Master of Shadows (41 page)

A knife was in Lẽna’s hand as she reached John Grant and with one smooth slashing movement cut the ties at his wrists. Handing him the knife (Angus Armstrong’s knife) and leaving him to free his own feet, she glanced around at the melee.

Confronted by the timbers of the palisade surrounding the sultan’s tents, the charging beasts had broken around it, leaving John Grant and Lẽna safely in its lee. Once past the obstruction, however, the animals came together again and ploughed towards and then into the mass of the Turkish army, scattering the soldiers left and right and crushing scores and hundreds beneath pounding hooves.

Mehmet watched, awestruck and aghast – and with all thoughts of ritual torture driven from his mind.

Lẽna had spotted the figure of Sir Robert Jardine; indeed she had sensed him while she waited in the lines and had looked around and glimpsed the back of his head.

As the beasts bore down upon the sultan’s flock, she looked for him again and found his face. While the thousands fled, he stood his ground, his sword gripped tightly in his fist. But it was no warrior that challenged him now, defied his will. Instead a monstrous bull bore down on him, as tall as a man at its shoulder and its horns ablaze from root to tip. Enraged and terrified in equal measure, it sought relief from its ills in the violence of its charge.

There before it, frozen in place and with eyes wide, stood a movable object. Perhaps this two-legged creature was to blame for the pain and the terror. Perhaps its destruction would bring peace. In any event the bull came on, making the earth shake and turning the air around it into a storm of dirt and dust, flecked with white spume from its flaring nostrils.

Framed for an infinitesimal fragment of time within the flaming crescent of the beast’s horns, Sir Robert Jardine, who felt himself owed so much by the world, caught sight of the woman whose death should have delivered it all to him long ago. Her face, her ageless, smiling face, was the image upon which he closed his eyes and swung his sword and felt it land between the flaming horns before he knew no more, and for ever.

Lẽna watched him fall, spread-eagled on his back. One great hoof had landed squarely in the middle of Sir Robert’s face, backed by nearly two tons of beef, and she would have sworn she heard, amid the tumult, the sound of his skull cracking like an egg.

She had a momentary recall of feeling that mouth clamped upon her lips, its tongue writhing against her own like a trapped snake. She saw his arms fly upwards beneath the bull’s belly and glimpsed the hands and remembered them forced inside her clothes, between her legs and grabbing at her breasts. She saw all of his bodily destruction in a blessed moment vouchsafed to her by chance, and hoped the same might happen to his everlasting soul, and then she thought of him no more.

John Grant was beside her and naked as the day he was born when both looked then into the face of the sultan. He was standing quite still, like a white rock in a river. He turned from the devastation wrought upon his army and Lẽna made sure she had his gaze before she reached up and threw back her hood. Then she unwound her scarf to let him see her face, before she smiled at him.

She turned, pulling John Grant by the shoulder and taking a path around to the rear of the enclosure. By the time they had climbed its timbers – John Grant moving gingerly, as befitted a man with no clothes, and with his scrotum and penis dangling in the breeze – Hilal was waiting for them, eyes shining with triumph and excitement.

‘Your baby boy is a fine specimen,’ she said, and turned to lead them both away.

65

‘What have you done with the girl?’ asked Lẽna.

John Grant was clothed once more, in garments gifted to him by the father of Hilal. While he had dressed he had been watched, with innocent curiosity, by a little dark-haired boy who had looked to be perhaps four or five years old. He told John Grant his name was Ahmet.

The sky was shedding the last light of the day, and now he and Lẽna were alone once more and crouched in the shadow of the Wall of Theodosius. In contrast to so many of the days they had endured so far, it had been a fine one, and bright. The sky above was clear and cold. They had crept as close as possible to the stretch of ancient masonry by the Blachernae Palace, near to the Gate of the Wooden Circus. The postern there was tucked where the wall was sharply angled around one side of the palace, and therefore out of sight of the Turks.

‘She is safe,’ he said. ‘When we left you in the prison, she led me to some basement deep beneath the palace. She was well acquainted with the place – said it had once been part of her home.’

‘What was said between you?’ asked Lẽna. ‘While the two of you were alone – what did she tell you?’

He shook his head as the memory came back to him. He had missed, and by a whisper, the agony of being skinned alive, but he had never felt as raw as he had when she had broken their kiss and pushed him away. He shivered and wondered if it was the memory that had goose bumps rise on his skin, or the chill of the evening.

‘Something about twins,’ he said.

‘Twins?’

‘Twins,’ he said. His tone was one of disbelief, almost amusement. ‘Something about souls and twins, and some being alone for all eternity and some being together. I did not understand it then and I fail to grasp her meaning still.’

Lẽna looked at him as though the madness was his.

‘Oh, and she told me she was to be married,’ he said.

‘And what did you tell her?’ asked Lẽna.

He was briefly aware that she was asking more questions than she ever had before.

‘That I would help her,’ he said. ‘And the man she is supposed to marry.’ He shook his head at the memory.

Lẽna felt her own past pulling at her, like too-thin clothes tugged by a gust of cold wind.

‘What do you remember about your father?’ she asked.

‘Which one?’ he replied. ‘Patrick Grant or Badr Khassan?’

Lẽna indulged him with a tight, thin-lipped smile before continuing.

‘Patrick,’ she said.

He sighed and looked away, off towards the west, where the last brightness of the sun was falling away beyond the horizon, leaving a crisp sheet of darkness in its place.

‘I wish that I could say I remember him bouncing me upon his knee and ruffling my hair with big hands,’ he said. ‘I wish I could tell you how he taught me to bait a hook and fish for trout in the big black river that flowed slow and deep beneath the weeping willow trees not far from our home.’

She watched his mouth as he spoke, achingly familiar with the shape of his lips, the set of his eyes.

‘I would like to say I had a clear memory of him walking hand in hand with my mother, or hugging her so tightly her feet were lifted clean off the floor. I wish I could tell you what he looked like, but I cannot.’

He fell silent then, still watching the last of the light, or his memory of it. His face was all in shadow.

‘He looked just like you,’ she said. ‘Or rather, you look just like him.’

She felt rather than saw him turn in the gloom to look at her once more.

‘Same mouth … same nose,’ she said. ‘Same hair … and the same eyes. More than anything else it is in your eyes that I see him.’

All had been quiet while they spoke. For once, the Turkish gunners had been stood down for the night. Beyond no-man’s-land, appearing one by one like stars in heaven above, little fires appeared outside those tents that had either been missed by the stampede or salvaged and re-erected in its aftermath. The Ottomans lived frugally while on campaign and made only one meal each day, always at nightfall, and around the fires were groups of men, bringing together and sharing whatever provisions they had.

A siege was hard to bear, John Grant knew. While those trapped within the walls might think they had all the troubles to bear, weeks camped outside a city’s defences were wearing and disheartening too. After weeks of effort, morale among the Turks would be dipping lower each day. However hard they fought, whatever tactics they brought to bear and near broke their backs to implement, still they were denied by Constantinople’s ancient walls and by the grit of those few defenders spread thin behind them.

While the stampede of oxen had caused havoc and dispatched hundreds of men, most had escaped with their hides intact. It was a distraction – no more – but still it would have served to whittle away at the Turks’ resolve. Hope in the camp would be running just as short as food, and if success did not come soon, the sultan would have to call off his dogs and slink back to Edirne.

But the silence John Grant had just begun to appreciate was all at once destroyed. It was a single voice at first – a Turk’s, and raised in questioning excitement. Almost at once it was joined by more of the same until a whole crescendo rose above the city of battered tents.

From where they sheltered against the wall, there was nothing for John Grant and Lẽna to see – nothing to explain the commotion. With the hairs rising on their arms and necks, they stepped away from the wall and out into open ground, looking around them all the while.

Now there was another cacophony, come to join the first but in awful discord: a wailing lament by countless voices coming from beyond the walls, within the city.

Although John Grant had felt the planet-shaking violence of the volcanic eruption that had blown an entire island to smithereens (an island thousands of miles away and in the middle of an ocean then unknown to any Scotsman), he had had no way of knowing its cause. A man blessed (or cursed) with awareness of the world’s journey into the universe and all its travails, he had felt the onset of the symptoms but had had no way of understanding the malady that caused them.

So when the cloud of ash and dust, which was all that remained of that faraway island, spread around the world’s skies like the shadow of the angel of death, not even John Grant understood the truth of the darkness caused by it.

Instead he looked up into the night sky above the Great City and was appalled by what he saw.

He had spent enough days and weeks among the citizen soldiers of Constantinople to know the importance they placed upon the moon and its cycle. If the people put their faith in the Virgin
– Theotokos, Mater Dei
, the Mother of God – whose image, the Hodegetria, they could reach out to and touch and kiss, then equal hope was vested in the eternal truth of the moon that was beyond their reach. It waxed and waned and the tides of the waters that surrounded their city on three sides ebbed and flowed because of it. It was a constant, unchanging rhythm and it reminded them day after day, month after month and year after year that if the light and journey of the moon was old beyond memory, then so too was their city.

Their mothers had told them, and in turn they told their own children, that the city would never fall to an enemy beneath the all-seeing eye of a full moon. Just as there had always been a moon, so there would always be Constantinople.

Tonight of all nights, when hearts and minds were breaking under the strain of the worst siege yet, and the sight of the expected full moon should have been a fixed point in a universe in flux, the sacred circle was broken.

Where there should have been a waxing moon, a solid silver coin promising that all was well, there was instead a pale grey crescent. It was the day of the full moon and yet in its place, looming over the Christian city like the most evil of omens, was the curving sword blade of the Muslim Turk.

Unbeknown to all – even to John Grant, who felt more than any other soul – the miasma of the greatest explosion in ten thousand years had slipped unseen and unsuspected between earth and moon like a cataract in a human eye.

The sky was filled with voices, the jubilant as well as the broken-hearted, and John Grant reached out for Lẽna’s hand and she took it in her own and clasped it tight.

66

Constantinople, eighteen years before

We see them first from high above and far away, a man and a woman dancing together in a room as white as the buildings of the city that are visible through tall arched windows.

We spiral down towards them, like a bird of prey.

Patrick Grant holds Isabella close and they smile into each other’s faces as he spins them faster and faster, around and around, until they laugh and stumble towards the bed and collapse upon it, side by side on their backs.

Badr Khassan is known then only to one of them – to Patrick. The men are friends of long standing, but these are still the days before the giant Moor has laid eyes upon his Izzi.

For these few days Patrick has been Isabella’s lover, her first. He is a wonderful excitement, a secret of her own to be enjoyed and played with out of sight of her father’s possessive gaze.

She is lovely, with long dark-blonde hair and a face made unforgettable by high cheekbones. He is slim and tall, fine-boned and almost feminine, with a thin face and sandy hair and hazel eyes. In perfect synch they turn their heads and look at one another.

‘I should be angry with you,’ Izzi says.

‘But you are not,’ says Patrick. ‘No one stays angry with me.’

She moves as though to land a blow on his smiling face, but she is smiling too and he catches her hand and kisses the knuckles.

‘It is true!’ she says, and she pretends to pout but he reaches across and pinches her at the waist with strong fingers, so that she buckles and pulls her knees up to evade the tickling.

He is lovely too, but his heart belongs to another, she knew that much before the start. He was wounded when they met and she has been a dressing on the hurt, no more. She will have him for these days and then let him go for ever, surely no harm done.

‘My father would have your hide anyway,’ she says. ‘His prize bitch ruined by a wandering stray.’

‘I prefer to see myself as a lovable hound,’ he says. ‘And you are what you have always been – a princess.’

She is quiet then, her face made dark, as though her own private sun is briefly obscured by clouds.

‘You will still come to Rome?’ she asks.

‘Of course,’ he says. ‘It is our job – to protect the delegation.’

‘You say
our
,’ she says. ‘Who else are you taking to Rome, may I ask?’

He smiles.

‘I wonder what you will make of him,’ he says.

‘Make of whom?’ she asks.

‘Of my friend,’ he says. ‘He is a serious fellow. And dark, very dark. I just wonder.’

Isabella frowns at him, before continuing.

‘And no one will know about this, about us?’ she asks.

He shakes his head, and it is his turn then to be lost for words. He is far away, remembering another woman and a baby and a little golden ring that was both given and returned.

‘Nor ever will,’ he says.

He sits up then and turns to look down at her.

‘This could only ever be a moment,’ he says. ‘You and me. We could never be. A Scots mercenary and a princess of the court of Byzantium? We must remember to thank our lucky stars that we had what we had.’

‘And you will remember me, Patrick?’ she asks.

‘Us,’ he says, placing one fingertip on her lower lip. ‘Trust me, Isabella, we will remember.’

And the world keeps turning and turning, spinning into the unknown, and the force of it, constant and unchanging, propels us back and away from them once more, back to where we came from. They grow smaller and smaller, the image of them contracting like a pupil in an eye opened to the sun.