"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.