The gate was passed, and the drawbridge crossed. Aldarin stood upon the platform of turf surmounting the summit of the hill; beneath him descended the road into the valley; on either side yawned chasms dark and deep; while the rocks upon whose massive piles the castle was founded, threw their fantastic forms from amid clumps of brushwood, and here and there colossal stones rose brightly into the sunshine from the depths of the gloomy void.
Aldarin looked around, and beheld the face of nature clad in the smile of sunshine; waves of foliage rising in the light; the bosom of the Arno calm and beautiful as a silver mirror, seen through the intervals of undulating hills; the Apenines frowning in the far distance, and the calm blue sky, glowing with the first kiss of morn, arching above.
Aldarin looked around upon the face of nature, but another spectacle fixed his attention and excited his wonder.
Not far from where he stood, four dark steeds were rearing and springing on the sod, while their grooms, four swarthy Moors, whose distorted faces scarce resembled the visages of humanity, were forced to exert all their giant-strength in the effort to hold the wild horses of the desert.
Wildly with their hoofs the barbs tore the sod, scattering the loosened earth in the very face of Aldarin; their eyes flashed like coals of flame, their sinews seemed to creep under the smooth and glossy skin, black as midnight; their crests proudly arching, gave their manes, long and dark, to the breeze; while with quivering nostrils and a shrill piercing neigh they seemed panting to break loose from all restraint and dart like lightning down the steep.
“What would ye with me now?” exclaimed Aldarin, as a strange wonder and a darker fear gathered around his heart. “Cowards that ye are, ye still delay your work of murder. I would this merry mysterie were finished—”
“To the gibbet with the brother-murderer!” arose the thunder shout of the multitude. “To the gibbet with the wizard and sorcerer!”
“To the Doom, to the Doom!” shouted the stout yeoman. “To the Doom, but not to the gibbet!”
Robin the Rough smiled and waved his hand to the Moors who led the barbs of Arimanes down the steep, while Damian and Halbert followed at their heels, bearing the Fratricide to his doom.—
Meanwhile the multitude thronging from the castle-gate, in one dense crowd, began to darken over the rocks that hedged in the moat, as the men-at-arms followed Aldarin down the hilly road, their upraised swords glittering in the first beams of the morning sun.