Under the Witches' Moon: A Romantic Tale of Mediaeval Rome
accept the trust which the Senator of Rome offers you?" Alberic turned
from the Grand Chamberlain to Tristan.
The latter found his voice at last.
"How shall I thank you, my lord!" he said, grasping the Senator's hand.
"Grant me but a week, wherein to absolve the business upon which I
came--and I shall prove myself worthy of the lord Alberic's trust!"
"So be it," the son of Marozia replied. "A long deferred pilgrimage to
the shrines of the Archangel at Monte Gargano will take me from Rome
for the space of a month or more. I should like to be assured that this
keep is in the hands of one who will not fail me in the hour of need!
My Lord Basil--greet the new captain of Castel San Angelo--"
Approaching almost soundlessly over the tiled floor, the Grand
Chamberlain extended his hand to Tristan, offering his congratulations
upon his sudden advancement.
Whatever it was that flashed in Basil's eyes, it was gone as quickly as
it had come. His thin lips parted in an inscrutable smile as Tristan,
with a bend of the head, acknowledged the courtesy.
For a moment, following his acceptance, Tristan was startled at his own
decision. Another would have felt it to be an amazing streak of luck.
Tristan was frightened, though his misgivings vanished after a time.
Owing to the lateness of the hour and the insecurity of the streets
Alberic offered Tristan the hospitality of his future abode for the
night and the latter gladly accepted.
After Basil had departed, he remained closeted with the Senator for the
space of an hour or more. What transpired between these two remained
guarded from the outer world, and it was late ere the sentinel on the
ramparts saw the light in the Senator's chamber extinguished, wondering
at the nature of the business which detained the lord Alberic and the
tall stranger in the pilgrim's garb.
CHAPTER VII
MASKS AND MUMMERS
Amid the ruin of cities and the din of strife during the tenth century
darkness closed in upon the Romans, while the figures of strange
despots emerged from obscurity only to disappear as quickly into the
night of oblivion. Little of them is known, save that they ruled the
people and the pope with merciless severity, and that the first one of
them was a woman.
The beautiful Theodora the older was the wife of Theophylactus, Consul
and Patricius of Rome, but the permanence of her power seemed to have
been due entirely to her own charm and personality.
Her daughter Marozia, with even greater beauty, greater fascination
and greater gift of daring, played even a more conspicuous part in
the history of her time. She married Alberic, Count of Spoleto, whose
descendants, the Counts of Tusculum, gave popes and mighty citizens to
Rome. One of their palaces is said to have adjoined the Church of S. S.
Apostoli, and came later into the possession of the powerful house of
Colonna.
Alberic of Spoleto soon died and Marozia, as the chronicles tell
us, continued as the temporal ruler of the city and the arbitress
of pontifical elections. She held forth in Castel San Angelo, the
indomitable stronghold of mediaeval Rome.
In John X. who, in the year 914, had gained the tiara through Theodora,
she found a man of character, whose aim and ambition were the dominion
of Rome, the supremacy of the Church.
By the promise of an imperial crown, the pope gained Count Ugo of
Tuscany to his party, but Marozia outwitted him, by giving her hand to
his more powerful half-brother Guido, then Margrave of Tuscany.
John X., after trying for two years, in spite of his enemies, to
maintain his regime from the Lateran, at last fell into their hands and
was either strangled or starved to death in the dungeons of Castel San
Angelo.
After the death of Guido, Marozia married his half-brother Ugo. The
strange wedding took place in the Mausoleum of the Emperor Hadrian,
where a bridal hall and nuptial chamber had been arranged and adorned
for them.
From the fortress tomb of the Flavian Emperor, Ugo lorded it over the
city of Rome, earning thereby the hatred of the people and especially
of young Alberic, his ambitious step-son, the son of Marozia and Count
Alberic of Spoleto.
The proud youth, forced one day to serve him as a page, with
intentional awkwardness, splashed some water over him and in return
received a blow. Mad with fury, Alberic rushed from Castel San Angelo
and summoned the people to arms. The clarions sounded and the fortress
tomb was surrounded by a blood-thirsty mob. In no time the actors
changed places. Ugo escaped by means of a rope from a window in the
castello and returned to Tuscany, leaving behind him his honor, his
wife and his imperial crown, while the youth Alberic became master of
Rome, cast Marozia into a prison in Castel San Angelo and kept his
half-brother, John XI., a close prisoner in the Lateran.
But the imprisonment of Marozia, and her mysterious disappearance from
the scenes of her former triumphs and baleful activity did not end the
story of the woman regime in Rome.
There lived in a palace, built upon the ruins of nameless temples
and sanctuaries, and embellished with all the barbarous splendor of
Byzantine and Moorish arts, in the remote wilderness of Mount Aventine,
a woman, who, in point of physical charms, ambition and daring had not
her equal in Rome since the death of Marozia. Theodora the younger, as
she is distinguished from her mother, the wife of Theophylactus, by
contemporary chroniclers, was the younger sister of Marozia.
The boundless ambition of the latter had left nothing to achieve for
the woman who had reached her thirtieth year when Alberic's revolution
consigned her sister to a nameless doom.
Strange rumors concerning her were afloat in Rome. Strange things were
whispered of her palace on Mount Aventine, where she assembled about
her the nobility of the city and the surrounding castelli, and soon
her court vied in point of sumptuousness and splendor with the most
splendid and profligate of her time.
Her admirers numbered by thousands, and her exotic beauty caused new
lovers to swell the ranks of the old with every day that passed down
the never returning tide of time.
Some came openly and some came under the cover of night, heavily
muffled and cloaked: spendthrifts, gamblers, gallants, men of fashion,
officers of the Senator's Court, poets, philosophers, and the feudal
lords of the Campagna.
Wealthy debauchees from the provinces, princes from the shores of
the Euxine, Lombard and Tuscan chiefs, Northmen from Scandinavia and
Iceland, wearing over their gnarled limbs the soft silken tunics of
Rome, Greeks, sleek, furtive-eyed, rulers from far-off Cathay, wearing
coats of crimson with strange embroidery from the scented East, men
from the isles of Venetia and the stormy plains of Thessaly, men with
narrow slanting eyes from the limitless steppes of Sarmatia, blond
warriors from the amber coasts of the Baltic, Persian princes who
worshipped the Sun, and Moors from the Spanish Caliphate of Cordova;
chieftains from the Lybian desert, as restive as their fiery steeds;
black despots from the hidden heart of Africa, with thick lips and
teeth like ivory, effete youths from Sicily and the Ionian isles,
possessed of the insidious beauty of the Lesbian women, adventurers
from Samarkand and Bokhara, trading in strange wares and steeped in
odor of musk and spices; Hyperboreans from the sea-skirt shores of an
ever frozen unimaginable ocean;--from every land under the sun they
came to Rome, for the sinister fame of Theodora's beauty, the baleful
mystery that surrounded her, and her dark repute proved powerful
incentives to curiosity, which soon gave way to overmastering passion,
once the senses had been steeped in the intoxicating atmosphere of the
woman's presence.
And, indeed, her physical charms were such as no mortal had yet
resisted whom she had willed to make her own. Her body, tall as a
column, was lustrous, incomparable. The arms and hands seemed to have
been chiselled of ivory by a master creator who might point with pride
to the perfection of his handiwork--the perfection of Aphrodité, Lais
and Phryné melted into one. The features were of such rare mould and
faultless type that even Marozia had to concede to her younger sister
the palm of beauty. The wonderful, deep set eyes, with their ever
changing lights, now emerald, now purple, now black; the straight,
pencilled brows, the broad smooth forehead and the tiny ears, hidden in
the wealth of her raven hair, tied into a Grecian knot and surmounted
by a circlet of emeralds, skillfully worked into the twining bodies of
snakes with ruby eyes; the satin sheen of the milk-white skin whose
ivory pallor was tinted with the faintest rose-light that never changed
either in heat or in cold, in anger or in joy: such was the woman
whose long slumbering, long suppressed ambition, coupled with a daring
that had not its equal, was to be fanned into a raging holocaust after
Marozia's untimely demise.
Concealing her most secret hopes and ambitions so utterly that even
Alberic became her dupe, Theodora threw herself into the whirl of life
with a keen appreciation of all its thrilling excitement. Vitally
alive with the pride of her sex and the sense of its power, she found
in her existence all the zest of some breathlessly fascinating game.
Men to her were mere pawns. She regarded them almost impersonally, as
creatures to taunt, to tempt, to excite, to play upon. Deliberately and
unstintingly she applied her arts. She delighted to see them at her
feet, but to repel them as the mood changed, with exasperating disdain.
Love to her was a word she knew but from report,--or, from what she had
read. She knew not its meaning, nor had she ever fathomed its depths.
To revel through delirious nights with some newly-chosen favorite
of the moment, who would soon thereafter mysteriously disappear, to
be tossed from the embrace of one into the arms of another; in the
restless, fruitless endeavor to kill the pain of life, the memory
of consciousness, to fill the void of a heart, that, alive to the
shallowness of existence, clutches at the saving hope of power, to
rule and to crush the universe beneath her feet, a dream, vague, vain,
unattainable: this desire filled Theodora's soul.
Her soul was burning itself to cinders in its own fires,--those baleful
fires that had proven the undoing of her equally beautiful sister.
Alone she would pace her gilded chambers, feverishly, unable to think,
driven hither and thither by the demons of unrest, by the disquietude
of her heart. Desperately she threw herself into whatever excitement
offered.
But it was always in vain.
She found no respite. Ever and ever a reiterant, restless craving
gnawed, like a worm, at her heart.
As she approached the thirtieth year of her life, Theodora had grown
more dazzling in beauty. Her body had assumed the wonderful plasticity
of marble. Her eyes had become more unfathomable, more wondrously
changeful in hues, like the iridescent waters of the sea.
Living as she did in an age where a morbid trend pervaded the world,
where the approach of the Millennium, though no one of the present
generation would see the day, was heralded as the End of Time; living
as she did in the darkest epoch of Roman history, Theodora felt the
utter inadequacy of her life, a hunger which nothing but power could
assuage.
Slowly this desire began to grow and expand. She wished to wield her
will, not only on men's emotions, but upon their lives as well. Perhaps
even the death of Marozia, with its paralyzing influence over her soul,
the captivity in the Lateran of her sister's son, and the hateful rule
of Alberic, would not have brought matters to a focus, had not the