be both compassionate and highly intelligent. She had become increasingly aware of a loneliness in him to share the excitement of his knowledge. He not only collected works of art, especially from antiquity, but even more he loved the treasures of the mind and hungered to share them.
They walked together from the anteroom to one of the great galleries. He guided her a little to the left. "Have you met John Beccus, the new patriarch?"
"No." She was interested and knew that it showed in her voice. This was the calling that Constantine had wanted, even though he was obliged to hide it.
"He is with the emperor now. If you wait a short while, I shall introduce you," Nicephoras offered.
"Thank you," she accepted quickly. They fell into conversation about art, moving into history and the events that had inspired certain styles, and from that into philosophy and religion. She found his views more liberal than she had expected, teasing her mind with new and broader ideas.
"I have just been reading some works by an Englishman named Roger Bacon," he said with intense enthusiasm. "I have never discovered a mind like his. He writes of mathematics, optics, alchemy, and the manufacture of a fine black powder which can explode"-he jerked his hands apart to demonstrate-"with great force, when it is ignited. The thought is exciting and terrifying. It could be used for immense good, and perhaps even greater evil." He looked at Anna's face to judge her appreciation of what he had said, the sheer intellectual excitement of it.
"He is an Englishman?" Anna repeated. "Did he discover this stuff, or invent it?"
"I don't know. Why?" Then he understood. "He is a Franciscan, not a crusader," he said quickly. "He has many practical ideas, such as how lenses could be ground and then assembled into a machine so that the tiniest objects could appear enormous, and you could see them quite clearly." His voice lifted again with the love of pure knowledge. "And other lenses so that objects miles distant could seem to be only yards away. Consider what that could do for the traveler, especially at sea. He is either one of the greatest geniuses in the world, or he lives in an ecstasy of madness."
She looked down, hating what she was thinking. "Perhaps he is a genius, and can see all these things, but is he wise? The two are not the same."
"I have no idea," Nicephoras answered gently. "What is it you are afraid of? Would it be bad to see things in the distance more clearly? He writes of being able to fix some of these lenses in a contraption so you could wear them on your nose, and those who cannot now see would be able to read." His voice rose with his excitement. "And he studies also the size, position, and paths of celestial bodies. He has worked out great theories on the movement of water, and how it could be used in machines to lift and carry things, and to create an engine that transforms steam into power which could drive ships across the sea, regardless of the wind or the oar! Imagine it."
"Can we make these things that explode?" she asked softly. "Machines that create steam to drive ships across the sea, without the wind in the sails, or men at the oars?" She could not rid herself of the fear of such things, the power it would give the nation that possessed them.
"I expect so." He frowned slightly, as if at the first touch of a chill. "Then we need not be prisoners of the wind."
She looked up at him. "The kings and princes of England come on crusade, don't they?" It was a statement. Everyone knew of Richard, known as the Lionheart, and of course more recently Prince Edward.
"You think they will use these things in war?" Nicephoras was pale now, his excitement bled away, leaving horror like an open wound.
"Would you trust them not to?"
"Bacon is a scientist, an inventor, a discoverer of the miracles of God in the universe." He shook his head. "He is not a man of war. His religion is one of wonder, the conquest of ignorance, not of lands."
"And perhaps he thinks all other men are the same," she said dryly, an edge of sarcasm in her tone. "I don't, do you?"
He was about to respond again when the door opened and John Beccus emerged from the emperor's presence. He was imposing, a gaunt and hatchet-faced man.