Freize froze on the side of the arena, silently watching as the beast rose from his four legs to his hind legs, as if he was remembering how to walk, as if he was remembering the woman who had held his hands for every step that he took. Sara pushed herself off the arena wall and moved towards him, her legs weak beneath her, hands outstretched.
‘It’s you,’ she said wonderingly, but with absolute certainty. ‘It’s you . . . Stefan. My Stefan, come to me.’
He took a step towards her, then another, and then in a rush which made the watching people gasp with fear but which made his mother cry out with joy, he dashed at her and flung himself into her arms. ‘My boy! My boy!’ she cried out, wrapping her arms around his scarred body, pulling his matted head to her shoulder: ‘My son!’
He looked up at her, his dark eyes bright through his matted mane of hair. ‘Mama,’ he said in his little boy’s voice. ‘Mama.’
The bishop got hold of Luca for a whispered angry consultation. ‘You knew of this?’
‘Not I.’
‘It was your heretic servant who had an arrow on the bow and didn’t shoot. It was your fool of a servant who has been feeding the beast and coaxing it. He must have known, but he led us into this trap.’
‘She was ready with the arrow, you saw her yourself. And my servant was about to jump into the arena and get between the woman and the beast himself.’
‘Why didn’t she shoot? She said that she could shoot. Why didn’t she do so?’
‘How would I know? She is no servant of mine. I will ask her what she thought she was doing and I will write it up in my report.’
‘The report is the last of our worries!’
‘Forgive me, Your Eminence, it is my principal concern.’
‘But the beast! The beast! We came to kill it and show a triumph for the Church over sin. There can be no killing of the beast now.’
‘Of course not,’ Luca said. ‘As my report will show. He is no beast. His mother has claimed him back. She will take him and bathe him and cut his hair and nails and teach him to wear clothes again and to speak.’
‘And what do you think you will say in your report?’ the bishop said acidly. ‘You had a werewolf in your keeping and behold now you have nothing but a dirty wild boy. You don’t come out of this very well, any more than we do.’
‘I shall say that your scholarship revealed to us what happened here,’ Luca said smoothly. ‘Among the other accounts that your scholars prepared, you brought us the classical story of Romulus and Remus, who were raised by a wolf and founded the City of Rome, our rock. You told us of other stories of children who had been lost in the forest and were raised by wolves and then by God’s grace found again. Your library held these stories, your scholarship recognised them, your authority warned us what might have happened here.’
The bishop paused, mollified, his rounded belly swelling with his vanity. ‘The people were waiting for an execution,’ he warned. ‘They won’t understand the miracle that has happened here. They wanted a death, you are offering them a restoration.’
‘That is the power of your authority,’ Luca said quickly. ‘Only you can explain to them what happened. Only you have the scholarship and the skill to tell them. Only you can proclaim a miracle. Will you preach now? It is the theme of the Prodigal Son, I think: the return of the lost one whose father sees him afar off and runs to greet him, loving him dearly.’
The bishop looked thoughtful. ‘They will need guidance,’ he considered, one plump finger to his lips. ‘They were expecting a trial to the death. They will want a death. They are a savage unlearned people. They were expecting an execution and they will want a death. The Church shows its power by putting evil-doers to death. We have to be seen to conquer over sin. There is nothing that brings more people to the church than a witch-burning or an execution.’
‘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 great bishop 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, Raul Rossi and his younger son, unbarred the single entrance door into the arena, and went in to fetch Sara Rossi, 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,’ Raul 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 your toy? – 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, Raul Rossi 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,’ Raul Rossi 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 pursed her lips in disapproval, but clearly she was not at all surprised.
Ishraq faced Freize. ‘I’m afraid I did.’
Raul Rossi, one arm around his wife, one around Tomas’s shoulders, looked at Ishra
q. ‘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.
Find out what happens as the group continue their journey in . . .
STORMBRINGERS
THE ROAD FROM ROME TO PESCARA, ITALY, NOVEMBER 1460
The five travellers on horseback on the rutted track to Pescara made everyone turn and stare: the woman who brought them weak ale in a roadside inn; the peasant stacking the hewn stones for a wall by the side of the road; the boy trailing home from school to work in his father’s vineyard. Everyone smiled at the radiance of the couple at the front of the little cavalcade, for they were beautiful, young, and – as anyone could see – falling in love.
‘But where’s it all going to end, d’you think?’ Freize asked Ishraq, nodding ahead to Luca and Isolde as they rode along the ruler-straight track that ran due east towards the Adriatic coast.
It was golden autumn weather and, though the deeply scored ruts in the dirt road would be impassable in winter-time, the going was good for now, the horses were strong and they were setting a fair pace to the coast.
Freize, a square-faced young man with a ready smile, only a few years older than his master Luca, didn’t wait for Ishraq’s response. ‘He’s head over heels in love with her,’ he continued, ‘and if he had lived in the world and ever met a girl before, he would know to be on his guard. But he was in the monastery as a skinny child, and so he thinks her an angel descended from heaven. She’s as golden-haired and beautiful as any fresco in the monastery. It’ll end in tears, she’ll break his heart.’
Ishraq hesitated to reply. Her dark eyes were fixed on the two figures ahead of them. ‘Why assume it will be him who gets hurt? What if he breaks her heart?’ she asked. ‘For I have never seen Isolde like this with any other boy. And he will be her first love too. For all that she was raised as a lady in the castle, there were no passing knights allowed, and no troubadours came to visit singing of love. Don’t think it was like a ballad, with ladies and chevaliers and roses thrown down from a barred window; she was very strictly brought up. Her father trained her up to be the lady of the castle and he expected her to rule his lands. But her brother stole everything and she was bundled into a nunnery. These days on the road are her first chance to be free in the real world – mine too. No wonder she is happy.
‘And anyway, I think that it’s wonderful that the first man she meets should be Luca. He’s about our age, the most handsome man we’ve – I mean – she’s ever met; he’s kind, he’s really charming, and he can’t take his eyes off her. What girl wouldn’t fall in love with him on sight?’
‘There is another handsome young man she sees daily,’ Freize suggested. ‘Practical, kind, good with animals, strong, willing, useful . . . and handsome. Most people would say handsome, I think. Some would probably say irresistible.’
Ishraq delighted in misunderstanding him, looking into his broad smiling face and taking in his blue honest eyes. ‘You mean
Brother Peter?’ she glanced behind them at the older clerk who followed leading the donkey. ‘Oh no, he’s much too serious for her, and besides he doesn’t even like her. He thinks the two of us will distract you from your mission.’
‘Well, you do!’ Freize gave up teasing Ishraq and returned to his main concern. ‘Luca is commissioned by the Pope himself to understand the last days of the world. His mission is to understand the end of days. If it’s to be the terrible day of judgement tomorrow or the day after – as they all seem to think – he shouldn’t be spending his last moments on earth courting with an ex-nun.’
‘I think he could do nothing better,’ Ishraq said stoutly. ‘He’s a handsome young man, finding his way in the world, and Isolde is a beautiful girl just escaped from the rule of her family and the command of men. What better way could they spend the last days of the world, than falling in love?’
‘Well, you only think that because you’re not a Christian, but some sort of pagan,’ Freize returned roundly, pointing to her pantaloons under her sweeping cape and the sandals on her bare feet. ‘And you lack all sense of how important we are. He has to report to the Pope for all the signs that the world is about to end, for all the manifestations of evil in the world. He’s young, but he is a member of a most important order. A secret order, a secret papal order.’
She nods. ‘I do, so often, lack a sense of how very important men are. You do right to reproach me.’
He heard, at once, the ripple of laughter in her voice, and he could not help but delight in her staunch sense of independence. ‘We are important,’ he insisted. ‘We men rule the world, and you should have more respect for me.’
‘Aren’t you a mere servant?’ she teased.
‘And you are – a what?’ he demanded. ‘An Arab slave? A scholar? A heretic? A servant? Nobody seems to know quite what you are. An animal like a unicorn, said to be very strange and marvellous but actually rarely seen and probably good for nothing.’
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