Palombara looked at it with distaste. “It’s expensive,” he agreed. “But it’s vulgar. I think it’s new.”
“Would you prefer some nice Aretino castle, perhaps? Familiar and comfortable?” Vicenze said sarcastically. “All little stones and sharp angles?”
“I would like something a little less brash,” Palombara replied, trying to keep the coldness out of his voice. Vicenze was from Florence, which had been engaged in a bitter artistic and political rivalry with Arezzo for years. He knew that was what lay behind the remark.
Vicenze regarded him sourly. “This will impress people. And it is convenient. We can walk to most of the places we shall need to go. It is near the palace the emperor lives in now.”
Palombara turned around slowly, his eyes stopping at the heavily crowned pillars. “They will think we are barbarians. It’s money without taste.”
Vicenze’s long, bony face was bleak with incomprehension and a growing impatience. He considered preoccupation with the arts to be effete, a digression from the work of God. “It doesn’t matter whether they like us or not, only whether they believe what we say.”
Palombara settled to the conflict with a sense of satisfaction. The man was obedient without imagination, and dogged as an animal following a scent. In fact, there was something faintly canine in the way he sniffed. Vicenze sought nothing but a sterile, obedient power for himself.
“It is ugly,” Palombara insisted with harshness in his voice. “The other house, to the north, has grace of proportion, and quite sufficient room for us. And we can see the Golden Horn from the windows.”
“To what purpose?” Vicenze asked, his face completely innocent.
“We are here to learn, not to teach,” Palombara said, as if explaining to someone slow of wit. “We wish people to feel comfortable when we speak with them, and let down their guard. We need to know them.”
“Know your enemy,” Vicenze said with a slight smile, as if the answer had satisfied him. He conceded to Palombara’s choice of a more modest house.
“Our brothers in Christ!” Palombara retorted. “Temporarily alienated,” he added dryly, the humor there only to please himself.
Palombara set out to explore the city, which in spite of the winter weather, brisk winds off the water, and occasional rain, he found fascinating. It was not particularly cold, and he was perfectly comfortable to walk. A Roman bishop’s dress was not remarkable here in streets where so many nations and faiths passed one another every day. After a long day of studious walking, he was exhausted and his feet were blistered, but he understood the broad layout of the city.
The following day he was stiff, to Vicenze’s sarcastic pleasure. But the day after, ignoring blisters, he wandered in his own neighborhood. The weather was fine, with bright sun and little wind. The streets were narrow, old, and bustling, not unlike the Roman ones he was accustomed to.
He bought lunch from a peddler and ate it while watching two old men playing chess. The board was set out on a table barely large enough to hold it. The carved wooden pieces were worn from use and darkened with the natural oils of the hands that had held them.
One old man had a lean face, a white beard, and black eyes almost hidden in the wrinkles of his skin. The other was bearded also, but nearly bald. They played with total dedication, oblivious to the world around them. Other people passed by, children shouted across the street, donkey carts rumbled over the stones. A peddler asked them if they wished for anything and was not heard.
Palombara watched their faces and saw the intense pleasure in them, an almost fierce joy at the intricacy of the mental battle. He waited for a full hour until it was finished. The thin man won and ordered the best wine in the house and fresh bread, goat cheese, and dried fruit so they could both celebrate, which they did with as great a delight as they had in playing.
He returned earlier the next day and watched the game from the beginning. This time the other man won, but there was just the same celebration at the end.
Suddenly he was overwhelmed by the arrogance of coming here to tell old men like these what they should believe. He stood up and walked away into the wind and sun, too disturbed in mind to think clearly; yet the ideas raced in his head.
One day in early January, having forced himself to work with Vicenze on the coming signing of the agreement, Palombara escaped to a public restaurant.
He sat deliberately close to another table where two middle-aged men were involved in a fierce debate on the Byzantines’ favorite subject-religion. One of the men observed Palombara listening and immediately drew him in, asking his opinion.
“Yes,” the other added eagerly. “What do you think?”
Palombara considered for several seconds before plunging in with a quote from Saint Thomas Aquinas, the brilliant theologian who had died on his way to the Council of Lyons.
“Ah!” the first man said quickly. “Doctor Angelicus! Very good. Do you agree that his choosing to stop his own greatest work, the Summa Theologica, was right?”
Palombara was taken aback. He hesitated.
“Good!” the man said with a brilliant smile. “You don’t know. That is the beginning of wisdom. Didn’t he say that all he had written was as straw compared with what he had seen in a vision?”
“Albertus Magnus, who knew him well, said that his works would fill the world,” his friend argued. He swung around to Palombara. “He was Italian, may God rest his soul. Did you know him?”
Palombara remembered meeting him once: a large man, corpulent, dark-skinned, and immensely courteous. One could not help but like him. “Yes,” he answered, and described the occasion and what had been said.
The second man seized on it as if he had found a treasure, and both attacked the ideas with intense enjoyment. Then they immediately moved on to discuss Francis of Assisi and his refusal to be ordained. Was that good or bad, arrogance or humility?
Palombara was delighted. The free-flowing urgency of it was like the wind off an ocean, erratic, undisciplined, dangerous, but sweeping in from an endless horizon. It was not until he was joined unexpectedly by Vicenze that suddenly he realized how far he had strayed from the accepted doctrine.
Having overheard some of the conversation, Vicenze interrupted in a tone barely civil, saying that he had urgent news and Palombara was to come immediately. Since it was merely an acquaintance fallen into by chance, Palombara had no excuse to finish the discussion. He pardoned himself reluctantly and walked out into the street with Vicenze, angry and frustrated, startled by his sense of loss.
“What is this news?” he asked coldly. He resented not only the interruption, but the high-handed manner in which Vicenze had made it, and now his tight-lipped expression of disapproval.
“We have been summoned to present ourselves to the emperor,” Vicenze replied. “I have been arranging this, while you have been philosophizing with atheists. Try to remember: You serve the pope!”
“I would like to think I serve God,” Palombara said quietly.
“I would like to think you do, too,” Vicenze retaliated. “But I doubt it.”
Palombara changed the subject. “Why does the emperor wish to see us?”
“If I knew what he wanted, I would have told you,” Vicenze snapped.
Palombara didn’t think so, but it was not worth an argument.
Their audience with Emperor Michael Palaeologus was held in the Blachernae Palace. To Palombara, who had learned a little of its history, the glories of the past seemed to haunt the air like bright ghosts lost in the grayer present.