Master of Shadows (42 page)

67

‘I loved your father, John Grant,’ said Lẽna. ‘He did not believe it and I gave him no cause to, but it is true.’

He kept his eyes on the crescent moon and said nothing, but felt her thoughts flooding towards him like his destiny.

‘I remember his face so very clearly,’ she said. ‘It is twenty years and more since I last saw it, but it is before my eyes even now.’

The sound of all the voices, the happy and the sad, rose and fell, waxing and waning.

‘It is your face, because he was your father,’ she said. ‘And it is Yaminah’s face, because he was her father too.’

68

Prince Constantine was moving his feet from side to side on their heels. He could not see them, since he was enfolded in total darkness, but he could feel them. It had started with a simple desire to fight back against the chill of underground. He had begun by moving his arms, cycling them in front of himself and rolling his shoulders forwards and back.

He had bent at the waist, reaching for his knees and then his feet. He had rubbed and massaged his thighs, even drummed upon them with cupped hands – all in a bid to keep warm blood circulating, fending off the cold. And then he had realised that his feet, his long-dead feet, were moving in time with his stretches. Once he became aware of it, he had stopped all other movement and concentrated on the rocking motion that had begun all by itself. Where would it stop? he wondered. How far would the feeling rise?

While he continued with his exercises, it occurred to him that the French had the best word to describe the nature of his prison. He had heard it from Doukas. (He wondered what his old teacher was doing now. Eating, most likely, adding yet more inches to his already ample circumference, or else hovering on the edge of other people’s lives, watching and remembering.)

The word was
oubliette
, a noun made out of the verb
oublier
, which meant ‘to forget’. The sense of it summed up his situation perfectly, he thought. They had told him they were coming back for him, but he had his doubts. If it were best he be made to disappear, would it ever truly make sense to bring him back again? More likely they had lacked the will to finish him off. Perhaps their master – his father the emperor? Helena? – had given them the impression it did not matter either way. Kill him … leave him to die in the dark … the end result would be the same.

So,
oubliette
– he was to be something forgotten. His mortal remains would occupy a space on loan from the endless darkness, and old Doukas would excise the rest of the proof of his existence with the nib of his pen.

The irony of it! Just as his broken half had begun to repair itself – just as his legs had begun to awaken from their years-long slumber, to remember what they were for – his father’s tolerance of his predicament had finally run out. His legs might remember, but he would be forgotten.

In his place another Prince Constantine (harvested, according to Doukas, from somewhere in the empire) would stand – and stand on his own two legs – in front of an awestruck congregation inside the Church of St Sophia and exchange rings with Yaminah. He would give the people the last ounce of hope they needed – the living proof that the Virgin had reached out her hands to fix a broken boy, just as she would restore their broken empire.

They would appear to leave the city then, on a ship bound for a place of safety where a cutting from the imperial tree might take root and thrive, ready to be replanted when the time was right and the infidel Turk had been expelled.

It was all a ruse, of course. The stand-in was no prince of the house of Palaiologos – just a cipher. Whatever they had promised him, his job was done and his life over the moment he passed out of sight of the hapless herd corralled within the church. He and Yaminah would vanish, to be slain and buried and forgotten just like Constantine himself. It was the emperor who would reap the benefit of the illusion. The people of Constantinople would have had their faith restored, and with faith for armour they might take swords and cudgels in their hands and turn back the tide of their attackers.

If anyone would flee when all was lost, aboard a ship bound for the west and the setting sun, it would not be some happy couple. It would be the emperor himself.

But there in the darkness Prince Constantine felt … now what was it? … a burgeoning sense of peace. He wondered first of all if he had given up hope; if it was just the calm acceptance of fate. But no – rather it was like being at the hub of a spinning wheel that was slowing down.

Beyond the dark, beyond this
oubliette
, the final pieces of a puzzle were falling gently into place. Settled peace was on its way, and someone was coming.

69

The moon, the same that had risen as a pale sickle, shook off its shroud of volcanic dust and came to full before the end of its journey across the night. Long before then, while the crescent still hung like the sword of Damocles over the citizens, Mehmet seized his moment and ordered a final assault.

Just as the defenders were close to breaking point, so too were his own men. They were an unlikely fellowship – Muslims from Mehmet’s own realm, Christians pressed from far and wide – and the bindings keeping them together were frayed and split after forty days. If all was not to be lost – if the countless sacrifices made so far were not to be squandered – then the crucial moments were upon them.

On the other side of no-man’s-land, Emperor Constantine stood upon an earthen rampart with his chief commander Giustiniani by his side. The relentless pressure brought to bear upon the outer wall had forced a desperate decision. Throughout the day, and on into the darkness lit only by the ill-starred crescent moon, the Genoan had had the defenders prepare a last redoubt.

It was in the Lycus valley, close by the Gate of St Romanus and with their backs to the inner wall, that they would make their stand.

‘Would you bring them now?’ asked the emperor.

‘That I would,’ answered Giustiniani. ‘By the light of this accursed moon, I would bring every man and beast I had.’

Constantine was still nodding in agreement when the horns began to howl and the sound of a thousand drums began to roll towards them out of the dark.

‘How many are we?’ shouted the emperor above the rising din.

Giustiniani did not have to look to know the answer, but he turned his head left and right just the same, surveying the thin line of fighting men poised and ready, their fatigue pushed to the backs of their minds as they readied themselves once more.

‘No more than two thousand,’ he said.

He looked around again.

‘The Bochiardi brothers,’ he said. ‘Where are they?’

‘At the Gate of the Wooden Circus,’ replied the emperor. ‘I sent them there myself. They will sally forth and harass those Turks seeking to keep our men pinned down in defence of the palace.’

Giustiniani smiled a grim smile and looked out into the darkness. Appearing out of the void were smudges of light, burning torches spread out along the front ranks of the attacking force.

‘
Azaps
,’ he said.

‘Lambs to the slaughter,’ said Constantine.

‘We shall see,’ replied the Genoan, and on his last word there came the sound of bellowed commands and the attackers broke into a wild sprint across the last yards separating them from their foes.

‘Now!’ shouted Giustiniani, and his command was repeated up and down the line. At once a hail of arrows, javelins, crossbow bolts, and shot of lead and stone was poured down upon the attackers. They fell like wheat before the scythe but they were in such numbers it made little difference.

Cruelly pressed from behind – by janissaries under orders to cut down any man seeking to turn and flee – they continued forward into the rain of death. Once their momentum brought them to the foot of the rampart, and as they struggled for a foothold on the soft earth, the defenders turned to their Greek fire, and great gouts of flame spouted forth and deluged the foremost of the
azaps
. The fire clung to them and they were roasted alive by the dozen and by the hundred.

Still they came on, urged forward by their commanders and even by Mehmet himself, mounted upon his warhorse.

For all that they were so few in number, the defenders held firm, numb to the horror of the killing and dying they were both inflicting and suffering. After a hellish hour of constant fighting, Mehmet ordered his
azaps
to withdraw. The defenders bent forward on their weapons, gasping for breath in the moments of reprieve.

Without needing to be told, they soon cut their rest short in favour of attending to the damage to their redoubt.

It was as he surveyed their desperate work with barrows and shovels, lit only by the rising moon and the light from lamps, that the Genoan turned to find himself face to face with John Grant, the woman by his side.

‘Well bless my soul,’ he said. ‘I had thought to find you among the butchered dead.’

John Grant’s face was impassive, haunted by stories too long for the telling then.

‘I had my guardian angel with me,’ he said.

The Genoan looked at Lẽna, but she only shook her head.

‘There are no angels here, I fear,’ she said. ‘Or at least I have not seen them.’

Giustiniani waited for the smile that would tell him she was playing with him, but none came.

He was turning from her to peer out into the last hour of the night when a cannonball from a Turkish gun smashed into the face of the rampart beneath his feet. The force of the impact tore a massive hole, and flung the three of them through the air to land in a jumble on the level ground behind the redoubt. John Grant was first to his feet and ran forward, back into the gap, a sword in his hand. Lẽna followed, and the Genoan too.

Realising the dire peril of the situation, those defenders still able to stand dashed in behind as a howling wedge of Turks surged forward to meet them. Their momentum was too strong and the defenders were pushed back beyond their own rampart. John Grant wheeled on his heels, hacking and slashing at the foe. Out of the corners of his eyes he saw Lẽna, and Giustiniani too, locked in the dance of death with one enemy after another.

For some moments the attacking Turks were flushed with the promise of victory. Thinking they would triumph at last, they fought without fear, almost drunk on the very air they were breathing, beyond the line of the ancient walls at last.

Only once in all their thousand years had an enemy penetrated Constantinople’s defences. Those Christian crusaders had come in search of plunder – treasures to take and living flesh to defile. The Muslim Turks now taking their first footsteps inside the walls promised nothing less than the ending of the world, and their arrival was greeted with an awful roar of insult and defiance by those still standing.

The intruders’ ecstasy was short-lived. Rallied by Giustiniani and the rump of his Genoan force, the defenders found fresh heart and pushed back once more, butchering the Turks where they stood until the ground was slick and slippery with gore.

Cowed by the fury of it, the last of the attackers turned and ran as the first grey light of dawn sent their long shadows ahead of them.

‘Hold them, Giustiniani.’

It was the emperor, mounted now upon his horse and wheeling the beast around towards the Middle Way, the broad thoroughfare leading into the heart of the city.

‘Hold them, and I will return with men from the sea walls.’

He spurred his horse and the animal reared up on its hind legs before plunging forward into the fingers of light rising above the buildings beyond.

The Genoan nodded and turned at once to address his shattered and exhausted men.

‘Quickly now,’ he shouted, his face a mask of exhaustion and concern. ‘Make whatever repairs are possible, as quickly as you can. They will be back among us within the hour, I promise you!’

John Grant turned to Lẽna and she met his gaze. Without a word he smiled, then left her to find a horse of his own.

70

Inside the Church of St Sophia, beneath the impossible dome that seemed to hang suspended from heaven itself, a murmur of soft voices rose to mingle with the incense smoke.

At all times, but especially in the low light just before the dawn, it was like being within the crystalline heart of a dark jewel. There were shafts and sheets of brightness from windows high above, but always too there were defiant, seductive corners of scented shadow, home to all the prayers left unanswered.

Upon the vaulted ceilings, acres of gold mosaic and the details of myriad marble carvings dazzled the eye, while staring down from the cliffs of masonry that supported them, the sad surrendered eyes of painted saints and likenesses of Christ himself bore holes into the souls of all who looked upon them.

It was cold that day, unreasonably and unseasonably cold. Many of the church’s windows were broken – through the neglect of years or the damage caused by fragments from countless shattered cannonballs. Some of the doorways were open to the elements as well, the doors hanging crooked on buckled hinges. The miserable weather of the outside world had seeped into the interior of the church, driven by unchecked gusts of wind. Instead of hanging like languid clouds, the smoke swirled and twisted like unhappy ghosts.

Gathered there in the perfumed chill were those hundreds of guests who had been summoned by imperial command to bear witness to a miracle. They did not know it yet, but they were to receive a gift – living proof of God’s mercy and the rightness of their cause.

They had come to witness the blessing of a union, begun on earth but soon to be made everlasting by the intercession of heaven and the perfect world yet to be. For those faithful of the Great City, tested though they had been, and to the very limit of their endurance, there was no death. Since there was no death (the Son of God having conquered the end of life upon his cross), the union they were about to witness between a girl and a broken boy was eternal.

All eyes, hungry for hope, were focused on the western doorway of the church, the place where the sacred mystery and ritual of marriage would begin. But while they expected to see the bride there – Princess Yaminah, flanked by escorts bearing torches and garlands of thorns to keep her safe from evil until she could reach the sanctuary of the vestibule – it was their emperor who stepped into the space instead.

They gasped, almost as one, as he appeared from the shadows garbed as a common soldier, the two-headed eagle of the house of Palaiologos on his chest smeared with blood and filth. He had men with him, brothers in arms and similarly grimed and weary, and they strode together, without a word, into the great church and towards its centre beneath the dome.

All heads turned slowly, following their path, and saw, walking towards the emperor from a point beyond the high altar, Prince Constantine.

There was a stunned silence at first, and then shouts of astonishment. Voices were raised in praise and thanks and men and women dropped to their knees as they watched him striding confidently and with head held high. He was robed in white, with the jewelled coronet of burnished gold resting lightly upon his temples.

Among the congregation were many who had witnessed the moment six years before when the princess had dropped like an angel from heaven and into his waiting arms. They had seen him reach up and out for her, snatching her away from certain death but condemning himself to half a life in the process. In the years since, some few had glimpsed him from time to time, in his wheeled chair, as Yaminah had pushed him through the halls and courtyards of the palace. And now here he was, made whole again.

‘See how our son is restored to us,’ said the emperor as he reached the prince and embraced him as a father should.

‘Those of you that saw the likeness of Our Lady fall to the ground by the steps of the hippodrome and thought that she had turned her back on us … see now that she is with us still, as she always has been and always will be. This is her work.’

Taking the prince’s hand in his own, he scanned the faces of the congregation in search of doubters and found none.

‘Just as our son has been raised up from his sickbed – whole and hearty – so shall our Great City and our empire be raised up beyond the grasping paws of the heathens.’

Emperor Constantine’s eyes flashed fire but his heart was hammering in his chest. She had promised that all was well – that if she were left in peace she would attend her wedding ceremony and play her part. Now here he was, approaching the last of his prepared lines, and still he was one bride short of a marriage.

Suddenly the moans of rapture inside the church were replaced by cries of fear. Where before all eyes had been fixed upon the emperor and the prince by his side, now every face was turned upwards, towards the dome. He craned his neck and followed their gaze, and then opened his faithless eyes wide as he beheld the cause of their concern.

All around the interior of the dome were tongues of fire – not in hues of red or orange, but violet and pink, or blue and dazzling white. They flickered and flitted, faster than the eye could track, and yet for all that they gave the appearance of an inferno, they seemed not to touch, far less to damage, the fabric of the dome itself.

As the congregation watched in horror, waiting for the flames to catch and somehow bring the whole edifice crashing down upon their sorry heads, they cried out to their God.

‘Lord have mercy!’ they howled. ‘Do not forsake us now!’

The cries mingled with more from the city beyond, and in ones and twos, men and women ran to the doors of the church and looked outside. The dawn that had been growing like a blood-red bloom only minutes before seemed to have retreated in the face of the return of night.

It was no familiar darkness, either. Rather it seemed thick, oppressive, and it leaned down upon the city like a black hand. All around the church and by the ruins of the hippodrome and in the city beyond, people gathered in tight knots and pointed upwards. More tongues of fire, of purple and blue, lapped and curled around the topmost parts of the outside of the dome as well. Then, while the populace stared open-mouthed, the flames came together into a single shimmering tower of light and shot up, away from the church and into the blackened heaven.

‘God has deserted us!’ they cried, and fell upon the ground, covering their faces with their hands. ‘The Holy Spirit has gone from the church, and from us, for ever!’

Nothing more – or less – than St Elmo’s fire, caused by the thunder-laden weather that was yet another consequence of the volcanic eruption far away, the sight of the natural phenomenon that had wrapped itself around the dome had nonetheless been more than the faithful could bear. Born and raised in superstition and denied the science that would have explained it to them, they saw the discharge of electricity and the resultant creation of glowing plasma only as a portent of doom.

It was then, as Emperor Constantine sought to rise above the chaos and restore peace and calm, that John Grant arrived at the western doorway of the church. He jumped from his horse and moved silently into the din of frightened voices within. Along with everyone else in the city he had seen the ghostly, unearthly fire that had threatened to consume the building. For John Grant the inexplicable event had only intensified his fear for Yaminah, his need to reach her.

The bottom part of the southern wall of the church was all shadow, cast by the massive balcony suspended above, and he stepped into the darkness there and began moving further inside. Yaminah would be here – she had promised him – and he scanned the cavernous interior in search of some sign of her.

In desperation – hoping that his presence might be overlooked for as long as he needed – he stepped out from beneath the balcony, turning around and around as his eyes sought to scour every corner.

It was while he was thus distracted, giving all his attention to the search, that he found himself looking into those eyes that were almost as familiar to him as his own; not his half-sister Yaminah’s, however, but Angus Armstrong’s.

John Grant had been walking forwards, towards the eastern end of the church, when the push had had him turn. He was therefore walking backwards, his arms outstretched for balance, when he saw the archer. He had hoped his tormentor might be dead at last, crushed beneath the thundering hooves of the sultan’s beasts of burden. Some small part of him had known, however, and with awful certainty, that he would have survived. Angus Armstrong was his fellow traveller and therefore bound to him, never for good and always for ill. His compulsion to hunt down his quarry had outlived even the death of his master. Sir Robert Jardine lay dead, destroyed upon the field of battle, and yet the trail had still called out to the archer.

He was staring at John Grant down the shaft of the arrow nocked in his bowstring. His muscles were fully tensed, vibrating with the strain of resisting the two hundred pounds of draw weight in his fully flexed bow of the good red yew. He could have dropped his quarry already with a shot to the back, but he wanted John Grant to see the arrow coming, and to know who it was that had killed him. He was especially pleased by his target’s open stance, with arms outstretched and palms turned up to heaven.

Suddenly a woman’s shrill cry cut through the simmering hubbub. Whether she had wanted to or not, she had captured the attention of every member of the congregation, silencing them where the emperor had failed. Every last one of them turned towards the source of the sound – including Emperor Constantine and his false prince beside him.

They saw an elderly woman standing with her arm outstretched and her hand pointing towards the balcony above. Those among them with the fastest reactions turned their heads for a second time, in the direction she was pointing, in time to see an angel fall from the sky.

Yaminah had been waiting in the balcony above, watching the proceedings and considering her options. She could see no hope, no way out. Every avenue available to her led somewhere she did not want to go. They would never let her back to Constantine; she doubted he was even still alive. Her heart dropped towards her stomach and she felt dizzy with the grief of it. Maybe it was all a punishment, dealt out by the Virgin to punish her faithless heart.

She remembered the last time she had stood on the balcony inside the Church of St Sophia. She remembered her mother, cold and dead. It was at that sad moment that she looked down over the wooden balustrade and spotted John Grant in the aisle below. He was some distance away, walking with his back to her, when he suddenly turned.

She thought he had sensed her somehow and that he was going to look into her eyes and give her strength. But his gaze had fixed on someone else and she had followed his line of sight and found that the focus of his attention was a man directly beneath her. Nearly fifty feet below the balcony upon which she stood, he had a longbow fully flexed, the arrow pointed at John Grant.

Without another thought she had climbed on to the balustrade and hopped out into space, calling out as she did so.

‘Help me,’ she cried.

Her hair stood straight up like fronds of weed in the clearest sea; the folds of her dress billowed with the force so that the skirt ballooned outwards. Her shapely legs, exposed for all to see, were cycling too.

Caught all unawares and focused only on his quarry, Armstrong was undone by the sound of her voice from directly above. He looked up, relaxed his bowstring and dropped the bow and arrow to the floor at his feet. He was ducking his head and holding up his arms, torn between the urge to catch and the instinct to ward off the impact, when she landed squarely on top of him, so that she broke his neck with a snapping sound heard only by him, and then he dropped beneath the weight of her, dead as a stone.

John Grant ran to them, dread flooding his chest like cold water. He reached them, a jumble of clothes and arms and legs, and was crouching down and reaching out, readying himself for yet more grief, when she rolled away from Armstrong’s corpse and smiled up into his anxious face.

‘I hoped I would see you again,’ she said. ‘And here you are, on my wedding day.’

He cocked his head to one side, his expression a mix of confusion and breathtaking relief, as he hauled her to her feet and led her by the hand towards the door and the gloomy daylight beyond.

Emperor Constantine stood like a tree in the midst of a storm, reliant as never before upon the depth of his ancient roots, and watched them go.

John Grant, the soldier who had somehow summoned and tamed the two-headed eagle, and Princess Yaminah, who should even now be standing before the priest to hear her marriage blessed.

He felt the world, his world slipping and sliding beneath his feet. Heaven had grown dark above his head and the sky was catching fire. The eagles had flown and the Holy Spirit had abandoned the church raised by Justinian a thousand years ago. It was time.