"For God's sake, Yash. Can't we get him to the night watch?"
"There isn't time. Give me an hour. There's bread and olives. You can leave him here after that. If he gets free, so be it--though you could try knocking him on the head with a saucepan before you go. For my sake."
"All right, all right, I'll stay," Palewski grumbled. "But it's not what I joined for, you know. One night, intimate conversation with the sultan. Next night, quiet evening with friends. Third night, silent vigil over murderous three-hundred-pound wrestling deaf-mute. I think I'll have a drink," he added, sliding his valise closer.
But Yashim was hardly listening.
"It's two I owe you," he said over his shoulder, as he cleared the top flight of stairs in a single jump.
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The Kara Davut was always busy on a Friday night. The shopkeepers and cafe owners set out lanterns above their doorways, and after mosque, families paraded up and down the street, stopping for a sherbet or an ice, queuing for hot street food and thronging the coffee shops. Children chased each other in and out of the crowds, shouting and laughing, only occasionally called to order by their indulgent parents. Young men gathered around cafe tables, those who could afford it sitting with a coffee, the others at their elbows chatting and trying to catch a glimpse of the local girls, decorously swathed in chador and yashmak, who walked accompanied by their parents, but all the time signaling with their gait and the movement of their heads and hands.
Yashim didn't think he was imagining that the atmosphere tonight was different. The street was as full as ever, even more crowded than usual, but the children seemed quieter, as if they were playing on a shorter rein, and the knots of youths in the cafes seemed larger and more subdued.
This impression of subdued expectation didn't evaporate as Yashim hurried toward the palace. He had failed to find a chair and guessed that the chairmen would contribute to the confusion approaching the city: if not ex-Janissaries, they were still a rough crew, the sort of men who went to swell a mob or serve the rabble if they scented an opportunity.
As he half walked, half jogged through the streets and alleys, he was surprised to meet no soldiers on the way, none of the little platoons the seraskier had forecast at every street corner. How soon would they secure the city?
He had an answer of a kind as he swept out of the maze of streets behind Aya Sofia and onto the open ground that lay between the mosque and the walls of the Seraglio. A pair of uniformed guardsmen ran toward him, shouting: behind them he could see that the whole space was occupied by soldiers, some on horseback, several platoons in what looked like a drill formation, and others simply sitting quietly on the ground with their legs crossed, waiting for instructions. Beyond them he thought he could make out the silhouettes of mounted cannon and mortars.
This has the makings of a complete disaster, he thought fiercely--an opinion confirmed on the spot, as the two soldiers ran up to block his way.
"The way is closed! You must go back!" They were holding their guns across their chests.
"I have urgent business at the palace," Yashim snapped. "Let me through."
"Sorry. These are our orders. No one is to come through here."
"The seraskier. Where is he?"
The nearest soldier looked uneasy. "Couldn't say. He'll be busy anyways."
The second soldier frowned. "Who are you?"
Yashim saw his chance. He jabbed a ringer.
"No. Who are you? I want your rank and your number." He didn't know much about military organization, but he hoped he sounded better than he felt. "The seraskier is going to be very unhappy if he gets to hear about this."
The soldiers glanced at one another.
"Well, I don't know," one of them muttered.
"You know who I am," Yashim asserted. He doubted that, very much, but there was an angry edge to his voice that wasn't faked. "Yashim Togalu. The seraskier's senior intelligence officer. My mission is urgent."
The men shuffled their feet.
"Either you take me to the Imperial Gate right now, or I will speak to your commanding officer."
One of the soldiers glanced around. The Imperial Gate loomed black and solid in the darkness only a hundred yards away. The corps commander--he might be anywhere.
"Go on, then," said the soldier quickly, with a jerk of his head. Yashim walked past them.
After he'd gone, one of the men let out a sigh of relief.
"At least we didn't give our names," he remarked.
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YASHIM felt the hairs prickling on the back of his neck as he picked his way among the soldiers waiting patiently on the ground. At any minute he expected to be challenged again, delayed again. A shout was all it would take.
There it came. One shout, and another. He saw the men around him turn their heads.
But they weren't looking at him.
Another shout: "Fire!"
Yashim swiveled, following the men's gaze. Over their heads, beyond the silhouette of the great mosque, the sky had lightened Uke an early dawn. A dawn rising in the west. A dawn rising upwind of the city of Istanbul. As he watched, he saw the light go yellow and flicker.
For a few seconds he stood transfixed.
Around him the men strained uneasily, taking up their rifles, awaiting the order to rise.
Yashim broke into a run.
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The flap in the lattice dropped open with a click as Preen and Mina reached the corridor at the foot of the stairs, but they sailed past it without a word, noses in the air. On the street they nudged each other and giggled.
For ten minutes they walked eastward, looking for a chair to carry Preen. Preen seemed to have recovered her poise on leaving the house, leaning only slightly on Mina's arm, looking hungrily around as if she had been in bed for a month instead of a couple of days. A few men threw them curious glances, but finally she could bear it no longer.
"Where are the handsome soldiers, then?" she demanded.
Mina snorted. "And I thought you wanted to come out to get reassurance from your friend! Really, Preen!" Then she looked around and shrugged. "There were dozens of'em earlier, honest. I can't say I'm not a bit disappointed myself. Oh, where are all the chairmen?"
"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 holding only 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 bluish flames, and the man wheeled around, 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 upward, 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 around 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 turbaned 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 toward the Kara Davut.
They didn't get so far. As they turned into the alley that 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 around. Together they fought their way back to the street corner and took the turn to the right.
"We'll go around behind the mosque," Preen whispered in Mina's ear.
They slackened their pace, partly to avoid the people running up the alleyway toward 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 raid 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 toward each other like members of a scattered regiment, plunging and burning through the obstacles that 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.
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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 Ortakapi 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 fight. "Yashim Togalu, on the sultan's service!"
They stepped warily aside to let him pass.
The wind that had been whipping his cloak against his legs was still: for a moment he marveled 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 center 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 that controlled the lives of men from the Red Sea to the Danube. Beyond 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 upward. The huge eaves jutted forward 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 toward 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 forward 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--I 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 h
ad 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 Court of the Valide Sultan.
Then he took a step back and very softly closed the door.
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The sleeping quarters of the harem slaves lay above the colonnade that 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 pajamas.
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 recognize a few faces: he saw sables, and caftans 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.
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