Jason Goodwin

by The Janissary Tree

  The sound of hammers beating against the tin was fainter here: it broke upon the courtyard like the musical note of frogs tinkling in a nearby lake. Few smiths were working in the alcoves of the courtyard itself: it served, instead, as a caravanserai where tin merchants brought the raw materials of the trade and sold it, at need, to the smiths outside. Here were piled thick sheets of tin in apparently random shapes, and their owners sat among them on low stools in quiet contrast to the arrhythmic tintinnabulation of the street beyond, sipping tea and telling their beads. Now and again one of them would make a sale; the tinsmith cut the sheet, the tin merchant weighed it out, and the smith carried it away.

  Yashim wandered out for a last look. The bigger objects--lanterns, in the main, and trunks--were being assembled on the ground outside the shops. But Yashim was satisfied that nowhere, either inside or out, was there a place where a cauldron with a base big enough to fit a man could be discreetly built.

  Someone, he thought, would have seen.

  And that person, he thought, would have been legitimately puzzled. Why, in the name of all things holy, should anyone want to make a cauldron out of tin?

  Of such a size, too! The biggest cauldron anyone had seen since-- when?

  Yashim froze. All around him the tinsmiths beat out their meaningless birdlike paean to industry and craftsmanship, but he no longer heard. He knew, in a flash, when that moment had been.

  Ten years before. The night of June 15,1826.

  8

  **************

  YASHIM felt conspicuous as soon as the thought flashed upon him. It was as if the knowledge had made him glow.

  In a nearby cafe, the proprietor brought him a coffee while Yashim looked with unseeing eyes down the street. The noise of the tinsmiths insistently hammering had melded with a memory of that terrifying sound, ten years ago, of the Janissaries battering on their upturned cauldrons. It was an age-old signal that nobody in the palace, or in the streets, or in their homes in the city could misunderstand. It was the mother of all dins, and it hadn't meant that the Janissaries wanted more food.

  It meant that they wanted blood.

  Up through the centuries that driving and sinisterly insistent sound of the Janissaries beating on their cauldrons had been the prelude to death in the streets, men torn apart, the sacrifice of princes. Had it always been so? Yashim knew well what the Janissaries had achieved. Each man was selected from a levy of the empire's toughest, likeliest, most wide-awake Christian boys. Brought to Istanbul, renouncing the faith of the Balkan peasants who had borne them, swearing allegiance as slaves to the sultan mounted at their head, they became a corps. A terrifying fighting machine that the Ottoman sultans had unleashed against their enemies in Europe.

  If the Ottoman Empire inspired fear throughout the known world, it was the Janissaries who carried the fear to the throats of the unbelievers. The conquest of Sofia and Belgrade. Istanbul itself, wrested from the Greeks in 1453. The Arab peninsula and, with it, the Holy Cities. Mohacs, 1526, when the flower of Hungarian knighthood was cut down in the saddle and Suleiman the Magnificent led his men to Buda, and on, fleetingly, to the gates of Vienna. Rhodes and Cyprus, Egypt and the Sahara. Why, the Janissaries had even landed in France in 1566 and spent a year in Toulon.

  Until--who could say why?--the victories dried up. The terms of engagement changed. The Janissaries sought permission to marry. They petitioned for the right to take up trades when there was no fighting, to feed their families. They enrolled their sons into the corps, and the corps grew reluctant to fight. They were still dangerous: loaded with privilege, they lorded it over the common people of the city. Designed to die fighting at the lonely borders of an ever-expanding empire, they enjoyed all the license and immunity that the people and the sultan could bestow on men who would soon be martyrs. But they no longer sought to martyr themselves. The men who had been sent to terrify Europe made a simple discovery: it was easier--and far less dangerous--to terrorize at home.

  The palace made efforts to reason with them, efforts to discipline them. In 1618, Sultan Osman tried to overturn them: they had him killed, as Yashim knew, by the compression of his testicles, a mode of execution that left no traces on the body. Special man, special death. It was considered fitting for a member of the imperial family. Later still, in 1635, Murad IV rounded up thirty thousand Janissaries and marched them to their deaths in Persia. But the corps survived.

  And slowly, painfully, the Ottomans had come to realize that they could no longer properly defend themselves. Unreliable as they were, the Janissaries still insisted on being the supreme military power: they had become unassailable. The common people were afraid of them. In trade, they exploited their privileges to become dangerous rivals. Their behavior was threatening and insolent, as they swaggered through the city streets, fully armed and wielding sticks, uttering loutish blasphemies. Outside the Topkapi Palace, between Aya Sofia and the Blue Mosque, lay an open space called the Atmeidan, the ancient Hippodrome of the Byzantines. In it grew a huge plane tree to which the Janissaries always rallied at the first sign of any trouble, for the blotched and peeling trunk of the Janissary Tree stood at the center of their world; as the palace lay at the center of Ottoman government, and Aya Sofia at the heart of religious faith. Beneath its branches the Janissaries divulged their grievances and secrets, and plotted mutinies. From the swaying limbs of the tree, too, they hanged the bodies of men who had displeased them: ministers, viziers, and court officials sacrificed to their bloodlust by a terrified succession of weak and vacillating sultans.

  Meanwhile, lands conquered by the sultan's armies in the name of Islam were being lost to the infidels: Hungary, Serbia, the Crimea. In Egypt, Ali Pasha the Albanian built on the experience of the Napoleonic invasion to train the fellahin as soldiers, Western-style. And when Greece disappeared, from the very heartland of an empire where every other man was Greek by speech, it was the final blow. The Egyptians had held the fort for a while: they were to be commended. They had drill and discipline; they had tactics and modern guns. The sultan read the message and began to train his own, Egyptian-style force: the seraskier's New Guard.

  That was ten years ago. The sultan issued orders that the Janissaries should adopt the Western style of the New Guard, knowing that they would be provoked and affronted. And the Janissaries had rebelled on cue. Caring only for their own privileges, they turned on the palace and the fledgling New Guards. But they had grown stupid as well as lazy. They were loathed by the people. The sultan had made ready. When the Janissaries overturned their cauldrons on the night of Thursday, June 15, it took a day to accomplish by modern means what no one had managed to achieve in three hundred years. By the night of the 16th, efficient modern gunnery had reduced their mutinous barracks to a smoldering ruin. Thousands were already dead: the rest, fleeing for their lives, died in the city streets, in the forests outside the walls, in the holes and lairs they crept into to survive.

  It was a trauma, Yashim reflected, from which the empire still waited to recover. Certain people might never recover at all.

  9

  ****************

  A man with grime up to his elbows and a leather apron was working on a lantern in the street outside his shop. With a pair of tongs he crimped the tin sheets, fixing them together with a speed and dexterity Yashim was content simply to admire, until the man looked up questioningly.

  "I've got something slightly unusual I'd like a price for," Yashim explained. "You seem to make large objects."

  The man grunted in agreement. "What is it you want, efendi?"

  "A cauldron. A very big cauldron--as tall as me, on legs. Can you do it?"

  The man straightened up and pulled his hand over the back of his neck, wincing.

  "Funny time of year for a big cauldron," he remarked.

  Yashim's eyes widened. "You can do it? You've done it before?"

  The smith's answer took him by surprise. "Do it every year or so. Big tin cauldrons for the Soup Makers' Guild.
They use them for the city procession."

  Of course! Why hadn't he thought of that? Every year, when the guilds-men process through the streets to the Aya Sofia, each guild drags a juggernaut loaded with the implements of their craft. The guild of barbers have a huge pair of scissors and offer free haircuts to the crowd. The fishmongers make their float like a ship and stand casting nets and hauling on the ropes. The bakers set up an oven and toss hot rolls to the people. And the soup makers: huge black cauldrons of fresh soup, which they ladle out into clay pannikins and distribute to the crowd as they go along. Carnival.

  "But a tin cauldron wouldn't take the heat or the weight," Yashim objected.

  The smith laughed.

  "They're not real! The whole float would collapse if they were real. You don't think, efendi, the barber cuts people's hair with that giant pair of scissors? They put a smaller pot of soup inside the tin cauldron and just make believe. It's for a laugh."

  Yashim felt like a dim-witted child.

  "Have you made one of those cauldrons recently? Out of season, even?"

  "We make the cauldrons when the guild orders them. The rest of the year, well"--he spat on his hands and picked up the tongs--"it's just lanterns and such. The cauldrons get a bit battered and they split, so we make more at the right time. If you're looking for one, I'd talk to the soup men's guild if I were you." He looked at Yashim and creases of amusement showed around his eyes. "You're not the mullah Nasreddin, are you?"

  "No, I am not the mullah." Yashim laughed.

  "Sounds like some kind of prank, anyway. If you'll excuse me..."

  10

  ****************

  THE girl lay on the bed in her vestal finery, her eyes closed. Her hair was elaborately braided, fastened with a malachite clasp. Perhaps it was the kohl, but her eyes seemed very dark, while the skin of her beautiful face seemed almost to glitter in the slatted sunlight that filtered through the shutters of the room. Heavy tassels of gold thread hung from the gauze scarf she wore around her breasts, and her long legs were encased in pantaloons of a satin muslin so fine it was as though she were naked. A small golden slipper dangled from the toe of her left foot.

  The tongue that protruded slightly between her rouged lips suggested that she needed more than a kiss to waken her now.

  Yashim bent over and examined the girl's neck. Two black bruises on either side of her throat. The pressure had been severe, and she'd been killed from in front: she would have seen the killer's face before she died.

  He glanced down at the girl's body and felt a pang of pity. So flawless: death had made her like a jewel, lustrous and cold, her beauty beyond all power of touch. And, he thought sadly, I will die like her: a virgin. More mangled, in my case. He quickly blocked the thoughts: years ago they had maddened and tormented him, but he had learned to control them. They were his thoughts, his desires, and so he could sheath them like a sword. He was alive. That was good.

  His eyes traveled over her skin. The pallor of death had left it like cold white butter. He almost missed the tiny suggestion that she was not, after all, absolutely without a flaw. Around the middle finger of her right hand he spotted the very slight trace of a narrow band where the skin had been squeezed. She had worn a ring; she was not wearing it now.

  He raised his head. Something in the atmosphere of the room had changed--a slight shift in pressure, perhaps, a shift in the balance of the living to the dead. He turned quickly and scanned the room: hangings, columns, plenty of places for someone else to hide. Someone who had already killed?

  Out of the shadows a woman glided forward, her head slightly cocked to one side, her hands outstretched.

  "Yashim, cheri! Tu te souviens de ta vieille amie?"

  It was the valide sultan, the queen mother herself: and she spoke, he noticed without surprise, in the voice of the Marquise de Merteuil. It was she who had given him the book. In his dreams, the marquise spoke French with what Yashim was not to know was a Creole twang.

  She took his hands and pecked him on the cheek, three times. Then she glanced down at the lovely form laid out in death for his inspection.

  "C'est triste," she said simply. Her eyes came up to meet his. "Poor you."

  He knew exactly what she meant.

  "Alors, you know who did it?"

  "Absolutely. A Bulgarian fisherman."

  The valide sultan put a pretty hand to her mouth.

  "I was about fifteen."

  She waved him away, smiling.

  "Yashim, sots serieux. The little girl's dead and--don't shout now--also my jewels have gone. The Napoleon jewels. We are all having a very bad time in the appartements."

  Yashim gazed at her. In the half-light she looked almost young; in any light she was still beautiful. He wondered if the dead girl would have looked so good at her age--or would have survived so long. Aimee--the sultan's mother. It was the role that every woman in the harem fought for: to sleep with the sultan, bear a son and, in due course, engineer his elevation to the throne of Osman. Each step required a greater concentration of miracles. The woman in front of him had possessed a singular advantage, though: she was a Frenchwoman. One miracle under her belt from the start.

  "You're not telling me that I never showed you the Napoleon jewels?" she was saying. "Well, my God, you are the lucky man. I bore everyone with these jewels. I admire them, my guests admire them--and I'm quite sure they all think them as ugly as I do. But they came from the Emperor Napoleon to me. Personnellement!"

  She darted him a roguish look.

  "You think--sentimental value? Rubbish. They are, however, part of my batterie de guerre. Beauty is cheap within these walls. Distinction, though, comes at a price. Look at her. Not all the mountains of Circassia could produce a creature so lovely again--but my son would have forgotten her name in a week. Tanya? Alesha? What does it matter?"

  "It mattered to somebody," Yashim reminded her. "Somebody killed her."

  "Because she was beautiful? Pah, everyone is beautiful here."

  "No. Perhaps because she was about to lie with the sultan."

  She eyed him suddenly: at times like this he knew exactly why she was valide, and no one else. He held her gaze.

  "Perhaps." She gave a pretty little shrug. "I want to tell you about my jewels. Ugly, very useful--and worth a fortune."

  He wondered if she needed money, but she had read his thoughts. "One never knows," she said, tapping him on the arm. "Things are never quite as one expects."

  He bowed slightly to acknowledge the truth of her remark. In his life, it was true. In hers? Without question: and with an unexpectedness that was fantastic.

  Fifty years before, a young woman had boarded a French packet en route from the West Indies to Marseille. Raised on the Caribbean island of Martinique, she was being sent to Paris to complete her education and find a suitable husband.

  She never arrived. In the eastern Atlantic her ship was taken by a North African xebec, and the beautiful young woman became the prisoner of Algerian corsairs. The corsairs presented her to the dey of Algiers, who marveled at her exotic beauty and her white, white skin. The dey knew she was far too valuable to be retained. So he sent her on, to Istanbul.

  But that was only half the story, the half that was merely unusual. Over the centuries, other Christian captives had made their way into a sultan's bed. Not many; some. But the whim of destiny is powerful and inscrutable. On Martinique, young Aimee had been almost inseparable from another French Creole girl called Rose Tascher de la Pagerie. A year after Aimee set out on her fateful voyage to France, young Rose had followed. Same route: a luckier ship. Reaching Paris, she had weathered revolution, imprisonment, hunger, and the desires of ambitious men to become the lover, the wife, and finally the empress of Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of France. Aimee, the friend of Rose's youth, had vanished to the world as the valide sultan. Rose was Empress Josephine.

  One never knows.

  She reached up and gave him a chaste kiss. At the door she turned.<
br />
  "Find my jewels, Yashim. Find them soon--or I swear I'll never lend you another novel as long as I live!"

  11

  ****************

  In the rain, in the night, even a city of two million souls can be quiet and deserted. It was the dead hour between the evening and the night prayers. A rat, its wet fur glistening, scrambled out of an overflowing drain and began to scuttle along the foot of a building, looking for shelter. The rising water pursued it almost imperceptibly.

  Slowly the puddle rose, from one cobble to the next, probing the joints for a means of escape. When it found one, it began to trickle through, blindly but unerringly seeking its path downhill. From time to time it stopped, pooled, and started over, insistently seeking its own way to the Bosphorus, lining the banks of its own clear trail with mud, twigs, hairs, crumbs. It spread across a lateral street but pooled again on the other side where a flight of stone steps ran down to the Mosque of the Victory, just newly completed on the shore.

  The rain, continuing to fall, continued to back up against the drain. At the hour of the morning star, the janitor of the mosque sent two workmen to trace the torrent that was threatening to seep into the cement floors and spoil the carpets. They hitched their woolen cloaks over their heads with their elbows against the rain, and started up the steps.

  About two hundred yards uphill, they found a section of road that had turned into a pond and cautiously probed the muddy water with their rods.

  Eventually they located the drain and started work trying to unblock it: first with the rods and later, standing up to their chins in the freezing, filthy water, with their hands and feet. The obstruction was a soft package of some sort, so tightly bound with cords that neither man, slipping footfirst into the icy murk for a few seconds at a time, could get a proper purchase on it. At last, shortly before daybreak, they managed to guide a rod between the package and the wall of the drain, and lever it away far enough to let the water escape with a gurgle.