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.

Somewhere, all alone, a bird started to sing, calling for its lost mate.

‘Where’s Freize?’ Luca suddenly asked.

The group’s slowly dawning relief at their own escape suddenly turned into nauseous fear. Luca, still clenching his knees on the sides of the roof, raised himself up and shaded his eyes against the bright sunshine. He looked out to sea, and then down to the quayside. ‘I saw him running out towards the children,’ he said.

‘He turned some of them back. They got into the inn yard,’ Isolde replied in a small voice. ‘I saw that.’

‘He turned around,’ Brother Peter said. ‘He was coming back in, carrying a little girl.’

Isolde let out a shuddering sob. ‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘What just happened?’

Nobody answered her. Nobody knew. Luca tied his cloak to the chimney, and using it to steady himself like a rope, climbed down the steeply sloping roof, kicking his booted feet in between the displaced tiles. He looked down. The water level was falling now, as the sea flowed away. It was below the window of the girls’ room. He held on to the end of the cloak and got his feet onto the sill of their smashed window.

‘Climb down to me,’ he said. ‘I’ll help you in.’

Brother Peter gripped Isolde’s hands and lowered her down the rope of capes towards Luca, who held tight to her legs, her waist and her shoulders as she scrabbled over him and dropped into the room, knee deep in flood water. Ishraq followed, naked but for her linen chemise. Brother Peter came last.

The girls’ bedroom was draining fast, the water sluicing through the gaps in the floorboards to the room below, as the water level all over the village dropped and the sea drained out of houses, down the higher streets and gurgled in drains and watercourses.

‘You’d better stay here,’ Luca said to Ishraq and Isolde. ‘It may be bad downstairs.’

‘We’ll come,’ Isolde decided. ‘I don’t want to be trapped in here again.’

Ishraq shuddered at the wet chaos that had been their room. ‘This is unbearable.’