Stormbringers Read online

  The older man nodded, seeing that Luca was close to breaking down. ‘I’ll send this off as it is,’ he said. ‘And we’ll go on looking for him.’

  ‘You think it’s hopeless,’ Luca said flatly.

  Brother Peter crossed himself. ‘I’ll pray for him,’ he said. ‘Nothing is hopeless if God will hear our prayers.’

  ‘He didn’t hear the children singing hymns,’ Luca said flatly, and turned and stared out to sea. ‘Why should He hear us?’

  At dinner time, Isolde went down to the quayside to find Luca, wrapped in his cloak, looking at the darkening horizon. ‘Will you come in for dinner?’ she asked. ‘They have dried out the dining room and stewed a chicken.’

  He looked at her without seeing her heart-shaped face and grave eyes. ‘I’ll come in a moment,’ he said, indifferently. ‘Start without me.’

  She put a hand on his arm. ‘Come now, Luca,’ she whispered.

  ‘In a moment.’

  She took a few steps back and waited for him to turn around. He did not move. She hesitated. ‘Luca, come with me to dinner,’ she commanded sweetly. ‘You can’t stay here, you do no good mourning alone. Come and have something to eat and we’ll come out together, afterwards.’

  He did not even hear her. She waited for a little longer and then understood that he was deaf to her and could hardly see her. He was looking for his friend, and could see nothing else. She went back to the inn alone.

  The darkness of early autumn found Luca still seated on the quayside, still looking out at the darkening sea. A few of the mothers whose children had been lost on the crusade had come down and thrown a flower or a cross made from tied twigs into the gently washing water of the harbour, but they too were gone by nightfall. Only Luca stood waiting, looking out to the paler line of the horizon, as if the act of staring would make Freize visible, as if he gazed for long enough he would be bound to see the wet head of Freize, and his indomitable beaming smile, swimming for home.

  The church clock chimed for Matins: it was midnight.

  ‘You fear you have lost him, as you lost your mother and father,’ a cool voice said behind him, making him swing around. Ishraq was standing in the shadows, her head uncovered, her dark hair in a plait down her back. ‘You believe that you failed them, that you failed even to look for them. So you are looking for Freize, hoping that you will not fail him.’

  ‘I was not even there when they were taken,’ he said bitterly. ‘I was in the monastery. I heard the bell started to toll, the warning tocsin that rang in the village when they saw the galleys of the slaving ships approaching. We hid the holy things in the monastery and we locked ourselves into our cells and prayed. We spent the night in prayer. When we were allowed to go out, the Abbot called me from the chapel and told me that he was afraid that the village had been attacked. I ran down to the village and across the fields to our farmhouse, which was a little way out towards the river. But I could see from a long way off that the front door was banging open, the house was empty, all the things of value were gone, and my mother and father disappeared.’

  ‘They came like a wave from the sea,’ Ishraq observed. ‘And you did not see them take your parents nor do you know where they are now.’

  ‘Everyone says they are dead,’ Luca said blankly. ‘Just as everyone thinks Freize is dead. Everyone I love is taken from me, I have no one. And I never do anything to save them. I lock myself into safety or I run like a coward, I save myself, I save my own life, and then I realise that my life is nothing without them.’

  Ishraq raised a finger, as if she would scold him. ‘Don’t pity yourself,’ she said. ‘You will lose all your courage if you wallow in sympathy for yourself.’

  He flushed. ‘I am an orphan,’ he said bitterly. ‘I had no friend in the world but Freize. He was the only person in my life who loved me, and now I have lost him to the sea.’

  ‘And what do you think he would say?’ she demanded. ‘If he saw you here like this?’

  Luca’s mask of sorrow suddenly melted and he found he was smiling at the thought of his lost friend. Colour rushed into his cheeks and his voice choked. ‘He would say, “There’s a good inn and a good dinner, let’s go and eat. Time enough for all this in the morning.”’

  Ishraq stood waiting, knowing that Luca’s heart was racing with grief.

  A cry broke from him and he turned to her and she opened her arms to him. He stepped towards her and she held him tightly, her arms wrapped around him as he wept with great heaving sobs, on her shoulder. She said nothing at all but just held him, her arms wrapped around him in a hug as strong as a man’s, rocking him gently as he wept broken-hearted for the loss of his friend.

  ‘I never told him,’ he finally gasped, as the truth was wrenched out of him. ‘I never told him that I loved him as if he were my own brother.’

  ‘Oh he knew,’ she assured him, quietly and steadily in his ear. ‘His love for you was one of his greatest joys. His pride in you, his admiration for you, his pleasure in your company was well known to him and to us all. You did not need to speak of it. You both knew. We all knew. He loved you and he knew you loved him.’

  The storm of his weeping subsided and he pulled back from her, wiped his face roughly on his damp cloak. ‘You will think me a fool,’ he said. ‘A woman weeping. As soft as a girl.’

  She let him go at once, and stepped back to perch on one of the capstans, the mooring posts where they tied up the ships, as if she were settling down to talk all night. She shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think you a fool to mourn for one you love.’

  ‘You think me a weakling?’

  ‘Only when you were writing your life into a ballad of self-pity. I thought that you were too strong in your grief. You can’t bring him back to life by your determination. Alas, if he is lost to us then you cannot bring him back again by wishing. You have to know that there are things you cannot do. You have to let him go. Perhaps you will have to let your parents go too.’

  ‘I can’t bear to think that I will never see any of them again!’

  ‘Perhaps the task of your life is to think the unthinkable,’ she suggested. ‘Certainly, your mission is to look at the unknown and try to understand it. Perhaps you are called to understand things that most people never consider. Perhaps you have to find the courage to think terrible things. The disappearance of your parents, like the loss of Freize, is a mystery. Perhaps you have to let yourself know that the very worst thing that could have happened, has indeed taken place. Your task is to start to think about it, to ask why such things happen? Perhaps this is why you are an inquirer.’

  ‘You think my grief prepares me for my work?’

  She nodded. ‘I am certain of it. You will have to look at the worst things in the world. How can you do that if you have not faced them in your own life, already?’

  He was quiet, turning over her words in his mind. ‘You’re a very wise woman,’ he said as if seeing her for the first time. ‘It was good of you to come down here for me.’

  ‘Of course I would come for you,’ she replied.

  He was thinking of something else. ‘Did Isolde come earlier?’

  ‘Yes. She came to fetch you for dinner. But you were deaf and blind to her.’

  ‘That was some time ago?’

  ‘Hours.’

  ‘It’s very late now, isn’t it?’

  ‘Past midnight,’ she said. She rose and came close to him as if she would touch him again. ‘Luca,’ she said his name very quietly.

  ‘Did Isolde ask you to come for me?’ he asked. ‘Did she send you to me?’

  A rueful smile flickered across her face and she took a careful step back from him. ‘Is that what you would wish?’

  He made a little gesture. ‘I dare not hope that she is thinking of me. And today she has seen me act like a fool and yesterday like a coward. If she thought of me at all before now, she will not think of me again.’

  ‘But she is thinking of you, and of Freize,’ Ishraq claimed. ‘S