Master of Shadows

by Neil Oliver

  ‘This cannot be right,’ he said. ‘There must be something more that I can do.’

  She had smiled at him and raised a hand to his face.

  ‘Apart from anything else, more than anything else, you are his best friend,’ she said. ‘He will need you now.’

  He had turned from her then so that he was beyond her reach, and began walking away with his chin down on his chest like a chastened child. She left her hand extended towards him, but he did not turn back, and some small part of her was glad.

  He was right, in any case. Badr would be a good father for her baby, and a good husband. But not here, and not now.

  Two men concealed in the shadows of a dark alleyway waited until Isabella was long out of sight before stepping into the dawn light and crossing the street …

  It was Patrick who came for him in the burning bedroom half an hour later – Patrick who found that the flames had already taken hold beyond any hope of extinguishing them. Crawling on his hands and knees beneath the worst of it, he had found his friend by touch rather than by sight. The big man was unconscious, half in and half out of the bed, some of his clothing already on fire.

  ‘Wake up!’ Patrick bellowed, as he hauled and pulled at the dead weight. ‘Come on, Badr! Wake up!’

  33

  Yaminah opened her eyes. The room was quiet now, the storytelling over. Much to Constantine’s annoyance, it often happened like this. He would be in full flow, almost lost in the tale, when he would become aware of the change in her breathing. No matter how many times she told him it was a compliment – that he made her feel so safe and relaxed here on his bed with him that a peaceful snooze was all but inevitable – still he preferred to take offence.

  ‘Some teacher I am,’ he would say, when the time came to wake her. ‘Even the attention of a classroom of one is too much for me to hold.’

  ‘You’re not my teacher. I have plenty of those. But sleeping with you – falling asleep with you – is my favourite thing,’ she would reply, sitting up and brushing the creases from her clothes, fixing her hair and checking the corners of her mouth for trails of drool. ‘Lying here, with you. Your voice is like soft music to me … it leaves me powerless.’ She would pretend to swoon, falling backwards on to his bed.

  He would snort and busy himself putting away the props, opening the curtains and blinds once more so that the daylight might banish the intimacy, like a traitor.

  What he overlooked, and what she was careful never to remind him of, was how she pleased him in sleep just as she did when she was awake. Her calm invariably pulled him down like quicksand, so that he almost always followed her into unconsciousness. He was happiest beside her, in this realm or any other.

  This time, however, it was different. She awoke with her head in his lap, as always, but now there was a hardness there, unmistakable against her cheek. Gently she raised her head to see if he was awake, but unlike any time before, she had been first to resurface. His eyes were closed, his breathing slow and deep. Gently, so gently, she reached out a hand and touched the solid ridge beneath the sheet. It felt hot, and emboldened by the strangeness of the situation, she stroked it lightly. It twitched against her hand. She almost laughed out loud, but sensed a seriousness and a certainty at the same time and bit into her lip instead. Here was a bubble not to be lightly burst.

  Constantine was wont to say that he was half dead already, dead from the waist down. Here, however, hard and heavy as a length of lead pipe, lying tensed and ramrod straight against the lower part of his stomach, was the surest sign of life.

  Yaminah, still a virgin at eighteen, had dabbled with boys and they with her – kisses and caresses and wandering hands. She lacked her mother’s height, but the curves that had arrived with her adulthood, coupled with quick wits and a mercurial, spirited manner, meant she had attracted male attention from early on. She was a bolt of energy, enlivening any room she walked into, and boys and men reached for her like a will-o’-the-wisp in hopes of luck and a better life.

  Her heart was Constantine’s – always had been – but given the circumstances, there had been dalliances along the way. She had been held tightly enough by one admirer or another to know when a man wanted her. Here now, long after she had accepted things as they were, was proof of Constantine’s desire – like a longed-for guest at a party and certainly better late than never. This might change everything – and if perfection was out of the question, here at least was the hope of a few steps in the right direction.

  On an impulse she bowed her head and placed her lips upon the outline of its tip, the gentlest of welcoming kisses. The hardness twitched again, pushed against her mouth of its own free will, and to her surprise she pushed back, softening and opening her lips to feel the whole of it. She felt a wetness, in her mouth and between her own legs.

  Constantine groaned, a heavy, gravelly sound deep in his throat, and she stopped at once, suddenly mortified. She sat up, blushing crimson, set both feet back upon the floor and glanced at him over one shoulder. His eyes were open but he took a moment even to notice she was still there. Quickly he bundled his sheets across his middle and ran a hand through his thick black hair. She knew at once that it was not the first time – that he had felt this way before today. She felt a fluttering in her chest and looked away.

  ‘Some teacher I am,’ he said, as usual.

  Yaminah laughed, too loudly. Constantine looked at her with an expression close to pity.

  ‘I have somewhere to be,’ she said, standing quickly and making for the door.

  34

  He lay in a tangle of sheets. The paradox of the disarray did not escape him – quite a confusion for a man who moved so little in bed. Rather than his own limited movements, it was Yaminah who was the messy sleeper. Always when they slept together he awoke to the chaos left behind by her dreaming.

  There was a tangled knot inside his head as well. After six years tethered to his own lifeless legs, hope of anything more was a dangerous thing, a threat to the world he had built out of light and dark, and shadow shapes, and then accepted as his all. He had Yaminah too, a brightly coloured bird with whom to share his cage. Her devotion had clipped her wings, clipped them as surely as his own – and hope … well, hope might change everything.

  Here was an interloper, a newly arrived … possibility … a wandering salesman offering goods of uncertain provenance and unproven value. There was no denying the change to his status quo. For weeks there had been, from time to time, moments of feeling between his legs. The sensation was there now, while he stared at the bump of it, beneath a rumple of bedclothes. It amazed him he had even recognised the feeling for what it was after all this time, faint but unmistakable.

  He dismissed the notion like a sometime friend who might yet make him look a fool. He turned his face towards the windows instead and reached back behind his head for the ropes to open the blinds and shutters. Winter sunlight poured through them, and he squinted and then closed his eyes against the glare, hoping it might have burned away his fantasies of a different life, perhaps a better life; his old life.

  In the midst of his tortured thinking he noticed that the sounds from beyond the window glass were louder than usual, almost a cacophony. Threaded through the normal symphony – the hustle and bustle of the city dwellers, the shouts and cries of the traders in the markets, the hubbub of conversations conducted in a score of different languages – was an unfamiliar, discordant note. Anxious voices rose and fell with questions, accusations and prayers. From some of the womenfolk came the ululations for a death in the family.

  The Turks were at the walls once more right enough, and their arrival was like a terrier’s appearance by a nest of ducklings. If there had been anywhere for the locals to go, they would be gone. Trapped as so many of them were, between their walls and the sea, they could only quack and clamour, panic and pray.

  His city, he knew, was well accustomed to the arrival of would-be conquerors. While he ignored his toes – and everything
else below his waist – he lost himself in the paintings and maps around his bedroom walls. The story of Constantinople, from inception until now, was laid out in sequence before him like the moments of a life that might flash before the eyes of a dying man.

  Though no one’s intention – neither the artists who made them nor the teachers who hung them there for his pleasure – together they revealed a sad decline. The product of work spread across a millennium, they showed what had once been, as well as what Constantinople had become. He closed the shutters once more, plunging the room into near darkness, and used the reflected light from the polished bronze dish – the same that illuminated his shadow plays – to pick out each work in turn.

  Obvious in the oldest was the ordered tartan of streets laid out by Constantine the Great. Order and control on the eastern frontier; Western civilisation self-consciously realised in the East. Rome had felt, to the new emperor and his generals, too far from the empire’s frontiers, and so they had built Nova Roma, New Rome, to take her place.

  Prince Constantine gazed in admiration, undiminished by years of scrutiny, at the result of six years of labour completed more than a thousand years before. Conceived and realised as heaven on earth, New Rome grew to beguile and captivate all who saw it, a lustrous white jewel set between the twin sapphires of the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara. They were Romans in a new Rome, but soon the inhabitants took to calling the place Constantinople in honour of their benefactor.

  In more recent centuries, in artworks by locals and visitors, the diamond’s flaws lay unintentionally revealed: a once lovely woman, ripe fruit of many mothers and fathers, now trading on memories and hiding from her own reflection.

  As the later maps and paintings had it, Constantine’s Constantinople was made mostly of empty spaces, a gap-toothed grimace in an ageing maw. A dream made real, it had been a place fit for Roman emperors. Colonnaded streets, their towering pillars taller and wider than trees; elegant squares filled with sculpted gods and emperors; grand buildings styled to humble passers-by; trophies looted and pilfered from old Rome and from every town and city in between; marvels from elsewhere grafted on to the body of the newborn wonder of an ancient world.

  Admirers had been drawn from the beginning. But what once had seemed unattainable and out of reach fell prey in time to grabbing hands. Constantine played the dish’s light from one work to another, exposing the fall from grace.

  Six years, much of the time spent in this same room, had made the young prince unusually sensitive to the approach of others. Yaminah, wary as a fawn, sometimes arrived at his door without his knowing. Mostly though he felt he was becoming some sort of spider, his chamber the heart of an invisible web that twanged and jangled with the vibrations of intruders. So it was now, and he turned the dish to fix the beam on his closed door. He heard shuffling feet, and before their owner could speak he called:

  ‘Come in, whoever you are – I can hear you breathing.’

  The handle turned and the door was pushed inwards. Into the beam of light stepped the plump figure of Doukas, one of his father’s closest confidantes and chief historian of the empire.

  ‘Sorry if I’m disturbing you, my young prince,’ he said in a voice as warm and rich as melting butter. ‘But I feel the need of conversation, yours most of all.’

  Doukas was holding one hand up to his face to avert the glare of the beam, but he was unmistakable even before he spoke.

  Realising it was friend and not foe, Constantine swung the dish away so as to let his teacher’s eyes adjust to the near darkness. He returned the beam of light to a painting depicting his city’s darkest hour – a devastation meted out not by heathen Turkmen but by Christian soldiers bearing the sign of the cross.

  During the past eleven hundred and more years, he knew, the place had been besieged over and over again. The great defensive wall – two in fact, one behind the other and fronted by a deep, brick-lined moat they called the fosse – stretched from the waters of the Golden Horn in the north to the Sea of Marmara in the south. They had stood for a thousand years at least, a wonder of his own and any age, and never breached.

  Constantine kept his light fixed upon the huge painting, one that had outlived its artist’s name. In harrowing detail it portrayed the coming of Christian crusaders two centuries and more before his birth, and the havoc they had unleashed in their bitterness and envy. Denied all other hope of spoils, they had ripped their way through every street and avenue, every lane and alleyway, every home from the lowest to the highest. Men and women and children were raped, and most of them finished with the sword or other cruelty; their corpses were set alight as kindling to feed flames that left less than half the city standing. Ruined and defiled and never fully to recover, Constantinople lost her beauty for ever, to puckered scars and crooked bones.

  ‘You’re a gloomy lad, Costa,’ said Doukas, crossing to the prince’s bed and sitting heavily beside him, so that Constantine fairly bounced upon his mattress. While he looked at the highlighted painting of Greek maidens cowering in the shadow of a porticoed church frontage and being put to the sword by wild-eyed crusaders, their hands red and dripping, he reached out and patted the boy’s thigh.

  ‘And do you remember the words of our fellow historian on the subject of the razing of our city by those we ought to have been able to count as our brothers in Christ?’ he asked.

  Constantine smiled and leaned his head back against his mounded pillows. His eyes were open but he let the world split apart – like a pomegranate and as full of crimson moments – so that he was freed from his broken frame and walking instead along the paved surface of the Mese, the middle way that was the backbone of the old Roman city.

  ‘Ah, now,’ he said. ‘Let me think. You mean, of course, our friend Akominatos … Nicetas Akominatos.’

  ‘Good. Now go on,’ said Doukas, lacing his chubby fingers together on his luxuriously upholstered lap.

  He had schooled his pupil in the Socratic tradition, insisting that all meaningful knowledge be committed to memory. On their first morning together as teacher and pupil, when the prince was just eight years old, Doukas had begun by telling him that memory and only memory was the path to wisdom. According to Socrates, said Doukas, writing was a distraction from the path of truth.

  He began to quote from the master.

  ‘This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories,’ he had told the boy, revelling in the notion. ‘They will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific you have discovered is an aid not to memory but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth.’

  Constantine began to recite what he had learned by heart and by rote.

  ‘How shall I begin to tell of the deeds wrought by these nefarious men!’ he said, summoning the account laid down by Akominatos more than two centuries before, when memories of the deeds were warm like torn flesh.

  ‘Alas, the images, which ought to have been adored, were trodden underfoot!’ he continued easily, strolling in his mind through a version of the city he had conjured from maps and other images but never known, never seen.

  He had nonetheless learned to use this creation of his mind’s eye for the safe stowage of his learning. The street he walked was filled with people, and with incident, but silent. For Constantine it was as though his head had been plunged into deep water.

  There was action all around: people gesticulated wildly at one another and their mouths moved in impassioned speech, men and women fought and died, children cried or ran. But there was no sound for the prince beyond a dull roaring in his ears. He turned into a well-remembered side street to his left and watched, unsurprised, as a broken and bloodied saint, clad in filthy robes and holding a battered gilded cup, emerged from a doorway and stumbled and fell beside an open sewer. An armoured man ran to his side, as though to help him, and instead used the toe of one foot to roll t
he prostrate figure into the foulness. His plight triggered his recitation of the next section of the historian’s account.

  ‘Alas, the relics of the holy martyrs were thrown into unclean places! Then was seen what one shudders to hear, namely, the divine body and blood of Christ was spilled upon the ground or thrown about. They snatched the precious reliquaries, thrust into their bosoms the ornaments which these contained, and used the broken remnants for pans and drinking cups …’

  Doukas watched enthralled, and not for the first time, as his student spoke from a far-off place. For Constantine it was a walk through familiar places. The anonymous passers-by were dimly lit, or in faded hues, so that the principal figures upon which he relied – vivid and bright, commanding his attention – had centre stage at all times.

  He turned right and followed a street parallel to the Mese. Fine buildings lined the way, columns and pillars, statuary and towering doorways of ancient timber. Off to his right he glimpsed one curving end of the hippodrome, built for Constantine the Great and topped with four bronze horses, miraculous and enormous, the work of the genius Lysippos. Ahead of him, beyond the end of the street, stood the unmistakable edifice of the Church of Divine Wisdom, the Church of St Sophia. The pale blue dome of its roof, a bulging eye, stared unblinking into heaven above, wilfully blind as always to the suffering of her faithful.

  ‘Nor can the violation of the Great Church be listened to with equanimity. For the sacred altar, formed of all kinds of precious materials and admired by the whole world, was broken into bits and distributed among the soldiers, as was all the other sacred wealth of so great and infinite splendour.’

  From the main doorway of the church poured a river of unspeakable horror, human and animal excrement bearing whole and partial corpses of men and women, as well as of beasts. The surging river of filth broke around the base of a great stone column a hundred feet high. Atop it stood a colossal sculpture of Justinian, the last great Roman, seated upon a mighty horse. He was styled after Achilles, with gleaming breastplate and helmet topped with a cock’s comb. In his left hand he held a globe that declared that the shadow of his grasp stretched across the whole world.