travelled that day. It was evening when Sofia noticed something amiss.
Ezra was standing still, though the sail was flapping, bleeding wind. Levi was merrily murdering a condottieri song – something about stealing a dead comrade’s boots – when suddenly Ezra turned about. The look on his face made Levi fall silent.
Ezra mumbled something as he took in the sail and the wind abruptly ceased, then he turned back to the water.
Sofia said quietly, ‘What is it?’
He put his fingers to his lips and whispered, ‘We’re hunted.’
Sofia and Levi looked behind them – if the Moor was following, then surely they should sail for the nearest shore, and quickly? But Ezra was looking down, into the cold depths of the wine-dark sea. Abruptly he pointed, his finger travelling slowly over the surface.
‘I don’t see anything,’ said Levi, but Sofia felt her skin crawl as the foul shadow of something, a great fish or worm, crossed their path below, followed by a wafting stench of dead, sodden flesh, worse even than the burning sheep mound near Gubbio. A minute passed before the wind took up again.
Ezra quietly raised the sail. ‘It’s gone, but we must be on guard.’
Levi announced that in his considered opinion, Ezra and Sofia were sun-touched, and he was going to take a nap.
Sofia found Ezra looking at her. ‘You’ve tangled with that old fellow before?’ he asked.
‘Only in dreams. This is the real world—’
‘There are places where they are one. We’re in the sea’s hands now. The dark place that fellow came from wants to keep you from your destination.’
‘Those tales you read us yesterday – you believe them? That Mary’s son could have made everything better for ever?’
‘Oh, not so long as that,’ Ezra said. ‘Even Messiah is not once and for all. Messiah is the spring that must come when the earth has grown old. For hundreds of thousands of years the seasons of Man have rotated: after summer comes winter, the heat retreats from the land, rivers dry up, the deserts grow, the earth shrinks. Good deeds become rare, charity a myth, cynicism prevails. And then, at the darkest hour, a new voice cries out and all who hear it remember there were once such things as honour and love, and all the wickedness of the world loses courage and retreats into the Darkness.’
‘But God let Herod kill him.’
‘Who told you God is master of this world? The disaster that befell the Madonna was His disaster as much as ours. Her grief is everyone’s. We see its results all round us – corruption and deceit, revolution and civil war spreading like plague until all hope is gone.’
Pedro escaped Ariminum before the alarm went up. On the way back to Rasenna he halted briefly near Gubbio. Where the burning sheep mound had been was a black patch of grassless earth that stank like a wound. The men were gone, the tree empty. Hereabouts Giovanni had died, and hereabouts a second Giovanni had been born. The carrion was too decayed even for scavengers, and the rot in the air made it hard to think clearly. He hurried home.
His first stop in Rasenna was the baptistery. He remembered visiting Giovanni here after he’d almost drowned – had Giovanni himself begun to suspect then? In the light of Sofia’s revelation, Pedro felt duty-bound to re-examine all his assumptions. His initial reaction had been doubt. Engineers were sceptical of theory and faithful to experience, but Giovanni hadn’t been an ordinary engineer; and his grandfather certainly wasn’t. The Concordians had pulled the mechanical arts to a frontier where it was not measurable phenomena like Gravity or Friction that mattered but the unquantifiable: Faith and Love. Pedro had helped to create the transmission that had stopped the Wave during the siege, so he knew the mathematics it was based on, backwards and forwards. It was as solid as a gear-shank.
As he tied up his horse, the unfinished orphanage next to the baptistery seemed to reproach him. Inside, he circled the cool interior looking up at the stages of the Madonna’s life. The fanciful story was familiar, of course, but its meaning had always been remote. He had never even considered that it might be taken seriously, let alone literally.
‘Do you believe in Her?’
Pedro turned and found Isabella standing at the doorway.
‘I believe in things I see.’
‘You saw the Wave.’
‘That’s no more miracle than a flag is. It’s a weapon made by men.’
‘Understand a thing and it ceases to be miraculous?’
‘I suppose. The