The Flight of the Falcon

by Daphne Du Maurier

  “Keep out of the way,” said the second man, “that’s all. The horses are insured, that’s what matters to their owners.” And then he added, “It was tried out, so they told us, some five hundred years ago, and never since. They must breed madmen in your city. But if he breaks his neck it’s his affair, not ours. Here, look at this.”

  A van had now drawn up by the side of the piazza, and the man beside the driver jumped out and opened the rear doors. They let down a ramp and then, with great care, two men to the shaft and two to the wheels, they lowered a small vehicle painted red and gold. It was a perfect replica of a Roman chariot, and bore upon the front and above each wheel the insignia of the Malebranche, the Falcon with spread wings.

  So it was true. The crazy, fantastic feat attempted by Duke Claudio more than five centuries ago was to be repeated now. The pages I had quoted mockingly from the German history to Aldo last Sunday as Jehu’s feat, never for one moment thinking that any representation of the event would be other than a staged affair with perhaps two horses—and he himself on Wednesday had spoken of it simply as a cortège—would be translated into fact. Duke Claudio had driven eighteen horses from the northern to the southern hill. There were eighteen horses before me now. It was not possible. It could not be. I tried to remember what the history said. “He was set upon and pursued by almost the entire populace, after having trampled many of them to death beneath his horses’ hooves.”

  Now a second van drew into the piazza, smaller than the first, and from this they lowered harness, traces, collars, ornamented with studs bearing the Falcon’s head, and carried these things to the shelter of the trees where the horses stood, and the smell of the leather, polished and bittersweet like spice, mingled with the warm horse flesh and the scent of trees.

  The grooms in attendance upon the horses began to sort the harness and the other appurtenances, quietly, methodically, chatting among themselves. The very orderliness of the sight, the absence of fuss, as if what they did was just part of a regular morning routine, made it the more fantastic, and as the sun rose higher and the horror of what was to happen became more imminent, I felt a sort of terror invade my whole being. It started in my guts and seized my heart, at the same time paralyzing thought. Hearing was keener. Every sound was magnified. The church bells had sounded for first Mass at six, then once more at seven, then at eight. They seemed, to my imagination now in turmoil, to be the summons to a city’s doom, until I remembered that it was Passion week, and this the Friday dedicated to the Mother of God. When we were young Marta had escorted us to San Cipriano and we had laid bunches of wild flowers before the statuette, which, its painted prettiness veiled, symbolized the seven sorrows that pierced the heart. It seemed to me then, kneeling in bewilderment, that the Mother played a sorry part in her Son’s story, first goading Him to change the water into wine, and later standing with relatives on the crowd’s fringe, calling to Him in vain, receiving no answer. Perhaps this was the seventh sorrow that struck her down, which the priests in Ruffano’s churches were now commemorating. If so, they would do better to forget one woman’s pain and go out into the streets and prevent mass murder.

  Now a cordon was being formed around the piazza by uniformed police to keep away the traffic and the early crowd. They smiled and joked, good-natured for this day of Festival, and now and again called out laughing instructions to the grooms, busy with their dressing of the horses.

  The nightmare scene became more vivid, more appalling. None of them knew, none of them understood. I went up to one of the policemen and touched him on the shoulder.

  “Can’t it be stopped?” I said. “Can’t it be prevented? It’s not too late, even now.”

  He looked down at me, a big cheerful fellow, wiping the sweat from his brow. “If you’ve got a seat in a window along the route get to it,” he said. “There’ll be no one on the streets after nine, except performers.”

  He had not heard what I said. He was not interested. His job was to see that the piazza was kept clear for the horses and the chariot. He moved away. Panic enveloped me. I did not know where to go, what to do. This must be the fear that comes upon men before a battle when only discipline and training saves them. I had no such discipline, no such training. The desire of a child to flee, to hide himself, to stifle sight and sound, was paramount. I began to run towards the trees in the municipal gardens, thinking that if I flung myself head downward among the shrubs and grass the world would be blotted out. Then as I blundered forward into the splurge of color made up by the horses and the jingling harness, the gaily-painted chariot and the heedless grooms, I saw the Alfa-Romeo come up into the piazza. The driver must have seen me too, for the car braked suddenly and stopped, and I altered my useless panic course and ran towards it. The door opened, and Aldo sprang out and caught me as I fell.

  He jerked me to my feet and I clung to him, stammering, incoherent. “Don’t let it happen,” I heard myself saying. “Don’t let it happen, please, God no…”

  He hit me, and the oblivion I had sought for came. Pain brought darkness and release. When I opened my eyes, dizzy and sick, my head swimming, I found myself propped against a tree. Aldo was squatting by me, pouring steaming coffee from a thermos jug.

  “Drink this,” he said, “then eat.”

  He gave me the cup and I drank. Then he broke a roll in half and forced it into my mouth. Mechanically I did what I was told.

  “You disobeyed orders,” he said. “If a partisan did that we shot him instantly. That is, if we found him. Otherwise he was left to rot alone up in the hills.”

  The coffee warmed me. The dry bread tasted crisp and good. I snatched at a second roll, and then a third.

  “Orders disobeyed put other men to inconvenience,” he continued. “Time is wasted. Plans are disrupted. Go on, drink some more.”

  The preparations went on about us, the horses stamped, the harness jingled.

  “Cesare gave me your message,” he said. “When I got it I telephoned the café at Fano and asked them to fetch Marco to speak to me. When he told me you hadn’t turned up at the boat I guessed something of this sort might happen. But I didn’t think you would come here.”

  The panic had gone, whether because of the blow he had struck me, or because the food and drink he had given me filled my craving belly, I did not know.

  “Where else should I go?” I asked him.

  “To the police, possibly,” he shrugged, “thinking by accusing me to clear yourself. It wouldn’t have worked, you know. They would never have believed you.” He got up, and crossing to one of the grooms picked up a wash-leather, soaked it in a pail of water and came back. “Wash your face with this,” he said. “There’s blood on your mouth.”

  I cleaned myself after a fashion, then ate another roll and had a second drink of coffee.

  “I know why you killed Marta,” I said. “I came back, not with any idea of going to the police—they can arrest me if they want to—but to tell you that I understand.”

  I stood up, throwing the soaking leather back to him and brushing the earth off my clothes. I had forgotten until then how insignificant I must look, scruffy and unshaven in my black jeans with the jade green shirt, my hair with the new cut shaped like a convict. Aldo, dressed as I had seen him at the ducal palace on Wednesday night in doublet and hose, with a short cape slung from his shoulders, resplendent, elegant, looked part of the background, just as the horses did, parading now beneath Duke Carlo’s statue.

  “There are two baptismal entries in the San Cipriano records,” I said. “One for a son that died, the second for you. The double entries made no sense to me when I read them for the first time last week, nor your sponsor’s name, Luigi Speca, nor even the letter I gave you on Wednesday night. It was only yesterday on the beach at Fano that I guessed the truth. There was a nun there, with a little group of orphan boys. She told me the Superintendent of Ruffano foundling hospital, some forty years ago, was called Luigi Speca.”

  Aldo stared down at m
e, unsmiling. Then, abruptly, he turned on his heel and left me. He walked over to the horses and began giving orders to the grooms. I watched and waited. The long preliminaries of harnessing began. Each horse was fitted with its own decorated collar, scarlet with golden flanges, and the bridles they had been wearing up to now were changed to others, decorated as the collars were, bearing across the headstrap a medallion of a Falcon’s head. Two of the horses were fitted with small saddles close to their collars, fastened by broad bands of scarlet round their chests. The chariot was then drawn up to them and the pole attached to the saddles by golden chains. These yoked horses were the center pair, bearing the chariot between them, but then I saw that two more horses were being coupled to the center pair on either side, making six in all, their traces fastened to the chariot front. The twelve remaining horses in groups of four were harnessed in turn, some distance ahead of the chariot bearers and their fellows, their reins leading back to the arched chariot top. The chariot itself, a featherweight above the rubber mounted wheels, had a semicircular guard around the front and sides and a floor to stand upon. There was space upon the floor for two, no more, and the rear was open without rail or step. Chains, fastened to the front and side like aircraft safety-straps would bind the riders to the chariot sides. Once fastened and in motion the riders could not fall unless the chariot itself upturned, when the galloping horses would drag vehicle and passengers in their wake, and so to instant death.

  Now that the horses were harnessed, and the chariot in place, all movement ceased. The grooms, standing at the horses’ heads, were silent, as were the police cordoning off the piazza. Then Aldo moved from the chariot and came towards me. His face was pale, inscrutable, as it had been in the car on Wednesday night.

  “I sent you to Fano believing it best for both of us,” he said, “but since you are here you may as well play your part. The role of the Falcon is still yours. That is, if you have nerve enough to accept it.”

  The voice took me back to boyhood days. It was the old challenge, given with the same contemptuous grace, the same tacit suggestion of my own inferiority. Yet, strangely, the mocking tone no longer stung.

  “Who would have played the Falcon if I had sailed with Marco?” I asked.

  “I intended to drive alone,” he said. “There were no couriers five centuries ago. The Falcon was his own charioteer.”

  “Very well,” I said, “then today you can be mine.”

  My retort, as surprising to myself as it was to him, caught him momentarily off guard. He must have expected my boyhood plea to be spared participation in his adventures. Then he smiled.

  “You’ll find Duke Claudio’s robe in the car,” he said, “and the flaxen wig. Jacopo’s there. He’ll give them to you.”

  I was no longer conscious of feeling, or of fear. I was predestined to what must be. The decision had been taken. I walked over to the car, and Jacopo was standing there. I had not noticed him earlier when the car arrived, but he must have been beside Aldo all the time.

  “I’m going with him,” I said.

  “Yes, Signor Beo,” he replied.

  There was an expression in his eyes I had not seen before. Surprise, yes, but it was also respect, even admiration.

  “I’m to be Duke Claudio,” I said, “and Aldo the charioteer.”

  He did not comment, but opened the door of the car and handed out the robe. He helped me into it and tied the girdle round my waist. Then he gave me the wig, and I put it over my cropped hair and stared at myself in the mirror.

  There was a cut on my mouth where Aldo had struck me, and the blood had dried. The blonde wig framed my white, unshaven face, and my eyes confronted me, pale and staring, like the eyes of Claudio in the ducal palace picture. They were also the eyes of Lazarus in the church of San Cipriano.

  I turned to Jacopo. “How do I look?” I said.

  He considered me gravely, his head a little on one side. “You look just like your mother, Signora Donati,” he replied.

  He meant it kindly, but it was the final insult. The humiliation of the years returned. The foolish figure that pattered in bare feet back to the chariot and mounted beside Aldo was not Duke Claudio, not the Falcon it was supposed to represent, but a scarecrow effigy of the woman I had rejected and despised for twenty years.

  I stood motionless, allowing Aldo to bind me to the chariot with the safety chains. Then he shackled himself. The guide reins of the center horses, the guide reins of the leaders, were passed up to him by the attendants across the chariot front. The attendants released their hold upon the bridles as Aldo gathered the myriad reins in his two hands. The horses, feeling the strain, moved forward. The distant campanile by the Duomo sounded ten, echoed by all the churches of Ruffano. The flight of the Falcon had begun.

  23

  We circled the piazza first, proudly, sedately, processing like the triumphant entry of the Emperor Trajan into Rome. The twelve leaders wheeled to the right, obedient to the rein, and then the six in line abreast wheeled likewise, the turning movement like the slow unfolding of a gigantic fan, bearing our painted chariot behind them.

  The roads were empty, as the policeman had said they would be, but every window was flung open, black with spectators, and as we paraded slowly before them the gasp of astonishment, of wonder, became magnified into a single cry. The cry rose in the air from multitudinous throats, turning from wonder to acclaim, and then the applause began, with upraised hands sounding as they clapped like the fluttering of innumerable wings. The eighteen horses, indifferent to the thunder, circled and moved on, the burnished metal on their trappings glittering in the morning sun, the jingle of the harness making its own defiant music in opposition to the tumult from the crowds. There was no clatter from the horses’ hooves, for all were specially shod, and as they stepped the sound was muffled, dull, an oddly muted note, silent like our chariot wheels.

  Twice we circled the piazza, twice the eighteen horses and their charioteer wheeled and straightened in deference to the applauding crowd, and then the attendants approached the horses’ heads once more, leading them and us to the far end of the piazza where it was broadest. We turned again, and now we were directly facing the via del Duca Carlo leading downhill to the city. Adjustments were made to the guide reins and the traces, and to the girths of the center horses. The attendants examined every horse in turn, reporting to Aldo. It took about four minutes, and it seemed to me in those last brief moments, when Aldo gathered the reins and the attendants fell back on either side, that I had reached the peak of fear; nothing, not the final holocaust nor the ultimate crash, could exceed this second.

  I looked at Aldo. He was pale, as always, but now with a tense excitement I had never seen in him before, and the smile at the corner of his mouth was a grimace.

  I said to him, “Shall I pray?”

  “If it stops the panic in your guts I should,” he answered. “The only permissible prayer is a prayer for courage.”

  None of my childhood prayers was appropriate, neither the Pater Noster nor the Ave Maria. I thought of all the millions upon millions who had prayed to God and died—even Christ Himself upon the Cross.

  “It’s too late,” I told him. “I never had any courage anyway. I depend on yours.”

  He laughed, and called to his horses. They broke into a trot and then a gallop, gathering speed, the muffled hoofbeats thudding the hard ground.

  “Your German Commandant should have quoted Nietzsche to you,” he said. “He who no longer finds what is great in God will find it nowhere; he must either deny it or create it.”

  We came to the front of the piazza and the last of the level ground, and the crowds, seeing the galloping horses, broke once more into a tornado of applause. The cries from the piazza now behind us were echoed by the waiting masses at each window, and for a single moment, here on the summit of the northern hill, I saw the full compass of the city spread below, rooftops, churches, spires, and away yonder, crowning the southern slope, the Duomo and the duc
al palace. Then the via del Duca Carlo opened up beneath us like the descent to hell, and as the street narrowed and curved, and the leading horses wheeled to the guiding reins, never pausing in their headlong flight, their muffled hooves stabbing the cobbles with their muted thunderous note, the houses closed in upon us, leaning precariously from the hill like cardboard shapes with windows all agape, each window spilling out a face, a scream, a terrible tumultuous roar.

  There were no cordons here, no uniformed police, the street was ours alone, and when it narrowed before descending to the piazza della Vita in the city’s heart the six horses spanning the chariot like a fan behind the leaders reached to the via del Duca Carlo’s limits on either side. One check, one startled shy from any of the twelve leading horses, and he would bring his fellows down; they would collapse one upon the other in a sickening, plunging mass, ourselves and the chariot upturned and buried in the midst of them.

  The street curved and narrowed further yet, the flanking horses must surely brush the lintels of the doors, and as we plunged deeper towards the city’s heart I was not conscious of speed, nor of Aldo’s voice cheering and calling to the horses, nor of the lurching, swaying cradle in which I stood; but only of the massed and terrified faces at all the windows, of the mounting screams as our headlong pace increased, and in my nostrils the smell of horseflesh and under my clenched hands the burning chariot rail. The church of San Cipriano swam into my line of vision on the left, the steps thronged with students, yelling, shouting, and there were students massing on the converging streets, and down we thundered into the piazza della Vita, every window of every building alight, aflame, with hands gesticulating, mouths that shouted, screamed. The horses, finding level ground again, tore on, the leaders heading for the via Rossini on the far side of the piazza, and so up the ascending hill towards the ducal palace, spurred by their own impetus, maddened and excited by the crescendo of terror and applause.