Under the Witches' Moon: A Romantic Tale of Mediaeval Rome
world. And I am he whose palace rings with the eternal Never!"
Frozen with terror Basil listened.
The thunder growled ever louder. A vampire's bark stabbed the darkness;
the shriek of witches rose above the tempest, there was a rattling of
bones as if skeletons were rising from their graves. All round the
Emperor's Tomb the ghouls were prowling, and the soulless corpses were
as restless as the fleshless souls that whimpered and moaned in the
night. Giant bats flew to and fro like evil spirits. The great peals
shook the huge pile from vault to summit. The running finger of the
storm scribbled fiery, cabalistical zigzags on the firmament's black
page. And in every peal, louder and louder as the echoes spread, Basil
seemed to hear his name shrieked by the weird powers of darkness, till,
half mad with terror, he cried:
"Away! Away! Your presence flings dark glare like glowing lava--"
"I come across the night," replied the voice, "ere death has made you
mine! Deserve the doom that is prepared for those who do my bidding.
You have shot into my heart a ray of blackest light--"
Basil held out his hands, as if to ward off some unseen assailant.
"Whirl back into the night--" he shrieked, but the voice resumed,
mocking and gibbering.
"Only a coward will shrink from the dreadful boundaries between things
of this earth and things beyond this earth. I have sought you by night
and by day--as fiercely as any of those athirst pant round hell's mock
springs! In the great vaults of wrath, in the sleepless caverns, whose
eternal darkness is only lighted by pools of molten stone that bathe
the lost, where, in the lurid light, the shadows dance--I sit and
watch the lakes of torment, taciturn and lone. I summon you to earthly
power--to the fulfillment of all your heart desires!"--
The voice ceased. All the elements of hell seemed to roar and shriek
around the battlemented walls.
There was a pause during which Basil regained his composure.
At last the dread shadow was looming across his path. An undefined awe
crept over him, such as dark chasms instill; an awe at his own self.
He would fain have been screened from his own substance. By degrees he
welcomed the tidings with a dark rapture. In himself lay the substance
of Evil. It was not the Angel of Light that ruled the reeling universe.
It was the shadow of Eblis looming dark and terrible over the lives of
men. Long before he had ever guessed what rills of flaming Phlegethon
ran riot in his veins, had he not felt his pulses swell with joy at
human pain, had he not played the fiend untaught? Could not the
Fiend, as well as God, live incarnate in human clay? Was not the earth
the meeting ground of Heaven and Hell? And why should not he, Basil,
defying Heaven, be Hell's incarnation?--
Ay--but the day of death and the day of reckoning! Would his parentage
entail eternal fire, or princely power and sway in the dark vaults of
nameless terror? Should he quail or thrill with awful exaltation?
"And--in return for that which I offer up--King of the dark red
glare--will you give to me what I crave--boundless power and the woman
for which my soul is on fire?"
"Have you the courage to snatch them from the talons of Fate?" came
back the gibbering reply.
A blinding flash of lightning was succeeded by an appalling crash of
thunder.
"From Hell itself!" shrieked Basil frenzied. "Give me Theodora and I
will fill the cup of torture that I have seized on your shadowy altars,
and quaff your health at the terrific banquet board of Evil in toasts
of torment--in wine of boundless pain!"
In the quickly succeeding flashes of lightning the dark form seemed to
rise and to expand.
"I knew you would not fail me! Come!"
For a moment Basil hesitated, fingering the hilt of his poniard.
"Where would you lead me?" he queried, his tone far from steady. "How
many of these twilights must I traverse before I see him whom you
serve?"
"That you shall know to-night!"
In the deep and frozen silence which succeeded the terrible peals of
thunder their retreating footsteps died to silence in the labyrinthine
galleries of the Emperor's Tomb.
Only the dog-headed Anubis seemed to stare and nod mysteriously.
CHAPTER III
THE CRYSTAL SPHERE
Outwardly and in daylight there was nothing noticeable about the sixth
house in the Lane of the Sclavonians in Trastevere beyond the fact that
it was a dwelling of a superior kind to those immediately surrounding
it, which were chiefly ill-favored cottages of fishermen and boatmen,
and had about it an air of almost sombre retirement.
It stood alone within a walled court, containing a few shrubs. The
windows were few, high and narrow, and the front bore a rather
forbidding appearance. One ascending to the flat roof would have found
it to command on the left a desolate view of a square devoted to
executions, and on the right a scarcely more cheerful prospect over the
premises belonging to the convent of Santa Maria in Trastevere. Had
the visitor been farther able to penetrate into the principal chamber
of the first floor, on the night of the scene about to be related, he
might indeed have found himself well repaid for his trouble.
This chamber, which was of considerable size and altogether devoid of
windows, being lighted during the daytime by a skylight, carefully
blinded from within, was now duskily illumined by a transparent device
inlaid into the end wall and representing the beams of the rising moon
gleaming from a sky of azure. The extremity of the room, which fronted
the symbol, was semi-circular and occupied by a narrow table, before
which moved a tall, shadowy form that paused now and then before a
fire of fragrant sandal wood, which burned in a brazen tripod, passing
his fingers mechanically, as it would seem, through the bluish flame.
In its unsteady flicker the strange figures on the walls, which had
defied the decree of Time, seemed to nod fantastically when touched by
a fitful ray.
This was Hormazd, the Persian, the former confidant and counsellor of
Marozia, in the heyday of her glory. In those days he had held forth
in a turret chamber on the summit of Castel San Angelo, where he would
read the stars and indulge his studies in the black arts to his heart's
content. Driven forth by Alberic, after Marozia's fall, the Persian had
taken up his abode in the Trastevere, where he continued to serve those
who came to him for advice, or on business that shunned the light of
day.
Now and then the Oriental bent his tall, spare form over a huge tome
which lay open upon the table, the inscrutable, ascetic countenance
with the deep, brilliant eyes seemingly plunged in deep, engrossing
thought, but in reality listening intently, as for the approach of some
belated caller.
The soft patter of hurried footsteps on the floor of the corridor
without soon rewarded his attention. The rustle of a woman's silken
garments caused him to give a start of surprise. A heavy curtain was
raised and she glided noiselessly into his presence.
The woman's face was covered with a silken vizor, but her coronet of
raven hair no less than the matchless figure, outlined against the
crimson glow, at once proclaimed her rank.
The first ceremony of silent greeting absolved, the Persian's visitor
permitted the black silken cloak which had enveloped her from head to
toe, to fall away, revealing a form exquisitely proportioned. The ivory
pallor of the throat, which rose like a marble column from matchless
shoulders, and the whiteness of the bare arms, seemed even enhanced by
the dusky background whose incense-laden pall seemed to oppress the
very walls.
"I am trusting you to-night with unreserved confidence," the woman
spoke in her rich, vibrant voice. "Many serve me from motives of
selfishness and fear. Do you serve me, because I trust you."
She laid her white hand frankly upon his arm and the Persian, isolated
above and below the strongest impulses of humanity, shivered under her
touch.
"What is it you desire?" he questioned after a pause.
"If you possess the knowledge with which the vulgar credit you," the
woman said slowly, not without an air of mockery in her tone, "I hardly
need reveal to you the motives which prompted this visit! You knew
them, ere I came, even as you knew of my coming!"
"You speak truly," said Hormazd slowly, now completely master of
himself. "For even to the hour it was revealed to me!"
The woman scanned him with a searching look.
"Yet I had confided in none!" she said musingly. "Tell me then who I
am!"
"You are Theodora!"
"When have we met before?"--
"Not in this life, but in a previous existence. Our souls touched then,
predestined to cross each other on a future plane."
She removed her silken vizor and faced him.
The dark eyes at once challenged and besought. No sculptor could have
chiselled those features on which a divinity had recklessly squandered
all it had to bestow for good or for evil. No painter could have
reproduced the face which had wrought such havoc in the hearts of men.
Like summer lightnings in a dark cloudbank, all the emotions of the
human soul seemed to have played therein and left it again, forging it
in the fires of passion, but leaving it more beautiful, more mysterious
than before.
The Oriental regarded her in silence, as she stood before him in the
flickering flame of the brazier.
"In some previous existence, you say?" she said with dreamy interest.
"Who was I then--and who were you?"
"Two driftless spirits on the driftless sea of eternity," he replied
calmly. "Foredoomed to continue our passage till our final destiny be
fulfilled."
"And this destiny is known to you?"
"Else I had watched in vain. But you--queen and sorceress--do you
believe in the message?"
She pondered.
"I believe," she said slowly, "that we make for ourselves the destiny
to which hereafter we must submit. I believe that some dark power can
foretell that destiny, and more--compel it!"--
Hormazd bowed ever so slightly. There was a dawning gleam of satire in
his brilliant eyes, a glimpse which was not lost on her.
Again the question came.
"What is it you desire?"
Theodora gave an inscrutable smile that imparted to her features a
singular softness and beauty, as a ray of sunlight falling on a dark
picture will brighten the tints with a momentary warmth of seeming life.
"I was told," she spoke slowly, as if trying to overcome an inward
dread, "that you are known in Rome chiefly as being the possessor of
some mysterious internal force which, though invisible, is manifest to
all who place themselves under your spell! Is it not so?"
The Persian bowed slightly.
"It may be that I have furnished the Romans with something to talk
about besides the weather; that I have made a few friends, and an
amazing number of enemies--"
"The latter argues in your favor," Theodora interposed. "They say,
furthermore, that by this same force you are enabled to disentangle the
knots of perplexity that burden the overtaxed brain."
Hormazd nodded again and the sinister gleam of his eyes did not escape
Theodora's watchful gaze.
"If this be so," the woman continued, "if you are not an impostor who
exhibits his tricks for the delectation of the rabble, or for sordid
gain--exert your powers upon me, for something, I know not what, has
frozen up the once overflowing fountain of life."
The Oriental regarded her intently.
"You have the wish to be deluded--even into an imaginary happiness?"
Theodora gave a start.
"You have expressed what I but vaguely hinted. It may be that I
am tired"--she passed her hand across her brow with a troubled
gesture--"or puzzled by some infinite distress of living things.
Perchance I am going mad--who knows? But, whatever the cause, you,