Order of Darkness Read online

  She could see him square his shoulders and knew she had brought him to himself.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You are right. I should be worthy of him.’

  Together they turned for the inn. At the doorway, where a torch burned, set in the wall beside the door, its yellow flickering light reflected in the wet cobbles beneath their feet, he stopped and turned to her. He took her face in both his hands and looked into her dark eyes. Without fear or coquetry she stood still and let him hold her, slowly closing her eyes as she turned her face up to him. She felt a sense of belonging to him, as if it were natural to stand, face to face, all-but embracing.

  Luca breathed in the scent of her hair and her skin and put a kiss between her eyebrows, where a child would be signed with the sign of the cross at baptism. Ishraq felt his kiss where her mother used to kiss her – on the third eye, where a woman sees the unseen world – and she opened her dark eyes and smiled at him as if they understood each other; then they went quietly into the inn together.

  The next day was a Sunday but nobody thought that they should rest for the Sabbath. The lower half of the town was a mess of wreckage and filth. Luca helped in clearing up the village, his teeth gritted as he shifted piles of wood and rubble and found, among the roof beams and broken spars the bodies of some of the drowned children.

  Reverently, Luca and the other men used an old door as a stretcher and carried the little corpses two at a time up to the church and laid them down in a side chapel. The light was burning on the altar as the midwives of the village washed the bodies and prepared small shrouds. Luca prayed over the lost children and then went up to the cliff just outside the village walls where they were making a new graveyard for the drowned, as there was not enough space for them to be laid all together in the old churchyard.

  Luca helped the men digging the graves in the hard soil, swinging a pick, and felt a sense of relief when he stripped off his shirt and worked in his breeches, sweating with the hard labour against the unyielding earth under the bright unforgiving sun.

  Ishraq brought him some ale and some bread at midday and saw the grimness of his face and the tension in his broad shoulders. ‘Here,’ she said shortly. ‘Rest for a moment. Eat, drink.’

  He ate and drank without seeing the food. ‘How could I be so stupid as to let him go?’ he demanded. ‘Why didn’t I make sure that he was behind us? I just assumed he was there, I didn’t think twice.’

  Just then a girl limped up to the makeshift wall that they had built around the little graveyard. ‘Where’s the other man?’ she demanded.

  The two of them started as if they had seen a ghost. It was Rosa, the girl with the bleeding feet that they had seen on the very first day. The little girl that Freize had carried back, through the mud of the harbour, just before the wave had struck.

  ‘He told me to run back to the inn for sweetmeats,’ she said accusingly. ‘I’m here to tell him he’s a liar. There were no sweets. The kitchen was empty, and there was a terrible noise. It frightened me so much that I ran up the hill and when I looked behind the sea was chasing me. I ran and ran. Where is he? And where’s Johann the Good and the other children?’

  ‘I don’t know where the man is right now,’ Luca said, his voice a little shaky. ‘We haven’t seen him. He went out in the harbour to try to get all you children back to high ground, away from the sea. That’s why he lied to you about sweets. He wanted you to get to safety. Then the great wave came . . . but he can swim. Perhaps he is swimming now. Perhaps your companions and Johann have been washed in somewhere, and are walking back right now. We’re all hoping for them all.’

  Her face trembled. ‘They’re both gone?’ she asked. ‘They’re all gone? The sea took them? What am I to do now?’

  Luca and Ishraq were silent for a moment. Neither of them had any idea what this little girl should do.

  ‘Well anyway, come with me to the inn and we’ll get you some food and something to wear and some shoes,’ Ishraq said. ‘Then we’ll think what would be the best for you.’

  ‘He saved you,’ Luca said, looking at her white face trembling on the edge of tears. ‘We’ll care for you for his sake, as well as for your own.’

  ‘He lied to me,’ she complained. ‘He said there were sweets and there was a great wave and I could have drowned!’

  Luca nodded. ‘He did it to save you,’ he repeated. ‘And I am afraid that it is he who is drowned.’

  She nodded, hardly understanding, and then took Ishraq’s proffered hand and walked down the hill to the village with her.

  Luca’s day had started at dawn on the quayside looking out to sea, and dusk found him there too. But when it grew dark he came in and ate his dinner as a man who has set himself a dreary task to do. After dinner he prayed with Brother Peter and the little party listened as Brother Peter read the story of Noah, of men and women and the animals saved from a Flood. The little girl Rosa, who had never heard the story before went to bed with her head full of the rainbow at the end of the story.

  The rooms had been dried out and the landlady had borrowed dry bedding. She offered Rosa a truckle bed in the warm kitchen. The four travellers, so conscious that they were missing one, that they should be five, went to their beds early. The inn was filled with people who had come in from villages to the north of Piccolo who had lost their children to the crusade, but hoped that they had been saved from the wave. The murmur of their quiet talking, and some of the mothers crying, went on all night. Brother Peter and Luca took a share in the big bed of the men’s room but Luca spent the night gazing blankly at the ceiling, not sleeping at all.

  Isolde and Ishraq went to their bedroom and plaited each other’s hair in unhappy silence.

  ‘I keep thinking about him,’ Isolde started, ‘and how sweet and funny he was.’

  ‘I know.’

  They had no night gowns, so they hung their robes on the post of the bed and prepared to sleep in their linen shifts. Isolde knelt in prayer and mentioned Freize by name. When she rose up, Ishraq saw that her eyes were red.

  ‘He ran back for the horses,’ Ishraq said. ‘When he heard them crying and neighing. He knew that something bad was happening. He wouldn’t leave them on board. He called the children to shore, he saw that we were safe, and then he went to the horses.’

  Isolde climbed into the bed. ‘I’ve never met a man more steady,’ she said. ‘He was always cheerful and he was always brave.’

  ‘I was unkind to him,’ Ishraq confessed. ‘He asked me for a kiss and I threw him down in the stable yard at Vittorito. I regret it now, I regret it so much.’

  ‘I know he said that he was offended at the time, but I think he found it funny,’ Isolde volunteered. ‘I think he liked you for your pride. He spoke of it and laughed, as if he were offended and admiring, both at once.’

  ‘Right now, I wish I had given him a kiss,’ she said. ‘I liked him more than I told him. Now I wish I had been kinder.’

  ‘Of course you could not kiss him,’ Isolde said sorrowfully. ‘But it was so like him to ask! I wish we had all been kinder to him. We never tell people that we love them for we think, like fools, that they are going to be with us forever. We all act as if we are going to live forever, but we should act as if we would die tomorrow, and tell each other the best things.’

  Ishraq nodded, she got into bed beside her friend. ‘I love you,’ she said sadly. ‘And at least we have always said goodnight like sisters.’

  ‘I love you too,’ Isolde replied. ‘D’you think you can sleep?’

  ‘I just keep thinking of the wave, that terrible wave. I keep thinking of him out in the water, under the water. I just keep thinking that if he is drowned – what difference does it matter if I sleep or not? If he is drowned, what would it have mattered if I had kissed him or not?’

  They lay in silence until Isolde’s quiet breathing told Ishraq that she had fallen asleep. She turned in the bed and closed her eyes, willing herself to sleep too. But then her dark eyes suddenly snap