Stormbringers Read online

  Isolde gasped at the word, and looked at Luca, expecting him to silence the shouts. He said nothing to defend her.

  ‘And the gatekeeper says they went out at night.’

  ‘It was afternoon,’ Isolde insisted.

  Luca raised his hand on the groan from the crowd and the single shout: ‘Liar. Dirty liar!’

  There was a scuffle at the doorway, as the door banged, and the porter from the west gate came into the church.

  ‘You tell him,’ they pushed him forward till he arrived before Luca, Father Benito, and Brother Peter,

  ‘You are?’ Brother Peter dipped his pen in the ink.

  ‘Porter. Gatekeeper Paolo. I saw the women, and I warned them to be back inside the gates before dusk,’ he said.

  ‘Was the sun setting as they left?’ Luca asked.

  ‘It must have been, for I warned them of the curfew.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘They said they were going for a walk.’

  ‘Why should they lie?’ someone shouted. ‘If they were going for a wash? Why not say that?’

  ‘And they went out as night fell! Why would they do that?’

  ‘They went out as night was coming, so that no one could see them calling up a storm in the green lake!’

  Luca looked at Isolde and saw defiance in her dark blue eyes. She looked as she did when he first met her, a woman against the world, despite her own desire to live at peace in her home. A woman driven to defiance. A woman with no trust in him, nor in any man: a woman at bay.

  ‘Tell these people,’ he said. Suddenly he broke into Latin, confident that she would understand him but few other people in the church would. ‘Please, please my dearest, trust us with the truth. Tell them that you would not call up a storm. Tell them that you are not a storm-bringer. Ishraq too. Just tell them. For God’s sake, Isolde, we are all in trouble here. I can only ask you questions – you have to save yourself. Tell them what you were doing.’

  Slowly, Isolde rose to her feet and stepped down from the choir stalls to face the crowded church ‘I am no storm-bringer,’ she said, speaking simply and loudly so that her words echoed off the stone walls. ‘I am no witch. I am a woman of good repute and good behaviour. I am a woman who does not obey a father, since my father is dead, nor do I obey a husband, since I have no fortune and no man will take me without a dowry. I don’t obey my brother, since he is false and faithless. So you see me as I am – a woman without a man to represent her, a woman alone in the world. But none of this – none of this makes me a bad woman. It makes me an unlucky one. I am a woman who would not knowingly do a wicked act. I cannot prove this to you, you have to trust me, as you trust your mothers and your wives and your sisters. I have to call on you to think of me with generosity, as a good woman of high repute, raised to be a lady in a castle. And my friend here, Ishraq, was raised beside me almost as my sister, she is the same.’

  Ishraq slowly rose to her feet, and stood beside Isolde as if she were answering to a tribunal on oath. ‘I am a heretic and a stranger,’ she said. ‘But I have done nothing to harm anyone. I did not call up the wave. I don’t believe that any mortal has the power to call up a wave like this. I would never have called up a wave to hurt the children, nor you, and I would never have done anything to put our travelling companion, my friend Freize, in danger.’

  Luca, who had been looking down at his papers, praying that the village people would hear the raw sincerity in Isolde’s explanation, suddenly flicked his gaze up to see Ishraq’s dark eyes were filling with tears. ‘He was a true friend, and a loyal heart,’ Ishraq’s voice was low, choked with tears. ‘I think he wanted to be my sweetheart and I was such a vain fool that I refused him a kiss.’

  There was a murmur of sympathy in the room from some of the younger women. ‘Ah, God bless you,’ one of them said. ‘And now you’ve lost him. Before you could tell him.’

  ‘I’ve lost him,’ Ishraq agreed. ‘And now I’ll never be able to tell him that I loved how he laughed at things, and I loved how kind he was to everything, even a kitten, and how he understood things without learning. He was no scholar but he was wiser than I will ever be. He taught me that you can be wise without being clever. The last thing he did – almost the very last thing on earth that he did – was to send me and Isolde and his friend Luca to safety. That’s how we got back to the inn, that’s how we knew to get high, up to our room and then to the roof. There was no mystery about it. It was Freize who had the sense to notice that his kitten was crying for fear, and he saw the kitten climbing up to the roof. He guessed that the water would flow back. And I am grieving for him now.

  ‘I have lost the dearest sweetheart that a woman might have. I lost him through my own pride and my own folly and I only knew that he was a fine young man when he sent me to safety and went back himself to save the horses. You have to know that I would never ever have done anything that would endanger him. You can call me a heretic. You can call me a stranger. But you can’t think that I would have put Freize in the way of a great wave – I would never have hurt him.’

  ‘Let me through!’ a voice from the doorway interrupted and the crowd parted as the stable boy came in, propelled by the innkeeper, red-faced and furious.

  ‘What’s this? Brother Peter asked, alarmed by the sudden noise, and then, as he recognised the innkeeper with the landlady behind him, he said: ‘Dear Lord, who is this now?’

  ‘He’s got something to say,’ the landlord said. ‘Dirty little tyke.’

  The boy, his face as scarlet as his twisted ear, ducked his head before Luca’s gaze.

  ‘Do you have something to tell us?’ Luca asked. ‘You can speak without fear.’ To the innkeeper he said: ‘Do let him go, that can’t be good for him.’

  ‘I followed them,’ the boy confessed, rubbing his ear. ‘Out of town, and down to the lake.’

  There was a whisper of excitement from the packed church.

  ‘What did you see?’

  The lad shook his head, his colour deepening. ‘They went naked,’ he confessed. ‘I watched them.’

  Oddly, Luca’s colour rose too, burning red in his cheeks, in his ears. ‘They undressed to swim?’

  ‘They swam and they washed each other with soap. The water was cold. They squealed like little piglets. They washed their hair, they plaited it. Then they got out of the water.’

  ‘Did they do anything,’ Luca paused and cleared his throat. ‘Did they do anything like making waves in the water, pouring water from a jug, did they say words over the water, did they do anything that was not washing and swimming?’

  ‘They played about,’ the boy said. He looked at Luca as if he hoped he would understand. ‘They swam and splashed and kicked. They were . . .very . . .’

  ‘Very?’

  ‘Very bonny.’ His chin dropped to his chest, his whole body slumped with his shame. ‘I watched them. I couldn’t look away. She . . .’ he made a shrugging gesture with his shoulder towards Isolde, as if he did not dare to point a finger. ‘She wore a shift. But t’other one went naked.’ He looked up and saw Luca’s flushed face. ‘Stark naked and she had skin like a ripe peach all over. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. And her . . .’

  ‘You will have to confess,’ the priest interrupted quickly, before the boy could continue his description of Ishraq glowing like a peach, naked in the lake. ‘You have had unclean thoughts.’

  The boy went an even deeper red. He looked imploringly at Luca. ‘So bonny,’ he said. ‘Anybody would have watched. You couldn’t look away.’

  Luca dropped his eyes to his papers, conscious of his own guilty desire. ‘Yes, very well,’ he said shortly. ‘I think we understand that. But at any rate you saw nothing that made you think they were calling up the wave?’

  ‘They weren’t doing that,’ the boy said flatly. ‘They were just playing about and washing like girls. And anyway, it was the middle of the afternoon.’

  ‘The porter warned them of the curfew?’