'About it, then,' rasped the Duke. 'You have the means.'
'With the Burgundians enlisted after Travo, my condotta stands at two thousand three hundred men. If the civic militia is added ...'
'It is required for the city's defence against Estorre and the other roving insurgents.'
Facino did not argue the matter.
'I'll do without it, then.'
He set out next day at early morning, and by nightfall, the half of that march to Alessandria accomplished, he brought his army, wearied and exhausted by the June heat, to rest under the red walls of Pavia.
To proceed straight against the very place which Vignate had seized and held was a direct course of action in conflict with ideas which Bellarion did not hesitate to lay before the war-experienced officers composing Facino's council. He prefaced their exposition by laying down the principle, a little didactically, that the surest way to defeat an opponent is to assault him at the weakest point. So much Facino and his officers would have conceded on the battle-ground itself. But Bellarion's principle involved a wider range, including the enemy's position before ever battle was joined so as to ensure that the battle-ground itself should be the enemy's weakest point. The course he now urged entailed an adoption of the strategy employed by the Athenians against the Thebans in the Peloponnesian war, a strategy which Bellarion so much admired and was so often to apply.
In its application now, instead of attacking Alessandria behind whose walls the enemy lay in strength, he would have invaded Vignate's own temporarily unguarded Tyranny of Lodi.
Facino laughed a little at his self-sufficiency, and, emboldened by that, Carmagnola took it upon himself to put the fledgling down.
'It is in your nature, I think, to avoid the direct attack.' He sneered as he spoke, having in mind the jousts at Milan and the manner in which Bellarion had cheated him of the satisfaction upon which he counted. 'You forget, sir, that your knighthood places you under certain obligations.'