The soup master nodded. Without moving his hand from the table, he raised his fingers and nodded solemnly at the proprietor, who came forward, bowing.
"Coffee, very sweet, with cardamom. No cinnamon." The cafe owner walked over to his stove. "I don't like cinnamon," the soup master added.
They discussed the question politely until the coffee arrived. Yashim was inclined to agree with the soup master that cinnamon in bread was an abomination.
"Where do we get these ideas?" The soup master's eyebrows shot up in perplexity. "For what?"
Yashim shrugged and said nothing.
The soup master put down his cup and leaned forward.
"You wonder why I am here. Last night the guards did not show up for work. It is the first time. I thought you might be interested."
Yashim cocked his head. He was wondering why the big man had come. He said, "I'd rather talk about the past. Twenty, twenty-five years ago. The Janissaries kicked up trouble, didn't they? What did they do, exactly?"
The soup master ran his fingers over his mustache.
"Fires, my friend. We had men in the corps who could lead a fire easy as a gypsy with a bear. I said we--I meant they. I was not involved. But this was how they made their feelings known."
"Where were the fires, mostly?"
The soup master shrugged. "In the port, in Galata, over here by the Golden Horn. Sometimes it was as if the whole city was smoldering, like underground. They had only to lift a cover somewhere and--whoosh! Everyone felt it. Danger all around."
Like now, Yashim thought. The whole city knew about the murders. People understood what was happening. The place was tense with expectation. There were three days to go before the sultan proclaimed his edict.
"Thank you, Soup Master. Did you notice the direction of the wind today?"
The soup master's eyes suddenly narrowed.
"Off Marmara. The wind has been set from the west all week."
107
***********
The seraskier pursed his lips.
"I doubt it can be done. Oh, operationally, yes, perhaps. We could flood the city with the New Guard, a man at every corner, artillery--if we could get it through--in the open spaces. Such as they are."
He scrambled to his feet and went to stand by the window.
"Look, Yashim efendi. Look at these roofs! What a mess, eh? Hills, valleys, houses, shops, all straggling around little lanes and alleys. How many corners do you think I could find out there? Ten thousand? Fifty thousand? And how many open spaces? Five? Ten? This is not Vienna."
"No," Yashim agreed quietly. "But nevertheless--"
The seraskier raised a hand to stop him. "Don't think I misunderstand you. And yes, I think something could be done. But the decision would not lie with me. Only the sultan can order troops out of barracks. Troops under arms, I mean. You think he can make this decision so fast?"
"He did ten years ago."
The seraskier grunted. "Ten years," he echoed. "Ten years ago the people were united with the sultans will. The Janissary menace had overwhelmed us all. But todays--what do we know? You think Stambouliots will welcome my men with open arms?
"There is another thing I hesitate to point out. What happened ten years ago was not the work of a day. It took months, you could say years to prepare for victory over the Janissary rabble. We have twenty-four hours. And the sultan is--older. His health is not so good."
He drinks, you mean, Yashim thought. M. Le Moine, the Belgian wine merchant in Pera, notoriously fortified the sultan's wines with brandy. And what about the discovery only last year of a mountain of long-necked bottles in the woods close to where the sultan liked to take his family for picnics?
"There will be a Janissary insurrection," said Yashim flatly. "I think it will take the form of a fire, or many fires, I don't know. Either sooner or later the sultan will have to order out the Guards, to keep order and deal with the conflagration, and I for one would prefer it was sooner." He stepped away from the window and turned to face the seraskier.
"If you won't, even I will try to talk to the sultan," he said.
"You." It wasn't a question. Yashim could see the seraskier weighing the situation. He stood with his back to the light, his hands clasped behind his back. The silence deepened.
"We will go together, you and I," the seraskier announced at last. "But you, Yashim efendi, will make it clear to the sultan that this was your suggestion, not mine."
Yashim stared at him coldly. One day, he thought, he would come across a man in the sultan's service who would stand up and stand out for his beliefs. But not today.
"I will take responsibility," he said quietly.
I'm only a eunuch, after all.
108
***********
THEIR footsteps echoed off the high walls of the Seraglio as they walked across the First Court. Usually on a Friday the place would have been busy, but a combination of gray skies and the suppressed tension hanging in the air had left the great court all but deserted. Ceremonial guardsmen stood at attention around the perimeter walls, as silent and immobile as the Janissary guards whose stillness had once struck chill into the hearts of foreign envoys. Yashim wondered if the New Guards were not, in their own way, more sinister: like German clockwork dolls rather than real men. At least the Janissaries had possessed their own swaggering panache, as his friend Palewski had pointed out.
His fingers closed on a scrap of paper tucked beneath his belt. Coming across the Hippodrome, he had swerved on an impulse from the bronze serpent and cut across the dirt to the Janissary Tree, knowing what he would find: the same mystic verses that had been puzzling him all week.
They had been pinned to the peeling bark. This was how the Greeks advertised their dead, Yashim thought, with a piece of paper nailed to a post or tree. He had pulled down the paper and studied it again.
Unknowing
And knowing nothing of unknowing,
They sleep.
Wake them.
A fire in the night, Yashim thought. A call to arms. But what did this mean?
Knowing,
And knowing unknowing,
The silent few become one with the Core.
Approach.
He folded the paper and tucked it into his belt.
109
***********
The sultan kept them waiting for an hour, and when he met them it was not in the private apartments, as Yashim had expected, but in the Throne Room, a room that Yashim had seen only once, fifteen years before.
He had not seen the sultan, either, for several years. Mahmut's beard, which had been jet-black, was red with henna, and the keen dark eyes had turned watery, sunk beneath folds of fat. His mouth seemed to have drooped into a pout of permanent disappointment as if, having tasted everything that money could buy in the world, he had found it all to be sour. He waved them in with a chubby hand, larded with rings, but made no effort to rise from the throne.
The room itself was as Yashim remembered it, a jewel box of the coolest blues, tiled from the floor to the apex of the dome in exquisite Iznikware, a frozen dream of a garden that twined and dripped and hung festooned around the walls.
Yashim and the seraskier entered stooping at the waist, and after they had advanced five paces they prostrated themselves on the ground.
"Get up, get up," snapped the sultan testily. "About time," he added, pointing at Yashim.
The seraskier frowned. "Your Imperial Majesty," he began. "A situation has arisen in the city which we believe--Yashim efendi and myself--to be of the gravest potential consequence to the well-being and security of the people."
"What are you talking about? Yashim?"
Yashim bowed and started to explain. He spoke of the edict and the murder of the cadets. He described a prophecy uttered centuries ago by the founder of the Karagozi order of dervishes--and caught the sultan's warning frown.
"Be careful, lala. Be very careful of the words you choose. There are some things one cannot
speak about."
Yashim eyed him levelly. "Then I don't think it will be necessary, Sul-tan.
There was a silence.
"No," Mahmut replied. "I have understood. Both of you, approach the throne. We don't want to shout."
Yashim hesitated. The sultan's words had reminded him of the last lines in the verse: The silent few become one with the Core. Approach. What could it mean? He took a step closer to the sultan. The seraskier stood stiffly beside him.
"What do you say, Seraskier?"
"There may be upward of fifty thousand men preparing to take to the streets."
"And Istanbul could be burned to the ground, is that it? I see. Well, we must do something about that. What do you have in mind?"
"I believe, sire, you must let the New Guards occupy the city temporarily," Yashim explained. "The seraskier is reluctant, but I can't see a better way of guaranteeing public safety."
The sultan frowned and tugged his beard. "Seraskier, you know the temper of your men. Are they ready to take such a step?"
"Their discipline is good, Sultan. And they have several commanders who are level-headed and decisive. With your permission, they could take up positions overnight. Their presence alone might overawe the conspirators.
Yashim noticed that the seraskier sounded less hesitant now.
"All the same," the sultan observed, "it could become a battle in the streets."
"There is that risk. In those circumstances we would simply have to do our best. Identify the ringleaders, limit the damage. Above all, Sultan, protect the palace."
"Hmm. As it happens, Seraskier, I hadn't been planning to remain in the city."
"With respect, Sultan. Your safety can be guaranteed, and I think that your presence will help to reassure the people."
The sultan answered with a sigh.
"I am not afraid, Seraskier." He rubbed his hands across his face. "Get the men ready. I will consult with my viziers. You can expect an order within the next few hours."
He turned to Yashim.
"As for you, it is high time you made progress in our inquiry. Be so good as to report to my apartments."
He dismissed them with a gesture. Both men bowed deeply and walked backward to the door. As it closed on the audience room, Yashim looked up to see the sultan sitting on his throne, his fist bunched against his cheek, watching them.
110
***********
OUTSIDE the door the seraskier stopped to mop his forehead with a handkerchief.
"Our inquiry? You should have told me that you were working on a case in here," he muttered reproachfully.
"You didn't ask. Anyway, as you heard, I gave yours priority." The seraskier grunted. "May I ask what the inquiry concerns?"
The seraskier was too brusque. On the parade ground it would do, perhaps: soldiers promised their unwavering obedience. But Yashim wasn't a soldier.
"It wouldn't interest you," Yashim said.
The seraskier's lips drew tight.
"Perhaps not." He stared Yashim in the face. "I suggest, then, you do as the sultan said. As I will."
He watched the seraskier stepping briskly toward the Ortakapi, the central gate leading to the First Court. It wasn't a position he'd enjoy to be in himself. On the other hand, if the seraskier handled it well, both he and the Guard would emerge with honor. It was an opportunity to restore the reputation of the Guards, somewhat tarnished by their failures on the battlefield.
And a duty, too. Not just to the sultan, but to the people of Istanbul. Without the Guards, the whole city was in danger from the Janissary rebels.
There was no doubt in Yashim's mind that the fourth murder had completed a stage, established the preliminaries. The old altars had been reconsecrated, in blood. The second stage was under way, Yashim felt sure of that.
Wake them. Approach.
What did it mean?
Within the next seventy-two hours, he sensed, they would all find out.
He saw the seraskier disappear into the shadow of the Ortakapi. Then he turned and headed for the harem apartments.
111
***********
"HELLO, stranger!"
It was almost a whisper. Ibou the librarian doubled up his long arm and waggled the fingers in greeting.
Yashim grinned and raised a hand.
"Off to work?" he asked in a low tone. By long-established custom, no one ever raised his voice in the Second Court of the palace.
Ibou cocked his head. "I've just finished, actually. I was going to get something to eat."
Yashim thought he sensed an invitation.
"Well, I wish I could come with you," he said. And then: "You've come out of the wrong door."
Ibou gave him a solemn look, then turned his head. "It looks all right to me."
"No, I mean from the archives. I--I didn't know you could get through on this side." Yashim felt himself blushing. "It doesn't matter. Thanks for your help the other night."
"I only wish I could have done more, efendi," Ibou replied. "You can come and see me again, if you like. I'm on nights for the rest of this week."
He salaamed, and Yashim salaamed back.
Yashim went into the harem by the Gate of the Aviary. He could never pass this gate without thinking of the valide Kosem, who two centuries before was dragged here from the apartments naked by the heels and strangled in the corridor. That had been the finale to fifty terrifying years in which the empire was ruled by a succession of madmen, drunkards, and debauchees--including Kosem's own son Ibrahim, who had his rooms papered and carpeted in Russian furs, and rode his girls like mares... until the executioner came for him with the bowstring.
Dangerous territory, the harem.
He stepped into the guard room. Six halberdiers were on duty, standing in pairs beside the doors that led to the Court of the Valide Sultan and the Golden Road, a tiny, open alleyway that linked the harem to the selamlik, the men's living quarters. The halberdiers were unarmed, except for the short daggers they wore stuffed into the sash of their baggy trousers; they carried halberds only on protective duty, as when on rare occasions they escorted the sultan's women out of the palace. In the meantime they had a single distinguishing characteristic: the long black tresses that hung from the crown of their high hats as a token that they had been passed for entry into the harem. Yashim remembered a Frenchman laughing when the function of the hair was explained to him.
"You think a mane of hair will stop a man from seeing the sultan's women? In France," he had said, "it is the women who have long hair. Is it so that they cannot steal glances at a handsome man?"
And Yashim had replied, rather stiffly, that the halberdiers of the tresses went into only the more public areas of the harem, to bring in the wood.
He laid his fist against his chest and bowed slightly. "By the sultan's order," he murmured.
The halberdiers recognized him and stood to let him pass.
He found himself beneath the colonnade that ran along the western edge of the valide's court. It had been raining, and the flagstones were gleaming and puddled, the walls greenish with damp. The door to the valide sultan's suite was open, but Yashim stood where he was, turning the situation over in his mind.
What was it, he asked himself, that created danger in the harem?
He thought of the halberdiers he had just met, wearing their long hair like blinkers.
He thought of the chambers and apartments that lay beyond, as old and narrow as Istanbul itself, with their crooked turns, and sudden doorways, and tiny jewellike chambers crafted out of odd corners and partitioned spaces. Like the city, they had grown up over the centuries, rooms polished into place by the grit of expediency, rooms hollowed out of the main complex on a whim, even doorways opened up by what must have felt like the pressure of a thousand glances and a million sighs. None of it planned. And in this space, scarcely two hundred feet square, baths and bedrooms, sitting rooms and corridors, lavatories and dormitories, crooked staircases, forgotten balconi
es: even Yashim, who knew them, could get lost in there, or find himself looking unexpectedly from one window into a court he had thought far away. There were rooms in there no better than cells, Yashim knew.
How many people trod the labyrinth every day, unraveling the hours of their existence within the walls, treading a few well-worn paths that led from one task to the next: sleeping, eating, bathing, serving? Hundreds, certainly; perhaps thousands, mingling with the ghosts of the thousands who had gone before: the women who had lied, and died, and the eunuchs who pitter-pattered around them, and the gossip that rose like steam in the women's baths, and the looks of jealousy and love and desperation he had seen himself.
His eye traveled around at the courtyard. It was only about fifty feet square, but it was the biggest open place in the harem: the only place where a woman could raise her face to the sky, feel the rain on her cheeks, see the clouds scudding across the sun. And there were--he counted them--seven doors opening into this court; seven doors; fifteen windows.
Twenty-two ways to not be alone.
Twenty-two ways you could be watched.
As he stood below the colonnade, staring at the rain, he heard women laugh. And immediately he said to himself: the danger is that nothing you ever do is a secret in this place.
Everything can be watched or overheard.
A theft can be observed.
A ring can be found.
Unless--
He glanced at the open door to the valide's suite.
But the valide wouldn't steal her own jewels.
He heard the door behind him open and turned around. There, puffing with the exertion and filling the doorway with his enormous bulk, stood the kislar agha.
He looked at Yashim with his yellow eyes.
"You're back," he piped, in his curiously tiny voice.
Yashim bowed. "The sultan thinks I haven't been working hard enough."
"The sultan," the black man echoed. His face was expressionless.
He waddled slowly forward, and the door to the guard's room closed behind him. He stood by a pillar and stuck out a hand, to feel the rain.
"The sultan," he repeated softly. "I knew him when he was just a little boy. Imagine!"
He suddenly bared his teeth, and Yashim--who had never seen the kislar smile--wondered if it was a grin or a grimace.
Jason Goodwin Page 25