‘You were hardly grieving very much, if you were kissing another man.’
Ishraq looked incredulously at her friend, and then crossly got to her feet, pushing the stool out of the way under the bed. ‘What on earth is the matter with you about all this?’ she said rudely. ‘You are screaming like a stuck pig.’
‘I am so shocked by you!’ Isolde’s voice quavered as if she were about to cry.
‘Shocked by what? By my holding a young man in my arms who was grieving for his friend? Or by my kissing a young man when he had just come back from the dead?’
‘And him! How could he? How can we travel with them – how can we travel at all – if you are going to be like this? How can we face them tomorrow knowing that you have kissed not just one but both of them!’
Ishraq almost laughed and then looked again at Isolde’s distressed face, saw even in the flickering candlelight the shine of tears on her pale cheeks. ‘Why you’re crying! Isolde, this is ridiculous. What’s the matter with you? Why are you so upset?’
‘I can’t bear that he should kiss you!’ burst out the girl. ‘I hate it. I hate you for allowing it! I hate you!’
There was a stunned silence. Both girls were deeply shocked at the words.
‘This is about Luca. Not about me or Freize, not about my honour. It is about Luca.’
Isolde sat on the bed and put her face in her hands and nodded.
‘So you are in love with him,’ Ishraq observed coldly. ‘This is serious.’
‘No! Of course not! How can it possibly be?’
‘You are jealous that I held him in my arms, and that he took my face in his hands and kissed me on the forehead.’
‘Shut up!’ Isolde rounded on her friend in a fury. ‘I don’t want to hear about it, I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to have to imagine it, I wish you had not done it, and if you do it again – if you even think of doing it again – then we will have to part. I can’t stay with you if you are going to become some sort of . . .’
‘Some sort of what?’ Ishraq demanded icily.
‘Some sort of whore!’ Isolde spat out in her rage.
Ishraq was shocked into silence, then she got into bed, pulled up the covers of the bed as far as they would go, up to her chin and turned over as if ready for sleep. ‘If you were a man I would have thrown you down for saying such a name to me,’ she said to the limewashed wall. ‘But as it is, I see that you are a stupid jealous girl who fears that the man she loves is being taken from her.’
Isolde gasped, but could not deny it. She sat on the edge of the bed and put her face in her hands.
‘A jealous girl, a stupid girl,’ Ishraq went on bitterly, still with her back turned. ‘A girl truly dishonoured by thinking such things of her friend and saying such a word to her friend. And you are wrong, so wrong. I would not take the man you loved away from you, even supposing that he would be willing. I would not do such a thing to you, for I never forget that we love each other like sisters, and that our love should matter more than what we might feel for a man. A passing man,’ she said driving the point home, into the silence of the darkened bedroom. ‘A man that you met just a month ago. A man who is promised to a monastery and to an order and is not free to kiss anyone, anyway. A young man who probably cares for neither of us.
‘But you have put your stupid girlish feelings for him above your love for me. And then you accuse me of being dishonoured! And then you call me a foul name! You’re no sister to me, Isolde, though I have lived my life thinking of you as dearly as a sister. But at the first sight of a handsome young man you become a rival. A stupid rivalrous girl. You’re not fit to be my sister, you don’t deserve my love.’
She heard a sob behind her, but she refused to turn around.
‘And it is you who are dishonoured,’ she said fiercely. ‘For you are in love with a man who is not free, and who has not spoken to your family to ask for your hand in marriage. So you are a fool.’
She was answered by a little shaky gasp.
‘Goodnight,’ Ishraq said frostily, and closed her eyes and fell, almost at once, asleep, as Isolde got on her knees at the foot of the bed and prayed to God for forgiveness for the sin of jealousy, for speaking cruelly and wrongly to her dearest friend; and then – reluctantly – owning the truth to herself: she prayed for forgiveness for the terrible sin of desire.
In the morning the two girls were pointedly polite to each other, but hardly spoke at all. Luca and Freize, in the joy of being reunited, completely failed to notice the icy atmosphere. Brother Peter regarded the young women critically, and thought to himself that they were – like all women – as changeable as the weather, and as inexplicable. He would have thought they would be overjoyed to have the favourite Freize back with them again – but here they were sour-faced and silent. Why would God make such beings but for the trouble and puzzlement of men? Who could ever doubt that they were a lesser being to the men that God had made in His image and set over them for their guidance? What could he do but thank God for preserving him from their company by keeping him safe in a religion governed by men in an order exclusively male?
As Freize went down to the harbour to confirm the arrangements for them to sail, Luca, Brother Peter and Isolde went up the hill to the church for Terce, the third service of prayer in the day. Isolde made her confession to the priest and then kneeled in prayer, her face buried in her hands throughout the mass. When it was over, and the men had said farewell to Father Benito, she was still kneeling. They left her to follow them and walked back to the inn.
Freize greeted them on the threshold of the inn, his face grave. ‘We can’t take a ship to Split,’ he said. ‘I found a man who has just come from there. He’ll be the first of many. The town is all but destroyed, the country for miles around laden with broken boats and upturned trees, wrecked houses and drowned barns. The place was hit by a greater wave than we were; it is far worse than here. There’s no house standing for miles around, and nothing to eat that has not been spoiled with salt water. We can’t go to that coast at all.’
Luca shook his head at himself. ‘I should have thought of that! What a fool I am! Of course we won’t be the only town that had the wave. If the sea moved, then every town on the coast would have been affected.’ For a moment they could see him furiously thinking, then he turned to Brother Peter. ‘If we knew which town was worst affected then we would know which town was closest to the source of the wave,’ he said. ‘If Ishraq is right, and it was like a pebble in a bowl, then the wave is deepest nearest to where it starts and gets more and more shallow as it rolls away. If we knew where the wave was greatest we might at least discover where it came from.’
‘That’s true,’ Brother Peter said. ‘But . . .’
Suddenly, shockingly, the warning bell of the lookout on the harbour wall started to sound, a single jangling bell, an urgent clangour, terrible for the whole village, terrifying for those on the quayside.
‘Not again!’ Brother Peter exclaimed. ‘God save us from another wave.’
‘Where’s Isolde?’ Freize demanded urgently. ‘Where did you leave her?’
‘At the church,’ Luca shouted. ‘Get up there, get to higher ground!’
Everyone tumbled out of the inn, the innkeeper among them.
‘Why are they ringing the tocsin?’ Luca demanded of him. ‘Is it another wave?’
‘No!’ the innkeeper said. ‘Look, see they’re raising the signal.’ He yelled above the pealing bell, so the people clamouring in the yard could hear. ‘God bless us, it’s not a wave, it’s a slave galley. That’s the bell for the warning. That’s the bell that warns of a slave galley. They’ve raised the signal on the harbour fort. Don’t run for high ground. It’s not the sea, it’s a raid! Take your places! Guardsmen! Take your places in the fort!’
Luca’s face grew dark with anger. ‘A slave galley? Raiding now? When the people have just lost their children to the sea?’
At once the men of the village sta
rted to run to the squat little fort that guarded the harbour, shouting to each other that it was not a wave but the warning bell for a slave galley. The women raced for their homes calling for their children. They could hear doors slamming from all over the village as frightened families bolted themselves inside. Isolde came running down from the church. ‘Father Benito says there is a slave galley coming into port!’ she said breathlessly. ‘He saw it from the tower.’
They crowded into the inn where the innkeeper was lifting a formidable hand gun out of a cupboard, with a box of gunpowder. Freize stepped back from the dangerous-looking instrument. ‘Won’t that be too wet to fire?’
‘Couldn’t I dry it quickly on the fire?’ he asked.
‘No!’ Freize said hastily. ‘No! Much better not.’
Luca turned to the two young women. ‘You’d better go to your room and lock yourselves in. We’ll go down to the harbour fort and do what we can to stop them landing.’
‘The laundry room,’ the landlord advised. ‘Go with my wife and the little maid. You can mend laundry while you wait. Nobody will ever find you there.’
When the two girls were about to argue Luca raised his hand. ‘You can’t come with us. What if they were to see you and take you? Go and lock yourselves in as this good man says.’
Jealously, Isolde saw that he turned to Ishraq, trusting her to cope in this new emergency. ‘Take a weapon in with you, in case they come,’ he said to her quietly. ‘Knives from the kitchen, an axe from the yard. And don’t open the door till you know it’s safe.’
‘Of course,’ she said quickly, and led the way upstairs.
‘Go,’ he said quietly to Isolde. ‘I can do nothing, unless I know you are safe.’
‘And Ishraq,’ she said, testing him. ‘You trust her to defend us.’
‘Of course,’ he said, and was then puzzled when she turned on her heel, without another word to him, and ran upstairs without even wishing him good luck.
Luca, Freize and Brother Peter followed the innkeeper down to the harbour.
‘We too should get into safety,’ Brother Peter said anxiously. ‘We’re not equipped to fight.’
‘I’d use my bare hands against them,’ swore Luca. ‘I’d go after them with a hammer.’
Freize exchanged one fearful look with Brother Peter and hurried after his master.
The innkeeper had paused on the quayside and was shading his eyes, looking out to sea. Men pushed past him, hurrying to the little round fort that guarded the entrance to the harbour, where they were handing out pikes. Half a dozen men were heaving on a wooden capstan. With a great groaning creak it yielded and slowly hauled a sunken chain out of the water to stretch across the harbour mouth, and bar the entrance.
‘It’s not like a raiding ship,’ the innkeeper said, puzzled. ‘I’ve never seen them approach so slowly before. And it’s coming in under a white flag. Perhaps they were damaged out at sea. It’s coming in too slowly and there are no cannon on deck, and there’s a white flag at the spur. It’s not an attack.’
‘Could be a trick,’ Luca said suspiciously, squinting to see the distant outline of the ship that was coming slowly, cautiously, closer. ‘They would stoop to anything.’
They hurried on to the little fort. An older man was there, shouting orders. ‘Is it a raid?’ the innkeeper asked him. ‘Captain Gascon, is it a raid?’
‘I’m ready for one,’ was all he grimly replied. ‘Tell me what they’re doing.’
Luca stepped to the edge of the quay, and got his first clear sight of the ship that had sailed through his nightmares ever since he had learned that his mother and his father had been captured. It was a narrow ship, lying very low in the water with oars stretching out either side, scores of them, in two banks, one above the other, rowing slowly now, but moving absolutely as one. Over the noise of men running to get weapons and taking their places in the tower behind him he could hear the steady beat-beat-beat of the drum keeping the rowers to a slow tempo. A wicked spike extended from the prow as if it would gouge the very land itself, a white scarf billowing from the killer blade in a temporary gesture of peace.
The first sail was down, tightly lashed, but he could see at once that the second sail, in the middle of the ship, had been torn down and had brought the mast down with it. They had cut it away, but the ropes were still trailing over the side; and the broken stem of the mast was jagged and raw. At the stern of the ship, on a raised platform, the master of the galley himself held out a broad white sheet in his upraised arm, so that the signal for parley flickered like a flag at front and back. They came slowly towards the chain, as if they feared nothing, and then, as the rhythm of the drum changed they did an extraordinary manoeuvre, feathering the oars all together, so that the ship moved neither forwards nor back, despite the swift inward current, but stayed, rocking in the churned water of the harbour, waiting before the chain, as if they could dream that any town in Christendom would ever willingly admit them.
‘What are they doing?’ shouted the captain, frantically loading the only weapon they had – an old culverin – inside the fort.
‘Holding still before the chain,’ Luca replied. ‘As if they think that we would ever lift it to them.’ He felt his heart thudding fast at the sight of the ship that was such a terror to every port and riverside village in Europe.
Every year the Ottoman slave galleys or the Barbary corsairs took thousands of people into captivity; whole towns had been abandoned because of the raids, villages destroyed. The slaving raids were a curse and blight on every coast in Europe. They raided from Africa to Iceland, creeping up quiet rivers and inlets at night, falling on isolated farmhouses and stealing people away. Now and then they would sail into a town, steal all the treasures and burn all the wooden houses to the ground. Families, like Luca’s own, had been torn apart by the brutal kidnaps. For Luca, safe in the monastery, the news that his father and his mother had gone missing was worse than if he had been told that they had died. For the rest of his life he feared that perhaps his mother was working as a house slave in a Muslim household, perhaps – or far worse – slaving to death in the fields, or brutalised by her owner. His father was probably serving in a galley like this one, chained to the oars and rowing every day all day, never raising up from his seat but sitting in his own dirt with the heat of the sun on his back, trained like an obedient mule to pull and pull when commanded, till his strong heart gave out under the strain and he died still rowing, and they unchained him and threw his wasted body over the side.
‘Luca,’ Brother Peter said shaking his shoulder. ‘Luca!’
Luca realised he had been staring blindly, filled with hatred, at the galley. ‘It’s just that – for all I know – my father is slaving on one of these,’ he said. ‘I’m going to get a pike.’
The captain came out from the fort, the ancient culverin in his hand, a slow burning fuse in another. ‘Hold this,’ he said, thrusting the handgun into Brother Peter’s unwilling hands.
‘I really can’t . . .’
‘What do you want?’ the captain shouted over the water, cupping his hands around his mouth. ‘What do you want? I have cannon trained on your ship.’
‘Do you?’ asked Freize, surprised.
‘No,’ the captain said. ‘A town like this can’t afford a cannon. But I’m hoping he doesn’t know that.’
‘Anyway, they can sail after they have been holed,’ Luca said bitterly. ‘You could have a cannon and fire it and hit him and still he would come on. They can stay afloat when they are filled with water. They are all but unsinkable.’
‘Can I give this back to you?’ Brother Peter asked faintly, proferring the weapon and the smoking fuse. ‘Really, I have no skills . . .’
Silently Freize took the weapon from the clerk.
‘I need a mast and a new sail,’ the shout came back across the water in perfect Italian. ‘I will pay a fair price for it.’
The captain looked at Luca. ‘You can see they need a mast.’
r /> ‘Could still be a trick,’ Luca said. ‘Don’t let them in.’
‘How did your mast break?’ the captain bellowed.
There was a little silence. ‘A terrible wave,’ came the reply. ‘You will have had it here, Inshallah. We have seen its path all along this coast. You and I, we are all equally powerless against the greatness of the sea. We are all sailors. We all need help sometimes. Let us in to your harbour to repair our ship. And I will remember that you have been a brother of the sea to me.’
Brother Peter crossed himself at the name of the Muslim god.
‘Did you see any children in the water? Any children swimming?’ shouted Captain Gascon, the commander of the fort.
‘Allah – praise be His holy name – help them, yes, we saw them; but we were running before the wind and our sail came down. We could reach only two of them. We pulled them on board and have them safe. You can have them if you will give us a mast and a sail.’
‘Show them,’ prompted Luca.
‘Show them to us,’ the captain of the fort shouted.
The master of the ship bent down and spoke to someone in the waist of the ship. He lifted and half pushed two children to stand in the prow. They clung to each other and turned white, frightened faces towards the shore.
The captain exchanged one look with Luca.
‘We’ve got to get the children back,’ Luca said.
‘Why should we help you?’ Captain Gascon shouted. ‘You are our enemy.’
The master of the ship made a little gesture with his hands, commanding the slaves to keep feathering the oars, holding the galley just clear of the chain, as the drum beat still thudded. ‘Because we are all men who have to face the sea,’ he said simply. ‘Because we wish to put our enmity aside, since the greater enmity of the sea has been shown to us. If you sell us a mast and a sail we will pay you well for them. And we will return these children for free.’
‘Would you agree to never come here in war again?’ the captain asked. ‘No raids.’