The corpulent Fra Tomasso took his place behind the table in a heavy chair wider than the pope's, though its back was not as high. He called for Cardinal Adelberto Ugolini. The cardinal, a tiny man with flowing side whiskers and a receding chin, stood up at his place in the pews. He in turn summoned from the audience a knight called Sire Cosmas.
Sire Cosmas, an elderly man, walked stiffly to the pope and knelt before him. Ugolini told the assembly that Cosmas had seen and fought the Tartar invaders in his native Hungary and was driven from his home by them.
The Tartars have long since withdrawn from Hungary, Simon thought. Why did Sire Cosmas never go back there?
Sire Cosmas was lean and dark, with gray hair that fell to his shoulders. Over scarlet gloves he wore many rings that flashed as he gestured.
"They came without warning and all at once, like a summer cloudburst," the Hungarian said. "One moment we were at peace, the next the lines of Tartar horsemen darkened the eastern horizon from the Baltic to the Adriatic."
Sire Cosmas's Latin was very good, fast and fluent.
Simon stood transfixed as Cosmas described the fall of one Russian city after another, how the Tartars leveled Riazan, Moscow, and Kiev and butchered all their people. They would gather all the women, rape them, and cut their throats. The men they cut in two, impaled on stakes, roasted, flayed alive, used as archery targets, or suffocated by pounding dirt down their throats. The details of the atrocities sickened Simon. On into Poland the Tartars came.
Cosmas's tale of the trumpeter of Krakow, who kept sounding the alarm from the cathedral tower until Tartar arrows struck him down, brought tears to Simon's eyes.
Simon found the Hungarian's recital spellbinding. Cosmas had undoubtedly repeated his account many times, polishing his storytelling skills a little more with each occasion. It was probably easy and perhaps profitable for him to remain in western Europe telling and retelling, in great halls and at dinner tables, his adventures with the Tartars.
How much is Cardinal Ugolini paying him for this performance?