The Saracen: The Holy War Part 51

"I know you cannot forget your people, but you could escape this war. My service is done, now that the new pope has confirmed the alliance with the Tartars. I do not have to stay in Italy."

She was glad he did not want to fight for Charles. The thought of him and Daoud meeting on a battlefield was horrible. But surely this brother of King Louis would make every effort to draw Simon into the war.

"Count Charles will want you to fight."

"If you will marry me and come to Gobignon, nothing else will matter to me. We will live content in my castle in the heart of my domain. We will shut out the world and its wars."

She turned to look at him, and the longing on his face was painful to see.

She felt the tears coming, hot, blurring her vision.

"Simon, I cannot!"

His grip on her hand was painful. "Again and again you say that to me.

And you never tell me _why_. Are you secretly a nun? Have you taken vows? Does your husband still live? I demand that you tell me! Stop tormenting me like this." His usually pale face was suddenly scarlet with rage.

His anger dried up her tears.

_I know how I can put an end to this._

"I will, Simon. But I am not ready to speak of it today."

"Then _when_?"

"Go now and meet your Count Charles at Ostia. By the time you come back to the papal court we will probably have moved to Viterbo. And when I see you again, I will tell you why I cannot marry you."

The shadow cleared from his face. "Do you promise with all your heart?

And if I can persuade you that your reason is not good enough, then will you marry me?"

For a moment she hesitated. Even though her life depended on deceiving him, she could not bear to make such a promise. But then she saw that she could honestly agree to what he asked.

"If you still want me to marry you--yes."

_I can say that because if you ever come to know my true reason for not marrying you, you will hate me more than you have ever hated anyone in your life._

He left her soon afterward. She went back to her room and cried for most of the afternoon. Every so often she looked up to see the icon of the desert saint staring at her. She saw the same reproach in Simon Stylites's eyes that she had seen in Simon de Gobignon's.

LXI

Though the day was cold and damp, the sky an ugly, unwelcoming gray, Simon's first view of Rome brought tears to his eyes. He came out of a small grove of cypresses on the east bank of the Tiber to see gray walls, punctuated by square towers, spread wide before him. Beyond the walls, out of a haze of dust and wood smoke, above ma.s.ses of peaked roofs, crenellated palace towers rose lordly, vying for ascendancy with the bell towers of churches. Marble buildings adorned with white columns crowned the hills.

The swift-moving brown river on his left bent around the walls and disappeared beyond them.

Even though he did not want to be part of Charles d'Anjou's invasion of Italy, the thrill of seeing Rome for the first time made up for his distress.

Rome was by no means as beautiful a sight as Orvieto, but it awed him to think that this city had ruled the world when Jesus walked the earth.

What must it have been like to be a Roman legionary, returning to this place from a victory in some far-off land? This dirt track would have been a well-paved road then. Looking off to his right, he saw fragments of wall bounding the edge of a field, and a broken, fluted column rising among olive trees, quiet reminders that the city had once extended into these fields and beyond.

Simon was mounted on a borrowed war-horse, a mare whose shiny coat reminded him of Sophia's hair--a brown so dark it might be taken for black. After many hours of riding, the mare's rocking pace had chafed the insides of his mail-clad legs.

He rode a few yards behind Count Charles d'Anjou and the three knights Charles had appointed marshals of his army. When he looked back over his shoulder, he saw a column of mailed knights riding three abreast strung out along the Tiber for nearly half a mile, and beyond them, almost obscured by clouds of yellow dust, clinking files of men-at-arms, crossbows and spears over their shoulders.

Unimpressed by the sight of Rome, Anjou and his commanders carried on an argument.

"You are a hard taskmaster, Monseigneur," said Gautier du Mont, whose bronze hair was cropped in the shape of a bowl, slightly tilted so that the back was lower than the front. "To make your knights ride half a day in full armor when they have not seen a denier from your coffers since we sailed from Ma.r.s.eilles--you demand too much." The points of du Mont's mustache hung below his chin. Simon had heard he was little better than a routier, a highwayman, who had begun his knightly career by robbing travelers who pa.s.sed his castle in the Pyrenees.

What Simon had seen thus far of Charles's army made the enterprise look decidedly unsavory. Before reaching Ostia, Simon had expected that the men Charles commanded would be va.s.sals, men who had received land from him and were bound by ancient oaths. He quickly realized that all of these men were adventurers with little or no holdings of their own, in this enterprise with Charles for whatever they could gain. Charles could command them only as long as they could hope to grow rich in his service.

Simon supposed this was the best Charles could do, since King Louis had refused to help him raise knights and men and insisted that he hire them himself. Knights willing to go to war for hire could not be expected to be the better sort. Not only did Simon not want to make war on the Italians, he wanted even less to be a.s.sociated with men like the ones Charles had recruited.

Unlike his three marshals, who were all bareheaded, Charles wore a helmet. A steel replica of his count's coronet ringed its pointed top.

Beside him rode an equerry with his personal standard, the black silhouette of a lion rearing up on its hind legs against a flame-red background. Charles turned so that his big Capetian nose was outlined against the iron-gray sky.

"You complain, du Mont, because I ordered our knights to wear full armor?" said Charles. "I did it for their own protection. I expect to meet resistance."

_Only eight hundred knights and two thousand men-at-arms_, Simon thought. _Hardly enough to take Rome, if the Romans do decide to fight.

Nowhere near enough to beat Manfred._

He had been shocked when he arrived at Ostia last night and found out how small Charles's invasion force was. Being a part of this war was going to be downright dangerous.

"Time enough for us to don armor when the resistance appears," said Alistair FitzTrinian, a knight from England whose face was a ma.s.s of smallpox scars. Simon had so far been unable to look at the man without having to freeze the muscles of his face to keep from wincing.

Count Charles sighed, and held out his arm in the direction of Rome.

"Look there, gentlemen," he said in a patient tone, as if instructing schoolchildren. "The Romans are not waiting for us to put on our armor."

Simon followed his pointing finger and saw a gray ma.s.s spreading out into the field near one of the city's gates, flowing around cottages and groves of trees. It appeared to be a great crowd of several thousand citizens. Fully alert now, Simon heard a dull roar, like the hum of a swarm of bees, that sounded decidedly hostile. He felt a twinge of fear.

"Get your helmets on, the three of you," Charles snapped. "Set an example for the rest, or may the devil carry you away!"

The three commanders slowly and sullenly pulled on their helmets, which had been hanging down their backs from straps under their chins. The manner of the three marshals toward Count Charles shocked Simon. If these were the leaders, what In G.o.d's name could the rank and file be like?

_Any one of my Venetian archers or the Tartars' Armenian guards would be worth a dozen of these._

As the army of Anjou, with Charles and Simon and the three marshals in the lead, advanced slowly, Simon noticed that six or so men, several hundred paces in front of the shouting citizens, were walking to meet them.

In a short time the small delegation stood before Count Charles, blocking his path.

Charles raised his arm, and the knights behind him shouted the order to halt down the line. How would Count Charles deal with the representatives of an unfriendly populace, Simon wondered. This should be interesting. He might learn something.

The count turned to Dietrich von Regensburg, his third commander. "I want a troop of the Burgundian pikemen up here now. Surround these fellows." Von Regensburg, a knight with hard blue eyes, a flattened nose, and a huge jaw, saluted and swung his dun horse around to ride back to the long line of men-at-arms following Charles and his knights.

Anjou's order made Simon uneasy. Why try to frighten these Romans? Would it not be better if he could enter the city with their approval?

Then he beckoned Simon to bring his horse up beside him. "No doubt you speak Italian better than any of us. Translate for me." He glowered down his long nose at the Romans who had approached him. "I am Count Charles d'Anjou. I have come here as protector of the city of Rome, at the request of His Holiness, the pope."