The Hill of Venus

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 Circé, 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.

CHAPTER VII

THE QUEST

AS the world grew gray with waking light, Francesco came from the woods and heard the noise of the sea in the hush that breathed in the dawn. The storm had passed over the sea and a vast calm hung upon the lips of the day. In the east a green streak shone above the hills. The sky was still aglitter with sparse stars. An immensity of gloom brooded over the sea.

Gaunt, wounded, triumphant, Francesco rode up beneath the banners of the dawn, eager yet fearful, inspired and strong of purpose. Wood and hill slept in a haze of mist. The birds were only beginning in the thickets, like the souls of children yet unborn, calling to eternity. Beyond in the cliffs, San Nicandro, wrapped round with night, stood silent and sombre athwart the west.

Francesco climbed from the valley as the day came with splendor, a glow of molten gold streaming from the east. Wood and hillside glimmered in a smoking mist, dew-bespangled, wonderful. As the sun rose, the sea stretched sudden into the arch of the west, a great expanse of liquid gold. A mysterious lustre hovered over the cliffs, waves of light bent like saffron mist upon San Nicandro.

The dawn-light found an echo in Francesco's face. He came that morning the ransomer, the champion, defeated in life and hope and happiness, yet with head erect, as if defying Fate. His manhood smote him like the deep-throated cry of a great bell, majestic and solemn. The towers on the cliff were haloed with magic hues. Life, glory, joy, lay locked in the gray stone walls. His heart sang in him; his eyes were afire.

As he walked his horse with a hollow thunder of hoof over the narrow bridge, he took his horn and blew a blast thereon. There was a sense of desolation, a lifelessness about the place that smote his senses with a strange fear. The walls stared void against the sky. There was no stir, no sound within, no watchful faces at portal or wicket. Only the gulls circled from the cliffs and the sea made its moan along the strand.

Francesco sat in the saddle and looked from wall to belfry, from tower to gate. There was something tragic about the place, the silence of a sacked town, the ghostliness of a ship sailing the seas with a dead crew upon her decks. Francesco's glance rested on the open postern, an empty gash in the great gate. His face darkened and his eyes lost their sanguine glow. There was something betwixt death and worse than death in all this calm.

He dismounted and left his steed on the bridge. The postern beckoned to him. He went in like a man nerved for peril, with sword drawn and shield in readiness. Again he blew his horn. No living being answered, no voice broke the silence.

The refectory was open, the door standing half ajar. Francesco thrust it full open with the point of his sword and looked in. A gray light filtered through the narrow windows. The nuns lay huddled on benches and on the floor. Some lay fallen across the settles, others sat with their heads fallen forward upon the table; a few had crawled towards the door and had died in the attempt to escape. The shadow of death was over the whole.

Francesco's face was as gray as the faces of the dead. There was something here, a horror, a mystery, that hurled back the warm courage of the heart.

With frantic despair he rushed from one body to the other, turning the dead faces to the light, fearing every one must be that of his own Ilaria. But Ilaria was not among them; the mystery grew deeper, grew more unfathomable. For a moment, Francesco stood among the dead nuns as if every nerve in his body had been suddenly paralyzed, when his eyes fell upon a crystal chalice, half overturned on the floor. It contained the remnants of a clear fluid. He picked it up and held it to his nostrils. It fell from his nerveless fingers upon the stone and broke into a thousand fragments, a thin stream creeping over the granite towards the fallen dead. It was a preparation of hemlock and bitter almonds. He stared aghast, afraid to move, afraid to call. The nuns had poisoned themselves.

Like a madman he rushed out into the adjoining corridor, hither and thither, in the frantic endeavor to find a trace of Ilaria. Yet not a trace of her did he find. But what he did discover solved the mystery of the grewsome feast of death which he had just witnessed. In a corner where he had dropped it, there lay a silken banderol belonging to a man-at-arms of Anjou's Provencals. They had been here, and the nuns, to escape the violation of their bodies, had died, thus cheating the fiends out of the gratification of their lusts.

The terrible discovery unnerved Francesco so completely that for a time he stood as if turned to stone, looking about him like a traveller who has stumbled blindly into a charnel house. Urged by manifold forebodings, he then rushed from room to room, from cell to cell. The same silence met him everywhere. Of Ilaria he found not a trace. Had the fiends of Anjou carried her away, or had she, in endeavoring to escape, found her death outside of the walls of San Nicandro?

He dared not think out the thought.

The shadows of the place, the staring faces, the stiff hands clawing at things inanimate, were like the phantasms of the night. Francesco took the sea-air into his nostrils and looked up into the blue radiance of the sky. All about him the garden glistened in the dawn; the cypresses shimmered with dew. The late roses made very death more apparent to his soul.

As he stood in deep thought, half dreading what he but half knew, a voice called to him, breaking suddenly the ponderous silence of the place. Guided by its sound, Francesco unlatched the door and found himself face to face with the Duke of Spoleto.

For a moment they faced each other in silence.

Then he gave a great cry.

"Ever, ever night!" he said, stretching out his hands despairingly as to an eternal void.

The duke's eyes seemed to look leagues away over moor and valley and hill, where the blackened ruins of Astura rose beneath a dun smoke against the calm of the morning sky.

A strange tenderness played upon his lips, as if with the extinction of the Frangipani brood peace had entered his soul.

"A man is a mystery to himself," he said.

"But to God?"

"I know no God, save the God, my own soul! Let me live and die, – nothing more! Why curse one's life with a 'to be?'"

Francesco sighed heavily.

"It is a kind of Fate to me!" he said, "inevitable as the setting of the sun, natural as sleep. Not for myself do I fear it alone, – but I should not like to think that I should never see her again."

The duke's eyes had caught life on the distant hillside, life surging from the valleys, life and the glory of it. Harness, helm and shield shone in the sun. Gold, azure, silver, scarlet were creeping from the bronzed green of the wilds. Silent and solemn the host rolled slowly into the full splendor of the day.

The duke's face had kindled.

"Grapple the days to come!" he said. "Let Scripture and ethics rot! My men are at your command! Let them ride by stream and forest, moor and mere! Let them ride in quest of your lost one, ride like the wind!"

Francesco looked at the duke through a mist of tears.

"You know?" he faltered.

"For this I came!" replied the duke, extending his hand. "You will find her whom your heart seeks. Like a golden dawn shall she rise out of the past. Blow your horn! Let us not tarry!"