Dark Tracks

by Philippa Gregory

  Freize looked miserable.

  “I thought it followed me in the water,” she said very quietly. “I thought it kept up with a rowing boat, in the canal at Venice.”

  “And now it keeps up with us on horseback,” Freize said. “Day after day of travel.”

  She was very pale. “Have you told Luca about it?”

  “No,” he admitted finally. “Because I wasn’t sure that I had anything to tell him. I thought perhaps I was imagining it. I hoped I was being a fool—jumping at shadows. Frightening myself with mysteries. I thought I’d turn a blind eye and it would just go away. But now you’ve seen it too.”

  “I didn’t really see it here. I only heard something.”

  “At any rate, it’s a real thing.”

  Typically, Ishraq faced her fear. “So what is it? Is it the lizard, grown to a child?”

  “I’ve wondered about that,” Freize remarked. “But then I thought of something else.”

  “What? What do you mean, Freize? Are you talking in riddles now?”

  “Never mind what it is. That’s not really the question. The question is: why is it following us? If this is a mysterious Being, once as tiny as a lizard, now the size of a human child, why is it coming after us like a stray dog?”

  Ishraq came a little closer and put her hand gently on his solid chest. She could feel the rapid beating of his heart through the thin linen of his shirt, and knew that he was sharing her own superstitious dread. “What do you think it wants of us?” she asked him, knowing he had no answers. “And when will it turn and face us, and ask?”

  They rode all day, following the old Roman road that ran due north, through little fields of wheat and rye, past gardens growing vegetables and fruit. Sometimes they left the road for a shortcut that a villager showed them, taking tracks that were little more than packmen’s trails and drover routes, hard-beaten, single-file paths. There were a few dirty little farmhouses along the way, with their unglazed windows shuttered and their doors bolted.

  They climbed higher and higher into woods that were vaultingly high and still at midday, not even birds singing in the green shade. There were no inns when they left the old road, so they were glad to stop at noon under the shade of the thick trees and eat the magnificent meal that Freize unpacked from the saddlebags and drink the acidic light wine.

  It was late in the afternoon of the second day as their road wound down out of the hills toward a great expanse of river as wide as a smoothly moving lake—the Danube—and on the other side a handsome, bustling, stone-built quayside with a town wall and a gate. Without needing to say a word, the group changed the order of their little cavalcade: the women dropped back to ride together a little behind the men, their hoods pulled over their heads, completely hiding their hair, their eyes lowered to the ground, the very picture of obedient female docility. The ferryman came out of his house on their side and waved to acknowledge their progress as they rode toward him.

  “You wanting to go over to Mauthausen?” He nodded at the town on the opposite bank.

  “Yes,” Freize said, getting down from his horse and pulling out his purse to pay the fee.

  “You may not want to go,” the man warned them. “They have a sickness, a dancing sickness.”

  “A wise man would turn back here,” Freize agreed. He nodded to Luca to say that they had found the dancers, and Luca swung down from his horse and stepped forward. “How long have they been here?”

  “Two days now,” the man said. “Nothing seems to stop them. They got into town through the north gate and they’ll have to leave that way, for I won’t have them on my boat. They can’t stop dancing; they’d overturn my boat on the water they’re so mad. The gateman should never have let them in. They crept in quietly, that’s their cunning. Now they dance round and around the square and who’s going to have to pay to take them away? Us townsmen, that’s who.”

  “We have to cross,” Luca confirmed shortly.

  Freize held the horses as the rest of the party dismounted. The ferry was a broad, flat-bottomed barge hooked at stern and prow onto a strong rope that looped across the river, mounted on great posts at each end. Freize led one horse after another on board and tied them to the hitching points in the stalls. The rest of the party came up the gangplank and the ferryman cast off.

  The swift current of the river caught them and pulled them in a looping course downstream. Luca, Freize, Brother Peter, and the ferryman had to pull the craft along by going hand over hand on the rope, which swung high above their heads, until they crossed the river to bump against the quay of the town.

  Moored next to the ferry stage were barges from upstream and those that were beating their way back against the current, from Vienna, farther east. The quayside was busy with ships’ masters paying the toll to the custom house, and people loading and unloading goods, but every man was working in silence, each casting a glance over his shoulder toward the closed gate into the town. Everyone was hurried and anxious: there was no cheerful banter, no whistling, no songs to keep the time as a gang hauled on a pulley rope to unload a salt barge. It was as if there were plague in the town. All the bargees were in a hurry to leave, the toll collectors going through the cargo as fast as they could, and everyone waiting for the sound of an irresistible jig.

  The big wooden gates of the town were closed, but, as the travelers’ horses were unloaded, the quayside gateman opened one side to let them through. Everyone stopped work to watch them go into the town; Freize made a grimace at Luca: “Seems like no one wants to go into the town but us,” he said.

  “Of course,” Luca replied. “But we have work to do here.”

  “I know, I know,” said Freize unhappily, taking the reins of his horse, Rufino, and leading him through the gateway, followed by the others.

  Inside the gate it looked like a normal, small, prosperous town. The streets were cobbled with big sets of local granite, running uphill to a central square where a stone obelisk in the center served as a waymark, and the grand houses of the town were set square on three sides with the steps to a church with an old chapel behind it on the fourth side.

  “Is there a good inn in this town?” Freize shouted at a man driving a cow before them to the square, his head down. “Somewhere with an honest alewife, decent wine, and a good cook in the kitchen?”

  “Not really,” the man said pessimistically. “I wouldn’t say she was a good cook. But you can try the Red Fish. In the market square, on your right.”

  Freize nodded gloomily, as if this were just what he had expected. He led his horse up the cobbled street to the central square, where a sheaf of wheat hanging from a balcony showed that a dark doorway was the entrance to the bakery, and next door a drying bough of old holly was the sign for an inn. The others followed him.

  It was obvious that things were badly wrong. The doors of the church that faced the square stood wide open, and the travelers saw a family struggle with an elderly gray-haired man who was clawing his way out of the door as his son tried to drag him back inside the sacred space. In the square outside, a fiddler in a bright, tattered coat of motley colors was turning the pegs on a tuneless fiddle and nearly two dozen people were hopping and skipping from one foot to another. Some of them were dressed in their finest clothes, as if going to a harvest dance that had dragged on too long; some of them were in tatters, as if they had ripped their clothes dancing through brambles or pulling away from people trying to hold them back.

  To Luca’s dismay, he saw the distinctive headdresses and flying ribbons of other villages and towns, from far away, and guessed that the dancers were traveling from town to town, gathering numbers as they went. Some of them must have danced for days.

  “What’s going on here?” Freize asked the cow-herder, who was hurrying away, pulling his cow with a halter around her neck.

  “They’ve run mad,” the man said solemnly. “Started last Sunday, right after Vespers. Some woman came into town, chased by one of the woodcutters. As he was tak
ing her to the priest, another woman came out of the church and just lifted her skirt clear of her boots and started to dance, then another joined her, and then half a dozen of them came in from the north with the fiddler and now they can’t make them stop. Then the drummer gave them a beat, where’s it going to end?”

  “Whoa!” Freize shouted as a woman danced past, caught him by the hand, and tried to pull him away. Freize took tight hold of Rufino’s mane. “Keep me steady!” he said in an undertone to the horse. “You must excuse me, I don’t dance,” he said politely to the woman.

  Immediately, the cow-herder crossed himself, tugged at the halter, and disappeared down the cobbled lanes to his house, hurrying to get away.

  “I don’t think she can hear you,” Luca said, fascinated, as the woman circled Freize, her handsome face set in a grimace of a smile, her eyes open but quite blind, pulling at his hand, at his collar, at the hem of his coat.

  Freize gently fended her off, murmuring: “No, Mistress, I really can’t. I don’t dance, ever. Forgive me.”

  The woman seemed sightless, the pupils of her eyes so wide that it looked as if she had no eyes at all, just bottomless depths of blackness. Her face was stiff with a rigid, toothy smile, and dried saliva was shiny on her cheek. She held Freize’s hand and her feet kept moving, dancing on the spot as she tugged at him to follow her.

  “I can’t,” Freize said desperately, embracing his horse around its strong neck. “I’m not the dancing kind.”

  She was deaf to his words; all she could hear was the thud of the drum from the far side of the square. She jigged in time to the music, and then, to Freize’s horror, the others came to join her, dancing in a line toward him, linking hand in hand in one of the old country dances, going one way with a kick, and then dancing back again, but always making progress, closer and closer to him. He looked at Luca.

  “Sparrow,” he said. “Save me. God knows what they want with me. But you know I am not the man for dancing. And this lady seems to have taken a mortal fancy to me.”

  Luca led his own horse closer to Rufino so that he could walk alongside Freize. He put his arm around Freize’s shoulders and gave him a hard shake. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get to the inn. Just ignore them. Keep hold of your horse. Don’t let them grab you. Come on.”

  Luca moved on, keeping a firm grip on Freize as the strange woman danced in front of them. Ishraq and Isolde put their horses shoulder to shoulder and walked before them, holding each other’s hand. Brother Peter brought up the rear, his face grave, muttering a prayer, one hand holding his horse’s reins, the other clenching his wooden crucifix.

  The woman fell back to let the young men go as they reached the stable doors of the inn; but as the girls walked past her she grinned, a horrid grimace. “Come and dance!” she said in a voice that croaked with exhaustion, so that it sounded like a curse. “Come and dance, pretty girls! What girl doesn’t love a dance?”

  Both young women shrank back, and pulled their horses onward as the woman jigged beside them, and now once again she was joined by the other dancers, whirling around and waving their scraps of cloth, one of them rattling a gourd in time with the drum, someone tunelessly singing a dancing song. “Come on! Come on! Come away!”

  Luca plowed forward, keeping his hand on Freize as the big stable gate swung open at their approach. The little party almost fell into the inn yard and the stable gate was banged shut and barred behind them.

  “God save me,” Brother Peter said, crossing himself. He looked from the shaken young women to Freize’s expression of petrified horror. “God save all of us.”

  “The town has run mad,” an older woman observed from the doorway of the inn. “I take it you won’t be staying.”

  “We will be staying,” Luca declared, hiding his own shock. “I am an Inquirer, sent by the Holy Father himself. I have come to discover what is happening here and, if I can, return the dancers to their normal lives, to restore them to Christian godly ways.”

  “You’d much better leave,” the landlady declared. “I’m warning you. First one, then another catches the madness and goes off. You don’t want the young ladies to run away dancing.”

  “We won’t,” Isolde said, but she was badly shaken. “I would never go with such people. I would hate to dance like that. They looked as if they were ready to fall down in the streets from exhaustion.”

  “They are,” the woman said, her voice harsh. “And pull everyone else down with them.”

  “We’ll take rooms for tonight,” Luca said. “And stable the horses. I have to know what is happening here. If God is willing, we might be able to learn all that we need to know and leave tomorrow.”

  Freize suddenly recovered his wits. “I’ll see to the horses,” he said. “But if you could do all the study you need, as fast as you can, so we can be away at dawn tomorrow, I would be a happy man. The faster your inquiry, the less likely one of us will catch this sickness. You know, she had tight hold of me, and was pulling me away!”

  “I know,” Luca said grimly. “For I had tight hold of you on the other side, and I was pulling you back.”

  Luca made sure that the young women were sharing a room at the back of the house, overlooking a little herb garden and orchard with the stable yard beyond so they could not hear the beat of the drum in the town square. When they came down to join the men in the dining room at the front of the inn, and cracked open the shutters, they could see the dancers going continually round and round the square, dancing all the afternoon with their weary, shuffling stride, as if they could never stop. Only when the sun went down did they collapse onto the cobbles and onto the doorsteps of the houses, and moan for the pain in their feet and their exhaustion. One woman, in the bright clothes of one of the mountain regions, fainted, and her dance partner laid her on the stones and left her for dead, as if he had forgotten her.

  Luca looked up from the papers that the visiting Inquirer had left with him. “Nobody knows for sure what causes the dancing,” he said. “In the south, they think it is the bite of the tarantula spider and they call the dance the tarantella. But in other places it just seems to start and to stop without warning or reason.”

  “We should ask the people why they have chosen to dance,” Brother Peter said.

  “It’s got a lot quieter now. We’ll go and talk with them,” Luca said. He turned to Isolde and Ishraq. “Please stay in this room and don’t go out.”

  Isolde nodded, and not even Ishraq insisted on her right to freedom. “Will you take Freize with you?” she asked. “Is it safe for him?”

  “I’d like him with me,” Luca decided. “But only if he is willing to come.”

  “I’ll come too,” Brother Peter volunteered. “You may need me.”

  Luca hesitated. “I’d rather have you three in here, watching for us,” he said. “If we get into any difficulty you can come and pull us away.”

  Ishraq nodded. “If you think you are going to dance, raise your right hand and we’ll come for you.”

  Brother Peter took one look at the square, where only a couple were still on their feet, circling slowly, slumped with exhaustion in each other’s arms. “Very well,” he said. “The dancers look as if they are resting, but I suppose they could start again at any moment. You take care of yourself, Inquirer, and I will watch you from here. Don’t step out of the square; don’t go away from where I can see you from this window. And don’t let them lay hold of you.”

  Cautiously, Luca and Freize undid the bolts of the front door. The landlady stood behind them, ready to slam the door and bolt it again.

  “I won’t have them in the house,” she whispered. “I’ll serve them ale through the window and let them drop the money into a cup of vinegar. Same as when the plague comes through the valley. But I won’t let them so much as touch me. If they take hold of you, they dance you away and you can’t ever get back. Some ideas are like a plague. You must never entertain them.”

  “Make sure that you let us in the
moment that we knock,” Freize reminded her.

  “I will,” she promised. “But take my warning: and don’t go out at all.” She turned to Freize. “You especially. Now that they’ve laid hold of you once, they’ll be looking out for you again. They’ll want to claim you for their own. They’ll think you are a dancer like them, one of theirs.”

  “Indispensable. I have to go with my master—I am indispensable,” Freize explained, his face pale and frightened as he followed Luca into the quiet square.

  The dancers were resting wherever they had fallen when the last dance had ended, some of them sprawled on the steps of houses, some leaning against the shutters of the closed shops at the edge of the square; others, too tired to move, slumped in little groups on the cobbles of the main square, one or two leaning against the cool, worn stone of the old obelisk at the very center of the town. Luca approached them and then knelt down beside one middle-aged woman who seemed to be all alone, the sole of her shoe flapping on her foot, her gray wool gown tattered at the hem.

  “God bless you, Goodwife,” he said.

  She opened her dazed eyes. “And you.”

  “You look weary.”

  “I am near dead with exhaustion. Do you have something to drink?”

  Luca nodded to Freize, who pulled a leather flask of small ale from his belt and handed it over reluctantly. The woman took a sip and passed it back. Freize wiped the rim carefully and corked it again.

  “Are you hungry?” Luca asked her.

  She shook her head and lay back on the ground, cupped her hands under her face, rolled on her side, and appeared to go to sleep.

  “Why are you doing this?” Luca persevered. “Why this dancing?”

  “I need to sleep now. We’ll wake and dance again in a little while. I don’t have the strength now—I am ready to die for tiredness. Let me sleep, boy.”

  “Then stop dancing,” Luca suggested. “I will take you into the inn and you can sleep in a bed. Think of that! A good dinner and a quiet night’s rest!”