Dark Tracks Read online

“Of course,” Isolde agreed. “But equally it might not be there.”

  “There were no marks,” Luca said thoughtfully. “At least, I didn’t see anything. Did you, Freize?”

  “No signs in common at all except that they are all so tired they can hardly stand,” Freize pointed out. “And their eyes are like fish.”

  Brother Peter hesitated, his pen poised. He sighed at Freize, who so often turned a phrase that was far from scholarly. “Eyes like fish? What do you mean by that?”

  “Oh no, he’s right,” Luca said. “Their eyes are dead: they have no intelligence or interest or sparkle.” Without being aware of his gaze, he nodded toward Ishraq’s intent, thoughtful face. “With some people, you can almost see what they are thinking by their eyes; you can almost see their mind working as their eyes gleam and darken when the thoughts cross them. But all the dancers’ eyes are dead. Freize is right. They are people with eyes like fish.”

  “You were like that, little Sparrow,” Freize confirmed. “Your eyes went blank. Until I asked you to solve a problem, and then you came back to me.”

  One of the old men in the corner, who had been listening to this, let out a crack of laughter. “You’re right, young’un!” he said disrespectfully to Luca. “That’s how they look the moment before they go. I lost my wife and my son in one afternoon when the dancers last came, and they looked at me with as much interest or love as if they were a pair of carp from the pond with string through their gills.”

  “This is an Inquirer, from the Holy Father himself,” Freize corrected him. “You call him ‘sir.’ ”

  “Call him what you like, makes no difference to me.” The old man was not at all rebuffed. “But he has the right of it. You can tell the Pope that. You can tell him that from me.”

  “Let him speak as he wants,” Luca prompted Freize, who was inclined to argue that the proper respect be shown to his master.

  “Did your wife and son leave with these dancers who are in the town now? The same people?” Brother Peter asked the old man.

  “No, with another lot,” he said. “A different lot. They came through three years ago, just the same. They stayed two or three days and then we drove them out of town. But they took my son with them, the brightest boy in the town—everyone loved him. I was going to give him to the church for a clerk, he was so clever and able. And I heard later that he danced till his feet bled, the blisters went bad, and he took sick, and then there was no more dancing for him. They laid him on the floor of the church and bid him be at peace, but still he writhed about and waved his arms until he died.

  “So they took him for nothing. I should think that they are the Devil’s own; I should think they are possessed. You should tell the Holy Father that he must stop them. They steal our young men and women and dance them to death. The Holy Father should stop them.”

  “Why do you think they dance?” Luca demanded.

  The man shrugged. “It’s as if they all go mad for it, all at once. Why does anyone do anything foolish? Why do storks all come in springtime? They all act together without thinking.”

  “Does Lord Vargarten do nothing to stop it?” Luca asked.

  “He’d move them on if he knew they were here,” the old man said. “But no one has dared to leave their house and go up to the castle to tell him. We’ve bolted ourselves into our homes and we just run from one house to another when the dancers go quiet or fall asleep. You should go and tell the lord that they are here again, frightening everyone, stealing children. You go and tell him if you’re brave enough to cross the square and take the road to his castle. If the Pope ordered you to come here, then God will keep you safe. Go and tell Lord Vargarten that the dancers are here again and we need his help. He should drive them out like the vermin they are.”

  “Where is the lord’s castle?”

  “Just ten miles up the track going north. You can’t miss it. Straight out of the north gate.”

  Luca looked at Brother Peter. “I’ll go,” he said. “I’ll wait till the dancers are asleep tonight and then I’ll set off before it’s light.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Brother Peter said. “We’ll go to the castle and see if he is going to move them on, or what he intends. I can send this report to Rome with one of his men. I take it that the dancers don’t respond to prayer?”

  “One of the men said that he had been taken right into the church and up to the altar and still danced away,” Luca said, as Brother Peter made notes. “He said he had holy water actually on his head and yet kept on dancing. This is a stubborn sin. It’s like a madness, but a madness that passes from one to another. A plague that you catch the moment you are touched.”

  “I’ll come with you too,” Freize said. “We’ll need to ride out of the stable gate and get through the square so quickly that they can’t stop us. We’ll do that better all three of us at once. Rufino can lead. We’ll need to charge.”

  “Will you be all right on your own?” Luca turned to Isolde and Ishraq. “If we leave early in the morning, before sunrise, and get back before midday?”

  “Of course we will.” Ishraq spoke for them both.

  “Keep to your bedroom with your door locked. We won’t be long.”

  “We’ll be safe,” Isolde assured him.

  Ishraq nodded. “I’ll lock our door and guard it. And our bedroom faces the herb garden and orchard. We can’t even hear the music when we’re in there.”

  “Block your ears if you have to,” Freize advised her. “When you hear the drum start, it’s the oddest of things. You just want to get up and dance. You think that no harm could come of it, and it’s what you want to do. It feels like a good idea, like a merry thought. It feels like it is your own idea, nothing to do with all of them.”

  “I don’t think it’s a merry thought,” Isolde said. “I think it’s horrifying. It doesn’t make me want to dance, it makes me want to hide under my pillow.”

  “Keep your door locked till we come back,” Luca commanded. “And we will be as quick as we can.” He glanced at Isolde and spoke as if to her alone: “I will be as quick as I can,” he promised. “I will not fail you.”

  Before dawn, while a rain-hazy moon was setting, Luca woke his two companions. Despite the cold and his unease, he could not help but laugh when he saw Freize, who had forced two scraps of linen into his ears and tied up his head with a rag, looking like a man with toothache.

  “They’re not stirring yet,” Luca pointed out, cracking open one of the shutters of the inn’s front windows and looking out at the quiet square and the exhausted dancers huddled in doorways. “I think you’re overprotected.”

  “I’m taking no chances,” Freize said as he went out of the back door, carrying the horses’ tack. He crossed the yard, the wet cobbles gleaming in the pale light of the dawn sky, and went into the stables. Something at the back of the barn moved quietly. “There now,” Freize said, as if to himself. “You here in this troubled town? Following us? Be still. Be quiet. Go your way. No need to pay any attention to me, and no need to follow us, either, what with the world ending and us always going to the worst places.”

  He squinted into the gloom at the back of the barn and thought he saw a pale child, perhaps a boy, shrink back and disappear.

  “Go your way and God bless you,” Freize said quietly, shaking his head. “As if we didn’t have enough to worry about without you, you poor little thing.”

  He waited in case there was any response and then he said again into the silence: “I don’t know who you are, nor what you are, to tell the truth. And if you are following me for gratitude because it was me that saved you from the alchemists’ jar, then you need not trouble yourself. All I want from you is that you go. Go well, go safely, but go. We have troubles of our own, and I can’t care for you or keep you. And—no offense—if I wanted a little pet, I would have one less clammy.”

  He finished this address into the silence of the barn and then led the horses out into the yard as Luca and Brother Peter