The Janissary Tree

by Jason Goodwin

  He coughed and tried to raise his head. His eyes opened. They seemed to be filmed over: his vision was foggy. He made another effort to raise his head, and this time his cheek sucked against the hard top of the massage bench, where he lay in a pool of his own sweat. He rolled over, his whole body slithering on the bench, and swung his legs to the floor.

  A dull pain throbbed through his feet, and it took him some moments to realize that the soles of his feet were burning against the stone floor. He sat back on the bench, legs raised, and looked around. There was nobody else there.

  The steam was peeling away from the floor in angry ribbons, which blended into a fog that thickened as it approached the dome. Yashim found that he was breathing hard: the air was so hot and humid that every breath stuffed his throat like a rag. With a heavy hand he dashed the sweat from his eyes.

  The fog felt curiously intimate, as if it were really a problem with his eyes, and this seemed to disorient him: he jerked his head about, searching for the doors. He saw his wooden clogs beside the massage bench. With his feet in the clogs he stood swaying for a moment, holding on to the bench, and then, like a man struggling through the snow, he staggered forward toward the door. He fell against it, groping for a handle, but the door was as smooth as the walls.

  No handle.

  Yashim drummed with his fists, unable to shout, his breath sobbing through his teeth. No one came. Again and again he crashed against the door, throwing his whole weight behind his shoulder, but it didn’t budge, and the sound itself was flattened against the iron-bound oak. He sank into a squat, one hand against the door for support.

  The heat rolling off the floor made it impossible to hold that position for very long. He slowly stood up; bent double, he pushed himself along the wall. The spigot in the first niche had stopped flowing. There was a scoop on the floor, but it contained only an inch of water and the metal was hot.

  He could not guess how long he crouched there, gazing down between his arms at the water in the scoop. But when the water started to steam he thought, I’m being braised.

  But I am thinking.

  I must get out.

  Gingerly he raised his head, for it felt as though it must burst at any minute: he needed to keep the water out of his eyes.

  A faint pattern of light penetrated the fog above. It came from the pattern of holes let into the roof of the dome, and for a second Yashim wondered if he could somehow climb up and reach it, thrust his hands, maybe, and his lips against the holes.

  You can’t climb the inside of a dome, he said to himself.

  His eye followed the base of the walls, searching for anything that he could use.

  He almost missed it: the long bamboo cane attached to the head of a mop, tucked up into the angle between the floor and the wall.

  He could hardly pick it up: his fingers were puffy and hard to bend.

  Yashim raised the flimsy cane with an effort. Too short.

  Once more he started around the room. Twice he almost blacked out and fell to his hands and knees: but the burning stone tortured him back to life, and he tottered on until he found the second cane.

  Now he needed a strip of cloth to bind them together. He tore at a towel with his fingers and his teeth, whimpering now.

  At last he managed to create a nick in the hem. Even tearing the cloth he was like a puny child, nearly too weak to raise his arms, but at last he had a bandage of cotton that he secured around the two bamboos. The remaining scrap he tied to the top of the pole, and then he began to raise it up. The bare end struck on the side of the dome. He scraped it upward.

  It was too short.

  Through the vapor, against the dome, Yashim could hardly tell how short. His face was set in a rictus now, his teeth bared. He staggered across to the massage bench and clambered onto it. Every movement was an agony. As he raised his arms, he noticed that they were almost purple, as if blood was starting to ooze from his pores.

  He started to pump the stick up and down, up and down. At every stroke he felt that he was pumping the blood, too, through the pores in his skin. He faintly remembered that he needed to make the stick move, but he could no longer remember why this had seemed important, only that it was all the instruction he possessed. It was all he had left.

  96

  ***********

  “Avec permission, Seraskier.” Palewski stuck out his hand as he bowed. “Palewski, ambassadeur de Pologne.”

  The seraskier glanced upward with a look of surprise. Then he smiled politely.

  “Enchante, Excellence.”

  “I’m so sorry to interrupt,” Palewski continued, “but I have just seen something rather strange and I wanted your opinion.”

  “Mais bien sur.” The seraskier did not sound impressed. What he and the Polish ambassador found strange could be entirely different things. “What have you seen, Your Excellency?”

  It occurred to Palewski that any explanation he could give would sound thin, even laughable. He turned to the seraskier’s companions.

  “Would you excuse me? I’d like to borrow the seraskier for just one minute. Please indulge me, efendi.”

  The men made noncommittal gestures but said nothing. The seraskier looked from them to Palewski with an impatient half smile.

  “Very well, Excellency.” He was on his feet. “My apologies, gentlemen.”

  Palewski took him by the arm and steered him into the street.

  “Something funny just happened at the baths,” he began. “First they closed them, quite suddenly, on a Thursday night.” He had seized on this detail, which had so baffled him at first, as being the oddest from a Turkish point of view. “They are supposed to be cleaning them out, but a minute ago I watched someone waving a flag out through a hole in the roof. I say a flag, because there is simply no other explanation I can think of. It looked like, well, a signal. And now it has stopped. D’you see, efendi? It may sound odd to you, but it really did look like that—as if someone had been signaling, and then was stopped for some reason. I wanted to go down there myself, but seeing you—well, I thought you could make an inquiry with greater weight.”

  The seraskier frowned. It sounded like rubbish, of course, and whatever went on in a hammam was really no concern of his… and yet, the Pole was clearly agitated.

  “For your sake, Excellency, we will go and ask,” he said, with as much gallantry as he could muster.

  97

  ***********

  YASHIM could hear voices. A tiny sliver of light cut into the darkness as he raised his eyelids a fraction of an inch. Something that soothed him pressed for a moment against his body, and was gone.

  Dim shapes moved in the light. Dreadful accident… stroke of luck . . . Then someone was wiping his face with a cool wet cloth and Palewski’s own face swam into view.

  “Yash? Yashim? Can you hear me?”

  He tried to nod.

  Palewski put a hand under his head and tilted him forward.

  “Drink this,” he said. Yashim felt the rim of a glass against his lips, but his lips felt huge. His fingers seemed to be in gloves, they were so hard to bend.

  “Can he speak?” It was the seraskier’s voice.

  I am dreaming, Yashim thought.

  Hands picked him up and moved him through the air. Then he was lying back again, covered with a blanket.

  Palewski saw his friend settled on the litter and motioned to the bearers. To the seraskier he said, “I’ll take him to the embassy. He’ll be safe there.”

  The seraskier nodded. “Please let me know how he is doing later.”

  The litter bearers shouldered their poles and followed the ambassador out into the night.

  Yashim was aware of the jouncing of the Utter as they threaded through the dark streets. He heard the slap-slap of the bearers’ feet and the jingle of little bells, and wondered how badly he was hurt. Sometimes the fabric of the Utter rasped against his skin and he almost shouted out.

  A runner had gone on ahead to give Palewski’
s maid time to make up a bed and lay a fire; when they arrived she was already on the stairs with a wedge of fresh linen. Palewski took candles off a table in the hall to light the bearers’ way, and so expertly did they carry him that Yashim knew they were going upstairs only by the slope of the ceiling.

  They transferred him to the bed. Palewski settled a fire in the stove that stood in one corner of the room, tiled with a design of twining blue flowers, while Marta appeared with a basin of cold water and a sponge, turning down the sheet so that she could dab delicately at Yashim’s inflamed skin.

  Yashim felt nothing, only a wave of nausea that now and then clutched at his belly and made him retch. When he did, Marta cleaned him up without a word. He slept for a while, and when he woke she was there again, with a spoonful of liquid so bitter it made his mouth ache, but he swallowed and the nausea slowly dissolved.

  Marta brought up a basin of warm water that smelled of lavender and honey. Yashim was breathing steadily now. By the light of the candles he watched the silent Greek girl, with her straight brow and olive skin, standing over the basin, absorbed in her task. She took a pile of big linen napkins and one by one she soaked them in the basin, wrung them out, and spread them on a clothes rack to cool. Her straight black hair was gathered in two plaits, pinned to the sides of her head; when she bent forward he could see the little hairs on the nape of her neck as they caught the light.

  When she was ready, she took the first honey-scented napkin and folded it.

  “Please close your eyes,” she said, in a voice as soft as a dove’s. She laid the napkin firmly over his forehead, and he felt her fingers smooth the damp cloth over his eyelids and mold it across his nose and cheekbones.

  “Can you roll onto your side? Here, let me help you.”

  A moment later he felt another cool cloth pressed around his chin and neck and shoulder. His left arm was lifted, and Marta’s fingers smoothed another napkin over the side of his chest and his back.

  “Try not to move,” she said. As she worked her way down his body, Yashim began to find his sensations returning. He felt her palms on his buttocks and thighs, through the cool cloth. At length she reached his feet and helped him roll onto his back to finish wrapping his right side.

  “I feel like an Egyptian mummy,” Yashim croaked. She put a finger to his lips. His voice had sounded weak and strained: he even wondered if she had heard what he said.

  He must have dozed, because suddenly he was afraid he was being smothered, unable to open his eyes, crushed by a fearful pressure on his chest and limbs. He gave a cry and tried to struggle free, but two small hands pressed him back by the shoulders and a voice whispered softly, “I am here, don’t worry. It’s all right. It’s better now.”

  For a moment he felt her breath on his lips, and then she had removed the bandage over his eyes and he opened them to see her standing over him with the napkin in one hand and a shy smile on her face.

  He smiled back. For the first time since she had touched him, he was conscious of his nakedness, conscious that he was, once again, alone with a woman. He raised himself gingerly on one elbow, and she seemed to feel it, too, because she turned to the candle and said, “If you feel better, you should wash. The honey will be sticky. I will fetch what you need.”

  She was gone for a minute. She returned with a basin of warm water and a robe draped over her arm. She set the basin down by the bed and laid the robe near his feet.

  “There is a sponge in the basin,” she explained.

  As she turned to go, Yashim said, “My arm is still very stiff.”

  She shot him a smile and for the first time he saw her serious dark eyes twinkle.

  “Then you will have to wash slowly,” she said, sweetly. And was gone.

  Yashim sighed and heaved his legs off the bed in a rustling cascade of napkins.

  He washed himself, as the girl had said, slowly.

  Aware that there was little time.

  Wondering what had become of Murad Eslek.

  Wondering what Marta meant to his friend Palewski—and he to her.

  98

  ***********

  “WHAT is the time?”

  Yashim had opened his eyes to find Palewski perched at the foot of his bed, his elbows resting on his knees, looking patiently into his face.

  “After midnight. Marta has gone to bed.”

  Yashim gave him a weak smile as a stray thought entered his mind. To Palewski I am only half a man—but the half he likes. The half he can trust. And he decided never to tell his friend about what happened between him and Eugenia at the Russian embassy.

  “I have to thank you, Palewski, for saving my life.”

  “And I you, my old friend, for allowing me to hobnob for an hour or so with the sultan.” He clapped his hands together. “It was a capital party!”

  Yashim looked blank. Palewski told him about Derentsov’s challenge and the intimate conversation he had held with Sultan Mahmut II.

  “I get the impression, Yash, that the sultan has sleepless nights over this edict of his. It will make him a very lonely man. He makes a lot of enemies.”

  Yashim nodded. “I’m beginning to think that murder is the least of it. And tonight, but for you, they would have killed me too.”

  “You were in a public place.”

  But Yashim said, “I forgot something I’d learned. Working in the stokeholes of the baths was one of the jobs that Janissaries took up, if they survived the purge. Tell me, you saw my signal?”

  Palewski recounted the series of events that had brought him and the seraskier to the doors of the baths.

  “The seraskier?” Yashim put in. “If I hadn’t been half dead—he’s the man I need to speak to. I ought to go and find him.”

  Palewski put out a restraining hand. “Marta left me particular instructions, Yashim. She expects to find you here in the morning. You are her patient. Perhaps you would like to drink some tea? Or something stronger?”

  Yashim closed his eyes. “I’ve found out where the fourth man is going to appear.”

  Palewski looked anxious. “Good, good,” he murmured. He straightened his back. “I’m sorry, Yashim, but do you know what I think? None of us are players in this scheme. We’re witnesses, at best: even you. It’s too—” He searched his mind. “You told me you had the impression that it was like a feast prepared, meze and a main dish, remember? Well, I believe you were right. We’re guests. And it’s a dangerous party.”

  He stood up carefully and approached Yashim, crouching beside his pillow.

  “You aren’t going to find anyone alive. None of the other cadets were killed where you found them. You won’t find this one being cooked in front of your eyes, either. Take this rest. You can go off, if you feel fit, very early in the morning after Marta has seen to you again.”

  Yashim stared at the ceiling. It was sensible advice. He’d lost the time he needed, and nothing would bring it back. He wanted so much to do as his friend suggested, sleep—and trust to Eslek. He could be at the Kerko-porta by first light.

  It was sensible advice. But in one particular, at least, the Polish ambassador could not have been more wrong.

  99

  ***********

  The provisioning of a great city, the kadi liked to remark, is the mark of a successful civilization. In Istanbul it was a business that had been honed close to perfection by almost two thousand years’ experience, and it could truly be said of the markets of Istanbul that there was not a flower, a fruit, a type of meat or fish that did not make its appearance there in season.

  An imperial city has an imperial appetite, and for centuries the city had commanded daily tribute from an enormous hinterland. Where the Byzantines had managed their market gardens on the approaches from Thrace and Asia Minor, the Turks, too, raised vegetables. From two seas—the warm Mediterranean and the dark, gelid waters of the Black Sea—it was supplied abundantly with fish, while the sweetest trout from the lakes of Macedonia were carried to the city in tanks
. From the mountains of Bulgaria came many kinds of honey to be turned into sweets by the master sweet makers of Istanbul.

  It was a finely regulated business, all in all, from the Balkan grazing grounds to the market stall, in a constant slither of orders, inspections, purchases, and requisitions. Like any activity that needs unremitting oversight, it was open to abuse.