Master of Shadows (16 page)

Outside the barn, the man who had been on sentry duty was unconscious, courtesy of a blow to the back of the head from a sword butt. He was bound now and gagged, and tied to the trunk of one of the pine trees that shielded the barn from the pilgrims’ trail. Just for the fun of it, John Grant had turned the unconscious man towards the tree, resting his slack face against the rough bark of the trunk and wrapping his arms and legs around it, in the manner of a bear hug, before tying him securely. He would have liked to witness his comrades’ distress or amusement at finding him there, but by then he and Lẽna would be far away, of course.

Back in the barn, by the soft and flickering light of the dying fire, Sir Robert Jardine recognised the woman straddling him. While the heavy, iron taste of his own blood filled his mouth, he realised he was looking into the face of Joan of Arc.

She had been his prisoner once long ago. She was to have been exchanged for wealth and lands beyond even his imaginings (and his imagination was fertile indeed). Instead she had been stolen from him, spirited away by one of his own, leaving him humiliated, ruined and disgraced. And now here she was, twenty-two years later, sitting on his chest. He prayed with all his heart for the sound of a string being pulled tight on a longbow, but if this woman was on the loose then perhaps the archer had breathed his last.

‘Sorry to wake you, Bobby,’ she whispered. ‘But since you’ve come all this way, it would be rude of me not to say hello.’

She smiled a dark smile that came from long ago and far away. Sir Robert remained silent, as she intended, his eyes blinking hard with amazement. She slid the knife from side to side slightly, enjoying the sound of razor sharpness upon tooth enamel. His breath was bad, sour, but she could bear it for as long as the encounter had to last.

‘You do deserve to die right now, Bobby,’ she said. ‘We each of us owe a death, of course. But by my estimate, yours is long overdue.’

He squirmed beneath her, as though the spoken threat forced him to react, however pointlessly, however hopelessly. He made a small noise, somewhere towards the back of his throat.

‘Hush now,’ she said, pushing the point of the blade upwards, minutely, so as to underline her sincerity. He closed his eyes against the pain, felt more blood flow and began to fear he might gag.

‘You stole my life,’ she said. ‘You were supposed to protect me – you were paid to protect me. And yet you betrayed me.’

She stared down at him, noting how the intervening years had taken most of his hair and creased his skin. His teeth, those that remained, were ground down and yellow. But for all that time had had him pay towards his final debt, his eyes were as bright and clear as she remembered. A predator’s eyes, shaped for assessing the value and the weakness of prey.

‘I should take yours now,’ she said. ‘Most of me wants to kill you, and it would be so easy for us both. Another inch or two would do it.’

He squirmed again and his eyes opened wider than ever.

‘But I have learned something recently. I have been shown something and … and I think I have been promised something.’

Her face was beautiful to him, and in spite of himself, in spite of the pain and the threat, he felt the leaden weight of his balls and his stiffening prick. She smiled then, almost as if she sensed his arousal – or perhaps she was just baring her teeth.

‘I have taken the lives of many men,’ she said. ‘Thanks to you I have the blood of one woman on my hands as well. I am covered in blood, Bobby – some little of it innocent, and most nothing of the kind – and I stink of it.’

She paused and licked her lips.

‘I have had … a vision.’

She did not look at him while she said this, fixing her gaze instead on the glow of the fire.

‘I have been reminded of the blood of the maiden, fresh as new life,’ she said. ‘I have seen that there is blood that flows, blood that is not mine to take. I have been promised the death that is owed to me. That is the death I care about now – not yours.’

He felt her shift position, rocking forward slightly, and she seemed to be reaching back behind her with her right hand.

‘I will not kill you tonight, Bobby,’ she said. ‘But I have something to give you – something I very much want you to have and the last thing of mine that you shall ever receive.’

And with that she swiftly withdrew the knife, brought her right hand forward and smeared a handful of her own firm, warm shit across his mouth and nose. An instant later she used the heel of her left hand to shut his mouth and send him back to sleep.

25

‘You should have killed him,’ said John Grant.

They had ridden hard for more than an hour, and their mounts’ flanks and mouths were flecked with white. It had taken them all of the previous day to reach the barn and they had had to wait long into the night that followed before making their moves upon the men within and without. They had then taken advantage of the cool of the remainder of the night to put distance between themselves and Jardine and his men. Dawn was breaking over a low range of hills ahead of them. Beyond the hills, barely discernible from the sky, was the sea.

‘His time will come,’ she said.

‘I dare say it will,’ he said. ‘But I would rather it came before mine. You tell me he is the architect of all our ills, all our sadnesses,’ he continued. ‘You say we and others like us have had our lives altered, and for the worse, by the greed and vengefulness of Robert Jardine. And yet when the moment came and you had
his
life in your hands, you let him slip through your fingers.’

He reined in his horse and she missed the cue. Having overshot him, she had to wheel around before coming alongside. As yet they had no sense of one another and were awkward as strangers forced to dance together. He was scanning the horizon, taking bearings on landmarks and seemingly checking his course.

‘Robert Jardine will be judged,’ she said. ‘Not by me and not by you. He was not ours to judge in that place and at that time. I know now what I must do, and taking the lives of those who have wronged me has no part in it.’

He was shaking his head. She understood his inability to comprehend, but felt forbidden to tell him why. It had been a long time since she had expected others to understand the will of angels. She needed to change the course of their conversation.

‘Now will you tell me where it is that you are going?’ she asked.

He noticed she had not said ‘we’, and wondered if she counted herself in or out of what he had planned. Perhaps her interest so far was just curiosity, a diversion while she formulated her own designs. Among a welter of emotions and ideas, he knew at least that he wanted time with her.

‘Did my father ever mention the names of men he rode with?’ he asked.

He kicked his horse forward once more and she did likewise. If he and she struggled to find each other’s rhythm, the animals did not, and he was grateful for their easy mutual understanding as they fell into their stride.

‘I think he preferred to leave that part of his life elsewhere when he was with me, which wasn’t often’ she said. ‘The only name he ever let me hear was Khassan. I know that they were friends, although Patrick did not ever say as much.’

He reeled each time she said the name. That Patrick Grant had known this woman, and she him; that they had made him together, and then parted, seemed impossible. For all that some of him, most of him, accepted the truth of it, some other portion clung to the mother he had known. Dead and buried as Jessie was, and long, hard years ago now, his feelings for the mother he had loved were real as ever. This new knowledge, of this other woman and all that she must now mean, sat in his gut like undigested food.

They rode on in silence for a while, their horses’ heads nodding together companionably – the easy instinct of herd animals – while the third was tethered to a lead rein fixed to the rear of John Grant’s saddle. Lẽna felt rootless but not quite lost. The tide of recent events had taken her far enough from her home – at least the only home she had known for more than twenty years – so that any pull from it was too weak to affect her path now. The flow of the present might make an eddy that would turn her around and spin her back towards the convent and the shrine – or some other languid sweep might move her further away. She did not know and could not tell. The pull she felt most strongly, however, was towards the boy.

‘My father saved Badr Khassan’s life,’ he said. ‘And Badr saved mine in return, and more than once.’

She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye and saw him smile as he said the name.

‘Do you ride now to meet with him?’ she asked.

‘Badr is dead,’ he said. ‘Angus Armstrong killed him.’

She thought about her erstwhile captor, remembered how she had first beheld him behind the steel head of an arrow pointed at her face and wondered for the first time how much damage he had done.

‘How did you find me?’ she asked.

He looked her up and down and she felt, for a moment, as though he might be deciding whether or not she had been worth the effort.

‘Badr told me where to look,’ he said. ‘While he lay dying, skewered by one of Armstrong’s arrows, he told me about … about you.’

‘How long have you been travelling?’

He made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a sigh.

‘For a while,’ he said. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘But it is time that I have, and people I lack.’

She felt as though some small animal was scuttling around inside her stomach. She had turned her back on a life. It seemed to her now that all her efforts at forgetting had merely seen her take the long way round, all the way back to the place from which she had started out long ago. She had turned her back on a child, a baby, and yet the years had carried her far enough to meet him coming the other way.

‘How did he know about me?’ she asked.

John Grant shrugged. ‘Well, let us imagine maybe my father told Badr Khassan that you were my mother,’ he said. ‘And Badr managed to remember that.’

She snapped her head around to look at him, but he was staring straight ahead, towards the hills and the sun.

There was no emotion in his voice when he continued.

‘Badr told me Patrick loved you – that you were the woman he would have … preferred.’

She looked away from him, down towards her hands resting on the pommel of her horse’s saddle.

‘I did not ask him and he did not tell me, but I have presumed you did not want to spend your life with him,’ he said. ‘Or with me.’

She was watching him and saw a glint of sunlight reflected from the thin band of gold he wore on the little finger of his left hand. She had already observed that he led with his left, and for some reason that she barely noticed, far less understood, it pleased her to see the keepsake there on his good hand …

‘You want none of it, do you?’ Patrick had asked her at the end. ‘You do not want me and you do not want our son.’

She had looked into his face and had seen his tears, but when she had reached out instinctively to wipe them away, he had flinched and recoiled from her touch.

The words – any words that might have helped – were lost to her then, and she found nothing worth saying. She felt only hollow inside, like a dead tree still standing in spite of the emptiness within.

He had stood in the doorway of her cottage, an outbuilding of the convent. He seemed uncertain whether to stay or leave. He held their baby in his arms, swaddled in white cotton and pale blue silk, and sleeping. He looked down at the peaceful face, and despite the grief, he pouted at the perfection he found there. By the time he looked up, she had slipped the ring from her finger. It had been his first and only gift to her, and she had wondered at the meaning of the inscription:
No tengo mas que darte.
I have nothing more to give thee.

Even as she had read it that first time, it struck her as a portent of unhappiness, filling her with foreboding. Perhaps he had always known, in spite of all his hopes to the contrary, that their time together could not last.

She tried to press it into his free hand, but he clenched it into a fist, a final act of defiance.

‘Please take it,’ she said. ‘I cannot wear it, I cannot … bear it.’

The hurt on his face was awful to her, and she cursed herself, wondering why God had seen fit to take away her heart along with everything else.

He looked instead at their sleeping son, and she unfolded one end of the pale blue swaddling, in fact a scarf that had been a gift long ago from her own mother, and slipped a corner of it through the ring. Swiftly she tied a knot to hold it in place. She looked up at him and saw that he had been watching.

‘You really do want none of it,’ he said, and walked away without once looking back …

It was the soft voice of John Grant that summoned her from her place of memory. It felt for all the world as though he had been reading her mind.

‘Will you tell me about my father?’ he asked, and his voice sounded, in his own head at least, like a child’s.

‘And if I do, then will you tell me where it is that we are going?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Then I will tell you.’

And so she began her tale of Patrick Grant, or as much of it as she knew. To tell it, she had to begin with some of her own story, and that, anyway, was what he truly wanted to hear, and somehow she knew that as well. A story told by one of them was easier for both than the back-and-forth of conversation, and so as their horses trotted, and they rose and fell in their saddles, it was the rhythm of the tale that soothed their hearts.

‘I was a soldier too,’ she began. ‘I am sure that surprises you – the thought of a girl on the battlefield – but it was my … my calling, I suppose you might say.

‘For as long as I can remember, I knew how to fight. I had three older brothers and fighting was their play, of course. I joined in their games, and though younger and smaller than them I soon found ways to defeat them, and easily. It was amusing for them at first – to find their little sister a handful and to have to pay full attention to her as she advanced upon them with wooden swords and spears and laid them low. But the novelty wore off quicker than the bruises and in time they chose simply to exclude me. When I complained to our mother, they told her it was because they feared I would surely get hurt. But my father had watched, and had seen, and he knew the truth of it. There was no anger in the fight for me, no need of the violence – which they did not understand but that he did. It was just … something I could do, and better than them or anyone else. That is what so displeased them, I think – that I didn’t have to try and I didn’t have to think.’

‘Was he a soldier – your father, I mean?’ asked John Grant. She was jolted by the interruption and he regretted it at once.

‘My father was Jacques d’Arc,’ she said, recovering her place. ‘I was young when we left our home and it is the truth when I tell you that I never did learn as much about him as I would have liked. I remember men in the village addressing him as “Sergeant” – and that part of his duty was to prepare them for the defence of our homes in times of need. It is all so long ago for me and I spent many years trying not to remember, but to forget.

‘I learned later that my father had indeed been a soldier, and a fine one – brave and loyal. Before I fought the English, my father did too – and alongside more of your Scots. It seems my family has been fated to stand shoulder to shoulder with your countrymen. I know that he was part of the defence of Melun, a walled town on an island in the River Seine. There was a French garrison there, of course, but also many Scots, fighting in defiance not just of Henry, the English king, but also of their own so-called king, James of the Stewarts. Your James was no more than a puppet of Henry then – obedient as a dog. The Scots soldiers were under another’s command, a Scots aristocrat called Albany, and they were honouring ties that have bound your folk to my own for longer than the life of any
soi-disant
king.

‘But like the rest of his kind, English Henry thought France belonged to him and had crossed the Channel with his hordes to try and prove it. Twenty thousand English besieged Melun. The French and Scots soldiers inside numbered fewer than one thousand, but for half a year they held on, fighting from the walls and also in the tunnels the English miners burrowed beneath.

‘When it was over – when the defenders could fight no more and the townspeople were reduced to eating the rats that feasted by then upon their dead … when it was over, Henry ordered that the garrison commander would spend the rest of his life in an iron cage. And as for your countrymen … well, most of them were taken and hanged from the city walls as a warning to all. Only a handful survived and escaped back home.

‘My father never forgot them – called them friends ever after – and when he decided that my … my talents should be tested and perfected, it was to his comrades in your homeland that he took me. What I became … what I have become … is the work not of French martial arts, but those of your Scots.

‘I was trained by the same Scotsmen who fought alongside my father. And when I returned home to carry on the fight against the English invaders, more of their kind came with me as my bodyguard. It mattered a great deal to my father – when I went before our prince to swear that I would see him on his throne – that I was accompanied and supported by men such as those.’

‘But why lay so much on the shoulders of a girl?’ asked John Grant. ‘Even if you could fight – and I can hardly doubt it – what difference were you supposed to make, no matter how skilled?’

She held his gaze, looked deep into his hazel eyes flecked with gold. She felt suddenly foolish, as she always did when she tried to make sense and words out of something she could not readily explain even to herself.

‘My father took me to the land of the Scots to practise my … my art,’ she said. ‘That much is certainly true.’

‘But?’ he asked. ‘I know you need to tell me something more.’

‘But he also sought … or rather
needed
the reassurance of those he had learned to trust more than other men.’

‘Reassurance about what?’

Out of nowhere John Grant suddenly felt the push – not from any unseen stranger, but from Lẽna. He recoiled, and her eyes opened wide as she saw him reel as if he were under attack from an invisible foe. She reached out a hand but he batted her concern away.

‘It is nothing,’ he said. ‘I think perhaps we should look for some food soon. I need to rest and refresh myself, is all.’