He pressed his hand against his middle and
hoped the mother had not lived to see what had been done to her baby.

He wanted desperately to be away from there, not just because he himself
might be in danger, but because he could not stand to watch.

He looked up at Ugolini. The little cardinal sat rigid on Riccardo's
shoulders, his face white and blank, his whiskers quivering. How foolish
he had been to want to see.

Not far away, de Verceuil's dark face under his wide-brimmed red hat
stood out above the other faces in the crowd on the steps. The little
mouth was set in a satisfied smile. Daoud wished he could slash that
smug face with his sword.

Another Monaldeschi man-at-arms set Marco di Filippeschi's head on the
end of his pike and waved it in the air for all to see. The mob in the
piazza began to boil. It was a chaos that Daoud's eyes could take in
only piecemeal. Men and women fought with swords and daggers and clubs;
masses of people shrieking with terror surged toward the streets leading
off the piazza where mounted Monaldeschi retainers slashed at them with
swords and drove lances into them; crossbowmen fired into the crowd
from balconies.

Now Daoud's heart was beating so hard that the booming of his blood in
his ears almost drowned out the noise in the piazza. This was a war
breaking out all around him.

A continuation, he reminded himself guiltily, of the war he had started.

No, he need not blame himself. He had not started this. These people had
been slaughtering one another long before he came to Orvieto.

How could the Monaldeschi tell their friends, or the innocent, from
their enemies, Daoud wondered. Perhaps, he thought, it did not matter to
them.

He now made out, on a balcony opposite the cathedral steps, the stooped
figure of the Contessa di Monaldeschi. Her cloak glittered with gold
embroidery, and on her gray hair she wore a small silver coronet. She
rested one hand on the shoulder of a boy, her grandnephew Vittorio.

_What a monster that child must be!_

Daoud heard Ugolini's choking whisper from above him: "Get me out of
here."

There was only one way to escape, back into the cathedral and out one of
the side doors. Daoud helped Ugolini down from Riccardo's back, and they
hurried through the center doorway, followed by his men-at-arms.

"Do not draw your weapons," Daoud said to Riccardo and the others. "Or
you might get pulled into the fighting. But be ready to stand and fight
i