At once, Freize slapped his hand to his forehead. ‘The sealed orders!’ he exclaimed wrathfully. ‘Any time we are minding our own business and going quietly to somewhere, a pleasant inn ahead of us, perhaps a couple of days with nothing to do but feed up the horses and rest ourselves, out come the sealed orders and we are sent off to inquire into God knows what!’

‘We are on a mission of inquiry,’ Brother Peter said quietly. ‘Of course we have sealed orders which I am commanded to open and read at certain times. Of course we are sent to inquire. The very point of this journey is not – whatever some people may think – to ride from one pleasant inn to another, meeting women; but to discover what signs there are of the end of days, of the end of the world. And I have to open these orders at sunset today, and discover where we are to go next and what we are to inspect.’

Freize put two fingers in his mouth and made an ear-piercing whistle. At once the two lead horses, obedient to his signal, stopped in their tracks. Luca and Isolde turned round and rode the few paces back to where the others were halted under the shade of some thick pine trees. The scent of the resin was as powerful as perfume in the warm evening air. The horses’ hooves crunched on the fallen pine cones and their shadows were long on the pale sandy soil.

‘New orders,’ Freize said to his master Luca, nodding at Brother Peter, who took a cream manuscript, heavily sealed with red wax and ribbons, from the inside pocket of his jacket. To Brother Peter he turned and said curiously, ‘How many more of them have you got tucked away in there?’

The older man did not trouble to answer the servant. With the little group watching he broke the seals in silence and unfolded the stiff paper. He read, and they saw him give a little sigh of disappointment.

‘Not back to Rome!’ Freize begged him, unable to bear the suspense for a moment longer. ‘Tell me we don’t have to turn round and go back to the old life!’ He caught Ishraq’s gleam of amusement. ‘The inquiry is an arduous duty,’ he corrected himself quickly. ‘But I don’t want to leave it incomplete. I have a sense of duty, of obligation.’

‘You’d do anything rather than return to the monastery and be a kitchen lad again,’ she said accurately. ‘Just as I would rather be here than serving as a lady companion in an isolated castle. At least we are free, and every day we wake up and know that anything could happen.’

‘I remind you, we don’t travel for our own pleasure,’ Brother Peter said sternly, totally ignoring their comments. ‘We are commanded to go to the fishing village of Piccolo, take a ship across the sea to Split and travel onwards to Zagreb. We are to take the pilgrim road to the chapels of St. George and St. Martin at Our Lady’s church outside Zagreb.’