Stormbringers Read online

  Ishraq and Isolde took the last private bedroom in the house, a little room under the slanting roof. They could hear the occasional scuffling from mice and probably rats under the tiles, but this did not disturb them. They laid their riding cloaks on the bed and washed their hands and faces in the little earthenware bowl.

  Freize, Luca and Brother Peter would bed down in the attic room opposite with half a dozen other men, as was usual when there were many travellers on the road and the inn was crowded. Brother Peter and Luca tossed a coin for the last place in the big shared bed and when Luca lost he had to make do with a straw mattress on the floor. The landlady of the inn apologised to Luca whose good looks and good manners earned him attention everywhere they went, but she said that the inn was busy tonight, and tomorrow it would be even worse as there was a rumour that a mighty pilgrimage was coming into town.

  ‘How we’ll feed them all I don’t know,’ she said. ‘They’ll have to take fish soup and bread and like it.’

  ‘Where are they all going?’ Luca asked, ashamed to find that he was hoping that they were not taking the road to Zagreb. He was anxious to be alone with Isolde, and determined that she should not join another party.

  ‘Jerusalem, they say,’ she replied.

  ‘What a journey! What a challenge!’ he exclaimed.

  She smiled at him. ‘Not for me,’ she said. ‘It’s challenge enough making gallons of soup. What will the ladies want for their dinner?’

  Freize, who sometimes served their dinner and sometimes ate with them, depending on the size of the inn and whether they needed help in the kitchen, was sent into the private dining room by the landlady and took his place with his friends at the table.

  He was greeted with little smiles from both girls. He bowed to Lady Isolde and noticed that her blonde hair was coiled demurely under a plain headdress, and her dark blue eyes were carefully turned away from Luca, who could not stop himself glancing towards her. Brother Peter, ignoring everyone, composed a lengthy grace and Isolde and Luca prayed with him.

  Ishraq kept her dark eyes open and sat in quiet thought while the prayer went on. She never recited the Christian prayers, but as Freize noted – peeking through his fingers – she seemed to use the time of Grace for her own silent thoughts. She did not seem to pray to her god either; as far as he knew, she carried no prayer mat with her few clothes and he had never seen her turn to the east. She was in this, as in so much else, a mystery, Freize thought, and a law to herself.

  ‘Amen!’ he said loudly, as he realized that Brother Peter had finally finished and that dinner might be served.

  The innkeeper’s wife had excelled herself, and brought five dishes to the table: two sorts of fish, some stewed mutton, a rather tough roast pheasant, and a local delicacy, pitadine, which was a pancake wrapped around a rich savoury filling. Freize tried it in the spirit of adventure and pronounced it truly excellent. She smiled and told him he could have pitadine for breakfast, dinner and supper, if he liked it so much. The filling changed according to the time of day, but the pancake remained the same. There was coarse brown bread baked hot from the oven with local butter, and some honey cakes for pudding.

  The travellers dined well, hungry from their long ride, and easy and companionable together. Even Brother Peter was so warmed by good food and the friendliness of the inn that he poured a glass of wine for the two young women and wished them, ‘Salute.’

  After dinner the ladies rose and said goodnight, and Ishraq went up to the little bedroom while Isolde lingered on the stairs. Luca got up casually from the dining table, and heading for the inn’s front door, happened to arrive at the foot of the stairs in time to say goodnight to her. She was hesitating on the first two steps, holding her lit candle, and he laid his hand over hers on the stair rail.

  ‘And so it seems we travel together for a little longer,’ he said tentatively, looking up at her.

  She nodded. ‘Though I will have to keep my word to Brother Peter, and go with another party if we meet one,’ she reminded him.

  ‘Only a suitable one,’ he reminded her.

  She dimpled. ‘It would have to be very suitable,’ she agreed.

  ‘Promise me, you will be very careful who you choose?’

  ‘I shall be extremely careful,’ she said, her eyes dancing, and then she lowered her voice and added more seriously, ‘I shall not readily leave you, Luca Vero.’

  ‘I can’t imagine parting from you,’ he exclaimed. ‘I really can’t imagine not seeing you first thing in the morning, and talking to you through the day. I can’t imagine making this journey without you now. I know it is foolish – it’s been only a few weeks, but I find you more and more . . .’

  He broke off, and she came down one step of the stair, so that her head was only a little higher than his. ‘More and more?’ she whispered.

  ‘Essential,’ he said simply, and he stepped up on the bottom step so they were level at last. Tantalisingly, they were so close that they could have kissed if he had leaned only a little more, or if she had turned her face towards him.

  Slowly, he leaned a little more; slowly, she turned . . .

  ‘Shall we plan our journey before we go to bed?’ Brother Peter asked dryly from the doorway of the dining room. ‘Brother Luca? Do you not think we should plan our journey so that we can make an early start tomorrow?’

  Luca turned from Isolde with a quiet exclamation. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘of course.’ He stepped back down to Brother Peter. ‘Yes, we should. Goodnight, Isolde.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ she said sweetly and watched him as he went back into the little dining room and shut the door. Only when he was gone did she put her hand to her mouth as if she had been longing for the kiss that could not happen on this night, and should never happen at all.

  In the morning the quayside was alive with noise and bustle. The boats that had been out at sea since dawn were jostling for position in the port. The earliest arrival was tied up alongside the harbour wall, the others tied to it and the farthest ones throwing ropes at bow and stern and the fishermen walking on planks laid across one boat to another with huge round woven baskets of fish dripping on their broad shoulders till they reached the shore and stacked them in their usual place for the buyers to come and see what they had landed.

  The air above the boats was filled with seagulls, circling and swooping for offcuts of fish, their cries and screams a constant babel, the flash of their white wings bright in the morning sunshine.

  A little auction of the catch was taking place at the harbour wall, a man yelling prices to the crowd, who raised their hands or shouted their names when he reached a price that they could meet, with the winner going forward, paying up, and hefting the basket to their cart to take inland, or carrying it up the stone steps into the town, higher up the hill, to the central market.

  Basket after basket heaped with shoals of sardines came ashore, the fish brilliantly shining and stippled black like tarnished silver, and the landlady of the inn came down and bought two baskets and had the lad from the stables carry them home for her. The other women of the town hung back and waited for the buyers to drive down the prices before they approached and offered their money for a single fish. Wives and daughters went to their fathers’ boats and took the pick of their catches for a good dinner that night. Individual fishermen had sets of scales on the quayside and leaned from their boats to sling iridescent-scaled fish into the tray, holding the balance to show to the waiting women, who then hooked the fish and dropped them into the bottom of their baskets.

  Sleek cats wound their way around the legs of the buyers and sellers alike, waiting for the fish to be gutted and cleaned and scraps dropped down to them. In the sky above, the seagulls still wheeled and cried, the cold sunlight of the early morning shining on them as brightly as on the dazzling scales of the fish, as if the air, the land, and the sea, were all celebrating the richness of the ocean, the courage of the fishermen and the profitable trade of Piccolo.

  Freiz