The girls went past the shops with barely a glance into the shadowy interiors, their eyes drawn to the steps of the church and to the shining fair head of the boy who waited, cheek against his simple crook, as if he were listening for something.

Before him, the crowd gathered, murmuring quietly, attentively. Behind him, in the darkened doorway of the church, stood Brother Peter, Luca and Freize beside the village priest. Many of the fishermen and almost all the women and children of the village had come to hear Johann the Good preach, but Isolde noticed that some of the older children were absent. She guessed they had been sent to sea with their fathers, or ordered to stay at home – not every family wanted to risk its children hearing Johann preach. Many mothers regarded him as a sort of dangerous piper who might dance their children out of town, never to be seen again. Some of them called him a child-stealer who should be feared, especially by mothers who had only one child.

The children of the crusade had been fed on a mean breakfast of bread and fish. The priest had collected food from his parishioners and the people of the market had handed out the leftovers. The monks in the abbey had sent down baskets of fresh-baked bread and honey scones. Clearly some of the children were still hungry, and many of them would have been hungry for days. But they still showed the same bright faces as when they had first walked into the village of Piccolo.

Ishraq, always sensitive to the mood of a crowd, could almost feel the passionate conviction of the young crusaders: the children wanted to believe that Johann had been called by God, and had convinced themselves that he was leading them to Jerusalem.

‘This is not faith,’ she whispered to Isolde. ‘This is longing: a very different thing.’

‘You ask me why we should walk all the long, long way to the Holy Land?’ Johann started suddenly, without introduction, without telling them to listen, without a bidding prayer or calling for their attention. He did not even raise his voice, he did not raise his eyes from the ground nor his cheek which was still resting thoughtfully against his shepherd’s crook, yet the hundreds of people were immediately silent and attentive. The round-faced priest in the grey unbleached robes of the Cistercian order, who had never in all his life seen a congregation of this size, lowered his gaze to the doorstep of his little church. Brother Peter stepped slightly forwards, as if he did not want to miss a word.

‘I will tell you why we must go so far,’ Johann said quietly. ‘Because we want to. That’s all! Because we choose to do so. We want to play our part in the end of days. The infidels have taken all the holy places into their keeping, the infidels have taken the greatest church in Constantinople and the Mass is celebrated no more at the most important altar in the world. We have to go to where Jesus Christ was a child and we have to walk in His footsteps. We have to be as children who enter the kingdom of heaven. He promised that those who come to him as little children will not be forbidden. We, His children, will go to Him and He will come again, as He promised, to judge the living and the dead, the old and the young, and we will be there, in Jerusalem, we will be the children who will enter the kingdom of heaven. D’you see?’