A Brightness Long Ago, page 36
It would be possible, he had judged, to go around the woods, let Monticola chase him, then choose his own ground if he turned to fight. His sense was that this was what the other man would expect him to do, and that he wouldn’t follow. Monticola had a contract to be south and west of there, behind two city walls with a force he’d have to divide.
That forced division could have been a part of his thinking, Folco later decided. Monticola trying to defeat a less experienced commander with his full army before splitting his force. Also, burnish his reputation—which would be worth money in campaigns to come.
They had never met before that day.
Already there were stories, a tale that it was Teobaldo who had taken out his eye in a duel. And, of course, Teobaldo Monticola’s nighttime assault on Folco’s sister Vanetta at a holy retreat was known. Their father had made certain of that. It was useful.
By the time they met on that field in summer their families, and the two young men, already hated each other like death.
Folco hadn’t withdrawn. Hadn’t gone around the other side of the wood to avoid a foolish fight or choose better ground if pursued. You could offer many reasons.
But the ground Monticola had chosen, according to Folco’s scouts, was level, even, as if the other man was daring him to fight. The armies were equal. And if he beat Teobaldo Monticola there, or even damaged him enough, this campaign could be over.
Also, he was twenty years old. A withdrawal would be noted, known, remembered. Monticola would cause that to be so. Young Folco d’Acorsi was prudent and calculating by nature, but prudence needed to factor in how you were seen at the outset of your career.
Also, he was not a man to decline a challenge.
He ordered his army forward.
They camped at sundown on low, flat ground within sight of the Remigio force. There had been sown fields here, but not this year, the ground had been trampled. Nothing grew on brown-baked midsummer earth. He had men slip forward before dark to bring him a more precise count, and they reported it was true: this would be an even match of forces.
He could win this war in the morning. That decided him. He was doing the right thing, he told himself. He went to sleep after telling his officers how they would deploy at daybreak. He was crisp and precise. He knew what he wanted.
He actually slept, though sunrise would bring his first major battle as a commander. But in the dark of night he woke, heart pounding with a terror he could not attribute to anything at all. Was it fear of war? Of dying? That was not him! He’d fought before!
He lay on his cot in the commander’s tent and listened to what seemed like thunder in his blood. His mouth was dry. He called hoarsely for a drink and a man brought that for him in the darkness. He rose and walked from the tent to stand under the blue moon, looking out over what would be a battlefield.
And something—an instinct he could never explain or understand (and this, this was a cause of his nightmares after, that he’d had no control over the thought at all, it had just . . . come to him under that moon)—caused him to call for his cousin, his second-in-command. He instructed Aldo to quietly, immediately, take eight hundred infantry and archers back behind their line then into the woods north of them, and stand ready there, at the edge of the trees, hidden, for whatever might come.
No, he said, he didn’t know what might come, but he had . . . he had a feeling. He could not put it better than that. Aldo, who was loyal to death, and who hated Teobaldo Monticola as much or more than Folco did, would later say it was his cousin’s military genius showing at the very start.
Folco knew better. It had been fear, and an impulse to do something to allay it. He’d lifted the flap and gone back inside the tent. He’d even slept again, fitfully.
The sun rose, and with it came the waters. He woke to a flooded tent. His boots were floating past his cot.
He scrambled desperately into clothing. His heart was pounding. An aide helped him put on breastplate and helmet. There was shouting outside. He pulled on the soggy boots and rushed, squishing, from the tent into a sunrise nightmare.
There was a shallow lake out there, in the midst of which his forces were encamped. Some tents had been dislodged from their poles. He watched one of them float by. He saw more boots drifting past.
Then arrows rose and descended from the west—where Teobaldo Monticola had pulled his force back in the night, to be elevated enough so they were not similarly swamped by the rising water. Folco’s aide sloshed to his side, shield up to protect his commander.
Later, they would understand.
Monticola had opened the sluice gates along the river that the farmers here used to irrigate their soil before planting season—in years when the land was planted. The other commander had noted these and figured out how to use them if faced with a young opponent who might be induced to camp in exactly the right place.
Face burning with anger and humiliation, Folco began giving orders as quickly—and as calmly—as he could. His own archers could return fire from here. Monticola’s men could not advance into the swamp without suffering the same problem with movement. He sent the infantry pikemen forward a little, behind shields, to block any such attempt by cavalry.
It made sense to retreat to higher ground. The Remigio forces couldn’t follow; they’d be vulnerable if they moved after him. This would be, he decided, an embarrassment but not a rout. Not deadly. Monticola would have decided last night that an open battle didn’t serve his needs. Setting up a rival for mockery did, splendidly. It amused, diverted. It could also last, Folco thought, for a lifetime, both their lifetimes, when the story spread. As it would.
But then the story changed, as stories do. It changed because Jad—it seemed—did not want young Folco Cino d’Acorsi ruined in this way.
His archers from the wood—the ones he’d sent there in the night with Aldo—began loosing arrows at the Remigio force. They arced and fell in rapid waves. Then Aldo sent his infantry out of the trees to hit the Remigio cavalry on the flank. Hit them hard, before they could react, adjust, and suddenly, wonderfully, mockery was gone. The other army was shouting and flailing in its own disruption, and some of them were dying.
Monticola’s cavalry couldn’t get their horses turned and clear swiftly enough, and pikemen were deadly against cavalry in a situation like this. Losing too many horses was its own disaster for an army.
Folco had the horns blown, he ordered his forces to pull back.
With a counterattack on the flank launched and effective, it became strategic, not weak. He gave a flurry of orders. He had men collect all the gear they could, including the tents. Tents could dry in summer heat. Everything could, just about.
Ahead of him, he saw Monticola reorganizing to face Aldo. But his cousin knew what he was doing: he pulled his pikemen back into the trees. Then he started back through the woods to rejoin the main body of the army, the same way they’d gone out in the night.
Remigio’s army could have tried to go after them, but fighting in woods was difficult, and Folco’s main force would have no trouble launching arrows at their flank if they moved that way. Folco gave another order, to have his archers ready to do that.
But no, the other man knew it, too. And suddenly both sides were pulling back. Both sides. Thanks be to merciful Jad, both sides.
It became a story told, sluice gates opened in the night to flood the army of Acorsi, that dangerous situation forestalled, anticipated, by a young commander having placed a large group in the woods under cover of night, those men doing damage with unexpected arrows and an infantry assault.
Two clever commanders, then, with a clear edge in casualties inflicted going to the younger one, d’Acorsi, even if amusing tales were told of his soldiers (and their leader) floundering about in water as they woke of a summer morning.
In the event, no grievous harm had been done to his men or his reputation—but only, only because he’d woken in the night with a fear he could never understand.
He had been desperately close to a terrible defeat, even capture, at best an embarrassment he might never have lived down—on his first major campaign.
Life can hinge on such moments. It is sometimes that close, in our lives, in the lives of others. Sometimes the arrow or the sword misses us, or wounds instead of killing, the earthquake smashes the world flat a little distance away from where we are, and there is a life for us . . .
He mounted his horse, looking over towards the way they’d come to reach this field. They’d passed a Brothers of Jad retreat. Its sanctuary dome gleamed now in the sunrise light.
He turned then, the sun behind him, towards the figure of Teobaldo Monticola, also mounted. The other man had a hand raised, a salute. Folco thought he heard him laughing. It was unlikely, it would have been too difficult to hear laughter over shouting men and at that distance, but he has heard it in his dreams since that day.
He cannot now remember if he’d returned the salute. He thinks he must have done so. It would have been the right thing to do, sent the right signal back.
CHAPTER XV
With no oxen pulling cannons we went quickly west from Remigio. Speed is dictated by infantry and by those who supply an army (you don’t want to separate too much), and we had wagoneers, cooks with portable ovens, bakers, smiths, grooms and doctors for the horses. But, unusually, we had no women or merchants following. Monticola was going into Bischio to repel an assault or deal with a siege, and there was no place for the usual followers. Useless mouths was the term.
I’d heard stories of commanders throwing the women following an army off a bridge into rushing water when they refused to turn back on orders. I’d wondered if it was true, and if the soldiers had then rebelled, or deserted. Could you follow a man who sent a woman you cared for to her death, just so his forces could move faster?
There was nothing pretty about war.
But it was exciting. I’d be lying if I denied that. There was something about rising (the weather stayed fair as we went), eating quickly, mounting up, knowing an enemy lay ahead somewhere, and a test of courage, fame, and wealth to be gained. Or death.
Not for me. I was an observer, and a symbol. Monticola wanted me with him so that if he met Folco d’Acorsi on the way west (and it seemed he intended to), the other man would see me and know me—and understand that Seressa was opposed to him. Or to Firenta and the Sardis, whom Folco was serving. He would probably realize that Macera was a part of that, too. I had time, as we went, to work this out.
Thinking about Macera took me back to Adria, however, and pleasure in the quickening spring would leave me then. It was foolish and I knew it. I’d met her twice. Her life had had so little to do with mine.
But our meetings had not been ordinary, either one, and her last letter had invited me to keep writing her—with a hint of wanting me to visit one day. I knew I hadn’t imagined that.
I was young, and she had laid claim to some deep part of me, and taken me to her bed. And at the heart of all of this was the feeling I might never know a woman like her again.
Which, as the years have passed—quietly at times, and at other times less so—has proven to be true. She did not live her life to be a memory for me, or anyone, but she is. Some people mark you as they go by.
I also thought, as we went west, about Ginevra della Valle and a moment in Remigio. What she’d said to me on the dock, sun setting, wind rising. A very different woman, a different kind of memory.
“You need to know: if he dies on this campaign I will have you killed.”
I had not been composed in my response.
“Me?” My voice had swirled upwards, embarrassingly high. “Why would . . . what can I . . . ?”
And she’d given me her answer. That I was Seressa among them that spring. A nest of snakes, she’d called us.
* * *
Folco knew exactly where he wanted to go as they headed west from that quick, successful, small campaign at Rosso. His cousin Aldo, with him most of their lives, took the view that Folco always knew what he wanted to do in war.
There was a story, going back to their childhood, that Aldo was actually his commander’s half-brother, another son of Folco’s father (who had left a number of children scattered through Batiara). There had never been anything conclusive, and by now it hardly mattered. Aldo would die for the other man, whether cousin or brother.
Aldo Cino was one of those rare men whose sense of his strengths and limitations was an accurate one. He was aware that his position at Folco’s side had been, for all these years, the perfect place for him. He felt as if Jad had looked kindly upon him when he was born. He was, accordingly, exceptionally devout, in an age where passion for the god often arrived for powerful men only late in life, as they turned their minds towards death, and what might come after.
Aldo ensured that his cousin offered the dawn and sunset invocations whenever possible. In Acorsi, the palace cleric took charge of this. Out here, riding and marching, or before a battle, it was Aldo’s accepted responsibility. At such times he always offered a prayer for the soul of Vanetta Cino, whom he had loved, and he made sure her brother heard him and did the same.
They had prayed this morning before moving their very substantial army into a position just past where the road southwest met one coming up from Remigio.
There was a large religious retreat near this meeting of two main roads; Aldo could see its walls as they went past, the sanctuary dome, smoke rising from chimneys on a cool day with a breeze.
This was, of course, a place he and his cousin knew extremely well, from long ago. Aldo looked at the river to the south, and the woods north, and his memories were vivid. He remembered slipping into those woods in the night with eight hundred men. He had his own anger and fears associated with this place. They had lasted a long time.
Folco’s would be deeper. It was why they were here.
Aldo set about deploying their force. He knew what his cousin wanted done. He detached three thousand cavalry under Gian’s command (Gian was very good) with precise instructions. They rode south, fording the river, crossing the other road, riding across newly sown fields to be out of sight. They would ruin those fields, but armies did that. The farmers and their labourers were nowhere to be seen. Prudent of them, Aldo thought.
He watched Gian’s horsemen until they disappeared behind a ridge. A ridge Folco had remembered, and specified. Aldo returned to his cousin’s side. Folco had been watching the riders too.
“And now?” Aldo asked.
“Won’t be long,” the other man replied. “Today is likely, tomorrow if not, I think. He’ll be here.”
Folco was, Aldo understood, in a mood to kill people. He was, uncharacteristically, hungry for a fight. It was because of his niece, the news that had come to them at Rosso.
Aldo wanted to say Adria’s death had no connection at all to Folco, to his allowing her to be one of them for a time (by her wish and desire). It had been treachery in Macera, only that, her father’s lack of attention, if anything, and likely her own brave recklessness (he didn’t say that).
Nothing to do with anything Folco had done, or had her do for him.
It didn’t matter. Gone was gone, and Folco was grieving and they were where they were and Teobaldo Monticola was coming.
Aldo hated Monticola di Remigio. Possibly even more than his cousin did.
* * *
It did seem strange to me, how hard Monticola was pushing west. It was still early in spring, surely there was time to get inside Bischio before any investing force arrived. Perhaps, I’d thought, he wanted to try to cut off the smaller part of the Firentine army bringing the artillery? But then he’d have sent cavalry ahead, not limited their speed with the infantry and wagons.
I reconciled myself to not understanding, just being present. Why should I understand war? I thought. Did I even want to?
In a way, though, I did. Warfare was, then and now (all these years later), a theatre for men to perform, test themselves, a way to advance in and through the world. Over the bodies of others, of course—but none of us had been born into a time that offered peace and seemliness.
My teacher, Guarino, had tried to instill in some of us the idea that there were other ways to excel and rise, even end up governing the affairs and relations of cities and states. Almost all of his pupils had been the children of powerful families, however, and he hadn’t made much headway with those teachings. He had been tacking, I might put it now, against headwinds towards a narrow harbour.
Late one morning I realized, because it had been only a year ago, and because it had marked one of the important places of my own life, where we had come.
Ahead of us lay remembered fields on the left side of the road; a river was flowing on the right, with more low-lying level fields beyond it, then the land rose towards a forest. It was here that I had caught up with a small party from Remigio, all of us headed to see the Bischio race.
We passed the hill and the lone tree I had raced towards to keep a horse I still loved. Not far from here would be the retreat from which a young cleric had come out to stand in the roadway before Teobaldo Monticola and a company of men (and his elegant mistress).
I wondered what had become of that cleric. Most likely nothing, I thought. He would be proceeding, behind those walls we would see soon, through the endless routines of prayer. So little time had passed. He’d be pursuing piety and calm to the rhythm of bells and seasons.
A horseman was galloping back, dust on the road. He reined up hard before Monticola. He said, loudly enough for anyone nearby to hear, “He’s here already! Just ahead, my lord! Other side of the river, in a field past the holy retreat. D’Acorsi! His army!”
Monticola di Remigio smiled, and then he laughed. “Of course he is,” he cried. “Let us go and see dear Folco. My life has been lacking that pleasure for too long!”
