Blazovic said, “We’ll have to face Giovanni sometime.”
Fia said, “His name is not Giovanni.”
Laskaris said, “We’ve danced around fighting the church’s armies in the open field before. We can trick them again.”
The Company of the Star specialized in raiding, in fighting on superior terms. They fought only when they already knew they had their opponent outmatched. When leagues of cities sent armies against them, the company melted away. It was easy. They had no home territory to defend, no place where they could be pinned down. The leagues were disinclined to send their armies to protect others’ lands. The tensions between the cities were such that the leagues usually disbanded in a year or two regardless.
This was going to be different from all that.
Janos Szarvasi said, “We’re not afraid to fight him. And then–”
Antonov interrupted, “It’s not a matter of being afraid. It’s a matter of capability. We still don’t know how large his army is.”
Janos told Blazovic, “Those spies of yours have never been able to tell us.”
“Neither have anyone’s,” Blazovic said. “He knows he’s being watched. He travels in small groups, a thousand at most. Even if we knew the numbers of each group, it wouldn’t matter. He recruits along the way.”
Laskaris said, “He won’t have trouble recruiting. We are not popular in the north.”
Antonov said, “Nor is he. Not after Faenza and Cesena.”
Fia said, “There’s little point in guessing. I doubt even he knows how large his army will be. We cannot hold against a man we are afraid to properly name.”
Two years ago, the papacy had declared a Crusade against the condottieri of Italy. Now the pope had called for one again, against the cult of Saint Renatus. The papacy had hired their own mercenaries, led by a foreigner, an Englishman. His only brief was to destroy the Company of the Star. Unlike the leagues the company had faced before, he would not hesitate to cross territorial boundaries.
His name did not easily translate. Fia knew the power that names held. There was little strategy worse than letting an opponent choose his own name. He could shift with the shadows, adopt whatever one suited him best. Giovanni the Sharp for his prowess as a captain. Giovanni di Hauwode when he needed to make local allies, seem less foreign. Writers in different cities transcribed his name in different ways: Iohannes de Hauvod, or Hanklevode, or Augudh, or Aucgunctur. They had made him amorphous.
A man with one name could be nailed down. His real name was the English corruption of Giovanni: John. John Hawkwood, as Fia insisted her officers call him, was the name of just another foreigner. Italy already had plenty of those. They could beat another foreigner.
She glared at her officers. Hard to believe, sometimes, that these men could still behave like panicked sheep. They had been through more battles with her than she could count. They were the only people who knew the company’s deepest secrets – like where much of the company’s funding really came from, and why it had been founded.
She needed to be a better shepherd. She had let them become too addicted to bickering. Antonov hadn’t stepped in to change that either.
But they had a ghost of a point. It was hard to react to a threat without form. Hawkwood would not be on them at any particular time, just sometime. His capabilities were cloaked. He’d become a general anxiety that had been introduced into the careful balance the Company of the Star had made of itself and its allies. A shadow creeping over their shoulders. A ticking of a clock.
Fia said, “He makes it all the more important to attack Siena, and soon. We need more than money this time. We want capitulation. A vassal.” The company’s conventional strategy had always been to resist taking cities. It was too much an effort, even assuming they could win – and they usually couldn’t. Even if they were to win, holding territory just meant they could be pinned down. It gave their adversaries a place to attack. One of the condottieri’s most useful tactics was to just slip away.
Hawkwood changed things. His army was not so different from theirs, and likely too fast to evade. But, just as they were unprepared to assault cities, so was he. He was coming at them too fast to carry siege equipment.
Fia did not want to remain a nomadic society of fighters forever. She had other goals. But that was a discussion for a different time.
Fia said, “News from Parma changes nothing about our plans, except to let us know that we know we need to move faster.”
There was nothing in the looks they gave her that united them. Janos smoldered. Blazovic was silent. None of them showed it, not much, but all of the men in her camp were ragged from the pace she’d set. But at least they were all silent.
She said, “So we move.”
Fia had no rank in the company. Her position was one without precedent. She carried a commander’s baton. On the march to Siena, she rode alongside Captain Antonov. She gave orders with the force of his authority. Many of the men would have listened regardless. Antonov could have overridden her orders, but these past few years he had shown himself increasingly disinclined to do so.
The Company of the Star was his – but it owed its fortunes to Saint Renatus. The saint was hers. More and more, the two were indistinguishable from each other. Fia knew it. So did Captain Antonov.
When Fia had started traveling with Antonov, he had never been uncomfortable on the back of a horse. Now each day’s travel left him sagging. Fia ached too. She rode with her shoulders arched, braced against the spear of pain. She fought to keep from showing it.
This land did not allow an easy passage. This swampland was called the Maremma. The Company of the Star knew it well. It was marshy, malarial, poor for camping. But the surrounding lands were rich, poorly guarded – a favorite raiding ground for years. The insects had not yet summoned their summertime legions, but they still kept her from sleeping. No matter how she lay, the pain in her back was a biting spider, fangs sinking deep.
The Maremma was the last leg of this march on which she saw any hint of their camp followers. She was grateful to see them gone. She hated seeing prostitutes in camp, pretending not to notice them. For once, she envied English military discipline. The English reportedly didn’t allow prostitutes past their barricades. That was one of many differences between English and Italian soldiers. Even with all her cachet, she never could have gotten away with such an order.
At least some of them got a taste of life inside the barricades. The Company of the Star was the only one she knew to openly allow women soldiers. Fia’s page Caterina was a girl. The few who’d joined had come from unconventional places, and most often from among the camp followers. Just as Fia had been.
After three days on forced march, the company’s outriders returned with news of the first sighting of a target. There was a town of at least twenty-five buildings ahead: hostels, stores, homes, all lined along the old pilgrimage road, the Via Francigena.
This town hadn’t been here last time. It wasn’t on her maps. It didn’t matter; it wouldn’t be when they left again.
Like the folk around the monastery, the locals had gotten word that the Company of the Star would be coming. Like the people of the monastery, they had not expected the company so soon.
The company approached as a sharply angled crescent, enclosing the town. The pioneers led each tip. The cavalry led the center, hoisting the company’s comet-and-spear banners. By the time the center reached the town, the pioneers had cut off Via Francigena in both directions.
Fia did not rush with them. She lingered behind, watching.
She dismounted with a wince. Her page, Caterina, offered her the reins of her war horse, her courser, but Fia waved her off. Fia did not, could not, don her armor. On an ordinary raid, she would have. But the pain in her back had hardly let her dismount. The weight of steel was out of the question. She had to hope that no one noticed, or cared.
Caterina was a short, muscular girl, the daughter of itinerant laborers captured on the road
. They had been sold into servitude while they awaited ransom. Caterina did not speak. Not ever. The company only knew her name from her parents.
She had a wide-eyed stare that others mistook for absence of mind but Fia understood was keenness. She learned fast, and was competent at everything Fia asked her to do.
Fia did not want to feel pity. The first foreign condottieri to carve a foothold in Italy, Werner von Urslingen, had worn a breastplate inscribed “Enemy of God, pity, and mercy.” He had written it in Latin, so that all literate men might read it. Pity did not fit the profession.
John Hawkwood took after von Urslingen. He and his papal ally, Cardinal Robert of Geneva, had butchered Faenza’s and Cesena’s inhabitants on a slim provocation. They had murdered thousands. Even by the standards of condottieri, Hawkwood’s reputation was bestial. Fia would have been better served by doing everything she could to match it.
Fia had been a slave like Caterina once, too, though.
Caterina had shrunk from Fia when Fia won her bid, but her fear hadn’t lasted. She stayed close to Fia whenever she had the opportunity, rigid and focused as a bodyguard. Fia took care not to show affection or favor in public, and only rarely in private. Condottieri were not supposed to be human. Fia did not often feel human.
Caterina had not cared for her parents. Fia had seen it in her face, only once, when she’d mentioned her parents had been ransomed by relatives. The payers had not mentioned Caterina by name. Fia had asked if she wanted to go with them. Caterina had looked to her, lips locked tight and pale, her fingernails biting into her fist. Fia had not mentioned it again.
The Croat Zvonimirov Kristo rode just ahead, their bodyguard. For the past ten miles, he had ridden armored. The strain showed in his red cheeks. Like the Szarvasi brothers, Kristo was an exiled noble. He had come to the company with his own agenda. Unlike the Szarvasis, he’d dropped it as soon as he’d converted to the veneration of Saint Renatus.
Kristo had his own molded plate armor. He had a heraldic shield lashed side-saddle. He peered at Fia through the slit in his basinet. That was the closest anyone came to remarking that she had held back.
As ever, fire and smoke heralded the Company of the Star.
The pioneers had reached the outlying fields, set them ablaze. They had orders to capture anyone they saw, but not to give chase. The company needed some of the rural families to get away. Those from the town would not be so fortunate. They were to be the hostages. Townsfolk, in general, made for better ransoms.
“Town” was not even a good name for this place. It was ramshackle, unplanned, undefended. There were no walls or barricades. They sheltered under Siena’s influence and protection. They all paid a tax to Siena. That made hurting them a way to hurt Siena.
There couldn’t have been more than seventy people living here. Their church was the tallest building, and only for its steeple. Some of the townsfolk had retreated there under the misapprehension that they would be left alone. Company lancers dismounted, wasted no time battering the door. They shouted blasphemies, an easy way to break morale.
The infantrymen and crossbowmen were not long after. They ran straight to the buildings the scouts had identified as travelers’ hospices, to loot and secure hostages. Travelers, too, made for fine profit. An infantryman’s pay rate was hardly better than farming blood turnips. The promise of plunder sustained them better than the grosso her treasurer handed out.
There would be no wicked showmanship, no swinging of cages over ponds this time. Not yet. They were still too far from Siena.
When Fia had still collected clocks, time had become something new – concrete, measurable in small detail. It was more than a flat expanse onto which events were projected. It had helped her reconceptualize each day’s march, each battle. It helped her see that speed could be a weapon, too.
Condottieri marched on their purses like most armies did on their stomachs. The company’s treasure train had done nothing but grow since Fia had joined, but it would vanish in a few seasons without a swift pace of sustained raids. Every season, every week, every day saw an astonishing number of bills to pay. Her men were expensive.
The Company of the Star was organized into three-man lances, an English-style unit that had been adopted throughout Italy. A lance consisted of three soldiers led by a veteran man-at-arms. Each lance cost the company sixteen florins per month. And then there were the officers, the light cavalrymen, the stradiots, the infantry and crossbowmen and conscript pioneers. The nine hundred florins they had gotten from the monastery wouldn’t cover even the expense of marching from Orvieto to Siena.
Much of that could be made up by the company’s real paymasters. And had, in the past. That couldn’t happen too much at once, or too visibly.
When she reached the town, her men had herded the first group of hostages in front of the broken church. One man’s ear had been pulped to a mangled mass of skin. Another’s hair was soaked with blood, and he was only upright because two women held him. She walked past. Her pulse beat harder.
She did not want to look. Did not want to remember.
Antonov ignored them. Caterina looked upon them with the same disinterest that she did everything else. Good. She would have an easier time that way.
These people weren’t her target. She needed to do this to them to survive. Antonov’s Company had done this long before she had made it the Company of the Star. It would do so whether or not she was with it.
They would never be able to catch Siena so unprepared. The company had to move as lightning regardless. Any extra time would give Siena a chance to draw in their own condottieri, make defensive arrangements with their neighbors.
The company did not intend to massacre. There was no profit in killing. They aimed to take. In Italy, a company of soldiers was every bit as much a commercial venture as a company of merchants. Silver and plunder and ransom sustained the company, not blood. Her pioneers had allowed those at the farms to flee. They had relatives inside the town, and they would be desperate to pay ransoms. At the very least, Siena would have to deal with them as refugees. They’d left their homes and stores and animals behind for plunder.
Soldiers could be artless, though. She passed two dead women and the body of an old man. A teenage boy, hardly older than she had been when the company captured her, lay silent in a blood-soiled ditch.
It could have been bloodier.
After a short survey and discussion with their officers, she and Antonov remounted. Kristo and Caterina followed. He said, “Not as fun to ride through and watch, is it?”
When she was in the fighting, she could change things. She had turned more than one about-to-be-executed man into a hostage. A profit instead of a loss. “No,” she said. Then, more pointedly: “I’ve only missed a handful. You haven’t ridden at the front of a raid yet this season.”
“There’s been no need.”
“Condottieri respect commanders they see charging alongside them,” she said. “You’re not that old and decrepit.”
But even as she spoke, Fia realized Antonov was acting older. Last summer, he had charged into every fight, directed the vanguard by holding his baton high above them.
“I am impossibly old,” he said.
“You’re the right age for a captain,” she said. “Half of the condottieri commanders in Italy are older.”
“I used to think I would be able to go home,” he said.
“So did a lot of soldiers.”
“I know what you’re going to say. It was a different life. I’ve been reborn. I don’t need a sermon.”
She looked to him. “I wasn’t going to preach.”
In all their years of partnership, Antonov had never once told her the names of the family he’d left. Not parents, not siblings. She did not know if he had married. Unlike other foreign condottieri, he had never taken an Italian wife. When they had both been younger, she had been convinced that he would advance on her. She had braced herself to reject him, to lose everything to that ba
ttle. But he had held his distance.
Antonov said, “I was told they would be well cared for.”
No one other than Caterina were close enough to hear them. Even if Caterina hadn’t been mute, though, she was loyal. She and Antonov could talk around her. They rode out of the huddle of the town, toward the wide dirt trail of the Via Francigena. Smoke blurred the horizon.
Something had changed. Antonov had never talked about his family before, even in private.
She said, “You’ve received letters.”
“No,” he said. “I did, for a while. The roads so far north are not good. Word was intermittent for years. Then nothing.” He was silent for a while. Fia let him be. “I think they have been forced from their home. There was a hint in the last letter.”
“How long ago was that?” she asked.
He didn’t know. His family had been an ancient memory before she’d come to the company. Little wonder that her message of rebirth and remaking had found him listening.
She was content to let the conversation rest there, but he wasn’t. He asked, “How long do you imagine you’ll keep fighting?”
Fia shrugged. Many soldiers didn’t grow old. The relentless pain in her back reminded her that might not be for the worst. Tracing her thoughts, Antonov asked, “Do you think Saint Renatus will let his prophet off easily?”
“There will always be another fight.”
It was a tenet of the Cult of Saint Renatus that the last of a soldier’s rebirths would not be on earthly soil. In the Kingdom of God, they would be more highly placed than merchants and farmers. She fought here for the same end: to elevate common soldiers beyond the lot of servitude and simple banditry they had been given. Soldiers were better than the people who tried to rule them. They always had been.
Her sermons had spread far beyond the Company of the Star. Men from all over came to listen to her. They returned to their own cities, their own companies, and repeated what she’d said. All of her sermons, her ideals, narrowed to that end.
More and more people across Christendom, and beyond, had heard her. There was untapped opportunity in that.
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