Jason Goodwin

by The Janissary Tree

  "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.

  112

  ***********

  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.

  113

  ***********

  The seraskier walked briskly across the First Court of the palace and stepped out through the Imperial Gate, the Babi-Humayun, 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.

  Having regained his apartments, he summoned a dozen senior officers to a briefing.

  He followed the briefing with a short pep talk. Everything, he said, depended on how they and their men conducted themselves over the next forty-eight hours. Obedience was the wat
chword. He had every confidence that together they could meet the challenge that had presented itself.

  That was all.

  114

  ***********

  YASHIM made a grab for the door. The man on the threshold sprang forward and for several seconds they fought for purchase, separated only by the thin door that lay between them. But Yashim had been caught off balance, and it was he who yielded first: he leaped away from the door and his assailant came barreling into the room, almost stumbled, but whipped around fast to face Yashim at a sagging crouch.

  A wrestler, Yashim thought. The man was completely shaved. His neck sloped into his big shoulders, which bulged from the armholes of a sleeveless leather jerkin. The leather was black and glistened as though it had been oiled. He was short legged, Yashim noticed, his bare feet planted a yard apart on the rug, knees bent, slim waisted. There was no sign of a weapon beyond the string in his right fist.

  A man who could crack me apart without even trying, Yashim thought. He took a backward step, sliding his bare feet on the polished boards.

  The man gave a grunt and lunged forward, lowering his head like a ram, coming at Yashim with surprising speed. Yashim flung back his arm as he leaped backward and swept his hand across the kitchen block. His fingers felt the knife, but they only knocked it: it must have spun, for when he tried to close on the hilt his fingers met in the air, and as the wrestler's huge shoulder crashed against his midriff he was rammed back hard against the block with a force that made his head whiplash. He gasped for breath and felt the wrestler's arms fly upward to pinion his own.

  Yashim knew that if the wrestler got him in his grip, he was finished. He lunged to the right, throwing all the weight of his upper body against the wrestler's rising arm, flinging his own arms out at the same time to grab at the handle of the stockpot. With a wrench he snatched it up and swung it around over the man's shoulder, but the lid was stuck and he had no room to do more than swing the pot and clamp it against the wrestler's back before his arm was caught in his grip.

  A band of leather was sewn around the collar of the man's jerkin, and as the pot slid up the lid must have snagged against it. The man flipped back as the boiling stock sloshed over his neck, and he let Yashim go.

  The surprise on the assassin's face when he slammed his taloned hand into Yashim's groin and squeezed down hard was palpable. Certainly more palpable than Yashim's groin.

  The assassin jerked back his arm as if he'd been stung. Yashim slid his right hand up the assassin's left arm as hard as he could and then brought his left down hard, gripping his wrist as he pivoted the man's arm against his own hand. There was a crack and the arm went limp. The assassin clutched at it with his right, and in a moment Yashim had taken his right wrist out away from his body and with a heave sent the assassin curving in an arc that brought him around, doubled up, and his right arm in a tight hold. The assassin had neither screamed nor spoken a word.

  Five minutes later, and the man had still not spoken. He had barely grunted. Yashim was at a loss.

  And then Yashim saw why the man had failed to speak. He had no tongue.

  Yashim wondered if the mute could write. "Can you write?" he hissed in the man's ear. The look was blank. A deaf-mute? Long ago, in the days of Suleiman the Magnificent, it had been decreed that only deaf-mutes should attend the person of the sultan. It was a way of ensuring that nothing was overheard, that nothing they saw could be communicated to the outside world. They signed at one another instead: ixarette, the secret language of the Ottoman court, was a complex sign language that anyone, hearing or deaf, speaking or dumb, was expected to master in the palace service.

  The palace service.

  A deaf-mute.

  Frantically, Yashim began to sign.

  115

  ***********

  At the other end of the city, Preen the kdfek dancer lay back on the divan, staring at the dark window.

  A jet-black wig of real hair, bolstered with horsehair plucked from the tail, was draped over a stand. Her pots of makeup, her brushes and tweezers, stood unused on the dressing table.

  Preen tried to wriggle her frozen shoulder. The bandages the horse doctor had applied creaked. When it came to treating breaks and bruises, the girls always turned to the horse doctor: he had more practice and experience in a month than ordinary sawbones saw in a lifetime, as Mina said, because the Turks looked after their horses even better than themselves. He had probed Preen's twisted shoulder and diagnosed a sprain.

  "Nothing broken, God be praised," he said. "When my patients break something, we shoot them."

  Preen had laughed for the first time since her attack. Laughter wasn't the only medicine the horse doctor used, either: he had salved her shoulder and neck with a preparation of horse chestnut. He had then applied the bandages and painted the result with hot gum.

  "Tastes dreadful," he observed. "And stops the loops from sagging and coming apart. Whether or not it is medically necessary, who knows? But I'm too old to change my prescriptions."

  The gum had set and dried, and now it creaked whenever Preen moved her shoulder. At least she could work her fingers: two days ago they had been swollen and immovable. Mina had come to help her eat, bringing the tripe soup she loved in an earthenware bowl. Apart from the horse doctor and her friend Mina, Preen had no visitors: she had resolved to turn even Yashim away, should he come. Without her war paint she felt sure that she looked a fright.

  She looked different, certainly. Her own hair was cropped close to a downy fluff, and her skin was very pale; yet Mina could see in the shape of her head and the high-boned face more than a trace of the boy she had once been, eager and fragile at the same time. With her big brown eyes she had pleaded with Mina to stay the night, and Mina had curled up beside her friend and watched her sleep.

  On the third morning, Preen had had to tell her landlady that she had no intention of paying extra for her so-called guest. The conversation had been conducted through the door, because Preen refused to let the old woman come in.

  "Perhaps I should deduct rent when I am not home for the night?" she called out. "It is your fault, anyway, that I have to have a nurse. I trusted you to keep an eye on people coming and going! And you let in a murderer!"

  There was an outraged silence, and Preen grinned. Nothing could be more mortifying to the landlady than to be accused of slackness when it came to peering through her lattice. It was like doubting her faith.

  That was earlier. Now Mina was coming in with bread and soup for their supper.

  She helped prop Preen upright on the divan and handed her a bowl.

  "You're missing a lot of excitement, darling," she said, sitting on the edge of the divan. "A positive invasion of handsome young men."

  She arched her eyebrows. "Men in tight trousers! The New Guard."

  Preen rolled her eyes.

  "Doing what, exactly?"

  "That's what I asked them. Taking up positions, they said. Well, I couldn't resist it, could I? I said I could show them a few they hadn't thought of."

  They giggled.

  "But what does it mean?" Preen demanded.

  "It's for protection, apparently. All that plotting and killing, it's coming to a head. Oh, Preen, I'm sorry--you look white as a sheet. I didn't mean-- I mean, I'm sure it's got nothing to do with what happened the other day. Look, why don't you ask your gentleman friend?"

  "Yashim?"

  "That's right, dear. Yashim. Come on, eat your soup and put on your face. I'll help you. You can walk, can't you? We'll get a chair and go and find him right now."

  The truth, of course, was that Mina was getting just a tiny bit bored of her nursing duties. She fancied an outing, especially when there was something exciting going on outside. So she was her most persuasive and overruled Preen's doubts.

  "It's just that--I don't feel safe," Preen admitted.

  "Nonsense, darling. I'll be with you, and we'll find your friend. It'll be fun, who knows? You'll be perfectly safe going
out. Just as safe as staying here. Safer."

  Later, Preen was to remember that remark.

  116

  ***********

  YASHIM, as it happened, was already dealing with his second visitor of the evening.

  Palewski had come up the stairs to sniff the aroma on Yashim's landing, but for once he was disappointed. There was a faint smell of onions, he imagined, and perhaps boiled carrot, but the insubstantial clues failed to gel: it could be any number of recipes. Then he noticed the shoes, a pair of sturdy leather sandals.

  Company, he supposed. He knocked on the door.

  There was a slight delay, and the door opened an inch.

  "Thank God it's you," Yashim said, pulling the door open and scooping Palewski through into the room.

  Palewski almost dropped his valise in surprise. Yashim was holding a large kitchen knife, not that it mattered. What struck his notice instead was the body of a huge man, facedown on the carpet, largely enveloped in a knotted sheet.

  "I've got to do something about this maniac," Yashim said shortly. "I've tied his wrists with the corner of a sheet, but now I'm out of ideas."

  Palewski blinked. He looked at Yashim, and back at the body on the floor. He realized that the man was breathing hard.

  "Perhaps what you need," he said quietly, fumbling at his waist, "is this."

  He held out a long cord, made of twisted silk and gold thread.

  "It went with my dressing gown. My Sarmatian finery, I should say."

  Together, they bound the man's wrists tightly behind his back. Yashim undid the sheet and wrapped it around his legs: the man was so docile that Palewski found it hard to credit what Yashim was saying.

  "A wrestler?" Then he silently mouthed the word: "Janissary?"

  "Don't worry, he can't hear, poor bastard. No, not a Janissary. It's odder than that. Worse than I thought. Look, I have to reach the palace immediately. I don't know what I could have done with this fellow if you hadn't come. Will you stay? Keep an eye on him? Prick him if he tries to move."

  Palewski was staring at him in horror.