The beginning of the end came the following spring. I had passed my sixteenth birthday, which had fallen that year on the very Tuesday before Lent, when we and all the villages were celebrating Carnival. It had come rather early that year, so it was a bit cold, but it was a gay time.
It was on that night before Ash Wednesday that I had the terrible dream in which I saw myself holding the severed heads of my brother and my sister. I woke up in a sweat, horrified by this dream. I wrote it down in my book of dreams. And then actually I forgot about it. That was common with me, only it had been truly the most horrid nightmare I’d ever had. But when I mentioned my occasional nightmares to my mother or father or anyone else, they always said:
“Vittorio, it’s your own fault for reading the books you read. You bring it on yourself.”
To repeat, the dream was forgotten.
The country was by Easter in great flower, and the first warnings of horror to come, though I knew them not to be, were that the lower hamlets on our mountain were quite suddenly abandoned.
My father and I and two of the huntsmen and a gamekeeper and a soldier rode down to see for ourselves that the peasants in those parts had departed, some time before in fact, and taken the livestock with them.
It was eerie to see those deserted towns, small as they were and as insignificant.
We rode back up the mountain as a warm embracing darkness surrounded us, yet we found all the other villages we passed battened down with hardly a seam of light showing through the chinks of a shutter, or a tiny stem of reddened smoke rising from a chimney.
Of course my father’s old clerk went into a rant that the vassals should be found, beaten, made to work the land.
My father, benevolent as always and completely calm, sat at his desk in the candlelight, leaning on his elbow, and said that these had all been free men; they were not bound to him, if they did not choose to live on his mountain. This was the way of the modern world, only he wished he knew what was afoot in our land.
Quite suddenly, he took notice of me standing and observing him, as if he hadn’t seen me before, and he broke off the conference, dismissing the whole affair.
I thought nothing much about it.
But in the days that followed, some of the villagers from the lower slopes came up to live within the walls. There were conferences in my father’s chambers. I heard arguments behind closed doors, and one night, at supper, all sat entirely too somber for our family, and finally my father rose from his massive chair, the Lord in the center of the table as always, and declared, as if he’d been silently accused:
“I will not persecute some old women because they have stuck pins in wax dolls and burnt incense and read foolish incantations that mean nothing. These old witches have been on our mountain forever.”
My mother looked truly alarmed, and then gathering us all up—I was most unwilling—she took us away, Bartola, Matteo and me, and told us to go to bed early.
“Don’t stay up reading, Vittorio!” she said.
“But what did Father mean?” asked Bartola.
“Oh, it’s the old village witches,” I said. I used the Italian word strega. “Every now and then, one goes too far, there’s a fight, but mostly it’s just charms to cure a fever and such.”
I thought my mother would hush me up, but she stood in the narrow stone stairs of the tower looking up at me with marked relief on her face, and she said:
“Yes, yes, Vittorio, you are so right. In Florence, people laugh at those old women. You know Gattena yourself; she never really did more then sell love potions to the girls.”
“Surely we’re not to drag her before a court!” I said, very happy that she was paying attention.
Bartola and Matteo were rapt.
“No, no, not Gattena, certainly not. Gattena’s vanished. Run off.”
“Gattena?” I asked, and then as my mother turned away, refusing, it seemed, to say another word, gesturing for me to escort my sister and brother safely to bed, I realized the gravity of this.
Gattena was the most feared and comical of the old witches, and if she had run off, if she was afraid of something, well, that was news, because she thought herself the one to be feared.
The following days were fresh and lovely and undisturbed by anything for me and my Bartola and Matteo, but when I looked back later, I recalled there was much going on.
One afternoon, I went up to the highest lookout window of the old tower where one guardsman, Tori, we called him, was falling asleep, and I looked down over all our land for as far as I could see.
“Well, you won’t find it,” he said.
“What’s that?” I remarked.
“Smoke from a single hearth. There is no more.” He yawned and leaned against the wall, heavily weighed down by his old boiled-leather jerkin, and sword. “All’s well,” he said, and yawned again. “So they like city life, or to fight for Francesco Sforza over the Duchy of Milan, so let them go. They didn’t know how good they had it.”
I turned away from him and looked over the woods again, and down into the valleys that I could see, and beyond to the slightly misty blue sky. It was true, the little hamlets seemed frozen in time down there, but how could one be so sure? It was not such a clear day. And besides, everything was fine within the household.
My father drew olive oil, vegetables, milk, butter and many such goods from these villages, but he didn’t need them. If it was time for them to pass away, so be it.
Two nights later, however, it was undeniably obvious to me that everyone at supper was perpetually under a strain of sorts, which went entirely unvoiced, and that an agitation had gripped my mother, so that she was no longer engaging in her endless courtly chatter. Conversation was not impossible, but it had changed.
But for all the elders who seemed deeply and secretly conflicted, there were others who seemed relatively oblivious to such things, and the pages went about serving gaily, and a little group of musicians, who’d come up the preceding day, gave us a lovely series of songs with the viol and the lute.
My mother couldn’t be persuaded to do her old slow dances, however.
It must have been very late when an unexpected visitor was announced. No one had left the main hall, except Bartola and Matteo, who had been taken off to bed by me earlier and left in the care of our old nurse, Simonetta.
The Captain of my father’s Guard came into the hall, clicked his heels and bowed to my father and said:
“My Lord, it seems there is a man of great rank come to the house, and he will not be received in the light, or so he says, and demands that you come out to him.”
Everyone at the table was at once alert, and my mother went white with anger and umbrage.
No one ever used the word “demand” to my father.
Also it was plain to me that our Captain of the Guard, a rather prepossessing old soldier who’d seen many battles with the wandering mercenaries, was himself overvigilant and a little shaken.
My father rose to his feet. He did not speak or move, however.
“Would you do that, my Lord, or should I send this Signore away?” the Captain asked.
“Tell him that he is most welcome to come into my house as my guest,” said my father, “that we extend to him in the name of Christ Our Lord our full hospitality.”
His very voice seemed to have a calming effect on the whole table, except perhaps for my mother, who seemed not to know what to do.
The Captain looked almost slyly at my father, as if to convey the secret message that this would never do, but he went off to deliver the invitation.
My father did not sit down. He stood staring off, and then he cocked his head, as though listening. He turned and snapped his fingers, drawing to attention the two guards slumbering at the ends of the hall.
“Go through the house, see to everything,” he said in a soft voice. “I think I hear birds which have entered the house. It’s the warm air, and there are many open windows.”
These two went off, and immediately two other soldiers appeared to take their place. That in itself was not usual, for it meant that there were many men on duty.
The Captain came back alone, and once more bowed.
“My Lord, he will not come into the light, he says, but that you must come out to him, and he has little time to wait on you.”
This was the first time I had ever seen my father really angry. Even when he whipped me or a peasant boy, he was rather lazy about it. Now the fine lineaments of his face, so given to reassurance by their very proportions, became absolutely wrathful.
“How dare he?” he whispered.
Yet he strode around the table, came in front of it and marched off with the Captain of the Guard hastening behind him.
I was out of my chair at once and after him. I heard my mother cry out softly, “Vittorio, come back.”
But I stole down the stairs after my father, and into the courtyard, and only when he himself turned around and pressed my chest hard with his hand did I halt.
“Stay there, my son,” he said with his old kindly warmth. “I shall see to it.”
I had a good vantage point, right at the door of the tower, and there across the courtyard, at the gates in the full light of the torches, I saw this strange Signore who would not come into the light of the hall, for he did not seem to mind this outdoor illumination.
The huge gates of the arched entrance were locked and bolted for the night. Only the small man-sized gate was opened, and it was there that he stood, with the blazing crackling fire on either side of him, glorying in it, it seemed to me, in his splendid raiment of dark, wine-red velvet.
From head to toe he was dressed in this rich color, hardly the current style, but every detail of him, from his bejeweled doublet and blown-up sleeves of satin and velvet stripes, was this same hue, as though carefully dyed in the best fullers in Florence.
Even the gems sewn into his collar and hanging about his neck on a heavy golden chain were wine red—most likely rubies or even sapphires.
His hair was thick and black, hanging sleekly onto his shoulders, but I couldn’t see his face, no, not at all, for the velvet hat he wore overshadowed it, and I caught but a glimpse of very white skin, the line of his jaw and a bit of his neck, for nothing else was visible. He wore a broadsword of immense size, with an antique scabbard, and casually over one shoulder was a cloak of the same wine-dark velvet trimmed in what seemed to my distant eyes to be ornate gilt symbols.
I strained, trying to make them out, this border of signs, and I thought I could see a star and crescent moon worked into his fancy adornments, but I was really too far away.
The man’s height was impressive.
My father stopped quite far short of him, yet when he spoke his voice was soft and I couldn’t hear it, and out of the mysterious man, who still revealed nothing now of his face but his smiling mouth and white teeth, there came a silky utterance that seemed both surly and charming.
“Get away from my house in the name of God and Our Holy Redeemer!” my father cried out suddenly. And with a quick gesture, he stepped forward and powerfully thrust this splendid figure right out of the gate.
I was amazed.
But from the hollow mouth of darkness beyond the opening there came only a low satin laughter, a mocking laughter, and this it seemed was echoed by others, and I heard a powerful thundering of hooves, as though several horsemen had commenced at once to ride off.
My father himself slammed the gate. And turned and made the Sign of the Cross, and pressed his hands together in prayer.
“Dear Lord God, how dare they!” he said, looking up.
It was only now, as he stormed back towards me and towards the tower itself, that I realized the Captain of the Guard was paralyzed with seeming terror.
My father’s eye caught mine as soon as he came into the light from the stairs, and I gestured to the Captain. My father spun round.
“Batten down my house,” my father called out. “Search it from top to bottom and batten it down and call out the soldiery and fill the night with torches, do you hear? I will have men in every tower and on the walls. Do it at once. It will give peace and calm to my people!”
We had not yet reached the supper room when an old priest living with us then, a learned Dominican named Fra Diamonte, came down with his white hair all mussed, and his cassock half unbuttoned, and his prayer book in his hand.
“What is it, my Lord?” he asked. “What in the name of God has happened?”
“Father, trust in God and come and pray with me in the chapel,” said my father to him. He then pointed to another guard who was fast approaching. “Light up the chapel, all its candles, for I want to pray. Do it now, and have the boys come down and play for me some sacred music.”
He then took my hand and that of the priest. “It’s nothing, really, you must both of you know that. It’s all superstitious foolishness, but any excuse which makes a worldly man like me turn to his God is a good one. Come on, Vittorio, you and Fra Diamonte and I will pray, but for your mother put on a good face.”
I was much calmer, but the prospect of being up all night in the lighted chapel was both welcome and alarming.
I went off to get my prayer books, my Mass books and books of other devotions, fine vellum books from Florence, with gilt print and beautifully edged illustrations.
I was just coming out of my room when I saw my father there with my mother, saying to her, “And do not leave the children alone for a moment, and you, you in this state, I will not tolerate this distress.”
She touched her belly.
I realized she was with child again. And I realized, too, that my father was really alarmed about something. What could it mean, “Do not leave the children alone for a moment”? What could this mean?
The chapel was comfortable enough. My father had long ago provided some decent wooden and velvet-padded prie-dieux, though on feast days everyone stood. Pews didn’t exist in those times.
But he also spent some of the night showing me the vault beneath the church, which opened by means of a ring handle on a trapdoor, faced in stone, the ring itself fitted down flat beneath what appeared to be only one of many marble inlaid ornaments in the floor tiles.
I knew of these crypts but had been whipped for sneaking into them when I was a child, and my father had told me back then how disappointed in me he’d been that I couldn’t keep a family secret.
That admonition had hurt far more than the whipping. And I’d never asked to go with him into the crypts, which I knew he had done over the years now and then. I thought treasure was down there, and secrets of the pagans.
Well, I saw now there was a cavernous room, carved high and deep out of the earth, and faced with stone, and that it was full of varied treasure. There were old chests and even old books in heaps. And two bolted doorways.
“Those lead to old burial places that you don’t need to go to,” he said, “but you need to know of this place now. And remember it.”
When we came back up into the chapel, he put the trapdoor right, laid down the ring, relaid the marble tile, and the whole was quite invisible.
Fra Diamonte pretended not to have seen. My mother was asleep and so were the children.
We all fell asleep before dawn in the chapel.
My father walked out in the courtyard at sunup, when the cocks were crowing all over the villages inside the walls, and he stretched and looked up at the sky and then shrugged his shoulders.
Two of my uncles ran at him, demanding to know what Signore from where dared to propose a siege against us and when we were supposed to have this battle.
“No, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong,” my father said. “We’re not going to war. You go back to bed.”
But he had no sooner spoken these words than a ripping scream brought us all around, and through the opening courtyard gates there came one of the village girls, one of our near and dear girls, shrieking the terrible words:
“He’s gone, the baby’s gone, they’ve taken him.”
The rest of the day was a relentless search for this missing child. But no one could find him. And it was soon discovered that one other child had also vanished without a trace. He had been a half-wit, rather beloved because he caused no harm, but so addle-brained he couldn’t even much walk. And everyone was ashamed to say that they did not even know how long that half-wit had been missing.
By dusk, I thought I would go mad if I didn’t get to see my father alone, if I couldn’t push my way into the locked chambers where he sat with his uncles and the priests arguing and fighting. Finally, I hammered so loudly on the door and kicked so much that he let me in.
The meeting was about to break up and he drew me down by himself, and he said with wild eyes:
“Do you see what they’ve done? They took the very tribute they demanded of me. They took it! I refused it and they took it.”
“But what tribute? You mean the children?”
He was wild-eyed. He rubbed his unshaven face, and he crashed his fist down on his desk, and then he pushed over all his writing things.
“Who do they think they are that they come to me by night and demand that I tender to them those infants unwanted by anyone?”
“Father, what is this? You must tell me.”
“Vittorio, you will tomorrow be off to Florence, at the first light, and with the letters I mean to write tonight. I need more than country priests to fight this. Now get ready for the journey.”
He looked up quite suddenly. He appeared to listen, and then to look about. I could see the light was gone from the windows. We ourselves were just dim figures, and he had thrown the candelabra down. I picked it up.
I watched him sidelong as I took one of the candles and lighted it by the torch at the door and brought it back, and then lighted the other candles.
He listened, still and alert, and then without making a sound he rose to his feet, his fists on the desk, seemingly uncaring of the light that the candles threw on his shocked and wary face.
“What do you hear, my Lord?” I said, using the formal address for him without so much as realizing it.
“Evil,” he whispered. “Malignant things such as God only suffers to live because of our sins. Arm yourself well. Bring your mother, your brother and your sister to the chapel, and hurry. The soldiers have their orders.”
“Shall I have some supper brought there as well, just bread and beer, perhaps?” I asked.
He nodded as though that were scarcely a concern.
Within less than an hour we were all gathered inside the chapel, the entire family, which included then five uncles and four aunts, and with us were two nurses and Fra Diamonte.
The little altar was decked out as if for Mass, with the finest embroidered altar cloth and the thickest golden candlesticks with blazing candles. The Image of Our Crucified Christ shone in the light, an ancient colorless and thin wooden carving that had hung on the wall there since the time of St. Francis, when the great saint was supposed to have stopped at our castle two centuries ago.
It was a naked Christ, common in those times, and a figure of tortured sacrifice, nothing as robust and sensual as those crucifixes made these days, and it stood out powerfully in contrast to the parade of freshly painted saints on the walls in their brilliant scarlet and gold finery.
We sat on plain brown benches brought in for us, nobody speaking a word, for Fra Diamonte had that morning said Mass and bestowed into the Tabernacle the Body and Blood of Our Lord in the form of the Sacred Host, and the chapel was now, as it were, put to its full purpose as the House of God.
We did eat the bread, and drink a little bit of the beer near the front doors, but we kept quiet.
Only my father repeatedly went out, walking boldly into the torch-lighted courtyard and calling up to his soldiers in the towers and on the walls, and even sometimes being gone to climb up and see for himself that all was well under his protection.
My uncles were all armed. My aunts said their rosaries fervently. Fra Diamonte was confused, and my mother seemed pale to death and sick, perhaps from the baby in her womb, and she clung to my sister and brother, who were by this time pretty frankly frightened.
It seemed we would pass the night without incident.
It couldn’t have been two hours before dawn when I was awakened from a shallow slumber by a horrid scream.
At once my father was on his feet, and so were my uncles, drawing out their swords as best they could with their knotted old fingers.
Screams rose all around in the night, and there came the alarms from the soldiers and the loud riotous clanging of old bells from every tower.
My father grabbed me by the arm. “Vittorio, come,” he said, and at once, pulling up the handle of the trapdoor, he threw it back and thrust into my hand a great candle from the altar.
“Take your mother, your aunts, your sister and your brother down, now, and do not come out, no matter what you hear! Do not come out. Lock the trapdoor above you and stay there! Do as I tell you!”
At once I obeyed, snatching up Matteo and Bartola and forcing them down the stone steps in front of me.
My uncles had rushed through the doors into the courtyard, shouting their ancient war cries, and my aunts stumbled and fainted and clutched to the altar and would not be moved, and my mother clung to my father.
My father was in a very paroxysm. I reached out for my eldest aunt, but she was in a dead faint before the altar, and my father thundered back to me, forced me into the crypt and shut the door.
I had no choice but to latch the trapdoor as he had shown me how to do, and to turn with the flickering candle in my hand and face the terrified Bartola and Matteo.
“Go down all the way,” I cried, “all the way.”
They nearly fell, trying to move backward down the steep narrow steps that were by no means easy to descend, their faces turned towards me.
“What is it, Vittorio, why do they want to hurt us?” Bartola asked.
“I want to fight them,” Matteo said. “Vittorio, give me your dagger. You have a sword. It’s not fair.”
“Shhh, be quiet, do as our father said. Do you think it pleases me that I can’t be out there with the men? Quiet!”
I choked back my tears. My mother was up there! My aunts!
The air was cold and damp, but it felt good. I broke out in a sweat, and my arm ached from holding the big golden candlestick. Finally we sank down in a huddle, the three of us at the far end of the chamber, and it felt soothing to me to touch the cold stone.
But in the interval of our collective silence I could hear through the heavy floor howls from above, terrible cries of fear and panic, and rushing feet, and even the high chilling whinnies of the horses. It sounded as if horses had come crashing into the chapel itself over our heads, which was not at all impossible.
I rose to my feet and rushed to the two other doors of the crypt, those which led to the burial chambers or whatever they were, I didn’t care! I moved the latch on one, and could see nothing but a low passage, not even tall enough for me, and barely wide enough for my shoulders.
I turned back, holding the only light, and saw the children rigid with fear, gazing up at the ceiling as the murderous cries continued.
“I smell fire,” Bartola whispered suddenly, her face wet at once with tears. “Do you smell it, Vittorio? I hear it.”
I did hear it and I did smell it.
“Both of you make the Sign of the Cross; pray now,” I said, “and trust in me. We will get out of here.”
But the clamor of the battle went on, the cries did not die out, and then suddenly, so suddenly it was as wondrous and frightful as the noise itself, there fell a silence.
A silence fell over all, and it was too complete to spell victory.
Bartola and Matteo clung to me, on either side.
Above, there was a clatter. The chapel doors were being thrown back, and then quite suddenly the trapdoor was yanked up and open, and in the glimmer of firelight beyond I saw a dark slender long-haired figure.
In the gust my candle went out.
Except for the infernal flicker above and beyond, we were committed unmercifully to total darkness.
Once again distinctly, I saw the outline of this figure, a tall, stately female with great long locks and a waist small enough for both my hands as she appeared to fly down the stairs soundlessly towards me.
How in the name of Heaven could this be, this woman?
Before I could think to pull my sword on a female assailant or make sense of anything at all, I felt her tender breasts brushed against my chest, and the cool of her skin as she seemed to be throwing her arms about me.
There was a moment of inexplicable and strangely sensuous confusion when the perfume of her tresses and her gown rose in my nostrils, and I fancied I saw the glistening whites of her eyes as she looked at me.
I heard Bartola scream, and then Matteo also.
I was knocked to the floor.
The fire blazed bright above.
The figure had them both, both struggling screaming children in one seemingly fragile arm, and stopping, apparently to look at me, a raised sword in her other hand, she raced up the stairway into the firelight.
I pulled my sword with both hands, rushed after her, up and out into the chapel, and saw that she had somehow by the most evil power all but reached the door, an impossible feat, her charges wailing and crying out for me, “Vittorio, Vittorio!”
All the upper windows of the chapels were full of fire, and so was the rose window above the crucifix.
I could not believe what I beheld, this young woman, who was stealing from me my sister and brother.
“Stop in the name of God!” I shouted at her. “Coward, thief in the night.”
I ran after her, but to my utter astonishment she did stop, still, and turned to look at me again, and this time I saw her full in all her refined beauty. Her face was a perfect oval with great benign gray eyes, her skin like the finest Chinese white enamel. She had red lips, too perfect even for a painter to make by choice, and her long ashen blond hair was gray like her eyes in the light of the fire, sweeping down her back in a pampered swaying mass. Her gown, though stained dark with what must have been blood, was the same wine-red color I had seen in the apparel of the evil visitor of the night before.
With the most curious and then poignant face, she merely stared at me. Her right hand held her sword upraised, but she didn’t move, and then she released from the powerful grip of her left arm my struggling brother and sister.
Both tumbled sobbing to the floor.
“Demon. Strega!” I roared. I leapt over them and advanced on her, swinging the sword.
But she dodged so swiftly that I didn’t even see it. I couldn’t believe that she was so far from me, standing now with the sword down, staring at me still and at the sobbing children.
Suddenly her head turned. There was a whistling cry, and then another and another. Through the door of the chapel, seeming to leap from the fires of Hell itself, there came another red-clad figure, hooded in velvet and wearing gold-trimmed boots, and as I swung my sword at him, he threw me aside and, in one instant, cut off the head of Bartola and then severed the head of the screaming Matteo.
I went mad. I howled. He turned on me. But from the female there came a sudden firm negation.
“Leave him alone,” she cried in a voice that was both sweet and clear, and then off he went, this murderer, this hooded fiend in his gold-trimmed boots, calling back to her.
“Come on, now, have you lost your wits? Look at the sky. Come, Ursula.”
She didn’t move. She stared at me as before.
I sobbed and cursed and, grabbing my sword, ran at her again, and this time saw my blade descend to cut off her right arm, right below the elbow. The white limb, small and seemingly fragile like all of her parts, fell to the paved floor with her heavy sword. Blood spurted from her.
She did no more than look at it. And then at me with the same poignant, disconsolate and near heartbroken face.
I lifted my sword again. “Strega!” I cried, clenching my teeth, trying to see through my tears. “Strega!”
But in another feat of evil, she had moved back, far away from me, as if pulled by an invisible force, and in her left hand she now held her right, which still clutched her sword as if it were not severed. She replaced the limb I had cut off. I watched her. I watched her put the limb in place and turn it and adjust it until it was as it should be, and then before my astonished eyes, I saw the wound I had made utterly seal up in her white skin.
Then the loose bell sleeve of her rich velvet gown fell down again around her wrist.
In a twinkling she was outside the chapel, only a silhouette now against the distant fires burning in the tower windows. I heard her whisper:
“Vittorio.”
Then she vanished.
I knew it was vain to go after her! Yet still I ran out and swung my sword around in a great circle, crying out in rage and bitterness and mad menace at all the world, my eyes now blinded with tears, and my throat full to choking.
Everything was still. Everyone was dead. Dead. I knew it. The courtyard was strewn with bodies.
I ran back into the chapel. I grabbed up the head of Bartola and the head of Matteo into my arms. I sat down and held them in my lap, and I sobbed.
They seemed still alive, these severed heads, their eyes flashing, and their lips even moving with hopeless attempts to speak. Oh, God! It was beyond all human endurance. I sobbed.
I cursed.
I laid them side by side, these two heads in my lap, and I stroked their hair and stroked their cheeks and whispered comforting words to them, that God was close, God was with us, God would take care of us forever, that we were in Heaven. Oh, please, I beg you, God, I prayed in my soul, don’t let them have the feeling and the consciousness which they still seem to possess. Oh, no, not such. I can’t bear it. I cannot. No. Please.
At dawn, finally, when the sun poured arrogantly through the door of the chapel, when the fires had died away, when the birds sang as if nothing had happened, the innocent little heads of Bartola and Matteo were lifeless and still, and very obviously dead, and their immortal souls were gone from them, if they had not flown at the moment when the sword had severed these heads from the bodies.
I found my mother murdered in the courtyard. My father, covered with wounds on his hands and arms, as if he had grabbed at the very swords that struck him, lay dead on the stairs of the tower.
The work all around had been swift. Throats cut, and only here and there the evidence, as with my father, of a great struggle.
Nothing was stolen. My aunts, two dead in the far corner of the chapel, and two others in the yard, wore still all their rings and necklets and circlets about their hair.
Not a jeweled button had been ripped away.
It was the same throughout the entire compound.
The horses were gone, the cattle had roamed into the woods, the fowl flown. I opened the little house full of my hunting falcons, took off their hoods and let them all go into the trees.
There was no one to help me bury the dead.
By noon, I had dragged my family, one by one, to the crypt and tumbled them unceremoniously down the steps, and then laid them all out, side by side in the room, as best I could.
It had been a backbreaking task. I was near to fainting as I composed the limbs of each person, and last of all my father.
I knew that I could not do it for everyone else here in our compound. It was simply impossible. Besides, whatever had come might well come again, as I had been left alive, and there was a hooded demon man who had witnessed it, a vicious hooded assassin who had slaughtered two children piteously.
And whatever was the nature of this angel of death, this exquisite Ursula, with her barely tinted white cheeks and her long neck and sloping shoulders, I didn’t know. She herself might come back to avenge the insult I had done her.
I had to leave the mountain.
That these creatures were not anywhere around now I felt instinctively, both in my heart and from the wholesomeness of the warm and loving sun, but also because I had witnessed their flight, heard their whistles to one another and heard the ominous words of the demon man to the woman, Ursula, that she must hurry.
No, these were things of the night.
So I had time to climb the highest tower and look at the country round.
I did. I confirmed that there was no one who could have seen the smoke of our few burning wooden floors and torched furniture. The nearest castle was a ruin, as I have said. The lower hamlets were long abandoned.
The nearest village of any size was a full day’s walk, and I had to be off if I meant to get to any kind of hiding place by nightfall.
A thousand thoughts tormented me. I knew too many things. I was a boy; I could not even pass for a man! I had wealth in the Florentine banks but it was a week’s ride from where I was! These were demons. Yet they had come into a church. Fra Diamonte had been struck dead.
Only one thought finally was possible for me.
Vendetta. I was going to get them. I was going to find them and get them. And if they couldn’t come out by the light of day, then it would be by that means that I would get them! I would do it. For Bartola, for Matteo, for my father and mother, for the humblest child who had been taken from my mountain.
And they had taken the children. Yes, that they had done. I confirmed it before I left, for it was slow to dawn on me with all my concerns, but they had. There was not a corpse of a child on the place, only those boys of my age had been killed, but anything younger had been stolen away.
For what! For what horrors! I was beside myself.
I might have stood in the tower window, with clenched fist, consumed with anger and the vow for vendetta, if a welcome sight hadn’t distracted me. Down in the closest valley, I saw three of my horses wandering about, aimlessly, as though wanting to be called home.
At least I should have one of my finest to ride, but I had to get moving. With a horse I might just reach a town by nightfall. I didn’t know the land to the north. It was mountain country, but I had heard of a fair-sized town not too far away. I had to get there, for refuge, to think and to consult with a priest who had a brain in his head and knew demons.
My last task was ignominious and revolting to me, but I did it. I gathered up all the wealth I could carry.
This meant that I retired first to my own room, as if this were an ordinary day, dressed myself in my best dark hunter’s green silk and velvet, put on my high boots and took up my gloves, and then taking the leather bags which I could affix to my horse’s saddle, I went down into the crypt and took from my parents and my aunts and uncles their very most treasured rings, necklaces and brooches, the buckles of gold and silver which had come from the Holy Land. God help me.
Then I filled my purse with all the gold ducats and florins I could find in my father’s coffers, as if I were a thief, a very thief of the dead it seemed to me, and hefting these heavy leather bags, I went to get my mount, saddle him and bridle him and start off, a man of rank, with his weaponry, and his mink-edged cape, and a Florentine cap of green velvet, off into the forest.