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  “Let’s get out of here,” Luca said. “Blasphemy is punished by God. You don’t want to be part of it.”

  “How could it be blasphemy to attack the infidel?” the lord asked.

  “Their Bible is our Bible,” Luca said. “The very same.”

  “Never!” Lord Vargarten exclaimed. “Who knew that?” He kicked his horse and made it wheel round, through the broken doorway of the synagogue. “Maybe I shouldn’t have taken my horse in there,” he remarked.

  In the street outside, his men were painfully hauling themselves into their saddles. A couple of them were hiding away little stolen treasures, but most of them were stunned with shock, nursing a broken arm, or bleeding from the nose.

  “You impious dogs!” Lord Vargarten yelled, anger replacing fear. “Theft and rape weren’t enough for you? Oh no! You had to go and try to steal the Jewish Bible. Don’t you know that’s as good as our Bible? You’ll all have to go to confession and your hurts are your own fault.”

  “Johann is dead!” someone shouted from the back of the troop.

  “And it’s his own fault!” Lord Vargarten replied. “Because he put his hand on the Holy Bible and an angel struck him dead. Remember it. When I tell you to take a little reward for your work, I don’t expect you to desecrate our own Bible! Fools that you are. Follow me, we’re riding home.”

  He glanced down at Luca. “Are you coming back with us?”

  Luca shook his head. “We’ll come later. I thank you for your help. I shall send my report to the Holy Father and tell him that you saved two towns from the dancers.”

  “No need to mention desecrating the Bible? It was not me, remember, it was that fool and he’s dead. I’d rather not have that marked up against me.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Follow me!” his lordship bellowed to his men, and pushed his horse through his troop, down the narrow street, and toward the gates.

  Luca and Brother Peter stayed very still, the setting sun burning into their faces, until they heard the gates bang shut behind them, the diminishing clatter of the hooves, and then the tocsin sound once, to tell everyone that the village was empty of Vargarten’s men and the danger had gone—this time.

  Slowly, people opened their shutters and peered out into the empty streets. Tentatively, front doors opened and people came out to assess the damage.

  Householders whose windows had been broken emerged with brooms of twigs and started to sweep up the precious glass. There was the noise of hammering from a nearby street as someone started to repair a shutter, torn from its hinges. A woman began to cry over the loss of an heirloom, a treasure that had been passed down by her family for centuries, which they had kept safe through centuries of raids like this, but lost today.

  The young woman who had run from the soldier walked back to her house, holding her ripped gown together at the neck to hide her nakedness, her head down.

  “I thank you for your help,” she whispered to Luca as she went by.

  He was overwhelmed by her dignity. He could find nothing to say but bowed as low to her as if she had been a Christian lady and not a despised Jewess. Then he turned back and paused at the wrecked doorway of the synagogue.

  Freize was underneath the opening to the attic, standing astride, balanced on the arms of one of the heavy wooden chairs in the gallery so that he could reach upward, to where the children were peering down. As Luca watched, a small boy lowered himself into Freize’s arms and was lifted safely onto the floor.

  Men and women came into the synagogue, calling out for their children and hearing their voices reply. Others went to the rabbi’s house and brought their children down the ladder and through the secret door. The mothers who had hidden elsewhere swooped down on their children and gathered them into their arms, kissing their faces, stroking their hair, patting them all over as if to be sure that they were unhurt.

  Many of the children, released from their promise of silence, chattered to their parents that Freize had frightened them at first, suddenly appearing through the secret door in the rabbi’s house, but he had ordered them to be quiet and hide at the back of the attic, and that he had stood before them as the soldiers hammered on the floor, breaking through from the gallery in the synagogue below.

  “And then he threw down the bench!” one girl told her father. “When the bad man came in. He broke down the floor and threw them all down!”

  The rabbi arrived in the synagogue with his wife. “That was you?” he asked Freize.

  Luca could see Freize struggle to explain. “Tell the rabbi,” he said shortly. “Tell him truly what has happened here. For I saw something that I cannot understand.”

  Freize spoke quietly to the rabbi. “There was a Being,” he said. “Call me a fool, but he joined us in Venice. First time I saw the creature it was no bigger than a lizard. Kept by some alchemists in a jar. I know it doesn’t sound like it could be so, but it was. When we put it into the canal, it swam like a fish, like a salamander. When we left Venice, I thought it was walking on dry land, and following us—I kept seeing it from the corner of my eye, looking like a stable lad, like a little boy.”

  He broke off and looked from Luca to Brother Peter, then back to the rabbi. “You’ll think I’m a fool,” he said. “Or drunk and seeing things.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything to me?” Luca demanded. “Why didn’t you tell me you were seeing such a thing?”

  “Because I thought I must be mistaken!” Freize exclaimed. “Even now, it sounds like madness.”

  “Go on,” the rabbi said steadily. “It is not madness to me.”

  Brother Peter looked at him. “Have you heard of such a thing before?”

  “Yes,” said the man. “Have you?”

  Brother Peter nodded.

  “Ishraq saw the Being when it was no more than a lizard,” Freize said. “And then she saw him when he was the size of a little lad. I told her that I thought it was the lizard from Venice and we looked out for it after that. When the dancers took Isolde, and I followed her, then I spotted the Being again—he was following me.”

  “Why?” Luca asked. “Why would he follow you?”

  Unhappily, Freize shrugged. “I don’t know. I never knew. He never spoke to me. He never answered when I told him to go away. But he was growing considerably. It was troubling. Anyway, when I tried to get Isolde away from the dancers, it was the Being who saved her. He helped her and pulled her onward, and when I started dancing too, he got hold of my hand and drew me away. He ran us down the hill toward the village when our feet were dancing us away, back to them, as if he were a good father and we were silly children. And it was the Being who shouted out the special words and got the gateman to open the gates.”

  “He shouted in Hebrew,” the rabbi told Luca. “He said: ‘Open the gate in the name of the one and only God!’ ”

  “In Hebrew?” Luca asked.

  The rabbi nodded. “The language of our faith. Of course the gateman obeyed.”

  “But when we got in the gates and they were closed behind us, and we were safe, the Being was gone. Slipped away.”

  “Disappeared?” Brother Peter asked.

  “I don’t know,” Freize said. “I was trying to hold Isolde still, and begging the gateman not to put us out, then this gentleman arrived and we wanted to get her shoes off. I didn’t see the Being again, and I didn’t think to look for him. What with Arabs with scimitars and Ishraq gone, and being trapped in a village of Jews, and leaving you, Sparrow, all on your own, I forgot all about him.”

  “And I never saw him at all,” the rabbi said. “Not when they came in, and not afterward. Though it would have meant everything to me to see him.”

  “I saw him at the window.” Freize gave a little shudder. “I was afraid he was up to mischief, in your house, sir,” he said to the rabbi. “So I thought I should warn the lady, your wife, since she had been so good to us. She wasn’t afraid at all. She knew just who I meant and she showed him to me, in the attic