Chapter 4 Chapter Four

After his father's death, Medardo began to come out of the castle.The nanny was the first to discover it again.One morning she saw the door was open and the room was empty, so she sent a small company of servants out into the fields to track down the Viscount.The servants trotted all the way, and they came to a pear tree, on which they had seen the late fruit not yet ripe the previous evening. "Look up there," said a servant.They looked at the pears hanging against the dawn, and they were all stunned.Because the pears are not whole anymore, there are many pears that have been cut in half vertically, each of which is still hanging on its own handle, and each pear has only the sided half (or the left half) , depending on which side you look at it from, but they all keep the same half) The other half is missing, cut off or bitten off.

"The Viscount has been here!" said the servants.Of course, he shut himself up for many days without eating. The night before, he felt hungry and thirsty. When he first saw this tree, he climbed up to eat pears. The servants went forward and saw half a moth jumping on a stone. Due to the characteristics of frogs, it was still alive. "We're on the right track!" They continued to give chase.They got lost, and because they didn't see the half of the melon under the green leaves, they had to go back, and they didn't go in the right direction until they found the half of the melon.

In this way the servants came from the field to the forest, and they saw a mushroom cut in half, half a stone fungus, and then half a stone fungus, half a poisonous red mill.They continued to walk into the forest, and from time to time they saw mushrooms emerging from the ground, only half of the handle and half of the top.It was as if someone had split them in half with a knife, and the other half didn't even leave a bit of residue.Here are assorted mushrooms, puffballs, ovules, toadstools, poisonous and edible in roughly equal numbers. The servants followed this extended trace to a lawn called "Nuns' Land", where there was a pond in the middle of the green grass.In the first light of dawn, the water surface of the pond reflected the slender figure of Guidardo in a black cloak, and white, yellow and brown mushrooms were floating there.This is the half of the mushroom he killed, and now it is scattered on the clear and clear water.The mushrooms on the water looked intact, and Yu Jue watched them.The servants hid on the opposite side of the pond, not daring to say anything, and also stared at the floating mushrooms, only to realize that they were only edible fungi.What about the toadstools? Since he didn't throw it into the pond, what was the use? The servants ran back into the forest.They hadn't gone far when they met a boy carrying a basket half full of poisonous mushrooms on the path.

That child is me.At night, I was playing alone on the lawn of the nun's field, and a person suddenly emerged from the bushes, which really frightened me.When I walked towards my uncle, he was hopping across the grass on one foot in the pale moonlight, with a basket slung over his arm. "Hello, Uncle!" I greeted loudly.It was the first time I dared to speak to him.He looks like he hates seeing me. "I'm off to pick mushrooms," he explained to me. "Have you picked it?" "Come and see." My uncle said, and we sat by the pond.He started picking mushrooms, throwing some into the water and leaving others in the basket. "Here," he handed me the basket containing the mushrooms he had prepared, "fry in oil." I wanted to ask him why the mushrooms in his basket were only half, but I knew he wouldn't pay attention to this question, I said "thank you" and ran away.I was going back to fry the mushrooms when I met the menservants, and I realized they were all poisonous.

After hearing what they told about this incident, Nanny Sebastiana said, "It's the bad half of Medardo who came back. Who knows what will happen in today's trial!" A group of bandits captured by the ten guards.The bandits belong to our territory, so they must be dealt with by Jue.During the trial, Medardo sat slanted on a chair, biting his fingernails.The bandits were brought up in chains, at the head of which was the young man named Fiorfiero who had first seen the stretcher while picking grapes.The injured parties also came, some Tuscan cavalry on their way to Provence, who, passing us, were attacked and robbed in the forest by Fiorfiero and his companions.Fiorfiero argued that it was the cavalry who came to poach our territory, and he stopped them and disarmed them as poachers, while the guards did not think they were poachers.It should be said that bandit attacks were very common at that time, and the law was lenient about it.Besides, our place is especially suitable for bandits to haunt. Even some members of our family joined the gang, and even formed a gang of bandits themselves during the turbulent years.Not to mention poaching, it is the lightest crime.

But Nurse Sebastiana's worries were well founded.Medardo sentenced Fiorfiero and all his accomplices to be hanged as robbers.Those who were robbed, who were themselves poachers, were also hanged, as punishment for the guards who intervened too late, because they neither knew how to prevent the poachers beforehand, nor Know how to guard against bandit crimes. A total of more than 20 people were sentenced to death.We were appalled at this cruel and ruthless sentence, not least for the Tuscan gentlemen whom no one had seen before, but for the bandits and guards, who were generally not obnoxious.Pietrochiodo, the master carpenter who built the mule and horse pack racks, was in charge of building the gallows.He is an able and conscientious worker who does his every job with due diligence.He endured great grief because two of those sentenced were his relatives.He wanted to make a gallows with as many branches as a tree, and all its ropes could be raised by a single winch.The machine was so large and ingenious that it could lift more people at a time than was sentenced that day, so the Viscount used the spare noose to hang ten cats between every two prisoners.The stiff bodies and dead cats hung for three days, and at first no one could bear to look.But people soon discovered that the corpse was staring with anger, and our understanding of this tragedy has also changed. We have different feelings from before, and we regret the decision to unload the corpse and dismantle the large hanging machine.