The following is a brief excerpt from my latest novel, The Witch of Bastanes. If you enjoy this passage, my book is available on Amazon.com and wherever books are sold.
My Dearest Teresa,
My thoughts seldom stray from the joy I felt when last we held each other. Your strength sustains me as I look forward to our uncertain future. I tell myself we must go on this way, but I cannot bring myself to accept this separation.
My journey occupies all my attention. With my passage into imperial territory, my forebodings are filled with the prospect of what greeting their leaders may have prepared for unwelcome guests.
Tell the pope that I reject his commission. Tell him I would rather go with you to some country cottage and harvest figs for you to make into jam to spread over homemade bread on an outdoor table. This is the face of temptation, the call of my inner self over the role I am supposed to play for Church and science and the future we bequeath to our children.
No, I won’t stop and go back. I’d probably never make it across Frangipani territory, anyway. That doesn’t keep me from wanting to, but I also want to make a difference, reinvigorate our culture with ideas from other places and other peoples. I want to give the world a chance to make peace and learn something from one another. I want to make a new age possible, because that’s what I believe God expects of us.
Some people think that the way to preserve our way of life is to seal it off from “foreign” influences and outlaw any ideas and progress that are not our own, like a city behind stone walls. But history shows that such cities die, not all at once, but by slow starvation and the strangulation of culture. War is only temporary, and its effects reversible, but contact and exchange between cultures are permanent.
The only important part of my life, that I cannot replace with a bauble from the East or the Islamic lands of Africa, is you, my dear. Your beauty, courage, and honesty are unique among thinking people I have encountered in my travels around the world.
Why do you put up with me? I find it so difficult to talk or write about my feelings, as if, by ignoring them, they might simply go away. But they don’t go away. Instead, they build up and occupy such a position of importance within me that, I feel, one day, I must burst and spill my feelings all over the page in front of me. My thoughts and feelings are out of balance, in stark contrast to the equanimity and clarity that your words give to me. I must learn to put my feelings toward some positive goal or purpose, or surely, I will go mad.
The other day, Ugolino and I met a group who had fled from Spain to seek refuge in the Kingdom of Sicily, under Emperor Frederick. Their leader was an elderly man, Rabbi Soliman Ben Naman, who said that he knew your parents and your grandfather. He is an enthusiastic scholar who has spent his life translating Greek and Arabic medical texts for Jewish and Christian scholars in Toledo. You would have loved questioning him on the efficacy of old herbal remedies. I confess, he has a tremendous sense of humor, and he talks of your mother as if she were as beautiful as you are. Based on your stories about your parents, I suspect he is right about that. He told me what his friends and relatives had to say about Palermo, and if only half of it is true, I can’t wait to get there. It encourages me to think about a place where Christians, Jews, and Muslims can still live and work together, respecting each other and building on each community’s storehouse of knowledge to make a better world for all of us. I mean, we all agree that there is only one God, although there are many of us. From what I’ve heard, that’s what the emperor believes, as well. That is better for humanity in the long run than endless war.
There I go, drifting into these kinds of discussions instead of telling you how much I miss you and how much brighter the world is with you in it. I guess I’m just more comfortable in the world of ideas than I am in the world of feelings. For me, this is going to be a long struggle before I can make peace with myself long enough to be of any use to anyone else, especially to you.
Tell Aidor that you and he are in my thoughts and prayers every day and that I hope and pray to meet you both one day, in a world at peace.
With all my love,
Miquel
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