The Saracen: Land of the Infidel by Robert Shea (read novel full txt) 📕

out over his audience for another silent moment, then said, "God must value freedom very highly if He allows so much evil to occur, just so freedom can exist."

I never thought of that.

But there was very little freedom in the world, Simon thought, apart from the power to sin. Everybody from kings down to the meanest serfs was bound in a net of obligations, duties, laws, loyalties, obedience. Simon remembered what Friar Mathieu had said about using Fra Tomasso's vow of obedience, through de Verceuil's speaking to his Dominican superior, to force him to give up his opposition to the alliance.

And now Simon noticed that Fra Tomasso was looking at de Verceuil.

"Often, all too often, one man will seek to rob another of the freedom to do what is right," Fra Tomasso said. "If a superior commands another to do wrong, and the inferior obeys, the one who gives the wrongful order bears the greater burden of guilt. But some guilt also falls upon the one who obeys. It is only with the greatest reluctance and after the greatest deliberation that one should disobey any order from one of higher rank. But there are times when it must be done."

Again he looked at de Verceuil.[392]

"Thus when we see a mighty nation that again and again does harm to the innocent," said Fra Tomasso, "we are bound in conscience to denounce it."

Simon felt as if he had been struck on the head with a rock. Now he was sure of what was coming. And so, evidently, were others, because a murmuring was arising in the church.

Fra Tomasso blinked slowly, as if to show his calm acceptance of the stir he was causing. "We are obliged to denounce unjust war even when the evildoer offers us the hand of fellowship. When a puissant nation takes up arms against the world, when it makes war its chief occupation, when it attacks peoples that have not harmed it, when it threatens all humanity, we are not permitted to condone such wrongs. When this nation carries war to innocent, unarmed men, women, and children, slaughtering these noncombatants by the tens and hundreds of thousands, we are obliged to condemn it."

Oh, my God! If this is the Church's verdict, all is lost.

Simon looked at the pope on his throne to the right of the altar. He sat slumped, his white mitre tilted forward, his eyes half shut as if in thought. Simon saw no sign that Urban objected to what Fra Tomasso was saying.

The murmur was louder now. Despairing, Simon turned to look back at the Tartars. Little points of candlelight were reflected in their black eyes, and their brown faces were tight. Simon could imagine what would happen to anyone, holy man or not, who spoke out against them so in their own camp.

The stout Dominican stretched an arm in a flowing white sleeve toward the still, mail-clad body on the red bier. "It may be asked, why do I speak of such things on this sad day, when we mourn a young man cruelly struck down in youth? I answer that this young man came here and died here because Christendom is now faced with this great moral dilemma. What we owe this young man, what we owe any man who dies in the performance of his duty, is to do our own duty."

"Enough! Sit down!" came a hoarse whisper from Simon's left, and he turned to see de Verceuil half out of his chair, fists clenched. It had been de Verceuil who had wanted Fra Tomasso, as the most distinguished speaker in Orvieto, to deliver the funeral sermon. And doubtless it was the cardinal's heavy-handed dealing with Fra Tomasso that had provoked this particular sermon. And now de[393] Verceuil was trying publicly to silence Fra Tomasso, making more enemies for their cause.

Fra Tomasso turned in the cardinal's direction, then once again slowly shut his eyes and slowly opened them as he turned away. He went on speaking.

"And perhaps God has taken this young man from us to remind us how many other innocent lives may be lost if we wage war unwisely."

Simon and the other five French knights turned the red-draped wooden pallet so that Alain's head was toward the altar and his feet toward the church door. The weight had not bothered Simon carrying Alain into the church, but now the burden seemed twice as heavy. He was afraid, as he descended the stairs in front of the cathedral, one worn stone step at a time, that his knees might buckle and he might spill Alain to the ground. He would be anxious until he got Alain back on the cart that would carry him to his final resting place in the cemetery on a hill to the north of Orvieto's great rock.

And where will I go?

Trying to get de Verceuil to change Fra Tomasso's mind had been a serious error in judgment. Every important churchman and official in Orvieto had heard the greatest thinker in Christendom attack the plan of Christians and Tartars waging war together on the Saracens. What would happen now?

Nothing.

Nothing would happen, and that was all that was needed for the alliance to fail. The Tartars would go home. They would continue their war against the Saracens, the war they had been losing lately, without Christian help. And eventually the Mameluke waves would roll over Palestine and Syria and the Christian strongholds in Outremer would crumble like sand castles.

And the escutcheon of Gobignon is a little more tarnished. And I have led my dearest vassal to useless death. Whenever the Tartars leave Italy, and it will probably be soon, I will return to Château Gobignon a failure.

He thought back to his meeting with Charles d'Anjou on the wall of the Louvre last July. It had seemed then that helping the Tartars to ally themselves with the Christians was a way to change his whole life for the better. He would take his rightful place in the kingdom as a great baron. He would end the shame and suffering he had[394] always lived with. He would hold his head up among the nobility, and King Louis and Count Charles would love and respect him.

Now he would accomplish none of those things. He had been knocked from his horse and was rolling in the dust. He would go back to the living death of being afraid to show his face beyond the bounds of Gobignon, the only place in the world where he was known and respected.

Go back to Gobignon and never see Sophia again? She, at least, would not think less of him because the grand alliance had failed. She probably felt sorry for Alain. Perhaps even felt responsible for his death. Simon should go and reassure her.

And then what? Bid her farewell?

He and de Puys on the other side, two knights behind each of them, slid Alain's body with a dry, rasping sound along the unpainted gray wood of the cart bed. The red ribbons on the four tall cartwheels fluttered in the slight breeze.

A thought that had fleetingly occurred to Simon before now formed itself solidly in his mind.

What if he were to take Sophia back to Gobignon as his bride?

Many there were who would rail against him for doing it. His grandmother in particular, herself the daughter of a king, would be beside herself with fury. King Louis and Uncle Charles might even try to stop him. But he was the Count de Gobignon, a Peer of the Realm, almost a king in his own right, and he had tried to do what his elders expected of him, and he had failed.

Twice he had loved women whose lands and high birth made them proper matches for him in the eyes of the world, and twice he had been prevented from marrying the woman of his choice because of Count Amalric's legacy of wickedness.

Well, the devil take all of them. If they would not accept him as a member of the noblesse, then he was not obliged to behave as one.

Surely his mother and father, considering the way their own marriage had come about, would understand and approve his choice.

And somehow he doubted that Cardinal Ugolini would raise any objection to his marrying his niece, Sophia.

[395]

XXXVII

An open letter from Fra Tomasso d'Aquino of the Order of Preaching Friars to the Christian sovereigns of Europe, from Orvieto, 7th day of November A.D. 1263