Hearing a faint moan to his left, he unobtrusively turned his head. The old Chevalier was beside him, his face twisted in agony.
"Trouble, signore?" Toby murmured.
"Cramps!" came the whispered response.
"Be grateful that they keep you awake."
The old scoundrel just scowled, a man without humor.
At last, thank good spirits, the speech ended. Now, perhaps, the mercenaries would be presented to the acclaimed General Neguder and could ask a few penetrating questions about his strategy and intentions. Alas, not so. A herald shook the noble warrior awake. He rose and shuffled out, followed by all his entourage. The audience was over.
The visitors scrambled to their feet and jigged up and down to restore circulation. Don Ramon — to Toby's delight — was deep purple with fury.
"What of Prince Sartaq, senor? Is he any more, um, impressive?"
The don gnashed some teeth. "His Highness is a worthy scion of his exalted forebears."
Splendid! They were going to need all of those they could get.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Khan's son was an entertaining novelty at first, but his stallion interests quickly alarmed all mothers and husbands of young Florentine women. A week of Sartaq was enough to start them whispering that it must be time for the illustrious prince to go on and visit Milan. He must see Venice. Why not Padua? Verona was especially lovely in the spring. Anywhere. The city of flowers fidgeted, but the Magnificent tightened his grip and the complaints remained no more than complaints.
Rumors — never in short supply in Italy — were excessively, superfluently abundant and contradictory. Everyone anyone had ever heard of was going to be appointed suzerain, but the prince had decided to lead the armies of Italy in person, that he was going to flee the peninsula long before there was any chance of the Fiend arriving and catching him there. Also, Nevil's armies were massing to cross Mount Cenis Pass, Brenner Pass, and Simplon Pass, and to enter Italy by the coast road through Savoy. Choose the truth you preferred.
Toby Longdirk, the supposed defender of the city, was no wiser than anyone else. His petitions were ignored, his plans frustrated. He was shut out of the inner councils, if there were any, and the don now seemed less certain of what was being planned, if anything was. If Lucrezia was his source, she might not be as well informed as he had thought. Although he normally bragged openly of his conquests, he was almost discreet in his talk of the duchessa. She must be dangerous indeed if she frightened him.
Toby had a formidable lady of his own to handle. One rather typical afternoon was made worse by a stormy interview with Countess Maud, alias Blanche, Queen Mother of England.
By noon the air was stifling. He could find little compensation in the knowledge that the trellis vines would provide better shade later in the spring. Later in the spring he might be far away or even dead. He would be ready to break off and take a siesta if he could only convince himself that he had done any good at all so far.
He had wasted more than an hour repeating a familiar argument with Alberto Calvalcante, master of gunnery in the Company. Calvalcante had conceded that transporting guns in carts was an untidy and inefficient business. Yes, the noble constable's idea of building a permanent but transportable mount so that a cannon or bombard could be hauled to the battlefield and be ready to fire in minutes instead of hours or days, was an appealing notion. But, he insisted mulishly, such a carriage would fly apart at the first shot unless it was built of enormous balks of timber, so it would require as many oxen to haul it as all the carts it replaced. The recoil would drive it back into its own lines. The wheels would fall off. On muddy roads — and most roads were muddy most of the time — it would sink right out of sight. Toby had managed to answer all the objections except one, which was that a gun had to be aimed. That was achieved now by building a trough for it to lie in pointing at the target, which was almost invariably a city under siege. This fancy carriage of his, the gunner said, would require a mechanism to change the elevation of the barrel, and Maestro Calvalcante would never believe that such a contraption could be built strong enough not to fly apart after a couple of shots.
Toby was baffled but not convinced. In the last twenty years or so, armorers had perfected ways of casting bronze cannons far stronger than the old ones built from iron strips, and yet the military had found no better way of moving them around. Doubtless Nevil would bring many guns with him and use them to batter down city walls. Florence was a big target and stayed where it was. The attackers would not be so obliging.
After Calvalcante came Marshal Diaz, to present half a dozen minor condottieri who had signed up to enjoy the Florentine gold and serve under the celebrated comandante Longdirk. All of them were foreign refugees except one, a crusty peasant farmer from Romagna who led two lances composed entirely of his own sons, aged sixteen to twenty-three. Diaz swore they were as tough a gang of warriors as he had ever met, and Toby promised to come and meet them all in the next day or two. He refrained from asking how many mothers they shared.
Even Diaz, that stolid, imperturbable Catalan, was becoming frayed and harassed these days. The Company had expanded past the seven thousand mark, with no end in sight. There were too few large bands left to enlist as associates, and the small ones had to be included under the don's banner; it was the lesser of the two administrative evils. In theory, Toby could now field more than seventeen hundred helmets for Florence, half of them in the Don Ramon Company itself, but theories never won wars. Men did, good men. D'Amboise, Simonetta, and della Sizeranne had all accepted his invitation and were marching north with their troops. When they arrived, he would have to warn them that he was out of favor in Florence. He was certain that none of them would choose to serve under the don.
As Antonio and his recruits departed, Chancellor Campbell arrived with Brother Bartolo and Sorghaghtani — plus, of course, Chabi, who swirled down from the sky and flattered Toby by choosing his shoulder to perch on. She gave the back of his doublet a token of her affection, too. These were the Company's Intelligence Arm, but their subdued manner as they settled round the table told him that they had no significant news to report.
"Well?" Toby demanded. "It is almost April. The roads are dry in the north. The passes are open. Which way is he coming?"
Hamish grimaced, making his narrow features seem almost wolfish. "I don't know! As of five days ago, there was still utter, absolute, outright nothing. I'm sorry, Toby. Demons, I'm sorry! I'm doing everything I can!"
"You expect me to shoot you? If you don't know, you don't know."
Hamish had posted agents at the mouth of every Alpine pass to talk with travelers. Doubtless they reported what they had learned as promptly as they could, but all of them were stationed at least five days away from Florence and some even farther. The first word to arrive might be a report that Nevil's army was already entering Italy.
Hamish sighed. "You want a guess, I'll give you a guess. It's going to be the Brenner again."