Master of Shadows

by Neil Oliver

  In hopes of lowering the temperature of the sultan’s furious disappointment, a company of prisoners had earlier been paraded before him. The luckless party had been taken during the retreat, bundled among the fleeing Turks and carried back to their encampment.

  Mehmet had watched impassively as they were tortured and abused with hot knives, and then blinded. They had had little to reveal anyway, and he had lost interest before even half of them had been defiled. Instead he had had each man strung up by his feet from a hastily erected timber frame. One by one they had been sawn in two with long blades, from crotch to shoulder. Mehmet had heard that these Christians valued their heads and so feared the consequences of being separated from them. He had therefore spared them the indignity by leaving their heads upon their shoulders. Now all of them were dead, steam rising lazily from their remains.

  ‘I am saddened,’ he said.

  No one replied, not even Halil Pasha, who valued his own head as much as did any Christian.

  ‘I have provided the tools required for the task, and yet here I sit outside the walls while the emperor looks down at me from on top of a heap of dirt. Explain to me why this is so.’

  Halil Pasha stepped forward, but before he could speak, Mehmet continued.

  ‘I am sad about these infidels,’ he said, gesturing behind him with a wave of his hand. ‘In spite of all my encouragement – my love – you have fallen short, every one of you. And all you can think to do is bring these men to me – these brave defenders – and have me watch while they are tormented.

  ‘I am saddened,’ he said again.

  Sensing the building of a wave that might sweep him and the rest away, Halil found his moment to speak.

  ‘There is another possibility,’ he said.

  Mehmet was quiet for a long minute. Finally he sighed and motioned with his hand in front of his face, as though savouring a scent and wafting it towards his nose. Halil recognised it as a gesture to continue. He was long in the tooth now, having served and outlived Mehmet’s own father, and well practised in reading his masters.

  ‘It has always been thought that the Great City, and the walls surrounding it, were built on solid rock,’ he said.

  Mehmet looked his vizier in the eye for the first time since the audience had begun.

  ‘But among our mercenaries are men who say different.’

  ‘You have my attention,’ said Mehmet.

  ‘They are men from the north, from the land of Saxony,’ said Halil. ‘They are miners of silver, and masters in the art of digging and cutting away mountains. To their tools, it is said, marble is as beeswax and the black mountains of their own land are as piles of dust.’

  Mehmet watched his vizier, enjoying the visible tension and the need to please. He knew too that Halil would be happiest watching his sultan swinging from a noose with his feet cut off at the ankles.

  ‘And so what do they say about the rock here?’ asked Mehmet.

  ‘That is the point, sire,’ said Halil. ‘Among them are men who say they have seen terrain like this in their own country – that while there is a hard crust over much of the surface, it can be cut through.’

  ‘And then?’ asked Mehmet.

  ‘And then, the Saxons say, it is sand and soil and boulders – that it is a matter only of tunnelling towards and then under the walls.’

  ‘We have mountains of black powder for our guns,’ said Mehmet. ‘And more on the way. If I cannot knock down the walls, then perhaps I may blow them to the heavens. I had thought mining impossible in this terrain, but if what these Saxons say is true …’

  He stood up and walked towards his vizier, who unconsciously took three steps backwards.

  ‘… then perhaps the bone in Allah’s throat may yet be loosened.’

  48

  ‘Buckets and bowls?’ asked Giustiniani. ‘So it has come to this?’

  The Genoan’s tone was gently mocking, but he had acceded to the young Scotsman’s request just the same. When John Grant told him that the Turks were tunnelling under the walls – that they might burst from the ground at any moment or under cover of night (like Greek warriors of old, from their giant horse), he was sceptical for only a few moments.

  Giustiniani had spent the larger part of his life commanding men in war. Along the way he had learned the value, indeed the necessity, of trust. Among his company were several men he trusted with his own life. He knew too, with an intensity of feeling that was almost painful, that all his soldiers had placed their trust in him. Most of all, however, he trusted his instincts, and since their first encounter aboard the ship, he had had a feeling about John Grant.

  He would have struggled to say out loud quite what it was, and did not even fully understand it inside his own head. Some of it came from the manner of the woman who had been by his side. She had had to be twice his age and yet she had followed him into a war, disguising herself as a man in order to do so. He had discerned no hint of romantic attachment between them, and so it had been something else that placed her close to him and kept her there.

  And then, he had to admit, there were the eagles. He had watched dumbfounded with the rest as the giant birds had come together upon the legbone the lad had held aloft in one hand. He had gasped at the sight of it – and at the way the birds had seemed for a moment like the incarnation of the double-headed eagle on the crest of the house of Palaiologos – and he had gone down on one knee.

  There was something in the boy, he was sure of it – something unknown and unmeasurable. There were always men upon the field of battle to whom others were drawn. Call it luck, call it good judgement, call it magic – there were those soldiers who always saw the surest path and took it, and survived as a result; men who made the right choice in a split second, the choice that saved their lives. And other men noticed – others on the field sensed the one among them who seemed guided, perhaps sheltered by an angel’s wings, and he gave them faith and belief. They were drawn to such men and made of them lucky charms.

  With his own eyes Giustiniani had watched his soldiers seek out the young Scotsman. Since that moment in the square they had seemed pulled in his direction, drawn to his side. The truth was, Giustiniani felt it too – felt a quality about this young man – and so when John Grant came to him and said he believed tunnels were being dug beneath the walls of Constantinople, he believed him.

  For days now, in addition to fending off assaults on the fosse and upon the outer wall, the defenders had had to become preoccupied with bowls and buckets. When Giustiniani had accepted the truth of what John Grant had had to say, he asked next what was to be done about it. And the Scotsman’s answer had been to call for hundreds of vessels for holding water.

  He had filled one and placed it on the ground at the commander’s feet.

  ‘Watch what happens,’ he said, walking away from the bowl. ‘Keep your eyes on the water.’

  When he was a dozen paces from Giustiniani, he turned and stamped his foot. ‘Do you see?’ he asked.

  The Genoan smiled and nodded, watching the telltale ripples on the surface of the water.

  Having received the go-ahead for the deployment of his early-warning system, John Grant had had receptacles of every sort distributed at intervals across the space between the outer and the inner walls, placed directly on the ground where the vibrations from any nearby activity would be at their strongest. Women and children were tasked with keeping watch on them; special attention was to be paid to those bowls closest to the walls themselves.

  John Grant was on the battlements of the outer wall when it happened. It was a moonless night and he was seated among a company of weary soldiers taking comfort from a fire lit inside an iron brazier. The siege was in its third week, and the defenders, few enough to begin with, were spread thin as gossamer around the city’s perimeter. In the end it was their own silence that saved them.

  ‘Listen,’ said John Grant. He was warm enough, but the hairs had risen on his arms and he felt a pressure beneath him l
ike the uplift from a soft swell in deep water. His nerves had been jangling for days, assaulted by threats and doubts, but now there was a sound as well.

  ‘Listen,’ he said once more, and the men around him sat forward, straining to hear.

  After a few moments, the faint but unmistakable ring of a pickaxe striking rock reached out to them from the dark.

  ‘I hear it,’ said one of the soldiers.

  ‘Digging!’ said another. ‘I hear it too.’

  ‘Get word to Giustiniani,’ said John Grant, to the first who had successfully picked out the sound. ‘And to the emperor. Go!’

  The rest of the men grabbed their weapons and bolted down the steps leading to ground level. John Grant was ahead of them and sprinted to the location of the nearest of his bowls. He stood motionless beside it. Nothing. He ran on to the next, a wooden bucket, and gazed at its surface, lit by a flaming torch on the wall above. Pulsing there, with an even rhythm like that of a distant heartbeat, was the proof of all he had said.

  It was one thing to read the ripples and know someone was digging somewhere, quite another to pinpoint the location of the tunnel itself. He could already hear the sound of approaching horses. It would be the commander – perhaps the emperor as well – and they would want answers.

  In the moments that remained to him, he closed his eyes and reached out towards the push, searching for its centre. The world turned and hurtled into the void on its endless flight, and John Grant, witness to the journey, imagined the force of it scouring away dust and sand to reveal a lost jewel.

  ‘Where is it?’ It was the voice of Giustiniani. ‘Where are they?’

  John Grant heard horses beside him but kept his eyes closed and was motionless while he concentrated.

  ‘Well?’

  He moved forward, walking at first and then breaking into a trot as he realised he knew where he was going, and how far. He stopped abruptly and turned to look for Giustiniani – and his eyes met those of the emperor instead, mounted upon a white horse.

  ‘Well?’ asked Constantine.

  ‘Here,’ said John Grant, and he gestured at the ground between his feet. His voice was calm and filled with certainty. ‘We dig here.’

  49

  Lẽna’s breathing was shallow and slow as she stood in the shadows of the balcony above the throne room in Blachernae Palace. Unusually adept in combat though she was, fast as a striking snake and as strong, she had also mastered stillness and silence. Just as John Grant had been transfixed by the sight of the girl standing by the emperor’s side when they arrived in the royal harbour of Constantinople, so too had the Maid of Orleans. Had she been on her own, she might have missed the face in the crowd of onlookers. What she had noticed instead was her son’s concentrated gaze, and when she followed it, and found the girl who had so captivated him, her breath had caught in her throat.

  As soon as it had been possible, she had absented herself from the fighting men on the battlements and gone in search of her. The pressure from the siege and the barely contained chaos it had created in the city meant comings and goings to and from the palace precinct were less well controlled than they might otherwise have been. Lẽna was, in any case, more than capable of sidestepping a guard or two and finding her way, by stealth and guile, into the vast and sprawling interior of the building itself.

  Luck had played its part as well, and it had been as she made a circuit of the cloister surrounding all four sides of an elegant courtyard, with an extravagantly appointed ornamental pond and fountain at its centre, that she had observed the progress of two women. They had been on the far side of the courtyard and moving in the direction opposite to her own.

  Her attention had been drawn first by the urgent speed of their walk – not side by side like friends or colleagues, but in single file, the one leading the other. There had been a tension about the pair, and it was as she scrutinised their movements that she realised the rearward of the two, the one following, was the girl from the harbour.

  Blessing providence, she had looped quickly around the courtyard so as to follow the pair at an inconspicuous distance. After a few minutes they had arrived at a dark and heavily panelled wooden door. The girl leading the way had opened it on to what appeared to be a huge hall or chamber, and the second girl had entered, without any sign of hesitation, while the other stood by. Lẽna had looked around before deciding to follow the corridor around a corner to the right, and so give the impression she had business of her own to attend to.

  She had spotted an open door leading to a flight of stairs. Guessing that it might put her in a position above the interior of the space the girl had entered, she had taken the steps two and three at a time before arriving, as she had hoped, in a vast and darkened gallery lined with wooden pews and designed to give an audience a discreet view of anything happening in the huge hall below.

  She had taken a moment or two to admire the cavernous scale of the place. She had heard the sound of a solitary pair of feet clicking on a stone floor, and while she could not yet see the girl, with her eyes she followed the echo of her footsteps up into a domed ceiling impossibly high above. Had she not been reminding herself to remain silent and undetected, Lẽna might have gasped at the immensity and the grandeur.

  It was the booming sound of a door slamming shut – no doubt the door through which the girl had entered, she thought – that pulled her back into the present. Carefully she walked forward, still concealed by shadows, until she could observe the scene below.

  The girl, the beautiful girl with the long chestnut hair and a perfect face made to fit neatly into the cupped hands of a lover, was so rooted to the spot in the centre of the chamber that she might have grown out of the floor. For all that she was dwarfed by the immense space, she was nonetheless its focal point, like a diamond in its setting, and Lẽna felt her heart swell and rise in her chest at the sight of her.

  ‘Costa?’ the girl had said, and at the sound of it – the sound of certainty and disbelief mixed in equal measures – Lẽna was transported back to the moment when she had known the dauphin, without understanding how or why. The angels had not spoken to her, had not told her which one of the many men she should honour with her attention, and yet she had felt their wisdom wrapping around her like a following wind that moved her in the right direction.

  ‘Costa?’ The bittersweet sound of a word from a heart made naked by hope and doubt rose from the girl’s lips and flitted, like a bird, between the curls, curves and twists of stone forming the details of the ceiling high above her.

  Reluctantly tearing her eyes from the girl, Lẽna followed the line of her gaze, as if the desperate heat of it had burned a path across the distance separating her from its object. It was a young man, tall and lean. He was robed and garbed as a prince, in shimmering white and gold. Shafts of light from windows high in the walls made him shine so that he was almost too much to look upon. On his head, resting lightly on his temples, was a coronet of gold the colour of rich butter and set with many gems, polished en cabochon. Had she not known better, Lẽna might have mistaken him for an angel.

  ‘Hello, Yaminah,’ he said.

  For the first time, and at the sound of his voice, the girl moved. Rather than towards him, however, she took a step backwards and away. She stopped and craned her head and neck forward as though that couple of extra inches might sharpen the sight of him. Visibly gathering her courage around her like the folds of long skirts, she began walking hesitantly towards him, turning her head slowly from one side to the other as though favouring each of her eyes in turn, the better to examine him. Lẽna could not fail to notice that the girl had stopped saying his name.

  The young man did not move; rather he stayed firmly in place with his feet slightly apart and his hands on his hips.

  ‘Stop there, Yaminah.’

  At the sound of the new voice, the girl froze.

  Lẽna turned her head to locate the speaker. It was a woman, stepping out from the shadows beneath the gal
lery opposite. She was closer to Lẽna’s age than that of the girl or the young man, with long hair as black as night. She was tall and stood straight to maximise every inch of the advantage it gave her. In one hand she carried a black walking stick topped with a white carving. The distance was too great and Lẽna could not see the shape clearly, but while the woman walked she fondled the decoration with the fingers of her right hand.

  Lẽna’s heart ached for the girl. Although she had stopped when commanded by the woman, she had not for a moment switched her gaze away from the young man’s face. Her eyes seemed to plead wordlessly with him, or for him. Her hands were together, the fingers worrying at each other like squabbling siblings. Lẽna looked at him again and found that he was smiling.

  All at once the intensity of the moment was ripped asunder by the sound and percussion of a pounding impact nearby. The girl dropped to her knees and put her hands over her ears; the young man briefly crumpled too and turned to look for signs of damage or danger. There were none, and Lẽna had realised faster than they that whatever part of the palace the cannonball had hit, it was somewhere out of sight of the great room within which they were gathered. She saw too that the middle-aged woman had been least affected by the intrusion. She had ducked her head, no more than that, and regained her composure almost at once.

  ‘Makes a handsome bridegroom, does he not?’ she asked.

  Yaminah collected herself and stood up straight. She turned from the young man (straightening too and brushing at his clothes, as though they mattered most) and looked at Helena. The girl’s confusion was palpable, and Lẽna realised that she had been holding her breath as she watched. She let it out, slowly and silently, while the girl spoke. Her gaze flickered between one and the other as she did so, as though not sure to whom her enquiries were best directed.