Master of Shadows

by Neil Oliver

  ‘Help me,’ she cried.

  Her hair stood straight up like fronds of weed in the clearest sea; the folds of her dress billowed with the force so that the skirt ballooned outwards. Her shapely legs, exposed for all to see, were cycling too.

  Caught all unawares and focused only on his quarry, Armstrong was undone by the sound of her voice from directly above. He looked up, relaxed his bowstring and dropped the bow and arrow to the floor at his feet. He was ducking his head and holding up his arms, torn between the urge to catch and the instinct to ward off the impact, when she landed squarely on top of him, so that she broke his neck with a snapping sound heard only by him, and then he dropped beneath the weight of her, dead as a stone.

  John Grant ran to them, dread flooding his chest like cold water. He reached them, a jumble of clothes and arms and legs, and was crouching down and reaching out, readying himself for yet more grief, when she rolled away from Armstrong’s corpse and smiled up into his anxious face.

  ‘I hoped I would see you again,’ she said. ‘And here you are, on my wedding day.’

  He cocked his head to one side, his expression a mix of confusion and breathtaking relief, as he hauled her to her feet and led her by the hand towards the door and the gloomy daylight beyond.

  Emperor Constantine stood like a tree in the midst of a storm, reliant as never before upon the depth of his ancient roots, and watched them go.

  John Grant, the soldier who had somehow summoned and tamed the two-headed eagle, and Princess Yaminah, who should even now be standing before the priest to hear her marriage blessed.

  He felt the world, his world slipping and sliding beneath his feet. Heaven had grown dark above his head and the sky was catching fire. The eagles had flown and the Holy Spirit had abandoned the church raised by Justinian a thousand years ago. It was time.

  71

  Prince Constantine waited. Somewhere beyond his place of imprisonment, a noise was steadily building.

  He had imagined he had been buried so deep that he was beyond all contact with the outside world. Even in the blackness it was easier to concentrate if he squeezed his eyes shut. While he watched a display of pale-coloured dots and swirls of light on the inside of his eyelids, from neurons mindlessly, happily firing in the visual cortex of his brain, he paid attention to the dim sounds of battle.

  If he let his mind relax and placed the palms of both hands lightly upon the ground, he could even persuade himself he felt the vibrations of it too.

  He must be close to the city walls, he thought – and since the sounds and tremors were reaching him even here, the fighting must be rising to a greater pitch than ever before.

  72

  With Yaminah in front of him in the saddle, John Grant kicked his horse into a full gallop. He had no wish for an encounter with the emperor and his bodyguard, far less the necessity to try and explain what had just happened in the church and why he was fleeing the scene with the bride-to-be.

  He had the girl in his arms, and while he struggled to accept that she was Patrick’s daughter, still he was determined to keep his promise to Badr. The Moor had died believing she was his, conceived out of love, and so that love was his still. Badr was John Grant’s father too (he and she were brother and sister no matter how he twisted and turned to get away from the truth of it), and he would see her safely out of this place before his debt was paid to the Bear.

  If he would keep Yaminah safe, then the city must survive, and he spurred the horse all the harder, devouring the miles that separated them from the palace and Giustiniani and hope of success.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  He barely heard her words above the pounding hooves and the rush of air passing his ears.

  ‘You came for me as you said you would.’

  ‘For all the use I was,’ he replied. ‘It was you who saved me.’

  ‘I did, didn’t I?’ she said. ‘I don’t remember jumping. I only knew that I needed to stop that man hurting you.’

  ‘I have been trying to stop that man for half my life,’ he said. ‘And you pulled off the trick just by sitting on him.’

  He felt rather than heard her laugh.

  As they drew closer to Giustiniani’s redoubt, John Grant’s heart began to sink towards his boots.

  The fighting was a frenzy of men, just as he had left it, and as they reached as far as he dared to bring Yaminah, he saw the Genoan commander carried like a crumpled bundle between four of his men. He barely had his horse at a standstill before he leapt from the saddle and ran to him. His comrade’s faces were grey masks of concern and he looked from them to Giustiniani and saw the shaft of a crossbow bolt protruding from his side.

  ‘He lives,’ said one of the men. ‘But he is done. We must take him where we can tend to him.’

  Giustiniani opened his eyes. They were dark, the pupils dilated to black holes.

  ‘I will be back,’ he whispered. ‘I promise I will be back, once they’ve plucked this flower from my jacket.’

  John Grant glanced at one of the men holding him and saw him shake his head and look away. Giustiniani’s eyes closed once more and the men hauled him out of sight.

  The sky above was black with arrows, bolts and javelins. A giant of a man, a janissary, appeared atop the rampart carrying the sultan’s standard in both hands.

  ‘Allahu Akbar!’ he roared – God is Greater! – and he thrust the end of the shaft into the trampled earth at his feet.

  There were more Turks with him, slashing at the defenders to keep them from their giant, but they were cut down, and the standard-bearer too was hacked to pieces.

  The pressure from beyond the rampart was building, however, and still they came on.

  Then from off to the north-west and the Gate of the Wooden Circus – the same hidden postern through which John Grant and Lẽna had returned on the night of the crescent moon – came the terrible cry the defenders had feared all their lives.

  The dread was ancient, a thousand years old or more, and it had lurked within the hearts of their ancestors as well, so that the sound of their terror seemed woven through with the bitterness of the ancient dead.

  ‘The city is taken! The city is taken!’

  A desperate wailing roar came from the mouth of every defender, but greater still was the distant sound of triumph.

  Even Doukas would fail to find out how it had happened – whose fault it was in the end. Suffice it to say that some or other defender, returning through the gate from yet another raid upon the relentless numbers surging around the fosse, left it unlocked and unbarred behind him.

  Some would say it was treachery that was their undoing – a Judas promised Turkish coins and his pick of the womenfolk. Whatever the cause, the door was left unbarred, and through it poured the first waves of the torrent that would sweep the Christians into the sea and out of Byzantium for ever.

  ‘The city is taken! The city is taken!’

  The cry, heartbroken and terrified, was spreading like a fire and reaching all the way to the citizens cowering in their battered homes or on their bloodied knees in the churches.

  John Grant ran back to his horse and hauled Yaminah from the saddle. He looked into her face, unsure for the first time what best to do.

  ‘Come with me,’ she said, and she led him away from the fighting and towards the palace gates.

  73

  The last moments of peace for the Great City, the Queen of Cities, were to be had in the half dark of the Church of St Sophia.

  Like a rock, or perhaps a mountain, the building raised nine centuries before by the Roman Emperor Justinian waited in the light of early morning. The flames of St Elmo’s fire were gone, extinguished, and it was the scent of another kind of burning that mingled with the smoke of the incense.

  Three miles from the land walls, the church would be the Turks’ ultimate prize, and they were coming, sweeping through the city and pausing only to slaughter and to defile. Ancient folk tales promised the invaders wealth uncou
ntable, stored in the crypt of St Sophia as piles of gold and jewels.

  The citizens’ own legends promised that the infidel might come as far as the great column topped with the statue of the emperor on horseback, and no further. Any invader daring to penetrate so far would be confronted there, so the story told, by an angel bearing a flaming sword. There in the shadow of the Church of St Sophia, the infidel would be cut down and swept all the way to hell.

  The faithful waited. All thoughts of a wedding for a prince and a princess were gone like dew burned off a leaf by the rising sun, and the dark jewel was filled with the heartbroken and the fearful. The priests had closed and barred the doors as best they could.

  There in the shadows, or high in the dome, or coiled around the columns were the echoes of all the voices down through the centuries: voices raised in fear by those seeking sanctuary; the astonished gasps of Vikings humbled by the impossibility of the space; the mumbled prayers of Russians lost for words and knowing only that they had found the place where God lived among men.

  Everything that the Church of St Sophia had ever meant was woven through the fabric of the place, or suffused the holy air.

  Prayer alone remained for the thousands gathered there beneath it all, surrounded by it all – and pray they did as the beast came on. Mehmet had promised three days of pillage, and there would be barely enough blood to slake the thirst built up by the weeks of siege.

  Whatever the savagery, however merciless and depraved, it could be no worse than might have been expected in other places and times from soldiers of the cross. Frankish crusaders had raped the city herself in 1204; the Byzantines had visited similar horrors on their own enemies.

  But in Constantinople on the twenty-ninth day of May 1453 there came the ending of a world.

  The Turks swept towards their prize and no angel came, and the great doors of the church were cleaved with axes. Few would die here – rather they would be tethered in ropes and chains and even with the fabric of their own clothes and led away to slavery. Like most of the rest of the city’s folk – rich and poor, noble and base – they would be property bound for the markets of the Ottomans.

  From their strange new lives elsewhere some few of them would recall – indeed would swear the truth of it upon a stack of bibles – how they had watched with their own eyes as the priests took up the holy vessels from the altar and walked towards the sanctuary. All at once a doorway opened in a wall and the priests passed through to safety before the opening vanished once more.

  When all the people were gone, taken from the church, the Turks would set about tearing apart the very fabric of the place. They would search in vain for the piled gold and jewels and settle instead for taking every single item that might be moved. In the apportioning of the spoils they would fight savagely among themselves, spilling each other’s blood as every man claimed his share.

  By the time Mehmet entered the city in triumph, with cries of Fatih – Conqueror – ringing in his ears, he would confront the truth of what he once beheld. Having dreamed of Constantinople like his father and their fathers before them, he would find a shell hollowed out by the weakness and failures of men.

  The great buildings, the once fine squares and courtyards, the palaces, the columns and statues – even the hippodrome and the Church of St Sophia – all of it would seem to him like the crumbling bones of a creature dead of all seven of the deadly sins.

  He would dismount before the doors of St Sophia and there bow down before God. He would enter the place and gasp at a wonder laid low by greed and envy and hatred, and climb up to the dome itself and look out upon the smoking, bloodied city and know that all of it was his.

  He would watch the sad procession of tens of thousands of slaves – men, women and children. He would watch the fires burn and see the smoke rise and then turn his attention to the waters of the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara and watch as ships laden with refugees set sail for Venice and for a West already in mourning.

  He would know that all of it was his at last – that Allah had coughed up the bone and the dream was over.

  74

  It was as John Grant and Yaminah were making their way through a covered cloister that a figure stepped from a doorway in front of them. It was the emperor’s consort, Helena.

  All three haulted, gauging one another.

  Helena was the first to speak.

  ‘Do you love the prince?’ she asked.

  Stunned by the consort’s appearance in front of them like a spirit conjured from the next world, Yaminah said nothing.

  ‘Do you love him?’ she asked again.

  ‘I do,’ said Yaminah. ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Well so do I,’ said Helena. ‘Now come with me.’

  She turned, heading across the courtyard beside the cloister. They were following her and halfway across the open space when the sound of many booted feet thundering on flagstones had them pause and look back in the direction from which they had come.

  It was the emperor, accompanied by two men of the imperial bodyguard – the Varangian Guard – of Viking descent and with fighting in their blood.

  ‘There!’ shouted Constantine. ‘Take them!’

  ‘What treachery is this?’ asked Yaminah. She turned to stare at Helena and ground her teeth in sudden fury.

  John Grant looked to the consort as well, but the expression he found on her face was one of dismay.

  The bodyguards had vaulted the low stone balustrade separating the cloister from the courtyard and were sprinting towards them. John Grant sighed and drew his sword.

  Helena was frozen, fixed in place and momentarily wrong-footed.

  She turned to look at John Grant, then at Yaminah. She was shaking her head, all but defeated, when a figure, slight and graceful, stepped into their path ten feet in front of them. They stopped – everyone stopped – and the moment stretched out like a sleepless night.

  It was Lẽna, and she crouched down, slipping her hands into the loose tops of her knee-high boots. When she straightened, she had a knife grasped lightly in each.

  She looked at the emperor, and as she considered his face and the expression upon it, she would have sworn he diminished before her eyes. His shoulders drooped just a fraction and his face relaxed and his lips parted as though he might say more. He was less – less distinct, as though his image had softened and receded into a past ready to receive him.

  ‘Leave them be,’ she said.

  Emperor Constantine paused and shrugged, and then slowly shook his head. His guards seemed uncertain, surprised into sudden stillness by her unexpected words.

  She turned then to look at John Grant and found his eyes. She nodded at him, once, and smiled.

  He nodded in reply, a smile upon his own lips, and then gasped. It was a small sound, heard by none but him, but it had been coaxed from his chest by the push – though not the push as he had always known it, the forewarning of danger, but rather a blessing.

  She was saying farewell, this much he knew, and as the pause ended and events returned once more to full speed, he felt for all the world like a toddler sent on his way with a pat on the behind from a loving parent.

  ‘It was I who named you Jean,’ she said. ‘You are Jean – Jean Grant – like me.’

  John Grant blinked on the image of her and needed suddenly to be away. He swallowed and turned to the women beside him.

  ‘Let us go,’ he said.

  They ran across the flagstones and through an arched doorway and into a corridor beyond. Helena led them through the maze, turning left and right seemingly at random. When John Grant felt they had put sufficient distance between themselves and the courtyard, he had them pause for breath.

  ‘Where is he?’ asked Yaminah.

  ‘There is a tunnel,’ said Helena. ‘It is as old as the city. It runs from beneath the palace to a small harbour beyond the sea wall, where a ship is kept waiting. It was a way for the emperors to flee to safety in time of need.’

  �
��I know it,’ said Yaminah.

  Helena stared at her.

  ‘I know the tunnel,’ Yaminah repeated. ‘I should not, but I do. There is a hatchway into it from our old apartments, where I lived with my mother. I … I used to keep … things dear to me down there.’

  She looked at John Grant but he gave no sign that he had understood; just looked at her.

  Helena had regained her composure.

  ‘Well the Turks almost found it too – though not quite, thanks to your John Grant.’

  ‘Thanks to me?’ he asked.

  ‘The last of their tunnels,’ she said. ‘The one they dug along the line of the walls and had packed with gunpowder?’

  John Grant nodded, remembering the fight there and his capture.

  ‘Their miners almost cut across the old escape route. After you were taken – after the Turks were driven out – I sent men into the old way to see how close they had come to stumbling across the city’s secret.’

  ‘And?’ asked John Grant.

  ‘And one of my men fell through the floor into the enemy workings,’ she said. ‘That is how close they came. The floor of the old tunnel gave way beneath the feet of my men and one of the soldiers fell through.’

  ‘And Prince Constantine?’ asked Yaminah.

  ‘The emperor tasked me with … getting rid of him,’ she said.

  ‘I heard you,’ said Yaminah. ‘I heard you plotting against him.’

  Helena nodded. ‘Another time I will explain it all,’ she said. ‘For now, just listen and hear me when I say that you were not the only one who loved him. You were not the only one who wished to see him freed from that room and that bed.’

  ‘There is no time now,’ said John Grant. ‘Let me go by myself. I can find the tunnel you speak of, and the prince. Lord knows, I am as happy beneath this city as I am in its streets and palaces. If there are Turks there in the dark now, then I would rather be alone with them.’