"Tell him I thank His Serenity for his courtesy and will forever honor him for it."
Sordello nodded, and there was a look of respect in his craggy face.
As Sordello repeated Simon's words to the sergente of the doge's guards, Simon wheeled and strode back the way he had come, to stare out to sea. Tears of frustrated fury burned his eyes. He could feel hot blood beating in his temples. The doge had treated him like a small boy. That old gargoyle had insulted him, had insulted the house of Gobignon, had insulted King Louis.
And there was nothing Simon could do about it. He felt furious and miserable. A failure, at the very start of his task.
VI
Crushed, Simon decided that at least he would quarter his French knights and the Venetian archers as near to the doge's palace as possible. The doge alone would be protecting the Tartars for the time being, and Simon had no choice about it.
With Sordello's help he found lodgings for his men at the outrageous price of two deniers a night per man—not all the thieves were on the highways—at the nearest inn to the Piazza San Marco, just a short distance down a side street. How much of what he paid the innkeeper, he wondered, would end up in Sordello's purse?
Then, accompanied by Alain de Pirenne, he walked back to the entrance gate to the doge's palace, a long three-story building that stretched from the waterfront to the basilica. He sent a message in by way of a guard, asking Friar Mathieu to meet him in the piazza. The kindly Franciscan was, he suspected, the most important person in the Tartars' entourage.
Simon and Alain had taken off their mail and were more comfortably dressed in silk tunics, short capes, and velvet caps. Each still wore his weapons belt, with longsword hung on the left and dagger on the right. The leather heels of their point-toed boots rang on the stones of the piazza as they paced, waiting to see if Friar Mathieu would come out.