ACT the SECOND
wherein the noble COUNT reccollects old WOUNDS
They overtook the lead elements of the army four miles up the road. The host was crossing the new canal between the Brenta and the Bacchiglione. Here they caught up with the commander of the foot soldiers, Vanni Scornigiani. Called Asdente, the Toothless Master, he was ushering the last of the mounted force out of the way of his beloved ‘groundlings,’ who had a much more wearying trek ahead – twenty miles to be covered between sun down and sun up.
Mouth wrecked by a sword-stroke from the Pup himself, Asdente was perhaps the fiercest warrior the Paduans owned. He could have made a fortune hiring himself out to lead a condottiere, leading fighting men into battle for a different prince each season, wintering in the south with all the wine and women he could manage. But, gruff and bluff as he was, Asdente was a patriot. Padua was lucky to have him, thought the Count. And, as most often happened in such situations, Padua was ungrateful for their good fortune.
Arriving, the Count noted that for all their thunderous exit of the city, the army was remaining remarkably quiet. This, the Count knew at once, was entirely due to Vanni's presence.
Vinciguerra watched as the Podestà greeted Asdente in cool tones. Little love was lost between these two. The older and viscerally martial Asdente seemed to know Ponzino's every insecurity, and relished each opportunity to rub his nose them.
"Any trouble?" asked the Podestà.
"I had to get rough with a few of the Dutch knights to get them to stop their wretched singing," growled Asdente genially. "The rest fell in line."
"How rough?" asked Ponzino.
Asdente's twisted grin looked like the rictus of a corpse. "Battle hasn't started, and we've got casualties." He paused, noting Ponzino's hardening look. Asdente shrugged. "They'll live to complain."
The Count watched Ponzino stifle the rebuke building within him. Good. Padua needed Asdente, or someone very like him. The pity of it was that Asdente knew it.
The elder Carrara arrived and, seeing Ponzino’s face, decided to intervene by asking, “No sign of spies?”
"Haven't seen a soul," replied Asdente, put out – though by the lack of spies or at Ponzoni’s salvation, the Count couldn’t be sure. “They're lazy after that scare they gave us last month. Think we'll hole up until Spring."
Ponzoni’s relief was evident. "Then this surprise will work."
"It better," said Asdente, grimacing. “Vicenza belongs to us,” he added, referring to their destination, which lay at the heart of this conflict – the Commune of Vicenza.
The Count was an educated man. The irony of this war was not lost on him. In opposition to historical precedent, a minor war had grown out of a larger one. A hundred years before, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI had declared his right to rule the lands of central Italy – Tuscany, Umbria, Romagna and the marches thereabouts. These had been ceded to Henry’s father, Frederick Barbarossa, by a duke named Welf VI. Before Henry pressed the claim, these lands had always been under the influence of the papacy.
Henry hadn't had the political might to enforce his aspiration, but his successor, Otto IV, did. A condition of Otto being offered the imperial throne was his renounciation of all rights to these fertile lands. Otto had agreed and, immediately following his coronation in Rome, did just the opposite. The central states assumed, correctly, that they faced less interference from an Emperor in Germany than a pope in Rome. Thus they flocked to Otto's banner, under the cry of "Welf!"
Meanwhile, opposition among the northern states solidified behind another German faction, the Waiblingens, who devoutly supported, not the papacy, but the rights of another German ruling house, the Hohenstaufen. When Otto died, he was succeeded by the Hohenstaufen ruler Frederick II.
Ironically, rather than be extinguished, the Welfs chose to side with their former enemy, the Papacy, against the Waiblingens. Adopting the fight for their own, the Italians changed the names of the parties. Welf, a hard German sound, had become Guelph, and Waiblingen had transmogrified somehow into Ghibbiline. And the lines had been drawn.
Padua was a supporter of the Guelph cause, harrying each new Emperor in favor of papal rights. Though Vicenza was nominally an independent state, Padua had long viewed it as within the padovano – the Paduan sphere of influence. So when, two years before, Vicenza had declared for Emperor Henry VII and voted the Pup into office as the Imperial representative, Padua had been outraged. Vicenza was theirs. Peaceful, if vehement, protests to Venice and the Florence proved fruitless. So the Paduans had decided to use force.
Why Padua hadn't won in that first year was probably a mystery to Ponzino, sitting in Cremona listening to reports. The Paduans had done well in the field. Battle after battle was a victory. Asdente especially had distinguished himself, bravely riding into every engagement. "I eat steel for breakfast" he was often heard to roar, the disfigurement slurring his softer sounds.
But the Count understood why this war dragged on. The Pup had convinced his people that he was blessed by God, that he had a streak of immortality. It didn’t hurt that the Florentine poet had hinted at some prophecy surrounding Il Veltro, one of the Pup’s many names. With the story of Dante’s journey into Hell being read aloud and even sung by everyone from the nobility to the lowest serf – a consequence of the clever poet’s writing in Italian, not Latin – everyone was coming around to the view that the Pup was somehow invincible.
Thus, regardless of Paduan bravery or victory, they never seemed to be able to weaken the enemy spirits enough to retake their lost city. Nor were they ever able to catch the enemy general in the field. The Pup was wily, from clever and dangerous stock. No one knew that family better than the Count – the blame for his exile he laid at their door.
For inside the Count burned an injustice just as old as the Guelph-Ghibbeline feud, a hatred so long-lived must be carefully nursed, lest it burn itself out.
* * * *
The road to Verona
5 November, 1259
“We are almost home.” Vinciguerra’s father, the Count, pulled his horse alongside the wagon bearing his son and a few of the family trunks.
The father clearly expected his son to share in his delight. But the ten year-old surprised him by saying, “Is he truly dead?” The boy looked at the trees lining the road, as if the Tyrant would leap out from behind them and behead them all. In the last thirty years Romano the Tyrant had become the nighttime dread of every child in Italy.
Vinciguerra’s father laughed with real pleasure – not at his son’s fear, but at the fact in question. “There’s little doubt of that. The leaders of three factions slew him, and chopped him to pieces. Oh, how I wish I had been there!” The Count clenched his fists on the reins. “Still, there are the Montecchii to be dealt with.” The Count looked sharply at his only son. “Tell me why they must be destroyed.”
Dismissing his fears, young Vinciguerra sat upright on the trunk and began reciting from memory. “Because when the Tyrant drove our family out of Verona, he was aided by the Montecchi family.”
“And who are they?”
“A bunch of horse-thieves turned noble,” parroted Vinciguerra, to his father’s approval.
“Yes. Just like the Romani – they, too, took their names from estates stolen from true Veronese. And what did they used to be called?”
“The Onara,” said Vinciguerra instantly.
His father nodded. “Never forget it. Names matter, boy. We need to remember who we’ve been to know what we will become. Prove to me that you know the tale – tell me, where did it begin?”
“Vicenza.”
“And when.”
“Forty-nine years ago,” said Vinciguerra with utter certainty. This tale had been drilled into him even before his letters. “Out of revenge for us exiling them from Verona, the Romani family usurped our control of Vicenza and used it to wage a private war against us. Great-grandfather fought bravely –”
“Names, boy! Names!”
“Bonifacio di San Bonifacio,” said Vinciguerra quickly. “He fought bravely and valiantly to hold off the Romani. But he died, leaving two children, a son and a daughter, to carry on our line. Grandfather – Rizardo di San Bonifacio – carried on the fight for ten more years. Then God came to the Romano lord –”
“Or the Devil,” interposed the Count, as he had a hundred times before, “to give him a well-deserved fright from Hell.”
“Yes. The Romano made peace with grandfather Rizardo by offering his daughter in marriage. In return, grandfather gave his twin sister Tilde to Romano’s son. Romano gave up his possessions, retired from public life, and lived out his days in a monastery a broken man.”
“Leaving us no quarrel with him,” said the Count. “He had repented his bad deeds. God has forgiven him, and so must we.” Vinciguerra’s father did not sound as if he truly believed the words, learned at his own father’s knee.
“But he failed!” protested little Vinciguerra. “His son, married to your aunt, made war against us again! He united with the Montecchi to throw us out of our lands, and he took over Verona.” And became the Tyrant, thought Vinciguerra with a shiver he hoped his father didn’t see.
“Don’t forget the final offense,” chided the Count. “My father was the Podestà of Verona at the time. Ezzelino da Romano had a puppet, Leo delle Carceri, whom he had declared Capitanus Veronae. The title itself is an insult – the Tyrant created the Captainship to supersede the Podestà.
“But Ezzelino III's reign was proof that we were in the right, boy. The blood that flowed over the Feltro ruptured the Lombard League. I hear that when the Tyrant finally gasped his last, he begged like a dog. It gives me heart. There is justice in the universe. No stone marks the grave to that enemy of God and man. I only wish my father was alive to see this day – for today, my son, the San Bonifacii return to our rightful home, and rightful throne. Verona is leaderless – and we shall ride through the gates and be hailed as saviors.”
Little Vinciguerra was wishing that they had marked the Tyrant’s grave somehow. It frightened him to think that such a man’s spirit might be rooted anywhere, that one might stand on the patch of unhallowed ground and not know it.
Seeing his son’s anxious look, the father said, “Don’t be concerned. They know we’re coming. I sent word. Now, prove to me you know the value of names – recite the family tree.”
Vinciguerra did not sigh as another boy might have when asked to recite the Christian names of a family line stretching back six hundred years to the days of Charlemagne. Instead he furrowed his brow and launched in, working his way from the very first Count of San Bonifacio to the present one – his father.
But before he reached the conclusion of the recitation, his father interrupted. “Look, boy – there it is. Verona.”
Young Vinciguerra twisted about in the wagon to look past the driver at the city rising into view. His father’s city. His city. “The towers! Oh father! Look at all the towers!”
“Yes, son. And we shall build more, and more, to honor our family. More, until the city is a forest of towers, looking down on the rest of the world. Under our rule, Verona will become the new Caput Mundi.”
“My lord,” called one of the men-at-arms riding ahead. “A party, mounted, is on the road.”
Instantly the Count turned to his son. “Come, get your horse and follow me. You must meet your subjects properly.”
Vinciguerra’s horse was brought, and he followed his father to the front of the procession of their worldly goods, riding right alongside the men-at-arms and knights in the employ of San Bonifacio.
The party of riders were equally numerous, and armed. At their center were three men, dressed in finer armor than all the rest. One was broader than a bear, with a chest-plate so wide and deep that Vinciguerra could have used it for a winter sledge. Next to him was a man tall and rail-thin, with close-cropped hair and a cheekbones so sharp his skin seemed in danger of being cut. The third wore a helmet, a massive helm with a snarling mastiff leaping from the crown. The other two appeared apprehensive, but this man was perfectly still in his saddle. That stillness made him fearsome, and for a wild moment Vinciguerra imagined that the Tyrant Romano had risen from the grave to bar their path.
He looked to his father, who was scowling. “Who are they?” asked the son.
“The big one is Nogarola. The others, I’m not sure – though the thin one looks like the Ongarello the consul. He was from a family of carpenters – though they climbed the ladder of their own name and stepped into some little power.”
“Are they here to welcome us?”
The Count shook his head, waving off the question. “Wait here, boy.” Nodding his guards to accompany him, Vinciguerra’s father rode boldly forward to face the assembled Veronese.
There were words that young Vinciguerra could not make out. But the shaking of his father’s fist was clear enough. And the laughter that emitted from inside the hound helmet. Relaxed, easy. Scornful.
They were denying him! Vinciguerra realized this, and waited for his father to react. He fully expected the great sword to be drawn and to hack at these pitiful fools who barred their passage to their rightful realm. He ignored the anxious looks that were passing between the men-at-arms, ignored the assembled pikes and crossbows that faced them, ignored everything but his father.
Who had grown very still. Who said nothing, now. Who –
Who turned and rode back, away from Verona. Away from their home.
When his father reached him, Vinciguerra looked up into the face. It was flushed with anger, hard with sour rage. But more, it was older. It was weak. And it was shy of meeting Vinciguerra’s gaze.
“Father, what..?”
“Not now,” was all the Count said to his son. He began at once to issue orders that the carts be turned about.
In that moment, Vinciguerra swore he would do whatever he could to kill the men that had destroyed his father's dreams.
Vinciguerra twisted in his child’s saddle and looked murder at the man in the snarling helmet. His eyes traveled up to the towers rising, it seemed, from the waters of the river Adige itself. Then the order was given and the future Count of San Bonifacio rode away from the city of Verona – his city.
* * * *
That had been the first and only time the Count had seen his homeland. Oh, he had made raids on his family’s former holdings in San Bonifacio and Montecchio, but never near Verona itself. His father had died of a broken heart not long after, and Vinciguerra had inherited the title, determined to bring down anyone of the Scaliger or Nogarola name.
Tonight’s venture pleased him for two reasons. The first, that in taking Vicenza he was reducing the two Nogarolese yet living, the sons of the man who had faced his father on that fateful day. The second, that a surprise attack on Vicenza over a hundred years before had been the beginning of the bad times for his family. Poetic justice, then, that Vicenza was the key to reversing the San Bonifacio fortunes once more.
From Vicenza, he would urge the Paduans to take Montecchio, then the castle at Illasi and his own hereditary estate to the south. Then on to Verona itself. By this time next year, the Pup and his allies would be licking their wounds on the far side of the Alps – or in their graves.
But that meant treading carefully, leading these fools top triumph without ever letting them feel the leash.
Once across the canal they covered the next ten miles quickly. They were past the border of Paduan lands, into the rocky terrain that had seen so many of these wars. The knights were spread in small clusters, horses ready to chase any peasant or traveler who started an alarm.
At midnight they reached Camisano, a castle not far down the road from Vicenza. The Count watched as Ponzino ordered the lead horsemen to move off the road and onto a cattle track to remain out of sight of the guard-towers. The track led down to the Bacchiglione on their left, its running waters never fading from their hearing.
It was a nerve-wracking two hours as the entire body of men moved silently past the enemy-held fortress. Properly, Ponzino held the ground a mile from Camisano, directing the troops. The Count stayed close by in case he was needed – but to his surprise the general seemed to have things well in hand. After the bulk of the foot had passed, the Podestà rode back up the length of his forces to the front line, leaving young Carrara to finish directing the two hundred soldiers straggling behind.
The Count thought that perhaps an older man would handle it better, but Ponzino couldn't deny Carrara the right of his station.
Once past Camisano, the men began to move faster. They would arrive at the gates of Vicenza and sweep through the city like an inferno. The garrison left there would be killed before they unsheathed their swords. For the glory of Padua, of course. What did it matter the cause, thought the Count, so long as the deed was done.
The army kept away from the roads entirely after Camisano. Instead, they followed the Bacchiglione until it met the Astico River coming down from the Alps. Here Ponzino was faced with a decision, and the Count was at his elbow the moment they reached the water’s edge.
“Reports vary on the fordability of the river,” said the Podesta. “You know these parts as well as any. What do you say? Should we follow the Astico up to the road to the bridge, or can we ford here and continue following the Bacchiglione?”
The Count pretended to consider. In fact, his answer was never in doubt, thought long before. It was the phrasing that mattered. “The Tesina bridge is the compulsory passage to and from Padua,” replied the Count in a ponderous manner. “It’s fortified by the Vicenzan population. You may have heard, it was the site of fierce fighting last year.”
“Yes,” replied Ponzino. “And I understand that the towers guarding the bridge were completely razed.”
“Yes – but that ensures someone is watching the bridge. The river here may not look it, but it is shallow enough.”
Ponzino looked to the elder Carrara, who shrugged. “I bow to his superior knowledge of the terrain.” Fortunately young Carrara was nowhere in sight – he would certainly have objected to any scheme proposed by the Count.
“So – ford the Astico it is,” said Ponzino, and issued orders.
Asdente took charge of the logistics. He used the remaining fifty-two Flemish knights to form a wall of horses that would keep back the waters while the bulk of the army crossed. There were curses and protests in Dutch. Asdente persuaded with fists cloaked in mail gloves, with spurred heels, and elbows with spikes on the armor-joints. Two more mercenaries fell before the group moved to obey.
When the first man hit the ground, Ponzino reached for his reins. Vinciguerra reached out a restraining hand. "Don't."
"I have to stop this," the younger man said. "That's not the way a caviliere treats his men."
"It is, if he wants them to fight." The Count shrugged. "Look at them."
Ponzino observed the grins on the faces of the Dutch knights and Vinciguerra watched realization wash over the Podesta – perhaps not all soldiers wanted respectful treatment as Italian soldiers did.
As a disgusted Podesta spurred away the Count wondered if the fellow would be any use at all in a real crisis. Not that it mattered. It was old soldiers like Asdente who really ran armies. Generals were for speeches and plans, and the plans were already laid. Vinciguerra spurred ahead, looking for landmarks, ever watchful for enemies.
* * * *
Quartesolo derived its name from the Latin quartum milium solum, meaning "fourth mile", as it stood four miles from Vicenza down the ancient Roman via Emilia which linked Vicenza and Padua. The Roman mile measured 1477 meters, the equivalent of 1500 Roman soldier paces, exactly one quarter the distance from this spot to Vicenza. The city was asleep and easily subdued. Ponzino gave strict orders against pillaging.
The men of the Paduan army were being well paid, he argued. There was no need for plunder.
Vinciguerra understood – the Podestà's goal was to be welcomed into Vicenza with open arms. If he forbade the unsavory behavior knights were notorious for, made them behave as knights ought, perhaps he could win over the people.
It was admirable, if foolish. But at the moment it harmed nothing, so the Count remained silent.
After taking Quartesolo it was merely a matter of waiting for the scouting party, led by young Carrara, to return. He did so in less than an hour, in the company of young della Torre. Scouting was for youthful bones.
The Count thought he spied a spring in the step of both young men, which was confirmed as Carrara said, "There's no guard. None. The outer walls around San Pietro are completely unguarded. The double gates are shut, but that's all."
The Count was surprised, for once sharing a sentiment with Ponzino, who stared wide-eyed. It was the elder Carrara who answered. “Can it be a ruse? Do they have an army inside?"
"They can't," Marsilio replied. "We rode on the hill to the north of the suburb. There is nowhere for an army to be hiding."
"What about the main gates to the city?" asked Asdente.
"Too far to see without being spotted. I did suggest we climb the walls and take a look, but I got outvoted. I thought Florence was the only working democracy," he muttered.
Asdente snorted. "Democracy doesn't work," he said. "One look at Florence would tell you that."
Vinciguerra, though, had latched on to something Carrara had said. "The walls aren’t manned at all?"
Carrara clearly disliked being addressed by someone he considered a traitorous Veronese. He answered with heavy scorn. "I said so, didn’t I?”
“Entirely?” asked the Count.
Carrara colored. “There are three men parading around every quarter of an hour, but it’s hardly a guard.”
“And hardly unguarded, either,” said the Count with a wry grimace on his cheerful face.
Before the youth could spew insults and challenge the Count to the duel he clearly longed for, his uncle intervened. "What do you have in mind, my lord Count?"
It only took the Count a few moments to outline his plan. When he was finished the elder Carrara was nodding, a smile across his lips. "I like it.”
"I don't," his nephew objected. "It could be a trap. He could be handing us over to the Scaliger." But no one paid him any heed, which seemed the best way to deal with the boy.
Ponzoni, though, was frowning. "You're not serious. The soldiers could have those gates down in an hour."
The Count merely smiled. "I'll have them open for you in half that."
