Master of Shadows (18 page)

‘Just keep moving, John,’ she said.

He took a breath, reaching for control with the tips of his fingers. He found purchase with his hands and kicked gently and nudged forward a fraction. He took another breath, and kicked again, and again. With unbounded relief he realised that his shoulders were beyond the constriction, into a wider section of the passage. Flooded with gratitude, he kicked and pulled and drew his legs forward until his waist, then his knees and then his feet were wholly clear of whatever had held him.

He was drenched with sweat. He felt the salt stinging his eyes but he kept moving, determined never to stop again. It was hot, too. Despite the flow of the cooler air, he felt swallowed within the body of a living thing, eaten alive. To keep his panic at bay, to keep the scream buried, he began counting his own movements, measuring his progress. He had reached one hundred when gradually he became aware of more space around him. Where before the walls and roof of the tunnel had brushed his sides and back as well as pushing up from below in a sickening embrace, suddenly he realised he had room to reach out on either side. He felt a laugh bubbling inside him as he relished the freedom.

What had been a narrow tunnel became a wide, flat cavity, and when he reached left and right with his arms he made no contact with the rock. The roof still pressed down, but there was space either side, and hope and relief began to rise in him. Cautious of the new emotions, fearful that they might yet be their undoing, he battled for calm and careful thought. The movement of air against him was stronger again too, and he reminded himself to breathe, relishing the cool of it, the promise of it.

The seeming proof that he had been right – that his instincts might yet save them – filled him like a blessing and he allowed himself to smile. He heard Lẽna behind him, heard her panting in the new-found space.

‘Stay with me,’ he said. ‘Stay close.’

She made no reply, but he listened as her breathing softened.

The floor sloped upwards and he crawled forward, reaching ahead for purchase and digging in harder than ever with the toes of his boots. It was only when it levelled out that he realised his eyes were squeezed shut.

When he opened them, he beheld something wondrous: the backs of his own hands. Faint though it was, like the first hint of gloom before the dawn, the trace of light filled him with joy, and he redoubled his efforts. The floor dropped steeply away from him again and suddenly, some little way ahead, he saw a triangle of golden daylight. Crawling towards it with renewed energy, he called out to Lẽna.

‘Do you see?’ he said. ‘There’s light ahead!’

‘Just keep moving,’ she replied. He realised that her words had been a chant upon which she had focused her own efforts, perhaps even her sanity.

The walls narrowed either side once more, but there was space above and he found he could rise to his knees. The triangle of light became an opening ahead, filled with the blue of the sky, and he scrabbled his way towards it, panting with blessed relief.

He emerged on his knees, like a penitent, into the light and found himself above a sheer drop into a wide ravine with a broad brown river flowing far below. He was perched upon a cliff like a flightless chick in a nest. He breathed long and deep, revelling in the sunlight and the suddenly limitless open space. Looking upwards behind him, he saw a precipitous face too smooth and steep for climbing. The ledge on to which he had crawled was no wider than he was tall. He heard Lẽna emerging and turned to slow her down.

‘Have a care,’ he said.

She joined him in the opening and did as he had done moments before – looking first upwards at the giddying height above and then down towards the river. She slumped backwards, leaning against the cliff face beside the mouth of the fissure. He stayed on his knees, wordless, a roaring sound in his head like rushing water. He closed his eyes and breathed, offering thanks to the sky above and the abyss below.

The moments passed and finally he felt able to open his eyes. He settled back on his heels and gazed at the far wall of the canyon.

‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked. ‘Why did you come in search of me?’

He continued to gaze at the canyon wall – at the foliage, even small trees, clinging to the sides and making lives from next to nothing.

‘I have lost too many people,’ he said.

‘We almost lost two more in there,’ she said.

He laughed, but it was a bitter sound.

‘I knew there was a way through,’ he said at last. ‘And I was right, wasn’t I?’

‘You were brave even to try,’ she said. ‘I would never have done that on my own.’

‘Nor I, as it turned out,’ he said.

She watched as he played with the ring on his finger, slowly turning it round and around.

‘But if you hadn’t come looking for me, you would never have found yourself in such a place,’ she said.

He nodded.

‘I need something new to remember,’ he said. ‘The people, the things I have known, and that I remember – they were not mine.’

‘They loved you,’ she said. ‘They gave their lives for you.’

‘Their lives were taken from them – that’s different.’

‘Why did you come looking for me?’ she asked again.

‘How could I not?’

She blushed and raised a hand to the hot skin of her face.

‘We are strangers,’ she said.

‘One way or another I have spent my life with strangers,’ he said. ‘I loved Jessie Grant. I loved Badr Khassan. But they were not my own.’

‘That is ungracious,’ she said. ‘They were not obliged to love you. They chose to, which is a greater gift.’

He looked hard into her face then, and when she returned his gaze she glimpsed a question flickering there.

‘You still haven’t told me about my father,’ he said. ‘About Patrick Grant.’

‘You say he saved the life of Badr Khassan.’

He nodded.

‘Well he saved mine first.’

‘Tell me,’ he said.

‘First tell me where you are going,’ she replied.

He dropped his shoulders in frustration.

‘I have my own debts to pay,’ he said. ‘In the city of Constantinople … there is a girl.’

‘Do you love her?’ she asked. She felt the question curl and uncurl inside her like a serpent’s tail while she asked it.

‘Love her? I do not even know her.’

‘Then who is she?’

‘She is his daughter,’ he said. ‘Badr Khassan’s. Her mother’s name was Isabella. He asked me to find her – to take care of her.’

‘Constantinople is half a world away from here,’ she said. ‘How do you propose to get there? You do not even have a horse now.’

‘I travel light. I just have to follow this river to the sea, and then find a port, and a ship heading east, and a captain who needs another crewman.’

He looked at her face but found he could not read the meaning of the expression he found there.

‘I have told you my destination,’ he said. ‘Now you must tell me about my … my father.’

Without another word, Lẽna stood, strode forward and leapt out into the void. John Grant gasped and reached for her. He almost toppled into space and gasped again as he regained his balance and then sat down heavily. By the time he had done so he heard the splash and leaned out again in time to see her head break the surface of the water. She turned and looked up at him on his perch, and raised both arms out of the water in a questioning, beckoning gesture.

‘I followed
you
,’ she shouted, and the sound of her voice echoed around the canyon.

He rose to his feet and looked down at the surging waters.

‘Follow
me
and I will tell you what you want to know!’ By then the river had carried her further away from him and her words were all but lost beneath the roar of the water. But he had heard enough.

He took three steps back, until he felt the rock wall behind him, and then sprinted forward and out into the nothingness.

Lẽna glanced upwards in time to see him leap, and for an instant, before the fall began, he seemed, to her at least, fixed there like a bug in amber. It was an image she would carry for the rest of her days, as he seemed to float, perfect and beyond the reach of either earth or sky.

More than anything else she would recall how completely he gave himself to the moment. His head was thrown back and he looked not down towards the murky depths but up and out and into infinity. His arms were extended behind his back, so that he had the look of a crucified Christ, lost in an ecstasy of agony. And then the moment passed and the fall began.

PART THREE

Siege

26

Constantinople, 1453

‘Tell me about the fat Turk, and how he drowned that poor baby.’

‘He wasn’t a baby. He was two years old – a little black-haired boy. Walking and talking.’

‘
Nearly
two years old, you always say. That’s still a baby to me.’

He felt her settle down beside him, like a child.

And he began … the way he always began:

‘While some of this must be true, and some of it might not be, it is all I know …’

His fingers fluttered in the dark and a black shape moved against a blue sky painted on the ceiling above their heads. Grotesquely fat, its pumpkin head topped with an outsize turban, the shadow might have been comical.

She hissed at the sight of the villain while she moved closer on the bed where they lay.

Armed only with paper cut-outs, his own clever hands, slivers of metal and glass mirrors, he had become a talented illusionist. His shadow characters loomed and diminished, danced and fought, flew and ran. In the darkness of his room his broken body was no hindrance to his art, and all the while his figures moved and lived at his command, he was like a little god – master of his creations. The room was a world of their own, one split into light and dark, real forms and shadows.

‘A man in his middle years, Ali Bey was a leader among his own people. In his homeland he would have been the one giving orders, dispatching others to exercise his will. He seldom felt any sense of superiority nowadays, however. Just as the hairs were slipping from his scalp in alarming numbers, so his self-esteem was sloughing off him like dead skin.’

Ali Bey was all at once replaced in the tableau by the shadow of a snake – one shedding its skin so as to become a bigger, fatter version of itself.

She snuggled deeper into the bedclothes, lulled by the familiar words and all but hypnotised by the interplay of his voice and the light and dark. The sounds of the city all around them seemed far away, inconsequential to the precious moments here in the jasmine-scented gloom of his bedchamber.

‘Now more than halfway through his allotted span, he felt thwarted. A son of chieftains, Ali Bey had been convinced he was destined for glory.’

Ali Bey’s fat shadow floated on high, suddenly ghoulish above the heads of a crowd of tiny figures.

‘In a favourite dream he floated above his fellows, so that they had to crane their necks to gaze upon him.’

She cupped her hands around her mouth and booed.

‘Here among the splendours of the palace of Edirne, padding quickly past elegant courtyards and quadrangles, he was just another servant of the sultan.’

Suddenly Ali Bey’s silhouette was that of a young man, lithe and strong, while the shadows of lesser men fell at his feet.

‘In his youth he had won fame as a wrestler, and his strength and speed had not quite left him. Even now, fat as a pig, he moved with feminine grace. But while once his body had been widest at the shoulders, now the circumference of his waist was the larger measurement.’

She dutifully catcalled as the youthful wrestler departed the scene and a bloated mockery of his former self was left behind, watching the other go.

‘Finally he arrived at the double doors of the harem.’

A pair of shadow doors parted and a figure stalked through them, dripping pompous self-regard.

‘All at once the fat man was confronted by the eunuch, Quadir.

‘“What is your business here, Ali Bey?”’

The voice he used for the eunuch was high, almost shrill. Its shadow was as large as Ali Bey’s, but muscular and with a bare, shaven head as smooth as an egg. The figure grew larger for a moment, imposing, while Ali Bey’s drifted out of focus.

‘Ali Bey wasn’t even through the door and already the eunuch’s tone was irksome. What would the atmosphere be like, here in the women’s quarters, when he had finished what he had come to do?

‘Quadir, whose duty it was to oversee all the business of the seraglio, had uttered Ali Bey’s name like an insult. The eunuch was a towering figure, half a head taller than Ali Bey, and slowly he folded his arms across his chest.’

A tap, tap, tapping, made by a fingernail upon part of the bed frame, was the sound of Quadir’s agitated foot upon a tiled floor.

The shadows came together as one, almost comically, and then parted, with Ali Bey’s in control and striding ahead.

‘Rather than reply, Ali Bey used the fading skills of the wrestler he had once been to unbalance his challenger and push him aside. Eunuch or not, Quadir had commanded respect for half a lifetime, and here in his own domain such effrontery was shocking. The fat man was past him, however, and looking around at doorways and corridors leading in all directions. He turned to face the eunuch once more.

‘“Little Ahmet,” he spat, his voice wheezing and thick with the effort of the confrontation. “Where is Little Ahmet?”

‘“You have no business here, Ali Bey,” the eunuch said, his anger coiled, ready to strike. “Must I summon the guards and have you rolled out of here on your fat belly?”

‘“I am here on the sultan’s business,” said Ali Bey. “The boy’s mother is in the throne room, at his majesty’s pleasure, and he has sent me to collect the child. Where is Little Ahmet?” he asked for the last time.

‘Quadir smiled. The suggestion that Mehmet would have sent this man – any man – to collect a child from the harem was ridiculous. Something in Ali Bey’s sweaty manner, however, gave the eunuch pause.’

The shadows came together a second time, and a flash of light, created by a flick of the illusionist’s wrist, suggested a glimpse of steel.

‘While he stood in what he hoped appeared like calm contemplation, Ali Bey stepped lightly forward and struck Quadir just beneath his breastbone. Knocked backwards by the blow, the eunuch stumbled. He raised a hand to massage the sore place and found dampness there. Looking down, he was surprised, and only surprised, to find his hand covered in blood. He snapped his head up to look at Ali Bey. Only then did he glimpse the blade disappearing, like a darting fish, back into the folds of the other man’s sweat-damp robes.

‘There were many things Quadir wanted to say to Ali Bey then. But his mouth only opened and closed, twice in quick succession. Like a fish, he thought.’

Now the eunuch’s shadow stood alone against the painted sky, while suns, moons and stars passed over his head.

‘All at once, and for the first time in many a long year, he remembered standing buried up to his chin under a boiling hot sun after the priests had held him down and cut away the puny seahorse of his penis, the shrivelled seeds of his testicles. The searing agony when the bamboo stalk was inserted into the wound was long gone, unrecoverable, but the heat of his burial, neck deep in the scorching sand, washed over him like a blast from the baker’s oven.

‘Quadir, chief eunuch and confidante of wives and sultans, back in the mind of his eight-year-old self, was dead before his face hit the floor.’

The shadow eunuch’s fall was as graceful as it was tragic. His audience, his audience of one, buried her face in her hands as she always did at this moment in the telling.

There were no shadow puppets for the murder of the baby boy, only soft words and a sky flecked with clouds and birds and with a fiery sun at its centre. The muffled hubbub from beyond the windows – the cries of traders in the market, iron-shod hooves on cobbled lanes, the chatter of passers-by – might have been the grief and ululations of mourners.

‘There were moments at the end, a handful at least, when peace and quiet replaced the frenzy of the struggle. All sensations were set aside and Little Ahmet was suspended in the silence, hovering there. The fat man was gone and there were no hands upon him any more, forcing him under. He floated on the surface, legs splayed and arms outstretched. He was face down, his hair arrayed like the fronds of some aquatic plant. While he had thrashed and fought, his eyes had been squeezed tight shut, another way of resisting. But the pain and fear were gone now. His lungs had filled with water but there was no more choking. That time had passed.

‘Not so very long ago he had been a creature of water and the womb, and in the little life that remained, he remembered. His dying eyes opened into a shimmering light, and as he gazed into its warmth he heard her voice, clear as notes from a bell. He could not see her face – only dappled light – but her voice was all around him. As soon as he heard her call his name he began to fall deeper, slowly descending through still, warm water towards the source of the light and the sound. He was not afraid.’

They lay quietly together for a while, letting the words settle around them like birds.

‘And Ali Bey?’ she asked, finally.

‘The sultan executed him, had him hanged, as you well know.’

‘Even though it was he – Mehmet – who had ordered his baby half-brother’s murder,’ she said.

‘Even though – yes,’ he said, indulging her need for repetition. ‘That’s what makes Ali Bey’s dream so satisfying, don’t you think – when he looks down upon his fellow chieftains. It came true when their upturned faces were the last thing he saw, with the noose around his neck.’

‘And they really called the baby
Little
Ahmet?’ she asked. ‘It just makes it all the sadder.’

‘He was his father’s last son, sired when the old man was nearer death than life. And he was, as well, a silent, listless scrap of a thing at birth, and premature. No one expected him to live beyond his first breaths.’

‘His mother’s love, though,’ she said, wistfully.

‘Whatever it was, he thrived, apparently. They loved him.’

‘So that is our foe,’ she said. ‘A man who would kill his own half-brother, a baby, to secure his throne.’

They were silent for a little while, and then he said:

‘They all do that. It’s what makes them men.’

‘You’re wrong,’ she whispered. ‘It’s what makes them sultans … and emperors.’

They lay in the dark, a boy and a girl in a darkened bedchamber. Above them, the ceiling of the room was all aglow so that there seemed to be two worlds – one made of day and the other of night; or two times, the past and the present.

We draw back from them now, out and away from them, and their room is revealed as part of a palace built of white stone. It is hard to tell if it is the stone itself that is white or if the brightness of the structure is due only to the heartless light of a wintry sun. Higher still and their city, once the greatest city, is revealed as a web of streets, lanes and alleyways, with lives and buildings great and small trapped within.

As we rise higher, in an ever-widening gyre, the city’s place in the landscape is made clear. It sits at the end of a triangular peninsula of land shaped like the snout and horn of a rhinoceros. The squat stump of the horn thrusts up and out into the sea, so that there is water on two sides. The neck of the peninsula, the throat of the beast, is cut across by a great white wall like a collar or a livid scar, and flowing towards it like an unstoppable wave is a horde of people and animals – the massed forces of Sultan Mehmet II.

It is April, but spring has been slow in coming and the misery of winter is all around, so that a million sets of hooves and marching feet have made a mire that stretches in every direction. Their progress is slow, painful and accompanied by the shouts and groans of men and the complaints of beasts of burden.

However long it takes, whatever effort is required, their advance upon the wall and the city will not stop.