Order of Darkness Read online

  ‘Little cross hens in a hen house,’ he said comfortably. ‘Very, very ordinary. But at least you have me to fall back on.’

  ‘When would I fall back on you?’

  ‘When he prefers her to you. When he makes his choice; if it’s not you. When you are down to the bottom of the barrel. And have to scrape.’

  Again he saw her colour rise. But she managed to laugh. ‘Ah, but you swore loyalty to her already. I’m not such a fool that I don’t know that everyone always prefers her to me. Everyone always will.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ he said tucking her hand in his arm again. ‘I worship her from afar. I have promised her that she can call on me as her squire. I have offered her my fealty, of course. But you . . .’

  She was ready to be offended. ‘Me? Don’t you worship me from afar?’

  ‘Oh no. You, I would bundle up behind the hayrick, lift up your skirts, and see how far I could get!’

  He was ducking before she even swung at him and he laughed and let her go as she turned in the inn door.

  And she was laughing too, as she went up the stairs to the bedroom that she shared with Isolde to tell her that they were all to go to Venice, and that they could stay with the two young men for a little while longer, whoever was in love, whoever was preferred, whatever might happen.

  The evening grew steadily darker. Luca and his lord spoke quietly of the cause of the wave, of the learning of the ancients, and of the signs of the end of days, and then Luca left the lord to pray alone, and go to his solitary bedroom.

  In the kitchen the fire was banked down, Freize dozing before it, seated in a wooden chair with his booted feet cocked on the chimney breast. He started up when he heard the dining room door close. ‘I waited up to see you to bed,’ he said, rubbing his eyes and yawning.

  ‘I think I can get up the stairs safely,’ Luca remarked. ‘You don’t need to tuck me in.’

  ‘I know,’ Freize said. ‘But it’s so good to be together once more. I wanted to say goodnight.’

  ‘Where are you sleeping?’ Luca asked. ‘Our bedroom is packed tight with guests. And Milord won’t share.’

  ‘She said I could bed down here,’ Freize said, gesturing to the pallet bed of straw in the corner of the kitchen where the kitten was already fast asleep. ‘I’ll be warmer than all of you.’

  ‘Good night,’ Luca opened his arms and the two young men hugged. ‘Dear God, Freize, it’s good to have you back again.’

  ‘I can’t tell you what it means to be safe on dry land and know that you and the girls are safe,’ Freize said. ‘I was even glad to see that miserable monk.’

  Luca turned and went quietly up the stairs, and the door creaked and then there was silence. Freize shucked off his boots and loosened his belt, gently moved the kitten to one side, and stretched himself out on the pallet bed. He put his hands behind his fair head and readied himself for sleep.

  Half dozing, he heard Milord go quietly up to his bedroom and the click as he dropped the latch on his door. The kitten settled itself on Freize’s throat and Freize fell deeply asleep.

  He was drifting in and out of pleasant dreams when the tiniest noise jolted him into wakefulness. It was a hiss, like the sound of a sleeping snake, a whisper of cloth. He opened his eyes but some apprehension of danger warned him to lie completely still. Through the open kitchen door he could see the darker hallway of the inn, and beyond that, the open front door. Even then, he did not move but lay watching and saw two dark silhouettes against the starlit sky. One was a woman; he could see her slight shoulders and her bare feet, the gleam of silver on one toe. The other was a man completely robed and hooded in black. Freize recognised at once Luca’s lord who Brother Peter had called Milord and who had insisted on sleeping alone.

  It was Ishraq who stood with him, and it was her whisper and the susurration of her chemise under her cape that had woken Freize. She paused in the doorway, her hand on the lord’s arm, and Freize saw the lord turn his hooded face towards her, but could not hear his reply.

  Whatever he said, whatever he murmured so quietly that Freize’s straining ears could make out no words, it satisfied the girl, for she released his arm and let him go. He stepped out onto the quayside; Freize noted that he walked like a dancer, his boots made no sound, he was as quiet as a cat, and he disappeared into the darkness in the next second. The girl stood for a moment longer, looking after him, but as he went from shadow to shadow in the darkness he disappeared as if by magic.

  Carefully, she closed the door, holding her finger under the latch so that it did not make the slightest noise. She turned towards the kitchen. Freize snapped his eyelids shut so that she could not see the gleam of his eyes by the ebbing firelight, and sighed a little, as a man deeply asleep. He felt her watching him. By her complete silence he knew that she was standing still and studying him, and he felt, despite his attraction to her, despite his affection for her, a chill at the thought of those dark eyes looking at him from the darkness, as her companion, her accomplice, went quietly down the quayside, on who knew what mission?

  Then he heard the first stair creak, just a tiny noise, no more than the settling of an old house, drying out after a flood, and knew that she had slipped up the stairs, and a little draught of air told him that she had opened and closed her bedroom door.

  Freize waited for moments, listening to the silence, knowing that the two of them, the young woman and the dark lord, could move as quietly as ghosts. What the hooded lord was doing, speaking to Ishraq whom he had declared a complete stranger to himself, and then creeping out to the dark quay, he could not begin to imagine. What Ishraq was doing, silently closing the door behind him, acting as his porteress, he could not think. He lay still, turning over treacheries and uncertainties in his mind, and then he sat up in his pallet bed, pulled on his boots in case of an emergency, and spent the rest of the night dozing in the chair by the fireside, on guard – but against what, he did not know. At some time, just before dawn, he thought he was on guard against fear itself, and that he could hear it, quietly breathing at the keyhole.

  The inn was stirring at dawn, the lad who slept in the stable yard bringing in wood for the kitchen fire, the innkeeper’s wife coming down yawning to bake the bread which had been rising in a pungent yeasty mound all night long, and the innkeeper running up and down stairs with jugs of hot water for the guests to wash before they walked up the hill to attend Prime at the church. The church bell was starting to toll when Freize started at the sound of a shout from the top of the stairs.

  He was out of the kitchen and racing up the stairs, two at a time, to the door of the lord as Luca came tumbling downstairs from the attic room. The door stood open and the lord was there, his hand held out, shaking slightly. As Luca and Freize came towards him he turned his face away from them, pulled the hood over his head to hide his face, and then showed them what he had in his hand.

  ‘Radu Bey,’ Luca said at once recognising the standard in the lord’s hand. It was a perfectly circular beautiful piece of fabric, richly embroidered in gold and turquoise, green and indigo, to look like the eye of a peacock’s feather, the symbol of nobility in the Ottoman empire, the colour of the standard that Radu Bey had laughingly unfurled from his galley while Luca’s lord had shouted impotently for his arrest.

  ‘How?’ Luca stammered. ‘What does it mean? Where did it come from?’

  ‘I found it this morning, pinned on my heart. On my heart! It was fastened to my robe with a gold pin. He sent a killer to pin this on me, as I slept. He pinned it over my heart. This is his warning. This is a message from Radu Bey telling me that he has put his mark on me; he could have put his dagger through my heart just as easily.’

  The lord thrust the perfectly circular, beautiful badge into Luca’s hand. ‘Take it!’ he swore. ‘I can’t bear to touch it. It is as if he put a target on my heart.’

  ‘Why would he do such a thing?’

  ‘To warn me. To boast that he could have killed me. It’s