“Never better. There. How do I look?”
“Eye-catching.”
She turned her head this way and that, following her reflection the mirror.
“Not old?”
“Certainly not,” said Yashim quickly. Preen put her fingers to her cheek and gently pushed the skin up. She let it drop, and Yashim saw her look at him in the mirror. Then she smiled brightly and turned to face him.
“Fixing a party?”
Yashim grinned and shook his head. “Looking for information.”
She raised a finger and wagged it at him.
“Darling, you know I never betray a confidence. A girl has her secrets. What kind of information?”
“I need a quick line on the gossip.”
“Gossip? Why on earth would you come to me?”
They both laughed.
“Men in uniform,” Yashim suggested.
Preen wrinkled her nose and made a moue.
“The New Guards, from the Eskeshir Barracks.”
“I’m sorry, Yashim, but the thought revolts me. Those tight trousers! And so little colour. To me they always look like a bunch of autumn crickets hopping to a funeral.”
Yashim smiled. “Actually, I want to know where they do hop. Not the men so much as the officers. Boys from very good families, I’m told. I wouldn’t bother you about the ordinary soldiers, Preen, you wouldn’t know about that. But the officers…”
He left it hanging. Preen raised her eyebrows and touched her hand to the back of her hair.
“I can hear the girls now. No promises, but I’ll see what I can do.”
[ 22 ]
The room was tiny, more like a cell, sparsely furnished with a pine footstool, a sagging rope bed and a row of wooden hooks, from which hung several large bags, bulking black in the yellow light. The room had no windows and smelt fetid and damp, a queasy amalgam of scent, and sweat, and the oil that smoked blackly from the lamp.
The person whose room it was moved swiftly towards the bags and fumbled at the neck of the smallest, groping around inside until their fingers closed on another, smaller bag which they proceeded to pull out, plucking at the drawstrings. The contents fell onto the mattress with a soft, metallic chink.
A pair of glittering black eyes stared with hatred at the jewels which glittered back. There was a golden chain bearing a dark lapis. There was a silver brooch, a perfect oval, set with diamonds the size of new peas. There was a bracelet—a smaller version of the gold chain, its clasp hidden beneath a ruby anchored to a silver roundel—and a pair of earrings. There was no doubting where the jewels had originated. On every face, painstakingly inlaid into the lapis, between the diamonds, over the ruby, that loathsome and idolatrous symbol, Z or N, zigzagging back and forth, crooked as the man.
That was the way it had all begun, for sure. It wasn’t easy to follow the exact steps—those Franks were cunning as foxes—but Napoleon had been the author of it all. What was it that the French kept pressing on the world? Liberty, equality, and something else. A flag with three stripes. There was something else. No matter, it was all lies.
That flag had fluttered over Egypt. Men like scissors had gone about scratching, scraping, digging things up, writing it all down in little books. Other scissor men, led by a half-blind infidel, had burned their ships within the shadow of the Pyramids, and Napoleon himself had run away, sailed off in the night. Then those infidels had marched and starved, thirsted for water and died like flies in the deserts of Palestine.
But that was only the beginning. You would have thought, wouldn’t you, that everyone would see the folly of the foreigners? But no: the Egyptians tried to be more like them. They’d seen how the French had gone about, behaving like the masters in the dominion of the sultan. They put it down to the trousers, to the special guns the French had left behind, to the way the French soldiers had marched and wheeled, fighting like a single body in the desert, even while they were dropping like flies.
New ways. New stuff which came out of little books. People always scribbling and scribbling, sticking their noses into books until their eyes went red with the effort. Pretending to understand the French gibberish.
Napoleon. He’d killed the French king, hadn’t he? Invaded the Domain of Peace. Thrown sand in the eyes of his own men and all the world. Why else could no one see what was going on? And these jewels—were we to sell ourselves for baubles?
Valuable as they are.
It was a pity that the girl had seen. That killing had been an unexpected duty, and dangerous. Perhaps an over-reaction. She might have seen nothing, understood nothing. Other things on her mind. A secret smile of triumph and expectation on her pretty face. Nothing like the bewilderment with which she fought for breath, seeing whose hands lay around her neck. The hands which had taken the jewels.
Ah, well, there were the others. In here it paid to act swiftly, without remorse.
A ball of spit landed on the lapis and began to trail slowly down the upright of the letter N.
[ 23 ]
Preen felt the ouzo scorch the back of her throat and then plummet like something alive into the pit of her empty stomach. She set the glass back on the low table, and selected another.
“To the sisters!”
A round of little glasses swayed in the air, chinked, and were tossed back by five raven-haired, slightly raddled-looking girls. One of them hiccupped, then yawned and stretched like a cat.
“Time’s up,” she said. “Beauty sleep.”
The others cackled. It had been a good evening. The men, silent while the kocek danced, had showed their appreciation in time-honoured fashion by slipping coins beneath the seams of their costume as they danced close. You couldn’t always tell, but the house had looked clean and the gentlemen sober. Some reunion, she never found out exactly what.
She liked her gentlemen sober, but after a performance she didn’t mind getting a little drunk herself. They’d asked the carriage to drop them off at the top of the street which led down to the waterfront, and teetered away into the dark until they reached the door of a tavern they knew. It was Greek, of course, and full of sailors. That in itself was no bad thing, Preen thought with a ghost of a smile, for as it happened there were two of them throwing surreptitious glances at them now and then, two young, rather handsome boys she didn’t know. Only fishermen from the islands, but still…
Two other girls decided to leave, but Preen thought she’d prefer to stay. Just her and Mina, together. Another drink, maybe.
She was having her second when the sailors made their move. They were from Lemnos, as she’d guessed, and they had shifted a big catch at the morning market, a little tight themselves on their last night in town and with money to spend. After a few minutes, Preen noticed the man’s sunburnt hand moving towards her leg. Go on! she smiled.
But out of the corner of her eye she saw a small, slightly hunchbacked man with a pockmarked face enter the tavern. Yorg was one of the port pimps, one of the weaselly crowd who accosted newly arrived seamen and offered them cheap lodgings, a visit to their sister or, if it seemed safe, a free drink at their place. Yorg’s place, of course, was a brothel where haggard girls from the countryside turned trick after trick, night after night, until they were either let loose on the streets or bumped off and dumped into the Bosphorus. They were part of the human detritus that floated around the docks and the men who sailed from them; their life expectancy was short.
Preen shuddered. Very gently she brushed away the hand which had just settled on her thigh, put a finger to the sailor’s lips and slipped past him, with a flash of an elegant waist. He’d hold, she thought. Right now, she had a little job to do.
A girl doesn’t like to break her promises.
[ 24 ]
There’s a section of Istanbul, right up under the city walls at the head of the Golden Horn, which has never been fully built up. Perhaps the ground is too steep for building on, perhaps in the days of the Byzantines it was forbidden to build so close to the
palace of the Caesars; so it had lingered on into the beginning of the nineteenth century as a sort of ragged wilderness, planted with rocks and scrubby trees.
If you knew where to look you could find men living there, and sometimes women, too; but it was unwise to poke about too diligently. Some of the denizens of this patch were more often abroad by night than by day, and at any hour an air of resigned criminality hung about the tired trees and the little caves and crannies where some of the city’s rubbish had been carefully drawn up to form a dismal kind of shelter. Benders, shacks and bustees artfully constructed by a shadowy people who had somehow slipped through the net of charity—or the hangman’s noose.
Now and again the city authorities would order a sweep-out of the hillside, but invariably most of its inhabitants would appear to have crept away, unseen. The sweeps turned up a lot of rubbish which was burned at the foot of the ravine, sometimes a corpse, a starving feral dog or someone too far removed from the world to do more than stare, with unseeing eyes, at this emanation of men from a city they had long since lost and forgotten. The noisy men, armed with long sticks, would finally depart; the hill-dwellers would silently sift back, and the creation of shelters would begin again.
Someone was now fumbling their way very slowly down the ravine, moving noiselessly and carefully from rock to rock. There was a little moon, but a heavy rolling bank of cloud blotted it out entirely for minutes at a stretch; and in one of those dark interludes the figure stopped, waiting, listening. “All quiet?”
The answer came in a whisper.
“All quiet.”
Two men groped past one another in the dark. The newcomer dropped feet-first into a shallow cave, squatted on his haunches and leaned his back against the wall.
Minutes later the cloud parted. The moonlight showed the man all he needed to see. A little opium box, propped against the wall. A dark pile of what he knew to be the uniforms. And at the back of the cave two men, trussed and gagged. The head of one was tilted back, as if he were asleep. But the eyes of the other man were flaring like the eyes of a terrified animal.
The newcomer glanced instinctively at the little box, grateful at least that the choice was made.
[ 25 ]
Yashim threw back his head as the moonlight came streaming through a break in the cloud. It seemed to him, as he stood with two hands touching its bark, that the tree was taller than he remembered: the black and twisted limbs corkscrewed upwards overhead, a nest of branches so thick and so high that even the moonlight struggled to break through between them.
The Janissaries had chosen this tree as their own. Some happy instinct had led them to adopt a living thing, in a part of the city that was stiff with monuments to human grandeur. Compared to this massive plane tree, Topkapi seemed cold and dead. To his left, Yashim could make out the black silhouette of the palace erected long ago by a vizier who thought himself to be all-powerful, before he was strangled with the silken bow-string. To the north lay Aya Sofia, the Great Church of the Byzantines, now a mosque. Behind him stood the Blue Mosque, built by a sultan who beggared his empire to have it done. And here was this tree, quietly growing on the ancient Hippodrome, generous with its shade in the heat of the day.
Nobody had tried to blame it for what it had come to represent: the jeering power of the Janissary corps. That, Yashim reflected, was never the Turkish way. The same instinct that prompted the Janissaries to adopt the tree made the people reluctant to do away with it now that the very name of the Janissaries was consigned to oblivion. People liked trees, and they disliked change: the Hippodrome itself was proof of that. A few steps away stood an obelisk with incised hieroglyphs, which a Byzantine emperor had brought from Egypt. Further on, there was a massive column erected by some Roman emperor long ago. There was also the celebrated Serpent Column, a bronze statue of three green twining serpents that once stood at the Greek Temple of Apollo at Delphi. The serpents’ heads were missing now, it was true: but Yashim knew that the Turks could hardly be blamed for that.
He smiled to himself, remembering the night in the Polish residency when Palewski, drunk and whispering, had revealed to him the astounding truth. Together they had peered by candlelight into the depths of a vast and elderly armoire, where two of the three heads, which had been a wonder of the ancient world, lay on a pile of dusty linen, practically untouched since they were snapped off the column by some revelling youths in the Polish ambassador’s suite a century ago. “Too dreadful,” Palewski had murmured, shuddering at the sight of the brazen heads. “But too late, now. What’s broken is better not mended.”
So the Janissary tree remained. Yashim leaned his forehead against the peeling bark, and wondered if it were 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 were 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; Uskiidar, 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, who 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 burnouses closely round 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 modelled 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 which took up space in the centre of the room were invisible in the gloom. Down one si
de of the room ran a low bench, or reading table, with a line of cushions; and far away, almost lost in the echoing darkness, was a very small point of light 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 exagger—ated sway of his walk, Yashim realised, 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 favour 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.
2006 - The Janissary Tree Page 7
