Dark Tracks

by Philippa Gregory

  “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
m. “I have heard of a woman who fell asleep like this. A deep sleep like death and she never ate nor drank nor aged. As you grow older and her friends grow older, she will just sleep, as she does now, sleep like a beautiful, untouched girl, and wake like an unfolding rose in time to see your old age and death, and know that she is alone in the world, and that you did not save her.”

  “Then we will be here for her,” Luca swore. “Older and tired, but ready to greet her, as if we love her, as if our love is untouched, even if we are dying of old age, as she wakes like an unfolding rose.”

  Brother Peter looked as if he thought this was not a workable plan, and the physician exchanged a glance with him. The two men turned to the door together.

  “He loves her?” the physician asked Brother Peter quietly. “I thought you said he was a novice priest? But he’s so much in love with her that he cannot think straight.”

  Brother Peter spoke low, so that Luca could not hear. “I had no idea. Indeed, I am sure that he has no idea. They are close—all four of them like comrades; but I had no idea that it had grown to a passion for him. Actually, I thought he favored the other one. But—what would I know of these young people and their fancies? You heard him yourself—he speaks like a young man in love. This is a disaster! He’s not free to love either of them, and she is an infidel. But yes, I think he loves her. I am afraid that he must.”

  The long day was turning to evening, the sun was going down, but the dancers, who had been bobbing along for hours after their brief rest, showed no sign of slackening their steps. The fiddler’s jig whined under the dark branches and the tambourine went pattering on as the dancers trailed wearily behind them. Isolde was still out in front, her feet keeping time, whirling around, following the fiddler, her pale face set and determined. No one was close enough to see that her dark blue eyes were filled with tears and her cheeks were stained, and no one in the wild, jigging crew would have cared. Far behind them, Freize worked his way up the darkening road, making sure that he kept out of sight, going from tree to tree, from shrub to shrub, watching Isolde and hoping that she would stumble and sit down, and that the dancers would go on without her. He could see that she was tiring, but she moved as if her feet were taking her against her will, as if she could not make herself stop.

  The forest ahead was thinning; the narrow track that they were following ran into a clearing and the moon, a slim silver sickle, was rising over the darkness of the trees. The drummer gave a triumphant roll on the tambourine and the fiddler sawed a final chord. The dancers staggered off the road as if their legs were about to give way beneath them and most of them collapsed where they stood. Some of them had little flasks of small ale or wine; others had food. Nobody shared anything: it was as if they were each in their own solitary torment and could not help or care for each other. They could barely even see each other.

  Those who had cloaks rolled themselves up and lay down with only the tussocky grass for a pillow. Those who had nothing but rags huddled near each other for warmth, without a word of companionship. Nobody fetched wood; nobody made a fire; they turned to the night and to sleep as if they were animals, incapable of lighting a campfire or making a shelter, far from any sympathy or tenderness, far from helping and far from caring for each other.

  From the darkness of the wooded side of the glade Freize watched, and saw that Isolde was not yet lying down or sleeping. She had brought nothing to eat—rushing out of the inn, dragged along by her shoes—and she had nothing to wrap herself in for warmth. But the landlady of the inn was edging toward the fiddler and his warm cloak. Isolde stood at the roadside, shifting from one foot to another, as if she could hear the music in her head, as if she still wanted to dance though her head was bowed with fatigue and, under the tangled veil of her hair, the tears were rolling down her cheeks.

  As Freize watched her, hardly daring to hope that some longing for her home and her friends was quietly stirring inside her, she turned back down the road, the way that they had come, and started to walk toward him, not even knowing that he was there. She walked blindly, one foot slowly placed before the other, as if she were wading through invisible water that was pushing her back, making her way south, to the town.

  “Come on,” Freize whispered. “Come to me, come to me, and the moment you are near enough I will pull you into the wood and hide you from them.”

  Isolde took one small step on her sore feet, and then another, steadily winding her way through the sleeping dancers who had dropped on the roadside or in the glade, slowly coming toward Freize, her face quite blank, her blank eyes sightless in the darkening shadows of the trees.

  Freize kept in the gloom of the wood, waiting for her to come close, determined to take her hand as soon as she came near him and run with her, as fast as they could, back to the safety of Lord Vargarten’s little town. But, as if sensing that he was losing one of the dancers, the fiddler raised himself up on one elbow and looked around. He saw Isolde making her slow way, then sat up and drew his bow across the strings in one enticing trickle of music. A few of the dozing heads came up, and someone laughed as Isolde turned as if she had been called, and danced back down the road to where the landlady and the fiddler shared his cape. She lay down beside them as if they were her chosen companions and only friends.

  Freize waited patiently as, one after another, the dancers turned around on the hard ground, settled, and finally went to sleep. They were restless sleepers; their feet twitching, they shifted uncomfortably from one side to another, shouting out in their dreams. As the moon rose over the tops of the dark trees and shone down on them, they slowly stilled, and the color drained from the scene in the cold light. Freize shuddered and crossed himself; they looked like a village of paupers suddenly struck by plague, or a ragged army of dead men and women left to rot where they had fallen on the battlefield. He could not bear to think that the Lady of Lucretili was twitching in her sleep under a fiddler’s cloak. He could not believe that he himself, who so hated adventure and discomfort, was hunkering down on the cold ground and waiting like a faithful squire in a fairy tale for his lady to recover from a deep enchantment.

  Luca ate his dinner in Ishraq’s room, seated on a little stool drawn up to the bed so that he could see at once if she stirred. The kitchen lad had fried some bacon and bought some bread from the town baker, but, with the landlady missing, there was no one who could cook anything better, and the taproom downstairs was silent and subdued, as if the drinkers were mourning the loss of the alewife.

  There was the bang of the front door opening and a heavy tread on the stairs. Luca stood up and moved to the bed as if to protect Ishraq’s death-like sleep, as Lord Vargarten thrust open the door and came into the room.

  “They told me your wench had fallen down like a dead woman,” he said. “And that another girl was missing?”

  “They’re not wenches,” Luca said irritably. “The missing one is the Lady of Lucretili, and this is her companion, Ishraq. They were traveling with us for safety.”

  “Not so safe,” Lord Vargarten remarked cruelly.

  “You need not remind me that I completely failed to protect them,” Luca said hotly. “And the physician here has no idea what to do.”

  Lord Vargarten looked down at the sleeping girl and was surprised. “A beauty,” he remarked. “Extraordinary. A Moorish girl?”

  “Yes, but will she live?” Luca demanded.

  The lord bent down and put his ear to Ishraq’s nose. “Hardly breathing,” he said. He put his hand to her cheek. “Cold.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you’d better send for the priest to give her the last rites,” his lordship said bluntly. “She won’t last the night. She’s cooling as she’s lying here. Can’t you see for yourself this is a dead girl? Pity. D’you know what caused it?”

  “A man in the taproom said that the landlady admitted a peddler, and when he went out he left the door wide open so that the dancers came in.”

  “The dancer
s killed her?”

  “Nobody knows for sure. Nobody actually saw them come in.”

  “These are evildoings. We should’ve put them to the sword when we had them. I told you, Priest. Better dead than doubtful. Where’s the peddler?”

  “Nobody saw him leave.”

  The lord shook his head. “Dark times. What will you report of this? What will you tell the Holy Father?”

  Luca shrugged. “What can I tell him, but that the dancers have come and gone and the Lady of Lucretili is missing and her friend is all but dead? And that I understand nothing, and am as helpless as a child.”

  The lord nodded. “Dark times,” he repeated. “You’d better come back to the castle with me, for your own safety.”

  “No, I can’t leave Ishraq,” Luca said miserably. “I won’t leave her. Do you think we could carry her to the castle?”

  “I’m not having this girl under my roof,” his lordship said bluntly. “She’s dying and we don’t know the cause. You do nobody any good by making a vigil at her bedside. Leave her to die in peace, for God’s sake. And anyway, what about t’other one?”

  “I hope that my companion Freize will save the Lady of Lucretili. As soon as Ishraq—” Luca swallowed. He could not say the word “dies.” “As soon as I am free to leave here, I will go after her. Her ladyship was under my protection. I should never have left the two young women here alone.”

  “You had no way of knowing that some fool would open the door. I’ll leave two men in the market square; you can send them to me in case of need. I’ve posted guards on the town gate so that the dancers cannot return. If you see that peddler again, throw him in the cellar and send for me. I’ll come down and hang him.”

  Numbly, his eyes not moving from Ishraq’s pale face, Luca nodded.

  His lordship slapped his shoulder. “I’m doing the best I can for you,” he pointed out. “The best would have been to hunt them down like vermin. But be of good heart, Inquirer! If you ride about the world, looking for the signs of the end of times, you’re bound to see some terrible things. You want to find them, after all. You’re hoping for horrors. It’s a sort of success.”