Piero made a dismissing gesture. “I followed.” Of course so active a mind would learn German, hog-language though he doubtless considered it. Vernaculars were steadily gaining both political and cultural importance. “You gave a different impression erenow.”
“I am sorry if I was misunderstood.”
Piero looked elsewhere and fell silent, brooding. Does he think I may be a spy? For whom? As far as we’ve been able to find out, Frederick doesn’t have any enemies left worth fussing over. Oh, the French king is surely concerned—
The emperor laughed. “Do you suppose our visitor means to disarm us, Piero?” he gibed. He could be a little cruel, or more than a little, even to those who stood him closest. “Set your heart at ease. I cannot see how good Munan could be in anyone’s pay, yea, not though that anyone be Giacomo de Mora.”
Realization sank into Everard. That’s it. Piero’s worried sick about Sir Giacomo, who has in fact taken more interest in me than would have been expected. If Giacomo has not actually planted me here, Piero fears, then maybe he’s thought of some way to make a tool of me against his rival Somebody in Piero’s position is apt to see shadows in every corner.
Pity followed. What was this man’s fate in this history? Would he “once more” fall a few years hence, accused of conspiracy against his lord, and be blinded, and dash his brains out against a stone wall? Would the future forget him and instead remember Giacomo de Mora, whose name was not in any chronicle known to the Patrol?
Yeah, these intrigues are like dancing on nitroglycerine. Maybe I ought to shy clear of Giacomo, too. And yet … how better might I pick up a clue to what went wrong, than from Frederick’s brilliant military leader and diplomat? Who’s got a wider and shrewder knowledge of this world? If he’s chosen to cultivate me when he’s not busy and the emperor is, I should accept the honor with due fulsomeness.
Odd that he made some excuse and didn’t come along today—
Hoofs clopped. The party had reached a main road. Frederick spurred his horse and, for a moment, drew well ahead of the rest. His hair tossed auburn-gold from beneath a feathered cap. The low sunlight made a halo of it. Yes, he was getting bald, and the trim, medium-sized frame was putting on weight, and lines were deep in the clean-shaven face. (It was a Germanic face, taking more after his grandfather Frederick Barbarossa than his grandfather Roger II.) Nevertheless, for that instant, he looked somewhat like a god.
Peasants still at work in a nearby field bowed clumsily to him. So did a monk trudging toward the city. It was more than awe before power. There had always, also in Everard’s history, been an aura of the supernatural about this ruler. Despite his struggle with the Church, many folk—no few Franciscans, especially—saw him as a mystic figure, a redeemer and reformer of the mundane world, Heaven-sent. Many others saw in him the Antichrist. But that seemed past. In this world, the war between him and the Popes was over, and he had prevailed.
At a ringing canter, the falconers neared the city. Its main gate stood open yet, to be closed an hour after sundown. There was no need for that, no threat, but so the emperor commanded, here and throughout his lands. Traffic must move at certain times, commerce proceed according to regulation. The gate had little about it of the grace and exuberance of Palermo, where Frederick spent his boyhood. Like buildings he had ordered raised elsewhere, strongholds and administrative centers, it was massive, starkly foursquare. Above it a banner rippled in the evening breeze, an eagle on a golden field, the emblem of the Hohenstaufen dynasty.
Not for the first time since he came here, Everard wondered how much of this his history had known. Little remained in the twentieth century, his twentieth century, and the survivors of the Patrol had an overwhelming task already without studying architectural developments. Maybe this wasn’t very different from the “original” medieval Foggia. Or maybe it was. A lot would depend on how soon events had veered off track.
Strictly speaking, that happened about a hundred years ago, when Pope Gregory IX failed to be born—unless it was later, when he died young or did not take holy orders or whatever went amiss. But changes in time don’t spread outward on any simple wave front. They’re an infinitely complicated interplay of quantum functions, way over this poor head of mine.
The tiniest alteration could conceivably annul an entire future, if the event concerned was crucial. There should theoretically be countless such; but hardly ever were they felt. It was as if the time-flow protected itself, passed around them without losing its proper direction and shape. Sometimes you did get odd little eddies—and here one of them had grown to monstrousness—
Yet change must needs spread in chains of cause and effect. Who outside the immediate vicinity would ever even hear what went on, or did not go on, in a couple of families of Anagni? It would take a long time for the consequences of that to reach far. Meanwhile the rest of the world moved onward untouched.
So Constance, daughter of King Roger II, was born after her father’s death. She was over thirty when she married Barbarossa’s younger son, and nine more years went by before she bore to him Frederick, in 1194. Her husband became the Emperor Henry VI, who had gotten the crown of Sicily through the marriage, and who died soon after this birth. Frederick inherited that glamorous hybrid kingdom. He grew up among its plots and tumults, the ward of Pope Innocent III, who arranged his first marriage and maneuvered for a German coalition to hail him supreme king in 1211, because Otto VI had been giving the Church intolerable trouble. By 1220 Frederick was everywhere triumphant and the new Pope, Honorius III, consecrated him Holy Roman Emperor.
Nevertheless, relations with him had long been worsening. He neglected or disowned promise after promise; only in his persecution of heretics did he seem to proceed with any regard to Mother Church. Most conspicuously, time after time he postponed fulfillment of his vow to go on crusade, while he put down revolts and secured his own power. Honorius died in 1227—Yeah. As far as we can find out, with what skimpy resources we’ve got left, things went pretty much the same up till then. Frederick, a widower, married Iolande in 1225, daughter of the titular King of Jerusalem, uh-huh, just as he was supposed to. A smart bit of groundwork for the recovery of that real estate from the paynim. Except that he kept putting the job off, he tried instead to assert his authority over Lombardy by force. And then in 1227 Honorius died.
And the next Pope was not Gregory IX, he was Celestine IV, and after that the world became less and less what it ought to have been.
“Hail!” roared the sentries. They lifted their pikes on high. For a moment the bright hues of the falconers dimmed in the tunnellike gateway. Echoes rolled off stone. They came forth onto the lists, the broad, smoothly paved open space under the wall, beyond which reared the buildings of the city. Above roofs Everard glimpsed cathedral towers. Somehow, against the eastern sky, they looked somber, as if night were already drawing down over them.
A well-clad man with an attendant waited beyond the gate. Judging by the restlessness of their horses, they had been there for a considerable time. Everard recognized the courtier, who brought his mount close and made salutation.
“Your Grace, forgive my intrusion,” he said. “I believed you would desire to know at once. This day did word come. The ambassador from Baghdad landed yesterday at Bari. He and his train were to start hither at dawn.”
“Hellfire!” exclaimed Frederick. “Then they’ll arrive tomorrow. I know how Arabs ride.” He glanced about. “I regret the festivity planned for eventide must be stricken,” he told the party. “I will be too occupied making ready.”