen him or one of his Assassins and most people believed that he was a figure in Saracen folklore and that the stories about him may have had their origin in some far less picturesque tyrant who had terrorised the land long ago. Certainly very few people actually believed that if they could search Lebanon thoroughly they would come across the Old Man, his tribesmen who murdered for pleasure, his turreted castle or his fabulous pleasure gardens, comparable with Paradise, where lovely, scented, jewelled houris wandered amongst the fountains and the flowers.

But it was interesting to talk about him, idly, speculatively, as the feasters were doing now.

Suddenly Raife of Clermont laid down his knife, leaned forward and spoke. Except in moments of excitement, he usually took pains to mask the certain shrillness of his voice and spoke with a deliberate gruffness. Now his words reached even the far side of the circle of tables, though he looked only at Richard.

‘Would it surprise you very much if I told you that I have seen the Old Man and his establishment?’

There was the expected murmur of surprise, interest and disbelief, out of which Philip of France’s precise ‘Indeed, yes, it would both surprise and amuse me,’ sounded very clearly.

‘Then I will tell you,’ said Raife, casting Philip a glance of cold dislike and then looking back at Richard. ‘I went once with my—with the Sultan when he visited him. It was a very secret visit and he chose to take me to attend him rather than a native because he trusted my discretion.’ A peculiar look, half smile, half sneer, flitted across his tanned face for a second. ‘There is a castle and there are domes and floors of silver, just as they say—or rather more fantastic than they say. The castle stands on a ledge of rock, surrounded by the gardens of which, again, the stories are rather understatements than exaggerations. At the edge of the garden the mountain drops down to a ravine so deep that it looks like the edge of the world. One day as we walked there the Old Man said in an idly curious way to my—to the Sultan, “Now you are no mean ruler, would any of
your
people jump over that edge if you gave the word? Willingly, joyfully, I mean.” The Sultan looked at me and I felt the sweat break out. Not that I would have jumped, of course, but—well, they hold life cheap and until you have seen—’ He faltered and then went on, holding now the fascinated attention of the whole company: “Mine would,” the Old Man said. And he said something and made a sign and I swear, my lords and gentles all, I swear by Holy Cross that six men, sprung as it were from nowhere, came running and with jubilant cries—indeed, there was no mistaking—with jubilant cries they threw themselves into the abyss. “You see,” said the Old Man, turning away as calmly as though he were leaving a supper table, “they know that by obeying me they go straight to Paradise!” And it is in that belief, of course, that they go forth to do these almost ritualistic murders at a word from him.’

They paid him the tribute that all storytellers crave, the breathless attention, the hush of appreciation. Then Philip of France leaned forward and spoke.

In these last days, with little to do save watch and listen, I had realised that the King of France bore one of those most involuntary grudges against Raife of Clermont, akin to a man’s hatred of blue eyes because once a blue-eyed girl jilted him or a housewife’s distrust of all red-haired men because a red-haired pedlar once sold her a bad comb. Philip could never look at Raife without remembering that the surrender of Acre had been made to Richard alone. Richard’s fussing over Raife and Raife’s obvious deference to Richard had, for Philip, a hateful significance. When Richard had eventually taken Raife along to Philip’s tent and exhibited him as the first rescued prisoner and told his story, Philip had been incredulous—or chose to seem so—until given proof.

Now he was asking again for proof.

And of course, though we did not know it at the moment, those of us who were Richard’s friends should have been grateful that Philip did not let this moment pass in easy acceptance of a dramatic story but leaned forward and said most courteously:

‘Sir Raife, did you really
see
this or are you repeating—in good faith, I am sure—a story told you? I ask because your story is so very true to the pattern of the legend and also because since my arrival I have gone to some pains to make inquiries about this mysterious old man and they have all led me to the conclusion that he is a mythical personage.’