Order of Darkness

by Philippa Gregory

  ‘Who would have thought they could come this far? Children led by a youth who doesn’t even know where Jerusalem is? Brother Peter thinks they are part of the signs that we have been sent out to observe. I’m not sure, but I have to see that it is a sort of miracle. He is an ignorant country lad from Switzerland, and here he is in Italy, on his way to Jerusalem. I have to think it is almost a miracle.’

  ‘But you’re not sure,’ Ishraq observed.

  He shrugged. ‘He says the waters will part for them – I can’t imagine how. It would be a miracle in this place and time and I can’t see how it would happen. But perhaps they will be able to walk south to Messina and someone will give them ships. There are many ways that they could get to Jerusalem dry-shod. There are other miracles as great as parting the waters.’

  ‘You believe that this boy can find his way to Messina?’ Ishraq asked him sceptically.

  Luca frowned. ‘It’s not your faith,’ he said defensively. ‘I see that you would not believe these pilgrims. You would think them fools, led by a charlatan. But this boy Johann has great power. He knows things that he could only have learned by revelation. He claims that God speaks to him and I have to believe that He does. And he has already come so far!’

  ‘Can we come and listen to him?’ Isolde asked.

  Luca nodded. ‘He is preaching this afternoon. If you cover your heads and wear your capes, you can join us. I should think half the village will be there to listen to him.’

  Isolde and Ishraq, wearing grey gowns with their brown cloaks, came out of the front door of the inn and walked along the stone quayside. Most of the fishing ships were moored in the harbour, bobbing on the quiet waves, the men ashore mending their nets or coiling ropes and patching worn sails. The two girls ignored the whistles and catcalls as the men noted the slim, caped figures and guessed that there were pretty faces under the concealing hoods. Isolde blushed and smiled at a shouted compliment but Ishraq turned her head in disdain.

  ‘You need not be so proud, it’s not an insult,’ Isolde remarked to her.

  ‘It is to me,’ Ishraq said. ‘Why should they think they can comment on me?’

  They turned up one of the narrow alleyways which led up the hill to the market square and walked below criss-cross lines of washing strung from one overhanging balcony to another. A few old ladies sat on their doorsteps, their hands busy with mending or lace-making, and nodded at the girls as they went by, but most of the people were already in the market square to hear Johann preach.

  Isolde and Ishraq passed the bakery, as the baker came out and closed up shop for the day, his face and hair dusted white with flour. The cobbler next door sat cross-legged in his window, a half-made shoe on his last, looking out at the gathering crowds. The next shop was a ships’ chandlers, the dark interior a jumble of goods from fishing nets to cork floats, fish knives and rowlocks, screws by the handful, nails in jars, blocks of salt and barrels. Next door to him was a hatter and milliner, doing poor trade in a poor town; next to her a saddler.

  The girls went past the shops with barely a glance into the shadowy interiors, their eyes drawn to the steps of the church and to the shining fair head of the boy who waited, cheek against his simple crook, as if he were listening for something.

  Before him, the crowd gathered, murmuring quietly, attentively. Behind him, in the darkened doorway of the church, stood Brother Peter, Luca and Freize beside the village priest. Many of the fishermen and almost all the women and children of the village had come but Isolde noticed that some of the older children were absent. She guessed they had been sent to sea with their fathers, or ordered to stay at home – not every family wanted to risk its children hearing Johann preach. Many mothers regarded him as a sort of dangerous piper who might dance their children out of town, never to be seen again. Some of them called him a child-stealer who should be feared, especially by mothers who had only one child.

  The children of the crusade had been fed on a mean breakfast of bread and fish. The priest had collected food from his parishioners and the people of the market had handed out the leftovers. The monks in the abbey had sent down baskets of fresh-baked bread and honey scones. Clearly some of the children were still hungry, and many of them would have been hungry for days. But they still showed the same bright faces as when they had first walked into the village of Piccolo.

  Ishraq, sensitive to the mood of a crowd, could almost feel the passionate conviction of the young crusaders: the children wanted to believe that Johann had been called by God, and had convinced themselves that he was leading them to Jerusalem.

  ‘This is not faith,’ she whispered to Isolde. ‘This is longing: a very different thing.’

  ‘You ask me why we should walk all the way to the Holy Land?’ Johann started suddenly, without introduction, without telling them to listen, without a bidding prayer or calling for their attention. He did not even raise his voice, he did not raise his eyes from the ground nor his cheek which was still resting thoughtfully against his shepherd’s crook, yet the hundreds of people were immediately silent and attentive. The round-faced priest in the grey unbleached robes of the Cistercian order, who had never in all his life seen a congregation of this size, lowered his gaze to the doorstep of his little church. Brother Peter stepped slightly forwards, as if he did not want to miss a word.

  ‘I will tell you why we must go so far,’ Johann said quietly. ‘Because we want to. That’s all! Because we choose to do so. We want to play our part in the end of days. The infidels have taken all the holy places into their keeping, the infidels have taken the greatest church in Constantinople and the Mass is celebrated no more at the most important altar in the world. We have to go to where Jesus Christ was a child and we have to walk in His footsteps. We have to be as children who enter the kingdom of heaven. He promised that those who come to him as little children will not be forbidden. We, His children, will go to Him and He will come again, as He promised, to judge the living and the dead, the old and the young, and we will be there, in Jerusalem, we will be the children who will enter the kingdom of heaven. D’you see?’

  ‘Yes,’ the crowd breathed. The children responded readily, at once, but even the older people, even the villagers who had never heard this message before were persuaded by Johann’s quiet authority. ‘Yes,’ they said.

  Johann tossed his head so his blond ringlets fell away from his face. He looked around at them all. Luca had a sudden disconcerting sense that Johann was looking at him with his piercing blue eyes, as if the young preacher knew something of him, had something to say especially to him. ‘You are missing your father,’ the boy said simply to the crowd. Luca, whose father had disappeared after an Ottoman raid on his village, when Luca was only fourteen, gave a sudden start and looked over the heads of the children to Isolde, whose father had died only five months ago. She was very pale, looking intently at Johann.

  ‘I can feel your sorrow,’ he said tenderly. Again his blue gaze swept across Luca and then rested on Isolde. ‘He did not say goodbye to you,’ Johann observed gently. Isolde bit her lip at that deep, constant sorrow and there was a soft moan from the crowd, from the many people who had lost fathers – at sea or to illness, or in the many accidents of daily life. Ishraq, standing beside Isolde, took her hand and found that she was trembling. ‘I can see a man laid cold and pale in his chapel and his son stealing his place,’ Johann said. Isolde’s face blanched white as he told her story to the world. ‘I can see a girl longing for her father and him crying her name on his deathbed but they kept her from him, and now, she can’t hear him and he will never speak again.’

  Luca gave a muffled exclamation and turned to Brother Peter. ‘I didn’t tell him anything about her.’

  ‘Nor I.’

  ‘Then how does he know this?’

  ‘I can see a bier in a chapel alone,’ Johann went on. ‘But nobody mourns for the man who has gone.’ There was a sob from a woman in the crowd who fell to her knees. Isolde stood like a statue, listenin
g to the young man describing the loss of her father. ‘I can see a daughter driven from her home and longing to return.’

  Isolde turned to Ishraq. ‘He is speaking of me.’

  ‘It seems so,’ Ishraq cautiously responded. ‘But this could be true of many people.’

  ‘I see a girl whose father died without her at his side, whose brother stole her inheritance, who longs, even now, to be back in her home, to see her father again,’ Johann said his voice low and persuasive. ‘And I have good news for you. Good news. I see this young woman, her heart broken by her loss, and I can tell you that she will return. She will return and take her place again.’

  Isolde clutched at Ishraq’s steady hand. ‘He says I will return!’

  ‘And I see more,’ Johann went on. ‘I can see a young man, a boy. A young boy, and his father lost at sea. Oh! I can see that boy waiting and waiting on the quayside and looking for the sails of a boat that never comes home.’

  A muffled sob from one youth in the huge crowd was repeated all around the people. Clearly, Johann saw truly. Many people recognised themselves in his vision. Someone cried out for the blessing of God on a fatherless family, and one woman was comforted, softly weeping for her father who would never come back from the sea.

  ‘This is an easy guess in a port,’ Ishraq muttered to Isolde and got a look of burning reproach 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. Do you have his crusader sword?’

  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 know all about this. It could be very important. It is a crusade of its own making, a rising up of the people, 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 of followers. 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. He will want to make sure they do not fall into heresy. A movement as poweful as this must be harnessed by the Church.’

  ‘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 rushing 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. ‘But
not today. 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, 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 would have done nothing but keep the farm after their death and handed it on to my son. They wanted me to be able to study. They wanted me to rise in the Church. My mother was convinced that I was gifted by God. My father just saw that I could understand numbers quicker than the merchants, speak languages almost at the first hearing. He said that I must be educated. He said that they owed it to themselves to give me a chance.’

  ‘But could you see them again? After they put you into your novitiate?’

  ‘Yes. Bless them, they came to the abbey church most mornings, twice on Sundays. I would see them standing at the back and looking for me, when I was a choir boy too small to see over the choir stall. I had to stand on a kneeler so that I could see them in the congregation every week and twice on Sundays. My mother came to visit me every month and always brought me something from home, a sprig of lavender or a couple of eggs. I know how much she missed me. I was her only child. God Himself only knows how much I missed her.’