r 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,