by Neil Oliver
‘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.’
Badr was crouching by John Grant’s side and there was more than enough moonlight for him to see which way the boy was facing. Taking that direction as his cue, he set off downhill. The big man’s sudden absence made mother and son feel suddenly and terribly alone and helpless. They huddled together – she straining to persuade her senses to let her hear or see anything useful, he reassured by the way his own senses told him there was nothing and no one to fear. He clung to her just the same, savouring the closeness and enjoying the warmth of her breath against his cheek. Agonising minutes drew out. Neither spoke.
He felt a movement in the otherwise still air, but detected no threat from it. He breathed out a long, steady sigh of relief. The return of their guardian some little while later almost made Jessie cry out. He came to them as fast and lithe as a deer and had one hand cupped gently over her mouth before she had a chance to make a sound.
‘You were right, boy,’ he said quietly, his voice betraying admiration, or disbelief. Badr was a trained and battle-hardened survivor. He relied on his senses more than his sword, or his horse, and yet he had noticed nothing at all before this callow boy had quietly warned of the presence, albeit distant, of a threat to their safety. ‘Half a mile downslope from us and moving south, on the same line as ourselves but across a terrace below the plateau where we are now. Sir Robert Jardine and around a score of men. Their horses’ tack makes no noise. They must have the metalwork wrapped in rags to muffle any sound. I came close enough to the last of them to hear their talk.’
‘And what were they saying?’ asked Jessie.
Badr said nothing for a moment or two before continuing, almost reluctantly.
‘Let us just say they have visited your cottage,’ he said. ‘And found their comrades. I knew they would set out in pursuit but I did not expect them to follow us into the night.’
He placed a heavy hand on the boy’s shoulder.
‘How did you know Sir Robert and the rest of them were out there?’ he asked. ‘What gave them away to you?’
John Grant was quiet, looking down at his fingers interlaced on his lap.
‘Well?’ asked Badr once more.
‘I just … I knew,’ he said finally. ‘I always know people are there before I see them.’
‘You did it before,’ said Badr. His tone was light and John Grant looked up at the dim outline of the Moor’s face, the eyes flecked with starlight. ‘While I waited at your cottage yesterday for the right moment to deal with your attackers. I could see you and your mother, though you both had your backs to me. I made no move, no sound at all, I know it – and yet you turned towards where I was crouching. If I hadn’t ducked back behind the building then, you would have looked me straight in the eye.’
John Grant felt the Moor’s face crease into a smile and more starlight flashed along the edges of great white teeth.
‘How did you do it?’
His hands balled involuntarily into fists before he answered. No one had noticed before, far less asked questions. Not even his mother. The moment, and this man, seemed right nonetheless.
‘The push told me,’ he said.
‘The push?’ said his mother, her voice rising into the first show of real feeling since they had set out. ‘The push … told you? What in the name of Almighty God are you talking about? What is the push?’
He felt the colour rise into his cheeks. He hated his mother’s disapproval more than any rebuke. Worse still, her tone carried a note of hurt – that here was a secret he had kept from her.
Badr said nothing and instead allowed the weight of a mother’s interrogation of a dutiful son to do its work.
‘It’s what I call it when I … know something that I … well, that I can’t see, or hear,’ he said, almost sadly.
‘The push?’ she asked again, apparently no further forward in her attempt to take in what she was hearing.
‘That’s how it feels, like the air gets, I don’t know … thicker maybe … and moves in my direction,’ he managed. ‘It feels like I’m being pushed … from the direction of whatever it is I can’t see …’
‘Or hear.’ It was Badr who finished the sentence.
Whatever had moved John Grant to reveal some of his view of the world, the shocks of the day – the beating, the fear, the sight of all the bodies – left him then. He had said enough. He would leave out any mention of the turning of the planet, the feel and the sound of it.
‘Well it’s all surprises today!’ said Jessie, louder than she intended, and all three of them flinched at the sound. She went on, standing now and turning on the spot, giving vent to pent-up emotion, hissing like a kettle come to the boil. ‘My long-absent husband is dead – in Rome and half a world away,’ she spat. ‘I’ve come within a sweaty finger’s breadth of being raped in my own home. Now I’m on the run with my child and a giant who has just killed, on my behalf, more men than I’ve ever had round my table at one time.’
She sat down, hard, upon the ground and buried her head in her arms. She mumbled the rest of it into her skirts, so that they hardly heard what she said.
‘And now my son says he has the power of witchcraft … that he feels people.’
‘I don’t feel people,’ John Grant said. He regretted having revealed any of it. ‘I said I feel the push of them.’
All three were quiet then, briefly lost in their own thoughts. Somewhere out in the night a dog fox barked and received no answering call.
‘Why now?’ asked Jessie. ‘My son and I have been alone for most of the years of his life. Why do you come among us now?’
Badr sighed. ‘I feel time catching up with me,’ he said.
Jessie Grant snorted, nodding her head.
‘I have seen a great deal of the world. I have done many things, but …’
‘But?’ she asked.
‘But I have been selfish.’
‘How so?’ she asked.
‘All the battles I have fought, all the lives I have cut short …’ He stopped, hesitated. ‘All of it has been for myself,’ he said, feeling for a pathway through jumbled thoughts. ‘I have neglected the needs of others. Others I should have helped, cared for. I have kept my back to them. Or at least I have never done enough that was right.’
He fell into silence and Jessie Grant let him be. More sil
ent minutes passed before her son whispered into the dark:
‘I feel it again – from beyond the stones.’
John Grant was briefly angry with himself. All the while his elders had spoken, his skin had fairly jangled with the presence of figures unseen. His earlier confession of his ability had made him feel ashamed, furtive, and for the first and only time he had sought to ignore the warning.
The Moor placed a finger to his mouth, demanding silence. His other hand he held palm outwards, towards Jessie. He rose into a low crouch and crept across the grass until he was behind one of the great monoliths. Painfully slowly he moved his head around one edge until he could peer across the interior of the circle, a space illuminated by moon- and starlight, and empty.
In spite of herself, and in spite of Badr’s signal to remain motionless, Jessie got to her feet and began closing the gap separating her from her son. Hearing the movement, the rustle of clothing, Badr turned towards them. The action caused him to lose balance momentarily, and he stumbled forward into the gap between two stones. Sensing sudden danger, more intense than the push, John Grant leapt to his feet and reached out for his mother.
All three were therefore exposed to harm’s way when Angus Armstrong, archer and would-be assassin, released the stored power of his bowstring.
9
‘I could not have loved you more,’ said Jessie Grant.
Her eyes were closed and her words barely audible, so that he felt he was reading them on the cracked, dry parchment of her lips. John Grant, down on his knees, bent and pressed his face against her cheek. Her skin was cold and clammy to the touch, and matched the silvery blue cast applied to her complexion by the moonlight. Much worse, he found he was struggling to recognise her through the veil of injury and pain that separated them now.
The three of them – Jessie and John Grant, and Badr Khassan – were together in the burial chamber of an ancient tomb. Armstrong’s arrow had found Jessie, piercing her from side to side just above her hipbones. Fast as thought, Badr had spotted the source of the missile – a man standing beyond the far side of the stone circle. Without apparent concern for his own safety, the Moor had begun sprinting towards the archer, and the archer had turned and disappeared into the shadows.
Badr had returned a minute later, anger and frustration rising from him like a charge of static electricity. He found the boy kneeling, cradling his mother’s head in his lap. He had known at once there was no saving her, but he could hardly have expected the boy to leave her where she fell. Against his better judgement, then, they had carried her away from the circle of stones in search of shelter, a more private place. Only by luck had they chanced upon the tomb. Badr’s attention had been drawn first of all by what he took to be a stand of gorse bushes, a low, dark hump barely discernible in the gloom and close by the place where Jessie had been felled. The Moor fancied there might be some cover there, perhaps a protective hollow in which to crouch out of sight and wait for the woman to die.
There had been gorse right enough, but the thorny bushes had taken root, in their hundreds, around the entrance to a megalithic tomb. Carefully placed upright stones and lintels made a passage leading to a roughly square chamber that was more than large enough to shelter the three of them. The roof was formed by a pair of colossal stone slabs that had once been placed neatly together. The millennia that had passed since the long-dead farmers had completed their self-appointed task had seen the slabs slump apart, however, so that the chamber was partly open to the night sky and flooded with moonlight. Badr had crawled into the passageway first and then turned to haul Jessie in behind him by her shoulders. John Grant had struggled forward on hands and knees, doing his best to support her legs. Despite their efforts, she had groaned as their manoeuvrings caused the arrow shaft to twist and turn inside her body.
The roof of the chamber was higher than that of the passage, but still low. They had laid Jessie out between them and then knelt either side. John Grant had busied himself for a minute or two by smoothing her clothes, making sure her legs were together and decently covered. Content that at least her dignity was intact, he had then fussed over her hair, tidying stray strands from her face and forehead.
It was as he was finishing the job that she spoke to him.
‘I could not have loved you more,’ she said.
‘I love you too, Mum,’ he said, his face buried in the space between her neck and her shoulder. ‘I need you … I …’ He broke off and rolled on to his heels so that he could look at her face. He rocked back and forth, like a penitent at prayer.
‘Don’t leave me. Please …’ he said.
Badr Khassan, giant and warrior, more used to causing harm than coping with its consequences, reached out with one uncertain hand. Unsure at first where best to lay it, he left it hovering for a moment before deciding to place it gently on the boy’s shoulder. He was so slight, even fragile, and Badr winced at the thought that this boy would soon be alone in the world. John Grant tore his gaze from his mother’s face and looked at him. Badr looked back and saw fear. Worse, he saw a wordless cry for help.
‘Leave her be, son,’ he said. ‘Her wounds are beyond what little skill I possess. I am quite sure they are beyond any help.’
Badr watched as the boy slumped, collapsing into himself and seeming to diminish. For all his anguish, though, he apparently understood that he was being told the truth.
Badr reached for a bag at his belt. After rummaging inside it for a moment, he produced a small glass bottle wrapped in leather. He removed its stopper and, cradling Jessie’s head in one hand, helped her take a few sips from it.
‘It tastes bad – bitter,’ he said to her. ‘But it will help the pain.’
He settled her down and watched as she licked her lips, seeking every trace.
‘I could not have loved you more,’ said Jessie again, her voice near as quiet as a thought.
Both of them looked down at her. Badr felt like an intruder. He was certain, however, that Armstrong would shortly return with the rest of the troopers. His concern that all of them must remain in the chamber, out of sight, kept him from absenting himself from the scene. Jessie’s eyes were open and she looked more like herself. John Grant laid his hand gently upon one of her hip bones, as close to the arrow as he dared. He could feel her battling to reassemble herself, the self he had always known. She knew it was slipping from her like worn-out clothes, but by a force of will that passed through his fingers and into his body, he detected her efforts to rally, if only for a little while.
‘I know that, Mum,’ he said. He felt the need to swallow, and would have sworn a handful of jagged gorse was lodged in his throat. He reached for one of her hands and clasped it tightly in his own, like a drowning man.
‘Stay with me,’ he said. ‘Please stay with me.’
She turned her head so that she was looking straight at him. Her eyes were all darkness, the pupils dilated, and he felt them draw him forward with their own gravity. She tried to raise her head from the dry earthen floor of the chamber, but the effort was beyond her. She blinked hard, swallowing her agony.
‘My son,’ she said. Her hand had been limp within his own, and frighteningly cold, but now he felt her fingers squeezing back as though willing him to understand something she lacked the strength to say.
‘I know, Mum,’ he said. He needed her to know he felt loved by her, had always and only felt loved by her, and he pulled her hand towards him and buried his face in her palm. The smell of her skin, so familiar, seemed like the scent of his life, of his world.
‘Mum … Mum,’ he said, hungry for the feel and the sound of the word. ‘I could not have been more loved.’
Her hand relaxed and felt suddenly heavy. He placed it gently by her side, and when he looked into her eyes, he knew that she was gone. It was the very instant of her dying, and as he watched, a shimmer like smoke, or perhaps the heat haze from a flame, rose from her body, hung in the air for a moment, and disappeared.
H
e gasped and looked at the Moor.
‘Did you see?’ he asked, his eyes suddenly blinded by tears, his voice broken into brittle shards. ‘Did you see?’
Badr shrugged helplessly and shook his head, uncomprehending.
‘See what?’ he asked.
John Grant understood that he and he alone had been vouchsafed the vision. He turned back to his mother and found he was looking only at some form resembling the mother he loved. He gasped and raised his hand to his mouth, stunned by the change and by the sudden absence. Her scent was still on his skin, had somehow outlived her, and he breathed deeply, a great jagged gulp of a breath that he hoped to hold inside his chest for ever.
The tears overwhelmed him then and he dropped his chin on to his chest, his whole body racked with sobs. Badr, a novice in the art of comforting broken-hearted boys, shuffled over to him on his knees, his hair brushing against one of the roof slabs of the chamber so that he felt like a clumsy bear in a cave right enough. For all his years, for all the wisdom he possessed, he found he had nothing to say, nothing of value to offer. He thought about taking the boy in his arms, but did not. He waited helplessly while the waves of John Grant’s grief broke around them both.
Suddenly the boy stopped crying, a breath hitched in his throat. He tensed, and Badr felt the change in his posture.
‘They’re coming back,’ said John Grant.
Badr held one finger against his own lips. Slowly and silently he crawled to the passage and down the length of it. Part of the stone circle was visible from the mouth of the tomb, was in fact aligned upon it, and at first the Moor saw no one. The stone sentinels were alone in the moonlight but he knew better than to doubt the boy’s instincts. He heard a scuffling behind him and looked round to see John Grant scuttling towards him down the passage. He stopped just behind him and to one side, and Badr reached out a hand, to make sure he went no further, and placed it on his knee.
Well balanced though he was, squatted down on his hunkers, the big man reeled and almost fell backwards into the passage. He kept his hand on the boy’s leg, desperate to regain his equilibrium, but a tide of force was pushing against his whole body. There was more besides. Where before the world had been steady beneath his feet, now he felt a horribly disorientating sense of falling, and turning. It was like trying to maintain his balance while standing on a floating log. Overwhelmed and dizzy, as though a sudden earthquake had taken hold of the land, he took his hand from the boy’s knee and spread both arms out so that he might brace himself against the passage walls.
