ch
for them. They beg to go crusading under your leadership."

_Under my leadership! God help them!_

"You are right welcome, Messires. When we stop for the night, see my
clerk, Friar Amos, and have him add your names to our roll."

The young men dismounted, rushed to him, and kissed his hands.

Why did he not send them away, send all these knights away, tell them
there would be no war in Italy? Because he was afraid of his own barons
and knights, the men he was supposed to lead. Because he felt he had set
something in motion that could not be stopped, like one of those
horrendous avalanches in the Alps.

If they were to keep going, he must--without mishap--cover ten leagues a
day to reach Rome by February. He must study again the maps Valery was
carrying in his saddlebags, especially the one he had just received,
along with a letter, from Count Charles--King Charles.

The infidel Manfred, Charles had written, had stirred up the Ghibellino
cities of northern Italy. They were lying in wait for allies of Anjou,
who might come down from France or the Holy Roman Empire. Simon must not
waste troops fighting the Sienese or Florentine militia. So he should
enter Italy by way of Provence and Liguria, then cut across eastward to
Ravenna and thence down to Spoleto and Viterbo, and finally to Rome. The
roundabout route would take longer, but Charles would expect Simon in
Rome by the first of February. Charles intended to march against Manfred
at the beginning of April.

Two months to reach Provence, march along the Ligurian coast, perhaps as
far as Genoa, which was safely Guelfo, and then pick his way around the
nests of northern Ghibellini to Rome. It could be done, but only if his
army met with no unexpected obstacles--a Ghibellino army, for instance,
or a bad winter storm.

And then, beyond Rome, what would they find?

Once they were there, at least he would not have to make the decisions
that determined the fate of these men. The responsibility--and the blame
if they failed--would be Charles's.

_The greatest war since you were a child_, Charles had promised.

And none of the Gobignon men would ever know that they were fighting
because he had fallen in love with a woman named Sophia--if that was
truly her name--and she had let him taste her love and then had
disappeared.

He remembered a trouvere at a feast singing of how the Greeks went to
war because Helen, wife of one of their kings, ran off with Paris,
princ