But already some forty of our saddles were empty, and the fight, though brief, had proved exhausting to many of us.
Before us, like an array of mirrors in the October sun, shone the serried ranks of the steel-cased Borgia soldiers, their lances in rest, waiting to receive us.

Their leader, a gigantic man whose head was armed by no more than a pot of burnished steel, from which escaped the long red ringlets of his hair, was that same Ramiro del' Orca who had commanded the party pursuing Madonna Paola three years ago.

He was, since, become the most redoubtable of Cesare's captains, and his name was, perhaps, the best hated in Italy for the grim stories that were connected with it.
As we rode on he backed to join the foremost rank of his soldiers, and his voice--a voice that Stentor might have envied--trumpeted a laugh at sight of us.
"Gesu!" he roared, so that I heard him above the thunder of our hoofs.
"What has come to Giovanni Sforza.

Has he, perchance, become a man since Madonna Lucrezia divorced him?
I will bear her the news of it, my good Giovanni--my living thunderbolt of Jove!" His men echoed his boisterous mood, infected by it, and this, I argued, boded ill for the courage of those that followed me.

Another moment and we had swept into them, and many there were who laughed no more, or went to laugh with those in Hell.
For myself I singled out the blustering Ramiro, and I let him know it by a swinging blow of my mace upon his morion.