The Saracen: Land of the Infidel by Robert Shea (best fiction books to read .TXT) 📗

wound, hard. That will slow the bleeding." Simon took the man's hand and put it on the hole the crossbow bolt had made.

"Here, let me do that." Friar Mathieu was on his knees beside the hurt man, his hand covering the wound. "Messere," he said to the carpenter, "ride my donkey to the hospital of the Franciscans. Tell them there is a man badly hurt here and Friar Mathieu d'Alcon says they are to send brothers to take him for treatment."

Simon stood up slowly as the carpenter climbed on Mathieu's donkey.

"It is not safe for you to stay here," he said to Friar Mathieu. "The people know you were part of the procession and may blame you for what happened."

Mathieu shook his head. "No one will hurt me. Go along now."

Simon jumped into the saddle and spurred his palfrey to a trot. Thierry rode beside him.

"Those two didn't throw anything," Thierry said.

"Of course not." Simon wondered if de Verceuil cared that the Venetians had shot two innocent men.

When Simon caught up with the procession, de Verceuil was still furiously scrubbing his face with his pale violet cloak.

"If you had done something sooner about the rioting, this outrage[124] would not have happened to me," he said, a quaver of anger in his deep voice.

God help me, thought Simon. I could easily grow to hate him. Cardinal or not.

Word of the shootings must have spread through the city, Simon thought, because the twisting street leading to the cathedral was nearly empty.

But the piazza in front of Orvieto's cathedral of San Giovenale was packed with people. Simon's eye was immediately drawn to the top of the cathedral steps. There stood a white-bearded man wearing a red mantle over white robes glittering with gold ornament. On his head a tall white lozenge-shaped miter embroidered with a red and gold cross. In his hand, a great golden shepherd's crook at least seven feet tall. Simon's mouth fell open and he held his breath.

The ruler of the whole Catholic Church the world over, the chosen of God, the anointed of Christ, the heir of Saint Peter. His Holiness, Urban IV, the pope himself. Simon felt almost as much awe as he had that day in Paris when King Louis had let him kiss the Crown of Thorns.

How lucky I am to be here and see this man whom most Christians never see. It is close as one can come to seeing Jesus Christ Himself.

It looked to Simon as if the Holy Father were glowing with a supernatural light. To his left and his right stood a dozen or more men in bright red robes and wide-brimmed red hats with long red tassels dangling down to their shoulders. The cardinals, the princes of the Church. Simon wondered if the Tartars realized what honor this did them.

As soon as their sedan chair was set before the pope, the two short brown men stepped out of it, knelt, and pressed their foreheads to the cobblestones. They stayed that way until the pope gestured to de Verceuil, who bent and touched them on the shoulder and raised them up.

The pope turned and, followed by the Tartars and then the cardinals, proceeded into the cathedral. For this meeting to succeed, a papal mass was the best possible beginning.

So many people were ahead of Simon that Friar Mathieu caught up with him before he was able to enter the door of the cathedral.[125]

"What do you think stirred up the crowd like that?" Simon asked as they pushed through the people standing in the nave of the church.

"In the cities of Italy the mob is always either furious or ecstatic," said Friar Mathieu.

"But to defile a cardinal!" Simon said. "That would never happen in France."

"Italians do not reverence the clergy as much as Frenchmen do," the Franciscan said with a little smile. "They have had to put up with the princes of the Church for so long that they are a good deal less awed by them."

The interior of the cathedral was ablaze with the light of a thousand candles, but Simon was not impressed by the windows, which were small and narrow and filled with dull-colored glass. This was an old church, he thought, remembering the huge windows of many-colored glass in the newer cathedrals of France.

The crowd was so tightly packed that Simon and Friar Mathieu could not get to the front of the nave, where chairs had been set before the altar for dignitaries. They had to be content with standing halfway down the length of the church. Simon thought wryly that he was getting used to being pushed into the background. Perhaps he was accepting it too easily.

Pope Urban, his white hair uncovered, had raised high the round wafer of bread for the Consecration of the Mass, when an angry shout echoed through the cathedral.

A chill went through Simon's body, cold as a knife blade. Using his shoulder as a wedge, he forced his way through the crowd toward the source of the sound, near the front of the church.

"Ex Tartari furiosi!" the man was shouting in Latin. "Libera nos, Domine!" From the fury of the Tartars, Lord deliver us! Cries of dismay rang out near the disturbance, and people began shouting in Italian.

"Stand aside! Let me through!" Simon shouted. If this were an assassin, reverence for the mass, even for the pope, must be set aside. Again and again the shout rose, "Ex Tartari furiosi!" It was harder to move through the crowd. People were struggling to get away from the man making the uproar.

Simon stopped, shoved men right and left to make room, and pulled his scimitar from his scabbard.

People around him turned at the unmistakable rasp of steel on leather, a sound that so often preceded sudden death. They saw the Saracen sword in Simon's hands and drew back. As Simon hoped,[126] more people noticed and fell over one another trying to get out of his way.

Like Moses' rod parting the Red Sea, Simon's scimitar opened a path for him.

Simon saw a young man with a tangled mass of brown hair whipping about his face and a brown beard that spread over his chest. He was big and broad-shouldered, and he wore a plain white robe, ragged and gray with dirt, and sandals. In one hand he held a dagger.

Blood of Jesus! He must have come here to kill the Tartars.

Terrified people had opened a circle around the white-robed man, and as he moved toward the front of the cathedral the open space moved with him.

"Stop!" Simon cried.

Baring greenish-looking teeth in a snarl, the man swiveled his shaggy head toward Simon, then immediately rushed at him.

He's crazy, Simon thought, a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach. He crouched, holding his sword out before him, diagonally across his chest.

"Do not kill him!" boomed a deep voice that Simon recognized as de Verceuil's.

The man with the dagger hesitated now, just out of reach of Simon's sword.

Am I to risk my life to keep this madman alive?

But de Verceuil's demand made sense. They must try to find out who sent the man.

Simon took a deep breath. He had practiced sword fighting innumerable times, but only twice in his life had he come up against an armed man with a look in his eyes that said he was willing to kill.

But this is no different from practice, he told himself.

He feinted to the white-robed man's left, then jumped forward, lifting his sword high and bringing the flat of it down with all his strength on the hand that held the dagger. The dagger tumbled through the air. Simon saw at once that the man had no martial skill.

The madman darted forward in a crouch to retrieve his dagger, and as he did so Simon kicked him in the chin. The thick beard protected the man's chin from the full force of Simon's pointed leather boot, but he staggered. Before the bearded man recovered[127] himself, Alain de Pirenne charged out of the crowd, seized him in a bear hug, and wrestled him to the ground.

"Ex Tartari furiosi!" The shouts rang out again and again as the pope's guards dragged the would-be assassin out of the church.

Simon saw Pope Urban shake his bare white head slowly, then turn back to the high marble altar and raise the Host overhead once more.

De Verceuil and Friar Mathieu reached Simon at the same time.

The cardinal held out his hand for the dagger, which Simon had retrieved, and studied it. "One could buy a hundred like it in any marketplace," he said, keeping his voice low now that the mass had resumed. He thrust the dagger into his black leather belt with a shrug.

"The white robe and sandals are the mark of the Apostolic Brethren," said Friar Mathieu. "Heretics who preach the doctrine of Joachim of Floris about a coming new age of enlightenment and equality."

"When it comes to heresy," said de Verceuil with an unfriendly grin, "there is little to choose between the Apostolic Brethren and the Franciscans. Many of your brethren are secret Joachimites."

"Of course, he might have been dressed that way only to deceive us," Friar Mathieu went on, ignoring the insult.

"We will find out who he is and whence he comes," said de Verceuil. "When we are through with him he will tell us everything. I have ordered him handed over to the podesta of Orvieto, who will subject him to questioning in his chamber of torment." He turned on the ball of his foot, his violet cloak swinging out behind him, and headed back toward the altar.

And not a word about my disarming the assassin, Simon thought angrily.

Friar Mathieu winced and shook his head sadly. "Then again, that man may not be able to say anything. And the less he can tell us, the more he will suffer. I pity him."

Simon cringed inwardly at the thought that by capturing the mad heretic he was the cause of the man's being subjected to horrible tortures. But greater fears preoccupied him. The Tartars had been in Orvieto only a few hours, and already the people had been stirred up against them and they had nearly been assassinated. Somewhere in this town an enemy lurked, and Simon's body turned cold as he wondered what that enemy would do next.

[128]

XII

A letter from Emir Daoud ibn Abdallah to El Malik Baibars al-Bunduqdari, from Orvieto, 21st day of Rajab, 662 A.H.: