Master of Shadows (17 page)

He settled himself, breathed deep and collected his thoughts.

‘Reassurance about what?’ he asked again. ‘What else did your father need to know?’

‘That I was not mad,’ she said.

He said nothing; just raised his eyebrows.

She sighed, resigned, hoping she might breathe out the resolve to withhold her truth from him, regardless of the consequences.

‘I fight as I do … win as I do … because I fight with the will of God.’

She looked at him and found that his gaze was directed not at her but off towards the horizon and the hills.

John Grant was replaying her words in his head. While he did so, he turned his attention to the rumble of the world spinning on its axis like a giant top. He opened his consciousness to the flight of the planet into the blue and the dark void beyond. The push was still there too – the push from this woman who had given birth to him and sent him away.

She could not know – and he was not about to tell her yet, if ever – about his life at the mercy of the push. She could not know it, but nonetheless she had told her truth to someone who understood what it was like to know what no one else knew; someone who understood how it felt to hear what no one else heard.

He looked round at her and nodded.

She had no idea what the nod meant, but before she had time to puzzle over it, he asked another question.

‘If you have the will of God, what did you ever need from my father?’ he asked.

She felt the years moving and shuffling before her eyes, backwards and forwards, like the pages of a book left outdoors and riffled by the wind.

She opened her mouth to speak, but before she had time to form any words, the black gelding, tied by a rein to the saddle of John Grant’s horse, gave a terrible whinny of pain as it rose up on its hind legs before toppling on to its side.

Panicked by the sound and by the commotion, John Grant’s horse reared up too, and he had only a split second to react and to stand in his stirrups as he battled to avoid being thrown backwards. He brought the beast under control and wheeled around. The downed gelding was struggling to rise again, but failing. The cause was suddenly apparent to John Grant as he spotted a foot of arrow shaft sticking out of the animal’s right rear leg.

For all that he was fast, the woman was faster. Taking Angus Armstrong’s knife from her belt, the same she had used to secure the silent compliance of Sir Robert Jardine, she urged her horse across to the head of the felled gelding and sliced through the leather rein holding it to John Grant’s saddle.

‘Ride!’ she shouted, and brought a hand down sharply on his horse’s rump. As they both spurred their animals into a gallop, John Grant looked behind them, seeking desperately for the location of their attacker. He knew without thinking that it was Armstrong, and furious anger rose in his chest.

‘I can’t see him,’ he shouted.

‘Just ride,’ she said.

He felt an impact in his right foot and looked down to see a second arrow sticking from the heel of his boot. The head was embedded, harmlessly, in the wood of the heel.

‘His aim is off today,’ he shouted at Lẽna. ‘I’ve never known that bastard miss his target even once, let alone twice.’

‘Keep riding,’ she said. ‘I suspect my parting gifts may be affecting his abilities.’

‘I wish you’d finished the job,’ he said, leaning forward and keeping his head low. With his right hand he reached down and snapped off the arrow, leaving just the head behind. ‘Your mercy towards our foes will be our undoing.’

She said nothing but grimaced instead, aware that he might be speaking the truth. She cursed her decision to leave her captor alive, and then remembered her angel on her shelf of rock and, just as quickly, reproached herself for doubting.

Looking behind them, John Grant finally located the position of their pursuers. There were four of them, clustered by a huge granite boulder in the lee of a hill he and Lẽna had trotted past just minutes before. Three were on horseback. One was dismounted beside them but preparing to climb back on to his horse. They were at the limit of the bow’s range, but the dreaded weapon was clearly visible, slung across its owner’s back as he climbed into his saddle.

John Grant and Lẽna galloped hard for a short distance over level ground before their path took them steeply uphill. He feared they might soon be within the archer’s range once more, and he urged his horse onwards, all the while calling out to Lẽna to drive her own mount as fiercely as possible. She needed no urging from him or from anyone else.

The slope levelled again, on to a terrace of flat ground, and they were able to gain speed. The steep gradient rising ahead of them would be too much for the horses, however, and they swung around to their right, following the level contour into a narrow cleft between two hills.

Briefly relieved to be out of Armstrong’s direct line of sight, they galloped hard, desperately trying to put some distance between themselves and their pursuers while also seeking some means of escape, or even just concealment. They followed the narrow valley as it twisted and turned until suddenly, in front of them, a near-vertical wall of rock blocked their path.

‘No!’ shouted John Grant, wheeling his horse around and looking in every direction for a path worth taking. The valley sides were much too steep, and behind them the path would lead only back towards Armstrong and his companions.

‘It’s a dead end,’ said Lẽna.

Without replying, John Grant leapt from his horse and ran forward to the rock wall. Hunkering down he saw, with a mixture of hope and horror, that there was an opening at ground level not much wider than his own shoulders. At first sight it looked more like an animal burrow than any space fit for a human being, but he lay down and peered into the darkness, the total darkness beyond.

‘What are you doing?’ she shouted. ‘We don’t have time for this.’

He ignored her and leaned into the space. Forcing all thoughts of their predicament from his mind, he breathed in deeply, scenting the air. He felt the cool touch of a soft wind brushing against his face. The movement was almost imperceptible but he felt it just the same. Somewhere beyond the darkness, fresh air was finding a way towards him. If air could pass through, then so might they.

In her frustration, Lẽna jumped from her saddle and crouched behind him. She looked beyond him, seeing the cramped opening in the rock for the first time.

‘You are not serious,’ she said, realisation sweeping over her so that she felt sick with dread.

‘Trust me,’ he said, reaching out to her and placing a hand on her shoulder. ‘You have to trust me. We have no time. None.’

‘But why would you even consider crawling into that … that hole?’ she shouted. ‘Look at it – there’s barely room for a dog!’

‘Because they will not follow us,’ he said. ‘They wouldn’t have the nerve.’

She took a deep breath and let it out in one long, whistling gasp.

‘But you have no idea where it goes,’ she said. ‘It may go nowhere at all.’

He shook his head.

‘I can feel fresh air,’ he said. ‘It is not a hole – it’s a tunnel, a passage of some sort. I am sure of it. There is a wind blowing through it from … from somewhere – blowing through from the other side.’

‘I would rather fight them,’ she said. She knelt down and looked into the opening. Only darkness greeted her.

‘We cannot fight him like this – not here,’ he said. ‘We cannot protect each other. Armstrong will shoot me down and take
you
back – back to Jardine.’

She dropped her chin to her chest for a moment and then looked him in the eye. She knew he was right.

‘So be it,’ she said.

He nodded once and turned from her, squeezing his body into the opening. She watched the effort it took just to get inside the space and felt her stomach clench.

As soon as he had wriggled in up to his waist, he was enveloped by the seeming madness of what he was proposing for them both, and he felt his fear taking hold yet again. Some other part of him said it was too late for panic – that there was no
room
for panic. Their options had shut down to this narrow fissure, made by water long ago or created in an instant by some ancient movement of the earth itself.

But there was something else as well, some certainty from deep within him that insisted the way ahead was clear, even if their passage through it might be hellish. He touched the rock wall and felt the distant, grinding vibration of the spinning of the world. The darkness would hide them, and take care of them. Armstrong and his men would not dare to follow. The hunter was driven only by the thrill of the chase, while they sought freedom and life itself. Armstrong had options and time, while they suddenly had neither.

By committing themselves to the unthinkable, they would confound their enemies. To all intents and purposes they would have disappeared into another world.

Breathing shallow, so as to keep his own size to a minimum, he kicked forward into the dark with his knees and feet, concentrating with all his power on the flow of air coming towards him, reassuring him, so that he clung to it like a rope. He let the soft wind take shape and colour in his imagination, saw it flowing towards them and over them, bringing with it the promise of an end to their struggle, of a reward for their daring …

Only when he had disappeared entirely, swallowed up by the earth and the darkness, did Lẽna turn one last time to look at their horses. The animals were unperturbed and grazing peacefully on a patch of coarse grass, oblivious to the predicament of their erstwhile masters. She patted her own mount, the grey mare, relishing the warm, familiar smell of her, and then knelt down at the opening. She had to lie flat and pull herself forward on her stomach. She could hear him in the darkness, scrabbling and cursing, and with her heart in her mouth she began the dreadful business of shimmying forward into the nightmarish space.

In pauses between his own movements he heard her behind him, gasping and fighting for purchase. It occurred to him that if terror held at bay had a sound, then it was the desperate scraping of hands and feet, invisible in the dark.

The tension of the situation kept threatening to engulf him – the looming prospect of suddenly feeling rock in front of his face as well as above and around him. There was every chance that the airflow, the only promise of salvation, came from a space too small to crawl through. Maybe they would be caught like rats in a trap. Perhaps they were crawling into their own graves. Panic threatened to rise within him again, making an enemy of his own body until he felt he was swelling, filling the space and plugging it like a cork. He felt his chest expanding with the need to draw in a deeper breath, but managed to regain control. He focused on the airflow once more, told himself it was growing stronger.

He forced himself to trust his instincts and to concentrate only on his own movements. The fissure twisted and corkscrewed, sometimes rising up and sometimes dropping downwards. Desperate to maintain a handhold on his own sanity, he tried to visualise the shape of the tunnel, even prayed for it to open into some dimly lit cavern where they might look around – look at each other, and remind themselves they still existed in the world. But none came. From time to time he was forced to roll on to his side, almost on to his back, in order to keep making headway.

Facing upwards, his nose occasionally brushing the roof, was worst of all. The sensation of the world pushing down upon him all but convinced him of their doom, and he kicked harder still with his heels until he reached a wider section and was able to turn on to his stomach once more.

Mercifully there were larger pockets of space from time to time – room in which to change position and stretch – but always the fissure narrowed again, bringing the terror of contact with the bedrock all around. The mass above seemed almost to be moving, pressing down like the sole of a giant’s boot come to crush them. The near impossibility of their situation kept threatening to smother him, and he felt his mouth dry, his tongue swelling. He heard her make a sound behind him, like a sob, and he stopped and called her name, suddenly grateful for the distraction.

‘Just keep moving,’ she said. The sound of her words was muffled and seemed to come from somewhere far off, until he felt her head bump against the soles of his boots and she gasped. Her closeness to him in the space made matters worse, and a fresh image flashed into his mind of them reaching a dead end and kicking and struggling against one another as they used up the last of the breathable air and …

‘Just keep moving,’ she said again. Her voice sounded more urgent than before, and he edged forward to give her more room. And then it happened. He kicked, and instead of moving forward, he felt his shoulders pinned on both sides. The fissure had narrowed even further and he was trapped. He pushed with his hands, trying to move backwards, but he was fixed in place. He moaned and struggled, disbelieving – felt the world collapsing until all that existed was this tiny space, these terrible endless moments. He cried out, a wordless sound, and froze.

‘John,’ she said.

It was the first time she had used his name, but the sound came from somewhere unreachable.

‘John,’ she said again. ‘Speak to me.’

He was battling for control, the remainder of his sanity flickering and guttering like a candle flame dying in the night.

‘Say my name,’ she said.

Her words reached him as though through water.

‘Lẽna,’ he said.

‘No, John Grant – say my real name, my given name.’

His face was pressed against the rock of the tunnel’s floor. He felt like he was drowning.

‘Jeanne,’ he said, and felt a flame flicker and glow, as though touched by fresh air.

‘I trust you, John,’ she said. ‘I trust you to get us through.’

He listened to her words and to the sound of his own breathing. He felt her hands on his ankles and flinched, but she held on. Suddenly, with a power he did not expect, she pulled him backwards. It was no more than an inch, but it was all the distance that mattered, all that was needed. His shoulders were freed and he could flex his arms, reaching for a new position.