Dark Tracks Read online

“Surely he doesn’t think he can stop them? He can’t countermand their lord.”

  “He says that he has to try.”

  “Where are we to go?” Isolde asked. “Back to the inn?”

  “Yes, I’ll go with you, see you safely inside, and then come back for Luca and Brother Peter.”

  Ishraq took a look at the men, who set up a great growl of a cheer as some fat roasted chickens and a big bowl of butter and gravy were brought to their table. “Let’s go,” she said. “Perhaps they’ll eat themselves sick.”

  “I’m sure that’s the intention,” Isolde said.

  Ishraq helped Isolde onto her horse and mounted her own, but was surprised as Freize handed her the reins to his horse, Rufino. “What are you doing?” she demanded. “Freize, we have to go now.”

  “One moment,” he said, and turned back to the rabbi’s house. He knew the front door was barred, so he tapped on the shutters and they opened a crack and the rabbi’s wife, Sarah, peered out.

  “I am sorry,” Freize said awkwardly. “Forgive me. I am afraid of something, afraid for you. When we came to your town, I think we brought a Being in with us, and I think he is in your rooms upstairs.”

  Sarah looked at him as if she could not understand his speech. “A Being,” Freize said again, feeling more and more of a fool before her dark, frightened gaze. “A great, growing boy.”

  She looked at him as he struggled to explain. “He spoke Hebrew to the gateman,” he said. “On his forehead is the word ‘EMET.’ ”

  She knew that word—he could tell by the flicker of recognition in her eyes. She did not speak, but opened the shutter wide and swung open the window behind it in a silent invitation. Freize pitched himself in over the windowsill headfirst and scrambled to his feet. Inside the darkened house, she stood to one side and gestured that he might go up the twisting stairs to the upper floor. Freize bent his head beneath the low beams and climbed up.

  The first room that he came to was a bedroom with a broad bed, piled high with feather mattresses and clean white linen sheets. On the doorway was the mezuzah. Freize looked at it without understanding, thinking it was some kind of pagan icon that might poison him if he went through the door; but he ducked his head and went past it, his neck prickling. The only furniture in the plain room was a chest at the foot of the bed. Certainly, there was no place that the giant Being could hide.

  The rabbi’s wife crossed the room ahead of him and showed him the smooth, unbroken linenfold paneling on the wall. Freize tapped on it, but it did not yield and it did not sound hollow. He looked at Sarah and, with a little smile, she stepped to one side and pressed her foot down on a floorboard. There was a tiny click, and a hidden doorway in the panels swung open.

  It looked like nothing more than a cupboard. Any searcher might conclude that it was a hiding place for treasure, or for a single man to stand still and silent, and that they had found all there was to discover. Sarah went into the small space and pressed an unmarked place on the ceiling, and all at once it slid back and a wooden ladder descended on a pulley. She gestured that Freize might go up.

  Slowly, he climbed through the hatch into the attic and found that it adjoined the roof vault of the next-door synagogue. The women and the children of the village were hiding here, seated, holding each other, in complete silence in the darkness. As Freize’s head slowly emerged through the open hatch, their faces turned toward him, but nobody said a word. Freize took in the golden-skinned, dark-eyed faces of a dozen children, the blaze of treasure of the case holding the scrolls of the Torah, the beautiful brocade cover, the silver yad, the rolls of the sacred texts, the golden menorah, and before it all, on guard, his head brushing the very top of the steeply sloping rafters, unsmiling and silent, was the Being.

  On his forehead, shining as if in gold, were the letters that Freize had seen on the head of the little Being in the glass jar in the alchemists’ room in Venice: EMET.

  Freize’s compassion for the strange Being overcame his superstitious fear. “I saw you at the window,” he explained. “And you saved us last night. Thank you. So I came to tell you: there’s going to be trouble. You might not be safe here.”

  He looked around at the little dark heads of the children, at their trusting faces and the dark eyes fixed unblinkingly on him. “I’ll come back,” he said, as if the words were being forced from him. “I’ll come back for you.”

  He reached out for two of the nearest children. “I’ll take two now,” he said.

  Silently, as they had promised their parents they would be silent, they yielded themselves to him, and, one under each arm, he went carefully backward down the ladder, through the hidden door, across the bedroom, and down the stairs. The rabbi’s wife saw him lift them through the window and squeeze through the opening himself. She said nothing, but watched him from the window as he put one child on the horse behind Isolde and one child on the horse behind Ishraq, then drew their long riding capes down over the children to hide them. As Freize mounted Rufino, he heard the shutter slam and bolt.

  The gateway stood wide open: there was no point in securing the village with Lord Vargarten inside. Its safety would depend on his whim, not on its defenses. Ishraq led the way through the open gates with Isolde alongside her, Freize bringing up the rear. The soldiers glanced up indifferently as they passed. Ishraq felt the silent child’s arms tighten round her waist and spurred her horse onward. Freize glanced back. All the shutters were barred; all the doors were bolted. It was so quiet and it felt so doomed, he thought, that it was like a town with the plague.

  Once through the gate, the girls rode side by side, letting the horses walk up the stony path to the forest and then urging them forward in a canter where the track was smooth.

  “As long as we don’t meet the fiddler,” Isolde said.

  “I think he would have no power over you now,” Ishraq said. “It was the peddler who persuaded you that the shoes would make you dance.”

  “It felt like the music.”

  “It was a trick of the wits, by the peddler. He was hired by Giorgio to kill me, to get rid of you, and to steal the sword.”

  “And he poisoned you?” Isolde demanded. “On my brother’s orders?” She looked grim. “I will never forgive Giorgio for this,” she said. “I knew he was my enemy before—I had sworn to recapture my lands from him—but to poison you! You could have died. We could both have died. I will see him dead at my feet for this.”

  Ishraq told her friend that she had been in a deep sleep, perhaps a faint, very like death, but Luca had brought her round. She did not say how; she did not describe their tranced night of joy together. She thought that she would never tell anyone—she would never even think of it herself. Luca would never speak of it to her; even now, it felt like a dream, part of the deathlike experience: too strange and too secret ever to be spoken of.

  “He held you?” Isolde asked.

  Ishraq glanced sideways at her friend, looking for signs of jealousy, but saw none. It was as if they had all been too close to death to worry about anything but their survival. “He warmed me through,” she said. “He breathed for me. Truly, I think he brought me back to life.”

  “Thank God he was there and knew what to do,” Isolde said. “Think if he had not searched the inn for you?”

  “He and Freize saved each of us,” Ishraq said. “We owe them our lives.”

  “And, as well, I owe my life to Radu Bey,” Isolde told her.

  “No!” Ishraq exclaimed. “What was he doing here?”

  Isolde told her how Radu Bey had appeared in the village and saved her from the red shoes, how he had lifted his scimitar and whirled down on the shoes, that she had felt the wind of the blade as he slashed it down but nothing but the sudden cool on her feet as the shoes fell off.

  “And did he just cut them off and leave?” Ishraq wondered. “Did he say what he was doing here in the first place? Did he say anything about the fools’ gold and Luca’s father in slavery?”

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