ed 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.

"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 disturba