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 hungered he now despised. Cursed with perversities, baffled and mocked, the eternal trivialities of life made the soul sink within him. Not all are mild earth, to be smitten and make no moan. There are sea spirits that lash and foam, fire spirits that leap and burn,--was he to be cursed because he was born with a soul of fire?
They were now in the midst of the great wilderness. On all sides myriads of trees, interminably pillared; through their tops the wind sighed and pined like the soft breath of a sleeping world. Away on every hand stretched oblivious vistas, black under multitudinous green spires.
The interminable trees seemed to vex the duke's spirit, as their trunks crowded the winding track and seemed to shut in the twain as with a never ending barrier. And behind them, with the muffled tread of a phantom army, came the duke's armed array striding through the night.
"Have you too suffered a wrong at the hands of the Frangipani?" Francesco at last broke the silence, turning to his companion.
The latter jerked the bridle of his charger so viciously that the terrified animal reared on its haunches and neighed in protest.
"Man, know you whereof you speak?" the duke snarled, as he came closer to Francesco. "He has made the one woman the Duke of Spoleto ever loved--a wanton!"--
They pushed uphill through the solemn shadows of the forest. A sound like the raging of a wind through a wood came down to them faintly from afar. It was a sullen sound, deep and mysterious as the hoarse babel of the sea, smitten through with the shrill scream of trumpets, like the cry of gulls above a storm. Yet in the aisles of the pine forest it was still as death.
Then, like a spark struck from flint and steel falling upon tinder, a red glare blazed out against the background of the night. A horn blared across the moorlands; the castle bell began to ring, jerkily, wildly, a bell in terror. Yellow gleams streaked the fretted waters, and again the trumpet challenged the dark walls, like the cry of a sea-bird driven by the storm.
The duke and Francesco looked meaningly at each other. The sound needed no words to christen it; they knew that the Pisans had attacked. They heard the roar and the cries from the rampart, the cataractine thunder of a distant battle.
Pushing on more swiftly as the woods thinned, the din grew more definite, more human, more sinister in detail. It stirred the blood, challenged the courage, racked conjecture with the infinite chaos it portended. Victory and despair were trammelled up together in its sullen roar; life and death seemed to swell it with the wind sound of their wings. It was stupendous, chaotic, a tempest cry of steel and passions inflamed.
The duke's face kindled to the sound as he shouted to his men to gallop on. Yet another furlong, and the spectral trunks dwindled, the sombre boughs seemed to mingle with the clouds, while gray, indefinite before them, engulfing the lightnings of heaven, loomed the great swell of the Tyrrhene, dark and restless under the thunderclouds, that came nearer and nearer. Ghostly the plains of Torre del Greco stretched towards the Promontory of Circe, and, solitary and impregnable, the Castello of Astura rose upon its chalk-cliffs, white in the lightnings which hissed around its summit.
The duke's men had come up, forming a wide semicircle around the leaders. At their feet opened a deep ravine, leading into the plain; half a furlong beyond, although it seemed less than a lance's throw across, rose the castle of the Frangipani, washed by the waves of the Tyrrhene. The Pisans had attacked the southern acclivity, and the defenders, roused from their feast of blood, had poured all their defences towards the point of attack, leaving the northern slope to look to itself.
As they rode down the ravine there came from the bottom of the valley the sharp yelp of a dog. It was instantly answered by a similar bark from the very top of the castello.
"No two dogs ever had the same voice," the duke turned to Francesco. "They must be hell-hounds, whom the fiend has trained to one tune. But what is that yonder? A goat picking its way?"
"A goat walking on its hind legs!"
"Are there horns on its head?"
"No!"--
"Then it is not the Evil One! Forward, my men!"
The pause that preceded the breaking of the storm had been unnaturally long. Save for the gleam of the lightnings, the waters had grown to an inky blackness. There came one long moment, when the atmosphere sank under the weight of a sudden heat. Then the ever increasing thunder rushed upon the silence with a mighty roar and out of the west, driven by the hurricane, came a long line of white waves, that rose as they advanced, till the very Tritons beat their heads and the nymphs scurried down to greener depths.
And now a sudden streak of fire hissed from the clouds, followed by a crash as if all the bolts of heaven had been let off at once. From the ramparts of Astura came cries of alarm, the din of battle, the blaring of horns, the shouting of commands.
The duke and Francesco had dismounted and were gazing up towards the storm-swept ramparts. Shrieks and curses rolled down upon them like the tumbling of a cascade.
Then they began to scale the ledge, the path dwindling to a goat's highway.
Above them rose a sheer wall on which there appeared not clinging space for a lizard. The abyss below was ready to welcome them to perdition if their feet slipped.
After a brief respite they continued, the duke's men scrambling up behind them, looking like so many ants on the white chalk-cliffs. The air was hot to suffocation; the storm roared, the thunder bellowed in deafening echoes through the skies, and the heavens seemed one blazing cataract of fire, reflected in the throbbing mirror of the sea.
They had reached a seam in the rock, where they paused for a moment to let their brains rest. There was hardly room for the duke and Francesco on the ledge, so narrow was the rocky shelf, and the latter was pushing close against the wall when he was suddenly forced to look up. He heard the din of the encounter above. The Pisans, having attacked the Frangipani from the south, were driving them out at the north. Suddenly two bodies whizzed by him, thrust over the ramparts in the fierceness of the assault. Another came; he seemed to have jumped for life, for he kept feet foremost for a distance through the air, before he began to whirl. These fell clear of the scaling party, and were impaled on the broken tops of the stunted trees, that bossed the side of the precipice. One came so near the duke that his flight downward almost blew him off his narrow perch. His head struck the ledge, while his body caught in the bushes, hung a moment, then dashed after its comrades below.
Just then the end of a rope fell dangling by their side, let down from the ramparts above. The duke tried to grasp it, but it shifted beyond the gap. Down the rope came a man, then another; they both gained a foothold on the narrow ledge. No sooner were their feet on it, than the duke sent them headlong to the bottom. Then grasping the rope without waiting to see if a third or fourth were coming down, he shouted to Francesco to follow. Perilous as was the task, it was no more so than to follow the steep and narrow goat's trail, and in a brief space of time they swung into a courtyard which was deserted. Anticipating no attack on this side, the defenders of Astura had turned their whole attention to the southern slope, where the Pisans were scaling the walls. The roar of the conflict seemed to grow with the roar of the hurricane, and, as one by one the duke's men leaped into the dark square, and the muster was complete, Count Rupert turned to Francesco.
"I feared lest they might clean out the nest before our arrival," he said, then, pointing to a distant glare of torches, he gave the word. They caught the unwary defenders in the rear. No quarter was to be given; the robber brood of Astura was to be exterminated.
"Conradino!" was the password, and above the taunts and cries of Frangipani's hirelings it filled the night with its clamor, rode on the wings of the storm, like the war-cry of a thousand demons.
Notwithstanding the fact that a few of the most daring among the Pisan admiral's men had scaled the ramparts and, leaping into the Frangipani's stronghold, had tried to pave a way for those lagging behind, their companions-in-arms were in dire straits. For those of Astura poured boiling pitch upon the heads of the attacking party, hurled rocks of huge dimensions down upon them which crushed into a mangled mass scores of men, unable to retain the vantage they had gained under the avalanche of arrows, rocks and fire.
In a moment's time the situation was changed.
Noiselessly as leopards, the duke's men fell upon their rear, raising their war-cry as they leaped from the shadows. Those on the ramparts, forced to grapple with the nearer enemy, abandoned their tasks. The Pisans, profiting by the lull, swarmed over the walls. Taken between two parties, a deadly hand-to-hand conflict ensued. Above the din and the roar of the hurricane, of the clashing of arms, above the cries of the wounded, the death-rattle of the dying, sounded the voice of the Duke of Spoleto.
"Onward, my men! Kill and slay!"
Side by side the duke and Francesco leaped into the thickest of the fray, both animated by the same desire to come face to face with the lords of Astura, spurning a lesser enemy.
For a time they seemed doomed to disappointment. Had the Frangipani been slain?
The zest of the conflict pointed rather to their directing the defence. Else their mercenaries would have left Astura to its fate.
Suddenly an unearthly voice startled the combatants.
"Guard, devil, guard!"
There was the upflashing of a sword, and a hoarse challenge frightened the night.
Giovanni Frangipani saw a furious face glaring dead white from under the shadow of a shield.
He stopped in his onward rush, blinked at the duke as one gone mad.
"Damnation, what have we here?"
"By the love of God, I have you now!"
"Fool, are you mad?"
The hoarse voice echoed him, the eyes flashed fire.
"Guard, ravisher,--guard!"
"Ten thousand devils! Who are you?"
"Your obedient servant,--the Duke of Spoleto!"
The Frangipani growled like a trapped bear.
He raised his sword, put forward his shield.
"On with you, dog!" he roared. "Join your wanton under the sod!"
"Ha, say you so?" cried the duke, closing in.
Their swords flashed, yelped, twisted in the air. A down cut hewed the dexter cantrel from the Frangipani's shield. His face with a gashed cheek glared at the duke from under his upreared arm. So close were they that blood spattered in the duke's face as the Frangipani blew the red stream from his mouth and beard.
The duke broke away, wheeled and came again. He lashed home, split the Frangipani's collar-bone even through the rags of his hauberk. The Frangipani yelped like a gored hound. Rabid, dazed, he began to make blind rushes that boded ill for him. The swords began to leap and to sing, while blinding flashes of lightning followed each other in quick succession and thunder rolled in deafening echoes through the heavens. Cut and counter-cut rang through the night, like the cry of axes, whirled by woodmen's hands.
Suddenly the Frangipani parried an upper cut and stabbed at the duke. The sword point missed him a hair's breadth. Before he could guard the duke was upon him like a leopard. Both men smote together, both swords met with a sound that seemed to shake the rocks. The Frangipani's blade snapped at the hilt.
He stood still for a moment as one dazed, then plucked out his poniard and made a spring. A merciless down cut beat him back. His courage, his assurance seemed to ebb from him on a sudden, as though the blow had broken his soul. He fell on his knees and held up his hands, with a thick, choking cry.
"Mercy! God's mercy!"
"Curse you! Had you pity on your victims?"
Thunder crashed overhead; the girdles of the sky were loosed. A torrent of rain beat upon the Frangipani's streaming face; he tottered on his knees, but still held his hands to the heavens.
"They lied," he cried. "Give me but life."--
The duke looked at him and heaved up his sword.
Giovanni Frangipani saw the white face above him, gave a great cry and cowered behind his hands. It was all ended in a moment. The rain washed his gilded harness as he lay with his blood soaking into the crevices of the rocks.--
Francesco had witnessed neither the fight nor the ending. Impelled by an insensate desire to find Raniero, to have a final reckoning for all the baseness and insults he had heaped upon him in the past, for his treachery and cruelty to Ilaria, he had made his way to the great hall.
The door was closed and locked from within.
Francesco dealt it a terrific blow. Its shattered framework heaved inward and toppled against the wall.
In the doorway stood Raniero and looked out at his opponent. He did not recognize Francesco. His face was sullen; the glitter of his little eyes mimicked the ring gleams of his hauberk. He put out the tip of a tongue and moistened his lips.
Francesco's face was as the face of a man who has but one purpose left in life and, that accomplished, cares not what happens. Raising his vizor, he said:
"I wait for you!"
Raniero broke into a boisterous laugh.
"The bastard! The monk! Go home, Francesco, and don your lady's attire! What would you with a sword?"
Francesco's mouth was a hard line. He breathed through hungry nostrils, as he went step by step toward Raniero.
Then with a swift shifting of his sword from right to left he smote him on each cheek, then, lowering his vizor, he put up his guard.
With an oath Raniero's sword flashed, feinted, turned with a cunning twist, and swept low for Francesco's thigh.
Francesco leaped back, but was slashed by the point a hair's breadth above the knee. It was a mere skin wound, but the pain of it seemed to snap something that had been twisted to a breaking point within him. He gave a great cry and charged down Raniero's second blow.
Their shields met and clashed, and Raniero staggered. Francesco rushed him across the hall as a bull drives a rival about a yard. Raniero crashed against the wall, and Francesco sprang back to use his sword. The blow hewed the top from Raniero's shield and smote him slant-wise across the face.
Raniero gathered himself and struck back, but the blow was caught on Francesco's shield. Francesco thrust at him, before he could recover, and the point slipped under the edge of Raniero's gorget. He twisted free and blundered forward into a fierce exchange of half-arm blows. Once he struck Francesco upon the mouth with the pommel of his sword, and was smitten in turn by the beak of Francesco's shield.
Again Francesco rushed Raniero to the wall, leaped back and got in his blow. Raniero's face was a red blur. He dropped his shield, put both his hands to his sword and swung great blows at Francesco, with the huge rage of a desperate and tiring man. Francesco led him up and down the hall. Raniero's breath came in gasps, and his strength began to wane.
Francesco bided his chance and seized it. He ran in, after Raniero had missed him with one of his savage sweeping blows, and rushed him against the wall. Then he struck and struck again, without uttering a word, playing so fast upon Raniero that he had his man smothered, blundering and dazed. The end came with a blow that cut the crown of Raniero's helmet. He threw up his hands with a spasmodic gesture, lurched forward, fell, rolled over on his back and lay still.
For a moment Francesco stood over him, the point of his sword on Raniero's throat. He seemed to waver; then all the misery the Frangipani had inflicted on Ilaria rushed over him as in a blinding cloud.
His sword went home. A strange cry passed through the hall, then all was still. The torch spluttered once more and went out. Francesco was in the darkness beside the dead body of Raniero.--
Meanwhile the Pisans had succeeded in scaling the walls. The clamor of the fight grew less and less, as one by one the defenders of Astura were relentlessly struck down and hurled over the ramparts. The storm had increased in violence, the heavens were cataracts of fire.--
In the blood-drenched court the duke and the Pisan admiral shook hands. Everything living had been slain. Astura was a castle of the dead.
"God! What work!" exclaimed the Pisan. It was the testimony wrung from him by the stress of sheer hard fighting.
"One of the viper-brood still lives," the duke turned to his companion, kicking with the tip of his steel boot the lifeless form of Giovanni Frangipani.
The Pisan turned to a man-at-arms.
"Take twenty men! Scour the lair from vault to pinnacle! We must have that other,--dead or alive!"
The rain had ceased for the time. New thunder-clouds came rolling out of the west. Flambeaux flared in the court. Black shadows danced along the ghostly walls. The wind moaned about the crenelated turrets; sentinels of the Pisans stood everywhere, alert for ambush.
The duke and his companions approached the door leading into the great hall. It lay in splinters. Stygian darkness held sway within.
Suddenly the duke paused, as if turned to stone, at the same time plucking his companion back by the sleeve of his surcoat.
Noiselessly as a ghost out of the door came the form of a woman. She was tall, exquisitely proportioned, and young. For a moment she paused on the threshold and looked out into the night. Almost immediately a second form followed, and paused near the first: that of a man. The woman seemed to stare blindly at the duke, with wide, unseeing eyes, as one who walks in a sleep.
With a choked, inarticulate outcry the duke snatched bow and arrow from the nearest sentry, and ere the Pisan could grasp the meaning of what he saw, or prevent, he set and sped the bolt. A moan died on the stillness. A form collapsed, shuddered and lay still.
The duke dropped bow and arrow, staring like a madman, then rushed towards the prostrate form.
Bending over it, a moan broke from his lips, as he threw his arms about the lifeless clay of her he had loved in the days of yore, ere the honeyed treachery of the Frangipani had sundered and broken their lives. The woman of the Red Tower had expiated her guilt.
He saw at once that no human agency might here avail. Death had been instantaneous. The arrow had pierced the heart.
The duke knelt long by her side, and the strong man's frame heaved with convulsive sobs, as he closed the eyes and muttered an Ave for her untimely departed soul.
When he arose, he looked into the pale face of Francesco, whose blood-stained sword and garments told a tale his lips would not. He understood without a word. Silently he extended his hand to the duke, then, taking off his own mantle, he covered therewith the woman's body.
It was midnight when the Pisans and the duke's men groped their way cautiously down the steep winding path to the shore. The Pisans made for their ships and Spoleto's men for the dusk of their native woods, carrying on a hurriedly constructed bier the body of the woman of the Red Tower.
Not many minutes had passed after their perilous descent when a sphere of fire shot from the clouds, followed by a crash as if the earth had been rent in twain, and the western tower of Astura was seen toppling into the sea.
Bye and bye sea and land reflected a crimson glow, which steadily increased, fanned by the gale, until it shone far out upon the sea.
Astura was in flames, the funeral pyre of the Frangipani.
