Pasha's Tale

by Turney, S. J. A.

  The Greek began to emerge through the roof, and Dimo held the tile behind his back in tight fingers, his spare hand held out for balance. The Greek paused for a moment, presumably waiting to see if Dimo threw another knife. Would that he could…

  When no knife appeared, Skiouros the Greek heaved himself up with some difficulty until he was standing on an area of roof still relatively intact. He wobbled a little, then straightened and drew his sword, glaring menacingly at Dimo. Behind the Greek, the sky was a beautiful mackerel-skin of gold against indigo, and Dimo couldn’t see much of the man’s face beyond the impression of a feral scowl. But Skiouros’ silhouette against the glory of God’s golden creation made him appear to be some djinn from the ancient tales with a halo of flame, come for him – his own nemesis; his qarīn come to turn him from the righteous path...

  Fuelled by sudden religious fury coupled with desperation, Dimo uncoiled like a spring, sending the tile in a deadly arc. His aim was as true as he could have hoped, given an arm that had been trained by years of slinging spears at Mamluk warriors, and the tile smashed into the Greek’s good shoulder hard. The sword fell from numb fingers, clattering back down the ladder into the floor below. Good. Now they would be more even, and Dimo could fight the man.

  But he wouldn’t need to!

  Allah was on Dimo’s side this day, clearly.

  Not only had the tile hurt the man’s arm and forced him to drop his weapon, but it had also knocked him off balance, especially given his already-wounded leg, and Dimo stepped forward two deliberate, short steps as he watched with delight. The Greek staggered back. His leg gave way on the uneven tiles and, with a scream, he was pitched out into the air, three storeys above certain death.

  Dimo thanked God and the prophets and began to inch carefully forward along the beam, back towards the intact section of roof. It was possible that the Greek had only crippled himself in the fall, but dead or not, he would certainly not be walking away from it. And Dimo would collect the man’s sword from below on his way down. Killed with his own blade… that would be a fitting end for the fake Paşa.

  Slowly, he crept forward, making sure not to lose his own balance on the angled tiles, and peered over the edge.

  His eyes scoured the undergrowth and thick grass below, but found no body. Impossible! No one would walk away from that! He looked again, and then squawked as a hand closed around his ankle and pushed, hard.

  In the split second his leg shot backwards and his point of balance fatally altered, Dimo’s eyes caught the face of his personal devil – his qarīn – peering up over the roofline with a face that made him quail with terror, more even so than the fatal drop.

  ‘Corbels,’ was the last word he ever heard.

  *

  Skiouros watched the last of the Alevi plotters plummet past him with a disbelieving squawk. The Romani bounced off an old crumbled piece of wall just before he hit the ground, and might well have been dead before impact. The young Greek looked down at the twisted, broken shape of his enemy. If Dimo had been lucky, he’d already been dead. Skiouros found himself, in a fit of uncharacteristic uncharitableness, hoping the man had lived and felt each of those four limbs being bent into that unnatural shape. The rapidly-growing pool of dark liquid around the man’s head confirmed even from this height that Yayan Dimo was no more.

  And with him had died all the Alevi plans. Though he’d had to leave the Tekfur sharply, Skiouros had no doubt that Dragi would manage to overcome Diego and that between he and Parmenio they would put things right with the prince. The Romani witch had already been doomed even before he left. The Alevi dreamer and the holy man who had found her had both gone, and the king-breaker too. Well, he still officially existed, of course…

  With a wry chuckle, Skiouros realised that not only did Sincabı-Paşa still exist, he was no longer a fake. The Sincabı who now lay at the bottom of the Golden Horn had been a greedy, opportunistic beggar, claiming to be something he was not. In the eyes of the sultan, Sincabı-Paşa was a Greek former thief who had foiled a Mamluk plot against the empire. And now, finally, Sincabı-Paşa was indeed that man. In a moment of odd clarity, the young Greek accepted the fact that Skiouros the low thief had finally gone. He was Sincabı the respectable citizen of the empire now.

  A skitter of dust passed Skiouros’ face and disappeared off into the darkness below, reminding the Greek that he was not safe yet. Two years ago he had climbed the wall at Roccabruna and found himself faced with having to pass corbels not unlike these. Today one had saved his life as he plummeted over the edge, but he’d only just made it. His right arm was slightly numb from the thrown tile and his left shoulder still burned from the musket wound. He’d hit the corbel hard and only instinct had made him pull himself to it and wrap his shot-wounded arm around it tightly, clinging on for dear life. As he’d hung there his shoulder burned with pain, but he’d heard Dimo approaching and flexed his slightly numb free arm to bring back some feeling. Grabbing the man’s ankle had been surprisingly easy and, given Dimo’s precarious position, it had taken hardly any force to bring him down.

  But now, with two wounded arms, he was still clinging to the corbel, and his shoulder was going to sleep even as his arm strength continued to ebb. In any normal circumstance, Skiouros would have panicked, but somehow he felt that everything was going to be alright. God, luck and his own skills had seen him through plenty of predicaments in his time.

  What was one more climb…?

  Epilogos

  Of friends and brothers…

  28 years later…

  8th November 1523, Istanbul.

  SKIOUROS approached the door of the building with more than a little trepidation. Another adjustment in his thinking was required here, but one that he had been putting off for far too long. Stretching weary arms, he gestured to the small unit of janissaries that hovered protectively around him.

  ‘Stay here. I will return presently,’ he said in his long-native Turkish.

  The Çorbasi in command of his personal guard gave him a hard look. He had been Skiouros’ guard officer now for a number of years and had become used to the foibles and oddities of the unusual nobleman. Though he nodded his acceptance, the man made it abundantly clear that he disapproved of such recklessness.

  ‘Yes, Sincabı-Paşa.’

  Next to him, the standard bearer grounded the butt of his burden and heaved a small sigh of relief, earning him another hard look from the officer. Skiouros looked up at the standard, the crescent gleaming in the late autumn sun, which was accompanied by a cold wind that jostled the three horse-tails below and cut through no end of jackets and coats to chill Skiouros’ ageing bones.

  Yes. Another adjustment. Throughout his early life in the city he had known this glorious, decorative brick edifice as the church of Saint Saviour in the fields. It had been the Kariye mosque now for perhaps a dozen years, but it was still hard to think of it as anything other than Saint Saviour’s, even with the delicate minaret soaring into the leaden-grey sky.

  He had not visited the mosque.

  He had even politely declined the invitation from Hadim Ali Paşa to its inauguration all those years ago. The man’s involvement with Prince Ahmed and the Alevi plot had rankled long after the festival, and it had been something of a relief late in 1511 when the man had finally passed away, only weeks after his mosque’s dedication.

  But it had not been the rededication of the church as a mosque that had put him off coming. After all, living as a Paşa at the Ottoman court, he had adopted the appropriate religious habits long ago – since his idea of God was something nebulous and heretical anyway, it was as easy to kneel in a mosque and thank God for what had come to pass as it would have been to kneel in a church and do the same.

  And it had not been Hadim Ali Paşa’s involvement that had kept him away. Indeed, those sixteen long years throughout which Saint Saviour’s church had undergone a slow and sporadic rebirth had passed without Sincabı-Paşa even once laying his eyes on the pl
ace.

  But this morning, Skiouros had tried to rise from his bed and something had tightened and clunked in his ribcage. The doctor had been called quickly and had examined the ageing Paşa carefully. His prognosis was not good. Skiouros’ heart was beginning to fail. There would be months at best, more likely weeks.

  Naime had cried when she heard and blabbered about calling the boys back, but Skiouros had smoothed down her hair and dried her tears and smiled. Every man had his allotment of time, and few had filled it with as much as Skiouros. He was not sad. He was in fact cheerful as he looked back upon his span. And the boys’ careers would suffer if they came back to the capital for their father’s sake while their ships under the great Hayreddin ‘Barbarossa’ Reis pressed home their advantage in the wake of the latest victory of the great Ottoman navy.

  And so the time had finally come. He’d not many more days left in this world and, while the Christian priests would tell him that all loved ones are united once more in the glory of heaven, and the imams told him they would all meet again in paradise, the real uncertainness of what was to come had led to this morning’s visit.

  And perhaps not through chance, today was the first day of Muharram, the New Year in the Ottoman calendar and the month of remembrance. Wordlessly, he stepped inside, the old knife-wound in his leg lending him a slight limp as it had these past three decades, and hobbled through the outer narthex, all white plaster and Arabic script, the only other decoration a geometric pattern around the top of each arch. It was like walking into a different world – all those glorious mosaics and paintings gone forever. His boots clicked off the tiles as he passed around the corner of the building and into the parekklesion side chapel. So many memories…

  His skin prickled a little and a chill fluttered through him.

  ‘Lykaion?’

  He didn’t expect an answer, of course. Through all those years of conversing with his departed sibling, the more he had grown and gained control of himself, the less Lykaion had spoken to him. And finally, during that terrible time in Italia with poor, doomed Prince Cem, he had heard the last from his brother. He had finally come to realise that all it had ever been was his conscience playing with his imagination. But in case there was no heaven, or Jannah, this might be the last chance he would ever have to speak to Lykaion, reply or no.

  ‘There are so many things I should tell you. I don’t know where to begin. Perhaps at the beginning,’ he smiled.

  Skiouros sank with difficulty to the floor, crossing his stiff legs, and began to recount the tale of everything that had happened once Dragi, Diego, Parmenio and he had returned to the city from Crete and placed Lykaion’s remains below this place. Time seemed an ethereal thing here and, though he knew that his spell alone here would be at an end when the imam came to issue the next call to prayer, in the meantime it seemed to be endless and peaceful.

  He told of the saving of Korkut. He laughed aloud when he told his brother of his masquerade as one of the Bostancı. He recounted the fight in the great ship in the yard across the water. He told of the Hospitallers and of the Jews, and of the two Romani camps. He told Lykaion of the encounter at the Tekfur Sarayi and of Diego’s betrayal, Parmenio’s bravery and Dimo’s demise.

  Finally, after almost an hour of breathless narrative, he fell silent with a small smile and sat back.

  ‘You won’t know about the succession, of course,’ he said, conversationally. ‘And that’s of prime concern, considering what we did to preserve its natural progression. It seems that the end might very well justify the means after all. The great Bayezid lived past the festival, you see. Long past, in fact. He lasted until about a decade ago and would probably have managed more years yet, but Selim had had enough by then. He had already tried for the throne once and been exiled for his pains, but a decade ago, he came back with janissary support and forced Bayezid to abdicate.’

  Skiouros chuckled darkly. ‘If I were being charitable, I would say that perhaps Selim had seen the end coming and moved quickly to prevent his brothers winning the day. But I think I know in my heart that Selim would have taken that throne then even without the threat of his brothers, and he was simply tired of waiting. His siblings ran to oppose him, of course. Ahmet was captured and executed the next year – 1513 that would be – and Korkut, despite pledging allegiance to Selim, was executed the same year. Selim never allowed sentimentality to overcome common sense. That, I think, was what made him strong and the best candidate in the end. Dragi’s people had been right after all, you see.’

  Skiouros stretched. Soon the imam would come, but there now seemed so much still to say – a veritable flood of news. Had it really been so long since he’d spoken to Lykaion?

  ‘Selim was not a bad sultan, I suppose. He was hard. Very hard. He only lasted eight years but you’d have approved of him, I think. In just eight years, he put the Safavids in their place and completely overwhelmed the Mamluks. The empire now extends from Albania to Egypt and all the way to Arabia, but Selim fell ill on campaign and died early.’

  His face became very serious as he remembered the harsh sultan who had become Caliph of all Islam and overlord of Egypt. ‘I think he carried a grudge against the Alevi for his whole life, you know, after the festival conspiracy. Not long after he took the throne, he had forty thousand Alevi in Rum province – where the Khoraxané dede Babik and Yayan Dimo had come from – registered and put on a death list. A few of us pressured the chief cleric to intervene and he managed to persuade the sultan not to do it, but he hated them ‘til the day he died.’

  A smile warmed the old Greek Paşa’s face ‘But his son, Lykaion… if only you could have known his son Süleyman. He’s only ruled for three years so far, but he is a new Bayezid, my brother, and better even than that. A great man! Already they are calling him the ‘lawgiver’, but he is so much more. He is magnificent, Lykaion. The Empire goes from strength to strength under his guidance.’

  He sighed.

  ‘But I’m wandering off course. I have limited time, and I may not get to visit again. And, of course, the events at the festival were only the start of my own story, really. From that day on, Skiouros of Hadrianople was gone, you see. And Sincabı-Paşa as he is now was born. I have served three sultans and numerous viziers. I have watched that Galata shipyard grow and change – oh, I still control it, you see. I will do until I pass on, though I think my days of striding around the sheds may be over now. The shipyard is enormous and constantly busy these days. The great Göke I mentioned earlier was one of a pair that heralded a new dawn for the navy. I had my work cut out, especially under Selim, who wanted everything instantly. Selim spent two hundred thousand ducats expanding it. We now have one hundred and sixty dry docks turning out vessels and maintaining extant ones. I have janissaries working for me – two entire orta! And we’re so busy. Even without all the smaller flotillas based in troublesome areas of the empire, Barbarossa’s fleet alone requires constant replacement and maintenance.’

  Again the smile slid from his face, this time to be replaced by a tired melancholy. ‘Of course, Barbarossa is a great admiral, but his stream of victories owes much to his predecessor. I got to know the great Kemal Reis and his nephew Piri at court, and came to greatly appreciate them. Piri Reis is an accomplished sea captain and military commander, but he’s also the greatest geographer the empire has ever seen. Kemal defeated the Venetians soundly at Modon, proving our supremacy at last, and won endless smaller victories all over the middle sea until he died in a shipwreck back in 1511. Dragi Reis outlived him, having distinguished himself at Modon, and only died earlier this year at Rhodos.’

  His melancholy shifted slightly, combining with a sad smile. ‘Barbarossa took Rhodos from the Hospitallers back in January, and Dragi was mortally wounded in the siege. At last that black-clad, cross-wearing murdering thorn in the empire’s side has been drawn, and they’ve retreated west across the sea. I heard stories that there were half a dozen Spaniards captured during the siege, and I often
find myself wondering if one of them was Don Diego de Teba. After all, if anyone could save him from his gut wound, it would be the Knights of the Hospital.’

  He chuckled. ‘Parmenio never stopped telling Dragi how daft he was to let the Spaniard go, but then Dragi had little time for Parmenio after the festival, and the pair’s relationship was ever cool. You see, Parmenio had led Selim’s men to the Romani camp in Sulukule and the prince had every last Alevi Romani killed slowly and painfully in the dungeons of the Yedikule. They say the torrent of blood from the execution tower poured out into the Propontis for four days without pause.’

  His face darkened again for a moment, but memories of the Genoese captain soon brought back his good, if melancholy, mood. ‘Parmenio took a position at the Galata shipyard with me. It was his experience and knowledge that informed a lot of decisions about the way our arsenal would work and the vessels would be produced. He was, I would say, invaluable. In the end, though, I think he got sick of being on land. About five years ago, he started taking out the new ships and giving them their first run. A year or so later, he fell ill. He must have been sixty summers old by then, and he wouldn’t tell me what the doctor said, but he resigned his shipyard commission, hugged me once, told me to look after myself, and then left on a Genoese merchantman. I never saw him again. I dreamed of him the night after he left, though – him and his deadly ladle – which was a shock to me, for after those dreams induced by Dragi’s smoke ended, I stopped dreaming altogether. Just that once, about Parmenio. Odd, that, isn’t it?’