The money disappeared into a pocket of his tunic.
“It’s information you want, mate. Effendi. A hint to the wise, am I right? You’ve been handsome with me, so I’ll be handsome with you, as the saying goes. All right: there isn’t a fourth tower. Never was, as far as I know.”
There was a silence. The fireman ran a hand over his moustaches.
Their eyes locked.
“Is that it?”
The fireman shrugged. “It’s what you asked for, ain’t it?”
“Right.”
Neither man moved for a few moments. Then Palmuk turned his back on Yashim and stood by the parapet, looking south to the Bosphorus, lost in the fog.
“Mind the stairs as you go down, effendi,” he said, not looking round. “They’re slippery when it’s wet.”
[ 48 ]
It’s mine,” said the girl.
It was the only thing she’d said so far.
Yashim bit his lip. He’d been trying to talk to her for half an hour.
Lightly, at first. Where was she from? Yes, he knew the place. Not the exact place but…he drew her a picture in words. Mountains. Mist. Dawn creeping down the valley. Was that like it?
A blank.
“It’s my ring.”
Heavy: we don’t think it belongs to you. Serious suspicion, serious charge. Unless you tell us what you know it’ll be the worse for you, girl.
“It’s mine.”
Cajolery: come on, Asul. You have a life half the women in Circassia would die for. Whims granted. Luxuries. A safe and honourable and enviable position. A lovely girl like you. The sultan’s bed and then—who knows?
She pushed out her lips and turned her head, threading a curl with her fingers.
Yanked the curl savagely, pressed her lips together.
“My ring,” she blurted.
“I see. She gave it to you?” Yashim asked gently.
“Don’t believe a word,” the Kislar Agha interrupted. “They all lie like hyenas.”
Yashim raised his shoulders and swallowed his irritation. “Asul may answer as she pleases, but I hope it will be the truth.”
The kislar snorted. The girl flashed him a contemptuous look.
“She never gave it to me.”
“Um. But did you have some agreement, some understanding about the ring?”
The girl gave him a strange look.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. What does it matter anyway? She’s dead, isn’t she? Fucking fish food. What does it matter if I took the ring?”
Yashim frowned. Did he have to explain the idea of theft? There was something particularly repugnant about stealing from a corpse. A sacrilege. If she didn’t at least feel that, where could he begin?
“It may matter very much indeed. Was she dead or alive when you took the ring?”
But the gorgeous little face had clammed up again.
Yashim knew these mountaineers, raised among the far-off peaks of the Caucasus. Hard as their stony houses, as their frozen tracks in winter. Living on air, forever feuding with their neighbours. God had made them beautiful, especially their women: but he made them hard.
Wearily he put the question again. Alive? Or dead?
She made no response.
Perhaps she was right, after all. What did it matter? Yashim looked again at the ring in the palm of his hand. The dresser was right. It was no better than market tat, a plain band of silver, with a worn motif on the annulus which seemed to show two snakes swallowing each other’s tails.
He glanced at the girl. She was wearing bangles, a torque: all gold. Not unusual here, in the harem, where gold and jewels from across the empire went to satisfy the cravings of the women for—what had the valide called it—distinction? Yet he knew how objects like these could take on a resonance no outsider could ever detect or guess at: how they could become the focus of spite or jealousy in spite of their intrinsic worthlessness, the cause of livid arguments, rages, tears, fights.
The sultan’s women had been raised on the hardscrabble. What was death out there? Babies died. Women died giving birth to babies who died, and men got shot in the back for an unlucky word—or lived to be a hundred. Death was nothing: honour counted. In the mountain world they came from people took offence at the lightest word, and allowed feuds to develop into bloodshed over generations, long after their original causes were forgotten.
Was it possible, Yashim asked himself, for a feud like that to have been carried into the palace? The distance which separated the Caucasus from Istanbul was too great. More than geographical.
The snakes, what did they mean? Round and round they ran, forever swallowing their tails: a symbol of eternity, was it, derived from some impious mumbo-jumbo peddled by shamans in the mountains?
Yashim sighed. He had the feeling that he was stirring up problems where they didn’t exist, making trouble where it wasn’t needed. Wasting his own time. All he had achieved was to sharpen the animosity he detected flying between Asul and the Kislar Agha.
“That’s it,” he said. He bowed to the black eunuch and, taking him by the arm, drew him aside. “Five more minutes, kislar. Give me that. Alone.”
Looking into his bloodshot eyes, Yashim found it hard to know what he was thinking.
The kislar grunted.
“You are wasting your time,” he said. His eyes slid round to fasten on the girl.
“The lala will talk to you in private.” She glanced up, expressionless. “You know what we expect.”
And he left the room.
[ 49 ]
Asul watched the door close, and very slowly turned her eyes to look at Yashim. He had the feeling that she had never looked at him until now. Perhaps never really registered his presence in the room.
“Here,” he said softly. “Catch.”
The girl’s eyes followed the ring through the air. At the last moment, with a movement snake-like in its speed, she put out a hand. She clenched the ring in her fist, balled against her chest.
“I’ve seen you before,” she said in a small voice.
Yashim blinked slowly, but said nothing.
Asul glanced down, and uncurled her fingers. “He will take it from me again,” she said.
“But I will ask him not to,” Yashim said.
The girl almost smiled. A weary flicker of expression crossed her face. “You.”
Yashim pressed his palms to his face. “When you are hurt,” he began slowly, “when you have lost something—or someone—it makes you sad, doesn’t it? Sometimes change is good, and sometimes it makes us only want to cry. When you are young, it is hard to believe in pain or loss. But sadness is what makes us alive. The dead don’t grieve.
“Even here, there is plenty of sadness. Even in the Abode of Felicity. The Happy Place.”
He paused. Asul had not moved, except to rub the ring slowly between her fingers.
“You don’t have to say anything, Asul. Not now. Not to me. The sadness is yours, and only yours. But I want to give you something else, besides that ring.”
Asul raised her chin.
“Advice.” Yashim inclined his head, wondering how much he might say. How much she might understand. “Nothing can be changed, Asul. The loss is never repaired, the pain is never fully over. That is our fate, as men or women.
“Bitterness is not a better kind of grief, Asul. Grief has its place, but bitterness invades a wound like rot. Slowly, bit by bit, it shuts you down. And in the end, even though you are alive, you are really dead. I’ve seen it happen.”
Asul pressed her lips together. She glanced downwards, blinking. “Will I keep the ring?” Her voice was small, unsteady.
Yashim gazed at her, silent for a moment. A few minutes longer, and she would tell him what she knew. And with that single act of self-betrayal, perhaps, the bitterness would return.
He found the handle of the door.
“I will speak to the valide myself,” he said.
He needed to speak to her anyway, he thought. To fulfi
l a promise. To procure an invitation.
[ 50 ]
The seraskier clawed his way to the edge of the divan with his heels and clambered to his feet.
“You should have told me.” His voice was clipped, correct. “I did not ask you to speak to foreigners. Unbelievers.”
Yashim, sitting on the divan, put his chin upon his knees.
“Do you know why I brought you in? Do you think it was because I wanted discretion?” He glared at Yashim. “Because you’re supposed to be fast. My men are dying. I want to know who is killing them, and I don’t have a lot of time. It is one week exactly before the Review. Days have gone by, and you’ve told me nothing. You were quick enough in the Crimea. I want to see that right here. In Istanbul.”
The veins on his temples were pulsing.
“Poems. Taxi rides. They tell me nothing.”
Yashim got to his feet and bowed. When he reached the doorway, the seraskier said: “Those meetings were fixed up by me.”
Yashim’s cloak swirled. “Meetings?”
The seraskier stood against the window with his hands behind his back.
“Meeting the Russians. I’ve made it my business to see that my boys get an education. Present arms and salute your superior officer! Fine. Learn how to load a breech gun or to drill like a Frenchman? That’s the half of it. Someday we are going to be fighting the Russians. Or the French. Or the English.
“How do they think? How willingly do the men fight? Who are their heroes? You can learn a lot if you understand another man’s heroes.”
The seraskier cracked his knuckles.
“I could pretend that none of that matters. There was a time when we met our enemies on the field, and crushed them underfoot. We were very good. But times have changed. We are not as fast as we were, and the enemy has become faster.
“We can’t afford to ignore them—Russians, Frenchmen. Yes, even those Egyptians can teach us something, but not if we suck on narghiles here, in Istanbul, trying to imagine what they are like. It’s for us to go out and learn how they think.”
Yashim scratched his ear. “And you think your officers can learn all this by having coffee with the Russian military attache?”
The seraskier thought: he is not a military man. Not a man at all.
He spoke with exaggerated precision. “You asked me the other day if I spoke French. In fact I do not. Nowadays we have a book, a dictionary, which gives all the words in Turkish and French so that our men can read some of the French textbooks. This book never existed when I was young. Apart from the officers we engage to teach our men, I have never met a Frenchman. Or an Englishman or a Russian. And never, of course, any of their ladies. Of course not. I would not know how to—”
He broke off, gripping the air with outstretched hands.
“How to act. How to speak with them. You know? Thirty years ago the idea would not have occurred to me. Now I think about it all the time.”
“I understand.” Yashim felt a wave of pity for the seraskier, in his western kit, his efficient boots, his buttoned tunic. These were symbols he endured, not knowing exactly why, like one of those simpletons in the bazaar who feel that no medicine is good unless it causes them some pain. Magic boots, magic buttons. Ferenghi magic.
“Things are moving fast. Even here.” The seraskier rubbed a hand across his chin, watching Yashim. “The sultan recognises that our military review presents him with an opportunity. Next Monday, all the city will be watching. People will see the banner of the Prophet at the head of the troop. The jingle of cavalry, brightwork sparkling, beautiful mounts. There’ll be the deep lines of soldiery, marching in step. Whatever they think of us now, they’ll be moved. They will be impressed, I’m sure of that. Better still, it’s going to make them proud.”
The seraskier raised his chin with the population, and his nostrils flared as if pride were something he already smelled in the air.
“To coincide with the display, the sultan will issue an Edict. An Edict that will move us all along in the direction he wants us to take. It is up to us to support him. To try and learn the good things that the infidels can teach us now. Even, as you say, by having coffee with the Russians.”
But Yashim had stopped listening. “An Edict?”
The seraskier lowered his voice.
“You may as well know. Changes will be made in many areas. Equality of the people under a single law. Administration. Ministers instead of pashas, that sort of thing. It will follow the way the army has been reformed on western lines, and it will not be enough. Naturally.”
Yashim felt flattened. What did he really know about anything? In six days, an imperial Edict. An order for change. With an effort he pushed the thoughts that crowded in aside.
“Why the Russians? Why not send our boys to have tea with the English? Or drink wine with the French ambassador?” The seraskier rubbed a hand across the back of his enormous neck. “The Russians…were more interested.”
“And that didn’t strike you as being suspicious?”
“I’m not naive. I took a risk. The boys from the Guard were…what shall I say? Sheltered. I thought it safer for them to make some mistakes now, in Istanbul, than to be ignorant later, on the battlefield.”
Yet they might have survived a battle, Yashim thought. In Istanbul they didn’t have a chance.
[ 51 ]
The man who kills in the dark is not afraid of darkness.
He waits for it. It is reliable, it always comes.
Darkness is his friend.
His feet were bare, to make no sound. He knew he would make no sound.
Years ago, he was one of the Quiet Men. One of the elite. Now he watched the daylight ebb from the grating that lay overhead. In four hours’ time he would lift the grating as easily and silently as a feather, and begin his work. But now he would wait.
He remembered the day of selection. The colonel had sat with a rose on his lap and a blindfold over his eyes at the centre of the barracks hall and dared the men to approach him, one by one. To lift the rose—and return to their place. The reward: a commission in the sappers.
The stone floor of the hall was strewn with dried chickpeas.
Nobody had the dexterity and the patience that he had. His self-control. One or two others reached the rose: but their eagerness betrayed them.
They taught him how to move in the dark, making no sound. It was easy.
They taught him how to live underground. They buried him alive, breathing through a cane.
They explained to him how shadows worked, what the eye could see, the difference between movement and movement.
They ordered him to be a shadow. Live like a rat. Work like a miner. Kill like a snake.
Patience. Obedience. Time, they said, is an illusion: the hours pass like seconds, seconds can seem like lifetimes.
Inch forward under the enemies’ lines. Burrow into his defences like a rat. Listen for the enemy sappers, the countermines, the creaking of the props. Absorb the dark like a second skin. Kill in silence.
And if he was captured—it happened, that far forward of the lines—say nothing. Give nothing.
They didn’t talk much anyway. That suited him, too, he’d never been a talker. The sappers were the Quiet Men.
He hadn’t needed friends when he had the corps. He belonged. He shared faith. And the faith carried him through, didn’t it? Through the cramped tunnel. Beyond the cramped muscle. Over fear and panic into the timeless and immobile centre of all things.
Then came the Betrayal. The shelling of the barracks. Dust, falling masonry, splinters of stone. A wall that hung in the air before it fell. He remembered that moment: an entire wall, thirty feet high, blown from its foundations and sailing, hanging in the air.
He remembered how it flexed and buckled like the flanks of galloping horse. As if the air itself was thick as water. It was a moment that seemed like an eternity.
It gave him ample time, then, to seek the hollow and roll up into it.
&nb
sp; Like a man entombed. But not dead. Breathing through an aperture in the rubble. Working the rubble gradually from head to toe like a worm coming up for the dew.
The grating overhead was now invisible. The sapper could see it, though, by moving his head just a fraction of an inch. By using the light that no one else could see.
He raised his chin. This was the time.
Patience was all that mattered.
Obedience was all that mattered.
People would die. People had to die.
Only death could sanctify the empire’s rebirth.
Only sacrifice could cleanse and protect the holy shrines.
The four pillars of the Karagozi.
The assassin felt in his pouch. He touched the ground with the palm of his hand.
And then, like a cat, he began to move.
[ 52 ]
Yashim leaned forward and fixed his eyes on page thirty-four of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. But it was no use. The book had been open on the same page for half an hour.
Whose law would it be? Would it be like the Prankish laws, which allowed the Greeks to have a country but denied the same convenience to the Poles? And would it work as well in the highlands of Bulgaria as in the deserts of Tripolitana?
The necessary leap? Perhaps. A single law for everybody, regardless of their faith, their speech, their parentage. Why not? He doubted that such a thing was sacrilegious, but then…plenty of others would think it was.
As he resolved these questions in his mind, Yashim won—dered who else, precisely, knew about the Edict. The sultan and his viziers, of course. High-ranking dignitaries like the seraskier himself, no doubt. The religious leaders—the Mufti, the Rabbi, the Patriarch? Probably. But the rank and file -priests and imams, say? No. And not the common people of the city. For them it was to be a surprise. As it had been for him.
He snapped the book shut, and closed his eyes, leaning back on the divan.
In the past few hours he had thought this through a dozen times. There was going to be trouble, he could be sure of that.
But there was something else, wasn’t there?
2006 - The Janissary Tree Page 14