Master of Shadows (34 page)

‘I tell you now I will not play your game, far less accept the hand of your … your phantom.’

‘You will do these things, Yaminah,’ said Helena.

Yaminah looked away from Helena while she spoke and glanced at the emperor, but his gaze was above her and beyond her. He seemed to be looking through the windows of the throne room as though he had said all he wanted and had moved on to other matters in his head.

‘You will marry this man and you will smile as you do so, and wave to your witnesses as they greet the happy couple,’ said Helena. ‘You will do all of this or you will never see Prince Constantine again.’

Yaminah stared at her, expressionless but with some soft parts of her insides feeling as though they were being ground under the heel of the emperor’s consort.

‘As it is, you will not see Costa now until after your wedding, at the earliest,’ Helena continued. ‘If you do as you have been instructed, then the two of you shall meet and you may be reassured that all is well with him.’

‘And then?’ asked Yaminah. She felt fingers of panic grasping at her soul. ‘After that, what then?’

‘After that you will leave the city,’ said Helena. ‘Together with your new husband you will take ship for Venice, there to establish our imperial court in exile. If needs be – if the city must be lost – the emperor will join you there to make plans for whatever must be done to take the empire back from the Turk.

‘At the very least, the citizens shall see that the line of the House of Palaiologos is safe – that there is hope beyond hope, and beyond despair. All of this you will do, or your prince shall perish.’

Yaminah lunged towards Helena, her hands clenched into fists, but the doppelgänger was faster and came between them and caught her by the wrists. Furious, she spat into his face, even if it be the shadow of Costa’s face, and rammed her right knee into his groin. He made no sound, merely opened his mouth wide as he fell.

‘Take her!’

It was the emperor’s voice, and Yaminah looked round in time to see a company of armed guards advancing towards her at a run. A door was open behind them, and before the first of them reached her, she glimpsed an unmistakable figure framed there. He had clearly intended to remain unseen, but for a split second before he ducked out of sight she saw the portly figure of Doukas, teacher and erstwhile friend to Prince Constantine.

50

‘Who will tell Mehmet this time, do you think?’

‘I would rather dig these tunnels – and hide forever in their darkness – than go before him with news of another failure.’

‘How many has it been now?’

‘Ten, I think, maybe a dozen. It is not my job to count them, nor is it yours. All we have to do is shovel out the spoil. If I ever leave this damned place, with my skin intact, I will count myself lucky.’

‘How can it be that they know – that they always know where we are? How can it be that whatever line the Saxons take with their workings, however deep we burrow with our picks and shovels, they find us?’

‘You know as well as I do it is not
they
who find us … it is
him
. Every time it is the same one who is first to break through the roof above … the same one who orders our tunnels flooded with the fire that sticks to men’s clothes and skin and burns them alive … the same one who leaps among us with his knives.’

‘I saw him slice off a man’s face with a shovel – one sharpened so the edge gleamed like silver in the light of the dying flames of the inferno he had unleashed.’

‘Did you see it yourself, Tekin? Or did you only hear about it from one who did?’

‘I saw it, Hebib, with these same eyes that are looking at you now. He leapt among us from above and he brought the shovel up from below so that it found the man’s chin first and then sliced onwards and upwards to his forehead. The poor bastard was still alive when he fell, I tell you, his face no more than a side of meat.’

‘I did not know you had seen the devil for yourself.’

‘Well I have, Hebib. And I hope never to see him again. May Allah see to it that I am always to the rear of the miners from now on – and never again among them while they work.’

‘So what does he look like? Is he a giant, like they say? Is he strong like a carthorse? Is he crazy like a cut snake?’

‘I am sorry to disappoint you, but he is slight, slender as a reed. I swear I could snap his arms in two if I ever got close enough – may Allah see to it I am never that close.’

‘Do his eyes blaze like the fire he rains upon us?’

‘It is you that is crazy like a cut snake if you think I have been close enough to see his eyes.’

‘Have you heard him speak a word of his hatred?’

‘Hatred?’

‘Well surely he must hate us? I believe he must wish that the whole world had one neck – and that he had his hands around it.’

‘He is silent always. I have heard the Saxons say he makes no sound at all when he attacks – that his feet seem hardly to rest upon the earth, so that he floats among them like a ghost. I have heard what they call him, though – the word his men cry when they want him back.’

‘And what is his name, Tekin?’

‘The miners say it is foreign even to them. But when the heathens need their devil’s attention, they shout “Jon-grant”.’

‘Perhaps this Jon-grant
is
the devil, says I. Trust the infidels to have the devil himself on their side.’

51

‘What say you, John Grant?’ asked Minotto, the bailey of Venice, standing sword in hand. The armour that had gleamed like a newly minted coin when John Grant had first laid eyes upon it was grimed now and dull, and bearing fresh dents from recent fighting. ‘A good night’s work?’ Minotto bent and slapped him hard on the shoulder. ‘A good night’s work indeed,’ he repeated, before striding off.

John Grant only nodded in reply, and smiled grimly at the Venetian’s departing back. He was slumped against the wall of a sentry post beside the Caligaria Gate, a cup of water in his hand. He was filthy, and he tasted only blood and dirt. And he was tired – in fact as exhausted as he had ever been. For ten days they had fought either on the outer wall or beyond it – sallying forth from the postern close by the Caligaria Gate to howl and hack and slash at the
azaps
struggling to fill the fosse, or even to cross it on those occasions when they managed to work through the night, shielded by the dark, and bridge the abyss with debris. Then the janissaries would follow, sometimes on horseback – but always they had been driven back by the slowly dwindling army of defenders. The toll was scarcely bearable and a force spread thin as fat on a poor man’s bread could not last much longer.

The emperor and the rest of the great men still promised help from the West – still rallied their wearied comrades with talk of a crusade, white knights with red crosses on their breasts, leaping from ships and riding out to drive off the filthy Turk.

John Grant listened with the rest – even felt his hackles rise at the prospect of relief from out of the setting sun. But it was not crusaders that he saw every day and every night; rather it was Turkish levies, and while he cut down every one he could reach with sword or knife, or with the karambit that appeared in his fist whenever it was needed, still he had learned to admire them for their courage and their obedience.

They were to be pitied, though, he thought, those
azaps
. Brave they surely were, driven by their masters or their faith or by a lethal combination of both. But they were poor souls just the same, perhaps the poorest – straight from the fields where they had gleaned their livings, and thrust face first against the greatest obstacle in the wide world.

When he came close enough to see their faces, John Grant saw their eyes gleaming sometimes with hatred, but most often with hope. When he struck down at them from his warhorse, felt his sword passing through them, or when he took them in his deadly embrace and opened their stomachs and throats, he watched their eyes grow dim and felt only sorrow.

But most exhausting of all was the work in the tunnels. First his mental strength was sapped by the enervating effort of finding them – studying the ripples in the bowls and calling upon his senses to locate the miners themselves. Then it was the physical graft of dropping vertical shafts, two and three at a time through the brick-hard topsoil and into the softer material beneath that could be carved like chalk, in search of their burrowings.

He either patrolled the digging sites, tirelessly and obsessively, to encourage the workers as they bent their backs to the endless labour, or gave in to his frustration and leapt in among them to wield pick or shovel with his own hands.

Tonight’s events had been the worst so far. He had been sitting in just this same place, by the gate, but with a bowl of red wine cupped in his two hands. He was watching the tiny crimson bubbles lining the rim, relishing the prickling dryness in his throat in the moments before the first gulp, when the opaque surface had suddenly risen in the slightest of perfect circles. And he had known they were back again, and a sudden tingle in his feet and on the side of his face told him just where they were.

Quickly he had pinpointed the workings, but the tunnel itself had been the deepest yet and he had begun to doubt himself as his men dug further and further downwards without finding any sign. Desperate with the need to reach the foe and drive them off, he had climbed down the wooden ladders – two lengths of them – and thrown his own muscle power behind the effort.

Suddenly the ground beneath their feet had given way unexpectedly and they had plunged – John Grant and four others – into the tunnel. The soil and rubble they brought down with them had extinguished the enemy miners’ torches and buried the first of them alive, and it was in a hot, inky blackness that they struggled to right themselves and find their bearings.

The collapse had briefly silenced the foe, but all at once there were cries and angry shouts as they too began to orientate themselves in the blanketing dark. John Grant was quickest as always. He had no memory of going for his weapons, but there in his left hand was his long-bladed knife, in his right the karambit, curved like a little crescent moon.

He was slicked with sweat, beads of it stinging his eyes as he blinked uselessly in the dark. He heard his own men behind him, but they were diggers rather than fighters and he was, anyway, blocking them from the foe. In a heartbeat he reached out and assessed the dimensions of the tunnel, and found to his dismay that there was barely room enough to crouch, far less to stand. He was on his knees and the air was thick with panicked calls and the stink of men’s sweat and fear.

On a reflex he thrust forward with his right hand and felt his blade part flesh and strike bone. When his hand, wrapped around the hilt, struck home behind it, he recognised the feel of that place immediately above the topmost curve of a man’s hipbone, on the left-hand side. He heard the groan and felt the body fold towards him. A bearded face brushed his own and he slashed upwards with the karambit in his left hand – felt the cutting edge slice across a throat and the flow of hot blood on his fingers.

He was pushing the dying man to the floor when he was struck from behind – by one of his own seeking only to find and perhaps help him but instead causing him problems he did not need.

Another hand came out of the dark in front and above him, fumbling and feeling for him. He felt fingers in his hair, grappling for a hold, and in desperation he rolled over on to his side and lunged upwards with both blades. He felt the knife enter the second man’s body, just below the ribcage, and before it went slack with hurt he twisted and pushed the weight clear until he could gain an upright position once more, still on his knees and with the top of his head brushing the roof of the tunnel.

The air was filled then with a sound like thunder, and he was smothered and bent double, his head crushed on to his knees. His ears rang and his mouth was dry and he wanted to cry out, but the weight of the roof collapse had emptied his lungs as completely as a pair of leather bellows. He flexed his arms but they were pinned by his sides. He was immobile, fixed like a fossil in rock, and his lungs burned, screaming for an intake of breath. Before his eyes were bright flashes, whole starbursts, and the noise inside his head was deafening. Just as he felt he was letting go, slipping downwards into his own deeper darkness, he felt hands grasping at his ankles. He had a momentary flashback to the tunnel through the rock, and Lẽna reaching for him, and then he was moving, being dragged backwards. His legs were straightened beneath him, like an opening penknife, but he was helpless still, his mouth and nose filling with dirt as someone pulled him clear of the roof fall. Then he was beyond the collapse, and gasping and choking as someone he could not see rolled him on to his back. He sucked in air – hot and damp, but blessed nonetheless. He swallowed more soil and choked again and rolled up on to one side and coughed and vomited, emptying himself of strings of bitter bile and then sucking down more merciful draughts of air.

‘You’re all right,’ said a voice, familiar but stricken with concern. ‘You’re fine, you’re fine,’ the words babbled like a prayer.

He was carried then, arms around his shoulders and under his legs as he was passed, still in a sitting position, to the base of the first ladder. They would have fixed ropes and hauled him bodily up the shaft to the surface, but he brushed them away and found the rungs for himself and slowly made his way upwards into the night.

He reached the top and was pulled clear of the shaft by many hands. While he gathered himself, shaking and breathing deeply of the cooler night air, more soldiers poured down the ladders. Bronze cylinders filled with the makings of Greek fire were lowered then, their flammable, oily contents pressurised by hand pumps.

Once in place, the deadly mix was pumped out through a short pipe and ignited by a flaming taper fixed on its end. Mixed with the oil was wood resin, sticky as honey, so that the resultant fire that reached far into the tunnel clung to the clothes and skin of the men it found there.

The Turks in the tunnel, the living and the dead, had a few moments of light by which to consider one another’s startled faces before the flames engulfed them. As the air below ground was consumed by the white-hot blaze, more was sucked down the shaft and the inferno inhaled deeply of it, and all and everyone was incinerated. The timber props burned too, until they could no longer support the weight pressing down upon them and they crumpled, so that scores of terrified men were either burned or buried alive.

John Grant sat close by the lip of the shaft, watching smoke coiling wraith-like into the sky as his comrades emerged coughing and spluttering, and triumphant. Behind them they dragged a pair of prisoners, Turks who had leapt from among the flames into the waiting arms of their tormentors.

‘Let us see what these fine boys may tell us about where the rest of their friends are hiding,’ said one.

‘Rats travel in swarms, do they not,’ said another. ‘I’m sure these ones can be persuaded to point out more of the nests.’

John Grant watched as the hapless
azaps
were led away towards a nearby guardroom, and then he leaned back and looked up at the sky. There was no moon, no stars. Instead a blanket of cloud lay over the city so that the place had the feel of a corpse wrapped in its shroud.

Behind him, to the east, a barely perceptible light presaged the dawn. Despite his fatigue, he knew sleep would elude him for now. He put his head down on his knees and gave himself over to the fall.