‘Little cross hens in a hen house,’ he said comfortably. ‘Very, very ordinary. But at least you have me to fall back on.’
‘When would I fall back on you?’
‘When he prefers her to you. When he makes his choice; if it’s not you. When you are down to the bottom of the barrel. And have to scrape.’
Again he saw her colour rise. But she managed to laugh. ‘Ah, but you swore loyalty to her already. I’m not such a fool that I don’t know that everyone always prefers her to me. Everyone always will.’
‘Don’t you believe it,’ he said tucking her hand in his arm again. ‘I worship her from afar. I have promised her that she can call on me as her squire. I have offered her my fealty, of course. But you . . .’
She was ready to be offended. ‘Me? Don’t you worship me from afar?’
‘Oh no. You, I would bundle up behind the hayrick, lift up your skirts, and see how far I could get!’
He was ducking before she even swung at him and he laughed and let her go as she turned in the inn door.
And she was laughing too, as she went up the stairs to the bedroom that she shared with Isolde to tell her that they were all to go to Venice, and that they could stay with the two young men for a little while longer, whoever was in love, whoever was preferred, whatever might happen.
The evening grew steadily darker. Luca and his lord spoke quietly of the cause of the wave, of the learning of the ancients, and of the signs of the end of days, and then Luca left the lord to pray alone, and go to his solitary bedroom.
In the kitchen the fire was banked down, Freize dozing before it, seated in a wooden chair with his booted feet cocked on the chimney breast. He started up when he heard the dining room door close. ‘I waited up to see you to bed,’ he said, rubbing his eyes and yawning.
‘I think I can get up the stairs safely,’ Luca remarked. ‘You don’t need to tuck me in.’
‘I know,’ Freize said. ‘But it’s so good to be together once more. I wanted to say goodnight.’
‘Where are you sleeping?’ Luca asked. ‘Our bedroom is packed tight with guests. And Milord won’t share.’
‘She said I could bed down here,’ Freize said, gesturing to the pallet bed of straw in the corner of the kitchen where the kitten was already fast asleep. ‘I’ll be warmer than all of you.’
‘Good night,’ Luca opened his arms and the two young men hugged. ‘Dear God, Freize, it’s good to have you back again.’
‘I can’t tell you what it means to be safe on dry land and know that you and the girls are safe,’ Freize said. ‘I was even glad to see that miserable monk.’
Luca turned and went quietly up the stairs, and the door creaked and then there was silence. Freize shucked off his boots and loosened his belt, gently moved the kitten to one side, and stretched himself out on the pallet bed. He put his hands behind his fair head and readied himself for sleep.
Half dozing, he heard Milord go quietly up to his bedroom and the click as he dropped the latch on his door. The kitten settled itself on Freize’s throat and Freize fell deeply asleep.
He was drifting in and out of pleasant dreams when the tiniest noise jolted him into wakefulness. It was a hiss, like the sound of a sleeping snake, a whisper of cloth. He opened his eyes but some apprehension of danger warned him to lie completely still. Through the open kitchen door he could see the darker hallway of the inn, and beyond that, the open front door. Even then, he did not move but lay watching and saw two dark silhouettes against the starlit sky. One was a woman; he could see her slight shoulders and her bare feet, the gleam of silver on one toe. The other was a man completely robed and hooded in black. Freize recognised at once Luca’s lord who Brother Peter had called Milord and who had insisted on sleeping alone.
It was Ishraq who stood with him, and it was her whisper and the susurration of her chemise under her cape that had woken Freize. She paused in the doorway, her hand on the lord’s arm, and Freize saw the lord turn his hooded face towards her, but could not hear his reply.
Whatever he said, whatever he murmured so quietly that Freize’s straining ears could make out no words, it satisfied the girl, for she released his arm and let him go. He stepped out onto the quayside; Freize noted that he walked like a dancer, his boots made no sound, he was as quiet as a cat, and he disappeared into the darkness in the next second. The girl stood for a moment longer, looking after him, but as he went from shadow to shadow in the darkness he disappeared as if by magic.
Carefully, she closed the door, holding her finger under the latch so that it did not make the slightest noise. She turned towards the kitchen. Freize snapped his eyelids shut so that she could not see the gleam of his eyes by the ebbing firelight, and sighed a little, as a man deeply asleep. He felt her watching him. By her complete silence he knew that she was standing still and studying him, and he felt, despite his attraction to her, despite his affection for her, a chill at the thought of those dark eyes looking at him from the darkness, as her companion, her accomplice, went quietly down the quayside, on who knew what mission?
Then he heard the first stair creak, just a tiny noise, no more than the settling of an old house, drying out after a flood, and knew that she had slipped up the stairs, and a little draught of air told him that she had opened and closed her bedroom door.
Freize waited for moments, listening to the silence, knowing that the two of them, the young woman and the dark lord, could move as quietly as ghosts. What the hooded lord was doing, speaking to Ishraq whom he had declared a complete stranger to himself, and then creeping out to the dark quay, he could not begin to imagine. What Ishraq was doing, silently closing the door behind him, acting as his porteress, he could not think. He lay still, turning over treacheries and uncertainties in his mind, and then he sat up in his pallet bed, pulled on his boots in case of an emergency, and spent the rest of the night dozing in the chair by the fireside, on guard – but against what, he did not know. At some time, just before dawn, he thought he was on guard against fear itself, and that he could hear it, quietly breathing at the keyhole.
The inn was stirring at dawn, the lad who slept in the stable yard bringing in wood for the kitchen fire, the innkeeper’s wife coming down yawning to bake the bread which had been rising in a pungent yeasty mound all night long, and the innkeeper running up and down stairs with jugs of hot water for the guests to wash before they walked up the hill to attend Prime at the church. The church bell was starting to toll when Freize started at the sound of a shout from the top of the stairs.
He was out of the kitchen and racing up the stairs, two at a time, to the door of the lord as Luca came tumbling downstairs from the attic room. The door stood open and the lord was there, his hand held out, shaking slightly. As Luca and Freize came towards him he turned his face away from them, pulled the hood over his head to hide his face, and then showed them what he had in his hand.
‘Radu Bey,’ Luca said at once recognising the standard in the lord’s hand. It was a perfectly circular beautiful piece of fabric, richly embroidered in gold and turquoise, green and indigo, to look like the eye of a peacock’s feather, the symbol of nobility in the Ottoman empire, the colour of the standard that Radu Bey had laughingly unfurled from his galley while Luca’s lord had shouted impotently for his arrest.
‘How?’ Luca stammered. ‘What does it mean? Where did it come from?’
‘I found it this morning, pinned on my heart. On my heart! It was fastened to my robe with a gold pin. He sent a killer to pin this on me, as I slept. He pinned it over my heart. This is his warning. This is a message from Radu Bey telling me that he has put his mark on me; he could have put his dagger through my heart just as easily.’
The lord thrust the perfectly circular, beautiful badge into Luca’s hand. ‘Take it!’ he swore. ‘I can’t bear to touch it. It is as if he put a target on my heart.’
‘Why would he do such a thing?’
‘To warn me. To boast that he could have killed me. It’s
how they work. It’s what they do. They warn you, and the next time they come, they kill you.’
‘Who?’ Freize asked. ‘Who came?’
‘The Assassins,’ the lord said shortly. ‘He has set an Assassin on me.’
‘An Assassin?’ Brother Peter asked, coming down the stairs. ‘An Assassin has been in the inn?’
Isolde and Ishraq, disturbed by the noise, came out of their attic bedroom, and stood at the doorway, their capes thrown over their night gowns. ‘What’s happening?’ Isolde demanded, coming down the stairs.
Luca turned to her. ‘Someone got into the inn last night, and left Milord a message. A threat.’
Freize was watching Ishraq, on the steps above them all. She was quite still, her face impassive; she was looking at the lord.
‘How did he get in?’ Isolde asked.
Slowly, as if she felt his gaze upon her, Ishraq turned her eyes to Freize, and looked at him, her dark eyes revealing nothing.
‘They can climb walls like cats, they can run along rooftops,’ Milord said, shaken. ‘They study for years how to enter a room in silence, how to kill without warning and leave again. They are trained killers, they take a target and hunt him down until he is dead,’ he broke off. ‘This is a warning for me.’
‘Did he come in the window?’ Luca strode across the room and swung open the shutters and one side squeaked loudly. ‘No, you would have heard that.’
‘The front door is never locked,’ Freize volunteered. ‘He could just have let himself in.’ Ishraq’s gaze was steady on his face. ‘And out again.’
She raised her eyebrows slightly and turned a little away.
‘What does it mean?’ Luca asked the lord. ‘Why would he do this?’
‘It means that I am under sentence of death,’ he said. He exhaled and gave a shaky little laugh. ‘I am a dead man walking,’ he said. Beneath his hood they could see his faint bitter smile. ‘If the Assassins have a command to kill me, they will send one of their number, and then another, and then another, until I am dead, or until they are countermanded.’
‘What are the Assassins?’ Isolde asked, coming down the last steps, Ishraq following her. ‘Who are they?’
‘They are an order,’ Brother Peter replied. ‘More like a guild. They take talented youths very young, they teach them all the arts of warfare, all the arts of spying, all the dark arts of deception and weaponry. And then you can hire them: you give them a target and pay them, and they send one Assassin after another until they have fulfilled their mission and their victim is dead.’
‘Why did he not kill you then?’ Ishraq asked bluntly.
‘They did this to Saladin,’ Brother Peter explained. ‘They put a target on his heart while he slept, fully guarded in his tent, to warn him that if he went on he was a dead man.’
‘What did he do?’
‘Retreated,’ Brother Peter said shortly.
‘They are infidels; but they threatened Saladin?’ Luca asked, puzzled. ‘They threatened their own kind?’
‘They honour their order before anything,’ Milord replied. ‘They will accept any target, of any faith, of any nation. They serve themselves, not religion or race.’
‘But why would this galley slaver want to kill you?’ Isolde asked, puzzled.
He spoke to her directly for the first time, inclining his head in a small gesture of respect. ‘He’s no galley slaver,’ he said. ‘He is one of the greatest men of the Ottoman Empire, he is commander of all the armies, he is head of the janissary soldiers, the elite fighting force. He’s the righthand man of the Sultan Mehmet, who has just triumphed at Constantinople; they are sworn to each other for life. He stands for everything that I fight against – the victory of the Ottoman Empire over Christianity, the invasion of the Arabs across Europe, the rise of terror, the end of the world. We are enemies, sworn enemies for life. That was the man you had here, and you let him go. Now he warns me that I will not be as lucky if I fall into his hands. He taunts me. This is a game to him. A game to the death. He will know I have commanded you to kill him. This is his way of telling me that he has ordered my death too.’
There was a horrified silence.
‘What will you do, Milord?’ Luca asked quietly.
The man shrugged, recovering himself. ‘I’ll go to Prime,’ he said. ‘Breakfast. Talk with you and Brother Peter, and go on my way. Continue my struggle. Fight for Christ.’
‘Will you defend yourself?’
‘If I can, for as long as I can. But this tells me that I will die. I won’t stop my work. I have sworn an oath to lead the Order of Darkness to guard against fear itself, and I will never give up.’
Luca hesitated. ‘Should we not come with you? Should we not defend you against this threat? You should have someone with you all the time.’
His voice was bleak. ‘It is a fight to the death,’ he said. ‘My death or his. And neither my death nor his death is as important as your mission. When I die, a new lord will take my place, you will still have work to do. For now, you go to Venice and trace the signs of the end of days. And I will keep myself as safe as I can.’
He looked at the peacock badge in Luca’s hand. ‘Get rid of that,’ he said. ‘I can’t bear to see it.’
Silently, Ishraq put out her hand and took it from him. Freize watched her as she tucked it into the pocket of her cape.
The three men and Isolde went up the hill to the church. Freize saw them go from the inn doorway, as Ishraq started up the stairs to pack their few things ready to leave.
‘You didn’t hear anything, in the night, I suppose?’ Freize asked her neutrally.
She turned on the stair, looked him straight in the face, and lied to him. ‘No. I slept through it all.’
‘Because he must have come up the stairs and stood on the landing floor just below your bedroom, and gone into the room beneath yours.’
‘Yes. But he went past the kitchen door too. Did you hear nothing?’
‘No. If he had killed the lord, it would have been most terrible. He is my lord’s commander. I am bound to defend him. Luca is bound to guard him.’
‘But whoever it was didn’t kill him,’ she pointed out. ‘He never intended to kill him. He took him a message, he left the message, and went away again. It is Milord who speaks of death and threatens death. All I saw was a badge from a standard.’
‘A message from our enemy,’ Freize prompted her. ‘And not any old message. A death threat from our enemy.’
‘From your enemy,’ she said. ‘To the lord of your lord. But I don’t know that I like Luca’s commander very much. I don’t know that he is my friend. I don’t know if I am on his side. I don’t know that he is my lord. I don’t know if his enemy is my enemy. I don’t even know if he’s a very good lord to Luca. Perhaps you should think of that, before you ask me how I sleep?’
The four walked back from Prime and the travellers took breakfast in the inn kitchen while Milord ate alone in the dining room. When they had finished eating, the two young women went up to their attic bedroom to prepare for the journey.
‘What will you do with that?’ Isolde asked, seeing Ishraq put the gloriously embroidered peacock eye standard in the bottom of her little bag.
‘Keep it, I don’t know,’ she said.
‘Luca’s commander was very afraid,’ Isolde observed. ‘He wanted it out of his sight.’
‘I know.’
‘Perhaps you should burn it.’
‘Perhaps I will.’ Ishraq hesitated. ‘But I don’t understand why Luca’s lord was so troubled. He was unhurt, after all.’
‘If it was an Assasin who pinned it on his chest for a warning . . .’
‘It was no Assassin,’ she said. ‘It was Radu Bey himself. I saw him come out. I let him out of the front door.’
‘Why didn’t you say?’ Isolde asked.
‘Because I didn’t know if Radu Bey had crept in, as silent as an Assassin, or if Milord had admitted him. I didn’t know what it meant. Now I doubt L
uca’s lord.’
‘He is appointed by the Pope,’ Isolde pointed out.
‘That doesn’t make him a good man,’ Ishraq reminded her. ‘There are many appointed by the Pope who persecute and destroy. And there is more between him and Radu Bey than we know. And, as he left, Radu Bey warned me.’
‘Of what?’
‘He asked me had I ever looked in Milord’s face, and I said that he is always hooded and in shadow. And he laughed and said that a man of God does not work in darkness. He said that when I see his face I will understand more. He said . . .’ she broke off.
‘What?’ Isolde asked, lowering her voice as if she feared that Milord might be listening to them.
‘He said never to let him come too close.’
‘Why?’
Ishraq shook her head. ‘He didn’t say. He said not to let Milord touch me. Not to let him . . .’ she hesitated. ‘Not to let him kiss me.’
‘He’s sworn to a monastic order!’ Isolde objected.
‘I know. But it wasn’t because it would be a sin,’ Ishraq tried to explain. ‘He said it as if . . . as if it would be dangerous. As if his touch might be . . . dangerous.’
There was a frightened silence. Then Isolde shook her head. ‘We can trust no one,’ she said.
‘We can trust Luca, and Freize,’ Ishraq said. ‘We’re safe with them. And I know that Brother Peter is a good man. But I don’t trust Luca’s lord nor his Order.’
‘We can trust each other,’ Isolde suggested, tentatively. She stretched out her hand to her friend and Ishraq stepped into her embrace. For a moment they stood together, then Ishraq stepped back. ‘We can trust each other,’ Ishraq ruled. ‘And we have to. For I think we are in a very dangerous world.’
After his breakfast, Milord came down to the inn kitchen and gave Brother Peter a set of sealed orders, and a heavy bag of cash. ‘And a note to the Jewish moneylenders in Venice,’ he said. ‘You will want for nothing while you search for the forgers.’ Brother Peter tucked the sealed orders into his jerkin; Freize rolled his eyes to heaven.
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