Order of Darkness

by Philippa Gregory

  ‘Did she tell you I kissed her forehead?’ Luca whispered in her ear, delighting in the touch and the rose-water scent of this young woman that he had desired since the moment that he had first seen her.

  She raised her head. ‘She did.’

  ‘Were you jealous of that too?’

  There was a gleam of mischief in his eyes, and she saw it at once and smiled back at him, ‘Unfortunately, I was.’

  ‘Shall I kiss you as I kissed her? Would that make it fair?’

  In answer she closed her eyes and raised her face to him. Luca longed to kiss her warm mouth but instead, obedient to his offer, he gently kissed her forehead, and had the satisfaction of feeling her sway, just slightly, in his arms, as if she too wanted for more.

  In a moment she opened her dark blue eyes.

  ‘Shall I kiss you on the lips?’ Luca asked her.

  It was a step too far. He sensed her flinch and she leaned back so she could see his warmly smiling face.

  ‘I think you should not,’ she said, but, in contradiction, her arms were still around his waist and she did not let him go. His arms held her close and she did not step back.

  Slowly, he leaned forwards, slowly her eyes closed, and she raised her mouth to his. Behind them the door opened and Freize came out with the dishes from dinner. He checked himself when he saw the two of them, enwrapped in the darkened hall. ‘’Scuse me,’ he said cheerfully, and went past them to the kitchen.

  Luca rapidly released Isolde who put her hands to her hot cheeks. ‘I should go to bed,’ she said quietly. ‘Forgive me.’

  ‘But you’re not angry with Ishraq, nor upset with yourself any more?’ he confirmed.

  She went to the stairs but he could see that she was laughing. ‘I scolded Ishraq like a fishwife!’ she confessed. ‘I accused her of loose behaviour for allowing your kiss. And now here am I!’

  ‘She’ll forgive you,’ he said. ‘And you will be happy again.’

  She went up the stairs and turned back and smiled at him. He caught his breath at the luminous loveliness of her face. ‘I am happy now,’ she said. ‘I think I have never been as happy in my life as I am now.’

  In the morning, as Freize went out to buy new and beautiful capes and hats for their sea voyage to Venice, Brother Peter and Luca – holding to their pretence of being merchant brothers – and Isolde and Ishraq – as their sister and her companion – went to walk in the town of Ravenna.

  It was a small city, tightly enclosed within the encircling walls, the great castle dominating the jumble of shabby roofs around the castle hill. The morning was bright and sunny, the early frost melting from the red tiled roofs. Rising to the blue sky, at every street corner, were the tall bell towers of great churches. A shallow canal flowed into the very centre of the town, where a market sold everything on the stone-built quay. The city had been the capital of the ancient kingdom, and the great stone roads running north and south, and east and west, across the whole of Italy crossed at the very heart of the old city.

  The two girls hesitated beside the great church that towered over the area, admiring the rose-coloured brick. ‘The church is what takes your eye, but the tomb I want to see is just here,’ Luca said, and led the way to a modest little building set to one side.

  ‘This little place?’ Isolde ducked under the low opening, Ishraq followed her, Brother Peter behind her. The building was in the shape of a cross and they entered by the north door. For a moment they paused at the entrance of the tiny building and then as Isolde crossed herself, and bent her knee, Luca exclaimed at the explosion of colour.

  Every part of the arched interior was glistening, almost as if it had been freshly painted. The walls, the floor, even the curved ceilings were rich with bright mosaics. Isolde gazed around her in amazed delight, Ishraq could not take her eyes from the roof above their heads, which was deep sea blue, studded with hundreds of golden stars. It was like a silk scarf sweeping over their heads and down into the arches on all four sides.

  ‘It’s beautiful!’ Ishraq exclaimed, thinking how similar it was to the rich designs of the Arab world. ‘What is it? A private chapel?’

  ‘It’s not a church at all, it’s a mausoleum,’ Brother Peter told her. ‘Built by a great Christian lady hundreds of years ago for her own burial.’

  ‘Look,’ Isolde said, turning back to the door where they had entered. A spacious mosaic over the doorway showed a warmly coloured scene of the Good Shepherd, leaning on his crook, crowned with a golden halo and surrounded by his sheep. ‘How could they do this hundreds of years ago? The tenderness of the picture? See how he touches the sheep?’

  ‘And that is the story of a Christian risking his life for the gospels,’ Brother Peter said piously, pointing to the opposite wall where a man was depicted running past the flames of an open fire, with a cross over his shoulder and an open book in his hand. ‘See the gospels in the library?’

  ‘I see,’ Ishraq said demurely. In this exquisite and holy place she did not want to tease Brother Peter about his devotion, or to express her own scepticism. She had been raised in the Christian household of Isolde’s father, the Lord of Lucretili, but her mother had taught her to read the Koran. Her later education encouraged her to examine everything, and she would always be a young woman of questions rather than of faith. She looked around the glittering interior and then found her attention caught by a wash of colour on some white mosaic tiles. Someone had glazed the open windows of the mausoleum and one of the pieces of glass had been broken. The morning sunlight, shining over the chipped surface, threw coloured rays on the white tiles and even on Ishraq’s white headscarf.

  ‘Look,’ Ishraq nudged Isolde. ‘Even the sunlight is coloured in here.’

  Her words caught Luca’s attention and he turned and saw the brilliant spread of colours. He was dazzled by the rainbow shining around Ishraq’s head. ‘Give me your scarf,’ he said suddenly.

  Without a word, her eyes on his face, she unwrapped it, and her dark thick hair tumbled down around her shoulders. Luca handed one end to her and kept the other. They spread it out to catch the light from the window. At once the white silk glowed with the colours of the rainbow. Together, as if doing a strange dance, they walked away from the window and saw the colours become more diffuse and blurred as the stripes grew wider, and then they walked back and saw that the brightly coloured beam narrowed and became more distinct.

  ‘The broken glass seems to be turning the sunlight into many colours,’ Luca said, wonderingly. He turned back to the mosaic that he had been examining. ‘And look,’ he said to her. ‘The mosaic is a rainbow too.’

  Above his head was a soaring wall going up to the vault above them, decorated exquisitely in all the colours of the rainbow, and overlaid with a pattern. Luca, his hands holding out Ishraq’s scarf, nodded from the rainbow mosaic to the rainbow on the scarf. ‘It’s the same colours,’ he said. ‘A thousand years ago, they made a rainbow in these very colours, appearing in this order.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ Isolde asked, looking at the two of them. ‘What are you looking at?’

  ‘It makes you think that a rainbow must always form the same colours,’ Ishraq answered her when Luca was silent, looking from the scarf to the mosaic wall. ‘Does it? Is it always the colours as they have shown here? In this mosaic? Don’t look at the pattern, look at the colours!’

  ‘Yes!’ Luca exclaimed. ‘How strange that they should have noticed this, so many hundreds of years ago! How wonderful that they should have recorded the colours.’ He paused in thought. ‘So, is every rainbow the same? Has it been the same for hundreds of years? And if the chip of glass can make a rainbow in here, what makes a rainbow in the sky? What makes the sky suddenly shine with colours?’

  Nobody answered him, nobody had an answer. Nobody but Luca would ask such a question; he had been expelled from his monastery for asking questions which verged on heresy, and even now, though he was employed by the Order of Darkness to inquire into all questions
of this world and the next, he had to stay within the tight confines of the Church.

  ‘Why would it matter?’ Isolde asked, looking at the rapt expressions of her two friends. ‘Why would such a thing matter to you?’

  Luca shrugged his shoulders as if he was returning to the real world. ‘Oh, just curiosity, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Just as we didn’t know the cause of the great wave in Piccolo, we don’t know what makes thunder, we don’t know what makes rainbows. There is so much that we don’t know. And while we don’t know the answer, people think that these strange tricks of nature are carried out by witchcraft or devils or spirits. They frighten themselves into accusing their neighbours, and then it is my job to discover the truth of it. But I can’t give them a simple explanation, for I don’t have a simple explanation. But here – since whoever made these mosaics knew the colours of the rainbow – maybe they knew what caused them too.’

  ‘But why are you interested?’ Isolde pursued. ‘Does it matter what colour the sunset was last night?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ishraq said unexpectedly. ‘It does matter. For the world is filled with mysteries, and only if we ask and study and go on discovering will we ever understand anything.’

  ‘There is nothing to understand, for it has already been explained,’ Brother Peter ruled, speaking with all the authority of the Church. ‘God set a rainbow in the sky as his promise to Man after the Flood. I will set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be the sign of a covenant between me, and between the earth. And when I shall cover the sky with clouds, my bow shall appear in the clouds.’ He looked gravely at the young women. ‘That is all you need to know.’

  He turned his hard stare to Luca. ‘You are an Inquirer of a holy Order,’ he reminded the younger man. ‘It is your duty and your task to inquire. But beware that you do not ask about things outside your mission. You are commanded by our lord and by the Holy Father to discover if the end of days is coming. You are not commanded to ask about everything. Some questions are heretical. Some things are not to be explored.’

  There was a silence as Luca absorbed the reproof from the older man.

  ‘I can’t stop myself thinking,’ Luca replied quietly. ‘Perhaps God has given me curiosity.’

  ‘Nobody wants to stop you thinking,’ Brother Peter said as he opened the low door to the mausoleum. ‘But Milord will have made it clear when he hired you, that you are to think only inside the limits of the Church. Some things are not known – like the change of a man into werewolf, like the cause of the terrible flood – and it is right that you hold an inquiry into them. But God has told us the meaning of the rainbow in His Holy Word, we don’t need your thoughts on it.’

  Luca bowed his head but could not stop himself glancing sideways at Ishraq.

  ‘Well I shall go on thinking, whether your Church needs it or not,’ she declared. ‘And the Arab scholars will go on thinking, and the ancient people were clearly thinking too, and the Arab scholars will translate their books.’

  ‘But we are obedient sons of the Church,’ Brother Peter ruled. ‘And actually, what you think – as a young woman and an infidel – does not matter to anyone.’

  He turned and led the way out and they obediently followed him, Isolde lingered in the doorway. ‘It’s so beautiful,’ she said. ‘As if it were a freshly painted fresco, the colours so rich.’

  There was a little pause before Luca came out, and she saw he was putting something in the pocket of his breeches, under the fold of his cape.

  ‘What d’you have there?’ Isolde whispered to him, as Brother Peter led the way back to the inn.

  ‘The chipped piece of glass,’ he said. ‘I want to see if we can make a rainbow with it, anywhere.’

  Gravely, she looked at him. ‘But isn’t it God’s work to make a rainbow? As Brother Peter just said?’

  ‘It’s our work,’ Ishraq corrected her. ‘For we are in this world to understand it. And like Luca, I want to see if we can make a rainbow. And if he is not allowed to do it, then I will try. For my God, unlike yours, has no objection to me asking questions.’

  Freize was waiting for them back at the inn and they mounted up and rode the little way out of Ravenna alongside the silted-up canal to the old port of Classe. The ferry boat was waiting for them at the stone harbour wall.

  ‘But do you have the courage to get on board?’ Ishraq teased Freize, who had not been on board a ship since he had been swept away by a terrible storm.

  ‘If Rufino my horse can do it, then I can do it,’ Freize answered. ‘And he is a horse of rare courage and knowingness.’

  Ishraq looked doubtfully at the big skewbald cob, who looked more doltish than knowing. ‘He is?’

  ‘You need to look beyond ordinary appearances,’ Freize counselled her. ‘You look at the horse and you see a big clumsy lump of a thing, but I know that he has courage and fine feelings.’

  ‘Fine feelings?’ Ishraq was smiling. ‘Has he really?’

  ‘Just as you look at me and you see a handsome down-to-earth straightforward sort of ordinary man. But I have hidden depths and surprising skills.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘I do,’ Freize confirmed. ‘And one of those skills is getting horses on board a boat. You may sit on the quayside and admire me.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Ishraq said, and sat on one of the stone seats let into the harbour wall, as he led all five horses and the little donkey to the wooden gangway which stretched from boat to quay.

  The horses were nervous and pulled away and jibbed, but Freize was soothing and calm with them. Ishraq would not feed his joyous vanity by applauding; but she thought there was something very touching about the way that the square-shouldered young man and the big horses exchanged glances, caresses and little noises, almost as if they were talking to each other, until the animals were reassured and followed him up the gangway to their stalls on the boat. Freize loaded their saddlebags and the crusader broadsword that had belonged to the Lord of Lucretili – Isolde’s father. All their other things: Brother Peter’s writing desk, the rolled manuscripts, had been lost in the flood.

  There were no other travellers taking the ship that day, and so when the horses were safely loaded, they all took hunks of bread and pots of small ale for breakfast, and followed Freize on board as the master of the ship cast off and set sail.

  It took all day and all night to sail to Venice going before a bitterly cold wind. The girls slept for some of the time in the little cabin below the deck but in the early hours of the morning they came out and went to the front of the ship where the men were standing, wrapped against the cold, waiting for the sky to lighten. Ishraq’s attention was taken by a small sleek craft coming towards them on a collision course, moving fast in the dark water, a black silhouette against the dark waves.

  ‘Hi! Boatman!’ she called over her shoulder to the captain of the boat who was at the rudder in the stern of the boat. ‘D’you see that galley? It’s heading straight for us!’

  ‘Drop the sail!’ the man bellowed at his son, who scurried forward and slackened the ropes and dropped the mainsail.

  ‘Here! I’ll help,’ Freize said going back to haul the sail down. ‘What’s he doing, coming at us so fast?’

  The two girls, Brother Peter and Luca watched, as the galley, speeding towards them, powered by rowers hauling on their oars to the beat of a drum, came closer and closer.

  ‘A galley should give way to a vessel with sails,’ Brother Peter remarked uneasily. ‘What are they doing? They look as if they want to ram us!’

  ‘It’s an attack!’ Luca suddenly decided. ‘They are coming straight for us! Who are they?’

  Brother Peter, squinting into the half-darkness, exclaimed: ‘I can’t see the standard. They’re showing no light. Whose boat is it?’

  ‘Freize!’ Luca shouted, turning to the deck and grabbing a boathook as the only weapon to hand. ‘Beware boarders!’

  ‘Get the sail back up!’ Brother Peter shouted.

  ‘We can’t outs
ail them,’ Ishraq warned.

  A galley with a well-trained rowing crew could travel much faster than the lumbering ship. Ishraq looked around for a weapon, for somewhere that they could hide. But it was a little boat with only the stalls for the horses on deck, and a small cabin below.

  Freize joined them, his club in his hand. He pulled a knife out of his boot and handed it to Ishraq for her defence. His face was grim.

  ‘Would this be the Ottoman lord come back for us?’ he asked Luca.

  ‘It’s not an Ottoman pirate,’ Luca said, staring at the oars biting into the waves as the galley came swiftly closer. ‘It’s too small a craft.’

  ‘Then someone else is very eager to speak with us,’ Freize said miserably. ‘And it looks like we can’t avoid the pleasure.’

  Slowly, as their little caravel came to a halt and wallowed in the water, the galley changed course and drew up alongside them. Two of the rowers got to their feet and threw grappling hooks upward at once, gripping the rail of the boat. Isolde resisted the temptation to throw them off, as the rowers in the mysterious galley hauled on the ropes and drew in close.

  Summoning their courage, Luca and Isolde looked down into the galley at the rowers, who were free, not chained; and at the man who stood in the stern.

  ‘Who are you? And what do you want with us?’ Luca demanded.

  The commander at the back of the boat had drawn his cutlass. The cold light glinted on the hammered blade. He looked up at them both, businesslike. ‘I am commanded by the Lord of Lucretili to take that woman into my keeping,’ he said, pointing at Isolde. ‘She is the runaway sister to the great lord and he has commanded her to come home.’

  ‘Your brother!’ Ishraq exclaimed under her breath.

  ‘I’m not her,’ Isolde said at once in the strong accent of a woman from the south. ‘I don’t know who you are talking about.’

  The man narrowed his eyes. ‘We have followed your trail, my lady,’ he said. ‘From the convent where the lord your brother entrusted you to the good sisters, to when you fell in with these men of God, to the fishing village, to here. You were charged with witchcraft . . .’