CHAPTER VIII
CARMAGNOLA'S BRIDGES
Dissensions at the very outset between Carmagnola and Bellarion protracted by some days the preparations for the departure of the army. This enabled Theodore of Montferrat fully to make his dispositions for resistance, to pack the granaries of Vercelli and otherwise victual it for a siege, and to increase the strong body of troops already under his hand, with which he threw himself into the menaced city. Further, by working furiously during those October days, he was enabled to strengthen his bastions and throw up fresh earthworks, from which to shatter the onslaught when it should come.
Upon these very circumstances of which Bellarion and his captains were duly informed followed fresh dissensions. Carmagnola advocated that operations should be begun by the reduction of Mortara, which was being held for Theodore, and which, if not seized before they marched upon Vercelli, would constitute, he argued, a menace upon their rear. Bellarion's view was that the menace was not sufficiently serious to merit attention; that whilst they were reducing it, Theodore would further be strengthening himself at Vercelli; and that, in short, they should march straight upon Vercelli, depending that, when they forced it to a capitulation, Mortara would thereby be scared into immediate surrender.
Of the captains some held one view, some the other. Koenigshofen, Stoffel, and Trotta took sides with Bellarion. Ercole Belluno, who commanded the foot in Carmagnola's condotta, took sides with his leader as did also Ugolino da Tenda who captained a thousand horse. Yet Bellarion would have overruled them but for the Princess Valeria who with her brother entered now into all their councils. These were on the side of Carmagnola. Hence a compromise was effected. A detachment under Koenigshofen including Trotta's troops was to go against Mortara, to cover the rear of the main army proceeding to Vercelli.
To Vercelli that army, now not more than some four thousand strong, yet strong enough in Bellarion's view for the task in hand, made at last a speedy advance. But at Borgo Vercelli they were brought to a halt by the fact that Theodore had blown up the bridge over the Sesia, leaving that broad, deep, swift-flowing river between the enemy and the city which was their goal.
At Carpignano, twenty miles higher up, there was a bridge which Bellarion ascertained had been left standing. He announced that they must avail themselves of that.
'Twenty miles there, and twenty miles back!' snorted Carmagnola. 'It is too much. A weariness and a labour.'
'I'll not dispute it. But the alternative is to go by way of Casale, which is even farther.'
'The alternative,' Carmagnola answered, 'is to bridge the Sesia and the Cerva above their junction where the Sesia is narrower. Our lines of communication with the army at Mortara should be as short as possible.'
'You begin to perceive one of the disadvantages of having left that army at Mortara.'
'It is no disadvantage if we make proper provision.'
'And you think that your bridges will afford that provision.' Bellarion's manner was almost supercilious.
Carmagnola resented it. 'Can you deny it?'
'I can do more. I can foresee what will happen. Sometimes, Francesco, you leave me wondering where you learnt the art of war, or how ever you came to engage in it.'
They held their discussion in the kitchen of a peasant's house which for the Princess Valeria's sake they had invaded. And the Princess and her brother were its only witnesses. When Carmagnola now moved wrathfully in great strides about the dingy chamber, stamping upon the earthen floor and waving his arms as he began to storm, one of those witnesses became an actor to calm him. The Princess Valeria laid a hand upon one of those waving arms in its gorgeous sleeve of gold-embroidered scarlet.
'Do not heed his taunts, Messer Carmagnola. You have my utter trust and confidence. It is my wish that you should build your bridges.'
Bellarion tilted his chin to look at her between anger and amusement.
'If you are to take command, highness, I'll say no more.' He bowed, and went out.
'One of these days I shall give that upstart dog a lesson in good manners,' said Carmagnola between his teeth.
The Princess shook her head.
'It is not his manners, sir, that trouble me; but his possible aims. If I could trust him ...'
'If you could trust his loyalty, you should still mistrust his skill.'
'Yet he has won great repute as a soldier,' put in Gian Giacomo, who instinctively mistrusted the thrasonical airs of the swaggering Carmagnola, and mistrusted still more his fawning manner towards Valeria.
'He has been fortunate,' Carmagnola answered, 'and his good fortune has gone to his head.'
Meanwhile Bellarion went straight from that interview to despatch Werner von Stoffel with five hundred arbalesters and six hundred horse to Carpignano.
There was a fresh breeze with Carmagnola when the latter discovered this. He demanded to know why it should have been done without previous consultation with himself and the Princess, and Valeria was beside him when he asked the question.
Bellarion's answer was a very full one.
'You will be a week building your bridges. In that time it may occur to Theodore to do what he should have done already, to destroy the bridge at Carpignano.'
'And what do I care about the bridge at Carpignano when I shall have bridges of my own here?'
'When you have bridges of your own here, you need not care. But I have a notion that it will be longer than you think before you have these bridges, and that we may have to go by way of Carpignano in the end.'
'I shall have my bridges in a week,' said Carmagnola.
Bellarion smiled. 'When you have them, and when you have put two thousand men across to hold them, I'll bid Stoffel return from Carpignano.'
'But in the meantime ...'
Bellarion interrupted him, and suddenly he was very stern.
'In the meantime you will remember that I command. Though I may choose to humour you and her highness, as the shortest way to convince you of error, yet I do not undertake to obey you against my better judgment.'
'By God, Bellarion!' Carmagnola swore at him, 'I'll not have you gay with me. You'll measure your words, or else you'll eat them.'
Very coldly Bellarion looked at him, and observed Valeria's white restraining hand which again was upon Carmagnola's sleeve.
'At the moment I have a task in hand to which I belong entirely. While it is doing if you forget that I command, I shall remove you from the army.'
He left the swaggerer fuming.
'Only my regard for you, madonna, restrains me,' he assured the Princess. 'He takes that tone when he should remember that, if it came to blows between us, the majority of the men here would be upon my side, now that he has sent nearly all his own away.' He clenched his hands in anger. 'Yet for your sake, lady, I must suffer it. There can be no quarrel between his men and mine until we have placed you and your brother in possession of Montferrat.'
These and other such professions of staunch selfless loyalty touched her deeply; and in the days that followed, whilst the troopers, toiling like woodmen, were felling trees and building the bridges above the junction of the rivers, Carmagnola and Valeria were constantly together.
She was driven now to the discomfort of living under canvas, sharing the camp life of these rude men of war, and Carmagnola did all in his power to mitigate for her the hardships it entailed, hardships which she bore with a high gay courage. She would go with him daily to watch the half-naked labourers in the river, bundling together whole trees as if they were mere twigs, to serve as pontoons. And daily he gave her cause to admire his skill, his ingenuity, and his military capacity. That Bellarion should have sneered at this was but another proof of Bellarion's worthlessness. Either he could not understand it, or else of treacherous intent he desired to deprive her of its fruits.
Meanwhile Carmagnola beglamoured her with talk of actions past, in all of which he played ever the heroic part. The eyes of her mind were dazzled by the pictures his words drew for her. Now she beheld him leading a knightly charge that shattered an enemy host into shards; now she saw him at the head of an escalade, indomitably climbing enemy walls under a hail of stones and scalding pitch; now she saw him in council, wisely planning the means by which victory might be snatched from overwhelming opposition.
One day when he spoke of these things, as they sat alone watching the men who swarmed like ants about the building of his bridge, he touched a closer note.
'Yet of all the enterprises to which I have set these rude, soldier hands, none has so warmed me as this, for none has been worthier a man's endeavour. It will be a glorious day for me when we set you in your palace at Casale. A glorious day, and yet a bitter.'
'A bitter?' Her great dark eyes turned on him in question.
His countenance clouded, his own glance fell away. 'Will it not be bitter for me to know this service is at an end; to know that I must go my ways; resume a mercenary's life, and do for hire that which I now do out of ... enthusiasm and love?'
She shifted her own glance, embarrassed a little.
'Surely you do yourself less than justice. There is great honour and fame in store for you, my lord.'
'Honour and fame!' He laughed. 'I would gladly leave those to tricksters like Bellarion, who rise to them so easily because no scruples ever deter them. Honour and fame! Let who will have those, so that I may serve where my heart bids me.'
Boldly now his hand sought hers. She let it lie in his. Above those pensive, mysterious eyes her line brows were knit.
'Aye,' she breathed, 'that is the great service of life! That is the only worthy service—as the heart bids.'
His second hand came to recruit the first. Lying almost at her feet, he swung round on his side upon the green earth, looking up at her in a sort of ecstasy. 'You think that, too! You help me to self-contempt, madonna.'
'To self-contempt? It is the only contempt that you will ever know. But why should you know that?'
'Because all my life, until this moment, I have served for hire. Because, if this adventure had not come to me by God's grace, in such worthless endeavours would my life continue. Now—now that I know the opinion in which you must hold such service—it is over and done for me. When I shall have served you to your goal, I shall have performed my last.'
There fell a long pause between them. At last: 'When my brother is crowned in Casale, he will need a servant such as you, Messer Carmagnola.'
'Aye, but shall you, madonna? Shall you?'
She looked at him wistfully, smiling a little. He was very handsome, very splendid and very brave, a knight to win a lady's trust, and she was a very lonely, friendless lady in sore need of a stout arm and a gallant heart to help her through the trials of this life.
The tapering fingers of her disengaged hand descended gently upon his golden head.
'Shall I not?' she asked with a little tremulous laugh. 'Shall I not?'
'Why, then, madonna, if you will accept my service, it shall be yours for as long as I endure. It shall never be another's. Valeria! My Valeria!'
That hand upon his head, overheating its very indifferent contents, drove him now to an excessive precipitancy.
He carried the hand he held almost fiercely to his lips.
It was withdrawn, gently but firmly as was its fellow. His kiss and the bold use of her name scared her a little.
'Carmagnola, my friend ...'
'Your friend, and more than your friend, madonna.'
'Why, how much more can there be than that?'
'All that a man may be to a woman, my Valeria. I am your knight. I ever have been since that day in the lists at Milan, when you bestowed the palm on me. I joy in this battle that is to be fought for you. I would joy in death for you if it were needed to prove my worship.'
'How glibly you say these things! There will have been queens in other lists in which you have borne off the palm. Have you talked so to them?'
'O cruelty!' he cried out like a man in pain. 'That you should say this to me! I am swooning at your feet, Valeria, you wonder of the world!'
'My nose, sir, is too long for that!' She mocked him, but with an underlying tenderness; and tenderness there was too in her moist eyes. 'You are a whirlwind in your wooing as in the lists. You are reckless, sir.'
'Is it a fault? A soldier's fault, then. But I'll be patient if you bid me. I'll be whatsoever you bid me, Valeria. But when we come to Casale ...'
He paused for words, and she took advantage of that pause to check him.
'It is unlucky to plan upon something not yet achieved, sir. Wait ... wait until that time arrives.'
'And then?' he asked her breathlessly. 'And then?'
'Have I not said that to plan is unlucky?'
Boldly he read the converse of that statement. 'I'll not tempt fortune, then. I dare not. I will be patient, Valeria.'
But he let it appear that his confidence was firm, and she added nothing now to shake it.
And so in ardent wooing whilst he waited for his bridge, Carmagnola spent most of the time that he was not engaged in directing the construction of it. Bellarion in those days sulked like Achilles in his tent, with a copy of Vegetius which he had brought from Milan in his baggage.
The bridges took, not a week, but eleven days to build. At last, however, on the eve of All Saints', as Fra Serafino tells us, Carmagnola accompanied by Valeria and her brother bore word himself to Bellarion that the bridges were ready and that a party of fifty of his men were encamped on the peninsula between the rivers. He came to demand that Bellarion should so dispose that the army should begin to cross at dawn.
'That,' said Bellarion, 'assumes that your bridges endure until dawn.'
He was standing, where he had risen to receive his visitors, in the middle of his roomy pavilion, which was lighted by a group of three lanterns hung at the height of his head on the tent-pole. The book in which he had been reading was closed upon his forefinger.
'Endure until dawn?' Carmagnola was annoyed by the suggestion. 'What do you mean?'
Bellarion's remark had been imprudent. Still more imprudent was the laugh he now uttered.
'Ask yourself who should destroy them,' he said. 'In your place I should have asked myself that before I went to the trouble of building them.'
'How should Theodore know of it, shut up as he is in Vercelli, eight miles away?'
Part of his question was answered on the instant by a demoniac uproar from the strip of land across the water. Cries of rage and terror, shouts of encouragement and command, the sound of blows, and all the unmistakable din of conflict, rose fiercely upon the deepening gloom.
'He knows, it seems,' said Bellarion, and again he laughed.
Carmagnola stood a moment, clenching and unclenching his hands, his face white with rage. Then he span round where he stood and with an inarticulate cry dashed from the tent.
One withering glance Valeria flashed into Bellarion's sardonically amused countenance, then, summoning her brother, she followed Carmagnola.
Bellarion set down his book upon the table by the tent-pole, took up a cloak, and followed them at leisure, through the screen of bare trees behind which his pavilion had been pitched, and along the high bank of the swirling river towards the head of Carmagnola's bridge.
There, as he expected, he found them, scarcely visible in the gloom, and with them a knot of men-at-arms and a half-dozen stragglers, all that had escaped of the party that Carmagnola had sent across an hour ago. The others had been surrounded and captured. Last of all to win across, arriving just as Bellarion reached the spot, was Belluno, who had commanded them, an excitable Neapolitan who leapt up the bank from the bridge ranting by all the patrons of Naples that they had been betrayed.
Over the river came a sound of tramping feet. Dimly reflected in the water they could see the forms of men who otherwise moved invisible on the farther bank, and presently came a sound of axes on timber.
'There goes your bridge, Francesco,' said Bellarion, and for the third time he laughed.
'Do you mock me, damn you!' Carmagnola raged at him, and then raised his voice to roar for arbalesters. Three or four of the men went off vociferously, at a run, to fetch them, whilst Valeria turned suddenly upon Bellarion, whose tall cloaked figure stood beside her.
'Why do you laugh?' Her voice, sharp with disdain, resentment, and suspicion, silenced all there that they might hear his answer.
'I am human, I suppose, and, therefore, not entirely without malice.'
'Is that all your reason? Is your malice so deep that you can laugh at an enemy advantage which may wreck the labour of days?' And then with increasing sharpness and increasing accusation: 'You knew!' she cried. 'You knew that the bridges would be destroyed to-night. Yourself, you said so. How did you know? How did you know?'
'What are you implying, madonna?' cried Carmagnola, aghast. For all his hostility towards Bellarion, he was very far from ready to believe that he played a double game.
'That I have no wits,' said Bellarion, quietly scornful.
And now the impetuous Belluno, smarting under his own particular misadventure and near escape, must needs cut in.
'Madonna is implying more than that. She is implying that you've sold us to Theodore of Montferrat.'
'Are you implying it, too, Belluno?' His tone had changed. There was now in his voice a note that the Princess had never heard, a note that made Belluno's blood run cold. 'Speak out, man! Though I give licence for innuendo to a lady, I require clear speech from every man. So let us have this thing quite plainly.'
Belluno was brave and obstinate. He conquered his fear of Bellarion sufficiently to make a show of standing his ground.
'It is clear,' he answered sullenly, 'that we have been betrayed.'
'How is it clear, you fool?' Bellarion shifted again from cold wrath with an insubordinate inferior to argument with a fellow man. 'Are you so inept at the trade by which you live that you can conceive of a soldier in the Marquis Theodore's position neglecting to throw out scouts to watch the enemy and report his movements? Are you so much a fool as that? If so, I shall have to think of replacing you in your command.'
Carmagnola interposed aggressively; and this partly to protect Belluno who was one of his own lieutenants, and partly because the sneer at the fellow's lack of military foresight was a reflection upon Carmagnola himself.
'Do you pretend that you foresaw this action of Theodore's?'
'I pretend that any but a fool must have foreseen it. It is precisely what any soldier in his place would do: allow you to waste time, material, and energy on building bridges, and then promptly destroy them for you.'
'Why, then, did you not say this ten days ago?'
'Why?' Bellarion's voice sounded amused. His face they could not see. 'Because I never spend myself in argument with those who learn only by experience.'
Again the Princess intervened. 'Is that the best reason you can give? You allowed time, material, and energy, and now even a detachment of men to be wasted, merely that you might prove his folly to my Lord of Carmagnola? Is that what you ask us to believe?'
'He thinks us credulous, by God!' swore Carmagnola.
Bellarion kept his patience. 'I had another reason, a military one with which it seems that I must shame your wits. To move the whole army from here to Carpignano would have taken me at least two days, perhaps three. A mounted detachment from Vercelli to destroy the bridge could reach Carpignano in a few hours, and once it was seen that I moved my army thither that detachment would have been instantly despatched. It was a movement I feared in any case, until your bridge-building operations here deceived Theodore into believing that I had no thought of Carpignano. That is why I allowed them to continue. Though your bridges could never serve the purpose for which you built them, they could excellently serve to disguise my own intention of crossing at Carpignano. To-morrow, when the army begins to move thither, that detachment of Theodore's will most certainly be sent to destroy the bridge. But it will find it held by a thousand men under Stoffel, and the probable capture of that detachment will compensate for the loss of men you have suffered to-night.'
There was a moment's utter silence when he had done, a silence of defeat and confusion. Then came an applauding splutter of laughter from the group of men and officers who stood about.
It was cut short by a loud crash from across the stream, and, thereafter, with a groaning and rending of timbers, a gurgling of swelling, momentarily arrested, waters, and finally a noise like a thunderclap, the wrecked bridge swinging out into the stream snapped from the logs that held it to the northern shore.
'There it goes, Carmagnola,' said Bellarion. 'But you no longer need bewail your labours. They have served my purpose.'
He cast his cloak more tightly about him, wished them good-night almost gaily, and went striding away towards his pavilion.
Carmagnola, crestfallen, swallowing his chagrin as best he could, stood there in silence beside the equally silenced Princess.
Belluno swore softly, and vented a laugh of some little bitterness.
'He's deep, always deep, by Saint Januarius! Never does he do the things he seems to do. Never does he aim where he looks.'