‘If the building goes . . .’ Brother Peter shouted in Luca’s ear.

‘We should rope together,’ Luca said. He took their capes and knotted them in a line. The girls wrapped their arms around the middle section. They all knew that they were preparing for little more than drowning together.

‘See if we can catch some driftwood,’ Luca shouted at Brother Peter.

Brother Peter said no more. They watched in horror as lumber and wreckage, uprooted trees and an overturned market stall thudded into the wall of the inn, and the roof below them. They heard the roof shed its tiles into the water and the roof beams shift. An old wooden chest bobbed up from out of the attic below them and Luca reached out and grabbed hold of it, struggling to hold it against the current. ‘If you fall in the water, you must hang on to this!’ he shouted at the two girls, who were clinging to each other as they realised that if the building collapsed the old chest would not save them, they would go down, tumbled among roof beams and tiles, almost certain to drown.

Isolde leaned down and put her face against the ridge tiles of the inn, closing her eyes against the terror of the boiling flood around her, whispering her prayers over and over by rote, the words of her childhood, though she was too frightened to think. Ishraq stared wide-eyed as the sea boiled around them, watched the waters thrust and break on the roof, as they rose steadily higher. She looked at Luca and at Brother Peter, watched Luca struggling to hold the wooden chest balanced on the roof and saw that it might support her and Isolde but that the men would be lost. She gritted her teeth, and watched the rising water, trying to measure its height, as it broke against the roof, each time coming a little closer to them. A sudden eddy would make a high wave break over her feet and she could see Isolde flinch as the cold water snatched at her foot, but then the dip between the waves would make it seem as if it was ebbing. Ishraq held her foot very still and counted the unsteady roof tiles between her foot and the water. She glanced over at Luca and saw that he was doing the same thing. Both of them were desperately hoping that the wave was at its full height, that the flood had run inland and was now steadying, both of them trying to calculate the rise of the waters to know how long before they would be hopelessly engulfed.

Luca met her eyes. ‘It’s still rising,’ he said flatly.

She nodded in agreement and pointed. ‘It’s two tiles below me now, and before it was three.’

‘It will be over the roof in an hour,’ Luca calculated. ‘We’ll have to be ready to swim.’

She nodded, knowing that it was a death sentence, and crept a little closer to Isolde. And then, slowly, after what felt like long, long hours, the waters started to become still. The sea coiling and recoiling like a wild river around the town flowed through ancient streets, spat out of hearths, swirled through windows, gurgled in chimneys; but the incoming roar of the wave fell silent, the groan of the earth was finished, and the water steadied, one tile below Ishraq’s bare foot.