Master of Shadows

by Neil Oliver

  ‘I wonder if you knew,’ said Armstrong, suddenly.

  ‘Knew what?’ asked John Grant.

  ‘About the nature of the arrangement between them.’

  John Grant’s face was expressionless.

  ‘I think not,’ said Armstrong. ‘I think you do not know that Grant paid the bitch to take you in.’

  Still John Grant remained impassive, but the archer’s words had reached inside him just the same and he wondered if they were true or not, and understood too that he would never know.

  ‘The word is, he arrived with you and with a purse of coins,’ said Armstrong. ‘The former was placed in her arms while the latter was squirrelled out of sight. Your mother’s love was bought and paid for.’

  John Grant wondered what if anything to feel while he kept his eyes, unblinking, upon his inquisitor’s face.

  ‘What did you do with her, by the way?’ asked Armstrong. He had apparently grown tired of his game. ‘After I skewered her properly with my arrow?’

  John Grant remembered another grave, in another dark corner of his past, and wondered for a moment about the thorns; whether they had protected her all the years as Badr had said they would. For the first time in a long time he had a yearning to go home and feel soft rain on his face.

  ‘I am more interested in your plans for me,’ he said.

  ‘Well for that you must hear from my master,’ said Armstrong.

  ‘Who’s the dog now?’ said John Grant.

  He glanced at his mother’s former landlord, heard him grunt as he stood up from his stool and stepped into the firelight.

  Sir Robert folded his arms across his chest and looked at John Grant as though he were a beast in the bidding ring at a market.

  ‘The trouble you have put me to,’ he said at last. ‘If I hadn’t the loyalty of the finest hunter I have ever known, your trail would have gone cold long, long ago.’

  ‘I was trained by the best,’ said John Grant.

  ‘Not quite the best, eh, given how things have turned out,’ said Sir Robert. ‘But never mind all that. I would much rather hear about Joan of Arc and why you are making so much trouble for the sultan.’

  John Grant wriggled, trying to straighten his back against the tent pole.

  ‘I would need my hands for that,’ he said.

  ‘I think not,’ said Sir Robert. ‘As it is, I am tempted to have Armstrong here cut them off at the wrists, but I have given my word you will be handed over complete and in good health. Now tell me where she is.’

  ‘I wish I knew,’ said John Grant.

  Sir Robert grimaced, pulling his lips back to reveal broken teeth. He swept the stumps with his tongue and swallowed thickly before continuing.

  ‘You see, if you would make it possible for my men to collect her, I might be minded to let you go. I will satisfy the Turk if it suits me to do so, but I would rather have the woman.’

  ‘That won’t happen,’ said John Grant.

  ‘I expected you to say as much,’ said Sir Robert. ‘Losing one mother might be considered an unfortunate accident, but two …’

  ‘So you know,’ said John Grant.

  ‘Know what?’ said Sir Robert. ‘About your mother? Your real mother?’

  John Grant met his eyes, saw the malice swimming there like a pike in deep water.

  ‘Joan of Arc was mine,’ said Sir Robert. ‘Before your father got his claws and his prick into her, she was mine.’

  ‘That is not quite the way she tells it,’ said John Grant.

  Angus Armstrong paced slowly back and forth in the shadows. Out of nowhere the thought occurred to John Grant that it was the first time he had seen the man indoors. He had the look of a hunting dog caught on the wrong side of a shut door.

  ‘Have you any idea what she was worth back then?’ said Sir Robert. ‘Has it occurred to you to consider the value of a … now how would you describe such a creature … the value of a living saint?’

  A questioning look passed across John Grant’s face, and Sir Robert pounced on it like a cat upon a mouse.

  ‘Do you not know?’ he asked. ‘Those Frenchmen truly believed our dear Jeannie Dark was an instrument of Lord God Almighty!’

  Sir Robert raised a hand to his mouth, suddenly aware that he was shouting.

  ‘Jeannie Dark talks to God – you know that, don’t you?’ he asked.

  John Grant held his tongue.

  ‘Well I tell you, lad, I don’t need God or anyone else to tell me what to do. And I certainly don’t need him to show me the way to the Promised Land.’

  He paused then and spat thickly upon the floor of the tent, as though clearing his mouth of something rotten.

  ‘I saw your mother for what she was,’ he said. ‘She was boxes filled with gold coins and fine estates in England. She was my passport – all I needed to open the doors leading to King Henry himself.’

  ‘Are you quite sure you’re not hearing voices?’ asked John Grant.

  Sir Robert eyed him coldly. He was old now, his teeth ground down to stumps and his hair gone. His joints ached and his heart along with them. He thought about what she would have done for him twenty-odd years before when he was still young, and his prick woke him in the night for more than pissing. It was one thing to live a life out of sight of dreams; quite another to have those dreams come close enough to touch and then slip past like strangers in a crowd.

  ‘So what now?’ asked John Grant.

  Sir Robert was jerked back from his brooding, found himself looking into the young man’s face once more.

  ‘Long ago I needed your father,’ he said. ‘I would have put him on a leash and had him lead me to her.’

  John Grant closed his eyes, reaching out for the peace of the fall.

  ‘Now I have you. At long, long last I have you.’

  ‘I won’t lead you out of this tent, far less anywhere else,’ he said. His eyes were still closed, the spin of the earth upon him.

  ‘You misunderstand my intentions,’ said Sir Robert. ‘You will be my gift to this sultan of the Turks. I have promised you to him and he has made promises to me in return.’

  ‘You trust him?’ asked John Grant.

  ‘God is great,’ said Sir Robert Jardine.

  61

  Beyond the tent’s flap door, in a fold of shadow, Lẽna crouched and listened to the voices within. She was wearing an ill-fitting black robe, scavenged from the body of a defender, the hood up and wholly concealing her face, disguising her gender.

  It had been easy enough to leave the city, and for the second time, when she heard about John Grant. Constantinople had been haemorrhaging its inhabitants, as those with the nerve and the will sought safety elsewhere. The soldiers might pay rapt attention to any attempting to enter the city, but shadowy figures making their exit were oft times overlooked as the spineless rats they were.

  She listened to the voice of Sir Robert Jardine and wondered if her gift to him had worsened or improved his breath.

  ‘If I accept for now that you do not know the precise whereabouts of Jeannie Dark, what about your father?’ said Sir Robert. ‘What has become of Patrick?’

  ‘Dead,’ said John Grant.

  ‘Really?’ asked Sir Robert.

  ‘And you say your hunting dog is the best?’ asked John Grant. ‘I would say you could do better.’

  ‘Dead where?’ asked Sir Robert. ‘Dead how?’

  ‘Did you hurt her?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Jeannie Dark,’ said John Grant. ‘Did you hurt her?’

  Lẽna felt her soul shimmer like a heat haze.

  ‘You would have to ask her if it hurt,’ said Sir Robert.

  John Grant watched him as he spoke, wondered at the depths he saw there.

  ‘Sometimes … sometimes I remember the taste of her skin,’ said Sir Robert.

  He paused then, as though confused by his own memories. Reminiscences and images left alone in the dark were wont to change shape after all, and now, as Sir Ro
bert recalled his time alone with the woman, he was surprised by the thought of her eyes.

  ‘Blue,’ he said. The mean-spirited malice was briefly gone from him as the recollection held him in its thrall and he looked again at what he had once held, like a thief with a prize. ‘Her eyes were blue.’

  So intent was Lẽna on the conversation inside the tent, she failed to notice the arrival of the other eavesdropper until she was tapped lightly on the elbow.

  She turned, knife in hand, to find a woman dressed as discreetly as herself. It had been a while since any had snuck up on her so successfully. She put the lapse down to fatigue – or perhaps age, God forbid – but she was impressed by the stealth just the same.

  The woman said nothing; only raised her hands, palms outwards in a gesture of peace.

  Lẽna held a finger to her own lips and motioned the newcomer to follow as she crept away from the tent and into a pool of darkness by a heavily laden wagon parked nearby.

  ‘Qui êtes-vous?’ asked Lẽna. Who are you?

  ‘Vous êtes venus pour le diable,’ said the woman. You have come for the devil.

  She was younger than Lẽna, but her face showed all the wear of hard years. ‘Je peux vous aider, si vous me laissez,’ she said. I can help you, if you will let me.

  Without thinking, still troubled by her failure to detect the woman’s approach, Lẽna had spoken in French and the woman had replied in the same.

  ‘How do you understand me, Muslim?’ she asked.

  ‘I was educated in the sultan’s court,’ she said. ‘He is learned and requires the same of those likely to spend time in his presence. I speak the tongue of the Genoese as well, if you prefer, and also the Rus.’

  ‘Why would I trust you?’ asked Lẽna. ‘And why would you help me – your enemy?’

  ‘Your back was towards me as I approached you just now,’ she said. ‘If I meant you harm, I could have hurt you then.’

  This time when she held up her hand, Lẽna caught the glint of a weapon there.

  ‘What is your name?’ she asked.

  ‘I am Hilal,’ she said. ‘And the talk among the men is that Mehmet plans to skin your devil alive.’

  ‘There is one inside the tent who is skilled with the bow,’ said Lẽna. ‘The rest of the men I can best easily, but not him.’

  ‘I will help you free your friend,’ said Hilal.

  ‘He is my son,’ said Lẽna.

  ‘Then I am more determined than ever to be of assistance,’ said Hilal, and her eyes flashed hot.

  ‘Tell me why,’ said Lẽna.

  ‘This sultan is my enemy too,’ said Hilal. ‘He sent a man to drown my only son – a baby, but half-brother to Mehmet. I found him all but dead in his bath. I brought him back to life with my own breath – alhamdulillah – and we fled, little Ahmet and I.

  ‘I am in my father’s care now – he has my son. We travelled from the royal capital at Edirne, among the camp followers.

  ‘I am sworn to strike back, to avenge my son. You tell me the one they call the devil is your son? Mehmet’s men fear him like an evil spirit – and what troubles the sultan fills my own heart with happiness.

  ‘I came to try and free him by myself, so that he might continue to torment Mehmet, and I find a mother, fighting like I fought to keep her son safe. It is the will of God that has brought us together.’

  Lẽna reached out to Halil and took her hand.

  ‘What are you able to do for me?’ she asked.

  Before Halil could answer, Lẽna looked at the ground beside them and saw her own shadow. While they had been speaking, the sun had begun to rise.

  She turned back towards the tent and saw they were too late. Angus Armstrong emerged from within, leading John Grant and followed by Jardine and the rest.

  Armstrong held one end of a long wooden pole and John Grant’s hands were bound to the other. He was hobbled too, by a rope around his knees, so that he could take only baby steps.

  ‘They are taking him to Mehmet,’ whispered Halil. ‘You must come with me.’

  62

  Prince Constantine was in total darkness. His hands were tied, but in front of him and almost as an afterthought. The men who had come for him – wheeled him away from Doukas in his contraption, with a hood over his face, and then carried him down steps and ladders before abandoning him on a rough, cold floor – evidently thought his crippled legs were fetters enough. They had removed his hood before leaving, but the blackness was so complete he could scarce tell if his eyes were open or closed.

  He had thought he knew the palace well, its corridors and halls, courtyards and cloisters, but they had taken him on an endless journey, around and around, in order to confuse him utterly before depositing him in this hole. He had no idea where within (or apparently underneath) the labyrinthine complex of buildings he was presently imprisoned.

  They had left him in a sitting position, his back against a roughly hewn wall of rock. It was already cool. He felt his body heat seeping out of him, into the stone, and wondered how much colder he might get. To distract himself he rested his head against the wall and willed himself to sleep, and perhaps to dream of flying.

  Instead his thoughts turned inevitably to Yaminah and how she was to be married after all – though not to him. Before the soldiers took him, Doukas had talked and talked, wringing himself out like a saturated sponge until there was not a drop left. Constantine was certain his teacher had been in some reckless breach of his instructions – that it had been no one’s intention for the prince to hear the emperor’s plans for the future security of his line. To his credit, Doukas had not even bothered to plead with the prince to keep his indiscretion between the two of them.

  When they had come for him, he found he lacked the energy, far less the spite, to think of telling tales out of school and making trouble for a man who had been his friend.

  But for all that the wedding plans were going ahead, Yaminah was still missing. Having been locked for safe keeping inside the prison of Anemas, a darker hole even than the one in which he now found himself, she had escaped, Doukas said. Or rather, she had apparently been set free, by a mystery assailant who had dispatched three men-at-arms, favourites known to the emperor himself. More mysterious yet, given the circumstances and the evident skill of the lone warrior, all had been left alive.

  Constantine thought about what a marvellous shadow play it would make and his slender fingers moved in the dark while he imagined the shaping of the figures he would have made dance and fight and run upon the pale blue sky painted on the ceiling above his bed.

  Next he gave himself over to the sensations in his legs. The feeling was in both now, prickling and hot. If he concentrated and held his breath, and clenched his fists until the fingernails dug half-moons in his palms, he could move his toes as well. He tried to take pleasure in it, to daydream about what it might mean, but here in the dark, somewhere deep in the ground beneath the palace, it was hard to see the pins and needles as anything more than a cruel twist of fate. There was pain too, deep and building. He might still die of thirst down here in an early grave, but on the bright side, he could move his toes.

  They would come back for him, they said. He was to be kept out of sight for a little while, that was all. He closed his eyes and watched lights flash on the inside of his eyelids, and dreamed of dreaming about flying.

  When he awoke, he had no idea how long he had slept. He opened his eyes into the darkness. All at once he glimpsed himself, as though in his mind’s eye, and saw the hopelessness. He was helpless as a newborn baby and suddenly he was frightened too.

  He had borne it all for years – years that had spanned the abyss between boyhood and manhood. Others had vented their grief upon him or around him and always he had remained calm, seemingly untouched and untroubled. Stoic – that was the word they had had for him. He had heard them whisper it in a tone of admiration. Stoic – self-controlled, even in adversity.

  He thought of walks not taken and
games not played; of time trapped among the cotton sheets and silk cushions of his bed – days that turned to weeks, and then to months and then to years. He thought of shadows on a ceiling. He thought of a girl who had become a woman beneath his gaze and to whom he had given only stories of other men.

  He tasted salt and realised that he was crying, and that he wanted no more of darkness.

  63

  ‘The gall of the brat,’ said Emperor Constantine. ‘She sends a message? To me?’

  Helena had experienced her lover in all weathers. His temper was no storm, she knew – just the occasional flash of lightning. Stand still and the moment would pass.

  He pursed his lips, his eyes set like dark jewels beneath his brows.

  ‘Though I have to say, I suspect she may be the right woman for the job,’ he said.

  ‘How so?’ asked Helena. She already knew, but it would serve her better to hear it from him.

  They were alone in the throne room. He had come to her as soon as he had heard. He had been worshipping with some of his citizens, in the Church of the Holy Redeemer in the Fields, home to the Hodegetria. Since the storm, and her fall, the faithful had been shaken to the point of collapse. Keen to reassure them, or at least to be seen to share their pious concern, he had made the church the focus of his own worship. A runner had come, bearing word from his consort, and he had cut short his time with them so as to hasten to the palace.

  ‘How so?’ said Helena again.

  ‘Well, if my son lacks a backbone, it seems his intended bride does not.’

  He stood up from the throne and walked forward, down the two steps, until he was beside Helena on the floor of the cavernous chamber.

  ‘Tell me her words again,’ he said. ‘Just as they were repeated to you.’

  Helena cleared her throat.

  ‘She said, “Leave me be now, and I will do as you command. I will attend the Church of St Sophia at the appointed time and you will see me there.”’

  ‘And that is all?’ asked the emperor. ‘That is all she told her messenger to say?’

  Helena nodded and looked down at the floor.