by Neil Oliver
The price John Grant had paid for their transport was the promise of their service in the war to come. Their ship would be one of three commissioned to carry a force of armed men to Constantinople, and the addition of two more professional soldiers was apparently welcome. Lẽna had passed for a man before and would do so again provided no one paid too close attention.
John Grant would do the talking and she would provide silent, brooding backup. Given the anonymity afforded by the always grim and dehumanising conditions aboard a troop ship, it would only be a matter of keeping her face obscured, and shunning contact with the ship’s company. As it had turned out, her sickness put her below with all those dozens similarly afflicted. For the duration she had been just another heaving mess curled in a corner and best avoided.
The commander of the operation was a Genoan noble, and the money for the whole enterprise – the private army of eight hundred men, their arms and the vessels to carry them – was coming out of his own purse. All of it was in answer to the latest desperate cry for help from the emperor himself.
It seemed their own need to reach Constantinople was in tune with a greater calling that was penetrating the distant reaches of the world like ripples from a stone tossed into a pond.
‘Badr was right,’ John Grant had said on his return from the harbour and his successful negotiations.
‘About what?’ she had asked.
‘About the Ottomans. Badr said years ago they were on the rise – and we fought for them together more than once. But I wonder if even he would have predicted how high they might reach.’
Lẽna had nodded, her eyes raised so that she looked beyond him.
‘Their desire for Constantinople is as old as their heathen faith,’ she had said. ‘Their Prophet foretold the fall of the city into their hands. They have believed it ever since.’
‘Well it seems a reckoning is at hand,’ he had replied. ‘If the winds of the same storm might drive me where I wish to go, then that is well and good.’
She had shrugged and set herself to gathering up her few possessions. His casual dismissal of the threat posed to a Christian city by a Muslim horde had caused her pain, but she held her tongue.
Their journey so far, from the claustrophobic confines of the tunnel to the sour-smelling belly of the carrack, had taken most of a year, certainly more months than she had bothered to count, and they carried only what they needed to survive. The miles that remained, separating them from their goal, mattered little. The force that drew her towards Constantinople now was greater even than that driving John Grant, though she would not have revealed as much to him.
She had spent almost the entire voyage in a miasma of nausea, either heaving the emptiness of her insides into a wooden bucket or sipping brackish water that did little more than keep her alive. From within the depths of her suffering she had recalled the long-ago journey with her father to the western isles of Scotland and the home of MacDonald of Islay. She had been just a girl then, and while the necessary sea crossings had made her queasy, out of sorts for their duration, there had been nothing to compare with the misery of this first sea voyage made in adulthood. She would have prayed to God for death except that even in extremis she had been wary of making demands upon the almighty when so much else was at stake.
More than that, seasickness aside, she was somehow at peace.
‘I did not know a person could turn such a colour,’ John Grant had said on one of his regular visits to her side. Despite her suffering, his attentiveness pleased her for reasons she preferred not to dwell upon. That said, if anything could make her feel worse than she already did, it was the presence of someone, anyone, who was so visibly well.
‘Leave me be,’ she had said. She wanted not to talk, but to listen, and the making of words had burned her raw throat so that she felt she was swallowing hot sand.
‘The good news is that the captain says we’ll be in the Sea of Marmara by this time tomorrow,’ he had said.
‘And the bad news?’ she asked.
‘No bad news,’ he said. ‘Giustiniani says the weather is changing for the better at last. The wind is behind us … or athwart, or … on the side of us … or … or anyway it’s precisely where he – that is we, and especially you – would want it to be.’
‘Quite the navigator, you are,’ she said.
‘Indeed I am,’ he said. ‘And I can also tell you that we will be in the city in no more than a day or two.’
Those conversations – only hours before – seemed to her like distant memories already. Whatever storm clouds were building above the Christian empire of Byzantium had apparently stirred the sea for a thousand miles around – but their weather had changed as predicted and she had awoken from her latest fitful sleep to find a sea smooth as oil and the ship steady upon it.
The near-instantaneous transformation of her condition had seemed almost magical to her and she had offered up a silent prayer of thanks. All at once she had felt able to rise – and better yet to climb out of the fetid confines of the cramped and stinking quarters below decks.
John Grant had seen her emerge through the hatchway and had joined her at once. There was still a distance between them – some wariness each retained regarding the other’s intentions – but she detected something in his manner that seemed almost like hunger for her presence.
‘How’s your new friend?’ she asked.
She was referring, he knew, to the man whose personality permeated every inch of the ship – and of the others in the flotilla.
Standing close to Giovanni Giustiniani Longo felt like proximity to a flame; in his presence there was the prospect of both warmth and danger. A head shorter than John Grant, he was as muscled as a cat. He was clean-shaven and his features were fine, with full, almost girlish lips and dark, blue-black hair. It was his eyes, however, that captured and held attention. Large, dark and deep-set beneath heavy brows, they shone with an inner light, suggestive of sharp intelligence but also of sadness, or regret. His clothes, though obviously expensive and well made, were dishevelled and worn. He seemed never to be at rest – always moving among the men, asking questions, checking gear or holding court.
As Lẽna spoke, they both watched their new-found leader busying himself with a mariner’s astrolabe.
‘He is in fine form,’ said John Grant. ‘If we must go to war, then it is good to go with one such as he.’
She said nothing in reply and he turned to look at her, troubled by her silence.
‘Are you sorry you came?’ he asked.
She shook her head. She had already told him she had business of her own in Constantinople. When she had first said it, as they sat drying themselves by a hastily built fire on the riverbank after their flight through the hellish confines of the cave, he had doubted her.
He had long known that the Great City was in peril – that the Turkmen were pressing the last redoubt of Christendom in the East. Every soldier had known it for years – and some had been drawn to the place already in hopes of rich rewards.
Both sides were paying for the services of fighting men after all – Christian and Muslim – and the swords of mercenaries would go to the highest bidder. He had fought for both empires in his time, alongside Badr Khassan, and would have cared little for the outcome. His only motivation now was his promise – the safety of the girl. If that put him on the side of the Christians, then so be it.
But it seemed word of the city’s plight had reached even Lẽna’s hiding place in the convent at the Great Shrine. She knew too – and it seemed she cared, though why or how much he could not tell.
The city walls were growing clearer, rising out of the sea like a cresting wave. Their ship rode up on the back of an unexpected swell and dropped into the trough beyond. Lẽna felt her stomach turn over, and she reached above her head to grab hold of a rope and steady herself.
‘What is your business here – really?’ he asked. ‘Why have you come?’
The nausea peaked and passe
d, leaving her breathless. She swallowed thickly before answering.
‘I am afraid I have your Angus Armstrong to thank for setting me on the path,’ she said. ‘If he had not taken me, I would not have … I would not have got the message. That is why I spared his life.’
‘Message?’ he had asked.
‘I had been hiding too long, is all,’ she said. She ran a hand through her hair, smoothing it into shape. ‘By taking me he … he brought me back into the world.’
He knew she was leaving something out of her testimony, perhaps a great deal.
‘Why there of all places?’ he asked. ‘Why the shrine of St James?’
‘Patrick Grant’s idea,’ she said. ‘Just somewhere far away.’
‘From what?’
‘From Sir Robert Jardine,’ she said.
‘Tell me,’ he said.
She felt her skin prickle with discomfort. It was all so long ago, and breathing upon the embers of her memories filled her with heat that made her blush. She pulled the scarf up to the bridge of her nose. For all that the story pained her, the need to tell him about herself was stronger still.
‘Years ago – many years ago, when I was young – I went to war.’
He raised his eyebrows.
‘I was a better soldier than any of them,’ she said. ‘I had trained as long, or longer. I was born to it, born for it. I do not know why – it is only the truth. My father saw to my training, as I have told you, and when we returned from Scotland I was taken before the dauphin, the man who would be king.’
He watched her scarf move as she spoke, found it easier than looking into her eyes.
‘They walked me into a room full of people. I should have recognised no one – I was just a peasant girl and those were great men of the realm. But as soon as I saw him, I knew he was the heir.’
‘How did you know?’ he asked.
‘I have told you,’ she said. ‘God talks to me through his angels, and I listen.’
‘God pointed out the prince?’
She looked at him pityingly, and he regretted his teasing tone.
‘I let go of my father’s hand and crossed the room towards him, and when he turned around I knelt before him.’
‘And what happened?’
‘What happened? People gasped is what happened,’ she said. ‘People gasped and then clapped and the dauphin took my hand and helped me stand.’
‘And what did he make of you – just a peasant girl?’
She smiled at him indulgently.
‘He made me commander of his armies,’ she said. ‘I was God’s instrument, he said, and only I could rid his kingdom of the English.’
‘And my father?’
‘I was accompanied at all times by bodyguards – Scotsmen. Sir Robert Jardine was among them. Serving him – and serving me, as it turned out – was Patrick Grant.’
‘Serving you?’
‘Once we had our victory – when the English were on the run – Jardine saw the bigger prize. He betrayed me – betrayed all of us. He had his men murder the rest of my protectors and took me prisoner – bore me away to my enemies.
‘Because I said I heard the word of God, the English called me a heretic and a witch. They held a trial for me and found me guilty and condemned me to burn in their fire.
‘On the night before the dawn of my execution, Patrick Grant came for me – freed me from my prison and carried me away.’
‘You talk as though the memory of it makes you sad,’ said John Grant. ‘My father spared you a dreadful death.’
‘I do not deny that,’ she said.
‘So what is wrong?’ he asked.
‘What is wrong is that another died in my place,’ she said. It seemed she could not bring herself to look at him as she said the words, and she gazed out to sea instead.
‘The English commander could not bear the loss of face,’ she continued. ‘Rather than admit to my escape, he had his men seize another girl – a peasant girl like me, but one who had done them no harm. It was she who suffered my fate instead. They cut her hair like me and dressed her like me – told the waiting crowd she was me. She had done no harm – to them or to anyone else – and yet they tied her to a stake and had the flames consume her.’
John Grant was quiet, considering her words.
‘The death of that other girl should not be your burden,’ he said at last. ‘You were not there. You could not have known.’
‘I let him take me,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I was afraid,’ she said. ‘I was afraid to burn in their fire.’
‘Blame my father, then,’ he said. ‘He was the one who carried you away.’
‘I could have stopped him,’ she said.
‘Who?’
‘I could have stopped your father, accepted my fate.’
She looked him squarely in the eye.
‘I can stop anyone,’ she said. There was no note of idle boasting in her voice, only a statement of fact.
‘Well what have we here?’
The question came from a man standing behind them. Like the rest of the mercenaries aboard, he spoke in the Tuscan dialect, and both Lẽna and John Grant understood him at once. So engrossed had they been in their own conversation, they had not noticed he was close enough to overhear.
They turned sharply to face him. Out of the corner of his eye John Grant saw that Giustiniani had heard the question too – or more likely its angry tone. While the three of them stood eyeing one another, more and more men on deck became aware of a sudden change of mood in the air and stopped what they were doing, the better to watch.
‘What have we here?’ the man asked again. He was in his middle years, lean and muscled – the product of hard work and harder fighting. Realising he had gained an audience, and relishing it, he raised his voice for all to hear.
‘This one has a lady friend,’ he said, gesturing at John Grant. He made a grab for the scarf that partially concealed Lẽna’s face, but she stepped smoothly out of his reach. There was a laugh, and some catcalls as the watchers warmed to the moment. It had been a long and uncomfortable voyage, and here, suddenly, was a wholly unexpected and welcome distraction.
John Grant shot a glance at Giustiniani. The commander had set down the astrolabe and was watching the scene with an expression that was somewhere between surprise and dismay. For all that he seemed interested, his stance suggested he was inclined to let natural justice run its course.
‘Well let’s have a look at you, then,’ said the soldier, and this time he stepped forward as though to grab Lẽna by the shoulders. Despite the enervating toll exacted by the seasickness upon her muscles and her senses, the lunge might as well have been made in slow motion. As her assailant began to close the distance between them, she stepped not away from him but towards, turning her right shoulder as she did so and dropping into a half-crouch. His momentum, coupled with the rolling movement of the ship, was suddenly to her advantage rather than his. Her right hand grabbed the man’s crotch, her left snapped shut on his throat, and in one graceful, effortless movement she propelled him into a forward somersault over her knee.
He landed flat on his back on the deck with a solid sound that made the onlookers grimace and raise their shoulders in sympathy. When she knelt down on him, her knee on his neck, the point of Angus Armstrong’s knife was hovering just above his right eye.
‘Hold there!’
It was the voice of Giustiniani, and he was striding towards them. By the time he reached them, Lẽna had straightened and stood up. She spun the knife in the air so that she could catch the tip and offer him the handle. He stopped and stared at the weapon. Like everyone else, he had missed the moment when she had made it appear. He held his hands up and shook his head.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘That clearly belongs to you – but I would rather you put it away.’
She slipped the weapon blade-first under the cuff of her right sleeve, until it was out of sight once m
ore.
Giustiniani looked at her questioningly, and in reply she raised a hand and pulled away her scarf. She looked him in the eye without blinking, and he returned her gaze evenly.
‘What business have you here, madam?’ he asked.
John Grant opened his mouth to speak, but the commander held up a hand to silence him.
‘I have deceived you,’ she said. ‘But if it is war you are bringing to the Turk, then I too have skills that are of use.’
Giustiniani looked down at his winded and bested soldier, who had just begun to move – rolling on to his stomach and rising to his knees, his eyes wide and staring. He was a veteran of many battles. The commander had seen him stand and fight and hold his own when others might have fled. Yet this woman had tossed him aside like an empty coat.
‘My battles are not fought by women,’ he said.
‘More fool you,’ she said. ‘And so what would you have me do? We travel together, this lad and I, and we fight together.’ She glanced at John Grant and he nodded.
‘I have no time for this,’ said Giustiniani. ‘We make port in a few hours and my fight is there, not here on this ship.’
He pointed at John Grant and addressed him directly.
‘You are in my service,’ he said. ‘What arrangements you seek to make for your … your travelling companion are your own affair.’
He turned away, waving at them with one large hand. In his mind’s eye he watched once more as his soldier turned a somersalt in the air before flopping on to the deck like a landed fish.
Without turning back he said:
‘I would ask only that you do no more harm to any of the men.’
There was laughter at this, as one by one the onlookers began talking among themselves, marvelling at what had just happened.
The soldier Lẽna had overpowered was on his feet, brushing down his clothes and wiping his face with his hands.