Master of Shadows (30 page)

42

John Grant had grown tired of being the centre of attention.

Since his moment in the square, he had felt eyes upon him at all times. For a day or so the novelty had appealed, and he had walked tall, aware of every movement he made and every expression on his face.

It was Lẽna who was first to say he would live to regret having made himself such a spectacle (though privately she had been as moved by the scene as any other who witnessed it), and she was right.

There had been little time for celebrity in the first moments after the birds rose up and away from the soldiers, still vying with one another for ownership of the trophy.

Once the giant stone missiles began raining down, the emperor had called for horses and departed for the palace and the wall, accompanied by Giustiniani and his closest aides. The rest of the newly arrived force had struggled across the city any way they could. Wagons and carts had been gathered from all around – gratefully accepted from those who offered or taken forcibly from those less willing. The weapons and the rest of the equipment they had brought with them were ferried to where they were needed, at the land walls, with all possible haste.

Once begun, the bombardment continued relentlessly, like a man-made volcanic eruption. The ground shook, a foul reek of burned gunpowder filled the air and hot rocks fell from the sky like judgement.

Underneath it all was another sound – that of hundreds, thousands of voices crying out together in fear and sadness.

There had been portents of disaster after all. The days and weeks ahead of the Turks’ arrival had been laden with evil signs. Before the guns began their hellish shuddering chorus, the earth herself had flexed her aching back and sent tremors that rippled beneath the city, toppling statues, breaking windows and sending cracks and fissures through walls.

Even spring had found reasons to disappoint the citizens of Constantinople; while they might have expected clear skies and warmer air by now, banks of fog draped themselves thickly across the Bosphorus, and snow had fallen.

For all that John Grant had been filled with a new and unfamiliar clarity – a powerful sense of having arrived in the right place, and at precisely the right time – he was aware too of an all-pervading feeling of dread wrapped around the city. A population in need of a clear view of heaven had felt a shadow fall instead. Desperate for a breath of clean, fresh air, they were trapped inside a cooking pot, and now the lid was being lowered upon it. He stole glances at Lẽna, and her expression, as she took in their surroundings, told him she laboured under the sensation too.

More than anything else, he was troubled by the guns. He had in fact been in the presence of such contraptions more than once, and found little to fear. With Badr at his side he had heard and felt the blast of them right enough, and witnessed at first hand the erratic impact of cannonballs. The Moor had hardly rated the technology, and dismissed those guns he had seen as little more than noise-makers.

‘They are more trouble than they are worth,’ he had said. ‘So heavy they can scarcely be moved … so clumsy they cannot be aimed in any meaningful way. If you ask me, they pose more of a danger to those poor souls tasked with serving them than they do to any enemy.’

John Grant had agreed, and harboured infinitely more respect for bowmen like Angus Armstrong, or any warrior skilled with sword and knife. But these new bombards of Mehmet and his Ottomans were altogether different. Never before had he even heard talk of anything like the weapons now trained upon Constantinople. He had been taught that castles and cities surrounded by stone were impervious to assault, and knew as well as any soldier that a few good men shielded by high stone walls had little to fear from hundreds, even thousands of enemies thrown against such defences.

But now he knew different. Now he had seen stone balls pass through buildings like darts through paper. Worse, he had with his own eyes witnessed the fall of whole sections of the city’s legendary wall.

He had thought he would have time in this place. He had travelled knowingly into the heart of a war, but had been confident he had little to fear. He trusted his skills and his senses. He had Badr’s daughter to find and had believed the sanctuary of the Great City would protect her well enough, at least until he could track her down and make himself known to her. Now he realised with a jolt that time might be of the essence.

It was not the push that told him so – rather it was his own two eyes.

Many of the Genoan men-at-arms had spent time in the city before, and they set the pace towards the walls, sometimes marching and sometimes jogging along a route that kept the safe anchorage of the Golden Horn always to their east and on their right-hand side.

The sound of tolling bells, from church buildings all across the city, was constant, and John Grant wondered why a population pressed by a besieging army was more inclined to pray than to rise up in arms.

‘Less time on their knees and more on their hind legs with swords in their hands,’ he said to Lẽna. ‘Badr said that God loved a fighter – and I believe him.’

All around was evidence of sad decline. For all that John Grant had been told about this place, what struck him most forcibly was a sense of despair. There were great buildings here and there, evidence of past glory, but even those had the cast of age and neglect upon them. Wide-open spaces were as common as anything built, and from among the vegetation sprouted ruins, stubborn shards of what had once been.

The Genoan commanders said Giustiniani would meet them again at the Blachernae Palace, home of the emperor and the headquarters of the defensive efforts. By the time they arrived in its shadow, Constantinople was plainly a city at war. Time would tell when and if the citizens would choose to attend to the present need and take action, or remain absorbed in their appeals to the almighty.

The palace had already suffered the attentions of the guns, but the sight of the building, freshly wounded or not, was enough to stun John Grant into silence. Never before, in all his travels, had he felt so dwarfed and humbled by the works of men as he did now. The stonework of Blachernae was so finely wrought it looked more like something grown out of the earth itself than fashioned by mortals.

He was pulled back from his wondering by the sound of a man’s voice.

‘You there – have you come to fight or to sightsee?’

He turned to see a man of advanced years, yet heavily armoured and with an unsheathed sword in his hand. He was backed by half a dozen more soldiers, similarly attired.

‘To fight,’ said John Grant.

‘The woman,’ said the soldier, gesturing towards Lẽna with the point of his sword. ‘For the love of God – what is she doing here?’

Lẽna stepped forward and spoke quietly and on her own behalf. Her voice caught and held the attention of her inquisitor.

‘It is the love of God that brought me here,’ she said. ‘And I fight better than any man – better than you, I say.’

Her audacity might have earned her a beating, but no one in his company seemed minded to attempt the job.

‘We are few enough,’ said the commander. ‘I will accept the help of any willing and able to do their duty. Just keep out of my view and out of my way.’

With that he turned away and strode towards a set of stone steps leading up towards the battlements on the inner wall, looming high alongside the masonry of the palace.

‘Minotto,’ said a voice from among a gaggle of the Genoans, standing closer than she might have liked. Since the incident in the square, she and John Grant had drawn followers like honey attracted wasps.

The foremost of them, a soldier in his middle years and clad in chain mail of a quality that declared he was a man of substance, was evidently the speaker.

‘Girolamo Minotto,’ he said again. ‘Venetian diplomat, but a warrior by inclination. I believe he has taken up residence in the palace.’

Lẽna shrugged and turned to make for the steps Minotto had climbed. John Grant followed along with the rest of their group. It was like being attended by courtiers.

The view from the battlements drove every private thought from the mind of every soul that gazed upon it then. Spread out across the rolling landscape beyond the walls was an entire city – but one in which the buildings were made of canvas and silk rather than timber or stone. From the Sea of Marmara to the glistening waters of the Golden Horn, there was barely a patch of ground left unoccupied by the sultan’s force. For all that it was a temporary creation, it had all the order of a settlement that had been in place for months. The conical tents of each fighting unit were neatly grouped around that of the officer in command. Corps by corps they had formed themselves, square after square, column after column. A chaotic rabble might have been easier to look upon. Instead, the sense of order and control, of relentless purpose, added an air of quiet menace.

In a broad strip of cleared ground – between the tented city and Constantinople’s outer wall – John Grant saw the livid scar of the hurriedly excavated trench that was home to the sultan’s bombards.

It was while he struggled to take in the scale of the army ranged against the city, like flood water rising behind a levee, that the emperor spotted him. He had been talking urgently to Minotto, hearing the Venetian’s assessment of the damage, when Giustiniani, standing by his side, noticed the new arrivals on the battlements and tapped the emperor’s arm.

‘The man who summons eagles out of the sky,’ said the emperor, his voice loud enough that all of them heard his words.

John Grant dropped his head resignedly. He had not meant to make himself a focus, but there it was.

Emperor Constantine, accompanied by Giustiniani and Minotto, walked slowly towards him, his arms stretched out in a welcoming gesture. He placed his hands on John Grant’s shoulders, and then turned to address his audience.

‘Long before the shadow of Islam fell across the land of Persia, the people there had their own name for eagles such as those commanded by our friend.’

He gripped John Grant’s shoulder firmly, like a brother, or a son.

‘They called them
huma
, and said that the very sight of them brought joy, and the promise of good fortune. Any man who brings such messengers among us is welcome here.

‘You shall be our talisman! And I say to all of you – any who fights by this man’s side shall likely share in that good fortune.’

The emperor reached out a hand to summon Giustiniani, and took him by the shoulder as well.

‘To you, old friend – a thousand thank-yous, for bringing this one among us.

‘Now tell us – what is your name?’

Those watching seemed to take in a collective breath, as though expecting to be reminded of something they already knew.

‘I am John Grant,’ he said. ‘I have come to fight for you and yours.’

‘And so you shall, John Grant,’ said the emperor. ‘Giustiniani – I urge you to make good use of this one.’

As quickly as it had begun, the performance was over. The emperor turned and strode off along the battlements, followed by Minotto and a handful of his lieutenants.

Giustiniani did not move. Instead he looked into the eyes of each man, as though weighing his soul. Last of all he looked at Lẽna, and found he was not surprised to see her there. She returned his gaze without any outward show of emotion. From behind them came the sound of many footsteps, the clatter and clank of armoured men. John Grant turned to see that the rest of the Genoans – all forty score of them – had reached the rendezvous and were now looking expectantly at their commander.

Giustiniani seemed charged by their arrival, fuel to his flame. He looked away from them for a few moments, out at the Turkish encampment, and slowly passed his right hand across the whole expanse of it. There was a roar from close by and another cannonball found its mark, pounding into a section of wall beside the nearby Gate of the Wooden Circus, close by the palace. This time, the missile shattered harmlessly and the masonry held firm.

‘We are here of our own free will,’ bellowed Giustiniani. ‘We come as free men, beholden to none. A few short days ago we were safe in our homes, and now here we stand, in harm’s way. This is where I prefer to be, and I hope and pray that none of you would say different.

‘I have not come to fight for an empire. I have not come to fight for my God. I have come here to slaughter the Turk because he is the enemy of my blood. I will not turn away from him, or from those who side with him, while there is breath in my body.

‘I make one promise to you, and one promise only: if this grand adventure shall be the death of me, then when you gather up my remains and wrap me in my shroud, you will find no wounds upon my back.’

None spoke. No one moved. Every man kept his own counsel.

Elsewhere on the battlements, Minotto was keeping pace with Emperor Constantine.

‘I know the legend of the
huma
, majesty,’ he said. ‘I noticed you stopped your account before the part that says that whomsoever falls under his shadow is a king-to-be, a sovereign in waiting.’ He raised his eyebrows questioningly.

‘Only sovereigns make sovereigns,’ said Constantine. His expression was hard, his eyes cold. ‘Hear me when I say it.’

43

‘Tell me again about the birdman,’ said Prince Constantine.

Set against the relentless percussion of shattering impacts upon the walls, the level tone of his voice seemed faintly surreal. Unperturbed by the intrusion, the assault upon his whole world, he focused his attention upon his hands, deft and swift.

‘I just wish you might have seen it for yourself,’ she said. Her own voice sounded brittle inside her head, along with the rest of her, as though a fine web of cracks was spreading from within. She felt she might soon shatter into a thousand tiny pieces.

Despite the constant danger posed by the Turkish bombardment, which had continued day and night, he refused to abandon his quarters in the palace. They would concentrate their fire on the walls, he said, and he had been proved right.

While the occasional missile was sent hurtling into the city, to strike at random buildings or sweep away luckless citizens like dust from a board, the gunners’ focus had been and remained the ancient defences. The Blachernae Palace had been damaged too – particularly on the first day, as the gunners found their range and aim – but Constantine’s apartment was located on the side of the building facing into the city and with its back to the onslaught. Many hundreds of yards of rooms, corridors and courtyards, all of it comprising massive masonry, stood between his rooms and the facade of the building most exposed to the Ottoman artillery.

He had said anyway that he was not worth worrying about – a useless cripple unable to mount a horse and sally forth, or to wield a sword upon the battlements. His words grieved Yaminah, but to her dismay it seemed that no one but her – not even the emperor himself – was minded to dispute his stance.

She sensed that his father’s acceptance of his decision to stay in harm’s way burned the prince somewhere deep down inside himself, but he would never have admitted it – and certainly not to her. Emperor Constantine had merely nodded when told of his son’s determination to stay put. For Yaminah, the growing realisation that the man she loved was being casually left adrift in stormy waters was one that ran around inside her head like a cockroach.

From the moment they had come angrily to life, the guns had been driven ceaselessly by their masters, like tortured beasts fit only for screaming and roaring in hot agony. Their howls provided a constant punctuation to the day, and the intermittent blasts, followed by the sound and sensation of the impact of the projectiles, became part of the fabric of life, like the onset of chronic pain. Even now Yaminah struggled to recall the days before it began, before her life was one lived inside a constant round of destruction, and beneath a darkening pall of fear and dread.

Sometimes the firing stopped, but only to allow waves of attackers to swarm across the open ground towards fresh breaches in the walls. So far the fosse had defied these suicidal attempts, but the howl of the men as they came on was as hateful to her as the hammering of the guns. Costa said they were the most desperate of the sultan’s volunteers – peasants and the like who had thrown down their tools and answered the call to arms in hopes of riches or, more likely, a martyr’s death.

Constantine seemed strangely immune to it all, his own domain a glass bubble left inviolate at the heart of a storm. Beyond his rooms, beyond the palace, men and women ran, fetched and carried, while children cried out. Orders and commands echoed around the palace in a near chaos and yet on the edge of it all, overlooked and all but forgotten, he passed his days as he had done for the past six years and more. His isolation – and the absentee court’s indifference to it – left Yaminah sick to her stomach.

He had spent the morning shaping new characters for his shadow plays, and as he asked his question about the birdman, he brought his latest creation to life. His commitment to something so fragile in the midst of pounding stone and shrieking metal made her want to kiss him or strike him, she was unsure which.

There upon his ceiling, silhouetted by the slim finger of sunlight reflected from his polished bronze mirror, was a warrior borne aloft by a pair of eagles. Prince Constantine manipulated thin rods to create the illusion of beating wings.

‘They did not carry him away,’ she said. ‘As I have told you several times already,
he
held
them
in place. It was … magnificent.’ She sighed, and he did not miss her show of emotion.

No matter how many times she recalled the moment, and the vision, always she felt her heartbeat increase its pace. The heat that the thought of him left inside her made her blush and she was thankful for the dark. She was anxious to change the subject.

‘The emperor is keener than ever that our wedding should go ahead as planned,’ she said. ‘He even said as much to me in front of the Genoan, Giustiniani.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘Even Doukas is full of talk about the grandeur of all that is planned.’

‘And so he should be,’ she said. ‘It is in times like this, in the heart of darkness, that light is needed most. Our wedding is no longer just about us, if it ever was. Our coming together at this moment, of all moments, will be a hopeful sign for all – a show of belief in happiness to come.’

‘I admire your optimism, I really do,’ he said.

She scowled at him, unsure of his sincerity.

‘No, really,’ he said, raising his hands in a placatory gesture. ‘I admire you and … and I love you.’

She was taken aback, and only stared at him. For all that she understood how much she meant to him, he seldom expressed it in words. To hear him say out loud that he loved her made unfamiliar feelings of guilt uncoil in her tummy.

‘I love you too,’ she said. And she meant it.

She meant it, but she was troubled too, and by her own words. She thought again, for the hundredth time, about the one her prince called the birdman. She was furious with herself, and confused. Here she was, days from marrying a man she had loved since … since she was no more than a child. Here she was on the point of joining for a lifetime with a man who had all but given his life for her, and yet her thoughts returned moment by moment to this
birdman
, and to that look he had had on his face when their eyes met, and for just a second.

She looked at her prince and told herself to believe that all was well – that all was as it had always been. It was better, in fact. She thought about the moment just days before when she had awoken with her head in his lap to find they might yet be lovers and parents after all. She had loved Costa when he was, as he insisted on saying, dead from the waist down. If that dead half came back to life, then anything was possible – indeed a whole life together as man and wife.

With all of that, why then, she asked herself desperately, did her thoughts keep returning to a glimpse of a stranger? She had met his eyes for only an instant, and yet in that glance she had seen another world. All in a moment she had understood that he might take her to that world, and far away. Why now, when so much might be possible, was she waking in the night from dreams of that face – that face shadowed by the beating of wings as it came ever closer to her own? Then just at the moment of coming together, eyes to eyes and lips to lips and ready to be … consumed, she would awaken breathless and sweating, alone in the dark.

Loneliness took her by surprise then and pooled around her like cold, dark water that sapped the warmth from her bones, and she looked at the floor.

‘I miss my mum,’ she said, able at least to give voice to some of her thoughts. ‘I miss her every day, but I miss her now more than ever.’

She wanted Costa to reach out for her, maybe take her hand and hold it, but he remained still on the bed, looking at her with an open expression on his thin face.

‘I wish you could have known your father,’ he said.

She gasped. While she was aware that he knew about her parentage, the truth of it was always left alone between them.

She was silent, and to fill the gap he pressed on.

‘I think … in fact I know that what I really mean to say is …
I
would like to have known him.’

‘Why?’ Her voice was fragile, like a child’s.

‘Because I love you.’

There it was again – his second declaration of love in less than a minute!

‘And
because
I love you, I feel the need to know the people who … who made you. I knew Isabella a little – enough at least to see how she fits into the person that is you. But I would like to have … I don’t know – heard your father’s voice, maybe got a sense of the sort of things that made him laugh, or angry …’

His voice tailed away as though he was embarrassed by what he was saying.

Out of nowhere, unbidden and unwanted, she was aware of the memory of the man who had been her mother’s husband. The man she had been told to accept as her father but who had been no such thing – neither husband nor father.

‘I am glad they had one more time together – if only for such a little while,’ she said. She realised her words were an extension only of her own thoughts and that she would have to say more if he was to understand.

‘If only you had had the chance to … even to look at each other, see each other’s faces,’ he said.

She thought about the birdman’s face and looked down at her hands, folded neatly in her lap as always.

Her mother had confessed the same sadness, and many times.

After many years of wanting to, and trying to, Isabella had got a message to Yaminah’s real father. They had a daughter, she wrote. She was more sorry than she could say that she had kept the truth from him, but she needed him to know. And he had come, even though she had begged him not to. He must put aside any such thought, she had written. It was much too dangerous.

Isabella’s father, Philip Kritovoulos, another prince of the realm and mentor and friend to the emperor, still nursed a furious anger. And if he was not enough of a reason to stay away, then her husband, Martin Notaras – who had done them all such a favour by marrying her and giving his name to the child – was every bit as vengeful. Even though there had been no connection between Notaras and Isabella (he had been drafted into the role of husband, and father to Yaminah, only after the fact and as a favour to the family), his venomous nature had allowed him to backdate his hatred.

That her real father had wanted to come – in spite of the danger and in spite of her mother urging him to stay away, for all their sakes – mattered more to Yaminah than she could say.

‘Tell me how they met,’ said Constantine, snapping her back into the present.

She took a moment to collect her thoughts. She had never told the story to anyone before, and it mattered to her to find the right words.

‘My grandfather had travelled to Rome,’ she began. ‘He was sent on the emperor’s behalf – the leader of a delegation. My mother told me that the rest of them were churchmen and that they sought an audience with the Holy Father so that they might secure promises of help and support in the face of the Turkmen’s relentless advances into our territory.

‘My mother went with him. She said it was because he was so possessive of her that he feared the consequences of leaving her behind.’

‘What consequences?’ asked Constantine.

‘My mother loved my grandmother, and was loved in return,’ she said. ‘My father did not understand, had no time for … for love. She loved her nurse, Ama, perhaps even more. All that my grandfather saw was people wanting my mother to be happy. She said that as far as he was concerned, her happiness mattered not at all. To him she was a bargaining piece, to be played at just the right moment in the long game of life at court. Rather than see her value squandered – on love or any other foolishness – he took her everywhere.’

‘For all the good it did him,’ said Constantine. ‘I mean … by the sounds of it.’

She smiled at him, enjoying the fact that he evidently understood the irony of her grandfather’s actions.

‘My father was among the bodyguards – soldiers sent along to keep the delegates from harm. My mother told me he was the single most beautiful man she had ever laid eyes on.’ Yaminah relished the thought and rocked back in her seat and closed her eyes.

‘Would I be right in supposing he laid more than his eyes on your mother?’ asked Constantine. She opened her eyes wide and stared at him, mock horror on her face.

‘How
dare
you?’ she said, but she smiled again. It felt like they were taking sides – she and Costa conspiring against the memory of her grandfather – and she was surprised by the pleasure of it. The thrill came from a secret sealed away long ago, but it tasted sweet just the same.

‘She said she noticed him as soon as she stepped aboard the ship,’ she said. ‘He told her later that he had spotted her waiting by her father’s side on the dock – that it had pleased him to know the first sight was his alone.’

‘What did he look like?’ asked Constantine.

She glanced down at her hands once more.

‘I only wish I knew,’ she said.

‘I know that. Of course I know that,’ he said. ‘But how did your mother describe him?’

‘He was dark,’ said Yaminah. ‘Darker than her, anyway. She said the tone of my skin was from him, and my hair too, I suppose.’

‘What else?’

‘Well, he was quite the grand physical specimen, apparently,’ she said. She blushed at the thought of her father the giant, and while she had no such memory, she allowed herself to picture him picking her mother up off the ground and spinning her around like a toy.

‘And you such a little thing,’ said Constantine.

She scowled at him again.

‘That is all the picture I have of him,’ she said. ‘My mother spent more time telling me how gentle he was, and kind … how he would look into her eyes and tell her he could hardly believe she was real.’

‘And so they became lovers,’ he said.

‘And so they became lovers. My grandfather and the rest of the delegates were kept busier than any of them had imagined, I think. They were in Rome for weeks and my grandfather had no option but to leave my mother to her own devices. He attended meeting after meeting after meeting. My mother and father stole some time alone together and … and I was the result.’