by Neil Oliver
‘She loved you and raised you,’ said Badr. ‘But she did not bear you.’
John Grant was silent, feeling the spinning of the world and his place upon it.
‘It was not Jessie Grant who gave you life,’ said Badr. ‘That was the work of another …’
Angus Armstrong lay upon the clifftop, as close as he dared to the fissure through which sunlight and water entered the cave. If he remained still and kept his breathing shallow, he could just hear the voices of John Grant and Badr Khassan, strangely altered by their passage through the rock.
He had been baffled and bored by the Bear’s talk of mice and monkeys and maidens, but his attention had certainly been piqued by mention of a long-lost daughter. Carefully he tucked away the sparkling nugget, safe among the store of information that kept him always close on his quarry’s trail. If he was honest with himself, he had to admit it was the chase, the pursuit through months and years, that pleased him.
Killing was the work of a moment, but hunting might last him a lifetime.
Better yet was the talk of Jessie Grant. Not for the first time he remembered the night years before when an arrow meant for the Moor had found the woman instead. It had been the last in his quiver, and if it had struck Badr Khassan, as he had intended, he might have taken his time with the woman and her son.
As it was, the Moor had sighted back along the trajectory taken by the arrow and spied his location beyond the circle of stones. Low and menacing, the giant had set out in his direction with a burst of speed that was quite unexpected (and deeply upsetting) in one so large.
Armstrong had taken the only course open to him then and had turned and fled. Finding his horse where he had left it, tethered to a solitary tree silhouetted against the night sky, he had mounted the beast with a great leap and galloped ahead to rejoin his fellows.
He smiled at the memory, amused by the thought of his panic in the face of the Bear. Now the old monster lay in a cave below him, mortally wounded.
When Armstrong and the hunting party had returned to the stones that night, they found nothing and no one, not even the woman’s body. Clearly the Bear and the boy had taken Jessie Grant with them, and Armstrong wondered again, as he had many times, just how they had managed to disappear so quickly and so completely.
He was brought back from his musings by the sound of John Grant’s voice.
‘Of course Jessie was my mother, Bear,’ he said. ‘It’s just the opium … giving you dreams.’
Many feet below the spot where Armstrong lay, John Grant placed the palms of both hands on the smooth rock of the cave floor by his sides. The vibration was faint, but unmistakable – the low rumbling of the world turning on its axis. He drew strength from the force of it while he waited for Badr to speak again.
The Moor was growing weaker and his consciousness moved back and forth, swaying like a reed, but in a river made of opium.
‘She was your mother,’ he said. ‘Of course that is true. Mothering is the work of years, an occupation without an end.’
‘What are you saying, then?’ asked John Grant. He was not looking at Badr – instead his gaze was directed into the darkness while the world beneath him hurtled into the void at an impossible speed.
‘You did not grow in the womb of Jessie Grant,’ said Badr. ‘You were born from another. One who gave you up before you were even weaned.’
John Grant said nothing.
‘Compared to a lifetime of love, the work of giving birth is the lesser task,’ said Badr. ‘Vital, I grant you, but lesser.’
He rode upon the river, rising and falling, while John Grant remained silent.
‘Don’t you remember?’ asked Badr. ‘Don’t you remember what she said to you the night she died?’
‘I could not have loved you more,’ said John Grant at last. He had listened to the words in his head a thousand times.
‘I could not have loved you more,’ said Badr Khassan.
Suddenly they sounded different to John Grant, and he blushed. Had she meant, after all, ‘I could not have loved you more … if you had been my own’?
The thought, the apparent truth of it, ran around his innards like a rat, so that he felt hollow.
‘Who then?’ he asked. ‘Who gave me life?’
‘The woman who gave you life was … your father’s great love,’ said Badr. ‘I am sorry to say it, but you should know. A woman he saved from death just as he once saved me.’
‘But who was she?’ asked John Grant. ‘Where is she?’
‘My bag,’ said Badr, gesturing weakly to his belongings, heaped by his side. The scimitar was sheathed, beside his cloak and a bag of leather.
John Grant crawled over on hands and knees and reached for the bag.
‘Look inside.’
In all the years, John Grant had never had cause to inspect Badr’s few belongings. The act felt intimate now, as he unfastened the ties and lifted the flap.
‘Wrapped in blue,’ said Badr.
John Grant reached inside. Alongside a few little books bound in dark leather, some bundles of dark cotton wrapped variously around clinking coins or ampoules of some or other liquid, he saw a square package of pale blue.
‘Gently,’ said Badr. ‘It would be a shame to break it now.’
The fabric was fine, perhaps silk, thought John Grant, and as he began to unwrap it, he saw it was a scarf, fine and for a woman. He looked at Badr, mystified, as he unwound the layers. Inside he found a large shell, as big as his hand.
‘Do you know what that is?’ asked Badr.
John Grant turned it over and over reverently, as though handling a sacred relic.
‘It is a scallop shell,’ he said, more loudly than he intended. The strangeness, the unexpectedness of it left him almost disappointed.
‘It was your mother’s,’ said Badr. ‘Not Jessie’s – but the one who bore you.’
John Grant felt empty, as though he was looking into a void, and the void was inside himself.
‘Why do you have it?’ he asked.
‘Your father wanted me to keep it for you,’ said Badr. ‘And so I did. He never told me when I should give it to you. But now seems the time.’
He coughed and shuddered at the pain of it.
High above, where the sun shone and water flowed, Angus Armstrong had been pressing ever closer to the fissure. The words of the Moor and John Grant were on the outer limit of his hearing, and he was holding his breath while he strained to gather in the information rising towards him, fleeting as minnows in dappled shallows.
At the mention of the scallop shell, however – such a telltale possession, evidently treasured by Patrick Grant and loaded with import – all thoughts of concealment disappeared.
Then the revelation that it came from her, from the woman …
In his desperation to hear more easily, to catch every last little fish, he reached too far forward and for a moment allowed his head and upper body to block the opening.
The effect in the cave beneath was instantaneous. While Badr breathed low and slowly and John Grant struggled with what he was being told, the shaft of sunlight between them was abruptly broken. The shadow stayed in place for no more than a fraction of a second, but it informed the younger man of another matter of great import. They were not alone.
He hissed in anger and frustration as he leapt to his feet. Surely it was Armstrong. Who else? Gifted the knowledge that their tormentor had sought them out yet again, that he was somewhere above them, John Grant finally made sense of the arrhythmic percussion of the heartbeats he had felt – and could still feel – against his face.
There was Badr’s – slow and deep as always. But there was another besides. He understood it now and cursed himself for his mistake. What he had interpreted as one troubled, wounded heart was in fact the beats of two, woven into one messy plait.
Despite his wound, Badr’s reflexes had him try to rise as well, to accompany his ward as always. A desperate gasp escaped him as his strength f
ailed him utterly and he slumped down once more. John Grant shot him an anxious glance, but decided his most urgent business lay elsewhere.
Laying aside the shell and its wrapping, he sprinted for the cave’s narrow entrance, his footfalls making scant impact on the bedrock so that he fairly seemed to fly. Back in the daylight he blinked and grimaced. He turned to look up at the sheer face of the cliff rising above him. All at once a black shape appeared at the top, no more than a shadow against the dazzling blue, but he knew it for what it was – who it was.
Angus Armstrong right enough – drawn to them always, as though attached by an unbreakable thread.
Suddenly the shadow changed shape. Armstrong had moved something, or rather rolled something off the edge of the precipice, and with only a sliver of a moment to spare, John Grant realised that a boulder as big around as a cartwheel was hurtling towards him out of the sunlight. He flinched and ducked to his right and the missile impacted deafeningly but harmlessly on the ground, splitting into many pieces. By the time he had collected himself and looked up once more, the silhouette was gone.
It was a hopeless situation and he knew it. There was no sense in risking abandoning Badr long enough to circle around the cliff face in search of a gentle approach to the top. Even less appealing was the thought of scaling the cliff itself, vulnerable every inch of the way to attack from above. He breathed deeply, in search of calm and the clearer thinking that might accompany it. Stepping back into the comparative safety of the cave’s mouth, he weighed his options. As the minutes passed, he found his way back to his original assessment of the situation: denied the advantage conferred by his longbow, Angus Armstrong would surely avoid coming face to face with him in combat.
High above, the archer was already on his way – away from the cliff and the cave, and away from John Grant. There were no doubts in Armstrong’s mind and no uncertainty. He had his destination and the promise of his prize – the prize.
Sir Robert would be pleased, well pleased.
Back in the cave, Badr floated on a river of opium and memory. His eyes were open and the shaft of sunlight from the cave’s roof shimmered and shone before him like a waterfall of burnished gold, twisted like a girl’s braided hair, or billowing like a ship’s sail. Within it, against it, he saw the seasons of his life. Along with much else, he was losing his sense of time, or time was losing track of him as it let him go. Moments lengthened so that seconds gave space for whole sequences of events …
‘You are a fool, Badr,’ said Patrick Grant, from across the years.
Badr smiled at his old friend’s passion, anxious as always to guard and to protect. For the first time he noticed how closely the son resembled the father. Hazel eyes flecked with gold.
‘If you stay with her, you will die,’ said Patrick. ‘It is that simple, Badr. Her father will see to it.’
A wave of regret washed over him. He saw that it was in his own foolhardiness, his own stubbornness, that the seeds of Patrick’s death had been sown.
‘And if you won’t give a thought to your own safety, then think of hers,’ said Patrick. ‘Isabella will live, but her life will be ruined. In her family’s eyes, she will be ruined.’
Patrick turned his back on his friend, his shoulders shaking with frustration.
Badr remembered how his pet name for her – Izzi – had been too … light for his friend’s taste. She was royalty, after all, he said, or as good as. The girl could claim descent – distant and on her mother’s side, but real enough – from emperors past.
Her father, the schemer, was a minister of the imperial court. Some said he might soon be made mesazon – most senior of the emperor’s ministers and the most trusted, called upon night and day.
To Patrick, Izzi seemed too slight a word for one such as she.
From the cave’s mouth, John Grant heard a mumbled word and queried it.
‘My son?’ he asked. ‘Did you say my son?’
‘Mesazon,’ corrected Badr. ‘The go-between.’
Back in his past, the Moor heard his old friend’s voice again.
‘Their sort are all about bloodlines and breeding. No one will want a pup from a bitch that’s been had by the wrong dog.’
He turned to face Badr.
‘And you, my friend, are the wrong dog.’
Patrick had pulled his chin towards his chest and half closed his eyes, as though in expectation of a blow. But Badr had laughed instead, a great roaring sound that made the other man jump with surprise …
Lying on his side on the cold stone of the cave, Badr laughed again at the memory – laughed at his friend’s nerve as well as at his determination to make his case.
‘What is it, Badr?’ said John Grant. He had returned from the cave mouth and now took up a position seated by his old friend, his back to him and one hand on the big man’s shoulder.
‘He was brave,’ said Badr. ‘Braver than me.’
He seemed to have altogether forgotten the events of just moments before – the younger man’s flight from the cave, the explosive impact of the boulder pushed off the cliff by Armstrong, all of it.
‘Who?’ asked John Grant.
‘Your father. He feared no one. And nothing.’
John Grant gently patted Badr’s shoulder.
‘I wish he had been afraid,’ he said.
‘You think that would have saved him?’ said Badr. ‘I am not so sure.’
‘Maybe if he had feared someone, or something, he would have come home to my mother, and to me.’
Badr offered no answer, just gazed ahead into the golden light, hypnotised by the way it seemed to pulse and breathe.
‘Tell me about his woman,’ said John Grant. ‘Tell me about my mother.’
Badr did not see John Grant, but Patrick instead …
It was another place for the Moor, and another time.
Patrick Grant was seated on the harbour wall at Corunna, Galicia’s port town on the Atlantic, his feet dangling over the water. In his hands he held a scallop shell, wrapped in its sky-blue scarf.
‘I do not think I will ever see her again,’ he said, turning the package over and over, stroking the fabric with his fingertips.
Badr was seated beside him and fairly towering over him, so that to an onlooker they might have seemed more like father and son. They were so close together that their bodies were almost touching, and Badr gave Patrick a nudge with his elbow that caused the smaller man to overbalance. He almost dropped the shell into the harbour.
‘Careful, you big lump,’ said Patrick.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ said Badr, holding up both hands in abject apology. ‘I forget my own strength – especially around the little people.’
For all his sadness, Patrick had to smile.
‘I’ll give you little people,’ he said, and pushed back, ineffectually, with his shoulder. It was like leaning against a bolted door.
Badr frowned. He had mastered the English tongue long ago, but the Scotsman’s turns of phrase often left him baffled.
It was the springtime of 1432, and Patrick Grant was preparing to board a ship bound for Scotland, and home.
They were an unlikely pair in more ways than one. As well as the difference in their sizes, there was the child – in fact a baby boy just three months old and lying swaddled in a basket.
‘Talking of little people,’ said Badr, nodding towards the infant. ‘How exactly do you propose to get him home?’
‘There’s a family aboard – merchants, trading Scottish wool for olive oil,’ said Patrick. ‘The wife is nursing one of her own, born a month early. She has agreed to lend a hand, or rather a tit.’
Badr laughed and shook his head at his friend’s predicament. Patrick saw the look and pressed on.
‘I’ll be paying her for her trouble,’ he said. ‘If we have to disembark and find another wet nurse along the way, then we will. It is time that I have, and a mother for the boy that I lack. And anyway, the crew has goats aboard – one way or another he�
�ll not starve. He’ll suck on a milk-soaked rag if he’s hungry enough.’
Badr patted him heavily on the back.
‘Changed days, eh?’ he said. ‘From fighter to father.’
Patrick reached out to the basket and rocked it gently.
‘He’s the fighter,’ he said.
‘He will have to be,’ said Badr. ‘Without a mother.’
‘He has me,’ said Patrick. ‘And I will give him a mother, in time.’
‘How could his own mother send him away?’ asked Badr. ‘What woman turns her back on her own young?’
There was movement in the basket and the baby cried out, a high, reedy sound that made both men wince.
Patrick reached in, dropped the scarf and shell among the blankets and picked up the baby, brought him in to his chest.
‘He’ll be hungry, no doubt,’ said Badr.
He stood up and held out his hands for the baby. Patrick passed him over. In the big man’s arms the infant looked pathetically small. Now standing upright himself, Patrick reached out for his son and Badr handed him back. The crying had stopped and the baby was calm, comforted by the movement and the change of position.
‘Her heart is broken,’ said Patrick. ‘It was broken before I got to her. I thought I could put it right. As God is my judge, I let her be. I left her alone when I could, and went to her only when my heart demanded it.
‘And then I thought … well, I thought our baby would put it right.’
‘But it did not,’ said Badr.
‘It did not,’ said Patrick. ‘He did not. I think she feels … no – I tell you she believes she has no right.’
‘No right to what?’ asked Badr.
‘To much of anything now. To happiness … to love … to a life,’ said Patrick. ‘She’s the only person I’ve ever met who feels that her own life does not belong to her.’
‘I wish I had been there for you,’ said Badr. ‘In France, and against those English.’
Patrick Grant nodded, and breathed out through his nose so that the sound was close to a rueful laugh.
‘I have not always needed to have you holding my hand,’ he said.
‘I might have steered you clear of … all of this,’ said Badr.
