We were firm friends from that day onwards.
In fact, our arrival in Messina had not been as uniformly glorious as Ambroise or the King might have hoped. The local population was a mixed crew: mainly Greeks, with a sprinkling of Italians, a few Jews and even some Arabs — and they all hated us. When we had arrived at the harbour there had been some booing and jeering from the crowd, audible even over the blare of the trumpets, even a few pieces of rotten fruit thrown. Fists were shaken, and King Richard had been extremely angry, white-faced, his blue eyes seeming to spark with fury. He had wanted to put on a show of his power and majesty and had assumed that his Sicilian audience — quickly dubbed the Messy Nessies by Little John — would be suitably awed. They were not. They seemed to regard us as something between an army of occupation, and a crowd of foreign bumpkins who could be robbed and insulted at will. The feelings of dislike, I have to say, were entirely mutuaclass="underline" we referred to the Greeks dismissively as ‘Griffons’, and the Italians as ‘Lombards’; the Arabs, many of them slaves, we ignored as beneath our Christian contempt.
Ambroise had the honour of beginning the musical festivities on a bright October morning in the herb garden of the monastery of San Salvatore. The weather had cleared and it was a half-warm sunny day, the sky a pale blue but streaked with woolly clouds. He opened with a simple and supposedly melancholic song of a knight who is bemoaning the departure of his mistress. It was hardly an original theme. Actually, as my friend is long dead now, I can admit to myself that Ambroise was not an enormously gifted trouvere. God rest his jolly soul. He had a fine voice, it is true, but his musical compositions were rarely inspiring. And, occasionally, I even suspected him of appropriating other men’s ideas. He admitted to me once that he found all the conventions of troubadour-style music-making, with its focus on unrequited love, a tremendous bore. What interested him most was poetry, specifically epic poetry that recorded dramatic events. He was talking once again about his history of the Great Pilgrimage, something he would bang on and on about when he was in his cups in The Lamb, our favourite watering hole in the old town.
If I remember correctly, Ambroise’s song began: Farewell my joy,
And welcome pain,
Till I see my lady again…
Grim, I think you’ll agree. And it was quite difficult to imagine rotund little Ambroise as a heart-sick swain, as he described himself later in the piece, unable to eat or drink for love of his departed lady. But perhaps I am wrong: I’m ashamed to say that I paid scant attention to my friend’s turgid verses and spent the time studying his audience instead. King Richard sat in the place of most honour, next to his royal French guest. Richard was a tall man, well-muscled and strong, although with a slight quiver to his hands when he was nervous or excited. At the age of thirty-three he was in his prime. His red-gold hair was truly regal, it glinted and sparkled in the brisk morning light; his complexion was fair and slightly sunburned, and his honest blue gaze was unflinching. His reputation as a warrior was second to none, and it was said that he loved nothing more than a good, bloody fight. Richard was what Tuck would have called a ‘hot’ man, whose anger was always near the surface, and who, when riled, was a fearsome sight. Beside him, the French King, Philip Augustus, was as different as chalk from cheese. He was a sallow, dark fellow; thin, even frail looking with large luminous eyes and, at twenty-five, the bowed back of a much older man. Tuck would have called him a ‘cold’ man, hiding his true feelings behind a wall of ice. Richard and Philip had been great friends in their youth, some even said that the young Richard had been infatuated with Philip, but it was clear in the way that they held their bodies, seated on cushioned chairs in the sweet-smelling herb garden, that there was very little love now between the two Kings. Also present were Robin and several of King Richard’s other senior commanders, including Robert of Thurnham, a knight I had met last year at Winchester and who had helped me then to escape the clutches of Ralph Murdac. He was now a very important man, Richard’s high admiral no less, and I had not had time to renew our acquaintance beyond a brief smile and nod.
Seated next to Sir Robert was Sir Richard Malbete. The Evil Beast had a fresh pink scar all down the right side of his face, I noticed with great satisfaction, but other than that he seemed regrettably unchanged. His white forelock and splintered feral eyes were exactly as I remembered them, but it seemed that he did not remember me at all as, when our eyes met briefly, his blank animal gaze showed no flicker of recognition. I felt it would be unwise to stare so I looked away quickly.
There were also a handful of French knights present at the gathering, a gaggle of local prelates, and the governors of Messina, appointed by King Tancred, two creatures who called themselves Margarit and Jordan del Pin, a pair of nervous, shifty looking knights, richly dressed but who said little and watched the two kings unceasingly with dark, worried little eyes.
The governors had good reason to be nervous; Richard and Tancred were involved in a vicious dispute over money. I never completely understood the complexities of it, but it seemed that Tancred’s predecessor had promised Richard’s predecessor a large sum of money to support the great expedition to the Holy Land. Both were now dead, but Richard was insisting that Tancred make good old King William’s promise. Then there was the matter of Richard’s sister Joanna: she had been married to William and when he died, and Tancred became king, she should have been given a large sum of money, a dower, and allowed to live as she chose. Instead, Tancred had withheld the money and kept her in close confinement, virtually a prisoner. When Richard and his huge army arrived in Sicily, Tancred took fright, released Joanna, and sent her with a smaller sum of money to Richard. She was now lodged securely in great comfort across the Messina straits at the monastery of Bagnara on the mainland. Richard was still demanding the rest of the cash from Tancred and, with fifteen thousand men at his back, and yet more on the way, he made a very compelling argument. Some people have suggested — Robin for one, but that was how his mind always worked — that Richard’s bloody actions in the next few hours were merely a move in the chess game between himself and Tancred, with an eye to forcing the King of Sicily to pay up.
As the notes of Ambroise’s song faded away, and the courtiers smattered their applause, a small cloud covered the sun, and I could feel the true chill of October in the air. I got to my feet, picked up my instrument, and bowed low to the two kings — it had been arranged that I should perform next. As Robin had suggested, I stuck to the traditionaclass="underline" rendering the classic tragic poem of Tristan and Isolde quite exquisitely, I think, accompanying myself on the vielle with a simple but elegant tune I had devised that morning. You will think it merely the boasting of an old man, but I swear to you that I saw genuine tears in King Richard’s eyes as I bowed the last haunting chord.