Changeling Read online

  The Inquisitor sat back in his chair as if he was weary of listening, as if he had heard more than enough. ‘You can get up.’

  He looked at the paper with its few black ink notes as Luca scrambled to his feet. ‘Now I will answer the questions that will be in your mind. I am the spiritual commander of an Order appointed by the Holy Father, the Pope himself, and I answer to him for our work. You need not know my name nor the name of the Order. We have been commanded by Pope Nicholas V to explore the mysteries, the heresies and the sins, to explain them where possible, and defeat them where we can. We are making a map of the fears of the world, travelling outwards from Rome to the very ends of Christendom to discover what people are saying, what they are fearing, what they are fighting. We have to know where the Devil is walking through the world. The Holy Father knows that we are approaching the end of days.’

  ‘The end of days?’

  ‘When Christ comes again to judge the living, the dead, and the undead. You will have heard that the Ottomans have taken Constantinople, the heart of the Byzantine empire, the centre of the Church in the east?’

  Luca crossed himself. The fall of the eastern capital of the Church to an unbeatable army of heretics and infidels was the most terrible thing that could have happened, an unimaginable disaster.

  ‘Next, the forces of darkness will come against Rome, and if Rome falls it will be the end of days – the end of the world. Our task is to defend Christendom, to defend Rome – in this world, and in the unseen world beyond.’

  ‘The unseen world?’

  ‘It is all around us,’ the man said flatly. ‘I see it, perhaps as clearly as you see numbers. And every year, every day, it presses more closely. People come to me with stories of showers of blood, of a dog that can smell out the plague, of witchcraft, of lights in the sky, of water that is wine. The end of days approaches and there are hundreds of manifestations of good and evil, miracles and heresies. A young man like you can perhaps tell me which of these are true, and which are false, which are the work of God and which of the Devil.’ He rose from his great wooden chair and pushed a fresh sheet of paper across the table to Luca. ‘See this?’

  Luca looked at the marks on the paper. It was the writing of heretics, the Moors’ way of numbering. Luca had been taught as a child that one stroke of the pen meant one: I, two strokes meant two: II, and so on. But these were strange rounded shapes. He had seen them before, but the merchants in his village and the almoner at the monastery stubbornly refused to use them, clinging to the old ways.

  ‘This means one: 1, this two: 2, and this three: 3,’ the man said, the black feather tip of his quill pointing to the marks. ‘Put the 1 here, in this column, it means one, but put it here and this blank beside it and it means ten, or put it here and two blanks beside it, it means one hundred.’

  Luca gaped. ‘The position of the number shows its value?’

  ‘Just so.’ The man pointed the plume of the black feather to the shape of the blank, like an elongated O, which filled the columns. His arm stretched from the sleeve of his robe and Luca looked from the O to the white skin of the man’s inner wrist. Tattooed on the inside of his arm, so that it almost appeared engraved on skin, Luca could just make out the head and twisted tail of a dragon, a design in red ink of a dragon coiled around on itself.

  ‘This is not just a blank, it is not just an O, it is what they call a zero. Look at the position of it – that means something. What if it meant something of itself?’

  ‘Does it mean a space?’ Luca said, looking at the paper again. ‘Does it mean: nothing?’

  ‘It is a number like any other,’ the man told him. ‘They have made a number from nothing. So they can calculate to nothing, and beyond.’

  ‘Beyond? Beyond nothing?’

  The man pointed to another number: –10. ‘That is beyond nothing. That is ten places beyond nothing, that is the numbering of absence,’ he said.

  Luca, with his mind whirling, reached out for the paper. But the man quietly drew it back towards him and placed his broad hand over it, keeping it from Luca like a prize he would have to win. The sleeve fell down over his wrist again, hiding the tattoo. ‘You know how they got to that sign, the number zero?’ he asked.

  Luca shook his head. ‘Who got to it?’

  ‘Arabs, Moors, Ottomans, call them what you will. Mussulmen, Muslim-men, infidels, our enemies, our new conquerors. Do you know how they got that sign?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It is the shape left by a counter in the sand when you have taken the counter away. It is the symbol for nothing, it looks like a nothing. It is what it symbolises. That is how they think. That is what we have to learn from them.’

  ‘I don’t understand. What do we have to learn?’

  ‘To look, and look, and look. That is what they do. They look at everything, they think about everything, that is why they have seen stars in the sky that we have never seen. That is why they make physic from plants that we have never noticed.’ He pulled his hood closer, so that his face was completely shadowed. ‘That is why they will defeat us unless we learn to see like they see, to think like they think, to count like they count. Perhaps a young man like you can learn their language too.’

  Luca could not take his eyes from the paper where the man had marked out ten spaces of counting, down to zero and then beyond.

  ‘So, what do you think?’ the Inquisitor asked him. ‘Do you think ten nothings are beings of the unseen world? Like ten invisible things? Ten ghosts? Ten angels?’

  ‘If you could calculate beyond nothing,’ Luca started, ‘you could show what you had lost. Say someone was a merchant, and his debt in one country, or on one voyage, was greater than his fortune, you could show exactly how much his debt was. You could show his loss. You could show how much less than nothing he had, how much he would have to earn before he had something again.’

  ‘Yes,’ the man said. ‘With zero you can measure what is not there. The Ottomans took Constantinople and our empire in the east not only because they had the strongest armies and the best commanders, but because they had a weapon that we did not have: a cannon so massive that it took sixty oxen to pull it into place. They have knowledge of things that we don’t understand. The reason that I sent for you, the reason that you were expelled from your monastery but not punished there for disobedience or tortured for heresy, is that I want you to learn these mysteries; I want you to explore them, so that we can know them, and arm ourselves against them.’

  ‘Is zero one of the things I must study? Will I go to the Ottomans and learn from them? Will I learn about their studies?’

  The man laughed and pushed the piece of paper with the Arabic numerals towards the novice priest, holding it with one finger on the page. ‘I will let you have this,’ he promised. ‘It can be your reward when you have worked to my satisfaction and set out on your mission. And yes, perhaps you will go to the infidel and live among them and learn their ways. But for now, you have to swear obedience to me and to our Order. I will send you out to be my ears and eyes. I will send you to hunt for mysteries, to find knowledge. I will send you to map fears, to seek darkness in all its shapes and forms. I will send you out to understand things, to be part of our Order that seeks to understand everything.’

  He could see Luca’s face light up at the thought of a life devoted to inquiry. But then the young man hesitated. ‘I won’t know what to do,’ Luca confessed. ‘I wouldn’t know where to begin. I understand nothing! How will I know where to go or what to do?’

  ‘I am going to send you to be trained. I will send you to study with masters. They will teach you the law, and what powers you have to convene a court or an inquiry. You will learn what to look for and how to question someone. You will understand when someone must be released to earthly powers – the mayors of towns or the lords of the manor; or when they can be punished by the Church. You will learn when to forgive and when to punish. When you are ready, when you have been trained, I will send you on
your first mission.’

  Luca nodded.

  ‘You will be trained for some months and then I shall send you out into the world with my orders,’ the man said. ‘You will go where I command and study what you find there. You will report to me. You may judge and punish where you find wrong-doing. You may exorcise devils and unclean spirits. You may learn. You may question everything, all the time. But you will serve God and me, as I tell you. You will be obedient to me and to the Order. And you will walk in the unseen world and look at unseen things, and question them.’

  There was a silence. ‘You can go,’ the man said, as if he had given the simplest of instructions. Luca started from his silent attention and went to the door. As his hand was on the bronze handle the man said: ‘One thing more . . .’

  Luca turned.

  ‘They said you were a changeling, didn’t they?’ The accusation dropped into the room like a sudden shower of ice. ‘The people of the village? When they gossiped about you being born, so handsome and so clever, to a woman who had been barren all her life, to a man who could neither read nor write. They said you were a changeling, left on her doorstep by the faeries, didn’t they?’

  There was a cold silence. Luca’s stern young face revealed nothing. ‘I have never answered such a question, and I hope that I never do. I don’t know what they said about us,’ he said harshly. ‘They were ignorant fearful country people. My mother said to pay no attention to the things they said. She said that she was my mother and that she loved me above all else. That’s all that mattered, not stories about faerie children.’

  The man laughed shortly and waved Luca to go, and watched as the door closed beind him. ‘Perhaps I am sending out a changeling to map fear itself,’ he said to himself, as he tidied the papers together and pushed back his chair. ‘What a joke for the worlds seen and unseen! A faerie child in the Order. A faerie child to map fear.’

  THE CASTLE OF LUCRETILI, JUNE 1453

  At about the time that Luca was being questioned, a young woman was seated in a rich chair in the chapel of her family home, the Castle of Lucretili, about twenty miles north-east of Rome, her dark blue eyes fixed on the rich crucifix, her fair hair twisted in a careless plait under a black veil, her face strained and pale. A candle in a rose crystal bowl flickered on the altar as the priest moved in the shadows. She knelt, her hands clasped tightly together, praying fervently for her father, who was fighting for his life in his bedchamber, refusing to see her.

  The door at the back of the chapel opened and her brother came in quietly, saw her bowed head and went to kneel beside her. She looked sideways at him, a handsome young man, dark-haired, dark-browed, his face stern with grief. ‘He’s gone, Isolde, he’s gone. May he rest in peace.’

  Her white face crumpled and she put her hands over her eyes. ‘He didn’t ask for me? Not even at the end?’

  ‘He didn’t want you to see him in pain. He wanted you to remember him as he had been, strong and healthy. But his last words were to send you his blessing, and his last thoughts were of your future.’

  She shook her head. ‘I can’t believe he would not give me his blessing.’

  Giorgio turned from her and spoke to the priest, who hurried at once to the back of the chapel. Isolde heard the big bell start to toll; everyone would know that the great crusader, the Lord of Lucretili, was dead.

  ‘I must pray for him,’ she said quietly. ‘You’ll bring his body here?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I will share the vigil tonight,’ she decided. ‘I will sit beside him now that he is dead though he didn’t allow it while he lived.’ She paused. ‘He didn’t leave me a letter? Nothing?’

  ‘His will,’ her brother said softly. ‘He planned for you. At the very end of his life he was thinking of you.’

  She nodded, her dark blue eyes filling with tears, then she clasped her hands together, and prayed for her father’s soul.

  Isolde spent the first long night of her father’s death in a silent vigil beside his coffin, which lay in the family chapel. Four of his men-at-arms stood, one at each point of the compass, their heads bowed over their broadswords, the light from the tall wax candles glittering on the holy water that had been sprinkled on the coffin lid. Isolde, dressed in white, knelt before the coffin all night long until dawn when the priest came to say Prime, the first office of prayers of the day. Only then did she rise up and let her ladies-in-waiting help her to her room to sleep, until a message from her brother told her that she must get up and show herself, it was time for dinner and the household would want to see their lady.

  She did not hesitate. She had been raised to do her duty by the great household and she had a sense of obligation to the people who lived on the lands of Lucretili. Her father, she knew, had left the castle and the lands to her; these people were in her charge. They would want to see her at the head of the table, they would want to see her enter the great hall. Even if her eyes were red from crying over the loss of a very beloved father, they would expect her to dine with them. Her father himself would have expected it. She would not fail them or him.

  There was a sudden hush as she entered the great hall where the servants were sitting at trestle tables, talking quietly, waiting for dinner to be served. More than two hundred men-at-arms, servants and grooms filled the hall, where the smoke from the central fire coiled up to the darkened beams of the high ceiling.

  As soon as the men saw Isolde followed by the three women of her household, they rose to their feet and pulled their hats from their heads, and bowed low to honour the daughter of the late Lord of Lucretili, and the heiress to the castle.

  Isolde was wearing the deep blue of mourning: a high conical hat draped in indigo lace hiding her fair hair, a priceless belt of Arabic gold worn tightly at the high waist of her gown, the keys to the castle on a gold chain at her side. Behind her came her women companions, firstly Ishraq, her childhood friend, wearing Moorish dress, a long tunic over loose pantaloons with a long veil over her head held lightly across her face so that only her dark eyes were visible as she looked around the hall.

  Two other women followed behind her and as the household whispered their blessings on Isolde, the women took their seats at the ladies’ table to the side of the raised dais. Isolde went up the shallow stairs to the great table, and recoiled at the sight of her brother in the wooden chair, as grand as a throne, that had been their father’s seat. She knew that she should have anticipated he would be there, just as he knew that she would inherit this castle and would take the great chair as soon as the will was read. But she was dull with grief, and she had not thought that from now on she would always see her brother where her father ought to be. She was so new to grief that she had not yet fully realised that she would never see her father again.

  Giorgio smiled blandly at her, and gestured that she should take her seat at his right hand, where she used to sit beside her father.

  ‘And you will remember Prince Roberto.’ Giorgio indicated a fleshy man with a round sweating face on his left, who rose and came around the table to bow to her. Isolde gave her hand to the prince and looked questioningly at her brother. ‘He has come to sympathise with us for our loss.’

  The prince kissed her hand and Isolde tried not to flinch from the damp touch of his lips. He looked at her as if he wanted to whisper something, as if they might share a secret. Isolde took back her hand, and bent towards her brother’s ear. ‘I am surprised you have a guest at dinner when my father died only yesterday.’

  ‘It was good of him to come at once,’ Giorgio said, beckoning the servers who came down the hall, their trays held at shoulder height loaded with game, meat, and fish dishes, great loaves of bread and flagons of wine and jugs of ale.

  The castle priest sang grace and then the servers banged down the trays of food, the men drew their daggers from their belts and their boots to carve their portions of meat, and heaped slices of thick brown bread with poached fish, and stewed venison.

  It was hard f
or Isolde to eat dinner in the great hall as if nothing had changed, when her dead father lay in his vigil, guarded in the chapel by his men-at-arms, and would be buried the next day. She found that tears kept blurring the sight of the servants coming in, carrying more food for each table, banging down jugs of small ale, and bringing the best dishes and flagons of best red wine to the top table where Giorgio and his guest the prince picked the best and sent the rest down the hall to those men who had served them well during the day. The prince and her brother ate a good dinner and called for more wine. Isolde picked at her food and glanced down to the women’s table where Ishraq met her gaze with silent sympathy.

  When they had finished, and the sugared fruits and marchpane had been offered to the top table, and taken away, Giorgio touched her hand. ‘Don’t go to your rooms just yet,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you.’

  Isolde nodded to dismiss Ishraq and her ladies from their dining table and send them back to the ladies’ rooms, then she went through the little door behind the dais to the private room where the Lucretili family sat after dinner. A fire was burning against the wall and there were three chairs drawn up around it. A flagon of wine was set ready for the men, a glass of small ale for Isolde. As she took her seat the two men came in together.

  ‘I want to talk to you about our father’s will,’ Giorgio said, once they were seated.

  Isolde glanced towards Prince Roberto.

  ‘Roberto is concerned in this,’ Giorgio explained. ‘When Father was dying he said that his greatest hope was to know that you would be safe and happy. He loved you very dearly.’

  Isolde pressed her fingers to her cold lips and blinked the tears from her eyes.

  ‘I know,’ her brother said gently. ‘I know you are grieving. But you have to know that Father made plans for you and gave to me the sacred trust of carrying them out.’