Under the Witches' Moon 5 – Gallizier · Verses Across
Literature · Historical Fiction
Under the Witches' Moon 5Book the First · On the Aventine
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Literature · Historical Fiction
Under the Witches' Moon 5
Book the First · On the Aventine
GallizierEnglish
When Tristan at last regained his bearings, he found himself among the convents and cloisters on Mount Aventine. His eyes rested wearily on the eddying gleam of the Tiber as it wound its coils round the base of the Mount of Cloisters, thence they roamed among the grass and weed-grown ruins of ancient temples and crumbling porticoes, which rose on all sides in the silent desolation.
Just then a last gleam of the disappearing sun touched the bronze figure of the Archangel on the summit of Castel San Angelo, imbuing it for an instant with a weird effect, as though the ghost of some departed watchman were waving a lighted torch aloft in the heavens. Then the glow faded before a dead grey twilight, which settled solemnly over the melancholy landscape.
The full moon was rising slowly. Round and large she hung, like a yellow shield, on the dark, dense wall of the heavens. In the distance the faint outlines of the Alban Hills and the snow-capped summit of Monte Soracté were faintly discernible in the night mists. In the background the ill-famed ruins of the ancient temple of Isis rose into the purple dusk. The Tiber, in the light of the higher rising moon, gleamed like a golden ribbon. The gaunt masonry of the Septizonium of Alexander Severus was dimly rimmed with light, and streaks of amber radiance were wandering up and down the shadowy slopes of the Mount of Cloisters, like sorrowing ghosts bound upon some sorrowful errand.
All sense of weariness had suddenly left Tristan. A compelling influence, stronger than himself, seemed to urge him on as to the fulfillment of some hidden purpose.
Once or twice he paused. As he did so, he became aware of the extraordinary, almost terrible stillness, that encompassed him. He felt it enclosing him like a thick wall on all sides. Earth and the air seemed breathless, as if in the throes of some mysterious excitement. The stars, flashing out with the brilliant lustre of the south, were as so many living eyes eagerly gazing down on the solitary human being whose steps led him into these deserted places. The moon herself seemed to stare at him in open wonderment.
At last he found himself before the open portals of the great Church of Santa Maria of the Aventine. From the gloom within floated the scent of incense and the sound of chanting. He could see tapers gleaming on the high altar in the choir. Women were passing in and out, and a blind beggar sat at the gate.
Moved more by curiosity than the desire for worship, Tristan entered and uncovered his head. The Byzantine cupola was painted in vermilion and gold. The slender pillars of white marble were banded with silver and inlaid with many colored stones. The basins for holy water were of black marble, their dark pools gleaming with the colors of the vault. Side chapels opened on either hand, dim sanctuaries steeped in mystery of incense-saturated dusk.
The saints and martyrs in their stiff, golden Byzantine dalmaticas seemed to endow each relic with an air of mystery. The beauty and the mystery of the place touched Tristan's soul. As in a haze he seemed again to see the pomp and splendor of the sanctuaries of far-away, dream-lost Avalon.
Tristan took his stand by one of the great pillars, and, setting his back to it, looked round the place. There were some women in the sanctuary, engaged in prayer. Tristan watched them with vacant eyes.
Suddenly he became conscious that one of these worshippers was not wholly absorbed in prayer under her hood. Two watchful eyes seemed to consider him with a suggestiveness that no man could mistake, and her thoughts seemed to be very far from heaven.
Once or twice Tristan started to leave the sanctuary, but some invisible hand seemed to detain him as with a magic hold.
In due season the woman finished her devotions and stood with her hood turned back, looking at Tristan across the church. Her women had gathered about her and outside the gates Tristan saw the spear points of her guard. Turning, with a glance cast at him over her shoulder, she swept in state out of the church, her women following her, all save one tall girl, who loitered at the door.
Suddenly it flashed upon Tristan, as he stood there with his back leaning against the pillar. Was not this the woman he had met by the fountain, the woman who had spoken strange words to him in the Navona?
Had she recognized him? Her eyes had challenged him unmistakably when first they had met his own, and now again, as she left the church. They puzzled Tristan, these same eyes. Far in their depths lurked secrets he dreaded to fathom. Her scented garments perfumed the very aisles.
Tristan was roused from his reverie by a woman's hand plucking at his sleeve. By his side stood a tall girl. She was very beautiful, but her eyes were evil. She looked boldly at Tristan and gave her message.
"Follow my mistress," were her words.
Tristan looked at her, his face almost invisible in the gloom. Only the moonlight touched his hair.
"Whom do you serve?" he replied.
"The Lady Theodora!" came the answer.
Tristan's heart froze within him. Theodora--the woman who had succeeded to Marozia's dread estate!
In order to conceal his emotions he brought his face closer to the fair messenger, forcing his voice to appear calm as he spoke.
"What would your mistress with me?"
The girl glanced up at him, as if she regarded the question strangely superfluous.
"You are to come with me!" she persisted, touching his arm.
Tristan's mouth hardened as he considered the message, without relinquishing his station by the pillar.
What was he to Theodora--Theodora to him? She was a woman, evil, despite her ravishing beauty, so he had gathered during the days of his journey. The spell she had cast over him on the previous evening had vanished before the memory of Hellayne. Her sudden appearance, her witch-like beauty had, for the time, unmanned him. The hardships and privations of a long journey had, for the moment, caused his senses to run rampant, and almost hurled him into the arms of perdition. Yet he had not then known. And now he remembered how they all had fallen away from him, as from one bearing on his person the germs of some dread disease. The terrible silence in the Navona seemed visualized once again in the silence which encompassed him here. Yet she was all powerful, so he had heard. She ruled the men and the factions. In some vague way, he thought, she might be of service to him.
Tossed between two conflicting impulses, Tristan slowly followed the girl from the church and, crossing the great, moonlit court that lay without, entered the gardens which seemed to divide the sanctuary from some hidden palace. Mulberry trees towered above the lawns, studded with thick, ripening fruit. Weeping ashes glittered in the moonlight. Cedars and oaks cast their shade over broad beds of mint and thyme.
The girl watched Tristan closely, as she walked beside him, making no effort to conceal her own charms before eyes which she deemed endowed with the power of judgment in matters of this kind. Her mistress had not put her trust in her in vain. She studied Tristan's race in order to determine, whether or not he would waver in his resolve and--she began to speak to him as they crossed the gardens with a simplicity, an interest that was well assumed.
"A good beginning indeed!" she said. "You are in favor, my lord! To have seen her fair face is no small boast, but to be summoned to her presence--I cannot remember her so gracious to any one, since--" she paused suddenly, deliberately.
Tristan regarded her slantwise over his shoulder, without making response. At last, irritated, he knew not why, he asked curtly: "What is your mistress?"
The girl's glance wandered over the great trees and flowers that overshadowed the plaisaunce.
"She bears her mother's name," she replied with a shrug, "and, like her mother, the blood that flows in her veins is mingled with the fire that glitters in the stars in heaven, a fire affording neither light nor heat, but serving to dazzle, to bewilder.--I am but a woman, but--had I your chance of fortune, my lord, I should think twice, ere I bartered it for a vow, an empty dream."
He gave her a swift glance, wondering at her woman's wit, yet resenting her speech.
"You would prosper?" she queried tentatively at last, casting about in her mind, how she might win his confidence.
"I have business of my own," he replied, evading her question.
She looked up at him, her eyes trembling into his.
"How tall and strong you are! I could almost find it in my heart to love you myself!"
The flattery seemed so spontaneous that it would have puzzled one possessed of greater guile than Tristan to have uncovered her cunning. Nor was Tristan unwilling to seem strong to her; for the moment he was almost tempted to continue questioning her regarding her mistress.
"You may make your fortune in Rome," the girl said with a meaning smile.
"How so?"
"Are you blind? Do you not know a woman's ways? My mistress loves a strong arm. You may serve her."
"That is not possible!"
The girl stared at him and for the moment dropped the mask of innocence.
"What was possible once, is possible again," she said.
Then she added:
"Are you not ambitious?"
"I have a task to perform that may not permit of two masters! Why are you so concerned?"
The question came almost abruptly.
"I serve my lady!" she said, edging towards him. "Is it so strange a thing to serve a woman?"
They had left the garden and had arrived before a high stone wall that skirted the precincts of Theodora's palace. Cypresses and bays raised their tops above the stones. Great cedars cast deep shadows. In the wall there was a door studded with heavy iron nails. The girl took a key that dangled from her girdle, unlocked the door and beckoned to Tristan to enter.
Tristan stood and gazed. In the light of the moon which drenched all things he saw a garden in which emerald grass plots alternated with beds of strange-tinted orchids, flowers purple and red. At the end of the plaisaunce there opened an orange thicket and under the trees stood a woman clad in crimson, her white arms bare. She wore sandals of silver, and her dusky hair was confined in a net of gold.
As Tristan was about to yield to the overmastering temptation the memory of Hellayne conquered all other emotions. He turned back from the door and looked full into the girl's dark eyes.
"You will speak to your mistress for me," he said to her, casting a swift glance into the moonlit garden.
The girl looked at him with a puzzled air, but did not stir.
"What am I to say to her?" she said.
"That I will not enter these gates!"
"You will not?"
"No!" He snapped curtly.
"Fool! How you will regret your speech!"
Her face changed suddenly like a fickle sky, and there was something in her eyes too wicked for words.
Without vouchsafing a reply, Tristan turned and lost himself in the desolation of Mount Aventine.
The night marched on majestically.
The moon and her sister planets passed through their appointed spheres of harmonious light and law, and from all cloisters and convents prayers went up to heaven for pity, pardon and blessing on sinful humanity that had neither pity, pardon nor blessing for itself, till, with magic suddenness, the dense purple skies changed to a pearly grey, the moon sank pallidly beneath the earth's dark rim and the stars were extinguished one by one.
Morning began to herald its approach in the freshening air.
Tristan still slept on his improvised couch, a marble slab he had chosen when he discovered that he had lost his way in the wilderness of the Aventine. His head on his arm he lay quite still among the flowers, wrapt in a sort of dizzy delirium in which the forms of Theodora and Hellayne strangely intermingled, until the riddles of life were blotted out together with the riddles of Fate.
