A triumphant cheer echoed from the walls of Castiglione as the last of the besiegers fled into the hills. Lord Orso clapped Alessandro on the shoulder, his face alight with a joy he thought he would never feel again. "We have done it, my lord! We have driven them off! We must get back behind the walls before the Baron returns!"
Alessandro looked at the burning camp, then at the exhausted but elated faces of his sixty-five soldiers. He shook his head. "No," he said, his voice quiet but absolute. "We will not be trapped again. A cornered animal can only wait to die. We will finish this now. On this ground."
Lord Orso stared at him as if he were mad. "Face them? In the open? My lord, he has fifty knights! They will ride us down like wheat before the scythe!"
"Not on this field," Alessandro replied, his eyes already scanning the terrain with the cool, calculating gaze of an engineer. "This is no longer just a field. This is a fortress of our own making. To work! We have less than two hours!"
What followed was not a celebration of victory, but a frantic, brilliant preparation for the next, more decisive battle. Alessandro did not choose the flat, open ground for his stand. He positioned his future battle line on a slight rise, with the steep, rocky slope leading up to Castiglione's walls protecting his right flank. His left was anchored by the smoldering, debris-strewn edge of the burned siege camp. The enemy would have only one direction from which to charge: straight ahead.
And Alessandro would make that path a nightmare.
"The cavalry is his hammer," he explained to a stunned Enzo and Marco as he directed the men. "So we will break the hammer before it strikes."
Using the Baron's own abandoned tools, the men worked with a desperate fury. First, they dug a shallow, hastily-excavated ditch about fifty paces in front of their chosen line, a crude but effective tripwire for charging horses. Immediately behind it, they hammered in hundreds of sharpened stakes, salvaged from the siege camp's palisades, angling them towards the enemy.
Next came the caltrops. Lorenzo had not forged enough for a full battle, but they had a handful. Alessandro had them scattered in the grass just before the ditch. For the rest, he had his men break apart any remaining wreckage with sharp iron points, creating a field of jagged, hoof-maiming debris.
Finally, he had his men drag several of the still-smoldering tents and wagons to his left flank. The thick, acrid smoke drifted lazily across the field, creating a partial screen that would obscure his numbers and confuse a charging enemy.
By the time the lookout on the castle wall sounded the horn to signal the enemy's return, the battlefield was ready. Alessandro gathered his small army. They were tired, sore, and spattered with the grime of two battles, but they stood before him with an unshakeable faith in their young lord.
"Look before you!" Alessandro's voice rang out. "You see the ground where our enemy believed they would starve us. We have made it our own. They are coming back, not with a plan, but with a wounded pride. They are angry, and angry men make mistakes. They will see our small number and their arrogance will blind them. They will charge, expecting to crush us."
He drew his sword, its point gleaming in the afternoon sun. "But they are not charging a line of men. They are charging a wall of iron. They will break upon us! Trust your training! Trust the man next to you! Hold the line, and the Falcon will feast on the Lion today! For Rocca Falcone! For Castiglione!"
A single, unified roar of "For the Falcon!" was his answer.
He deployed his men in a tight, deep phalanx. The thirty-eight surviving Falcon Guards, the disciplined heart of his army, formed the front ranks. Lord Orso and his twenty-five men, their courage bolstered by the sight of the professionals before them, formed the rear ranks, ready to plug any gaps.
The Baron of Monte San Giovanni's army appeared over the rise, a wave of steel and fury. They had discovered the ruse of the ghost army and seen the smoke from their own camp. The Baron, riding at the head of his fifty knights, was apoplectic with rage. He saw the small, defiant knot of soldiers arrayed below Castiglione, their lone falcon banner flapping in the breeze. He saw not a strategic deployment, but a final, pathetic act of defiance. He would not wait for his infantry. He would obliterate this insult with one, glorious charge.
He turned to his standard-bearer and his trumpeter. "Knights of Monte San Giovanni!" his voice bellowed across the field. "To me! We will ride them into the dirt! Sound the charge!"
The trumpet blew, a long, piercing call for blood. Fifty lances were lowered. Fifty armored knights spurred their great warhorses forward. The ground began to shake under the thunder of two hundred hooves. A tidal wave of flesh and steel, the most powerful weapon on the medieval battlefield, was bearing down on Alessandro's tiny, unmoving line.