Order of Darkness Read online

  ‘Why are they ringing the tocsin?’ Luca demanded of him. ‘Is it another wave?’

  ‘No!’ the innkeeper said. ‘Look, see they’re raising the signal.’ He yelled above the pealing bell, so the people clamouring in the yard could hear. ‘God bless us, it’s not a wave, it’s a slave galley. That’s the bell for the warning. That’s the bell that warns of a slave galley. The guard has raised the signal on the harbour fort. Don’t run for high ground. It’s not the sea, it’s a raid! Take your places! Guardsmen! Take your places in the fort!’

  Luca’s face grew dark with anger. ‘A slave galley? Raiding now? When the people have just lost their children to the sea?’

  At once the men of the village started to run to the squat little fort that guarded the harbour, shouting to each other that it was not a wave but the warning bell for a slave galley. The women raced for their homes calling for their children. They could hear doors slamming from all over the village as frightened families bolted themselves inside. Isolde came running down from the church. ‘Father Benito says there is a slave galley coming into port!’ she said breathlessly. ‘He saw it from the tower.’

  They crowded into the inn where the innkeeper was lifting a formidable handgun out of a cupboard, with a box of gunpowder. Freize stepped back from the dangerous-looking instrument. ‘Won’t that be too wet to fire?’

  ‘Couldn’t I dry it quickly on the fire?’ he asked.

  ‘No!’ Freize said hastily. ‘No! Much better not.’

  Luca turned to the two young women. ‘You’d better go to your room and lock yourselves in. We’ll go down to the harbour fort and do what we can to stop them landing.’

  ‘The laundry room,’ the landlord advised. ‘Go with my wife and the little maid Rosa. You can mend laundry while you wait. Nobody will ever find you there.’

  When the two girls were about to argue Luca raised his hand. ‘You can’t come with us. What if they were to take you? Go and lock yourselves in as this good man says.’

  Jealously, Isolde saw that he turned to Ishraq, trusting her to cope in this new emergency. ‘Take a weapon in with you, in case they come,’ he said to her quietly. ‘Knives from the kitchen, an axe from the yard. And don’t open the door till you know it’s safe.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said quickly, and led the way upstairs.

  ‘Go,’ he said quietly to Isolde. ‘I can do nothing, unless I know you are safe.’

  ‘And Ishraq,’ she said, testing him. ‘You trust her to defend us.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, and was then puzzled when she turned on her heel, without another word to him, and ran upstairs without even wishing him good luck.

  Luca, Freize and Brother Peter followed the innkeeper down to the harbour.

  ‘We too should get into safety,’ Brother Peter said anxiously. ‘We’re not equipped to fight.’

  ‘I’d use my bare hands against them,’ swore Luca. ‘I’d go after them with a hammer, with the broadsword!’

  Freize exchanged one fearful look with Brother Peter and hurried after his master.

  The innkeeper had paused on the quayside and was shading his eyes, looking out to sea. Men pushed past him, hurrying to the little round fort that guarded the entrance to the harbour, where they were handing out pikes. Half a dozen men were heaving on a wooden capstan. With a great groaning creak it yielded and slowly as it turned it hauled a sunken chain out of the water to stretch across the harbour mouth, and bar the entrance.

  ‘It’s not like a raiding ship,’ the innkeeper said, puzzled. ‘I’ve never seen them approach so slowly before. And it’s coming in under a white flag. Perhaps they were damaged out at sea. It’s coming in too slowly and there are no cannon on deck, and there’s a white flag at the spur. It’s not an attack.’

  ‘Could be a trick,’ Luca said suspiciously, squinting to see the distant outline of the ship that was coming slowly, cautiously, closer. ‘They would stoop to anything.’

  They hurried on to the little fort. An older man was there, shouting orders. ‘Is it a raid?’ the innkeeper asked him. ‘Captain Gascon, is it a raid?’

  ‘I’m ready for one,’ was all he grimly replied. ‘Tell me what they’re doing.’

  Luca stepped to the edge of the quay, and got his first clear sight of the ship that had sailed through his nightmares ever since he had learned that his mother and his father had been captured. It was a narrow ship, lying very low in the water with oars stretching out either side, scores of them, in two banks, one above the other, rowing slowly now, but moving absolutely as one. Over the noise of men running to get weapons and taking their places in the tower behind him he could hear the steady beat-beat-beat of the drum keeping the rowers to a slow tempo. A wicked spike extended from the prow as if it would tear the very land itself, a white scarf billowing from the killer blade in a temporary gesture of peace.

  The first sail was down, tightly lashed, but he could see at once that the second sail, in the middle of the ship, had been torn down and had brought the mast down with it. They had cut it away, but the ropes were still trailing over the side; and the broken stem of the mast was jagged and raw. At the stern of the ship, on a raised platform, the master of the galley himself held out a broad white sheet in his upraised arm, so that the signal for parley fluttered like a flag at front and back. They came slowly towards the chain, as if they feared nothing, and then, as the rhythm of the drum changed they did an extraordinary manoeuvre, feathering the oars all together, so that the ship moved neither forwards nor back, despite the swift inward current, but stayed, rocking in the churned water of the harbour, waiting before the chain, as if they could dream that any town in Christendom would ever willingly admit them.

  ‘What are they doing?’ shouted the captain, frantically loading the only weapon, an old culverin, inside the fort.

  ‘Holding still before the chain,’ Luca replied. ‘As if they think that we would ever lift it to them.’ He felt his heart thudding fast at his first sight of one of the many ships that were such a terror to every port and riverside village in Europe.

  Every year the Ottoman slave galleys or the Barbary corsairs took thousands of people into captivity; whole towns had been abandoned because of the raids, villages destroyed. The slaving raids were a curse and blight on every coast in Europe. They raided all the way from Africa to Iceland, creeping up quiet rivers and inlets at night, falling on isolated farmhouses and stealing people away. Now and then they would sail into a town, steal all the treasures and burn all the wooden houses to the ground. Families, like Luca’s own, had been torn apart by the brutal kidnaps. For Luca, safe in the monastery, the news that his father and his mother had been enslaved was worse than if he had been told that they had died. For the rest of his life he feared that perhaps his mother was working as a house slave in a Muslim household, perhaps – or far worse – slaving to death in the fields, or brutalised by her owner. His father was probably serving in a galley like this one, chained to the oars and rowing every day all day, never raising up from his seat but sitting in his own dirt with the heat of the sun on his back, trained like an obedient mule to pull and pull when commanded, till his strong heart gave out under the strain and he died still rowing, and they unchained his hands from his oar and threw his wasted body over the side.

  ‘Luca,’ Brother Peter said, shaking his shoulder. ‘Luca!’

  Luca realised he had been staring blindly, filled with hatred, at the galley. ‘It’s just that – for all I know – my father is slaving on one of these,’ he said. ‘I’m going to get a pike.’

  The captain came out from the fort, the ancient culverin in his hand, a slow burning fuse in another. ‘Hold this,’ he said, thrusting the handgun into Brother Peter’s unwilling hands.

  ‘I really can’t . . .’

  ‘What do you want?’ the captain shouted over the water, cupping his hands around his mouth. ‘What do you want? I have cannon trained on your ship.’

  ‘Do you?’ asked Freize, surpr