Order of Darkness Read online

  ‘Who would have thought they could come this far? Children led by a youth who doesn’t even know where Jerusalem is? Brother Peter thinks they are part of the signs that we have been sent out to observe. I’m not sure, but I have to see that it is a sort of miracle. He is an ignorant country lad from Switzerland, and here he is in Italy, on his way to Jerusalem. I have to think it is almost a miracle.’

  ‘But you’re not sure,’ Ishraq observed.

  He shrugged. ‘He says the waters will part for them – I can’t imagine how. It would be a miracle in this place and time and I can’t see how it would happen. But perhaps they will be able to walk south to Messina and someone will give them ships. There are many ways that they could get to Jerusalem dry-shod. There are other miracles as great as parting the waters.’

  ‘You believe that this boy can find his way to Messina?’ Ishraq asked him sceptically.

  Luca frowned. ‘It’s not your faith,’ he said defensively. ‘I see that you would not believe these pilgrims. You would think them fools, led by a charlatan. But this boy Johann has great power. He knows things that he could only have learned by revelation. He claims that God speaks to him and I have to believe that He does. And he has already come so far!’

  ‘Can we come and listen to him?’ Isolde asked.

  Luca nodded. ‘He is preaching this afternoon. If you cover your heads and wear your capes, you can join us. I should think half the village will be there to listen to him.’

  Isolde and Ishraq, wearing grey gowns with their brown cloaks, came out of the front door of the inn and walked along the stone quayside. Most of the fishing ships were moored in the harbour, bobbing on the quiet waves, the men ashore mending their nets or coiling ropes and patching worn sails. The two girls ignored the whistles and catcalls as the men noted the slim, caped figures and guessed that there were pretty faces under the concealing hoods. Isolde blushed and smiled at a shouted compliment but Ishraq turned her head in disdain.

  ‘You need not be so proud, it’s not an insult,’ Isolde remarked to her.

  ‘It is to me,’ Ishraq said. ‘Why should they think they can comment on me?’

  They turned up one of the narrow alleyways which led up the hill to the market square and walked below criss-cross lines of washing strung from one overhanging balcony to another. A few old ladies sat on their doorsteps, their hands busy with mending or lace-making, and nodded at the girls as they went by, but most of the people were already in the market square to hear Johann preach.

  Isolde and Ishraq passed the bakery, as the baker came out and closed up shop for the day, his face and hair dusted white with flour. The cobbler next door sat cross-legged in his window, a half-made shoe on his last, looking out at the gathering crowds. The next shop was a ships’ chandlers, the dark interior a jumble of goods from fishing nets to cork floats, fish knives and rowlocks, screws by the handful, nails in jars, blocks of salt and barrels. Next door to him was a hatter and milliner, doing poor trade in a poor town; next to her a saddler.

  The girls went past the shops with barely a glance into the shadowy interiors, their eyes drawn to the steps of the church and to the shining fair head of the boy who waited, cheek against his simple crook, as if he were listening for something.

  Before him, the crowd gathered, murmuring quietly, attentively. Behind him, in the darkened doorway of the church, stood Brother Peter, Luca and Freize beside the village priest. Many of the fishermen and almost all the women and children of the village had come but Isolde noticed that some of the older children were absent. She guessed they had been sent to sea with their fathers, or ordered to stay at home – not every family wanted to risk its children hearing Johann preach. Many mothers regarded him as a sort of dangerous piper who might dance their children out of town, never to be seen again. Some of them called him a child-stealer who should be feared, especially by mothers who had only one child.

  The children of the crusade had been fed on a mean breakfast of bread and fish. The priest had collected food from his parishioners and the people of the market had handed out the leftovers. The monks in the abbey had sent down baskets of fresh-baked bread and honey scones. Clearly some of the children were still hungry, and many of them would have been hungry for days. But they still showed the same bright faces as when they had first walked into the village of Piccolo.

  Ishraq, sensitive to the mood of a crowd, could almost feel the passionate conviction of the young crusaders: the children wanted to believe that Johann had been called by God, and had convinced themselves that he was leading them to Jerusalem.

  ‘This is not faith,’ she whispered to Isolde. ‘This is longing: a very different thing.’

  ‘You ask me why we should walk all the way to the Holy Land?’ Johann started suddenly, without introduction, without telling them to listen, without a bidding prayer or calling for their attention. He did not even raise his voice, he did not raise his eyes from the ground nor his cheek which was still resting thoughtfully against his shepherd’s crook, yet the hundreds of people were immediately silent and attentive. The round-faced priest in the grey unbleached robes of the Cistercian order, who had never in all his life seen a congregation of this size, lowered his gaze to the doorstep of his little church. Brother Peter stepped slightly forwards, as if he did not want to miss a word.

  ‘I will tell you why we must go so far,’ Johann said quietly. ‘Because we want to. That’s all! Because we choose to do so. We want to play our part in the end of days. The infidels have taken all the holy places into their keeping, the infidels have taken the greatest church in Constantinople and the Mass is celebrated no more at the most important altar in the world. We have to go to where Jesus Christ was a child and we have to walk in His footsteps. We have to be as children who enter the kingdom of heaven. He promised that those who come to him as little children will not be forbidden. We, His children, will go to Him and He will come again, as He promised, to judge the living and the dead, the old and the young, and we will be there, in Jerusalem, we will be the children who will enter the kingdom of heaven. D’you see?’

  ‘Yes,’ the crowd breathed. The children responded readily, at once, but even the older people, even the villagers who had never heard this message before were persuaded by Johann’s quiet authority. ‘Yes,’ they said.

  Johann tossed his head so his blond ringlets fell away from his face. He looked around at them all. Luca had a sudden disconcerting sense that Johann was looking at him with his piercing blue eyes, as if the young preacher knew something of him, had something to say especially to him. ‘You are missing your father,’ the boy said simply to the crowd. Luca, whose father had disappeared after an Ottoman raid on his village, when Luca was only fourteen, gave a sudden start and looked over the heads of the children to Isolde, whose father had died only five months ago. She was very pale, looking intently at Johann.

  ‘I can feel your sorrow,’ he said tenderly. Again his blue gaze swept across Luca and then rested on Isolde. ‘He did not say goodbye to you,’ Johann observed gently. Isolde bit her lip at that deep, constant sorrow and there was a soft moan from the crowd, from the many people who had lost fathers – at sea or to illness, or in the many accidents of daily life. Ishraq, standing beside Isolde, took her hand and found that she was trembling. ‘I can see a man laid cold and pale in his chapel and his son stealing his place,’ Johann said. Isolde’s face blanched white as he told her story to the world. ‘I can see a girl longing for her father and him crying her name on his deathbed but they kept her from him, and now, she can’t hear him and he will never speak again.’

  Luca gave a muffled exclamation and turned to Brother Peter. ‘I didn’t tell him anything about her.’

  ‘Nor I.’

  ‘Then how does he know this?’

  ‘I can see a bier in a chapel alone,’ Johann went on. ‘But nobody mourns for the man who has gone.’ There was a sob from a woman in the crowd who fell to her knees. Isolde stood like a statue, listenin