Stormbringers Read online

  Luca’s fists clenched on the table. ‘She is my mother,’ he said warningly. ‘I won’t hear a word . . .’

  Behind him Freize tensed, readying himself for a fight but Ishraq stepped swiftly forwards, her hat pulled low over her eyes. ‘More wine, Sires?’ she lifted the bottle and deliberately clunked it against the back of Luca’s head in passing. ‘Sorry, Sir.’

  ‘Clumsy fool,’ Luca gasped, recovering himself. He took a breath and turned to Radu. ‘We won’t speak of my parents. You will not speak of my mother. Now, to business. The manuscript. You don’t object that my clerk’s lad makes a note of what we say?’

  Radu shook his head. ‘Not at all.’ He looked at Ishraq who pulled out a stool to sit down, and dipped the quill in the ink. For a moment their eyes met: dark into dark. ‘Interesting boy,’ he said. ‘An Arab?’ He said a few rapid words in Arabic. Ishraq did not allow herself even a flicker of response, though he had said to her, ‘Are you an Arab boy? Do you want me to free you?’

  ‘Half-caste,’ Luca said indifferently. ‘The child of a slave.’

  ‘Does he understand Latin?’

  ‘No,’ Luca said. ‘Only enough to write what I say, that’s all he’s good for.’

  ‘You should teach him,’ Radu advised. ‘It’s amazing what a bright boy can learn.’

  ‘Were you a bright boy?’

  Radu smiled. ‘My brother and I were more than bright, we were brilliant boys. Our father gave us to the Sultan as hostages for his alliance and though he did not intend it, he sent us to perhaps the only court in the world where we would be educated by the best in the world. We were raised with Sultan Murad’s son Mehmet, we were taught with him – five languages, mathematics, geography, philosophy – in short: the meaning of the world and how to describe it.’

  ‘And now?’

  The smallest shadow crossed Radu Bey’s face – Ishraq saw it, but nobody else did. ‘My brother went home. He inherited my father’s throne and agreed to hold our homelands for the Ottoman Empire, but he was faithless and turned against us. He’s overthrown now – in exile, but he’ll be gathering an army I don’t doubt, and hoping to hold the frontier against us again. He is dead to me. I doubt I’ll ever see him again. He chose the wrong side. He is my enemy. Our fates have led us in opposite directions: he is a great Christian commander, and I am one of the greatest commanders that my friend the Sultan Mehmet can put in the field.’

  ‘And you carry manuscripts with you everywhere that you go? You study?’

  ‘I read, all the time, and then I read some more. This is the way to understanding. I believe that one day we will understand everything.’ He smiled. ‘Shall I read what Plato says about earthquakes? It’s translated from the Greek into Arabic. I’ll translate it as I read for you, as best I can.’

  Carefully, he unwrapped the manuscripts that were written in beautiful Arabic letters on scrolls of vellum. Meticulously he spread them out, and with a glance at Ishraq, started to read. ‘Now, this is the bit you will find interesting: Here . . . he talks about a great island in the Atlantic, a huge country, bigger than Libya and Asia put together . . . and he says, hmm . . . “There occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.”’

  ‘Earthquake and the land sinking?’ Luca confirmed. ‘An army of men sinking down into the earth? A great island sinking down into the sea and then nothing but a shoal of mud where it had been?’

  ‘It sounds as if there was an earthquake so great that it swallowed up an army. An earthquake which caused the sea to drown a huge country.’ Radu read on. ‘Plato is telling of this because Socrates has been talking about an account of a city with earthquakes and floods.’ Radu’s smooth voice paused. ‘That’s about it.’

  ‘Earthquakes and floods? As if they come together?’

  Radu nodded. ‘Also, one of our own Arabic thinkers suggests that the earthquake moves the land under the sea. If you can imagine it, the land beneath the sea rises up, and the water is forced to flow away from it.’

  Luca made sure he did not look at Ishraq, who kept her head bowed over the paper, rapidly writing.

  ‘What else does he write about, Plato? What else does he say?’ Luca was transfixed.

  ‘He writes about everything, really.’ Radu saw Luca’s entranced face. ‘Ah, you must get hold of a manuscript and have a Greek translate it for you.’

  ‘I could learn Greek,’ Luca said eagerly. ‘If I were to have a manuscript in Greek I could understand it. I can learn languages quickly.’

  ‘Can you?’ Radu Bey smiled. ‘Then you should come to our library in Istanbul. There is so much there, I can’t begin to tell you. Plato, for instance, talks about all of the real world that can be observed. He is very interesting about things that he has seen and heard about.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And he talks about the real world that sits behind the things that you cannot observe. That there is another reality we do not touch. A world that we can’t eat like food, a world that doesn’t trip us up, like rocks. There is a reality which is more real, that sits behind all this.’

  ‘So how would we ever see it?’

  ‘That’s the very thing. This is the unseen world behind the real one. We wouldn’t see it, we would only know it. We would understand it with our minds, not with grabbing hold of it and looking at it.’

  ‘The things that we can see and taste are of no help to understanding?’

  ‘They are shadows on the wall. Like a child making shapes in candlelight. The real thing is the candle, not the shadow. But all the child observes is the shadow.’

  Luca looked at Radu as if he would lay hold of him and shake information out of him. ‘I want to understand!’

  Radu wiped his mouth and then started to roll up the manuscript again. ‘Come to Istanbul,’ he offered. ‘Come with me now. There are students there who can speak in your language; they will take you into the library. You can read the documents we have, you can study. Are you a mathematician?’

  ‘No!’ broke from Luca in frustration. ‘Not as you would mean!’

  Radu smiled. ‘Plato studied with his tutor Socrates, and in turn he taught Aristotle. You are not a mathematician yet because you have to try to understand things alone. This is not a single thing that you can learn. It is about a body of knowledge – one man builds on another man’s learning. You need to understand those who have gone before you – only then can you ask questions and learn yourself.’

  Luca rose to his feet, his hands shook a little and he tucked them into his robe so that the sharp-eyed Ottoman soldier could not see that he was deeply tempted at the thought of a library of mathematical manuscripts. ‘This has been an interesting meeting for me; but I have to remember that you are the enemy of my faith, of my country, and of my family.’

  ‘It is so. But you could change your faith, and your country, and your family is anyway lost to you.’

  ‘I could not change my faith,’ Luca said shortly.

  ‘Perhaps all faiths are shadows on the wall,’ Radu Bey said crinkling his dark eyes as he looked up at Luca. ‘Perhaps there is a God like firelight, but all we can see is the shadows that we cast ourselves when we walk in front of the fire. Then we see great leaping shadows and think that this is God, but really it is only our own image.’

  Luca’s eyes widened slightly. ‘I will pray for your soul,’ he said. ‘For that is terrible heresy.’

  ‘As you like,’ Radu Bey said with his handsome lazy smile. ‘Did you write it all down, boy?’

  Ishraq kept her head down. ‘I did, milord.’

  ‘Heresy and all?’

  Ishraq stopped herself from looking up and smiling into his warm dark face. ‘Yes, sir.’