Two days after her flight came news of Fioravanti’s death in the grim fortress he defended, and Castrocaro was dispatched by the Duke to Cesena on a mission which might well have been entrusted to a less-important officer. It was ten days later when his immediate return was ordered, and, in view of the terms of that order, he went, upon reaching Urbino, all dust-laden as he was, into the Duke’s presence with the dispatches that he bore.
Valentinois sat in council at the time, and Della Volpe from the lines under San Leo was in attendance.
‘You are very opportunely returned,’ was his greeting of Messer Lorenzo, and he thrust aside, as of no consequence, the dispatches which the latter brought. ‘We are met here to consider this resistance of San Leo, which is being conducted now by Tolentino with all the firmness that was Fioravanti’s. We must make an end; and you, Messer Lorenzo, are the man to accomplish it.’
‘I?’ cried the young soldier.
‘Sit,’ Cesare bade him, and obediently Castrocaro took a chair at the table. ‘Listen. You are to understand that I am not commanding you to do this thing, for I command no valued officer of mine so greatly to imperil his life. I but show you what is our need — what might be done by one who has your knowledge and whose heart is stout enough to bid him take the risk which the thing entails.’
The condottiero nodded his understanding, his blue eyes set upon the Duke’s calm face.
‘You told us here,’ Cesare continued, ‘of a perilous way into San Leo which is known to few, and to yourself amongst those few. You said that if a man were to gain the plateau on the southern side of the rock’s summit he might, with a rope and a grappling hook, effect an entrance. Now, if a man were to do this at dead of night, choosing his time wisely so as to take the sentry unawares, stab that sentry, and thereafter reach the gates and loose the bars, the rest would be an easy task. Della Volpe’s troops would, meanwhile, have crept up by the bridlepath to await the signal, upon which they would pour forth against the unbarred gate, and so San Leo might be reduced at last with little loss of life.’
Messer Lorenzo considered for some moments, the Duke watching him.
‘It is shrewd,’ he said, approvingly. ‘It is shrewd and easy, and likely to succeed, provided the man who goes is one who knows the rock and the fortress itself.’
‘Provided that, of course,’ said Cesare; and he looked steadily at the young man.
Messer Lorenzo bore that look a moment with the self-possession that was natural to him. Then, translating its quiet significance:
‘I will go,’ he said quietly, ‘and, Heaven helping me, I will succeed.’
‘You have counted the cost of failure?’ said Cesare.
‘It needs no counting. It is plain enough. A rope and a beam from the castle wall, or a leap from the rock itself.’
‘Then, since who gambles should know not only what he may chance to lose, but also the stake he stands to win,’ said the Duke, ‘let me say that if you succeed I’ll give you the governorship of the fortress with a stipend of ten thousand ducats.’
Messer Lorenzo flushed in his agreeable surprise. His eyes sparkled and his tone rang with youth’s ready confidence in its own powers.
‘I will not fail,’ he promised. ‘When do I make the attempt?’
‘Tomorrow night, since you have resolved. See that you rest betwixt this and then to fit you for the fatigue of such an enterprise. And so, sirs, let us hope that we have found at last a solution to this riddle of San Leo.’
III
You see, I hope, what Messer Castrocaro did not yet see, nor for that matter ever saw — knowing nothing of what had happened on the night when the duke visited Messer Corvinus Trismegistus. You see in the Duke’s choice of him for this enterprise an instance of that fine discrimination with which Cesare picked his instruments.
Macchiavelli, who studied the Duke at close quarters, and who worshipped him as the very embodiment of all the virtues of princeship, was no doubt inspired by the duke’s unerring wisdom in the choice of ministers to devote to the subject a chapter of his ‘The Prince’.
‘The first conjecture made of a prince and of his intellectual capacity,’ he writes, ‘should be based upon a consideration of the men by whom he surrounds himself, and when these are faithful to him, and sufficient for his occasions, he is to be accounted a wise prince, for having chosen them sufficient and kept them faithful.’
Macchiavelli writes thus no more than Cesare might, himself, have written had he theorized upon princeship instead of practising it. It is, indeed upon Cesare Borgia’s practices — as Macchiavelli half admits in one place — that the Florentine founded his theories. So that it is hardly an over-statement to say that whilst Macchiavelli wrote ‘The Prince’, Cesare Borgia was its real author, since his were the conceptions and actions that Macchiavelli converted into precepts.
You see him here selecting for this task one who although the youngest among all his captains, was yet undoubtedly the most sufficient for his particular need. And observe the quality of his sufficiency. In a measure it was adventitious, depending upon Castrocaro’s chance acquaintance with that back way up the rock of San Leo. But in a still greater measure it was the result of Cesare’s clever manipulation of circumstances.
If that is not yet quite clear to you, it shall become abundantly so ere all is told. But do not fall into the error of supposing that anything that befell was the result of chance. From now onward all happens precisely as Cesare had designed. He had discovered certain forces, and he had harnessed them to his needs, setting them upon a course by him predetermined and marked out.
He realized that chance might disturb their career, and fling them out of that course, but he did not depend upon chance to bear them to the goal at which he aimed them.
On the afternoon of the following day, thoroughly rested and refreshed, Messer Lorenzo Castrocaro rode out of Urbino with a bodyguard of a half-dozen of his men-at-arms and took the road to Della Volpe’s camp under San Leo. He arrived there without mishap towards nightfall, and having supped with the commander of the beleaguerers in the latter’s tent, he thereafter completed his preparations. Towards the third hour of night he set out alone upon his perilous undertaking.
To lessen the risk of being perceived by any watcher in the castle, he had dressed himself entirely in black, taking the precaution to put on under his doublet a shirt of mail, which whilst being dagger-proof, was yet so finely wrought that your two cupped hands might contain it. He was armed with sword and dagger, and bandolier-wise about his body, was coiled a rope, to which he had attached a strong, double-pronged grappling hook very broad in the bend, all swathed in straw. This had been carefully and firmly adjusted upon his back, so that it should not hamper his movements.
With Della Volpe he had concerted that the latter, at the head of fifty men, should quietly approach the fortress by the bridlepath, and, having gained the summit, lie concealed until the gate should be opened by Castrocaro himself. Then they were instantly to spring forward, and so effect an entrance.
It was a fine clear night of summer, and a full moon rode in the heavens, rendering the landscape visible for miles. This was well for the earlier part of Messer Lorenzo’s climb; and before midnight, by when he hoped to reach the summit, that moon would have set, and darkness would lend him cover.
Alone, then, he set out, and made his way round to the southern side of the great precipitous hill on the crest of which, like the capital of a column, the bulk and towers of the fortress showed grey in the white moonlight.
At first the ascent was easy, and he was able to go forward swiftly; soon, however, the precipice grew more abrupt, the foothold became scantier, and in places failed almost entirely, so that his progress was retarded and for his life’s sake he was compelled to move with infinite caution, husbanding his strength against the still more strenuous labour that lay before him.
Hesitation or doubt he had none. It was a good ten years since last, in boyhood, he had scale
d those heights; but boyhood’s memories are tenacious, and he was as confident of his way as if he had trodden it but yesterday. Every little projection of that cliff, every fissure that afforded foothold, every gap to be overcome, he knew before he reached it.
At the end of an hour he had not accomplished more than a third of the ascent, and the most difficult part of it was yet to come. He sat down upon a grassy ledge, unusually spacious, and there he rested him awhile and recovered breath.
Thence he viewed the Emilian plain, revealed for miles in the moon’s white light, the glittering, silvery spread of sea away in the distance to the east, the glimmering snow-capped peaks of the Apennines to westward. Above him towered the grey cliff, abrupt and sheer as the very walls of the fortress that crowned its summit, a climb that well might have appalled the hardiest mountaineer, that might, indeed, have baffled even a goat. Surveying it with his calm blue eyes, Messer Lorenzo realized that the worst danger he had to face that night was the danger of this climb. By comparison, the rest — the scaling of the castle wall, the poniarding of a sentry or two, and the opening of the gate — were safe and simple matters. Here, however, a false step, a misgiving even, or a moment of giddiness, such as might well beset him, must plunge him down to instant death.
He rose, inhaled the fragrance of the summer night, breathed a short prayer to his patron saint, the Holy Lawrence, and pushed on. Clinging with hands and feet and knees to the face of the cliff, he edged along a narrow strip of rock, for some few yards, to another ledge; there he paused to breathe again, thankful that so much was accomplished.
Thereafter for a while the going was easier. A natural path, some three feet wide, wound upwards along the precipice’s face. At the end of this he was confronted by another gap, to be surmounted only by a leap.
Fearing lest his sword should trip him, he unbuckled his belt, and cast the weapon from him. He did so with regret, but constrained to it by the reflection that if he kept it he might never live to need it.
Then he took a deep breath, seized his courage in both hands, and jumped across the black unfathomable void at a stunted tree that thrust out from that sheer wall. With arms and legs he clutched like an ape at the frail plant, and had its hold given way under his weight, there would have been an end of him forthwith. It held, however, and clinging to it, he groped for foothold, found it, and went on.
This brought him to a narrow fissure in the cliff. Up this fissure he swarmed, supported by just the pressure of knees and forearms against the rock, and only at times finding a projection affording a safer grip for one or the other.
Up, straight up, he went for nearly twenty feet, until at last he reached the fissure’s summit; one of its walls permitted him to get astride it, and there he rested, bathed in sweat and winded by the stupendous exertions he had put forth. Seated thus, his breast close against the cliff, he looked sideways and down into the awful depths below him. He shuddered, and clung with his bruised hands to the rock, and it was some time before he could proceed upon the second half of his ascent, for by now he knew that he was a good midway.
At last he resumed his climb, and by similar means, and surmounting similar and constant perils, he pushed on and ever upwards.
One narrow escape he had. As he clung with both hands to that awful wall at a place where the foothold was but a few inches wide, a great brown body, with a shrieking whirr, dashed out of a crevice just above his head, and went cawing and circling in the void beyond. So startled was he that he almost loosed his hold, and a cold sweat broke out upon his roughened skin as he recovered and knew the thing for what it was. And later, when, an hour or so before midnight, the moon went down and left him in utter darkness, fear at last assailed his stout spirit, and for a time he did not dare to move. Presently, however, as he grew accustomed to the gloom, his eyes were able to pierce it to an extent that restored his courage. The night, after all, was clear and starlit, and at close quarters objects were just visible; yet immense care was necessary lest he should now commit the irreparable error of mistaking substance for shadow, or should misjudge his distances, as was so easy.
At long length, towards midnight, utterly spent, with bleeding hands and rent garments, he found himself on the roomy platform at the very foot of the castle’s southern wall; and not for all the wealth of the world would he have consented to return by the way he had so miraculously ascended — for miraculous did he now account it that he should have reached his goal in safety. He flung himself down, full length, there at the foot of the wall, to rest awhile before attempting the escalade. And what time he rested, he whispered a prayer of thankfulness for his preservation so far, for a devout soul was this Messer Lorenzo.
He looked up at the twinkling stars, out at the distant sheen of the Adriatic, down at the clustering hamlets in the plain, so far below him, from which so painfully he had climbed. Immediately above his head he could hear the steady measured tread of the sentry, approaching, passing, and receding again, as the man patrolled the embattled parapet. Thrice did the fellow pass that way before Castrocaro stirred; and when at length he rose, as the steps were fading in the distance for the third time, he felt a certain pity for the soldier whose spirit he must inevitably liberate from its earthly prison-house that night.
He uncoiled the rope from his body, stood back, and swung the grappling hook a moment, taking aim, then hurled it upwards. It soared above the wall, and fell beyond, between two merlons, then thudded softly against the masonry, the straw in which he had the foresight to swathe it muffling the sound of the metal.
He pulled gently at the rope, hoping that the hooks would fasten upon some projection in the stone or lodge within some crevice. But neither happened. The hooks came to the summit of the wall, and toppled back, falling at his feet. Again he repeated the operation, with a like result; but at the third attempt the hooks took hold. He swung his entire weight upon the rope to test the grip, and found that it held firmly.
But now the sentry’s return warned him that the moment was unpropitious. So he waited, intently listening, crouching at the wall’s foot, until the man had passed, and his footsteps were once more receding in the distance.
Then he began the ascent in sailor fashion, hauling himself up hand over hand, his feet against the masonry to lighten the labour of his arms. Thus he came swiftly to the top of the wall, and knelt there, between two merlons, peering down into the black courtyard. All was silent. Save for the tramp of the sentry, who was now turning the north-western angle of the ramparts, as Messer Lorenzo rightly judged, no sound disturbed the stillness of the place.
He loosed the hooks from the crevice in which they had fastened. He flung them wide, the rope with them, and sent them hurtling over the precipice, that there might be no evidence of the manner of his coming. Then he dropped softly down upon the parapet, exulting to realize that his journey was accomplished, and that he was within the fortress.
His mission was all but ended. The rest was easy. Within a few moments the Borgia troops would be pouring into San Leo, and the soldiers of the garrison, surprised in their beds, would make a very ready surrender. It no longer appeared even necessary to Messer Lorenzo to butcher that single sentry. If he but wisely chose his moment for the unbarring of the gates, the whole thing might be done without the man’s suspicions being aroused until it was too late. Indeed, it was the safer course; for, after all, if he came to grapple with the soldier, there was always the chance that the fellow might cry out and give the alarm before Castrocaro could dispatch him.
Resolved thus upon that score, he moved forward swiftly yet very cautiously, and gained a flight of stone steps that wound down into the inner bailie. This he descended, and so reached the quadrangle. Round this vast square he moved, keeping well within the shadows, until he came to the gateway opening upon a passage that ran past the guard-room on one side and the chapel on the other, into the outer bailie of the fortress.
In this gateway he crouched, and waited until the sentry, who was
coming round again, should have passed once more to the castles northern side. No window overlooking the courtyard showed a single light; the place was wrapped in slumber.
Messer Lorenzo waited calmly, his pulse quite regular. Should the door be locked, then he must return, deal with the sentry, and make his way to the main gates by the battlements. But it was unlikely that such would be the case.
High up, immediately before him upon the ramparts, he saw the sentry, passing slowly, pike on shoulder, a black shadow dimly outlined against the blue-black, star-flecked dome of sky. He watched him as he passed on and round, all unsuspicious, and so vanished once more. Then, very softly, Messer Lorenzo tried the latch of that big door. It yielded silently to his pressure and a black tunnel gaped before him. He entered it, and very softly closed the door again on the inside. Then he paused, reflecting that were he to go straight forward and pass out into the northern court he must risk detection by the sentry, who was now on the northern battlements. Therefore he must wait until the fellow should come round again.
Interminable seemed his wait this time, and once he fancied that he heard a man’s voice coming from the guard-room on his right. The sound momentarily quickened his pulses that had been steady hitherto. But hearing no more, he concluded that his senses, strained by so much dodging, waiting, and listening, had deceived him.
At last he caught the sound of the sentry’s step approaching again along the parapet. Satisfied that he had waited long enough he made shift to grope his way through the black darkness of that passage. And then, even as he turned, his heart almost stood still. Upon the chapel door, at the height of some three feet, there was a tiny oval splash of light, along the ground at the same spot a yellow gleam long and narrow as a sword-blade. Instantly he understood. The guard-room, whose windows looked upon the northern court, was still tenanted, and what he beheld was the light that shone through the keyhole and under the door.
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 437
