De Verceuil seized her by the shoulders, his fingers digging in so hard
she felt as if nails were being driven into her muscles. She was almost
dizzy with panic.
"You lying little Jewess!"
Suddenly Rachel felt a violent shove, and she was thrown back against
her quilt-covered chest and sat down on it hard. She looked up and saw
that John was standing before de Verceuil. It was he who had pushed them
apart. His arms were spread wide.
"Do not dare to touch her again!" John shouted in the Tartar tongue. He
turned to Friar Mathieu and jerked his head at de Verceuil.
"Tell him!"
When Friar Mathieu had repeated John's command, the cardinal answered,
"Tell Messer John that we have reason to believe that this Jewish whore
is an agent of Manfred von Hohenstaufen, the enemy we are marching to
destroy. She met with Sophia Orfali, Ugolini's niece, and Ugolini and
his niece have both fled to Manfred. Manfred has tried before now to
harm Messer John, and he could do it through this girl."
John shrugged and glowered at de Verceuil when he heard this.
"Foolishness. Reicho does nothing but read books and comfort me. She has
no friends, and no one comes to talk with her. Except you. Go away."
De Verceuil took another swallow from the wine jar.
"Put that down!" John shouted. De Verceuil did not need to have that
translated. He put the jar down, frowning at John, offended.
"Sordello is right," de Verceuil said. "The man is a savage."
"Do you want me to tell him so?" said Friar Mathieu.
De Verceuil replied to this with a haughty stare.
"Tell him this," he said. "Tomorrow we march to Benevento. King Charles
has sent scouts and spies into Manfred's lands, and they have learned
that Manfred is moving in our direction with a large army. Larger than
ours, if the reports are to be believed. We would be stronger still if
your friend the pusillanimous Count de Gobignon were to put in an
appearance."
Rachel remembered the Count de Gobignon, that tall, thin, sad-looking
man who had so frightened her with his questions about Madonna Sophia.
Everyone was asking questions about Madonna Sophia. There was no doubt
that Madonna Sophia and her friends had some secret. Rachel had always
known that, though she did not want to know what the secret was.
Whatever it was, Rachel promised herself that no one would get a hint of
it from her.
"Count Simon was reported coming down the east coast of Italy," said
Friar Mathieu. "He could have joined our army if King Charles had been
able to wait for him in Rome."
"King Charles did not choose to wait in Rome," said de Verceuil.
"Oh, I think he did," said Friar Mathieu. "I think he would have been
happy to stay in Rome if his supporters, such as his marshals and
yourself, had not pressed him to move southward when you heard Manfred
was on the march."
"I did not know that you ragged Franciscans were experts on military
strategy," said de Verceuil.
"We are not. Indeed, war greatly grieves us. But we do possess common
sense."
What if there were a battle and Manfred won? Rachel thought. Would
Manfred's soldiers kill John? Would they treat her as one of the enemy?
Would they rape her, steal her treasure? She had always hoped to escape
to the kingdom of Sicily, and now she was in the camp of Sicily's
enemies.
"Will there be a battle?" she asked timidly of no one in particular.
De Verceuil's head swung around toward her. "Do not worry about the
battle, little harlot," he said in an unpleasantly syrupy voice. "Yes, I
expect we will be too busy tomorrow and the next day to concern
ourselves with you. After that, perhaps we will have some Ghibellino
prisoners to help us find out what you have been up to. And you will
furnish our weary troops with diversion."
Rachel felt as if her body had turned into a block of ice. Was he saying
that he would let the troops have her? That would kill her. After
something like that, she would want to be dead.
"Please--" she whispered.
"Yes, diversion," said de Verceuil, reaching down to take her face
between his hard, gloved fingers. "It has been many a year now since I
have seen a Jew burn. And when you go up in flames, it will mark a new
beginning for this Sicilian kingdom of heretics, Jews, and Saracens. You
will be the first, but not the last."
He let go of her face just in time to avoid being pushed away by John.
He took a last swallow of wine and turned and strode out of the tent,
followed by Sordello, who turned and gave Rachel a last leering,
gap-toothed grin.
"Is that a great man among your people?" John asked Friar Mathieu, his
face black with rage. "Among my people he would be sewn into a leather
bag and thrown into the nearest river."
Rachel sat on her traveling box, her hand pressed between her breasts to
quiet her pounding heart. She could hardly believe what she had heard,
that de Verceuil wanted to burn her at the stake as an agent of
Manfred's after the coming battle.
_Oh, God, let Manfred win, please._
* * * * *
His name was Nuwaihi, and he was so young that his beard was still
sparse. He came riding with his two companions out of the blue-gray
hills to the north, and brought his pony to a skidding stop beside
Daoud. He turned his mount and they rode on together, side by side, in
Manfred's vanguard.
"I saw the army of King Charles, effendi, I and Abdul and Said," he said
in Arabic, gesturing to include his comrades. "The Franks are on the
road that leads from Cassino to Benevento. They are about two days' ride
from here. We hid behind boulders close to the road, and we counted
them. There are over eight hundred mounted warriors and five thousand
men on foot. They have many pack animals and wagons and merchants and
priests and women following them. Just as our army does." His breath and
that of his pony steamed in the cold air.
Daoud felt a prickling sensation rise on his neck and spread across his
shoulders. Two days' ride. The armies could meet tomorrow. Tomorrow
would decide everything.
Now, if only Manfred could conceive a plan for outmaneuvering Charles.
If only he would take Daoud's advice. He knew Europeans preferred to
fight pitched battles, and he prayed that Manfred would not choose that
way.
"Did you see a purple banner with three gold crowns?" Daoud asked.
Two weeks ago a courier from the Ghibellini in northern Italy had
brought word that Simon de Gobignon's army had passed through Ravenna,
on the Adriatic coast. It seemed unlikely to Daoud that de Gobignon
would catch up with Charles in time to take part in the coming battle.
"No purple banner. They fly the white banner with the red cross."
Nuwaihi turned his head to the left and spat. "And all the soldiers have
red crosses on their tunics." He spat again. His fierceness pleased
Daoud.
At one time, he thought, he would have been sorry to learn that Simon de
Gobignon was not with Charles's army. He would have longed to meet Simon
on the field and fight and kill him. But now he understood that he had
hated Simon because Simon resembled the Christian David that he might
have been. It did not matter to him that he would not meet the French
count again. Instead, he could feel relieved that Charles would not have
Simon's knights and men as part of his army.
Nuwaihi went on, "Their Count Charles, he who would be king, was at the
head of the column. I knew him because he wears a crown on his helmet.
His banner is red with a black lion rearing up on its hind legs."
Daoud looked over his shoulder and saw Manfred not far behind him, on a
white horse with a black streak running from forehead to nose. The king
of southern Italy and Sicily, in a cloak the color of springtime leaves,
was the center of a mounted group of his favorite courtiers. One
strummed a lute, and they were singing together in Latin.
_A brave spectacle. Manfred rides into battle singing Latin sonnets._
A Mameluke army on its way to war would have mullahs praying for victory
and a mounted band playing martial music on kettledrums, trumpets, and
hautboys.
The young blond men around Manfred, Daoud knew, were nimble dancers,
witty talkers, skilled musicians, and expert falconers. How well they
could fight he had yet to see. Manfred was the oldest of them, but right
now he looked as young as the others. He had on no visible armor, though
Daoud knew he regularly wore a mail vest under his lime tunic.
Behind Manfred, all on glossy palfreys and wearing mail shirts, rode his
Swabian knights, Lorenzo Celino and Erhard Barth in the first rank. The
Swabians' grandfathers had come to Sicily to serve the Hohenstaufens,
and they still spoke German among themselves. Like their king, they wore
no helmets, but most of them had fur-trimmed hoods drawn tight around
their heads to protect them from the February wind. Above them fluttered
the yellow Hohenstaufen banner with its double-headed black eagle.
The column of knights, four abreast, stretched westward down this main
road. The lines of helmets and pennoned lances disappeared over the
crest of a pass cutting through the bleak mountain range that formed the
rocky spine of Italy. Snow outlined the crevices in the rocks that
towered above the army of Sicily.
Manfred's host moved at a leisurely rate Daoud found typically European.
The march west, after they had assembled at Lucera, had taken two weeks.
The mounted warriors were held to the pace of the foot soldiers. Twice
the army had been struck by sleet storms that changed the road into a
river of mud. Rather than press on, as Baibars would have, Manfred had
ordered his army to halt and seek shelter in hillside forests.
In some of the valleys the army had been able to spread out and march
briskly over frozen fields and pastures. But then, along a mountainside
or through a pass, the road would close down again, and the flow of
troops would slow to a trickle.
Daoud turned back to Nuwaihi. "Were you close enough to the road to see
the Tartars I told you of? Two small brown men with slanted eyes?"
"Yes, effendi, they were riding near the head of the Franks. Just as you
told me, they had eight mounted men wearing red cloaks guarding them.
And before and after them marched many men carrying crossbows."
_Their people are such masters of war. How they will laugh at the
idiotic way Christians fight each other._
Daoud wondered whether the enemy army were mostly Frenchmen, or as
mixed a host as Manfred's troops were. Manfred's thousand knights and
four thousand men-at-arms included Swabians, south Italians, Sicilians,
and Muslims.
_If only, instead of three scouts, we had three hundred men lying in
ambush along that road, we could have broken Charles's attack and
perhaps killed him and the Tartars then and there._
Daoud thanked Nuwaihi, Abdul, and Said and sent them to join the Sons of
the Falcon, riding today as the rear guard. He rode back to Manfred,
hoping he could persuade the king and his commanders to use wisely the
great army they had assembled.
Soon Manfred, Erhard Barth, several of Manfred's German and Italian
commanders, Lorenzo, and Daoud were dismounted and gathered in a field
beside the line of march. Manfred's orderly had brought a map of the
region and spread it out on the ground, weighting the edges with rocks.
As Manfred crouched over the map, his five-pointed silver star with its
ruby center hung over a town, represented on the map by an archway and a
church surrounded by a wall. The drawing was marked with the Latin name
"Beneventum."
"We can be in Benevento by nightfall," said Barth. "And Anjou's army
will probably arrive at the same time. There is but one road they can
follow." He pointed to a brown line that ran down from a large oval, at
the top of the map, drawn around a collection of buildings and marked
"Roma." Between Rome and Benevento was a series of towns, each indicated
by a drawing of one or two buildings surrounded by walls. Mountains were
shown as rows of sharp little points.
"Benevento is a Guelfo town," said Manfred, "and deserves to have us
move in on it and quarter our troops there. The town is at the end of a
long valley that runs north to south. The opening at the north end of
the valley is a narrow pass. Anjou's army must come through that pass.
They will find it easier to get into the valley than to get out, because
we will be waiting for them."
Daoud felt a surge of exasperation, and quickly pushed it back down.
Anger would not help him.
"Waiting for them?" he said. "If we are making war, we do not _want_ to
meet them."
Manfred frowned. "If we drive them up against the north end of the
valley, we will have them trapped." Manfred smashed his fist into his
palm. "There will be nowhere for them to escape to."
_He is getting tired of my giving advice that contradicts the way he
thinks things should be done. After all, he did win battles before I
came here._
But to simply meet Charles's army face-to-face, like two bulls butting
heads, seemed lunacy to Daoud.
"Such a battle will be bad for both sides," he said. "We will butcher
each other."
_Perhaps I should have spent less time training my men and more trying
to teach Manfred._
"We do outnumber them," said Manfred testily.
"And if every one of their men kills one of ours and every one of our
men kills one of theirs, there should be a few of our men left at the
end of the battle. Do you call that a victory?"
"Show some respect for your king!" a Neapolitan officer snapped.
"No, be still, Signore Pasca," Manfred said to the Neapolitan. "I want
to hear Emir Daoud out. What can we do, except meet them and fight
them?"
Daoud remembered how he had wished that instead of scouts he had set men
to ambush the Franks. He studied the map.
"Let us send men into the mountains around here and here." He ran his
finger over the angular shapes the mapmaker had drawn around Benevento.
"Then, when Charles's army is in the valley, we will fall upon it from
both sides and destroy it."
No one spoke for a moment. The younger Swabian officers were looking at
him with mingled horror and disgust. Manfred stared at the map with
embarrassed intensity.
Erhard Barth broke the silence. "Such an ambush would not be according
to the customs of chivalry, Herr Daoud. Even if we were to win the
battle in such a fashion, the victory would bring us so much infamy that
it would be better had we lost."
"We are not in Outremer, thank God," said a Swabian with a long scar on
his cheek.
"And we are not Saracens," said the one called Pasca. "Most of us."
"In other words, our noble commanders would refuse to fight?" said
Lorenzo, glaring angrily at the other officers.
How would Baibars deal with these men, Daoud wondered. He might cut off
a head or two and lavish gold and jewels and robes of honor on the rest.
But Daoud had placed himself under Manfred's orders. And Manfred's army
was not disciplined as Islamic armies were. European armies were made up
of bands of warriors led by men who might or might not choose to take
orders from their overlord.
"You cannot turn my men into Saracens," said Manfred firmly. "Even my
Saracens fight like Europeans, because they have lived in Sicily for
generations. You have trained two hundred men in your Mameluke methods
of fighting, and I have seen that they are a brilliant unit, but you
would need many years to teach your ways to thousands of knights and
men. And I must give my Germans and Italians a plan that will be
acceptable to them."
Erhard Barth's mouth drew down in an apologetic grimace. "It is the way
we are used to fighting, Herr Daoud."
It was infuriating. Daoud felt rage burst in him like Greek Fire. With a
silent inward struggle, he brought it under control. For good or ill,
his destiny was bound to Manfred's.
When the conference ended, Daoud's horse picked its way among the shrubs
and rocks beside the road, retracing the line of march back to the
supply caravan. Daoud felt a powerful need to spend a few moments with
Sophia. She had insisted on coming with him. He had wanted her to stay
out of danger. Now, tormented by misgivings about the coming battle, he
feared for her even more. But nothing now could spare them from
tomorrow's peril and it lifted his heart to know that she was here.