SERAGLIO

by Colin Falconer

  'On what?'

  'It is a poor bargain. Four hundred thousand gold pieces. My mullah's thought I should hold out for Baghdad. All very well for them, they would have gone to hide in the mountains of your father had marched here with his army. I decided to take the money instead.'

  'You pledged me protection!'

  The Shah shrugged. ''It is what they call diplomacy. You say what it is best to say at the time. I am truly sorry. It is a very poor example of our hospitality. I wish it could have been another way.'

  Bayezid span around. There were five of them. One of them was the man they said had murdered Mustapha, the head gardener, a huge, ugly Sudanese. Each of them held in his hands a loop of razor thin silk.

  Bayezid's hand went to his killiç but one of the Shah's bodyguards had anticipated this and caught his wrist. Two more guards pinned his arms behind him. Bayezid looked at his sons. God help me in my sorrow; they were too young to understand, too young to die. His eldest started to run and one of the Persians caught him, laughing.

  'Could you not have spared my boys?'

  'Especially not the boys. Boys grow up to become men. Suleiman was quite specific in his demands.'

  'Then let Selim be his epitaph,' Bayezid said. The silken bowstring was around his neck and he was jerked backwards over the head gardener's knee, choking. His hands clawed instinctively at his throat but once the bostanji had the noose in place there was no reprieve.

  'The children were next. The Shah watched with a frown of disgust. He did not hold with the assassination of children. But what was to be done? He selected a sliver of spiced lamb from the plate in front of him and chewed reflectively. Statesmanship was an indelicate business at times, but it had to be borne.

  Bursa

  A woman was screaming in the courtyard below the window. The eunuch wished the guards would do something to keep her quiet.

  Bayezid's youngest son was still only nine months old. He had been conceived before the battle of Konia and his father had never seen him.

  As the eunuch bent over the cot the child smiled at him and put an arm around his neck and kissed him. His hands began to shake and he dropped the bowstring.

  He went outside and gave the porter who had led him here two gold pieces and a new bowstring. He waited. A few minutes later the man reappeared and fled down the steps. The coins tinkled and rolled on the stones.

  He sighed and went back inside. The child was still smiling.

  'Would that you have been a girl,' he said. He felt for the leather pouch at his waist. If he did not return with it filled, Suleiman would have his own head.

  He tested the string and closed the door behind him. As he approached the child giggled and held out his arms.

  Chapter 64

  Konia

  A long journey from Venice to Konia, from the Campanile di San Marco to this lonely place surrounded by stone caravansarayas and the black yurts of nomads.

  A lonely place to die.

  They found Abbas in his cell slumped face down on the rug. A white kitten was licking at the bloodstained handkerchief clutched in his left hand.

  'Consumption,' the physician muttered. Or perhaps poison. Still, death was infinitely preferable to being the Kislar Aghasi to the shahzade Selim. Or perhaps there were other reasons. Who could know? The less you knew, the better. Knowledge could be dangerous.

  It took six pages to lift him and carry him out of the iron-studded door of the Harem into the waiting cart. The physician remained behind to examine the room. Abbas had been writing a letter. Quill and parchment lay on the table beside the body. The letter was unfinished. In fact he had only written the salutation.

  'Dear Julia'.

  The Chief Eunuch writing to a girl? Perhaps it was his pet name for another of the black boys. Well it did not matter now. He screwed it up and threw it in the fire.

  Cyprus

  Ludovici joined Julia on the terrazzo, the sun glittering in the distance on the blue of the sea, beyond the vineyards. They sat for a while, holding hands, listening to the murmur of insects.

  'I had a letter today,' he said, finally. 'Abbas is gone.'

  She nodded. 'Oh. Oh, my poor Abbas. Finally, then. Was it a good passing?'

  'He did not suffer.'

  'Not at the end, at least.'

  'No, he did enough of that in his life. He is free now.'

  They were silent for a long time. He watched a tear roll down her cheek. She brushed it away and offered him a sad smile. 'This may seem a strange time to say this, but I love you, Ludovici.'

  'I love you, too.'

  'I wish I had been able to give you children.'

  'Don't regret it. I don't. I regret nothing, nothing at all. We are given gifts in life, others are withheld. I am grateful that I found you, I am grateful for a friend like Abbas. I am grateful that I found peace here at last. To wish for more would be to forget how rich these gifts have been. I only hope that Abbas has found his peace too, now, wherever he is.'

  'You're a good man, Ludovici.'

  'Thank you. In the end, it's all I ever wanted to become.'

  Topkapi Saraya

  After the wardrobe page had left, after the final offering up of prayers, Suleiman was alone. He lay on his quilt listening to the sound of his own laboured breathing, but sleep would not come. He got up and went to the latticed window and looked at the stars.

  'Please tell me you lied,' he said aloud.

  'I was ill, I was dying. How could you have believed what I said at the last?'

  'But how can I be sure?' He stared at her, so lovely, with her burnished copper hair braided with glittering pearls, the green taplock pinned rakishly on her head.

  'You said Bayezid belonged to Ibrahim.'

  'Do you truly believe I deceived you for thirty five years?'

  Suleiman could not answer her.

  'I would not have betrayed you that way,' a man's voice said. There he was, swaggering with his thumbs in the sash at his waist, a livid raw wound at his throat.

  'You had the opportunity, Ibrahim. I loved you and gave you my trust. I allowed you into the heart of my seraglio.'

  'She lied to you.'

  'Tell him!' he screamed at Hürrem. 'Tell him what you told me!'

  'I was sick, it was the Devil who spoke, not me.'

  Suleiman cried aloud and covered his ears but it was Mustapha who spoke next. Even with his eyes tight shut he saw him standing right there in front of him, in flowing white kaftan and silk turban, beard neatly combed, head held high. 'I did not betray you, Father.'

  'The evidence against you was plain.'

  'No, it was you who betrayed me! You gave our Empire to Selim, a lecher and a drunkard.'

  'He is of my blood at least!'

  'I loved you, my Lord,' Hürrem said. 'How could you ever believe that I hated you?'

  'Of course you loved me! I gave up my harem for you! I made you queen! Of course you loved me!'

  'Then why did you murder our son?'

  'Because I can never be sure!' he groaned and sank to his knees. The mutes, deaf to his screams, watched him, terrified, but did not move from their posts at the door.

  Night closed around the place of silence, a paradise of marble and gardens and glittering stones, leaving the King of Kings, the Lord of Life, to rail at the phantoms that returned to torment him, and to writhe for five more years in his hellish heaven upon the earth.

  "What men call empire is worldwide strife and ceaseless war

  In all the world the only joy lies in a hermit's rest."

  (From a poem written by Sultan Suleiman, the one they called the Magnificent, discovered after his death in 1566).

  EPILOGUE

  The Suleimaniye mosque dominates the modern city of Istanbul, its minarets and massive domes towering above the Golden Horn, dwarfing the mosque of Rüstem Pasha on the slopes below it. It is a memorial in stone to the man the Turkish people remember as the greatest of all Ottoman Sultans. In the first three hundred ye
ars of the Osmanli dynasty, ten sultans, culminating with Suleiman, built an empire of thirty million people, encompassing twenty different languages, all of it won in battle from the saddle of a horse.

  After Suleiman there were twenty five more Sultans; an unbroken line of weaklings and degenerates who debauched themselves in their Harems, bled the empire's finances with their extravagances or satiated themselves with acts of unbridled cruelty against those unfortunate enough to fall under their power. The Osmanli tradition of soldiers and statesmen ceased with Suleiman's son, Selim II, the one they called The Sot.

  Scholars have speculated that the line was broken. It can never be proved. The loss of greatness may simply have been the natural result of an excess of power, riches and ease.

  Anyone interested in the history of the Ottomans can consult the facts. I have not strayed from them, but there is much about the history of Suleiman's reign that historians have never completely understood. This book is fiction only in that it speculates on why things happened the way that they did. Perhaps it is wholly fiction; perhaps it is not. The only ones who know the truth are long dead.

  THE END

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  Born in north London, Colin Falconer worked for many years in TV and radio and freelanced for many of Australia's leading newspapers and magazines. He has been a novelist for the last twenty years, with his work published widely in the UK, US and Europe. His books have been translated into seventeen languages.