"Show some respect for your king!" a Neapolitan officer snapped.
"No, be still, Signore Pasca," Manfred said to the Neapolitan. "I want to hear Emir Daoud out. What can we do, except meet them and fight them?"
Daoud remembered how he had wished that instead of scouts he had set men to ambush the Franks. He studied the map.
"Let us send men into the mountains around here and here." He ran his finger over the angular shapes the mapmaker had drawn around Benevento. "Then, when Charles's army is in the valley, we will fall upon it from both sides and destroy it."
No one spoke for a moment. The younger Swabian officers were looking at him with mingled horror and disgust. Manfred stared at the map with embarrassed intensity.
Erhard Barth broke the silence. "Such an ambush would not be according to the customs of chivalry, Herr Daoud. Even if we were to win the battle in such a fashion, the victory would bring us so much infamy that it would be better had we lost."
"We are not in Outremer, thank God," said a Swabian with a long scar on his cheek.
"And we are not Saracens," said the one called Pasca. "Most of us."
"In other words, our noble commanders would refuse to fight?" said Lorenzo, glaring angrily at the other officers.
How would Baibars deal with these men, Daoud wondered. He might cut off a head or two and lavish gold and jewels and robes of honor on the rest. But Daoud had placed himself under Manfred's orders. And Manfred's army was not disciplined as Islamic armies were. European armies were made up of bands of warriors led by men who might or might not choose to take orders from their overlord.