Changeling (33 page)

‘Your Grace, they are lost in the darkness of their own confusion. They are your sheep; lead them to the light. Tell them that a miracle has taken place here. A little child was lost in the wood, he was raised by wolves, he became like a wolf. But as your eminence watched, he recognised his mother. Who can doubt that the presence of a bishop made all the difference? These are an ignorant and fearful people but you can preach a sermon here that people will remember forever. They will always remember the day that the Bishop of Pescara came to their village and a miracle took place.’

The bishop rose up and straightened his cape. ‘I will preach to them from the open window of the dining room,’ he said. ‘I will preach now, while they are gathered before me. I shall preach a midnight sermon, extempore. Get torches to shine on me. And take notes.’

‘At once,’ Luca said. He hurried from the room and gave the order to Freize. The balcony glowed with torchlight, the people, abuzz with speculation and fear, turned their faces upwards. As their attention went to the bishop, glorious in his purple cope and mitre at the window, Freize and Ishraq, Ralph Fairley and his younger son, unbarred the single entrance door into the arena, and went in to fetch Sara Fairley, her eldest son held tightly in her arms.

‘I want to take him home,’ she said simply to her husband. ‘This is our son Stefan, returned to us by a miracle.’

‘I know it,’ Ralph replied. His wind-burned cheeks were wet with tears. ‘I knew him too. As soon as he said “Mama”, I knew it. I recognised his voice.’

Stefan could barely walk; he stumbled and leaned on his mother, his dirty head on her shoulder.

‘Can we put him on the donkey?’ Freize suggested.

They lifted the panniers of wolfsbane from the donkey’s back but the herb was still in its mane and clinging to the animal’s back. Sara helped him up, and he did not flinch either at the touch of the herb or the smell of the flowers. Ishraq, watching quietly in the darkness, gave a quick affirmative nod.

Freize led the donkey away from the village, up the twisting little steps, as Sara walked beside her son cooing soothingly to him. ‘Soon we will be home,’ she said. ‘You will remember your home. Your bed is just as it was, the sheets on the bed, the pillow waiting for you. Your little poppet Roos – do you remember him? – still on your pillow. In all these years I have never changed your room. It has always been waiting for you. I have always been waiting for you.’

On the other side of the donkey, Ralph Fairley held his son steady, one hand on his little tanned leg, one hand on his scarred back. Ishraq and Isolde came behind with his little brother Tomas, his dog at his heels.

The farmhouse was shuttered for the night, but they brought the wolf-boy into the hall and he looked around, his eyes squinting against the firelight, without fear, as if he could just remember, as in a dream, when this had been his home.

‘We can care for him now,’ Ralph Fairley said to the girls and Freize. ‘My wife and I thank you from our hearts for all you have done.’

Sara went with them to the door. ‘You have given me my son,’ she said to Ishraq. ‘You have done for me what I prayed the Virgin Mary would do. I owe you a debt for all my life.’

Ishraq made a strange gesture: she put her hands together in the gesture of prayer and then with her fingertips she touched her own forehead, her lips, and her breast, and then bowed to the farmer’s wife. ‘
Salaam
. It was you who did a great thing. It was you who had the courage to love him for so long,’ she said. ‘It was you who lived with grief and tried to bury your sorrow and yet kept his room for him, and your heart open to him. It was you that did not accuse the beast – when the whole village howled for vengeance. It was you who had pity for him. And then it was you who had the courage to say his name when you thought you faced a wolf. All I did was throw you down into the pit.’

‘Wait a moment,’ Freize said. ‘You threw her down into the bear pit to face a beast?’

Isolde shook her head, in disapproval, but clearly she was not at all surprised.

Ishraq faced Freize. ‘I’m afraid I did.’

Ralph Fairley, one arm around his wife, one around Tomas’s shoulders, looked at Ishraq. ‘Why did you do it?’ he asked simply. ‘You took a great risk, both with my wife’s life and with your own. For if you had been wrong, and she had been hurt, the village would have mobbed you. If she had died there, attacked by the beast, they would have killed you and thrown your body down for the wolf to eat.’

Ishraq nodded. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But in the moment – when I was sure it was your son, and I was certain they would order me to shoot him – it was the only thing I could think of doing.’

Isolde laughed out loud, put her arm around her friend’s shoulders and hugged her close. ‘Only you!’ she exclaimed. ‘Only you would think that there was nothing to do but throw a good woman into a bear pit to face a beast!’

‘Love,’ Ishraq said. ‘I knew that he needed love. I knew that she loved her son.’ She turned to Freize. ‘You knew it too. You knew that love would see through the worst of appearances.’

Freize shook his head, and stepped outside into the moonlight. ‘I’ll be damned,’ he said to the changing sky. ‘I will be damned and double damned if I ever understand how women think.’

The next morning they saw the bishop leave in his pomp, his priests before him on their white mules, his scholars carrying the records, his clerks already writing up and copying his sermon on ‘The Prodigal Son’, which they said was a model of its kind.

‘It was very moving,’ Luca told him on the doorstep. ‘I have mentioned it in my report. I have quoted many of the passages. It was inspirational, and all about authority.’

As soon as he was gone, they ate their own midday dinner and ordered their horses brought out into the stable yard. Freize showed Ishraq her horse, saddled and bridled. ‘No pillion saddle,’ he said. ‘I know you like to ride alone. And the Lord knows, you can handle yourself and, I daresay, a horse as well.’

‘But I’ll ride alongside you, if I may,’ she said.

Freize narrowed his eyes and scrutinised her for sarcasm. ‘No,’ he said after a moment’s thought. ‘I’m just a servant, you are a lady. I ride behind.’

His smile gleamed at the consternation on her face.

‘Freize – I never meant to offend you . . .’

‘Now you see,’ he crowed triumphantly. ‘Now you see what happens when you throw a good man down on his back on the cobbles – when you go tipping good women into bear pits. Too strong by half, is what I would say. Too opinionated by half, is what I would propose. Too proud of your opinion to make any man a good sweetheart or wife. Bound to end in a cold grave as a spinster, I would think. If not burned as a witch, as has already been suggested.’

She raised her hands as if in surrender. ‘Clearly I have offended you—’ she began.

‘You have,’ Freize said grandly. ‘And so I shall ride behind, like a servant, and you may ride ahead, like an opinionated overly powerful lady, like a woman who does not know her place in the world, nor anyone else’s. Like a woman who goes chucking men onto their backs, and women into bear pits, and causing all sorts of upset. You shall ride ahead, in your pomp, as vain as the bishop, and we know which of us will be the happier.’

Ishraq bowed her head under his storm of words, and mounted her horse without replying. Clearly, there was no dealing with Freize in his state of outrage.

Isolde came out of the inn and Freize helped her into the saddle and then Luca came out followed by Brother Peter.

‘Where to?’ Ishraq asked Luca.

He mounted his horse and brought it alongside hers. ‘Due east, I think,’ he said. He looked to Brother Peter. ‘Isn’t that right?’

Brother Peter touched the letter in his jacket pocket. ‘North-east it says on the outside of the letter, and at breakfast tomorrow, at Pescara, if we get there, God willing, I am to open our orders.’

‘We will have another mission?’ Luca asked.

‘We will,’ Brother Peter said. ‘All I have is the directions to Pescara, but I don’t know what the instructions will say nor where they will take us.’ He looked at Isolde and Ishraq. ‘I take it that the ladies will be travelling with us to Pescara?’

Luca nodded.

‘And leaving us there?’ Brother Peter prompted.

‘Can’t go soon enough for me,’ Freize said from the mounting block as he tightened his girth and got on his horse. ‘In case she takes it into her head to throw me into a river – or into the sea when we get there, which clearly she might do if she takes it into her own wilful head.’

‘They will leave us when they find safe companions,’ Luca ruled. ‘As we agreed.’ But he brought his horse alongside Isolde and reached out to put his hand on hers, as she held her reins. ‘You will stay with us?’ he asked quietly. ‘While our roads go together?’

The smile that she gave him told him that she would. ‘I will stay with you,’ she promised. ‘While our roads lie together.’

The little cavalcade of Luca and Isolde, Brother Peter and Ishraq, with Freize behind them, surrounded by his beloved extra horses, clattered out of the gateway of the inn, not yet knowing where they were going, nor what they had to do, and headed north-east for Pescara – and for whatever lay beyond.

This has been a joy to write, and I hope that you’ve enjoyed reading it as much as I have loved working on it. The character of Luca Vero is entirely imaginary, as are Isolde and Freize. The character of Ishraq, though invented, is based on the many courageous and adventurous men and women who moved between the world of Christendom and the worlds of the other religions: Jews, Muslims, and even those farther afield.

What the book means to you, the reader, will be for you to decide. Most people will read it, I hope, for pleasure and with pleasure, and have the fun of joining young, passionate characters on a journey into an unknown world, where they face their fears and experience their powers. Some readers may want to know a little more about the world of the Order of Darkness.

The Order of Darkness is based on the fifteenth-century Order of the Dragon, which was created to defend Christendom against the apparently unstoppable rise of the Muslim Ottoman Empire. One of the characters who will arrive in the story in subsequent books, was introduced to this Order by his father when he was just a little boy and rose to become its commander, fighting at the very outpost of Christendom.

The investigation entrusted to Luca – to find the signs of the end of times – is a fictional version of the anxiety felt by most people after the fall of Constantinople. The rise of all sorts of strange phenomena in Europe at this time shows that many people were fearing that anything could happen – and was happening. Also, these were deeply superstitious times. People genuinely believed that there was another, unseen, world sometimes glimpsed but often bearing down upon their lives. For those of us who now live in a world where we try to measure and understand everything, it is hard to imagine what it would have been like to have no explanation for everyday events like illness, thunder, or an eclipse, yet having your world rocked by the death of a loved one, your house shaken by a thunderclap or your day turning into night as a dark moon eats up the sun.