Master of Shadows Read online

  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.’<
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  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.

  13

  Somewhere in Turkia, six months later

  The fighting had begun soon after dawn, and the Moor looked around him at a heap of slain. Not all were his own handiwork but he had sent more than a few of them on their way, right enough. The air was thick with the stink of it – with the iron-laden reek of spilled blood and the putrid exhalations from split and punctured bodies.

  For Badr Khassan and John Grant, everything had changed, and also nothing. Upon an ebbing tide – ebbing at least from the forces and soldiers of Christ – they had allowed themselves to float into the service of the Ottomans.

  It had been easily accomplished. Badr spoke the Moorish tongue, and everything about him – from the colour of his skin to the style of his clothing – advertised him as one most likely to fight for the Turks. That his companion was smaller by far, and fairer, mattered not at all once their would-be employers had witnessed the younger man’s handling of the karambit.

  The sun was held low in the sky by the weight of morning, but the air shimmered with summer heat. No more than an hour had passed, but already the matter was decided. The Christian emperor’s forces were broken. Discipline was all but lost, and those men still fit for flight were leaving the field in disorder, pursued by the victors. Here and there the determination of individual captains maintained pockets of resistance, and it was in the face of one such knot of desperate souls that Badr and John Grant now found themselves.

  Badr had briefly lost track of the younger man in the fray, and in a momentary lull he surveyed the scene and spotted his erstwhile student. There he was – student no longer and locked in single combat with a bull-shouldered armoured giant apparently bent on splitting his foe into multiple parts. Taller and heavier by far than John Grant, the huge crusader was wielding a double-handed broadsword in the manner of a butcher’s cleaver.

  Despite his size advantage, however, he was winded and all but spent, and the smaller man evaded the clumsy blows with ease. Finally broken, the bull dropped his head and lowered his weapon, resting the cutting edge on the ground as a support.

  John Grant stepped lightly forward and used his own momentum to put more weight behind his own weapon as he sliced the giant’s head cleanly from the stooped shoulders. The head spun high and the massive body fell forward. For a moment its descent was stopped, comically, by the prop of the broadsword – its point digging into the sand, the pommel trapped against the giant’s belly and briefly taking its owner’s dead weight. Then slowly and sadly the whole mass toppled sideways, landing with a soft thump. The severed head, having hit the ground first, rolled around in a circle before coming to a halt close by the dead man’s knees.

  Badr realised he had not been the only man observing the contest. The sight of the felling of a champion had drained his fellows of any dregs of spirit. Christian soldiers had grown familiar with defeat in the East, and judging that there was nothing more to be achieved among their dead and dying comrades, the remaining handfuls turned to leave the field.

  Some kept their weapons, while others dropped theirs in hopes of a speedier exit. The general withdrawal, messy though it was, might soon become a rout, and each man assessed his own chances of survival and acted accordingly. It was as Badr watched the last of them turn and flee, pursued by the Sultan’s forces, that he caught sight of the bird.

  A lammergeier was easy to spot – ten feet of wings and a long, narrow tail making a distinctive silhouette against the blue – and he gave himself over to the sight of it. He remembered that his own people called them huma, and chose to believe that such birds never touched the ground. Badr, however, had seem them land many times, especially upon battlefields heaped with gore. Rather than flesh, it was the bones they favoured, tearing them free from muscles and tendons and flying high into the sky from where they might drop them on to rocks to smash them. Then came a spiralling descent as the birds flew down to gorge upon the bloody marrow and even upon the milk-white shards.

  Badr had no time for any nonsense about flight without end, but he did cling superstitiously to another of his people’s legends: that whomsoever was touched by the shadow of the huma would one day sit upon a throne as king.

  And so when he saw the bird begin to drop, not in the expected corkscrew but in a vertical stoop like that of a falcon eyeing prey, he was transfixed. Like a thunderbolt from heaven itself the raptor plummeted towards the earth, its pointed wings swept neatly back, its great talons extended. As it dropped, its colours became clearer – blue-grey wings and tail, tawny breast and head, eyes ringed with crimson.

  Just as it seemed it must surely hit the ground, driving itself into the sandy soil of the plain like a feathered meteorite, the bird extended its wings, folded away its feet and swept across the landscape in a graceful arc just a few yards above the battlefield.

  At the very moment when its trajectory began to rise once more, the lammergeier pulled backwards and upwards with its wings, so that for a moment it seemed frozen in space.

  It was an instant so brief that only the Moor was gifted the sight of it, the bird’s shadow cloaking John Grant’s back like a black mantle, and he gasped, the air knocked out of his lungs by the impact of the vision. Badr Khassan and only Badr Khassan saw his adoptive son draped with the shadow of a cross.

  A lump, hot and jagged, rose in his throat and two tears burned molten at the corners of his eyes. Every hair on his neck and arms stood on end and he wondered if lightning had followed the thunderbolt.

  He would have sworn the air thrummed and jangled, and it was while he drew in his breath to shout the name of John Grant across the sand, to tell him what he had seen, that he felt a blow to his back. He exhaled, heard the whistling of his own breath and looked down to see a broad arrowhead protruding from his front, down on his right side close by his hip, on the end of its long thin shaft.

  There was no pain. Instead he was filled from the top of his head to the tips of his toes with an overwhelming rush of love for John Grant. Filling his lungs with life-giving breath once more, and never taking his eyes from his charge, he bellowed the young man’s name with the roar of a wounded bear.

  John Grant’s head snapped around, as did some of those of the retreating crusaders. None but John Grant cared what they saw, however, and he was running towards his friend before he noticed the arrow.

  Badr sank to his knees, and regained his balance there. He placed one hand lightly on the arrow shaft and felt a vibration from it, likely stirred by his own breathing. He was pleased he was still thinking clearly. John Grant reached him, dropping down in front of him and catching sight of the arrow for the first time. He reached for the head of the thing, but before he could touch it, a movement behind his wounded friend captured his full attention. Looking beyond Badr, he saw a face he had seen too many times before.

  Angus Armstrong was running towards them at full tilt. As he came on, he sought to nock another arrow on to the string of his longbow, but before he could do so he stumbled, one foot catching on a rock.

  He went down heavily, at full length. One hand, his right, partially broke his fall, but the other still gripped his bow. His head narrowly missed connecting with another boulder, all but buried in the sandy soil to his left,
but while he avoided injury, one end of his bow snagged neatly in a cleft in the same stone.

  As he hit the ground he was aware of a cracking sound and thought at first it was one of his own bones – which would have been worse. As it was, he realised it was the sound of his longbow snapping neatly in two.

  Even before Armstrong stumbled, John Grant had been on his feet and sprinting towards their foe – the man who had hunted and haunted them over the years.

  He had known that his life, both of their lives, depended upon him closing the distance before the archer had time to loose another arrow. Now the predator was downed, sprawling in the dirt, and Armstrong had not been the only man to register the sound of the snapping bow.

  John Grant increased his pace, seeing at last a crucial advantage, but before he could come to grips, the fallen man had pulled himself up on to all fours. John Grant, still running at full speed, aimed a kick at his enemy’s face, but rather than connecting with flesh and bone, his foot met only fresh air.

  Armstrong was always dangerous, always fast, and in the fractions of a second available to him before a booted foot sent him into oblivion, he rolled to his right, clear of the blow.

  John Grant clawed at the air in his desperation to slow down, but the momentum of his failed kick kept him travelling forward and beyond his target. Armstrong was able to stand, and by the time John Grant had turned to face him, the archer held a knife in his right hand and a lethally tipped arrow in his left.

  Here now was a contest John Grant might relish. Badr had taught him to fight with the sword and the axe, as well as with the knife, but it was with the hook-bladed karambit that he naturally excelled.