Master of Shadows

by Neil Oliver

  The sun, he knew, would be past its height and descending into the west once more, there to have its light extinguished by the Sea of Marmara. But the sky above was made only of murk and greyness, and he cursed the dismal weather as he spotted the familiar sight of men at work dropping a shaft into the earth – this one close by the masonry of the outer wall.

  ‘This is a bad one,’ said the lieutenant – the same that had sent the messenger to summon him.

  ‘They’re all bad,’ said John Grant. ‘What is different about this one?’

  ‘There are ripples in every bowl for a distance of sixty paces along the wall.’

  ‘Along it?’

  The soldier nodded and looked down at the ground, as though expecting to see the earth itself vibrating.

  John Grant considered the news. Every previous burrowing by the Turks had passed directly under the walls, perpendicular to them, in apparent hope of making it beyond the defences before striking for the surface and a clear run at the city and the citizens beyond. If the lieutenant was right in his assessment of this latest effort, the focus of the enemy’s attentions had turned to the wall itself.

  ‘If they have undermined the wall, then enough black powder would bring it down along a length too great to defend,’ he said.

  The lieutenant nodded and worried at his bottom lip with his top teeth.

  John Grant had picked up a shovel lying by the lip of the shaft and was about to descend and join the diggers when he heard Giustiniani’s voice.

  ‘You have done enough this day,’ he said.

  He turned to face the commander and found the usually cheerful countenance replaced by a frown.

  ‘You have fought hard and well,’ said Giustiniani. ‘Leave this one to others and get the rest you need.’

  John Grant shook his head.

  ‘I must be there,’ he said. ‘I could not rest knowing they are burrowing down there. It makes my skin crawl as though I had lice under my clothes.’

  Giustiniani smiled, but the furrows on his forehead remained.

  ‘If you will work on, then so will I.’

  With that, the Genoan selected an iron-headed pickaxe and was first to the top of the ladder.

  By the time John Grant had joined him at the bottom, the diggers had stopped their efforts and were holding up their hands for silence. Faint but unmistakable was the ping of steel upon stone, the sound of the miners at work directly beneath.

  ‘We must make ready with our fire,’ said Giustiniani.

  John Grant shook his head.

  ‘We dare not,’ he said. ‘If the wall is undermined, the risk is too great. At the very least, the flames would consume whatever props they have in place to support their workings. At worst, if they have black powder down there, then fire will do the job for them. Either way, we must fight them hand to hand.’

  Giustiniani sighed and nodded, accepting the truth of it. By whispered commands and gestures, the message was sent topside that a force of men was urgently required. Within minutes, a little army had assembled. The vanguard was on the ladders, the rest waiting ready to follow when the first wave had gone in. When all was ready, John Grant gave the signal and the diggers hacked at the barrier of material still separating them from the foe. All at once the last of it gave way and their picks broke through into a cavity. By the dim light of the lamps inside they glimpsed the faces of many men. With a jolt of dread, John Grant realised that their own workings had been heard and an enemy force had assembled to confront them.

  ‘With me!’ he shouted, and leapt into the half-dark, followed by Giustiniani and half a dozen lightly armed men. Swords were altogether useless in the narrow confines of the tunnels and it was with knives and hammers and wooden clubs studded with iron nails that they plunged among the enemy. As always there was barely room to manoeuvre, and the only way forward was through the enemy in front. John Grant carved his way past one and then a second. He felt the press of men behind him and then, to his shocked surprise, the tunnel opened out into a chamber as wide as three men were tall. While he fought, he glimpsed timber props supporting the roof, through which lumps of masonry – the foundations of the wall – protruded like ground-down teeth. Worse still were the piled sacks between the props – surely filled with gunpowder and ready to be ignited.

  Perhaps it was the fatigue of the fight at the Gate of St Romanus, or maybe the enervating toll of a sleepless night. In any case John Grant’s senses finally let him down and he failed to see the assailant advancing upon him from the side while he tackled a man in front of him.

  The karambit was in his hand but fell from fingers made limp from a crushing blow to the side of his head, just above the neck. He dropped poleaxed, and as he lay on his back he felt hands grabbing at his clothes and hair and hauling him clear of the fight, further into the dimly lit tunnel and beyond the reach of his comrades.

  His world spun and his vision swam, and in a final moment of clarity before the darkness took him, he looked up into the face of Angus Armstrong, archer and assassin.

  ‘Well now, lad – or should I say devil, since that’s what the boys around here have taken to calling you,’ he said. ‘Sir Robert would like a word, if you don’t mind.’

  59

  Michel Doukas was looking at his hands. He was perched upon a window seat in Prince Constantine’s bedchamber, but he had seen enough of the city that day. He had therefore been relieved to find the shutters drawn and the room in darkness, save for the finger of light reflected on the disc of polished bronze by the prince’s bed.

  He was wearing fresh clothes, but his hair was still damp and the skin of his hands was puckered from the soaking. He had been by the hippodrome, close by the Church of St Sophia, at a carefully chosen vantage point overlooking the likely path of the procession.

  Emperor Constantine himself had grown weary of the enervating misery of the citizens, their ceaseless appeals to this icon or that and the endless tolling of a thousand bells, the all-pervading atmosphere of defeat. He had been born into a city and an empire through which rumour and superstition were marbled like fat through meat. He understood the bottomless depth of their faith, their need for reassurance from oracles and auguries; most of all he was sensitive to – and tolerant of – their flaccid fatalism.

  But enough was enough and he had told his advisers, Doukas included, what had to be done to prop them up before they dissolved entirely and sank into the dust beneath their own feet.

  The time had come, the emperor had said, to call upon the Virgin herself. Constantinople was held in Mary’s cupped hands, after all, and the people must see that she was with them still. Accordingly he had summoned the city’s most precious icon – the likeness of the Virgin they called the Hodegetria (which meant She who Shows the Way) – so that it might be carried through the streets for all to see.

  Doukas was immensely fat now, and his days of tramping miles through streets thronged with the grovelling faithful were definitely behind him. Accordingly he had eschewed the march in favour of finding a location from which to watch proceedings as they passed him by. He was therefore in position beneath the eaves of the ancient and crumbling hippodrome when he heard the unmistakable sound of the procession.

  It had been a decent morning – dull as usual, but still and mild. Doukas had been seated on his luxuriously upholstered bottom on a broad stone step that should have given a fine view. He heard them long before he saw them. He was hardly alone on the steps; around him were gathered hundreds of citizens, and at the sound of the Virgin’s approach they set up their accustomed lament, throwing back their heads and calling out their prayers to heaven above. Finally the procession itself came into view, led by a priest in full raiment and holding aloft a golden cross heavily jewelled. Behind him came more churchmen, monks and priests, and then the common folk – men, women and children, all of them walking in time, singing or praying or a combination of both.

  The Hodegetria was a sight to behold – life-size and painted
, it was said, by St Luke himself. She was carried upon a wooden stage supported by the shoulders of a dozen monks, and as they approached, it was possible to believe that the Virgin was there too, inhabiting the plaster and stone.

  All seemed well: the faithful swayed in time with one another and with the motion of the censers, from which cloying clouds of incense billowed and swirled; the voices swelled and rose together. Surely God himself would hear and look down upon his children with loving eyes. So when the thunderclap came, rattling Doukas’ teeth in their sockets and setting the hairs on his arms on end, it was as shocking and unexpected as if the Virgin had stuck out her plaster tongue and pulled aside her plaster robes to reveal a pert breast.

  Women and children cried out in fright and the monks carrying the Hodegetria flinched as one so that the statue wobbled, sickeningly, and then toppled from the pallet and on to the soft ground at their feet.

  If the women had cried out before, they howled now – and the men too. What worse sign could there be that the Virgin wished to be elsewhere? Doukas had risen to his feet, his mouth open and his eyes wide. The monks set down the pallet and clustered around the statue lying face down in the dirt. But before they could move it, let alone set it upright once more, a second peal of thunder rolled across the sky and sheets of hailstones the size of peas, mixed with freezing torrents of rain, swept across the city. Within seconds the streets ran like rivers and a veritable torrent spewed around the Hodegetria until she was all but submerged.

  Doukas had stood transfixed, oblivious to the drenching of the rain and the scouring of the hail. He watched in silence as men, women and children slipped and fell or were washed right off their feet by the force of the deluge. For all that the monks and others had struggled to right the fallen Virgin, calling out to her as they did so, she refused to move.

  Shaken to his marrow, the cold finally penetrating his clothes and chilling his bulk, urging him to move, Doukas had turned from the scene in search of transport back to the palace.

  The prince had listened without interruption to his friend’s account of the morning’s events. Normally it was his custom and practice to heckle and tease his erstwhile mentor, but the all-pervading city-wide sense of grief and foreboding seemed to have settled upon his shoulders as well. Minutes had passed since Doukas had stopped speaking, but Constantine was content just to watch him as he studied his hands, first the backs and then the lines on his palms.

  ‘I am growing old,’ he said at last. ‘I look at my hands now and see my father’s. It is as though he has been within me all along and is now rising to the surface.’

  ‘Did you love him?’ asked the prince.

  Doukas finished his examination of his hands and placed them on his meaty thighs before answering.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Then it is no bad thing to be reminded of him,’ said Constantine.

  ‘I see his face too,’ said Doukas. ‘Every morning when I look in the mirror to shave.’

  ‘Then you remember him every day,’ said Constantine. ‘I am sure he would be pleased – to know that he is in his son’s thoughts so often, and not forgotten.’

  ‘I remember everything,’ said Doukas. ‘Your father wants a record he can see, and pass onwards into the future, and so he has me write down what I have seen and what I have learned. You and I carry the truth of it in our heads; others would have it on parchment piled on shelves in darkened rooms. As long as the pages remember, they themselves are free to forget’.

  ‘You should tell it to the bees,’ said Constantine.

  ‘The bees?’ asked Doukas.

  Constantine smiled. ‘Something Yaminah says. She says beekeepers must tell their bees everything, or else they will feel neglected and up and fly away in search of others who will pay them more attention.’

  ‘No one likes to be forgotten,’ said Doukas. ‘Overlooked.’

  ‘Was Yaminah there?’ the prince asked. ‘Was she there when Our Lady took her tumble?’

  The teacher was quiet for a moment, seemingly surprised by the question.

  ‘If she was, I did not see her,’ he said.

  ‘How will you remember me?’ asked the prince. ‘What have you written about Prince Constantine of the house of Palaiologos?’

  ‘It is all there,’ said Doukas. He seemed happier on familiar ground. ‘I am a historian, after all. If I do not write it down and keep it safe and pass it on, it will be as though it had never been. As though you had never been.’

  ‘So sombre, Doukas,’ said the prince.

  ‘Are these not sombre times?’

  Constantine did not answer, and looked at the backs of his own hands instead.

  It was while the prince’s gaze was elsewhere that Doukas felt able to begin telling him another story. Before long, Constantine was watching his old friend and teacher even more closely than before, but Doukas kept his eyes averted, anywhere but on the prince’s face, as he told him what the emperor had ordered him to do.

  As the story progressed, Constantine remained quiet but reached into a drawer for a handful of his shadow figures. He selected the fat Turk – the same that had always played the part of Ali Bey in the story Yaminah requested again and again – but this time he used a little pair of shears to clip off the fez. Now the shadow it cast bore a satisfactory resemblance to his old teacher, and it was joined upon the ceiling by the silhouette of a broken boy, a beautiful girl and an evil emperor.

  While Doukas explained that his instructions were to go back through his pages and obliterate every reference to the empire’s crippled heir, so that in years to come it would seem that he had never existed, Constantine worked his shadows with clever hands and had the boy and girl kiss, but only once and chastely, before the boy seemed to shimmer and then disappear, subsumed by the silhouette of the emperor.

  ‘The emperor has his eyes on the future,’ said Doukas. ‘And he sees no future for the empire if it should pass to you.’

  ‘To a cripple,’ said Constantine, his hands and fingers busy with the play.

  ‘He has loved you, Costa,’ said Doukas.

  ‘Not well enough,’ said Constantine.

  ‘He would see some cuttings of his tree transported to a place of safety. He might leave himself, in hopes of returning. He might send others in his stead. But whoever returns – be it him or an heir—’

  ‘Then it must be an heir who walks on two legs – not one who is pushed around on four wheels. I see it all, Doukas. Be in no doubt. Do as you must with your pen and your pages.’

  And all the while the shadow teacher had his back turned to the prince, so that for him it might be as though none of it had ever happened.

  The door of the bedchamber swung wide, and while the armed men approached the bed, and Doukas kept his eyes to the wall, the young prince raised his arms in an attitude of prayer, or perhaps surrender.

  60

  When John Grant regained consciousness, he was seated on the floor of a tent, hard against its central pole and with his hands bound tightly behind his back.

  He had a powerful headache and would have liked to rub the place between his shoulder and his neck where the weapon had come down, but the pain was of little consequence. What concerned him, when he opened his eyes and looked around, were the faces of the men watching him.

  Seated in the shadows beyond a meagre fire, worn by years but hard like seasoned wood, was Sir Robert Jardine of Hawkshaw. There were three more near him and cross-legged on the floor. They were younger, but while one of them seemed vaguely familiar, he could not conjure their names.

  Closest to him, on a little three-legged stool that barely raised him from the floor, was Angus Armstrong. A longbow was across his knees, an arrow nocked ready on the string. He was first to speak.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ he said. ‘How did you sleep?’

  ‘Like a baby,’ said John Grant.

  ‘Like a baby,’ said Armstrong. ‘Well that is what we wanted to hear.’

  ‘I
am surprised to find myself awake and alive in your company,’ said John Grant. ‘Disappointed, really.’

  Armstrong smiled and nodded.

  ‘I can imagine,’ he said.

  He paused for emphasis and then added:

  ‘I have been meaning to talk to you about your mother.’

  John Grant studied the archer’s face.

  ‘Which one?’ he asked.

  Armstrong wrinkled his nose.

  ‘Perhaps I hit you harder than I intended,’ he said. ‘Your mother? Jessie Grant?’

  John Grant said nothing, just wondered in what direction Armstrong might be headed with his talk.

  ‘Well, to begin with, when I first had her, she was Jessie Hunter,’ said Armstrong. ‘And then of course when I took her for my wife, she became an Armstrong. She was well ridden, I can assure you. Spent.’

  John Grant’s mind wrestled with the image of his mother lying with such a man, the one who had murdered her, murdered Badr – and who had hunted him all these years.

  ‘We all make mistakes,’ said John Grant. ‘My mother included.’

  ‘The mistake was all mine,’ said Armstrong. ‘The useless bitch was barren.’

  He watched John Grant in hopes of a reaction, but his captive remained still, watching him impassively.

  ‘I flung her away in the end,’ said Armstrong. ‘Flung her out.’

  He opened his mouth and with finger and thumb freed a shred of food from between two teeth; he examined it for a moment and then tossed it towards the fire.

  ‘And then your loving father came along, with you in his baggage, and scooped up my leavings. Helped himself to her worn-out cunt.’

  ‘I imagine they were happy enough with all the inches beyond the worn out part,’ said John Grant.

  There was a snort of laughter from Sir Robert, and Armstrong blinked heavily.