“That’s all right,” said Preen, smiling and patting her friend’s arm. “I’m getting on all right now.”
There was a buzz of excitement in the street behind them, like a sudden cooing of pigeons, Preen thought. She turned her head to see a man running up the alley, pumping his arms and flinging out his chest: he wore a beard and a high red cap with a white pennant flying from its crown. In each fist he carried a flaming torch.
“Fire! Fire!” He bellowed suddenly. He swerved to the wall: there was a sound of breaking glass and the man lunged, reappeared and sped across the alley.
“Fire!”
He was only holding one brand now, but there was a bottle in his other hand and he was sloshing gobbets of liquid from it over a doorway. “Fire!”
“What are you doing?” Preen screamed, breaking away from Mina who had clapped a hand to her mouth.
She put out her hands without thinking and felt the bruise ripen in her shoulder.
The man touched the brand to the door: as Preen reached him it sprouted a lovely mass of blueish flames and the man wheeled round, grinning wildly.
“Fire!” he roared.
Preen slapped him hard across the face with her good hand. The man jerked his head back. For a moment he narrowed his eyes and then he dodged down and sped past her, up the street, before she could think what to do next.
Preen threw an alarmed look at the doorway: the blue flames suddenly started to spit. Some were turning yellow as they licked upwards, snapping at the old wood.
“Mina!”
Mina hadn’t moved, but she was looking from Preen to the other side of the street where a shattered window was leaping in and out of view as the flames guttered and shrank inside.
“Let’s go back!” Mina wailed.
Preen acted on impulse. People were already running in the street, in both directions. A few had stopped and were making an effort to smother the flames creeping round the doorway. But even as they beat the fire with their cloaks flames had started to shoot from the window opposite.
“No! Go on, to Yashim’s!” she shouted. She glanced back: a light seemed to hover at the corner of the alley, and then a wall of turbanned men with flickering torches surged around the corner, blocking the alley. “Run!”
The pain in her shoulder seemed to fade away as she began to run uphill. After a moment she put out a hand and rested it on Mina’s shoulder. Both dancers stopped and kicked off their shoes, those two-inch pattens on which they liked to totter into male company; and both, as women will, snatched them up and carried them as they ran barefoot through the alleyways towards the Kara Davut.
They didn’t get so far. As they turned into the alley which led to the open space beneath the Imperial Gate, they flung themselves into a packed crowd of men, jostling and elbowing against each other. Almost immediately they were hemmed in by other people running up behind them: Preen grabbed Mina by the arm and spun her round. Together they fought their way back to the street corner, and took the turn to the right.
“We’ll go round behind the mosque,” Preen whispered in Mina’s ear.
They slackened their pace, partly to avoid the people running up the alleyway towards them, partly because among so many people Preen felt unwilling to surrender herself to the panic that was already developing around them.
But at the next crossroads they had to push and shove their way through the crowd, and turning her head left, back west, Preen saw the flicker of fires smoking on the hill above.
Beyond the crowd the side-street was also heaving with men, and women, too, some of them leading children, trying to protect them from the constant buffeting of people running back and forth. Everyone seemed to be shouting, screaming to make way, bellowing about fire.
Two men, running into each other from opposite directions, suddenly stopped shouting and fell to exchanging blows.
A man called Ertogrul Asian, who had just poked his head out from his doorway, got a smack on his ear from a wooden box carried by a man dodging down the alley close to the wall.
A printer who ran into the street was carried away by a tide of people racing for the next corner.
A little boy in a nightshirt, who would one day sit as a deputy in the Kemalist National Assembly and spend an evening drinking raki with an air ace called Baron von Richthofen, had his little hand popped out of his mother’s grip and was scooped up and passed overhead by total strangers for several minutes before he found himself being pressed to her bosom again, an experience he could later recall perfectly from other people’s memories.
Alexandra Stanopolis, a Greek girl of marriageable age, had her bottom pinched sixteen times and hoarded the secret to her death in Trabzon fifty-three years later, when she finally revealed it to her daughter-in-law, who herself died in New York City.
A notorious miser known as Yilderim, the Thunderbolt, lost a wooden chest he was carrying to a cheerful thief who later found it contained nothing but a silk scarf with a very tight knot in it; the miser died later in an asylum and the thief in Sevastopol, of dysentery, still wearing the knotted scarf.
Several hundred worshippers at the great mosque, formerly the church of Hagia Sophia, found themselves trapped inside the building and had to be escorted in batches by armed troops who led them to an alleyway beneath the seraglio and told them to find their own way home. Two of the worshippers, swathed in their ostlers’ cloaks and hiding their frightened faces underneath their hoods, quailed at the soldiers’ appearance and in the melee around the great door followed instead a notorious army deserter into a former side-chapel of the cathedral, where they sank down behind a column and communicated in nervous glances. Their names, unusual for Muslims, were Ben Fizerly and Frank Compston.
And all the while, west of the city, the fires raged and raced towards each other like members of a scattered regiment, plunging and burning through the obstacles which lay between them. So that Stanislaw Palewski, Polish ambassador to the Sublime Porte, with a kitchen knife in one hand and an eye on the window, retrieved the golden threaded cord to his dressing gown and without a word to the man stirring on the carpet beat a hasty retreat to Pera, across the Golden Horn.
In times of crisis, he told himself, foreign representatives needed to make themselves available at their embassies.
[ 120 ]
As Yashim ran across the first court of the seraglio he noticed that it was almost completely deserted: with the New Guard installed in the square and preventing anyone from crossing it was something he might have expected. The few men who remained seemed to have gathered beneath the great plane tree. The Janissary Tree. Yashim shot them a nervous glance as he scuttled over the cobbled walk, his brown cloak billowing behind him.
At the Ortokapi Gate five halberdiers of the selamlik, not wearing curls, stood forward in a body to challenge him. Two of them held pikes in their hands; the others were armed only with the dagger, but their cloaks were pinned back and they stood legs akimbo with their right hands cradling the hilts stuffed into their pantaloons.
“Bear up, men!” Yashim cried as he stepped into the light. “Yashim Togalu, on the sultan’s service!”
They stepped warily aside to let him pass.
The wind which had been whipping his cloak against his legs was still: for a moment he marvelled at the great space that opened up in front of him before he plunged down an alley of cypress, struck by the still blackness of the trees, by the darkness that enveloped him almost at the centre of Ottoman power. Only the thin spark of a lamp at the far end of the tunnel prevented him from succumbing to the frightening atmosphere of a wood at night.
He burst out of the alley and crossed swiftly to the portico of the last, most numinous gate of all the gates that defined the power of the Sublime Porte: the Porte del’ Felicita, the Gateway of Happiness, which led from the workaday second court where viziers, scribes, archivists, ambassadors kicked their heels or rapped out the orders which controlled the lives of men from the Red Sea to the Danube. Beyo
nd it lay the sacred precincts of the third court, where one enormous family led an existence made precious by the presence of the sultan, the Shah-in-Shah, God’s very representative on earth.
The representative’s doors, however, were firmly closed.
His fist made no echo on the iron-studded gates: he might have been beating stone. Exasperated, he took a few steps back and looked upwards. The huge eaves jutted forwards ten feet or more, in classical Ottoman style. He ran his eyes along the walls. The outer walls were built up with the imperial kitchens, a long series of domes, like bowls stacked on a shelf: there was no way through there. He turned to the left and began to walk quickly towards the Archives.
No one challenged him as he placed his hand on the inlaid doors and pushed. The door creaked back, and he stepped into the vestibule. The door ahead stood slightly ajar, and in a minute Yashim was back in the familiar dark archive room.
He called softly.
“Ibou?”
No answer. He called again, a little louder.
“Ibou? Are you there? It’s me, Yashim.”
The tiny candle at the far end of the room was snuffed out for a moment; then it reappeared. Someone had moved in the darkness.
“Don’t be afraid. I need your help.”
He heard the slap of sandals on the stone floor and Ibou stepped forwards into the light. His eyes were very round.
“What can you do?” he almost whispered.
“I need to use the back door, Ibou. Can you let me through?”
“I have a key. But -1 don’t want to go.”
“No, you stay. Do you know what’s happening?”
“I am new. I wasn’t asked—but it is some kind of meeting. Dangerous, too.”
“Come on.”
The little doorway gave onto the corridor in which the Valide Kosem had been dragged to her death. Yashim clasped Ibou’s hand.
“Good luck,” the young man whispered.
The door to the guard room was closed. Yashim opened it with a quick flick of the handle and stepped inside.
“I am summoned,” he announced.
Approach.
The halberdiers stood frozen.
They made no effort to stop Yashim opening the door, as though they were clockwork soldiers that someone had forgotten to wind.
For a moment he, too, stood transfixed, looking into the Courtyard of the Valide Sultan.
Then he took a step back and very softly closed the door.
[ 121 ]
The sleeping quarters of the harem slaves lay above the colonnade which spanned one side of the valide’s court: quietly trying the door, Yashim found himself in a small, bare chamber strewn with rugs and mattresses and dimly lit by a few short candles set on plates on the floor. The beds were empty: dark shadows at the latticed window showed him that the harem slaves were crowding there for a better view.
One of the slave-girls gave a gasp as Yashim stepped up behind her. He put a finger to his lips, and looked down.
Never in all his life would Yashim forget that sight. To the left, the Valide Sultan stood at the doorway to her apartments, at the head of a crowd of harem women that spilled from the doorway and lined the walls three deep: a hundred women, maybe more, Yashim guessed, in every state of dress and undress. Some, roused from their beds, were still in their pyjamas.
Across the courtyard, massed in their finery, stood the palace eunuchs, black and white. Their turbans sparkled with precious jewels, nodding egrets. There must have been three hundred men, Yashim guessed, rustling and whispering like pigeons roosting in a tree.
A silence fell on the eunuchs: they turned their faces to the doorway below Yashim’s window, and slowly they began to move aside, creating a corridor. Yashim could see them better now, even recognise a few faces: he saw sables, and kaftans of cashmere, and an imperial ransom of brooches and precious stones. They were more like magpies than pigeons, Yashim thought, drawn to everything that glittered, amassing their nests of gold and diamonds.
He reached up on tiptoe to see who was coming through the crowd, though he already knew. The Kislar Agha looked magnificent in an enormous dark pelisse so spangled with the moisture in the air that it sparkled. He walked slowly, but his tread was surprisingly light. His hand, clutching at the baton, was thick with rings. His face was lost beneath a great turban of whitest muslin, wrapped around the conical red hat of his office; so Yashim was unable to gauge his expression. But he saw how the other eunuchs lowered their eyes to the ground, as if they didn’t quite dare to look him fully in the face. Yashim knew that face, wrinkled like an ape: the bloodshot eyes, the fat, blubbery cheeks, it was a face that carried the stamp of vice, and wore its vice with an air of blank unconcern.
The eunuchs had now formed two wedges, leaving the Kislar Agha standing alone between them, facing the valide across the court. He didn’t raise his hands: he didn’t need to. Nobody stirred.
“The Hour has come.”
He spoke slowly in his high, cracking voice.
“We, who are the sultan’s slaves, proclaim the hour.”
“We, who are the sultan’s slaves, assemble for his protection.”
“We, who kneel beside the throne, uphold the sacrament of power.”
“We will speak with your son, our lord and master, the Shah-in-Shah!”
The chief eunuch’s voice rose as he cried out: “The hour has come!”
And a wavering cry rose from the ranks of the eunuchs: “The Hour! The Hour!”
The Valide Sultan never moved, except to tap one dainty foot on the stone step.
The chief eunuch raised his arms, his fingers curled like talons.
“The banner must be unfurled. The wrath of God and the people has to be appeased. He shall draw back from the abyss of unbelief, and wield the Sword of Osman in defence of the faith! It is the Path.
“It is written that the knowing shall approach, and become one with the Core. Caliph and sultan, Lord of the Horizons, this is his destiny. The people have risen, the altars are prepared. It is God who has awoken us, at the eleventh hour, the Hour of Restoration!
“Produce him!” He bellowed, in a terrible voice. He curled his fingers into loose fists and let them sink to his sides. His voice sank to a hoarse whisper. “Reveal the Core.”
Like Yashim, the Valide Sultan seemed to find the chief’s performance somewhat hammy. She turned her head to murmur something to an attendant, and Yashim saw her perfect profile, still clear and beautiful, and recognised the lazy look in her eyes as she turned back and focused on the chief eunuch. Lazy meant danger. He wondered if the Kislar Agha knew.
“Kislar,” she said, in a voice that rang with amused contempt. “Some of our ladies present are not at all well dressed. The night, I may point out, is chill. As for you, you are not suitably attired.”
She raised her chin slightly, as if inspecting him. The eunuch’s eyes narrowed in fury.
“No, kislar, your turban seems to be in order. But you do seem to be wearing my jewels.”
Good work, Yashim thought, bunching his fist. The valide certainly knew how to use information.
The chief eunuch’s nostrils flared, but he looked down quickly. Whether that movement—made, as it were, under the influence of a woman more powerful than him—put him off his stroke, or whether it was the sheer unexpectedness of the valide’s remarks, Yashim could not guess. But he opened his mouth and shut it again, as if he had a speech he couldn’t make.
The valide’s voice was like drawn silk.
“And you murdered for them, too, didn’t you, kislar?”
The eunuch raised a forefinger and pointed it at the valide. Yashim saw that he was trembling.
“They are—for my power!” he screeched. He was improvising now, drawn into an argument he didn’t mean to have, and couldn’t win. His power was lessening with every word he spoke.
Out of the corner of his eye, Yashim saw a white shape stirring close to the wall. A girlish figure sprang forwards, like a c
at, and began to run towards the eunuch.
The eunuch didn’t see her immediately: she was blocked by his outstretched arm.
“Produce the sultan, or suffer the consequences!” The Kislar Agha screamed. Then his head turned a fraction, and at the same moment Yashim recognised the girl.
The girl who had stolen the gozde’s ring.
Yashim closed his eyes. And in that second he saw her beauti—ful, unyielding face again, when she had closed her mind to him.
Only now he recognised that look. A mask of grief.
A slave-girl gasped at his side, and Yashim opened his eyes. The girl had hurled herself upon the enormous eunuch: he swatted her aside like a fly. But she was on her feet in a moment, and for the first time Yashim saw that she carried a dagger in her fist, a long, curved steel like a scorpion’s sting. She sprang again, and this time it was as if the two embraced, like lovers: the slim white girl and the huge black man, staggering as she clung to him.
But she was no match for the kislar. His hands closed around her neck and with a tremendous thrust of his arms he pushed her off. His long fingers spread around her neck like a stain. Her feet kicked wildly but skidded on the wet stone. Her hands came up to his, clawing at them: but the Kislar Agha’s strength was far greater. With a grunt he flung her aside. She crumpled back against the floor, and lay still.
Nobody moved. Even the valide’s foot had stopped tapping.
Suddenly one of the women screamed and clapped her hand to her mouth. The Kislar Agha swung round, his head moving from side to side as if expecting another assault. Yashim saw the women shrink back.
The Kislar Agha opened his mouth to speak.
He coughed.
His hands went to his stomach.
Behind him the eunuchs stirred. Their chief started to turn towards them, and as he moved Yashim saw very clearly what had made the women scream.
2006 - The Janissary Tree Page 28