,
witty talkers, skilled musicians, and expert falconers. How well they
could fight he had yet to see. Manfred was the oldest of them, but right
now he looked as young as the others. He had on no visible armor, though
Daoud knew he regularly wore a mail vest under his lime tunic.

Behind Manfred, all on glossy palfreys and wearing mail shirts, rode his
Swabian knights, Lorenzo Celino and Erhard Barth in the first rank. The
Swabians' grandfathers had come to Sicily to serve the Hohenstaufens,
and they still spoke German among themselves. Like their king, they wore
no helmets, but most of them had fur-trimmed hoods drawn tight around
their heads to protect them from the February wind. Above them fluttered
the yellow Hohenstaufen banner with its double-headed black eagle.

The column of knights, four abreast, stretched westward down this main
road. The lines of helmets and pennoned lances disappeared over the
crest of a pass cutting through the bleak mountain range that formed the
rocky spine of Italy. Snow outlined the crevices in the rocks that
towered above the army of Sicily.

Manfred's host moved at a leisurely rate Daoud found typically European.
The march west, after they had assembled at Lucera, had taken two weeks.
The mounted warriors were held to the pace of the foot soldiers. Twice
the army had been struck by sleet storms that changed the road into a
river of mud. Rather than press on, as Baibars would have, Manfred had
ordered his army to halt and seek shelter in hillside forests.

In some of the valleys the army had been able to spread out and march
briskly over frozen fields and pastures. But then, along a mountainside
or through a pass, the road would close down again, and the flow of
troops would slow to a trickle.

Daoud turned back to Nuwaihi. "Were you close enough to the road to see
the Tartars I told you of? Two small brown men with slanted eyes?"

"Yes, effendi, they were riding near the head of the Franks. Just as you
told me, they had eight mounted men wearing red cloaks guarding them.
And before and after them marched many men carrying crossbows."

_Their people are such masters of war. How they will laugh at the
idiotic way Christians fight each other._

Daoud wondered whether the enemy army were mostly Frenchmen, or as
mixed a host as Manfred's troops were. Manfred's thousand knights and
four thousand men-at-arms included Swabians, south Italians, Sicilians,
and Muslims.

_If only, ins