Charles frowned, throwing his head back and staring down his long nose
at Simon. "You want to go back to France now? But our work here has only
begun."

"If you wish to offer any of my vassals fiefdoms or positions in your
new kingdom, they have my leave to accept. I promised them that when
they came with me."

"But you cannot leave before taking possession of your own dukedom."

"Thank you, Sire. But I have decided that for myself I want nothing."

He had rehearsed that sentence in his mind a hundred times. He was
delighted at the sound of it and even more delighted at the stupefied
expression on Charles's face. It was not often one surprised a man like
Charles d'Anjou.

"_Nothing?_ But that is preposterous. You have come all this way, won
this great victory--has your head been addled by chivalrous romances?
This is not the world of Arthur and Lancelot."

Simon recalled Manfred's last stand on the field yesterday and thought,
_Perhaps that world ended with him_.

Surely Charles, keeping himself well out of the battle and threatened
only when Daoud desperately tried to reach him, had been no figure out
of chivalric romance. This was a man he could not trust, could not
admire, and especially could not like.

"Too true, Sire. But it is a world in which people need decent rulers. I
do not need more land, and the land I already have needs me. If I divide
myself between a domain in northern France and another one here in
Italy, I cannot govern either well. And, frankly, I do not want to live
in the midst of a strange people as a foreign conqueror."

_Giving up this dukedom, too, gives me a better right to be Count de
Gobignon._

"You overestimate the difficulty of governing," said Charles.

_No, you underestimate it_, thought Simon. For Charles governing was a
simple matter of squeezing the people and their land for all they were
worth. And killing anyone who protested, as he had those citizens
outside Rome. If the people were strange to him, all the easier to
oppress them.

"Perhaps what comes easily to you is difficult for me, Sire," he said.

Charles shook his head, then quickly reached up to steady the heavy
crown. "I do not understand you. But that province is too valuable for
me to press it on someone who does not want it. I can use it to reward
others who have served me, not as well as you have, but well enough."

"I hoped you might see it that way."

"But think, since I asked you to guard the Tarta