Stormbringers Read online

  ‘This is an easy guess in a port,’ Ishraq muttered to Isolde and got a burning look in reply.

  ‘I see a boy, a youth, learning that his father has been taken by the infidels themselves. They came at night in their terrible galleys and stole away his father, his mother, and everything they owned, and that boy wants to know why. That boy wants to know how. That boy will spend the rest of his life asking questions.’

  Freize, who had been with Luca in the monastery when the Abbot had called him out of chapel to tell him that there had been an Ottoman slaving raid and his mother and father were missing, exchanged one level look with Luca. ‘Odd,’ was all he said.

  ‘A youth who has lost his father without explanation will ask questions for all his life,’ Johann stated.

  Luca could not take his eyes from the young preacher; it was as if the boy was describing him, as if he knew Luca at the deepest level.

  ‘I can answer his questions,’ the boy reassured the crowd, his voice sweet as if he were quite entranced. ‘I can answer that boy who asks, “where is my father?” “Where is my mother?” God will tell me the answers. I can tell you now, that you will hear your father, I can tell you how to hear his voice.’

  He looked over towards Isolde who was hidden among the village women, all dressed alike, with her hood completely covering her shining blonde hair. ‘I can tell you how to claim your inheritance and sit in your father’s chair where he wants you to be. I can tell you how to return home.’

  A little cry broke from Isolde, and Luca checked himself from moving towards her.

  ‘Come with us,’ the boy said quietly. ‘Come to Jerusalem where the dead will rise and your fathers will meet you. Come with me, come with all of us and we will go to Jerusalem and the world will have no end and your father will put his hand on your head with a blessing once more, and you will feel his love and know you are his child.’

  Isolde was openly weeping, as was half the crowd. Luca gulped down his emotion, even Freize knuckled his eyes. Johann turned to the priest. ‘Now we will pray,’ he said. ‘Father Benito will hear confession and pray with us. May I confess, Father?’

  The priest, deeply moved, nodded, and led the way into the darkness of the church. Most of the crowd knelt where they stood and closed their eyes in prayer. Isolde dropped to her knees on the dirty cobblestones of the market and Ishraq stood beside her, almost as if she would guard her from this revelation, from grief itself. Freize, looking over, met Ishraq’s steady dark gaze and knew himself to be shaken and puzzled by what they had heard.

  ‘He knows things that we didn’t tell him,’ Luca said in a rapid undertone to Brother Peter. ‘He knows things that are impossible that he should know other than by revelation. He spoke of me, and of my childhood, and I had said nothing of either to him. He spoke of the Lady Isolde and he hasn’t even seen her. Nobody in this village knows anything about any of us.’

  ‘Would Freize . . .’ Brother Peter asked doubtfully.

  Freize shook his head. ‘I’m not the one who gives breakfast to boys begging on the harbour wall,’ he said loftily. ‘And I don’t gossip. I haven’t said one word to him that you have not heard. If you ask me, he made a few lucky guesses and saw the response he got.’

  ‘You wept,’ Luca said bluntly.

  ‘He said things that would make a stone weep!’ Freize returned. ‘Just because it makes you cry, doesn’t mean that it’s true.’

  ‘To speak of an Ottoman raid to me?’ Luca challenged him. ‘That’s not a guess. To speak of Isolde driven from her castle? That’s no wild guess, there is no way that he would think of it, no way that he could know such things. He knew nothing of her, she kept out of his way. And yet he spoke of her father laid on a cold bier and her brother stealing her inheritance.’

  ‘I believe he is inspired,’ Brother Peter agreed, overruling Freize’s scepticism. ‘But I shall ask the priest for his opinion. I shall ask him what Johann tells him.’ He glanced into the shadowy interior of the church where the priest was kneeling on one side of a carved wooden screen and Johann was kneeling on the other side, reverently whispering his confession with his fair head bowed.

  ‘Johann’s confession must be secret,’ Luca remarked. ‘Between him, the priest and God.’

  Brother Peter nodded. ‘Of course. But Father Benito is allowed to give me an impression. And as soon as I have spoken with him I shall send our report to Rome. Whether the boy is a visionary or a fraud I should think that Milord will want to help this. It could be very important. It is a crusade of its own making, a rising up of the people. It’s much more powerful than the lords ordering their tenants to war. It is the very thing that the Pope has been calling for and getting no response. It could change everything. As Johann goes through Italy he could gather thousands. Now I have seen him preach I understand what he might do. He might make an army of faith – unstoppable. Milord will want to see that they are fed and shipped to the Holy Land. He will want to see that they are guarded and have arms.’

  ‘And he spoke of fathers,’ Luca went on, indifferent to Brother Peter’s plan for a new great crusade. ‘He spoke of me, and my father. He spoke of Isolde and her father. It was not general, it was not ordinary preaching. He spoke of Isolde, he spoke of me. He knew things he could not know except by a genuine revelation.’

  ‘He is inspiring,’ Brother Peter conceded. ‘Perhaps a visionary indeed. Certainly he has the gift of tongues – did you see how they listened to him?’

  Luca made his way through the praying crowd to Isolde and found her on her knees with Ishraq standing over her. When she crossed herself, and looked up, he gave her his hand and helped her to her feet.

  ‘I thought he was speaking of me,’ he said tersely. ‘And of the loss of my father.’

  ‘I am sure he was speaking of me,’ she agreed. ‘Speaking to me. He said things that only one who had been at the castle, or who had been advised by God could know. He was inspired.’

  ‘You believe him?’

  She nodded. ‘I do. I have to believe him. He could not have guessed at the things he said. He was too specific, it was too vivid a vision.’

  He offered her his arm, and she put her hand in the crook of his elbow and they walked together down the narrow steps to the quayside inn. Freize and Ishraq followed them in sceptical silence, the little ginger kitten skipped along behind them, following Freize.

  ‘I don’t see you weeping?’ Freize remarked to the young woman at his side.

  ‘I don’t cry easily,’ she said.

  ‘I cry like a baby,’ Freize confessed. ‘He was inspiring. But I don’t know what to think.’

  ‘He could have said that stuff anywhere,’ Ishraq said roundly. ‘Every port on the coast will have women who have lost a father. Most villages will have someone cheated of their inheritance.’

  ‘You don’t believe he is inspired by God?’

  She gave a short laugh and risked the confession: ‘I’m not even sure about God.’

  He smiled. ‘Are you a pagan indeed?’

  ‘I was raised by my mother as a Muslim, but I have lived all my life in a Christian household,’ she explained. ‘I was educated by Isolde’s father the Lord of Lucretili to be a scholar and to question everything. I don’t know what I believe for sure.’

  Ahead of them Luca and Isolde were talking quietly together.

  ‘I have missed my father more than I would have believed,’ Luca confided. ‘And my mother . . .’ He broke off. ‘It was not knowing that has been so dreadful. I didn’t know what happened when they were kidnapped and I still don’t know if they are alive or dead.’

  ‘They sent you to the monastery?’ she asked.

  ‘They were convinced that I was a boy of extraordinary abilities and that I had to be given a chance to be something more than a farmer. They had their own farm, and it gave us a good living, but if I had inherited it after them and stayed there, then I would have known nothing more than the hills around my home and the weather. I