des," he said. "We will butcher
each other."

_Perhaps I should have spent less time training my men and more trying
to teach Manfred._

"We do outnumber them," said Manfred testily.

"And if every one of their men kills one of ours and every one of our
men kills one of theirs, there should be a few of our men left at the
end of the battle. Do you call that a victory?"

"Show some respect for your king!" a Neapolitan officer snapped.

"No, be still, Signore Pasca," Manfred said to the Neapolitan. "I want
to hear Emir Daoud out. What can we do, except meet them and fight
them?"

Daoud remembered how he had wished that instead of scouts he had set men
to ambush the Franks. He studied the map.

"Let us send men into the mountains around here and here." He ran his
finger over the angular shapes the mapmaker had drawn around Benevento.
"Then, when Charles's army is in the valley, we will fall upon it from
both sides and destroy it."

No one spoke for a moment. The younger Swabian officers were looking at
him with mingled horror and disgust. Manfred stared at the map with
embarrassed intensity.

Erhard Barth broke the silence. "Such an ambush would not be according
to the customs of chivalry, Herr Daoud. Even if we were to win the
battle in such a fashion, the victory would bring us so much infamy that
it would be better had we lost."

"We are not in Outremer, thank God," said a Swabian with a long scar on
his cheek.

"And we are not Saracens," said the one called Pasca. "Most of us."

"In other words, our noble commanders would refuse to fight?" said
Lorenzo, glaring angrily at the other officers.

How would Baibars deal with these men, Daoud wondered. He might cut off
a head or two and lavish gold and jewels and robes of honor on the rest.
But Daoud had placed himself under Manfred's orders. And Manfred's army
was not disciplined as Islamic armies were. European armies were made up
of bands of warriors led by men who might or might not choose to take
orders from their overlord.

"You cannot turn my men into Saracens," said Manfred firmly. "Even my
Saracens fight like Europeans, because they have lived in Sicily for
generations. You have trained two hundred men in your Mameluke methods
of fighting, and I have seen that they are a brilliant unit, but you
would need many years to teach your ways to thousands of knights and
men. And I must give my Germans and Italians a plan that will be
acceptable to them."