Authors: Neil Oliver
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.
The Moor had wondered what so appealed to the boy about such a meagre weapon, and had concluded it was the intimacy of the act. Killing should leave a good man with feelings of taint, of having been made unclean. If the opponent was to be deprived of life, robbed of every thing and every moment, then for some it seemed only right to commit the act while close enough to touch. Badr Khassan, himself a master, had been amazed by his student’s aptitude, and by now, after years of practice and hundreds of encounters, not even he would have willingly faced down the Scot.
John Grant walked forward with a swagger. His back was straight, his arms loose by his sides. When it was over, he knew, he would have no memory of drawing his knife; it would appear in his left hand when the moment required it. The key was in never letting the foe catch so much as a glimpse of the thing. He must only feel it, Badr had said.
He was circling the archer now, taking his time and listening to his heartbeat, allowing his breathing to slow down, when Badr called his name for a second time. Hearing something new in the wounded man’s tone – something as desperate as it was insistent – John Grant turned from the fight and towards his friend.
The opium had dulled Badr’s pain, and now he listened to the sound of his own breathing. He was lying on his side in the half-dark of a cave. In front of him a shaft of sunlight split the darkness and pooled on to the floor. He raised one arm, felt a stab of pain that made him grunt. Determined, however, in spite of the discomfort, he reached his hand forward until it was bathed in the light.
‘Keep still, Badr,’ said John Grant.
The younger man had returned from the mouth of the cave, where he had stood for a minute or so to content himself they were alone – that none of the crusaders had chosen to follow. Already the battlefield was busy with scavengers, birds of prey, dogs and other scurrying, scuttling forms.
It had taken an agonising effort to move Badr from where he had fallen. At first, in spite of the arrow thrusting from his abdomen, he had been able to walk, slowly and leaning heavily on his companion. John Grant had seen many wounds in his short life, caused by all manner of weapons and projectiles. He had seen faces cloven in two from crown to chin and heads hacked from necks; chests and bellies laid open and their contents spilled upon the ground; the brittle ends of snapped bones protruding from ragged wounds in arms and legs.
He had inflicted all of these himself over the years, and more besides. But the sight of the arrow piercing Badr’s Khassan’s body from back to front gave rise to feelings of horror he had not felt since that day long ago, at the cottage, when he had first beheld the corpses of the slain troopers. Those dead had seemed unreal, like broken toys, but the blood and the gore of their wounds had stayed with him for weeks. Glimpses of the scene had featured in his dreams and he had awakened cold and nauseated.
Those days were far behind him now, however; his profession had hardened him. But Badr’s pain unmanned him.
They had made their way towards a cliff face that bordered one side of the plain. The enemy had appeared upon its heights in the prelude to the fighting and John Grant had noted caves and shallow rock shelters there. The sunlight had added to Badr’s misery and the priority had been to get him somewhere shaded and cool. After a few tens of yards of treacle-slow progress, stumbling over the broken, rock-strewn terrain that lay between them and the cliff, Badr had suddenly slumped to his knees as though his legs had transformed into strings. The shock of the impact jarred the arrow and he bit down on a rasping cry. The pain braided through the sound reached deep into John Grant’s own body and pulled hard on something there, so that he almost retched.
The position of the arrow meant Badr could only lie on his side, and John Grant felt him slowly twisting towards the ground in search of rest.
‘No, Badr,’ he said, stepping around to his back, reaching his hands into the big man’s armpits and using all of his strength to pull him backwards over the ground. ‘We can’t stop here.’
If their progress had been slow before, it deteriorated then almost to a standstill. John Grant could manage only a few yards of hauling at a time. Whenever he stopped, he had no option but to support Badr’s almost unconscious weight on his knees and shins, the feathered end of the arrow protruding insolently from between his lower legs. A snail’s trail of blood stretched darkly across the rocks and dust, evidence of the severity of the wound and of the meagre distance covered.
The sun was high in the sky by the time they reached the blessed shadow of the cliff. The closest cave entrance was narrow, like a mean mouth, but widened into a large chamber beyond. A stream of water flowed sluggishly from somewhere high in the roof and then gathered in a shallow depression before snaking towards the entrance and beyond. As John Grant pulled Badr inside, his blood mingled with the water and flowed rosy pink over the pale bedrock.
It mattered to get properly out of sight, away from prying eyes, but when John Grant stopped, thankfully, and lowered Badr down on to his side by the stream, the Moor spoke for the first time in the hour it had taken to cover the ground.
‘Not the dark – don’t have me lie in the dark,’ he said. ‘I want to see you while we speak.’
At the rear of the cave a narrow blade of sunlight cut a golden scar on to the floor. A crack in the roof reached all the way to the clifftop high above them, and it was through this that the water seeped, filling its pool before spilling into the shallow channel that led to the cave mouth.
John Grant set about moving Badr further into the cave and to a point where he might benefit both from cool shade and the light of day. The presence of water made the shelter ideal, and John Grant wished with all his heart they had been settling down only to make a meal and spend the night.
Badr wanted to lie on his right side with his face close to the sunlight. Once he was in position, John Grant made him as comfortable as was possible – raising his head slightly on a folded cloak and positioning the big man’s arms and legs in an attitude of rest.
More than anything he wanted to deal with the arrow, but experience of such wounds had taught him there were terrible dangers. Removal of the shaft might increase the flow of blood, doing more damage. The thought, the realisation indeed, that the wound was a fatal one, circled like a vulture and he failed to drive it off. For the time being, and until he could think of how or even if help might be obtained, the Bear would have to lie there in the cave.
Misery radiated from him like heat from a fire, and John Grant reeled before it, his vision blurred and swimming in sympathy with his friend’s suffering.
From a bag on his hip he took a glass bottle, sheathed in leather decorated with worn and tattered stitching. There in the cave it was more precious than gold or diamonds, and John Grant removed its stopper with a care that bordered on reverence. The soft popping sound brought a sigh from Badr.
‘
Af-yon
,’ he said, returning in his misery to the tongue of the Muslim.
John Grant crawled over to Badr on his knees and stooped to raise the great dark head. Holding the bottle, which contained a tincture of opium, he allowed a little of the dark liquid to pour into the Moor’s mouth. Content that he had given him as much as was appropriate, he settled Badr once more and took up a position close by, close enough that he might gently caress the big man’s shoulder from time to time, hear his breathing.
All at once, and for the first time, John Grant took in the sight of his friend lying helpless, perhaps beyond help. The enormity of it broke over him, threatening to wash him away. The memory of a night long ago, back in the land of his birth, was suddenly before his eyes. Badr’s shape disappeared and it was Jessie, his mother, that he saw, her face lit not by a shaft of sun but by silver-blue moonlight.
It was then that he had risen quickly to his feet and made for the cave mouth and fresh air.
After a few minutes spent staring at the blue through a mist of tears, he had allowed his gaze to settle upon the birds and dogs busying themselves among the dead and nearly dead.
How many more, before day’s end? he wondered.
He scanned the landscape around him with all possible concentration. Once more he reprimanded himself for breaking off from dealing with Angus Armstrong. Never before had their tormentor been so exposed and vulnerable. The moment had finally come, and then … and then the sound of Badr’s anguished cry had made him turn from his quarry.
The need to help his friend had overwhelmed the opportunity finally to dispatch the man who had caused so much pain. He must surely be out there now somewhere. Perhaps he was far away, licking his wounds and plotting; maybe he was watching from some hidey-hole and weighing his chances.
Without his bow John Grant doubted Armstrong would come close, far less seek to tackle them. At close quarters Armstrong was likely dangerous enough, but not as lethal as he. The archer, his wing clipped, had wisely chosen to flee from the scene, and now they were well hidden.
Over the years, John Grant had begun to suspect Armstrong wanted something other than their deaths – that his objective after all was to create a situation where one or other of them was left alive and at his mercy. He clenched his fists until the bones in his knuckles shone white, and then turned back into the cave.
Badr’s breathing had grown deeper, easier. The rasp of it – and the pain that caused it – had been smoothed by the drug, jagged edges turned to ridges and creases. John Grant watched as the Moor turned his hand in the shaft of light, considering first the back and then the palm. Aware of the younger man’s return, Badr lifted his eyes and looked at him.
‘Did I ever tell you how
af-yon
came into the hands of men?’ he asked.
John Grant shook his head and sat down cross-legged, close enough that his back was almost touching the Moor’s chest. It was easier to listen to him, and be with him, if he did not have to see the discomfort etched into his face. Badr’s relief, however temporary, crossed the gap between them and seeped into him. He would have no need to feel for a pulse, since he could feel the irregular tempo of the big man’s heart as vibrations on his own skin.
‘Once, long ago, when the world was younger, a saintly holy man lived on the banks of a great and holy river, far away in the east,’ said Badr.
John Grant would have been happier if Badr had been content to rest rather than using his energy for the business of storytelling – but he made no protest.
‘The holy man shared his little hut of reeds and grass with a tiny brown mouse. The mouse was quick, very quick, and mischievous, always on the move and on the lookout for crumbs. As is always the case, the mouse was also much troubled by larger creatures that wanted to eat her, and one day she asked the holy man to transform her into a cat. The holy man smiled and thought about it, and then did as the mouse had asked. Instead of a mouse crouched before him on its hind legs, attending to its whiskers as before, there was now a sleek white cat.
‘All was well for a few days until the cat realised she now faced the attentions of the dogs that prowled the land around the holy man’s house from time to time, always on the lookout for food. Since the holy man ate next to nothing, the pickings were meagre indeed, but still the dogs came. If there were no scraps to be had, then perhaps they might kill and eat the white cat.’
Badr broke off from his storytelling to smile at his charge. John Grant was looking down at his hands, folded in his lap. As he listened to his own words, Badr could not be sure he had not told the story before, perhaps more than once. The rhythm of the telling was soothing, however, and he kept going for his own sake as well as that of John Grant.
‘So the cat asked to be transformed into a dog, the better to fight off her latest foes, and the holy man obliged. When the novelty of a canine existence wore off, she had the holy man make of her a wild boar, and then a mighty elephant. All too soon thereafter, and no longer content with life on the ground and all its many travails, she asked for the form of a monkey.
‘Each time the holy man granted the wish and each time she found reasons to change again.
‘Finally she asked to be transformed into a beautiful maiden so that she might find a rich man and marry him. Once more the holy man granted her wish, and in no time at all the maiden, who was named Postomoni, had found herself a king, who fell in love with her at once and married her and made her his queen.
‘All was well until the day when Postomoni, who had never retained any form long enough to master the intricacies of its being, stumbled while crossing the palace courtyard and fell into a well and drowned. The king was broken-hearted and sought out the holy man.
‘“Grieve not,” he said, when the king had broken the news and finished weeping. “Postomoni began life as a mouse. I made her into a cat, and then a dog, and then a boar, and then an elephant and finally a monkey before at last I made her into the beautiful maiden who became your wife and queen. Now I shall make her immortal.
‘“Let her body stay where it lies. Fill the well to the top with earth and in time a plant will grow there, from her flesh and bones. This plant shall be called
posto
– the poppy – and from within its flower buds you will harvest a thick sap.”
‘The king dabbed at his tears with the cuff of his robe and asked what use the sap might be to him. The holy man explained that all men would come to taste it. Once tasted, they would hunger for it, just as the king hungered for Postomoni.
‘“Each man who eats or drinks the sap, which is called
af-yon
, will find within himself the characters of all the animals. He shall be fast and mischievous as the mouse; he shall lap milk like the cat and fight like the dog. He shall be savage like the boar, mighty as the elephant and filthy in his habits like the monkey. Finally he shall be lofty and imperious as a queen.”’
The telling of the tale had sapped Badr’s strength, his energy drawn from him just as opium was drawn from poppy heads.
‘
Af-yon
,’ he said once more, and John Grant brought him the bottle.
‘Why now, Badr?’ he asked. ‘Why do you tell me this now, in this place?’
The Moor was silent for a while, letting the dark and bitter liquid flow down his throat.
‘I was thinking on the women I have known.’
John Grant moved restlessly, easing muscles and joints that had stiffened while he sat listening to the story.
‘And …?’ he asked.
‘I had a child once,’ said Badr. ‘A daughter.’
John Grant’s eyes opened wide with astonishment. He wondered first of all if the big man might be dreaming, or hallucinating.
‘Then where is she?’ he asked.
Badr did not answer right away. His eyes were open to the shaft of sunlight and he was smiling at whatever he saw there.
‘Your father made me your guardian,’ he said. ‘And I count myself the luckiest of men. I would ask that you take care of my daughter if needs be – see to it that she is safe.’