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  Luca was as shocked by Brother Peter’s cold hatred as his prediction. He swung into the saddle. “I’ll leave the spare horses with you. I’ll be as fast as I can. Whatever the truth of this, whether our enemies are dancers or Jews, Isolde is in terrible danger and we need help to save her.”

  In the Jewish village, the shutters were barred on every house, every door locked. The gateman, standing on the gate tower with his fingers stuck in his ears, shouted down to the dancers below: “Stop the music and we will give you food.”

  At once, the tambourine rattled with a shimmer of brassy zils and the fiddle ended the tune with a triumphant chord. Inside the gate, Freize slumped on the ground beside Isolde, as if his legs had been cut from under him, and Isolde’s feet in the red bloodstained shoes were suddenly stilled, the red ribbons scattered around her like trails of blood. She leaned forward and clasped her calves as the muscles went into rigid cramps.

  There was an eerie silence. Outside the village walls, the dancers dropped to the ground with exhaustion. Those who had any food unwrapped their meager supplies of bread and cheese, watched hungrily by the others. Some of them stumbled down the steep banks of the river to the water’s edge and drank, bending their heads down and gulping thirstily. Some of them splashed their faces; a very few stripped off their shirts and washed in the cold water. The drummer confidently leaned back against the village gate, as if it were the entrance to his own hometown, stretched out his legs with an air of satisfaction, and dozed, his tambourine resting on his chest. The fiddler found a patch of soft grass and lay on his back, his face turned to the sun. Nobody could be in any doubt that the dancers were resting, waiting for their breakfast, only so that they would be ready to start again. The silence was nothing more than a temporary truce.

  On the inner side of the door Freize knelt at Isolde’s feet, desperately pulling at the shoes. They were so tightly fitted that he could not get them off. “How did you ever get them on?” he asked, pulling at them and twisting her foot.

  “They just slipped on,” she said desperately. “Easily, without a moment’s difficulty. They should come off easily.”

  It was impossible for him to get a grip on the slick leather. On the foot where he had cut her ankle, the blood was still flowing and the shoe was wet and slippery. His hands were damp with nervous sweat. Now her shoes and her feet were smeared with blood and, though he pulled and pulled at them, he could not tear the shoes off.

  “I’m so afraid of hurting you,” he said.

  “Pull them off!” Isolde demanded. She was panicking now, her voice high and frightened. “I don’t care if it hurts. If they start playing again and the shoes start dancing, it will hurt me far more then, Freize—it will be the death of me.”

  Freize scrabbled at the back of her foot, trying to get his fingers between the shoe and her heel, but there was no gap, and he could see the redness of her skin where his fingernails had raked her.

  “Pull them off!” she said again.

  “Looks like you’ll have to cut them off,” the rabbi observed. “While she is still.”

  “Yes!” Isolde exclaimed. “Cut the shoes off.”

  Freize looked from his dagger to the red shoes. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t do it without hurting you. I daren’t. My knife isn’t sharp enough to cut through this leather without sawing at it, and then I’ll cut into your feet.”

  Isolde looked stricken. Any open wound was likely to go bad, and a bad wound was fatal. Often, the poultices of the wisewomen and the treatments of the physicians only made things worse. Someone with a stab wound, or even just a scratch, could die in terrible pain, with no other injury, the wound swollen and stinking, the patient mad with infection.

  “I really can’t,” Freize said. “Isolde, I dare not do it. I might cut your heel off. I don’t dare.”

  The rabbi shook his head at a guard who had put his hand to his dagger. “We can’t do it,” he said simply to Freize. “If the knife slips and we cut her, then Lord Vargarten will never believe that we weren’t torturing her.”

  “I will tell him that you were helping me!” Isolde exclaimed. “I give you my word.”

  The rabbi looked at her with pity in his dark face. “You might be dead,” he said frankly. “If we cut you deeply and we can’t stanch the bleeding, you will die. And then Lord Vargarten will destroy this village and kill every one of us. Nobody would believe that we had not murdered you. You people say that we bleed Christian babies to death for our own amusement. Who is ever going to believe that we were trying to help you?”

  “Isolde, everyone knows that these people sacrifice Christians,” Freize whispered to her. “And it’s certain that they kidnap Christian babies. These are not Jews like the moneylender in Venice who was living in a city alongside Christians, bound by our laws. They are living here according to their own religion; they hate us, and we hate them.”

  “We have put ourselves in danger just by admitting you inside our gates,” the rabbi went on. “We are supposed to live here without contact with Christians, except for serving them or lending them money. There are dozens of laws about when we may or may not see you. You are breaking these laws just by being here—we broke them when we opened the gate—but it is us who will be punished if anyone finds you here.”

  Freize tore at his hair. “What are we to do? What?”

  “Perhaps we can persuade the dancers to go away,” the rabbi said, nodding his head toward the barred gate. “When they are gone, we can put you on the road again, even if she is still in the shoes, and you can find your friends and they can help you.”

  “Won’t we hurry after the dancers if we are still dancing?” Isolde asked.

  The rabbi shrugged. “Perhaps. I don’t know.”

  Isolde put her hand on Freize’s arm. “I have to get these shoes off,” she said passionately. “I can’t go out there with them on. They will make me dance, and I will run after the dancers, I know I will. I have to get them off.”

  Outside the gate, the tambourine rattled as the drummer stirred in his sleep. Isolde gave a little moan of fear. “Do you have a shoemaker in this village?” she asked the rabbi. “Could he unpick the leather, get the uppers off the soles, tear them apart, and get these shoes off me?”

  “He can look at them,” the rabbi offered. “But we won’t do anything that causes you injury.”

  “Do you eat Christian blood or not?” Freize demanded directly, his own fear driving him to ask. “Is it true that you bleed Christians to make your Passover bread?”

  The rabbi turned his head from the question. His contempt and disdain were clear. He ignored Freize and instead he asked Isolde: “Did you just hear the tambourine? Did that slight sound, that little rustle, make you want to dance?”

  Shamed, Isolde nodded her head. “But please don’t put me out with the dancers,” she pleaded. “I have so much to do. I have to get back to my friend. I have to get back to my home and win it from my brother. I was born to be the Lady of Lucretili: it was my father’s wish that I should look after our people. I have to get back to my lands. I can’t just die here on the road because of a stupid moment of vanity when I saw a pair of shoes and wanted them.”

  The rabbi nodded to one of the guards, who went running up the main street. Isolde watched him go, seeing how the houses leaned against one another as if in mutual support, odd buildings, unlike anything she had seen before. There was a building rather like an inn but blank-walled—with no windows on the street. It had beautiful paintings on the outside walls and the doors stood open as if inviting everyone to come inside.

  It was a small village just like any other, the main cobbled street leading from the gate to the central square, the greater merchants’ houses with their double doors high and wide enough to admit wagons into the ground floors where they stored their goods, the smaller houses leaning on the back walls behind them. She would not have known it was a Jewish settlement except for the absence of a church tower constantly chiming