nearly tipped over his slop bucket. ‘I knew! Herod was amongst us once more, and where Herod is, near about is Emmanuel. O, I was frantic! I’d weathered millennia, but now time was short. I searched between the stars for my brothers, in deep time; I sailed on the burning winds between suns until at last I saw a pair of shifting shadows on the bloody skin of a dying star: two wrestlers. I raced to intervene – O, but the vacuum is vast. When I reached the star, the hurly-burly was done and only a smouldering husk was left of what had been my youngest brother.’
For a time Fra Norcino said nothing, just sat humming and cooing to himself.
Torbidda leaned in to examine the shivering sobbing wreck.
‘My elder brother has fallen into apostasy,’ Norcino confessed quietly. ‘He is Magi no more.’ Suddenly he reached out, and Torbidda flinched instinctively, but he was too slow. Norcino pulled him to the bars, babbling in his ear, ‘You are the last Apprentice as I am the last Magi! When I returned to my body, my skin was raw and blistered and a buzzard was feeding on my eyes. I did not blame the creature; all things need sustenance. I sucked it dry and threw myself from the pillar, and after my bones healed, I limped towards Etruria. On the way, I fell in with some pilgrims—’
‘Yes, I remember,’ Torbidda said, struggling to free himself.
‘—but when I came to Concord and learned that Girolamo Bernoulli was long dead, I feared that I was too late. I launched my spirit once more into the stars, to search out my King. I did not look long. It’s close, Torbidda, closer than ever before. The Darkness waits behind the rising sun to swallow the world at last. It told me to tarry in the desert until the temple burned; it told me the vessel would soon be ready. Then you found me.’
‘I told you before, I’m no lamb.’ Torbidda’s hand blindly searched for the switch.
The blind man’s breath was the rabid panting of a predator about to pounce. ‘Seek your heart: you know you have a great destiny, if only you will stop running from it. Torbidda, you were born to slay God’s son!’
Torbidda’s fingers found the switch and the cell was flooded with crackling blue light. The current passed to his body from Norcino’s and when his grip fell away, they collapsed as one on either side of the bars: prisoner and jailer; courtier and king.
CHAPTER 61
Volume II: the Land across the Water CRUSADE
Before broaching this perennially thorny subject, a brief review is necessary of the Holy Land from the expulsion of the Etruscans to the eve of the Western invasion.
The desert has been always incontinent with prophets, but in the first century a flood of holy fools doused the land. Each heralded a new kingdom; each had a vision that bloomed as briefly as desert flowers, beautiful and inconsequential. The Prophetess’ message was different, and not merely in the sense that she preached with a dagger. In the great fire that consumed Jerusalem, she reforged Judaism into a proselytising creed. She turned an inchoate resentment of Etruscans into nationalism. In a remarkable few decades, waves of fanatical armies erupted from the desert to envelop the Middle East and beyond.22
After the Prophetess’ death, and under the guidance of her apostles,23 power migrated to the more refined coastal cities; the capital shifted north to Tyre, then south to Alexandria before meeting halfway in Akka. The nomadic fighting spirit of the desert was lauded ever louder as the Radinate became more cosmopolitan. The Melics’ belief that this savage hinterland would always save them in time of peril was about to be tested.24
CHAPTER 62
As the fogbank on the Tarentine coast thinned under the morning sun, a small skiff emerged, drawing on silent oars. Only when the Tancred and her escort were out of sight did Sofia dare speak. ‘What now?’
‘Now we run,’ said Ezra. He set the jib opposite the mainsail and goosewinged it, to put some distance between them and the watchful shores of Etruria. The streamlined little boat’s cutwater sank like a dagger into the waves and released an arterial spray that misted them. After a few hours, they cleared the strait and felt the welcome chill of the northern tradewind that would carry them south.
The course Ezra plotted would take them by Crete, then they would hug the Anatolian coast until they reached Cyprus and