by Teresa Denys
We must have been in danger then, because Santi urged us on at a faster pace than I thought the horses could bear; they stumbled as they went, and several times someone was nearly thrown. But at last, as dusk was falling, we halted under the lip of a huge rock overhanging a cave a little way up the mountainside. Santi had sent a couple of men to scout for a resting-place, and they had returned to guide us to this one. It was bleak and cramped, but at least the overhang would provide a little shelter; for the horses there was a steeply shelving meadow inhabited by a couple of thin cows, and we turned them loose to graze at will.
As we dismounted, I took a couple of horses and led them away, and as I turned with them, Domenico brushed by me. For an instant my heart beat high in my throat with apprehension and a sudden suffocating excitement. I thought he glanced at me impatiently as his elbow brushed my shoulder, but I did not dare look up and could not be sure. Then he was gone, without pausing, leaving me shivering and clinging to the horses' bridles as if for support.
"Marcello," Santi called sharply. "Stir yourself, boy."
I muttered, "Yes, messire," and hauled the horses forward with a disregard for their mouths that brought me a sharp word from Lorenzo. There was little talk that night; exhaustion made men forget their empty bellies, and when they huddled beside the fire, they fell asleep almost at once. I had meant to stay awake and make sure that Domenico slept, but the moment I lay down, my eyelids shut of their own accord.
A hand on my thigh roused me, and I murmured drowsily. I thought, "Domenico," but my tongue said, "Your Grace." A stifled titter answered me, and I stiffened.
"Ambitious boy! But I may serve as well."
I wrenched myself away from the questing fingers just in time, fully awake now, and Andrea Regnovi tittered again.
"You must not be so coy, or you will wake your fellows. Come closer, my dear, and stay mum."
My flesh crept, somewhere between terror and revulsion, and I hissed, "My lord, go back to sleep."
"So I will, but not alone. Come now, Marcello—it is Marcello, is it not?—you are old enough to know what I want of you, and I daresay that coarse brute Santi has lessoned you well. You owe him no loyalty!" He pressed closer to me, and I shrank. "Do my bidding quietly, and I shall give you . . ."
"Forbear the boy, my lord." Santi's whisper came out of the dark. "Or I will knock your teeth down your throat. He is tired and so are all the others, and I have no mind to be kept awake by your amours. Go and lie down, for God's sake!"
"You need not be so hot in his defense, good Santi—he woke even now from dreaming of my lord's Grace. If the duke once rouses from this black mood of his and should choose to snap his fingers, you will have lost your minion."
"He is not my minion." There was a dangerous rumble in the big man's throat. "I do not like unnatural pleasures. But I will not have these boys forced against their wills."
"How can you be sure it is against his will?" Andrea's whisper became coaxing. "Do you not wish to lie with me, Marcello?"
I said in a shaking voice, "No, my lord."
Santi grunted, "Then you are answered, my lord," and after a moment Andrea tittered lightly.
"So it seems! But I wonder what answer I should have away from your stern guardian, Marcello?"
"The same, my lord." Lorenzo's voice, drowsy but very clear, spoke out of the dimness, and I saw he had raised himself on one elbow. "If he will listen to my advice. Do as Messire Giovanni says-—go back to sleep and do not trouble us." In the dusk his eyes burned sea blue, and his boyish face looked curiously adult. Andrea hesitated a moment longer and then was gone, slithering over the ground like a serpent. Lorenzo watched him go and then lay down again.
Santi and I settled ourselves to sleep in silence; neither liked to ask what Lorenzo knew of Andrea, and the boy said nothing more. Then, when I thought he was asleep; I heard him whisper, quietly and contemptuously, "It is true what he says; I have heard you talk of the duke in your sleep. Now perhaps you will learn to mind your tongue."
He turned his back on me coldly and hunched himself into the folds of his cloak, leaving me fighting down gusts of hysterical laughter.
My sleep was fitful after that, and I was thankful when, before sunrise, the camp began to stir. The last of the stale bread from the horses' saddlebags was shared, and then the whole troop mounted in a morose silence. If any others had heard the little scene with Andrea, they made no sign, and he only glowered as he swung astride his horse. Santi was speaking urgently to the duke: I think he was trying to find out our destination, but his anxious words won no response. Domenico heard him out in silence, his eyes downcast and a moody thrust to his bottom lip—then he looked up, and the murderous glitter in his dark eyes silenced the big man. The duke thrust impatiently past him and swung into the saddle, never looking behind to see whether any man followed him or not.
That day our pace was slower because of the difficult terrain. We could not follow the road for fear of being seen, and above it the mountains sloped so steeply in places that we had to dismount and lead the slipping horses. What had set out as a group of well-dressed courtiers was by now degenerating into a tatterdemalion crew—skins had a grayish look in the sunlight, ingrained with dirt, and the men's chins were no longer immaculately barbered. Cloaks and boots were crumpled and stained, breeches white with lather from the horses' backs. No one who did not know what he sought would look for the Duke of Cabria in this company.
We had turned on to a track bending southward to avoid a village called Stretza—a cluster of limewashed houses and a church—when Santi, just ahead of me, reined in sharply. I jerked the mare's head around to avoid him and halted, too. "What is it?"
"Horsemen," he said tersely. "Look at the ground. Your Grace!"
I flinched as his low call brought Domenico's head around, and he reined in in his turn. His gaze flickered disinterestedly over my face and rested on Santi, and I held my breath. My body, my brain, felt full of pain like a bulging wineskin; one unwary move and it would spill and spatter the ground with poison. It was desperately important that I should not move, that I should not give a single sign of how much his indifference hurt me.
Santi said, "Your Grace, there have been riders here less than half an hour since, and a good many at a guess. I'd say they were riding from Stretza due south to Alcina. Asking questions of the townsfolk, most like."
The duke's eyes narrowed slightly, and in a toneless breath of a voice he asked, "How many?"
"A hundred—more perhaps. Look for yourself." Santi pointed to the churned-up earth with a fatalistic gesture.
Domenico's head bent, and for a long moment he considered the confused tracks; then he looked up, and there was a queer expression on his face.
"Your Grace," Baldassare spoke quickly, "there are too many for us to challenge. We must hope to go by them."
Domenico did not seem to hear. Then he said softly, "Must we so?"
I saw Baldassare swallow even across the distance that separated us. "Your Grace, I beg of you, be cautious. We are scarcely an hour's ride from the border, and if we should come upon the Spanish now . . ."
"We have nothing left to lose."
"We have our lives still."
The beautiful mouth twisted savagely. "Are they so valuable?"
"Our hope of revenge would be better with more men," Santi said into the sudden silence, and Domenico's lashes drooped, veiling his eyes.
"Well, on."
Baldassare breathed a faint sigh of relief, but I was still uneasy. I distrusted the now deliberate impassivity of the duke's face and the way his fingers had clenched, very slightly, on the horse's rein. But Santi and Baldassare seemed to notice nothing wrong, and I feared to speak in case I drew attention to myself.
Somewhere between wariness and resignation we proceeded, and the troop rode on as it had before, but even slower now, starting at every gust of wind or scurrying animal. At times we were moving at little more than a walk. But there w
as a difference: The threat of immediate danger had served to rouse Domenico from his tranced grief for Ippolito, and now he was alert, the old arrogance stiffening his supple back as he pushed his horse ahead.
The track we were taking leveled out as we rounded the foot of a sheer bluff, and here the slope was gentler. On our left hand the ground ran gently away in what was almost a meadow, and beyond that the cliff fell sheer to the valley road. Before anyone could stop him, Domenico had turned aside and was drawing rein at the head of the slope, looking down at the distant road; it was thick with horsemen, and although I could not see the flapping standards, I knew they must bear the Spanish eagle. A murmur ran through the troop of men like a breeze.
"God's nails," Santi said, "there are two hundred at least."
Domenico turned his horse's head with a vicious jerk. "We must pass them," he snapped. There was a snarl in his voice like a leopard cheated of its prey, and for one absurd moment it was as though the Spaniards were the hunted and he the hunter. Then I urged my mare forward again, past thinking, and we pressed forward along the narrow track.
We came across the Spanish scouts around the next bend. They were dawdling along, looking back over their shoulders at the sound of our horses' hooves, and as soon as they saw us their eyes widened. One of them shouted something—I could not hear what—and the next moment, incredibly, they were fleeing down the mountainside as though the devil himself were at their heels.
For a moment I sat dazed, uncomprehending, conscious only of a great relief. I did not know why armed soldiers should run from such a small troop without even a challenge; I was only grateful that they should. Then I saw that Domenico was spurring after them, and others in his wake. They must be crazed, I thought; let the scouts go and be thankful. It was not until the Cabrian horsemen were pounding at a gallop across the sloping meadow that I remembered the force below. The scouts had only to give the alarm and we would be lost, overwhelmed by the whole mass of soldiers. They were shouting as they rode, but their voices were too faint, too blessedly faint, to reach the ears of the Spaniards below.
I saw the glint of steel in Domenico's hand as he drew level with the hindmost Spaniard, and then arm and weapon seemed to disappear in a blur of light. The man sat like a dummy, like a sack, on his horse's back. It was unnatural, I thought, the way he sat there letting himself be wounded, letting those dreadful crimson slashes plow up his back and shoulders. He should have made some resistance; he must have known that the blow would slice away half his shoulder like a butcher's cleaver. . . .
The humped red thing was still on the terrified horse's back when one of the other men turned and came rushing on Domenico. I saw Santi come up and then veer away towards the third man. The third man was the luckiest; he was killed cleanly.
Domenico was off his horse when the others came up to him, crouched over the jerking body of the second Spaniard. I could see the bunched muscles in his back as he wrenched his sword through bone and gristle, but the entrails were soft enough. They had to prize the sword out of his grip because the blood had glued it to his clenched fingers; afterwards Santi told me he thought he would have to break his arm to get the weapon from him.
When at last he moved to mount his horse again, he was moving slowly, as though he were tired, and I saw with a sinking heart that indifference was back in his face and cold withdrawal in his eyes. It was as though the whole thing had been a bad dream, with only the three corpses left behind and the dark rust on the unwiped swords to tell that it had been otherwise. We waited silently at the head of the slope until the last of the soldiers on the road below had disappeared southwards. In their midst I glimpsed a litter and knew /that Gratiana had had the news of Sandro's death.
No one spoke when the road finally lay empty: Domenico only turned his horse and guided it along the track, leaving the meadow behind. We had reached the outskirts of another village, and as we circled it, Santi observed in an undertone, "Now we can stop fearing the Spaniards and start fearing the pope."
I stared uncomprehendingly.
"That was the border."
A little superstitious shiver shook me. I had never been out of Cabria in my life before, never thought to cross its frontiers. Suddenly the pope, for so long a dimly imagined figure like a child's bogeyman, loomed in my mind like some omnipotent ogre. For fifty years the pontiffs had sought revenge on the della Raffaelle family—and now the reigning duke was trying to cross their own territories. I looked around me nervously, half expecting the pope's Swiss guards to appear from behind every boulder. But there was nothing, only the empty mountains.
After something like an hour there was another road to cross, cutting directly across our path from north to south, and beyond that a river, bursting on my dazed sight like something hardly remembered. It seemed like years, like centuries, since I had seen running water.
"There is no bridge," I whispered to Santi. "How are we going to cross?"
He gave me a quick, impatient look. "The horses can swim," he said shortly, and I fell back, abashed.
In the crossing I clung desperately to my mare's neck, soaked to the waist and watching the foam around her flailing legs with trepidation. She, however, seemed completely unperturbed and shook herself so heartily on the opposite bank that I was nearly unseated. But all around me other horses were shaking themselves as vigorously, their riders giving little shouts and explosions of startled laughter; the ground was soaked as though by heavy rain. At last the men dismounted, feeling their clinging wet clothes disgustedly and wringing out their dripping cloaks. Only Domenico remained in the saddle, and Baldassare looked up at him apprehensively.
"Your Grace, would it not be wise to rest the horses here and dry our clothes? We could make camp and then press on tomorrow."
Domenico shook his head curtly and did not answer. There was nothing for it but to remount, wet clothes rubbing horribly against wet leather, and to go on in weary silence. Andrea touched Baldassare's arm as he hauled himself into the saddle and whispered, "You are glib, my dear, with your talk of pressing on! Do you know where he means to take us?"
A smile, uncharacteristic in its irony, curved Baldassare's mouth. "No, my lord, no more than you. But I am sure he does not mean to seek sanctuary with Pius."
To judge by the shadows, ever slanting towards us as the sun sank, we were still riding west through the declining slopes of the mountains. I sat slumped in the saddle, lost in my thoughts, lulled almost to sleep by the monotonous jog trot of the mare. I had lost sight of Santi—he had gone with a few others to look for game for our meal that night—and it seemed to me that the day would never have an end and that the rest of my life was stretching before me in this tedium of anguish.
Ahead of me one of the riders checked, and I almost rode into him. Then I saw what he had seen and gasped. From either side of the road ahead the hills fell away, and the track sloped down to a broad treeless plain.And stretching to the horizon before us was a glittering, tideless sea, its blue surface fretted by thousands of pinpoints of light. For an instant I thought we had crossed the breadth of Italy unaware, and then part of my mind said, "There are no gulls."
Behind me Lorenzo spoke in a low voice. "This must be Trasimene, I think. I hate the places where the old battles were fought—I always feel the soldiers are still there."
One of the other boys laughed at him, his unbroken voice somehow shocking in the eerily gathering twilight. "You are fey, Lorenzo! This place is as quiet as a grave!"
I shivered involuntarily, and Lorenzo answered, "Yes."
Lights were blossoming in the windows of the little village on the lakeside as we left it behind, moving softly and steadily northward. I was beginning to wonder where we would spend the night; there was no shelter for miles but the village itself and its fellow, a smudge of light reflected in the water beside the northern bank. Not a tree, not a rock.
I started at the sound of horses approaching across the fields, but as they loomed up out of the dark,
I recognized Santi's bulky form leading them. Two of the other men were riding double, and across the saddle of the third horse was slung the carcass of a deer. Santi whistled softly as he came up and drew rein beside the duke.
"Your Grace, we are in luck!" There was a note of excitement in his voice. "About a mile away there is a farmhouse and its outbuildings without a soul living there—I rode in and looked around. The roof has fallen in, but the stables are sound enough to sleep in, and there is room for the horses too. We can build a fire and roast our supper in comfort."
The whole party held its breath, waiting for the duke's yea or no. It was too dark now to read his face, but I caught a glimpse of his pure profile against the sky as he nodded. There was a relieved shifting among the riders, and the next moment we were turning into the teeth of the freshening night wind to follow where Santi led.
He had spoken the truth about the farmhouse; it had been long since abandoned, and the roof beams had caved in over the main chamber. Looking up through the roof, I could see the stars coming out, and for a moment I stood spellbound. Then somebody touched my arm, and I turned quickly to making the stables fit for habitation.
There was ordure to be cleared and cracks to be stopped with sacking; Santi lit a fire in the yard outside and slung the deer on a spit to roast over it. Soon the smell pervading the building was so appetizing that my hands trembled with hunger and my eyes filled with tears. No meat I have ever tasted seemed as good to me as the half-roasted chunk of venison I held in my scorched fingers that night.