air.

"Dieu et le Sepulcre!"

"L'Eglise et le Pape!"

"Le Roi Charles!"

He saw the green and white Falcon banner go down. He heard the band
instruments give out their last ugly sounds as they and the men who
played them perished under maces and axes. He saw with agony the deaths
of men he had trained and ridden with--Husain, Said, Farraj, Omar--heads
smashed, bodies cloven. He felt in his own body the blows that killed
them.

Daoud recognized the purple banner now. Three gold crowns. He had seen
it before in Orvieto. Simon de Gobignon had come at last to this battle.

He should feel hatred for de Gobignon, but all he felt was a numb
despair.

His few remaining men crowded against him, forcing him to fall back. He
rode back toward Benevento, away from the triumphant army of Gobignon,
crushed with sorrow. The Sons of the Falcon, the force he had taken a
year to build, had been destroyed in a flicker of time, as if the earth
had opened and swallowed them.

* * * * *

Lorenzo wept and cursed himself for being too late to warn Daoud before
the French attacked. He stood on the edge of the field, holding his
horse's reins in one hand and his crossbow in the other, watching the
French knights sweep across the valley from east to west, trampling
everyone in their path. Through his tears he saw the purple and gold
banner of Gobignon fluttering against the cold blue-and-white sky.

_Simon de Gobignon. If only we had killed him in Orvieto._

All about him, men rode and ran and fought. Singly and in twos and
threes, horses without riders ran wildly this way and that. He wondered
if Daoud was still alive. What had happened to King Manfred and the
other Hohenstaufen leaders? Charles d'Anjou still occupied his hill at
the north end of the valley. Almost overwhelmed at the moment help
arrived, he had never moved.

There were fewer and fewer of Manfred's men in sight, and more of
Charles's with their accursed red crosses.

A line of about a dozen horsemen was coming toward him at a walk. Most
of them wore crosses, but they looked like neither French knights nor
their Guelfo allies. Lorenzo rubbed his eyes to clear his vision of
tears and took a harder look. Two men rode in the center wearing
bowl-shaped steel helmets and gleaming gray mail shirts without
surcoats. They held short, heavy bows in their hands. The brims of their
helmets shaded their faces, but Lorenzo could tell that their sk