Stormbringers (Order of Darkness) (13 page)

‘See if we can catch some driftwood,’ Luca shouted at Brother Peter.

Brother Peter said no more. They watched in horror as lumber and wreckage, uprooted trees and an overturned market stall thudded into the wall of the inn, and the roof below them. They heard the roof shed its tiles into the water and the roof beams shift. An old wooden chest bobbed up from out of the attic below them and Luca reached out and grabbed hold of it, struggling to hold it against the current. ‘If you fall in the water, you must hang on to this!’ he shouted at the two girls, who were clinging to each other as they realised that if the building collapsed the old chest would not save them, they would go down, tumbled among roof beams and tiles, almost certain to drown.

Isolde leaned down and put her face against the ridge tiles of the inn, closing her eyes against the terror of the boiling flood around her, whispering her prayers over and over by rote, the words of her childhood, though she was too frightened to think. Ishraq stared wide-eyed as the sea boiled around them, watched the waters thrust and break on the roof, as they rose steadily higher. She looked at Luca and at Brother Peter, watched Luca struggling to hold the wooden chest balanced on the roof and saw that it might support her and Isolde but that the men would be lost. She gritted her teeth, and watched the rising water, trying to measure its height, as it broke against the roof, each time coming a little closer to them. A sudden eddy would make a high wave break over her feet and she could see Isolde flinch as the cold water snatched at her foot, but then the dip between the waves would make it seem as if it was ebbing. Ishraq held her foot very still and counted the unsteady roof tiles between her foot and the water. She glanced over at Luca and saw that he was doing the same thing. Both of them were desperately hoping that the wave was at its full height, that the flood had run inland and was now steadying, both of them trying to calculate the rise of the waters to know how long before they would be hopelessly engulfed.

Luca met her eyes. ‘It’s still rising,’ he said flatly.

She nodded in agreement and pointed. ‘It’s two tiles below me now, and before it was three.’

‘It will be over the roof in an hour,’ Luca calculated. ‘We’ll have to be ready to swim.’

She nodded, knowing that it was a death sentence, and crept a little closer to Isolde. And then, slowly, after what felt like long, long hours, the waters started to become still. The sea coiling and recoiling like a wild river around the town flowed through ancient streets, spat out of hearths, swirled through windows, gurgled in chimneys; but the incoming roar of the wave fell silent, the groan of the earth was finished, and the water steadied, one tile below Ishraq’s bare foot.

Somewhere, all alone, a bird started to sing, calling for its lost mate.

‘Where’s Freize?’ Luca suddenly asked.

The group’s slowly dawning relief at their own escape suddenly turned into nauseous fear. Luca, still clenching his knees on the sides of the roof, raised himself up and shaded his eyes against the bright sunshine. He looked out to sea, and then down to the quayside. ‘I saw him running out towards the children,’ he said.

‘He turned some of them back. They got into the inn yard,’ Isolde replied in a small voice. ‘I saw that.’

‘He turned around,’ Brother Peter said. ‘He was coming back in, carrying a little girl.’

Isolde let out a shuddering sob. ‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘What just happened?’

Nobody answered her. Nobody knew. Luca tied his cloak to the chimney, and using it to steady himself like a rope, climbed down the steeply sloping roof, kicking his booted feet in between the displaced tiles. He looked down. The water level was falling now, as the sea flowed away. It was below the window of the girls’ room. He held on to the end of the cloak and got his feet onto the sill of their smashed window.

‘Climb down to me,’ he said. ‘I’ll help you in.’

Brother Peter gripped Isolde’s hands and lowered her down the rope of capes towards Luca, who held tight to her legs, her waist and her shoulders as she scrabbled over him and dropped into the room, knee deep in flood water. Ishraq followed, naked but for her linen chemise. Brother Peter came last.

The girls’ bedroom was draining fast, the water sluicing through the gaps in the floorboards to the room below, as the water level all over the village dropped and the sea drained out of houses, down the higher streets and gurgled in drains and watercourses.

‘You’d better stay here,’ Luca said to Ishraq and Isolde. ‘It may be bad downstairs.’

‘We’ll come,’ Isolde decided. ‘I don’t want to be trapped in here again.’

Ishraq shuddered at the wet chaos that had been their room. ‘This is unbearable.’

They had to force the door; Luca kicked it open. It was crooked in its frame as the whole house had shifted under the impact of the wave. They went down the stairs that were awash with dirt and weed and debris, and dangerously slippery underfoot. The whole house which had smelled so comfortingly of cooking and woodsmoke and old wine only a few hours ago, was dank and wet, and filled with the noise of water rushing away, and of loud dripping, as if it were an underwater cave and not an inn at all. Ishraq shuddered and reached for Isolde. ‘Can you hear it? Is it coming again? Let’s get outside.’

Downstairs was even worse, the ground floor chest deep in water. They held hands to wade through the kitchen and out into the yard. Isolde had a sudden horror that she would step on a drowned man, or that a dead hand would clasp round her foot. She shuddered and Luca looked around at her. ‘Are you sure that you wouldn’t rather wait upstairs?’

‘I want to be outside,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear the smell.’

Outside in the stable yard was the terrible sight of drowned horses in their stalls, their heads lolling over the stable doors where they had gasped for air; but the innkeeper was there, miraculously alive. ‘I was on the top of the haystack,’ he said, almost crying with relief. ‘On the very top, chucking down some hay, when the sea came over my yard wall, higher than my house, and just dropped down on me like an avalanche. Knocked me flat but knocked me down on the hay. I breathed in hay while it battered down on me and then it tore me to the stable roof, and when I stopped swimming and put down my feet, I was on an island! God be praised, I saw fishing ships sail over my stable yard, and I am here to say it.’

‘We were on the roof,’ Ishraq volunteered. ‘The sea came rushing in.’

‘God help us all! And the little children?’

‘They were walking out to sea,’ Isolde said quietly. ‘God bless and keep them.’

He did not understand. ‘Walking on the quayside?’

‘Walking on the harbour floor. They thought the sea had parted for them. They walked out towards the wave as it came in.’

‘The sea went out as Johann said it would?’

‘And then came in again,’ Luca said grimly.

They were all silent for a moment with the horror of it.

‘They swam?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Luca said.

‘Some of them came back,’ Ishraq said. ‘Freize sent some of them back. Did you see them?’

The innkeeper was stunned. ‘I thought they were playing a game, they ran through the yard. I shouted at them for disturbing the horses, they were kicking and rearing in their stalls. I didn’t know. Dear God, I didn’t know. I didn’t understand what they were shouting, or why the horses were so upset.’

‘Nobody knew,’ Isolde said. ‘How could we?’

‘Did Freize come in with the children?’ Luca demanded.

‘Not that I saw. Have you seen my wife?’ the man asked.

They shook their heads.

‘Everyone will be at the church,’ the innkeeper said. ‘People will be looking for each other there. Let’s go up the hill to the church. Pray God that it has been spared and we find our loved ones there.’

They came out of the yard of the inn and paused at the quayside. The harbour was ruined. Every house that stood on the quayside was battered as if it had been bombarded, with windows torn away, doors flung open and some roofs missing, water draining from their gaping windows and doors. The ships which had been anchored in the port had been flung up and down on the wave, some washed out to sea, some thrown inland to cause more damage. The iron ring on the quay where their ship had been tied was empty, its ropes dangling down into the murky water. The gangplank had been washed far away, and their ship and the horses and Freize were gone. Where it had grounded on the harbour floor was now an angry swirl of deep water – it was unbelievable that this had ever been dry, even for a moment.

‘Freize!’ Luca cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled despairingly into the harbour, towards the town, and back over the sea again.

There was no answering shout, only the terrible agitated slapping of the sea, washing too high, against the harbour wall, like a familiar dog which has risen up and savaged terribly and now settles back down again.

The church was a scene of families greeting each other, others crying and calling over the heads of the crowd for missing children. Some of the fishing ships had been at sea when the wave had risen and some people thought that they might have been able to ride out the storm; the older men, who had heard of stories of a monster wave, shook their heads and said that such a wall of water was too steep for a little boat to climb. Many people were sitting silently on the benches which ran all round the side of the church, their heads bowed over their hands in fervent prayer while their clothes streamed water onto the stone floor.

When the wave had hit the town some people had got to the higher ground in time – the church was safe, the water had rushed through it at knee height, and anything west and north of the market square was untouched by the flood. Many people had clung to something and had the wave wash over them, half-drown them but rush on, leaving them choking and terrified but safe. Some had been torn away by the force of the water, turning over and over in the flood that took them as if they were twigs in a river in spate, and their families put wet candles in the drenched candle stands for them. Nobody could light candles. The candle which had burned on the altar to show the presence of God had blown out in the blast of air that came before the wave. The church felt desolate and cold without it, godforsaken.

Luca, desperate for something to do to help restore the village to normal life, went to the priest’s house and took a flint and, finding some dry stuff in a high cupboard, lit a fire in the kitchen grate so that people could come and take a candle flame or taper and spread the warmth throughout the shaken village. He took a burning taper into the church and went behind the rood screen to the altar to light the candle.

‘Send Freize back to me,’ he whispered as the little flame flickered into life. ‘Spare all Your children. Show mercy to us all. Forgive us for our sins and let the waters go back to the deep. But save Freize. Send my beloved Freize back to me.’

Brother Peter seated himself in the church before the damp church register and started a list of missing persons, to post on the church door. Every now and then a bedraggled child would come to the door and his mother would fall on him and snatch him up and bless him and scold him in the same breath. But the list of missing people grew in Brother Peter’s careful script, and no-one even knew the names of the children on their crusade. No-one knew how many of them had walked dry-shod in the harbour, no-one knew how many had turned back, nor how many of them were missing, nor even where their homes had been.

Ishraq borrowed a cape from the priest’s housekeeper and then the five of them – Isolde and Ishraq, Luca, Brother Peter and the innkeeper – went back to the inn, looking out to sea as if Freize might be swimming home. ‘I can’t believe it,’ Luca said. ‘I can’t believe he didn’t come with us.’

‘He went out in the harbour to try to get the children to come back to land,’ Ishraq said. ‘It was the bravest thing I’ll ever see in my life. He pushed us towards the inn and then he went out towards the sea.’

‘But he always comes with me. He’s always just behind me.’

‘He made sure we were safe,’ Isolde said. ‘As soon as we were running for the inn he went back for the children in the harbour.’

‘I can’t think how I let him go. I can’t think what I was doing. I really thought that the sea was going out, and I would walk with them, and then everything happened so fast. But why would he not come with me? He always comes with me.’