slapped him on the shoulder, a blow that jarred his teeth. "I could like you, Dandolo," he said heartily. "We'll talk numbers, and money, in a little while. Have another glass of wine."
Three hours later Giuliano left with his mind whirling, walking back through the halls hardly less ornate than the Doge's Palace in Venice, although the courtiers were less sophisticated, even coarse in their habits by comparison.
Some said Charles was stern but fair, others that he taxed his subjects into penury, almost to starvation, and that he had neither love for nor interest in the people of Italy.
Yet for ambition's sake, he chose to have his court so often here in Naples, passionately, intensely, almost madly alive and placed like a jewel on the side of a sleeping dragon whose smoke even now scarred the horizon. Charles too was a force of nature that might destroy those who took him too lightly.
Guiliano must learn a great deal more, study, listen, watch, and take intense care as to exactly what he reported back to the doge. He went down the steps into the blinding sunlight, and the heat from the stones embraced him.
When Charles moved his court from Naples south to Messina on the island of Sicily, Giuliano followed after him a week later. As in Naples, he watched and listened. The talk was of the reconquest of Outremer, as the old kingdom of Christian Palestine was known.
"Just the beginning," one sailor said cheerfully, drinking down half a pint of wine and water with gusto. "More than time we took the war back to the Muslims. They're all over the place, and spreading."
"Time we got our own back," another said savagely. He was a big man with a red beard. "Fifteen years ago they killed a hundred and fifty Teutonic knights at Durbe. Then all the people in Osel apostatized and slaughtered every Christian in their territory."
"At least they stopped the Mongols going into Egypt," Giuliano volunteered, interested to see their answer to that. "Better the Muslims fight them than we have to."
"Let the Mongols soften them up for us," the first man rejoined. "Then we'll finish them. I'm not choosy who's on my side." He guffawed with laughter.
"Clearly," a small man with a pointed beard put in.
The red-haired man slammed his tankard on the tabletop. "And what the hell is that supposed to mean?" he challenged, his face flushing with anger.
"It is supposed to mean that if you had ever seen an army of Mongol horsemen, you'd be damn glad to have the Muslims between you and them," the other rejoined.
"And the Byzantines?" Giuliano asked, hoping to provoke an informative reply.
The small man shrugged. "Between us and Islam?"
"Why not?" Giuliano urged. "Isn't it better they fight Islam than we have to?"
The man with the red beard shifted in his seat. "King Charles will take them when we pass that way, just like before. Plenty of treasure there for the picking."
"We can't do that," Giuliano told him. "They've agreed to union with Rome, which makes them fellow believers in the one faith with us. Taking them by force would be a sin unpardonable by the pope."
Redbeard grinned. "The king'll take care of that, never you worry. He's writing to Rome even now, asking the pope to excommunicate the emperor, which will take all protection from him. Then we can do as we like."
Giuliano sat stunned, the room melting into a blur of sound, senseless around him.
Two days later, Giuliano set out for Constantinople. The voyage east was calm and swifter than he had expected, lasting only eighteen days. Like most other ships, theirs hugged the shore all the way, often unloading cargo and taking on more. It was to be a profitable journey in money as well as information.
However, as they sailed up the Sea of Marmara in the early May morning, the mares-tail clouds high and fragile, the wind painting brushstrokes on the sea, he admitted to himself that no matter how long it took, or however he steeled himself, he would never be ready to see the homeland of the mother who had given him birth and yet loved him so little that she had been willing to abandon him.
He had looked at women with their children passing him in the street. They might be tired, worried, heartbroken for a hundred reasons, but they never took their eyes from their children. Every step was watched. A hand was ever ready to support or to chastise, but it was