VITTORITO, ITALY, OCTOBER 1453
The little party lingered for two more days in the village while Ishraq’s bruises faded and she grew strong again. Isolde and Ishraq bought light rust-coloured gowns for travelling, and thick woollen capes for the cold nights, and on the third day they were ready to set out at sunrise.
Freize had pillion saddles on two of the horses. ‘I thought you would ride behind the lord,’ he said to Isolde. ‘And the servant would come up behind me.’
‘No,’ Ishraq said flatly. ‘We ride our own horses.’
‘It’s tiring,’ Freize warned her, ‘and the roads are rough. Most ladies like to ride behind a man. You can sit sideways, you don’t have to go astride. You’ll be more comfortable.’
‘We ride alone,’ Isolde confirmed. ‘On our own horses.’
Freize made a face and winked at Ishraq. ‘Another time, then.’
‘I don’t think there will be any time when I will want to ride behind you,’ she said coolly.
He unfastened the girth on the pillion saddle and swept it from the horse’s back. ‘Ah, you say that now,’ he said confidently, ‘but that’s because you hardly know me. Many a lass has been indifferent at first meeting but after a while . . .’ He snapped his fingers.
‘After a while what?’ Isolde asked him, smiling.
‘They can’t help themselves,’ Freize said confidentially. ‘Don’t ask me why. It’s a gift I have. Women and horses, they both love me. Women and horses – most animals really – just like to be close to me. They just like me.’
Luca came out to the stable yard, carrying his saddle pack. ‘Are you not tacked up yet?’
‘Just changing the saddles. The ladies want to ride on their own, though I have been to the trouble of buying two pillion saddles for them. They are ungrateful.’
‘Well, of course they would ride alone!’ Luca said impatiently. He nodded a bow to the young women, and when Freize led the first horse to the mounting block he went to Isolde and took her hand to help her up as she stepped to the top of the mounting block, put her foot in the broad stirrup and swung herself into the saddle.
Soon, the five of them were mounted and, with the other four horses and the donkey in a string behind them, they rode out onto the little track that they would follow through the forest.
Luca went first, with Isolde and Ishraq side by side just behind him. Behind them came Brother Peter and then Freize, a stout cudgel in a loop at the side of his saddle and the spare horses beside him.
It was a pleasant ride through the beech woods. The trees were still holding their copper-brown leaves and sheltered the travellers from the bright autumn sun. As the path climbed higher they came out of the woods and took the stony track through the upper pastures. It was very quiet; sometimes they heard the tinkle of a few bells from a distant herd of goats, but mostly there was nothing but the whisper of the wind.
Luca reined back to ride with the two girls and asked Ishraq about her time in Spain.
‘The Lord Lucretili must have been a most unusual man, to allow a young woman in his household to study with Moorish physicians,’ he observed.
‘He was,’ Ishraq said. ‘He had a great respect for the learning of my people, he wanted me to study. If he had lived I think he would have sent me back to Spanish universities, where the scholars of my people study everything from the stars in the sky to the movement of the waters of the sea. Some people say that they are all governed by the same laws. We have to discover what those laws might be.’
‘Were you the only woman there?’
She shook her head. ‘No, in my country women can learn and teach too.’
‘And did you learn the numbers?’ Luca asked her curiously. ‘And the meaning of zero?’
She shook her head. ‘I have no head for mathematics, though of course I know the numbers,’ she said.
‘My father believed that a woman could understand as well as a man,’ Isolde remarked. ‘He let Ishraq study whatever she wanted.’
‘And you?’ Luca turned to her. ‘Did you attend the university in Spain?’
She shook her head. ‘My father intended me to be a lady to command Lucretili,’ she said. ‘He taught me how to calculate the profits from the land, how to command the loyalty of people, how to manage land and choose the crops, how to command the guard of a castle under attack.’ She made a funny little face. ‘And he had me taught the skills a lady should have – love of fine clothes, dancing, music, speaking languages, writing, reading, singing, poetry.’
‘She envies me the skills he taught me,’ Ishraq said with a hidden smile. ‘He taught her to be a lady and me to be a power in the world.’
‘What woman would not want to be a lady of a great castle?’ Luca wondered.
‘I would want it,’ Isolde said. ‘I do want it. But I wish I had been taught to fight as well.’
At sunset on the first evening, they pulled up their horses before an isolated monastery. Ishraq and Isolde exchanged an anxious glance. ‘The hue and cry?’ she muttered to Luca.
‘It won’t have reached here. I doubt your brother sent out any messages once he was away from the abbey. I would guess he signed the writ only to demonstrate his own innocence.’
She nodded. ‘Just enough to keep me away,’ she said. ‘Naming me as a witch and declaring me dead, leaves him with the castle and the abbey under his control, giving him the abbey lands and the gold. He wins everything.’
Freize dismounted and went to pull the great ring outside the closed door. The bell in the gatehouse rang loudly, and the porter heaved the double gates open. ‘Welcome, travellers, in the name of God,’ he said cheerfully. ‘How many are you?’
‘One young lord, one clerk, one servant, one lady and her companion,’ Freize replied. ‘And nine horses and one donkey. They can go in the meadow or in the stables as suits you.’
‘We can put them out on good grass,’ the lay brother said, smiling. ‘Come in.’
He welcomed them into a big yard and Brother Peter and Luca swung down from their saddles. Luca turned to Isolde’s horse and held up his arms to lift her down. She smiled briefly and gestured that she could get down on her own, then swung her leg and, lithe as a boy, jumped to the ground.
Freize went to Ishraq’s horse and held out his arm. ‘Don’t jump,’ he said. ‘You’ll faint the moment you touch the ground. You’ve been near to fainting any time this last five miles.’
She gathered her dark veil across her mouth and looked at him over the top of it.
‘And don’t look daggers at me either,’ Freize said cheerfully. ‘You’d have done better behind me with your arms around my waist and my back to lean on, but you’re as stubborn as the donkey. Come on down, girl, and let me help you.’
Surprisingly, she did as he suggested and leaned towards him and let herself fall into his arms. He took her gently and set her on her feet with his arm around her to keep her steady. Isolde went to her and supported her. ‘I didn’t realise . . .’
‘Just tired.’
The porter gave them a light to the guesthouse, indicated the women’s rooms on one side of the high wall and the entry to the men’s rooms on the other. He showed them the refectory and told them that they might get their dinner with the monks after Vespers, while the ladies would be served in the guesthouse. Then he left them with lit candles and a blessing.
‘Goodnight,’ Isolde said to Luca, bowing her head to Brother Peter.
‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ Luca said to both women. ‘We should leave straight after Prime.’
Isolde nodded. ‘We’ll be ready.’
Ishraq curtseyed to the two men and nodded at Freize.
‘Pillion saddle tomorrow?’ he asked her.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Because you were overtired with the ride today?’ Freize said, driving the point home.
She showed him a warm frank smile before she tucked her veil across her face. ‘Don’t gloat,’ she said. ‘I’m tired to my very bones. You were right, I was wrong, and foolishly proud. I’ll ride pillion tomorrow and be glad of it; but if you mock me I will pinch you every step of the way.’
Freize ducked his head. ‘Not a word,’ he promised her. ‘You will find me reticent to a fault.’
‘Reticent?’
He nodded. ‘It is my new ambition. It’s my new word: reticent.’
They left immediately after Prime and breakfast, and the sun was up on their right-hand side as they headed north. ‘Thing is,’ Freize remarked to Ishraq quietly as she rode behind him, seated sideways, her feet resting on the pillion support, one hand around his waist, tucked into his belt, ‘thing is, we never know where we are going. We just go along, steady as the donkey, who knows no more than us but plods along, and then that pompous jackal suddenly brings out a piece of paper and tells us we are to go somewhere else entirely and get into God knows what trouble.’
‘But of course,’ she said. ‘Because you are travelling as an inquiry. You have to go and inquire into things.’
‘I don’t see why we can’t know where we are going,’ Freize said. ‘And then a man might have a chance of making sure we stopped at a good inn.’
‘Ah, it is a matter of dinner,’ she said, smiling behind her veil. ‘I understand now.’
Freize patted the hand that was holding his belt. ‘There are very few things more important than dinner to a hardworking man,’ he said firmly. Then, ‘Hulloah? What’s this?’
Ahead of them in the road were half a dozen men, struggling with pitchforks and flails to hold down an animal which was netted and roped and twisting about in the dirt. Freize halted and Isolde, Luca and Peter pulled up behind him.
‘What have you got there?’ Luca called to the men.
One of the men broke from the struggle and came towards them. ‘We’d be glad of your help,’ he said. ‘If we could rope the creature to two of your horses we’d be able to get it along the road. We can’t get forwards or backwards at the moment.’
‘What is it?’ Luca asked.
The man crossed himself. ‘The Lord save us, it is a werewolf,’ he said. ‘It has been plaguing our village and forests every full moon for a year but last night my brother and I, and our friends, and cousin, went out and trapped it.’
Brother Peter crossed himself, and Isolde copied him. ‘How did you trap it?’
‘We planned it for months, truly months. We didn’t dare to go out at night – we were afraid his power would be too strong under the moon. We waited till it was a waning moon when we knew that his power would be weakened and shrunken. Then we dug a deep pit on the track to the village and we staked out a haunch of mutton on the far side. We thought he would come to the village as he always does and smell the meat. We hoped he would follow the track to the meat and he did. We covered the pit with light branches and leaves, and he didn’t see it. It collapsed beneath him and he fell in. We kept him there for days, with nothing to eat so he weakened. Then we dropped the nets on him and pulled them tight and hauled him out of the pit. Now we have him.’
‘And what are you going to do with him?’ Isolde looked fearfully at the writhing animal, laden with nets, struggling on the road.
‘We are going to cage it in the village till we can make a silver arrow, as only a silver arrow can kill it, and then we are going to shoot it in the heart and bury it at the crossroads. Then it will lie quiet and we will be safe in our beds again.’
‘Pretty small for a wolf,’ Freize observed, peering at the thrashing net. ‘More like a dog.’
‘It grows bigger with the moon,’ the man said. ‘When the moon is full it waxes too – as big as the biggest wolf. And then, though we bolt our doors and shutter our windows, we can hear it round the village, trying the doors, sniffing at the locks, trying to get in.’
Isolde shuddered.
‘Will you help us get it to the village? We’re going to put it in the bear pit, where we bait the bears at the inn, but it’s a good mile away. We didn’t think it would struggle so, and we’re afraid to get too close for fear of being bitten.’
‘If it bites you, you turn into a werewolf too,’ a man said from the back. ‘I swore to my wife that I wouldn’t go too close.’
Freize looked across their heads at Luca, and at a nod from his master, got down from his cob and went to the bundle in the road. Under the pile of nets and tangles of rope he could just see an animal crouched down and curled up. A dark angry eye looked back at him; he saw small yellow teeth bared in a snarl. Two or three of the men held their ropes out and Freize took one from one side and then one from the other side and tied them to two of the spare horses. ‘Here,’ he said to one of the men. ‘Lead the horse gently. Did you say two miles to the village?’
‘Perhaps one and a half,’ the man said. The horse snorted in fear and sidled as the bundle on the road let out a howl. Then the ropes were tightened and they set off, dragging the helpless bundle along behind them. Sometimes the creature convulsed and rolled over, which caused the horses to jib in fear and the men leading them had to tighten their reins and soothe them.
‘A bad business,’ Freize said to Luca as they entered the village behind the men, and saw the other villagers gather around with spades and axes and flails.
‘This is the very thing that we were sent out to understand,’ Brother Peter said to Luca. ‘I shall open a report, and you can hold an inquiry. We can do it here, before continuing with our journey and our mission. You can find what evidence there is that this is a werewolf, half-beast, half-man, and then you can decide if it should be put to death with a silver arrow or not.’
‘I?’ Luca hesitated.
‘You are the inquirer,’ Brother Peter reminded him. ‘Here is a place to understand the fears and map the rise of the Devil. Set up your inquiry.’
Freize looked at him; Isolde waited. Luca cleared his throat. ‘I am an inquirer sent out by the Holy Father himself to discover wrong-doing and error in Christendom,’ he called to the villagers. There was a murmur of interest and respect. ‘I will hold an inquiry about this beast and decide what is to be done with it,’ he said. ‘Anyone who has been wronged by the beast or is fearful of it, or knows anything about it, is to come to my room in the inn and give evidence before me. In a day or two I shall tell you my decision, which will be binding and final.’
Freize nodded. ‘Where’s the bear pit?’ he asked one of the farmers, who was leading a horse.
‘In the yard of the inn,’ the man said. He nodded to the big double doors of the stable yard at the side of the inn. As the horses came close, the villagers ran ahead and threw the doors open. Inside the courtyard, under the windows of the inn, there was a big circular arena.
Once a year, a visiting bear leader would bring his chained animal to the village on a feast day and everyone would bet on how many dogs would be killed, and how close the bravest would get to the throat of the bear, until the bear leader declared it over, and the excitement was done for another year.
A stake in the centre showed where the bears were chained by the leg when the dogs were set on them. The arena had been reinforced and made higher by lashed beams and planks so that the inner wall was nearly as high as the first-floor windows of the inn. ‘They can jump,’ the farmer said. ‘Werewolves can jump, everyone knows that. We built it too high for the Devil himself.’
The villagers untied the ropes from the horses and pulled the bundle in the net towards the bear pit. It seemed to struggle more vigorously and to resist. A couple of the farmers took their pitchforks and pricked it onwards which made it howl in pain and snarl and lash out in its net.
‘And how are you going to release it into the bear pit?’ Freize wondered aloud.
There was a silence. Clearly this stage had not been foreseen. ‘We’ll just lock it in and leave it to get its own self free,’ someone suggested.
‘I’m not going near it,’ another man said.
‘If it bites you once, you become a werewolf too,’ a woman warned.
‘You die from the poison of its breath,’ another disagreed.
‘If it gets the taste of your blood it hunts you till it has you,’ someone volunteered.
Brother Peter and Luca and the two women went into the front door of the inn and took rooms for themselves and stables for the horses. Luca also hired a dining room that overlooked the bear pit in the yard and went to the window to see his servant, Freize, standing in the bear pit with the beast squirming in its net beside him. As he expected, Freize was not able to leave even a monster such as this netted and alone.
‘Get a bucket of water for it to drink, and a haunch of meat for it to eat when it gets itself free,’ Freize said to the groom of the inn. ‘And maybe a loaf of bread in case it fancies it.’
‘This is a beast from hell,’ the groom protested. ‘I’m not waiting on it. I’m not stepping into the pit with it. What if it breathes on me?’
Freize looked for a moment as if he would argue, but then he nodded his head. ‘So be it,’ he said. ‘Anyone here have any compassion for the beast? No? Brave enough to catch it and torment it but not brave enough to feed it, eh? Well, I myself will get it some dinner, then, and when it has untied itself from these knots, and recovered from being dragged over the road for a mile and a half, it can have a sup of water and a bite of meat.’
‘Mind it doesn’t bite you!’ someone said and everyone laughed.
‘It won’t bite me,’ Freize rejoined stolidly. ‘On account of nobody touches me without my word, and on account of I wouldn’t be so stupid as to be in here when it gets loose. Unlike some, who have lived alongside it and complained that they heard it sniffing at their door and yet took months to capture the poor beast.’
A chorus of irritated argument arose at this, which Freize simply ignored. ‘Anyone going to help me?’ he asked again. ‘Well, in that case I will ask you all to leave, on account of the fact that I am not a travelling show.’
Most of them left, but some of the younger men stayed in their places, on the platform built outside the arena so that a spectator could stand and look over the barrier. Freize did not speak again but merely stood, waiting patiently until they shuffled their feet, cursed him for interfering, and went.
When the courtyard was empty of people, Freize fetched a bucket of water from the pump, went to the kitchen for a haunch of raw meat and a loaf of bread, then set them down inside the arena, glancing up at the window where Luca and the two women were looking down.
‘And what the little lord makes of you, we will know in time,’ Freize remarked to the humped net, which shuffled and whimpered a little. ‘But God will guide him to deal fairly with you even if you are from Satan and must die with a silver arrow through your heart. And I will keep you fed and watered for you are one of God’s creatures even if you are one of the Fallen, which I doubt was a matter of your own choosing.’
Luca started his inquiry into the werewolf as soon as they had dined. The two women went to their bedroom, while the two men, Brother Peter and Luca, called in one witness after another to say how the werewolf had plagued their village.
All afternoon they listened to stories of noises in the night, the handles of locked doors being gently tried, and losses from the herds of sheep which roamed the pastures under the guidance of the boys of the village. The boys reported a great wolf, a single wolf running alone, which would come out of the forest and snatch away a lamb that had strayed too far from its mother. They said that the wolf sometimes ran on all four legs, sometimes stood up like a man. They were in terror of it, and would no longer take the sheep to the upper pastures but insisted on staying near the village. One lad, a six-year-old shepherd boy, told them that his older brother had been eaten by the werewolf.
‘When was that?’ Luca asked.
‘Seven years ago, at least,’ the boy replied. ‘For I never knew him – he was taken the year before I was born, and my mother has never stopped mourning for him.’
‘What happened?’ Luca asked.
‘These villagers have all sorts of tales,’ Brother Peter said quietly to him. ‘Ten to one the boy is lying, or his brother died of some disgusting disease that they don’t want to admit.’
‘She was looking for a lamb, and he was walking with her as he always did,’ the boy said. ‘She told me that she sat down just for a moment and he sat on her lap. He fell asleep in her arms and she was so tired that she closed her eyes for only a moment, and when she woke he was gone. She thought he had strayed a little way from her and she called for him and looked all round for him but she never found him.’
‘Absolute stupidity,’ Brother Peter remarked.
‘But why did she think the werewolf had taken him?’ Luca asked.
‘She could see the marks of a wolf in the wet ground round the stream,’ the boy said. ‘She ran about and called and called, and when she could not find him she came running home for my father and he went out for days, tracking down the pack, but even he, who is the best hunter in the village, could not find them. That was when they knew it was a werewolf who had taken my brother. Taken him and disappeared, as they do.’
‘I’ll see your mother,’ Luca decided. ‘Will you ask her to come to me?’
The boy hesitated. ‘She won’t come,’ he said. ‘She grieves for him still. She doesn’t like to talk about it. She won’t want to talk about it.’
Brother Peter leaned towards Luca and spoke quietly to him. ‘I’ve heard a tale like this a dozen times,’ he said. ‘Likely the child had something wrong with him and she quietly drowned him in the stream and then came back with a cock-and-bull story to tell the husband. She won’t want to have us asking about it, and there’s no benefit in forcing the truth out of her. What’s done is done.’
Luca turned to his clerk and raised his papers so that his face was hidden from the boy. ‘Brother Peter, I am conducting an inquiry here into a werewolf. I will speak to everyone who has any knowledge of such a satanic visitor. You know that’s my duty. If along the way I discover a village where baby-killing has been allowed then I will inquire after that too. It is my task to inquire into all the fears of Christendom: everything – great sins and small. It is my task to know what is happening and if it foretells the end of days. The death of a baby, the arrival of a werewolf, these are all evidence.’
‘Do you have to know everything?’ Brother Peter demanded sceptically. ‘Can we let nothing go?’
‘Everything,’ Luca nodded. ‘And that is my curse that I carry just like the werewolf. He has to rage and savage. I have to know. But I am in the service of God and he is in the service of the Devil and is doomed to death.’
He turned back to the boy. ‘I’ll come to your mother.’
He got up from the table and the two men with the boy – still faintly protesting and crimson to his ears – led the way down the stairs and out of the inn. As they were going out of the front door, Isolde and Ishraq were coming down the stairs.
‘Where are you going?’ Isolde asked.
‘To visit a farmer’s wife, this young man’s mother,’ Luca said.
The girls looked at Brother Peter, whose face was impassive but clearly disapproving.
‘Can we come too?’ Isolde asked. ‘We were just going out to walk around.’
‘It’s an inquiry, not a social call,’ Brother Peter said.
But Luca said, ‘Oh, why not?’ and Isolde walked beside him, while the little shepherd boy, torn between embarrassment and pride at all the attention, went ahead. His sheepdog, which had been lying in the shadow of a cart outside the inn, pricked up its ears at the sight of him, and trotted at his heels.
He led them out of the dusty market square, up a small rough-cut flight of steps to a track that wound up the side of the mountain, following the course of a fast-flowing stream, and then stopped abruptly at a little farm, a pretty duck pond before the yard, a waterfall from the small cliff behind it. A ramshackle roof of ruddy tiles topped a rough wall of wattle and daub which had been lime-washed many years ago and was now a gentle buff colour. There was no glass in the windows but the shutters stood wide open to the afternoon sun. There were chickens in the yard and a pig with piglets in the walled orchard to the side. In the field beyond there were two precious cows, one with a calf, and as they walked up the cobbled track the front door opened and a middle-aged woman came out, her hair tied up in a scarf, a hessian apron over her homespun gown. She stopped in surprise at the sight of the wealthy strangers.
‘Good day to you,’ she said, looking from one to another. ‘What are you doing, Tomas, bringing such fine folks here? I hope he has been no trouble, sir? Can I offer you some refreshment?’
‘This is the man from the inn who brought the werewolf in,’ Tomas said breathlessly. ‘He would come to see you, though I told him not to.’
‘You shouldn’t have told him anything at all,’ she observed. ‘It’s not for small boys, small dirty boys, to speak with their betters. Go and fetch a jug of the best ale from the still room, and don’t say another word. Sirs, ladies – will you sit?’
She gestured to a bench set into the low stone wall before the house. Isolde and Ishraq took a seat and smiled up at her. ‘We rarely have company here,’ she said. ‘And never ladies.’
Tomas came out of the house carrying two roughly carved three-legged stools and put them down for Brother Peter and Luca, then dashed in again for the jug of small ale, one glass and three mugs. Bashfully, he offered the glass to Isolde and then poured ale for everyone else into mugs.
Luca and Brother Peter took their seats and the woman stood before them, one hand twisting her apron corner. ‘He is a good boy,’ she said again. ‘He wouldn’t mean to talk out of turn. I apologise if he offended you.’
‘No, no, he was polite and helpful,’ Luca said.
‘He’s a credit to you,’ Isolde assured her.
‘And growing very big and strong,’ Ishraq remarked.
The mother’s pride beamed out of her face. ‘He is,’ she said. ‘I thank the Lord for him every day of his life.’
‘But you had a previous boy.’ Luca put down his mug and spoke gently to her. ‘He told us that he had an older brother.’
A shadow came across the woman’s broad handsome face and she looked suddenly weary. ‘I did. God forgive me for taking my eye off him for a moment.’ At the thought of him she could not speak; she turned her head away.
‘What happened?’ Isolde asked.
‘Alas, alas, I lost him. I lost him in a moment. God forgive me for that moment. But I was a young mother and so weary that I fell asleep and in that moment he was gone.’
‘In the forest?’ Luca prompted.
A silent nod confirmed the fact.
Gently, Isolde rose to her feet and pressed the woman down onto the bench so that she could sit. ‘Was he taken by wolves?’ she asked quietly.
‘I believe he was,’ the woman said. ‘There were rumours of wolves in the woods even then, that was why I was looking for the lamb, hoping to find it before nightfall.’ She gestured at the sheep in the field. ‘We don’t have a big flock. Every beast counts for us. I sat down for a moment. My boy was tired so we sat to rest. He was not yet four years old, God bless him. I lay down with him for a moment and fell asleep. When I woke he was gone.’
Isolde put a comforting hand on her shoulder.
‘We found his little shirt,’ the woman continued, her voice trembling with unspoken tears. ‘But that was some months later. One of the lads found it when he was bird’s-nesting in the forest. Found it under a bush.’
‘Was there any blood on it?’ Luca asked.
She shook her head. ‘It was washed through by rain,’ she said. ‘But I took it to the priest and we held a service for his innocent soul. The priest said I should bury my love for him and have another child – and then God gave me Tomas.’
‘The villagers have captured a beast that they say is a werewolf,’ Brother Peter remarked. ‘Would you accuse the beast of murdering your child?’
He expected her to flare out, to make an accusation at once; but she looked wearily at him as if she had worried and thought about this for too long already. ‘Of course when I heard there was a werewolf I thought it might have taken my boy Stefan – but I don’t know. I can’t even say that it was a wolf that took him. He might have wandered far and fallen in the stream and drowned, or in a ravine, or just been lost in the woods. I saw the tracks of the wolves but I didn’t see my son’s footprints. I have thought about it every day of my life; and still I don’t know.’
Brother Peter nodded and pursed his lips. He looked at Luca. ‘Do you want me to write down her statement and have her put her mark on it?’
Luca shook his head. ‘Later we can, if we think there is need,’ he said. He bowed to the woman. ‘Thank you for your hospitality, goodwife. What name shall I call you?’
She rubbed her face with the corner of her apron. ‘I am Sara Fairley,’ she said. ‘Wife of Ralph Fairley. We have a good name in the village, anyone can tell you who I am.’
‘Would you bear witness against the werewolf?’
She gave him a faint smile with a world of sorrow behind it. ‘I don’t like to talk of it,’ she said simply. ‘I try not to think of it. I tried to do what the priest told me and bury my sorrow with the little shirt, and thank God for my second boy.’
Brother Peter hesitated. ‘We will certainly put it on trial and if it is proven to be a werewolf it will die.’
She nodded. ‘That won’t bring back my boy,’ she said quietly. ‘But I should be glad to know that my son and all the children are safe in the pasture.’
They rose up and left her. Brother Peter gave his arm to Isolde as they walked down the stony path, Luca helped Ishraq.
‘Why does Brother Peter not believe her?’ Ishraq asked him while she had her hand on his arm and was close enough to speak softly. ‘Why is he always so suspicious?’
‘This is not his first inquiry; he has travelled before and seen much. Your lady, Isolde, was very tender to her.’
‘She has a tender heart,’ Ishraq said. ‘Children, women, beggars, her purse is always open and her heart is always going out to them. The castle kitchen gave away two dozen dinners a day to the poor. She has always been this way.’
‘And has she ever loved anyone in particular?’ Luca asked casually. There was a big rock in the pathway and he stepped over it and turned to help Ishraq.
She laughed. ‘Nothing to do with you,’ she said abruptly. When she saw him flush she said, ‘Ah, Inquirer! Do you really have to know everything?’
‘I was just interested . . .’
‘No-one. She was supposed to marry a fat indulgent sinful man and she would never have considered him. She would never have stooped to him. She took her vows of celibacy with ease. That was not the problem for her. She loves her lands, and her people. No man has taken her fancy.’ She paused as if to tease him. ‘So far,’ she conceded.
Luca looked away. ‘Such a beautiful young woman is bound to . . .’
‘Quite,’ Ishraq said. ‘But tell me about Brother Peter. Is he always so miserable?’
‘He was suspicious of the mother here,’ Luca explained. ‘He thinks she may have killed the child herself, and tried to blame it on a wolf attack. I don’t think so myself; but of course, in these out-of-the-way villages, such things happen.’
Decisively, she shook her head. ‘Not her. That is a woman with a horror of wolves,’ she said. ‘It’s no accident she was not down in the village, though everyone else was there to see them bring it in.’
‘How do you know that?’ Luca said.
Ishraq looked at him as if he were blind. ‘Did you not see the garden?’
Luca had a vague memory of a well-tilled garden, filled with flowers and herbs. There had been a bed of vegetables and herbs near to the door to the kitchen, and flowers and lavender had billowed over the path. There were some autumn pumpkins growing fatly in one bed, and plump grapes on the vine which twisted around the door. It was a typical cottage garden: planted partly for medicine and partly for colour. ‘Of course I saw it, but I don’t remember anything special.’
She smiled. ‘She was growing a dozen different species of aconite, in half a dozen colours, and her boy had a fresh spray of the flower in his hat. She was growing it at every window and every doorway – I’ve never seen such a collection, and in every colour that can bloom, from pink to white to purple.’
‘And so?’ Luca asked.
‘Do you not know your herbs?’ Ishraq asked teasingly. ‘A great inquirer like yourself?’
‘Not like you do. What is aconite?’
‘The common name for aconite is wolfsbane,’ she said. ‘People have been using it against wolves and werewolves for hundreds of years. Dried and made into a powder it can poison a wolf. Fed to a werewolf it can turn him into a human again. In a lethal dose it can kill a werewolf outright, it all depends on the distillation of the herb and the amount that the wolf can be forced to eat. For sure, no wolf will touch it; no wolf will go near it. They won’t let their coats so much as brush against it. No wolf could get into that house – she has built a fortress of aconite.’
‘You think it proves that her story is true and that she fears the wolf? That she planted it to guard herself against the wolf, in case it came back for her?’
Ishraq nodded at the boy who was skipping ahead of them like a little lamb himself, leading the way back to the village, a sprig of fresh aconite tucked into his hatband. ‘I should think she is guarding him.’
A small crowd had gathered around the gate to the stable yard when Luca, Brother Peter and the girls arrived back at the inn.
‘What’s this?’ Luca asked, and pushed his way to the front of the crowd. Freize had the gate half-open and was admitting one person at a time on payment of a half-groat, chinking the coins in his hand.
‘What are you doing?’ Luca asked tersely.
‘Letting people see the beast,’ Freize replied. ‘Since there was such an interest, I thought we might allow it. I thought it was for the public good. I thought I might demonstrate the majesty of God by showing the people this poor sinner.’
‘And what made you think it right to charge for it?’
‘Brother Peter is always so anxious about the expenses,’ Freize explained agreeably, nodding at the clerk. ‘I thought it would be good if the beast made a contribution to the costs of his trial.’
‘This is ridiculous,’ Luca said. ‘Close the gate. People can’t come in and stare at it. This is supposed to be an inquiry, not a travelling show.’
‘People are bound to want to see it,’ Isolde observed. ‘If they think it has been threatening their flocks and themselves for years. They are bound to want to know it has been captured.’
‘Well, let them see it, but you can’t charge for it,’ Luca said irritably. ‘You didn’t even catch it, why should you set yourself up as its keeper?’
‘Because I loosed its bonds and fed it,’ Freize said reasonably.
‘It is free?’ Luca asked, and Isolde echoed nervously: ‘Have you freed it?’
‘I cut the ropes and got myself out of the pit at speed. Then it rolled about and crawled out of the nets,’ Freize said. ‘It had a drink, had a bite to eat, now it’s lying down again, resting. Not much of a show really, but they are simple people and not much happens here. And I charge half price for children and idiots.’
‘There is only one idiot here,’ Luca said severely. ‘And he is not from the village. Let me in, I shall see it.’ He went through the gate and the others followed him. Freize quietly took coins off the remaining villagers and opened the gate wide for them. ‘I’d wager it’s no wolf,’ he said quietly to Luca.
‘What do you mean?’
‘When it got itself out of the net I could see. It’s curled up now in the shadowy end, so it’s harder to make out, but it’s no beast that I have ever seen before. It has long claws and a mane, but it goes up and down from its back legs to all fours, not like a wolf at all.’
‘What kind of beast is it?’ Luca asked him.
‘I’m not sure,’ Freize conceded. ‘But it is not much like a wolf.’
Luca nodded and went towards the bear pit. There was a set of rough wooden steps and a ring of trestles laid on staging, so that spectators to the bear baiting could stand all around the outside of the pit and see over the wooden walls.
Luca climbed the ladder and moved along the trestle so that Brother Peter and the two girls and the little shepherd boy could get up too.
The beast was huddled against the furthest wall, its legs tucked under its body. It had a thick long mane, and a hide tanned dark brown from all weathers, discoloured by mud and scars. On its throat were two new rope burns; now and then it licked a bleeding paw. Two dark eyes looked out through the matted mane and, as Luca watched, the beast bared its teeth in a snarl.
‘We should tie it down and cut into the skin,’ Brother Peter suggested. ‘If it is a werewolf we will cut the skin and beneath it there will be fur. That will be evidence.’
‘You should kill it with a silver arrow,’ one of the villagers remarked. ‘At once, before the moon gets any bigger. It will be stronger then, they wax with the moon. Better kill it now while we have it and it is not in its full power.’
‘When is the moon full?’ Luca asked.
‘Tomorrow night,’ Ishraq answered. The little boy beside her took the aconite from his hat and threw it towards the curled animal. It flinched away.
‘There!’ someone said from the crowd. ‘See that? It fears wolfsbane. It’s a werewolf. We should kill it right now. We shouldn’t delay. We should kill it while it is weak.’
Someone picked up a stone and threw it. It caught the beast on its back and it flinched and snarled and shrank away as if it would burrow its way through the high wall of the bear pit.
One of the men turned to Luca. ‘Your honour, we don’t have enough silver to make an arrow. Would you have some silver in your possession that we might buy from you, and have forged into an arrowhead? We’d be very grateful. Otherwise we’ll have to send to Pescara, to the moneylender there, and it will take days.’
Luca glanced at Brother Peter. ‘We have some silver,’ he said cautiously. ‘Sacred property of the Church.’
‘We can sell it to you,’ Luca ruled. ‘But we’ll wait for the full moon before we kill the beast. I want to see the transformation with my own eyes. When I see it become a full wolf then we will know that it is the beast you report, and we can kill it when it is in its wolf form.’
The man nodded. ‘We’ll make the silver arrow now, so as to be ready.’ He went into the inn with Brother Peter, discussing a fair price for the silver, and Luca turned to Isolde and took a breath. He knew himself to be nervous as a boy.
‘I was going to ask you, I meant to mention it earlier, there is only one dining room here . . . in fact, will you dine with us tonight?’ he asked.
She looked a little surprised. ‘I had thought Ishraq and I would eat in our room.’
‘You could both eat with us at the large table in the dining room,’ Luca said. ‘It’s closer to the kitchen, the food would be hotter, fresher from the oven. There could be no objection.’
She glanced away, her colour rising. ‘I would like to . . .’
‘Please do,’ Luca said. ‘I would like your advice on . . .’ He trailed off, unable to think of anything.
She saw at once his hesitation. ‘My advice on what?’ she asked, her eyes dancing with laughter. ‘You have decided what to do with the werewolf, you will soon have orders as to your next mission. What can you possibly want with my opinion?’
He grinned ruefully. ‘I don’t know. I have nothing to say. I just wanted your company. We are travelling together, you and I, Brother Peter and Ishraq, Freize who has sworn himself to be your man – I just thought you might dine with us.’
She smiled at his frankness. ‘I shall be glad to spend this evening with you,’ she said honestly. She was conscious of wanting to touch him, to put her hand on his shoulder, or to step closer to him. She did not think it was desire that she felt; it was more like a yearning just to be close to him, to have his hand upon her waist, to have his dark head near to hers, to see his hazel eyes smile.
She knew that she was being foolish, that to be close to him, a novice for the priesthood, was a sin, that she herself was already in breach of the vows she had made when she had joined the abbey; and she stepped back. ‘Ishraq and I will come sweet-smelling to dinner,’ she remarked at random. ‘She has got the innkeeper to bring the bathtub to our room. They think we are madly reckless to bathe when it’s not even Good Friday – that’s when they all take their annual bath – but we have insisted that it won’t make us ill.’
‘I will expect you at dinner, then,’ he said. ‘As clean as if it was Easter.’ He jumped down from the platform and put out his hands to help her. She let him lift her down and as he put her on her feet he held her for a moment longer than was needed to make sure she was steady. He felt her lean slightly towards him, he could not have been mistaken; but then she stepped away and he was sure that he had been mistaken. He could not read her movements, he could not imagine what she was thinking, and he was bound by vows of celibacy to take no step towards her. But at any rate, she had said that she would come to dinner and she had said that she would like to dine with him. That at least he was sure of, as she and Ishraq went into the dark doorway of the inn.
Luca glanced up, self-consciously, but Freize had not observed the little exchange. He was intent on the werewolf as it turned around and around, as dogs do before they lie down. When it settled and did not move, Freize announced to the little audience, ‘There now, it’s gone to sleep. Show’s over. You can come back tomorrow.’
‘And tomorrow we’ll see it for free,’ someone claimed. ‘It’s our werewolf, we caught it, there’s no reason that you should charge us to see it.’
‘Ay, but I feed him,’ Freize said. ‘And my lord pays for his keep. And he will examine the creature and execute it with our silver arrow. So that makes him ours.’
They grumbled about the cost of seeing the beast as Freize shooed them out of the yard and closed the doors on them. Luca went into the inn and Freize to the back door of the kitchen.
‘D’you have anything sweet?’ he asked the cook, a plump dark-haired woman who had already experienced Freize’s most blatant flattery. ‘Or at any rate, d’you have anything half as sweet as your smile?’ he amended.
‘Get away with you,’ she said. ‘What are you wanting?’
‘A slice of fresh bread with a spoonful of jam would be very welcome,’ Freize said. ‘Or some sugared plums, perhaps?’
‘The plums are for the lady’s dinner,’ she said firmly. ‘But I can give you a slice of bread.’
‘Or two,’ Freize suggested.
She shook her head at him in mock disapproval but then cut two slices off a thick rye loaf, slapped on two spoonfuls of jam and stuck them face to face together. ‘There, and don’t be coming back for more. I’m cooking dinner now and I can’t be feeding you at the kitchen door at the same time. I’ve never had so many gentry in the house at one time before, and one of them appointed by the Holy Father! I have enough to do without you at the door night and day.’
‘You are a princess,’ Freize assured her. ‘A princess in disguise. I shouldn’t be surprised if someone didn’t come by one day and snatch you up to be a princess in a castle.’
She laughed delightedly and pushed him out of the kitchen, slamming the door after him, and Freize climbed up on the viewing platform again and looked down into the bear pit where the werewolf had stretched out and was lying still.
‘Here.’ Freize waved the slice of bread and jam. ‘Here – do you like bread and jam? I do.’
The beast raised its head and looked warily at Freize. It lifted its lips in a quiet snarl. Freize took a bite from the two slices, and then broke off a small piece and tossed it towards the animal.
The beast flinched back from the bread as it fell, but then caught the scent of it and leaned forwards. ‘Go on,’ Freize whispered encouragingly. ‘Eat up. Give it a try. You might like it.’
The beast sniffed cautiously at the bread and then slunk forwards, first its big front paws, one at a time, and then its whole body, towards the food. It sniffed, and then licked it, and then gobbled it down in one quick hungry movement. Then it sat like a sphinx and looked at Freize.
‘Nice,’ Freize said encouragingly. ‘Like some more?’
The animal watched him as Freize took a small bite, ate it with relish, and then once again broke off a morsel and threw it towards the beast. This time it did not flinch but followed the arc of the throw keenly, and went at once to where the bread landed, in the middle of the arena, coming closer all the time to Freize, leaning over the wall.
It gobbled up the bread without hesitation and then sat on its haunches, looking at Freize, clearly waiting for more.
‘That’s good,’ Freize said, using the same gentle voice. ‘Now come a little bit closer.’ He dropped the last piece of bread very near to his own position, but the werewolf did not dare come so close. It yearned towards the sweet-smelling bread and jam, but it shrank back from Freize, though he stood very still and whispered encouraging words.
‘Very well,’ he said softly. ‘You’ll come closer for your dinner later, I don’t doubt,’ and he stepped down from the platform and found Ishraq had been watching him from the doorway of the inn.
‘Why are you feeding him like that?’ she asked.
Freize shrugged. ‘Wanted to see him properly,’ he said. ‘I suppose I just thought I’d see if he liked bread and jam.’
‘Everyone else hates him,’ she observed. ‘They are planning his execution in two nights’ time. Yet you feed him bread and jam.’
‘Poor beast,’ he said. ‘I doubt he wanted to be a werewolf. It must have just come over him. And now he’s to die for it. It doesn’t seem fair.’
He was rewarded with a quick smile. ‘It isn’t fair,’ she said. ‘And you are right – perhaps it is just his nature. He may be just a different sort of beast from any other that we have seen. Like a changeling: one who does not belong where he happens to be.’
‘And we don’t live in a world that likes difference,’ Freize observed.
‘Now that’s true,’ said the girl who had been different from all the others from birth with her dark skin and her dark slanting eyes.
‘Now then,’ said Freize, sliding his arm around Ishraq’s waist. ‘You’re a kind-hearted girl. What about a kiss?’
She stood quite still, neither yielding to his gentle pressure nor pulling away. Her stillness was more off-putting than if she had jumped and squealed. She stood like a statue and Freize stood still beside her, making no progress and rather feeling that he wanted to take his arm away, but that he could not now do so.
‘You had better let me go at once,’ she said in a very quiet even voice. ‘Freize, I am warning you fairly enough. Let me go; or it will be the worse for you.’
He attempted a confident laugh. It didn’t come out very confident. ‘What would you do?’ he asked. ‘Beat me? I’d take having my ears boxed from a lass like you with pleasure. I will make you an offer: box my ears and then kiss me better!’
‘I will throw you to the ground,’ she said with a quiet determination. ‘And it will hurt, and you will feel like a fool.’
He tightened his grip at once, rising to the challenge. ‘Ah, pretty maid, you should never threaten what you can’t do,’ he chuckled, and put his other hand under her chin to turn up her face for a kiss.
It all happened so fast that he did not know how it had been done. One moment he had his arm around her waist and was bending to kiss her, the next she had used that arm to spin him around, grabbed him, and he was tipped flat on his back on the hard cobbles of the muddy yard, his head ringing from the fall, and she was at the open doorway of the inn.
‘Actually, I never threaten what I can’t do,’ she said, hardly out of breath. ‘And you had better remember never to touch me without my consent.’
Freize sat up, got to his feet, brushed down his coat and his breeches, shook his dizzy head. When he looked up again, she was gone.
The kitchen lad toiled up the stairs carrying buckets of hot water, to be met at the door of the women’s room by either Ishraq or Isolde who took the buckets and poured them into the bath that they had set before the fire in their bedroom. It was a big wooden tub, half of a wine barrel, and Ishraq had lined it with a sheet and poured in some scented oil. They closed and bolted the door on the boy, undressed, and got into the steaming water. Gently, Isolde sponged Ishraq’s bruised shoulder and forehead, and then turned her around and tipped back her head to wash her black hair.
The firelight glowed on their wet gleaming skin and the girls talked quietly together, revelling in the steaming hot water, and the flickering warmth of the fire. Isolde combed Ishraq’s thick dark hair with oils, and then pinned it on top of her head. ‘Will you wash mine?’ she asked, and turned so that Ishraq could soap her back and shoulders and wash her tangled golden hair.
‘I feel as if all the dirt of the road is in my skin,’ she said, as she took a handful of salt from the dish beside the bath, and rubbed it with oil in her hands and then spread it along her arms.
‘You certainly have a small forest in your hair,’ Ishraq said, pulling out little twigs and leaves.
‘Oh, take it out!’ Isolde exclaimed. ‘Comb it through, I want it completely clean. I was going to wear my hair down tonight.’
‘Curled on your shoulders?’ Ishraq asked, and pulled a ringlet.
‘I suppose I can wear my hair as I please,’ Isolde said, flicking her head. ‘I suppose it is nobody’s business but mine, how I wear my hair.’
‘Oh, for sure,’ Ishraq agreed with her. ‘And surely the inquirer has no interest in whether your hair is curled and clean and spread over your shoulders or pinned up under your veil.’
‘He is sworn to the Church, as am I,’ Isolde said.
‘Your oaths were forced at the time, and are as nothing now; and for all I know his oaths are the same,’ Ishraq said roundly.
Isolde turned and looked at her, soapsuds running down her naked back. ‘He is sworn to the Church,’ she repeated hesitantly.
‘He was put into the Church when he was a child, before he knew what was being promised. But now he is a man, and he looks at you as if he would be a free man.’
Isolde’s colour rose from the level of the water, slowly to her damp forehead. ‘He looks at me?’
‘You know he does.’
‘He looks at me . . .’
‘With desire.’
‘You can’t say that,’ she said, in instant denial.
‘I do say it . . .’ Ishraq insisted.
‘Well, don’t . . .’
In the yard outside, Luca had gone out to take one last look at the werewolf before dinner. Standing on the platform with his back to the inn, he suddenly realised he could see the girls in their bathtub as a reflection in the window opposite. At once he knew he should look away, more than that, he should go immediately into the inn without glancing upwards again. He knew that the image of the two beautiful girls, naked together in their bath, would burn into his mind like a brand, and that he would never be able to forget the sight of them: Ishraq twisting one of Isolde’s blonde ringlets in her brown fingers, stroking a salve into each curl and pinning it up then gently sponging soap onto her pearly back. Luca froze, quite unable to look away, knowing he was committing an unforgivable trespass in spying on them, knowing that he was committing a terrible insult to them and worse, a venal sin, and, finally, as he jumped down from the platform and blundered into the inn, knowing that he had fallen far beyond liking, respect and interest for Isolde – he was burning up with desire for her.
Dinner was unbearably awkward. The girls came downstairs in high spirits, their hair in damp plaits, clean linen and clean clothes making them feel festive, as if for a party. They were met by two subdued men. Brother Peter disapproved of the four of them dining together at all, and Luca could think of nothing but the stolen glimpse of the two girls in the firelight, with their hair down like mermaids.
He choked out a greeting to Isolde and bowed in silence to Ishraq, then rounded on Freize at the door, who was fetching ale and pouring wine. ‘Glasses! The ladies should have glasses.’
‘They’re on the table as any fool can see,’ Freize replied stolidly. He did not look at Ishraq but he rubbed his shoulder as if feeling a painful bruise.
Ishraq smiled at him without a moment’s embarrassment. ‘Have you hurt yourself, Freize?’ she asked sweetly.
The look he shot at her would have filled any other girl with remorse. ‘I was kicked by a donkey,’ he said. ‘Stubborn and stupid is the donkey, and it does not know what is best for it.’
‘Better leave it alone then,’ she suggested.
‘I shall do so,’ Freize said heavily. ‘Nobody tells Freize anything a second time. Especially if it comes with violence.’
‘You were warned,’ she said flatly.
‘I thought it might shy,’ he said. ‘This stupid donkey. I thought it might resist at first. I wouldn’t have been surprised by a coy little nip by way of rebuke and encouragement, all at once. What I didn’t expect was for it to kick out like a damn mule.’
‘Well, you know now,’ replied Ishraq calmly.
He bowed, the very picture of offended dignity. ‘I know now,’ he agreed.
‘What is this all about?’ Isolde suddenly asked.
‘You would have to ask the lady,’ Freize said, with much emphasis on the noun.
Isolde raised an eyebrow at Ishraq, who simply slid her eyes away, indicating silence, and no more was said between the two girls.
‘Are we to wait all night for dinner?’ Luca demanded, and then suddenly thought he had spoken too loudly and, in any case, sounded like a spoiled brat. ‘I mean: is it ready, Freize?’
‘Bringing it in at once, my lord,’ Freize said with injured dignity, and went to the top of the stairs and ordered that dinner be served, by the simple technique of hollering for the cook.
The two girls did most of the talking at dinner, speaking of the shepherd boy, his mother, and the prettiness of their little farm. Brother Peter said little, silent in his disapproval, and Luca tried to make casual and nonchalant remarks but kept tripping himself up as he thought of the dark gold of Isolde’s wet hair, and the warm gleam of her wet skin.
‘Forgive me,’ he suddenly said. ‘I am quite distracted this evening.’
‘Has something happened?’ Isolde asked. Brother Peter fixed him with a long slow stare.
‘No. I had a dream, that was all, and it left my mind filled with pictures, you know how it does? When you can’t stop thinking about something.’
‘What was the dream?’ Ishraq asked.
At once Luca flushed red. ‘I can hardly remember it. I can only see the pictures.’
‘Of what?’
‘I can’t remember them, either,’ Luca stammered. He glanced at Isolde. ‘You will think me a fool.’
She smiled politely and shook her head.
‘Sugared plums,’ Freize remarked, bringing them suddenly to the table. ‘Great deal of fuss about these in the kitchen. And every child in the village waiting at the back door for any that you leave.’
‘I’m afraid we cause a great deal of trouble,’ Isolde remarked.
‘Normally a party with ladies would go on to a bigger town,’ Brother Peter pointed out. ‘That’s why you should be with a larger group of travellers who have ladies with them already.’
‘As soon as we meet up with such a group we’ll join them,’ Isolde promised. ‘I know we are trespassing on your kindness by travelling with you.’
‘And how would you manage for money?’ Brother Peter asked unkindly.
‘Actually, I have some jewels to sell,’ Isolde said.
‘And they have the horses,’ Freize volunteered from the door. ‘Four good horses to sell whenever they need them.’
‘They hardly own them,’ Brother Peter objected.
‘Well, I’m sure you didn’t steal them from the brigands, and the little lord would never steal, and I don’t touch stolen horseflesh, so they must be the property of the ladies and theirs to sell,’ Freize said stoutly.
Both girls laughed. ‘That’s kind of you,’ Isolde said. ‘But perhaps we should share them with you.’
‘Brother Peter can’t take stolen goods,’ Freize said. ‘And he can’t take the fee for showing the werewolf, either, as it’s against his conscience.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ Peter exclaimed impatiently and Luca looked up, as if hearing the conversation for the first time.
‘Freize, you can keep the money for showing the werewolf but don’t charge the people any more. It will only cause bad feeling in the village and we have to have their consent and good will for the inquiry. And of course the ladies should have the horses.’
‘Then we are well provided for,’ Isolde said with a smile to Brother Peter and a warm glance to Luca. ‘And I thank you all.’
‘Thank you, Freize,’ Ishraq said quietly. ‘For the horses came to your whistle and followed you.’
Freize rubbed his shoulder as if he was in severe pain, and turned his head away from her, and said nothing.
They all went to bed early. The inn had only a few candles and the girls took one to light themselves to bed. When they had banked in the fire in their bedroom and blown out the light, Ishraq swung open the shutter and looked down into the bear pit below the window.
In the warm glow of the yellow near-full moon she could make out the shape of Freize, sitting on the bear-pit wall, his legs dangling inside the arena, a fistful of chop bones from dinner in his hand.
‘Come on,’ she heard him whisper. ‘You know you like chop bones, you must like them even more than bread and jam. I saved a little of the fat for you, it’s still warm and crispy. Come on now.’
Like a shadow, the beast wormed its way towards him and halted in the centre of the arena, sitting on its back legs like a dog, facing him, its chest pale in the moonlight, its mane falling back from its face. It waited, its eyes on Freize, watching the chops in his hand, but not daring to come any closer.
Freize dropped one just below his feet, then tossed one a little further away, and then one further than that, and sat rock-still as the beast squirmed to the farthest bone. Ishraq could hear it lick, and then the crunching of the bone as it ate. It paused, licked its lips and then looked longingly at the next bone on the earthen floor of the bear pit.
Unable to resist the scent, it came a little closer, and took up the second bone. ‘There you go,’ Freize said reassuringly. ‘No harm done and you get your dinner. Now, what about this last one?’
The last one was almost under his dangling bare feet. ‘Come on,’ Freize said, urging the beast to trust him. ‘Come on now, what d’you say? What d’you say?’
The beast crept the last few feet to the last bone, gobbled it down and retreated, but only a little way. It looked at Freize, and the man, unafraid, looked back at the beast. ‘What d’you say?’ Freize asked again. ‘D’you like a lamb chop? What d’you say, little beast?’
‘Good,’ the beast said, in the light piping voice of a child. ‘Good.’
Ishraq expected Freize to fling himself off the arena wall and come running into the inn with the amazing news that the beast had spoken a word, but to her surprise he did not move at all. She herself clapped her hand over her mouth to stifle her gasp. Freize was frozen on the bear-pit wall. He neither moved nor spoke, and for a moment she wondered if he had not heard, or if she had misheard or deceived herself in some way. Still Freize sat there like a statue of a man, and the beast sat there like a statue of a beast, watching him; and there was a long silence in the moonlight.
‘Good, eh?’ Freize said, his voice as quiet and level as before. ‘Well, you’re a good beast. More tomorrow. Maybe some bread and cheese for breakfast. We’ll see what I can get you. Goodnight, beast – or what shall I call you? What name do you go by, little beast?’
He waited, but the beast did not reply. ‘You can call me Freize,’ the man said gently to the animal. ‘And perhaps I can be your friend.’
Freize swung his legs over to the safe side of the wall and jumped down, and the beast stood four-legged, listening for a moment, then went to the shelter of the furthest wall, turned around three times like a dog, and curled up for sleep.
Ishraq looked up at the moon. Tomorrow it would be full and the villagers thought that the beast would wax to its power. What might the creature do then?
A delegation from the village arrived the next morning saying respectfully but firmly that they did not want the inquiry to delay justice against the werewolf. They did not see the point of the inquirer speaking to people, and writing things down. Instead, all the village wanted to come to the inn at moonrise, moonrise tonight, to see the changes in the werewolf, and to kill it.
Luca met them in the yard, Isolde and Ishraq with him, while Freize, unseen in the stable, was brushing down the horses listening intently. Brother Peter was upstairs completing the report.
Three men came from the village: the shepherd boy’s father, Ralph Fairley; the village headman, William Miller; and his brother. They were very sure they wanted to see the wolf in its wolf form, kill it, and make an end to the inquiry. The blacksmith was hammering away in the village forge making the silver arrow even as they spoke, they said.
‘Also, we are preparing its grave,’ William Miller told them. He was a round red-faced man of about forty, as pompous and self-important as any man of great consequence in a small village. ‘I am reliably informed that a werewolf has to be buried with certain precautions so that it does not rise again. So to make certain sure that the beast will lie down when it is dead and not stir from its grave, I have given orders to the men to dig a pit at the crossroads outside the village. We’ll bury it with a stake through its heart. We’ll pack the grave with wolfsbane. One of the women of the village, a good woman, has been growing wolfsbane for years.’ He nodded at Luca as if to reassure him. ‘The silver arrow and the stake through its heart. The grave of wolfsbane. That’s the way to do it.’
‘I thought that was the undead?’ Luca said irritably. ‘I thought it was the undead who were buried at crossroads?’
‘No point not taking care,’ Mr Miller said, glowingly confident in his own judgement. ‘No point not doing it right, now that we have finally caught it and we can kill it at our leisure. I thought we would kill it at midnight, with our silver arrow. I thought we would make a bit of an event of it. I myself will be here. I thought I might hand over the silver arrow to the archer, and perhaps I might make a short speech.’
‘This isn’t a bear baiting,’ Luca said. ‘It’s a proper inquiry, and I am commissioned by His Holiness as an inquirer. I can’t have the whole village here, the death sentence agreed before I have prepared my report, and rogues selling seats for a penny.’
‘There was only one rogue doing that,’ Mr Miller pointed out with dignity. The noise of Freize grooming the horse and whistling through his teeth suddenly loudly increased. ‘But the whole village has to see the beast and see its death. Perhaps you don’t understand, coming from Rome as you do. But we’ve lived in fear of it for too long. We’re a small community, we want to know that we are safe now. We need to see that the werewolf is dead and that we can sleep in peace again.’
‘I beg your pardon, sir, but it’s thought that my first son was taken by the beast. I’d like to see an end to it. I’d like to be able to tell my wife that the beast is dead,’ Ralph Fairley, the shepherd boy’s father, volunteered to Luca. ‘If Sara knew that the beast was dead then she might feel that our son Tomas can take the sheep out to pasture without fear. She might sleep through the night again. Seven years she has wakened with nightmares. I want her to be at peace. If the werewolf was dead, she might forgive herself.’
‘You can come at midnight,’ Luca decided. ‘If it is going to change into a wolf then it will do so then. And if we see a change, then I shall be the judge of whether it has become a wolf. Only I shall make that judgement, and only I will rule on its execution.’
‘Should I advise?’ Mr Miller asked hopefully. ‘As a man of experience, of position in the community? Should I consult with you? Help you come to your decision?’
‘No.’ Luca crushed him. ‘This is not going to be a matter of the village turning against a suspect and killing him out of their fear and rage. This is going to be a weighing of the evidence and justice. I am the inquirer. I shall decide.’
‘But who is going to fire the arrow?’ Mr Miller asked. ‘We have an old bow which Mrs Louisa found in her loft, and we have restrung it, but there’s nobody in the village who is trained to use a longbow. When we’re called up to war we go as infantry with billhooks. We haven’t had an archer in this village for ten years.’
There was a brief silence as they considered the difficulty. Then: ‘I can shoot a longbow,’ Ishraq volunteered.
Luca hesitated. ‘It’s a powerful weapon,’ he said. He leaned towards her. ‘Very heavy to bend,’ he said. ‘It’s not like a lady’s bow. You might be skilled in archery, ladies’ sports, but I doubt you could bend a longbow. It’s a very different thing from shooting at the butts.’
Freize’s head appeared over the stable door to listen, but he said nothing.
In answer, she extended her left hand to Luca. On the knuckle of the middle finger was the hard callous, the absolute mark of an archer that identified him like a tattoo. It was an old blister, worn hard by drawing the arrow shaft across the guiding finger. Only someone who had shot arrow after arrow would have his hand marked by it.
‘I can shoot,’ she said. ‘A longbow. Not a lady’s bow.’
‘However did you learn?’ Luca asked, his hand withdrawing from her warm fingers. ‘And why do you practise all the time?’
‘Isolde’s father wanted me to have the skills of the women of my people, even though I was raised far from them,’ she said. ‘We are a fighting people – the women can fight as well as the men. We are a hard people, living in the desert, travelling all the time. We can ride all day. We can find water by smell. We can find game by the turn of the wind. We live by hunting, falconry and archery. You will learn that if I say I can shoot, I can shoot.’
‘If she says she can, she probably can,’ Freize commented from inside the stable. ‘I, for one, can attest that she can fight like a barbarian. She could well be a time-served archer. Certainly, she is no lady.’
Luca glanced from Freize’s offended face, looming over the stable door, to Ishraq. ‘If you can do it, then I shall appoint you executioner and give you the silver arrow. It’s not a skill that I have. There was no call for it in the monastery. And I understand that no-one else here can do it.’
She nodded. ‘I could hit the beast, though it is only a little beast, from the wall of the arena, shooting across to where it cowers, at the far side.’
‘You’re sure?’
She nodded with quiet confidence. ‘Without fail.’
Luca turned to the headman and the two others. ‘I will watch the beast through the day and as the moon rises,’ he said. ‘If I see it transform into a full wolf I will call you, and in any case you can come at midnight. If I judge that it is a wolf in shape as well as nature then this young woman here will serve as executioner. You will bring the silver arrow and we will kill it at midnight, and you can bury it as you see fit.’
‘Agreed,’ the headman said. He turned to go and then he suddenly paused. ‘But what happens if it does not turn? If it does not become wolf? What if it remains as it is now, wolfish but small and savage?’
‘Then we will have to judge what sort of beast it is and what might be done with it,’ Luca said. ‘If it is a natural beast, an innocent animal ordained by God to run free, then I may order it to be released in the wild.’
‘We should try it with tortures,’ someone volunteered.
‘I will try it with the Word,’ Luca said. ‘That is my inquiry, that I am appointed to do. I will take evidence and study the scriptures and decide what it is. Besides, I want to know for my own satisfaction what sort of beast it is. But you can be assured: I will not leave you with a werewolf at your doors. Justice will be done; your children will be safe.’
Ishraq glanced to the stable, expecting Freize to say that it was a speaking beast, but the look he showed her over the stable door was that of the dumbest servant who knows nothing and never speaks out of turn.
At midday the bishop of the region arrived after a day’s journey from the cathedral town of Pescara, accompanied by four attending priests, five scholars, and some servants. Luca greeted him on the doorstep of the inn and welcomed him with as good a grace as he could muster. He could not help but feel that he was completely outclassed by a fully-fledged bishop, dressed all in purple and riding a white mule. He could not help but feel diminished by a man of fifty who had with him nine advisors and what seemed like endless servants.
Freize tried to cheer the cook by explaining that it would all be over one way or another by tonight and that she would have to provide only one great dinner for this unique assembly of great men.
‘Never have I had so many lords in the house at any one time,’ she fretted. ‘I will have to send out for chickens and Jonas will have to let me have the pig that he killed last week.’
‘I’ll serve the dinner, and help you in the kitchen too,’ Freize promised her. ‘I’ll take the dishes up and put them before the gentry. I’ll announce each course and make it sound tremendous.’
‘The Lord knows that all you do is eat, and steal food for that animal in the yard. It’s causing more trouble to me out there than ever it did in the forest.’
‘Should we let it go, d’you think?’ Freize asked playfully.
She crossed herself. ‘Saints save us, no! Not after it took poor Mrs Fairley’s own child and she never recovered from the grief. And last week a lamb, and the week before that a hen right out of the yard. No, the sooner it’s dead the better. And your master had better order it killed or there will be a riot here. You can tell him that, from me. There are men coming into the village, shepherds from the highest farms, who won’t take kindly to a stranger who comes here and says that our werewolf should be spared. Your master should know that there can only be one ending here: the beast must die.’
‘Can I take that ham bone for it?’ Freize asked.
‘Isn’t that the very thing that was going to make soup for the bishop’s dinner?’
‘There’s nothing on it,’ Freize urged her. ‘Give it to me for the beast. You’ll get another bone anyway when Jonas butchers the pig.’
‘Take it, take it,’ she said impatiently. ‘And leave me to get on.’
‘I shall come and help as soon as I have fed the beast,’ Freize promised her.
She waved him out of the kitchen door into the yard and Freize climbed the platform and looked over the arena wall. The beast was lying down, but when it saw Freize it raised its head and watched him.
Freize vaulted to the top of the wall, swung his long legs over, and sat in comfort there, his legs dangling into the bear pit. ‘Now then,’ he said gently. ‘Good morning to you, beast. I hope you are well this morning?’
The beast came a little closer, to the very centre of the pit, and looked up at Freize. Freize leaned into the pit, holding tightly on to the wall with one hand, leaned down so far that the ham bone was dangling just below his feet. ‘Come,’ he said gently. ‘Come and get this. You have no idea what trouble it cost me to get it for you, but I saw the ham carved off it last night and I set my heart on it for you.’
The beast turned its head a little one way and then the other, as if trying to understand the string of words. Clearly, it understood the gentle tone of voice, as it yearned upwards to the silhouette of Freize, on the wall of the bear pit. ‘Come on,’ said Freize. ‘It’s good.’
Cautious as a cat, the beast approached on all fours. It came to the wall of the arena and sat directly under Freize’s feet. Freize stretched down to it and slowly the beast uncurled, put its front paws on the walls of the arena and reached up. It stood tall, perhaps more than four feet. Freize fought the temptation to shrink back from it, imagining it would sense his fear; but also he was driven on to see if he could feed this animal by hand, to see if he could bridge the divide between this beast and man. And he was driven, as always, by his own love of the dumb, the vulnerable, the hurt. He stretched down a little lower and the beast stretched up its shaggy head and gently took the ham bone in its mouth, as if it had been fed by a loving hand, all its life.
The moment it had the meat in its strong jaws, it sprang back from Freize, dropped to all fours and scuttled to the other side of the bear pit. Freize straightened up – and found Ishraq’s dark eyes on him.
‘Why feed it if I am to shoot it tonight?’ she asked quietly. ‘Why be kind to it, if it is nothing but a dead beast waiting for the arrow?’
‘Perhaps you won’t have to shoot it tonight,’ Freize answered. ‘Perhaps the little lord will find that it’s a beast we don’t know, or some poor creature that was lost from a fair. Perhaps he will rule that it’s an oddity, but not a limb of Satan. Perhaps he will say it is a changeling, put among us by strange people. Surely it is more like an ape than a wolf? What sort of a beast is it? Have you, in all your travels, in all your study, seen such a beast before?’
She looked uncertain. ‘No, never. The bishop is talking with your lord now. They are going through all sorts of books and papers to judge what should be done, how it should be tried and tested, how it should be killed, and how it should be buried. The bishop has brought in all sorts of scholars with him who say they know what should be done.’ She paused. ‘If it can speak like a Christian, then that alters everything. Your lord, Luca Vero, should be told.’
Freize’s glance never wavered. ‘Why would you think it could speak?’ he said.
She met his gaze without coquetry. ‘You’re not the only one who takes an interest in it,’ she said.
All day Luca was closeted with the bishop, his priests, and his scholars, the dining table spread with papers which recorded judgements against werewolves and the histories of wolves going back to the very earliest times: records from the Greek philosophers’ accounts, translated by the Arabs into Arabic and then translated back again into Latin. ‘So God knows what they were saying in the first place,’ Luca confided in Brother Peter. ‘There are a dozen prejudices that the words have to get through, there are half a dozen scholars for every single account, and they all have a different opinion.’
‘We have to have a clear ruling for our inquiry,’ Brother Peter said, worried. ‘It’s not enough to have a history of anything that anyone thinks they have seen, going back hundreds of years. We are supposed to examine the facts here, and you are supposed to establish the truth. We don’t want antique gossip – we want evidence, and then a judgement.’
They cleared the table for the midday meal and the bishop recited a long grace. Ishraq and Isolde were banned from the councils of men and ate dinner in their own room, looking out over the yard. They watched Freize sit on the wall of the bear pit, a wooden platter balanced on his knee, sharing his food with the beast that sat beneath him, glancing up from time to time, watching for scraps, as loyal and as uncomplaining as a dog, but somehow unlike a dog – a sort of independence.
‘It’s a monkey for sure,’ Isolde said. ‘I have seen a picture of one in a book my father had at home.’
‘Can they speak?’ Ishraq asked. ‘Monkeys? Can they speak?’
‘It looked as if it could speak, it had lips and teeth like us, and eyes that looked as if it had thoughts and wanted to tell them.’
‘I don’t think this beast is a monkey,’ Ishraq said, carefully. ‘I think this beast can speak.’
‘Like a parrot?’ Isolde asked.
They both watched Freize lean down and the beast reach up. They saw Freize pass a scrap of bread and apple down to the beast and the beast take it in his paw, not in his mouth – take it in his paw and then sit on his haunches and eat it, holding it to his mouth like a big squirrel.
‘Not like a parrot,’ Ishraq said. ‘I think it can speak like a Christian. We cannot kill it, we cannot stand by and see it killed until we know what it is. Clearly it is not a wolf, but what is it?’
‘It’s not for us to judge.’
‘It is,’ Ishraq said. ‘Not because we are Christians – for I am not. Not because we are men – for we are not. But because we are like the beast: outsiders that other people dread. People don’t understand women who are neither wives nor mothers, daughters nor confined. People fear women of passion, women of education. I am a young woman of education, of colour, of unknown religion and my own faith, and I am as strange to the people of this little village as the beast. Should I stand by and see them kill it because they don’t understand what it is? If I let them kill it without a word of protest, what would stop them coming for me?’
‘Will you tell Luca this?’
Ishraq shrugged. ‘What’s the use? He’s listening to the bishop, he’s not going to listen to me.’
At about two in the afternoon the men agreed on what was to be done and the bishop stepped out to the doorstep of the inn to announce their decision. ‘If the beast transforms into a full wolf at midnight then the heretic woman will shoot it with a silver arrow,’ he ruled. ‘The villagers will bury it in a crate packed with wolfsbane at the crossroads and the blacksmith will hammer a stake through its heart.’
‘My wife will bring the wolfsbane,’ Ralph Fairley volunteered. ‘God knows she grows enough of it.’
‘If the beast does not transform . . .’ The bishop raised his hand, and raised his voice, against the murmur of disbelief. ‘I know, good people, that you are certain that it will . . . but just suppose that it does not . . . then we will release it to the authorities of this village, the lord and yourself, Master Miller, and you may do with it what you will. Man has dominion over the animals, given to him by God. God Himself has decreed that you can do what you want with this beast. It was a beast running wild near your village, you caught it and held it, God has given you all the beasts into your dominion – you may do with it what you wish.’
Mr Miller nodded grimly. There was little doubt in anyone’s mind that the beast would not last long after it was handed over to the village.
‘They will hack it to pieces,’ Ishraq muttered to Isolde.
‘Can we stop them?’ she whispered back.
‘No.’
‘And now,’ the bishop ruled, ‘I advise you to go about your business until midnight when we will all see the beast. I myself am going to the church where I will say Vespers and Compline and I suggest that you all make your confessions and make an offering to the church before coming to see this great sight which has been wished upon your village.’ He paused. ‘God will smile on those who donate to the church tonight,’ he said. ‘The angel of the Lord has passed among you, it is meet to offer him thanks and praise.’
‘What does that mean?’ Ishraq asked Isolde.
‘It means: “pay up for the privilege of a visit from a bishop”,’ Isolde translated.
‘You know, I thought it did.’
There was nothing to do but to wait until midnight. Freize fed the beast after dinner and it came and sat at his feet and looked up at him, as if it would speak with him, but it could find no words. In turn Freize wanted to warn the beast, but with its trusting brown eyes peering at him through its matted mane he found he could not explain what was to happen. As the moon rose, man and beast kept a vigil with each other, just as the bishop was keeping vigil in the church. The beast’s leonine head turned up to Freize as he sat, darkly profiled against the starlit sky, murmuring quietly to it, hoping that it would speak again; but it said nothing.
‘It would be a good time now for you to say your name, my darling,’ he said quietly. ‘One “God bless” would save your life. Or just “good” again. Speak, beast, before midnight. Or speak at midnight. Speak when everyone is looking at you. But speak. Make sure you speak.’
The animal looked at him, its eyebrows raised, its head on one side, its eyes bright brown through the tangled hair. ‘Speak, beast,’ Freize urged him again. ‘No point being dumb if you can speak. If you could say “God bless” they would account it a miracle. Can you say it? After me?“God bless”?’
At eleven o’ clock the people started to gather outside the stable door, some carrying billhooks and others scythes and axes. It was clear that if the bishop did not order the animal shot with the silver arrow then the men would take the law into their own hands, cleave it apart with their tools or tear it apart with their bare hands. Freize looked out through the door and saw some men at the back of the crowd levering up the cobbles with an axe head, and tucking the stones into their pockets.
Ishraq came out of the inn to find Freize, reaching down into the bear pit to give the beast a morsel of bread and cheese.
‘They are certain to kill it,’ she said. ‘They have not come for a trial; they have come to see it die.’
‘I know,’ he nodded.
‘Whatever sort of beast it is, I doubt that it is a werewolf.’
He shrugged. ‘Not having seen one before, I couldn’t say. But this is an animal which seeks contact with humans, it’s not a killer like a wolf, it’s more companionable than that. Like a dog in its willingness to come close, like a horse in its shy pride, like a cat in its indifference. I don’t know what sort of beast it is. But I would put my year’s wages on it being an endearing beast, a loving beast, a loyal beast. It’s a beast that can learn, it’s a beast that can change its ways.’
‘They’re not going to spare it on my word or yours,’ she said.
He shook his head. ‘Not on any word from either of us. Nobody listens to the unimportant. But the little lord might save it.’
‘He’s got the bishop against him, and the bishop’s scholars.’
‘Would your lady speak up for it?’
She shrugged. ‘Who ever listens to a woman?’
‘No man of any sense,’ he replied instantly and was pleased to see the gleam of her smile.
She looked down at the beast. It looked up at her and its ugly truncated face seemed almost human. ‘Poor beast,’ she said.
‘If it was a fairytale you could kiss it,’ Freize volunteered. ‘You could bend down and kiss it and it would be a prince. Love can make miracles with beasts, so they say. But no! Forgive me, I remember now, that you don’t kiss. Indeed, you throw a good man down in the mud for even thinking that you might.’
She did not respond to his teasing, but for a moment she looked very thoughtful. ‘You know, you’re right. Only love can save it,’ she said. ‘That is what you have been showing from the moment you first saw it. Love.’
‘I wouldn’t say that I. . .’ Freize started, but in that moment she was gone.
In a very little while, the head of the village, Mr Miller, hammered at the gate of the inn and Freize and the inn servant opened the great double doors to the stable yard. The villagers flooded in and took their places on the tables that surrounded the outer wall of the arena, just as they would for a bear baiting. The men brought strong ale with them, and their wives sipped from their cups, laughing and smiling. The young men of the village came with their sweethearts, and the cook in the kitchen sold little cakes and pies out of the kitchen door, while the maids ran around the stable yard selling mulled ale and wine. It was an execution and a party: both at once.
Ishraq saw Sara Fairley arrive, a great basket of wolfsbane in her arms, and her husband followed behind, leading their donkey loaded with the herb. They tied the donkey in the archway and came into the yard, their boy with his usual sprig of wolfsbane in his hat.
‘You came,’ Isolde said warmly, stepping forwards. ‘I am glad that you are here. I am glad that you felt you could come.’
‘My husband thought that we should,’ Sara replied, her face very pale. ‘He thought it would satisfy me to see the beast dead at last. And everyone else is here. I could not let the village gather without me, they shared my sorrow. They want to see the end of the story.’
‘I am glad you came,’ Isolde repeated. The woman clambered up on the trestle table beside Ishraq, and Isolde followed her.
‘You have the arrowhead?’ the woman asked Ishraq. ‘You are going to shoot it?’
Without a word, the young woman nodded and showed her the longbow and the silver-tipped arrow.
‘You can hit it from here?’
‘Without fail,’ Ishraq said grimly. ‘If he turns into a wolf, then the inquirer will see him turn, he will tell me to kill him, and I will do so. But I think he is not a wolf, nor anything like a wolf, not a werewolf nor any animal that we know.’
‘If we don’t know what it is, and can’t tell what it is, it’s better dead,’ the man said firmly, but Sara Fairley looked from the beast to the silver arrowhead and gave a little shiver. Ishraq gazed steadily at her and Isolde put her hand over the woman’s trembling fingers. ‘Don’t you want the beast dead?’ Isolde asked her.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know for sure if it took my child, I don’t know for sure if it is the monster that everyone says. And there is something about it that moves me to pity.’ She looked at the two young women. ‘You will think me a fool; but I am sorry for it,’ she said.
She was still speaking as the doors of the inn opened and Luca, Brother Peter and the bishop, the scholars, and the priests came out. Isolde and Ishraq exchanged one urgent glance. ‘I’ll tell him,’ Isolde said swiftly and jumped down from the stand and made her way to the door of the inn, pushing through the crowd to get to Luca.
‘Is it near to midnight?’ the bishop asked.
‘I have ordered the church bell to be tolled on the hour,’ one of the priests replied.
The bishop inclined his head to Luca. ‘How are you going to examine the supposed werewolf?’ he asked.
‘I thought I would wait till midnight, and watch it,’ Luca said. ‘If it changes into a wolf we will clearly be able to see it. Perhaps we should douse the torches so that the beast can feel the full effect of the moon.’
‘I agree. Put out the torches!’ the bishop ordered.
As soon as the darkness drowned the yard, everyone was silent, as if fearful of what they were doing. The women murmured and crossed themselves, and the younger children clung to their mothers’ skirts. One of them whimpered quietly.
‘I can’t even see it,’ someone complained.
‘No, there it is!’
The beast had shrunk back into its usual spot as the yard had filled with noisy people; now, in the darkness it was hard to see, its dark mane against the dark wood of the bear-pit wall, its dark skin concealed against the mud of the earth floor. People blinked and rubbed their eyes, waiting for the dazzle of the torches to wear off, and then Mr Miller said, ‘He’s moving!’
The beast had risen to its four feet and was looking around, swinging his head as if fearful that danger was coming but not knowing what was about to happen. There was a whisper like a cursing wind that ran around the arena as everyone saw him move, and most men swore that he should be killed at once. Freize saw people feeling for the cobbles they had tucked into their pockets, and knew that they would stone the beast to death.
Isolde got to Luca’s side and touched his arm; he leaned his head to listen. ‘Don’t kill the beast,’ she whispered to him.
At the side of the arena, Freize exchanged one apprehensive look with Ishraq, saw the gleam of the silver arrowhead and her steady hand on the bow, and then turned his gaze back to the beast. ‘Now gently,’ he said, but it could not hear his voice above the low curses that rumbled around it, and it pulled back its head and hunched its shoulders as if it was afraid.
Slowly, ominously, as if announcing a death, the church bell started to toll. The beast flinched at the noise, shaking its mane as if the sonorous clang was echoing in its head. Someone laughed abruptly, but the voice was sharp with fear. Everyone was watching as the final notes of the midnight bell died on the air and the full moon, bright as a cold sun, rose slowly over the roof of the inn and shone down on the beast as it stood at bay, not moving, sweating in its terror.
There was no sign of hair growing, there was no sign of the beast getting bigger. Its teeth did not grow, nor did it sprout a tail. It stayed on four legs, but the watchers, looking intently, could see that it was shivering, like a little deer will shiver when chilled by frost.
‘Is it changing?’ the bishop asked Luca. ‘I can’t see anything. I can’t see that it is doing anything.’
‘It’s just standing, and looking round,’ Luca replied. ‘I can’t see any hair growing, and yet the moon is full on it.’
Somebody in the crowd cruelly howled in a joking impression of a wolf, and the beast turned its head sharply towards the sound as if it hoped it were real, but then shrank back as it realised that it was a harsh jest.
‘Is it changing now?’ the bishop asked again, urgently.
‘I can’t see,’ Luca said. ‘I don’t think so.’ He looked up. A cloud, no bigger than a clenched fist, was coming up over the full moon, wisps of it already darkening the arena. ‘Maybe we should get the torches lit again,’ Luca said anxiously. ‘We’re losing the light.’
‘Is the beast changing to wolf?’ the bishop demanded even more urgently. ‘We will have to tell the people our decision. Can you order the girl to shoot it?’
‘I can’t,’ Luca said bluntly. ‘In justice, I cannot. It’s not turning to wolf. It’s in full moon, it’s in moonlight, and it’s not turning.’
‘Don’t shoot,’ Isolde said urgently to him.
It was getting swiftly darker as the cloud came over the moon. The crowd groaned, a deep, fearful sound. ‘Shoot it! Shoot it quickly!’ someone called.
It was pitch black now. ‘Torches!’ Luca shouted. ‘Get some torches lit!’
Suddenly there was a piercing terrible scream, and the sound of someone falling: a thud as she hit the ground and then a desperate scrabbling noise as she struggled to her feet.
‘What is it?’ Luca fought to the front of the crowd and strained his eyes, peering down into the darkness of the arena. ‘Light the torches! In God’s name what has happened?’
‘Save me!’ Sara Fairley cried out in panic. ‘Dear God, save me!’ She had fallen from the wall into the bear pit and was alone in the arena, her back pressed against the wooden wall, her eyes straining into the darkness as she looked for the beast. The animal was on its feet now, peering towards her with its amber eyes. It could see well in the darkness, though everyone else was blind. It could see the woman, her hands held out before her, as if she thought she could fend off fangs and pouncing claws.
‘Ishraq! Shoot!’ Luca shouted at her.
He could not see her dark hood, her dark eyes, but he could see the glint of the silver of the arrow, he could see the arrow on the string pointed steadily towards the dark shadow, which was the beast scenting the air, taking one hesitant step forwards. And then he heard her voice; but she was not calling to him, she was shouting down to Sara Fairley as she froze in terror, pinned against the wall of the arena.
‘Call him!’ Ishraq shouted to Sara. ‘Call the beast.’
The white blur of Sara’s frightened face turned up to Ishraq. ‘What?’ She was deaf with terror: too afraid to understand anything. ‘What?’
‘Don’t you know his name?’ Ishraq demanded gently, the silver arrow pointing unwaveringly at the beast slowly creeping closer.
‘How should I know the name of the beast?’ she whispered up. ‘Get me out! Get me up. For the love of God! Save me!’
‘Look at him. Look at him with your love. Who have you missed for all this time? What was his name?’
Sara stared at Ishraq as if she were speaking Arabic, and then she turned to the beast. It was closer still, head bowed, moving its weight from one side to the other, as if readying for a pounce. It was coming, without a doubt. It snarled, showing yellow teeth. Its head raised up, smelling fear; it was ready to attack. It took three stiff-legged steps forwards; now it would duck its head and run and lunge for her throat.
‘Ishraq! Shoot the beast!’ Luca yelled. ‘That’s an order!’
‘Call him,’ Ishraq urged the woman desperately. ‘Call him by the name you love most in the world.’
Outside the arena, Ralph Fairley dashed to the stables shouting for a ladder, leaving his son frozen with horror on the bear-pit fence, watching his mother face the beast.
Everyone was silent. They could just see the beast in the flickering light of the two torches, could see it slowly coming towards the woman, in the classic stalk of a wolf, its head down, level with its hunched shoulders, its eyes on the prey, sinuously moving forwards.
Freize thrust one torch into Luca’s hand and readied himself to jump down into the bear pit with another flaming in his grip as Sara spoke: ‘Stefan?’ she asked in a hushed whisper. ‘Stefan? Is that you?’
The beast stopped, putting its head on one side.
‘Stefan?’ she whispered. ‘Stefan, my son? Stefan – my son?’
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 servant who had an arrow on the bow and didn’t shoot. It was your 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 found again, raised by wolves. 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. 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 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.