Stormbringers (Order of Darkness) (16 page)

‘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.

Ishraq heard the snoring of several men, and grimaced at her own embarrassment. ‘I am sorry,’ she said clearly into the darkened room. ‘But I am going to walk through this room and go up that ladder.’

‘Is that a lass?’ came a hopeful, sleepy inquiry. ‘Wanting some company? Want a little kiss and a cuddle, bonnie lass? Want a little company?’

‘If anyone touches me,’ Ishraq went on in the same courteous tone, closing the door behind her and stepping carefully into the dark room. ‘I will break his hand. If two of you try it together, I will kill you both. Just so you know.’

‘Ishraq?’ said Luca, shocked from sleep. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ He rose up out of the darkness, naked but for his breeches, and they met at the foot of the ladder.

‘Fetching the kitten,’ she said. ‘Leave me alone.’

‘Are you mad? What kitten?’

‘Freize’s kitten,’ she said. ‘The one he had in his pocket.’

‘It’ll have got itself down.’

‘I’m going to see.’

‘In the middle of the night?’

‘I only just remembered it,’ she confessed.

‘Oh for God’s sake!’ Luca was suddenly furious with her, worrying about a kitten in a town filled with parents who had lost their children. ‘What does a kitten matter? In the middle of all this? In the middle of the night when half these people have cried themselves to sleep and everyone is missing someone?’

Ishraq did not answer him but turned and put her foot on the first rung of the ladder. ‘It’s pitch black,’ Luca cautioned. ‘You’ll fall and break your neck.’

He made a gesture to stop her, but she slapped his hand away and went up the little ladder to the roof. A ridged plank, a scrambling board, stretched up to the apex of the roof and she went up it like a cat herself, on her hands and bare feet. She could see nothing but the darkness of the roof against the greyer skyline. She got to the very top and sat astride, gripped the tiles with her knees, feeling them sharp through the thin linen of her shift. She heard her harsh breathing and knew that she was afraid. She raised her head and looked at the chimney. Of course, there was no kitten there. She bit her lip as she realised that now she would have to make her way down again, that she had taken a grave risk and for nothing.

‘Kitten?’ she said to the empty roofs of Piccolo, seeing the streets below them torn by the sea and cluttered with driftwood, the doors banging empty on wet rooms. ‘Kitten?’

A tiny little yowl came from the base of the chimney, where the tiles were warmed by the escaping smoke. Tentatively, the little animal rose up and stalked towards her, along the narrow tip of the roof.

‘Kitten?’ Ishraq said again, utterly amazed.

It came towards her outstretched hand and she picked it up, as a mother cat would, by the scruff of its skinny little neck, and she tucked it under her arm, holding it tightly against her. A muffled mew told her that it was uncomfortable but safe, as she crouched low on the roofer’s board and went down again till her questing feet found the ladder, and then went one rung after another, through the hole in the roof into the darkened room until she felt Luca’s hands on her waist and he lifted her down and she was safe inside the room with his arms around her.

‘I’ve got it,’ she said.

For the first time in long days she heard a chuckle in his voice. ‘You’re mad,’ he said. ‘That was the most ridiculous thing to do, the stupidest thing I have ever seen.’

But he did not let her go and for a moment she leaned against his naked chest feeling his warm skin and the prickle of soft hair.

‘I was terribly afraid,’ she admitted.

She felt his cheek against her hair, and the warmth of his body against her own, and she paused. For a moment she thought that anything might happen, and she did not draw back. It was Luca who steadied her on her feet, then stepped away, releasing her and saying, ‘Are you going to let it go?’

‘I’ll take it to the kitchen and get it some milk,’ she said. ‘I’ll keep it for tonight. If we had not seen it run we would not have known we were in danger. We owe our lives to it.’

He took her hand and guided her through the room full of sleeping men, and closed the door behind them.

‘It’s an odd thing,’ he said. ‘Odd that it knew to get up high.’

The kitten struggled in Ishraq’s grip and she put it gently down on the floor. The tiny creature shook its head, as if complaining at being held so tight, and sat on its fluffy rump and washed its back feet, and then found a warm corner in the log basket by the fire, and settled down for sleep.

‘There’s a writer,’ Ishraq said, trying to remember her studies. ‘Oh! I can’t remember his name! Aelianus or something like that. He says that frogs and snakes know when there is going to be an earthquake – they get out of their holes in time.’

‘How do they know?’ Luca demanded. ‘What do they know?’

‘He doesn’t say,’ she said. ‘I read him in the Arab library in Spain. I can’t remember more than that.’

They walked up the stairs together to the doorway of her room.

‘Why was it so important to you that you should save it?’ he asked her in a whisper, conscious of the many sleepers in the quiet house – Isolde just the other side of the door. ‘Why did the kitten matter, when so much else has been lost? You’re not sentimental about animals. Yet you risked your life.’

‘I suppose, for that very reason: that so much has been lost,’ she said. ‘We failed to save the children, we failed to save half the town, we came with all our learning and your mission to understand and yet we knew nothing and when something so terrible happened we could do nothing. We were useless. We did not even save ourselves. We lost Freize, though he was the only one who knew what was happening. But I could at least save Freize’s kitten.’

He took her hand and held it for a moment. ‘Goodnight,’ he said quietly. ‘God bless you for that. God bless you for thinking of him.’ And then he turned and brought her hand, palm up, to his mouth, and gently put a kiss in the middle, then closed her fingers over it.

Ishraq closed her eyes at the touch of his mouth on her hand. ‘Goodnight,’ she whispered, and held her fingers tight where his lips had touched her palm.

In the morning, the four of them, with Ree trailing behind Isolde at a faithful trot, went to the church where they helped the harassed priest and clerk to write out descriptions of children who were missing, to post on the gate of the little church. The pieces of paper fluttered in the wind, naming children who might never see their homes again, calling on parents who would never come to find them. A queue of people waited to confess to the priest, and the sense of death was heavy in the little church – it lay over the harbour like a low cloud. More and more people were coming slowly in the little gate to the north of the town, seeking the children who had gone with Johann, hoping that they had escaped the flood. They looked at the slurry of filth and water and the broken timbers in the market square as if they still could not believe that an evil tide had flowed high into the very heart of Piccolo and receded, leaving nothing but devastation.

In the lady chapel alongside the church the little bodies were being prepared for burial. Grim-faced, Luca and Brother Peter noted the clothes, the hair colour, the age, any little oddness of appearance, or brightness of hair, so that the children might be identified if their parents ever came seeking them. When they had looked into every blue, blanched face, and noted every missing tooth and freckled nose, they waved the two wise women forward who sewed the bodies into the newly-made shrouds, and laid them, two to a roughly-made stretcher, ready to be carried to the new cemetery beyond the walls of the town, for burial.

The wise women, who served as folk healers, as mid-wives and layers-out in the little village, did their work with a steady reverence for the little bodies, but they looked askance at Brother Peter and Luca; and when Isolde, Ishraq and Ree came into the church they turned away their heads and did not greet them at all.

‘What’s the matter with them?’ Ishraq muttered to Isolde, sensing the hostility but not understanding it.

‘They’ll be grieving,’ Isolde suggested.

The new cemetery had been made beyond the church, just outside the walls of Piccolo, on newly-consecrated ground beyond the north gate. It was overlooking the sea, and here the gravediggers stood around, leaning on their spades, beside a great hole, dug deep and wide for all the children to be laid together, just as they had rolled up together in sleep when they were following Johann and believed themselves to be blessed. Isolde took one look as the men laid the little shrouded bodies gently in the bottom of the wide trench, and then led Ree to stand behind the priest, where his robes, billowing in the wind from the sea, hid the view of the grave and the little bodies bundled together.

Father Benito read the service for burial, his voice clear over the constant crying of the seagulls, and the more distant noise of people sweeping their houses, cleaning their wet rooms, and repairing roofs and windows all over the town. Half a dozen people attended the little service, and as they walked away from the gravediggers, filling in the great hole with the dusty soil of the region, the priest promised that he would commission a stone monument to name the children as the pilgrims who walked into the sea. ‘If you ever come back here, you will see that we have not forgotten them,’ he said to Brother Peter. ‘Nor our own losses.’

‘D’you know yet how many of the townspeople are missing?’ Luca asked quietly.

The priest crossed himself. ‘About twenty people,’ he said. ‘And half a dozen of our own children. It is a terrible blow but this is a community of people who experience terrible blows, very often. In a bad plague year we would lose that number. If there is a storm which catches the fishermen at sea we might lose a ship or even two, five or six fathers lost at sea and five or six families thrown into grief and want. When the Black Death came through here a century ago, the village was emptied – half of them dead in a month, the fields barren of crops because there was no one to plant, the fish spawned in the sea without fishermen! God sends these things to try us; but this week He has sent us a trial indeed.’

‘A curse on them not a blessing!’ they heard a woman pantingly scream, running up the stone steps, out of the little town gate, and then ploughing breathlessly up the hill towards them, her gown bunched up in her fist, her hair wildly loose, her face ugly with grief. ‘Let Satan drag them down to hell! You should have thrown their bodies over the cliff, not given them a grave in sacred ground. Curse them all!’

‘What’s this?’ the priest spread his arms wide and intercepted her as if she were a runaway horse, halfway up the hill. ‘What’s this, Mistress Ricci? What are you doing running around like this? For shame, Mrs Ricci! Calm yourself!’

She glared wildly around, it was obvious that she hardly saw him. ‘They should be flung in the sea not buried with rites!’ she cried. ‘Beware. They are the storm-bringers! You are honouring our murderers! Demons! Every one of them!’