Jason Goodwin

by The Janissary Tree

  Shortly before the fish was ready to flake from the stick, he sliced a loaf of white bread and laid it on a plate with a small bowl of oil, some sesame seeds, and a few olives. He stuffed a tiny enameled teapot with sprigs of mint, a piece of white sugar, and a pinch of Chinese tea leaves rolled like gunshot, poured in water from the ewer, and crunched it down into the charcoal until its base bit into the glow.

  Finally he ate, sitting in the alcove, wiping the peppers and the fish from the skewer with a round of bread.

  Only then did he pick up the small folded note that had been waiting for him when he got home.

  It was from the imam, who sent his greetings. He had done a little research, as well. In a firm hand he had written out the final verses of Yashim's Sufi poem.

  Unknowing

  And knowing nothing of unknowing,

  They sleep.

  Wake them.

  Knowing,

  And knowing unknowing,

  The silent few become one with the Core.

  Approach.

  Yashim sat up and crossed his legs. Then he propped the window ajar, rolled himself a cigarette the way an Albanian horse merchant had shown him how, with a little twist at one end and a half inch of cardboard at the other, and drank a glass of scalding sweet mint tea while he read the verses again.

  He lay down on his side. Fifteen minutes later, his hand snaked out and groped for the old fur that lay rumpled somewhere by his legs. He hauled it over his body.

  In three minutes--for he was already half dreaming--Yashim the eunuch was fast asleep.

  41

  ****************

  The Polish residency was favored by the dark. As dusk gathered, even its railings seemed to shed their rust, while the ragged curtain of overgrown myrtle that sheltered the carriage sweep from the eyes of the street jostled together more closely, bulking black and solid as the darkness deepened. Then empty rooms, long since uninhabited, where the plaster sifted in eddying scales from the ornate ceilings and settled on wooden floors that had grown dull and dusty through disuse, gave out false hints of life within, as if they were merely shuttered for the night. And as night fell, the elegant mansion reassumed an appearance of weight and prosperity it hadn't known for sixty years.

  The light that flickered unevenly from a pair of windows on the piano nobile seemed to brighten as the evening wore on. These windows, which were never shuttered--which could not, in fact, be shuttered at all, owing to the collapse of various panels and the slow rusting of the hinges in the winter damp--revealed a scene of wild disorder.

  The room where only a few hours before Yashim had left the Polish ambassador dithering over whether to open the bison grass or simply a rustic spirit supplied to him, very cheap, by Crimean sailors, looked as if it had been visited by a frenzied bibliophile. A violin lay bridge down on a tea tray. A dozen books, apparently flung open at random, were scattered across the floor; another twenty or more were wedged haphazardly between the arms of a vast armchair. Tallow dripped from a bracket onto the surface of a well-worn escritoire, on which was piled a collection of folio volumes and several tiny decorated tea glasses that hadn't been used for tea. It seemed as if someone had been searching for something.

  Stanislaw Palewski lay on the floor behind one of the armchairs. His head was thrown back, his mouth open, his sightless eyes turned upward toward the ceiling.

  Now and then he emitted a faint snore.

  42

  ****************

  THE seraskier picked up a handful of sand and sprinkled it across the paper. Then he tilted the sheet and let the sand run back into the pot.

  He read through the document one more time and rang a bell.

  He had thought of having the notice printed for circulation, but on reflection he decided to have it simply transcribed, by hand, and delivered to the mosques. The imams could interpret it in their own fashion.

  From the Commander of His Imperial Highness's New Guard in Istanbul, greetings and a warning.

  Ten years ago it pleased the Throne to secure the peace and prosperity of the Empire through a series of Auspicious Acts, intended to extirpate a lying heresy and put an end to an abuse that his Imperial Highness was no longer prepared to tolerate. As by his wars, so by his acts, the Sultan achieved a complete victory.

  Those who, by dealing death, would wish to return the city to its former state, take heed. The forces of the Padishah do not sleep, nor do they tremble. Here in Istanbul, a soldier meets death with scornful pride, secure in the knowledge that he sacrifices what is unreal for what is holy, and serves the greater power of the Throne.

  In all your strength you will be crushed. In all your cunning you will be outfoxed. In all your pride, humbled and brought forward to face the supreme penalty.

  Once again you will flee and be brought from your holes by the will of the Sultan and his people. You have been warned.

  The seraskier felt that he had made an effort to clarify the situation. Rumor was an insidious force. It had this in common with the passion for war: it could be, and needed to be, controlled.

  Drill the men. Straighten the rumor. Keep the initiative and leave the enemy guessing. The eunuch suspected some kind of Janissary plot, but the seraskier had prudently decided to keep his terms vague. The implication was there, of course, between the lines.

  A textbook approach.

  The seraskier stood up and walked to the darkened window. From here he could look down on the city it was his duty to defend. He sighed. In daylight he knew it as an impossible jumble of roofs and minarets and domes, concealing myriad crooked streets and twining alleyways. Now specks of lamplight blended in the dark, softly glowing here and there, like marshlight shimmering over a murderous swamp.

  He curled his fingers around the hem of his jacket and gave it a smart tug.

  43

  ****************

  YASHIM'S first waking thought was that he'd left a pan on the coals. He shot from the divan and stood unsteadily in the kitchen, rocking on his heels. He looked around in bewilderment. Everything was as it should be: the stove banked low, its hot plate barely warm; a stack of dirty pans and crockery; the blocks and knives. But he smelled burning.

  From outside there rose a confused medley of cries and crashes. He glanced through the open window. The sky was lit with a glow like the early dawn, and as he watched, an entire roofscape was suddenly picked out in silhouette by a huge roar of flame that shot upward into the sky and subsided in a trail of sparks. It was, he judged, barely one hundred yards away: one, maybe two streets off. He could hear the crack of burning timber and smell the ashes in the air.

  An hour, he thought. I give it an hour.

  He looked around his little apartment. The books arranged on the shelves. The Anatolian carpets on the floor.

  "Ali, by the jewels!"

  The blaze had broken out in an alleyway that opened out into the Kara Davut. The mouth of the alley was blocked by a throng of eager sightseers, anxious householders, many of them bareheaded, and women in every stage of dishabille, though every one of them contrived to cover her nose and lips with a scrap of cloth. One woman, he noticed, had yanked up her pajama jacket, exposing a ripple of flesh around her belly while concealing her face. They were all staring at the fire.

  Yashim looked around. In the Kara Davut, people were emerging from their houses. A man Yashim recognized as the baker was urging them to go back and fetch their buckets. He stood on a step beside the fountain at the head of the street, gesticulating. Yashim suddenly understood.

  "Get these women out of here," he shouted, prodding the men next to him. "We need a line!"

  He jostled the men: the spell that had fallen over them was broken. Some of them woke up to the sight of their women, half dressed.

  "Take them over to the cafe," Yashim suggested.

  He intercepted a young man running forward with a bucket. "Give me that--get another!" He swung the bucket to a man standing nearby. "Form a chain--take this
and pass it on!"

  The man seized the bucket and swung it forward, into a pair of waiting hands. Another boy ran up to Yashim with a loaded bucket. The back of the line needed attention, Yashim realized. "You, stay here. Pass that bucket and be ready to take another."

  He darted back, seizing bystanders and hustling them into position a few feet apart. Some professional water carriers were already in attendance, as their duties required. More buckets were being produced; as fast as they came, the baker swung them through the fountain and passed them down. Yashim ran along the chain, checking for gaps, and then on to the head of the line to make sure that empty buckets were being returned. For the first time he found himself in the alley.

  The flames were gusting along the narrow street: as Yashim looked, a window burst in a shower of sparks and a long tongue of flame shot out and licked into the eaves of the neighboring house. The flame retreated, but in a moment it had burst out again, tunneled to its neighbor by the wind that was already being drawn like a bellow's blast into the narrow opening of the alley. Yashim, standing several paces back, could feel the wind ruffling his hair even as he felt the heat on the side of his face. He felt powerless. Suddenly he remembered what had to be done.

  "A break! A break!" He darted into the nearest doorway and found a whole family working the well in the backyard. "We must make a break--not here, across the street." Nobody paid him the slightest attention: they were all busy fetching water, sloshing it onto the facade of their house, which was already beginning to scorch and blister in the heat. "An ax! Give me an ax!"

  The man of the house nodded to a woodpile in the corner of the yard. With a jerk, Yashim flipped the broad-headed splitting ax out of the log where it had been buried and dashed out into the street.

  "A break!" he yelled, brandishing the ax. Several bystanders stared at him. He turned on them. "Get your tools, people. We've got to take down this house."

  Without waiting for their reaction, he whirled his body around with a shout and embedded the ax in the plaster infill. A piece the size of a hand fell away. He struck again: laths splintered and gave way. In a few minutes he had cleared a space large enough to wield an ax against the upright timbers. By now a few others had joined him: two men he sent through the house to check that there was no one still inside, and then to set to on the other side. He paused to catch his breath, leaning on the ax. The four men at work were stripped to the waist, the approaching firelight reflected in vivid glints in the sweat on their skin.

  "Janissary work," said one through gritted teeth, as he chopped with the flat of his ax in short, savage blows against a tenon pin. The wooden pin was growing mashed at the end; the man made a few swift passes and cut it again, and with a heave on the flat of his ax sent it loose out the other side. Yashim gripped the pin and jerked it out.

  The building gave a lurch. Several panels of plaster from the upper story crashed down at their feet and exploded into a powder that was immediately whipped away by the rush of hot wind flaring down the street. Yashim glanced back. Two houses along, the fire was beginning to take hold. Sparks were flying past: one of the men he'd sent to the back of the house stuck his head out through a pair of uprights leaning at a drunken angle to the ground and hurriedly withdrew it. Everyone laughed.

  "They'll be out in a moment. And none too soon," a man said. They scented victory: their mood had changed.

  Sure enough, the two men appeared suddenly on the other side of the frame and darted out through the collapsed doorway.

  "To think we used to get the Janissaries from the Beyazidiye Pound to do this for us!"

  They were enjoying themselves now. A slithering crash from overhead told them that the joists had sprung: the planking of the upper floor leaned at an angle that was already putting pressure on the roof supports, forcing them up.

  "It's going wide!" Yashim bellowed. It was true: the whole frame of the house was sagging toward them, spinning around. "Watch out!" Yashim backed, darted forward down the street away from the fire. The others followed. At twenty yards they stopped to watch the whole frame of the house take a sudden lurch into the street like a drunk wheeling from the wall. The roof tiles seemed to hang suspended in the air until, with a crash that could be heard over the crackling of the fire and the shouts from the upper end of the street, the building fell with a sudden whump! and a scouring plume of dust and fragments picked up by the wind billowed toward them like an angry djinn.

  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. Farther 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 few stray timbers dangling from a skinny beam.

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

  "You did us a favor, 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, efendi. 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

  ****************

  YASHIMstirred 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 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 of the jagged screen of flame dancing its way toward 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 Suleymaniye surpassed Aya Sofia, acknowledged that the Beyazit Mosque had shown the way. But it wasn't the mosque that 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 that 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 that held the nauseating corpse of the second cadet.

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

  Palewski had suggested that there co
uld 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 he weighed more than 250 pounds. 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?"

  Asul 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.