that rippled above Simon.
Equerries took turns riding with the banner according to a roster Simon
himself had written. Beside the crusading flag, another equerry carried
the banner of the house of Gobignon, three gold crowns, two side by side
and one below them, on a purple background.

His sisters' three husbands rode to war behind him today. Since he was
unmarried and had no heir, one of them would be Count de Gobignon if he
should fall.

_And with more right to the title, perhaps, than I have_, he thought
unhappily. And he felt as if icy fingers stroked the back of his neck
when he thought how much one of those three knights back there stood to
gain by his death.

His little troop raised no dust; the road was damp and covered with
puddles from yesterday's rain. Thank God it had not rained hard enough
to turn the road into mud. As it was, the weather made his leave-taking
gloomier than it need have been. The empty fields, littered with yellow
stubble, lay flat under the vast gray bowl of a cloudy November sky. The
only feature in that landscape was a darker gray, the bulk of Chateau
Gobignon with its round towers rising on its great solitary hill. The
road they traveled ran back to it as straight as if it had been drawn
with a mason's rule.

_I should stop this enterprise now_, Simon thought. _I should turn back
before it is too late._

The longer they were on the road, the harder it would be to declare
suddenly that Gobignon was _not_ going to war in Italy, to tell his
barons and knights to return to their homes and hang up their arms. If
he did so at this moment, he would provoke great anger in these men of
his own household. Today and tomorrow great barons would be joining him,
mature men--his vassals--but men of weight and power in their own right.
Their scorn at his change of heart would be almost unbearable.

But did he want to be another Amalric de Gobignon, leading the flower of
his domain's manhood, hundreds of knights and thousands of men-at-arms,
to war, with only a handful coming back? If this was a bad war, God
might well punish Charles d'Anjou with defeat. And Simon would share,
not in the glory as Charles had promised him, but in disaster and death.

_And I am not rightfully the Count de Gobignon._

He knew, though these men did not, that he had no right to call them out
to war. If Simon de Gobignon, a bastard and an impostor, led this army
to its destruction, what name was there for such a cr