As the heat of the day started to really rise, I went into the arbor of the Inn for the heavy noon meal and sat down by myself under the wisteria, which was blooming magnificently over the latticework. This place was on the same side of the town as the Dominican church, and it too had a lovely view of the town to the left and a view out over the mountains.
I closed my eyes, and putting my elbows on the table, I clasped my hands and I prayed. “God, tell me what to do. Show me what is to be done.” And then I was quiet in my heart, waiting, thinking.
What were my choices?
Take this tale to Florence? Who would believe it? Go to Cosimo himself and tell him this story? Much as I admired and trusted the Medici, I had to realize something. Nobody of my family was living but me. I alone could lay claim to our fortunes in the Medici bank. I didn’t think Cosimo would deny my signature or my face. He’d give over to me what was mine, whether I had kinsmen or not, but a story of demons? I’d wind up locked up somewhere in Florence!
And talk of the stake, of being burnt for a sorcerer, that was entirely possible. Not likely. But possible. It could happen very suddenly and spontaneously in a town like this, a mob gathering, denunciations by a local priest, people shouting and running to see what was up. This did now and then happen to people.
About this time, my meal was set out for me, a good meal with plenty of fresh fruit and well-cooked mutton and gravy, and as I started to dip my bread and eat, up came two men who asked to sit down with me and buy a cup of wine for me.
I realized one of them was a Franciscan, a very kindly-looking priest, poorer it seemed than the Dominicans, which was logical I suppose, and the other an elderly man with little twinkling eyes and long stiff white eyebrows, sticking up as if with glue, as if he were costumed as a cheerful elf to delight children.
“We saw you go in to the Dominicans,” said the Franciscan quietly and politely and smiling at me. “You didn’t look so happy when you came out.” He winked. “Why don’t you try us?” Then he laughed. It was no more than a good-natured joke and I knew it, about the rivalry of the two orders. “You’re a fine-looking young man; you come from Florence?” he asked.
“Yes, Father, traveling,” I said, “though where exactly, I don’t know. I’m stopped here for a while, I think.” I was talking with my mouth full, but I was too hungry to stop. “Sit down, please.” I started to rise, but they sat down.
I bought another pitcher of red wine for the table.
“Well, you couldn’t have found a finer place,” said the little old man, who seemed to have his wits about him, “that is why I am so happy that God sent my own son, back here, to serve in our church, so that he could live out his days by his family.”
“Ah, so you are father and son,” I said.
“Yes, and I never thought I’d live so long,” said the father, “to see such prosperity come to this town as has come. It’s miraculous.”
“It is, it is the blessing of God,” said the priest innocently and sincerely. “It’s a true wonder.”
“Oh, really, instruct me in this, how so?” I asked. I pushed the plate of fruit to them. But they said they had eaten.
“Well, in my time,” said the father, “you know we had more than our share of woes, or that’s how it seemed to me. But now? It’s utter bliss, this place. Nothing bad ever happens.”
“It’s true,” said the priest. “You know, I remember the lepers we had in the old days, who lived outside the walls. They are all gone now. And then there were always a few really bad youths, young men causing trouble, you know, the really bad sort. You had them in every town. But now? You couldn’t find one bad man in all of Santa Maddalana or in any of the villages around. It’s as if people have returned to God with their whole hearts.”
“Yes,” said the old elfin man, shaking his head, “and God has been merciful in so many other ways.”
I felt chills on my back again, as I had with Ursula, but it was not from pleasure.
“In what way is that, in particular?” I asked.
“Well, look around,” said the old man. “Have you seen any cripples in our streets? Do you see any half-wits? When I was a child, why, when you, my son, were a child”—he said to the priest—“there were always a few unfortunate souls, born ill formed, or without good brains, you know, and one had to look out for them. I can remember a time when there were always beggars at the gates. We have no beggars, haven’t had any for years.”
“Amazing,” I said.
“Yes, true,” said the priest thoughtfully. “Everyone here is in good health. That’s why the nuns left so long ago. Did you see the old hospital shut up? And the convent out of town, long abandoned. I think there are sheep in there now. The farmers use its old rooms.”
“No one ever takes sick?” I asked.
“Well, they do,” said the priest, taking a slow drink of his wine, as though he were a moderate man in this respect, “but they don’t suffer, you know. It’s not like the old days. It seems if a person is like to go, then he goes quickly.”
“Yes, true, thanks be to God,” said the elder.
“And the women,” said the priest, “they are lucky here in birth. They are not burdened with so many children. Oh, we have many whom God calls home to himself in the first few weeks—you know, it’s the curse of a mother—but in general, our families are blessedly small.” He looked to his father. “My poor mother,” he said, “she had twenty babies all told. Well, that never happens now, does it?”
The little old man stuck out his chest and smiled proudly. “Aye, twenty children I reared myself; well, many have gone their way, and I don’t even know what became of … but never mind. No, families are small here now.”
The priest looked slightly troubled. “My brothers, maybe someday God will grant me some knowledge of what became of them.”
“Oh, forget about them,” said the old man.
“Were they a spirited bunch, might I ask?” I said under my breath, peering at both of them and trying to make it seem quite natural.
“Bad,” muttered the priest, shaking his head. “But that’s our blessing, see, bad people leave us.”
“Is that so?” I asked.
The little old man scratched his pink scalp. His white hair was thin and long, sticking in all directions, rather like the hair of his eyebrows.
“You know, I was trying to remember,” he said, “what did happen to those poor cripple boys, you remember, the ones born with such miserable legs, they were brothers …”
“Oh, Tomasso and Felix,” said the priest.
“Yes.”
“They were taken off to Bologna to be cured. Same as Bettina’s boy, the one born without his hands, remember, poor little child.”
“Yes, yes, of course. We have several doctors.”
“Do you?” I said. “I wonder what they do,” I murmured. “What about the town council, the gonfalonier?” I asked. Gonfalonier was the name for the governor in Florence, the man who nominally, at least, ran things.
“We have a borsellino,” said the priest, “and we pick a new six or eight names out of it now and then, but nothing much ever happens here. There’s no quarreling. The merchants take care of the taxes. Everything runs smoothly.”
The little elfin man went into laughter. “Oh, we have no taxes!” he declared.
His son, the priest, looked at the old fellow as though this was not something that ought to be said, but then he himself merely looked puzzled. “Well, no, Papa,” he said, “it’s only that the taxes are … small.” He seemed perplexed.
“Well, then you are really blessed,” I said agreeably, trying on the surface to make light of this utterly implausible picture of things.
“And that terrible Oviso, remember him?” the priest suddenly said to his father and then to me. “Now that was a diseased fellow. He nearly killed his son. He was out of his mind, roared like a bull. There was a traveling doctor who came through, said they would cure him at Padua. Or was it Assisi?”
“I’m glad he never came back,” said the old man. “He used to drive the town crazy.”
I studied them both. Were they serious? Were they talking double-talk to me? I could see nothing cunning in either one of them, but a melancholy was coming over the priest.
“God does work in the strangest ways,” he said. “Oh, I know that’s not quite the proverb.”
“Don’t tempt the Almighty!” said his father, downing the dregs of his cup.
I quickly poured out the wine for both of them.
“The little mute fellow,” said a voice.
I looked up. It was the innkeeper, with his hands on his hips, his apron stretching over his potbelly, a tray in his hand. “The nuns took him with them, didn’t they?”
“Came back for him, I think,” said the priest. He was now fully preoccupied. Troubled, I would say.
The innkeeper took up my empty plate.
“The worst scare was the plague,” he whispered in my ear. “Oh, it’s gone now, believe you me, or I wouldn’t utter the word. There’s no word that will empty a town any faster.”
“No, all those families, gone, just like that,” said the old man, “thanks to our doctors, and the visiting monks. All taken to the hospital in Florence.”
“Plague victims? Taken to Florence?” I asked, in obvious disbelief. “I wonder who was minding the city gates, and which gate it was by which they were admitted.”
The Franciscan stared at me fixedly for a moment, as if something had disturbed him violently and deeply.
The innkeeper gave the priest’s shoulder a squeeze. “These are happy times,” he said. “I miss the processions to the monastery—it’s gone too, of course—but we have never been better.”
I let my eyes shift quite deliberately from the innkeeper to the priest and found that the priest was gazing directly at me. There seemed a tremor to the edge of his mouth. He was sloppily shaven and had a loose jaw, and his deeply creased face looked sad suddenly.
The very old man chimed in that there had been a whole family down with the plague out in the country not very long ago, but they had been taken to Lucca.
“It was the generosity of … who was it, my son, I don’t …”
“Oh, what does it matter?” said the innkeeper. “Signore,” he said to me, “some more wine.”
“For my guests,” I gestured. “I have to be off. Restless limbs,” I said. “I must see what books are for sale.”
“This is a fine place for you to stay,” said the priest with sudden conviction, his voice soft as he continued to gaze at me, his eyebrows knitted. “A fine place indeed, and we could use another scholar. But—.”
“Well, I’m rather young myself,” I said. I made ready to rise, putting one leg over the bench. “There are no young men here of my age?”
“Well, they go off, you see,” said the elfin one. “There are a few, but they are busy at the trades of their fathers. No, the rapscallions don’t hang around here. No, young man, they do not!”
The priest studied me as if he didn’t hear his father’s voice.
“Yes, and you’re a learned young man,” said the priest, but he was clearly troubled. “I can see that, and hear it in your voice, and all about you is thoughtful and clever—.” He broke off. “Well, I guess you’ll be on your way very soon, won’t you?”
“You think I should?” I asked. “Or stay, which is it?” I made my manner mild, not unkind.
He gave me a half-smile. “I don’t know,” he said. Then he looked dour again and almost tragic. “God be with you,” he whispered.
I leant towards him. The innkeeper, seeing this confidential manner, turned away and busied himself somewhere else. The old elfin one was talking to his cup.
“What is it, Father?” I asked in a whisper. “Is the town too well-off, is that it?”
“Go on your way, son,” he said almost wistfully. “I wish I could. But I’m bound by my vow of obedience and by the fact that this is my home, and here sits my father, and all the others have vanished into the wide world.” He became suddenly hard. “Or so it seems,” he said. And then, “If I were you, I wouldn’t stay here.”
I nodded.
“You look strange, son,” he said to me in the same whisper. Our heads were right together. “You stand out too much. You’re pretty and encased in velvet, and it’s your age; you’re not really a child, you know.”
“Yes, I see, not very many young men in the town at all, not the sort who question things. Just the old and the complacent and those who accept and who don’t see the tapestry for the one small monkey embroidered in the corner.”
He didn’t answer this overzealous streak of rhetoric, and I was sorry I’d said it. In that little lapse perhaps my anger and my pain had flashed through. Disgusting! I was angry with myself.
He bit his lip, anxious for me, or for himself, or for both of us.
“Why did you come here?” he asked sincerely, almost protectively. “By which way did you come? They said you came in the night. Don’t leave by night.” His voice had become such a whisper I could scarcely hear him.
“You don’t need to worry about me, Father,” I said. “Pray for me,” I said. “That’s all.”
I saw in him a species of fear as real as that which I had seen in the young priest, but it was even more innocent, for all his age, and all his wrinkles, and the wetness of his lips with the wine. He looked fatigued by that which he couldn’t comprehend.
I stepped free of the bench and was on my way when he grasped my hand. I bent my ear to his lips.
“My boy,” he said, “there’s something … something …”
“I know, Father,” I said. I patted his hand.
“No, you don’t. Listen. When you leave, take the main road south, even if it’s out of your way. Don’t go north; don’t take the narrow road north.”
“Why not?” I demanded.
Doubting, silent, utterly stricken, he let go of me.
“Why not?” I said in his ear.
He was no longer facing me. “Bandits,” he said. “Toll bandits who control the road; they’ll make you pay to go through. Go south.” He turned sharply away from me and began to speak to his father in a soft gentle scolding manner as if I was already on my way.
I left.
I was stunned as I set foot in the hollow street. “Toll bandits?”
Many shops were shut now, as was definitely the custom after the heavy meal, but others were not.
My sword weighed a ton on my hip, and I felt feverish from the wine and dizzy from all these people had revealed to me.
So, I thought, my face burning, we have a town here with no young men, no cripples, no half-wits, no diseased people and no unwanted children! And on the road north we have dangerous bandits.
I moved downhill, walking faster and faster, and went out the wide-open gates and into the open country. The breeze was at once magnificent and welcome.
All around me lay rich, well-tended fields, vineyards, patches of orchard and farmhouses—lush and fertile vistas which I couldn’t see when I had come in by darkness. As for the road north, I could see nothing of it due to the immense size of the town, whose uppermost fortifications were northward.
I could see, below on a ridge, what must have been the ruins of the convent and, way down the mountain and far off to the west, what might have been the monastery.
I made my way to two farms within the hour, having a cup of cool water with both farmers.
It was all the same, talk of a paradise here, free of miscreants and the horror of executions, absolutely the most peaceful place in the world, and only well-formed children everywhere.
It had been years since any bandits had dared to linger in the woods. Of course you never knew who might pass through, but the town was strong and kept the peace.
“Oh, not even on the north road?” I asked.
Neither farmer knew anything about any north road.
When I asked what became of the unhealthy, the lame, the injured, it was the same. Some doctor or other, or priest, or order of friars or nuns, had taken them off to a university or city. The farmers sincerely couldn’t remember.
I came back into the town well before twilight. I went poking around, in and out of every shop, in a near systematic manner, eyeing everyone as closely as I might without attracting undue attention.
Of course I couldn’t hope to cover even one street of the place, but I was determined to discover what I could.
In the booksellers, I went through the old Ars Grammatica and Ars Minor, and the big beautiful Bibles that were for sale, which I could only see by asking that they be taken out of the cabinets.
“How do I go north from here?” I asked the bored man who leaned on his elbow and looked at me sleepily.
“North, nobody goes north,” he said, and yawned in my face. He wore fine clothes without a sign of mending, and good new shoes of well-worked leather. “Look, I have much finer books than that,” he said.
I pretended interest, then explained politely that all were more or less what I had and did not need, but thank you.
I went into a tavern where men were busy at dice and shouting over the game, lustily, as though they had nothing better to do. And then through the bakers’ district, where the bread smelled wondrously delicious, even to me.
I had never felt so utterly alone in my life, as I walked among these people listening to their pleasant talk and hearing the same tale of safety and blessings over and over again.
It froze my blood to think of nightfall. And what was this mystery of the road north? Nobody, nobody but the priest, even raised an eyebrow at the mention of that point of the compass.
About an hour before dark, I happened into one shop where the proprietor, a dealer in silks and lace from Venice and Florence, was not so patient with my idle presence, as others had been, in spite of the fact that I obviously had money.
“Why are you asking so many questions?” she said to me. She seemed tired and worn out. “You think it’s easy to take care of a sick child? Look in there.”
I stared at her as if she’d lost her mind. But then it dawned on me, clear and cold. I knew exactly what she meant. I poked my head through a curtained doorway and saw a child, feverish and sick, slumbering in a dirty narrow bed.
“You think it’s easy? Year after year she doesn’t get better,” said the woman.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But what’s to be done?”
The woman tore out her stitches and put down her needle. She seemed past all patience. “What’s to be done? You mean to tell me you don’t know!” she whispered. “You, a clever man like you!” She bit into her lip. “But my husband says, No, not yet, and so we go on with it.”
She went back to her work, muttering to herself, and I, horrified and struggling to keep a straight face, made my way on. I went into a couple more shops. Nothing special happened. Then in the third on my way, I found an old man very out of his wits and his two daughters both trying to keep him from tearing his clothes off.
“Here, let me help you,” I said at once.
We got him down in the chair, got his shirt over his head, and finally he stopped making incoherent noises. He was very wizened and drooling.
“Oh, thank God, this won’t go on long,” said one of the daughters, wiping her brow. “It’s a mercy.”
“Why won’t it go on long?” I asked.
She glanced up at me, and away, and then back again. “Oh, you’re a stranger here, Signore, forgive me, you are so young. I only saw a boy when I looked at you. I mean God will be merciful. He’s very old.”
“Hmmm, I see,” I said.
She looked at me with cold cunning eyes, as if they were made of metal.
I bowed and went out. The old man had started to take off his shirt again, and the other sister, who had been silent all the time, slapped him.
I winced at it, and kept walking. I meant to see as much as I could right now.
Passing through rather peaceful little tailors’ shops I came at last to the district of the porcelain dealers, where two men were having an argument about a fancy birthing tray.
Now, birthing trays, once used in practicality to receive the infant as it came from the womb, had become by my time fancy gifts given after the child was born. They were large platters painted with lovely domestic designs, and this shop had an impressive display of them.
I heard the argument before I was seen.
One man said to buy the damned tray, while the other said the infant wouldn’t even live and the gift was premature, and a third man said the woman would welcome the beautiful gorgeously painted birthing tray anyway.
They stopped when I entered the shop proper to look at all the imported wares, but then when I turned my back, one of the men uttered under his breath, “If she has a brain in her head, she’ll do it.”
I was struck by the words, so struck that I turned at once to snatch a handsome plate from the shelf and pretend to be much impressed with it. “So lovely,” I said, as if I hadn’t heard them.
The merchant got up and started to extoll the contents on display. The others melted into the gathering evening outside. I stared at the man.
“Is the child sick?” I asked in the smallest most childish voice that I myself could muster.
“Oh, no, well, I don’t think so, but you know how it is,” said the man. “The child’s smallish.”
“Weak,” I volunteered.
In a very clumsy way, he said, “Yes, weak.” His smile was artificial, but he thought himself quite successful.
Then both of us turned to fussing over the wares. I bought a tiny porcelain cup, very beautifully painted, which he claimed to have bought from a Venetian.
I knew damned good and well I should leave without a word, but I couldn’t stop myself from asking him as I paid, “Do you think the poor smallish weak child will live?”
He laughed a rather deep coarse laugh as he took my money. “No,” he said, and then he glanced at me as though he’d been in his thoughts. “Don’t worry about it, Signore,” he said with a little smile. “Have you come to live here?”
“No, Sir, only passing through, going north,” I said.
“North?” he asked, a little startled but sarcastic. He shut up the cashbox and turned the key. Then shaking his head as he put the box into the cabinet and closed the doors, he said, “North, eh? Well, good luck to you, my boy.” He gave a sour chuckle. “That’s an ancient road. You better ride as fast as you can from sunup.”
“Thank you, Sir,” I said.
Night was coming on.
I hurried into an alleyway and stood there, against the wall, catching my breath as though someone were chasing me. I let the little cup fall and it shattered loudly, the noise echoing up the towering buildings.
I was half out of my wits.
But instantly, and fully aware of my situation, and convinced of the horrors I had discovered, I made an inflexible decision.
I wasn’t safe in the Inn, so what did this matter? I was going to do it my way and see for myself.
This is what I did.
Without going back to the Inn, without ever officially leaving my room in the Inn, I turned uphill when the shadows were thick enough to cover me, and I climbed the narrowing street towards the old ruined castle.
Now all day I had been looking at this imposing collection of rock and decay, and could see that it was indeed utterly ruined and empty of all save the birds of the air, except, as I have said, for the lower floors, which supposedly held offices.
But the castle had two standing towers remaining to it, one that faced over the town, and another, much fallen away, beyond and remote on the edge of a cliff, as I had seen from the lower farmland.
Well, I made for the tower that overlooked the town.
The government offices were shut up of course already, and the curfew soldiers would soon be out, and there was noise from only a couple of taverns that obviously stayed open no matter what the law was.
The piazza before the castle was empty, and because the three streets of the town took many a curve in their way downhill, I could see almost nothing now but a few dim torches.
The sky, however, was wondrously bright, clear of all but the most rounded and discreetly shaped clouds, very visible against the deeper blue of the night, and the stars seemed exquisitely numerous.
I found old winding stairs, too narrow almost for a human being, that curved around the useful part of the old citadel and led up to the first platform of stone, before an entrance to the tower.
Of course this architecture was no stranger to me whatsoever. The stones were of a rougher texture than those of my old home, and somewhat darker, but the tower was broad and square and timelessly solid.
I knew that the place was ancient enough that I would find stone stairways leading quite high, and I did, and soon came to the end of my trek in a high room which gave me a view of the entire town stretched out before me.
There were higher chambers, but they had been accessible in centuries past by wooden ladders that could be pulled up, to defeat an enemy and isolate him below, and I couldn’t get to them. I could hear the birds up there, disturbed by my presence. And I could hear the breeze moving faintly.
However, this was fine, this height.
I had a view all around from the four narrow windows of this place, looking in all directions.
And most especially, and important to me, I could see the town itself, directly below me, shaped like a great eye—an oval with tapered ends—with random torches burning here and there, and an occasional dimly lighted window, and I could see a lantern moving slowly as someone walked in a leisurely pace down one of the thoroughfares.
No sooner had I seen this moving lantern than it went out. It seemed the streets were utterly deserted.
Then the windows too went dark, and very shortly there were not four torches that I could see anywhere.
This darkness had a calming effect on me. The open country sank into a deep dark tinge of blue beneath the pearly heavens, and I could see the forests encroaching on the tilled land, creeping higher here and there, as the hills folded over one another or sank steeply into valleys of pure blackness.
I could hear the total emptiness of the tower.
Nothing stirred now, not even the birds. I was quite alone. I could have heard the slightest footfall on the stairs down below. No one knew I was here. All slept.
I was safe here. And I could keep a vigil.
I was too full of misery to be frightened, and frankly I was prepared to take my stand against Ursula in this spot, preferred it, in fact, to the confines of the Inn, and I feared nothing as I said my prayers and laid my hand on my sword as usual.
What did I expect to see in this sleeping town? Anything that happened in it.
Now, what did I think that was to be? I couldn’t have told anyone. But as I circled the room, as I glanced again and again down at the few scattered lights below and the hulk of the descending ramparts beneath the glowing summer sky, the place seemed loathsome, full of deceit, full of witchcraft, full of payment to the Devil.
“You think I don’t know where your unwanted babies are taken?” I muttered in a rage. “You think that people who are down with the plague are welcomed right through the open gates of your neighboring cities?”
I was startled by the echoes of my own murmurings off the cold walls.
“But what do you do with them, Ursula? What would you have done with my brother and sister?”
My ruminations were madness perhaps, or might have seemed so to some. But I learnt this. Revenge takes one’s mind from the pain. Revenge is a lure, a mighty molten lure, even if it is hopeless.
One blow from this sword and I can strike off her head, I thought, and heave it out that window, and then what will she be but a demon stripped of all worldly power?
Now and then I half-drew my sword, then put it back. I took out my longest dagger and slapped the palm of my left hand with its blade. I never stopped walking.
Suddenly, as I made one of my boring circumlocutions, I happened to spy far away, on a distant mountain, in which direction I really didn’t know—but not the direction by which I had come—a great quantity of light playing behind the mesh of the sylvan darkness.
At first I thought this might be a fire, there was so much light, but as I narrowed my eyes and focused my mind, I saw that this was out of the question.
There was no riotous glare on the few visible clouds above, and the illumination, for all the breadth of it, was contained as if it emanated from a vast congregation gathered together with a fantastical quantity of candles. How steady yet pulsing was this orgy of fierce light!
I felt a chill in my bones as I looked at it. It was a dwelling! I leant over the window edge. I could see its complex and sprawling outline! It stood out from all the land, this one luxuriantly lighted castle, all by itself, and obviously visible from one entire side of this town, this spectacle of forest-shrouded house in which some celebration appeared to require that every torch and taper be lighted, that every window, battlement and coping be hung with lanterns.
North, yes, north, for the town dropped straight off behind me, and this castle lay north, and it was that direction of which I’d been warned, and who in this town could not have known of this place, yet there had not been one single solitary mention save for the whisper of the terrified Franciscan in the Inn at my table.
But what was I looking at? What could I see? Thick woods, yes; it was very high but surrounded by close and concealing woods, through which its light again and again palpitated like a great menace, but what was that coming from it, what was that wild, half-visible movement in the darkness, over the slopes that fell away from the mysterious promontory?
Were there things moving in the night? Moving from that very distant castle right towards this village? Amorphous black things, as if they were great soft shapeless birds following the alignment of the land but free of its gravity. Were they coming towards me? Had I been charmed?
No, I saw this. Or did I?
There were dozens of them!
They were coming closer and closer.
They were tiny shapes, not large at all, the largeness having been a delusion caused by the fact that they traveled in packs, these things, and now, as they came near to the town, the packs broke apart and I saw them springing up to the very walls beyond me on either side like so many giant moths.
I turned around and ran to the window.
They had descended in a swarm upon the town! I could see them dip down and vanish in the blackness. Below me on the piazza, there appeared two black shapes, men in streaming capes, who ran or rather leapt into the mouths of the streets, issuing from their lips an audible and audacious laughter.
I heard crying in the night, I heard sobs.
I heard a thin wail, and a muffled groan.
No lights appeared in the town.
Then out of the darkness, these evil things appeared again, on the tops of the walls, running right on the edge and then leaping free.
“God, I see you! Curse you!” I whispered.
There was a sudden loud noise in my ears, a great brush of soft cloth against me, and then the figure of a man reared up before my face.
“Do you see us, my boy?” It was a young man’s voice, hearty, full of merriment. “My very curious little boy?”
He was too close for my sword. I could see nothing but rising garments.
With my elbow and shoulder and all my strength, I went for his groin.
His laughter filled the tower.
“Ah, but that does not hurt me, child, and if you’re so curious, well then, we’ll take you too with us to come and see what you long to see.”
He caught me in a suffocating swaddle of fabric. And suddenly I felt myself lifted off the floor, encased in a sack, and I knew we had left the tower!
I was head down, sick to nausea. It seemed he flew, carrying me on his back, and his laughter was now half blown away by the wind, and I could not free my arms. I could feel my sword, but couldn’t reach the handle.
Desperately I felt for my dagger, not the one which I must have dropped when I had been caught by him, but the other in my boot, and then having that, I twisted and turned towards the rough back on which I rode, bouncing and growling, and plunged the dagger through the cloth over and over again.
He gave a wild scream. I stabbed him again.
My whole body, inside the sack, was whipped up into the air, away from him.
“You little monster,” he cried. “You wretched impudent child.”
We descended sharply, and then I felt myself hit the ground, the rocky grassy ground, and I rolled over, tearing at the fabric of the blinding sack with my knife.
“You little bastard,” he cursed.
“Are you bleeding, you filthy devil?” I called out. “Are you?” I ripped at the sack, lost in it, rolling over and over, then feeling the wet grass with my naked hand.
I saw the stars.
Then the cloth was torn free of my struggling limbs.