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I would have risen, but he stayed me with a gesture. "We hear that you have long aspired to knighthood, to join the order that belongs to you by birth. By the power invested in me, I name you knight."
A moment later I felt the buffet of the colce on the side of my head, a light blow but it sent a pain through me. "Rise," he said, "Sir Thurstan Beauchamp, be brave and faithful in my service, that God may love thee."
A wave of heat came over me. I felt the blood flush in my face and I heard my voice replying with the words I had uttered so many times within myself in the days when I still thought to be knighted: "So shall I, with God's help."
Gilbert came forward and he was carrying the sword, still sheathed, and a belt. He came to a stop at the foot of the steps. I went down to him and he unsheathed the sword and tendered it to me, holding the hilt towards me. I took it and kissed the hilt and he returned the sword to its sheath and the King left his chair and came down to me, descended to my level, and girded me with the sword. "God go with you, sir knight," he said. "I have bespoken a fief for you in Calabria with forest and ploughland." His face was not steady to my sight, the mouth and jaw contracted strangely and all that was in my mind was a fear of staggering and the anguish of a question: how had he known that knighthood had been my dearest wish? It was the same question that had beset me hearing words almost the same from the mouth of Bertrand of Bo
This man, who had just blessed me and girded me with the sword, had learned of these hopes of mine. In gratitude he would have enquired. The purveyor of spectacles who had saved his life… They who had trapped me were the same who had answered his questions. It must be so; theirs was the only knowledge of it. He would not know of this entrapment. It was beneath his notice, who was concerned with threats of invasion, with the loss of his colonies in North Africa, the fall of his revenues from the sale of wheat, the continued refusal of the Pope to recognise his kingship. I was too low for his knowledge. But Yusuf's case was otherwise, Yusuf had been chosen. The perfect victim, high-born, wealthy, a distinguished figure among the Moslems. The crime had been devised, the mode of punishment studied…
The certainty of this came to me like an access of sickness – I shivered with it. How and in what order I retired, I do not know. I remember retreating with bows, I remember being again flanked by guards. The return to my house is a page on which memory has left no marks. When I dismounted I could hardly walk in a straight line.
XXIX
I had strength enough left to tell Pietro to look after my horse, get up the stairs, put the ruby in my strongbox and take off my outer clothes.
The sword I let fall to the floor. My head was throbbing and when I lay down and looked up to the ceiling it seemed to tilt, as if I had drunk too much. Almost at once I fell into a state that was between sleep and waking. Shallow dreams came to me, too shallow for sleep, glimpsed in the air above my head or in the corners of the room, never seen for long and never distinctly, sometimes dissolving in mist, sometimes sliding away. Yusuf came and he was in shining white like Christ on the Day of Transfiguration and he was trying to explain something but when I interrupted him to ask his pardon his face was lost to me and I saw that his robe was dark with blood. Muhammed came, he too in white. He had no face but I knew him by the strangler's cord he held in his hands, gloved hands, he held it like an offering, like a sword. It was Alboino holding out a paper to me, I saw his sorrowing face as he spoke of the daily wrong, and I saw Bertrand's, pleasurable and full of care, as it had been when he cut out the hart's tongue.
How long I lay like this I do not know. Darkness gathered round me and the light of another day. Someone gave me to drink and he had the face and voice of Stefanos. Then the room was dark again and I woke in this darkness because of the smell of sweetness that was pervading the room, which I thought at first was caused by the lilies that lay on the floor, but it came from some sugary thing that is dissolved in the mouth and breathed out and I knew the King was breathing in this room though I could see nothing, he was beckoning me to rise, to mount towards him, the water was gathering here below, lapping round me, but I could not see the way to the steps, the water rose around me, I was struggling in it, others too, I saw their dim forms twisting in the water and I looked up and saw the silver of the barge far above me and rose to it but when my head broke the surface there was nothing there, only reflections of light that stretched and shrank and a fire burning in the distance. Then all was quiet and I was walking among fields that I knew and they were lying under a thick cover of snow, fresh and shining and unmarked, such as I remembered seeing in my boyhood in the north of England.
This snow was cool, I felt it on my forehead and chest. I opened my eyes a very little, to see sunlight in the room and Nesrin's face above me, and it was her real face, it did not slide away. She held a bowl and a cloth and just for a moment my eyes were able to dwell on her face without her knowing it, because she was looking down at my chest where she was about to lay the cloth. And this, her not knowing, gave a look of calm to her face, in its ministering purpose, that was new to me, making her seem, in my weakened state, still feverish as I was, a person at once closely familiar and entirely strange. It will be with me always, this presence of hers when I awoke, her care as she held the bowl, her mouth that could sometimes seem bitter softened with this care. Then she saw my look was on her and her expression changed, the eyes narrowed a little, something of a smile came to her face.
"If you open your eyes wide, you think I fly away? All the night you talked to ghosts but I am not one."
But I closed my eyes instead, perhaps indeed not quite believing, wanting to keep this face of hers locked safe. "How did you come here?"
I said.
"I come up the stairs, like any person."
"No, I mean…" What I meant I did not know. Her presence there was like a miracle to me.
"He tried to stop me, he below who keeps the door."
"Pietro."
"He said you are sick, you want to see no one. I tell him I know better what you want. I tell him stand aside."
This made a sort of laughter within me, or perhaps only a prospect of laughter, remembering the night we had first met and the jesting of the others and her serious face in the firelight. I was naked under the sheet, I realised now. "You took off my shirt," I said.
"I take off everything. You are burning hot, like a fire inside you. You are sweating all over, you are talking to spirits. I need to bathe you, to make the fever less. How can I do that if you have the shirt? You fight with me, you think I try to rob you."
She had found me ugly and disordered, among tumbled bedclothes, the sweat of sickness lying on me. "You will stay?" I said. "You will not go?" If she promised this I knew I could sleep.
"How strange man you are. You think Nesrin leaves you when you are sick?"
"The water feels good. It has a good smell also. It scents the room.
What is in it?"
She was saying something in reply but I was asleep before I could catch the words. I lay in slumber all through the afternoon, without a dream that could wake me. When I opened my eyes the lamp was lit and she was sitting on cushions on the floor near the bed and I thought she must have got these cushions from Caterina, as they had not been in the room before. Her head was lowered over her work – she was joining strands of wool together, over and under, with a hooked piece of wood, and the movements of her hands were very rapid and sure.