Dark Tracks Read online

  Freize looked miserable.

  “I thought it followed me in the water,” she said very quietly. “I thought it kept up with a rowing boat, in the canal at Venice.”

  “And now it keeps up with us on horseback,” Freize said. “Day after day of travel.”

  She was very pale. “Have you told Luca about it?”

  “No,” he admitted finally. “Because I wasn’t sure that I had anything to tell him. I thought perhaps I was imagining it. I hoped I was being a fool—jumping at shadows. Frightening myself with mysteries. I thought I’d turn a blind eye and it would just go away. But now you’ve seen it too.”

  “I didn’t really see it here. I only heard something.”

  “At any rate, it’s a real thing.”

  Typically, Ishraq faced her fear. “So what is it? Is it the lizard, grown to a child?”

  “I’ve wondered about that,” Freize remarked. “But then I thought of something else.”

  “What? What do you mean, Freize? Are you talking in riddles now?”

  “Never mind what it is. That’s not really the question. The question is: why is it following us? If this is a mysterious Being, once as tiny as a lizard, now the size of a human child, why is it coming after us like a stray dog?”

  Ishraq came a little closer and put her hand gently on his solid chest. She could feel the rapid beating of his heart through the thin linen of his shirt, and knew that he was sharing her own superstitious dread. “What do you think it wants of us?” she asked him, knowing he had no answers. “And when will it turn and face us, and ask?”

  They rode all day, following the old Roman road that ran due north, through little fields of wheat and rye, past gardens growing vegetables and fruit. Sometimes they left the road for a shortcut that a villager showed them, taking tracks that were little more than packmen’s trails and drover routes, hard-beaten, single-file paths. There were a few dirty little farmhouses along the way, with their unglazed windows shuttered and their doors bolted.

  They climbed higher and higher into woods that were vaultingly high and still at midday, not even birds singing in the green shade. There were no inns when they left the old road, so they were glad to stop at noon under the shade of the thick trees and eat the magnificent meal that Freize unpacked from the saddlebags and drink the acidic light wine.

  It was late in the afternoon of the second day as their road wound down out of the hills toward a great expanse of river as wide as a smoothly moving lake—the Danube—and on the other side a handsome, bustling, stone-built quayside with a town wall and a gate. Without needing to say a word, the group changed the order of their little cavalcade: the women dropped back to ride together a little behind the men, their hoods pulled over their heads, completely hiding their hair, their eyes lowered to the ground, the very picture of obedient female docility. The ferryman came out of his house on their side and waved to acknowledge their progress as they rode toward him.

  “You wanting to go over to Mauthausen?” He nodded at the town on the opposite bank.

  “Yes,” Freize said, getting down from his horse and pulling out his purse to pay the fee.

  “You may not want to go,” the man warned them. “They have a sickness, a dancing sickness.”

  “A wise man would turn back here,” Freize agreed. He nodded to Luca to say that they had found the dancers, and Luca swung down from his horse and stepped forward. “How long have they been here?”

  “Two days now,” the man said. “Nothing seems to stop them. They got into town through the north gate and they’ll have to leave that way, for I won’t have them on my boat. They can’t stop dancing; they’d overturn my boat on the water they’re so mad. The gateman should never have let them in. They crept in quietly, that’s their cunning. Now they dance round and around the square and who’s going to have to pay to take them away? Us townsmen, that’s who.”

  “We have to cross,” Luca confirmed shortly.

  Freize held the horses as the rest of the party dismounted. The ferry was a broad, flat-bottomed barge hooked at stern and prow onto a strong rope that looped across the river, mounted on great posts at each end. Freize led one horse after another on board and tied them to the hitching points in the stalls. The rest of the party came up the gangplank and the ferryman cast off.

  The swift current of the river caught them and pulled them in a looping course downstream. Luca, Freize, Brother Peter, and the ferryman had to pull the craft along by going hand over hand on the rope, which swung high above their heads, until they crossed the river to bump against the quay of the town.

  Moored next to the ferry stage were barges from upstream and those that were beating their way back against the current, from Vienna, farther east. The quayside was busy with ships’ masters paying the toll to the custom house, and people loading and unloading goods, but every man was working in silence, each casting a glance over his shoulder toward the closed gate into the town. Everyone was hurried and anxious: there was no cheerful banter, no whistling, no songs to keep the time as a gang hauled on a pulley rope to unload a salt barge. It was as if there were plague in the town. All the bargees were in a hurry to leave, the toll collectors going through the cargo as fast as they could, and everyone waiting for the sound of an irresistible jig.

  The big wooden gates of the town were closed, but, as the travelers’ horses were unloaded, the quayside gateman opened one side to let them through. Everyone stopped work to watch them go into the town; Freize made a grimace at Luca: “Seems like no one wants to go into the town but us,” he said.

  “Of course,” Luca replied. “But we have work to do here.”

  “I know, I know,” said Freize unhappily, taking the reins of his horse, Rufino, and leading him through the gateway, followed by the others.

  Inside the gate it looked like a normal, small, prosperous town. The streets were cobbled with big sets of local granite, running uphill to a central square where a stone obelisk in the center served as a waymark, and the grand houses of the town were set square on three sides with the steps to a church with an old chapel behind it on the fourth side.

  “Is there a good inn in this town?” Freize shouted at a man driving a cow before them to the square, his head down. “Somewhere with an honest alewife, decent wine, and a good cook in the kitchen?”

  “Not really,” the man said pessimistically. “I wouldn’t say she was a good cook. But you can try the Red Fish. In the market square, on your right.”

  Freize nodded gloomily, as if this were just what he had expected. He led his horse up the cobbled street to the central square, where a sheaf of wheat hanging from a balcony showed that a dark doorway was the entrance to the bakery, and next door a drying bough of old holly was the sign for an inn. The others followed him.

  It was obvious that things were badly wrong. The doors of the church that faced the square stood wide open, and the travelers saw a family struggle with an elderly gray-haired man who was clawing his way out of the door as his son tried to drag him back inside the sacred space. In the square outside, a fiddler in a bright, tattered coat of motley colors was turning the pegs on a tuneless fiddle and nearly two dozen people were hopping and skipping from one foot to another. Some of them were dressed in their finest clothes, as if going to a harvest dance that had dragged on too long; some of them were in tatters, as if they had ripped their clothes dancing through brambles or pulling away from people trying to hold them back.

  To Luca’s dismay, he saw the distinctive headdresses and flying ribbons of other villages and towns, from far away, and guessed that the dancers were traveling from town to town, gathering numbers as they went. Some of them must have danced for days.

  “What’s going on here?” Freize asked the cow-herder, who was hurrying away, pulling his cow with a halter around her neck.

  “They’ve run mad,” the man said solemnly. “Started last Sunday, right after Vespers. Some woman came into town, chased by one of the woodcutters. As he was tak