A man in an ankle-length gown, his cap heavy with gold thread, confronted Simon. He was, Simon recalled, a camerlengo who had been present two weeks before when he had his brief audience with the doge and presented his charter from King Louis.
"Count, your troops are occupying the place needed by the doge, that he may properly greet our guests. Move them, if you please." The "if you please" was uttered in a tone so perfunctory as to be almost insulting. Simon's face burned and his muscles tensed, but when the ruler of Venice demanded that he give way, he was in no position to quarrel. He bowed curtly and turned to order his men to vacate the wharf.
And so, after waiting for hours, Simon suddenly found himself watching the arrival of the ambassadors from behind ranks of Venetian archers far more smartly turned out than his own mercenaries.
Why, Simon wondered, had the doge not made a place for him in this welcoming ceremony? The slight made him feel angry at himself as much as at the doge.
It is me. Uncle Charles should have sent an older man, more able to command respect.
First to come down the boarding ramp of the galley from Cyprus was a friar in a brown robe with a white cord wrapped around his waist. The crown of his scalp was shaved, and his beard was long and white. He threw himself on the ground and kissed it with a loud smacking sound. He rose and bowed to the doge's sedan chair.
The doge of Venice, Rainerio Zeno, emerged through curtains held for him by two equerries in purple. Zeno was a very old, toothless man whose black eyes glittered like a raven's. His bald head was covered by a white cap bordered with pearls. His gold-embroidered mantle looked stiff and hard as the shell of a beetle. Pages stood on either side of him, and he leaned heavily on their shoulders, using them as crutches. The friar bent and kissed Zeno's ring.
Simon could not hear what the doge and the friar said to each other. The friar gestured toward the ship. Armed men—Simon counted ten of them—tramped down the boarding ramp and formed two lines leading to the doge. They were short and swarthy, wearing red and black breastplates of lacquered leather and round steel helmets polished to a dazzling finish, topped with spikes. Bows were slung crosswise over their shoulders, and long, curved swords hung from their belts. Were these Tartars, he wondered.
Their swords looked very much like the one Simon wore. Simon's was an Egyptian scimitar, one of his most precious possessions, not because of its jeweled hilt—a pearl set just behind the guard, a ruby at the end of the hilt, and a row of smaller precious stones all along the grip—but because of the one who had given it to him. And yet, much as he prized it, the scimitar hurt him each time he looked at it, reminding him of his darkest secret, a secret known to only three living people. Simon's whole life, the scimitar reminded him, was built on a lie.
And he had accepted this mission, in part, to expiate the shame he felt when he remembered that.