The Sons of the Falcon had ridden to the far end of the valley and were
now roaring back, standing in the saddle and firing arrows over the
tails of their horses.
"Sire," said Daoud. "Not to act is to act." He felt urgency building in
him as he sensed that he was persuading Manfred.
"I remember my father saying something like that," said Manfred. "What
do you think, Erhard?"
Daoud's heart sank. The beefy Swabian would undoubtedly counsel more
waiting.
In thought, Landgrave Barth sucked in his upper lip and pushed out the
pendulous lower one until it seemed he was trying to pull his nose into
his mouth.
"Anjou will have to campaign against you soon, Sire, for the reason Herr
Daoud has just given," he said slowly. "His men will not allow him to
stay in Rome and endure the privation of a siege. When they learn you
are coming, they will demand that he march out to meet you. He is
probably planning an attack for next April or May, when the weather is
best. He must expect reinforcements--but, so he does not have to pay
them for long, he will not want them to come until the very moment he is
ready to invade. So, if you attack him in January or February, you catch
him unready." He finished with a vigorous nod of his head. "I recommend
it."
Daoud felt a new and unexpected warmth toward Barth. The landgrave was
not such a dull-witted old soldier after all.
The Sons of the Falcon had finished their archery exercise. In four
ranks, fifty mounted men abreast, they drew up at the base of the hill
and saluted Manfred, two hundred scimitars flashing in the afternoon
sun.
Manfred stepped forward to the crest of the hill and raised his hands
above his head. "_May God bless your arms!_" he shouted in Arabic.
The wild, high-pitched ululations of his Muslim warriors echoed against
the surrounding hills as Manfred, smiling, returned to his companions.
He said, "In three months' time, then. No more than four. The weather
will decide. I will call in my barons one by one and tell them to
prepare. We must keep this a secret for as long as possible."
Daoud, Lorenzo, and Barth all bowed in assent. Daoud felt a surge of
joy. He had succeeded in persuading Manfred to strike at Charles.
Manfred's reasons for not wanting to move were sound ones, he knew. He
had spent long hours considering them himself, but he was certain that
if Manfred did nothing, he was surely doomed. At this moment Manfred and
Charles were nearly evenly matched, Manfred a little stronger, Charles
growing in strength. To a great extent it would be luck--or the will of
God--that determined the outcome. Daoud could not control luck or God.
But he could make the best possible plan and give his all to it.
Suddenly, he badly wanted to get back to Sophia in Lucera. Usually he
enjoyed being out with the troops, overseeing their training. Today he
begrudged the time. Every moment seemed precious. Three months would be
gone before he and Sophia realized it. Then he would be riding with
Manfred's army, perhaps never to see her again.
He must make sure she would be safe no matter what happened. Perhaps
Ugolini or Tilia could help. Sophia would want to travel with the
army--with him--north. She was not a woman to pine at home while men
marched away. He must discourage her; it was too dangerous.
But to discourage her would probably be impossible.
* * * * *
Simon listened to the drumming hooves behind him on the dirt road and
thought, _I will be hearing this sound all day long every day for
months_. He supposed that after a while he would no longer notice it,
but today, the day after his departure from Château Gobignon, his ears
seemed to ache from the incessant pounding.
And the hoofbeats were a constant reminder that he was really leading
the Gobignon host to war.
All summer long the conviction had been growing upon him that this was a
bad war, and all the suffering it caused, all the deaths and
mutilations, would be on his conscience forever. No matter that the pope
had proclaimed it a holy crusade against the blasphemer Manfred. Popes
could be wrong about wars.
Simon's father, Roland, had vividly described for him the horrors of the
Albigensian crusade of a generation ago, when knights of northern France
had fallen upon Languedoc like a pack of wolves--like Tartars, in
fact--reducing it to ruins. And that crusade had been proclaimed by a
pope.
In days to come the rumbling in his ears would be louder, the feeling
that he was guilty of great wrongdoing harder to bear. He looked over
his shoulder and saw thirty knights mounted on their palfreys, another
twenty equerries and servants on smaller horses, two priests on mules,
five supply wagons, two of them full of weapons and armor, one hundred
foot soldiers and sixty great war-horses in strings, a page boy riding
the lead horse in each string. This was the Gobignon household
contingent. At today's end he would have three times that many of every
category, and by the end of the week his army would have swollen to its
full size of four hundred knights, fifteen hundred foot soldiers, and
all the equerries, attendants, horses, and baggage they needed.
And, a year or more from now, how many of them would come back from this
war? He thought of Alain de Pirenne, lying on a street in Orvieto. He
thought of Teodoro at the Monaldeschi palace, his chest crushed by a
stone, his warm blood pouring out of his mouth over Simon's hand. How
many of these men would die miserably like that?
Thierry d'Hauteville and Valery de Pirenne--Alain's younger brother--the
two young men who rode behind him, caught his eye and grinned
delightedly. He managed a smile in return, but feared it must look
awfully weak. The bright red silk crosses sewn on their chests caught
his eye. He wore one, too, on the breast of his purple and gold surcoat.
His oldest sister, Isabelle, a fine seamstress, had sewn it there and
embroidered the edges with gold thread.
All three of his sisters, Isabelle, Alix, and Blanche, had worked on the
crusaders' banner, red cross on white silk, that rippled above Simon.
Equerries took turns riding with the banner according to a roster Simon
himself had written. Beside the crusading flag, another equerry carried
the banner of the house of Gobignon, three gold crowns, two side by side
and one below them, on a purple background.
His sisters' three husbands rode to war behind him today. Since he was
unmarried and had no heir, one of them would be Count de Gobignon if he
should fall.
_And with more right to the title, perhaps, than I have_, he thought
unhappily. And he felt as if icy fingers stroked the back of his neck
when he thought how much one of those three knights back there stood to
gain by his death.
His little troop raised no dust; the road was damp and covered with
puddles from yesterday's rain. Thank God it had not rained hard enough
to turn the road into mud. As it was, the weather made his leave-taking
gloomier than it need have been. The empty fields, littered with yellow
stubble, lay flat under the vast gray bowl of a cloudy November sky. The
only feature in that landscape was a darker gray, the bulk of Château
Gobignon with its round towers rising on its great solitary hill. The
road they traveled ran back to it as straight as if it had been drawn
with a mason's rule.
_I should stop this enterprise now_, Simon thought. _I should turn back
before it is too late._
The longer they were on the road, the harder it would be to declare
suddenly that Gobignon was _not_ going to war in Italy, to tell his
barons and knights to return to their homes and hang up their arms. If
he did so at this moment, he would provoke great anger in these men of
his own household. Today and tomorrow great barons would be joining him,
mature men--his vassals--but men of weight and power in their own right.
Their scorn at his change of heart would be almost unbearable.
But did he want to be another Amalric de Gobignon, leading the flower of
his domain's manhood, hundreds of knights and thousands of men-at-arms,
to war, with only a handful coming back? If this was a bad war, God
might well punish Charles d'Anjou with defeat. And Simon would share,
not in the glory as Charles had promised him, but in disaster and death.
_And I am not rightfully the Count de Gobignon._
He knew, though these men did not, that he had no right to call them out
to war. If Simon de Gobignon, a bastard and an impostor, led this army
to its destruction, what name was there for such a crime?
The voice of Valery de Pirenne, Simon's new equerry, broke in on Simon's
tormented thoughts.
"I am not sorry to be leaving home this time of year. What better place
to spend the winter than sunny Italy?"
_I have already caused the death of this young man's brother. Will I
kill Valery too?_
"It rains much in Italy in January," said Thierry, now Sire Thierry
d'Hauteville, having been knighted by Simon at the beginning of November
on the Feast of All Saints. His tone was lofty with experience.
"Bad weather for war," said Henri de Puys, whose experience was ten
times Thierry's--or Simon's, for that matter. "But the rains should be
over by the time we reach that infidel Manfred's kingdom."
"Look there," said Thierry. "More knights coming to meet us."
Simon saw a line of about a dozen men on horseback, three canvas-covered
wagons and a straggling column of men on foot with spears over their
shoulders. The oncoming knights and men were tiny in the distance,
marching along a road that would meet Simon's route.
_Oh, God, now it will be harder to turn them back._
"That will be the party from Château la Durie," Thierry said, pointing
to the horizon where the four towers of a small castle were just barely
visible.
A distant bell was ringing out the noon hour as Simon's troop met those
from la Durie. All of the new knights wore red crosses on their tunics.
Sire Antoine de la Durie was a stout man about de Puys's age with a huge
mustache called an algernon, whose ends grew into his sideburns. Simon
and de la Durie brought their horses together and embraced. The knight
smelled like a barn.
"How was your harvest, Sire Antoine?"
Large white teeth flashed under the algernon. "Ample, Monseigneur. But
not so ample, I trust, as what we shall gather in Sicily."
They all wanted this so much.
How his chief barons had cheered and roared and stamped when he
announced this war to them at his Midsummer's Eve feast in the great
hall at Château Gobignon! It was at that very moment, when he had seen
the ferocious eagerness of his barons for war, that he had begun again
to doubt.
Antoine de la Durie gestured with a callused, bare hand to three young
men on horseback whose russet cloaks were patched, but whose longswords
proclaimed their knighthood. They grinned shyly at Simon.
"These are the Pilchard brothers, Monseigneur. They are not Gobignon
vassals, but they are Madame de la Durie's cousin's sons, and I vouch
for them. They beg to go crusading under your leadership."
_Under my leadership! God help them!_
"You are right welcome, Messires. When we stop for the night, see my
clerk, Friar Amos, and have him add your names to our roll."
The young men dismounted, rushed to him, and kissed his hands.
Why did he not send them away, send all these knights away, tell them
there would be no war in Italy? Because he was afraid of his own barons
and knights, the men he was supposed to lead. Because he felt he had set
something in motion that could not be stopped, like one of those
horrendous avalanches in the Alps.
If they were to keep going, he must--without mishap--cover ten leagues a
day to reach Rome by February. He must study again the maps Valery was
carrying in his saddlebags, especially the one he had just received,
along with a letter, from Count Charles--King Charles.
The infidel Manfred, Charles had written, had stirred up the Ghibellino
cities of northern Italy. They were lying in wait for allies of Anjou,
who might come down from France or the Holy Roman Empire. Simon must not
waste troops fighting the Sienese or Florentine militia. So he should
enter Italy by way of Provence and Liguria, then cut across eastward to
Ravenna and thence down to Spoleto and Viterbo, and finally to Rome. The
roundabout route would take longer, but Charles would expect Simon in
Rome by the first of February. Charles intended to march against Manfred
at the beginning of April.
Two months to reach Provence, march along the Ligurian coast, perhaps as
far as Genoa, which was safely Guelfo, and then pick his way around the
nests of northern Ghibellini to Rome. It could be done, but only if his
army met with no unexpected obstacles--a Ghibellino army, for instance,
or a bad winter storm.
And then, beyond Rome, what would they find?
Once they were there, at least he would not have to make the decisions
that determined the fate of these men. The responsibility--and the blame
if they failed--would be Charles's.
_The greatest war since you were a child_, Charles had promised.
And none of the Gobignon men would ever know that they were fighting
because he had fallen in love with a woman named Sophia--if that was
truly her name--and she had let him taste her love and then had
disappeared.
He remembered a trouvere at a feast singing of how the Greeks went to
war because Helen, wife of one of their kings, ran off with Paris,
prince of Troy. But that was just a story.
Sophia--her face and form arose in his memory, and there was a strange
happiness mixed with the pain, as if he were glad of his suffering. He
had heard songs about the sweet pain of love, but he had never before
now understood them.
And even now he could not think of Sophia as an enemy. His heartbeat
quickened at the thought that there was a chance, very small but still a
chance, that Sophia might truly be someone he could love, and that he
could free her from whatever entanglement had dragged her into Manfred's
power.
By the end of the day the sound of hoofbeats around him was no longer a
drumming, but a thundering. And all around and above him was a
fluttering of banners. Each of the larger contingents that joined him
had brought the standard of its seigneur.
The road south was climbing into forested hills. At the crest of the
first hill Simon tugged on the reins to slow his palfrey, and turned to
look back. In the fading light of the overcast day, Château Gobignon was
a violet outcropping on the flat horizon, its towers indistinct. This
would be his last sight of it, perhaps for years. And tomorrow he would
cross the boundary of his domain. That was a point past which there was
no return. Once the host was assembled, once they had crossed the
Gobignon border, it would not matter what he told them. If he refused to
lead them, they would find another leader.
He saw two more banners rising above the crest of a bare ridge to the
west. Then the heads and shoulders of men, then the horses they rode.
They waved and halloed. More followed them. And still more.
Simon met the newcomers by a stream that trickled through a small valley
lined with birch trees. Seigneur Claudius de Marion, the leader of the
large new party, lifted his square chin as he reached over and clapped
Simon heartily on the shoulder.
"The valley widens out up ahead," he said. "I propose that we camp
there. The forest beyond is thick and not a good place to ride through
at night. And, Monseigneur, to be frank, I do not want to send my
daughter home after dark."
"I will be quite safe, Father, if Monseigneur the Count wishes to press
on for the night."
The young woman riding a tall gray and white stallion beside Claudius de
Marion had humorous blue eyes and a wide mouth. Her upper lip protruded
slightly, an irregularity Simon thought quite pretty in her. She had not
inherited her father's nose, which was shaped like an axe blade; hers
was small and turned up at the end. Her single yellow-gold braid, which
circled round from under her blue hood and hung down between her high
breasts, seemed to glow in the gathering dusk.
Simon remembered dancing in a ring that included her at last Midsummer's
Eve feast. She had worn a woven wreath of white daisies in her hair.
"Barbara insisted on accompanying me to our meeting," said de Marion
with an indulgent grin. "I could not persuade her to bid me farewell
from our castle."
Barbara's smile was wide and frank, like her father's. "In truth,
Monseigneur, I had to see all the knights and men you have gathered. I
knew it would be a brave sight, such as I have never seen the like of.
God grant you a glorious victory. Will you take wine?"
She held up an oval wineskin, and at Simon's nod and murmur of thanks
she worked her horse over to his with a click of her tongue and a pat on
the neck. She rode like one born to it, thought Simon. Which she was.
She squirted the wine into his open mouth. It was red and strong, and it
lit a welcome little fire in his belly.
As they rode deeper into the valley, Simon asked himself, where had
Barbara de Marion been when he had been earnestly searching for a wife?
She had been a child, and his eyes had passed right over her. How
different his life might have been if she had been a little older two
years ago. Seigneur Claudius was one of his chief vassals and a good
friend, and would doubtless have had no objection to a marriage. Simon
might never have gone to Italy.
But there was room in this heart for only one love. And there was only
one course his life could take now.
Somehow, with the sight of this maiden and the realization that he might
have fallen in love with her once but never could now, a door closed in
Simon's mind. His destiny lay in Italy. He could no more forget Sophia
and return to Château Gobignon like a snail crawling into its shell than
he could spit himself on his own sword.
As for these men, they were going to Italy for their own gain, not to
help Simon find Sophia, nor yet to help Charles d'Anjou become King of
Sicily. Or even to protect the pope from his Hohenstaufen enemies. He
had not had to appeal to their feudal obligations in summoning them to
war. As Count Charles had predicted, they all _wanted_ to come. All they
cared about was a chance for riches and land and glory after years of
doing nothing but managing their domains. They marched of their own free
will. He only pointed the way.
He remembered something Roland had said to him: _Once you have made your
choice, put your whole heart and soul into it. Never divide yourself._
Which, Simon thought, was exactly why, even though he would pass near
Nicolette and Roland's home in Provence, he would not visit them. He
knew well their feelings about crusades, and he could be quite sure of
the loathing with which they would view this war. Roland had even spent
a good part of his youth at the court of Emperor Frederic, Manfred's
father. No, he had enough doubts of his own without letting his parents
add more.
Even so, from his belt hung Roland's gift to him, the jeweled Damascus
scimitar. He did not like to admit to himself that he was superstitious,
but with this scimitar Roland had gotten out of Egypt alive in the face
of the most terrible dangers. Somehow, Simon saw the scimitar as a
talisman that might also get him through this war.
He glanced over at the beautiful Barbara de Marion and felt a rush of
gratitude. Knowing that, lovely as she was, she could never make him
forget Sophia, had helped him make his decision.