"Stop your foul lies," I said before I could stop myself. "You think I'll do that? You 
murdered my family, you, you and yours, whatever you are!"
  Her head dipped, her hair ensnaring me. I fought vainly to get loose. It was out of the 
question. I couldn't budge her grip.
  All was blackness, and indescribable softness. I felt a sudden tiny pain in my throat, 
no more than the prick of pins, and my mind was suddenly flooded with the most tranquil 
happiness.
  It seemed I'd stumbled into a blowing meadow of flowers, quite far away from this place 
and from all woes, and she lay with me, fallen against silently crushed stems and 
uncomplaining irises, Ursula, with her undone ashen hair, and she smiled with the most 
engaging and demanding eyes, fervent, perhaps even brilliant, as if ours were a sudden 
and total infatuation of mind as well as body. On my chest she climbed, and though she 
rode me, looking down at me with exquisite smiling lips, she parted her legs gently for 
me to enter her.
  It seemed a delirious blending of elements, the wet contracting secretive pocket 
between her legs and this great abundance of silent eloquence pouring from her gaze as 
she looked lovingly down at me.
  Abruptly it stopped. I was dizzy. Her lips were against my neck. I tried with all my 
might to throw her off.
  "I will destroy you," I said. "I will. I vow it. If I have to chase you into the mouth 
of Hell," I whispered. I strained against her grasp so hard that my own flesh burned 
against hers. But she wouldn't relent. I tried to clear my mind. No, no dreams of 
sweetness, no. "Get away from me, witch."
  "Hush, be quiet," she said sorrowfully. "You are so young and so stubborn, and so 
brave. I was young like you. Oh, yes, and so determined and such a fearless paragon."
  "Don't talk your filth to me," I said.
  "Hush," she said again. "You'll wake the house. What good will that do?" How painful, 
earnest and enticing she sounded. Her voice itself could have seduced me from behind a 
curtain. "I cannot make you safe forever," she said, "or even for very long. Vittorio, 
go."
  She drew back so that I could see her sincere and large yielding eyes all the better. 
She was a masterpiece. And such beauty, the perfect simulacrum of the fiend I'd seen in 
the firelight of my chapel, needed no potions or spells to advance her cause. She was 
flawless and intimately magnificent.
  "Oh, yes," she confessed, her half-visible eyes searching my face, "and I do find such 
beauty in you it pulls on my heart," she said. "Unfairly, unjustly. How am I to suffer 
this as well as all else?"
  I struggled. I wouldn't answer. I wouldn't feed this enigmatic and infernal blaze.
  "Vittorio, get out of here," she said, lowering her voice ever more delicately and 
ominously. "You have a few nights, maybe not even that. If I come to you again, I may 
lead them to you. Vittorio. Don't tell anyone in Florence. They'll laugh at you." She was 
gone.
  The bed creaked and rocked. I was on my back, and my wrists ached from the pressure of 
her hands, and above me the window gaped on the gray featureless light, the wall beside 
the Inn rising up towards a sky I couldn't quite see from this helpless vantage point. I 
was alone in the room. She was nowhere.
  All of a sudden, I willed my limbs to action, but before I could so much as move, she 
appeared again, above in the window, visible from the waist to the top of her bowed head, 
peering down at me, and with her hands she tore loose the low embroidered border of her 
gown and bared her naked white breasts before me - tiny, rounded, very close together and 
with piquant nipples visible only in their darkness. With her right hand she scratched 
her left breast, just above the little nipple, made it bleed.
  "Witch!" I rose up to grab hold of her, to kill her, and instead felt her hand grasp my 
head, and there came the pressure of her left breast into my very mouth, irresistibly 
frail yet firm. Once again, all that was real melted and was swept away like so much idle 
smoke rising from a fire, and we were together in the meadow which belonged only to us, 
only to our diligent and indissoluble embraces. I sucked the milk from her, as if she was 
maiden and mother, virgin and queen, all the while I broke with my thrusts whatever 
flower remained inside of her to be torn open.
  I was let go. I fell. Helpless, unable even to raise a hand to keep her from flying, I 
fell down, weak and stupid onto the bed, my face wet and my limbs trembling.
  I couldn't sit up. I could do nothing. I saw in flashes our field of tender white 
irises and red irises, the loveliest flowers of Tuscany, the wild irises of our land, 
blowing in the greenest grass, and I saw her running away from me. Yet all this was 
transparent, half-tinted, and could not mask the tiny cell of a room as it had done 
before, only linger, like a veil drawn across my face, to torment me with its tickling 
weightless silkiness.
  "Spells!" I whispered. "My God, if you have ever committed me to guardian angels, will 
you spur them on now to cover me with their wings!" I sighed. "I need them."
  Finally, shakily and with dim vision, I sat up. I rubbed at my neck. Chills ran up and 
down my spine, and the backs of my arms. My body was still full of desire.
  I squeezed my eyes shut, refusing to think of her yet wanting anything, any source of 
stimulation, that would soothe this awful need.
  I lay back again, and was very still until this carnal madness had left me.
  I was a man again then, for not having been, at random, a man.
  I got up, ready for tears, and I took my candle down to the main room of the Inn, 
trying not to make a sound on the crooked winding stone stairs, and I got a light from a 
candle there on a hook on the wall, at the mouth of the passage, and I went back up, 
clinging to this comforting little light, shielding the shuddering flame with my cupped 
hand and praying still, and then I set down the candle.
  I climbed up and tried to see what I could from the window.
  Nothing, nothing but an impossible drop beneath me, a sloping wall up which a 
flesh-and-blood maiden could never have climbed, and higher, the mute, passive sky, in 
which the few stars had been covered by fleecy clouds as if not to acknowledge my prayers 
or my predicament. It seemed absolutely certain I was going to die.
  I was going to fall victim to these demons. She was right. How could I possibly exact 
the revenge they deserved? How in Hell could I do it! Yet I believed in my purpose 
utterly. I believed in my revenge as completely as I believed in her, this witch whom I 
had touched with my very own fingers, who had dared to kindle a wanton conflict in my 
soul, who had come with her comrades of the night to slaughter my family
  I couldn't overmaster the images of the night before, of her standing bewildered in the 
chapel door. I couldn't get the taste of her off my lips. All I had to do was think of 
her breasts, and my body would weaken as if she were feeding my desire from her nipple.
  Make this subside, I prayed. You cannot run. You cannot go off to Florence, you cannot 
live forever with nothing but the memory of the slaughter you saw, that is impossible, 
unthinkable. You cannot.
  I wept when I realized that I wouldn't be alive now if it had not been for her.
  It was she, the ashen-haired one I was cursing with every breath, who had stopped her 
hooded companion from killing me. It would have been a complete victory!
  A calm came over me. Well, if I was going to die, there was no choice, really. I would