Order of Darkness Read online

  ‘And everyone sells; but Milord commands us to buy,’ Ishraq said. She tapped her hand on the table as she suddenly realised what she was saying. ‘Because he knows that some of the nobles are good. Some of them will be old coins from England, they will be good. We tested them, we know that they are good. Perhaps all of the coins that came from the Calais mint were good. And if we buy up all of them, good and bad together, then some of them will be worth far more than the price that we pay for them.’

  ‘And we will have made Milord a small fortune,’ Luca breathed.

  Brother Peter bowed his head. ‘The Church,’ he said. ‘We will have made a small fortune for the Church. We must be glad of it. It is holy work to make a fortune for the Church. These have been dark days but perhaps we have done the right thing.’

  ‘But the Ottomans . . .’ Ishraq said slowly.

  Luca switched his gaze to her. ‘What about them?’

  ‘They are sending back the bleeding nobles, and they are accepting a reduced tribute. They believe, that they were paid in worthless coins. They have been cheated of their tribute, they have been hugely cheated of the fee they draw from the conquered lands. They are settling for a reduced fee this year.’

  ‘They should not have it, they should not collect it in the first place!’ Brother Peter burst out. ‘They deserve to be cheated. It is God’s work to cheat them!’

  Ishraq ignored him, she looked at Luca. ‘And they have suffered failure too. All their banks and merchants and traders will be at a loss – like we are. Milord has struck a powerful blow at the very heart of the Ottoman Empire,’ she said. ‘If this is his crusade he has had a powerful victory thanks to you. They may have won Constantinople; but this year they are much the poorer.’

  Luca nodded. ‘Bayeed is poorer too,’ he said. ‘He rejected the ransom but some of the coins must have been good.’ He paused. ‘And my father suffers for it,’ he said. ‘My father suffers for this brilliant trick, and so do so many others.’ He shook his head. ‘So many, many others.’

  Freize looked from one to another. ‘So what do we do now?’ he asked into the silence.

  Nobody spoke and then slowly the four young people realised that there would be orders. One by one they looked towards Brother Peter. ‘I know that when our work here is successfully concluded we have to ride north,’ Brother Peter volunteered. ‘I am to open the orders later, but we are to set out northerly.’

  ‘And what’s in the orders then?’ Freize asked bitterly. ‘For I don’t think we can bear to succeed again like this. Luca has lost his father, Isolde has lost her fortune, and we have sickened ourselves of Venice and nearly ruined the city.’

  Ishraq rose from the table and opened the shutters. A cold morning light came into the room, making the candles look tawdry. Isolde blew them out.

  ‘We have completed our work here?’ Luca looked older in the grey light from the windows. ‘Another successful mission?’ he asked bitterly. ‘Our enemies cheated of their money, some people made bankrupt, my father still enslaved, his heart broken, and I am disowned by him. He denied me. He called me a changeling and dishonoured my mother and me. We have accomplished all that Milord wanted? We can leave? Our work is done? We should be happy?’

  ‘Often, it is hard,’ Brother Peter said quietly to the younger man. ‘You are walking a solitary path in hard country. Often a victory does not feel like victory. There is a great work of which we are only a small part. We cannot tell what part we play. We have to trust that there is a great cause that we serve in our own small way.’

  Luca bowed his head over his clasped hands and closed his eyes as if he were praying for courage.

  ‘And I wonder where the alchemists have gone,’ Isolde said, speaking for the first time since Luca had called them all into the room. Luca raised his head and looked at her. ‘I wonder where they have been ordered to go,’ Isolde said. ‘For they have their patron, who gives them orders, just as we have Milord.’

  There was a silence as Isolde, and then all the others, realised what she had said.

  ‘They have a patron that they don’t know,’ she went on, wonderingly. ‘He commanded them to come here and to make the counterfeit coins, he commanded them to make the alchemy coins. He ordered that they should find the secret of life. He sent them here, and then Milord sent us after them.’

  Slowly, Luca rose to his feet and went to the windows. There was a little paler strip of cloud to the east where dawn was beginning to break.

  ‘They said they had a patron that was no friend,’ Ishraq supplemented. ‘They never saw his face but he sent them orders, and gave them the recipe for the false nobles. He gave them the chests of the good nobles too. He told them to make a market for the coins and then swell it with forgeries.’

  ‘Do you think that it was perhaps Milord who commanded them?’ Luca asked, speaking almost idly, not turning back to the room but staring out of the window at the silvery canal and the black cormorants sitting on the water and then suddenly folding their wings and plunging below for fish. ‘Do you think that Milord ordered both the counterfeiters and those that were to unveil them? Did he command both the hind and the hounds. Do you think he played both sides at once?’

  ‘Perhaps to him it is a game.’ Isolde came and stood beside him and put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Like the cups and ball that Jacinta played. Perhaps Milord has quick hands too, nobody can see what he is doing till the end of the game. Perhaps he has cheated us all.’

  They rode away from Venice heading north, the warm spring sun on their right-hand side. Brother Peter led the way with Luca behind him, Isolde at his side. Behind them came Freize and Ishraq, and the little donkey heavily laden followed Freize’s big cob Rufino. Another donkey came behind the first, also carrying sacks of gold nobles. Some of them were rusting away inside the leather purses, but in every rusting coin there was a heart of solid gold. Milord’s great gamble would pay off.

  Everyone was happy to be leaving the city behind them. Brother Peter was glad to be in his robes again and not living a lie, Ishraq was revelling in the freedom of being on the road and not cooped up as a Venetian lady companion, Isolde was setting off to her godfather’s son with renewed determination, and Luca was heading for his next inquiry with a sense that the world was filled with mystery – even his own mission puzzled him.

  ‘Are you glad to leave Venice?’ he asked Isolde.

  ‘It is the most beautiful city I have ever seen,’ she said. ‘But it has a darker side. Do you know I saw the strangest thing as we were going in the ferry to fetch the horses?’

  ‘What did you see?’ he asked, eager to be distracted from his own sense of failure and loss.

  ‘I thought I saw a child,’ she said seriously. ‘Swimming in the water, after our boat. I nearly called out for us to stop. A little child coming after us, but then I saw it was tiny, no bigger than a little fish, but swimming and keeping up with the ship.’

  Luca felt himself freeze. ‘What d’you think it was?’ he asked, trying to sound careless. ‘That’s odd.’

  She looked at him. ‘I assumed I had seen a pale-coloured fish and made a mistake. There could be nothing in the lagoon like a tiny person?’

  He contained his own shiver of superstition, and leaned towards her to put his hand over hers. ‘I won’t let anything hurt you,’ he promised her. ‘Nothing can come after us. And there couldn’t be anything like that in the waters.’

  Trustingly she let his hand rest on hers, slowly she smiled at him. ‘I feel safe with you,’ she said. ‘And at least Venice taught me to stand up for myself.’

  He laughed. ‘Will you protect me, Isolde?’

  She was radiant. ‘I will,’ she promised.

  ‘And did you learn to choose the one you love?’ he asked her very quietly.

  ‘Did you?’ she whispered. ‘Do you even know who you chose?’

  Luca gasped at her teasing, and laughed aloud, glancing back to see that no one was in earshot.

  Be