Romantic legends of Spain

by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

“It began, terrible and bloody. There was fighting with all sorts of weapons, in all places and at all hours, with sword and fire, on the mountain and in the plain, by day and by night.

“This was not fighting to live; it was living to fight.

“In the end the cause of justice triumphed. You shall hear how.

“One dark, intensely dark night, when no sound was heard on earth nor a single star shone in heaven, the lords of the fortress, elated by a recent victory, divided the booty and, drunk with the fume of the liquors, in the midst of their mad and boisterous revel intoned sacrilegious songs in praise of their infernal patron.

“As I have said, nothing was heard around the castle save the echo of the blasphemies which throbbed out into the black bosom of the night like the throbbing of lost souls wrapped in the hurricane folds of hell.

“Now the careless sentinels had several times fixed their eyes on the hamlet which rested in silence and, without fear of a surprise, had fallen asleep leaning on the thick staves of their lances, when, lo and behold! a few villagers, resolved to die and protected by the darkness, began to scale the crag of the Segre whose crest they reached at the very moment of midnight.

“Once on the summit, that which remained for them to do required little time. The sentinels passed with a single bound the barrier which separates sleep from death. Fire, applied with resinous torches to drawbridge and portcullis, leaped with lightning rapidity to the walls, and the scaling-party, favored by the confusion and making their way through the flames, put an end to the occupants of that fortress in the twinkling of an eye.

“All perished.

“When the next day began to whiten the lofty tops of the junipers, the charred remains of the fallen towers were still smoking, and through their gaping breaches it was easy to discern, glittering as the light struck it, where it hung suspended from one of the blackened pillars of the banquet hall, the armor of the dreaded chieftain whose dead body, covered with blood and dust, lay between the torn tapestries and the hot ashes, confounded with the corpses of his obscure companions.

“Time passed. Briers began to creep through the deserted courts, ivy to climb the dark heaps of masonry, and the blue morning-glory to sway and swing from the very turrets. The changeful sighs of the breeze, the croaking of the birds of night, and the soft stir of reptiles gliding through the tall weeds alone disturbed from time to time the deathly silence of that accursed place. The unburied bones of its former inhabitants lay white in the moonlight and still there could be seen the bundled armor of the Count of the Segre hanging from the blackened pillar of the banquet hall.