Dark Tracks

by Philippa Gregory

  Brother Jerome looked away. “I couldn’t say,” he said shortly. “I know of the Moor Radu Bey—he is second in command to the sultan himself, a danger to every Christian and every Christian community in the world.”

  “He’s not a Moor,” Ishraq pointed out. “He’s fairskinned.”

  “But why is he a particular enemy to Milord of the Order of Darkness?” Isolde prompted.

  “Every Moor is our enemy,” the Inquirer ruled. “For it is their advance which signals the end of days. But this Radu Bey is not part of my inquiry, nor is he mentioned in your orders. I don’t speculate about him.” Brother Jerome closed the conversation by reaching into his pocket and drawing out a rolled manuscript.

  Freize nodded toward Luca as if this confirmed his worst fears. “More sealed orders,” he said. “And so adieu to the stewed chicken and dumplings.”

  “We like to speculate,” Ishraq remarked dulcetly and earned a swift reproving grin from Luca.

  “Do you share the orders with everyone?” the Inquirer asked, looking at Luca.

  The young man nodded. “Without everyone’s insights and skills, we would have been lost over and over again.”

  The stranger raised his eyebrows as if he found this a most odd way of going about an inquiry and then he broke the seal and spread the rolled paper on the dining table.

  They all sat. They all waited.

  “There seems to be an outbreak of what is called dancing sickness,” he started. “La maladie de la danse. Milord wants you to take the the old road north, and then go east along the banks of the River Danube. Somewhere along the road you will hear reports of dancers, there is an outbreak in that area, they are traveling downriver, I don’t know where they are right now, you will have to ask for them and find them. You are to meet them and examine them as they dance together. Those who can speak should be interviewed individually. You will consult with the local priest and see if any exorcism or praying has worked on them. You may experiment with cures. You may test individual dancers with anything that you think might work—but only if they are people of no importance whose death or destruction does not matter. You will address the local landowner, Lord Vargarten, who rules north of the river, and speak with the bishop to see if they have had previous outbreaks, and if so what was the cause, and how it ended. And you will report back to Milord as soon as you know whether this is some kind of frenzy or poisoning or madness, or something worse.”

  “Worse?” Freize asked anxiously. “In heaven’s name, what sort of a world do you people live in? What do you imagine can be worse than a frenzy, a poisoning, or madness?”

  “Possession,” Brother Jerome said shortly. “If they have been invaded and taken over by demons. And if it is the demons who are making them dance.”

  “Demons?”

  “Possibly. Yes.”

  Freize’s horrified face spoke for them all. “Demons?” he said again. “You want us to go among people who may be possessed by demons?”

  The man bowed his head. “It is, of course, the work of the Inquirer to see the terrors of the world and discover their nature. You are free to decide that you don’t want to accompany him. That must be between him and all his companions.”

  “But to go looking for them?” Freize asked. “If they are demons? What if they want to possess us?”

  The Inquirer exchanged a smile with Brother Peter at the simplicity of the servant. “We will not be affected,” he said. “We are men of education; we are men of the Church.”

  “Then what about the girls?” Freize demanded.

  At once, the Inquirer lost his pompous confidence. “Ah, now that: I don’t know,” he said. “Women are known to be more vulnerable to madness and to fits. Their minds are frail, they have little determination, and they are not strong. Perhaps these young women should be left behind for their own safety.”

  “It’s our road. We can follow the River Danube east,” Isolde said drily. “The journey we have undertaken so far is proof enough of our determination and strength; and we both have had an education. If schooling makes you safe, then we should be fine.”

  “I don’t mean singing and needlework,” the man said, smiling at the pretty young woman.

  Isolde looked at him with such disdain in her deep blue eyes that for a moment he gasped as if he had been winded by a blow. “No, neither do I.”

  “Lady Isolde was raised by her father, the Lord of Lucretili, in Italy, to inherit his great estates, and to take his role in council,” Luca explained. “She ruled his castle and lands during his illness. She is a midons, a lord of the castle. She has studied a lot more than singing and needlework.”

  He bowed his head. “But may I ask, why is her ladyship not at home, ruling her lands at Lucretili?”

  “My brother stole my inheritance on the death of my father, and I am going to find my godfather’s son and ask him to raise an army for me to win it back,” Isolde said simply. “I am planning a battle to the death. I won’t be stopping on the way to dance.”

  “But what about your slave?”

  “I’m not a slave, I’m a free woman,” Ishraq corrected him. “The Lord of Lucretili allowed me to attend the universities of Spain and I studied there.”

  “Do Moorish universities admit women?”

  “Oh yes,” she said with a little smile. “Some of their finest philosophers and scientists are women.”

  Brother Jerome tried to nod as if this were not startling and unsettling news to him. “They are?”

  “I studied philosophy, and astronomy, geography and mathematics, and I trained as a warrior,” she said, smiling as his wonderment grew. “The Lord of Lucretili was generous enough to give me a wide education. I should be safe enough.”

  The priest bowed his head. “And I am learning much right now. You have studied things that I am forbidden to learn: banned books, heretical knowledge. Astronomy alone is limited, some men have said the wildest things, heretical things . . . well, I can see that your learning will protect you, and it is your decision. But I am bound to warn you that there may be danger.”

  “But what about Freize?” Isolde asked. “Will he be tempted to dance? He’s a young man of great courage and enterprise, but you had no schooling, did you, Freize? Will he be all right?”

  “I can’t really read,” Freize pointed out. “I can sign my name and reckon. But nobody would call me a scholar. Will that mean that I’ll dance about when we get wherever we’re going, God help us?”

  “I don’t know,” Brother Jerome said frankly. “That is the danger you face. We don’t know what causes the dancing sickness, why it stops, why it starts. That’s the reason for the inquiry: to discover the cause and the cure and to save the people from the sickness and send them home.”

  “Has anyone ever cured it before?” Luca asked.

  “Of course many people claim to have cast out demons, but the dancing sickness seems to start and to stop for no reason. That’s what makes us think it is a sign of the end of days. Surely it cannot be that people just take it into their heads to dance till they die. It must mean something. Perhaps you can find out why. I will pray for all of you.”

  “I thank you for your prayers,” Freize said unhappily. “But then what? After we have danced about with madmen?”

  The Inquirer looked up and allowed himself to smile. “Then your master Luca will make his report and I, or another messenger, will deliver your next mission,” he said. “In the meantime, I think you are carrying a quantity of gold from Venice which belongs to Milord?”

  “We are,” Brother Peter said. “And we would be glad to be relieved of the burden.”

  “You can give it to me in the morning when our ways part,” the Inquirer said. “I am going west. I will hand it over to another Inquirer, who will take it to Rome and to Milord himself.”

  “Why, how many Inquirers are there?” Ishraq asked curiously.

  The man looked at her as if she were an enemy spy, trying to worm secrets from him. �
�Enough to learn of all the dangers that face Christendom and all the signs of the end of the world,” he said grimly. “Some who report on the rise of your countrymen, who warn of the Ottoman forces who come closer and closer with every victory to the heart of Christendom. They have won Constantinople, the greatest Christian city in the East; they threaten all of Greece; undoubtedly, they are planning to conquer the whole of Europe; and when they reach Rome then we know—it has been prophesied—that it will be the end of days. But we, the guardians of Christendom, are everywhere. We watch everywhere. The Ottomans think that they are unstoppable, but we are always vigilant. We watch and we warn, we inquire and we report.”

  “My godfather’s son stands against them,” Isolde remarked.

  “Who is he?”

  “The third Count Vlad Tepes of Wallachia,” she replied.

  He bowed his head as if to acknowledge a powerful general. “He stands against them,” he confirmed. “And we keep constant watch.”

  “But still they come onward,” Ishraq remarked.

  He nodded. “Satan advances,” he said. “And the world is ending.”

  Brother Jerome left at dawn, taking the donkey loaded with the gold that had washed out from the dross they had bought in Venice. Milord had made a fortune by cheating the Ottomans and the little party was glad to deliver his profits and be free of the burden. Brother Peter especially was glad to see the back of the gold, which he could only regard as the wages of sin, the profits from a massively dangerous gamble which only Milord had understood as he had played them all: Christians and Ottomans like pawns on a board.

  Luca, Isolde, Ishraq, Freize, and Brother Peter had said goodbye to Brother Jerome, breakfasted, and met in the stable yard while the light was still cold and pearly. Isolde drew her cloak around her against the morning mist, and Luca reached toward her to lift the hood over her fair hair, in a gentle gesture that betrayed their intimacy.

  “I can’t believe our luck,” he said. “That we should go on, and our roads still lie together. That Milord himself should order that we travel together. That we should be together for another morning, with another day ahead of us.”

  “Every day is a gift for me too,” she said very quietly.

  Behind them, Freize heaved a saddle onto the big horse that Brother Peter always rode. Neither Luca nor Isolde was aware of him; they could see only each other.

  “We’ll have to part one day soon,” Luca warned her. “It’s bound to happen. You have to go to your godfather’s son, and I will have to go wherever Milord commands. I don’t know how I will face that day—I can’t imagine it. I can’t bring myself to imagine it.”

  Isolde hesitated before asking the question that was becoming more and more important to her. Then she spoke so low that he had to bend his head to hear her whisper: “Does that day have to come, Luca? Do you have to go on? Can’t you come with me and win back my castle and lands? Won’t you come with me, help me?”

  He looked very grave and shook his head, his eyes on her face. “You know how much I care for you—but I can’t abandon my inquiry. I have to be obedient to my vows. I am a novice now, but I will swear. I am promised to God—my own parents agreed that I should go into the Church—and I cannot break my obedience to them or my oath to God. Milord took me from my monastery for this special mission, but I will return to it. In the meantime, I have sworn loyalty to the Order of Darkness and—you heard the other Inquirer—it is important work that we do. Perhaps the most important work that has ever been done.”

  “You broke your vows once,” she reminded him.

  As if it were a strange, erotic dream, he remembered the moonlit garden and the woman who had come in, masked and hooded, and given herself to him in silence, never saying her name, so that he did not know whom he had kissed, whom he had loved for that one magical night. Even now, days after that unearthly dawn when she had gone without speaking, he did not know who it had been, and Isolde told him that she, Ishraq, and another woman had been outside the garden, and had sworn he would never know.

  “I should not have sinned,” he said quietly. “Whoever it was that night has a claim on me forever, as my first lover. But you told me the next day that I would never know her name. I would never know who came to me in the garden. It was not a betrothal in the real world but an isolated night of love, hardly to be remembered, never to be discussed. You told me yourself to never forget it, but never seek for the woman.”

  “You will never know,” she confirmed. “And we will not speak of it. But don’t you see that you broke your vows that night? Whoever you were with, your vow of celibacy is broken. Does that not release you from your oath?”

  He shook his head, but she pressed on: “What if I were to win back my inheritance? Then we could have such a different life. Together. At my castle.” She was near to offering herself to him, and he watched as the color rose from her neck to her chin to her cheekbones. “I would be a rich woman,” she whispered. “I would be the Lady of Lucretili again, and you could be the new lord.”

  “I broke my vows in a moment of sin, when I was alone in the moonlight and drunk with desire for you; but that does not release me from them,” Luca said steadily. “It makes me a bad novice, it makes me a failure, it makes me a sinner, but it does not set me free. And, even if I were free, you could not stoop to marry a man who was anything less than a lord or a prince. Isolde, beloved, I’m next to nothing! I am the son of a small farmer, tenant to a great lord, not even a landholder, and—worse than that—perhaps a changeling. I could be anyone’s child, from anywhere. People said that I was faerie-born to my face, to my own parents. My own mother could not deny it, and now that they are both in slavery, who will give me a name? Nobody knows who I am. In his anger, my own father denied me; he said I am a changeling!”

  “Your father was enslaved against his will by the Ottomans!” Isolde exclaimed. “He denied you in his anger. He is enslaved now, but I know you will free him. You will find and free your mother, too. They will not deny you then. And nobody would call you faerie-born if you were by my side and you were the Lord of Lucretili.”

  He was deeply tempted both by her and by the life she offered him. But he whispered a word of prayer and shook his head. “You can’t put a changeling bastard into the lord’s seat at Lucretili,” he said steadily. “It would shame you, Isolde of Lucretili. It would shame your father’s memory: he was a great crusader lord. It would even shame me to be the cause of your disgrace. Nobody would ever forgive you for lowering your line and your great name, and I would never forgive myself.”

  It was true; Isolde could not disagree. “I know,” she said unhappily. “I suppose I know. You are right, of course. But what are we to do? Are we simply to part when our roads go different ways? We’ve found each other now: are we just to leave each other as if it meant nothing? If we were born to be together, is that not more important than anything else?”

  “Shall I get the other horses saddled?” Freize asked, cheerfully interrupting them. “I have asked the kitchen to give us a saddlebag of food and something to drink. Only God Himself knows where we’ll be at dinnertime.”

  Coming out of the inn with the heavy saddlebags, Ishraq laughed at him. “At least we’ll never starve, not with you planning the expedition, Freize.”

  Isolde and Luca drew apart as Ishraq followed Freize into the barn beside the stable where the horses’ tack was kept, and fetched her horse’s bridle. As she slung it over her shoulder, she saw something move behind the feed bins at the back of the barn. Something as small as a child, as quick as a child.

  At once, in a moment, she was crouched into a fighter’s pose, her knife pulled from her boot, her balancing hand extended, ready for trouble. “Who’s there?”

  There was an urgent little scuffle, then a small door at the back of the barn swung open and banged shut, then silence. Freize, entering the barn to fetch the saddles, checked in the doorway and saw Ishraq straighten up from her fighter crouch. “What is it?”
he demanded. “Did you see something?”

  “I thought someone was there. Someone hiding.”

  “Are they there now?”

  “Gone, I think. Out through the door like a flash.” Ishraq tucked her dagger back into the scabbard in her boot and went over to the back door and opened it. Outside was a small paddock and an orchard, a few fat white geese nibbling at the grass. There was no one there.

  “Have you seen something before?” she asked Freize, closing the door and coming into the tack room.

  He nodded. “All of this journey. I keep thinking I see someone or hear something.”

  “But Freize, this was something strange. Something very small, no bigger than a bear cub. But moving as fast and as quietly as a cat.”

  He nodded. “The size of a child.”

  He saw her shudder. “A child couldn’t have followed us from Venice,” she pointed out. “We’ve ridden every day, and in open country. No child, not even a man, could have kept up with us and not been seen.”

  “That I know,” Freize said levelly, his voice unnaturally steady.

  “But you still think some creature is following us?” she asked very quietly.

  He was silent.

  “In Venice, there was a creature.” She spoke of it unwillingly. “The alchemists said that they had created life. We saved it from the broken jar and put it in the water. Freize, do you think this is it? The creature of their making?”

  “I’ve thought that,” he conceded.

  She looked horrified. “You think that it was the little creature in the glass vessel, that was as small as a lizard?”

  He nodded, his face grim.

  “But when we released it into the canal, it was the size of a baby.”

  “I know.”

  “But now you think it is the size of a child?”

  “Yes.”

  “So it is growing quickly, impossibly so?”

  He nodded.

  “And, if it kept up with the horses, it is impossibly fast?”