The Storm E-Book

Max Brand

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Twelve-year-old Tommy is left to fend for himself. Thanks to endurance, ingenuity and a wonderful union with the grizzly bear, whose mother he helped, the boy survives. When Tommy gets older, he and the bear set off for the valley, where they prevent the killing of an indestructible horse. The horse, bear and Tommy become legend – and the expedition is about to capture or kill Tommy.

Leseprobe

Contents

PART I

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

PART II

SYNOPSIS OF PART I

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

PART III

SYNOPSIS OF PARTS I AND II

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

PART I

I. TIZZO DECIDES

THE hose on his right leg was orange; on his left leg it was green. His doublet was a puff of yellow and through the slashed sleeves of it appeared the crimson of an undertunic. He wore, not for warmth since the day was mid-summer, but merely from the excess of vanity and fashion, a short cloak which tumbled down from his shoulders and washed about from side to side behind them. And on his head, tilted a shade to an angle, there was a small round hat which was looped about by a fine golden chain.

As though this flare of colors were not enough to attract the eye, his hair was flame-red and glistened in the slant of the afternoon sun. He rode swiftly through the camp of Giovanpaolo and, coming to the tent of the commander, which was distinguished by the long pennon which flew from the peak, he slipped out of the saddle and threw the reins towards one of the men-at-arms who stood guard at the entrance.

The man was struck by the flying leather and allowed the strips to fall.

“Hold the horse, my friend,” said the young fellow in the brilliant clothes. “Announce to Giovanpaolo that Tizzo is entering.”

“Go ask the devil to announce you!” said the guard who had been flicked by the reins.

One of the gentry who lolled under the adjoining olive tree broke into a loud laughter and sat up to watch the brawl.

The guard added: “His Highness, Giovanpaolo, is not to be disturbed.”

“Why not?” asked Tizzo, walking straight towards the two guards. Compared with their armor-sheathed bulks he seemed very slender and boyish. The sword at his side appeared to be a foolish vaunt. “Is Giovanpaolo sleeping because he’s had too much to drink? If he is, I’ll wake him up. Announce me!”

“Announce you?” said the guard who had spoken before. “Your name may be Firebrand, but you give me no warmth. I’m hot enough in the sun without having a fire at hand. Sit down on your heels and wait for the time of His Highness.”

There was another loud laugh from the nobleman who lounged under the tree, and who now stood up as though expecting something further to happen.

He said, “Here’s a check for Tizzo, at last.”

One of his companions answered: “I wager three ducats to one that he gets into the tent.”

“The guard will see him damned first,” said the first man.

“The guard will be damned himself if he tries to bar the way,” said the other. “I put money on Tizzo.” Young Tizzo, at this moment, stepped straight to the angry guard and said: “Give me your name so that I can remember you.”

“I give my name to my equals,” said the guard, “not to wild- headed young forget-me-nots like you.”

“Nevertheless, I’ll shake hands with you,” said Tizzo.

He caught the big, brown hand of the fighting man as he spoke. The latter tried to wrench his sword-arm free but the effort merely served to jerk Tizzo towards the entrance of the tent. Perhaps he tripped the guard as he passed. It was hard to tell exactly what happened, but the fact was that the man-at-arms tumbled flat on his back while Tizzo disappeared suddenly through the tent entrance. The guard, leaping to his feet, started to rush inside in pursuit, but his companion checked him.

“You’ve made a fool of yourself already,” said the companion. “But if you break in on them now, you’ll be damned for your folly.”

“What do you mean?” asked the first man.

“Why, if you wore ears in your head you ought to have recognized the name. Tizzo is the brightness of which Giovanpaolo is the shadow; he is the warmth in Giovanpaolo’s blood, the light in his eyes, the strength of his right hand. Tizzo, fool, is the man who saved the life of Giovanpaolo on the night of the Great Betrayal and got both him and the Lady Beatrice safely out of the city when men were running about like bloodhounds, lapping up the lives of the Baglioni.”

“You could have told me what he was,” growled the big guard.

“You asked no questions,” said the other. “You brought some of your Swiss cheese with you from the Alps, but you left your wits behind you. And this is Italy, man, where brains are better than sword-blades.”

“Tizzo? Tizzo?” said the man. “Now I think that I recall the name.”

“Pick up the reins of his horse and hold them, then,” said the other man-at-arms, “and the name may be willing to recall you.”

INSIDE the tent, Tizzo saw Giovanpaolo striding up and down, his head a little bent towards the depth of his thought. On the table lay a map. Pieces of armor were stacked on a folding chair. The whole tent was filled with confusion.

“Ah, Tizzo,” said Giovanpaolo, hardly turning his fine head towards the interloper, “what is it now? More brawling? More tavern drinking? More duelling? You have put Gismondo of Urbino to bed for a month with one of your sword tricks; the Spaniard from Naples will never see out of both eyes again, they tell me; and Ugo of Camerino will be a lucky man if he ever recovers the use of his left arm.”

“It was only the left arm,” said Tizzo, seriously. “I knew that he was a fellow you put a value on, and that was why I did not teach his right arm the sort of manners it ought to know.”

Giovanpaolo threw himself wearily back into a chair. He shook his head.

“Is the world always no more than a playground for you?” he asked, sadly. “Here we are shut out of Perugia, half of our friends killed, my own family slaughtered like sheep in the middle of the night, and the army which I am raising to retake the city already muttering and growling because I am slow in giving them pay. The men promised to me by the city of Florence have not appeared. All men begin to doubt my fortune. The sky turns black over me; and still you are dancing, drinking, laughing, fighting day and night without a care in the world.”

“I could use some clouds in that same sky,” said Tizzo. “Today is too hot for armor. The guards at your door are stewing under their cuirasses in their own sweat; they have turned as mad as hornets and try to sting your own friends.”

“I heard them trying to keep you out,” smiled Giovanpaolo, “but I knew that they might as well forbid a wild hawk to fly through the blue of heaven. What is it that you want?”

“Time to say farewell to you,” said Tizzo.

“Farewell? You?” said Giovanpaolo.

He rose slowly from his chair. “The rest have fallen away from me,” he said. “And now you? You are leaving?”

His handsome face darkened with sorrow. But he added, suddenly: “Very well. I can understand. You are too bright a butterfly for these dark days. Go where you please, Tizzo, and God go with you. Here–you will need funds for your journey. Help yourself from these–”

He jerked open the top of a small chest which appeared half filled with gold pieces. Then, stepping to the table, he unfastened a little casket awash inside with points of red and yellow and crystal flames. “Here are the last jewels which the Baglioni could collect,” he said. “Fill a pocket with them. God knows you are welcome. If it were not for you, all of us would have died on that night of the Great Betrayal.”

Tizzo lifted a handful of the jewels and let them sift slowly through his fingers, showering back into the casket.

“This stuff will do me no good where I am going,” he said.

“Where are you going, then?” demanded the other, shortly.

“To hell,” said Tizzo.

“Ha?” cried Giovanpaolo.

“To Perugia, I should say,” added Tizzo.

“You? To Perugia? Yes, when we take the city by storm. Yes, then you will go to Perugia. But in the meantime even the stones in the streets would cry out ‘Tizzo!’ and ‘Treason!’ if they felt the falling of your feet.”

“Look!” said Tizzo, and held out a rolled letter which Giovanpaolo pulled open and read aloud:

Friend and Fire-Eater, My Tizzo:

I send you this letter by sure hand. I have already rewarded him, but give him plenty of money when he arrives in honor of a dead man. That is myself.

The days went very well immediately after the Great Betrayal. The wine ran in the gutters, so to speak; the people cheered the murderers of the Baglioni; the traitors sat high in the saddle and they remembered Henry of Melrose with a good many favors and quite a bit of money. I began to feel that I might spend a happy time here except for the stench of murder which rises in my heart when I think of the midnight work which has been done in these streets.

However, when I was about to skim the cream off my cup of fortune and go away with it I was suddenly haled before the chiefs of the Great Betrayal–before Jeronimo della Penna, I mean, and Carlo Barciglia. For Grifone Baglioni is no longer accounted anything. Except for him they never would have taken the place, of course, but since the Great Betrayal conscience has been eating his heart; he has turned yellow and is growing old. Every day he goes to the castle of his lady mother and begs her to let him enter and give him her blessing, and every day the Lady Atlanta bars her doors against him and sends him a curse as a traitor instead of a blessing as a son.

So I was before Jeronimo and Carlo alone, and the information against me was dug up by that double-tongued snake of darkness, that hell-hound of a Mateo Marozzo, who hates you so sweetly and who wears on his forehead the cross which you put there with the point of your dagger. If he remains long out of hell, the chief devil will die of yearning.

It is this Marozzo who discovered that on the night of the Great Betrayal it was through my gate that there passed the Lady Beatrice Baglione, accompanied by the main head and brains of the Baglione family, the famous Giovanpaolo, and that firebrand, the hawk-brained wild man, Tizzo, who had snatched those two lives from the slaughter.

I damned and lied with a vengeance and offered to prove my innocence in single combat with Marozzo, but they have seen my swordwork and they shrank from that idea. In brief, out came two eye-witnesses and I was damned at once, and thrown into prison. Here Jeronimo della Penna is letting me lie while he revolves in his mind a punishment savage enough to be equal to my fault. After that, be sure, I shall die.

In dying, as I run my eyes down the years, I shall see no face more dear to me than that of my young companion who never showed his back to a friend. I shall think of you, Tizzo, as I die. Think of me also, a little, as you live.

Farewell,

Henry of Melrose.

####

II. THE RING

GIOVAN PAOLO, when he had finished reading the letter, his voice dropping with an honest reverence as he pronounced the last words, remained for a time with his head bent.

“I know the brave Englishman,” said he, at last. “I know he has been a bulwark of the house of the Oddi. I have seen him in battle and anyone who has watched the work of his sword can remember him easily enough. I know that it was he who allowed us to pass out of the city on the night of the Betrayal. I would give all the jewels and the gold in this place and all I could send for in order to set him free. But that would not help him. Money will not buy a man out of the cruel hands of Jeronimo della Penna. And what can you do, or any other man? We can only pray that we may storm the city and set him free before Jeronimo makes up his mind what form of torment he will use on Melrose.”

“I must go to him,” answered Tizzo.

“Listen to me,” urged Giovanpaolo. “How can one man help him?”

“The man who brought me the letter is an assistant jailer. I’ve bribed him with a fine sum of money. He is going to meet me in Perugia and admit me to the house of Jeronimo, where Melrose lies in one of the great cellars. He will furnish me with a file to cut through the manacles. After that, I must try to get Melrose away.”

“How will you take him out of the city? Will you use wings?”

“Chance,” said Tizzo. “I’ve worshipped her so long with dice, I’ve made so many sacrifices in her name, that she would not have the heart to refuse me a single request like this one.”

“Tizzo–tell me in brief. What is Melrose to you? He is brave; he has an eye which is the same flame-blue as yours in a fight; he is true to his friends. I grant all that. But other men have the same qualities.”

“Paolo,” said Tizzo, “you and I have sworn to be true to one another. We have sworn to be blood brothers without the blood.”

“That is right,” nodded Giovanpaolo.

“Well, then,” said Tizzo, “if I heard that you were lying in prison, expecting death, my heart would be stirred no more than when I hear that the Englishman is rotting in misery in the dungeon of della Penna.”

Giovanpaolo, after this, merely made a mute gesture and argued no more.

“Beatrice is in the inner tent,” he said. “You will want to say farewell to her?”

“No,” answered Tizzo. “If I see her, I’ll fall out of this resolution of mine and be in love with life again. Tell her so after I have gone.”

“I shall tell her,” said Giovanpaolo. “What is your plan?”

“Simply to enter the city and go to the house of a certain Alberto Marignello, in the little lane off the via dei Bardi. This Marignello is the fellow I have given the money to, the one with the keys to the cellars of della Penna. When I have the keys–why, you see that I’ll not know the next step until I come to take it.”

“Tizzo, you are a dead man!”

“I am,” said Tizzo, cheerfully, “and that is why I have come to say farewell!”

He held out his hands, and Giovanpaolo, with a groan but with no further protest, held out his hands to make that silent farewell.

THE green, the orange, the yellow and the crimson no longer flashed on the body of Tizzo when he came near Perugia in the twilight of that day. His skin, rather fairer than that of most Italians, had been darkened with the walnut stain which he had used on the night of the Great Betrayal, and his red hair, darkened also, tumbled unkempt about his face. His clothes were ragged; his back was bowed under a great fagot of olive wood to which was lashed a heavy woodsman’s ax. In the full light of the day a curious eye might have been interested in the blue sheen of the blade of that ax, but in the half-light of the evening the glimmer of the pure Damascus steel could not be noticed.

When he came to the gate, a pair of fine young riders were being questioned by the captain on duty there, but none of the guards paid the slightest attention to that bowed form under the heavy load of wood. A young lad inside the gate bawled: “Look! Look at the donkey walking on two legs!”

In fact, hardly the poorest man in Perugia would have carried such a crushing burden of wood on his back into the town, but Tizzo, with a hanging head and a slight sway from side to side of his entire body, strode gradually up the steep slope of the street. He turned right and left again before he came to the wide façade of the great house in which lived Atlanta Baglione, the mother of the traitor to his house. Grifone.

In the dusk, he came to the entrance of the courtyard, where the porter merely sang out: “What’s this?”

“A broken back and a load of olive wood,” said Tizzo. “Where shall I leave the stuff?”

He made as if to drop it to the pavement but the porter cursed him for a lout. “D’you wish to litter the street and give me extra work?” he demanded. “Get in through the court and I’ll open the inner door.”

He led the way, but stopped suddenly as he saw the form of a man kneeling on the farther side of the court under a shuttered window, crying out, not over-loud: “Mother, whatever I have done, I have repented. If I have sinned against God, he will have his own vengeance. If I have sinned against men, my heart is already broken. But if you turn a deaf ear to me, the devils in hell are laughing!”

“So!” muttered the porter. “Always the same! Always the same! But she is the sort of pale steel that will not bend. This way, woodcutter.”