Master of Shadows

by Neil Oliver

  The boy looked at him sullenly.

  ‘I would prefer that you accompany me,’ said Badr. ‘You have seen something of the world as it is – perhaps too much for one so young. I would ask that you come with me, so that I might keep my word to your father.’

  John Grant walked past Badr, into the cave, and hunkered down with his back against the wall.

  Without another word, Badr strode down to the riverbank and turned to follow its course. He counted a hundred paces before he allowed himself a look back over his shoulder. The boy was coming, and at a run. He caught up easily, and the Moor was impressed by the turn of speed. For all that he had fairly sprinted over the ground, his footfalls on the hard-packed earth along the riverbank had made hardly a sound.

  ‘You are quick on your feet, I’ll give you that,’ he said.

  John Grant said nothing, but Badr noticed he was not winded, and breathing quite easily, so the sudden burst of exercise had had no apparent effect on him.

  ‘Maybe it would help you to know that I lost my mother too – and when I was younger than you are now.’

  They kept walking in silence for a few more minutes before the boy replied.

  ‘Did she die?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Badr. ‘But she was taken from me just the same – or rather I was taken from her. I never saw her again, and I have no idea whether she lives or not.’

  John Grant weighed the information carefully.

  ‘What happened?’

  Badr snorted, almost a laugh.

  ‘Where to begin?’ he said, more to himself than to the boy. ‘My father said our family came once upon a time from a place called al-Maghrib al-Aqsa.’

  He smiled when he said this, savouring the words, and his white teeth flashed. He glanced at the boy and laughed at the look of complete incomprehension he found there.

  ‘I am not surprised to find you know nothing of this world below,’ he said. ‘One such as you …’ He looked up into the sky and raised his hands in an attitude of prayer. ‘One such as you who has all of the heavens to worry about!

  ‘In your tongue, al-Maghrib al-Aqsa, the land of my forefathers, might be translated as the farthest west.’

  Again he looked at the boy’s face but found little that could be called understanding. At least he glimpsed curiosity, the root of intelligence, and he pressed ahead.

  ‘Some of your people – those who have had an education at least – might recognise the name Morocco,’ he said. ‘And so that is the name I will ask you to remember. Repeat it, please.’

  John Grant cleared his throat, but said nothing.

  ‘Morocco,’ said Badr a second time.

  ‘Morocco,’ said John Grant, enjoying the feel of the word in spite of himself.

  ‘Good,’ said Badr. ‘And so now your education begins again.’

  ‘But your mother?’ asked John Grant.

  ‘I am coming to that, I promise,’ said Badr. ‘My father said our people came long ago from …?’

  ‘From Morocco.’

  ‘Quite so. Good. My people came from Morocco, the farthest west, but had made a new home for themselves far to the east. Perhaps my ancestors were merchants … perhaps they were sailors, or warriors. That much has been forgotten.

  ‘You should know that you live on the edge of the world, John Grant,’ said Badr. ‘There is much else to see – and I would show you. And you might learn that at the centre of the world there is a powerful pull – and people are drawn there from everywhere else. People like me, like you, all else besides. All in a muddle.’

  ‘And your mother?’ asked John Grant once more.

  ‘I lived with my mother and father, and my three little sisters, in a village in a land named Macedonia.’

  ‘Macedonia,’ said John Grant.

  ‘In Macedonia – yes, good,’ said Badr. ‘We were Christians – like you – but in a land within reach of another faith. A powerful and hungry faith.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked John Grant. ‘Hungry?’

  ‘Your people follow Jesus and his mother Mary,’ said Badr. ‘But there are other kinds of people in the world. My people were within reach of followers of another man, named Muhammad, who lived and died eight hundred years ago.

  ‘They are Muslims and they follow their Muhammad all the way to God and paradise.’

  ‘But you said they were hungry,’ said John Grant.

  ‘Hungry for land … and people,’ said Badr. ‘It is the custom of the followers of that faith – which is called Islam, which means submission to God – to steal the children of Christians and make Muslims of them, and also warriors to fight their battles for them.’

  John Grant was listening in the same way he had once listened to his mother’s stories at bedtime.

  ‘Muslim warriors came to my village one day and took me – took me from my father’s arms,’ said Badr. ‘They took all the young boys of my village and tied us to a long rope and led us away from our lives of before.’

  ‘And they taught you to fight? Made you a warrior?’

  ‘They taught me everything. But they made me a Muslim first – made me promise on my life to follow only Muhammad. They gave me to another family and I was raised as their son.’

  ‘And you never went home?’

  ‘Not until I was a grown man – and a warrior. They called me a janissary then.’

  ‘Janissary?’

  ‘Which means new soldier. They called us janissaries and had us fight their wars.’

  ‘And when you went home?’

  ‘And when I went home, my village was gone. Just ruins.’

  ‘What about your mother … and your father … and your sisters?’

  Badr shook his head.

  ‘Gone,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘Just gone.’

  They walked on in silence, the only sound the whisper of the river surging alongside.

  ‘I would like to be a janissary,’ said John Grant. ‘I would like to be a janissary and kill the man who killed my mother.’

  ‘I can teach you to make war,’ said the Moor. ‘But first …’

  He looked at the boy and smiled, and pointed ahead of them.

  ‘First?’ asked John Grant.

  ‘First we eat.’

  They were approaching a sweeping bend in the river. Beyond it, a few minutes ahead and shielded by a stand of sycamore trees, a curl of white smoke rose into the cloudless sky.

  ‘Your people have been hospitable to me before,’ said Badr. ‘Let us see if they will be so again.’

  With that, he broke into an easy, loping run. John Grant followed him, effortlessly.

  11

  In the East, 1448

  The urgency was gone from John Grant so completely it might never have existed. In place of any desire to stay pressed tight against her, inside her, he obeyed his present need and rolled off her and away. They were different people than they had been; at least she was to him. And soon, he knew, his seeming indifference would bring about the change for her as well.

  He lay on his back, eyes open and taking in the details of the little room for the first time. Moments before – and for hours before that – his mind had been filled only with thoughts of finding a woman. He had found one, found her, and pursued her then with all the energy with which he had been taught to make war. Everything about her had been all that mattered. Now, while the sweat of her was still wet upon his skin, his thoughts were all and only fixed on everything else besides her.

  His weapons were by the bed, along with his clothes and his purse. He reached down towards the floorboards with his left hand and found the little leather bag tied with a cord. He was pleased by the weight of coins there. As a skilled and practised mercenary, he was well paid, and in recent years John Grant and Badr Khassan had struck a rich vein.

  The walls of her room were roughly plastered and painted white. There were bits and pieces of furniture. Two chairs with woven hemp seats were set side by side against one wall. A table that
had been fine once, but many meals and years ago, took up too much of the remaining space. He imagined it had been better suited to the tavern below.

  The bed upon which they were lying was comfortable enough, the mattress feather-filled and as pleasantly plump as the woman beside him. The moonlight, spilling limply through the one arched window, was helped by the glow from a fire in a corner of the room. There was a pile of chopped logs beside it, and he thought about getting up and adding one or two of them to the failing flames, then decided against giving any signal that might be interpreted as a desire to linger long.

  He chanced a look at his erstwhile lover, from the corner of his eye. For a few moments she lay as he had left her, breathing heavily, arms by her sides, heels planted wide apart, each spread knee only inches from the mattress. Without his humping body on top of her, she seemed incomplete and faintly preposterous. The dance was over but she did not yet care that her partner had moved on. The act itself – or at least the need of it, the same that had drawn him to her – mystified him now, and with an equal and opposite force. Her breasts, so enthralling mere moments before, seemed intent on departing too, somehow deflated and each of them making for a separate armpit. She was a pretty one just the same, and still young enough to carry her weight with aplomb.

  It had been her smile anyway that drew his attention first of all, while she bustled between the tables of the tavern below the room where they lay. She had been busy topping up cups and glasses with wine and beer, swapping banter with the customers. The fact that her pretty face was bobbing atop a shapely frame, all curves and good length of bone, had only served to seal the deal – like finding that a finely appointed house was blessed too with a plentiful garden.

  He was sorry – for it and for her, and maybe for himself. That he had ever wanted her so hungrily seemed incredible now. She giggled as she closed her legs and reached down to pull a coverlet over both their naked bodies. She had sensed a sudden chill and seemed determined to retain some warmth. He said nothing, but when she cosied over to him and placed her tousled head upon his chest, he wrapped an arm around her shoulder. He had liked her before and he liked her still. He had no wish to hurt her feelings, but the need for intimacy was gone.

  ‘What’s good to eat here?’ he had asked her, emboldened by an afternoon’s worth of rough red wine on an empty stomach. She had her back to him – indeed he had been staring at her rolling hips and buttocks when the words escaped his lips. She stopped. And turned. For her own part she had already noticed him – knew what she was going to see before her gaze fell upon him once more. Pretty – that was the word that had come to her at her first sight of him, and it was the word that came to her while she considered her reply.

  ‘Everything,’ she said, hand on one full hip. ‘Anything and everything you fancy. It’s all good here, and plenty of it.’

  She turned away again, to continue her round of the busy and battered tables that filled the place.

  Pretty, she thought again, and smiled a crooked smile.

  She was hardly the first to see it – woman or man. Some women found his appearance effeminate and moved on quickly in search of something more overtly male. Those that approved of his looks – looks that mirrored or complemented something of their own appeal – often found they could not get enough of him (though he got enough of them, and soon enough).

  Badr Khassan slapped the young man’s thigh beneath the table, then kept his huge hand there and pinched hard just above the knee – so that John Grant’s leg flinched and snapped straight out in front of him like a length of knotted rope. His knee banged off the underside of the table hard enough to unbalance his freshly refilled glass. The whole lot of it toppled into his lap, soaking him through to the skin in an instant, so that he gasped and then groaned. The empty glass smashed on to the floor.

  Hearing the breakage, she turned to find its source and that pretty face all in the same place. He shook his head at her wide-eyed, and held up his hands in a gesture of apology. She might have smiled at him, but took the trouble to glare instead before marching quickly in his direction.

  John Grant looked hard at Badr, but the Moor was already apparently deep in conversation with the man seated to his right. She was beside him by then and he noticed the smell of her – hot, and with an underlying tang of salt. She smelled, it seemed to him, like a sea breeze, and as inviting. He felt a heaviness between his legs, defying the clinging cold of the spilled wine. She looked down into his lap and he moved his hands quickly to cover himself, lest she see the bulge.

  ‘Nothing there to worry about,’ she said.

  Badr guffawed beside him, understanding the joke before he did. He wanted her then, and desperately. Everything about her – every line and swollen curve, the hot scent of her and the lopsided smile on her pretty face …

  Hours had passed and much strong drink had been taken. Confidences exchanged and lingering looks. Unnecessary touching when they brushed past one another between tables as the evening wore on. He had taken her wine and taken her too.

  But that was then. Now his fingertips brushed against her breast and he glanced down to see a fan of stretch marks etched darkly, the colour of aubergine. She placed one leg over his and he felt, for the first time, the sharp rasp of bristled hairs on her shins. Evidently she took as much care of her appearance as circumstances allowed, but in the aftermath of their coupling the imperfections registered more clearly, demanding the attention he had previously paid only to the curves of her behind and the rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed and laughed.

  Rather than the sea, it seemed to him now that her skin smelled of sweat, yesterday’s as well as today’s. Her curls, so beguiling in the candlelit tavern and so intoxicating while he had buried his face in her neck as he ground his hips against her, smelled of cooking fat. Her panting breath against his chest was stale wine. She made a soft, warm sound of contentment and his body stiffened slightly, involuntarily, in response to her easy comfort, her familiarity with him – all but a stranger.

  ‘Quick … but not too quick,’ she murmured, and giggled again.

  It was true and he knew it. He almost blushed but took the second half of her sentence, and the fondness behind the laugh, as proof that she had taken something for herself from the encounter.

  Although he was already beyond her, making a memory of her, still he cared what she thought. In spite of himself and his reservations, he tightened his arm around her and pressed his face against the top of her head. Just a girl – just a girl, and he planted a kiss among her curls.

  He realised his lips had moved, and wondered for a moment if he had spoken out loud. She made no sign of it and he relaxed. He cared what all of them thought, but never enough to ask or to stay. He would leave when she fell asleep or when the fire went out – whichever came first.

  All unbidden, the memory of his mother came to mind – settled down where it chose, by his side like a faithful hound. He thought of the tomb and the gorse flowers, and about the arrow and Angus Armstrong. The months and the years had passed since her death there in the moonlight, but the archer had not forgotten them. John Grant had turned from boy to man and Badr Khassan had guided him as best he could, and yet neither time nor distance had kept their foe at bay.

  The girl was dozing now, her consciousness drifting like a skiff that had slipped its mooring. He listened to her breathing, deep and peaceful, and wished he might let go and join her there.

  It was thoughts of Angus Armstrong that preoccupied him then. John Grant imagined him out there in the night and prayed for a day, and soon, when his hands might be warm with the archer’s freshly spilled entrails.

  Not for the first time it struck him how far he had landed from the life he had once expected. He was like a seed plucked by the wind from among the branches of a tall tree and carried out of sight. He glanced at the sleeping girl and then up into the rafters of the room above a tavern in a land that was foreign to him, and shook his head in disbelie
f.

  He was a farmer’s son, and still little more than a boy. He ought to have been destined for a life of quiet hardship on the land. He looked at his hands, spread the fingers and thought how their skin should have been stained dark by now – ingrained like the hands that had once cared for him and loved him.

  He considered his fingernails, ragged and short, and recalled the sight of stubborn crescents beneath other nails that had once untangled his unruly hair or picked at careless traces of food left dried upon his cheeks.

  He remembered casual contact from two hands moved by love of an altogether different sort – that he had not known for years. He struggled to recall that touch that had once seemed more familiar than his own, and for a moment he ached to have those careworn hands upon him one more time, ruffling his hair or laid upon his shoulders in the preface to a mother’s kiss.

  Once it would have seemed to him unthinkable to find himself an hour’s walk from his mother’s cottage – and yet here he was, a warrior with blood-soaked hands, half a world away from that home and from the jagged darkness that now cradled Jessie’s bones.

  Instead of tending crops and husbanding beasts – the stuff of life – he was a bringer of death. By Badr’s side his tools had been the sword and the knife, and the man and the boy had earned their living harvesting souls ranged against them in wars not of their making. They were mercenaries – killers for hire and masters of the trade. A mere boy he might be, but his was a precocious talent that enthralled his guardian and mentor as much as anyone else.

  This night – the girl and the red wine – was only a distraction on the way to yet another fight in which their only concern would be the potential for profit. They were far from any home; flotsam carried this way and that by one conflict or another across the bloody face of the continent.

  Soon enough they would stand alongside Christian soldiers in the army of John Hunyadi of Hungary. The grand plan, about which they cared not at all, was to drive off the Ottoman Sultan Murad II. Good luck to their employer if the objective might be met, but they would still fill their purses with silver and gold along the way.