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.
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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.
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“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 balconies: 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 d
oorway 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.
“I saw Selim die. It was here, in this courtyard. Did you know that?”
As the rain continued to patter onto the courtyard, seeping through the flagstones, staining the walls, Yashim thought: he, too, feels the weight of history here.
He shook his head.
The kislar agha put up two fingers and pulled at his pendulous earlobe. Then he turned to look at the rain.
“Many people wanted him to die. He wanted everything to change. It’s the same now, isn’t it?”
The kislar agha continued to stare out at the rain, tugging on his ear-lobe. Like a child, Yashim thought vaguely.
“They want us,” he said in a voice of contempt, “to be modern. How can I be modern? I’m a fucking eunuch.”
Yashim inclined his head. “Even eunuchs can learn how to sit in a chair. Eat with a knife and fork.”
The black eunuch flashed him a haughty look. “I can’t. Anyway, modern people are supposed to know stuff. They all read. Eating up the little ants on the paper with their eyes and later on spraying the whole mess back in people’s faces when they don’t expect it. What do they call it? Reform. Well, you’re all right. You know a lot.”
The kislar agha raised his head and looked at Yashim.
“It may not be now, maybe not this year or the next,” he said slowly, in his mincing little falsetto voice, “but the time will come when they’ll just turn us out into the street to die.”
He made a flapping gesture with his fingers, as if he were batting Yashim away. Then he stepped out ponderously into the courtyard and walked slowly across to a door on the other side, in the rain.
Yashim stared after him for a few moments, then he went to the door of the valide’s suite and knocked gently on the wood.
One of the valide’s slave girls, who had been sitting on an embroidered cushion in the tiny hall, snipping at her toenails with a pair of scissors, looked up and smiled brightly.
“I’d like to see the valide, if I may,” said Yashim.
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By the time Yashim left the palace that Friday afternoon it was almost dark, and at the market by the Kara Davut the stallholders were beginning to pack up by torchlight.
For a moment Yashim wondered if he should have joined Ibou, the willowy archivist, for lunch, for he had had nothing to eat all day and felt almost light-headed with hunger. Almost automatically he brushed aside the idea. Regrets and second thoughts seldom occupied him for long: they were futile emotions he had trained himself to resist, for fear of opening the floodgates. He had known too many men in his condition eaten up by bitterness; too many men—and women, too—paralyzed by their second thoughts, brooding over changes they were powerless to reverse.
George the Greek came swarming out from behind his stall as Yashim stood picking over the remains of a basket of salad leaves. The sight seemed to drive him into a frenzy.
“What for yous comes so late in the day, eh? Buying this old shit! Yous an old lady? Yous keeping rabbits now? I puts everything away.”
He set his hands on his hips. “What you wants, anyways?”
Yashim tried to think. If Palewski came to dinner, as promised, he’d want something reasonably substantial. Soup, then, and manti—the manti woman would have some left, he was sure. He could make a sauce with olives and peppers from the jar. Garlic he had.
“I’ll take that,” he said, pointing out an orange pumpkin. “Some leeks, if you have them. Small is better.”
“Some very small leeks, good. Yous making balkabagi? Yous needs a couple of onions, then. Good. For stock: one carrot, onion, parsley, bay. Is twenty-five piastres.”
“Plus what I owe you from the other day.”
“I forgets the other days. This is today.”
He found Yashim a string bag for his vegetables.
The manti woman was still at work, as Yashim had hoped. He bought a pound of meat and pumpkin manti, half a pint of sour cream in the dairy next door, and two rounds of borek, still warm from the oven. And then, for what felt like the first time in days, he went home.
In his room he lit the lamps, kicked off his street shoes, and hung his cloak on a peg. He trimmed the wicks and opened the window a fraction of an inch to clear the accumulated air. With an oil-soaked scrap of rag and a handful of dry twigs he started a fire in the grate and scattered a few lumps of charcoal on top. Then he began to cook.
He dropped the stock vegetables into a pot, added water from the jug, and settled it on the back of the stove to reach a simmer. He slid a ripple of olive oil over the base of a heavy pan and chopped onions, most of the leeks, and some garlic cloves, putting them on to sweat. Meanwhile, with a sharp knife he scalped the pumpkin, scooped out the seeds, and put them aside. Careful not to break the shell, he scraped out the orange flesh with a spoon and turned it with the onions. He threw in a generous pinch of allspice and cinnamon, and a spoonful of clear honey. After a few minutes he set the pan aside and dragged the stockpot over the coals.
He put a towel and a bar of soap in the empty water basin and went downstairs to the standpipe in the tiny backyard, where he unwound his turban and stripped to the waist, shivering in the cold drizzle. With a gasp he ducked his head beneath the spout. When he had washed, he toweled himself vigorously, ignoring his smarting skin, and filled the water jug. Upstairs he dried himself more carefully and put on a clean shirt.
Only then did he curl up on the divan and open the valide’s copy of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. He could hear the stock bubbling gently on the stove; once the lid jumped and a jet of fragrant steam scented the room with a short hiss. He read the same sentence over a dozen times, and closed his eyes.
When he opened them again he was not sure if he had been asleep; there was someone knocking on the door. With a guilty start he scrambled to his feet and flung back the door.
“Stanislaw!”
But it wasn’t Stanislaw.
The man was younger. He was kicking off his shoes, and in his hand he carried a silken bowstring, looped around his fist.
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The seraskier walked briskly across the First Court of the palace and stepped out through the Imperial Gate, the Babi-Humayün, into the open space that separated the palace from the great church, now a mosque, of Aya Sofia. After the unnatural stillness of the palace he was struck by the returning noises of a great city: the rumble of iron-hooped cartwheels on the cobbles, dogs worrying and growling at scraps, the crack of a whip, and the shouts of mule drivers and costermongers.
Two mounted dragoons spurred their horses forward and brought up his own gray. The seraskier swung up gracefully into the saddle, settled his cloak, and turned the horse’s head in the direction of the barracks. The dragoons fell in behind him.
As they passed beneath the portico of the mosque, the seraskier glanced upward. The pinnacle of Justinian’s great dome, second in size only to the basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome, stood high overhead: the highest spot in all Istanbul, as the seraskier well knew. As they jogged along, he scanned the lay of the land for the hundredth time, mentally setting up his artillery batteries, disposing his troops.
By the time they reached the barracks, he had made decisions. To scatter his forces through the city would be futile, he reckoned
; it might even increase the danger to his men. Better to choose two or three positions, hold them securely, and make whatever forays were necessary to achieve their ends. Aya Sofia was one assembly point; the Sultan Ahmet Mosque to the southwest would be another. He would have liked to put men into the stables of the old palace of the grand vizier, just outside the Seraglio walls, but he doubted that the permission would be forthcoming. There was a hill farther west that provided a clear trajectory toward the palace.
It was the palace, essentially, he had to think about.
The Janissary Tree Page 28