Order of Darkness Read online

  ‘They weren’t doing that,’ the boy said flatly. ‘They were just playing about and washing like girls. And anyway, it was the middle of the afternoon.’

  ‘The porter warned them of the curfew?’

  ‘He always warns everyone,’ the boy said to a murmur of agreement. ‘He always closes the gate early and he always opens it late. He never keeps time. He always does just what he wants and then tells all of us that we are too late or too early.’

  Luca looked around the room, testing his sense that the people were satisfied, that he could declare the inquiry over. He saw the angry spiteful faces of Mrs Ricci and the two wise women, but he also saw the exhaustion in the other people, who were grieving for the children and the loves they had lost, and now felt that they had wasted their time, accusing girls who had done nothing more than walk out of town in the afternoon for a swim.

  ‘I am satisfied that neither the children of the pilgrimage nor these lady travellers did anything to summon the wave,’ he said. His words were greeted in silence, and then a sigh of agreement. ‘I shall so report,’ he said.

  ‘I agree,’ said the commander of the sea guard.

  ‘We agree,’ Father Benito said, rising to his feet and looking around his flock. ‘This is a sorrow which came upon us for no reason that we can yet understand. God forgive us and help us in the future.’

  ‘And the little girl?’ the landlady asked. She looked to where Isolde was holding Rosa’s hand. ‘She is cleared too?’

  ‘How can they all three be cleared?’ one of the midwives said irritably.

  ‘Because they are all three innocent,’ Luca said sternly. ‘There is no evidence against them.’

  ‘Rosa is innocent of everything,’ Isolde confirmed to the landlady. ‘Can we find a home for her? She is far from her village and all alone in the world.’

  The villagers nodded and slowly filed from the church, some of them stopping to light a candle for loved ones who were still missing. Luca nodded to Brother Peter. ‘Perhaps give them all a glass of grappa down at the inn?’ he asked. ‘For good will?’

  Brother Peter nodded and whispered the order to the innkeeper who bustled off with his wife. Brother Peter started to collect up his papers. There was a space and a silence for Luca and the two young women.

  ‘You’re cleared,’ Luca said to them both. ‘Again.’

  They smiled a little ruefully. ‘We don’t seek trouble,’ Isolde said.

  ‘It seems to follow you.’

  Ishraq heard the criticism in his voice. ‘If any woman steps outside the common way then she will find trouble,’ she said simply. ‘It does follow us. We have to fight it.’

  ‘You are thinking about the wave?’ Isolde asked Luca as he watched Brother Peter reading through his notes.

  ‘This is no report,’ Luca said, frustrated, flicking at the papers with his fingertips. ‘This is nothing. This is a village scandal, a few old women frightening themselves. But the question that they ask is the right one. What caused such a thing? What could make such a great wave happen? I can say that it was not you two – washing in a lake – but I can’t tell them what it was. And most importantly, I can’t tell them if it could happen again. Could it happen again? Tonight, even?’

  Isolde crossed herself at once at the thought of such a terror, and Luca lowered his voice so the people leaving the church would not hear.

  ‘I have been thinking of this too, and I think it may have been an earthquake, the fall of a mountain or a mighty cliff, perhaps far far away,’ Ishraq said, surprisingly. ‘Perhaps it caused a wave, just one great wave, as a bowl of water will make waves and spill over, if you were to throw a stone into it.’

  Brother Peter rose to his feet and smiled at the prosaic image, typical of a woman who cannot imagine the earth as void and empty, and darkness upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moving over the waters, as the Bible itself describes. ‘The ocean is not a bowl of water,’ he corrected her gently. ‘It does not move with waves because someone throws a stone. It is not rocked in a basin for you to wash dishes in.’

  ‘I am not saying that it is. But small things sometimes work the same way as larger. The wave may have been caused by an earthquake, a great falling of rock. Just as you can make a wave in a bowl of water if you throw in a pebble.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Luca said. ‘But what made you think of this?’

  ‘Plato describes the drowning of the country of Atlantis in just such a way,’ she said. ‘He says that a great earthquake caused a great wave which drowned the island.’

  ‘Plato?’ Brother Peter repeated sceptically. ‘How has a girl such as you read Plato? I’ve heard of him, but I’ve read nothing that he wrote. There are no copies of anything he wrote.’

  ‘No, not that you could read, not translated into Italian; but we Arabs have his books. A few of them have been translated from the Greek into Arabic. I read a little part of them in Arabic when I was in Spain, with Isolde and her father, and I was allowed to attend the university. Plato is a philosopher who talks about great mysteries such as the wave, and has strange understandings.’

  ‘You were privileged,’ Brother Peter said irritably, scooping up the papers and stoppering the bottle of ink. ‘A heretic and a woman to read such a thinker. You must take care that it does not strain your nature, putting too much pressure on you. Women cannot think of abstractions.’

  She gave a small shrug. ‘My brain is well enough so far, though I thank you for your concern. At any rate, Plato says that the drowning of Atlantis might have followed a great movement of the earth. It made me think that this might be a natural occurrence, not an act of God, nor of the Devil, nor of storm-bringers – if there are such people. Perhaps it occurs naturally, from the world of nature. Though why God would make a world where such a thing could happen, is another question.’

  Brother Peter knew himself to be on firmer ground. ‘Ah, you ask an important question. It is because the perfect world that God first made was destroyed by sin in the garden of Eden, when the woman ate the apple.’

  Isolde exchanged a quick smiling glance with Luca. They both knew that Ishraq and Brother Peter would be quarrelling within a moment.

  Ishraq looked at him quite blankly. ‘What is wrong with eating an apple?’

  ‘Because it does not mean an apple. The apple signifies knowledge.’

  Luca winked at Isolde.

  ‘The woman wanted knowledge?’

  ‘Yes,’ Peter said, adopting his teacher’s voice. ‘But it was God’s will that the woman and her husband should be innocent of knowledge.’

  Ishraq looked as if she did not need his instruction. ‘I would have thought an all-seeing God could have foreseen that a woman would want knowledge,’ she said. ‘Why should she not? Why should I not? Would any woman want to live in ignorance? Would any man? And what does it benefit God to have people so ignorant that they are like these poor peasants – believing that people call up storms and the Devil takes the time and the trouble to make them unhappy?’

  Brother Peter was almost too irritated to speak. He picked up his papers, bowed to the altar and turned away. ‘There is no point trying to explain such things to you,’ he said. ‘You are a heretic and a girl.’ It would have been impossible to say which he thought was worse.

  ‘The Lord Lucretili believed that a girl could study, without straining her nature,’ Ishraq insisted. ‘Women like Hypatia of Alexandria taught Plato to her students without illness. So when Lord Lucretili was in Spain he sent me to study at the university of Granada. Education is important to us heretics. There are many Arab women who are educated. We Moors believe that a woman can study as well as a man. We do not think that it is godly for a woman to be an ignorant fool.’

  ‘But he did not send his daughter, Isolde, to learn heretic knowledge? He took care to protect her,’ Brother Peter said pointedly.

  ‘I wish he had!’ Isolde interrupted.

  ‘The lessons were in Arabic or Spanish,