Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [250]
Felix had put his fancy helmet on. His face was white and his eyes, grey and shallow-set, shone in its shadow. Heat from his armour shimmered. They all wore gloves, and Astorre’s force carried the blue ribbons of the Charetty. Astorre himself wore his best helmet also, with the nosepiece. The plumes, so brave in Milan, hung over his bearded face, which was working with passion. He kept flinging words at Thomas on his other side, who stood without answering, his hand smoothing the hilt of his sword.
Julius kept looking round. Abrami. Manfred. A big man in good half-armour behind him said, “I don’t see Lionetto. Has he gone yet?”
Under the helmet was the familiar face of Nicholas, with the unfamiliar scar and both dimples. Julius said, “What do you think you’re doing?”
“The women threw me out of the cart,” Nicholas said. “Before I could do anything, too. Tobie isn’t here.”
“I know. That means … By God, there he is,” Julius said.
No one thought he meant Tobie, although the doctor had appeared outside Urbino’s tent. What he was looking at was the figure of Count Federigo himself being manhandled, stiff as a funerary figure, to sit his war horse.
The Count wore no armour. He had borrowed a leather jerkin and someone had laced it over Tobie’s bandaging, which encased him from neck to waist. Instead of a helmet he wore a light cap over the receding waves of his hair, still pressed flat from his pillow. Below it his great broken face jutted out, the sunken eye and gapped nose unmistakable among men.
It was not his only injury in a lifetime of wars, but it had come nearest to killing him, and that from a friendly jousting bout. Now his back was his weakness. He was grey with pain, catching his breath as he rode forward. But he made for a piece of high ground, and reined, and got their attention so that he could address them all. And then, despite the pain, he inflated his lungs, to make sure his strong voice would carry.
He laid no blame with Alessandro Sforza. Merely, the enemy had cast or was casting all his troops, bit by bit, into the field and they must therefore do the same or lose the day. Already their own troops had been forced to spread themselves too thinly for comfort. Soon, unless they were supported, the enemy would break their way through. Then the whole encampment would be taken, and their hopes of reaching Naples and assisting King Ferrante to defend his capital would be ended. He had hoped that some of those who had already fought hardest might be spared a battle, but it was not to be. God would reward them.
There was not time for much more. They mounted. To his former apprentice Julius said, “For Christ’s sake. This is your first battle?”
“It’s easy,” said Nicholas. “Stay on the horse and keep ducking. What are you doing here? You’re a notary.”
“The same reason as you. I feel safer with Astorre than I do left behind with the baggage. Keep beside him, and do what he tells you.”
Nicholas started to laugh. Before Julius could ask him why, they were out of the barriers and picking up pace as they began to trot and then canter over the plain into battle, with their banners snapping above and the trumpets braying before them.
The battle of San Fabiano, so recklessly brought into being, went on for seven hours. By the time dusk put an end to the bloodshed, it had earned its name as one of the costliest encounters of its time. Four hundred horses were killed. How many soldiers lost their lives was less easy to count, as both sides removed their own dead. With the charge of the reserve under the Count of Urbino, the immediate threat to his camp was removed. But by that time, or very soon after, the whole of Piccinino’s army had come to give battle against everything that Sforza and Urbino had, and no quarter was given.
No longer confined to one massive struggle, the fighting split and surged in one direction or another, sometimes threatening Urbino’s encampment, and sometimes pushing Piccinino’s men towards the slope of their hill. Fallen horses lay like