Claws of the Tigress, The Firebrand & The Pearls of Bonfadini (3 Historical Adventures in One Edition). Max Brand
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ran on into a bedroom with embroidered hangings over the walls, the windows, the doors. The bed itself was raised on a dais above a floor of wood mosaic; a heavily carved canopy rose above but from it some of the curtains had been torn away. These and the covers of the bed streamed out on the floor as though someone, desperately struggling, had fallen from the bed not long before.
But the dust was deep, everywhere.
A strange, oppressive odor made the air thick to breathe. And a chill of dread passed suddenly through the body of Tizzo, and through his spirit.
He no longer ran, but crossed that room slowly. The doorway on the far side, yawning like a dangerous mouth upon the unknown that lay beyond, made him draw his sword before he would cross the threshold.
He listened for the sound of pursuit, but there was no beating of footfalls on the stairs. He heard no more than a dim whisper through the room, and this came, he saw, from the wind which he had brought with him as he entered and which still made the rich hangings of the apartment sway slightly.
When he had passed the door into the next room he found himself stepping on the skins of leopards. A service of massive silver, now dim under tarnish and dust, stood on a sideboard; and on a central table a huge jewel box lay overturned. Red and green and crystal-bright, the jewels streamed across the table and lay scattered on the floor. Here in the palm of one hand there was wealth to make an entire family rich forever. But the beauty frightened Tizzo more than it excited him.
He remembered what the man had called to him in the street—that within the house was death itself.
He saw a Madonna in a niche at the end of the room, a beautiful carved image, but there was no taper burning beneath it. And then, compelled by a sudden cold horror in his blood, he turned and thought that he was looking into the eyes of death itself.
CHAPTER 9
It seemed to Tizzo an apparition which had not been in the chamber before; suddenly it appeared as a young man who sat in the depths of a chair near a casement. He was dressed very richly. About his neck shone a golden chain that supported a great jewel. But his hose lay wrinkled over his wasted legs; his neck was shrunk to hardly more than the bigness of a man’s wrist; and his face was a death’s-head in which the eyes were deep caverns of unlighted shadow. Like a death’s-head he grinned, or seemed to grin, at Tizzo. And to crown the horror some great red patches appeared across his forehead and down one side of the face.
Then realization came over Tizzo, and blew through him like the empty howling of a winter wind.
“The plague!” he groaned.
He looked back.
He had crossed many thresholds since he turned in from the street and each one had, in fact, brought him farther into the maw of death.
Far better to have turned and faced the riders in the wet street, dying obscurely but with sweet air in his nostrils. Now he was confined where every breath might be planting the horrible infection deep in his lungs.
He gripped his head with both hands, and he set his teeth to keep back a yell of fear.
“Welcome,” said a husky voice hardly louder than the stillness of thought. “The last of the Bardis of Perugia gives a kind welcome to the last of his guests!”
Such a sickness of spirit troubled Tizzo that he gripped the carved back of a chair and supported himself. He wanted to sink on his knees and implore Heaven for succor.
“I should rise to welcome you,” said young Bardi, “but I lack the strength to do anything except crawl to the bed where my father and my grandfather have died before me. I should offer you wine, but it is consumed. I should offer you food, but there is nothing in the house—except the rats and even those must be a little thin, by this time. But if you can catch one of them, you are welcome.”
Tizzo passed the tip of his tongue across his dry lips. He wanted to turn and flee but a powerful instinct made him walk straight up to the specter in the chair.
“If you come near my breathing, you are probably a dead man,” said the young Bardi.
“If I am to die, I shall die,” said Tizzo. “If I am to live, all the plagues in the world will not touch me.”
“You talk like a brave man, but that is because you are cornered,” declared Bardi. “But you will have this comfort: When I am dead you may throw me into the foulness of the cellars where the rest of the dead are lying; and then for a few days you will be the heir of the house and the master of it.”
Tizzo, forcing himself to step still closer, peered at the red blotches on the forehead and face of the other.
“Those sores are dry,” said Tizzo. “And that means you are recovering from the plague. It is starvation that kills you, my friend.”
“It is as good a way to die as any other,” said Bardi.
“You must have food,” said Tizzo.
“I have prayed for it; there is no other way to come by it,” said Bardi.
“If you are healed of the sores, all the world knows that you are a clean man again,” said Tizzo, remembering the dreadful stories of the plague which he had heard.
“I shall be dead of the famine before the sores disappear from my face,” said Bardi. “And you—whether you take the disease after the third day or not, you will starve here after me. And another month will go by after your death before brave men will venture into this rotten hellhole. What is your name?”
“Tizzo.”
“Tizzo, I have told you your future. Accept it.”
“It is better to run out on the street and die fighting.”
“So you think now; but every day a strange new hope will come up in you, and you will cling to your life for another twenty-four hours—until you are too weak to hold a sword.”
“We could steal out through some secret passage underground.”
“There is such a passage; and it has been blocked to close up the rattrap. My kind uncle, who wants this house and everything in it when the plague has finished its work, saw to it that the secret passage was stopped.”
“We might be able to slip away in the dark of a rainy night like this.”
“My good uncle and the city of Perugia keep guards at every door, day and night.”
“Yet I was allowed to enter?”
“It would never occur to them to try to stop a man from entering; their care is to keep anyone from getting out.”
Tizzo nodded. He attacked the last possibility.
“We may be able to get to a neighboring roof.”
“From the eaves of this house to the nearest, there is a span of thirty feet. I have thought of all of these things. There is no hope. I sat at that table with my own father trying to plan. There was no hope—”
His voice, which had raised to a great outcry, suddenly stilled and the Bardi fell sidewise across the arm of his chair.
Was he dying? Was he suddenly and mercifully dead?
It seemed to Tizzo that he could not force himself to touch that body, still no doubt reeking with the mortal presence of the plague; but he could not stand by and leave the helpless man in that position.
Besides, since Tizzo was in the house, since there was hardly a chance in a hundred that he could pass the crucial three days without becoming infected with the sickness, he felt that he might as well open his arms to the horrible danger. He deliberately picked up the wasted, skeleton body of Bardi and carried it back to the bedroom which he had noticed before. There he stretched