Fools' Gold Read online

  ‘It’s beautiful!’ Ishraq exclaimed, thinking how similar it was to the rich designs of the Arab world. ‘What is it? A private chapel?’

  ‘It’s not a church at all, it’s a mausoleum,’ Brother Peter told her. ‘Built by a great Christian lady hundreds of years ago for her own burial.’

  ‘Look,’ Isolde said, turning back to the door where they had entered. A spacious mosaic over the doorway showed a warmly coloured scene of the Good Shepherd, leaning on his crook, crowned with a golden halo and surrounded by his sheep. ‘How could they do this hundreds of years ago? The tenderness of the picture? See how he touches the sheep?’

  ‘And that is the story of a Christian risking his life for the gospels,’ Brother Peter said piously, pointing to the opposite wall where a man was depicted running past the flames of an open fire, with a cross over his shoulder and an open book in his hand. ‘See the gospels in the library?’

  ‘I see,’ Ishraq said demurely. In this exquisite and holy place she did not want to tease Brother Peter about his devotion, or to express her own scepticism. She had been raised in the Christian household of Isolde’s father, the Lord of Lucretili, but her mother had taught her to read the Koran. Her later education encouraged her to examine everything, and she would always be a young woman of questions rather than of faith. She looked around the glittering interior and then found her attention caught by a wash of colour on some white mosaic tiles. Someone had glazed the open windows of the mausoleum and one of the pieces of glass had been broken. The morning sunlight, shining over the chipped surface, threw coloured rays on the white tiles and even on Ishraq’s white headscarf.

  ‘Look,’ Ishraq nudged Isolde. ‘Even the sunlight is coloured in here.’

  Her words caught Luca’s attention and he turned and saw the brilliant spread of colours. He was dazzled by the rainbow shining around Ishraq’s head. ‘Give me your scarf,’ he said suddenly.

  Without a word, her eyes on his face, she unwrapped it, and her dark thick hair tumbled down around her shoulders. Luca handed one end to her and kept the other. They spread it out to catch the light from the window. At once the white silk glowed with the colours of the rainbow. Together, as if doing a strange dance, they walked towards the window and saw the colours become more diffuse and blurred as the stripes grew wider, and then they walked away again and saw that the brightly coloured beam narrowed and became more distinct.

  ‘The broken glass seems to be turning the sunlight into many colours,’ Luca said, wonderingly. He turned back to the mosaic that he had been examining. ‘And look,’ he said to her. ‘The mosaic is a rainbow too.’

  Above his head was a soaring wall going up to the vault above them, decorated exquisitely in all the colours of the rainbow, and overlaid with a pattern. Luca, his hands holding out Ishraq’s scarf, nodded from the rainbow mosaic to the rainbow on the scarf. ‘It’s the same colours,’ he said. ‘A thousand years ago, they made a rainbow in these very colours, appearing in this order.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ Isolde asked, looking at the two of them. ‘What are you looking at?’

  ‘It makes you think that a rainbow must always form the same colours,’ Ishraq answered her when Luca was silent, looking from the scarf to the mosaic wall. ‘Does it? Is it always the colours as they have shown here? In this mosaic? Don’t look at the pattern, look at the colours!’

  ‘Yes!’ Luca exclaimed. ‘How strange that they should have noticed this, so many hundreds of years ago! How wonderful that they should have recorded the colours.’ He paused in thought. ‘So, is every rainbow the same? Has it been the same for hundreds of years? And if the chip of glass can make a rainbow in here, what makes a rainbow in the sky? What makes the sky suddenly shine with colours?’

  Nobody answered him, nobody had an answer. Nobody but Luca would ask such a question; he had been expelled from his monastery for asking questions which verged on heresy, and even now, though he was employed by the Order of Darkness to inquire into all questions of this world and the next, he had to stay within the tight confines of the Church.

  ‘Why would it matter?’ Isolde asked, looking at the rapt expressions of her two friends. ‘Why would such a thing matter to you?’

  Luca shrugged his shoulders as if he was returning to the real world. ‘Oh, just curiosity, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Just as we didn’t know the cause of the great wave in Piccolo, we don’t know what makes thunder, we don’t know what makes rainbows. There is so much that we don’t know. And while we don’t know the answer, people think that these strange tricks of nature are carried out by witchcraft or devils or spirits. They frighten themselves into accusing their neighbours, and then it is my job to discover the truth of it. But I can’t give them a simple explanation, for I don’t have a simple explanation. But here – since whoever made these mosaics knew the colours of the rainbow – maybe they knew what caused them too.’

  ‘But why are you interested?’ Isolde pursued. ‘Does it matter what colour the sunset was last night?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ishraq said unexpectedly. ‘It does matter. For the world is filled with mysteries, and only if we ask and study and go on discovering will we ever understand anything.’

  ‘There is nothing to understand, for it has already been explained,’ Brother Peter ruled, speaking with all the authority of the Church. ‘God set a rainbow in the sky as his promise to Man after the Flood. I will set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be the sign of a covenant between me, and between the earth. And when I shall cover the sky with clouds, my bow shall appear in the clouds.’ He looked gravely at the young women. ‘That is all you need to know.’

  He turned his hard stare to Luca. ‘You are an inquirer of a holy Order,’ he reminded the younger man. ‘It is your duty and your task to inquire. But beware that you do not ask about things outside your mission. You are commanded by our lord and by the Holy Father to discover if the end of days is coming. You are not commanded to ask about everything. Some questions are heretical. Some things are not to be explored.’

  There was a silence as Luca absorbed the reproof from the older man.

  ‘I can’t stop myself thinking,’ Luca replied quietly. ‘Perhaps God has given me curiosity.’

  ‘Nobody wants to stop you thinking,’ Brother Peter said as he opened the low door to the mausoleum. ‘But Milord will have made it clear when he hired you, that you are to think only inside the limits of the Church. Some things are not known – like the change of a man into werewolf, like the cause of the terrible flood – and it is right that you hold an inquiry into them. But God has told us the meaning of the rainbow in His Holy Word, we don’t need your thoughts on it.’

  Luca bowed his head but could not stop himself glancing sideways at Ishraq.

  ‘Well I shall go on thinking, whether your Church needs it or not,’ she declared. ‘And the Arab scholars will go on thinking, and the ancient people were clearly thinking too, and the Arab scholars will translate their books.’

  ‘But we are obedient sons of the Church,’ Brother Peter ruled. ‘And actually, what you think – as a young woman and an infidel – does not matter to anyone.’

  He turned and led the way out and they obediently followed him, Isolde lingered in the doorway. ‘It’s so beautiful,’ she said. ‘As if it were a freshly painted fresco, the colours so rich.’

  There was a little pause before Luca came out, and she saw he was putting something in the pocket of his breeches, under the fold of his cape.

  ‘What d’you have there?’ Isolde whispered to him, as Brother Peter led the way back to the inn.

  ‘The chipped piece of glass,’ he said. ‘I want to see if we can make a rainbow with it, anywhere.’

  Gravely, she looked at him. ‘But isn’t it God’s work to make a rainbow? As Brother Peter just said?’

  ‘It’s our work,’ Ishraq corrected her. ‘For we are in this world to understand it. And like Luca, I want to see if we can make a rainbow. And if he is not allowed to do