A force of Moors, Spaniards, and Greek mercenaries laid siege to Montevarchi, in Tuscany, only to find their entrenchments shortly surrounded by the entrenchments of a force of Italians, Hungarians, Goths, and Burgundians, who proceeded to besiege the erstwhile besiegers.
At sea, the warships of Genoa, Venice, Naples, and the smaller Italian maritime principalities did their best to keep the shipping lanes free from Moorish and Spanish privateers and other sea-robbers. These ships suffered cruelly for their efforts and right often were compelled to put into the closest well-equipped port or naval basin for repairs, which meant that strange sights frequently were seen—a Venetian frigata undergoing the fitting of a new mast in the yards of her traditional enemy, Genoa, a ship of the battle line of King John of Naples being repaired in Palermo.
Such things as this had never before happened in the memories of living men.
In his ornate and comfortable palace, safe from all mainland strife. Cardinal D’Este sat in the warm Sicilian sunlight and read with sadness of the deaths of old friends and wondered if ever the carnage would end . . . and if it then would end in his favor.
Unknown to him and the rest, he was fated to have his answer and an end to the Italian chaos far sooner than he could imagine. For even as he sat musing, an army of above thirty thousand fighting men was slowly moving through the passes of the Alps, headed south, toward Italy. There marched therein grim knights of the Teutonic and other orders, fur-clad Poles and Rus-Goths, squadrons of slant-eyed Kalmyks and Lithuanians, Prussians, Bohemians, Saxons. Bavarians. Brandenburgers, Tyrolers, Styrians, Carinthians. Savoyards, Switzers, men of Franche-Comte. Marburg. Munster, Cassel. Frankfort. Koln, Luxemburg, Stuttgart, Regensburg, Hamburg, and Bremen.
At the head of this mass of men rode a young man whom Bass Foster would have immediately known—Egon, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, leading his vassals and allies and mercenaries down to put an end to the Italian anarchy and to see a new Pope firmly installed before he led them all back through these same passes again.
Like most monarchs of Christendom and all other men of reason who believed in order and fairness, he had been sickened and very angered by what had followed the death of old Pope Abdul, not that he, personally, had been any too pleased with all that had transpired while still the devil-spawn Moorish bastard had lived and misruled the Church from Rome but for Ifriqah, the Spanish kingdoms, and his own selfish ends.
Unlike most of the aforementioned monarchs and other men, however. Emperor Egon was in a position to do something about the situation roiling through the Italian peniivsula. He had only waited as long as he had because gathering such a host had taken time and effort and he had wanted to be certain that when he made his appearance in Italy it would be in such numbers that no one would even consider offering him battle, demur, or argument as he saw matters set right in Rome.
The electors had come as close as they ever before had come to refusal and open rebellion when he had presented them with his estimate of what this heterogeneous army would cost to raise, marshal, field, and maintain during the marches down to Italy and back. But he had managed not only to cool them all down but to get everything he had asked of them, in the end. He doubted that he could so easily have done so much with them a year back, but since his wife had recently given birth to a set of male twins, thus granting reasonable assurance to the succession of his house, he now wielded far more real power than in the past.
He meant to settle some old scores in Rome, set some flagrant injustices right—such as those wrought by Moorish malice upon his good friend King Arthur HI Tudor and his unhappy, much-persecuted realm, and some serious vengeance must also be wreaked upon some of the Moorish bastards for the shameful treatment and eventual murder of his elder sister, Arthur’s queen, by the Moorish minions in London. But he knew that he would have long enough in Italy to hunt them all out. try them in order to broadcast their misdeeds, and then arrange suitably impressive ways of publicly executing them; for entering Italy this late in the year, he knew that it would be next spring before the Alpine passes would be sufficiently free of snow to allow for the march back north.
CHAPTER
THE ELEVENTH
His every nerve drawn tense as wire, Bass sat his mount, watching Sir Ali ibn Hussein, clad in his white herald’s tabard, pacing his barb mare at a slow walk, and trailed by one of his squires, who bore the headless lance shaft from which depended the plain white square of linen cloth. From time to time, the Duke of Norfolk shifted the long glass to scan the head of the now-halted column of mounted men of Ulaid, over and among whom now coiled serpentine spirals of gray smoke from countless slow matches. Then, as Sir Ali drew closer to his objective, Bass concentrated entirely upon the possible foemen, for if a single shot was tired up the road there, if but one blade flashed free, he must immediately give his Kalmyks and gallog-laifhfs the order to loose a volley from their long guns, then charge close enough to deliver a few deadly caracoles or pistol volleys loosed by one rank at a time. And finally, had the foemen not already either charged or broken and fled, it would be, must be, bladework.
But no one fired on or drew steel against the sacred person of the herald. Sir Ali sat his barb easily, his empty right hand gesticulating as he conversed with the riders gathered around him. Abruptly, the semicircle of mounted men opened enough for the Arabian knight to turn his mare about, and, now accompanied by three of the Ulaidians, he returned toward the spot whereon Bass sat his own horse, with Wolfgang and Baron Melchoro flanking him a bit to his rear.
Carefully turning his head to allay any suspicion of sudden movement—for things still could quickly get very sticky if someone out there should even suspect possible treachery—Bass summoned Sir Conn to act as translator if such a need should arise in this coming parley.
As the party led by Sir Ali got closer, Bass was able to see the faces of the three who had come back with him and make some hurried estimates of them, of with just what sorts of men he would presently be conversing and dealing.
The two who trailed Sir Ali, with that knight’s squire behind them, wore fair-quality three-quarter plate, with both halves of the visors open. Their scarred, weathered faces and that indescribable aura of the veteran marked them both as either professional soldiers or very close to such. As they drew still nearer. Bass could see that their plain armor was nicked and dented, scarred and showing competent field repair here and there, but not the slightest speck of rust. Their rounseys looked to be about as well bred as was Bass’s.
The man who rode a big mule beside Sir Ali was altogether of a different mold—florid of face, his cluniacal tonsure marking him as some degree of cleric, but for all, he rode fitted out in an antique byrnie so recently sanded and oiled that the steel rings looked like silver beneath the patina of road dust; the barrel helm that hung on its chain at his side was probably of more venerable age than even the byrnie. but it too had been scoured shiny and oiled.
All three of the Ulaidians carried long horse pistols in pommel pipes. The two old soldiers’ baldrics held broadswords with pierced steel baskets, while that of the florid, mule-mounted man was weighted down with a cross-hilted brand that would not have looked out of place on the First Crusade or at the Battle of Clontarf and thus blended well with his archaic armor.
Bass squirmed uneasily in his sweat-damp saddle. If these men—leaders? spokesmen?—were examples, he might not be confronting some kind of army or guard at all. but rather a rather large pack of banditti of the stripe who often haunted roads in out-of-the-way places, trying to coerce or intimidate “tolls” for uncontested passage out of those too strong to be robbed and killed outright; such collections of lawless scum had plagued the English and Welsh countrysides all during and just after the civil war and foreign incursions until he and the Royal Horse had had the time to hunt them all out and exterminate them like the dangerous vermin they were.
Arrived at last before his lord and leader. Sir Alai said, stiffly and formally, “Your Grace, these be the commanders of yonder force, which is all the cavalry that their army owns. It would seem that the Righ we seek and his still-loyal forces are at this moment besieged in the city up ahead there, Oentreib. These men lead the entire besieging force and rode out when they heard of our coming because they feared us to be mercenaries summoned from afar by the Righ, Conan, to take them from the rear and possibly break the siege.