by Neil Oliver
Yaminah’s smile returned, replacing her frown like sunshine after rain, but the clouds remained, threatening. She snuck up on to the bed then, suddenly feeling tired, and curled beside him like a cat. She placed her head on his lap and tapped his thigh, just above his knee, three times with one thin finger.
‘Tell me stories,’ she said. ‘To make up for your stupid question.’
Constantine had watched her finger jab at his withered flesh, stretched thin over bone, but had not felt it, and when she settled her hand upon his leg he detected only a vague suggestion of its warmth. He could, however, just about register the weight of her head in his lap, and he closed his eyes as his heart beat faster. There was a sudden hint of heaviness, and of need, between his legs, and he might have groaned, but did not.
After a moment or two he opened his eyes and reached behind his head. With his left hand he felt for a set of dangling cords, each attached to some or other part of a network of little pulleys and weights above the bed. He made a few brief tugs and adjustments until heavy curtains and slatted blinds moved into their desired positions over tall windows, the room made all but dark. A single shaft of sunlight remained, lancing down on to the top of a wooden cabinet by the bed. Upon the cabinet stood a dish of highly polished bronze, four inches across and fixed to a stand by small brass screws. A turn here and a twist there made the gleaming dish swivel and turn like a roving eye.
With a practised hand Constantine manoeuvred the gadget until the beam, thinner than Yaminah’s wrist, was caught and reflected back up on to the ceiling. All at once the painted sky was lit up, bright as noon. It was an effect Yaminah never tired of, lying in the gloom beneath the apex of an upturned cone of light through which dust drifted like stars in heaven.
From a drawer in the cabinet Constantine produced a handful of black-painted rods, each of them topped with a different, exquisitely crafted, two-dimensional blackened figure or shape. There were crowned emperors and empresses; kings and queens; princes and princesses; mounted warriors; foot soldiers – singly and in ranks; crescent moons and stars, towers and battlements, lightning bolts and storm clouds – the props for any story the prince might weave.
Yaminah let out a contented sigh that was almost a purr, and her saviour prince began his tale as he always did:
‘While some of this must be true, and some of it might not be, it is all I know …’
And into the beam of light he brought the first of the figures and shapes so that their shadows were cast large against the blue, or passed across the face of the painted sun with its tendrils of flame. Armies advanced and clashed, fought and fell, triumphed or retreated; horses cantered and galloped; emperors made their empresses by marriage as required, and consorted with their mistresses as they wanted, while those empresses sought their own lovers; fortresses were raised and flattened, suns set, moons rose, stars roamed free and tears were shed for all of it.
‘…“Let him who loves me follow me,” roared Mehmet, sultan and lord of all,’ said Constantine, while Yaminah yelped, her face in her hands.
‘Out of his bedchamber he charged, shrugging off his robe of sky-blue silk, trimmed with the white fur of the Arctic fox, while courtiers rushed in all directions like startled birds.’
Shadows danced against a painted sky, and a prince and princess, a broken boy and the girl whose fate it had been to break him, lay together in a circular bedroom in a palace in a great city. He sent his stories up into the sky to fly alongside his dreams, and she, like an angel, could fly there too for as long as each tale lasted.
Sometimes the cast of characters remained only shadows; at other times, when the warmth of his body and the softness of his voice conspired to lure her into the space between waking and sleep, they seemed to come fully alive. Then their shapes would fill with colour and be transformed into flesh and blood, so that it was as real men and women that they played their parts.
‘“Let him who loves me follow me!”’ said Constantine again, more of a bellow this time as his shadow sultan strode forth, while grim-faced men rallied to his call, issuing from every doorway of his palace and flocking to his side.
‘A letter was clutched in Mehmet’s right hand – indeed he gripped it so tightly that his knuckles shone white like bone. The poor soul who had brought the missive remained on his knees in the bedchamber, his forehead pressed tightly against cool floor tiles, eyes closed.
‘Like everyone else he had no idea what news he had carried, and his lips moved silently as he prayed that its contents would not cost him his life. Only when the shouts and clattering footsteps faded from his hearing did he risk a sideways glance, first left and then right.’
Constantine flicked the messenger’s shadow from side to side, an elegantly exaggerated move that always made Yaminah giggle.
‘Content that he was alone, he risked a hitching, tearful breath.’ Constantine mimicked the panicky sob, making Yaminah giggle even louder. ‘Before rolling on to his side, still curled into a ball.’
Constantine turned the little figure then, made only of stiffened paper, until the man’s shape was reduced to nothing more than a black line beside a four-poster bed upon an otherwise empty sky.
Yaminah clutched his hand. For all that it was a tale she knew well – how Sultan Mehmet II had learned of the death of his father and had set out in all possible haste to seize the throne – it was Constantine who made it real for her, made it all true, and she held him tight.
‘Whatever storm the messenger had unleashed had passed him by,’ said Constantine, whispering now, ‘leaving him unharmed.’
It was in this way, lying in the warm, perfumed darkness of her prince’s bedchamber, that Yaminah had learned the history of her city, of the empire of Byzantium and of those, like Mehmet’s Seljuk Turks, who would harm it.
‘Out in the corridors it became apparent to one and all that Mehmet was making for the stables, and men began shouting ahead, issuing orders for the grooms to ready the horses,’ said Constantine, his voice high, in harmony with the thrill and foreboding of it all.
‘Mehmet’s gaze was fixed straight ahead, as though focused on a point far in the distance that only he could see.’
Constantine played a tiny mirror, cupped in his free hand, to make a momentary blinding flash.
‘None dared speak to him for fear of rebuke or reprisal. Instead they stole glances at his face in search of understanding.’
‘What age was he?’ asked Yaminah, momentarily breaking the spell of his storytelling. ‘When he learned his father was dead?’
‘No more than seventeen,’ Constantine replied, still playing with the mirror and moving the thin shaft of light around the walls.
‘So young,’ she said. ‘And why such urgency? The throne was his.’
He laughed. ‘The throne might go to whoever had the will and the strength to seize it,’ he said. ‘It is the way of the Ottomans. Where there are many sons – and that is what their harems and seraglios are for – each may claim the throne on the death of the father.’
‘So they murder babies too – just to be sure,’ she said.
‘Little Ahmet,’ he said. ‘I sometimes wish I had spared you that tale.’
‘It is no tale,’ she said. ‘In what sort of world is a tiny child a threat to a sultan?’
‘The Turks are hardly alone in that cruelty,’ said Constantine. ‘Do not forget my own family. Plenty of my ancestors have done away with kin. One of them blinded his own son and also his three-year-old grandson, just to keep them from his throne.’
Yaminah closed her eyes and turned away from him.
To distract her, Constantine returned to his shadow play. All at once, two parties of horsemen approached one another, stopping while they were still separated by a respectful distance.
‘A great horde – common people as well as grand men – rode out from the royal capital to greet him as he approached. When they saw Mehmet and his party on the horizon, they dismounted. Leading their ho
rses by the reins, they progressed in silence while the new sultan came on – and then he too climbed down from his horse and his followers did likewise.’
Constantine brought the shadow parties together so that they appeared as one thronging mass.
‘As they came upon one another, a great call went up – a wailing cry of mourning for the dead sultan, and the ululations rolled across the wide plain. As abruptly as it had begun, the wailing ended, and then every man and woman knelt down before the new sultan and offered him praise.’
32
Rome, twenty-one years before
It was still half dark, but the sunrise was close. Isabella’s right shoulder was exposed to the air. Keeping her breathing shallow and with movements slow, she reached for it with her left hand. Her skin was cold, like that of a corpse. It was just as well. She could not risk falling back to sleep, and the chill made her more determined to rise and be away.
Shrugging aside the covers, she swung her legs off the bed until she could sit upright. Only then, with her back turned, could she allow herself to look down at him over one shoulder. Given the gloom, she sensed rather than saw that Badr was lying on his front. His face was turned away from her, which was a relief. Somewhere outside and far away, a bird began to sing, heralding the rising of the sun. The fragile notes broke her lover’s spell and she closed her eyes, promising herself she would not look at him again.
She heard him groan, mutter some words she did not catch. He was feverish still, radiating the kind of heat that came only from illness. Soon he would be awake. She hated to take her leave of him while he was unwell, but part of her knew it was the perfect time to make her getaway.
She slipped out of the bedroom then, without a backward glance, and stole along the narrow hallway. There was a dim glow from tall windows high up on the walls, and when she stopped to dress by the main door, she could see well enough. There was a mirror on the wall beside her and she paused in front of it for a few moments, long enough to check that she looked respectable, nothing more. Her long fair hair was loose and reached more than halfway down her back. There was no time to fix it now, and pausing only to throw a wrap around her shoulders, she opened the door of the town house and stepped out into the dawn. Black-headed seabirds squabbled on the rooftops above, their keening cries full of hunger and sadness.
As she made her way along a narrow pavement touched by the sun’s first rays, she remembered some of Ama’s words. An old lady now, blind and frail, Ama had been Isabella’s nurse from the moment she drew her first breath. As full of stories as with love, it was Ama, more than Isabella’s mother or anyone else, who had cradled her and loved her. Needed her. As the gulls’ pleading, lonely cries sounded high above and out of sight, Isabella was reminded of Ama’s talk of souls and their twins.
Such a notion was tantamount to heresy, of course, or heathen nonsense at best. The thought had been entrusted to Isabella among many other confidences shared by the pair. Ama had loved her stories, kept them close around her in place of any family of her own, and Isabella couldn’t hear enough of them.
Now old age had taken Ama’s stories along with so much else. The woman who framed Isabella’s childhood, who featured in every other memory, had been robbed of her own power of recall. She embodied Isabella’s past but had access to none of her own. Her stories too had departed one by one, like guests leaving a party in the wee small hours; time to go. She existed now in a warm haze of confusion. Still in Isabella’s family home, though mostly unaware and untroubled by the blur of it all, Ama haunted the tumbledown remains of her own life.
When Isabella had asked where the idea of twin souls came from, Ama said it was a story that came out of the East – from India maybe. Whatever its origins, it had pleased Isabella as a little girl just as it pleased her now. Maybe she wasn’t alone – or at least, not for ever.
Ama said that for the most part each twin followed a separate path, without encountering its other half. But from time to time in an infinite universe they must come together, by accident or design, and the result then was greater than the sum of two parts.
It was only the souls that were identical, of course, said Ama, not the people who embodied them, so the individuals concerned need not look alike. Geography and distance created by the accident of birth played their parts, often keeping twins apart. Gender had its role as well. One soul might be incarnated in a male body, while its twin was female. Sometimes the souls got out of step with one another so that one was newborn when the other was old – and all points in between.
‘They may meet as parent and child, as lovers, as enemies, as strangers from opposite ends of the earth,’ Ama said, brushing Isabella’s dark blonde tresses until they shone. ‘Every once in a while, though, their time coincides, and for as long as they are together there must be consequences.’
‘Will my soul have a twin?’ Isabella had asked at once, gazing into Ama’s face reflected in the mirror. Ama bit her lip, wondering if it had been a mistake to dangle such a hope in front of a heart as needy as little Isabella’s. It was too late. The bait had been swallowed, and the hook was fast.
‘No one knows that about themselves, sweetheart,’ she said, smiling. Ama was as warm and soft as new-baked bread, and Isabella pushed back against her nurse’s tummy as though it was a cushion. Ama stopped her brushing then and rested both hands on the girl’s shoulders. She adopted a serious expression, as of the schoolroom, so that Isabella might pay attention and remember.
‘But here is the most important part … you must never, ever go looking.’ She was improvising, making up rules that did not exist. ‘Never imagine you have a twin. Better think of it as a story to make you smile. But if you did have a twin soul and …’ she was drifting helplessly back into her story, ‘you were to meet, then so be it. You cannot make it happen, though … must not try.
‘And anyway,’ she said, bending down to plant a soft kiss on Isabella’s cheek, ‘what need have you or I of twins, when we have each other?’
She winked at their reflection and Isabella gasped, her heart filled to the brim with the possibility.
‘Maybe we are twins!’ she said. ‘You and I!’
Ama smiled. ‘Maybe my darling,’ she said. ‘Maybe.’
Back in the present, back in the early morning of the Eternal City, Isabella felt the memory of the moment like a lump in her chest. An old memory, but one with such power – a light unfocused by great distance but burning bright.
But for all she had enjoyed the possibility that she herself might be blessed thus – gifted a partner for eternity, one she might encounter in this life or in some other yet to be – the thought made her sad today as well.
She felt she might have loved the man she was leaving behind, but he was not her soul’s twin; of that she was certain. He had caught her eye the first moment they met, but truly they were different people (she had learned that much, at least) and therefore – she was quite sure – theirs were unconnected souls. She realised she was nodding to herself as she reviewed the situation.
It was, however, no fancy thought of souls, entwined or otherwise, that had persuaded her to cut him away and for ever. She might have kept him, twin or not. It wasn’t the infinite possibilities suggested by the world invisible that had persuaded her to turn her back on him. Instead it was the straightforward understanding that if she did not give him up – and if their liaison were discovered – her father would have his life snuffed out like a candle’s flame. She would put away her own sorrow for now, ready to be unpacked later when the job was done.
‘Enough of all this,’ she said out loud.
She was shaking her head, suddenly filled with self-reproach.
Again and again her father had told her she was trouble, and that she had to be watched, and he was right! Stolen moments with one lover might be dismissed as an indiscretion; even predictable in the case of a girl kept always on so short a leash. But with two?
She raised her hand to her mouth to
stifle … what? A laugh? A groan? She was not sure herself, and she quickened her pace to distract herself from her line of thought.
Now there was another soul to be considered, of course – the baby growing inside her. A new life. She allowed herself to imagine that her unborn child might have a twin somewhere, a fellow traveller already out in the world and unaware. She was scared by her new-found circumstances – terrified – but the wonder of it all transcended every other consideration.
Her father would be appalled, furious – that much was certain. When he found out, he would roar at her, and shout obscenities. He might call her a whore and say she had disgraced him, brought their family name into disrepute. He would want to hit her – just as he sometimes hit her mother. But she was certain that in spite of the temptation, and the undoubted provocation, he would not raise his hand against her.
Philip Kritovoulos was a violent man, but never to her. She was his most precious possession (possession was quite the right word), and he would not allow her to be damaged, even if her recent actions and their consequences would see his reputation dragged through the mire.
Next, she thought about her lover, lying on his sickbed. Badr Khassan was a good man and would make a good father one day. But their situation was hopeless. If he were to stand by her side now, it would bring down his death sentence, nothing more.
She thought about Badr’s friend, Patrick Grant, and what he had said when she had confided in him, told him about the baby, and that she was leaving …
‘Badr loves you – you should tell him,’ he had said. ‘He will be a good father for the baby, a good husband for you.’
‘I know he loves me – that is precisely why he must not know. I have to leave him behind. It is the only way. And since I have to leave him, since we must part, there is no good in telling him. There will be pain enough to bear – I would spare him the worst.’