Order of Darkness Read online

  ‘It is so. But you could change your faith, and your country, and your family is anyway lost to you.’

  ‘I could not change my faith,’ Luca said shortly.

  ‘Perhaps all faiths are shadows on the wall,’ Radu Bey said, crinkling his dark eyes as he looked up at Luca. ‘Perhaps there is a God like a burning torch, but all we can see is the shadows that we cast ourselves when we walk in front of the flame. Then we see great leaping shadows and think that this is God, but really it is only our own image.’

  Luca’s eyes widened slightly. ‘I will pray for your soul,’ he said. ‘For that is terrible heresy.’

  ‘As you like,’ Radu Bey said with his handsome lazy smile. ‘Did you write it all down, boy?’

  Ishraq kept her head down. ‘I did, milord.’

  ‘Heresy and all?’

  Ishraq stopped herself from looking up and smiling into his warm dark face. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Well, leave your papers here and carry these to the ship for me,’ he said carelessly. He passed her the wrapped box of manuscripts and to Luca he extended his hand. They gripped each other, hand to elbow, and felt the power in each other’s arms.

  ‘You are too good to chase around a failing country asking ignorant people what is going wrong in their poor lives,’ Radu said quietly to Luca. ‘You are too intelligent to be employed studying the night-terrors of old ladies. I know your commander – he has pledged his life to the wrong side and he will find the price is too high. He will sell his soul, thinking that he is doing the work of God, but he will find the world changes and he is left far behind. Come on board with me now and we will sail for Istanbul, for the libraries and for the study you can do.’

  Luca released him. ‘I keep faith,’ he said, a little breathlessly. ‘Whatever the temptation.’

  ‘Oh, as you wish,’ Radu Bey said gently, then turned and walked towards the ship.

  Ishraq shot a quick glance at Luca, and at his nod, followed Radu Bey down the quayside carrying the box of manuscripts. Quietly, over his shoulder, the Ottoman threw a sentence to her in Arabic, ‘If you are a slave I will free you. Come down to the quayside at sunset and jump into the ship and we will take you away. If you are a girl, as I think, you will be safe. I give you my word. If you are a scholar, no – I know you are a scholar, girl or boy – you should come with me to Istanbul where you can study.’

  Carefully, she said nothing.

  ‘Your master is a fool to choose ignorance over learning,’ he said. ‘He chooses to stay with the side which is losing. He chooses to stay with a God who can foresee only the end of days. Will you remember me, when you see me again?’

  Startled, she blurted out in Arabic: ‘Yes!’

  He turned and smiled at her, his heart-stopping good looks quite dazzling in the midday sunshine. ‘Remember me well,’ he said. ‘And when you see a man who reminds you of me – and I think you will see a man that you would take for my very twin brother – then remember that you are in the most terrible danger, and that you should come to me.’

  ‘I cannot come to you,’ she said, recovering herself and speaking in Italian. ‘Ever. Never.’

  He spread his hands and made her a little smiling bow. ‘I think there will come a day when you pray to come to me,’ he said, and took the parcel from her hands and stepped down to the prow of his galley. ‘Sister mine, these Christians are not half as kindly as they seem. I know this for I was born and bred by them, and abandoned by them, just as you have been.’

  ‘I’m not abandoned,’ she said, suddenly urgent that he should hear her. ‘Nobody abandoned me.’

  ‘They must have done,’ he said. ‘Your father must have abandoned you, or your mother. For here you are, with skin like honey and eyes like dates and yet you are in service to a Franj, and you don’t acknowledge your people, nor come home with us when we invite you.’

  ‘I’m with my people,’ she said stubbornly.

  ‘No, you’re not, they’re Franj – foreign to us.’

  There was a little silence.

  ‘You are skilled,’ he said. ‘You’ve been well-taught; you walk like a fighter and you write like a scholar.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘You are working for people who think that you are going to hell,’ he pointed out.

  She handed the box to him and stepped off the raised deck to the quay.

  ‘When the day comes that you see a man who looks like me, you should turn your back on him and come to me,’ he repeated his warning. ‘Otherwise you will see terrible things, you will do terrible things, you will look into the abyss itself. You will start to believe that you are in the hell that these Christians have invented.’

  She pulled her cap over her eyes, she turned her collar up, as if against rain, and she turned and walked away from him – though she would rather have been walking to him.

  The village watched the Ottoman galley all day through the shuttered windows of the quayside houses, and from the arrow-slits of the fort, as the men planed the mast to fit, set it in the boat, rigged the stays and the sail, and then, finally, as they had promised, cast off at sunset and started to row out past the little fort and the dripping obstacle of the chain.

  ‘Stop that ship!’ The shout echoed in the narrow streets over the clatter of hooves as a horse and rider scrabbled down the cobbled steps towards the port. Luca whirled around, on guard against fresh danger.

  ‘Stop that ship! In the name of the Holy Father, stop it!’

  After one moment of hesitation, Luca ran to the fort, waving his arms. ‘Stop the ship! Someone is coming!’

  The horse burst from the shadow of the buildings, the rider bent low over his neck as the sparks flew from the horse’s hooves skidding on the stone cobbles. He flung himself to the ground and shouted, ‘I command you to stop it!’

  The men spilled out from the fort, demanding to know what the matter was now.

  The stranger threw himself at Luca. ‘Stop it! That ship is commanded by the greatest enemy to Christendom!’

  ‘How could we stop it?’ Captain Gascon demanded irritably. ‘It’s under sail and they are rowing? We have no way to stop it.’

  The stranger stamped his feet in his rage. ‘That ship is commanded by a devil!’

  ‘The ship is gone,’ Luca exclaimed. ‘And, anyway they have no cannon here. We can’t bombard it. And it was under a flag of truce. Why d’you want it held? What is your authority?’

  Then he saw the dark blue robe, the piercing black eyes inside the shadow of the hood, and realised they were terribly familiar. Brother Peter, beside him, dropped to one knee. ‘Milord,’ he said simply.

  Luca hesitated. ‘Is it really you, my lord?’

  The man looked past them both to the slave galley as the wind filled the sails and the rowers lifted their oars, and then shipped them. As if he were mocking them, the tall figure standing at the raised stern of the ship released a standard in gorgeous irridescent blues and greens with great golden eyes, a long ribbon of precious cloth of gold meticulously embroidered to look as if it were overlaid with peacock tails, the symbol of nobility in the Ottoman empire, the standard of a great man of a conquering country.

  ‘Was that Radu cel Frumos?’ the lord demanded. ‘Answer me! Damn you! Was that Radu cel Frumos?’

  ‘He called himself Radu Bey,’ Luca said carefully. A quick glance at Brother Peter, who was still on one knee, his hand on his heart, assured him that the furious hooded man, glaring after the vanishing ship, was the lord who had recruited him to the Order of Darkness. Luca knelt beside Peter and put his hand on his heart.

  ‘Greetings, lord.’

  ‘Get up,’ he spat, not even looking down at them.

  ‘I’m sorry that we didn’t know you wanted him detained,’ Brother Peter said quietly. ‘He was here with his ship after an accident with the mast. If we had known . . . But they were heavily armed, and we had no cannon or anything more than the local guard.’

  ‘You will know in future.