Master of Shadows (21 page)

31

Constantinople, April 1453

Prince Constantine flew high above the city, beyond its walls and out over the sparkling waters of the Sea of Marmara. A chill breeze swept over him, through him, ruffling his clothes and hair and filling his lungs. He was free, and filled with the joy of it and the endless possibilities. Far beneath him, formations of oared galleys practised their moves upon the blue. Lithe and fast as sea serpents, they cut with predatory purpose between the portly merchant ships plying back and forth, every which way – sharks among dugongs.

The waters around Constantinople were always busy, yet another means of approach to the centre of the world. The pull of the Great City attracted a ceaseless flow: pilgrims and merchants; makers of war and preachers of peace; madmen and malcontents; paupers and princes, and all else in between. They came on foot, on horses and on wagons and carts; on the broad shoulders of elephants and upon the cross-draped backs of donkeys; in boats and ships of every size and shape and in every condition imaginable. The prince’s city was irresistible and he marvelled anew at the colour of it all, and the energy.

He was dreaming, of course. The flying dream was his favourite – lived to the full for as long as it lasted and bitterly mourned when it ended. Sometimes he drifted gently back to consciousness, landing among his bedclothes as lightly as a leaf parted from a tree on a windless day; often the return to the waking world was presaged by a sudden, sickening fall, a headlong, flailing dive towards rooftops, desert sands or cresting waves. Soft landing or hard – each return to earth near broke his heart.

At other times he dreamed he was weightless in water, sweeping across an undersea world in the manner of a dolphin, or a seal – or better than either, able to breathe there, to suck down lungful after lungful of energy-giving oxygen without the need to return to the shackles wrought by gravity for the world above. But just as with the dream of flight, the thrill of the deep never lasted – or not long enough.

Always there was the sudden loss of ability followed by a terrifying plummet. In the dream of the sea it was a plunge, stone-like, into deeper water. Blue turned black and then his crushed lungs would blaze in his chest until he awoke gasping into the captivity of reality, weighed down by the anvils of his crippled legs.

This time he experienced the least familiar option, and the one he found most troubling of all. Having spent many happy minutes soaring and swinging in the sunlight, he became aware of heaviness in his legs. Instead of trailing straight out behind him, they began to pull earthwards of their own accord, as though his feet were suddenly encased in lead. His forward motion faltered and then failed completely. He was falling now, feet first towards the water, faster and faster, looking now not at the waves but into the empty vastness of the clear blue sky above. After too many desperate moments, tensed for impact but with no way of knowing when it would arrive, he awoke instead, with a jolt, sweating and panting among a chaos of sheets.

While he waited for his breathing to return to normal, he focused on the circular ceiling of his room. At his own request it had been painted like the sky – azure blue and flecked with white clouds. There were birds here and there, doves, starlings and sparrows and a single white gyrfalcon. Most of it, though, was empty blue and at the centre of it all the noonday sun, golden and with wisps and tendrils of fire coiling away from the rim. It was the sky he loved and flight he longed for – the chance to shake off the bonds of earth and rise up, weightless and untrammelled.

‘Costa?’

He heard her soft voice as though from far away. After a few moments, it came again. ‘Costa? It’s me, are you awake?’

It was Yaminah. Even now she sought his permission before coming into his room.

‘Yes … yes – come in, come in,’ he said, his gaze still fixed upon the ceiling.

She opened the door no more than a few inches and slipped inside. The heavy fabric of her dress made a shushing sound as she turned to close the door before stepping quickly over to his bedside. An observer might have thought her an intruder, someone who did not belong, and yet Yaminah had lived in the palace of Prince Constantine’s parents for six years. It was the only home she had and she was made welcome, but still she moved through its rooms and corridors as though in mortal fear of discovery by the guards.

She knelt down and took his right hand in both of her own. She stroked the slim, elegant fingers as she talked.

‘They’re here,’ she said.

‘I know,’ said Constantine softly. He looked down at the top of her head, bowed as if in prayer. She remained focused upon his hand rather than his face. ‘They certainly like their drums.’

‘And their horns,’ she added, and sniffed drily. ‘I suppose it’s safe to assume they would have us be in no doubt about their presence. Or their intentions.’

‘I expect you’re right,’ he said, and he smiled. The vulnerability of the pale skin of her scalp, revealed by the neat parting of her long brown hair, made him think of the child she had been when he first saw her, perched like a bird of paradise on a balustrade inside the Church of St Sophia all those years before. All those years before his old life had ended and a new one began. He reached for her face with his free hand, caressed her cheek as softly as a wish. He felt her expression change beneath his fingers as she too began to smile.

His touch, the reassurance of it, seemed finally to give her the peace of mind she needed, even if it would not last. She looked up into his face for the first time since she had entered. There was always shyness in her manner towards him, though she knew it pleased him every time she walked into a room. She had made his world smaller than before but she filled the space entirely.

Even from where she knelt on the tiled floor by his bed she could see that his legs were awkwardly arranged – out of line with his top half – and that he was, as always, unaware of it. He looked broken, a sapling toppled by a storm. He
was
broken, and she wished with all her heart that she might fix him – or at least straighten him, as she would have smoothed the sheets upon which he lay. But even to attempt to do so would wound what remained of his male pride, she knew, and she let him be.

He lay there like her own private Christ: come to save her and her alone, and paying an awful price for his good deed.

‘Do you still want to go through with it?’ he asked. ‘Now that all these uninvited guests have shown up? I mean, heaven alone knows what we’re going to feed them.’

Despite the seeming lightness of his question, the hearing of it made Yaminah’s smile vanish like day turned to night.

‘How dare you ask me that?’ she said, two hot tears pricking in her eyes. He might as well have struck her. Her gaze was fierce, an outright challenge, her chin raised towards his face. ‘And why say it like that – I’m not about to
go through
with anything. I want it even more now.’ Her voice sounded brittle. ‘Don’t you?
Don’t
you
?’

The speed of Yaminah’s emotions – their arrivals and departures – was a fascination to the young prince and sometimes made him want to laugh out loud, but this time her sudden momentary seriousness, and the accompanying hurt, banished his own smile as well.

‘Me too,’ he said, nodding, and he cupped her heart-shaped face with both his hands. With his thumbs he caught her tears, then lightly traced the lines of her cheekbones, as though opening a book to a favourite page. ‘Me too.’

When he had asked her to marry him, weeks before, he had known she would say yes. In truth he had felt he owed her, although sometimes in his heart he wondered if the gift he had to give was a blessing or a curse. She loved him – he knew that – but was it fair to bind her to him for a lifetime?

His father’s hearty approval of the betrothal had surprised him most of all. Since his accident, the prince had remained out of sight of most. His absence from court life had seemed to meet with the emperor’s approval, and so when Constantine had broken the news of his plans to marry Yaminah, he had expected a sharp intake of breath at the very least.

A wedding would place the prince centre stage after all – bringing him back to the forefront of everyone’s attention. He had thought therefore that there might be a note of caution from his majesty, if not outright disapproval – and yet the emperor had sounded only surprised at first, and then sincerely enthusiastic about the whole idea.

Yaminah’s smile returned, replacing her frown like sunshine after rain, but the clouds remained, threatening. She snuck up on to the bed then, suddenly feeling tired, and curled beside him like a cat. She placed her head on his lap and tapped his thigh, just above his knee, three times with one thin finger.

‘Tell me stories,’ she said. ‘To make up for your stupid question.’

Constantine had watched her finger jab at his withered flesh, stretched thin over bone, but had not felt it, and when she settled her hand upon his leg he detected only a vague suggestion of its warmth. He could, however, just about register the weight of her head in his lap, and he closed his eyes as his heart beat faster. There was a sudden hint of heaviness, and of need, between his legs, and he might have groaned, but did not.

After a moment or two he opened his eyes and reached behind his head. With his left hand he felt for a set of dangling cords, each attached to some or other part of a network of little pulleys and weights above the bed. He made a few brief tugs and adjustments until heavy curtains and slatted blinds moved into their desired positions over tall windows, the room made all but dark. A single shaft of sunlight remained, lancing down on to the top of a wooden cabinet by the bed. Upon the cabinet stood a dish of highly polished bronze, four inches across and fixed to a stand by small brass screws. A turn here and a twist there made the gleaming dish swivel and turn like a roving eye.

With a practised hand Constantine manoeuvred the gadget until the beam, thinner than Yaminah’s wrist, was caught and reflected back up on to the ceiling. All at once the painted sky was lit up, bright as noon. It was an effect Yaminah never tired of, lying in the gloom beneath the apex of an upturned cone of light through which dust drifted like stars in heaven.

From a drawer in the cabinet Constantine produced a handful of black-painted rods, each of them topped with a different, exquisitely crafted, two-dimensional blackened figure or shape. There were crowned emperors and empresses; kings and queens; princes and princesses; mounted warriors; foot soldiers – singly and in ranks; crescent moons and stars, towers and battlements, lightning bolts and storm clouds – the props for any story the prince might weave.

Yaminah let out a contented sigh that was almost a purr, and her saviour prince began his tale as he always did:

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

And into the beam of light he brought the first of the figures and shapes so that their shadows were cast large against the blue, or passed across the face of the painted sun with its tendrils of flame. Armies advanced and clashed, fought and fell, triumphed or retreated; horses cantered and galloped; emperors made their empresses by marriage as required, and consorted with their mistresses as they wanted, while those empresses sought their own lovers; fortresses were raised and flattened, suns set, moons rose, stars roamed free and tears were shed for all of it.

‘…“Let him who loves me follow me,” roared Mehmet, sultan and lord of all,’ said Constantine, while Yaminah yelped, her face in her hands.

‘Out of his bedchamber he charged, shrugging off his robe of sky-blue silk, trimmed with the white fur of the Arctic fox, while courtiers rushed in all directions like startled birds.’

Shadows danced against a painted sky, and a prince and princess, a broken boy and the girl whose fate it had been to break him, lay together in a circular bedroom in a palace in a great city. He sent his stories up into the sky to fly alongside his dreams, and she, like an angel, could fly there too for as long as each tale lasted.

Sometimes the cast of characters remained only shadows; at other times, when the warmth of his body and the softness of his voice conspired to lure her into the space between waking and sleep, they seemed to come fully alive. Then their shapes would fill with colour and be transformed into flesh and blood, so that it was as real men and women that they played their parts.

‘“Let him who loves me follow me!”’ said Constantine again, more of a bellow this time as his shadow sultan strode forth, while grim-faced men rallied to his call, issuing from every doorway of his palace and flocking to his side.

‘A letter was clutched in Mehmet’s right hand – indeed he gripped it so tightly that his knuckles shone white like bone. The poor soul who had brought the missive remained on his knees in the bedchamber, his forehead pressed tightly against cool floor tiles, eyes closed.

‘Like everyone else he had no idea what news he had carried, and his lips moved silently as he prayed that its contents would not cost him his life. Only when the shouts and clattering footsteps faded from his hearing did he risk a sideways glance, first left and then right.’

Constantine flicked the messenger’s shadow from side to side, an elegantly exaggerated move that always made Yaminah giggle.

‘Content that he was alone, he risked a hitching, tearful breath.’ Constantine mimicked the panicky sob, making Yaminah giggle even louder. ‘Before rolling on to his side, still curled into a ball.’

Constantine turned the little figure then, made only of stiffened paper, until the man’s shape was reduced to nothing more than a black line beside a four-poster bed upon an otherwise empty sky.

Yaminah clutched his hand. For all that it was a tale she knew well – how Sultan Mehmet II had learned of the death of his father and had set out in all possible haste to seize the throne – it was Constantine who made it real for her, made it all true, and she held him tight.