Читать книгу Chivalry - Рафаэль Сабатини - Страница 4

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HEN his father was hanged, his mother died of a broken heart.

For the same reason he is known to history merely as Colombo da Siena. His arms—azure, a dove statant argent—are of his own adoption and, in rebus, merely expressive of his patronymic, for all that he came of an armigerous family and possessed the right to a patrician name and to some famous quarterings. Behind his disdain of one and the other lies the tragedy that was not without influence on his life. He was, in fact, the only son of that Lord of Terrarossa, Sigismondo Barberi, whom the Florentines dispossessed and deservedly put to death for treachery. He was ten or eleven years of age when he was left orphaned and destitute to face the world; and that he did not perish is due to a saintly brother of his mother’s, a Franciscan of the Large Observance, who sheltered him in his tender years from evil.

Later, as the lad grew, deepening in resemblance to his mother and displaying other qualities which endeared him to Fra Franco, his uncle, the question arose of finding a place for him in life. The friar would have made a determined attempt to obtain his reinstatement in the lordship which his father’s villainy had forfeited; and that humble little brother of Saint Francis was not without influence. But in this he met the sternest opposition from Colombo.

“Since the forfeiture was deserved and just, it stands as an expiation. In some sort it serves to cancel the offence. If we retract a payment we revive a debt. So, let it be.”

After vain arguments, the friar yielded to the clarity and honesty of the boy’s logic, abandoned the attempts he was setting on foot, and addressed himself to other prospects for his nephew.

In later years Colombo would frequently insist that his natural inclinations were entirely pacific. He loved nature and would have found his proper vocation in her service and in agrarian pursuits. But it also happened that he was equipped with rather more than the perception which, as his namesake the Genoese navigator was to demonstrate, is necessary so as to apprehend the obvious. It is, I fancy, the whole secret of his success in life, as it is of many another’s. It showed him in his nonage that a man born into the turbulence that constantly distracted the Italian Peninsula in the second half of the Quattrocento, should make haste to determine whether he would range himself with the sheep or with the wolves, since mankind in that time, and particularly in that land of unrest, offered no further choice.

The sheep were the toilers: the merchants, the peasants, the craftsmen, the artificers, even the clergy. The wolves were the princes and those who served them in their quarrels over the soil upon which those toilers had their being. To be industrious, productive, law-abiding, was to be in danger of unending harassment, to be constantly in peril of being plundered, fined, ruined or even slaughtered.

Considering all this Colombo reached the conclusion that if his natural inclinations did not urge him to become a wolf, even less did they urge him to remain a sheep.

Thus he states his case. But whilst scarcely conscious of it himself, his history states it otherwise. Accounting extinguished the house from which he sprang, there were in him from an early age the vague stirrings of an ambition to found another, infinitely more splendid, that should be entirely the work of his own hands and brain. Since he could not be a descendant without shame, he would become an ancestor of whom his posterity should be proud.

It is not to be asserted that he had deliberately set out with this intention when at the age of sixteen we find him trailing a pike in the service of his native Siena. Rather did the notion grow in him with his own vigorous and rapid growth until it took definite shape during that Sicilian campaign when first his name was blared from Fame’s trumpet across the length and breadth of Italy. He was in his twenty-eighth year by then and he had learnt the trade of arms under that great soldier Bartolomeo Colleoni. From modest beginnings in Colleoni’s company, with the command of ten helmets, he had risen rapidly to the position of one of that famous captain’s most trusted lieutenants.

Then, soon after Colleoni entered Venetian service Colombino—by which affectionate diminutive he had come to be known in the company—had separated from him, and forming a small condotta of his own, of a hundred lances, he had taken his sword, as it were, to Bellona’s market-place.

In the Sicilian campaign of which before all was over he was constrained by the favour of fortune to take complete command on behalf of Aragon, he won not only fame, but enough wealth to acquire the homestead and vineyard on Montasco, in Sienese territory, which he was gradually and nobly to extend.

He was resting there after his labours in the summer of 1455, and with him were two other condottieri who had linked their fortunes with his own and had come to range themselves under his banner: the tough, elderly, worldly-wise Florentine soldier of fortune Giorgio di Sangiorgio, and the portly jovial Aragonese Don Pablo Caliente.

I suspect that it would be at about this time that he began to dream of scaling the summits. He did not lack for models. There was Colleoni himself, now grown old, but still nominally Captain-General of the Venetian forces, covered with honour and lord of great possessions. There was Francesco Sforza, now Duke of Milan and disputing with Venice the prepotency in the north, whose beginnings had been as humble as Colombino’s. There was Carmagnola, who had won to sovereignty before he had lost his head. And there were a dozen others whom Colombino could call to mind who by the trade of arms had raised themselves to princely estate. Like them, so might he come by the sword to found a dynasty. Already the Sicilian war had set his feet upon the road to those heights.

Nor were his ambitions a mere greed of power and possessions. He was imbued with the conviction that where he governed he would govern wisely and well, so that the governed should bless his name and find in him not a ravager, but a protector. He was guided by lofty ideals belonging to the age of chivalry rather than to his own age, which was already accounting chivalry a chimera. He entertained knight-errantly notions of succouring the helpless, of upholding the weak against the insolent strong; notions to be expressed in a benign rule, different, indeed, from the ruthless despotism practised by the Princes of the states that made up Italy.

You realize that much though Colombino had learned in eight-and-twenty years of a life that had been rich and varied in its experiences, he had still to learn that in the world of his day ambition and chivalrous ideals could not journey far as yoke-fellows. It was about to be demonstrated to him at the date at which, after this brief prelude, I am about to take up his history, or, at least, so much of it as it has seemed to me worth while to assemble from the various sources in which it may be sought.

Scarcely had he come to rest at Montasco, scarcely had he, as it were, doffed his harness and turned his mind from thoughts of war to matters concerned with the noble mansion he was building and to considerations of the husbandry he found so attractive, when the call reached him to a task that was not merely to weave a dominant pattern into the tapestry of his destiny, but was to bring a change into his outlook, and so into his very nature. It was just such a call as his chivalry must leap to answer. It came from the Sovereign Countess of Rovieto, that Eufemia de’ Santi, who with nothing in her life to place her in the memory of posterity, has yet been given by the brush of Antonello da Messina a fame as enduring as his canvas.

It was the end of a hot day of August, and Colombino sat at supper with his two captains in a room of the princely house, a part of which was still in the making. They were sitting with windows wide to the welcome breeze of sunset, when from the distance they heard the hoof-beats that announced a messenger breasting the hillside.

Someone from Siena, they supposed, until a servant entered with the letter whose source he announced. When Colombino had read it, he tossed it to his captains and by a gesture invited their attention to it.

Sangiorgio took it up, scanned it, frowning, and was thoughtful at the end. Caliente, on the other hand, having read it, was moved to a jovial satisfaction.

“Praised be Our Lady for this mark of favour. I never hoped we should find work again before going into winter quarters. It serves to show that your fame will now give you little rest, Don Colombo.”

There was a flash of white teeth in the Spaniard’s broad, good-humoured face, with the vivid red lips that told of the rich abundant blood in his veins, and the heavy jowl that was blue from the razor. The contrast between him and the tall, angular and saturnine Sangiorgio, was stressed now by the fact that the older man looked as sour as Don Pablo was gay. Tugging at his dagger of grizzled beard, Sangiorgio took the letter again, and read it a second time.

It was from the Countess of Rovieto, and she wrote at length. Filippo della Scala, Lord of Verona, was arming to invade her territory, to enforce a claim to it based on his kinship with her late husband. The resources of della Scala, strained by his share in the long-drawn struggle between Venice and Milan, did not permit him to engage for his purposes one of the free companies that stood for hire in Italy. Therefore he had sent his agents into the Swiss cantons to recruit among the mountaineers who were to be had upon reasonable terms. This made Time her ally, thanks to the warning she had received. Forestalling him, it was her aim and hope to strike the first blow, to invade his territory whilst he was still unprepared; and when he sued for peace she would impose such terms that there would be a definite end to his pretensions. To carry out this design, she invited into her service Messer Colombo da Siena and his Company of the Dove.

When at last Sangiorgio looked up, Colombino nodded to him across the board.

“A woman of spirit that. A woman who understands the cardinal principle of war: that attack is the best defence and that victory often goes to the first blow. A rare woman, on my soul.”

Sangiorgio wrinkled his long beak of a nose, dropped the sheet with a suggestion of scorn and made a gesture as of dusting his fingers. “Rare, yes. I thank God for it. If there were more such women there would be fewer men.”

Colombino raised his brows; Caliente swung his bulk round as on a pivot, so as to face his brother captain. Sangiorgio explained himself.

“Her history is more interesting than savoury. You need to learn something of it. She was born in the year that Lucca broke from Florence. So that she cannot yet be more than three and twenty; and already she has disposed of two husbands. The first was a patrician of the Milanese House of Visconti, an injudicious fool who went about Rovieto roaring in his jealousy of a Roman visitor, Gerolimini, until he suddenly dropped dead, stricken, most oddly, in mid-winter, by a malarial fever. Faith in that fever is not increased when we discover that she married Gerolimini three months after Visconti’s death. And then Gerolimini, who suffered from the common ambition to govern, refused to understand that the consort of a sovereign is not necessarily a sovereign himself.

“It was a presumption for which a judgment overtook him. He broke his neck in a fall from his horse, one day whilst hunting. At least, that is how the records run. He was hunting alone at the time. When they found him he was in a supine condition as if he had been laid out, and no sign of damage or disorder to his garments.

“As you say, Colombino, a rare woman, and a fortunate. Perhaps even a dangerous.”

Colombino’s answer was cold with reproof. “At present she is, on the contrary, a woman in danger.”

“Which is just when such a woman will be most dangerous.”

“Shall we leave old wives’ ill-natured gossip, and come to business?” Colombino pointed to the letter. “What concerns me is her desire to hire us.”

But Sangiorgio was not to be reproved out of his sardonic pessimism.

“It may well concern you. I ask myself how does she propose to pay. Her father, Todescano, all but ruined Rovieto before he died. She, following with filial piety in the footsteps of her spendthrift sire, has completed Rovieto’s bankruptcy. Della Scala, she says here,” and contemptuously he flicked the document, “is without resources to hire one of the mercenary companies in Italy. She, with still fewer ducats, invites the Company of the Dove into her Service. How will she pay for it? I ask again.”

“That is what I had better go and ascertain,” said Colombino.

“I could make a guess that would save you the trouble.”

“Ribaldry is natural to an old soldier.”

“And credulity to a young one. I began that way myself. I’ve learnt wisdom since, which you call ribaldry. And that letter wouldn’t take me to Rovieto.”

“I shall set out to-morrow,” said Colombino quietly.

“Is she beautiful, at least?” Don Pablo asked his brother captain.

“They say so.”

“Then why scowl? Or are you so old that you’ve forgotten everything? A beautiful woman, Giorgio, is worth any journey.”

Sangiorgio looked from the smiling Don Pablo to the thoughtful Colombino.

“God help you both,” he said, and gave his attention to the wine.