Chapter 53: Celebration (Part 2)
—A Byzantine official mentioned this incident in his private diary.
He said it was a typical Byzantine-style conspiracy, aimed at Princess Mary and her future barbarian husband.
Such conspiracies were commonplace in the Byzantine court, even crude by its standards. But they were more than enough for dealing with these simple-minded, rough, and guileless Franks.
The people behind this conspiracy had bought off several key figures in the princess's dowry procession:
First, the officials responsible for managing and guarding the beasts.
They had slipped a mother bear that had lost her cub into the rear of the procession and opened most of the cages.
"This mother bear was the largest I had ever seen," the official wrote. "When on all fours, it could still look an ordinary man in the eye. When it stood upright, it was twice his height. Its fur was thick and matted together with asphalt, resin, and tar, as though it wore a heavy suit of armor. Ordinary weapons were utterly useless against it; arrows either bent and fell away or lodged in its body to no effect."
Second, the slaves or maidservants at the princess's side.
The dead cub's head had been cut off and placed inside the reliquary that had originally held the hair of the Virgin Mary. This was undoubtedly an act of extreme blasphemy. Their souls would surely be cast into the lake of fire and burned for ten thousand years, but clearly, profit outweighed punishment after death.
And when the princess's maidservant discovered such a horrifying, filthy object inside the reliquary, whether deliberately or not, her first thought had actually been to find a way to throw it away.
By then, disaster had already struck. Dozens of beasts had been released from their cages: nimble, powerful