Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  “Now that you’ve seen him,” said the duke to Machiavelli, “what do you think of him?”

  The young statesman said: “That is the sort of a sword that I would leave in the scabbard until there was straightforward work to do.”

  “Perhaps. His men love him. Do you see them swarming and throwing up their hands in his honor? Now they have him off his horse and carry him on their shoulders... He has taught them to shoot straight, fence, and obey orders. They love him because he has made them stronger men. I tell you, Niccolo, the day may come when every Italian will love me because I have made Italy a strong nation.”

  “The virtues of age,” said Machiavelli, “outweigh the sins of youth, always. Today is greater than all the yesterdays.”

  “They still shout themselves hoarse. I knew they were fond of him, but this is devotion. Such a man could be a dangerous force in an army, Niccolo.”

  “When a tool has accomplished its purpose,” said Machiavelli, “it should be broken before it is thrown away.”

  The Borgia glanced aside at him, and then, slowly, smiled. Bonfadini was smiling also.

  That blue-headed ax of steel which the Borgia had carried to the meeting on the road by Faenza was once more in the hands of Tizzo. His sword was at his side. The white horse stepped lightly beneath him. He was not cased from head to foot in complete steel, as most mounted soldiers were, but wore merely an open helmet, or steel cap, with a breastplate and shoulder-pieces. Equipped in this light manner, he was a lighter burden for his horse when he rode and, on the ground, those quick-thinking feet of his would be able to dance more swiftly.

  The dance itself would not be long in starting.

  The dawn had not yet commenced but it would not be long delayed; and Tizzo’s peasant soldiery, armed with arquebuses and pikes and short swords, moved behind him with a steady thrumming of feet.

  He had been given the vanguard; a mile back of him came the French soldiers with the famous Swiss pike-men behind them; and last of all, at such a distance that the rumbling of its wheels could not be heard, moved the clumsy artillery which might have to batter down the gates of the town if Tizzo could not take them with the first rush.

  Another rumbling, a growing thunder, was beginning to come down the road at a walking pace toward Forli, and Tizzo reined back his horse to ask what the noise might be.

  “The carts of the farmers bringing in produce for the markets,” said one of the peasant soldiers. “They load their carts in the evening, and they start in the darkness so as to get to Forli just before daybreak. The market must be opened at sunrise, you see.”

  “Carts — sunrise — produce... Perhaps those carts will carry something more than vegetables when they get through the gates of Forli. Down in that ditch, every man of you. Do you hear? If one of you stirs, if one of you coughs or sneezes, if one of you allows the head of a single pike to shine in the moonlight, I’ll have that man’s head on the ground at my feet.”

  He saw his column sink down out of sight into the ditch. And suddenly he was alone in the road with the brilliant moonlight flooding about him and Forli lifting its gilded shoulders in the distance.

  He could see the fort of the Rocca looming above the city.

  With a hundred men to surprise such a place? He felt as though he had empty hands.

  He passed on a short distance toward the town, then turned his horse and let it jog softly back up the road. The carts were in view, now, a whole score of them trudging along, the owners walking at the heads of the horses, the carts piled high with all sorts of country produce; the squealing of pigs sounded, and now and then the drowsy cackling and cawing of disturbed chickens as the carts rolled over a deeper rut or struck a bump with creaking axles.

  Tizzo held up his hand when he came to the first cart.

  “Halt there, friend!” he commanded.

  “Halt yourself and be hanged,” said the Romagnol. “We’re already late for Forli. What puts you on the road so far from a warm bed at this time of the morning?”

  Two or three of the other peasants ran up with clubs in their hands to join in any altercation that might follow, but Tizzo knew these hardy Romagnols too well to interfere with them in this fashion. He reined the white horse aside and called out: “Up, lads, and at them!”

  The thing was ended in one rush, Tizzo’s voice calling: “Hands only! No daggers or swords! Don’t hurt them, boys!”

  So it was done, in a moment; the tough Romagnols, overwhelmed by numbers, were quickly helpless, and over the brief babbling noises could be heard only the voices of several of the farmers’ wives, crowing out their laments as they sat up on the tops of the loaded carts.

  Tizzo brought quiet.

  He rode up and down the line, saying cheerfully: “Friends, you have been robbed and cheated and taxed by the Countess Sforza-Riario for a good many years.

  “Here I am with some of the men of the Duca. If I open the gates of the town with your help, it will belong to Cesare Borgia before midday. Do you hear me?”

  A man growled out the short answer: “Why change one robber for another?”

  “The Duke of Valentinois and the Romagna does not rob peasants,” said Tizzo.

  “All dukes are robbers.”

  “Of course they are,” answered Tizzo, chuckling, “but this one only robs the lords and ladies and lets the peasant alone. For the food that his troops need, he pays hard cash.”

  The readiness of this reply and the apparent frankness of it brought a laugh from the peasants.

  “I leave you your cartloads unharmed,” said Tizzo. “I put a ducat in the hand of every man of you. I leave your women behind you on the road, here. I throw a few of my men into each cart, and we roll on through the gates. Do you hear? If we pass the gates unchallenged, all is well. If one of you betrays us, we cut your throats. Is that a bargain?”

  And one of the peasants answered with a sudden laugh: “That’s a soldier’s true bargain. Come on, friends! I’d as soon shout ‘Ducal’ as yell ‘Riario!’ Let’s take the bargain; because we can’t refuse it!”

  CHAPTER VII

  CATERINA, COUNTESS SFORZA-RIARIO, gathered a big woolen peasant’s cloak more closely about her and raised the lantern so that she could see better the picture before her. It was the Baron of Melrose, naked except for a cincture, and lashed up by the hands so that his toes barely rested on the floor. In this posture he could support his entire weight only for a few moments on the tips of his toes, after which the burden of his body depended from his wrists.

  He had been lashed there long enough to be close to exhaustion and now a continual tremor ran through his body, and the big muscles of his legs twitched up and down, and shudderings pulled at the tendons about his shoulders. But still his gray head was carried straight.

  The countess broke off a bit of bread and ate it, and then swallowed a bit of wine which a page offered her on one knee, holding the silver salver high.

  “How long before the strength goes out of his legs?” she asked. “How long before he hangs from the wrists like a heavy sack tied up by the two ears?”

  A tall, powerful man stepped out of the shadows a little and looked more closely at the prisoner. He reached up and felt the shoulder muscles of Melrose, then the trembling, great muscles of the thighs.

  “He’ll endure until not long after dawn,” said the executioner.

  “And how long after that, Adolfo, before the tendons begin to pull and break in his shoulders?”

  “He is a heavy man,” said the executioner, “but he is well muscled. You see that right arm, particularly?”

  “That’s the arm of a swordsman,” said the countess. “And I hear that he’s a famous fellow with a sword.”

  “After the middle of this morning, he never will be famous again,” said Adolfo.

  “Will his arms be ruined?”

  “Forever,” said Adolfo. “Until he dies, he will have to be fed, like a baby.”

  “Do you hear that, my lord?” ask
ed the countess.

  Melrose looked at her, with the sweat of the long agony running down his face. He said nothing.

  “There is something Christian in the sight of suffering like this,” said the countess. “After watching you, my lord, I’ll be able to say my prayers with more feeling, for a long time.”

  “Of course you will,” said the executioner. “I always go to church after I’ve killed a man in here.”

  He looked without a smile over his domain, the gibbet-like beams that projected from the wall, here and there, and the iron machines with projecting spokes, the iron boots, also, together with the little wedges which are driven between the metal and the knee, gradually crushing the bone as wedge after wedge is added. And there were other devices such as strong gloves which pulled on easily but were fitted with fishhooks inside; in fact, there were a thousand little devices that helped Adolfo to play on human flesh and nerves like a great musician.

  But best of all, the foundation of all the most perfect torments, was the great rack, whose sliding beams could be extended through the pressure exerted by a big wheel which worked against a screw. Here the body could be drawn out to the breaking point — or literally torn in two. But, when the flesh was all taut, the accepted practice was to strike the limbs and the joints one by one with a small iron bar, so breaking the tensed bone with ease. Sometimes the leg and arm on one side would be wrecked forever before the prisoner “confessed.” Sometimes both legs went. Sometimes a single stroke of the bar made the screaming victim begin to shriek out whatever he could remember, whatever he could invent — anything to end the torture.

  Adolfo, looking over his possessions, had good reason to smile. He felt like a miser in the midst of his hoard.

  “How long will it be before dawn?” asked the countess. “Very often they go to pieces when the gray of the morning commences to strike their faces.”

  “Another half-running of the hour glass, highness.”

  “Very well.”

  “No, it is beginning even now,” said the jailer.

  “The day is about to commence,” said the countess to Melrose. “Will you tell me now, my friend, where I’ll be able to find Tizzo, and who it was in my castle that let him go free from it?”

  Melrose, staring at her, parted his lips as though to speak, but he merely moistened them and set his jaws hard again. His eyes were commencing to thrust out from his head under the long-continued pressure of the torment.

  Here a confusion of tumult broke out in the town.

  “What’s that?” asked the countess. “Are my silly people starting a fiesta before sunrise?”

  Adolfo, running to the casement, leaned into it and listened. He started to cry out: “This is no fiesta, highness, but a trouble of some—”

  But here the countess herself cried out: “Do you hear it? They have passed the wall — they have broken into Forli. Oh, the careless, treacherous, hired dogs that are in my army! Do you hear?... Ring the alarm bells. Call for—”

  The uproar was washing rapidly across the lower level of the town, and the voice of the crowd streamed like a flag across the mind of Melrose. He could hear the shouting grow from confusion into syllables that were understandable: “Duca! Duca! Tizzo! Tizzo! Tizzo!”

  It seemed to him that the voices were pouring from his own throat in an ecstasy. And in fact they were. He was shouting involuntarily: “Tizzo! Tizzo! Tizzo!” and he began to laugh.

  The countess had jerked a door open and was crying orders to the men-at-arms who waited outside it; Aldolfo leaned, fascinated, at the casement and still was there when the countess slammed the door and hurried back into the torture chamber.

  “The red-headed wildcat has come into Forli to claw us all to death!” cried the countess. “Set his father free — quickly, Adolfo! Suppose Tizzo dreamed what had been happening here — he would make the stones of the Rocca melt away and come in at us with all his devils behind him.”

  Melrose, released from the ropes that held him, leaned feebly against the wall, breathing hard, his head for the first time bowed.

  “Have him taken to the Lady Beatrice,” said Caterina Sforza. “Guard them both as you would guard the balls of your eyes. Hai! How they yell in the streets! Are the Borgia and Tizzo saints and deliverers to my own people? Ah, if I were only a man — but today I shall be a man!”

  The day had in fact begun, the green gray of the dawn glowing on the edge of the sky as she ran from the room and down the stairs.

  Adolfo was saying: “Noble Signor Melrose, you will never forget that I have done nothing for my own pleasure, but all by command? Lean on me, highness. Step slowly. So! So!”

  CHAPTER VIII

  IT WOULD NOT be many minutes now, Tizzo knew, before the rioting soldiery of the duca had penetrated into every part of the castle; and somewhere in the Rocca were his father and Beatrice. They must be reached at once.

  It was true that the Borgia controlled his men carefully during nearly every emergency, but when a stronghold had been taken by open assault, there was only one sort of a reward that could be offered to the victors — the sacking of the place. And when the wild-headed victors found women —

  Tizzo looked grimly over his little group of prisoners. There was one elderly fighting man with a grizzled head, his face now as gray as his hair. Tizzo took him by the arm with a strong hand.

  “In the Rocca,” he said, “there are two prisoners. One is the Englishman — the big Englishman with gray hair and a red face — the Baron Melrose. And there is a girl — Beatrice of the Baglioni. Do you know where they may be kept, now?”

  A dull eye rolled toward the face of Tizzo in utter lack of comprehension. Fear had benumbed the brain of the prisoner. Tizzo used the most powerful stimulant known to the Italian mind. He snatched a handful of silver out of his purse and jangled the ducats in front of the man.

  “This money goes to you, if you can tell me where they’re apt to be found. If you can lead me to them before some of the raiders reach them — you get this money today and a whole purse of it tomorrow.”

  The man opened his mouth and eyes as though he were receiving both spiritual and mental food.

  “I think I know where they could be found,” he said. “Follow me, highness. Quickly, because they may be on the opposite side of the Rocca.”

  He set off at a run, down the stairs, and then at full speed along a corridor that rose and fell and twisted and angled. Not a single man of Tizzo’s company followed. Doors right and left invited them to hunt for plunder.

  And the whole castle was turned into a screaming-house. The shouts of the men were nothing. It was the thin screaming of the women that drove like sword strokes through the brain of Tizzo.

  They were in one of those endless corridors which most Italian fortresses were apt to have for a rapid means of getting from one part of the place to another.

  Groups of plunderers lurched into the runway, here and there, but the shout of Tizzo made them scatter before his coming. He had thrown off his steel cap so that his red hair would make him more readily known.

  And wherever he was seen, the men of the Borgia gave him a cheer — and went on about their business which would strip the famous Rocca to the bone long before noon in that day.

  The panting voice of Tizzo’s companion halted him, led him now through a side door and up another winding stairs into a tower where there was a great noise of trampling and battle.

  So he rushed up into a big room with an old, vaulted ceiling that rested on stout piers. At the head of the stairs a half dozen of the Borgians were fighting against a larger band of the defenders of the Rocca. And yonder in a corner he saw what he had been praying for sight of — Henry of Melrose, unarmored, but with a sword in his hands, heedless of the outcome of the fighting as he held his place in front of a smaller, slenderer figure. That was Beatrice Baglione. It must be she — now he could see the color of her dress — now her face, like a star to a sailor.

  “Beatrice!” he s
houted, and leaped into the fight, his head unarmored as it was. “Beatrice!” he cried, and “Beatrice!” It was his battle-cry, and with each utterance, he struck with the terrible swift ax, right and left.

  He had come at a good time, for the Borgians were having enough of this fierce struggling and were giving up when he sprang into the lead and rallied them.

  And he heard a woman’s voice coming out of a visored helmet and shouting, shrill and high: “Giovanni degli Azurri! There is your man! There is the one who brought all this ruin down on Forli! There is Tizzo of Melrose! Kill him now, and I swear that this is the happiest day of my life.”

  The outcry of the countess inspired all her men. They had been on the verge of retreating; now they made a sudden rally. Two of the Borgians were driven back over the edge of the floor and fell into the well of the stairs; Giovanni degli Azurri put his sword with a downright stroke through the throat of a third. The other pair gave back from the side of Tizzo and called on him to give up a hopeless fight. But he could not be drawn away. Down the length of the room he saw the big form of his father striding; and Beatrice, helplessly unarmed as she was, hurrying after him.

  When he should have retreated, he leaped in suddenly, springing here and there like an erratic dancer. He used the light sword in his left hand like a dagger to ward off blows; the ax in his right hand made lightning circles.

  One of these flashing arcs of light glanced against the helmet of Giovanni degli Azurri and staggered that champion.

  The second blow would have killed him outright, but here Caterina Sforza herself ran forward and struck a good two-handed blow at the head of Tizzo.

  He had not expected actual fighting from the countess. His hastily reared guard received the blow and turned the edge of it, but the force of the flat sword was enough to knock him to his knees.

  He heard the scream of Beatrice like a ray of light gleaming across his mind. The two Borgians, inspired by the attack he had delivered, had closed in from the sides and they lustily struck out to protect him. But the decisive blow came from Henry of Melrose.