Master of Shadows

by Neil Oliver

  As quickly as it had come, the lightning blinked out. Blind in the sudden darkness but filled with a rush of energy and power, she leapt to her feet.

  Back in the darkness, Crista ran her hands down the front of her nightdress and felt the thick wetness of her own blood. It was her first bleed, but she was none the wiser – she thought she must be dying. In horror and fear, she dropped to her knees, and pitched face forward on to the shelf of rock.

  When the lightning came a second time, just moments later, the ledge was empty – the apparition vanished.

  ‘You wanted to see an angel,’ said Lẽna, turning to her captor. ‘Well now you have.’

  She glimpsed the look of wonder on his face as she brought her forehead crashing down on to the bridge of his nose. Quick as a striking snake, she drew her head back and butted him again, with even greater force.

  ‘But she came for me,’ she said.

  He toppled sideways, semi-conscious, and hit the ground hard. A sheet of rain, so dense it might have been a waterfall, sluiced across the hillside, drenching everything in an instant. The leader moaned, and there came the shouts of the younger men. Another flash of lightning turned night to day, and for the moment that it lasted she saw the three of them, dismounted at the base of the tor and holding their horses by their reins, looking around in near panic.

  When the darkness returned, Lẽna sat down heavily. The pain from her shoulder was considerable, but she closed her mind to it as she worked her hands, still tied at the wrists, under her booted feet. She heard movement from the downed man and reached for him where he lay. He tensed at her touch and cried out.

  ‘Jamie!’ he bellowed, trying to rise. ‘Here to me, now! She’s loose!’

  He had made it on to his knees and she swung both hands, knitted together at the knuckles, with all the strength she had earned in the woods. She thought of him as the stubborn trunk of a tree as the work-hardened heels of her hands met his jaw and she heard a crunch as some or other bone in his face was parted from its mooring. He dropped to the ground. She felt for his belt and located his knife. Drawing it swiftly, she sat and gripped the handle between her heels, then slid the ropes holding her wrists down the length of the upthrust blade. Her hands parted easily and she was free to turn her attention to the other men, now running towards her out of the dark.

  She thought about killing him where he lay – opening the vein in his neck with his own knife and letting him bleed out – but the memory of the vision stayed her hand. She could similarly have dispatched the trio searching for her on the storm-lashed hillside, and her muscles fairly thrummed with the knowledge and skill required by the task. But instead she let them be, and for the same reason.

  She had seen the claret red upon the angel’s white garb and had understood the message in a heartbeat. There was blood to be spilled on the path back to her God, but not his and not theirs. The necessary sacrifice was hers and hers alone. She knew it now as she had known it long ago – as she had always known it.

  Thunder cracked and lightning flashed around her as she followed the contour of the hill. Her most urgent need was to be out of sight of any pursuers, and she leaned to her left, trailing one hand against the sodden grass of the slope rising steeply beside her. She heard a distant shout and guessed that one of them had found their leader. There were more calls as they sought and found one another in the dark, but she could tell she was putting distance and the curve of the hill between her and them. The torrent washed over her in sheets, like all the tears she had kept unshed down through the years. She realised she was crying too, and wiped the back of her hand uselessly across her eyes and nose.

  With sudden anger and disgust she realised she was crying, at least in part, for herself. She wept too for her bold protector Hugh Moray, murdered in his bed long ago, his throat slit from ear to ear on the orders of Robert Jardine. No one had foreseen his treachery, not even she who heard the word of God. Jardine it was who had ordered more deaths besides, seeing to it that a score of his fellow Scotsmen of the Garde Ecossaise were slaughtered in one night, so that he might steal her away and sell her to her enemies for the promise of coins and lands.

  When they came for her at Compiègne, they wore the colours of the Burgundians, allies of the English. In truth, though, they were traitor Scots, border Reivers from Hawkshaw with Jardine’s Judas coins in their purses. They had turned their coats and betrayed their French masters. She was the maiden they had been hired to protect, a prize of inestimable value. Now her life and death would be the making of their ambitious Scots master …

  The rain stopped – or rather, she was suddenly beyond its reach. Behind her, above her, a near-vertical wall of black, darker than the sky around it, rose towards infinity. Within the mass of cloud, jagged thorns of lightning flashed like signs of life and further crescendos of thunder still rolled in all directions.

  The storm cloud was moving away from her, though, and she had run out from under its baleful canopy. She was headed downhill into cooler air, her way ahead illuminated by moonlight. At the base of the slope she looked up at the stars, reassured herself that she was still heading eastwards, and pressed on. Her clothing was soaked through, and despite her exertions she was beginning to feel cold. The hairs on her arms rose up, pulling goose bumps of skin with them, and she shuddered. Her shoulder ached and she wondered if she had relocated it properly.

  She was on a clear path, well trodden by people and animals, and she hoped she was back on the same trail her captors had been leading her along. Surely it would pass through or close to some vestige of civilisation?

  She almost collided with the horses before she saw them. They were standing in the middle of the track, head to tail for comfort, their bulk neatly blocking her way. As she approached, the closest of them began to shy away. It was the horse she had been riding, a grey mare, as well as the one belonging to the leader, a black gelding with four white socks. A wave of pleasure and relief enveloped her. She looked heavenwards and mouthed a thank-you to providence.

  She made a soft shushing noise as she advanced more slowly, before gently reaching out and clasping the tangle of reins that hung low beneath the mare’s nose. Next she reached for the other horse, and when she had them properly positioned, she tied the gelding’s reins to the long leads that had enabled the leader to control her horse on the trail. She gently stroked her mare’s neck, shushing all the while, before hopping one foot into the stirrup and heaving herself into the saddle. Her shoulder complained bitterly at the effort, but she settled back gratefully and turned her mount towards the east once more.

  On horseback she had the speed and the freedom she required. If Sir Robert Jardine was somewhere ahead, waiting by the pilgrims’ trail – perhaps with Patrick Grant as his prisoner – then she desired to find him first, and in circumstances that were hers to control. She used her heels to coax the mare into a trot, keen to put many miles between herself and her former captors.

  She had done enough damage to the leader, she was sure, to make it unlikely that he would be in any condition to follow her that night, and by morning she would be well on her way. For all her elation at the events of the past hour, fatigue hung around her shoulders like a damp shawl. The adrenalin that had coursed through her body had ebbed away and her senses were dulled. She would need to rest, and soon.

  It was therefore understandable that she failed to notice the presence, in the deeper dark, of a third horse and the rider upon it.

  While he watched her, he thought of Badr Khassan buried in a shallow grave in a cave far to the east, and wondered how many loved ones he would leave in the dark before the end.

  It had taken an age to excavate a grave large enough to take the big man’s body, and when at last he had manoeuvred him into position, he realised he had not the heart to cover him with rocks and dusty soil. Remembering how they had left Jessie Grant, in the tomb under a nameless cairn on a hillside within a few miles’ ride of his childhood home, he had searched out
side the cave until he found a stand of long-stemmed white flowers growing by the side of the stream that flowed reluctantly from the cave mouth. He thought they might be lilies, and he gathered armfuls and bore them back to the graveside. When he had enough, he placed them over Badr’s body, starting at his feet and leaving his face clear for as long as possible.

  Finally he laid more flowers, just the drooping heads and petals, over the Moor’s face until he was completely covered and the cave was filled with their heavy scent. He looked down at his clothes and saw they were streaked with sticky golden pollen, like spiders’ webs.

  ‘I will hope to meet you on the road,’ he said, and turned and walked towards the light beyond the cave.

  He had journeyed for many weeks since then and always into the west, before alighting on the pilgrims’ path leading from southern France to Galicia and on towards the shrine of St James.

  Badr’s words in the cave had been his constant companions, holding his hand upon the road.

  The Bear had a daughter! She might be his own age by now, or near enough. The very thought of it almost made him laugh, or perhaps cry. And then too there was the big man’s lost love, Isabella. What of her?

  In spite of those twin fascinations, however, and the lure of Constantinople in the east, it was towards the west and Patrick Grant’s great love that he had been irresistibly drawn. Jessie Grant it was who had raised him and cared for him – had died for the love of him – and yet out here in the west was his true source, his wellspring.

  In ways that none but he could understand – none save any other gifted with awareness of the spinning of the world, and the journey into the empty dark, and the push of all the souls within his own orbit – he knew with unshakeable faith that he would find her path and cross it.

  His own mount was all but worn out by hard travelling and he had been on the point of approaching the mare and the gelding himself, and taking them for his own use, when the push had warned him of another’s approach. At first glance the trousers, the heavy boots and short hair of the bedraggled figure that emerged from the darkness of the trail made him assume he was dealing with a man. Only when he had had time to study the body language, particularly the posture adopted in the saddle, did he realise it was a woman who was helping herself to the unexpected bounty.

  From the darkness beside the trail he had watched her fix the tack to her own liking, setting the black gelding so that he would have to trot along at her rear. She was well used to horses, that much was obvious, but it was her whole demeanour that had him sit up and pay attention.

  She was on the run – and from challenging circumstances by the look of things. From her wrists there hung short lengths of rope, evidence of recent imprisonment, and the droop of her right shoulder suggested a wound or injury of some kind. There was fresh blood on her forehead. All the while she prepared the horses, she kept an eye back down the trail in the direction from which she had come. Despite the signs of trouble, however, and of the possibility of pursuit, she exuded no hint of anxiety, far less of fear. If she had recently been tested, it appeared she had passed and come out on top – and was single-mindedly capitalising on the advantage gained.

  By the time she had mounted the grey mare and set out towards the east, John Grant’s interest was more than piqued. The push that had preceded this individual had told him someone was coming, as usual. But now, as she and the horses melted into the dark, an entirely new sensation bade him follow. It felt as though some sort of cord was pulling him into her wake. He smiled at the unexpectedness of it, and his inability to resist. He felt as tethered and bound as the black gelding, and he realised, with a not unpleasant shiver, that all the hairs on his neck were standing on end.

  ‘I hear you, old Bear,’ he whispered.

  John Grant followed at a distance, so far to the rear that his quarry was always out of sight in the darkness ahead. From time to time he heard the clatter of hooves, or the sound of the horses snorting or tossing their heads so that their bridles rattled. At all times, too, there was the detectable presence of the woman herself. He felt like a dog fox following its prey into the night.

  He glimpsed movement on the trail ahead and realised it was the rump of the grey mare, her languid, rolling gait faintly illuminated by the half-moon. He had a split second to notice that the horse was riderless before a dark shape flew out of the darkness to his left. Landing lightly on his own horse’s back, the figure lunged at him with powerful arms, striking him squarely on the chest so that he toppled, arse over tit, out of the saddle. He landed flat on his back on the soft earth of the trail. Whoever had knocked him from his horse now leapt from the beast’s back and landed astride him, one foot either side of his head, before dropping to place one knee across his throat.

  He looked up into the face of his attacker and found it was that of the woman. Her left hand was drawn back behind her head, heel foremost and ready to strike down towards his face, and reflexively he raised an arm, palm extended and fingers splayed, to deflect the imminent blow.

  His assailant had been all silent, fluid movement, smooth as water over stones. Now she was frozen in place, gazing fixedly at his upraised hand. She leapt to her feet and took two swift paces backwards, out of his range. Her focus shifted from his hand to his face, and he felt her gaze like physical contact, as though she was feeling the contours of his cheekbones and jaw with her fingertips.

  ‘Ou avez-vous trouvé ça?’ she said, thrown, in her confusion, all the way back to the language of her childhood. How did you come by that?

  John Grant had stood by Badr’s side in enough battles in France to understand the language, if not the question. His immeditate problem was the lack of air in his lungs, and a consequent inability to make any sounds in reply. He had been winded completely by his unhorsing and a silence hung between them until at last he managed to suck down a great draught of air. It seemed to hit the bottom of his lungs and bounce all the way back out again, so that he sat up coughing and choking, shining threads of drool running from his gaping maw. Still fearing a continuation of her attack upon him, he kept his hand towards her, fingers spread in the universal gesture of submission while he fought to gather his senses. He focused on the back of his own hand and saw the ring – the same that had come attached to a scarf wrapped around a scallop shell.

  Both shell and scarf he had left with Badr Khassan, tucked inside his cloak and now accompanying him in his grave. The ring he had kept and found that it fitted – albeit tightly – on to the little finger of his left hand.

  He moved his focus from the ring to the woman’s face – and found she was staring at the little gold band as well.

  ‘Ou avez-vous trouvé ça?’ she asked again.

  A chilled charge of excitement ran over his skin, so that he shivered. Understanding flooded through him. She meant the ring! She was transfixed by the thing – her eyes focused sharp upon it like a kite’s upon a mouse. She had had him utterly at her mercy – had bested him like no one before – and yet here she stood, paralysed by the sight of a little band of gold.

  ‘C’était un cadeau de mon père,’ he said. It was a gift from my father.

  In all the years he had spent with the Moor, he had never thought of Badr Khassan as his father, far less called him it. The appellation had come unbidden to his lips, and he felt a wave of sadness rising within him.

  She backed further away until she began to disappear into the darkness by the side of the trail.

  The thought of his father made him think next of his mother. Jessie Grant lay dead in a tomb of stone, uncounted miles and half a lifetime away. A second charge rippled back and forth across his skin, raising hairs and causing him to close his eyes and exhale in a halting staccato of gasps. The ring was one of a kind – Badr had said so. The sight of it would matter only to one other, the one for whom it had been made.

  Badr had sent him on his way with his last breaths. Ambushed by death, he had struggled against the mercy of the opium, gr
appled for any trailing strands of clarity, and revealed to him the existence of two hidden lives. The first had been that of Badr’s daughter, surrendered long ago and now passed like a beating heart into John Grant’s care; the second had been that of his own mother, the woman who had borne him.

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked John Grant in his native Scots tongue.

  The woman stopped abruptly, so that she occupied a place between light and darkness – a ghost in the space between the living and the dead. She offered no answer but her pause, and something in the way she turned her head, told him she had understood his question well enough.

  ‘Your name,’ he tried again.

  His voice had regained its power, its certainty.

  ‘Tell me your name.’

  Instead of speaking, she began slowly to circle him, anticlockwise, like a would-be predator gauging the threat, if any, posed by the quarry at hand.

  ‘I know you understand me,’ he said.

  ‘Your face …’ she said.

  ‘My mother used to say I had my father’s face,’ he said. He stayed on the ground, felt the cold damp soaking his bottom and the backs of his legs. The air between them seemed to crackle, and he feared that if he moved too much he might break the spell and she would disappear entirely into the dark.

  ‘Used to say?’ she asked.

  ‘My mother is dead,’ he said. ‘Or so I thought.’

  She kept moving, kept circling, her eyes never leaving his.

  ‘And your eyes …’

  He risked a smile.

  ‘My father’s too, I believe.’

  ‘You are a Scotsman,’ she said.

  ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘That I am. I get that from—’

  ‘From your father,’ she cut him off. ‘A Scotsman,’ she said again.

  ‘So you’ve met others like myself?’ he said.

  He caught an edge of profile and glimpsed there an expression he could not read but that had, within its complex mix, a hint of sadness. Something about her manner made him blush, as though he were the butt of a joke he did not understand.