He reached up on tiptoe to see who was coming through the crowd, though he already knew. The kislar agha looked magnificent in an enormous dark pelisse so spangled with the moisture in the air that it sparkled. He walked slowly, but his tread was surprisingly light. His hand, clutching at the baton, was thick with rings. His face was lost beneath a great turban of whitest muslin, wrapped around the conical red hat of his office, so Yashim was unable to gauge his expression. But he saw how the other eunuchs lowered their eyes to the ground, as if they didn't quite dare to look him fully in the face. Yashim knew that face, wrinkled like an ape's: the bloodshot eyes, the fat, blubbery cheeks, it was a face that carried the stamp of vice and wore its vice with an air of blank unconcern.
The eunuchs had now formed two wedges, leaving the kislar agha standing alone between them, facing the valide across the court. He didn't raise his hands: he didn't need to. Nobody stirred.
"The Hour has come."
He spoke slowly in his high, cracking voice.
"We, who are the sultan's slaves, proclaim the Hour.
"We, who are the sultan's slaves, assemble for his protection.
"We, who kneel beside the throne, uphold the sacrament of power.
"We will speak with your son, our lord and master, the shah-in-shah!"
The chief eunuch's voice rose as he cried out, "The Hour has come!"
And a wavering cry rose from the ranks of the eunuchs: "The Hour! The Hour!"
The valide sultan never moved, except to tap one dainty foot on the stone step.
The chief eunuch raised his arms, his fingers curled like talons.
"The banner must be unfurled. The wrath of God and the people has to be appeased. He shall draw back from the abyss of unbelief and wield the Sword of Osman in defense of the faith! It is the Path.
"It is written that the knowing shall approach and become one with the Core. Caliph and sultan, Lord of the Horizons, this is his destiny. The people have risen, the altars are prepared. It is God who has awoken us, at the eleventh hour, the Hour of Restoration!
"Produce him!" he bellowed, in a terrible voice. He curled his fingers into loose fists and let them sink to his sides. His voice sank to a hoarse whisper. "Reveal the Core."
Like Yashim, the valide sultan seemed to find the chief's performance somewhat overdone. She turned her head to murmur something to an attendant, and Yashim saw her perfect profile, still clear and beautiful, and recognized the lazy look in her eyes as she turned back and focused on the chief eunuch. Lazy meant danger. He wondered if the kislar agha knew.
"Kislar," she said, in a voice that rang with amused contempt. "Some of our ladies present are not at all well dressed. The night, I may point out, is chill. As for you, you are not suitably attired."
She raised her chin slightly, as if inspecting him. The eunuch's eyes narrowed in fury.
"No, Kislar, your turban seems to be in order. But you do seem to be wearing my jewels."
Good work, Yashim thought, bunching his fist. The valide certainly knew how to use information.
The chief eunuch's nostrils flared, but he looked down quickly. Whether that movements--made, as it were, under the influence of a woman more powerful than him--put him off his stroke, or whether it was the sheer unexpectedness of the valide's remarks, Yashim could not guess. But the kislar agha opened his mouth and shut it again, as if he had a speech he couldn't make.
The valide's voice was like drawn silk. "And you murdered for them, too, didn't you, Kislar?"
The eunuch raised a forefinger and pointed it at the valide. Yashim saw that he was trembling.
"They are--for my power!" he screeched. He was improvising now, drawn into an argument he didn't mean to have and couldn't win. His power was lessening with every word he spoke.
Out of the corner of his eye, Yashim saw a white shape stirring close to the wall. A girlish figure sprang forward, like a cat, and began to run toward the eunuch.
The eunuch didn't see her immediately: she was blocked by his outstretched arm.
"Produce the sultan, or suffer the consequences!" the kislar agha screamed. Then his head turned a fraction, and at the same moment Yashim recognized the girl.
The girl who had stolen the gozdes ring.
Yashim closed his eyes. And in that second he saw her beautiful, unyielding face again, when she had closed her mind to him.
Only now he recognized that look. A mask of grief.
A slave girl gasped at his side, and Yashim opened his eyes. The girl had hurled herself upon the enormous eunuch: he swatted her aside like a fly. But she was on her feet in a moment, and for the first time Yashim saw that she carried a dagger in her fist, a long, curved steel like a scorpion's sting. She sprang again, and this time it was as if the two embraced, like lovers: the slim white girl and the huge black man, staggering as she clung to him.
But she was no match for the kislar. His hands closed around her neck, and with a tremendous thrust of his arms he pushed her off. His long fingers spread around her neck like a stain. Her feet kicked wildly but skidded on the wet stone. Her hands came up to his, clawing at them, but the kislar agha's strength was far greater. With a grunt he flung her aside. She crumpled back against the ground and lay still.
Nobody moved. Even the valide's foot had stopped tapping.
Suddenly one of the women screamed and clapped her hand to her mouth. The kislar agha swung around, his head moving from side to side as if expecting another assault. Yashim saw the women shrink back.
The kislar agha opened his mouth to speak.
He coughed.
His hands went to his stomach.
Behind him the eunuchs stirred. Their chief started to turn toward them, and as he moved Yashim saw very clearly what had made the woman scream.
The jeweled hilt of a Circassian blade.
The kislar spluttered as he turned, and then he began to twist toward 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.
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THERE was a momentary silence before the court erupted in pandemonium. The eunuchs swarmed toward 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 excitemen
t and pleasure in equal measure--and without issue.
The valide had stepped down into the courtyard, and the women were crowding around 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 nay for the entertainment of the palace girls. It was his own predecessor who carried out the lolling. 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 he 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 guardroom 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 doorjamb 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 traveled upward 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 toward 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 anymore, 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.
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WHEN they reached the Ortakapi Gate, Yashim checked his stride.
"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.
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BOMBARDIER Genghis Yalmuk slipped a finger beneath his chin strap and ran it around from ear to ear, to soothe the pressure. He had served in the New Guard for ten years, graduating from common soldiering to the artillery corps five years ago, and his only complaint in those ten 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 sabers 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 locat
ion 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 synchronized 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 coordinates as if his bombardier could not be trusted to fix the coordinates 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:"t 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 toward 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 toward 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.
Yashim followed the direction of his finger. Over the walls and trees surrounding the great mosque. Beyond the minarets. Higher, and farther away.
He was pointing at the dome of Aya Sofia.
"Then I'm too late," said Yashim crisply. "I'm afraid I have to ask to see your orders."
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THE seraskier leaned back against the lead casing of the buttress and put his cheek to the smooth metal. He had not realized how excited he was. His face seemed to be burning like the city that lay about him, at his feet.
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