The Hill of Venus

The goatherd's inclination to invoke untold saints, whenever there seemed occasion and whenever there was not, was curbed by a hard line round Francesco's lips, and they plunged into the great silence. A sense of green mystery encompassed them, as they traversed the green forest-aisles. The sky seemed to have receded to a greater distance. Everywhere the smooth dark trunks converged upon one another, sending up a tangle of boughs that glittered in the soft sheen of the sunlight. Withered bracken stood in thin silence, and here and there a dead bough lay like a snake with its head raised to strike.

The silence was immense, and yet it was a stillness that suggested sounds. It resembled the silence of a huge cavern, out of which came strange whisperings; innumerable crepitations seemed to come from the dead leaves. Francesco fancied he could hear the trees breathing, and from afar he caught the wild note of a bird.

The sun was low when they came at last to the edge of the forest and saw a hill rise steeply against the sky. It was covered with silver birches, whose stems looked like white threads in the level light of the setting sun. And rising against the sky-line from amidst the fretwork of birch-boughs Francesco saw the well-remembered outlines of the ruined tower wherein he had spent a memorable night.

The valley before them was flooded with golden light, and, as they crossed it, Francesco felt a curious desire for physical pain, something fierce and tangible to struggle with, to drown the ever-pulsing memory of the woman who had gone from him.

As the dusk deepened they went scrambling up the hillside amid the birches, whose white stems glimmered upwards into the blue gloom of the twilight. Francesco's thoughts climbed ahead of him, hurrying to deal with the unknown dangers that might be awaiting him. He had to dismount, pull his steed after him; but the scramble upwards gave him the sense of effort and struggle that he needed. It was like scaling a wall to come to grips with an enemy, whose wild eyes and sword-points showed between the crenelations.

At last they had reached the high plateau. A dog barked. The wood suddenly swarmed with bearded and grotesque forms. They did not recognize in Francesco the monk who had spent a night in their midst. The goatherd had maliciously disappeared, as if to revenge himself for his interrupted orisons. With glowering faces they thronged around Francesco, a babel of voices shouting questions and threatening the intruder.

He waved them contemptuously aside, and his demeanor seemed to raise him in their regards.

At his request to be forthwith conducted into the presence of the duke, one pointed to a low building at the edge of the plateau. Wisps of smoke curled out of it and vanished into the night.

"The duke and the Abbot are at orisons," the man said with a grimace, the meaning of which was lost upon Francesco. "He will not return before midnight."

"I will await him here," said the newcomer, dismounting and leading his steed to a small plot of pasture, where the grass was tall and untrodden. Then, spent as he was, he requested food and drink, and as he joined the band of outlaws, listening to their jokes and banter, he thought he could discern among them many a one whom Fate had, like himself, buffeted into a life, not of his forming, not of his choice.

CHAPTER V

THE ABBEY OF FARFA

THE great vaults of the Abbey of Farfa resounded with glee and merriment.

Before a low, massive stone table, resembling a druidical altar, surrounded by giant casks filled with the choicest wines of Italy, Greece and Spain, there sat the Duke of Spoleto and the Abbot Hilarius, discoursing largely upon the vanities of the world, and touching incidentally upon questions pertaining to the welfare of Church and State. A single cresset shed an unsteady light over the twain, while a lean, cadaverous friar glided noiselessly in and out the transepts, obsequiously replenishing the beverage as it disappeared with astounding swiftness in the feasters' capacious stomachs. And each time he replenished the vessels, he refilled his own with grim impartiality, watching the Abbot and his guest from a low settle in a dark recess.

The vault was of singular construction and considerable extent. The roof was of solid stone masonry and rose in a wide semicircular arch to the height of about twelve feet, measured from the centre of the ceiling to the ground floor.

The transepts were divided by obtusely pointed arches, resting on slender granite pillars, and the intervening space was filled up with drinking vessels of every conceivable shape and size.

The Abbot of Farfa was a discriminating drinker, boasting of an ancestral thirst of uncommonly high degree, the legacy of a Teutonic ancestor who had served the Church with much credit in his time.

They had been carousing since sunset.

The spectral custodian had refilled the tankards with amber liquid. Thereof the Abbot sipped understandingly.

"Lacrymae Christi," he turned to the duke. "Vestrae salubritati bibo!"

The duke raised his goblet.

"Waes Hael!" and he drained its contents with a huge gulp.

"I would chant twenty psalms for that beverage," he mused after a while.

The Abbot suggested "Attendite Populi!" – "It is one of the longest," he said, with meaning.

"Don't trifle with a thirsty belly," growled the duke. "In these troublous times it behooves men to be circumspect!"

"Probatum est," said the Abbot. "It is a noble vocation! Jubilate Deo!"

And he raised his goblet.

The Duke of Spoleto laid a heavy hand upon his arm.

"It is a Vigil of the Church!"

The Abbot gave himself absolution on account of the great company.

"There's no fast on the drink!" he said with meaning. "Nor is there better wine between here and Salamanca!"

The duke regarded his host out of half-shut watery eyes.

"My own choice is Chianti!"

"A difference of five years in purgatory!"

Thereupon the duke blew the froth of his wine in the Abbot's face.

"Purgatory! – A mere figure of speech!"

The Abbot emptied his tankard.

"The figures of speech are the pillars of the Church!"

He beckoned to the custodian.

"Poculum alterum imple!"

The lean friar came and disappeared noiselessly.

They drank for a time in heavy silence. After a time the Abbot sneezed, which caused Beelzebub, the Abbot's black he-goat, who had been browsing outside, to peer through the crescent-shaped aperture in the casement and regard him quizzically.

The duke, who chanced to look up at that precise moment, saw the red inflamed eyes of the Abbot's tutelar genius, and, mistaking the goat for another presence, turned to his host.

"Do you not fear," he whispered, "lest Satan may pay you a visit during some of your uncanonical pastimes?"

"Uncanonical!" roared the Abbot. "I scorn the charge! I scorn it with my heels! Two masses daily, – morning and evening – Primes, – Nones, – Vespers, – Aves, – Credos, – Paters – "

"Excepting on moonlight nights," the duke blinked.

"Exceptis excipiendis," replied the Abbot.

"Sheer heresy!" roared the duke. "The devil is apt to keep an eye on such exceptions. Does he not go about like a roaring lion?"

"Let him roar!" shouted the Abbot, bringing his fist down upon the table, and looking about in canonical ire, when the door opened noiselessly and in its dark frame stood Francesco.

He had waited at the camp for the return of the duke until his misery and restlessness had mastered every other sensation. Sleep, he felt, would not come to his eyes, and he craved for action. He should have liked nothing better than to mount his steed on the spot, ride single-handed into Anjou's camp and redeem his honor in the eyes of those who regarded him a bought instrument of the Church. The memory of Ilaria wailed through the dark chambers of his heart. He felt at this moment, more than ever, what she had been to him, and to himself he appeared as a derelict, tossed on a vast and shoreless sea.

For a moment he gazed as one spellbound at the drinkers, then he strode up to the duke and shook him soundly.

"To the rescue, my lord duke!" he shouted, in the excess of his frenzy, till the vaults re-echoed his cry from their farthest recesses. "Conradino has been betrayed by the Frangipani!"

At the sound of the name he hated above all on earth, the duke's nebulous haze fell from him like a mantle.

With a great oath he arose.

"Where is the King?"

"They have taken him to Rome, – or Naples, – or to some fortress near the coast," Francesco replied.

"Into whose hands was he delivered?"

"Anjou's admiral, – Robert of Lavenna!"

The duke paused a moment, as if endeavoring to bring order into the chaos of his thoughts. He scanned Francesco from head to toe, as if there was something about the latter's personality which he could not reconcile with his previous acquaintance.

At last Francesco's worldly habit flashed upon him.

"What of the Cross?" he flashed abruptly.

"There is blood upon it!" retorted Francesco.

"All is blood in these days," the duke said musingly. "Are you with us?" —

"I have broken the rosary!" —

The duke extended his broad hand, in which Francesco's almost disappeared as he closed upon it.

There was a great wrath in his eyes.

"We ride at sun-rise!"

"Our goal?" —

"To Naples!" —

The dawn was streaking the east with faint gold, and transient sunshafts touched the woods, when Francesco stood before the doorway of his lodge of pine boughs. The men of the Duke of Spoleto were gathering in on every side, some girding their swords, others tightening their shield-straps, as they came.

The duke ordered a single horn to sound the rally.

The glade was full of stir and action. Companies were forming up, shoulder to shoulder; spears danced and swayed; horses steamed in the brisk morning air.

At last the tents sank down, and, as the sun cleared the trees, the armed array rolled out from the woods into a stretch of open land, that sloped towards the bold curves of a river.

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 Circé."

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 Circé. 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.