Master of Shadows

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Master of Shadows Page 20

by Neil Oliver


  ‘Why did you come looking for me?’ she asked again.

  ‘How could I not?’

  She blushed and raised a hand to the hot skin of her face.

  ‘We are strangers,’ she said.

  ‘One way or another I have spent my life with strangers,’ he said. ‘I loved Jessie Grant. I loved Badr Khassan. But they were not my own.’

  ‘That is ungracious,’ she said. ‘They were not obliged to love you. They chose to, which is a greater gift.’

  He looked hard into her face then, and when she returned his gaze she glimpsed a question flickering there.

  ‘You still haven’t told me about my father,’ he said. ‘About Patrick Grant.’

  ‘You say he saved the life of Badr Khassan.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Well he saved mine first.’

  ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  ‘First tell me where you are going,’ she replied.

  He dropped his shoulders in frustration.

  ‘I have my own debts to pay,’ he said. ‘In the city of Constantinople … there is a girl.’

  ‘Do you love her?’ she asked. She felt the question curl and uncurl inside her like a serpent’s tail while she asked it.

  ‘Love her? I do not even know her.’

  ‘Then who is she?’

  ‘She is his daughter,’ he said. ‘Badr Khassan’s. Her mother’s name was Isabella. He asked me to find her – to take care of her.’

  ‘Constantinople is half a world away from here,’ she said. ‘How do you propose to get there? You do not even have a horse now.’

  ‘I travel light. I just have to follow this river to the sea, and then find a port, and a ship heading east, and a captain who needs another crewman.’

  He looked at her face but found he could not read the meaning of the expression he found there.

  ‘I have told you my destination,’ he said. ‘Now you must tell me about my … my father.’

  Without another word, Lẽna stood, strode forward and leapt out into the void. John Grant gasped and reached for her. He almost toppled into space and gasped again as he regained his balance and then sat down heavily. By the time he had done so he heard the splash and leaned out again in time to see her head break the surface of the water. She turned and looked up at him on his perch, and raised both arms out of the water in a questioning, beckoning gesture.

  ‘I followed you,’ she shouted, and the sound of her voice echoed around the canyon.

  He rose to his feet and looked down at the surging waters.

  ‘Follow me and I will tell you what you want to know!’ By then the river had carried her further away from him and her words were all but lost beneath the roar of the water. But he had heard enough.

  He took three steps back, until he felt the rock wall behind him, and then sprinted forward and out into the nothingness.

  Lẽna glanced upwards in time to see him leap, and for an instant, before the fall began, he seemed, to her at least, fixed there like a bug in amber. It was an image she would carry for the rest of her days, as he seemed to float, perfect and beyond the reach of either earth or sky.

  More than anything else she would recall how completely he gave himself to the moment. His head was thrown back and he looked not down towards the murky depths but up and out and into infinity. His arms were extended behind his back, so that he had the look of a crucified Christ, lost in an ecstasy of agony. And then the moment passed and the fall began.

  PART THREE

  Siege

  26

  Constantinople, 1453

  ‘Tell me about the fat Turk, and how he drowned that poor baby.’

  ‘He wasn’t a baby. He was two years old – a little black-haired boy. Walking and talking.’

  ‘Nearly two years old, you always say. That’s still a baby to me.’

  He felt her settle down beside him, like a child.

  And he began … the way he always began:

  ‘While some of this must be true, and some of it might not be, it is all I know …’

  His fingers fluttered in the dark and a black shape moved against a blue sky painted on the ceiling above their heads. Grotesquely fat, its pumpkin head topped with an outsize turban, the shadow might have been comical.

  She hissed at the sight of the villain while she moved closer on the bed where they lay.

  Armed only with paper cut-outs, his own clever hands, slivers of metal and glass mirrors, he had become a talented illusionist. His shadow characters loomed and diminished, danced and fought, flew and ran. In the darkness of his room his broken body was no hindrance to his art, and all the while his figures moved and lived at his command, he was like a little god – master of his creations. The room was a world of their own, one split into light and dark, real forms and shadows.

  ‘A man in his middle years, Ali Bey was a leader among his own people. In his homeland he would have been the one giving orders, dispatching others to exercise his will. He seldom felt any sense of superiority nowadays, however. Just as the hairs were slipping from his scalp in alarming numbers, so his self-esteem was sloughing off him like dead skin.’

  Ali Bey was all at once replaced in the tableau by the shadow of a snake – one shedding its skin so as to become a bigger, fatter version of itself.

  She snuggled deeper into the bedclothes, lulled by the familiar words and all but hypnotised by the interplay of his voice and the light and dark. The sounds of the city all around them seemed far away, inconsequential to the precious moments here in the jasmine-scented gloom of his bedchamber.

  ‘Now more than halfway through his allotted span, he felt thwarted. A son of chieftains, Ali Bey had been convinced he was destined for glory.’

  Ali Bey’s fat shadow floated on high, suddenly ghoulish above the heads of a crowd of tiny figures.

  ‘In a favourite dream he floated above his fellows, so that they had to crane their necks to gaze upon him.’

  She cupped her hands around her mouth and booed.

  ‘Here among the splendours of the palace of Edirne, padding quickly past elegant courtyards and quadrangles, he was just another servant of the sultan.’

  Suddenly Ali Bey’s silhouette was that of a young man, lithe and strong, while the shadows of lesser men fell at his feet.

  ‘In his youth he had won fame as a wrestler, and his strength and speed had not quite left him. Even now, fat as a pig, he moved with feminine grace. But while once his body had been widest at the shoulders, now the circumference of his waist was the larger measurement.’

  She dutifully catcalled as the youthful wrestler departed the scene and a bloated mockery of his former self was left behind, watching the other go.

  ‘Finally he arrived at the double doors of the harem.’

  A pair of shadow doors parted and a figure stalked through them, dripping pompous self-regard.

  ‘All at once the fat man was confronted by the eunuch, Quadir.

  ‘“What is your business here, Ali Bey?”’

  The voice he used for the eunuch was high, almost shrill. Its shadow was as large as Ali Bey’s, but muscular and with a bare, shaven head as smooth as an egg. The figure grew larger for a moment, imposing, while Ali Bey’s drifted out of focus.

  ‘Ali Bey wasn’t even through the door and already the eunuch’s tone was irksome. What would the atmosphere be like, here in the women’s quarters, when he had finished what he had come to do?

  ‘Quadir, whose duty it was to oversee all the business of the seraglio, had uttered Ali Bey’s name like an insult. The eunuch was a towering figure, half a head taller than Ali Bey, and slowly he folded his arms across his chest.’

  A tap, tap, tapping, made by a fingernail upon part of the bed frame, was the sound of Quadir’s agitated foot upon a tiled floor.

  The shadows came together as one, almost comically, and then parted, with Ali Bey’s in control and striding ahead.

  ‘Rather than reply, Ali Bey used the fading skills of the w
restler he had once been to unbalance his challenger and push him aside. Eunuch or not, Quadir had commanded respect for half a lifetime, and here in his own domain such effrontery was shocking. The fat man was past him, however, and looking around at doorways and corridors leading in all directions. He turned to face the eunuch once more.

  ‘“Little Ahmet,” he spat, his voice wheezing and thick with the effort of the confrontation. “Where is Little Ahmet?”

  ‘“You have no business here, Ali Bey,” the eunuch said, his anger coiled, ready to strike. “Must I summon the guards and have you rolled out of here on your fat belly?”

  ‘“I am here on the sultan’s business,” said Ali Bey. “The boy’s mother is in the throne room, at his majesty’s pleasure, and he has sent me to collect the child. Where is Little Ahmet?” he asked for the last time.

  ‘Quadir smiled. The suggestion that Mehmet would have sent this man – any man – to collect a child from the harem was ridiculous. Something in Ali Bey’s sweaty manner, however, gave the eunuch pause.’

  The shadows came together a second time, and a flash of light, created by a flick of the illusionist’s wrist, suggested a glimpse of steel.

  ‘While he stood in what he hoped appeared like calm contemplation, Ali Bey stepped lightly forward and struck Quadir just beneath his breastbone. Knocked backwards by the blow, the eunuch stumbled. He raised a hand to massage the sore place and found dampness there. Looking down, he was surprised, and only surprised, to find his hand covered in blood. He snapped his head up to look at Ali Bey. Only then did he glimpse the blade disappearing, like a darting fish, back into the folds of the other man’s sweat-damp robes.

  ‘There were many things Quadir wanted to say to Ali Bey then. But his mouth only opened and closed, twice in quick succession. Like a fish, he thought.’

  Now the eunuch’s shadow stood alone against the painted sky, while suns, moons and stars passed over his head.

  ‘All at once, and for the first time in many a long year, he remembered standing buried up to his chin under a boiling hot sun after the priests had held him down and cut away the puny seahorse of his penis, the shrivelled seeds of his testicles. The searing agony when the bamboo stalk was inserted into the wound was long gone, unrecoverable, but the heat of his burial, neck deep in the scorching sand, washed over him like a blast from the baker’s oven.

  ‘Quadir, chief eunuch and confidante of wives and sultans, back in the mind of his eight-year-old self, was dead before his face hit the floor.’

  The shadow eunuch’s fall was as graceful as it was tragic. His audience, his audience of one, buried her face in her hands as she always did at this moment in the telling.

  There were no shadow puppets for the murder of the baby boy, only soft words and a sky flecked with clouds and birds and with a fiery sun at its centre. The muffled hubbub from beyond the windows – the cries of traders in the market, iron-shod hooves on cobbled lanes, the chatter of passers-by – might have been the grief and ululations of mourners.

  ‘There were moments at the end, a handful at least, when peace and quiet replaced the frenzy of the struggle. All sensations were set aside and Little Ahmet was suspended in the silence, hovering there. The fat man was gone and there were no hands upon him any more, forcing him under. He floated on the surface, legs splayed and arms outstretched. He was face down, his hair arrayed like the fronds of some aquatic plant. While he had thrashed and fought, his eyes had been squeezed tight shut, another way of resisting. But the pain and fear were gone now. His lungs had filled with water but there was no more choking. That time had passed.

  ‘Not so very long ago he had been a creature of water and the womb, and in the little life that remained, he remembered. His dying eyes opened into a shimmering light, and as he gazed into its warmth he heard her voice, clear as notes from a bell. He could not see her face – only dappled light – but her voice was all around him. As soon as he heard her call his name he began to fall deeper, slowly descending through still, warm water towards the source of the light and the sound. He was not afraid.’

  They lay quietly together for a while, letting the words settle around them like birds.

  ‘And Ali Bey?’ she asked, finally.

  ‘The sultan executed him, had him hanged, as you well know.’

  ‘Even though it was he – Mehmet – who had ordered his baby half-brother’s murder,’ she said.

  ‘Even though – yes,’ he said, indulging her need for repetition. ‘That’s what makes Ali Bey’s dream so satisfying, don’t you think – when he looks down upon his fellow chieftains. It came true when their upturned faces were the last thing he saw, with the noose around his neck.’

  ‘And they really called the baby Little Ahmet?’ she asked. ‘It just makes it all the sadder.’

  ‘He was his father’s last son, sired when the old man was nearer death than life. And he was, as well, a silent, listless scrap of a thing at birth, and premature. No one expected him to live beyond his first breaths.’

  ‘His mother’s love, though,’ she said, wistfully.

  ‘Whatever it was, he thrived, apparently. They loved him.’

  ‘So that is our foe,’ she said. ‘A man who would kill his own half-brother, a baby, to secure his throne.’

  They were silent for a little while, and then he said:

  ‘They all do that. It’s what makes them men.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ she whispered. ‘It’s what makes them sultans … and emperors.’

  They lay in the dark, a boy and a girl in a darkened bedchamber. Above them, the ceiling of the room was all aglow so that there seemed to be two worlds – one made of day and the other of night; or two times, the past and the present.

  We draw back from them now, out and away from them, and their room is revealed as part of a palace built of white stone. It is hard to tell if it is the stone itself that is white or if the brightness of the structure is due only to the heartless light of a wintry sun. Higher still and their city, once the greatest city, is revealed as a web of streets, lanes and alleyways, with lives and buildings great and small trapped within.

  As we rise higher, in an ever-widening gyre, the city’s place in the landscape is made clear. It sits at the end of a triangular peninsula of land shaped like the snout and horn of a rhinoceros. The squat stump of the horn thrusts up and out into the sea, so that there is water on two sides. The neck of the peninsula, the throat of the beast, is cut across by a great white wall like a collar or a livid scar, and flowing towards it like an unstoppable wave is a horde of people and animals – the massed forces of Sultan Mehmet II.

  It is April, but spring has been slow in coming and the misery of winter is all around, so that a million sets of hooves and marching feet have made a mire that stretches in every direction. Their progress is slow, painful and accompanied by the shouts and groans of men and the complaints of beasts of burden.

  However long it takes, whatever effort is required, their advance upon the wall and the city will not stop.

  27

  From high above it looks like an anthill, clinging to a precipitous slope. A white structure, rising into the sky and surrounded by tiny creatures, thousands upon thousands of them, moving in ordered lines or gathered in clumps. Hither and thither the lines weave and criss-cross, filled with purpose and intent. Not a moment is wasted as they work tirelessly in concert, inspired it seems by a common goal.

  Closer to the ground now, hurtling down towards the mass of it, and we see the creation for what it is – a castle of pale stone surrounded by massive walls. The creatures moving busily in all directions around it are not ants but men. This is Rumelihisari, a great fortress of the Turkmen that erupted almost overnight, like a puffball in a field. Since the work began a little over four months ago, the hubbub of frenzied activity has never stopped. By day the men toil beneath the unforgiving sun. Stonemasons and the lime burners tasked with making their mortar; carpenters and joiners, and the smiths to make
and sharpen their tools; hod-carriers and labourers and practitioners of another score of trades besides.

  Such is the Ottomans’ desire to raise this clenched fist into the sky, so as to cast God’s shadow over what remains of the Byzantine Empire, even the sultan’s nobles toil ceaselessly alongside their underlings. From behind the walls of Constantinople itself – only six miles downstream from this latest audacity of their Muslim foes – the Christians can only watch and pray.

  In their eyes it is a monstrosity. Its growth is frighteningly fast, like that of a cancer, and there is a rumour that even Mehmet is to be seen there, stripped to the waist and heaving stones into place with his bare hands. By night, their efforts are illuminated by a thousand fires and a hundred thousand lamps.

  Like all of his ancestors, this latest sultan has spent a lifetime dreaming of Constantinople. The Prophet promised the city to his followers long ago, and it has been part of Islam’s destiny ever since, an article of faith. They must place their hands around the Christian neck and throttle the life out of it …

  From the windows of Prince Constantine’s apartments in the Blachernae Palace in Constantinople, the tops of three lead-roofed towers – the threatening pinnacles of the new Turkish fortress – could easily be glimpsed. Its walls reached from the very waves breaking upon the shore of the Bosphorus to the summit of a ridge more than sixty yards above the water.

  The prince lay in his bed, propped up on many pillows, but his teacher Doukas stood at one of the tall windows, the only one not shuttered against the sunlight. Constantine had already complained about the light, and Doukas was careful to allow only a sliver of bronze to intrude. In fact he was standing upon the window seat, the better to survey the distant scene.

  ‘How far, would you say?’ asked Constantine.

  Doukas turned from the window and was silent for a moment while he allowed his eyes to adjust to the gloom of the interior.

  ‘No more than six miles, Costa,’ he said, turning back and continuing his observations on tiptoe. ‘I have thought about this and I believe the infidels must have chosen to squat upon the ruins of our Church of St Michael.’

 

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