To bring up the subject, Simon said, "Friar Mathieu is most grieved at the deaths of the Tartar ambassadors, but it means you no longer need him here. He has asked me to take him back to France with me. He has permission from his order to go. He wants to tell King Louis in person about his journey among the Tartars. And he wants to spend his remaining years in France. As for me, I am eager to see my mother and stepfather in Provence." _Now that I can face them with a clear conscience._ Charles frowned, throwing his head back and staring down his long nose at Simon. "You want to go back to France now? But our work here has only begun." "If you wish to offer any of my vassals fiefdoms or positions in your new kingdom, they have my leave to accept. I promised them that when they came with me." "But you cannot leave before taking possession of your own dukedom." "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. Charles shook his head, then quickly reached up to steady the heavy crown. "I do not understand you. But that province is too valuable for me to press it on someone who does not want it. I can use it to reward others who have served me, not as well as you have, but well enough." "I hoped you might see it that way."