Master of Shadows (26 page)

All at once Yaminah was aware of a roaring, pounding sound inside her head and realised she was holding her breath. Slowly, painfully, she exhaled – taking care to let the trapped air seep soundlessly from between her lips. She realised too, with a shiver, that she had no idea which direction Helena had taken. For a moment she contemplated the possibility that the consort had seen her there, eyes tightly shut and pressed against the wall. Might it have suited Helena to know she had been overheard and yet to leave the eavesdropper dangling like a leaf in autumn? She dismissed the thought as nonsense and shook her head to clear it. Deciding to retrace the aimless steps that had so nearly delivered her into disaster, she turned from the door and walked away as quickly and as quietly as the flagstones allowed.

Any relief at having been overlooked at the scene of her crime was short-lived, however. Yaminah’s system had briefly coursed with adrenalin, but those moments of heightened sensation were past now, leaving dismal desolation in their wake. Reality bore down upon her narrow shoulders and she felt her knees might buckle, pitching her helplessly on to the floor.

Almost harder to bear than the new-found knowledge of the threat was having no one alive in the world, save Constantine himself, with whom she could share her burden. She had been taken into the care of his family, and of the wider court. He had spoken up for her from the depths of his own suffering to pledge his determination to care for her. But in spite of his patronage, she was and always would be an orphan. Her mother’s absence was a yawning emptiness at her centre, and while Constantine’s devotion made a bridge across the void, still she felt hollow.

She had cultivated acquaintances among the girls and young women whose orbits intersected her own, but always she had felt a need to maintain a distance. In part it was out of fidelity to her mother – some belief that her memory would remain untarnished only if no other woman or girl came between them.

But there was also an understanding of the reality of life within the gilded cage of the Blachernae Palace. At best the rarified world she inhabited was a rumour mill in perpetual motion. At worst it was a hive of venomous, hard-shelled creatures searching ceaselessly for the chance to land a mortal wound upon challengers both real and imagined.

Denied the bulwark of family, of elders and siblings bound to her by blood, she had grasped from the outset that her long-term security in the palace depended upon keeping her own counsel as much as possible, ensuring that at least a portion of her thoughts remained private. But above all, she knew she depended on Constantine. He was hers and she was his. All this time she had assumed others valued him as she did. The realisation that some of those closest to him might wish him ill struck her with the force of a thunderclap.

She scolded herself, furious at her own lack of awareness and maturity. Constantine was all she had. It was therefore her responsibility to spot danger at a distance, and yet she had allowed her own feelings to blind her to the intentions of others. Now a potentially lethal threat was close by, and only by chance had she learned the truth, like a splash of iced water to the face.

Childish … childish!
she scolded herself.

She made her way back through the corridors like a convict approaching the place of execution.

‘Yaminah?’

She was almost back on familiar territory, where she belonged, and within a minute’s walk of the sanctuary of her own quarters, when Helena’s voice reached out from behind her like an unseen hand. For the second time in the space of as many minutes she felt the rush of hot blood in her cheeks. How long had Helena been behind her? Had she followed her?

‘I am perfectly well, madam,’ she heard herself say.

If it was physically possible, her face felt even hotter than before. The non sequitur burned on her lips. She was so overheated she felt she might catch fire, and she was painfully aware of dampness on her brow and on her top lip. She ached to wipe away the beads of perspiration with the sleeve of her dress but resisted the temptation. Part of her wanted to run. An adult she might be, but the child within was alive and well. More than anything, she wished for darkness – cool, cosseting darkness in which to be unseen and unobserved.

Surely Helena must smell the sweat of her anxiety? She had read that animals could detect fear by scent, or some other sense, and she was not even sure she couldn’t smell it on herself now.

‘I am pleased to hear it, daughter,’ said Helena.

The expression on her face made clear Yaminah’s comment had arrived uninvited.

Helena was in the habit, when it suited her, of adopting what Yaminah regarded as an overly affectionate tone. There was no familial or legal relationship between the two women, no tie of blood or of marriage, and sometimes Yaminah felt the emperor’s consort used the word ‘daughter’ not as a term of endearment but rather as some kind of put-down. If nothing else, it underlined the pecking order, as if there was any need to do so.

Unable to stop the flow, seemingly determined to answer questions before they were asked, Yaminah heard herself ploughing ahead into an increasingly difficult furrow.

‘It is time for Prince Constantine’s therapy,’ she announced, too formally, the words falling over each other in their eagerness to be out. She blinked hard and imagined them scurrying around Helena’s well-turned ankles like needy lap dogs. ‘He will be expecting me.’

Helena’s demeanour softened nonetheless. Here was a subject of conversation that might serve as common ground, certain to deflect any aggression. Yaminah’s devotion to the prince was an accepted fact of life at court, and no one had ever questioned any tenderness she extended towards the young man who had so famously sacrificed his well-being and put her life before his own.

Whatever Helena’s intentions might be, she was commanded by custom and practice to respond favourably to such attention to duty – even, it seemed, when there were no witnesses. It was a gesture and a set of consequences that fitted easily into the thinking of a society desperate to demonstrate and to witness the fruits of Christian charity. With the enemy at the gate, just beyond the walls, all those who were trapped within felt the need to live up to the ideal, however inconvenient it might be. Here was self-sacrifice – indeed self-sacrifice that had inspired more of the same. Prince Constantine had saved Yaminah’s life, and she, without ever having been asked, had offered him her own in return.

‘Do you really love him?’ asked Helena.

38

It was Leonid, senior physician at court, who had advised that since the prince was incapable of moving his own legs, then efforts must be made by others to move them for him. Leonid himself had devised and prescribed the treatment, a routine he called ‘the therapy’.

Constantine had remained in his frame of wood and metal, immobile as a statue, for many days. That, said the old doctor, would allow any and all natural healing of wounds to take place. Leonid’s training in anatomy had allowed him to perceive that the prince’s attempt to catch his falling angel had tested his own young frame beyond its limits. Beyond black and purple bruises, he bore no visible outward signs of damage. But the shattering impact had somehow severed the connection between the upper and lower halves of his body. Control of the legs had been put beyond the reach of the lad’s own will.

After weeks and then months of waiting for spontaneous repair, Leonid had begun to observe the wasting of the boy’s limbs. Inactivity, he deduced, was causing the muscles to dissolve, the tendons to shorten.

Should the day come when the power of movement returned to the royal legs, it was Leonid’s avowed intention they would be fit for the fray. And so it was that the clever, cantankerous physician had set about devising a programme of exercises to counter the deterioration and stop the rot. If the prince could not move his own legs, then they would be moved on his behalf by others more able.

At first it had been Leonid’s fellow doctors who had undertaken the time-consuming and laborious business of flexing and straightening the prince’s lifeless limbs. The air of Constantine’s bedchamber was thick with incense, and while the medical men worked, a group of young priests standing beneath the shuttered windows of the room kept up a low, steady chanting – all of it designed to soothe the prince and keep him in a state of restful calm.

Yaminah, however, had found reasons and excuses to witness the therapy from the outset, and since everyone had to agree that her presence soothed Constantine – gave him peace and, more importantly, the patience to put up with the indignity of it all – no one was allowed to chase her away.

‘I don’t know about you, Yaminah,’ the prince would say, ‘but I’m exhausted just watching myself. I must have not walked for miles!’

Constantine’s seemingly bottomless reserves of good humour only made his predicament harder to witness. She would remember to smile at his stoicism, his endlessly inventive self-deprecation, but in truth it added to her own pain and feelings of guilt.

Soon enough she began even to inveigle herself into the application of the therapy itself. Having begun by watching from the point in the room furthest from the bed, skulking there like a dog with a heavy conscience, slowly she had edged inwards on an ever-decreasing circle, seeking forgiveness.

The doctors had tsked and tutted and generally fretted at the presence of a girl in such intimate circumstances, but she was impervious to their discomfort. Only the suffering of her prince mattered to Yaminah, and she blithely ignored their attempts to discourage her as she drifted ever closer.

Then came the day when she asked Constantine if she might help. His brow and face had been beaded with sweat, for the manipulation of his feet and legs – and indeed the rest of his slender frame, since Leonid prescribed exercises for his hands, arms and shoulders as well – took its toll. As always, though, when she spoke to him, his discomfort was apparently eased.

His doctors protested as though with one voice. Surely such an indignity ought not to be visited upon a royal personage? But Constantine’s own voice cut cleanly through the clutter of protest.

‘I should be delighted,’ he said, so that she blushed. ‘If there must be hands upon me, then better that they be cool and soft like I imagine yours to be.’

Yaminah had been barely thirteen years old at the time, and the flirtatious words from one who was already becoming a man sounded nothing less than scandalous even to her. There had been gasps and palpable shock from the assembled doctors, but Constantine pressed ahead boldly, gaining strength it seemed, and resolve, from the wave of indignation buffeting his bed.

‘Please show young Yaminah here how best to encourage some sap back into these broken sticks of mine,’ he said, his eyes on hers. And then addressing his doctors directly he added: ‘In any event, I am sure the time and undoubted experience of such learned men as yourselves would be better spent elsewhere. Train this girl as your replacement and perhaps she may yet relieve you all of a duty that must be onerous at best, if not completely pointless. If this dead horse must be flogged, then let it be done by younger hands.’

At this last apparent acceptance of defeat, a shadow somewhere between self-rebuke and regret flitted across the prince’s face. He batted it away, as unwelcome and troublesome as a fat bluebottle, and regained his good humour.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, his gaze fixed not on any of them but on Yaminah once more, ‘what can it hurt?’

39

Yaminah pulled the darkness around herself like a blanket, letting it smother her, and conceal her from the world above. She held, cradled at her breast like a newborn, a handful of finger bones.

‘Tell me what to do, Ama,’ she said.

From beyond the darkness, beyond the walls that contained it, came the sound of horns wildly blowing, and the cheering and jeering of many men. Even here, deep below the palace, where the foundations met the bedrock of the world, the first of the besieging Turkmen could be heard dimly, and Yaminah clasped her hands more tightly around the slender bones.

‘Is Mum with you today, Ama?’ she asked, and while there came no answer, there was at least comfort in the sound of the words …
Ama
…
Mum
… soft and warm and smooth, and more pleasing than any others she knew.

She had already told them everything Helena had said. She always told them everything. For want of a family, for want of the warm flesh and blood of loved ones, Yaminah had her box of bones. There were, anyway, those parts of every person’s life that were best kept secret, and perhaps especially from family. No matter the love between any two people, there were always thoughts and glimpses of self-knowledge that would not endear the one to the other – and so they were placed in a concealed room made only of imagination and memory; a room in the mind, the very existence of which – let alone its contents – was neither confessed to nor discussed with another living soul. What Yaminah might not have told her mother’s nurse in life, she could at least tell to her relics.

Once, long ago, almost lost in the palace gardens, she had chanced upon an elderly beekeeper tending his hives. She had been afraid at first, trembling at the sight of the insects, hundreds of them, as they drew their unerring straight lines towards or away from their little homes. The hum of them was soothing, though, like the sound of a crowd far away, and soon she relaxed and let the beekeeper, tall and stooped with the weight of years, tell her some of what he knew.

First and foremost, he had said, it was vital to tell the bees everything. A bee landed on the end of his hooked nose but he seemed entirely unconcerned. His eyes crossed, momentarily, as he noted the presence of the visitor, then focused once more on the girl.

Staring at the insect as it crawled up his nose and on to his forehead, she had enquired exactly what he meant by everything.

‘Just that, little mistress,’ he had said. ‘Everything that happens – to me and to each member of my family – everything. They are especially concerned with births, marriages and deaths, but I do my best to keep them fully up to date with even trivial details.’

‘And what happens if you don’t?’ she had asked. ‘Tell them everything, I mean?’

‘Now that would be a dreadful mistake on my part,’ he had replied, shaking his head. ‘The bees would know I had left something out.’

‘And then what?’ she had asked.

Before he answered, he raised his right hand from where it had been dangling by his side. There was a bee on the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger and he reached towards Yaminah until his hand, and the insect, was right under her nose. She looked closely and saw that the bee’s stinger was buried in the old man’s flesh. She gasped, and reached out to swat the thing.

Smoothly, calmly, he withdrew his hand. With the other he began gently, oh so gently, to nudge the bee – tapping its side. Under his patient direction, the little creature began to move, slowly describing an anticlockwise circle. It was almost comical, its tiny legs sidestepping like a high-stepping pony. After a couple of complete rotations, its stinger came free of the keeper’s skin, and for an instant Yaminah saw that the little thorn was twisted like a pig’s tail. The old man’s coaxing had enabled the bee quite harmlessly to unscrew its weapon.

‘Do you see?’ he said, looking down into her face. ‘If you or I had knocked him from my hand, his stinger would have been torn from his body. He would have been terribly wounded and certainly would have died. By helping him free himself, I let him live to fly on – and to make me more honey, of course.’

Yaminah nodded, mouth open, her subconscious noting the value of avoiding instantaneous reactions fuelled by hurt. Then she remembered her question from before and asked it a second time.

‘What would happen if you left something out, if you did not tell them everything?’

‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘Why then they would leave me, of course.’ His old face was a picture of sorrow at the thought. If the bee’s sting had caused him any discomfort, he gave no sign. It was only the notion of losing his bees that caused him pain.

‘The whole lot of them would up and leave me, never to return. They would make a new home somewhere else, start over with someone more attentive and forthcoming, and I would never see them again.’

With all that in mind, Yaminah had taken care to treat her bones the way the old man treated his bees. For fear that the memory of her loved ones might leave her for want of attention, she kept the bones in their wooden box; she visited them as often as she could; and she told them everything. She had already lost too much, she reasoned; she certainly could not afford to lose any more.

She sighed, rolling the bones between her fingers before raising them to her face. She closed her eyes, and then opened them. It made no difference, for here the darkness was total, her sense of vision made wholly redundant, so that her other senses had to close ranks and fill the gap.

She inhaled deeply, but there was no odour of decay from the relics. Ama had been gone a long time, after all. She had died on the same day Yaminah was born, in fact. (
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away
.) Yaminah’s mother Isabella had liked to say that it made her happy to know that her two favourite people had existed together for a little while, overlapped for a moment in eternity.

After many years, much handling and careful storage, the bones were clean and dry. Exposed to daylight they would have shown, in places, a pleasing patina.

‘Mother of God and Virgin, rejoice, Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee,’ Yaminah whispered softly, fondling the bones like worry beads. ‘Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, for thou hast given birth to the Saviour of our souls.’

She was seated on a flagstone floor, her back against a wall and her legs stretched straight out in front of her. With the finger bones still in her left hand, she reached with her right into the wooden chest by her side. By touch alone she identified Ama’s skull. As was her habit, she placed the palm of her hand over the empty eye sockets, her index finger over the triangular cavity once occupied by a nose.

‘I miss you ladies,’ she said. ‘I promise I will take you with me if I can.’

She stroked the smooth, cold bone of Ama’s forehead.

‘I shall carry you, Ama,’ she said, and smiled. ‘And you shall carry Mum, just as you used to long ago.’

Minutes passed; perhaps an hour. There in the dark with the memory of her mother, and her mother’s ancient nurse, Yaminah breathed low and slow.

More than any other physical feature, she remembered her mother’s long dark-blonde hair. When Yaminah was very little, her mother would stoop over her, bending low until a heavy curtain of fair tresses enveloped her completely. There were soft kisses to be had in the impromptu privacy, the rubbing of noses. Yaminah leaned her head back against the wall and felt once more the tickle of that warm mane upon her face, pursed her lips in expectation of a kiss.

She slept. In dreams she replayed the conversation with Helena, remembered the itchy prickle of sweat in her armpits and the dryness in her mouth.

‘Do you really love him?’ Helena had asked.

While she had spoken, she had reached out towards Yaminah with her cane and used the tip of it to free long strands of chestnut hair from the girl’s sweat-damp neck. There was something close to intimacy in the touch, the nearness, and Yaminah had thought for a moment that she detected the woman’s own scent, mingling lasciviously with her own.

The question had taken her by surprise. The moment, the context, was entirely wrong and Helena was too close.

‘Of course I do,’ she said. ‘Of course I love him. We are to be married!’ This last was delivered too loudly, the truth of it undermined somehow by the shrillness of her tone.

Helena smiled. ‘Marriage is hardly proof of love,’ she said.

Yaminah had offered no denial of the obvious, and concentrated only on holding Helena’s gaze. It was as uncomfortable as standing too close to a fire.

‘Why do you love him?’ asked the consort, tilting her head towards one shoulder as though the answer truly mattered. ‘He cannot protect you. He cannot even make love to you.’

‘He is stronger than me,’ said Yaminah. ‘He is stronger than you.’

She bit down hard on her own impertinence before continuing. ‘He has already borne a heavier burden than any of us has ever carried, or ever shall, God willing.’

‘Is that love?’ asked Helena.

Yaminah did not know and did not answer and so the consort pressed on. ‘So you admire him – we all do. Perhaps you pity him as well?’

Yaminah felt bitter anger rise in her chest, bubbling into her throat. Carefully she took three deep breaths, using them to smooth down her temper like she might have used her hands to smooth creases from her clothes.

‘He has made me a better person,’ she said quietly, firmly. ‘I love him for that. I am the person I am because of Constantine – in every way – and I would not change it.’

She felt Helena’s gaze like a physical intrusion, reaching inside her head. There it was again, another pulse of Helena’s intoxicating, heady scent.

‘And he
can
protect me,’ she said. ‘He always has.’

Suddenly the older woman closed her eyes, lifting her chin as she did so and seeming to let the moment pass.

‘I can protect him too,’ said Yaminah. ‘I always will.’

Helena opened her eyes and seemed, for a moment at least, unsure of where she was. Yaminah met her gaze squarely, and while she expected to find malice there, ill will, she glimpsed only another question. But this one was left unasked. Without another word, Helena turned and continued on her way, passing her cane from hand to hand as she did so.

Yaminah awoke in the darkness with a jolt. How much time had elapsed she did not know, and the complete absence of light made it impossible to judge. She was not afraid. Here she was never afraid. The bones of Ama’s fingers were in her lap, cradled in the folds of her skirts, and she returned them to their chest, all save one.

Finding the lid by feel, she replaced it and stood to place the casket inside a small stone sarcophagus beside the place where she had sat. Content that all was as it should be, she turned and took three confident, practised steps that brought her toes up against the first of a flight of twelve stone steps. Before she reached the top of them she felt the hair on the crown of her head brush against the underside of a wooden trapdoor. It was heavy but opened easily, thanks to the design of the hinges, into a basement beneath the apartment she and her mother had once shared.

The basement was dark, but light fell here and there through gaps between the pine floorboards that formed its roof. She walked quickly across to a flight of wooden stairs and climbed them. At the top was a landing and a heavy oak door. Taking a long-shafted key from a pocket of her skirts, she unlocked the door and opened it, gingerly.

There was silence beyond and she pulled it wide enough to allow her to look out into the corridor beyond. There was no one around – there never was – and she stepped out, taking care to lock the door behind her as quickly as possible.

Viewed from this side, the door was nondescript, without adornment, and therefore apt to be overlooked by passers-by. Pocketing the key once more, the key to the kingdom of her memories, Yaminah crept silently along the corridor, opened a larger and altogether more impressive set of double doors, and began making her way back towards her quarters. In one hand she held the small, smooth bone. She did not look at it, merely grasped it tightly in one hand before slipping it into her pocket alongside the key.

It was indeed time for the prince’s therapy and she needed the chariot. Since Constantine flatly refused to have it anywhere in his line of sight when it was not in use, it stayed always in Yaminah’s rooms.

For her own amusement, and partly due to her fondness for the dark, she closed her eyes. She focused on the sound of the hems of her skirts brushing lightly on the flags of the corridor and made her way by memory alone, taking turns left and right. Rounding the final corner, she counted fifteen steps before reaching out with her right hand and finding, with faultless judgement, her own door handle. Only when she was inside, with the door closed behind her, did she allow herself to open her eyes.

Her suite of rooms was flooded with dazzling wintry sunlight and she blinked hard. While her eyes adjusted to the brightness, she crossed the room to one of the tall windows and, by touch as much as anything else, located the chariot. She placed her hands on the handles, turned it smoothly towards the door and set off towards the prince’s quarters.

After years of what felt like hiding in the palace, of behaving like an interloper or an intruder, she felt infused suddenly with a sense of … right. As she made her way towards the man she had just sworn to protect, she realised for the first time since her mother’s death that she had an important role to play and a duty to perform. This time it was Constantine who stood on the edge of the abyss. This time it was her turn to catch
him
.

The chariot, so-called, was a wheelchair of sorts. Leonid’s masterstroke had been to conceive and then design a contraption that would perform, simultaneously, the two functions he felt were key to Constantine’s well-being. While he had denied himself the luxury of saying so, it had troubled the old man that his patient was confined to his bedroom, trapped like a moth in a jar. The interior of one room, well appointed though it might be, lacked the stimulation necessary for the maintenance of a healthy mind, he thought.