He took her hand and guided her through the room full of sleeping men, and closed the door behind them.

‘It’s an odd thing,’ he said. ‘Odd that it knew to get up high.’

The kitten struggled in Ishraq’s grip and she put it gently down on the floor. The tiny creature shook its head, as if complaining at being held so tight, and sat on its fluffy rump and washed its back feet, and then found a warm corner in the log basket by the fire, and settled down for sleep.

‘There’s a writer,’ Ishraq said, trying to remember her studies. ‘Oh! I can’t remember his name! Aelianus or something like that. He says that frogs and snakes know when there is going to be an earthquake – they get out of their holes in time.’

‘How do they know?’ Luca demanded. ‘What do they know?’

‘He doesn’t say,’ she said. ‘I read him in the Arab library in Spain. I can’t remember more than that.’

They walked up the stairs together to the doorway of her room.

‘Why was it so important to you that you should save it?’ he asked her in a whisper, conscious of the many sleepers in the quiet house – Isolde just the other side of the door. ‘Why did the kitten matter, when so much else has been lost? You’re not sentimental about animals. Yet you risked your life.’

‘I suppose, for that very reason: that so much has been lost,’ she said. ‘We failed to save the children, we failed to save half the town, we came with all our learning and your mission to understand and yet we knew nothing and when something so terrible happened we could do nothing. We were useless. We did not even save ourselves. We lost Freize, though he was the only one who knew what was happening. But I could at least save Freize’s kitten.’

He took her hand and held it for a moment. ‘Goodnight,’ he said quietly. ‘God bless you for that. God bless you for thinking of him.’ And then he turned and brought her hand, palm up, to his mouth, and gently put a kiss in the middle, then closed her fingers over it.

Ishraq closed her eyes at the touch of his mouth on her hand. ‘Goodnight,’ she whispered, and held her fingers tight where his lips had touched her palm.

In the morning, the four of them, with Ree trailing behind Isolde at a faithful trot, went to the church where they helped the harassed priest and clerk to write out descriptions of children who were missing, to post on the gate of the little church. The pieces of paper fluttered in the wind, naming children who might never see their homes again, calling on parents who would never come to find them. A queue of people waited to confess to the priest, and the sense of death was heavy in the little church – it lay over the harbour like a low cloud. More and more people were coming slowly in the little gate to the north of the town, seeking the children who had gone with Johann, hoping that they had escaped the flood. They looked at the slurry of filth and water and the broken timbers in the market square as if they still could not believe that an evil tide had flowed high into the very heart of Piccolo and receded, leaving nothing but devastation.