Master of Shadows (5 page)

7

John Grant dreamed he was flying high in the sky, or perhaps swimming in deep water. In any event, he was weightless and graceful as he soared, twisted and dived through an element that offered no resistance. He loved it. And then he hated it. All at once there was an awful dizziness as the world, or at least the world inside his head, began to spin, faster and faster. He felt the contents of his stomach pitch and roll. He closed his eyes as the sensation, so briefly perfect and wonderful, turned into a lurching fall. He was sinking deep or plummeting to earth and he opened his mouth to cry out, or to vomit, or both …

He returned to consciousness then, helpless and weak like a drowning man dragged from rapids. He lay on his back, his head supported, mercifully, by something soft. The world still spun for him – not the familiar grinding turn of the planet on its axis that he lived by, but a hideously tight rotation. When he opened his eyes he saw not his mother, nor even an empty heaven above, but a huge black face that seemed to be in high-speed orbit around his own sorrowful skull.

He breathed in sharply and felt the spinning start to slow. He tried to rise, pushing with his elbows, but a crushing pain in his head made him clench his eyes shut and collapse back on to the grass. Strong hands held his shoulders then, and when he opened his eyes a second time, just slits, the huge black face was almost stationary and beginning to speak.

‘Stay down for now,’ it said, the voice gentle.

‘My mother?’ said John Grant, remembering all of it at once. ‘Where …?’

‘She will be well. She sleeps. That’s best for now.’

‘Did they … Was she …?’

‘They did not touch her,’ said Badr Khassan. ‘She rests now on her bed. The blow to her head was a heavy one, I think.’

John Grant raised a hand to his face, felt a crust of dried blood.

‘Where are they?’ he asked.

‘They are at peace too,’ said Badr. ‘Though a deeper peace than that presently enjoyed by your mother.’

‘You …?’

‘Yes, little master,’ said the Moor. ‘I have sent them ahead to face judgment.’

‘You killed them?’ asked John Grant.

Badr shrugged, made light of the deed. He limited his reply to the practicalities of the work.

‘Small spaces like the inside of your cottage make it easier for one man to deal with many – keeps the targets bunched together, no?’ He reached behind his back for his scimitar, unsheathed it and held it in front of John Grant’s face. ‘And my good friend was with me, so all was well.’ He allowed himself a grim smile.

Stunned as he was, head spinning and with a still-sickening ache in his middle, John Grant was suddenly aware of his mother. Turning to look at the cottage, he saw her standing in the doorway, leaning heavily against the woodwork. Seeing her son lying on the ground, and with a huge stranger kneeling over him, she cried out.

‘Get away from him!’

She lunged towards them, but after no more than a couple of strides her legs gave way beneath her and she toppled headlong.

Badr Khassan was by her side in an instant.

‘I am a friend,’ he said, reaching for her as she struggled to rise once more, only making it to her knees.

Jessie lashed out blindly with both fists, but while the blows connected, they seemed as ineffectual as raindrops. Badr crouched beside her, easily pinning her arms by her sides. She looked into his face then and his calm expression slowly made her relax. The tension went out of her arms and she allowed him to help her rise to her feet.

John Grant was standing too now, unsteadily, and he stumbled towards his mother with his arms outstretched. They came together, all of them, and made an unlikely trio. Badr backed away from mother and child while the pair embraced.

‘Who are you?’ asked Jessie, defeated, still holding her son and with her back to the giant stranger.

‘I am all the trouble in the world,’ replied Badr, his eyes towards the ground at his feet. ‘But I came to settle a debt.’

Jessie turned to face him, an unspoken question on her face.

‘You are the wife of Patrick Grant?’ he asked. ‘And the boy is his son?’

‘Patrick? You have news of Patrick?’ she said, eyes widening in disbelief.

Badr was silent for long enough to let finely pointed roots of fear grow down into Jessie’s chest.

‘Patrick Grant is dead,’ he said, taking care now to look her in the eyes.

Jessie took a single step backwards, stumbling. For a moment Badr thought she might fall once more, but she rallied, steadied herself, and reached out instead for her son. Failing to feel him with her outstretched hand, she turned to look for him. But John Grant was nowhere to be seen.

‘John!’ she called out, her mind reeling, knocked in all directions at once. There was a sound in her head like rushing water, and she thought she might faint. ‘John!’

From behind the cottage there came a single cry. Jessie turned towards the sound, but Badr Khassan was quicker. He passed her in two great strides and was ducking around the low gable end before she was even under way. Picking up her skirts with both hands, she followed the giant unsteadily, and as she rounded the building she almost ran into his great broad back. Beyond him stood John Grant, stiff as a post, arms by his sides, staring at a row of dead men laid out neatly on the ground, their heads against the back wall of the cottage, like so much firewood.

‘We cannot stay here,’ said Badr.

His voice reached her across a yawning chasm – the distance between the familiar past and the uncertain future.

‘They would have had you – all of them,’ he said.

She could not stop looking at the bloodied corpses of Davey Kennedy and the rest. It was already impossible to think that these empty, broken shells had ever lived. The absence of life, plucked from them so recently, made it seem they had always been dead. John Grant had seen enough, however, and turned to bury his face in her chest.

‘And when they were done with you, they would have killed you,’ Badr added. ‘The boy too, I don’t doubt.’

‘My father is dead,’ said John Grant, quietly. It was a statement rather than a question.

‘Patrick Grant saved my life,’ said Badr. ‘I would do the same for his family. You must come with me, both of you.’

Jessie looked at him over one shoulder.

‘Where can we go?’ she asked.

‘As far away from here as we can get,’ he said.

8

It seemed to John Grant that sleep wanted nothing whatsoever to do with him. Lying on his back and looking up into a sky stirred thick with stars, he felt he would never sleep again. It was hard even to close his eyes. He tried to summon his father’s image but found he was able only to visualise an outline, almost a shadow.

He had always felt sure he knew what his father looked like – that he would have recognised him at once if he appeared before them now – but the features of the face, let alone any expressions, like a smile or a frown, eluded him. He knew he ought to be mourning the loss, crying. But all he felt was anxiety – a nagging emptiness that made him feel he had forgotten something important. Somewhere there as well was the truth of it all – that his mental image of his father was made not of his own memories, but those of his mother.

Patrick Grant had been in his life for only fragments of time, and all of those when he was too young to remember. The picture that came to his mind at the mention of his father was made of snatches of detail his mother had given him, though she had few enough of her own. He did not properly remember his father at all. His memories were hand-me-downs and borrowings; leftovers and scraps from meals enjoyed by others while he was left hungry, but treasured just the same.

The night was a warm one, but still as a tomb – as if the universe itself waited, breath bated, to see what might happen next. He slowly turned his head until he could make out the shape of Badr Khassan, a seated silhouette a shade darker even than the night, leaning against a solitary tree some little way from where John Grant lay close by his mother. He looked at her next, curled into an S and with her back to him. There was no way of telling if sleep eluded her too, but she seemed peaceful.

Badr had forced them onwards, southwards, for hours, long after darkness fell. He had allowed them mere minutes back at the cottage to gather together a few belongings – clothes, some food – before selecting a garron for each of them from among those of the dead troopers. The rest of the beasts he had driven away, with shouts and claps and a slap to the hindquarters of the one nearest. The animals had scattered, together with the remnants of the life John Grant had known before the coming of the Moor.

Khassan had almost thrown him into his mount’s saddle before being slightly gentler with his mother. For many hours thereafter they had kept up a punishing pace – a ride made all the harder by the big man’s insistence on staying far from any roads or even trackways.

‘They will be after us soon enough,’ he said as they started out. ‘Distance from this place must be our only friend now – the more miles the better.’

He had led them into the high country then, from where it was possible to see in all directions and so ensure they kept away from any who might observe their flight and speak of it to others.

‘The fewer folk catch sight of us for the first few days, the better it will be for us,’ he said.

John Grant had nodded his assent to whatever Badr said. Jessie, however, devoted all her efforts to watching the landscape around them. Her expression seemed as desolate as the hills they passed over, and since leaving their home she had remained all but silent.

It was while John Grant was a little ahead and just out of earshot that Badr took the opportunity to speak to Jessie.

‘I know about the boy,’ he said.

Jessie kept her eyes on the track ahead.

‘What about him?’ she asked.

‘I was close to Patrick,’ he said. ‘For many years. We talked together and I knew him well.’

It was no answer to her question, but Jessie guessed at his meaning just the same.

‘He is all I have,’ she said.

‘And you are all he has, I know,’ said Badr. ‘I wish only to tell you that I will do all I can for you both. I had hoped to find you well. If I am honest, I had thought you might be … better looked after.’

‘By another man, you mean?’ She did not ask the question harshly – if anything, there was a smile in her voice, for the first time. ‘I think not.’

She turned to look at Badr, and he felt sudden embarrassment and turned away.

‘I had not expected to find you both in danger,’ he said. ‘And now it is clear that my presence here, and my actions, has done more harm than good. I came only to see that you were safe and well – as Patrick had hoped – but I have brought trouble with me instead.’

Jessie nodded.

‘We have been alone until now,’ she said. ‘Jardine and his men have hung over us like a shadow all the while. Trouble of one sort or another would have come our way eventually. I am glad you are here … to share it.’

He stole a glance at her profile and saw the proud set of her jaw.

‘I must tell you that I had not prepared a rescue mission,’ he said. ‘Beyond finding shelter tonight, and putting more distance between us and Jardine tomorrow … I have no plan.’

Jessie Grant said no more and instead kicked her horse into a trot that put her alongside her son.

The sky was cloudless and the moon, not quite full, seemed to shrug one hunched shoulder at them. The long dusk of summer had given time for their eyes to adjust to the fading of the day, and now a million stars added lustre to the curtain of night.

As they dropped down below a ridge of high ground and on to a wide terrace, the way ahead had seemed blocked by huge figures. Badr had pulled up his great black warhorse in alarm, and while his eyes struggled to make sense of the scene before them, it had been John Grant who was first to recognise the ambush for what it was: a circle of standing stones. The push would have told him if there was life up here and it had not done so.

‘I have seen the like of this before,’ said Badr, after John Grant had explained. ‘Stones stood on end by the ancients, for some or other magical purpose, or so I was told.’

‘I am told my father said the people who lived here before us felt the need to track the journeys of the stars, and also of the sun and the moon,’ said John Grant.

‘Astronomers,’ murmured Badr, nodding.

‘Ast …?’ said John Grant, failing to catch the whole of the word.

‘Astronomers,’ said Badr carefully. ‘Astronomy is the study of the arrangement of the stars.’ He looked at the boy then, searching his face for understanding and finding none.

‘These are Greek words,’ he said.

‘Greeks?’ asked John Grant. At least this time he had been able to repeat the word the Moor had spoken.

‘Having saved your skin, now I must save your soul, I see,’ said Badr. ‘Your education begins now. It will pass the time for both of us.’

Badr had them settle by the stones, almost in their shadows. It would be as good a place as any to pass the night, he said, and perhaps the spirits of the ancients would watch over them through the remaining hours of darkness. Though he said nothing, John Grant was pleased by the choice of campsite. He knew, even if the Moor did not, that standing stones like these were regarded with suspicion by most folk hereabouts. It was said they had witnessed wickedness long ago, scenes of human sacrifice and witchcraft and the like, and none but the brave and the foolhardy risked spending time among them. They would be safe, he thought.

Lying in the darkness, his thoughts whirling like a gin, he stretched his arms out beyond the edge of his blanket until he could place his hands, palms downwards, on the cool grass. He spread his fingers and waited. There it was – the rumbling vibration of the spinning of the world. He could hear it too, deeper than the deepest bass note beneath the rise and fall of his own breathing and the beating of his heart, like wind in distant treetops. It was a comfort, a reminder that far beneath his cares, the world was turning, spinning forwards into the dark, as it should and always would. He let go and gave himself up entirely to the fall towards the stars, a movement so enveloping and so vast that all other considerations were swept away like dead leaves.

It was his mother’s voice that brought him back.

‘Why
did
Davey Kennedy and the rest turn up at my door?’ she asked.

Badr considered the question for a few moments.

‘You would have had to ask his brother,’ he said.

‘Will Kennedy,’ she said. ‘That snake. What was he up to this time?’

Badr nodded approvingly at the use of the word.

‘I spent enough time at Hawkshaw to learn the truth of that,’ he said. ‘He, and a few others in thrall to him … encouraged tenants like Thomas Henderson to part with an extra coin or two each month. If they did so, then their homes and children were left alone.’

‘Folk have little enough as it is,’ she said. ‘Why are there always men like Kennedy ready with ideas to make life harder still?’

‘Will Kennedy has nothing at all now,’ said Badr. ‘It was his gang who burned out the Hendersons the night before last. Drove them off for holding back what they owed him.

‘And you?’ asked Jessie.

‘I found him there yesterday morning,’ he said. ‘Perhaps he meant to cover his tracks – or maybe he was drawn back there by his own ill will. Whatever – he did not expect to encounter me there. We had words.’

‘Well … good,’ she said.

‘I expect there was no particular reason for Davey to lead his troopers to your door,’ he said. ‘You and your son were just—’

She interrupted him before he could finish.

‘We were just somewhere he could bring his anger,’ she said. ‘Jardine and his cronies have needed little excuse to make trouble for me and mine.’

There was a silence then, and John Grant gave himself completely to the planet’s spin, relishing the freedom from thought.

‘What happened to my husband?’ asked Jessie, and the boy drew back from the void.

Badr moved in the darkness, turned to face the place where she lay.

‘Your husband saved my life,’ he said. ‘Men came to kill me – and would have succeeded.’ He coughed to clear his throat and rubbed his hands over his face.

‘I was asleep, laid low with a fever. They locked the door of my bedchamber from the outside and set the house ablaze. They used some infernal mixture, I think, to make the flames take hold fast and fiercely. The smoke befuddled me, made my sleep all the deeper.’

‘And Patrick?’ she asked.

‘Unknown to my enemies, he was in the attic room above me. He broke through the boards of his floor – my ceiling. He was able to rouse me. When I awoke, my clothes were on fire and he was beating out the flames. Together we jumped for our lives from a window – to a lower balcony of a building next door.’

‘So what happened to Patrick?’ asked Jessie, her voice empty of emotion. ‘Why is it that you are here while he is not?’

‘Your husband had me jump first. It was the push he gave me that made all the difference, I am sure,’ said Badr. ‘But I landed badly, heavily. What with the burns and the fever and all, I … I lost consciousness.’

John Grant heard the scratching, rustling sound of restless hands once more.

‘When I came to, Patrick Grant was not with me. I was alone on the balcony and the fire was all around, spreading between the buildings. I heard people crying, men shouting. I got to my feet, calling for him.’

He paused and then stared down at his hands.

‘I looked down into the alleyway below, and … and he was lying there. He did not manage the leap, or missed his grasp. Something.’

He shrugged hopelessly.

There was a long pause then, a silence none felt able to break.

‘I was not there for him as he had been for me,’ said Badr. ‘Either to send him on his way or to catch him as he fell.’

‘He was dead,’ said Jessie. John Grant listened for any sound of loss, and heard none. It had been a plain statement of fact.

‘He wasn’t dead,’ said Badr. ‘Not then. Not quite. I made it down to him and found him still alive.’

‘Did you take him to where others might have helped him?’ asked John Grant.

He felt Badr and his mother turn to look at him, as though just that moment remembering he was with them.

‘Did you get help?’ he asked once more.

‘There was nothing to be done,’ said Badr quietly. ‘He lived only long enough to tell me where to find you.’

John Grant felt his face flush with hot blood.

‘He told me where to find you,’ Badr said to the boy. ‘And asked that I might seek you out. If needs be, keep you safe.’

‘Did he make me part of the debt as well?’ asked Jessie.

‘He did,’ said Badr. He paused.

‘Why was Patrick with you?’ asked Jessie.

‘He is my friend,’ said Badr. ‘He was my friend.’

John Grant detected a smile in the voice, alongside the sadness.

‘Where did it happen?’ asked Jessie after another silence. ‘All of this.’

‘In the Eternal City,’ said Badr, as though the answer should have been obvious, or known to her at least.

‘In London?’ asked Jessie, confused.

‘London – that sewer,’ he said. ‘The only thing everlasting about that shit pile is the stench. Spare me the thought.’

Neither mother nor son spoke a word; only waited for their guardian to stop speaking in riddles and make himself clear.

‘
A’udhu Billah
,’ muttered the Moor. ‘My refuge is in Allah. Truly Patrick Grant kept his people in ignorance. You have my sympathy, mistress, and you too, little master.

‘Patrick Grant and I were together in the Eternal City of Rome,’ he said. ‘Home of your Holy Father.’

Before Jessie had time to consider how much remained to be explained about her late husband’s last adventure, her son threw back his thin covering and sat upright in the dark. Hearing the movement and sensing the boy’s sudden change of mood, Badr stood up and took a few silent strides in his direction.

‘Someone’s out there,’ said John Grant, his skin pricking beneath his clothes, almost painfully, like a bout of chilblains.

‘Where?’ whispered Badr, and hairs rose on the boy’s neck at the soft sighing sound of the great curved sword being slid from within its fur-lined sheath.

‘Not sure,’ said the boy. ‘Still some way off. More than one person, though – and horses.’