The Silver Devil

by Teresa Denys

  I saw the murderous glance Domenico gave him and was as startled as he. But perhaps the Duke of Savoy would not give his daughter in a landless match, and Domenico hated even so unintentional a reminder. He did not answer the suggestion, only shook his head curtly.

  A second flight of arrows rattled over the battlement, and suddenly Santi, who had been watching the fighting through the smoke, thrust his way through the ring of men.

  "My lord Duke, you'll have to get down the side of this tower, or you are trapped here. They're at the gates down below." The direct rough speech, the sudden seriousness of the man's brutish face, were queerly compelling. "I know where some traders keep horses stabled in caves in the gorge—they use 'em for transporting grain from the ships to the mills—I could go down and fetch them, and lead them to that clump of trees at the foot of the walls there. The damned Spanish are nearly all inside the city now, so we should have a clear run along the coast as far as Pinzi, then turn west and make for the mountains. That should give them a wide enough berth. All we need are some ropes to let us down the walls—they will have men set to pick off whoever sticks his nose out of either of the north gates."

  This succeeded as nothing else had in silencing the whole assembly. Riccardo's body lay forgotten on the flags as the nobles stared in astonishment at Santi. He took no notice of them; he was staring at Domenico straight in the eyes, his heavy body expectant, his expression anxious.

  "Your Grace, this man is mad!" One of the nobles sounded shrill with outrage. "Only a commoner would expect Your Grace to hang from ropes to serve as a target for those devils who are shooting at us."

  Ippolito touched Santi's arm. "He is not quite a fool, Giovanni. What about the archers?"

  "We'll have to risk them. Quick, Your Grace!"

  Domenico held his gaze a moment longer and then turned away. "Get the ropes" was all he said.

  The men needed no second bidding. On the word some of them were racing towards the stairs, shouting orders to the servants within to fetch ropes, all they could find, and join them securely on pain of their lives.

  Domenico went swiftly to the north side of the tower and stared down for a moment with an unfathomable expression on his face. Then he called to Santi.

  "If you go down the full face of this tower, you will be stuck like a prize hog. Hang the rope from the lower rampart there—it will save so many lengths, and you can climb in the shelter of this tower. Most of the arrows will glance off it, belike."

  Santi looked and nodded. "Right."

  He had forgotten who it was he spoke to; and for an instant Domenico's bleak face was alight with self-mockery for miss­ing his title at such a time. The look flickered and was gone like summer lightning, but I stood like a stock, forgetting where I was and what I pretended to be.

  "We shall follow you." His voice, still harsh, but steadier now, startled me from my dream. "Are there enough horses for us all?"

  "Some dozen or fourteen. Enough and to spare."

  "Your Grace, I shall stay here." The captain of the guard spoke gruffly. "Saving your pleasure, someone in authority should oversee this rout and try to make terms that will save the palace."

  "Yes." The duke's voice sounded strange. "It is not to be pillaged."

  I caught the despairing look that the captain shot at his fellows.

  "Then I am to surrender it without a fight, Your Grace?" "I care not how. Only preserve it until I can deliver the city again."

  The captain drew a sharp breath and after a visible struggle bowed his head and stepped back. I heard him mutter to his ensign, "Surrender under a pledge of safety," and then the two of them withdrew to make their own plans. I realized with a stab of something like jealousy that Sandro had been right; Domenico loved the Palazzo della Raffaelie as much as he loved anything.

  I wondered what had become of Sandro. I had not seen him since the previous day—I had not even noticed him at the banquet. But then I forgot about him, for the servants were dragging great coils of rope on to the lower rampart, and I hurried after the others as they left the tower to join Santi down below in its sheltering shadow.

  After one look at Santi, swinging perilously as he lowered himself down fathom after fathom of rope, I had to back away from the edge. It took a steadier sight than mine to discern the stone flagway fringing the gorge; to my horrified glance, the side of the palace dropped sheer into the river, and it looked as though the big man would have to go on and on until he touched the water. In fact, although I could not look long enough to see it, he had less than half the apparent height to descend.

  The bowmen cannot have seen him, for the flights of arrows were no more frequent than they had been before, and the shafts were aimed to skim the battlements, not to pierce the man clambering between earth and sky. The men crouched beside the parapet, sweating as they watched the loop of rope rubbing against the stone with the shifting of Santi's weight.

  A jubilant mutter went up; the rope was still, and there had been no jerk, no cry. Ippolito looked eagerly up at the duke. "He is down, Your Grace. Will you follow him?"

  Domenico shook his head. "Send these first." His gesture indicated the whole group; his glance barely flicked us. "I have other business first."

  "There is no time, Your Grace." A flash of exasperation crossed Ippolito's kindly face. "You stand in greater peril than any of us—for God's sake, come now!"

  The fair face hardened. "Do not command me, sirrah! I do not keep a secretary to order my actions."

  "I do not seek to do that, Your Grace, but for your own safety . . ." His pleading glance drew the help it begged, and the nobles crowded about Domenico, pleading and persuading. I could see his bright head above the tallest of those surround­ing him; he was looking from face to face, his lips curling back in that almost animal snarl, light flooding his eyes so that it hurt to look at them. Then suddenly his voice cut through the hubbub in a vicious scream.

  "I say I will not!"

  They fell back before the blaze of his wrath, their reasoning and sophistry useless in the face of his blind absoluteness. Then suddenly Ippolito stepped close to him like a swordsman step­ping inside his opponent's guard and said something in a low voice. I saw Domenico go still, and gradually the silver malignancy in his eyes was replaced by an arrested expression. He stared down at Ippolito, suspicious but intent.

  "Do you swear?" It was almost too soft to hear, but I caught the movement of his lips.

  Ippolito nodded, and a little of the tautness went out of Domenico.

  "Good Ippolito . . . I am persuaded, then. But do it, as you hope to live."

  Ippolito beamed and slapped the looped rope with a propri­etary hand. "Your conveyance awaits, Your Grace."

  Domenico turned, moving past the clustered courtiers as though they did not exist, and looked down at the rope with a frown. Then, almost before I saw him move, he was over the parapet in one almost liquid motion and scorching down the rope. Watching his bright head gleaming farther and farther away, I felt as though I were watching Lucifer's fall from heaven. I wanted to cry out, but mercifully my fear for him kept me dumb while my thoughts rushed on in a tumult of wordless prayers. The vision of his supple body lying broken at the foot of the gorge was so clear that I seemed to see it with my waking sight. Inwardly I was waiting for the shout that would tell me that those around me saw it in reality. It seemed like hours, like centuries, before Ippolito straightened up and beckoned to Andrea Regnovi.

  "Come on, sir. His Grace is down—now I must go and do his errand."

  The relief was so great that I swayed and stumbled against the parapet. No one heeded me; I leaned against the stonework, my cheek against the roughness of the rock, and let my senses slide. Flags and sky were mingling, gray amid the smoke, and then the whole world seemed to slip away from me.

  Someone shook me by the shoulder, and with a jar I was back in the real world, slumped against the parapet. I had just enough sense left to keep my head down.

  "Com
e on, boy," Ippolito's voice said above me, "we shall have to leave you behind if you do not pluck up. Go and tell my nephew Lorenzo that I bade him look after you."

  I muttered shamefaced thanks, but he had already hurried on, his feet clattering down the stone stairs—the business Domenico had for him must have been urgent.

  Boys and men were clustering around the rope as one by one they lowered themselves into that gray infinity. The arrows were beginning to fly around us in earnest as the Spanish archers noticed the activity and made the lower rampart their special target. I knew that I must do as the others did and go down the rope, but every time I made a move towards the edge, fear weighted my limbs like gyves, and I stood rooted to the spot. My throat was dry and my palms were sweating, and I felt as helpless as I had in prison, in the grip of a fever. If Domenico had been before me, commanding me, I would have obeyed him without thought; but he had gone, "without a thought for me, not caring if I was with him or no. The fear of a cold welcome was as sharp as the fear of falling.

  To climb that rope would be to trust my life to a few strands of twisted hemp, to dangle helplessly in the air, four times higher than the tallest ship. Somehow I was standing gripping the ledge with both hands, on an empty rampart: all the others had gone while I hung back. In panic I slid to my knees, crouching abjectly behind the bulwark out of the hail of arrows. For my life, I dared not move. I might have been there yet if someone had not come.

  Footsteps came running across the flagstones, and Ippolito crashed to his knees beside me. He fell so suddenly and so close that I could not see his face; his voice sounded quite unlike his own, breathless and strained.

  "Are all the rest gone?"

  I found my voice. "Yes, my lord."

  "Then we must go, too. Though how I shall fare when the duke knows I have not done his errand, I dare not think—these Spanish arrows are swansdown feathers to the weight of his displeasure. But come." His voice was steadying as he spoke. "We must do something to salve your terrors, Sir Coward. Up with you!"

  Scrambling to his feet, he lifted me to mine: then I felt the grip of his hands tighten in astonishment, and he shook me so urgently that my head was jolted back as he stared at me in disbelief.

  "Lady!" He sounded utterly amazed. "What are you doing here, and in those clothes?"

  "I could not stay in my chamber while there was danger." I could not say more, but he seemed to understand, because there was a look of compassion in his face.

  "And you have found more danger than you bargained for," he finished gently. "Courage, then, for it will soon be over, and after the first step the worst is past."

  For an instant I heard in his words the echo of another voice—Piero's—wooing me to the duke's bed with the very same words. The memory was so sharp that I flinched momentarily, then forced it out of my thoughts as Ippolito closed my hands around the rope.

  "Go on." He was smiling still as I hesitated, but he meai.t what he said. "The duke will be halfway to Diurno if we do not make haste."

  There was no time to demur that the duke might not want me; if Ippolito said I was to go, there was no tarrying. I scrambled over the parapet, hearing his soothing instructions in my ears.

  "All you have to do is to keep a firm grip on the rope and find what footholds you can on the way down. Only remember not to let yourself slide, or you will burn the skin off your hands—and keep close to the side of the tower."

  I was over the edge now, my feet dangling in the air, and the strain on my arms was unbearable. I glanced down to find a foothold, and at once I was transfixed. The ground seemed to spiral up to meet me, and it was only by luck that my hands retained their grip.

  "Madam, you must not look down!" Ippolito's voice came sharply, and I wrenched my eyes away from the spinning void and craned upwards. His face was suspended above me in an arc of smoke-filled sky; he was kneeling atop the parapet and leaning down to call. As I peered up, my feet found crevices in the crumbling wall almost instinctively, and the trouble in his face cleared. "Well done! Now go on!"

  I took a deep breath to call my thanks, but the hiss of arrows drowned my voice. When it died, Ippolito still knelt there, perhaps leaning a little lower than he had done but not trou­bling to avoid the flying shafts; it took a moment to realize that he was slowly sagging forward and moments more to connect it with the feathered shaft protruding from his forehead. One hand moved slightly, ineffectually, as though to touch it; then, with nightmare slowness, his body teetered and fell. At first it doubled together and toppled, like a sack of flour, but as it fell out into space it spread-eagled, turning and sailing through the air into infinity, into oblivion.

  Chapter Eight

  It was pain, simple physical pain, which shocked me back to my senses. Every muscle in my arms was screaming in protest, and with an involuntary whimper I began to lower myself down the rope, my feet finding cracks in the masonry. I dared not look down: And now I dared not look up, in case I saw the empty battlement which would confirm what I had seen to be reality. Instead I stared straight ahead with numb concentration, seeing the scars of the other climbers' feet, marks where the sun-dried lichen crusting the wall had been trodden to powder, long scrapes where a boot had skidded or a crumbling foothold had given way. I was not aware of anything but the next step, and the next—the giddy seconds when the rope swung away from the wall and I clung to it like an ape—the realization that at last there was ground, solid ground under my feet.

  My legs almost gave way as I let go the rope, and I tottered drunkenly, staring unbelievingly at the frowning face of the tower. It seemed impossible that I should have climbed so far. I could still hear the din of battle within the city, men howling and the crackle of fire, but now it seemed to come from a world long past. The rope was sticking to the palms of my hands, and I pulled free, roughly.

  Nc one was waiting in the thicket as I scrambled down from the fiagway to the cover that Santi had pointed out; all the rest must have gone on. I ran panting from the foot of the wall, starting at every shadow, forcing my buckling legs to obey me as I raced uphill and in among the trees, expecting a Spanish ambush at every turn. Coming so suddenly out of the sun's glare, I was almost struck blind, and then as my eyes accus­tomed themselves to the blue-dappled shadows I saw two horses tethered there—mine and Ippolito's.

  A lump rose in my throat, but I choked it down; time enough to mourn later. I stared at the horses, trying to assess them as though I were calmly choosing a mount in the duke's stable.

  There was little choice, I realized, for I could never mount the tall chestnut gelding unaided. But with luck and the helpful bole of a tree, t might manage to mount the piebald mare. I would have to ride astride, for no boy ever sat a horse sidesaddle.

  It took some coaxing to calm the mare enough for her to let me mount her; she was nervous, sensing the violence in the air and upset by her cavalier treatment, and when I gathered up the reins, she laid back her ears and began to sweat. I talked nonsense to her, trying to distract her attention from the fading sounds of battle, and when the sound of my voice had lulled her into uneasy stillness, I hauled myself into the saddle.

  The sudden weight made her shy so violently that I almost lost my balance; I clung feverishly with thigh and knee and hand, bouncing in my unaccustomed seat. Then she was off and bolting, and I was riding without stirrups, winding my hands in her mane as I sought to stay on her back. She plunged out of the thicket like a mad thing, tearing through the under­growth like a thing possessed; I had no hope of controlling her, no idea even of where she was taking me. The ground ahead seemed to zigzag crazily as we veered away from the frowning walls—if we had finished by crashing into the river I would not have been at all surprised.

  I was riding flattened to the horse's back, half-smothered by her flying mane, and that must have been what saved me from the bowmen across the gorge. The mare must have looked riderless as she labored up the slope to level ground. Then, as she gained the crest, her stride leveled
into a headlong gallop. The earth blurred under her hooves, and the smoke-filled air became a wind which filled my eyes and lungs and left me gasping.

  I loosened one hand and managed to grab the flying rein, certain with every moment that I should slip off and be crushed by the flying hooves, and pulled with all my strength. The mare's pace checked as her head swung around, then steadied again as she wrenched at the bit; she was terrified beyond all control, driven by fear of the turmoil of war behind her.

  My arm felt as though it were being wrenched from its socket, all the muscles I had strained in the climb now screaming protest as the mare's head jerked and jerked again, but I knew that if I let the rein slip I was lost. If I could turn her back again, I thought dazedly, back off the level ground to the slope below the lip of the gorge, the rough ground would slow her down. Between my thighs her muscles were bunched and tense, and she was resisting my attempts at control with every nerve.

  Still tugging desperately at the rein, I saw the ground dip and fall away ahead. The mare was turning at last, but now she was headed straight for the precipice-—there was no barrier but a couple of old upright timbers stuck meaninglessly on the verge. The animal did not hesitate. She veered and, with one final defiant toss of her head, went thundering down on the brink.

  I felt the lift and surge of her muscles as though she were leaping and wondered why she did not try to check her momentum; then I heard her hooves striking timber and the drumming as she galloped on. Wiser than I even in her panic, she had looked and seen the old bridge that spanned the gorge, the one that Sandro had shown me what seemed like years ago. A collection of rotten planks, he had called it, for those who do not mind risking their lives—and now it had saved mine. I could hear the creak of its timbers even through the drumming of hooves; small wonder that the Spanish had not even tried to cross by it.