Master of Shadows (25 page)

‘What is wrong is that another died in my place,’ she said. It seemed she could not bring herself to look at him as she said the words, and she gazed out to sea instead.

‘The English commander could not bear the loss of face,’ she continued. ‘Rather than admit to my escape, he had his men seize another girl – a peasant girl like me, but one who had done them no harm. It was she who suffered my fate instead. They cut her hair like me and dressed her like me – told the waiting crowd she was me. She had done no harm – to them or to anyone else – and yet they tied her to a stake and had the flames consume her.’

John Grant was quiet, considering her words.

‘The death of that other girl should not be your burden,’ he said at last. ‘You were not there. You could not have known.’

‘I let him take me,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I was afraid,’ she said. ‘I was afraid to burn in their fire.’

‘Blame my father, then,’ he said. ‘He was the one who carried you away.’

‘I could have stopped him,’ she said.

‘Who?’

‘I could have stopped your father, accepted my fate.’

She looked him squarely in the eye.

‘I can stop anyone,’ she said. There was no note of idle boasting in her voice, only a statement of fact.

‘Well what have we here?’

The question came from a man standing behind them. Like the rest of the mercenaries aboard, he spoke in the Tuscan dialect, and both Lẽna and John Grant understood him at once. So engrossed had they been in their own conversation, they had not noticed he was close enough to overhear.

They turned sharply to face him. Out of the corner of his eye John Grant saw that Giustiniani had heard the question too – or more likely its angry tone. While the three of them stood eyeing one another, more and more men on deck became aware of a sudden change of mood in the air and stopped what they were doing, the better to watch.

‘What have we here?’ the man asked again. He was in his middle years, lean and muscled – the product of hard work and harder fighting. Realising he had gained an audience, and relishing it, he raised his voice for all to hear.

‘This one has a lady friend,’ he said, gesturing at John Grant. He made a grab for the scarf that partially concealed Lẽna’s face, but she stepped smoothly out of his reach. There was a laugh, and some catcalls as the watchers warmed to the moment. It had been a long and uncomfortable voyage, and here, suddenly, was a wholly unexpected and welcome distraction.

John Grant shot a glance at Giustiniani. The commander had set down the astrolabe and was watching the scene with an expression that was somewhere between surprise and dismay. For all that he seemed interested, his stance suggested he was inclined to let natural justice run its course.

‘Well let’s have a look at you, then,’ said the soldier, and this time he stepped forward as though to grab Lẽna by the shoulders. Despite the enervating toll exacted by the seasickness upon her muscles and her senses, the lunge might as well have been made in slow motion. As her assailant began to close the distance between them, she stepped not away from him but towards, turning her right shoulder as she did so and dropping into a half-crouch. His momentum, coupled with the rolling movement of the ship, was suddenly to her advantage rather than his. Her right hand grabbed the man’s crotch, her left snapped shut on his throat, and in one graceful, effortless movement she propelled him into a forward somersault over her knee.

He landed flat on his back on the deck with a solid sound that made the onlookers grimace and raise their shoulders in sympathy. When she knelt down on him, her knee on his neck, the point of Angus Armstrong’s knife was hovering just above his right eye.

‘Hold there!’

It was the voice of Giustiniani, and he was striding towards them. By the time he reached them, Lẽna had straightened and stood up. She spun the knife in the air so that she could catch the tip and offer him the handle. He stopped and stared at the weapon. Like everyone else, he had missed the moment when she had made it appear. He held his hands up and shook his head.

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘That clearly belongs to you – but I would rather you put it away.’

She slipped the weapon blade-first under the cuff of her right sleeve, until it was out of sight once more.

Giustiniani looked at her questioningly, and in reply she raised a hand and pulled away her scarf. She looked him in the eye without blinking, and he returned her gaze evenly.

‘What business have you here, madam?’ he asked.

John Grant opened his mouth to speak, but the commander held up a hand to silence him.

‘I have deceived you,’ she said. ‘But if it is war you are bringing to the Turk, then I too have skills that are of use.’

Giustiniani looked down at his winded and bested soldier, who had just begun to move – rolling on to his stomach and rising to his knees, his eyes wide and staring. He was a veteran of many battles. The commander had seen him stand and fight and hold his own when others might have fled. Yet this woman had tossed him aside like an empty coat.

‘My battles are not fought by women,’ he said.

‘More fool you,’ she said. ‘And so what would you have me do? We travel together, this lad and I, and we fight together.’ She glanced at John Grant and he nodded.

‘I have no time for this,’ said Giustiniani. ‘We make port in a few hours and my fight is there, not here on this ship.’

He pointed at John Grant and addressed him directly.

‘
You
are in my service,’ he said. ‘What arrangements you seek to make for your … your travelling companion are your own affair.’

He turned away, waving at them with one large hand. In his mind’s eye he watched once more as his soldier turned a somersalt in the air before flopping on to the deck like a landed fish.

Without turning back he said:

‘I would ask only that you do no more harm to any of the men.’

There was laughter at this, as one by one the onlookers began talking among themselves, marvelling at what had just happened.

The soldier Lẽna had overpowered was on his feet, brushing down his clothes and wiping his face with his hands.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘I am Joan of Arc,’ she said.

37

Yaminah could feel the blood pulsing hot in her face as she hurried from Prince Constantine’s bedchamber. The heels of her shoes clip-clipped on the stone floor of the corridor, and she raised one hand to her cheek to conceal the signs of her embarrassment. It was a needless gesture. The palace was all but empty. So close to the walls, and to the sight, sound and smell of the Turkish army, any and all that could had departed for less unseemly circumstances.

Even the air inside the palace reeked of the cloying damp of a winter without end, mixed with dread of whatever was to come. The cold, humiliating stench hung like a shroud, ready to enfold the dead. Yaminah made her way through halls and courtyards that smelled of the death of the world.

Constantinople was old, older than memory. The city had been pawed by more enemies than anyone had counted, and gnawed at from within by greed and neglect. Now it was the Ottoman Turks come to bait the tethered bear, and their hunger seemed insatiable. Bite by slavering bite, plain by plain, hill by hill and city by city they had consumed the empire until all that remained was the Great City itself.

Yaminah knew her focus should be on the present need of Constantinople. But she was a teenage girl, and youth and hope bubbled with her, alongside fear and dread. Her mind was therefore filled with thoughts of what the prince’s recovery – even his partial recovery – might mean; all that might change between them. For six years she had known him only as he had been from the moment of their catastrophic meeting in the Church of St Sophia – first the boy and then the man, but always without feeling or movement in his legs.

Mostly bedridden, he was a soul set apart from other people, from other men.

She had never once heard him complain, and his stoicism made his predicament harder to watch. Broken as he was, he carried an awful weight – the reality of his existence – and did so lightly. He was first to poke fun at himself, always quick to relieve the tension that might arise out of the thoughtless remarks of others.

From time to time she glimpsed an unfocused look in his eyes, as though he had allowed himself to drift in dreams towards a place where his legs obeyed his will, but she never asked him to share those thoughts, or to confess any sadness, and he never had.

She could not bear the word
cripple
and was quick to admonish any who used it about him in her hearing, but it lurked in the shadows just the same. Always she had liked him, and soon she loved him, but his handicap was between them every minute of the day. It was his dark half, never mentioned.

She had done this to him – or at best they had achieved the result together. She had not asked anyone to save her when she fell, but she was grateful nonetheless. He, and no one else, had had the nerve to step beneath her with arms outstretched, in defiance of gravity. He had broken her fall and she had broken his back – it was as simple as that. Then, in the aftermath, when her own fate had been uncertain (orphan that she was), it had been Constantine who had surprised everyone by insisting that
he
would take care of
her
. From his bed, while physicians shook their heads and his parents grieved for a son transformed – or an empire burdened with a crippled heir – he had summoned her.

Before all of them he had declared that she had been sent to him by Our Lady, and that having caught her it was his duty to keep hold of her ever after. His father the emperor, moved by his son’s words, had consented to his wishes.

In fact it had been the emperor’s companion and consort, Helena, who spoke first. Crossing to his bed, she had looked down at him, wordlessly, for what seemed an age. She was tall, so that in his dreamlike state it seemed her face floated high above him, and her dark beauty reminded him of the sharply delicate features of a hungry cat.

He lay confined and fixed upon a wooden frame that had been assembled on the orders of Leonid, most senior of the physicians – indeed a man so old his actual age was beyond the reach and knowing of everyone else at court. Leonid had declared that the prince’s best hope of recovery lay in being held immobile, belted and braced within a rigid structure that might give his body the chance to mend itself.

At last Helena had reached out to Constantine, seemingly meaning to take and hold his hand in her own while she spoke. But a sharp sound, somewhere between a hiss and a tut, stayed her hand. She snapped her head around in search of its source, and her dark eyes met those of Leonid, standing by the door of the bedchamber with three grim-faced colleagues. The sound had been involuntary, escaping his lips only when he sensed she might raise the injured prince’s arm, move him in any way, and the expression on his face showed he was already rebuking himself. Helena’s gaze softened and she smiled at the old man until he allowed himself an apologetic grimace in return.

‘Prince Constantine’s words reveal to one and all the kind of boy he is … the kind of man he will be,’ she had said, pausing to look at each of the assembled, anxious faces in turn. Her own face, illuminated by sunlight through the high windows, shone with righteousness so that it was hard to look at her

A murmur of approval had passed around the room then, like a breeze bringing relief to a room filled with stale air.

Constantine lay motionless, his eyes clouded with pain. He had been dosed with opiates but his senses remained within his control. He looked up at his father’s lover, keen to hear what else she might say.

‘The orphan Yaminah’s veins course with imperial blood from her mother, our sister so recently laid to rest, indeed from the line of Komnenos – the same who harried the Turkmen all the way back to their homeland two and a half centuries ago,’ she continued.

She paused again, and this time the low rumble of assent from her audience in the bedchamber made it clear she understood the will of the room.

‘Prince Constantine has accepted the child as a gift – and who are we to gainsay him after he risked and nearly lost his life in his determination to keep her from harm? And so in his wisdom he has made us her family now. In truth, she has always been one of us.’

Having said her piece, Helena had walked purposefully back across the room until she was beside the emperor once more. Constantine Palaiologos had reached for her hand and grasped it firmly. For a moment he had seemed smaller than the woman by his side, the lesser – but who knew whether it was his own sadness or her bravura in the face of grief that had made the difference?

‘So be it,’ he had said, his voice fragile with the emotion of the time and the moment. ‘So be it.’ Without another word and with his pale eyes shining, he had led Helena from his son’s bedchamber, followed by all but the physicians, who had gathered once more about the boy’s bed, eddying aimlessly there like the waters of a stream about a stubborn rock.

Since that hour and day, Yaminah had been a princess of the Byzantine Empire in all but name, raised alongside Constantine, his companion and his comfort all the while. Helena had been as good as her word, and Emperor Constantine along with her. Yaminah had grown to young womanhood with their every blessing. But like a flower grown in the shade, she had struggled for want of light. She lapped up warmth like a house cat laps milk, and found most of what she needed at her prince’s side.

She loved Constantine with a sharpness that sometimes made it hard for her to take a deep breath, but as the years passed and her girlish needs began to give way to those of a woman, the certainty that they could never be with one another as man and wife was a shadow on her heart, a draught of cold air that chilled her.

But now this! It was as though the golden, warming light of the sun itself had made its presence felt, unheralded and unexpected, through a break in the clouds. She had felt the hardness of him, the heat of him. Might there be new life after years of winter? Would the warmth newly returned venture further south? And would this late spring see him walk again as well?

It was all too much to hope for and she knew it. She closed her eyes and shook her head to banish the dreams. But for all her efforts to force herself back into the world of before, back into reality, a half-smile remained immovable upon her blushing face.

Gradually, Yaminah became aware of where she was. She had taken her leave of the prince in such a state of discombobulation she had climbed stairs at random and rounded corners into a less familiar part of the sprawling palace complex. Lost in her private thoughts, she had wandered far from her own territory, indeed right into the part of the palace reserved for the emperor’s consort.

She was thrust fully back into the here and now by the sound of two voices – one a man’s and the other that of Helena herself. The conversation, a heated one, drifted into the corridor through a half-open door a dozen paces ahead of her on her left. It was the mention of her wedding that stopped her.

She stepped to the wall and pressed herself against the cool stone, one hand up at her mouth as though to stifle the sound of her breathing while she listened.

‘It is more important now than ever,’ said Helena. ‘It is about the appearance of legitimacy … of the rightful order of things … of confidence!’

Yaminah could not identify the man’s voice, but whoever he was, he sounded fearful – submissive to his mistress.

‘Of course, of course,’ he said. ‘I understand, of course – and you are right, my lady. I meant only to enquire whether you still felt this was the best use of your time. There are so many demands on your attention now.’

‘Do not patronise me,’ said Helena, her voice quiet and controlled so that the threat loomed all the larger in the softness of her tone.

‘The people watch our every move now,’ she said. ‘These are the blackest clouds ever to hang over the city. If we are seen to falter … if any action or statement reveals a lack of resolve … well, think about the consequences. These are the most superstitious citizens on God’s earth. We must treat them like the children they are. Give them a party and they’ll smile and forget, for a little while, what waits beyond the walls.’

‘Of course,’ said the man once more. ‘All is well.’

‘All must
seem
well,’ said Helena, her voice rising in pitch. ‘All must seem well, and while they are still celebrating the union of a prince and his bride, we shall take whatever action is required. The empire needs a backbone, and Constantine’s is broken. He shall not be their undoing. He shall not be
our
undoing.’

Yaminah pressed even harder against the wall, as though to penetrate the very fabric of the building and disappear. The tiles were cool to the touch but her whole body burned, twisting in the flames of Helena’s threat. She felt the colour rise higher in her cheeks. There was a jagged lump in her throat too, like a half-swallowed shard of glass, and for a moment she thought she might cry.

For all that she burned with the blood pulsing through her body, the chill of the palace pressed all around her. She was often cold within its walls, regardless of the season, but now she felt as though she must be glowing, that the light and heat radiating from her body must surely give her away, like a glow-worm in a cave.

What was this?
Why
was this? Helena meant Constantine harm – that much seemed clear. All in an instant, and for the first time, Yaminah saw life in this place for what it was. The palace, the whole city, was constantly awash with rumour and plotting, that much she had always known. Some courtier was on the rise while another was out of favour. This wife was consorting with a lover half her age while that one was drunk on wine by noon every day.

Hour by hour the dramas and intrigues flowed like currents rippling the surface of the Sea of Marmara. Often blood was spilled. Guilty or innocent – who could tell? The key to survival was to turn a blind eye. Yaminah kept track of as much as she could – which was a great deal. Often she had had to clamp a hand across her mouth to stifle a gasp at some or other revelation. But now she felt the tide, a power far greater than her own, pulling at her feet and threatening to sweep her away. She clung to the wall for fear of losing everything.

There was movement in the room beyond. The conversation had drawn to its close and there was the shuffle of footsteps and the rustling of expensive garments. She must not be found here at such a moment. She had no real business near Helena’s apartments after all; even without the complication of having been in a position to overhear such words – private, sinister words – she would have struggled to explain her presence there. If Helena were to catch her eavesdropping … well, the mere possibility replaced her blushes with a prickling chill. The urge to turn and run was all but overwhelming, and it was some other, better part of her that had her stand firmly in place. Any attempted flight over marble flagstones in hard-heeled shoes would have betrayed her utterly; instead she remained still, fixed like a flower pressed between the pages of a book.

Helena, tall and dark, slipped from the room like a resident ghost. For a moment she paused, and Yaminah would have sworn the woman raised her nose a fraction, as though sniffing the air around her. In one hand she held a walking cane, topped with an ivory heart. With the fingers of the other she fondled the contours of the carving, and for a split second Yaminah imagined her raising it above her head and turning to pounce upon her where she stood transfixed.

A single bead of sweat pricked in the small of her back. It trailed, like the tip of a dead finger, down the curve of her lower spine and all the way to her tailbone. She closed her eyes and imagined Constantine, asleep upon his bed and surrounded by cloaked and hooded figures bearing swords in upraised hands. The tension of the stretched and endless moment tugged at her heart and she almost spoke, just to break the spell. When she opened her eyes, Helena was nowhere to be seen.