by Neil Oliver
‘We see them all on the pilgrims’ trail,’ she said. ‘Franks, English, Africans … even Scotsmen. All sorts make their way to the Great Shrine.’
He found that he was captivated by her – by the sight and sound of her. As he stared, he tried to assess her age but found he could not. Her clothes and boots were overtly masculine, as were some of her movements. When she stood still she seemed rooted in the ground, confident and unassailable. There was much besides that was of the feminine as well. Her cheekbones were high and sharp, suggestive of a bird of prey, and she had the countenance to match, but her black hair, flecked here and there with silver, was cut short like a boy’s. Her neck, long and slim, showed flexing tendons and muscle, but it was the neck of a woman right enough.
More than anything, it was her gaze that perplexed him and seemed to reach inside him. Her eyes were the palest blue, like the sky nearest the noonday sun, and it almost hurt to look at them. There were fine lines on the skin over her temples and these were thickly marked with the grime of the road. She did not blink, just looked at him evenly. No girl, no woman had ever looked at him that way. He realised he was being sized up in the way his opponents sometimes did. There was no hint of deference whatsoever, no suggestion of feminine wiles. He was being looked at by his equal, maybe his superior.
He was a soldier, a fighting man, and his reflexes were all engaged. The notion, the very idea, that this woman could best him was ridiculous, and he tried to dismiss it.
‘What is your name?’ he asked again.
She smiled. ‘Your fellow Scots had a name for me once,’ she said.
He looked her in the eyes.
‘They called me Jeannie Dark,’ she said.
He had come in search of the woman his father had loved best, the woman who had given him life, if nothing else. He had travelled long and hard in hopes of locating her before the men that were enemies to them both. He had trusted his instincts – known that if she lived still, he would find her.
What he had not expected, however, was that she would come to him on the road.
‘No one ever told me your name,’ he said. ‘But I knew I would recognise my own mother when I met her.’
24
Whoever she was and whoever she had been, Leña found herself broken and unbroken, unmade and made anew by his words – like a blade reforged.
My own mother, he had said.
The words hung in front of her eyes, clouded her thoughts and filled her nose and mouth.
Mother.
He had been silent since, content to leave her winded and reeling as though from a punch to the solar plexus.
Before he had said those words, she had seen the little gold ring upon his finger. She had seen it and known it – known it for what it was. But it was the declaration of the fact that had all but knocked the wind from her lungs.
The ring was Patrick Grant’s, and here now was his son. Here was her son.
She felt disconnected from reality – disconnected from time. The presence of the ring reminded her of when she was young; the presence of the boy reminded her she was growing old.
‘Who’s hunting you then, Jeannie Dark?’ he asked now as they rode. He felt sure he knew the answer, but some private part of him wanted to hear her say it.
They were travelling quietly through the night, two riders and three horses. At first there had been silence between them, a distance made of disbelief and a thousand questions left unasked.
After hours in which the pressure of the silence had steadily built inside John Grant’s head, and against his ears, until he felt he was in deep water, he spoke – and too loudly so that she flinched in her saddle as though he had slapped her.
‘I would prefer it if you would call me Lẽna,’ she said, but she did not even begin to answer the question. Her words, her voice seemed to echo inside his head so that he felt the touch of it like the fluttering of a bird’s wings against a window pane.
‘You arrived at these horses like a traveller in the desert who had stumbled upon an oasis,’ he said. ‘You had only recently freed your hands from their bonds and you were plainly on the run. From whom?’
She dropped her chin to her chest while she considered what, if anything, she might tell him. Her thoughts, the explanation of it all, added up to a mountain of sand she had to shift, each word worth no more than a single grain.
‘Another of your countrymen,’ she said. ‘In fact a neighbour of your mother and father.’
The mention of his parents gave him further pause. The thought of them as a man and a woman living together under the same roof, with others like them nearby, busy with lives, filled him with unexpected sadness.
He found it difficult anyway – impossible – to recall his life in Scotland, his life before the coming of Badr Khassan and the start of the chase that seemed sometimes to have lasted a lifetime. Worst of all, he felt the reality of Jeannie Dark rising like a ghost. Rather than face it, face her and accept her for who and what she was, he ploughed ahead with his questions.
‘A neighbour?’ he asked. ‘What do you mean? Who?’
Lẽna sighed heavily. She had not even begun the tale and yet already she was weary of it.
‘What happened to you … what happened to me … what happened to your mother and father and to many more besides …’
She stopped, checking the way ahead into her account of it all like a pilgrim surveying a path back over terrain half remembered. John Grant left her words, the unfinished sentence, hanging limply in the air.
‘All that has happened – to all of us – is the work, the fault of a man called Robert Jardine,’ she said. She was ahead of him on the road and for the first time she looked back at him over her shoulder. ‘Do you know that name?’
He smiled at her, though she could not think why.
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I remember the name right enough. Sir Robert was our laird – owner of the home I had with my mother, our land too. Our master, you would say.’
‘Master,’ she said. ‘He was that all right.’
‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘I mean that for him, people – people like your mother and father … people like me – were property.’
‘What does Sir Robert Jardine have to do with you – with here and now?’
‘How do you make your living?’ she asked.
The question was a non sequitur and took him by surprise. For a moment he felt he did not actually know the answer.
‘We are paid to fight,’ he said. He still tended to forget that his time as partner to Badr Khassan was now past, and for the thousandth time the realisation of it stabbed at his heart.
‘I am a soldier,’ he said. ‘If you can afford my fee – then I will fight for you.’
Lẽna smiled. ‘I am not hiring just now,’ she said.
John Grant blushed. ‘I did not mean … I was not offering my services. I was speaking hypothetically.’
‘Hypothetically,’ she said, drawing the word out like a blade.
He sensed a note of mockery and felt himself bridling. Determined not to rise, he sought to get the conversation back on to something like its original path.
‘Why do you ask me about my livelihood?’ he asked.
For an endless minute she offered no reply, and he listened to the rhythm of the horses’ hooves.
‘I am finding it hard to believe that you exist,’ she said at last. ‘I am trying to make you real to me.’
John Grant felt the blood rise into his cheeks once more. He had been addressing the back of her head for the most part, but her face appeared to him then, in his imagination, and hovered before his eyes against the darkness … the memory of her looking not at his hand but at the ring upon his finger. He thought of her pale blue eyes and blinked to keep them at bay.
‘Sir Robert Jardine is here,’ he said.
The effect was so instantaneous it seemed to him her reaction began before the words were fully out of his mouth. Her horse
wheeled around so quickly under her it might have been an extension of her own body, taking instruction directly from her thoughts. She was alongside him before he had a chance even to blink, and leaning out of her saddle so that her face almost brushed against his own.
‘Are you playing with me?’ she said.
Her words were no more than a whisper, but he felt an emotion that was utterly strange to him, and it was fear. He was all at once a boy, and the woman’s fierce intent enveloped him entirely. He caught the hot scent of her, like spice.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I am not playing. I swear it. Sir Robert Jardine is here on the road.’
‘Where?’ she asked again. Her eyes blazed, the pupils fully dilated.
‘Half a day’s ride from here, and beside this trail,’ he said. Her eyes bore into his, weighing the likely truth of his words.
He thought about the day just past and how, as he had journeyed along the road towards Santiago di Compostela, the push had warned him of the presence of men on the road ahead. Armstrong had been hunting him for years. Nowadays John Grant knew to expect his appearance – always, it seemed, at the most inconvenient moments. Since Badr had told him that the archer, together with his master, had history with this woman too, he had been even more wary than usual.
‘I left the trail and sought the high ground above it,’ he said. ‘In time I spotted them – or their horses at least, tethered by a tithe barn set back off the trail and screened from it by a stand of pine trees. My curiosity was aroused and I dismounted and snuck down the slope to the rear of the building.
‘Through an open window I counted a dozen men gathered about an open fire. Some of them had evidently found time to go hunting, and the carcass of a hind was roasting over the embers on a makeshift spit. A store of firewood was stacked against one wall, and here and there on the floor were blankets and other belongings. They had the look of a party that had been waiting in place for days, if not longer.
‘They did not, however, have the look of pilgrims. All travellers must carry weapons for self-defence, but the way those characters bore their swords suggested a company more used to fighting together than praying.’
‘And Jardine?’ asked Lẽna.
‘I had seen enough,’ he said. ‘I certainly had no wish to draw their attention and was about to withdraw when one of them spoke. He was a Scot.’
‘Sir Robert?’ asked Lẽna again.
‘No – but whoever he was, he spoke his lordship’s name. He said, “How much longer can we wait for them, Sir Robert? Are we not vulnerable here?”’
Lẽna was bolt upright in her saddle.
‘And he replied?’ she asked.
‘It wasn’t what he said; rather it was the way he said it that stuck with me,’ said John Grant. ‘The arrogance of it.’
‘What did he say?’ asked Lẽna.
‘He said, “I do not feel vulnerable – and I have no time for those that do. Wherever I am, wherever I stand and for as long as I stand upon it, then it is Jardine land.”’
Lẽna was motionless. Even her horse sensed the gravity of the situation and seemed carved from marble.
‘I remembered his voice,’ said John Grant. ‘It’s been years, but … but anyway, I knew him for who he was.’
She stayed silent.
‘And yet you were running towards him when we … when we met,’ he said.
He felt his fear dissipate, his familiar sense of control returning.
‘So who is behind us on the trail, Lẽna? Who bound your hands? Who is hunting you?’
She was silent for a few moments and John Grant almost persuaded himself he could feel the intensity of her thoughts. The air of concentration seemed to radiate from her in waves.
‘I do not know the name of the man who held me,’ she said. ‘But he fights with the longbow.’
John Grant sighed. ‘A Scot?’ He had no need to ask but felt compelled to draw the moment out.
Lẽna nodded. ‘All Scots,’ she said. ‘It would appear your countrymen are everywhere. I am beginning to think there has been an invasion.’
The joke sounded hollow even to her.
‘The bowman’s name is Angus Armstrong,’ said John Grant.
‘You know him?’ she asked.
‘For years and years I have known him,’ he said. ‘He kills the people I love.’
Lẽna was not hurt by the words. How could she be, after all? But the boy’s talk of love and her sense of her own exclusion from it rattled some part deep inside of her – some piece of her she had forgotten. She reproached herself at once, burned by the sensation and the notion – and at such a time.
‘I would very much like to see Angus Armstrong again,’ said John Grant.
Lẽna looked at him, and he felt her gaze reach deep inside him, as though her fingertips were brushing lightly against his innards. He all but flinched.
‘And I would very much like to renew my acquaintance with Sir Robert Jardine,’ she said. ‘Just for old times’ sake.’
His lairdship was dreaming he was walking down whitewashed corridors in a large house, indeed a mansion or a palace. Each side of every wide corridor was lined with doors and he opened them one after another and looked into the rooms beyond. Every one was furnished differently – some modest and some luxurious. He was searching for something, that much he knew, but for the life of him he could not remember what. He was certain, however, that he would know the prize when he saw it, and he scanned every interior with great concentration. The dream seemed to have been going on for ever, and he felt a steadily increasing sense of frustration. He was fairly trotting down the corridors, rounding corners and grabbing for each door handle in turn. These were becoming more awkward too – each harder to turn than the last – and he could feel fatigue, almost cramp, building in his wrists and arms. As his frustration grew and the ache in his muscles increased, so the knowledge of what he sought slipped further and further away, as though descending into deep water.
It had been a good enough day – one of many that had passed since the arrival at Hawkshaw of the message sent by Angus Armstrong. By now, the letter made clear, he would have the woman. She had been concealed all this time by nuns – nuns! – in a convent close by the Great Shrine of St James.
The final obstacle had been distance – separating hunter from prey – but Armstrong was an experienced traveller and had pinpointed both the time and the place for a rendezvous. His arrival, with the woman in tow, would be around the middle of September, he had said. It was many weeks since Sir Robert and his men, hand-picked for the job, had set out from his Scottish estate. For ten days now they had been in place by the pilgrims’ trail on the border between France and Spain.
He was impatient now, but in all the years, Armstrong had never once disappointed. The man’s determination to finish any task assigned to him was a wonder to behold. Soon enough he would have her. She had been of value then and she was precious beyond price now. The anticipation of all she could mean for him, still do for him, made him dizzy.
All at once, and without warning, Sir Robert was gripped by fear, and he sucked in a great breath and opened his eyes wide. He was awake – indeed, his return to the conscious world was so immediate and complete he felt as though he had never been asleep in his life. He was lying on his back on blankets arranged upon a bed of dried bracken that one of his men had collected and prepared for his comfort earlier in the day. As was his due, on account of his status, he was closest to the fire in the centre of the barn. The rest of them had laid out their bedrolls around the walls of the barn and some distance away from him. So far as was possible in a wide-open space within four walls, he was alone.
He noticed none of that, however – neither the warmth still radiating from the cooking fire, nor the softness of the makeshift bedding. Instead his attention was fixed entirely upon the woman’s face six inches above his own, and upon the point of the knife that she had pressed between his lips and which was now drawing blood from
the roof of his mouth.
He did not move – indeed, he dared not move for fear that any such action on his part might result in the rest of the blade being thrust through his soft palate and into his brain. She was squatting over him, one foot either side of his chest pinning his arms to the earthen floor. He heard deep breathing and some snoring, all evidence that the rest of the company were sleeping peacefully in the shadows.
Outside the barn, the man who had been on sentry duty was unconscious, courtesy of a blow to the back of the head from a sword butt. He was bound now and gagged, and tied to the trunk of one of the pine trees that shielded the barn from the pilgrims’ trail. Just for the fun of it, John Grant had turned the unconscious man towards the tree, resting his slack face against the rough bark of the trunk and wrapping his arms and legs around it, in the manner of a bear hug, before tying him securely. He would have liked to witness his comrades’ distress or amusement at finding him there, but by then he and Lẽna would be far away, of course.
Back in the barn, by the soft and flickering light of the dying fire, Sir Robert Jardine recognised the woman straddling him. While the heavy, iron taste of his own blood filled his mouth, he realised he was looking into the face of Joan of Arc.
She had been his prisoner once long ago. She was to have been exchanged for wealth and lands beyond even his imaginings (and his imagination was fertile indeed). Instead she had been stolen from him, spirited away by one of his own, leaving him humiliated, ruined and disgraced. And now here she was, twenty-two years later, sitting on his chest. He prayed with all his heart for the sound of a string being pulled tight on a longbow, but if this woman was on the loose then perhaps the archer had breathed his last.
‘Sorry to wake you, Bobby,’ she whispered. ‘But since you’ve come all this way, it would be rude of me not to say hello.’
She smiled a dark smile that came from long ago and far away. Sir Robert remained silent, as she intended, his eyes blinking hard with amazement. She slid the knife from side to side slightly, enjoying the sound of razor sharpness upon tooth enamel. His breath was bad, sour, but she could bear it for as long as the encounter had to last.
