Order of Darkness Read online

  ‘You can’t wish to be back in the nunnery,’ Ishraq objected. ‘You can’t wish to be under the command of your brother.’

  Isolde turned her face away and shook her head. ‘I wish I were a girl in my father’s care again,’ she said. ‘I wish I could be home.’

  ‘Well, Freize said that we would be about a week on the road,’ Ishraq replied, trying to cheer her friend. ‘And the only way to get your own home back is to get your godfather’s son to support you. It’s a long journey, but with luck it leads us home at last.’

  Isolde turned into the room. ‘I don’t know how we’ll manage without him. I can’t imagine setting out on a journey without him.’

  ‘Without him complaining?’ Ishraq suggested with a faint smile. ‘Without him endlessly complaining about the road, and about the mission, and about Brother Peter’s secret orders?’

  Isolde smiled. ‘We’ll miss all that,’ she said. ‘We’ll miss him.’

  It was a quiet group that assembled for dinner. Much of the company had left the inn since the burial of the bodies of the children, and travellers on the coastal roads had heard of the disaster that had hit all the fishing villages along the coast and were skirting the blighted areas and travelling inland. Nobody had much appetite and there seemed to be nothing much to say.

  ‘Where is Rosa?’ Isolde asked the landlady. ‘Is she in the kitchen with you?’

  ‘She’s worked like a little cook, and now she’s eating her dinner as good as gold,’ the landlady said, pleased. ‘That was a good thought of yours, my lady. That was kind Christian work.’

  ‘What did Lady Isolde do?’ Luca raised his head in momentary interest.

  ‘She took me to one side and she prayed with me and Rosa together. She showed Rosa my linen room and the child saw the beauty in it. She’ll make a good kitchen maid and a good housemaid. I was spared from the terror of the flood, locked safe in my linen room; I can’t help but warm to a girl who admires it. She can stay here with us. Lady Isolde has offered to pay for her keep for her first month and then she’ll earn her wages. I’ll look after her.’

  ‘That was well done,’ Luca said quietly.

  Isolde smiled at him. ‘It wasn’t hard to see that they might help each other. And Rosa will have a good home here and learn a trade.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Luca said, losing interest.

  ‘The town of Split tomorrow,’ Brother Peter said, trying to be cheerful. ‘We’ll probably get in about dawn if we leave early.’

  Isolde directed her words to Luca. ‘And then Zagreb.’

  There was a clatter of noise in the stable yard and a cheerful ‘Halloo!’ from outside. It was an incongruous yell in a town gripped with mourning. The innkeeper opened the kitchen door and said, ‘Hush, don’t you know what has passed here? Keep the noise down. What do you want?’

  ‘Some service!’ came the joyous shout. ‘Some stabling for the bravest horses ever to swim for shore! Some dinner for a great survivor! Some wine to toast my health in! And news of my friends. The two beautiful lasses and the brilliant young man? And the sour-faced priest that travels with us? Are they here? Have they gone on? Swear to me that they are safe as I have been praying?’

  Luca went white, as if he thought he was hearing a ghost and then he exclaimed, ‘Freize!’ and leapt up from the table, overturning his chair, and dashed down to the kitchen, and out through the back door to the stable yard.

  There, standing at the head of his horse and holding the reins of four others, with the tired donkey behind them, was Freize: sea-stained and dirty, but alive. As he saw Luca outlined in the light from the kitchen, he dropped the reins and spread his arms. ‘Little Sparrow, thank God you’re safe! I have been riding for miles fretting about you.’

  ‘I! Safe! What about you?’ Luca yelled and catapulted himself into the arms of his boyhood friend. They clung to each other like long-lost brothers, slapping each other’s backs, Luca patting Freize all over as if to assure himself that he was alive. Freize caught Luca’s face in his hands, and kissed him roundly on both cheeks and then wrapped his arms around him again.

  Luca thumped his shoulders, shook him, stepped back and looked at him and then hugged him again. ‘How ever did you—? How did—? I didn’t know where you were – why didn’t you run for the inn with us? I swear I thought you were right behind me – I’d never have left you on your own!’

  ‘Did you get up on the chimney like the kitten?’ Freize replied to the torrent of questions. ‘Are you all safe? The girls? Both girls?’

  As the two young men spoke at once, Ishraq and Isolde came running out of the inn door and threw themselves on Freize, hugging and crying and saying his name. Even Brother Peter came out into the yard and thumped him on the back. ‘My prayers!’ he cried. ‘Answered! God be praised He has brought Freize back to us. It is a miracle like the return of Jonah onto dry land from the belly of the fish!’

  Ishraq, tucked under Freize’s arm with Isolde clinging to his other side, glanced up. ‘Jonah?’ she asked. ‘Jonah swallowed by a great fish?’

  ‘As the Bible tells us,’ Brother Peter said.

  She laughed. ‘The Koran also,’ she said. ‘We call him Jonah or Yunus. He preached for God.’ She thought for a moment and then recited:

  ‘Then the big Fish did swallow him, and he had done acts worthy of blame.

  Had it not been that he (repented and) glorified Allah,

  He would certainly have remained inside the Fish till the Day of Resurrection.’

  Brother Peter’s delight faded slightly. ‘It’s not possible,’ he said. ‘He was a prophet for God, our God.’

  ‘For our God too,’ Ishraq said, pleased. ‘Perhaps, after all, they are one and the same?’

  The innkeeper paddled around the waters in his cellar for a special bottle of wine, two special bottles, three, as more and more people came to hear the extraordinary story and drink Freize’s health. Even those who had lost brothers or sons at sea were glad that at least one life had been spared. And his survival gave hope to those who were still waiting. The landlady brought some cheese and chicken to the table, some bread fresh-baked in the re-heated oven, and half the village piled in to watch the restored Jonah eat his dinner and hear how he had been saved from the terrible destruction.

  ‘I saw the wave and I was running for the inn after you when I heard the horses kicking down their stalls on the ship, so I ran back to them . . .’ Freize started.

  ‘Why didn’t you come with us?’ Isolde scolded him.

  ‘Because I knew that the little lord would care for you two, but there was no one to care for the horses,’ he explained. ‘I saw you set off at a run and I splashed across the harbour to where the boat was stranded. I got on board – Lord! the boat was sitting on the harbour floor – and I thought that I would set them free, let them run away, and catch them later. But as I was trying to get close enough to cut the ropes, talking to them and telling them all would be well, the world made me a liar indeed for I looked over the shoulder of the horse on the seaward side, and I saw the great wall of water, as high as a house, racing towards us and already in the mouth of the harbour. I had seen it shining like a white wall, a long way off, but it came faster than I had dreamed.’

  There was a little groan from the people who had lost their children, at the thought of the great wave. ‘I did nothing,’ Freize admitted. ‘God knows, I was no hero. Worse than that. I ducked down between one horse and another and I fairly buried my face in Rufino’s mane. I was so afraid I didn’t want to see what was coming. I thought it was my death coming for me, I don’t mind admitting. I could hear a great roar, like a beast coming for me. I closed my eyes and clung to a horse and cried like a baby.

  ‘I could hear it – dear God, a noise that I hope I never hear again – a grinding sliding screaming noise of the water storming towards me and eating up everything in its path. It hit the little ship like a hammer blow on a wooden box and threw us up in the air like we were a splint