2006 - The Janissary Tree

by Jason Goodwin

  Yashim hit the ground, cradling his head in his arms: it was like a desert sandstorm flying overhead. Someone nearby screamed. He pressed his face into the dirt, even as the storm of debris began to ebb. A few pieces of broken tile skittered along the ground and harmlessly struck his arms.

  Cautiously he peered up over the crook of his elbow. Further along the street the fire still raged: it had caught up with them now, and the shutters of the last house standing blew open with a force that sent them rocking wildly on their hinges. But the flames that shot from the casements darted out in vain. Where there had been wood and eaves, there was only a black gap and a few stray timbers dangling from a skinny beam.

  Someone stooped and helped him to his feet. He recognised the man with the axe: they shook hands and then, because the excitement had been intense and the labour was won, they embraced, three times, shoulder to shoulder.

  “You did us a favour, my friend,” the other man said. He looked like a ghost, his face blanched by the dust. “Murad Eslek, me.”

  Yashim grinned.

  “Yashim Togalu.” Not Yashim the eunuch. “At the sign of the Stag, Kara Davut.” And then, because it was true, he added: “The debt is all mine.”

  The note of cultivation in his voice caught the man by surprise.

  “I’m sorry, effendi. In the dark…all this dust…I did not—”

  “Forget it, friend. We are all one in the sight of God.”

  Murad Eslek grinned, and gave Yashim the thumbs up.

  [ 44 ]

  Yashim stirred his coffee mechanically, trying to identify what still bothered him about the night’s events.

  Not the fire itself. Fires were always breaking out in Istanbul -though it had been a close-run thing. What if he had left the window shut—would the smell of smoke have reached him in time? He might have gone on sleeping, oblivious to the jagged screen of flame dancing its way towards his street: roused when it was already too late, perhaps, the stairwell filled with rolling clouds of black smoke, the windows shattering in the heat…

  He thought of the crowd he’d seen that morning, the women and children standing dazed in the street. Dragged from their sleep. By God’s mercy they, too, had woken up in time.

  A phrase of the Karagozi poem leaped into his mind. Wake them.

  The spoon stopped moving in the cup.

  There was something else. Something a man had said.

  Janissary work. To think we used to get the Janissaries from the Beyazidiye Pound to do this for us.

  A Janissary fire-brigade had been stationed close to the Beyazit Mosque, the first and perhaps, in its way, the greatest of the mighty mosques of the sultans: for even Sinan Pasha, the master architect whose sublime Suleymaniyye surpassed Aya Sofia, acknowledged that the Beyazit Mosque had shown the way. But it wasn’t the mosque which mattered: it was its position. For the Beyazit Mosque straddled the spine of the hill above the Grand Bazaar, one of the highest points in Stamboul.

  A unique vantage point. So unique, in fact, that it was selected as the site of the tallest and perhaps the ugliest building in the empire: the Fire Tower which bore its name. The bag of bones had been discovered only yards away.

  And there had been another Janissary watch, across the city, operated from the Galata Tower. The Galata Fire Tower. High over the drain which held the nauseating corpse of the second cadet.

  And at the Janissaries’ old centre of operations, the old barracks now razed and replaced with the imperial stables, there’d been a tower which Yashim could still vaguely recall.

  Palewski had suggested that there could be a pattern to explain the distribution of the bodies—so if each body had been placed in the vicinity of an old fire-station, a Janissary fire-watch, a tower…Yashim probed the idea for a moment.

  Fire had always been the Janissaries’ special responsibility. It had become their weapon, too. People were roused from their beds by the firemen’s tocsin. Wake them.

  Where, then, had the other fire-station been? There were to be four corpses. There had to be four fire-stations. Four towers.

  Perhaps, Yashim thought fiercely, he might still be in time.

  [ 45 ]

  The Kislar Agha had the voice of a child, the body of a retired wrestler and weighed eighteen stone. No one could have guessed his age, and even he was not completely sure when he had crawled from his mother’s womb beneath the African sky. A few pounds of unwanted life. Another mouth to feed. His face was covered in dark wrinkles, but his hands were smooth and dark like the hands of a young woman.

  It was a young woman he was dealing with now.

  In one of those smooth hands he held a silver ring. In the other, the girl’s jaw.

  The Kislar Agha dragged the girl’s head sideways.

  “Look at this,” he hissed.

  She closed her eyes. He squeezed his hand tighter.

  “Why—did—you—take—the—ring?”

  Anuk squeezed her eyelids shut, feeling the stabbing tears of pain. His fingers had caved in on the soft part of her mouth and she opened it suddenly very wide. His fingers slipped between her teeth.

  She bit down hard. Very hard.

  The Kislar Agha had not screamed for many years. It was a sound he had not heard himself since he was a little boy in a Sudanese village: the noise of a piglet squealing. Still squealing, he brought his left hand up between her legs, sagging slightly for a better grip. Don’t mark the goods.

  His thumb searched for the gate. His fingers stretched and encountered a tight bunch of muscle. His hand clamped shut, with iron force.

  The girl gave a gasp and the Kislar Agha pulled himself free. He put his sore fingers under his armpit, but he did not let go.

  He wriggled his fingers and the girl jerked her head back. The Kislar Agha pressed harder. The girl felt herself being pressured to roll aside, and she obeyed the pressure.

  The eunuch saw the girl flip over and fling out her arms to meet the ground. He gave a sudden pull with the pincer of his hand.

  Panting now, he dropped to his knees and began to fumble at the folds of his cloak.

  He’d forgotten all about the silver ring.

  He remembered only the need for punishment, and the itch for pleasure.

  [ 46 ]

  Preen had found it hard to believe what the imam seemed to be saying. A revival of the Janissaries? New Guard cadets found murdered in despicable ways?

  She picked up a pair of tweezers and began to pluck her eyebrows.

  She wondered, looking into the mirror, if the imam’s message had anything to do with the information she had brought her friend Yashim.

  Murder.

  Her heart skipped a beat.

  Today she would take the line ever so slightly higher: she could always heighten the curve with kohl. She began to hum.

  Nothing she’d heard in the mosque had anything to do with Yashim, or her, or that disgusting pimp.

  She worked briskly with a practised hand along the arch of her brow, watching herself in the mirror.

  But Yorg could be involved in anything. With anyone.

  She’d only peddled a little ordinary gossip. It was nothing.

  Though Yashim had been pleased. Gold dust, he called it.

  But Yashim wouldn’t tell. She moved her hand and began on the other eyebrow.

  Yorg would tell. Yorg would tell anything, if he was paid enough.

  Or frightened enough.

  Preen sucked in her breath. The idea of Yorg being afraid was, well, scary.

  She lowered her tweezers and snapped up a piece of kohl between their jaws. Carefully she started to thicken the line.

  What would Yorg do, she wondered, if he heard about the murdered soldiers? Not at mosque. The Yorgs of this world heard nothing at mosque. They wouldn’t even go.

  But if he heard, and started putting two and two together?

  The kohl wavered. The face in the mirror was very white.

  He’d squeal, for sure.

  [ 47 ]<
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  Fire-officer Orhan Yasmit cupped his hands around his mouth and blew into them. It had been a filthy morning, not just because it was damp and cold but because the mist made it almost impossible for him to work properly. Who could spot a fire in this miasma? He could scarcely see across the Golden Horn.

  He stamped a few times to warm up, then crossed the tower to the southern side and peered gloomily down towards the Bosphorus. On good days, the Galata Tower presented him with one of the finest views the city could afford, almost three hundred feet up above the Golden Horn, across to Stamboul with its minarets and domes, south to the Bosphorus and Uskiidar on the farther side—sometimes he could actually see the mountains of Gule, purple in the distance.

  It was a solid tower of massive dressed stone, built by the Genoese almost five hundred years before, when the Greek emperor ruled in Byzantium and Galata was its Italian suburb. Since then it had survived wars and earthquakes—even fires. The face of the city had no doubt changed, as minarets replaced the spires, as more and more people settled in the burgeoning port, building their wooden houses cheek by jowl, fragile wooden houses crammed like dry tinder into the declivities of the seven hills. And they’d been kicking over their braziers, letting their candles tilt, sending out careless sparks for centuries, too. Hardly ten years ran by without some section of the city burning to the ground. That any of it still stood at all was a testament to the wisdom of the Genoese master-builders who erected the Galata Tower.

  The trick with any fire was to catch it early, contain it quickly. And to use it wisely, in the Janissary days—to control and shape it to the Janissaries’ best advantage. Orhan Yasmit was too young to have known those days personally, but he had heard the stories. Oh, the Janissaries put out fires—in the end.

  Orhan Yasmit leaned on the parapet, wondering how much longer it would be before he was relieved. He looked down. He had no trouble with vertigo. He liked to watch the people bustling back and forth so far below him: with the sun on his back there were times when he came close to feeling like a flying bird, skimming the rooftops and the marketplaces. From above, in their turbans, the people looked like birds’ eggs, rolling about beneath his feet: the foreigners with their small heads looked weird. More like insects.

  Hearing footsteps, he eased himself off the parapet and turned around. He expected to see the duty fireman, but the man who stepped out onto the platform was a civilian, a stranger in a plain brown cloak. Orhan frowned.

  “I’m sorry,” he said sharply. “I don’t know how you got in, but civilians aren’t allowed up here.”

  The stranger smiled vaguely, and looked around.

  “Two pairs of eyes are better than one,” he remarked. “I won’t detain you.”

  Orhan could make nothing of this.

  “You might say that we’re both working for the same service. I’m here for the seraskier.”

  Orhan instinctively stood a little straighter.

  “Well,” he said grudgingly, “it’s no use your being here anyhow. No one could see a thing on a day like this.”

  Yashim blinked at the fog.

  “No, no, I suppose not.” He went to the parapet and leaned out. “Amazing. Do you often look down?”

  “Not much.”

  Yashim cocked his head.

  “I expect you hear stuff, though. I’ve noticed that myself. The way sounds can carry much further than you expect. Especially upwards.”

  “True.” Orhan wondered what all this was leading up to.

  “Were you on duty the day they found that body?”

  “I was on the night before. Didn’t hear or see anything, though.” He frowned. “What do you want up here, anyhow?”

  Yashim nodded, as if he understood. “This tower must have been here a long time.”

  “Five hundred years, they say.” The fireman slapped a hand on the parapet. “The Stamboul Tower, Beyazit, that’s mostly new.”

  “Mostly new?”

  “There’s always been a fire-watch over there, see, but the tower used to be shorter. Good look-out over the bazaar and such, but to the east you’ve got the mosque, haven’t you, and that used to block the view that way. Didn’t matter so much, not with the Janissary Tower beyond to cover the ground.”

  “Ah. I thought there’d been another fire-tower there—above Aksaray?”

  Orhan nodded. “Proper job, by all accounts. Gone now, along with the tekke underneath and all the rest.”

  “Tekke? What tekke do you mean?”

  “Tekke, prayer-room, whatever. Like here, downstairs. For that Janissary Karagoz mumbo-jumbo. Oldest Karagozi tekkes in the city, apparently. That tower’s gone now, like I said. Got burned down during the—well, a few years back, you know what I mean? So what they did was, they raised the tower at Beyazit. To get the lift, see, over the mosque? Must have doubled its height, I reckon—and all in stone, now, like this one. The old ones were wood, and kept burning down. So there you are, we’ve got the two towers as good as the old three. Better, really, being all stone.”

  “I’m sure. Go on. Tell me about the fourth tower.”

  Orhan gave the stranger a look.

  “There isn’t a fourth. Galata, Stamboul, that’s it.”

  “There must be another. Yedikule, maybe?”

  “Yedikule?” The fireman grinned. “Tell me who’d be sorry if Yedikule caught fire.”

  Yashim frowned: the fireman had a point. Yedikule was the sink of the city, down in the south-east where the walls of Byzantium joined the sea. Apart from the dirt, and the feral dogs which prowled its mean, dark streets, the tanneries were there; also a grim edifice, old even when the Ottomans took Istanbul, known as the Castle of the Seven Towers, variously used as a mint, a menagerie and a prison, particularly the latter. Many people had died within its walls; still more had wanted to.

  “But you can watch Yedikule from the new tower at Beyazit, effendi. Stamboul and Galata, like I told you. Cover the city.”

  Yashim winced. The second verse of the poem swam into his head.

  Unknowing

  And knowing nothing of unknowing,

  They seek.

  Teach them.

  He was obviously a slow learner.

  “Look,” Orhan said affably. “You can ask old Palmuk, if you like.”

  A whiskered face appeared in the hatch. Palmuk was not really old, only perhaps twice Orhan’s age, with thick white moustaches and a noticeable paunch. He came out of the hatch wheezing.

  “Those bloomin’ stairs,” he muttered. Yashim noticed that he was carrying a paper twist of sugared buns. “No babies, then?” He winked at Yashim.

  “Now, Palmuk, I don’t think the gentleman wants all that. He is from the seraskier.”

  Palmuk took the warning with an exaggerated roll of his eyes.

  “Oho, old Frog’s Legs, eh? Well, effendi, you tell him not to worry about us. We get cold, we get wet, but we do our duty, ain’t that right, Orhan?”

  “You might not think it, effendi,” Orhan said, “but Palmuk’s got the best pair of eyes in Galata. You’d think he could smell a fire before it’s even started.”

  Palmuk’s face twitched. “Steady, there, boy.” He turned to Yashim. “You wondering about them babies I mentioned? It’s fireman’s talk, that is. Baby—that’s a fire. A boy’s a fire on the Stamboul side. We hang out the baskets that way”—he gestured to four huge wicker baskets leaning against the inside of the parapet—“and that puts the lads in the right direction, see? A girl, that’s Galata-side.”

  Yashim shook his head. However long you lived, however well you thought you knew this city, there was always something else to learn. Sometimes he thought that Istanbul was just a mass of codes, as baffling and intricate as its impenetrable alleys: a silent clamour of inherited signs, private languages, veiled gestures. He thought of the soup master and his coriander. So many little rules. So many unknown habits. The soup master had been a Janissary once. He looked at Palmuk again, wondering if he, too,
wore a tattoo on his forearm.

  “You’ve been a fireman a long time, then?”

  Palmuk stared at him, expressionless.

  “Twelve, thirteen years. What’s it about?”

  Orhan said: “Gentleman wants to know about another tower. Not the old barracks place. A fourth tower. I told him there wasn’t one.”

  Palmuk dug into his paper twist and took out a bun, looked at it, and took a bite.

  “You did right, Orhan. You can cut along now, old Palmuk’s in command.”

  Orhan yawned and stretched. “I could use a kip,” he said. “Fire in?”

  “Warm and bright, mate.”

  With a happy sigh, and a small bow to Yashim, Orhan lowered himself down the hatch and went off to enjoy the brazier in the fireman’s cuddy down below.

  Palmuk took a turn round the walls, looking out and finishing his bun.

  Yashim hadn’t moved.

  Palmuk leaned over the parapet and looked down.

  “Funny,” he said. “As you get older, you lose your head for heights. They ought to pay me more, don’t you think?”

  He looked back at Yashim, his head cocked.

  “Know what I mean?”

  Yashim eyed the fireman coldly.

  “A fourth tower?”

  Palmuk bent over a basket and wedged his cone of buns between the wickerwork. Then he stood looking out towards Stamboul. He appeared not to have heard.

  Suppressing a sigh, Yashim fished for his purse beneath the folds of his cloak. Selecting three coins, he chinked them together in the palms of his hand. Palmuk turned.

  “Why, effendi, I call that handsome. A welcome contribution to the Fund.”