Master of Shadows (37 page)

Her sudden anger surprised her as much as him. He let go of her arm and turned away from her. Instantly contrite, she reached out for him and placed a hand gently on his shoulder. She pulled on it and he turned back to face her once more.

‘Listen to me, please. I am as confused as you are,’ she said. ‘But it is true that I have thought about you and little else since I saw you in the square.’

His eyes were fixed on hers, and she forced herself to hold his gaze while she continued.

‘You remind me of what my mother always said about the moment she first saw my father – Badr Khassan.’

John Grant said nothing, but raised his chin expectantly.

‘She said he was the most beautiful man she had ever seen.’

He kept looking at her and she felt the blood rise in her face again.

‘You are beautiful, birdman,’ she said. ‘You may even be the most beautiful – but I have promised myself to another.’

‘So where is he?’ asked John Grant. ‘How is it that you were in that miserable cell if you are to be married? Where is he?’

‘I expect he is where he always is,’ she said. ‘In his bed.’

He looked at her with frank disbelief, pulling his head back in a motion that reminded her, just for a moment, of a tortoise retreating into its shell. She laughed out loud at the madness of it.

‘In his bed?’ asked John Grant.

‘And I think you may be just the man I need to get him up.’

He put his head on one side. One moment a tortoise, the next a puppy dog. Her heart filled with the need to hold him, but she resisted.

‘If you will be patient, I will try to explain,’ she said.

‘I am listening,’ said John Grant.

55

John Grant lay on his back in the guardroom by the postern near the Caligaria Gate. It had been hours since he had left Yaminah – at her insistence – and returned to his duties. The story she had had to tell was hard to believe and had it come from another source he might have dismissed it as fantasy. Despite knowing her hardly at all – and although his emotions still reeled from her brief acceptance of his desire, followed by swift rejection – he felt compelled to trust her and to believe her.

But as he lay on his straw-lined pallet, his mind spun like the planet beneath him. For want of distraction from her plight, he stretched his arms out by his sides and placed his hands palms downwards on the earthen floor. He spread his fingers, exhaled softly and surrendered to the flight into the void.

As though he had leapt from the edge of a cliff into space, his stomach seemed to rise inside his body. His head felt light and he thrilled at the speed of it. But while the feeling of the planet’s journey had always overwhelmed any other, possessing him completely, tonight the rumble and grind of the earth’s revolutions vied for dominance. He felt the thrum of it in his fingertips, stronger than ever before, and then, with a force that had him open his eyes wide and clamp his mouth shut so that his teeth fairly rattled in his skull, he felt a jolt against his back like a kick from a horse.

His ears were left ringing and he lay still and stiff, almost afraid to move. The jolt was followed by more impacts, each less powerful than the one before, until at last they stopped and the only sensation was the familiar, steady vibration, almost like the jangling from muscles tensed by excitement, or by fear.

He raised his head and looked around the room. He would not have been surprised to see the place in disarray – as in the aftermath of an earthquake – but the rest of the room’s inhabitants slumbered peacefully. He glanced at the table and saw cups and glasses still in their places, their contents undisturbed. Standing up, he walked to the door, left open for fresh air, and looked outside. A handful of men, soldiers by the look of them, were crossing the yard some hundred metres or so away. They were talking quietly, without any hint of excitement or agitation.

Confused but no less certain that what he had felt was real – that it had happened even if he alone had noticed – he returned to the guardroom and lay down once more, in faint hope of sleep.

Half a world away from John Grant and the Great City, and the girl and the broken boy and the Maid of Orleans, an island in an ocean then unknown to any soldier of Christ had ceased to exist, leaving nothing but a bottomless crater deep beneath the waves.

The greatest explosion in ten thousand years had blasted Kuwae, an island in the Pacific and home to hundreds, into mere fragments that rose into the sky and then lowered upon the wide world like the very shadow of death.

Trees in forests would be strangled, left starving for want of the warmth of the sun; crops in fields would be smothered by dust and debris; tempests and torrents and snowstorms would bury whole cities and blanket the earth, and everywhere and anywhere the hearts of men would be broken in the endless shade.

56

Alone in his bedchamber, Prince Constantine felt sick. He had awoken in the wee small hours before dawn with a feeling close to dizziness or vertigo, the like of which he had not felt since the early aftermath of his broken spine. He could imagine no physical cause that might explain it, and so he decided it was the worry of Yaminah’s absence that made his head spin and his stomach churn.

He spent the remaining hours of the night in tortured contemplation, seeking answers and explanations and possible outcomes. Where could she be? And why? Over and over he reviewed what she had told him – about the emperor’s consort and all that she had said. There was the wedding to be considered too, of course. For all her passionate insistence, all her tears and heartfelt talk of how much she loved him and wanted to be his wife, had reality set in at long last? Had she properly considered her future – a lifetime devoted, of necessity, to a man unable to stand, to walk, to make love, far less to make with her the children she deserved? Was she absent now, just days from the ceremony, because the very sight and sound of him had become painful and too much to bear?

There were more thoughts in his head as well – born of a steadily growing sense of anticipation. Woven through the leaden feeling of dread caused by the siege, and the anxiety about Yaminah, was something close to excitement. Given the circumstances, it was inexplicable. But there was no denying it. At loose somewhere in his mind, flitting between the conscious and the unconscious, was the notion that events were unfolding as they should … and that something was about to happen.

It was as he was mulling and musing, his forehead slick with cold sweat and his eyes dry and itching, that he became aware of a sensation he had not known for many years. Once he had noticed it, at first buried among his trials and tribulations, it rose to the surface and declared itself loudly. Its advent overwhelmed all other considerations, and his thoughts turned, all and only, to the feeling.

He remembered how, as a little boy, he would often awake in the morning to find a seemingly dead arm in bed with him – lying cold across his face or across his chest so that it had to be flung aside with the other. He would move, sometimes with much effort on account of the lifeless limb, until the deadness could be dangled out of the bed. Slowly then would come the return of sensation, as warm blood made its way to his fingertips and began the work of resuscitation. Sometimes the return to life was close to agony, or at least a confusing mix of pain and pleasure.

For some little while then he was distracted by an unbidden memory of his mother. She had been gone from him too long for any recollection of her face. Instead he recalled smooth, cool hands and soft words, the floral scent from her hair and skin as she bent over him and kissed him.

No one ever mentioned her now – and not for the longest time. She had been not a wife to his father but a mistress. Her place in the world, he imagined, left formal union out of reach. Only the boy, her boy, had been of value. She had tended him at first, as a nurse perhaps, until such time as he was old enough for his education to begin, and then the currents of court life had taken him away from her, or she from him.

He lay on his back and remembered the sound of her voice. It was she who had heard him cry out about his dead arm the first time it happened – she who had come to him and described it in a way that made sense to him then and stayed with him ever after. She had shushed and stroked him, and held his pudgy arm and told him it was just a dream.

‘Your arm has fallen asleep,’ she had said. ‘Let’s wait and see what happens now.’

She had sat with him that time, and many others, and gently massaged the skin and muscles while life returned.

He lay on his back and gave himself over to the feeling in the lower part of his right leg. Where before and for all the years since he’d caught Yaminah there had been only an absence, now there was a tingling like a thousand needles against the skin. He thought again about his mother’s words and reasoned that while a limb was asleep it would have no feeling at all. The tingle and the jabbing of the needles meant quite the opposite, therefore. The sensation came instead from a leg that was awake.

57

Hours had passed since John Grant had felt himself kicked in the back not once but a dozen times, and yet still he felt not quite properly in touch with the world. It was the last hour before dawn. He was due back on duty, patrolling the walls and monitoring the bowls, but he dreaded the prospect of setting his mind to the task.

For one thing, he felt almost numb, and all over. There was a faint hum in his head too, as of the last vibrations from a glass struck with the handle of a spoon. It seemed to him that he was wrapped in an invisible blanket that kept him from properly feeling anything around him. It was a hangover without the pain. He even pinched his nose and tried to make his ears pop, but there was no relief to be had from the distance he perceived between his own self and everything around him.

As distracting, if in a wholly different way, were his thoughts of the girl, Yaminah. He tried to concentrate – to consider the consequences of neglecting his duties and missing an attack from the Turks – but always her lovely face appeared before his eyes like that of a djinn.

As it turned out, the necessary distraction from his ills arrived with the first light of day. From the outer wall came the sound of men shouting, sounding the alarm. He grabbed his sword and dashed from the guardroom. More men followed, running behind him, leaping up the steps and on to the battlements high above.

For a moment he thought he was confronted by an illusion, some trick of the mind that was yet another symptom of whatever malady had beset him. Then the continued howls of the men – all of them pointing and staring, first into one another’s faces in search of explanation, and then back at the cause of their alarm – persuaded him that here was no hallucination.

Just in front of the outer edge of the fosse, and looming over the battlements he stood upon, was a massive square tower. It had evidently been constructed as a huge timber frame, then covered with animal hides and timber cladding. There were arrow slots from top to bottom, through which could be glimpsed the movements of the enemy within. Worst of all was the sight of Turks on the topmost level of the thing, peering from behind timber crenellations and actually looking down, from a superior height, on to the walls and into the city beyond.

‘Dear God,’ whispered John Grant under his breath.

The next voice he heard was that of Giustiniani. John Grant turned to look at him, finding reassurance in the sight and sound of the man. They had been fighting for weeks, doggedly repulsing every attack, and yet the Genoan seemed as full of energy as he had on the day they had arrived into port. Every time a section of wall was crumpled by the Ottoman guns, Giustiniani was there, rallying the workers, urging them on as they sought to plug the gaps with rubble and soil and their own sweat and tears.

‘These Turks have all the cunning of Satan himself,’ he shouted.

Now beyond the shock of the first sight of the monstrosity, John Grant began to study it in search of weakness. To his amazement he saw that the tower had a tail – a trench leading all the way from its base to the Turkish lines many hundreds of metres away. Covered with timber and more leathery hides, it provided the foe with the means to supply their construction with men and materials without fear of injury.

While he watched, the tower’s central purpose became shockingly apparent. From the base came a steady flow of debris, rubble and sand and much else besides, that was filling the fosse at an alarming rate. If something was not done – and soon – the workers in the tower would have created a bridge wide enough for the advance of an entire army.

‘They must have assembled it in the night,’ said Giustiniani. Scores of men had gathered to him and were listening intently as he assessed the threat. ‘And then hauled it upon wheels across no-man’s-land and to the very edge of the ditch.’

Before he could say another word, a series of monstrous blasts rang out in quick succession, followed by harrowing impacts. The Turks were concentrating their fire on the section of the wall close by the Gate of St Romanus. Looking towards the enemy lines, John Grant saw a cluster of gun barrels, evidently the heaviest and longest of those remaining. While he watched, a great cheer went up from the Ottomans, along with a blaring of horns and a pounding of drums and wooden gongs. Another gap, the widest yet, had appeared in the wall beneath a massive cloud of dust. An even greater roar, men’s voices raised in expectation of triumph, rose into the air, and moments later a wave of Turks began pouring down the slope towards the breach.

‘With me!’ shouted Giustiniani. ‘Come with me!’

While the wave came on, the defenders – fewer by far in number but as fired with bloodlust – ran for the gate, or mounted horses if they had them and galloped to the site.

John Grant was among the first to arrive at the breach, close by the commander. Together with the emperor, who had taken the Gate of St Romanus for himself, they mounted the rubble and debris and looked out upon an awful sight. The Ottomans had evidently done more than construct their tower overnight. Here too there had been preparations made under cover of darkness, and a wide section of the fosse had been all but filled with yet more debris.

Although the widest of any gap punched through the wall so far, it was quickly plugged, not with earth and barrels but by defenders. Shoulder to shoulder they stood, grimly ready as the first of the Turks lunged towards them, cruelly curved swords held high above their heads. John Grant glanced at the men nearest him, considered their expressions. There too was Minotto of Venice, his armour crazed with the gashes left by scimitar and axe, and three more Genoese: the Bochiardi brothers, Antonio, Paulo and Troilo, who had come to the city at their own expense, and bearing their own arms.

Next he turned to Giustiniani, to the fore as always and poised on the balls of both feet, ready for the off, and Don Francesco di Toledo, a maverick captain from Castile. For an instant he was filled with pride and thought that he might cry, not out of fear but out of love. If he had to die today then let it be here, he thought, in the company of men made brave by love of their own folk, sure and certain in the knowledge that should all be lost, they would know at the end that they had given every last ounce and breath, their own lifeless shells falling as final obstacles between family and foe.

At the front of the attackers was a man-at-arms, breastplate gleaming and flashes of sunlight dancing along the edges of his blade. Giustiniani met his eyes and leapt forward, but the boulder he landed upon was loose underfoot and he stumbled as the janissary loomed above him, sword poised for the strike. John Grant raised his own sword and lunged towards his commander in hopes of shouldering him out of danger and parrying the blow. Fast as he was, he was beaten to the clash by Paulo Bochiardi, who came in low and fast as a cat, swinging his straight blade like a woodcutter, and severed both of the janissary’s legs above the knees.

First blood drawn, the mass of the opposing forces came together in a frenzy of hacking blades and spear thrusts. John Grant lunged and slashed and felt flesh and bone parting and splitting beneath his sword. Out of the corner of one eye he spied a splendidly attired Turkish warrior, six and a half feet tall or more, looming above the rest with the tails of his brightly coloured robe snapping in his wake. Suddenly before him, blocking his way, stood another giant, a citizen defender, and as they began to circle one another, the sight of them gave other men pause. Both sides fell back then, transfixed by the moment of single combat.

Swung with terrible force, the crossed sword of the defender and the crescent of the scimitar of the Turk came together like bolts of lightning fusing in the midst of a storm. Steel squealed and the warriors roared into one another’s faces. Blow after blow was swung or parried until the Turk, his robe swirling like smoke, dropped low and aimed for his enemy’s knees. Quick as thought the giant defender leapt into the air, pulling both legs up towards his chest so that the scimitar passed harmlessly beneath his feet. Landing clean, and while his attacker was still unbalanced by his miss, the Christian swung his blade high and with a howl of rage brought it scything downwards. The mill-sharpened edge found the space between the Turk’s shoulder and neck and the massive force behind it had the sword sweep through his body to his right hip so that he was cloven in two.

John Grant would have cheered, but in an instant, and as the two halves of the dead Turk settled into the dust and dirt, the attackers surged forward as one and felled the Christian champion. His comrades, enraged by the injustice of it all, pushed into the mass of Turks, desperate to win back the corpse at least. But even as they fought forwards, John Grant among them, a colossal explosion brought them to a standstill.

Every one of them, attacker and defender alike, turned to look along the wall in time to see the Ottoman tower festooned in red and orange blossoms. A second wave of explosions erupted from it then as a cascade of barrels, each filled with gunpowder and with fuses spitting, joined those already poured at its base by the defenders on the battlements. The tower rippled and buckled like a giant tree in the grip of a gale, and then with a yawning roar it toppled backwards within a rising plume of smoke and dust.

Now John Grant did cheer, along with the rest of the defenders. Up on the battlements, the men who had dropped the scores of exploding barrels around the tower – like a deadly rain at the roots of a great tree – were dancing in jubilation.

Turning back to the job in hand once more, John Grant and his fellows pushed back against the foe, their hopes and strength renewed like a guttering flame refreshed by a wind. The feet of the warriors of both sides were slipping and sliding hideously on the blood and gore of dead men, or else stumbling over the corpses themselves. The mad and joyous horror of it held them all in its spell, and with an effort that felt like one collective outpouring of held breath, the defenders redoubled their efforts and chopped and hewed at the weakening wall before them.

Where before there had been shouts and cheers from among the Turks, the sounds of excited men urging one another forward and on to greater and greater feats, now there were only groans of failing effort.

In the end, the moment of their breaking was like a turn in the air by a massed flock of birds. As though a single thought had registered in every mind, the enemy fell back – and then turned and ran. Too exhausted to pursue the rout, the defenders began dropping to their knees, held upright only by hands grasped around the hilts of swords thrust point downwards into the bloodied dirt.