2006 - The Janissary Tree

by Jason Goodwin

The jewelled hilt of a Circassian blade.

  The kislar spluttered as he turned, and then he began to twist towards the ground, his enormous torso slowly sinking as he wheeled. His legs gave way and he sank to his knees, still holding the hilt of the dagger in his abdomen, wearing the look of horrified surprise that he would take to the grave.

  Yashim heard the thump as the Kislar Agha’s body pitched headfirst to the ground.

  [ 122 ]

  There was a momentary silence before the court erupted in pandemonium. The eunuchs swarmed towards the doors in a frenzy to escape, anything to put some distance between them and their fallen chief. Men were slithering and scrambling over each other to reach the doors, some running into the Golden Road, others pouring below the colonnade where Yashim could no longer see them. Doubtless those clockwork halberdiers would stand immobile as dozens of men fled to the sanctuary of their own quarters. Tomorrow you would not find one, Yashim reflected, who would admit to having been there that night.

  They’d accuse each other, though.

  There was one, at least, he could vouch for personally. He was glad that Ibou had chosen the right course, sticking to his world of musty texts and tattered documents.

  The eunuchs had all but cleared from the court, leaving jewels, slippers and even their batons strewn across the flagstones. A few men had attempted to stem the rout at the first panic, dragging at the crowd, shouting encouragement. “It is still the Hour!” But the eunuchs had run like chickens in a yard, and the words of encouragement had died away. Everyone had gone.

  Still the women had not moved, waiting for their mistress’s signal. The chief eunuch and the dead girl still lay on the gleaming flagstones like pieces seized from a giant game of chess -white pawn sacrificed for the black castle. It was a self-sacrifice, though. It had been her ring, all along. A token she had asked her lover to wear, Yashim supposed. There were other forms of love inside these walls than the love of a woman for a man—if the performance of the act could be considered love. What had the dresser told them? That this ring turned up here and there, with its esoteric symbol, its concealed meaning. It was clear enough, now. An endless circuit, snake swallowing snake. Frustration and excitement and pleasure in equal measure—and without issue.

  The valide had stepped down into the courtyard, and the women were crowding round the body of the girl, lifting her up, moving her beneath the colonnades.

  Even now, Yashim felt a pang of pity for the man who had killed her, and her lover, too. Only a few hours earlier they had spoken together, just where he lay now, and he had reminded Yashim of the murder of the sultan’s father, Selim, as he played music on the ney for the entertainment of the palace girls. It was his own predecessor who carried out the killing. Was this one of the traditions he was seeking to uphold: the murder of sultans by their Kislar Aghas?

  But why did he take the valide’s jewels? Perhaps, in some crazy way, he had explained it himself: in his narrow, cunning, superstitious old mind he had come to associate the jewels with power, and stole them as a talisman, a juju that would see him through the greatest crisis of his career.

  The slave-girls had crept out already. Yashim followed them, making his way down the steps and through the guard room to the corridor.

  He paused with his hand on the handle of the archive door. What should he tell the young man?

  He pressed the door and it opened. Ibou was standing just inside, holding a lamp.

  “What happened? I heard shouts.”

  He held up the lamp higher, to cast a light behind Yashim, into the corridor.

  “What’s the matter?” Yashim asked.

  Ibou peered over his shoulder. He seemed to hesitate.

  “Are you alone? Oh. I…I thought I heard someone.” He put up his arm and fanned his face with his hand. “Whooh, hot.”

  Yashim smiled.

  “It will be soon,” he said, “if we don’t get the fires put out.”

  “That’s true,” Ibou said, with a weak smile.

  Yashim put a hand against the door jamb and rested his weight against it, staring at the floor. He thought of Ibou working on all alone while the eunuchs bayed for their sultan in the valide’s court. He thought of the little back door he’d just come through so conveniently, and of the knot of men he’d seen beneath the Janissary Tree outside. The timing was tight, wasn’t it? The uprising in the city, and the persuasion of the sultan. The conspirators would need some way to communicate—to carry news of the sultan’s mystical apotheosis to the rebels outside.

  A go-between. Someone who could bring word from the closed world of the harem to the men on the outside who threatened the city.

  He felt a great weight in his throat.

  “What fires, Ibou?” he asked quietly.

  Yashim didn’t want to see Ibou’s face. He didn’t want to learn that he was right, that Ibou was the hinge on which the whole plot turned. But he knew from Ibou’s stuttering effort to reply. From the simple fact that no archivist, corralled within the high walls of his archives room, could have seen or heard the fires that Yashim had seen lighted only moments before he entered the half-deserted palace.

  Ibou had already known what would happen.

  Reluctantly his eyes travelled upwards to the young man’s face.

  “It didn’t work, Ibou. The chief eunuch is dead. You needn’t expect anyone else.”

  He looked past the archivist down the darkened stacks towards the door. The lamp ahead twinkled and glistened. Yashim squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. The light burned clear.

  Ibou turned and carefully set the lamp down on the table. He kept his fingers on the base, as though it were an offering, as though he were praying, Yashim thought. Ibou stared into the little ring of flame, and something in the sadness of his expression reminded Yashim of the man whose corpse lay neglected in the rain-swept courtyard outside. Years ago, the Kislar Agha must have been a man like Ibou. Soft and slender. Charming. Time and experience had made him gross: but once he had been lovely too.

  “It isn’t over, Ibou,” he said slowly. “You have to tell them. Stop what’s happening. The Hour isn’t come.”

  Ibou was breathing rapidly. His nostrils flared.

  Very gently he took his fingers from the lamp. Then he put up a hand and pulled at his earlobe.

  Yashim’s eyes widened.

  “Darfur?” He said.

  The young man glanced at him, and shook his head.

  “There is nothing there. Huts. Crocodiles in the river. Little bushpig in the road, dogs. He told me I should come. I wanted to.”

  Yashim bit his lip.

  “I’ve got four brothers, and six sisters,” Ibou continued. “What else could I do? He sent us a little money now and then. When he became chief, he sent for me.”

  “I see.”

  “He is my mother’s uncle,” Ibou said. Yashim nodded. “My grandfather’s brother. And I wanted to come. Even at the knife, I was glad. I was not afraid.”

  No, thought Yashim: you survived. Whether it was anger or desperation, one or the other would help you survive. In his own case, anger. For Ibou? A village of mud and crocodiles, the knife wielded in the desert, the promise of escape.

  “Listen to me, Ibou. What’s happened has happened. You have no protector any more, but I will vouch for you. You must come with me now, and tell the men outside that the game is finished. The Hour has passed. Do this, Ibou, before many people die.”

  Ibou shivered and passed his hand across his face.

  “You…you will protect me?”

  “If you come with me now. It has to come from you. Where are they waiting—beneath the Tree?”

  “By the Janissary Tree, yes,” Ibou almost whispered.

  We must go now, Yashim thought, before he has time to grow afraid. Before we are too late.

  He took Ibou’s arm. “Come,” he said.

  [ 123 ]

  When they reached the Ortakapi Gate, Yashim checked his stride.

&
nbsp; “Ibou,” he said in a low voice. “This is as far as I can go. My presence won’t do any good. You must say that the Kislar Agha is dead, and the palace is quiet. Just that. Understand?”

  Ibou clutched his arm.

  “Will you be here?”

  Yashim hesitated.

  “I have to find the seraskier,” he said. “There’s no danger for you: they expect the messenger. Now go!”

  He patted Ibou on the shoulder, and watched as the young man sauntered through the gateway and headed for the group of men in the darker shadows of the planes. He saw the men stir and turn and, certain that Ibou had their attention, he slipped through the gate and made his way around the opposite wall of the first court, sticking to the shadows.

  [ 124 ]

  Bombardier Genghis Yalmuk slipped a finger beneath his chin strap and ran it round from ear to ear, to soothe the pressure. He had served in the New Guard for fifteen years, graduating from common soldiering to the artillery corps five years ago, and his only complaint in those fifteen years had been the headgear that soldiers were expected to wear: ferenghi shakos, with tough leather straps. Now he commanded a battalion of ten guns and their crews: forty men, in all.

  He glanced over the Hippodrome and grunted. He’d slogged through the sand and heat of Syria. He’d been in Armenia, when the Cossacks broke through the infantry lines and charged his redoubt, with their sabres flashing in the sunlight and their horses foaming at the nostrils, and his commanding officer offering to shoot down any man who deserted his post. Battle, he’d learned, was days and hours of waiting, putting off thought, punctuated by short, savage engagements in which there was no time to think at all. Leave all that, he’d been told again and again, to the commanding officers.

  Well, he was one of them now himself, and the injunction against thinking still held, as far as he could discover. His orders had come direct from the seraskier himself, who had been moving through the lines like a man demented, setting the position of the guns, instructing the troops, fixing elevations and exhorting them all to obedience. Genghis had no quarrel with that, of course, but he was a Stamboul man himself, not one of your Anatolian recruits, and he found it strange to be in his own city, under arms and idle while the place was bursting into flames.

  He wished he’d been detailed to the Sultan Ahmet, perhaps, or the other, unidentified location deeper in the city, where the men would no doubt be tackling the fires head-on, instead of being told to train their guns every which way and stop the crowds from approaching the palace. But the seraskier had been very exact in his instructions. They had synchronised their timepieces, too, ready for the barrage that was to open in almost exactly one hour. The barrage whose purpose Genghis Yalmuk neither questioned, nor understood, but which the seraskier had personally prepared, working from gun to gun with a sheaf of co-ordinates as if his bombardier could not be trusted to fix the co-ordinates himself.

  And meanwhile, he thought wretchedly, they were waiting again. Waiting while the city burned.

  He caught sight of a man in a plain brown cloak speaking to two sentries outside the seraglio gate, and frowned. His orders were very clear, to keep civilians out of the operational area: this man must have slipped through the gate, from the palace. Genghis Yalmuk threw back his shoulders and started to march towards them. This fellow had better just slip back the way he’d come, and at the double, too, palace or no palace, or he’d know the reason why.

  But before he had walked five yards the man in the brown cloak had turned and was scanning the ground; one of the sentries pointed, and the man began to walk towards him, holding up a hand.

  “Look here,” Genghis began to say, but the civilian cut him short.

  “Yashim Togalu, imperial service,” he said. “I need the seraskier, and fast. Operational need,” he added. “Vital new intelligence.”

  Genghis Yalmuk blinked. The habit of obedience was very deeply ingrained, after all, and he had an ear that was tuned to the commanding style.

  As for Yashim, he crossed his fingers.

  For a moment the two men looked at one another.

  Then Genghis Yalmuk raised his hand and pointed.

  “Up there,” he said, crisply.

  Yashim followed the direction of his finger. Over the walls and trees surrounding the great mosque. Beyond the minarets. Higher, and further away.

  He was pointing at the dome of Hagya Sophia.

  “Then I’m too late,” said Yashim, crisply. “I’m afraid I have to ask to see your orders.”

  [ 125 ]

  The seraskier leaned back against the lead casing of the buttress, and put his cheek to the smooth metal. He had not realised how excited he was. His face seemed to be burning like the city which lay about him, at his feet.

  Out here, on the leads, he had the perfect view. From down below, Hagia Sophia seemed to rise in a single burst, the massive central dome supported on a buttressed ring that floated in the air over two half-domes on either side. This was how artists since time immemorial had pictured it, round-shouldered like so many mosques; but in this they erred. Built in the sixth century, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian’s great church was a reconciliation of two opposed forms. The great circle of the dome, rising on a round gallery of arches, thrust itself skywards through a lead-covered square. There was space at the four corners, where the pitch of the roof was slight, at most; and so it was from here, two hundred feet above the ground, that the seraskier saw across the Seven Hills, over the seraglio to the dark waters beyond, touched here and there by a bobbing lantern. Further west he imagined the water reflecting the flames that even now were shooting skywards, sending out brilliant showers of sparks, springing their way from rooftop to rooftop, consuming the wooden walls of the old portside houses, bursting through doorways, roaring down alleys. An unstoppable, purifying furnace fuelled by two thousand years of trickery and deceit.

  The flames belonged to the city. All those long centuries they had smouldered, now and then breaking loose, feeding on the packed-up tinder that had been sifting into the shadows and the corners of Istanbul, its crooked angles dredged with dust and detritus and the filth of a million benighted souls. A city of fire and water. Dirt and disease. A city that stank on the water’s edge like a decaying corpse, too rotten to be moved, shining by the oily bloom of putrefaction.

  He turned to the south. How dark the seraglio looked! Shuttered behind its ancient walls, how it brooded on its own eminence! But the seraskier knew better: it was a vulture’s nest, scattered with the filth and droppings of the generations, piled on the bones of the dead, filled with the insistent gaping cry of fledgelings warmed by their own excrement and fed with filth plucked from the surrounding midden of the city in which it had been built.

  The seraskier stepped forwards to the gutter, and looked down into the square where his men were standing by their guns. Order and discipline, he thought: good men, moulded these last twenty years in proper habits of deference and obedience. They knew the penalty for stepping out of line. Order and obedience made an army, and an army was a tool in the hands of a man who knew how to use it. Without order you had only a rabble, that snarled and bit like a mad dog, ignorant of its purpose, open to every suggestion and prey to every whim.

  Well, this night he would show the people who was stronger: the blind rabble and the vulture’s nest, or lead and shot and the power of discipline.

  And when the smoke cleared, a new beginning. A brave new start.

  He smiled, and his eyes glittered in the firelight.

  Then he stiffened. He eased away from the wall and slid the pistol from his belt.

  He cocked the firing pin and laid the barrel in a straight line, pointing back towards the arch.

  Someone was coming up the stairs.

  The shadow lengthened, and the seraskier saw the eunuch blinking as he turned his head from side to side.

  “Well done, Yashim,” said the seraskier, smiling. “I wondered if you would come.”

  [ 12
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  The seraskier tapped his foot on the sloping roof.

  “Do you know what this is? Do you see where we are?”

  Yashim gazed at him.

  “Of course you do. The roof of the Great Mosque. You see the dome, above your head? The Greeks called it Hagia Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom. One hundred and eighty-two feet high. Enclosed volume, nine million cubic feet. Do you know how old it is?”

  “It was built before the days of the Prophet,” Yashim said cautiously.

  “Incredible, isn’t it?” The seraskier chuckled. He seemed to be in the best of spirits. “And it took just five years to build. Can you imagine what an effort that must have required? Or what we could do with such energy today, applied to something actually worthwhile?”

  He laughed again, and stamped his foot.

  “How does something so old get to last so long? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s because no one, not even the Conqueror Mehmed himself, had the wit or courage to knock it down. Do I surprise you?”

  Yashim frowned.

  “Not entirely,” he replied quietly.

  The seraskier looked up.

  “Thousands of sheets of beaten lead,” he said. “Acres of it. And the pillars. And the dome. Just imagine, Yashim! It’s been weighing on us all for fourteen hundred years. We can’t even see beyond it, or around it. We can’t imagine a world without it. Can we? Do you know, it’s like a stench, nobody notices it after a while. Not even when it’s poisoning them.” He leaned forward. The gun, Yashim noticed, was still steady in his hand. “And it’s poisoning us. All this.” He waved a hand. “Year after year, habit piled on prejudice, ignorance on greed. Come on, Yashim, you know it as well as I do. We’re smothered by it, aren’t we? Tradition! It’s just grime that accumulates. Why, it even took your balls!”

  Yashim could no longer see the seraskier’s face against the light of the fires at his back, but he heard him snicker at his own thrust.

  “I’ve just come from the palace,” Yashim said. “The sultan is safe. There was a coup of sorts—”