Stormbringers

by Philippa Gregory

  The older man nodded, seeing that Luca was close to breaking down. ‘I’ll send this off as it is,’ he said. ‘And we’ll go on looking for him.’

  ‘You think it’s hopeless,’ Luca said flatly.

  Brother Peter crossed himself. ‘I’ll pray for him,’ he said. ‘Nothing is hopeless if God will hear our prayers.’

  ‘He didn’t hear the children singing hymns,’ Luca said flatly, and turned and stared out to sea. ‘Why should He hear us?’

  At dinner time, Isolde went down to the quayside to find Luca, wrapped in his cloak, looking at the darkening horizon. ‘Will you come in for dinner?’ she asked. ‘They have dried out the dining room and stewed a chicken.’

  He looked at her without seeing her heart-shaped face and grave eyes. ‘I’ll come in a moment,’ he said, indifferently. ‘Start without me.’

  She put a hand on his arm. ‘Come now, Luca,’ she whispered.

  ‘In a moment.’

  She took a few steps back and waited for him to turn around. He did not move. She hesitated. ‘Luca, come with me to dinner,’ she commanded sweetly. ‘You can’t stay here, you do no good mourning alone. Come and have something to eat and we’ll come out together, afterwards.’

  He did not even hear her. She waited for a little longer and then understood that he was deaf to her and could hardly see her. He was looking for his friend, and could see nothing else. She went back to the inn alone.

  The darkness of early autumn found Luca still seated on the quayside, still looking out at the darkening sea. A few of the mothers whose children had been lost on the crusade had come down and thrown a flower or a cross made from tied twigs into the gently washing water of the harbour, but they too were gone by nightfall. Only Luca stood waiting, looking out to the paler line of the horizon, as if the act of staring would make Freize visible, as if he gazed for long enough he would be bound to see the wet head of Freize, and his indomitable beaming smile, swimming for home.

  The church clock chimed for Matins: it was midnight.

  ‘You fear you have lost him, as you lost your mother and father,’ a cool voice said behind him, making him swing around. Ishraq was standing in the shadows, her head uncovered, her dark hair in a plait down her back. ‘You believe that you failed them, that you failed even to look for them. So you are looking for Freize, hoping that you will not fail him.’

  ‘I was not even there when they were taken,’ he said bitterly. ‘I was in the monastery. I heard the bell started to toll, the warning tocsin that rang in the village when they saw the galleys of the slaving ships approaching. We hid the holy things in the monastery and we locked ourselves into our cells and prayed. We spent the night in prayer. When we were allowed to go out, the Abbot called me from the chapel and told me that he was afraid that the village had been attacked. I ran down to the village and across the fields to our farmhouse, which was a little way out towards the river. But I could see from a long way off that the front door was banging open, the house was empty, all the things of value were gone, and my mother and father disappeared.’

  ‘They came like a wave from the sea,’ Ishraq observed. ‘And you did not see them take your parents nor do you know where they are now.’

  ‘Everyone says they are dead,’ Luca said blankly. ‘Just as everyone thinks Freize is dead. Everyone I love is taken from me, I have no one. And I never do anything to save them. I lock myself into safety or I run like a coward, I save myself, I save my own life, and then I realise that my life is nothing without them.’

  Ishraq raised a finger, as if she would scold him. ‘Don’t pity yourself,’ she said. ‘You will lose all your courage if you wallow in sympathy for yourself.’

  He flushed. ‘I am an orphan,’ he said bitterly. ‘I had no friend in the world but Freize. He was the only person in my life who loved me, and now I have lost him to the sea.’

  ‘And what do you think he would say?’ she demanded. ‘If he saw you here like this?’

  Luca’s mask of sorrow suddenly melted and he found he was smiling at the thought of his lost friend. Colour rushed into his cheeks and his voice choked. ‘He would say, “There’s a good inn and a good dinner, let’s go and eat. Time enough for all this in the morning.”’

  Ishraq stood waiting, knowing that Luca’s heart was racing with grief.

  A cry broke from him and he turned to her and she opened her arms to him. He stepped towards her and she held him tightly, her arms wrapped around him as he wept with great heaving sobs, on her shoulder. She said nothing at all but just held him, her arms wrapped around him in a hug as strong as a man’s, rocking him gently as he wept broken-hearted for the loss of his friend.

  ‘I never told him,’ he finally gasped, as the truth was wrenched out of him. ‘I never told him that I loved him as if he were my own brother.’

  ‘Oh he knew,’ she assured him, quietly and steadily in his ear. ‘His love for you was one of his greatest joys. His pride in you, his admiration for you, his pleasure in your company was well known to him and to us all. You did not need to speak of it. You both knew. We all knew. He loved you and he knew you loved him.’

  The storm of his weeping subsided and he pulled back from her, wiped his face roughly on his damp cloak. ‘You will think me a fool,’ he said. ‘A woman weeping. As soft as a girl.’

  She let him go at once, and stepped back to perch on one of the capstans, the mooring posts where they tied up the ships, as if she were settling down to talk all night. She shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think you a fool to mourn for one you love.’

  ‘You think me a weakling?’

  ‘Only when you were writing your life into a ballad of self-pity. I thought that you were too strong in your grief. You can’t bring him back to life by your determination. Alas, if he is lost to us then you cannot bring him back again by wishing. You have to know that there are things you cannot do. You have to let him go. Perhaps you will have to let your parents go too.’

  ‘I can’t bear to think that I will never see any of them again!’

  ‘Perhaps the task of your life is to think the unthinkable,’ she suggested. ‘Certainly, your mission is to look at the unknown and try to understand it. Perhaps you are called to understand things that most people never consider. Perhaps you have to find the courage to think terrible things. The disappearance of your parents, like the loss of Freize, is a mystery. Perhaps you have to let yourself know that the very worst thing that could have happened, has indeed taken place. Your task is to start to think about it, to ask why such things happen? Perhaps this is why you are an inquirer.’

  ‘You think my grief prepares me for my work?’

  She nodded. ‘I am certain of it. You will have to look at the worst things in the world. How can you do that if you have not faced them in your own life, already?’

  He was quiet, turning over her words in his mind. ‘You’re a very wise woman,’ he said as if seeing her for the first time. ‘It was good of you to come down here for me.’

  ‘Of course I would come for you,’ she replied.

  He was thinking of something else. ‘Did Isolde come earlier?’

  ‘Yes. She came to fetch you for dinner. But you were deaf and blind to her.’

  ‘That was some time ago?’

  ‘Hours.’

  ‘It’s very late now, isn’t it?’

  ‘Past midnight,’ she said. She rose and came close to him as if she would touch him again. ‘Luca,’ she said his name very quietly.

  ‘Did Isolde ask you to come for me?’ he asked. ‘Did she send you to me?’

  A rueful smile flickered across her face and she took a careful step back from him. ‘Is that what you would wish?’

  He made a little gesture. ‘I dare not hope that she is thinking of me. And today she has seen me act like a fool and yesterday like a coward. If she thought of me at all before now, she will not think of me again.’

  ‘But she is thinking of you, and of Freize,’ Ishraq claimed. ‘S
he and Brother Peter are at church now, praying for him and for you.’ She considered him. ‘You know that you will serve your love of him best if you come back to the inn now and take your grief like a man, and live your life in such a way that he might be proud of you?’

  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 little 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 the little 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’s the man? 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 little 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 little 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, whose name was Rosa but who answered to the name of Ree, had never heard the story before and 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 Ree 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 drown
ed – 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 snapped 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.