They had to force the door; Luca kicked it open. It was crooked in its frame as the whole house had shifted under the impact of the wave. They went down the stairs that were awash with dirt and weed and debris, and dangerously slippery underfoot. The whole house which had smelled so comfortingly of cooking and woodsmoke and old wine only a few hours ago, was dank and wet, and filled with the noise of water rushing away, and of loud dripping, as if it were an underwater cave and not an inn at all. Ishraq shuddered and reached for Isolde. ‘Can you hear it? Is it coming again? Let’s get outside.’

Downstairs was even worse, the ground floor chest deep in water. They held hands to wade through the kitchen and out into the yard. Isolde had a sudden horror that she would step on a drowned man, or that a dead hand would clasp round her foot. She shuddered and Luca looked around at her. ‘Are you sure that you wouldn’t rather wait upstairs?’

‘I want to be outside,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear the smell.’

Outside in the stable yard was the terrible sight of drowned horses in their stalls, their heads lolling over the stable doors where they had gasped for air; but the innkeeper was there, miraculously alive. ‘I was on the top of the haystack,’ he said, almost crying with relief. ‘On the very top, chucking down some hay, when the sea came over my yard wall, higher than my house, and just dropped down on me like an avalanche. Knocked me flat but knocked me down on the hay. I breathed in hay while it battered down on me and then it tore me to the stable roof, and when I stopped swimming and put down my feet, I was on an island! God be praised, I saw fishing ships sail over my stable yard, and I am here to say it.’

‘We were on the roof,’ Ishraq volunteered. ‘The sea came rushing in.’

‘God help us all! And the little children?’

‘They were walking out to sea,’ Isolde said quietly. ‘God bless and keep them.’

He did not understand. ‘Walking on the quayside?’

‘Walking on the harbour floor. They thought the sea had parted for them. They walked out towards the wave as it came in.’

‘The sea went out as Johann said it would?’

‘And then came in again,’ Luca said grimly.

They were all silent for a moment with the horror of it.

‘They swam?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Luca said.

‘Some of them came back,’ Ishraq said. ‘Freize sent some of them back. Did you see them?’