Master of Shadows (8 page)

‘Gone,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘Just gone.’

They walked on in silence, the only sound the whisper of the river surging alongside.

‘I would like to be a janissary,’ said John Grant. ‘I would like to be a janissary and kill the man who killed my mother.’

‘I can teach you to make war,’ said the Moor. ‘But first …’

He looked at the boy and smiled, and pointed ahead of them.

‘First?’ asked John Grant.

‘First we eat.’

They were approaching a sweeping bend in the river. Beyond it, a few minutes ahead and shielded by a stand of sycamore trees, a curl of white smoke rose into the cloudless sky.

‘Your people have been hospitable to me before,’ said Badr. ‘Let us see if they will be so again.’

With that, he broke into an easy, loping run. John Grant followed him, effortlessly.

11

In the East, 1448

The urgency was gone from John Grant so completely it might never have existed. In place of any desire to stay pressed tight against her, inside her, he obeyed his present need and rolled off her and away. They were different people than they had been; at least she was to him. And soon, he knew, his seeming indifference would bring about the change for her as well.

He lay on his back, eyes open and taking in the details of the little room for the first time. Moments before – and for hours before that – his mind had been filled only with thoughts of finding a woman. He had found one, found her, and pursued her then with all the energy with which he had been taught to make war. Everything about her had been all that mattered. Now, while the sweat of her was still wet upon his skin, his thoughts were all and only fixed on everything else
besides
her.

His weapons were by the bed, along with his clothes and his purse. He reached down towards the floorboards with his left hand and found the little leather bag tied with a cord. He was pleased by the weight of coins there. As a skilled and practised mercenary, he was well paid, and in recent years John Grant and Badr Khassan had struck a rich vein.

The walls of her room were roughly plastered and painted white. There were bits and pieces of furniture. Two chairs with woven hemp seats were set side by side against one wall. A table that had been fine once, but many meals and years ago, took up too much of the remaining space. He imagined it had been better suited to the tavern below.

The bed upon which they were lying was comfortable enough, the mattress feather-filled and as pleasantly plump as the woman beside him. The moonlight, spilling limply through the one arched window, was helped by the glow from a fire in a corner of the room. There was a pile of chopped logs beside it, and he thought about getting up and adding one or two of them to the failing flames, then decided against giving any signal that might be interpreted as a desire to linger long.

He chanced a look at his erstwhile lover, from the corner of his eye. For a few moments she lay as he had left her, breathing heavily, arms by her sides, heels planted wide apart, each spread knee only inches from the mattress. Without his humping body on top of her, she seemed incomplete and faintly preposterous. The dance was over but she did not yet care that her partner had moved on. The act itself – or at least the need of it, the same that had drawn him to her – mystified him now, and with an equal and opposite force. Her breasts, so enthralling mere moments before, seemed intent on departing too, somehow deflated and each of them making for a separate armpit. She was a pretty one just the same, and still young enough to carry her weight with aplomb.

It had been her smile anyway that drew his attention first of all, while she bustled between the tables of the tavern below the room where they lay. She had been busy topping up cups and glasses with wine and beer, swapping banter with the customers. The fact that her pretty face was bobbing atop a shapely frame, all curves and good length of bone, had only served to seal the deal – like finding that a finely appointed house was blessed too with a plentiful garden.

He was sorry – for it and for her, and maybe for himself. That he had ever wanted her so hungrily seemed incredible now. She giggled as she closed her legs and reached down to pull a coverlet over both their naked bodies. She had sensed a sudden chill and seemed determined to retain some warmth. He said nothing, but when she cosied over to him and placed her tousled head upon his chest, he wrapped an arm around her shoulder. He had liked her before and he liked her still. He had no wish to hurt her feelings, but the need for intimacy was gone.

‘What’s good to eat here?’ he had asked her, emboldened by an afternoon’s worth of rough red wine on an empty stomach. She had her back to him – indeed he had been staring at her rolling hips and buttocks when the words escaped his lips. She stopped. And turned. For her own part she had already noticed him – knew what she was going to see before her gaze fell upon him once more. Pretty – that was the word that had come to her at her first sight of him, and it was the word that came to her while she considered her reply.

‘Everything,’ she said, hand on one full hip. ‘Anything and everything you fancy. It’s all good here, and plenty of it.’

She turned away again, to continue her round of the busy and battered tables that filled the place.

Pretty, she thought again, and smiled a crooked smile.

She was hardly the first to see it – woman or man. Some women found his appearance effeminate and moved on quickly in search of something more overtly male. Those that approved of his looks – looks that mirrored or complemented something of their own appeal – often found they could not get enough of him (though he got enough of them, and soon enough).

Badr Khassan slapped the young man’s thigh beneath the table, then kept his huge hand there and pinched hard just above the knee – so that John Grant’s leg flinched and snapped straight out in front of him like a length of knotted rope. His knee banged off the underside of the table hard enough to unbalance his freshly refilled glass. The whole lot of it toppled into his lap, soaking him through to the skin in an instant, so that he gasped and then groaned. The empty glass smashed on to the floor.

Hearing the breakage, she turned to find its source and that pretty face all in the same place. He shook his head at her wide-eyed, and held up his hands in a gesture of apology. She might have smiled at him, but took the trouble to glare instead before marching quickly in his direction.

John Grant looked hard at Badr, but the Moor was already apparently deep in conversation with the man seated to his right. She was beside him by then and he noticed the smell of her – hot, and with an underlying tang of salt. She smelled, it seemed to him, like a sea breeze, and as inviting. He felt a heaviness between his legs, defying the clinging cold of the spilled wine. She looked down into his lap and he moved his hands quickly to cover himself, lest she see the bulge.

‘Nothing there to worry about,’ she said.

Badr guffawed beside him, understanding the joke before he did. He wanted her then, and desperately. Everything about her – every line and swollen curve, the hot scent of her and the lopsided smile on her pretty face …

Hours had passed and much strong drink had been taken. Confidences exchanged and lingering looks. Unnecessary touching when they brushed past one another between tables as the evening wore on. He had taken her wine and taken her too.

But that was then. Now his fingertips brushed against her breast and he glanced down to see a fan of stretch marks etched darkly, the colour of aubergine. She placed one leg over his and he felt, for the first time, the sharp rasp of bristled hairs on her shins. Evidently she took as much care of her appearance as circumstances allowed, but in the aftermath of their coupling the imperfections registered more clearly, demanding the attention he had previously paid only to the curves of her behind and the rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed and laughed.

Rather than the sea, it seemed to him now that her skin smelled of sweat, yesterday’s as well as today’s. Her curls, so beguiling in the candlelit tavern and so intoxicating while he had buried his face in her neck as he ground his hips against her, smelled of cooking fat. Her panting breath against his chest was stale wine. She made a soft, warm sound of contentment and his body stiffened slightly, involuntarily, in response to her easy comfort, her familiarity with him – all but a stranger.

‘Quick … but not too quick,’ she murmured, and giggled again.

It was true and he knew it. He almost blushed but took the second half of her sentence, and the fondness behind the laugh, as proof that she had taken something for herself from the encounter.

Although he was already beyond her, making a memory of her, still he cared what she thought. In spite of himself and his reservations, he tightened his arm around her and pressed his face against the top of her head. Just a girl – just a girl, and he planted a kiss among her curls.

He realised his lips had moved, and wondered for a moment if he had spoken out loud. She made no sign of it and he relaxed. He cared what all of them thought, but never enough to ask or to stay. He would leave when she fell asleep or when the fire went out – whichever came first.

All unbidden, the memory of his mother came to mind – settled down where it chose, by his side like a faithful hound. He thought of the tomb and the gorse flowers, and about the arrow and Angus Armstrong. The months and the years had passed since her death there in the moonlight, but the archer had not forgotten them. John Grant had turned from boy to man and Badr Khassan had guided him as best he could, and yet neither time nor distance had kept their foe at bay.

The girl was dozing now, her consciousness drifting like a skiff that had slipped its mooring. He listened to her breathing, deep and peaceful, and wished he might let go and join her there.

It was thoughts of Angus Armstrong that preoccupied him then. John Grant imagined him out there in the night and prayed for a day, and soon, when his hands might be warm with the archer’s freshly spilled entrails.

Not for the first time it struck him how far he had landed from the life he had once expected. He was like a seed plucked by the wind from among the branches of a tall tree and carried out of sight. He glanced at the sleeping girl and then up into the rafters of the room above a tavern in a land that was foreign to him, and shook his head in disbelief.

He was a farmer’s son, and still little more than a boy. He ought to have been destined for a life of quiet hardship on the land. He looked at his hands, spread the fingers and thought how their skin should have been stained dark by now – ingrained like the hands that had once cared for him and loved him.

He considered his fingernails, ragged and short, and recalled the sight of stubborn crescents beneath other nails that had once untangled his unruly hair or picked at careless traces of food left dried upon his cheeks.

He remembered casual contact from two hands moved by love of an altogether different sort – that he had not known for years. He struggled to recall that touch that had once seemed more familiar than his own, and for a moment he ached to have those careworn hands upon him one more time, ruffling his hair or laid upon his shoulders in the preface to a mother’s kiss.

Once it would have seemed to him unthinkable to find himself an hour’s walk from his mother’s cottage – and yet here he was, a warrior with blood-soaked hands, half a world away from that home and from the jagged darkness that now cradled Jessie’s bones.

Instead of tending crops and husbanding beasts – the stuff of life – he was a bringer of death. By Badr’s side his tools had been the sword and the knife, and the man and the boy had earned their living harvesting souls ranged against them in wars not of their making. They were mercenaries – killers for hire and masters of the trade. A mere boy he might be, but his was a precocious talent that enthralled his guardian and mentor as much as anyone else.

This night – the girl and the red wine – was only a distraction on the way to yet another fight in which their only concern would be the potential for profit. They were far from any home; flotsam carried this way and that by one conflict or another across the bloody face of the continent.

Soon enough they would stand alongside Christian soldiers in the army of John Hunyadi of Hungary. The grand plan, about which they cared not at all, was to drive off the Ottoman Sultan Murad II. Good luck to their employer if the objective might be met, but they would still fill their purses with silver and gold along the way.

He might have wept then for a life unlived and another cut short. But his eyes stayed dry as though cured by smoke from the fire.

12

Kosovo Poljo, Pristina, one month later

John Grant had known what had to happen as soon as his eyes met those of the beautiful stranger. Hubbub all around, and yet something in the other’s expression made it plain. A connection – mutual understanding reached in a heartbeat.

His heart, already working hard, reached for a new height, goaded by anticipation. Separated by the crowd though they were, each had all but ceased to notice the rest of the participants in the busy market square. Most had already paired off (let them dance their own dances). Those left alone and slumped in corners or collapsed on the floor were, anyway, beyond anyone’s concern.

For John Grant it was as though they came together through deep water; movements slow, sounds muted and distant, echoing and strange. It was a striking, haunting face that came towards him: angular lines but softened and made perfect by dark oval eyes. There was light and life aplenty there, but something else as well, hard and selfish, cruelty perhaps. Those were the faces and eyes that John Grant liked best of all, and there had been more than a few along the way.

Moment by moment and step by step the rhythms of the dance brought them closer together. Each had eyes only for the other.

Caught in his own moment, Badr Khassan could only watch the courtship unfolding in front of him. He was impressed in part by John Grant’s prowess, but also disapproving, and more and more so as the years passed. He had raised him as a son and, like any good father, had revelled in the youngster’s achievements; gasped, in fact, at the speed of his maturing. Just as often nowadays, however, Badr wondered if all was well. He had set out to make a warrior of the lad, and he had succeeded. But John Grant was a killer too, which was different. Badr Khassan was not in the business of caring for souls, but still he wondered if enough had survived of the gentle young man he had taken into his care.

The boy he had met had been sensitive to every tide and current in life’s ocean. But as the years passed, a space had opened up in the youngster’s heart – had been torn open long ago, in truth.

Those who met the boy, and then the young man, were impressed by his charm. Men envied his talents but women noticed something more, something else. For all the seeming tenderness in John Grant’s eyes, there was an absence as well. The most sensitive understood what was amiss. For the best of them, the kindest, there was no mistaking it. If he opened up at all, it to reveal a room made strange not by what it contained but by what it lacked.

The space he had to offer might seem welcoming at first, but something played upon the visitor’s mind. Here and there were marks on the wall, from paintings taken down; the shapes of missing furniture, windows filled in and painted over. Something was gone, a view made unwanted and unbearable.

It was something John Grant had lost while still too young. There was a grate in the room, but no fire; candles on their sconces, but no warming light. Since she was gone, because she was gone, he hunted high and low. But he would not find her.

The boy, the man, was motherless.

Badr felt the loss of Jessie Grant, but he grieved most for the boy. Some of the resultant hardness had served him well – served them both well.

John Grant’s awareness of everything and everyone around him remained astonishingly heightened, and at first Badr had wondered how the lad might cope beyond the cottage and a life shared only with his mother. But in her absence, steel had grown inside, and some other hard shell outside.

Having no other trade to teach, the Bear had made his cub into a soldier like himself. Since neither felt loyalty to a flag or to any man but each other, they fought for money. Skilled as Badr was – and exceptional as John Grant became – they had lived hard but well. Winning most and losing a few, they had made every venture pay, one way or another. But nowadays it was neither for money nor for reputation that Badr’s heart ached.

Distracted as he was now by his own affairs, still he found time to look out for his charge. In the moments he could dedicate to the other’s craft, he felt himself moved as always by the elegance and flair of it all.

The distance between John Grant and the fresh focus of his attention was closing now, and Badr finally looked away – in part to give them privacy and also to pay proper attention where it was more urgently required.

The perfect face had made its intentions clear. Sinuous movements promised much; too much as it turned out. John Grant’s ploy was always the same and always worked. He seemed so defenceless – his heart exposed. Any onlooker would have said he was bound to get hurt. His expression was as open as his hands, giving it all away.

Both felt the need, the hunger to come close, but it was John Grant who stopped, suddenly still. It was anyone’s guess whether those big brown eyes that gazed upon him then burned with lust or love, but they burned brightest of all close up.

John Grant felt the charge of the other’s life force jangling on his face and upon the exposed skin of his hands and arms. Only his eyes moved then, taking in the shape and the form as well as the intent; deciding where first to lay his hands.

And then finally the agony of anticipation was over and they came together lightly, so lightly. A statue no longer, John Grant returned to life and shifted his weight, minutely, on to his right foot. His partner seemed all at once confused and certainly unbalanced. Had there been a mistake, signals misread and only shame and embarrassment ahead?

All at once the silence ended for John Grant, and the tumult of the combat in the dying moments of the battle rushed over him. The fighting had spilled away from the battlefield and into a nearby town, the lanes and alleys, the streets and houses and here in the market square. Swords danced where there was room, but in the press of the final moments it was about knives and fists and teeth as well.

The karambit was a knife shaped to resemble a tiger’s claw. Curved so that it described an arc, it was carried close to the body, hidden, and brought into the light only when the intention was to draw blood. It came from Asia, where the ways and wiles of the tiger were well known. The index finger of the good hand was inserted into a hoop at the base of the knife, the fist clamped tight around the handle. In action it was used when two bodies were close enough to touch, and most blows came from below, delivered with an upwards slashing motion like that of the cat.

John Grant savoured the heat of the embrace as he took his latest enemy in his arms. His left hand, bearing the cruel blade, was now tightly between them, but so sharp there was little effort involved in sliding it free. The fine edge parted clothing, skin and muscle with ease. The soldier’s face, handsome and bright, was against his own, hot skin and a slick of eager sweat. John Grant drew softly back from him, the better to read the expression there, and as he pulled away, he reached up with the knife and ran an inch of shining silver across the taut, exposed skin of the neck. The agony of the wound to the abdomen had made the man throw his head back anyway. He lacked the breath to scream, however, and only crimson gushed from an ever-widening slit that ran from ear to ear.

Badr had finished his own man with his scimitar, and as the lifeless body hit the paved floor of the square, he took a moment to steal another glance at the more elegant display of artistry. There, amid the ugliness of bitter hand-to-hand combat, as defeated Christians struggled to hold off their Muslim opponents, he witnessed the final act of something as beautiful as it was cruel.

John Grant stepped away from his man and Badr would have sworn the lad performed a little bow. Certainly his head snapped forward an inch as the dying man fell to his knees and toppled sideways. Satisfied but not sated, he turned lightly in search of more and Badr closed his eyes.

When he opened them once more, he saw John Grant running towards him.

‘There’s nothing more for us here,’ the young man shouted as he reached his friend. ‘The day is theirs. We would do best if we left now.’

Badr clapped him on the shoulder and pulled him to his chest. He embraced him then, like a father, before leading the way into an alleyway off the square. John Grant did not notice the Moor’s tears.

‘You are right,’ said Badr, rubbing one hand across his face. ‘These Ottomans are on the up and up, I tell you. Hunyadi and his Hungarians have given all they have, and more than once – and all to no avail. Murad’s Muslims are too many and too keen.

‘Their exploits might make us rich. I believe, lad, that the time has come to switch sides.’

John Grant laughed a bitter laugh while they ran, jumping corpses and dodging shattered doors and the remnants of makeshift barricades.

‘God … Allah – what’s in a name for two such as we?’ he said.