"Man, know you whereof you speak?" the duke snarled, as he came closer to Francesco. "He has made the one woman the Duke of Spoleto ever loved—a wanton!"—
They pushed uphill through the solemn shadows of the forest. A sound like the raging of a wind through a wood came down to them faintly from afar. It was a sullen sound, deep and mysterious as the hoarse babel of the sea, smitten through with the shrill scream of trumpets, like the cry of gulls above a storm. Yet in the aisles of the pine forest it was still as death.
Then, like a spark struck from flint and steel falling upon tinder, a red glare blazed out against the background of the night. A horn blared across the moorlands; the castle bell began to ring, jerkily, wildly, a bell in terror. Yellow gleams streaked the fretted waters, and again the trumpet challenged the dark walls, like the cry of a sea-bird driven by the storm.
The duke and Francesco looked meaningly at each other. The sound needed no words to christen it; they knew that the Pisans had attacked. They heard the roar and the cries from the rampart, the cataractine thunder of a distant battle.
Pushing on more swiftly as the woods thinned, the din grew more definite, more human, more sinister in detail. It stirred the blood, challenged the courage, racked conjecture with the infinite chaos it portended. Victory and despair were trammelled up together in its sullen roar; life and death seemed to swell it with the wind sound of their wings. It was stupendous, chaotic, a tempest cry of steel and passions inflamed.
The duke's face kindled to the sound as he shouted to his men to gallop on. Yet another furlong, and the spectral trunks dwindled, the sombre boughs seemed to mingle with the clouds, while gray, indefinite before them, engulfing the lightnings of heaven, loomed the great swell of the Tyrrhene, dark and restless under the thunderclouds, that came nearer and nearer. Ghostly the plains of Torre del Greco stretched towards the Promontory of Circé, and, solitary and impregnable, the Castello of Astura rose upon its chalk-cliffs, white in the lightnings which hissed around its summit.
The duke's men had come up, forming a wide semicircle around the leaders. At their feet opened a deep ravine, leading into the plain; half a furlong beyond, although it seemed less than a lance's throw across, rose the castle of the Frangipani, washed by the waves of the Tyrrhene. The Pisans had attacked the southern acclivity, and the defenders, roused from their feast of blood, had poured all their defences towards the point of attack, leaving the northern slope to look to itself.
As they rode down the ravine there came from the bottom of the valley the sharp yelp of a dog. It was instantly answered by a similar bark from the very top of the castello.
"No two dogs ever had the same voice," the duke turned to Francesco. "They must be hell-hounds, whom the fiend has trained to one tune. But what is that yonder? A goat picking its way?"