Dark Tracks

  There was a hiss of fear at the mention of the great man’s name and the guards muttered among themselves. Freize had expected instant respect for the famous crusader count’s name, but it only seemed to make things worse. He looked from one guard to another, trying to measure the threat they posed to Isolde.

  “This is a good young woman, a Christian lady,” Freize assured them. “You would be in terrible trouble if you handed her over to those outside. You would be destroyed if you did not help her and your village would be ruined if you hurt her or tried to convert her to your beliefs. I promise you, nothing but trouble will come if you so much as touch her.”

  “Nothing but terrible trouble comes to us, anyway,” the rabbi observed bitterly. “We are always on the brink of ruin. If this lady is dancing, she has to be with the dancers, and this is not our fault. We will be in worse trouble if her friends come and find her here.”

  The men behind him nodded. “They’ll say we stole her away,” one of them volunteered.

  “I wouldn’t let them say such a thing,” Isolde replied. “I would say that you had saved me from the dancers. I will pay you a reward. I am asking you for help. Please don’t put us outside.”

  Freize shook his head at her. “Don’t,” he whispered. “Don’t even speak to them. Don’t promise them a reward; they will take everything that you have. God knows what they will do to you if you are in their power. We have to get away from here.”

  “We did fair business with the Jewish money changer in Venice,” she protested.

  “Yes, in Venice! Where he was under the rule of law, watched all the time by the doge’s spies, living under a curfew. But here? In a village of Jews? Where they are free to do whatever they want? Why do you think that Christians are forbidden to even enter a Jewish village? God knows what they do. We are in terrible danger.”

  “You hate us and fear us,” the rabbi said flatly. “Why come to us for help?”

  “Because I hate and fear the dancers more,” Freize admitted with incurable honesty. “I call on you to help this lady.”

  The rabbi looked uncertain. “You can stay only until the dancers leave. We can’t allow you to bring the dancing sickness down upon us.”

  “That’s all we ask for,” Freize said. “Just let us wait here, in the gateway, until they are gone. Don’t you come any closer to her; we’ll just wait here. I’ll cut the ribbons of her shoes now. I’ll get the shoes off her feet.”

  Freize held Isolde’s foot with one hand and put the blade of his knife under the ribbons that tied the shoes; but a rattle from the tambourine made her foot suddenly twitch, so that he sliced the delicate skin at her ankle. She cried out and the blood flowed from the cut, making everyone exclaim with horror at the bright red blood on the red shoes. “Isolde! I am so sorry!” Freize exclaimed.

  “You can’t cut her here!” the rabbi exclaimed, even more frightened than Freize.

  “I know you didn’t mean to—” Isolde cried. “He didn’t mean to. It was me! I moved! But I can’t keep still!”

  Frantically, Freize grabbed at her feet, throwing his jacket down and wrapping it round her feet, trying to hide the flow of blood. “Don’t let them see it!” he exclaimed. “Don’t you know what they do with Christian blood?”

  Isolde looked up at the rabbi, white-faced. “He didn’t mean to—it was my fault I couldn’t keep still.”

  “We can’t have our threshold stained with Christian blood!” the rabbi said. “They will come after us, every one of us, if they know your blood is on the gateway of our village. I am sorry, I am very sorry, but you have to go out. I cannot have a Christian bleeding in here. They will destroy us.”

  “No!” Isolde begged him in rising panic, her hands clutching at her feet. “You could not be so cruel! I will die if I have to dance another day with them. You see the trouble that I am in. You do it! Have the men hold me still and cut the ribbons of my shoes! Cut the shoes off my feet!”

  The rabbi looked from her frightened face to Freize, then he made a decision and waved one of the guards forward. “Tobias, you do it,” he said. “Hold her feet and, Zacchariah, you cut the ribbons. In the name of God, make sure you don’t cut her.”

  “No!” Freize exclaimed in sudden fear. “You may not touch her. I forbid it.”

  But Isolde trusted the rabbi. “You won’t hurt me, will you?” she asked. “The things they say about your people—they’re not true?”

  “Of course they’re true,” Freize moaned. “Who doesn’t know what they do to Christian children? Who doesn’t know that they crucify babies just as they did the Lord? Don’t you know that they will lie to us and then skin us alive and use our skin for parchment?”

  “They do that?” she whispered.

  The rabbi’s face was frozen with suppressed anger. “Of course the things that they say about us are lies,” he said coldly. “You would have to be a child or a fool to believe the slanders that are spread against us. We won’t hurt you. We have never hurt anyone since the Crucifixion, and the Romans did that. But we don’t want you here. We’re not allowed to admit you. It is against the law, your own Christian law, for you to be here. I would far rather we put you outside the gate to join your comrades in their dance than have my men touch you.”

  “They’re not my comrades,” Isolde said quickly. “Please don’t abandon me to them.”

  “Shall my men cut off your shoes? And then will you go away?” the rabbi asked. “If the shoes are cut off your feet, will you stop dancing, and when the dancers go onward will you leave? Is that your wish, Lady of Lucretili?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

  “Do you promise you will go?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I swear it.”

  “And you swear on your Bible that you will not bear false witness against us and say that we stole you away to hurt you?”

  She raised her bloodstained hand. “I swear,” she said. “I swear I will tell everyone that you took me in and saved me.”

  Freize stood, his feet jigging on the spot to the loud rhythm of the dance, torn between his fear and his need to see the shoes off Isolde’s bleeding feet. “Take care!” he said, as one man knelt before her and took Isolde’s leg in both his hands, trapping her foot between his knees, holding it so tightly that her frenzied movements were stilled. Another of the guards unsheathed his dagger. Freize, still convinced that Jews tortured Christians whenever they could capture them, rubbed sweat from his face, and danced first to one side and then the other, helpless to save her.

  Isolde leaned back against the wall, weak with exhaustion as her body twitched and swayed to the music. The man with the dagger cut through the red silk ribbons of one shoe and tore them away, throwing them down on the ground. Then, with meticulous care, he cut off the ribbons on the other shoe. He sheathed his knife.

  The rabbi exhaled, realizing that he had been holding his breath in fear that they would hurt the young woman and bring down the anger of two great lords.

  “Now get your shoes off, and we will give you a pair to walk in, and you can go.”

  “I’m grateful,” Freize stammered. “You have my thanks. And we will repay you as soon as we get safely home, I promise.”

  Isolde nodded, and leaned down and pulled at the heel of the shoe on her right foot.

  She tried again.

  She turned to Freize, her eyes filled with tears. “I can’t get them off,” she said. “My feet have swollen or something. Even with the ribbons gone, I still can’t get them off at all.”

  Ishraq held her horse by the reins while the ferryboat swayed and rocked as the boatman hauled them over the river. “Did the peddler come this way yesterday?” she asked the man.

  “He did; around noon,” he said. “Just as the dancers left town. I said to him: you could have walked around the town now that they’re gone. I said: why leave now, now that the town is safe? Carrying a great big sword sticking out of his pack. Said he had traded it for shoes. I said, they must be very
fine shoes.”

  “Oh, did he!” Ishraq remarked to herself. “Did he say where he was going?”

  “He didn’t,” the man replied. “He headed on the old road south.” They reached the quayside on the southern side of the river and before he could help her she was leading her horse up the ramp and urging him onto dry land.

  “You’ll want some help mounting into the saddle—that’s a big horse for a young woman . . .” He broke off as he saw her step on the mounting block, swing into the saddle, and gather up the reins.

  “Thank you,” she said, and as he was about to reply the horse sprang forward and the young woman was gone.

  She rode astride, sitting deep in the saddle, and urged her horse onward in a smooth, continuous canter down the track, straight as an arrow, that led southwest to Rome, the town of Enns before her. She guessed that the peddler would take this road; the old Roman roads were still signposted with the old stone waymarks carved with Roman numerals now green with moss and lichen.

  She thought he would be so confident that he had killed her, and destroyed Isolde, that he would have stopped to eat and sleep, and only set off again this morning. So when she came into the town of Enns she asked at both of the two big inns for him, and found, at the second, a stable lad who remembered that a man, with a broadsword thrust down the back of his pack, weary from walking, had stayed the night and hired a horse in the morning.

  Ishraq grimaced at the news that her enemy was now mounted, but was glad to know that he had taken a leisurely breakfast and tipped well. He was on his way home, confident in his triumph. Clearly, he had no fears that he was being pursued and had ridden out only a few hours earlier. Ishraq thought of him entrancing Isolde so that she ran out to the dancers, and then taking the ferry, strolling down the road, and eating a hearty dinner, and felt anger burn hotly inside her.

  She drank a mug of small ale and made herself eat some meat, though her stomach turned at the taste, and her head swam, reminding her that she had been near to death only the night before. She gritted her teeth. She knew that Isolde must have her father’s sword to exercise his authority. She could not go to her godfather’s son without it. Guarding Isolde and her authority was Ishraq’s life’s work.

  “Are you tired?” the boy asked, looking at the sweating horse and the exhausted girl. “Come far?”

  “I’m tired,” she said honestly. “But that peddler is a thief, and I must get my things back from him. If he ever comes this way again, you should capture him, and call your lord and report him as a thief.”

  Wide-eyed, the lad nodded. “Will you rest?” he asked.

  Ishraq handed him the cup, took hold of her stirrup and saddle, and swung up onto her horse’s back. “Not till I have found him,” she said.

  The lad was awed by her grim determination. “What will you do to him?” he asked.

  “I think I’ll kill him,” she said quietly.

  Luca and Brother Peter were riding side by side up the road through the forest, going north, past Lord Vargarten’s castle and onward, following the path winding round the great trees that Isolde and Freize had danced along so wearily the night before. Each led a horse, for their missing friends. Brother Peter said nothing, but he thought it very likely that, even if Freize had got Isolde away from the dancers, a delicate lady would not be able to ride at all and that they would have to send for a litter.

  “If only we could be certain that they came this way,” Luca said quietly. “What if they left the path and went deep into the forest?”

  “They won’t have done that,” Brother Peter assured him. “They have no food with them, and no weapons. They won’t go into the forest; there are wolves and bears, wild boar, all sorts of dangers. A troupe like this is fearful; they go from town to town begging, always driven onward.”

  “You’re sure they’re ahead?” Luca asked him.

  “I’m certain,” Brother Peter said. “This was the road they took out of town and we’ve seen no crossroads. They must be ahead of us, and they can’t be very far. We ride much faster than they can dance.”

  “When we first sight them, we’d better drop back and see what they’re doing,” Luca said. “Certainly, we need to keep away from the sound of the music. If we see Freize and Isolde among them, perhaps we’ll be able to ride down on them, and catch them up.”

  “We’ll decide what to do when we see them,” Brother Peter ruled. “But we can’t risk losing you as well as her. We can’t risk making a bad situation even worse.”

  “How could it be worse?” Luca asked simply. “Isolde is lost to us, half out of her mind. Ishraq was near death and is now riding in the opposite direction. What could be worse?”

  “If we lost you, an Inquirer on his first long journey out of Rome. If we failed to understand what the dancing means,” Brother Peter reminded him gently. “Our companions are in danger, but the inquiry must go on. We have to know what is happening here. This could be far worse even than danger to the two young women, however dear they are. This could be the start of the end of the world. We have to understand what it means.”

  Luca silenced his hot retort that the young women were more important than the inquiry, silenced his disloyal thought that he cared more about them than the end of the world.

  “Whatever the distractions, we have to do our work,” Brother Peter said gently, with some idea of the turmoil in Luca’s mind. “I know they are both very precious to you—but this could be the end of days, a danger to everyone, to the whole Christian world, not just them.”

  “They are very precious to me,” Luca confessed. “Both of them. I cannot tell you—”

  “You need not tell me.” The older man shrank from hearing that Luca was in love with one or both of the young women. “You should confess when we are next at church, and consult Milord. He will advise you. But in the meantime you have to understand the dancing; the safety of the world might depend on it.”

  Luca was about to answer when they came out of the shade of the wood and saw the road below them, winding down the side of the slope to a bridge at the bottom of the river valley. Around the gate were about twenty dancers, scattered, some lying in the road as if felled by exhaustion, some sitting at the edge of the water, soaking their bleeding feet in the river.

  “There they are!” Luca exclaimed in an undertone. “Resting before the gate of that village.”

  “Can you see Isolde?” Brother Peter asked. “Is she with them?”

  They pulled their horses back into the shadow of the wood, dismounted, tied the four horses’ reins to bushes and low branches, and picked their way carefully down the wooded slope, keeping under the cover of the trees.

  “I can’t see them,” Brother Peter said, cupping his hand over his eyes to shield them from the morning sun. “Freize and Lady Isolde. I can see the drummer, I think, but I can’t make out anyone else.”

  “I can’t see Isolde,” Luca exclaimed in a hushed whisper. “Or Freize. Perhaps they have got away.”

  “We would have met them coming back down the road,” Brother Peter pointed out. “They must have got ahead of the dancers and gone into that little village and taken sanctuary there, in the church.”

  “Yes, but I can’t see a church tower,” Luca remarked. “That’s odd.”

  The two men watched as the gateman appeared from the watchtower beside the gate. They heard snatches of the shouted demands of the dancers and the refusal of the gateman to release two runaway dancers.

  “That must be them!” Luca said eagerly. “Look, Brother Peter! Look!” They saw the rabbi appear over the top of the walls beside the gateman, as he climbed the steps to bargain with the fiddler. They saw his dark robes, and the unmistakable yellow star that all Jews were ordered to wear so that everyone knew of their shame.

  “The Jewish star! That is a rabbi!” Brother Peter exclaimed. He crossed himself. “They are in a Jewish settlement? God help them.”

  Luca was equally shocked. He turned to Brother Peter.
“We must get them out at once.”

  Brother Peter looked very grave. “It is against the law to even speak to Jews, forbidden to enter their towns.”

  “We’ll have to speak to them, if they have Isolde and Freize.”

  “Surely they wouldn’t have gone inside willingly,” Brother Peter said doubtfully. “Jews kidnap Christian babies—at any rate, kidnaps are reported again and again. I have been present at two inquiries into Jewish crimes and both times I have seen the mark of Cain on these people, and the terrible guilt that they carry for the death of Our Lord.”

  “Isolde might have asked for sanctuary. We dealt with a Jewish money changer in Venice and he treated us fairly. After all, Brother, you know well enough that the trade of Christendom would collapse without them!”

  “The more shame to us,” Brother Peter said steadily. “A Christian is forbidden to lend money at a usurious rate, so any man who wants money, vast sums of money, has to go to the Jews. God forgive them. I have no doubt that our rulers will see sense and ban moneylending, drive them out, drive them right away.”

  “To go where?” Luca demanded. “For aren’t they exiles without a homeland?”

  Brother Peter shrugged. “They killed Our Lord,” he said. “It is written that they will always be exiles, that they will always be in pain. Until the end of days.”

  “There’s no sense in talking of this,” Luca said impatiently. “Who knows what the truth is? Look, Brother, you stay here and keep watch and I will ride and fetch Lord Vargarten. If the village stays barred to the dancers, and protects Isolde and Freize, Lord Vargarten can drive the dancers onward and release the two of them. Isolde is safe if the Jews will keep her till the dancers are gone.”

  Brother Peter’s face was grim. “Oh, the Jews will keep her now that they have her. There’s no doubt in my mind. They will force her to marry some man and make her convert to Judaism, and then they will try to get her with child. They’d want a boy born from the Lady of Lucretili. Such a child would inherit her lands and the title. Think of what that would mean to them—to capture Lucretili Castle for Israel!”