by Max Brand
“This is the way to cut the Gordian knot,” he said.
Melrose opened his eyes, looked at the file, and shook his grizzled head.
“It won’t do, Tizzo,” he said. “You’re going to walk me out of the prison. Isn’t that the thought?”
“And why not?” said Tizzo.
“Can you find a way back for yourself?”
“I think so.”
“Then find it now, and use it.”
“What?”
“I shall not go with you.”
“My lord?”
“Damn my lord,” said the Englishman. “What made you come here in the first place?”
“You taught me what to do when a friend is in trouble,” said Tizzo.
“In what way?”
“I have not forgotten the day you entered Perugia and risked your head in order to set mine in freedom.”
“Ah, I remember something about that,” said Melrose. “And that good fellow, that Giovanpaolo, not only set you free but refused to take my life in payment for yours, though he knew that I was a lifelong servant of the Oddi, whom he has reason to hate.”
“Giovanpaolo is my sworn brother,” said Tizzo. “And chiefly because of what he did that day. If there were a way for him to break into Perugia suddenly, I should not have had to slip into the town by stealth. We should have bought you by our work in battle, my lord.”
“Perhaps you would,” said Melrose. “But I rather think that Jeronimo della Penna would have used an extra five minutes to run down into his cellar, when he saw the day — or the night — was lost. He would have used that time to come down and put a knife into me. The bottles of wine in his cellar, Tizzo, are not half so dear to him as all the revenge which he opens, like a sweet perfume, when he sees me.”
“Why does he hate you, my lord? Because Giovanpaolo slipped through the gate you were guarding?”
“And the Lady Beatrice — and you. Mostly because of you, Tizzo. The fact is that he hates you a little more than he hates the rest of the world because, as he says, you cheated him. You pretended to be on his side.”
Tizzo dropped to one knee and began to use the file on the heavy manacles that linked the wrists of the prisoner together. “It is no use, Tizzo,” said the prisoner.
“No use?” exclaimed Tizzo, looking up in astonishment.
“Not in the least. Do as I tell you. Leave the prison at once.”
“Why is there no use in setting your hands free?”
“Because, my lad, even after they are free, I shall not be able to use them.”
“I don’t understand,” said Tizzo, staring down at the deep, silver-shining trench which the file already had cut into the comparatively soft iron.
“Why, Tizzo, it means that I have paid a visit to the lady, yonder.”
“What lady?”
“It has a good many names. Some people call it the engine of grace. Others call it the rack.”
And Tizzo, groaning aloud, said: “God, God! Why have I come a day too late?”
“The rascal Marignello required time as well as money,” said the prisoner. “But a day ago you would not have found me here. I was in a cell on the tier above. This morning della Penna decided to begin spinning out my death in a long, thin thread. He stood over me during the torment. He kept feeling the hardness of my shoulders and thighs as the strain of the rack grew greater. He kept telling them to go more slowly, more tenderly. Tenderly was the word he used, laughing. He laughed, and told them to use me more tenderly. Stretch the beef today and cut it up tomorrow. He stood over me with the rod of iron, ready to tap some of my bones and break them, but that was a temptation he resisted. Tomorrow he will break an arm. The next day a leg. Then another arm. Then a few ribs. What, Tizzo? Would a connoisseur swallow off his wine? No, he would taste it slowly, rolling the drops over his tongue and up against his palate.”
“God curse and strike him!” said Tizzo.
“Not God. You must strike him,” said the baron. “I tell you, Tizzo, that I could not walk from the prison, even with all the doors thrown open. I could hardly crawl or writhe along like a snake. A snail would be faster than I. You are not a mule to carry me hence. Therefore, escape, yourself, as you may. And afterwards, if Giovanpaolo takes the city, strike no blow except at Jeronimo della Penna. Strike only for his head. Beat him down. And for every stroke that maims him, that slays him by degrees, cry my name. Cry ‘Melrose!’ while you enjoy the killing of him. That will be a comfort to my soul, no matter how deep in hell I am hidden away. I shall hear every word you utter. I shall taste every drop of his blood. I shall laugh at hellfire as della Penna dies.”
“I shall kill him afterwards,” said Tizzo. “God knows that I shall kill him, but now there is only one task.”
He gripped the wrist irons and began to file at them, furiously.
And the noise was like that of the singing of a mosquito in the torture chamber.
“Take care of what you do!” said Melrose. “If you throw yourself away, I am cheated of my revenge. Listen to me, Tizzo. If I even dream that revenge will fill its belly with the life of della Penna, I can endure everything. For every pang he gives me, I can laugh loud and long, because I shall promise myself that he will die by worse pains afterward. And, being a coward, he will taste every agony thrice over. My death will only enrich me, if I can hope that he will die afterward, and by your hand, my noble friend.”
Tizzo said nothing. He merely set his teeth, and the file turned the iron of the manacles hot as it bit into the metal.
“Tizzo!” exclaimed Melrose. “If ever we fought together, and if ever I taught you the innermost secrets of my swordcraft, I beseech you, leave me — save your life — do not cast yourself away in trying to help a hopeless wreck from the reef. I shall only sink, myself, and draw you down after me.”
“The courtyard of Marozzo,” said Tizzo, “and my own life bleeding away, and Marozzo ordering more of his men to fight with me, and then the entrance of Astorre and Giovanpaolo, with you — you who had given up your life in order to pay down a price that would ransom me. God! Do you think I have forgotten?”
“Ah, you remember that?” said Melrose.
“Aye. I remember.”
“And another thing?”
“When I first saw you,” said Tizzo, “I knew, suddenly, that I had met the man I wished to follow around the world.”
“Like a young, impressionable, silly fool,” said the Englishman. “I have received nothing from the world but blows and I have paid my reckoning in the same coin.”
Then he added: “Tizzo, I ask one boon of you.”
“I shall not grant it,” said Tizzo.
He asked, in his turn: “But tell me what angel drew you on, my lord? What made you, in the first place, risk your life in order to save mine?”
“An imp of the perverse, it seems,” said Melrose, “that must have told me that if I risked my life in the first place I then should have the privilege of drawing the two of us down into perdition, as I am drawing us now. Do you hear me?”
“Rather,” said Tizzo, “an angel of heaven who told you that death is an easy thing, when there are two friends to endure it.”
“Friends?” said the baron, loudly and suddenly. “Well, call it that—”
But as he said this, there was a dim sound of steps in the corridor outside, and then a wrangling of iron at the door to the torture chamber.
“They have come to take me to the finish,” said Melrose. “Jeronimo could not wait any longer. His appetite was greater than his patience. But, ah, God, that he should find two morsels to swallow instead of one!”
CHAPTER 39
TIZZO, FINGERING HIS ax, looked desperately toward the door. The quick, soft voice of Melrose stopped him.
“No, no! Tizzo, you may strike down one or two but the mob will kill you. They’ll worry you to death. You are trapped. But no man is dead to hope while there is still breath in him. Do you hear? Out with the lantern. Roll in u
nder the old straw, here. They shall not find you, if God is willing!”
The key was already grating in the lock when Tizzo, letting the commands of the baron take the place of his own thought, blew out the lantern and slid into the straw. There he lay flat, turning his face so that it dropped on the cold side of his ax.
Above him, he heard certain rustlings, and felt the straw being straightened by the manacled hands of the baron. Then a crushing weight fell on him, as Melrose must have straightened out and laid his body directly down across the hidden bulk of Tizzo.
The door had flung open and a faint gust of the stale air blew even through the straw to the nostrils of Tizzo, casting up dust that gave him an agonizing desire to sneeze.
But footfalls were pouring into the room. And he heard the deadly jangling of naked steel, and the queer humming, muffled noise of blades against scabbards.
Then Jeronimo della Penna cried out: “Look everywhere. If he was not above, he may be here!”
It was the voice of Marozzo that broke in: “He must be here because he goes to his work as straight as a ferret to blood — a ferret to the throat of a rabbit. Look well. I, from my own purse — a hundred florins of gold — do you hear, men? No, five hundred florins to the first fellow with sharp eyes who comes on the traces of the devil!”
To this Marignello’s voice added: “He will not be here, my masters. I said nothing of the baron being here. I knew nothing of his being here. He was brought in here after I left the cellars.”
Della Penna said: “Your work was worthless, Marignello. Your thoughts are worthless, also. By God, I have a thought to try you on the same rack that tried Melrose.”
He added, loudly: “To your work! Look everywhere!”
It was hard for Tizzo to breathe, there was such a pressure upon his body. And then there came to him a queer reaction — that it was better to burst upright before their eyes, ax in hand, and strike right and left, dying like a man. It was better to do that than to lie here and be discovered like a crawling rat.
“Everywhere! He may hide himself in a beam of light!” said Marozzo.
The voice of Marozzo was recognizable, but this enunciation was much stifled. Plainly his mouth had been smashed and perhaps many of his teeth knocked in by the battering which Tizzo had given him.
Men were trampling all about the room, knocking against metal, bumping the walls.
Something whispered through the straw and grinded against the stone not an inch from his face.
“No use thrusting your sword into that bed,” commanded della Penna. “Do you think that anything could be hidden under the bulk of Melrose without being stifled?”
And della Penna laughed as he spoke.
After a moment that half-muffled voice of Marozzo said: “Is there any possible way by which he might have escaped from the house after he found that the cell of Melrose was empty?”
“No,” said della Penna, “unless he went up the stairs and into the house itself. That could not be.”
“Why not?”
“Because there are servants everywhere.”
“Jeronimo, in God’s name remember that we are talking of a man who could hide himself in the shadow of a cat, if he wished to do so.”
“How could he escape through the front door, which is always guarded. In these days, I have a dozen men-at-arms at that door.”
“Numbers mean sleepy eyes,” said Marozzo. “What of the window?”
“None except those twenty feet from the pavement outside.”
“Ha! He could run down the perpendicular side of a wall!”
“Are you going to call him half fly and half cat?”
“And mostly devil!” cried Marozzo. “He is not here. Jeronimo, leave this place. Spread the alarm. Let the town be raised. God knows, if we can catch him, we have at a stroke secured half the strength of Giovanpaolo.”
“You may be right,” said della Penna.
He commanded someone to go at once and have an alarm rung, a word carried about the town to all the gates that Tizzo, not for the first time, had slunk inside the gates of Perugia. There was a rich reward on his head.
Then della Penna’s voice sounded close by.
“Ah, Melrose,” he said. “How is it with you?”
“Better, my lord,” said Henry of Melrose. “I breathe the air and still can taste it. It is better than wine.”
“Well, strangling might be a good end for you. I don’t know. How do your joints feel, Melrose?”
“They ache with sympathy for you.”
“For me?”
“Certainly, Jeronimo.”
“I don’t understand you — but then, I never could understand any man from the beef-eating English.”
“Why, my lord, you are searching for Tizzo, are you not?” asked Melrose.
“What of it?”
“Nothing. It is merely a token.”
“A token of what?”
“That you have named the wasp who will sting you to death.”
“Damn you!” snarled della Penna, and Tizzo heard the sound of a blow that re-echoed through his brain. Had della Penna struck that chained and helpless man?
“Well and knightly done,” said Melrose. “Your servants watch you, Jeronimo. They learn how men of noble birth should treat one another.”
“I have a mind to give you another taste of the rack at this moment,” declared della Penna.
“Give me enough tastes of it, close enough together, and soon I shall have a mouthful.”
“Do you hear him?” said della Penna. “He means that if I give him enough of it I shall soon have him dead. D’you know, Melrose, that if you were of a little different pattern, I would like to have you around me. But since I can’t buy you, I shall have to bury you.”
“It is one of the pities of the wars,” answered Melrose. “We are not able to love the sort of poison that might physic us.”
“Good again,” laughed della Penna. “I shall return to you again tomorrow, and the rack may even sharpen your wit a little more. Come, my lads. Out of this, and run through the house. Search in every corner. Remember, he can make himself as small as a rat.”
Then he added: “Put irons on Marignello. I shall have some use for the rack with him, tomorrow, also.”
CHAPTER 40
THE DOOR CLOSED, the lock grated.
“The way is open, Tizzo,” said the baron softly.
Tizzo wriggled into the open and began to blow out air through his nose, and to wipe the chaff and dust from his hair, from his face, from his eyes. He dusted himself all over.
“Neat as a cat,” said the baron. “Was it hard on you, Tizzo?”
“There are thirty excess pounds of you, my lord,” said Tizzo, “and I felt the weight of all of them. However, I can breathe again now. I swear to God that for a moment I was about to leap out and try for the head of della Penna with my ax.”
“Wrong, Tizzo,” said the baron. “Consider what a masterpiece he is, what a perfect semblance, picture, statue, harmony of evil! There is a man without charity or kindness, without decency or gentleness, without courtesy or heart, courage or warmth. A mere brain. A fox. A cold fire. Where will you find him again? Where is there his like? Merely to be killed by such a man is to be remembered by history. To be listed among his victims saves a man from oblivion. No, no, Tizzo, thank God that your eyes have seen such a prodigy.”
“He is a prodigy,” said Tizzo, “and I pray that I may have the prodigious pleasure of killing him.”
He resumed his work with his file, and in two strokes of it cut through one of the manacle irons. With the edge of the ax he pried the bracelet wide open at that mouth and let the hand of the Englishman escape.
He fell to work on the other handiron when the baron said: “Hush! Do you hear it?”
Tizzo, listening for a moment, started violently.
“They are coming again!” he muttered.
“No. They are walking on guard outside the door. You have startl
ed them, Tizzo, and now they are worried. They fear that you and the devil may come romping, hand in hand, down those stairs, yonder, ready to beat open the door and fly away with me in a cloud of red smoke. They have, in fact, corked the bottle; and inside that bottle you are to die!”
“True!” said Tizzo.
He stood up and stared at the door.
“Tell me, now,” asked Melrose. “This is the end. There is no possible escape. Day and night that door will be guarded. And this means that you must surely die. So tell me now how great is your regret that you have come here for a foreigner, a mere Englishman from the barbarous north?”
Tizzo said: “Are you tempting me to use some fine words? Well, my lord, I’ll only say that so long as I die in company, with a friend, I cannot ask any more of my life.”
“What is better than a friend?” asked Melrose.
“A blood relation, but I have none.”
“Are you sure?”
“My mother is dead, my lord, as I think I told you. There was never a father to me.”
“Do you remember your mother, Tizzo?”
“I was a very young child when she died.”
“Shall I describe her?”
“You, my lord?”
“A tall, slender girl. Brown-eyed, Tizzo. The grace of a wild deer and the step of a faun. A sweet smile and a gentle heart. A face as calm as prayer. Laughter as bright as the first spring day. And a faith that would have stirred a god and shamed a devil.”
“Did you know her?”
“Do I speak as though I were ignorant, Tizzo?”
“No, my lord.”
“Shall I tell you more about her?”
“Every word is like a life to me!”
“She was a girl so good that she could not expect villainy in others.”
“I have seen such people,” said Tizzo.
“There are tears in your eyes, Tizzo.”
“Well, let them fall, also,” said Tizzo. “I am not ashamed to weep for her, I would have died for her, if God had granted me that much grace.”
“Instead of which, she died for you.”