Master of Shadows (36 page)

54

‘I believe I know who you are,’ said Lẽna.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Yaminah.

‘What is your mother’s name?’

‘My mother is dead.’

‘I am sorry,’ said Lẽna. ‘Please forgive me for this. We have little time remaining to us. Please tell me your mother’s name.’

Yaminah stared into Lẽna’s face. There was no aggression in the look, not even suspicion. All Lẽna read was sadness.

‘Izzi … Isabella,’ she said. ‘My mother’s name was Isabella. Why do you ask me this?’

‘I honestly do not know where to begin,’ said Lẽna.

She smiled at the girl, smiled at the face that was so familiar. Almost on a whim, she thought of another question.

‘Do you speak the language of Galicia?’

Yaminah’s face was suddenly a study in surprise and confusion.

‘What?’

‘
No tengo mas que darte
,’ said Lẽna.

‘I have nothing more to give thee,’ said Yaminah.

‘Who taught you those words?’ asked Lẽna. Her heart was filled with sadness and there were tears in her eyes.

‘My mother,’ said Yaminah. None of it made sense to her, but she felt the other’s need and her soul reached outwards. ‘Those were my mother’s words.’

Before they could say any more, there came the sound of another’s approach. It was John Grant, and both turned to see if his search had been successful.

He could hardly bring himself to do more than glance at the girl. Instead he moved Lẽna away from the door and began trying one key after another. Finally, and with a gratifying click, the tumblers within the lock were satisfied and the door opened inwards with a sigh.

He looked at Yaminah then, felt his face flush and blessed the gloom for concealing it. He felt the push too, and stronger than before.

‘The birdman,’ she said.

‘Come now,’ said Lẽna. She was standing in the doorway holding out one hand. Yaminah crossed to her and took it and followed her into the hallway. She looked around at John Grant for a moment and he followed her, wordlessly.

They climbed the stairs and ran into the gloom of the chamber beyond. It seemed dreamlike to John Grant, and a wave of déjà vu washed over him as he watched the two women running hand in hand in front of him.

They were halfway to the guardroom when Lẽna spotted movement ahead. There were figures moving there – tending to the unconscious men. She halted, and then changed course, pulling Yaminah over towards the left-hand wall. John Grant saw the figures too and cursed himself for ignoring the faint warning he had felt in the dungeon. In the moments that remained to them, he rushed to Lẽna and the girl, where they stood concealed.

‘Take her,’ said Lẽna. ‘Stay in the shadows and keep moving forward until you are against the wall of the guardroom – close by the door.’

‘What about you?’ It was Yaminah’s voice, and they both turned to look at her, as though they had momentarily forgotten she could speak.

Lẽna smiled an ancient smile and turned to address John Grant.

‘Tell her she has no need to worry about me,’ she said, and she pushed him in the chest to get him moving.

‘I will see you soon,’ he said.

On a sudden impulse – before she could react and before he took Yaminah by the hand and led her away – he stepped back towards her and placed the lightest of kisses on his mother’s lips.

He and Yaminah had reached the far wall, no further, when the figures burst into the chamber. There were three of them – men, and altogether better dressed than the two lying senseless on the guardroom floor.

He watched Lẽna as they sprinted towards her. She glanced at him and their eyes met, and then she turned and ran for the spiral staircase leading to the dungeons.

‘Where best to go?’ he asked Yaminah. They were outside the prison, beyond the towering curtain wall. Her hand felt cool as they stood together in the light of a gibbous moon. She seemed almost bashful, momentarily uncertain. He wondered if she was uncertain about her hand in his or about where to go in hope of sanctuary, and hoped it was the latter.

‘Come with me,’ she said, tugging at him. ‘I know.’

To his surprise she led him into the palace, on a complicated route through courtyards and into a maze of corridors. Finally she stopped by an anonymous-looking door. She reached into a pocket in her skirts and produced a key. She held it up in front of John Grant’s nose, so close he had to squint to focus on it.

‘The key to the kingdom,’ she said, and smiled.

She opened the door and led him inside and down a flight of wooden stairs. The basement was dark, but thin shafts of light infiltrated the windowless space via cracks between the floorboards that formed its ceiling.

‘What place is this?’ he asked.

‘We’ll be safe here,’ she answered. ‘My realm.’

‘But seriously, where are we?’

‘I lived here when I was a child,’ she said. ‘Not this basement, but the rooms above. It was home to my mother and me.’

‘Isabella,’ he said. ‘Was your mother’s name Isabella?’

She looked at him, hard – the sort of look that might leave a bruise.

‘Who are you, birdman?’ she asked. ‘And the woman – who is she? Why did you come looking for me? How do you know my mother’s name?’

‘I am at a loss,’ he said.

John Grant’s mind reeled. Could it be? Was Lẽna right? Was this girl really Badr’s daughter? Possibilities and impossibilities jostled for position in his thinking.

For all that they were strangers, they were standing close together. He ached to touch her. More than that, he wanted desperately to hold her tightly, to crush her against him until her bones cracked. The longing was so intense he felt he might lose control of it, let go of it and lunge at her, bite her flesh, or do her some other harm with the force of all that he felt, that he was holding back like a wall of water checked by a dam.

‘Tell me how you know about my mother,’ she said, and the sound of her voice gave him something to hold on to.

‘I don’t … that is … I have never met her,’ he said. ‘My father … or, well, rather, the man who took care of me after my mother died … or I should say the woman I thought was my mother, the one who raised me …’

In spite of the tension, even because of it, Yaminah felt a laugh rising in her chest like an air bubble. She raised a hand to her mouth to stifle it.

‘Do you even know who
you
are?’ she asked.

He was suddenly crestfallen, embarrassed by his stammering attempt to explain himself. She saw his discomfort and felt an urgent need to reassure him.

‘What happened in the square – the day you arrived?’ she asked. ‘What happened with those eagles?’

Relieved by the change of subject, he brightened, remembering the moment and how it had felt when the birds mantled their wings and he had thought for an instant that they might lift him into the sky.

‘It was the bone they wanted,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘That foul-smelling bone. I was just the one that caught it.’

‘Where did it come from?’

‘From the birds, I suppose. One of them must have been flying with it and then dropped it. I caught it and then they both made a grab for it.’

‘It was quite the spectacle, all the same,’ she said. ‘You know the emperor took it as a message from God – a sign that his house will rise again?’

John Grant smiled.

‘But what did you think?’ he asked.

Then it was Yaminah’s turn to blush. She found that rather than watching his eyes while he spoke, it was his mouth she was drawn to. She found it hard anyway to look into those eyes. Even in the half-light of the basement she could tell they were hazel; more than that, they were flecked with gold that caught the light and sparkled like little suns.

Before she had known what colour they were, she had imagined them. She had listened to Constantine’s voice and felt them upon her, as though he was watching from a distance. She had held Constantine’s hand and wondered what the birdman’s would feel like, what scent it would leave on her skin. He was here now and Constantine was not, and she wished she might feel guilty but she didn’t.

There in the gloom, where everything was indistinct and not quite certain, she felt freedom. They were strangers after all, and she knew – just knew – that here there was no point in being less than honest. They were strangers and yet somehow not. Before being honest with him, she was honest first with herself, and she had to admit that when their eyes had met across the square, while he held the eagles aloft, there had been nothing like strangeness between them. That was the first time she had laid eyes on him, she was certain of it, and yet … and yet the feeling that had struck her in that brief moment was recognition.

She felt a powerful urge to kiss him – or otherwise close the remaining distance between them.

‘I thought that I would never forget the sight of them, or of you,’ she said.

They were standing in the bare room hardly moving, and he wondered how much time had passed since he had pulled the door closed behind them. He felt he had a thousand things to tell her, and only her. He needed her to know how much their being together – here and now – mattered to him, that it was important and that it was everything to him.

‘I was sent here, to you, by a man called Badr Khassan,’ he said. ‘Do you know that name?’

She stared at him, and motes of dust drifted between them like tiny planets adrift in the universe.

‘Badr Khassan is my father,’ she said.

‘He saved my life,’ said John Grant. ‘Many times over. It was his wish that I should come here to the Great City and seek you out and see to it that you are safe and well.’

‘Why is he not here himself?’

‘Badr is dead,’ said John Grant. The words, the fact of it, shocked him anew, and he thought again about the cave, and the way Badr had said the word
daughter
, and the smell of flowers.

‘Isabella is dead too,’ said Yaminah. Her sudden sadness then was like dark water too deep to swim in.

She fumbled in her pocket for Ama’s finger bone. She found it tucked in a fold and took it into her fist. She felt a lump like broken glass in her throat and she swallowed and closed her eyes against hot tears and felt his lips on hers. He kissed her face then and her eyes, tasting salt, and she gasped and put her arms around his neck as he found her lips once more. His arms were around her and he was pulling her against him, crushing her to his body, and then he broke the kiss and held her tighter still, pressing his face into her hair and kissing her neck. She opened her eyes and looked beyond him, over his shoulder, and saw that a finger-thick beam of light through a knothole in a floorboard above was making a shadow of them upon the wall of the basement.

All at once she saw them for what they were, lovers hidden in the dark. She heard Constantine’s voice in her head telling a story of a faithless empress, and she remembered the feel of her prince’s cool hand in her own – and she knew that she loved him still, as she always had. Then she was pushing John Grant away and stepping backwards, almost falling over in her need to be apart from him.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I want … I think …’

‘What is it?’ he asked again.

His voice was soft, filled only with concern, and confusion flooded her and she wanted him again and she shook her head to be free of the thought.

‘
This
is wrong,’ she said. ‘This cannot be.’

‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

She paused, breathing heavily and with her heart hammering, like the fists of someone trapped behind a heavy door. Searching for calm and reason, she flung her mind back in time, in hope of hearing her mother’s voice.

‘When I was little, my mother would tell me about soul twins,’ she said.

He breathed out hard through his nose, and shook his head.

‘What?’

‘She had it from her nurse, who was called Ama,’ she said.

She put her hand back in her pocket and felt for the little bone and played it in her fingers so that she could feel its contours.

‘Ama told my mother, and my mother told me, that while most people travel alone through eternity, some lucky few have a twin. They don’t look alike, but they have a … a connection, I suppose.

‘Sometimes, in some lives, the twins meet. They might be man and wife, parent and child; sometimes one is old and at the end of a life, while the other is newly born and just beginning.’

John Grant looked at her evenly. He had never heard the like, but his need for her made him wait and listen to what she had to say.

‘And this means …?’ he asked.

Yaminah sighed and looked down at the floor.

‘I don’t know what any of it means,’ she said. ‘I just feel – I just know that it’s no accident that you are here now, with me in this city.’

John Grant held his hands up, as though surrendering and admitting defeat.

‘I do not understand,’ he said. He pronounced each word slowly.

‘Nor me,’ she said. She looked up again, met his gaze squarely before taking a deep, halting breath and continuing.

‘And I am betrothed. I am to be married.’

‘Married?’ he asked. ‘Tell me.’

‘Married.’ She nodded as she spoke. ‘And in three days’ time.’

Suddenly desperate for the clear light of the world above, Yaminah half ran towards the wooden stairs. Before she had covered even half the distance, he had caught her by the arm and turned her to face him.

‘How can you be getting married in three days?’ he asked. ‘You were in a prison cell when we found you, locked up like a common criminal – hardly the usual routine for a bride.’

‘There is too much to explain,’ she said. She was trying to pull free of him, to shake off his hand, but his grip was unexpectedly strong.

‘I promised your father I would take care of you,’ he said.

She gestured over her shoulder with her thumb, to the spot where they had been standing moments before.

‘I suspect that was hardly what he meant by taking care,’ she said. ‘I would call that helping yourself.’