‘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 towards the window and saw the colours become more diffuse and blurred as the stripes grew wider, and then they walked away again 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 port of Classe. The ferry boat was waiting for them at the stone harbour wall; other merchant ships and the famous Venice galleys were tied up alongside.
‘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 knowing-ness.’
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.
There were no other travellers taking the ship that day, and so when the horses were safely loaded, the four travellers 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. ‘It can’t be an accident! 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 outsail 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 . . . ’
‘She was cleared!’ Luca interrupted. ‘I am an inquirer for the Church, commanded by the Pope himself to discover the reasons for strange happenings in this world, and to see the signs for the end of days. I examined her, and I sent my report to the lord of my Order. I have cleared her of any wrongdoing. She’s not wanted by the law of the land nor of the Church.’
The man shrugged. ‘She can be innocent of everything but she’s still the Lord of Lucretili’s sister,’ he said flatly. ‘She’s still his possession. If he wants her back then no one can deny his rights to her.’
‘What does he want her for?’ Ishraq asked, joining the two of them on the rail of the little ship. ‘For he was quick enough to get her out of the house when her father died, and quick enough to make an accusation which would have seen her burned to death. Why does he want her back now?’
‘You too,’ the man said shortly. ‘The slave, Ishraq. I am commanded to take you back too.’ He turned to Luca. ‘You have to give that one to me because she is a runaway slave and the Lord is her master. And the lady has to be given to me because she is the Lord of Lucretili’s sister and as much a part of his property as his chair or his horse.’
‘I am a free woman,’ Ishraq spat. ‘And so is she.’
He shrugged as if the words were meaningless. ‘You’re an infidel and she is his sister. She was at the disposal of her father and then, on his death, her brother. He inherited her like the cows in his fields. She’s his property just like a heifer.’
He turned his attention to Brother Peter. ‘If you prevent her coming with me then you have stolen Lord Lucretili’s property: his slave and his sister, and I will have you charged as a thief. If you keep her you are guilty of kidnap.’
Freize sighed. ‘Difficult,’ he remarked into the silence. ‘Because legally, you know, he’s right. A woman does belong to her father or brother or husband.’
‘I don’t belong to my brother any more,’ Isolde suddenly asserted. She slipped her
hand in Luca’s arm and gripped his elbow. ‘We are married. This man is my keeper. I am his.’
He looked from her determined face to Luca’s set jaw. ‘Really? Is this so, Inquirer?’
‘Yes,’ Luca said shortly.
‘But you are a man of the Church? Tasked to inquire into the end of days and report to your Order?’
‘I have broken my vows to the Church and taken this woman as my wife.’
Brother Peter choked but said nothing.
‘Wedded and bedded?’
‘Yes,’ Luca said gripping Isolde’s hand.
There was a moment, and then the man shook his head. He smiled disbelievingly, looking up at them both. ‘What? You bedded her? Took her with lust, had her beneath you, made her cry out in joy? You two kissed with tongues and you caressed her breasts? You held her waist in your hands, and she gladly took you into her body?’
Isolde’s face was blazing red with shame. Ishraq looked furious.
‘Yes,’ Luca said unblinking. ‘We did all that.’
‘Kiss her.’
‘You can’t . . .’ Isolde began, but Luca turned to her and put a finger beneath her chin to raise her face and then he kissed her slowly and deeply, as if he could not bear to move his mouth away from hers. Despite her embarrassment Isolde could not stop herself, her head tipped back, her arms came around his shoulders, they held each other, her hand on the nape of his neck, her fingers reaching into his hair.
Luca raised his head. ‘There,’ he said, a little breathlessly, when he finally let her go. ‘As you see. I do not hesitate to kiss my bride. We are husband and wife, she is my chattel now. Her brother has lost all his rights over her. She belongs to me.’
Freize nodded sagely. ‘A wife must go with her husband. His rights come first.’
Brother Peter’s face was frozen with horror at the lies spilling out of Luca’s mouth but he said nothing.
The Lucretili man turned to him. ‘Am I supposed to believe this? What about you, Priest? Are you going to tell me you are married to the other one? Are you going to kiss her to prove it?’