'But not, I hope,' said Bellarion innocently, 'under the obligation of being a fool.'
'Do you call me that?' Carmagnola's sudden suavity was in itself a provocation.
'You boast yourself the champion of the direct attack. It is the method of the bull. But I have never heard it argued from this that the bull is intelligent even among animals.'
'So that now you compare me with a bull?' Carmagnola flushed a little, conscious that Koenigshofen and Stoffel were smiling.
'Quiet!' growled Facino. 'We are not here to squabble among ourselves. Your assumptions, Bellarion, sometimes become presumptions.'
'So you thought on the Trebbia.'
Facino brought his great fist down upon the table. 'In God's name! Will you be pert? You interrupt me. Battering-ram tactics are not in my mind. I choose a different method. But I attack Alessandria none the less, because Vignate and his men are there.'
Discreetly Bellarion said no more, suppressing the argument that by reducing unguarded Lodi and restoring it to the crown of Milan from which it had been ravished, a moral effect might be produced of far-reaching effect upon the fortunes of the duchy.
After a conference with Filippo Maria in his great castle of Pavia, Facino resumed his march, his army now increased by six hundred Italian mercenaries under a soldier of fortune named Giasone Trotta, whom Filippo Maria had hired. He took with him a considerable train of siege artillery, of mangonels, rimbaults, and cannon, to which the Count of Pavia had materially added.
Nevertheless, he did not approach Alessandria within striking distance of such weapons. He knew the strength to withstand assault of that fortress-city, built some three hundred years before on the confines of the Pavese and Montferrat to be a Guelphic stronghold in the struggle between Church and Empire. Derisively then the Ghibellines had dubbed it a fortress of straw. But astride of the river Tanaro, above its junction with the Bormida, this Alessandria of Straw had successfully defied them.