The Hill of Venus
whose sinewy limbs stretched far over the sun-streaked sward.
As for Francesco, his mood partook of the silence of the hills. As the
sun rode higher in the heavens, he came to a wilder region. A desolate
valley opened gradually before him, steeped on every side with the
black umbrage of the woods. A wind had arisen, brisk and eager as a
blithe breath from the sea, and cloud shadows raced athwart the
emerald dells.
Lost in reveries of the past, and brooding over what the times to come
might hold for him, Francesco trotted on through a grove of birches,
whose filmy foliage arabesqued the heavens. A glade opened to the road
below. All around him were tall hills deluged with green woods. A
stream glittered through the flats under elms and drooping willows.
Suddenly a half-score of mounted men rounded the angle of the road.
They sighted the solitary traveller. At once they were at full gallop
over the grass, swords agleam, lances pricking the blue, while the hot
babel of their tongues echoed from the valley. Francesco, with a grim
twist of the mouth, heeled on his horse and took to the woods.
The great trees overarched him, beams of gold came slanting through.
The grass was a deep green under the purple shadows. Through the
silence came the dull thunder of hoofs as the men cantered on,
swerving and blundering through the trees. They rode faster than
Francesco upon his tired steed, and the distance dwindled between the
pack and the chase.
Onward Francesco fled. The black boughs grazed his head, the
tree-trunks seemed to gallop in the gloom. He could see steel flashing
through the wood, like meteorites plunging through a cloud.
Yet he hardly so much as turned his head, for his eyes were piercing
the shadows before him. As he swayed along, he now heard a great
trampling of hoofs in the woods. The nearest galloper swung out from
the gloom. He was leaning over the neck of his horse, his lips parted
over his teeth, his sword poised from his outstretched arm. The sword
circled over Francesco's head, its whistling breath fanning his hair.
He cowered; his horse swerved aside. The horse of his assailant
stumbled over a projecting tree stump, hurling its rider over its head
some six feet away upon the ground, where he lay stunned, dropping his
sword in his fall. Like lightning Francesco leaped from his saddle,
picked up the weapon, and remounted, just in time to ward off a
vicious blow aimed at his head from a second horseman who had plunged
from the thickets.
Francesco's early training served him well and proved his foe's
undoing. Drawing up his horse on sluthering hoofs he faced the second
assailant. Their swords whimpered, screamed and clashed. Francesco's
blade struck the man's throat through. Catching his upreared shield as
he fell, he tore it from its supporting arm, just as two more horsemen
blundered out of the gloom. They sighted the horseless steed, the dead
man on the ground; they saw the monk with sword and shield, and paused
for a moment staggered at the uncommon sight.
Francesco, profiting by their panic, twisted tighter the strapping of
his shield, and with sword circling over his head pushed his horse to
a gathering gallop down the hill. But his assailants had recovered
from their sudden paralysis. Swerving right and left, they dashed down
the glade in hot pursuit. Gaining on him from all sides, his fate
seemed to be sealed, when directly across Francesco's path there rode
leisurely out of the gloom of the forest a score or more of
individuals, mounted on steeds well suited to the riders, the like of
which in point of incongruity of garb and appearance he had never
before beheld.
One wore a cuirass of plaited gold, beneath which was visible a shirt
of coarsest hemp, and two dirty bare legs. Another had a monk's capote
tied about his neck with silver links, like jewels in a swine's snout,
while his carcass was encased in a leather jerkin. A third was covered
with the skin of a wolf, and a fourth wore that of a mountain lion.
Antler's horns protruded from the chain-mail skull-cap of a fifth; a
sixth carried a round shield, covered with raw-hide, and a spear. So
motley was the array and so fantastic the appearance of the newcomers,
that one might have taken them for a band of souls turned out of
purgatory, who, on returning to earth, had robbed a pawn shop to cover
their nakedness.
But he who in point of portliness and bulk would at once have been
acknowledged as the one in authority, a stout and herculean being,
swaying upon an antediluvian steed, with a helmet upon his head
resembling a huge iron cask, now hove into sight, like some portly Pan
bestriding a Centaur. He was of exceeding bulk, with a flaming red
beard and small, close-set eyes. His sword-belt would have girdled two
common men's loins. His arms had the appearance of two clubs. A great
slit of a mouth, under a bristling mustachio, revealed two rows of
teeth, large and strong as a boar's; a double chin flapped to and fro
with the motion of the steed, around which his legs curved like the
staves of a cask.
Being unable to check the speed of his horse in the steep downward
grade of the glen, Francesco was hurled almost bodily into the very
midst of this fantastic array, not knowing whether he had escaped one
foe but to encounter another, or whether there was salvation for him
in the appearance of this strange throng.
The sight of a monk racing at breakneck speed down the glade, swinging
aloft a blood-stained sword and riding as one born in the saddle, for
a moment staggered even the nondescripts and their leader. But, with
eyes blinking under their penthouses of fat, the latter had at a
glance taken in the situation. A signal,--and a whirlwind seemed to
fill the emerald gloom. The wood grew alive with shouting and the
noise of hoofs. Their number compelled Francesco to wheel about and
face his pursuers, as those to whom he trusted for his safety
completely choked up the gorge.
His assailants had come to a sudden halt, as they found themselves
face to face with this fantastic array, outnumbering their own some
ten to one. They seemed to wait the command of their leader, who had,
in the meantime, come up, bestriding a black stallion, a white plume
upon his helmet, and upon his shield and breastplate the armorial
bearings of some great feudal house, the emblem of the Broken Loaf.
The giant of the woods reined in his elephantine steed within a few
paces of Francesco's pursuers and waved his chubby arm, as if he bade
them welcome.
"What ho, gentles!" he roared with a voice like a mountain cataract,
while the fingers of his left hand played with the hilt of his huge
sword. "What is the sport? Pray, let us too share in your pastime! Six
to one--and he of friar's orders--we take the weaker side!"
"Insolent! Know you to whom you speak?" shouted the leader of the
men-at-arms. "The monk is our prisoner! Stand back--at your peril!"
"Your prisoner?" returned he with the iron cask in mocking accents and
barbarous Italian, such as characterized the hired mercenaries and
adventurers who hailed from beyond the Alps. "Are we at war? Pray,
gentles, enlighten our poor understanding, that we too may profit by
your wisdom. Or are we to understand that might is right? We shall be
governed by the oracle!"
"Know you who I am?" shouted the leader of the men-at-arms, relying
rather on the prestige of a dreaded coat-of-arms than on the issue of
so doubtful a conflict, to withdraw with honor from an affair of
little credit to his name. "I am Giovanni Frangipani, Lord of Astura,
Torre del Greco, and Terra di Lavoro! Who are you?"--
The giant bowed slightly in his saddle.
"Sono Rinaldo, Duca di Spoleto," he replied carelessly, squinting his
little watery eyes. "I am much beholden to meet you again, my Lord
Frangipani. Have you counted your beads to-day, after ravishing a
maiden from the Campagna, and are you loving your neighbor as
yourself? Pray--relieve my anxiety!"
At the mention of his name, the name of one of the most renowned
free-lances in Italy, at the period of our story, the Frangipani's
cheek paled and his followers uttered a cry of dismay.
But the Lord of Astura believed discretion the better part of valor.
With a half suppressed oath he wheeled his steed about, and, pursued
by the loud gibes and taunts of Rinaldo's men, they trotted off and
disappeared in the gorge.
He, whose grandiloquent estate seemed to have impressed even so
powerful a baron of the empire as the Lord of Astura, now turned in
his saddle and beckoned Francesco to his side.
His followers brought up the rear, and, choosing a winding forest path
scarcely wide enough for two to ride abreast, the singular cavalcade
cantered into the golden vapor of the wood.
At their feet lay a great valley, a broad bowl touched by the
declining rays of the sun. Its depths were checkered with woods and
meadows, pools set like lapis lazuli in an emerald throne. A lake lay
under the shadow of the hills. Heights girded the valley on every
hand, save where a river like a giant's sword clove a deep defile
through the hill.
Francesco rode in silence by the side of the giant, gazing at the
valley below. It seemed like a new world to him; the craggy heights,
the blown cloud-banners overhead, the dusky woods frowning and smiling
alternately under the sun. A stream sang under the boughs, purling and
foaming over a broad ledge of stone into a misty pool.
They had come to the run of an abyss, where, the trees receding, the
ground broke abruptly into rocky slopes, plunging down perpendicular
under thickets of arbutus and pine. Four roads crossed at a spot where
a great wooden crucifix stretched out rough arms athwart the sky.
For a time the Duke of Spoleto had maintained a grim silence, and
Francesco began to wonder what his captors, if such they were, held in
store for him. The gray walls of a ruin encrusted with lichen gold and
green, rose towards the azure of the evening sky. A great silence
covered the valley, save for the bleating of sheep on remote meadows,
or the cry of the lapwing from the marshes. Distance purpled the far
horizon. The woods stood wondrous green and silent, as mute guardians
of the past.
On the slope of a hill, in the shade of the battered masonry of a
feudal castle overlooking to the north Romagna and the hills of
Umbria, to southward the sun-steeped plains of Calabria, Francesco at
last faced the Duke of Spoleto, his bare, blood-stained sword across
his knees. He had partaken of drink and food, while his steed was
grazing on the emerald turf, and the men-at-arms were roasting a kid
and some chestnuts they had gathered, over a fire kindled with dried
branches and decayed leaves.
Then only the Duke of Spoleto addressed the youth, whose air and
manner had impressed the captain of free-lances to a degree that
confidence challenged confidence, for the duke was not slow to discern
the stalwart metal under the friar's garb.
"Honest men are best out of the way when great folk are upon the
road," he expounded largely, breaking the long silence. "By what
special dispensation have you incurred the love of the Lord of Astura?
Have you perchance confessed his wife?"
And the Duke of Spoleto roared, as if he had given vent to some
uncommon witticism.
The degrading nature of his predicament caused Francesco to be more
frank than he had intended. Nevertheless he replied tentatively.
"The Lord of Astura is a Ghibelline. No doubt it was the friar's garb
which aroused his choler, for I never saw him before."
The Duke of Spoleto nodded grimly.
"A renegade is ever the worst enemy of his kind."
The paradox was lost upon Francesco.
But in the course of their converse the Duke of Spoleto revealed