Below him was a
glen, with a stream in a coppice of oaks and alders, and on the
farther side of the valley, half a day's journey distant, another
hill, steep and bristling, which raised aloft a little walled town
with Ghibelline swallow-tails notched against the sky.
When the Hermit was a lad, and lived in the town, the crenellations
of the walls had been square-topped, and a Guelf lord had flown his
standard from the keep. Then one day a steel-coloured line of
men-at-arms rode across the valley, wound up the hill and battered
in the gates. Stones and Greek fire rained from the ramparts,
shields clashed in the streets, blade sprang at blade in passages
and stairways, pikes and lances dripped above huddled flesh, and all
the still familiar place was a stew of dying bodies. The boy fled
from it in horror. He had seen his father go forth and not come
back, his mother drop dead from an arquebuse shot as she leaned from
the platform of the tower, his little sister fall with a slit throat
across the altar steps of the chapel--and he ran, ran for his life,
through the slippery streets, over warm twitching bodies, between
legs of soldiers carousing, out of the gates, past burning
farmsteads, trampled wheat-fields, orchards stripped and broken,
till the still woods received him and he fell face down on the
unmutilated earth.
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