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 pitilessly.
  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.
  
  
  4
  IN WHICH I COME UPON FURTHER MYSTERIES, SUFFER SEDUCTION AND CONDEMN MY SOUL TO BITTER 
VALOR
  
  NOW, I was too full of rancor to be thinking straight, as I've already described, and 
surely you will understand this. But it wasn't smart of me to go riding through the woods 
of Tuscany dressed so richly, and by myself, because any woods in Italy was bound to have 
its bandits.
  On the other hand, playing the poor scholar wouldn't have been the best choice either, 
it seemed to me.
  I can't claim to have made a real decision. The desire for vengeance upon the demons 
that had destroyed us was the only central passion I could abide.