"They were Catholic, not Arian," Teja says, "and they were also cousins, which the Catholics forbade to marry. So the bishop of Florentia tried to force them to part, and declared me a bastard. My father went to appeal to the king, and when he returned, he found his homestead burned and his wife and son gone. My father searched, and found her locked away in a nunnery; he was killed trying to free her, and she then died in madness. Old Hildebrand, a friend of my father and my grandfather, even, found me in a monastery in Rome some time later, and freed me from there, and raised me with his own grand-children, an unrepentant heathen. I was not bothered with Christianity again."