Order of Darkness

by Philippa Gregory

  ‘Does your lord not expect the sea to part for the children?’ Freize asked. ‘Surely that’s the plan? Why would you need ships? Why would you need the Hospitallers? Isn’t God going to part the oceans?’

  Brother Peter looked up, irritated by the interruption and by Freize’s sarcastic tone. ‘God is providing for the children,’ he said. ‘If a miracle takes place we are to report it, of course.’

  ‘I won’t spy on him and I won’t entrap him,’ Luca stipulated.

  Brother Peter shrugged. ‘You are to inquire,’ he said simply. ‘Look for God, look for Satan. What else have you been appointed to do?’

  It was true that Luca had agreed to inquire into anything and everything. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘We will look clear-sighted at whatever happens. I won’t entrap him, but I will watch him closely. I’ll tell Johann we will travel with him and pay for the ships.’

  ‘Does your lord send money for feeding the children?’ Freize asked dulcetly.

  ‘A letter for the priest, and for other religious houses along the way,’ Brother Peter answered, showing him the messages. ‘To tell them to prepare food and distribute it. His Holiness will see that they are reimbursed.’

  ‘I’ll take that to the church then,’ Freize said. ‘That’s probably more important than the protection of the Hospitallers, who are, if I hear truly, an odd bunch of men.’

  ‘They are knights devoted to the service of God and the guarding of pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem,’ Brother Peter said firmly. ‘Whatever they do, they do it for the great cause of Christian victory in the Holy Land.’

  ‘Murderers, who have found a good excuse to wage war in the name of God,’ Freize said quietly, as he went out and closed the door to silence his own insubordination.

  Luca found Johann sitting on a wooden mooring post on the quayside looking out to sea. ‘May I speak with you?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course.’ Johann smiled his sweet smile. ‘I was listening to the waves and wondering if I could hear God. But He will speak to me in His own time, not mine.’

  ‘I have written of you to Milord, the commander of our order, and he has spoken of you to the Holy Father.’

  Johann nodded but did not seem particularly excited by the attention of the great men.

  ‘The Holy Father says that I am to guide you to Bari, further down the coast, where he will arrange for ships to take you and the children to Rhodes. From there, the Hospitallers will help you to Jerusalem.’

  ‘The Hospitallers? Who are they?’

  Luca smiled at the boy’s ignorance. ‘Perhaps you won’t have heard of them in Switzerland? They’re an order of knights who help pilgrims to and from the Holy Land. They nurse people who fall sick, and support people on their way. They are soldiers too, they guard pilgrims against attack from the infidels. They are a powerful and mighty order and if you are under their protection you will be safe. They can protect you from attack, and can help you with food and medicine if it is needed. The Holy Land has been conquered by the infidels and sometimes they attack pilgrims. It can be a fearfully dangerous road. You will need a friend on the way. The Hospitallers will be your guardians.’

  The boy took in the information but did not seem very impressed. ‘God will provide for us,’ he said. ‘He always has done. We need no help but His. And He is our friend. He is the only guardian we need.’

  ‘Yes,’ Luca agreed. ‘And perhaps this is His way to help you, with His Holy Order of Hospitallers. Will you let me guide you to Bari and we can all go on the ships that the Holy Father will send for us? It’s a long way to the Holy Land, and better for us all if there are good ships waiting for us and the Hospitallers to guard us.’

  Johann looked surprised. ‘We are not to walk all the way? We are not to wait for the seas to part?’

  ‘Milord says that the Holy Father suggests this way. And he has sent me letters that we can show at holy houses, abbeys and monasteries all along the way, and at pilgrims’ houses, and they will feed the children.’

  ‘And so God provides,’ Johann observed. ‘As He promised He would. Are you coming with us all the way to Jerusalem, Luca Vero?’

  ‘I would like to do so, if you will allow it. I am travelling with a lady and her servant, and they would like to come too. I will bring my servant Freize and my clerk Brother Peter.’

  ‘Of course you can all come,’ Johann said. ‘If God has called you, you have to obey. Do you think He has called you? Or are you following the commands of man?’

  ‘I felt sure that you were speaking of me when you spoke of a fatherless boy,’ Luca said. He was shy, telling this youth of his deepest sorrow. ‘I am a man who lost both his father and mother when he was only a boy and I have never known where they are, nor even if they are alive or dead. I believed you when you said that I should see them in Jerusalem. Do you really think it is so?’

  ‘I know it is so,’ the boy said with quiet conviction.

  ‘Then I hope I can help you on the journey, for I am certain that it is my duty as their son that I should come with you.’

  ‘As you wish, Brother.’

  ‘And if you have any doubts about your calling,’ Luca said, feeling like a Judas, tempting the boy to betray himself. ‘Then you can tell me. I am not yet a priest – I was a novice when I was called from the monastery to serve in this way – but I can talk with you and advise you.’

  ‘I have no doubts,’ Johann said, gently smiling at him. ‘The doubts are all yours, Brother Luca. You doubted your calling to the monastery, and now you doubt your mission. You doubt your instructions, you doubt the lord of your order, and you doubt even the words you speak to me now. Don’t you think I can hear the lies on your tongue and see the doubts in your mind?’

  Luca flushed at the boy’s insight. ‘I had no doubts when I heard you speak. I had no doubts then. My father was taken by the slavers when I was only fourteen. I long to see him again. My mother was taken too. Sometimes I dream of them and the childhood that I had with them. Sometimes even now I cannot bear that they are lost to me, cannot bear to think that they may be suffering. I was helpless to save them then, I am helpless now.’

  Johann was silent for a moment, his brilliant blue eyes searching Luca’s face. ‘You will see them,’ he said gently. ‘You will see them again. I know it.’

  Luca put his hand on his heart, as if to hold down his grief. ‘I pray for it,’ he said.

  ‘And I will pray for you,’ Johann said. ‘And tomorrow morning at dawn, we will walk on.’

  ‘To Bari?’ Luca confirmed. ‘You will allow me to guide you and help you to Bari?’

  ‘As God wills,’ Johann said cheerfully.

  In the top bedroom of the inn Ishraq and Isolde were packing their few clothes in a saddlebag, for the journey on the next day. Isolde twisted back her plait of fair hair. ‘D’you think the landlady would send up a bath and hot water?’

  Ishraq shook her head. ‘I already asked. She is boiling our linen in her washday copper and she was displeased at having to get that out for us. She washes her own things once a month. They bathe only once a year, and that on Good Friday. She was scandalised when I said we wanted more than a jug of water for washing.’

  Isolde laughed out loud. ‘No! So what are we to do?’

  ‘There’s a little lake in the woods outside the west gate – the stable boy told me that the lads go there to swim in summer. Could you bear to wash in cold water?’

  ‘Better than nothing,’ Isolde agreed. ‘Shall we go now?’

  ‘Before the sun goes down,’ Ishraq agreed with a shiver. ‘And whether she likes it or not I shall have some linen towels from the landlady to dry us off, and our clean clothes to wear.’

  Discreetly, the two girls watched Luca talking to Johann on the quayside, checked that Freize was helping in the kitchen and Brother Peter studying in the dining room and then went up the cobbled steps to the market square, and out through the west gate. The porter watched them go. ‘Gate closes at dusk!’ he
shouted.

  ‘We’ll be back before then,’ Ishraq called back. ‘We’re just going for a walk.’

  He shook his head at the peculiarities of ladies and let them go, distracted by the stable boy from the inn. ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’ the gatekeeper demanded.

  ‘Afternoon off,’ the lad replied.

  ‘Well the gate closes . . .’

  ‘At sunset!’ the boy finished cheekily. ‘I know. We all know.’

  The swimming lake was as round as the bowl of a fountain, tucked in the deep green of the forest, completely secluded with a guarding circle of trees, grass down to the soft sand edge, and clean clear water down to twenty feet.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Isolde said.

  ‘It’ll be cold,’ Ishraq predicted, looking at the darker depths.

  ‘Better jump in then!’ Isolde laughed, and shed her gown and her linen petticoat and, wearing only a little linen chemise, took a bare-legged run and a great joyful leap into the water. She screamed as she went under and then came up laughing, her golden hair floating around her shoulders. ‘Come on! Come on! It’s lovely!’

  Ishraq was naked in a moment and waded into the water, shivering and hugging herself. Isolde swam up to her and then turned on her back and kicked a little spray into Ishraq’s protesting face.

  ‘Oh! Cold! Cold!’

  ‘It’s fine when you’re in,’ Isolde insisted. ‘Come on.’ She took her friend’s hands and pulled her in deeper. Ishraq gave a little scream at the cold and then plunged in, swimming swiftly after Isolde who turned and splashed away as fast as she could.

  They played like a pair of dolphins, twisting and turning in the water until they were breathless and laughing, and then Ishraq went to the side of the pool where they had left their clothes and gave Isolde a bar of coarse lye soap.

  ‘I know,’ she said at Isolde’s little disappointed sniff. ‘But it’s all they had. And I have some oil for our hair.’

  Isolde stood knee deep in the water and lathered herself all over, and then, passing the soap to Ishraq, lowered herself into the clean water, and stepped out of the pool. She stripped off her wet chemise and wrapped herself in the linen towel, then held a towel for Ishraq who, washed and rinsed, came out too, teeth chattering.

  Warmly wrapped, they combed their wet hair and smoothed the rose-perfumed oil from scalp to tip, and then Isolde turned her back to Ishraq, who twisted her golden locks into a plait and then turned her own back as Isolde plaited Ishraq’s dark hair into a coil at the nape of her neck.

  ‘Elegant,’ Isolde said with pleasure in her own handiwork.

  ‘Wasted,’ Ishraq pointed out as she threw on her dress and pulled the hood of her cape over her head. ‘Who ever sees me?’

  ‘Yes, but at least we know we are clean and our hair plaited,’ Isolde said. ‘And we are making a long journey tomorrow, and who knows when we will be able to wash again?’

  ‘I hope it’s hot water next time,’ Ishraq remarked as they took up their little bundles and set off down the road. ‘Do you remember in Granada, the Moorish baths with hot steam and hot water and heated towels?

  Isolde sighed. ‘And in the women’s bathhouses the old lady who scrubs you with soap, and rinses you with rose-water, and then washes your hair and oils it and combs it out?’

  Ishraq smiled. ‘Now that is civilised.’

  ‘Perhaps in Acre?’ Isolde asked.

  ‘In Acre for sure.’ Ishraq smiled. ‘Perhaps our next bath will be a proper Moorish bath in the Acre bathhouse!’

  The girls got back to the inn unnoticed, and were on time for dinner that evening, ready to plan for their departure with the pilgrimage on the next day. Luca was clear that he could not ride while children walked. He could not bring himself to be mounted high on an expensive horse while Johann led everyone else on foot. He was going to walk alongside them to Bari. Ishraq and Isolde said that he was right, and they would walk also; Brother Peter agreed. Only Freize pointed out that it was too far for the young women to walk without exhaustion and discomfort, that if they travelled alongside the pilgrimage they would have to stop and eat where the children ate, and that would mean that food would be scarce and poor. Were they to eat nothing but rye bread and drink water from streams? Were the ladies to sleep in barns and in fields? he demanded irritably. And how were they to carry the tools of the Inquirer’s trade: Brother Peter’s little writing desk, the manuscripts for reference, the Bible, the money bag? How were they to carry their luggage: the broadsword, the ladies’ clothes and shoes, their combs, their hand mirrors, their little pots of scented oils? Would it satisfy their desire to appear more humble if they walked like poor people, but Freize followed behind them riding one horse, leading four others, and the donkey with the baggage tied at the end of the string? Would they not be play-acting a pilgrimage and pretending to poverty? And how was that more holy?

  ‘Surely we can walk with them during the day, and stay in pilgrim houses or inns for the night?’ Isolde asked.

  ‘Walk away and leave them sleeping in a bare field?’ Freize suggested. ‘Join them in the morning after you’ve had a good sleep and a hearty breakfast? And then there’s illness. One of you is almost certain to take a fever from a sickly child, and then either you’ll be left behind or we’ll all have to stay with you, and nobody going anywhere.’

  ‘He’s right. This is ridiculous. And you can’t walk all that way,’ Luca said to Isolde.

  ‘I could not allow it,’ Freize said pompously.

  ‘I can walk!’ Isolde said indignantly. ‘I can walk with the children. I’m not afraid of discomfort.’

  ‘You’ll get headlice,’ Freize warned her. ‘And fleas. It’s not a beautiful mortification of the flesh that you’ll look back on with secret pride: it’s dirt and bites and rats and disease. And long tedious days of trudging along while your boots rub your feet raw and you hobble like an old lady with aching bones.’

  ‘Freize,’ she said. ‘I am determined to go to the Holy Land.’

  ‘You’ll get corns on your feet,’ he warned her. ‘And you’ll never be able to wear a pretty shoe again.’

  It was inarguable, and he knew it. Despite her serious intentions she was silenced.

  ‘You’ll smell,’ he said, clinching the argument with a mighty blow. ‘And you’ll get spots.’

  ‘Freize,’ she said. ‘This is not a whim, it is a vision. I am sure that my father would want me to go. Ishraq is determined to go. We are going. Nothing will stop us.’

  ‘What about a nice boat to Bari?’ Freize suggested.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Go by boat,’ Freize repeated. ‘We can ship the horses and the baggage and the ladies by boat, we three men can walk with the children and help as we are required to do. The ladies can get there without walking, get there before us, find themselves an inn and wait in comfort till we arrive.’

  He looked at Isolde’s mutinous face. ‘My lady, dearest lady, you will have to travel in heat and dirt when you get to the Holy Land. Don’t think you are taking the easy way. Discomfort will come. If you want to trudge along in burning heat and miserable dirt, attacked half the time by madmen in turbans, scratching yourself raw with fleabites, sleeping in sand with cobras under your pillow, your ambition will be satisfied. But do it when you get to the Holy Land. There’s no particular merit in walking on rough ground in Italy.’

  ‘Actually,’ Brother Peter intervened. ‘If the ladies were to be at Bari first then they could make sure that the ships were waiting for us. We’ll be – what? – five days on the road? Perhaps more?’ He turned to the two of them. ‘If you were willing to go ahead, I could give you the papal letters of authorisation, and you could get the food ready for the children, and make sure there were enough ships. It would be very helpful.’

  ‘You would be helping the pilgrimage, not escaping the walk,’ Luca said to Isolde. ‘This is important.’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ She hesitated.

  ‘Perhaps they can�
�t do it alone,’ Freize said. ‘I could go too. Perhaps I had better accompany them.’

  Luca gave him a long narrow gaze from his hazel eyes. ‘You go by boat as well?’

  ‘Just to help,’ Freize said. ‘And guard them.’

  ‘And so you go by comfort in the ship and escape a long and uncomfortable walk,’ Luca accused.

  ‘Why not?’ Freize asked him. ‘If my faithless heart is not in it? If I would only blunt your resolve with my sinful doubts? Better keep me out of it. Better by far that only those who have the vision should take the walk.’

  ‘Oh very well,’ Luca ruled. ‘Isolde, you and Ishraq and Freize will go by boat to Bari, take all the horses, and we will join you there. Freize, you will keep the girls safe, and you will find ships that will take the children to Rhodes, agree a price, and take the papal letter of credit to the priest and to the moneylenders.’

  ‘I want to walk,’ Isolde insisted.

  ‘I don’t,’ Ishraq said frankly. ‘Freize is right, we’ll walk enough when we get there.’

  ‘So we are agreed,’ Brother Peter said. He opened his little writing desk and took out the papal letters. ‘These will draw on credit with the goldsmiths of Bari,’ he said. ‘They will no doubt be Jews, but they will recognise the authority; do the best you can to get a good price. They are a wicked people. They have a guilt of blood on their heads and will carry it forever.’

  Ishraq took the paper and tucked it in her sleeve. ‘And yet you are depending on their honesty and their trustworthiness,’ she observed tartly. ‘You are sending them a letter and expecting them to give you credit on that alone. You know that they will understand the authorisation and they will lend you money. That’s hardly wicked. I would have thought it was very obliging. The Pope himself is trusting them, they are doing the work that you allow them to do, they are doing it with care and good stewardship. I don’t see why you would call them wicked.’

  ‘They are heathens and infidels,’ Brother Peter said firmly.