Daoud added, "And call on your allies in Florence and Siena and the other Ghibellino cities to stop any more of Charles's allies coming into Italy. They cannot all come by sea as he did. Many times I have heard people in your court say that Charles has cut Italy in half. Nonsense.

He has put himself between two millstones."

Manfred's eyes lit up. "Yes, I like that way of looking at it."

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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sent. 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 G.o.d--that determined the outcome. Daoud could not control luck or G.o.d.

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 Chateau 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 t.i.tle, 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 G.o.d 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 Chateau 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 va.s.sals--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, G.o.d 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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, G.o.d, now it will be harder to turn them back._

"That will be the party from Chateau 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."