2006 - The Janissary Tree

by Jason Goodwin

  The soup master took a deep breath, and blew the air through his cheeks.

  “I left the corps at the first opportunity. I was a good cook, I had friends in Istanbul. In five years I was working for myself.”

  “Did you give up your pay-book, too?” Plenty of men had been on the payroll, drawing a Janissary’s wage and enjoying all the privileges of the corps without the slightest intention of turning up for war. It was a well-known scam.

  Mustafa hesitated. “Not immediately,” he admitted. “But within a few years I no longer needed help, and I gave it in.”

  Yashim doubted it, but said nothing.

  “You can check the records. I ceased to be a Janissary in May 1815. It took courage. You wouldn’t understand.”

  Yashim did his best. “They didn’t want to let you go? Or you wanted the money?”

  The Albanian shot him a look of contempt.

  “Listen. I go where I want. Today is an exception. I didn’t need the money, I was doing well.” Yashim blinked, believing him. “I found it hard to break with them.”

  Yashim leaned forwards.

  “How did you do it?”

  The guild master spread his huge hands and looked at them.

  “I learned to trust myself. I saw with my own eyes what had happened to the Janissaries. What they had allowed to happen to the real tradition, the one that mattered. They no longer served the empire.”

  He looked up.

  “You think that’s obvious? I was only waiting—many, like me, only waiting—for the tradition of service to come back to us. In the end, I decided I could wait no longer. I saw that we were doomed to repeat our mistakes. You think the Janissaries were lazy, cowardly, arrogant. The mutinies. The interference.”

  The soup master stroked his beard and narrowed his eyes at Yashim, who sat transfixed.

  “I tell you, the men we hung upon the Janissary Tree were all too easily taken. When we got angry, then someone fed us names, and we shouted: Kill him! Kill so-and-so! They threw them to us. We thought it would go better after that.

  “You put coriander in the soup. Well, some people like it, some don’t, some don’t even notice. Forget the people who don’t like it. You add some beans. Some carrots. The same thing. Some like it, some don’t. But more people don’t care much either way. By the end, you can take out the tripe. Call it soup. Nobody will know any better. Only a few.”

  He tugged at his moustache.

  “The Janissaries were like that. Like a recipe that has been quietly and completely altered. In the city I made tripe and onion soup from tripe and onion. But in the barracks, so to speak, they wanted me to believe in a kind of tripe and onion soup made of beans and bacon. In the end, I had to leave.”

  Yashim could admire the older man’s guts. So much in this city was founded on pretence: it took a certain kind of temper for a man to step aside. But then, the Albanian hadn’t stepped away entirely. Not if what Yashim suspected about the guards at the guild were true.

  “Your old friends,” he suggested.

  “No, no, they had no hold over me, not what you might think. They didn’t blame me, either. But they remembered me. Our lives went separate ways. But they remembered.”

  He picked up a pastry with a clumsy sweep of his arm and stuffed it into his mouth. Yashim watched him deliberately chew it down. His eyes were sparkling.

  “The fifteenth of June was the worst night of my life. I heard the cauldrons—we all did, didn’t we? Eighteen years the sultan had waited. Eighteen years for a boy to become a man, and all that time with one resolve, to destroy the force which had destroyed Selim.”

  Perhaps, Yashim thought. But Mahmut’s motives were more complex than mere vengeance for his uncle’s death. He wanted to rid himself of the men who had almost casually brought him to the throne, as well: to expunge a debt, as well as avenge a death. The Janissaries had crudely expected gratitude, and took carte blanche. Yashim could remember the cartoon that was stuck up on the palace gate one night, showing the sultan as a dog led by a Janissary. “You see how we use our dogs,” the notice ran. “While they are useful and let themselves be led, we treat them well; but when they stop being of service, we kick them out into the streets.”

  “The people of the city were scared. Boom boom! Boom boom! It was a frightening sound, wasn’t it? Night falling, and not a sound in the streets as we listened, all of us. I went up onto my roof, treading like a cat. Oh, yes, there was a tradition all right. They said the voice of the Janissaries was the voice of the people. The men believed it. The cauldrons were beating for the empire, as they’d beaten for centuries. Only the sound of the cauldrons drumming, and the barking of the pye-dogs in the streets.

  “Look, I stood on the roof and I heard the sound and I wept for those fools. I wept for a sound. I knew I would never hear it again, not if I lived for a thousand years.”

  He wiped his hands over his face.

  “Later, after the killing and the demolition, some of them came to me asking for a quiet job. One of them had been living for days in a foxhole when they torched the Belgrade woods to flush them out. They had to avoid their families and relatives, for their sakes. They were lost. They were hunted. But we had broken bread together. I gave them money and told them to slip away, get out of Istanbul. Nobody would be interested in them any more, not after a few weeks, a few months.

  “And slowly some of them started coming back. Looking for quiet jobs, out of sight—stokers, watchmen, tanners. I knew a few. There must have been thousands, I suppose, unknown to me.”

  “Thousands?”

  “I knew a handful, so I gave them the work. Night duties. Discreet.” He closed his eyes and shook his head slowly. “I can’t understand it. Ten years, and all good, quiet men. Grateful for the work.”

  “So what would they want a cauldron for, do you suppose?”

  The soup master opened his eyes and fixed them on Yashim.

  “That’s what I don’t understand. It was only a pretend cauldron, anyway. You can’t do it with a cauldron made of black tin. It would only be make-believe.”

  Yashim thought of the dead officer, coiled in the cauldron’s base.

  “It was always pretending, wasn’t it?” Yashim asked. “That’s what you said. Tripe soup made of beans and bacon.”

  The soup master looked at him in surprise, and folded his hands.

  [ 19 ]

  You must get Yashim back!” The Valide Sultan crooked her finger and wagged it at her son. “We may all be murdered in our beds.” Sultan Mahmut II, Lord of the Horizons, Master of the Black Sea and the White, put up his hands and rolled his eyes. It was scarcely conceivable, he thought, that three hundred able-bodied women—and in this sum he included his mother, for sure—could be actually murdered, one by one, in the very sanctum of imperial power.

  All the same he allowed himself to play with the idea. He would keep the delightful Fatima safely by his side at all times and by the end, through a simple process of elimination, they would know who the killer was. Then he and Fatima would spring out among the throttled beauties and despatch her. He would announce that he was too shaken by the experience to take on any more wives; it would be unfair on them, he was far too old. He would marry Fatima, and she would rub his feet.

  “Valide,” he said politely. “You know as well as I do that these things happen. There is probably a very good explanation.”

  He wanted to point out that it would almost certainly be a very trivial explanation, but he sensed that his mother would feel slighted by the insinuation. This was her realm, shared with the Kislar Agha, the chief black eunuch, and everything which happened in it had to be serious.

  “Mahmut,” the valide said sharply. “I can think of a very good explanation. The murderess wants you.”

  “Me?” The sultan frowned.

  “Not in bed, you silly fool. She wants to kill you.”

  “Aha. It was dark, and she mistook some ambergrised houri for her sultan and throttled her
before she realised her mistake.”

  “Of course not.”

  “So what was that girl, then? Strangling practice?”

  The Valide Sultan cocked her head.

  “Maybe,” she admitted. “I suppose it might take practice. I don’t suppose many of the girls have done a lot of strangling before they come.” She patted the cushion beside her, and Mahmut sat down.

  “I was more worried that she might simply be hurrying the moment,” the valide continued. “She has her place in the order. Sooner or later she will be alone with you. She wants it sooner. Then she can kill you.”

  “So she knocks off the nice girl and moves up one on the list? I see.”

  “You make it sound ridiculous, but I have been here a lot longer than you. I know just how ridiculous things can turn out to be extremely serious. Trust me. Trust a mother’s intuition.”

  “I trust you, of course. But what I don’t see is why the murderess is in such a rush. And by killing the girl she’s slowed the thing down, anyway. After this, I shan’t have to see any of them for days. My nerves, mother.”

  “It makes the thing more sure. That unfortunate girl might have infatuated you. You might have kept after her for weeks on end. She might have, I don’t know, rubbed your feet the way you like.”

  She gave him an arch look. Mahmut grinned ruefully: the valide knew everyone’s secrets.

  “And there’s the Edict, isn’t there? The great announcement. If you die, there will be no Edict. Don’t tell me someone doesn’t want to murder you over that!”

  “To get me out of the way in time, you mean?”

  “Exactly. I think you should send for Yashim right away.”

  “I have. He’s working on it.”

  “Nonsense. He’s not working on it at all. I haven’t seen him here all day.”

  [ 20 ]

  Yashim had, in fact, found time to visit the harem that day; but he had gone in quietly, alerting no one, simply to see where the body had been found, and where the girl had lived.

  Her room, which she had shared with three other girls, had iron bedsteads and several rows of pegs on which the girls hung their clothes and the bags which held the scented soaps they were fond of, a few shawls and slippers, some well-laundered strips of linen, and such bangles and jewels as they possessed. As cariyeler, harem maids, her room mates had not yet been advanced to the rank of gozde: but they were hoping.

  Two girls had spread an old sheet across their bed, and were busy depilating themselves with a sticky green ointment they took from a plain brass bowl that stood on a small octagonal bedside table. One of them, a redhead with green eyes and pale skin, was carefully anointing herself with a spatula when Yashim came to the door and bowed. She chucked her chin in a casual greeting.

  “The gozde’s bed?” Yashim enquired.

  The girl on her knees gestured with the spatula.

  The other girl, spreadeagled, raised her head and squinted down her body.

  “They ought to take her stuff out, poor thing,” she said. “It’s not very nice for us.”

  “I’m sorry,” Yashim said. “I just want to see what there is.” He ran his hands over her clothes, then pulled two bags off the pegs and emptied their contents onto the bed. “You must have been friends.”

  The girl who was kneeling got off the bed and came across for a better look. She had her elbow out, to keep the ointment on her armpit in the air, and with one hand she tugged her black hair back into a pony tail. Her skin was olive, and her lips were dark like old wine, the same colour as the nipples of her breasts, rising in firm curves.

  Yashim glanced back, and then stirred the belongings strewn across the empty bed.

  “She was my size,” the girl said, reaching forwards to pick up a bundle of transparent gauze. “We all knew that.”

  The girl on the bed giggled.

  “She was!” The girl shook the thing in her hand and then gathered it to her chest, working her free arm so that it lay across one breast, the transluscent silk ribbons dangling against her tummy. There was something so innocent and so obscene about the gesture, that Yashim blushed.

  The girl on the bed saved him from speaking.

  “Put it back, Nilu. It’s too creepy. Have you, lala, come to take her things away?”

  Nilu let the bustier flutter back onto the bed, and turned to her friend.

  Yashim carefully surveyed the gozde’s belongings.

  “What was she like?” He asked.

  The girl called Nilu climbed back onto her friend’s bed; Yashim heard the mattress creak. There was a silence.

  “She was…all right.”

  “Was she a friend?”

  “She was nice. She had friends.”

  “Enemies?” Yashim turned around. The two girls were sitting side by side, staring at him.

  “Ow!” The girl suddenly put a hand between her legs. “It’s stinging!”

  She jumped off the bed, her pale breasts swinging, one hand clamped between her slender legs.

  “Come on, Nilu. I’ve got to wash.”

  Nilu reached for a towel on a peg.

  “She had friends,” she said. She scampered to the doorway. “Lots of friends,” she added, over her shoulder.

  [ 21 ]

  Well, hello precious.”

  The speaker was a raw-boned girl of about forty in a glossy black wig, a sequinned bustier with padded breasts, a long diaphanous skirt and a pair of large beaded slippers. She was also wearing half a pound of make-up. It made her look older, Yashim realised with a slight pang.

  But it was what—eighteen years? They were both of them older than when he first came to the city in the retinue of the great Phanariot merchant-prince, George Mavrocordato. Mavrocordato had been quick to see where Yashim’s talent lay, setting him to work at the ledgers for the sake of his cultivated hand, sending him down to the port to pick up useful information, asking him to con over the manifests, and identify new articles of trade. Yashim had learned a great deal, and with his gift for languages—a gift greater, if possible, even than his employer’s, who spoke Ottoman Turkish, Greek ecclesiastical and demotic, Romanian, Armenian and French, but Russian badly, and Georgian not at all—he had made himself indispensable to the Mavrocordato clan. He’d discovered a talent for being invisible, a knack of holding himself quiet and saying little, so that people tended to overlook his presence.

  But while he was grateful for the long hours which kept his mind sharp, still the old torment, all the worse for being fresh, had flourished in the heavy atmosphere of trade and politics, a secret agony among secrets: to be a eunuch was, for Yashim at that time, the grammar of a language he could not understand.

  And so he had felt himself isolated in the most cosmopolitan society in Europe.

  He had met Preen at a party which Mavrocordato threw for a pasha he wanted to impress, hiring dancers for the evening. Yashim had been sent to pay them off afterwards, and he had found himself talking to Preen.

  Of all the traditions that bound Istanbul together, the long history of the koc.ek dancers was probably the least celebrated, and possibly the oldest. Some said that they were descended—in a spiritual sense—from Alexander’s dancing boys. The foundation of Constantinople would have occurred almost a thousand years after the koc.ek tradition had migrated from its homelands in northern India and Afghanistan to the frontiers of the Roman empire. The kocek were creatures of the city, and the rise of a city on the banks of the Bosphorus would have sucked them in like dust to a raging fire. What was certain was that the Greeks had entertained these dancers, selecting them from the ranks of boys who had been castrated before puberty and subjecting them to rigorous training in the stylised arts and mysteries of the kocek dance. They danced for both men and women; under the Ottomans, it was usually for men. They performed in troupes of five or six, accompanied by a musician who plucked at a zither while they whirled and stamped and curved their wrists. Each troupe was responsible for engaging new ‘girls’ and tra
ining them. Many of them, of course, slept with their clients; but they were adamantly not prostitutes, whom they regarded as utterly wanton—and unskilled. “Any girl can open her legs,” Preen had once reminded him. “The kogek are dancers.”

  But it was undoubtedly true that the koc.ek were not too picky about their friends. They stood on the very lowest rung of Ottoman society, above beggars, but with the jugglers, actors, conjurers and others who made up the despised—and well-patronised—class of professional entertainers. They had their snobberies—who doesn’t?—but they lived in the world and knew the way it turned.

  Yashim had been amused by Preen and her ‘girlfriends’, at first. He liked the open way they spoke, their roguishness and candour, and in Preen he came to admire the chirpy cynicism which concealed a heart plunged in romantic dreams. Compared to the heavy secrecy and dark glances of the Phanariot aristocracy, Preen’s world was rough but full of laughter and surprises. And when the Peloponnesian rebellion cast ominous shadows over the Greeks in Istanbul, Preen had reacted to his proposals without thought of her own danger or of the prejudice flaring in the streets. For two days, she had sheltered Mavrocordato’s mother and his sisters, while Yashim arranged the ruse that would carry them to the island of Aegina, and safety.

  Sometimes he wondered what she saw in him.

  “Come on in.” She twirled from the door and returned to her face in the mirror. “Can’t stop, sweetie. The other girls’ll be here in a moment.”

  “A wedding?” Yashim knew the form. Many times since that year of drama he’d helped Preen prepare for the weddings, circumcision celebrations and birthdays for which people required the presence of the ko?ek dancers. In return, perhaps without quite knowing it, Preen had prepared him for his days: those new, flat days when agonies of lust and anger gnawed at him from the inside, and all the better days that were to come.

  “Boys’ night,” she said, without looking round. “You’re lucky to find me.”

  “Business is good?”