The Hill of Venus
On that morning Francesco felt almost happy, as his fingers gripped
his sword and he cantered along by the side of the duke. The great
heart of the world seemed to beat with his.
"The day of reckoning has come at last!" he said to the leader of the
free lances.
The duke's features were hard as steel. Yet he read the other's humor
and joined him with the zest of the hour.
"You smile once more!" said the grim lord of the woods, turning to the
slender form in the saddle.
"I shall smile in the hour when the Frangipani lies at my feet,"
Francesco replied with heaving chest. "It is good to be strong!"
The duke's horsemen were scouring ahead, keeping cover, scanning the
horizon for the Provencals. By noon they had left the open land,
plunged up hills covered thick with woods. The duke's squadrons sifted
through, and he halted them in the woods under the brow of the hill.
Below lay a broad valley running north and south, chequered with
pine-thickets and patches of brushwood. On a hill in the centre stood
a ruined tower. Towards the south a broad loop of the river closed the
valley, while all around on the misty hills shimmered the giants of
the forest, mysterious and silent. The duke's outriders had fallen
back and taken cover in the thickets. Down the valley could be seen a
line of spears, glittering snake-like towards the tower on the hill.
Companies of horse were crossing the river, pushing up the slopes,
mass on mass. In the midst of the flickering shields and spears blew a
great banner with the Fleur-de-Lis.
It was a contingent of Charles of Anjou, which had been on the march
since dawn. They had thrown their advance guard across the river and
were straggling up the green slopes, while the main host crossed the
ford.
The sound of a clarion re-echoed from crag to crag: and down towards
the river played the whirlwind, with dust and clangor and the shriek
of steel. Spears went down like trampled corn. The battle streamed
down the bloody slope, for nothing could stand that furious charge.
The river shut in the broken host, for the ford was narrow, not easy
of passage. From the north came the thundering ranks of horse, and on
the south the waters were calm and clear. The Provencals, streaming
like smoke blown from a fire by a boisterous wind, were hurled in rout
upon the water. They were hurled over the banks, slain in the
shallows, drowned in struggling to cross at the ford. Some few hundred
reached the southern bank, and scattered fast for the sanctuary of the
woods.
In less than half an hour from the first charge the duke's men had won
the day. They gave no quarter; slew all who stood.
The duke rode back up the hill, Francesco by his side, amid the cheers
of his men.
Southwest they rode towards the sea, their hundred lances aslant under
the autumnal sky. They were as men challenging a kingdom with their
swords, and they tossed their shields in the face of fate. The
audacity of the venture set the hot blood spinning in their hearts.
To free Conradino from Anjou's clutches; to hurl damnation in the
mouth of the Provencals.
As for Francesco, he was as a hound in leash. His sword thirsted in
its scabbard; he had tasted blood, and was hot for the conflict.
On the fourth day they came upon the ruins of Ninfa, a town set upon a
hill in a wooded valley. Vultures flapped heavenward as they rode into
the gate; lean, red-eyed curs snarled and slinked about the streets.
Francesco smote one brute through with his spear, as it was feeding in
the gutter on the carcass of a child. In the market square the
Provencals had made such another massacre as they had perpetrated in
Alba. The horrible obscenity of the scene struck the duke's men dumb
as the dead. The towns-folk had been stripped, bound face to face,
left slain in many a hideous and ribald pose. The vultures' beaks had
emulated the sword. The stench from the place was as the breath of a
charnel house, and the duke and his men turned back with grim faces
from the brutal silence of that ghastly town.
Near one of the gates a wild, tattered figure darted out from a
half-wrecked house, stood blinking at them in the sun, then sped away,
screaming and whimpering at the sight of the duke, as though possessed
with a demon. It was a woman, still retaining the traces of her former
great beauty, gone mad, yet the only live thing they found in the
town.
The duke had reined in his steed at the sight, gone white to the roots
of his hair. Then he covered his face with his hands, and Francesco
heard him utter a heart-rending moan.
When his hands fell, after a lapse of time, he seemed to have aged
years in this brief space.
"Forward, my men," he shouted with iron mouth. "The Frangipani shall
not complain of our swords!"
They passed out of Ninfa through the opposite gate. At dark they
reached the moors, and soon the entire host swept silently into the
ebony gloom of the great forests, which seemed sealed up against the
moon and stars.
CHAPTER VI
RETRIBUTION
Beneath the dark cornices of a thicket of wind-stunted pines stood a
small company of men, looking out into the hastening night. The
half-light of evening lay over the scene, rolling wood and valley into
a misty mass, while the horizon stood curbed by a belt of heavy
thunder-clouds. In the western vault, a vast rent in the wall of gray
shot out a blaze of translucent gold that slanted like a spear shaft
to a sullen sea.
The walls of Astura shone white and ghostly athwart the plains.
Sea-gulls came screaming to the cliffs. Presently out of the blue
bosom of an unearthly twilight a vague wind arose. Gusts came,
clamored, and died into nothingness. The world seemed to shudder. A
red sword flashed sudden out of the skies and smote the hills. Thunder
followed, growling over the world. The lurid crater of Vesuvius poured
gold upon the sea, whose hoarse underchant mingled with the fitful
wind.
A storm came creeping black out of the west. The sea grew dark. The
forests began to weave the twilight into their columned halls. A
sudden gust came clamoring through the woods. The myriad boughs tossed
and jerked against the sky, while a mysterious gloom of trees rolled
back against the oncoming night.
The men upon the hill strained their eyes towards the sea, where the
white patch of a sail showed vaguely through the gathering gloom.
Their black armor stood out ghostly against the ascetic trunks of the
trees. Grim silence prevailed, and so immobile was their attitude,
that they might have been taken for stone images of a dead, gone age.
The wind cried restlessly amid the trees, gusty at intervals, but
tuning its mood to a desolate and constant moan. The woods seemed full
of a vague woe and of troubled breathings. The trees seemed to sway to
one another, to fling strange words with the tossing of hair and
outstretched hands. The furze in the valley, swept and harrowed,
undulated like a green lagoon.
Between the hills and the cliff lay the marshes, threaded by a meagre
stream that quavered through the green. A poison mist hung over them
despite the wind. The mournful clangor of a bell came up from the
valley, with a vague sound as of voices chanting.
After a time the bell ceased pulsing. In its stead sounded a faint
eerie whimper, an occasional shrill cry that startled the moorlands,
leaped out of silence like a bubble from a pool where death has been.
The men were shaken from their strained vigilance as by a wind. The
utter gray of the hour seemed to stifle them, then a sound stumbled
out of the silence and set them listening. It dwindled and grew again,
came nearer: it was the smite of hoofs in the wood-ways. The rider
dismounted, tethered his foam-flecked steed to a tree and stumbled up
to where the Duke of Spoleto and Francesco stood, their gaze riveted
upon the ghostly masonry of Astura.
Panting and exhausted he faced the twain.
"They have all died on the scaffold," he said with a hoarse, rasping
voice. "The Swabian dynasty is no more."
With a cry and a sob that shook his whole being, Francesco covered his
face with his hands.
For a moment the duke stared blankly at the speaker.
"And the Frangipani?" he asked, his features ashen-gray and drawn.
The messenger pointed to Astura.
"There is feasting and high glee: the Pontiff's bribe was large."--
Francesco trembled in every limb.
"Such a day was never seen in Naples," the messenger concluded with a
shudder. "To a man they died under the axe--the soil was dyed crimson
with their blood."
There was a silence.
The messenger pointed to the sea, which had melted into the indefinite
background of the night.
Dim and distant, like a pearl over the purple deeps, one sail after
another struck out of the vague west. They came heading for the land,
the black hulls rising and falling against the tumultuous blackness of
the clouds.
A red gleam started suddenly from the waves. A quick flame leaped up
like a red finger above the cliff.
The duke ignited a pine-wood torch. The blue resinous light spluttered
in the wind.
Three times he circled it above his head, then he flung it into the
sea.
"Bernardo Sarriano and the Pisan galleys," he turned to Francesco.
"They are heading for the Cape of Circe."
A shout of command rang through the woods.
As with phantom cohorts the forest-aisles teemed with moving shadows.
A ride of some five miles lay between them and the Cape of Circe. Much
of that region was wild forest land and moor; bleak rocky wastes let
into woods and gloom. Great oaks, gnarled, vast, terrible, held giant
sway amid the huddled masses of the underbrush. Here the wild boar
lurked and the wolf hunted. But for the most it was dark and
calamitous, a ghostly wilderness forsaken by man.
As they rode along they struck the occasional trail of the Crusaders
of the Church. A burnt hamlet, a smoking farmhouse with a dun mist
hanging over it like a shroud, and once they stumbled upon the body of
a dead girl. They halted for a brief space to give her burial. The
duke's men dug a shallow grave under an oak and they left her there
and went on their way with greater caution.
"There is one man on earth to whom I owe a debt," the duke, leading
the van beside Francesco, turned to the latter, "a debt that shall be
paid this night, principal and interest."
Francesco looked up into the duke's face, and by the glare of the now
more frequent lightnings he saw that it was drawn and gray.
"There lies his lair," the duke pointed to the white masonry of
Astura, as it loomed out of the night, menacing and spectral, as a
thunderbolt hissed into the sea, and again lapsed into gloom.
"Betrayer of God and man,--his hour is at hand!"--
The duke's beard fairly bristled as he uttered these words, and he
gripped the hilt of his sword as if he anticipated a conflict with
some wild beast of the forest, some mythical monster born of night and
crime.
Francesco made no reply. He was bowed down beneath the gloom of the
hour, oppressed with unutterable forebodings. He too had an account to
settle: yet, whichever way the tongue inclined in the scales, life
stretched out from him as a sea at night. He dared not think of
Ilaria, far away in the convent of San Nicandro by the sea; yet her
memory had haunted him all day, knocked at the gates of his
consciousness, dominated the hours. Compared with the ever present
sense of her loss, all in life seemed utterly trifling, and he longed
for annihilation only.
Yet a kindred note which he sounded in the duke's soul found him in a
more receptive mood for the latter's confidences; once life had
seemed good to him; he had thought men heroes, the world a faerie
place. Thoughts had changed with time, and that for which he once