"Le Roi Charles!"
He saw the green and white Falcon banner go down. He heard the band instruments give out their last ugly sounds as they and the men who played them perished under maces and axes. He saw with agony the deaths of men he had trained and ridden with—Husain, Said, Farraj, Omar—heads smashed, bodies cloven. He felt in his own body the blows that killed them.
Daoud recognized the purple banner now. Three gold crowns. He had seen it before in Orvieto. Simon de Gobignon had come at last to this battle.
He should feel hatred for de Gobignon, but all he felt was a numb despair.
His few remaining men crowded against him, forcing him to fall back. He rode back toward Benevento, away from the triumphant army of Gobignon, crushed with sorrow. The Sons of the Falcon, the force he had taken a year to build, had been destroyed in a flicker of time, as if the earth had opened and swallowed them.
Lorenzo wept and cursed himself for being too late to warn Daoud before the French attacked. He stood on the edge of the field, holding his horse's reins in one hand and his crossbow in the other, watching the French knights sweep across the valley from east to west, trampling everyone in their path. Through his tears he saw the purple and gold banner of Gobignon fluttering against the cold blue-and-white sky.
Simon de Gobignon. If only we had killed him in Orvieto.
All about him, men rode and ran and fought. Singly and in twos and threes, horses without riders ran wildly this way and that. He wondered if Daoud was still alive. What had happened to King Manfred and the other Hohenstaufen leaders? Charles d'Anjou still occupied his hill at the north end of the valley. Almost overwhelmed at the moment help arrived, he had never moved.
There were fewer and fewer of Manfred's men in sight, and more of Charles's with their accursed red crosses.