Dark Tracks Read online

  “Rest,” the fiddler commanded her. She turned her blank face up at him and shuffled back a little from the riverbank, and obediently curled up on the ground, head pillowed on her hands, lying on leaves as if she had not been raised to sleep on the finest linen behind a locked door.

  Keeping deep in the cover of the trees, Freize could just see her, lying among the resting dancers as if she were nothing more than a beggar. He sank down out of sight, sitting against a tree to keep watch. He did not know how to get closer; he did not know if he could get her away from the dancers without alerting the fiddler or risking the drummer seeing him. But, on the other hand, he felt sure that he had to take the risk. This was the first rest they had taken all day, and with every hour of dancing they were getting farther and farther away from the town and from help.

  Freize had no idea where they were going and he feared some terrible destination—some mountain precipice or deep shaft where they would be danced down to their deaths. Lord Vargarten’s wife had talked of the piper who had taken a band of dancing children into a rift in a mountain that had closed behind them. He was deeply afraid that the fiddler and the drummer would lead Isolde to the very edge of the world and they would all fall over into the abyss.

  He needed to get her attention and then beckon her to separate herself from the dancers while they rested. Freize cautiously raised himself up to look around. Everyone seemed to be asleep; at last the fiddler had abandoned his watch and was spread-eagled on the ground, his arm round his fiddle, his bow across his chest. The drummer was seated by a tree, leaning back against the trunk, his head slumped. Everyone else was lying where they had collapsed, deaf and blind with exhaustion. This was probably the best chance to get Isolde away.

  Freize pursed his lips and gave a low, clear whistle, the whistle he always gave to Rufino, Isolde must have heard it a hundred times. She heard it now. Even in her exhausted sleep she heard it, and it woke her. Isolde raised herself up, leaning on one hand and looking toward the shadows of the forest as she heard Freize’s call, as familiar and beloved as a blackbird song. He stepped from the shelter of the tree and into a shaft of sunlight so that she could clearly see him. He raised his hand, he waved at her, smiling.

  With a shiver of horror, he saw the blank face that she turned to him. She looked him over as if he were nothing to her, met his eyes as if he were a stranger and she was indifferent to him. She had, in her beautiful, expressionless face, the eyes of a fish, eyes empty of any recognition or affection or even intelligence. She looked at him with a long, blue, loveless stare as if he were a stranger to her, an ugly unknown stranger. Then she lay back down again as if she had seen no one, and fell asleep.

  Freize shrank back into the shadows of the wood, back to his tree, and sat down again as his trembling legs would not support him. He realized that he was very afraid.

  Luca carried the unconscious girl down one flight of stairs from the attic bedroom of the inn and laid her on the bed in her sunny room. He chafed her hands, which were as cold as stone; he laid his head again at her breast to see if he could hear a heartbeat. Very quietly, very slowly, he heard a gentle thud, nothing like the strong, steady pulse of the young woman he knew, nothing like the vitality of the girl who would challenge anyone, who could not be contained, who would run from one end of the town to another, who would dive from a building into deep water rather than be imprisoned. It was not possible to imagine that she might not live. Luca remembered her steady gaze as she aimed the longbow, her tight hold of him when he was in despair.

  He put his ear to her nose to hear her slow breath, and then sat beside her still body on the bed and whispered: “Ishraq, for God’s sake, come back to me.”

  It felt like hours before the door swung open and Luca leaped to his feet in alarm to see a being in the doorway: Death itself. He was horrifically tall, with a high, black pointed hat on his head, and his face completely hidden by a white mask with an elongated nose like a white cone that left only black eyeholes for his searching eyes. His robes were as black as sable, flowing from his shoulders to the ground. Luca instinctively stepped between the terrifying figure and the silent girl. “Stop!” he said. “No closer!”

  “It’s the physician,” Brother Peter reassured him, coming into the room. “He wears this mask with herbs in the nose so that he won’t take the plague.”

  “Take it off!” Luca said sharply. “There’s no plague here but a fainting girl, and she would faint again to see you dressed like that.”

  Slowly, the physician took the beaky mask from his face and smiled at Luca’s consternation. “What caused her to fall?”

  “We don’t know. It might have been the dancers,” Brother Peter said. “I felt a pulse. We think she is breathing.”

  “She should be cupped,” the physician said, before he had even looked at her.

  “No,” Luca said flatly, and when the physician turned his surprised gaze to him he continued: “She’s barely breathing, she hardly has a pulse, her heart is inaudible. Why would we drain her blood when she is fighting for her life?”

  “To stimulate her,” the man said, as if it were obvious. “To bring her to her senses. We could burn her, I suppose. We could put burning plasters on her hands and feet.”

  “We’re not going to hurt her in any way,” Luca ruled.

  The physician looked at him pityingly. “I see you have no learning in medicine,” he said. “She is weak; we have to awaken her. How else will she come to life again without a shock?”

  “I don’t know. But we’re not going to cut her or burn her or anything that would cause her pain.”

  The physician looked at the older man. “She will die if we leave her like this,” he observed. “Obviously, she has to be wakened. How else can we wake her but by administering intense pain?”

  “Brother Luca here has a gift—he often has an understanding,” Brother Peter said awkwardly. “And this is a lady, gently raised; it would be terrible to hurt her. And who could lay hands on her, anyway?”

  “We could get the midwife, who lays out the dead, to drag her out of bed and beat her?”

  “No!” said Luca, losing his temper. “Are you deaf? We’ll do nothing to hurt her. I will not have her injured. I forbid it.”

  The physician looked as if his repertoire of cures was running out. “We could walk her?”

  “How would we do that?” Luca asked.

  “Drag her round and round the square, hire women two by two, one after another, to make her march until her feet remembered to walk again.”

  Luca looked at him in despair. “Do you have no physic? No herbs? Do you have no idea what has caused this, or how to cure her? Do we have nothing for her but pain or an ordeal? Do you know nothing but what you might do to a beast in the field, to torment it into obedience?”

  There was a silence. The truth was that the physician had nothing to cure an illness, and almost no understanding of illness at all. The only doctors who had read the great Greek physicians were the Moors who had translated the manuscripts, and very few Christian doctors had defied the Church to read them. This man, in this little town, inherited his title of physician from his father, who had mostly tended to the sick animals. He himself did nothing more than draw teeth and drain blood with the leeches that he gathered from the river and kept writhing in jars in his larder. Sometimes he cupped people, slicing into their veins and draining out their blood, hoping to rid them of fever; sometimes he fed them burning spices, hoping to warm them up. Only the strongest of his patients survived his treatment.

  “We’ll nurse her gently,” Luca ruled, feeling his sense of terror at his own ignorance. “God is with us, and her. We’ll treat her gently and she will come back to us. She loves life, and she loves Isolde. When we get Isolde back, she will recover to be with her. I won’t have Ishraq tortured. I will trust her. I will trust her to come to her senses. We’ll care for her till she wakes up.”

  “It could be many years,” the physician warned hi