by Neil Oliver
‘We will meet you there, John Grant,’ said Helena. ‘And we will bring help.’
75
Yaminah had protested at John Grant’s decision to go alone, but Helena saw the sense of it. Even from the heart of the palace they could hear the sound of the Turks flooding into the city. The rout had begun and would not be stopped. The prince had to be reached, with all possible speed, but for now it was sanctuary they required.
Driven by instinct, Helena sought higher ground. Leading Yaminah by the hand, she made her way to the bottom of a broad staircase and they began their ascent. At the top of the second flight of stone steps there was a heavy oak door, and when Helena hauled it open, they found a timber walkway leading on to the battlements themselves.
Beyond them and for as far as they could see was the massed force of the Ottoman army. It was moving relentlessly forward, flooding through unattended gaps in the walls and pouring into the land promised to them by the Prophet long ago.
‘It is over,’ said Yaminah.
‘Not quite,’ said a voice close by.
Yaminah and Helena looked along the battlements. There, emerging from another doorway, was the false prince, sword unsheathed and in his hand.
‘So here we are, together again,’ he said. ‘I did so enjoy your entrance at the church. What a shame you chose to leap into the arms of another.’
‘A shame indeed,’ said Yaminah. ‘I only wish it had been your neck.’
He began walking towards them.
‘You promised me a wife,’ he said to Helena.
‘Do you really believe that matters now?’ asked the consort. ‘The city is fallen. The Turks will put you to the sword and take us into slavery.’
He slowly looked her up and down, his gaze lingering first on her hips and then on her face. Yaminah felt Helena bristle at the insolence of it.
‘You have had your day,’ he said. ‘I would say you had a beauty of a sort once upon a time, but it was the kind that is thinly spread. I see the base metal showing through the gold.’
‘We have all had our day,’ said Helena. ‘And I suspect that beauty, thinly spread or not, will offer no advantage on this one.’
‘What is your name?’
It was Yaminah who asked him, and he switched his gaze to her and looked her up and down as well.
‘I am Andrew,’ he said. The innocuousness of the question had taken him by surprise and he stopped his appraisal to pay attention to her words.
‘The first apostle,’ she said. ‘Do you know the legend of the last emperor?’
The fighting raged beneath them. Men fought and cried and died. Arrows choked the sky and guns roared, and yet there on the battlement, Yaminah had his rapt attention.
He shook his head.
She stepped closer.
‘They say there is a sheet of parchment kept under lock and key in one of the churches – I do not know which one, so don’t ask me. On it is a gridwork of little squares. The parchment is very old, and in every square is the name of an emperor. Every time an emperor dies, his name is etched into the place allotted to it. The first square has in it the name of Constantine, our city’s first. Only one square remains blank – left for the last emperor of Constantinople.’
She paused to look at him and raised her hand to her mouth, seeming to wipe her lips with her palm.
‘What do you think of that, Andrew?’ she asked. ‘Constantine and Constantine – first and last.’
He blinked, and she leaned in towards him. His lips parted and suddenly she kissed him, and while their mouths were tight together she blew with all her might and the bone, Ama’s finger bone, shot into his throat and lodged there.
She broke the kiss and stepped backwards. His look was all stunned surprise, and then he dropped the sword and his hands went to his neck and his eyes opened wide. He was silent. His airway had contracted around the obstacle and he stumbled forward. Yaminah and Helena backed away from him and he fell to his knees, clawing at his throat. He looked up at Helena, and then at Yaminah, and reached out to them with pleading hands. His face was darkening, a shade between grey and purple, and his eyes bulged as though they might burst. He pitched forward. His hands, back at his throat once more, took none of the force of the fall and his face smashed hard on to the stones of the battlement.
76
Like a loved one, the darkness took John Grant in her arms. The ghost of a flame drifted in front of him, fading to yellow and then to a blue that reminded him for just an instant of the flames that had leapt from the roof of the Church of St Sophia. Uncertain who he might find below, he had chosen darkness for his ally. He waited until there was nothing before his eyes but steady blackness.
It was the silence that sometimes felt overwhelming underground. He held his breath, straining with the effort of listening. The silence pressed against him from all sides and leaned down from above. He was a threat to its dominion – likely to make a sound and tear apart the quiet. Only the darkness held him safe.
He reached out to the side with his right hand until his fingertips brushed against the cool wall of the tunnel. Crouching, bent over like a half-shut knife, he took a step forward into the cramped space, and then another and another, and then stopped.
Instead of rock, his fingers felt empty space. He had reached a corner – a twist away towards the right. He moved sideways again until his fingers regained contact with the wall and began inching silently forward once more. Sometimes his hair brushed the roughly hewn roof of the tunnel and he flinched from it like a child ducking a blow.
In his left hand, his good hand, he clutched a knife, its blade curved like a tiger’s claw. Experience had taught him that a sword was unwieldy in the tunnels, an encumbrance. He made no noise as he drifted into the darkness, all but floating over the ground as he felt for each step. His breath trailed noiselessly from his open mouth. With his eyes closed he summoned his consciousness and sent it out ahead of him, further into the void.
He had covered a dozen yards beyond the corner when, on an impulse, he stopped. He trusted his impulses, however slight. The texture of the darkness had altered. Where before it had been smooth and still, now it was disturbed, ruffled. Ripples, like waves from a pebble dropped into water, pulsed against his face and chest. Beats from an anxious heart.
There was someone else there, someone else trying to be silent but disturbing the peace just the same by being alive. He smiled. With his knife held low, he reached out swiftly with his right hand, straight in front. He touched a man’s face, felt stubble on the chin and cold sweat. A gasp broke the silence – split it in two.
He stepped forward into the space created there, smelt the sour gust of the exhaled breath. His knife hand moved of its own accord and he found the ties binding the man’s wrists and sliced them neatly away.
Prince Constantine took a deep breath, filling his lungs, and then released it slowly, like a sigh of relief.
‘I knew you’d come,’ he said. There was nothing before the prince’s eyes but velvet black, nothing in his thoughts but the certainty of salvation at the hands of the one who had travelled from a great distance and for many years.
For John Grant, who had always felt the spinning of the planet and its flight into infinity, the world stood still. He was at the centre at last, at the fixed, unmoving centre of it all.
‘It was you,’ he said.
His mind was clear and the darkness mattered not at all. There was no push any more. There at the eye of the hurricane of his life, all was still. He reached for the prince’s hand and knew where it would be, and took it, and for a moment it was as though a charge coursed between them.
With certainty so bright it was blinding, he understood. It had not been for Yaminah, or for Badr, or for the woman his folk had called Jeannie Dark. He pulled on Constantine’s arm and the prince stood upright on legs that trembled but held firm.
‘I came for you,’ he said.
77
Lẽna was wounded. S
he had bested the Vikings of the Varangian Guard but not without paying a price. While the second and last of them was falling away from her, his life spared but knocked senseless, he had had enough fighting instinct to plunge a short, cruel blade of his own into her left side, below the ribs.
She had turned from the encounter and the wound to see the emperor himself drawing his sword from its sheath. Looking about her, in need of some moments to assess her injury and tend to it, she saw an open door in the corner of the courtyard and ran towards it with fading strength.
The emperor ran too. The lifeblood was ebbing from his domain just as the blood was leaving the body of the woman. But while he ran full tilt behind her, he felt the presence of another.
He had called out at the sight of the trio – Helena, Yaminah and the birdman – and had stood by while his guards made to take them. All of it, all that was unfolding now throughout the tattered remnants of his realm, was madness, and he had grappled for some sense to hold on to and to pull him forward.
And then the woman had put herself in the middle of it and everyone had paused as though placed momentarily under a spell, and he had felt at his shoulder the unmistakable presence of doubt.
He was forty-eight years old. He had sat upon a threadbare throne in a crumbling palace and his empire was a field of mud and corpses. He was successor to ancestors as cruel as any of the foe; heir to men who had intrigued and betrayed, tortured, blinded and murdered to secure their sweaty grasp upon the crown.
And now at the last he had set his hardest men against a woman, and seen them bested by the purity of her calling.
He had no retinue now – no more bodyguards or advisers or servants. His lover had turned against him too, it seemed. He was a soldier and that was all. His rank and status would make no difference and so he would do what soldiers did.
Lẽna concentrated on the way ahead of her. If she was to turn and face the emperor in this condition she would need a sword. Reasoning that she would find one among the fallen, she made her way towards the wall and the Gate of the Wooden Circus. Emerging from the palace compound, she spied the stone steps between the postern and the guardroom and leapt for them, landing with a groan.
In her pain and distress she looked up towards the sky and glimpsed upon the battlements above the slender figure of Yaminah, together with the emperor’s consort and the princeling from the throne room.
No sooner had she laid eyes upon them than they moved, as one, so that her view of them was blocked by the corner of a tower.
She climbed, leaning forward to use her right hand on the steps in front of her face while her left was clamped tight to her side to stem the flow of blood. She could hear the emperor behind her, and as she turned and began the second flight of steps, he was close and closing.
Reaching the top, the fighting platform wide enough for six men to march side by side, she spied a heap of slain and lunged towards it. Seizing a blood-slicked cross-hilted sword from a dead hand, she turned to face the emperor, backing away from him and weighing the threat.
Constantine took a moment to glance along the four miles of the land walls and then off towards the city. A tide of men was surging into the streets and squares, attackers and defenders together in a hellish maelstrom of fighting and fleeing. Here and there, sprouting like weeds along the wall and from the rooftops beyond, were Ottoman flags. At the sea walls the sails of cogs and carracks billowed in the breeze, preparing to depart with those carrying the coins to pay for safe passage away from the horrors to come.
Suddenly enraged once more, he turned on Lẽna as though she was to blame and passed his sword from hand to hand as he advanced upon her. Perhaps he would find the revenge he sought within her lifeless corpse.
Lẽna’s left side was wet and cold with blood and she was suddenly wearied. Despite the danger, she wanted only to sit down and take a deep breath. He came for her then and her soldier’s instincts took over so that she raised her own blade and parried the blow. He was off balance, and as he passed her, she turned and planted one booted foot on his rear and pushed him forward. He almost fell upon his face, but caught himself and staggered and regained his balance.
She felt a fresh punch of pain and looked down and saw blood, dark on her inner thigh. Bad luck had seen to it that the edge of his blade had caught her as he passed, slicing deeply through fabric and flesh and the vital artery within.
There were no angels now and no heavenly voices. She inhaled deeply through her nose, but there was no fresh, clean air of the sort she remembered from her father’s garden long ago. She thought about the girl who had burned in the fire in her stead, and wondered what she looked like when they had cut her hair.
It was the nuns of the Great Shrine of St James who had called her Lẽna. She had brought them firewood after all, and leña was their word for kindling. It had made them smile then, but now it felt to her like a cruel joke. She was Jeanne – Jeanne d’Arc, daughter of Jacques and Isabelle, from the village of Domrémy. She was Jeanne Grant, mother of John.
Emperor Constantine turned towards her once more. She was down on one knee as though seeking his blessing, but he raised his sword high instead and reached way back with it. In the moment before he could begin the downward stroke that would have split her in two like a log on her chopping block, he looked into her eyes and saw there the judgement of the ages.
He nodded, once, and lowered his sword, his anger finally spent, and would have reached out a hand to her. She might have taken it then, but as she looked up into his face, and saw only sadness there, she saw too a glint of sunlight upon a sword blade as it swung towards him from his left side and parted his head from his body.
Emperor Constantine’s severed head spun – long hair like a corona around the sun – and flew over the battlements and down among the Turks, where it landed unnoticed and was trampled underfoot. His corpse stayed in place for just a fraction of a second before falling sideways, to the right, on to the flagstones of the battlements.
There before her, revealed by the toppled corpse, stood the princeling, still clad in his robes of white. His face was flushed and there were gobbets of snot and saliva around his mouth.
In one hand he gripped the little bone that had all but choked him to death. He had fallen helplessly and hard on to the stone floor, and as the women fled from the sight of him, thinking him dead or dying, the impact had jogged the blockage loose. He had coughed and hacked and vomited until his airway had come clear.
Once peace had returned to his thundering chest, his blurred vision had cleared and he had seen the little cause of his pain. Reaching for it, he grasped the bone and held it in one clenched fist, determined one day to make a talisman of the thing.
It was with a shrug of mingled exasperation and disbelief then that Lẽna straightened to face this latest opponent. His face was dark with furious anger and she wondered at the heat of his rage as she passed her own sword from hand to hand.
‘I wanted his head,’ he said. He cleared his throat and spat, thickly. ‘I wanted his head and now it is gone for ever.’
She wondered how she was seemingly to blame for the loss, and shook her own head at him as she mirrored his movements, the strength ebbing from her limbs and her vision darkening.
‘With the head of the last emperor, I might have stood before the sultan himself.’
Lẽna felt his words wash over her. She could see that he was talking but she was not listening. She paid attention to the tumult of the battle still raging below and wondered if she might hear another’s voice above it.
Instead it was her own that she heard. She had not thought to speak but the words came fresh and clear, like water bubbling bell-like from a spring.
‘Greater than the cup – though a gift of gold – in honour of what to me is given,’ she said.
At the sudden sound of her voice, the false prince fell silent.
‘He received my love as payment,’ she said, and she smiled – not at the princeling,
but for her father and for herself.
And it was in his silence and sudden confusion, briefly captured as in a net by the calm of her words, and blindly raising his sword to land a fatal blow, that he was undone. With no more strength to fight, yet certain of her path and determined to remain upon it, she thrust straight forward with her own blade and punctured his throat clean through.
She pulled the point free and the blade made a rasping, sucking sound as she did so, and he fell lifeless to the floor.
She looked around then and saw the slick, dark trail of her own blood. She knew that she was dying, and it was with trembling hands that were hard to control that she stripped the fine robes from his body.
With what little strength remained to her, she struggled to pull the garments over her own head. She was smoothing them down and attending to her hair, black and cut short like a boy’s and threaded now with silver, when she glimpsed the unmistakable glint of gold. Tucked into his belt was the coronet the colour of butter, studded with jewels polished en cabochon. On an impulse she stooped and plucked it free and placed it on her own head.
There was a flight of three stone steps beside her, and when she climbed to the top of them she was able to stand between two crenellations. She gazed out and saw that of the Byzantine Empire that had lasted for a thousand years, nothing at all remained. Upon the trampled field below, men fought their last with swords and knives and with teeth bared and fingernails torn.
She listened for a voice and heard none. She was Jeanne d’Arc and her death was long overdue, and she was happy now, happy to pay it.
She heard a shout from below, and then a rising roar, and when she looked down again, ten thousand faces were gazing up at her. The fighting stalled and for a moment they stared and saw a figure clad in shining raiment and wearing a circlet of gold upon its head.
For those with sharp eyes, there was too the sight of blood, red as claret and seeping into the fabric between the figure’s legs.