"The condotta must be signed today. The Magnificent and I reached agreement on the essentials. You are Captain-General of Florence, senor."
The listeners broke into another cheer, for they had not been paid in weeks. The news would be all over the camp in minutes. That the don was in no state to negotiate with the hardheaded — and undoubtedly cold-sober — Florentine commissioners was very obvious, and there were a million essential details to be settled yet, enough to fill weeks of haggling. But speed was essential, and for all his grandiose illusions, no one had ever accused Don Ramon of lacking courage. An appeal to his sense of duty left him no escape.
"Today it shall be, Constable." He staggered off in the direction of the house. The mercenaries grinned admiringly, but they did not shout vulgar remarks after him as they would have done at Toby. The don was too dangerous to taunt.
Good spirits be with him this day! Fighting was much easier than negotiating. That was why most men preferred it.
The villa had begun life as a humble farmhouse, but now it was a rambling warren of low buildings, stonewalled and red-tiled, set about with vines and olives. The city placed it at the disposal of successive mercenary captains, and previous tenants had added watchtowers and a crenellated wall, so that it was almost a fortress, but not strong enough to alarm the Florentines.
The domestic functions of the villa were run by madonna Anna, a formidable widow whose iron-gray eyes had seen uncounted soldiers of fortune come and go. She ruled a diverse population of younger women who came and went much faster, and she treated them as servants. Some were legitimate wives of officers of the Company, some were innocents who believed they were about to become wives, and others would negotiate with anyone. Toby remained firmly celibate, having no choice, and Hamish preferred to hunt wild game in the city.
The two of them shared an attic room just large enough to contain a hamper for storage, a bed for Hamish, and seven feet of floor for Toby. It was cluttered with armor and weapons, and he was sure that one night he would be killed in his sleep by an avalanche of Hamish's high-piled books.
He arrived with a bucket of water and his foggy-headed feeling. As he stripped off his finery, he could look down on all of Florence. Seen from this vantage in the Fiesole hills, it was a fairyland of domes and palaces, a cake iced by red tile roofs. The city wall wrapped around it like a cord knotted with towers, and through it flowed the blue Arno, winding on toward Pisa across the fertile plain, between the hills in their olive, vine, and mulberry plumage. It was a jewel among cities, and he was its defender.
Italians had been fighting among themselves for centuries, but they had preserved the traditions of chivalry much longer than most of Europe had, waging war as a stately gavotte of maneuver and siege, where arms rarely clashed and nobody got hurt — certainly nobody of importance, but even the mercenaries' death toll was usually light. The peace treaty would stipulate reasonable ransoms for the prisoners, redistribute a few castles, and allocate some daughters in marriage to show there were no hard feelings. It was fine sport as long as nobody worried about the peasants whose crops were burned and womenfolk raped — and nobody did, certainly nobody of importance.
Fourteen years ago, Nevil had changed the rules by abolishing the rules. No rules, no peace treaties, and winner take all.
To be honest, in Italy it had been Toby Longdirk who introduced the new style of war. Less than three years ago he had landed at Genoa with Hamish, Don Ramon, Antonio Diaz, Arnaud Villars, and Karl Fischart. Even famous condottieri had jumped at the chance to sign up with these mad foreigners who would pay a retainer over the winter, when all sensible employers put their mercenaries out to pasture. The don was young, true, but he had earned a hero's fame in the Battle of Toledo. Diaz was an experienced trainer of infantry. Although Fischart, formerly Baron Oreste, had a gruesome reputation, he was a hexer of international renown, and any fighting man wanted a good hexer at his back. Villars, an obvious scoundrel, was throwing out handfuls of Josep Brusi's gold, smooth and yellow as butter.
By spring, when the fighting began, the men of the Don Ramon Company had discovered that the methodical Diaz lacked flair and the don had so much that he qualified as a maniac. They were taking their orders from a Scottish yokel who had no qualifications whatsoever — except, as it turned out, a ruthless ability to bring the enemy to battle on the wrong ground and beat him.
"You sigh?" asked a soft voice. The intruder in the doorway was a haggard scarecrow of a man in the black robe of a penitent, Karl Fischart, formerly Baron Oreste. He would not have interrupted without good cause, and good cause must be bad news.
"I was thinking that Florence is the fairest city in all Europe and I am a fool. Look at it! Isn't it glorious? Last night I promised to defend it. If I fail, it will be all gone before winter. Am I completely insane?"
"No, because to die fighting the Fiend is our only hope that some spirit will take pity on our souls. Any other death is ignoble. Faced with paramount evil, the only virtuous course is to die opposing it. We ourselves are so steeped in evil that to survive is evidence of insufficient dedication to the struggle."
So much for rhetorical questions. Toby had no doubts at all about his own sanity and felt no repentance for the deaths he had caused in his military career. Regret yes, but they had been necessary. Fischart was living with memories of the horrors he had committed when he was Nevil's premier hexer. No matter how he went barefoot, ate almost nothing, and mortified his flesh in ingenious ways, nothing would ever console him. Although his face was still round, the flesh on it had melted into bags and dewlaps. Stooped and white-bearded, he seemed to have aged a generation since the day he and Toby had come face-to-face in Barcelona and ended their long feud within the hour. The only evidence remaining of his former evil glory was the collection of jeweled rings on his fingers — plus his tedious habit of wailing his remorse to anyone who would listen.
"What's the bad news today?" Toby splashed water on his face. "Use short words and remember I'm stupid."
"I know you pretend to be. I was deceived once and have been paying for that error ever since and will pay until my death."
"The news?"
"We have been robbed. Gold is missing from the strongbox."
After a moment Toby realized he was staring like a gargoyle, mouth open. "Explain that! You were supposed to have hexed it."
"I am the premier suspect!" The old man wrung his hands in agony. "To fail in so simple a task is evidence that I have betrayed you all."
"Did you take the money?"
"Of course not! You think I would add to my sins by—"
"Then don't rant and wail, be helpful! We're cleaned out?" How much? Two days ago Arnaud had reported two thousand, five hundred, seventy-two florins in hand. Less fifty-seven for flour and eight-three for fodder — Toby rattled beads on his mental abacus. "There should have been twenty-two hundred and thirty or so florins there!" That was desperation money to keep the Company fed. Condotta or not, the dieci della guerra might still take weeks to deliver any cash, and it would not be inclined to move faster if the Don Ramon Company sank into debt to the Marradi Bank. Abandoning thoughts of washing, he threw open the hamper and rummaged in it for clothes.
"No, no! You don't understand! Villars insists only one bag is missing, a bag of green leather, one hundred florins. The rest has not been touched, and a purse of the don's is still there, too."
"That's absurd! Who can open the chest, apart from you and Arnaud?"
Fischart's hand rubbing grew more agitated. "Captain Diaz, Don Ramon, Brother Bartolo, messer Campbell. No one else can even get near it without setting off alarms and being trapped in the adytum. No one except a very skilled hexer."