"Are you all traitors or cowards, that you do not heed me?" cried Visconti, in a fury. "Throw, thrust, kick this thing into the garden--let him lie there till the morning." "My lord," said de Lana, with a dangerous look in his eyes, "he was a Prince and a Scaliger!" "He was my enemy--scorn for scorn! Throw Mastino della Scala from the balcony--or----" And half a dozen men came forward and lifted the prostrate body. "Haste," said Visconti, his eyes on de Lana. "Throw him out of my sight." "Let them carry him down the steps, my lord," cried de Lana. But Visconti turned on him, his face and hair glowing in the light of the flames from Novara, his face fiendish. "They shall do as I bid, or hang from the nearest tree! Now haste!" he said again, as if he feared the dead might yet arise. They carried the body to the edge of the steps and pushed it over, crashing dully down the foliage that half overspread the marble. Visconti stepped to the parapet and looked over. "He said something as he fell," he whispered to himself. "I heard him--but he must be dead now----" He turned back into the room, breathing more freely. "Now close the door again," he said, and watched while it was done. CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR AN INSTRUMENT OF GOD "How many, de Lana--how many?" "Five--six or seven----" "Hundreds!" "Thousands, my lord!" Visconti leaned forward in his chair in his excitement. "Thousands?" "The men from Magenta are come in, laden with plunder." Visconti laughed. "I said I would give them Lombardy to sack--and there are thousands of prisoners?" The scene was the summer palace, that same night. Visconti sat at the head of a table in a room adjoining the one in which the tapestry was torn and the floor still sticky with blood. It was a small apartment, beautifully inlaid with mosaic, and now blazing with lights, and full of a fine company of officers and nobles. "Thousands--men, women, and children--some men of note, too, my lord; the ransacking of palaces for miles----" "And Novara?" "Some beat the flames out still--they say half the place is saved." "Let them plunder it!" cried Visconti. "Let them pick Novara bare! The palace was burned?" "To a cinder----" "To a heap of ashes!" said another. "There is nothing but the bastion, red hot----" "As you should know, da Ribera," laughed the officer next him, "seeing you tried to ride over it." "And killed his horse," said another. "And saved myself!" shouted da Ribera. "I look for a reward for that, my lord--the saving of a valiant officer of yours----" "Shall not be forgotten!" laughed Visconti. "Be paid by this advice--remember burning towns are dangerous, as to his mortal cost a certain great Frenchman found at Rouen, and several great Germans more recently at Milan----" "When they lay along the ramparts like flies, I have heard my grandfather say, striving to loot in the midst of the very flames," said de Lana, "like da Ribera here."