arco
because the orange Monaldeschi tunics were everywhere.

"What is _happening_?" Ugolini demanded.

"They are killing Marco di Filippeschi," said Daoud, thinking: _He
helped me. He needs help now._ His hand gripped the hilt of his sword
tightly, and he wanted to draw it and rush down the stairs to fight
beside Marco.

But the knowledge that anyone who went to Marco's aid would die with him
held him motionless. Daoud was not free to draw his sword for Marco, not
while the Tartar ambassadors lived and the pope might yet proclaim a new
crusade.

Marco was shouting obscenities so rapidly that Daoud's Italian failed
him and he could not understand. The Filippeschi chieftain was tightly
bound and helpless, and the men around him pushed him to his knees.

_God be merciful to him_, Daoud prayed.

"Lift me up so I can see!" Ugolini cried to his men-at-arms.

"You do not want to see," said Daoud, but Riccardo obediently hoisted
him up to sit on his shoulders. The cardinal looked ridiculous, Daoud
thought, like an overdressed child being carried by his father.

A man holding a long two-handed sword stepped out of the empty space
surrounding Marco di Filippeschi. Daoud drew in a breath. The crowd
gasped. The blade flashed in the sun like a mirror as he swung it up.
Marco struggled, shouting curses, twisting and thrashing to escape the
sword. Blood splashed over the gray-black paving stones as the sword
came down. Marco cried out in agony. It took three strokes to behead
him.

As much death as Daoud had seen, this sickened him. He felt bile
flooding his stomach and rising in his throat.

After Marco's head lay apart from his still-trembling body in a rapidly
spreading pool of blood, the silence was shocking in the piazza that had
an instant before rung with his cries. As shocking as the look of the
bound body without its head.

A woman's piercing scream broke the silence. Holding a baby in her arms,
she burst out of the ring of men who had cordoned off the beheading. She
knelt, screaming and sobbing, and reached out with one hand to touch
Marco's severed head.

Another woman ran out of the crowd with a dagger in her hand. She
pounced on the mother and baby and stabbed and stabbed. A pikeman in an
orange tunic dragged the baby from its mother's arms, tossed it in the
air, and caught it on the end of his pike, spitting it. Some in the
crowd screamed with horror. Others cheered and laughed.

Daoud's stomach lurched.