could hear
Sophia saying she had been that same Michael's concubine for a time. He
suffered again as he had last night when he stood with her on the
balcony of that house and she told him at last the truth about herself.
He had felt then as if he were drowning in a lake of fire. And added to
his own anguish had been the realization that her pain, the pain of the
woman he had loved and still loved, had been worse than the worst of
what he felt.

Charles was still going on about his accursed ambitions.

"I mean to make that title a reality. Not since Rome will so many lands
around the Middle Sea have been united in one--empire."

The vision moved Simon, but not as Charles evidently hoped. It sickened
him, and he felt himself in the presence of a monster. Had Charles
forgotten already the heaps of corpses strewn on this battlefield at
dawn, that only now were being hauled away by the wagonload?

Simon remembered the long list of the Gobignon dead that Thierry had
handed him this morning on his return to camp. He thought of the
horribly wounded knights and men he had visited, men who, if God was
kind to them, would be dead in a day or two. His eyes still burned from
all the weeping he had done this barely begun day.

And this man, who had made the rescue of the Holy Land, the defeat of
Islam, and the alliance of Christians and Tartars seem all-important to
him, now spoke of sacrificing thousands and thousands more lives
entrusted to him so that he could realize his dream of being another
Caesar.

_God grant that he does not get what he wants._

The wind from the north blew steadily down the length of the valley. The
pile of rocks over Manfred's body had grown so high the men now had to
throw their stones to reach the top.

"What of our plans to liberate the Holy Land, Sire? What about the
alliance of Tartars and Christians? That is what I gave the last three
years of my life to. Surely that is not dead because John and Philip had
the ill luck to get killed on this battlefield."

Charles pulled his purple cloak tighter around him against the wind.
"The timing is wrong for an attempt to retake the Holy Land. I have no
intention of taking part in a crusade against the Egyptians, with or
without the Tartars."

There it was. Charles had confirmed what Simon suspected about him. He
felt indignation boiling within him, but he tried not to let it sound in
his voice.

"Sire, why did you let the Tartars go into the bat