He spoke in Saxon, the language of the country folk, but at the first words a figure sprang up and dodged from shrub to rock like a scared leveret. He called again quickly in French:
“Hola! little friend, wait a moment!”
There was no answer. Somehow he did not like to leave the mystery unsolved. There must be a child in trouble, but what child could there be in this wild place, and neither Norman nor Saxon? It was not far enough to the West to be Welsh borderland, and it was too far south to be near either Scotland or the Danelaw. He spoke in Provençal, and the fugitive halted at the sound of the soft southern o’s and a’s; then he spoke again in the Lombard dialect of Milan. A boy ventured out of the thicket and stood staring at him. Ranulph flung himself off his horse and held out his hand.
“Come here, little comrade, and tell me who you are, and why you are all alone here.”
The boy’s dark eyes grew wider in his elvish face and his hands opened and shut nervously as he answered in Italian:
“I am no one, and I have no home. Take me not to prison.”
“There is no thought of a prison, my lad, but I cannot wait here. Come, ride with me, and I will take you to a kind woman who will take care of you.”
The boy hesitated, but at last loneliness conquered timidity and distrust, and he came. The troubadour swung him up to the front of the saddle and they rode on through the gathering dusk. Forgetting his terror as he heard the familiar sound of his native tongue, the boy told his story readily enough. His name was Giovanni Bergamotto, but he had been born in Milan, in the year that Barbarossa crossed the Alps. The first thing that he could really remember was his mother crying over her father and two brothers, who had been killed in the siege. He remembered many days when there was nothing to eat in the house. When Milan was taken he was old enough to walk at his mother’s side as the people were driven out and the city destroyed so that no one should ever live there again. His father had been killed when the Emperor hung a siege-tower all over with hostages and captives to be shot at by their own people within the walls. He remembered his grandfather lifting him up to see when the Carocchio was brought out, and the great crucifix above the globe was lowered to do homage to the Emperor. He remembered seeing the Imperial banner unfurled from the top of the Cathedral. These things, his grandfather told him, no Milanese should ever forget.
He and his mother had wandered about from one city to another until his mother died, two or three years later. He had worked for a pastry cook who beat him and starved him. At last he had run away and stolen his passage on a ship bound for England. They had beaten him when they found him, but kept him to help the cook. When he landed at a southern port on the English coast, he had found himself in a land of cold mist, where no sun shone, no fruit grew, and no one knew his language. He had turned at first naturally to the towns, for he was a city boy and craved the companionship of the crowd. But when he said that he was a Lombard they seemed to be angry. Perhaps there was some dreadful mistake, and he was in a land where the Ghibellines, the friends of the Emperor, were the rulers.
When at last he faltered out this question his new friend gave a compassionate little laugh and patted his shoulder reassuringly.