The Janissary Tree

by Jason Goodwin

  So the Janissary Tree remained. Yashim leaned his forehead against the peeling bark and wondered if it was true that a tree’s roots were as long and deep as its branches were high and wide. Even when a tree was felled, its roots continued to live, sucking up moisture from the ground, forcing new growth from the stump.

  It was only ten years since the Janissaries had been suppressed. Many had been killed, not least those who barricaded themselves in the old barracks when the artillery was brought up and reduced the building to a smoking shell. But others had escaped—if the Albanian soup master was to be believed, more than Yashim would have guessed.

  And that was only counting the regiments stationed in Istanbul. Every city of the empire had had its own Janissary contingent: Edirne, Sofia, Varna in the west; Scutari, Trabzon, Antalya. There were Janissaries established in Jerusalem, in Aleppo and Medina: Janissary regiments, Janissary bands, Karagozi imams, the works. From time to time, their power in provincial cities had allowed them to form military juntas, which controlled the revenues and dictated to the local governor. How many of those still existed?

  How many men had formed the corps?

  How effectively had they been put down?

  Ten years on, how many Janissaries had survived?

  Yashim knew just where to ask the questions. Whether he would be vouchsafed any answers, he was not so sure.

  He looked up at the branches of the great plane tree for a last time and patted its massive trunk. As he did so his hand met something that was thinner and less substantial than the peeling bark.

  Out of curiosity he tugged at the paper. In the last of the moonlight he read:

  Unknowing

  And knowing nothing of unknowing,

  They spread.

  Flee.

  Unknowing

  And knowing nothing of unknowing,

  They seek.

  Teach them.

  Yashim glanced uneasily around. As the cloud blotted out the moon, the Hippodrome seemed to be deserted.

  Yet he had an uncomfortable feeling that the verses he had read were intended for him. That he was being watched.

  26

  ****************

  The gigantic records of the Ottoman administration were housed in a large pavilion that formed part of the division between the Second and Third, or more inward, Court of the palace at Topkapi. It was entered from the Second Court, through a low doorway protected by a deep porch guarded by black eunuchs day and night. An archivist was always in attendance, for it had long ago been observed that although most of the sultans avoided much strenuous work after hours, their viziers could demand papers at any time. Even now, as Yashim approached, two torches blazed at the entrance to the Archive Chambers. The light revealed four muffled shapes crouching in the doorway, the eunuch guard.

  The night was cold, and the men, drawing their heavy burnooses closely around their heads, were either fast asleep or wishing to be so. Yashim stepped lightly over them, and the door yielded soundlessly to his fingertips. He closed it behind him without a sound. He was standing in a small vestibule, with an intricately modeled ceiling and a beautiful swirl of kufic letters incised around the walls. Candles burned in glimmering niches. He tried the door ahead, and to his surprise he found it opened.

  In the dark it looked even bigger than the book barn he remembered: the stacks that took up space in the center of the room were invisible in the gloom. Down one side of the room ran a low reading bench, with a line of cushions, and far away, almost lost in the echoing darkness, was a very small point of fight that seemed to draw the darkness closer in upon it. As he watched, the light snapped off, then leaped out again.

  “An intruder,” a voice announced, pleasantly. “How nice.”

  The librarian was coming down the room. It was the exaggerated sway of his walk, Yashim realized, that had blocked the candlelight for a moment.

  “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

  The librarian stepped up to a lamp by the door and gently trimmed the wick until the light was bright enough for them to look at one another. Yashim bowed and introduced himself.

  “Charmed. My name’s Ibou,” the other said simply, with a slight bob of his head. He had a light and almost girlish voice. “From Sudan.”

  “Of course,” said Yashim. The most sought-after eunuchs at the palace came from the Sudan and the Upper Nile, lithe, hairless boys whose femininity belied their enormous strength and even more colossal powers of survival. Hundreds of boys, he knew, were taken every year from the Upper Nile and marched across the deserts to the sea. Only a few actually arrived. Somewhere in the desert, the operation was performed; the boy was plunged into the hot sand to keep him clean, and kept from drinking for three days. If, at the end of those three days, he was not mad and could pass water, his chances were very good. He would be the lucky one.

  The price, in Cairo, was correspondingly high.

  “Perhaps you can help me, Ibou.” Somehow Yashim doubted it: most probably the delicious young man was in the library as a favor to some infatuated older eunuch. He scarcely looked old enough to know what a Janissary was, let alone to have mastered the system in the archives.

  Ibou had put on a serious, solemn expression, his lips pursed. He really was very pretty.

  “What I’m looking for,” Yashim explained, “is a muster roll for all the Janissary regiments in the empire prior to the Auspicious Event.” The Auspicious Event—the safe, stock phrase had tripped out by force of habit. He’d have to be more explicit. “The Auspicious Event—” he began. Ibou cut him off.

  “Shh!” He raised one hand to his lips and fanned the air with the other. His eyes rolled from side to side, pantomiming caution. Yashim grinned. At least he knew something about the Auspicious Event.

  “Do you want names? Or only numbers?”

  Yashim was surprised.

  “Numbers.”

  “You’ll want the digest, then. Don’t go away.”

  He turned and teetered away into the darkness. At length, Yashim saw the distant candle begin to move, swaying a little until it disappeared. Behind the stacks, he supposed.

  Yashim did not know the archive well, just well enough to understand that its organization was comprehensive and inspired. If a vizier at the divan, or council meeting, needed a document or reference, no matter how remote in time or obscure by nature, the archivists would be able to locate it in a matter of minutes. Four or five centuries of Ottoman history were preserved in here: orders, letters, census returns, tax liabilities, proclamations from the throne and petitions running the other way, details of employment, promotion and demotion, biographies of the more exalted officials, details of expenses, campaign maps, governor’s reports—all going back to the fourteenth century, when the Ottomans first expanded out of Anatolia across the Dardanelles, into Europe.

  He heard footsteps returning. The candle and its willowy bearer appeared out of the darkness. Apart from the candle, Ibou’s hands were empty.

  “No luck?” Yashim could not keep a trace of condescension out of his voice.

  “Mmm-mmm,” the young man hummed. “Let’s just take a look.”

  He turned up a series of wall lights above the reading bench and knelt on a cushion. Above the bench itself ran a shelf containing nothing but tall, chunky ledgers with green spines, one of which the boy pulled down with a thud and opened on the bench. The thick pages crackled as he turned them over, humming quietly to himself. Eventually he ran his finger down a column on the page and stopped.

  “Got it now?”

  “We’ll get there eventually,” Ibou said. He closed the ledger with a heavy whump! and lifted it lightly back into place. Then he sauntered over to a set of drawers built into the wall near the door and pulled one out. From it, he selected a card.

  “Oh.” He looked at Yashim: it was a look of sadness. “Out,” he said. “Not you. You’re nice. I mean the records you wanted.”

  “Out? To whom?”

  “Tsk, t
sk. That’s not for me to say.”

  Ibou waved the little card in front of his face as if he were opening and shutting a fan, with a flick of the wrist.

  “No. No, of course not.” Yashim frowned. “I was hoping, though—”

  “Yes?”

  “I wondered if you could possibly tell me what revenue the beylic of Varna derived from—from mining rights in the 1670s.”

  Ibou put his lips together and blew. He looked, thought Yashim, as if he were about to give the figures from memory.

  “Any particular year? Or just the whole decade?”

  “Sixteen seventy-seven.”

  “One moment, please.”

  He popped the card facedown on the open drawer, picked up the candle, and in a moment had vanished behind the stacks. Yashim stepped forward, picked up the card and read:

  Janissary rolls; 7-3-8-114; digest: fig., 1825.

  By command.

  He put back the card, puzzled.

  A minute later, as he and Ibou pored over a thick roll of yellowing parchment that smelled powerfully of sheep skin and on which, to his infinite lack of interest, various sums and comments were recorded relative to the Varna beylic for the year 1677, he popped the question.

  “What does ‘By command’ mean, Ibou? The sultan?”

  Ibou frowned. “Have you been peeping?”

  Yashim grinned. “It’s just a phrase I’ve heard, somewhere.”

  “I see.” Ibou’s eyes narrowed for a moment. “Don’t touch the scroll, please. Well, it could mean the sultan. But it probably doesn’t. It certainly won’t mean, for instance, the halberdiers of the tresses, or the gardeners, or any of the cooks. Obviously we’d put them in, by their rank and place.”

  “Then who?”

  Ibou gestured slyly to the parchment roll. “Are you interested in this, or is it just an excuse to come and chat?”

  “It’s just an excuse. Who?”

  The archivist carefully rolled up the parchment. He tied it again with a length of purple ribbon and picked it up.

  “Just let me set everything in order.”

  Yashim chuckled to himself as he watched the boy prowling, loose limbed and insufferably fluid, over to the drawers. He tucked the card back into its place, ran the drawer shut with his long fingers, and disappeared into the stacks with the candle. God help the older men! He’d never known such coquetry. But he was also impressed. Ibou looked and sounded like a bit of African fluff, but he certainly knew his way around. And not just among the dusty records, either, as he could see.

  He came back very quickly.

  “By command,” Yashim prompted.

  “The imperial household. The sultan, his family, his chief officers.”

  “The imperial women?”

  “Of course. All the sultan’s family. Not their slaves, mind you.”

  “By command.” Yashim mused. “Ibou, who do you think wanted the book?”

  “I don’t know.” He frowned. “Could it be—” He shrugged, gave up.

  “Who? Who are you thinking of?”

  The archivist flipped his hand dismissively. “No one. Nothing. I don’t know what I was going to say.”

  Yashim decided to let it pass.

  “I wonder, though, where I could find out what I want to know.”

  Ibou cocked his head and gazed at one of the lamps on the wall.

  “Ask one of the foreign embassies. I shouldn’t be surprised.”

  Yashim began to smile at the sally. But why not? he wondered. It was exactly the sort of information they would be likely to have.

  He looked curiously at Ibou. But Ibou had raised the back of his hand to his chin and was gazing, innocently, at the lamp.

  27

  ****************

  “DAMN!” Preen hadn’t thought of money.

  Yorg the Pimp thought of nothing else.

  “What, kdfek dancer, are we just sitting around together having a drink? Swapping tales? No. You come across and ask me for some information. Something you want, perhaps I have. A trade.”

  He gave her a crooked smile and tapped his head. “My shop.”

  To Preen, it looked as though Yorg’s information was stored elsewhere: in his hump. Poisonous stuff, and he was full of it.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  Yorg’s eyes clicked past her like a lizard’s. “You’ve got friends, I see.”

  “Some boys. You haven’t answered my question.”

  His eyes swiveled back to her.

  “Oh, I think so,” he said softly. “You’ve got something I can use, right, kdfek} A drunken sailor for Yorg.”

  She glanced back over her shoulder. Her Greek sailor sat with a frown on his face, tilting his glass back and forth. Mina and the other boy had their heads together, until he said something that made Mina give a whoop of laughter and rock back, one hand fluttering at her chest.

  “Really!”

  She looked back at Yorg. His eyes were cold as stone. His fingers curled around a glass: they were almost flat, with huge, misshapen knuckles.

  “You’d be doing him a favor, kdfek,” he spat.

  He watched her, sensing a little victory.

  “That guy deserves a real woman, don’t you think?” Kdfek dancers! Ancient traditions, years of training, blah blah. What gave those sad bastards the right to look down on him? “Yes, a woman. And maybe, why not, a young one.”

  Preen stiffened. “You’re mean, Yorg. I think you’ll regret this one day. You take the sailor.”

  She went back to her table. Mina looked up, but the smile on her lips vanished when she saw the crook-backed pimp in tow. The sailor looked from Preen to Yorg in surprise.

  “I’ve got to go,” Preen bent forward to whisper in his ear. A little louder, she said, “This is Yorg. He looks like the devil’s toenail, but tonight—he wants to buy you a drink. Isn’t that right, Yorg?”

  Yorg gave her a sick look and then turned and put out his hand. “Hello, Dmitri,” he croaked.

  28

  **************

  British Embassy

  Pera

  Dear Sis,

  … awfully jolly. Ask a great deal after you.

  I am trying to write all my Impressions, just as you wanted me to, but there are so many I hardly know where to begin. Imagine you were trying to write a letter describing everything you ever saw in Grandmama’s china cabinets, you know the thing—Cups all piled up helter skelter, &. little saucers, & Shepherdesses & Coffeepots & colored sugar Pots, with domed lids: that’s what the whole place seems like to me. Not to mention a blue riband of Water, on which the whole thing seems to rest—not the cabinet, I mean—-Constantinople.

  Fizerly says the Turks don’t give a thought for Yesterday or tomorrow—all Fatalists—he once went into the great church built by Justinian—Aya Sofia (in Greek, pis)—all disguised as a Mohammedan (Fizerly, I mean, not Justinian—whizz!) and says it’s just awful, with nothing but some dinner gongs hanging in the corners to show what Ali Ottoman has done there in the last 400 years. He’s a splendid fellow, Fizerly, and you should get to meet his Sister for he says, and I believe him, we shall be fast Friends.

  On the same line, though, I have passed my first Great Test in Diplomacy. Fizerly’d hardly finished telling me the Turks live for the moment when one of them shambled up to the Embassy door—they all wear cloaks, you see, and look like Wizards—Turks not doors, I mean—and declared himself to be a historian! Fizerly spoke some Turkish to him and the chap replied in perfect French. Fizerly and I exchanged glances—I thought I would die of laughter—but the Turk v serious and wanted to investigate Janissary regiments See. The Amb says Istanbul is much duller without the Janissaries, Fizerly tells me. Not too dull for

  Yr loving bro.,

  Frank

  “Who are you working for?”

  Frank Compston spoke French badly. Yashim wished he would go away and leave him to get on with the assessment. The Englishman seemed puzzled.

&
nbsp; Yashim said, “Let us say I work for myself.”

  “Oh. A freelance?”

  Yashim rolled the unfamiliar word around his tongue. A free lance? He supposed he had: at least it was unencumbered by the plums that other men had gobbling at their groins.

  “You are very perceptive,” he said, inclining his head.