Order of Darkness Read online

  The new cemetery had been made beyond the church, just outside the walls of Piccolo, on newly-consecrated ground beyond the north gate. It was overlooking the sea, and here the gravediggers stood around, leaning on their spades, beside a great hole, dug deep and wide for all the children to be laid together, just as they had rolled up together in sleep when they were following Johann and believed themselves to be blessed. Isolde took one look as the men laid the little shrouded bodies gently in the bottom of the wide trench, and then led Rosa to stand behind the priest, where his robes, billowing in the wind from the sea, hid the view of the grave and the little bodies bundled together.

  Father Benito read the service for burial, his voice clear over the constant crying of the seagulls, and the more distant noise of people sweeping their houses, cleaning their wet rooms, and repairing roofs and windows all over the town. Half a dozen people attended the little service, and as they walked away from the gravediggers, filling in the great hole with the dusty soil of the region, the priest promised that he would commission a stone monument to name the children as the pilgrims who walked into the sea. ‘If you ever come back here, you will see that we have not forgotten them,’ he said to Brother Peter. ‘Nor our own losses.’

  ‘D’you know yet how many of the townspeople are missing?’ Luca asked quietly.

  The priest crossed himself. ‘About twenty people,’ he said. ‘And half a dozen of our own children. It is a terrible blow but this is a community of people who experience terrible blows, very often. In a bad plague year we would lose that number. If there is a storm which catches the fishermen at sea we might lose a ship or even two, five or six fathers lost at sea and five or six families thrown into grief and want. When the Black Death came through here a century ago, the village was emptied – half of them dead in a month, the fields barren of crops because there was no one to plant, the fish spawned in the sea without fishermen! God sends these things to try us; but this week He has sent us a trial indeed.’

  ‘A curse on them not a blessing!’ they heard a woman pantingly scream, running up the stone steps, out of the little town gate, and then ploughing breathlessly up the hill towards them, her gown bunched up in her fist, her hair wildly loose, her face ugly with grief. ‘Let Satan drag them down to hell! You should have thrown their bodies over the cliff, not given them a grave in sacred ground. Curse them all!’

  ‘What’s this?’ the priest spread his arms wide and intercepted her as if she were a runaway horse, halfway up the hill. ‘What’s this, Mistress Ricci? What are you doing running around like this? For shame, Mrs Ricci! Calm yourself!’

  She glared wildly around, it was obvious that she hardly saw him. ‘They should be flung in the sea not buried with rites!’ she cried. ‘Beware. They are the storm-bringers! You are honouring our murderers! Demons! Every one of them!’

  Half a dozen people, some coming down the hill from the simple funeral, others attracted from inside the village by the noise at the gate, started to gather around. ‘Storm-bringers?’ somebody repeated, a note of fear in their voice. ‘Storm-bringers?’

  ‘Devils,’ she said flatly. ‘These false children, saying that they were on a crusade! Weren’t they storm-bringers all along? Pretending to a holy quest, just to trick us? Were they mortals at all, that they appeared here without so much as a father or mother between them? Led by a boy as beautiful as an angel but with strange sea-blue eyes? And we gave them bread, and meat and cheese and they unleashed this horror on us? And now my son is missing at sea and my husband too, and the storm-bringers have destroyed our peace. And you dare to bless them? And bury them like Christians? Giving them our ground just as we gave them our own kin?’

  The priest exchanged one anxious glance with Luca.

  ‘What is she talking about?’ Luca asked quickly.

  ‘This is a fishing town, dependent on the sea for their livelihood, dependent on good weather for their safety,’ Father Benito answered him. ‘They cling to the belief that there are storm-bringers who can make spells and call up bad weather.’

  ‘They believe this as a truth?’ Luca whispered. ‘A literal truth? They think that people can whistle up a wind, bring down a storm?’

  ‘They have seen such things.’ Father Benito spread his hands. ‘Inquirer, I can tell you on oath. I have seen such things. I saw a woman call up a storm onto the mast of the ship of a man she hated. I saw it with my own eyes: the woman swore a curse on him as his ship sailed from port, and the one deckhand who swam to safety spoke of cold terrible lights dancing around the mast until the ship went down.’

  ‘We have had a crusade of storm-bringers, God help us,’ the woman cried out. ‘And then you bury them in holy ground?’

  The priest turned to her. ‘Mistress Ricci, the children were drowned as innocents. They were on a holy crusade. They were singing hymns as they walked out to sea.’

  She shot a pointing finger at Rosa. ‘All of them?’ she demanded, her face twisted with cunning. ‘Were they all drowned? Or did some of them cause the wave but then escape scot-free? Is there not, right here, a little girl who was one of the first into town and begging for bread, and yet she ran through the town ahead of the wave, silent – not warning anyone – and now here she is at the funeral of the others? Rejoicing in her work? Taunting us? Who is she? And what’s she going to do next? Bring down thunder? A plague? Are snakes going to come out of her hair? Frogs from her mouth?’

  ‘Now, that’s enough,’ Isolde commanded quietly, stepping forwards to shield the little girl. ‘She’s just a child. I am sorry for your grief, Mrs Ricci, but we have all lost someone we love. We must comfort each other . . .’

  ‘But who are they?’ Mrs Ricci looked from Isolde’s sympathetic face to Luca. ‘And how can you be so sure that they are mortal children? All very well for you to say that she is a child, that they were mortal children, but they didn’t act like mortal children. They came without parents, from who knows where! Did they not call up the great wave and ride away on it? Like the storm people they are?’

  The priest shook his head sorrowfully, raised his hand in blessing and turned away from the angry woman, refusing to answer her questions. He made his way through the little gate into the town, but nothing would discourage Mrs Ricci, and now the wise women were beside her, staring at Rosa and clenching their hands in the gesture against witchcraft.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ Isolde drew Rosa to her side, then went to follow the priest. At once the three women darted forward and started to close the gate against her. Ishraq stepped quickly forwards and took the weight of the wooden door, pushing back against the angry women, her dark gaze on Mrs Ricci. ‘Don’t,’ she advised briefly. The three women, cowed by Ishraq’s gaze and the strong push at the gate, gave way and Isolde and Rosa walked through it into the town, Ishraq closely behind them as if on guard.

  ‘No, wait,’ a man said, putting a hand out to delay Father Benito as he headed for the church. ‘Not so fast, Father. Answer the women. What they say is true. There were children who ran back into town ahead of the flood. How did they know to run? Some of them got clear away?’

  ‘Did they warn the others?’ another man asked. ‘Did they warn us? No! They didn’t!’

  Another woman nodded. ‘They ran in silence,’ she said. ‘One went past me and never said one word of what was coming.’

  Rosa’s cold hand crept into Isolde’s palm. ‘We were just running away,’ she whispered.

  Ishraq stepped up beside Isolde, putting the child between them as if to protect the little girl from the increasingly angry crowd that was now blocking the lane from the church, their voices echoing loudly in the narrow street. Father Benito went on through them, and climbed the steps to the church turning to see more people joining the crowd from the market square, people coming out of their houses, still dirty from their work of salvage and repair, their faces suspicious and fearful.

  ‘Did they not tempt our children into the harbour with their promises? Did they not