She could see him square his shoulders and knew she had brought him to himself.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You are right. I should be worthy of him.’
Together they turned for the inn. At the doorway, where a torch burned, set in the wall beside the door, its yellow flickering light reflected in the wet cobbles beneath their feet, he stopped and turned to her. He took her face in both his hands and looked into her dark eyes. Without fear or coquetry she stood still and let him hold her, slowly closing her eyes as she turned her face up to him. She felt a sense of belonging to him, as if it were natural to stand, face to face, all-but embracing.
Luca breathed in the scent of her hair and her skin and put a kiss between her eyebrows, where a child would be signed with the sign of the cross at baptism. Ishraq felt his kiss where her mother used to kiss her – on the third eye, where a woman sees the unseen world – and she opened her dark eyes and smiled at him as if they understood each other; then they went quietly into the inn together.
The next day was a Sunday but nobody thought that they should rest for the Sabbath. The lower half of the town was a mess of wreckage and filth. Luca helped in clearing up the village, his teeth gritted as he shifted piles of wood and rubble and found, among the roof beams and broken spars the bodies of some of the drowned children.
Reverently, Luca and the other men used an old door as a stretcher and carried the little corpses two at a time up to the church and laid them down in a side chapel. The light was burning on the altar as the midwives of the village washed the bodies and prepared small shrouds. Luca prayed over the lost children and then went up to the cliff just outside the village walls where they were making a new graveyard for the drowned, as there was not enough space for them to be laid all together in the old churchyard.
Luca helped the men digging the graves in the hard soil, swinging a pick, and felt a sense of relief when he stripped off his shirt and worked in his breeches, sweating with the hard labour against the unyielding earth under the bright unforgiving sun.
Ishraq brought him some ale and some bread at midday and saw the grimness of his face and the tension in his broad shoulders. ‘Here,’ she said shortly. ‘Rest for a moment. Eat, drink.’
He ate and drank without seeing the food. ‘How could I be so stupid as to let him go?’ he demanded. ‘Why didn’t I make sure that he was behind us? I just assumed he was there, I didn’t think twice.’
Just then a girl limped up to the makeshift wall that they had built around the little graveyard. ‘Where’s the other man?’ she demanded.
The two of them started as if they had seen a ghost. It was Rosa, the girl with the bleeding feet that they had seen on the very first day. The little girl that Freize had carried back, through the mud of the harbour, just before the wave had struck.
‘He told me to run back to the inn for sweetmeats,’ she said accusingly. ‘I’m here to tell him he’s a liar. There were no sweets. The kitchen was empty, and there was a terrible noise. It frightened me so much that I ran up the hill and when I looked behind the sea was chasing me. I ran and ran. Where is he? And where’s Johann the Good and the other children?’
‘I don’t know where the man is right now,’ Luca said, his voice a little shaky. ‘We haven’t seen him. He went out in the harbour to try to get all you children back to high ground, away from the sea. That’s why he lied to you about sweets. He wanted you to get to safety. Then the great wave came . . . but he can swim. Perhaps he is swimming now. Perhaps your companions and Johann have been washed in somewhere, and are walking back right now. We’re all hoping for them all.’
Her face trembled. ‘They’re both gone?’ she asked. ‘They’re all gone? The sea took them? What am I to do now?’
Luca and Ishraq were silent for a moment. Neither of them had any idea what this little girl should do.
‘Well anyway, come with me to the inn and we’ll get you some food and something to wear and some shoes,’ Ishraq said. ‘Then we’ll think what would be the best for you.’
‘He saved you,’ Luca said, looking at her white face trembling on the edge of tears. ‘We’ll care for you for his sake, as well as for your own.’
‘He lied to me,’ she complained. ‘He said there were sweets and there was a great wave and I could have drowned!’
Luca nodded. ‘He did it to save you,’ he repeated. ‘And I am afraid that it is he who is drowned.’
She nodded, hardly understanding, and then took Ishraq’s proffered hand and walked down the hill to the village with her.
Luca’s day had started at dawn on the quayside looking out to sea, and dusk found him there too. But when it grew dark he came in and ate his dinner as a man who has set himself a dreary task to do. After dinner he prayed with Brother Peter and the little party listened as Brother Peter read the story of Noah, of men and women and the animals saved from a Flood. The little girl Rosa, who had never heard the story before went to bed with her head full of the rainbow at the end of the story.
The rooms had been dried out and the landlady had borrowed dry bedding. She offered Rosa a truckle bed in the warm kitchen. The four travellers, so conscious that they were missing one, that they should be five, went to their beds early. The inn was filled with people who had come in from villages to the north of Piccolo who had lost their children to the crusade, but hoped that they had been saved from the wave. The murmur of their quiet talking, and some of the mothers crying, went on all night. Brother Peter and Luca took a share in the big bed of the men’s room but Luca spent the night gazing blankly at the ceiling, not sleeping at all.
Isolde and Ishraq went to their bedroom and plaited each other’s hair in unhappy silence.
‘I keep thinking about him,’ Isolde started, ‘and how sweet and funny he was.’
‘I know.’
They had no night gowns, so they hung their robes on the post of the bed and prepared to sleep in their linen shifts. Isolde knelt in prayer and mentioned Freize by name. When she rose up, Ishraq saw that her eyes were red.
‘He ran back for the horses,’ Ishraq said. ‘When he heard them crying and neighing. He knew that something bad was happening. He wouldn’t leave them on board. He called the children to shore, he saw that we were safe, and then he went to the horses.’
Isolde climbed into the bed. ‘I’ve never met a man more steady,’ she said. ‘He was always cheerful and he was always brave.’
‘I was unkind to him,’ Ishraq confessed. ‘He asked me for a kiss and I threw him down in the stable yard at Vittorito. I regret it now, I regret it so much.’
‘I know he said that he was offended at the time, but I think he found it funny,’ Isolde volunteered. ‘I think he liked you for your pride. He spoke of it and laughed, as if he were offended and admiring, both at once.’
‘Right now, I wish I had given him a kiss,’ she said. ‘I liked him more than I told him. Now I wish I had been kinder.’
‘Of course you could not kiss him,’ Isolde said sorrowfully. ‘But it was so like him to ask! I wish we had all been kinder to him. We never tell people that we love them for we think, like fools, that they are going to be with us forever. We all act as if we are going to live forever, but we should act as if we would die tomorrow, and tell each other the best things.’
Ishraq nodded, she got into bed beside her friend. ‘I love you,’ she said sadly. ‘And at least we have always said goodnight like sisters.’
‘I love you too,’ Isolde replied. ‘D’you think you can sleep?’
‘I just keep thinking of the wave, that terrible wave. I keep thinking of him out in the water, under the water. I just keep thinking that if he is drowned – what difference does it matter if I sleep or not? If he is drowned, what would it have mattered if I had kissed him or not?’
They lay in silence until Isolde’s quiet breathing told Ishraq that she had fallen asleep. She turned in the bed and closed her eyes, willing herself to sleep too. But then her dark eyes suddenly snap
ped open and she said aloud: ‘The kitten!’
‘What?’ Isolde murmured sleepily but Ishraq was already out of bed pulling her cape over her shift, stepping into her slippers.
‘I have to get the kitten.’
‘Go to sleep,’ Isolde said. ‘It’s probably tucked up warm in the hay loft. You can get it in the morning.’
‘It’s not in the hay loft. I’m going now.’
‘Why?’ Isolde asked, sitting up in bed. ‘You can’t go now, it’s dark.’
‘There’s a ladder in the men’s room,’ she said. ‘They were mending the roof beams today. There’s a ladder from their room that goes through the beams and up to the roof.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the kitten’s still up there.’
‘It’s almost certainly gone. It’ll have got itself down when the roofer was up there.’
‘What if it hasn’t?’ Ishraq rounded on her friend. ‘Almost the last thing I saw Freize do was lift that kitten out of his pocket, and it was when it ran for the roof that he knew of the danger. It warned us. We should make sure it’s safe.’
‘It didn’t know what it was doing.’
‘But Freize did. He was kind to it, just as he was kind to everyone, to every animal. I’m going to get the kitten down. He wouldn’t leave it there till morning.’
‘Ishraq!’ Isolde cried out, but the girl was already pulling on her cape, opening the ill-fitting bedroom door, crossing the little landing, and opening the door of the men’s room.
Ishraq heard the snoring of several men, and grimaced at her own embarrassment. ‘I am sorry,’ she said clearly into the darkened room. ‘But I am going to walk through this room and go up that ladder.’
‘Is that a lass?’ came a hopeful, sleepy inquiry. ‘Wanting some company? Want a little kiss and a cuddle, bonnie lass? Want a little company?’
‘If anyone touches me,’ Ishraq went on in the same courteous tone, closing the door behind her and stepping carefully into the dark room. ‘I will break his hand. If two of you try it together, I will kill you both. Just so you know.’
‘Ishraq?’ said Luca, still wide awake. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ He rose up out of the darkness, naked but for his breeches, and they met at the foot of the ladder.
‘Fetching the kitten,’ she said. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘Are you mad? What kitten?’
‘Freize’s kitten,’ she said. ‘The one he had in his pocket.’
‘It’ll have got itself down.’
‘I’m going to see.’
‘In the middle of the night?’
‘I only just remembered it,’ she confessed.
‘Oh for God’s sake!’ Luca was suddenly furious with her, worrying about a kitten in a town filled with parents who had lost their children. ‘What does a kitten matter? In the middle of all this? In the middle of the night when half these people have cried themselves to sleep and everyone is missing someone?’
Ishraq did not answer him but turned and put her foot on the first rung of the ladder. ‘It’s pitch black,’ Luca cautioned. ‘You’ll fall and break your neck.’
He made a gesture to stop her, but she angrily slapped his hand away and went up the little ladder to the roof. A ridged plank, a scrambling board, stretched up to the apex of the roof and she went up it like a cat herself, on her hands and bare feet. She could see nothing but the darkness of the roof against the greyer skyline. She got to the very top and sat astride, gripped the tiles with her knees, feeling them sharp through the thin linen of her shift. She heard her harsh breathing and knew that she was afraid. She raised her head and looked at the chimney. Of course, there was no kitten there. She bit her lip as she realised that now she would have to make her way down again, that she had taken a grave risk and for nothing.
‘Kitten?’ she said to the empty roofs of Piccolo, seeing the streets below them torn by the sea and cluttered with driftwood, the doors banging empty on wet rooms. ‘Kitten?’
A tiny little yowl came from the base of the chimney, where the tiles were warmed by the escaping smoke. Tentatively, the little animal rose up and stalked towards her, along the narrow apex of the roof.
‘Kitten?’ Ishraq said again, utterly amazed.
It came towards her outstretched hand and she picked it up, as a mother cat would, by the scruff of its skinny little neck, and she tucked it under her arm, holding it tightly against her. A muffled mew told her that it was uncomfortable but safe, as she crouched low on the roofer’s board and went down again till her questing feet found the ladder, and then went one rung after another, through the hole in the roof into the darkened room until she felt Luca’s hands on her waist and he lifted her down and she was safe inside the room with his arms around her.
‘I’ve got it,’ she said.
For the first time in long days she heard a warmth in his voice. ‘You’re mad,’ he said. ‘That was the most ridiculous thing to do, the stupidest thing I have ever seen.’
But he did not let her go and for a moment she leaned against his naked chest. ‘I was terribly afraid,’ she admitted.
She felt his cheek against her hair, and the warmth of his body against her own, and she paused. For a moment she thought that anything might happen, and she did not draw back. It was Luca who steadied her on her feet, then stepped away, releasing her and saying, ‘Are you going to let it go?’
‘I’ll take it to the kitchen and get it some milk,’ she said. ‘I’ll keep it for tonight. If we had not seen it run we would not have known we were in danger. We owe our lives to it.’
He took her hand and guided her through the room full of sleeping men, and closed the door behind them.
‘It’s an odd thing,’ he said. ‘Odd that it knew to get up high.’ Together, they went down to the kitchen.
The kitten struggled in Ishraq’s grip and she put it gently down on the floor. The tiny creature shook its head, as if complaining at being held so tight, and sat on its fluffy rump and washed its back feet, and then found a warm corner in the log basket by the fire, and settled down for sleep.
‘There’s a writer,’ Ishraq said, trying to remember her studies. ‘Oh! I can’t remember his name! Aelianus or something like that. He says that frogs and snakes know when there is going to be an earthquake – they get out of their holes in time.’
‘How do they know?’ Luca demanded. ‘What do they know?’
‘He doesn’t say,’ she said. ‘I read him in the Arab library in Spain. I can’t remember more than that.’
They walked up the stairs together to the doorway of her room.
‘Why was it so important to you that you should save it?’ he asked her in a whisper, conscious of the many sleepers in the quiet house – Isolde just the other side of the door. ‘Why did the kitten matter, when so much else has been lost? You’re not sentimental about animals. You’re not sentimental about anything, usually. Yet you risked your life.’
‘I suppose, for that very reason: that so much has been lost,’ she said. ‘We failed to save the children, we failed to save half the town, we came with all our learning and your mission to understand and yet we knew nothing and when something so terrible happened we could do nothing. We were useless. We did not even save ourselves. We lost Freize. He was the most ignorant of us all and yet he was the only one who knew what was happening. But I could at least save Freize’s kitten.’
He took her hand and held it for a moment. ‘Goodnight,’ he said quietly. ‘God bless you for that. God bless you for thinking of him.’ And then he turned and brought her hand, palm up, to his mouth, and gently put a kiss in the middle, then closed her fingers over it.
Ishraq closed her eyes at the touch of his mouth on her hand. ‘Goodnight,’ she whispered, and held her fingers tight where his lips had touched her palm.
In the morning, the four of them, with Rosa trailing behind Isolde at a faithful trot, went to the church where they helped the harassed priest and clerk to write out descriptions
of children who were missing, to post on the gate of the little church. The pieces of paper fluttered in the wind, naming children who might never see their homes again, calling on parents who would never come to find them. Father Benito had survived the flood clinging to the bell tower and now took his seat at the confessional. A queue of people waited to confess to him, and the sense of death was heavy in the little church – it lay over the harbour like a low cloud. More and more people were coming slowly in the gate to the north of the town, seeking the children who had gone with Johann, hoping that they had escaped the flood. They looked at the slurry of filth and water and the broken timbers in the market square as if they still could not believe that an evil tide had flowed high into the very heart of Piccolo and receded, leaving nothing but devastation.
In the lady chapel alongside the church the little bodies were being prepared for burial. Grim-faced, Luca and Brother Peter noted the clothes, the hair colour, the age, any little oddness of appearance, or brightness of hair, so that the children might be identified if their parents ever came seeking them. When they had looked into every blue, blanched face, and noted every missing tooth and freckled nose, they waved the two wise women forward who sewed the bodies into the newly-made shrouds, and laid them, two to a roughly-made stretcher, ready to be carried to the new cemetery beyond the walls of the town, for burial.
The wise women, who served as folk healers, as midwives and layers-out in the little village, did their work with a steady reverence for the little bodies, but they looked askance at Brother Peter and Luca; and when Isolde, Ishraq and Rosa came into the church they turned away their heads and did not greet them at all.
‘What’s the matter with them?’ Ishraq muttered to Isolde, sensing the hostility but not understanding it.
‘They’ll be grieving,’ Isolde suggested.
Order of Darkness Page 33