She shook her head. "I do not know. So high that he had to climb a
ladder to get to the top. Then his disciples took the ladder away." She
pointed at the pillar in the painting. "I tried to paint it so that it
could be any height you might imagine."
"_You_ painted this?"
"You find that hard to believe," she said with amused resignation. "That
is why I hardly ever tell anyone. Many people would be sure I was lying.
Others would think that a woman who paints is some kind of freak. Or
that it is somehow dishonorable for a lady to paint, as if you, for
instance, were to engage in trade. What do you think?"
"I think God has given you a very great gift," said Simon solemnly.
She squeezed his hand, giving him exquisite pleasure, and then, to his
sorrow, let it go. "I hoped you would understand." She put the
candlestick down, and Saint Simon Stylites receded into the shadows.
"I knew that you were going to be someone very important in my life when
I found out your name is Simon," she said. "I think my saint wished us
to meet."
How sweetly innocent she was, Simon mused. He was ashamed of the
thoughts he had been entertaining about her ever since they had kissed
in the Contessa di Monaldeschi's garden. Over the days and nights he had
gradually grown more and more familiar with her--in his fancy.
He had thought about holding her breasts through her gown, then putting
his hand on the warm, soft flesh, had thought about lying beside her in
her bed, both of them nude. He had even, one cool night, allowed himself
to imagine entering her body and lying very still, clasped inside her.
The ultimate act of l'amour courtois, this had been quite beyond his
power of self-restraint with the women who played at courtly love with
him in Paris. The way Sophia excited him, it was even less likely that
he could hold himself back while remaining inside her for hours, as a
true courtly lover was expected to do.
And now Sophia went over to the very bed he had imagined, and perched on
it. The frame of the canopied bed was high above the floor, and when
Sophia sat on it her feet dangled prettily, reminding Simon how much
shorter than he she was. The sight of her on the bed made him tremble,
frightened by his own passion. There was no one here to protect this
innocent girl from him, except himself.
"Sit with me," she said, patting the coverlet beside her. He knew that
the best way to protect her was to go nowhere near her. But he wanted
desperately to sit beside her, to feel her hand in his again, to put his
arms around her.
_But if I take her in my arms, on her very bed, how can I stop myself?_
Still, she had invited him to sit with her, and an invitation from his
lady was a command.
He had intended to sing a love song to her. He had not the skill at
making poetry to be a troubadour, but he had a good tenor voice, and he
had learned dozens of troubadour songs early in life from Roland. He had
sung them before he understood what they meant, because he liked the
sound of them.
He bowed and went to the bed. He sat as far from her as possible.
"Will you let me sing for you?"
When she smiled, he noticed, dimples appeared in her cheeks. "Oh, that
would be a pleasure. But softly, please. We do not want to rouse my
uncle's servants."
Softly, then, he sang.
My love is the flower that opens at morning,
That greets with her petals the radiant sun,
Yet methinks 'tis not she who lives by the sun,
But the sun gives its light so my lady may shine.
Sophia's smile was itself sunny as he finished the first verse. She
leaned back, putting her hands out behind her on the bed, and closed her
eyes as he sang the second and third. When he began the fourth verse,
she drew closer to him till their legs were touching. Making himself
concentrate on his music, he went on to the fifth verse. He resolved
that at the end of it he would stand up and move away.
At sunset my love will close up her petals
Till with the dawn she awakens again,
And her beauty will blaze out to dazzle the day.
To see her the sun will be eager to rise.
By the end of that verse she was leaning against him and had reached
around behind him to stroke his neck. Without his consciously willing
it, his arm stole around her waist and pulled her to him.
His song, he realized, was insidious in its power. He had thought only
to entertain her with his music, but he was seducing her. Her head
rested on his shoulder, her eyes closed. Her fingers crept slowly,
delicately, across the back of his neck under his hair, sending thrills
down his spine. He could not move away from her.
"Stop," he whispered. "Please stop."
"Are you afraid of me?" she asked softly.
"I am afraid for both of us. You do not know what a raging fire a lovely
woman like you can kindle in a man like me."
She withdrew her hand from his neck and let it rest on his thigh. That,
he thought, made it even more difficult for him.
"I must tell you something," she said. "I am not--wholly innocent."
His heart felt a sudden chill. How could this dear creature be anything
but innocent?
Now her hands were in her lap and her eyes were cast down. "As you
surely know, most women past twenty, unless they are nuns, have been
married for years. You must have wondered what I am doing in Orvieto,
unmarried, living with my uncle."
"I never thought about it."
"Then _you_ are very innocent."
Simon felt himself wilt inwardly. How could he have been so blind as not
to wonder why Sophia was not married? She had seemed timeless to him and
attached to no one. Even her relation to the cardinal, except that it
put her in the enemy camp, seemed unimportant.
"You have a husband?" His voice was heavy with sorrow. Foolish as it
was, he had dreamed that she might be virginal. But that made no sense,
now that he considered it. The rule in courtly love was to fall in love
with a lady who was married to someone else. His Parisian courtly lovers
had been married women. If Sophia were already married, that should make
it better.
Then why did he feel so disappointed?
"I was married at fourteen. His name was Alessandro. He died two years
later of the damned fever that takes so many of our good Sicilian
people. He was very kind to me, and I was inconsolable."
"Ah. You are still in mourning for him?"
She turned her hands over, showing empty palms. "I loved him so much
that I could not think of marrying another man in Siracusa. At length my
mother and father decided to send me to live with my uncle in the hope
that I could forget Alessandro enough to consider marrying again."
"Do you wish to marry again?"
"I have met no one I am drawn to but you, Simon, and marriage between
you and me would be unthinkable. My family's station is so far beneath
yours."
His heart leapt happily. She was free, yet, as she said, not wholly
innocent. He need not feel quite so guilty about the passionate thoughts
he had been having about her. And as for marriage between them being
unthinkable, she did not know that none of the great houses of France
would consider a daughter of theirs taking the name de Gobignon. Her
nonclerical family might be of low station, just as the pope's father
had been a shoemaker, but Sophia was the niece of a cardinal, a prince
of the Church.
It was love, not thoughts of marriage, that had brought him here
tonight. Still, he must respect her honorable widowhood. Since she had
loved her husband, she might be more susceptible to him, and he must
guard her virtue all the more steadfastly. Perhaps she thought that he
respected her less as a widow. He must reassure her.
She was not holding him any longer. He could stand up without tearing
himself away from her. He sprang to his feet and strode to the center of
the room.
"Believe me, I think you just as pure as if you had never been married
at all."
She looked up at him, surprised, her hands still folded in her lap, her
dark eyes wide.
"I am delighted to hear that. But"--she cast her eyes down and smiled
faintly--"does that mean there is to be nothing at all between us?"
"I love you!" Simon declared. "I will always love you. I think of you
night and day. I beg you to love me in return."
"Oh, Simon. How beautiful." She held out her arms to him. But he stayed
where he was and raised his hands warningly.
"I mean to love you according to the commandments of l'amour courtois.
With every fiber of my being I yearn to be altogether yours, but you
must restrain me."
"I must?"
"You must be what the poets of old Languedoc called 'mi dons'--my lord.
You must rule me. One day we will join together in body, but only after
I have been tested and found worthy."
"Is that what courtly love means?"
"Yes, and that is why it is more beautiful than marriage. Husband and
wife may embrace carnally the moment the priest says the words over
them. No, they are _required_ to. Courtly lovers know each other only
when love has fully prepared the way, so that their coming together may
be a moment of perfect beauty."
Sophia looked at him silently. Her face was suddenly unreadable.
"Do you understand?" he asked after he had stood awhile gazing into her
lustrous brown eyes. "These ideas are perhaps new to you."
"The woman is ruler of the man?"
"Yes."
The corners of her mouth quirked. "Then what if I were to command you to
get into this bed with me?"
He was certain from her sly smile that she was joking. But he could
think of no clever answer. He considered what he had read, what he had
been told, what he had done with other women. None of it helped. The
women who fell into bed with him on the first tryst had not been serious
about love, nor had he been. In all the lore of l'amour courtois the
woman made the man wait--sometimes for years, sometimes for his entire
life--and the man was happy to wait, and that was all there was to it.
Then he remembered something his mother had said, a secret so precious
he would never tell anyone, not even Sophia. Not even Friar Mathieu
needed to know it. But it guided Simon now.
_The first time your father and I were alone together I wanted him then
and there. But he was strong enough for both of us. It was a whole year
before we possessed each other in body. And you came of that union._
"You will not command me so," he said with cheerful confidence.
Her eyebrows rose--they were strong and dark, like a raven's wings.
"Indeed?"
"Because you know how much better it would be to wait. We both want each
other now. But if we restrain that hunger, it will grow. It will be not
just a desire of the flesh, but a longing of the spirit. It is said that
the souls in paradise know no greater happiness than two lovers do, who
are united in soul as well as body."
"Prodigioso," she said. "But I am just a Sicilian girl, and I do not
perhaps have the refined spiritual appetite of a French nobleman. What
if I cannot wait?"
"It is natural," Simon said, thinking again of what his mother had
confided to him. "Then I must be strong enough for both of us."
The thought of her powerful passions, which she restrained with such
difficulty, excited him. Holding himself back from her was going to be
painful, but delightfully so. And think of the ecstasy when at last they
were united.
Sophia released a long sigh and brought the palms of her hands down on
her knees with a slap of finality. "So be it, Simon. You will teach me
the ways of courtly love, and I will do my best to be your--what did you
call it?"
"Mi dons. My lord."
Her teeth flashed white in the candlelight, and her lips glistened.
Simon's own lips burned to taste hers.
"How strange. As if I were the man. Ah, but you are very much a man,
Simon, and you make me feel very much a maiden."
Simon turned and went to the window. The night air blew through the
gauze curtains, and he felt a wonderful aliveness all over his body. He
wondered whether Alain, out there in the dark somewhere, could see him
here in the window. He pushed the curtain aside so Alain, if he was
there, could get a good look and know that his seigneur was safe and
happy.
Dawn must still be hours away. What would he tell Alain about what
transpired this night? The truth, assuredly. But would Alain believe
him? And if he did, would he mock Simon for not bedding Sophia?
No, Alain would understand. He respected the good in men and women as
much as Simon did. Which was why they were friends as well as lord and
vassal.
Sophia stood beside him and put her hand on his shoulder.
"You cannot stand there all night, Simon. Come back and sit down."
He bowed. "As mi dons commands." He let her take his hand and draw him
away from the window.
There was one chair in the room, and he took it. Foolish to expose
himself to temptation by sitting beside her on the bed again. The chair
was straight, with a tall back and no arms. The only touch of comfort in
its rectilinear shape was a cushion laid upon its seat. Sophia smiled
and shrugged and sat again on her bed.
Would she let him spend the night? Whenever he had been all night with a
woman, they had made love. Should he sing to her again? Would she want
to sleep? He pictured himself watching over her while she slept, perhaps
kneeling by her bedside, and the beauty of it thrilled him.
Now he remembered something she had said earlier, that he had accused
her of kissing him _only to further my uncle's plots against the
Tartars_. She was aware, then, of what Ugolini was doing.
_She has no idea how much she revealed to me._
He sang another troubadour song, "White Hands." She let him draw off her
red silk slippers, and he almost cast away all his promises to himself
as she curled her toes against the palm of his hand. He forced himself
to stand up and pace the room while she lounged back on her bed, her
head propped up on her elbow, watching him with that delicious smile of
hers.
She questioned him about his life, and he offered her a simple version
of it, telling her nothing about his secret illegitimacy and the
dishonor of the man whose name he bore. It struck him while talking to
her that perhaps these two sins that had shaped his life--Amalric de
Gobignon's treason and Nicolette de Gobignon's adultery--had given him
the strength to resist the temptation to assail Sophia's virtue. He told
her how he had spent much of his youth in the household of the King of
France and how this had led to Count Charles d'Anjou's giving him the
task of protecting the Tartar ambassadors.
And thus, inevitably, their talk got around to the Tartars.
"Why did you accept this task from the Count of Anjou?" she asked. "You
have a lofty title, huge estates, everything you could want. Why trouble
yourself with all this intrigue?"
Having decided not to tell her the truth about his past, Simon now could
not answer her question both honestly and fully. He could not say that
he had committed himself to this mission to clear the stain of treason
from the name of de Gobignon and to prove that he had a right to the
title.
So he told her of another reason, equally true.
"I am in part an orphan, and the king was like a second father to me. It
is his wish that Christians and Tartars join together to liberate the
Holy Land. And I would do anything for him."
Sophia frowned. "I find that hard to understand. As for me, I hate the
Tartars."
Simon's mind pounced on that. Could she be more involved in Ugolini's
scheming than she had admitted?
"Why do you hate the Tartars? You know so little about them."
"I know that they almost made enemies of us because you thought I was
kissing you just to help my uncle."
_Walk carefully, Simon._
Again she was hinting at her uncle's involvement in all that had gone
wrong for the alliance. But if he asked her about it outright, she might
think--as he had thought of her--that he was courting her only to
further his cause.
"Well, I am sure your uncle is following his conscience, as we all are,"
said Simon. Actually, he believed nothing of the kind. But he did not
want to offend Sophia, and perhaps l'amour courtois would permit a small
lapse in one bound to be truthful to his lady.
"And your conscience tells you to guard those savages?"
"I want to see Jerusalem liberated and the Saracens conquered," Simon
said. "Every good Christian does."
She sat up in bed, looking at him earnestly. "Do you not fear that the
Tartars are worse than the Saracens? That is what my uncle says."
Step by step, as if he were defending a philosophical proposition at the
University of Paris, Simon explained to her what he believed. Yes, the
Tartars were barbarians and had committed unspeakable atrocities. But
the Saracens, united under the Mameluke Sultan of Egypt, were more
powerful now than they had been in hundreds of years. If not stopped
now, they would sweep all the crusaders out of Outremer, the land beyond
the sea.
And a wave of Mohammedan conquests might well not end there. To this day
the Moors were a power in Spain, and it was not that long ago that there
were Saracens in France and here in Italy. Surely she remembered that
her own island of Sicily had been conquered for a time by the Saracens.
Indeed, King Manfred von Hohenstaufen's army was made up partly of
Saracens, and he himself was an infidel.
With their belief in spreading their religion by the sword, the Saracens
were a far greater danger to Christendom than the Tartars. The Tartars
were simple pagans, easily converted to Christianity. Friar Mathieu had
personally baptized over a dozen high-ranking Tartars.
She listened intently, her golden-brown eyes so fixed on his that he
feared more than once to lose his train of thought. But he persevered to
the end. When he finished, she nodded thoughtfully.
Now, he thought, he could turn the conversation to her uncle.
"All this is so obvious," he said, "it is hard to understand why your
uncle should have formed a party to oppose the alliance."
She touched her fingertips to her mouth in surprise. That mouth--it was
like a blooming rose.
"You mean my uncle is the _leader_ of those who are against the
alliance?"
This reminded him of mornings he had tiptoed through his forest at
Gobignon, longbow drawn, catching a glimpse of a stag's brown coat and
then losing sight of it again in the thick broussailles, trying to stay
downwind and draw close enough for a good shot without frightening the
deer into headlong flight.
"But I thought you already knew that," he said. If she denied that she
knew any such thing, then his quarry had escaped him.
"So, he put David of Trebizond up to baiting the Tartars while you and I
were so delightfully engaged? Wicked uncle! To think I almost lost you
on his account." She clenched a pretty fist that looked as if it had
been chiseled in marble. On one finger her small garnet ring glittered
in the candlelight.
"I believe he brought David of Trebizond and his servant Giancarlo here
to Orvieto, as well as that Hungarian knight, Sire Cosmas, who spoke at
the pope's council, to discredit the Tartars." Simon wondered whether he
should tell Sophia about the bravos Giancarlo was recruiting. No, if he
told her what he knew about them, he would have to require her to keep
it a secret, and that might make her feel disloyal to Ugolini.
She nodded. "Now I understand why he spends so much time closeted with
that silk merchant, talking about--who is Fra Tomasso di--di--?"
_God's robe!_
"Fra Tomasso d'Aquino?"
She nodded. "That was the name. He sent David to see this Fra Tomasso,
and when David came back I overheard my uncle joyfully shouting, 'Fra
Tomasso is with us!' over and over again. Is he an important man, this
Fra Tomasso?"
Simon tried to keep his face calm, but he was horrified. Simon recalled
now that the d'Aquino family were from southern Italy, the kingdom of
Manfred the unbeliever, as was Ugolini. And were not the d'Aquinos even
related to the Hohenstaufens? Something must be done about this at once.
How far had the plotters--that was what they were, plotters--gotten with
d'Aquino?
How much further dare he pursue this subject before Sophia grew
suspicious of him? And how much further before he began to feel that he
was degrading their love?
_Our love? But she has not said she loves me._
The realization was like a thunderclap in his mind.
What he really wanted to know was whether she loved him or not. To come
right out and ask her was not the way of courtly love. He must wait for
her to say. But she would never speak of love as long as they went on
about the Tartars and Ugolini.
_To the devil with Ugolini and David of Trebizond and Fra Tomasso and
the Tartars!_
He had learned enough anyway, he decided. She had confirmed his
suspicion that Ugolini was the ringleader of the forces in Orvieto
arrayed against the Tartars. She had let him know that they had drawn
Fra Tomasso d'Aquino into their conspiracy.
Of one thing he felt certain. If she were working with her uncle to
block the alliance, she would not have let him learn so much.