The Janissary Tree

by Jason Goodwin

  “You’re saying that to be a Janissary was to follow a form of Sufism.”

  “Of course. That and all the other rituals of being a Janissary. The traditions.”

  The traditions. In 1806 the sultan, Selim, had begun to train up a parallel army to the Janissaries. In that respect it was a forerunner of Mahmut’s New Guard. But Selim, unlike Mahmut, had had little time to organize: the result was that when the Janissaries rebelled against their sultan, they crushed him and destroyed his re-formed army. The rebel Janissaries had been led by Bayraktar Mustafa Pasha, commander on the Danube.

  “So you were there,” Yashim suggested, “when Selim was forced off the throne, in favor of his brother Mustafa.”

  “Sultan Mustafa!” The Albanian ground out the title with scorn, and spat. “Girded with Osman’s sword, maybe, but mad like a dog. After two years the people were thinking how to get Selim back. Bayraktar had changed his mind as well, like all the rest of us. We were in Istanbul, at the old barracks, and for a night we prayed for guidance, talking with the Karagozi dervishes.”

  “They told you what to do?”

  “We stormed the Topkapi Palace the next day. Bayraktar ran through the gates, crying for Selim.”

  “At which point,” Yashim recalled, “Mustafa ordered Selim to be strangled. Along with his little cousin—just in case.”

  The soup master bowed his head. “So it was. Sultan Mustafa wanted to be the last of the House of Osman. Had he been the last, I think he would have survived. Whatever else we might have been, we Janissaries were loyal to the house. But God willed otherwise. Even though Selim was killed, the little cousin escaped alive.”

  Thanks to his quick-thinking mother, Yashim reflected. At the crucial moment, with Mustafa’s men scouring the palace with their bowstrings, the crafty Frenchwoman he now knew as the valide sultan had hidden her boy beneath a pile of dirty laundry. Mahmut became sultan by the grace of a heap of old linen.

  “You were there?”

  “I was in the palace when they brought the boy to Bayraktar Pasha. I saw the look on Sultan Mustafa’s face: if he had seemed mad before, then—” The soup master shrugged. “The chief mufti had no choice but to issue a fatwa deposing him. And Mahmut became sultan.

  “For myself, I was tired of this kind of soldiering. Rebellion, fighting in the palace, the murder of Selim.” He gestured with his arm: “Back and forth, here, there. I had enough.”

  The soup master took a deep breath and blew the air through his cheeks.

  “I left the corps at the first opportunity. I was a good cook, I had friends in Istanbul. In five years I was working for myself.”

  “Did you give up your pay book, too?” Plenty of men had been on the payroll, drawing a Janissary’s wage and enjoying all the privileges of the corps without the slightest intention of turning up for war. It was a well-known scam.

  Mustafa hesitated. “Not immediately,” he admitted. “But within a few years I no longer needed help, and I gave it in.”

  Yashim doubted it but said nothing. The soup master twirled a loop of his beads in the air and caught it again.

  “You can check the records. I ceased to be a Janissary in May 1815. It took courage. You wouldn’t understand.”

  Yashim did his best. “They didn’t want to let you go? Or you wanted the money?”

  The Albanian shot him a look of contempt. “Listen. I go where I want. Today is an exception. I didn’t need the money, I was doing well.” Yashim blinked, believing him. “I found it hard to break with them.”

  Yashim leaned forward. “How did you do it?”

  The guild master spread his huge hands and looked at them. “I learned to trust myself. I saw with my own eyes what had happened to the Janissaries, what they had allowed to happen to the real tradition, the one that mattered. They no longer served the empire.”

  He looked up. “You think that’s obvious? I was only waiting—many, like me, only waiting;—for the tradition of service to come back to us. In the end, I decided I could wait no longer. I saw that we were doomed to repeat our mistakes. You think the Janissaries were lazy, cowardly, arrogant. The mutinies. The interference.”

  The soup master stroked his beard and narrowed his eyes at Yashim, who sat transfixed.

  “I tell you, the men we hung upon the Janissary Tree were all too easily taken. When we got angry, then someone fed us names, and we shouted: Kill him! Kill so-and-so! They threw them to us. We thought it would go better after that.

  “You put coriander in the soup. Well, some people like it, some don’t, some don’t even notice. Forget the people who don’t like it. You add some beans. Some carrots. The same thing. Some like it, some don’t. But more people don’t care much either way. By the end, you can take out the tripe. Call it soup. Nobody will know any better. Only a few.”

  He tugged at his mustache.

  “The Janissaries were like that. Like a recipe that has been quietly changed. In the city I made tripe and onion soup from tripe and onion. But in the barracks, so to speak, they wanted me to believe in a kind of tripe and onion soup made of beans and bacon. In the end, I had to leave.”

  Yashim could admire the older man’s guts. So much in this city was founded on pretense: it took a certain kind of temper for a man to step aside. But then, the Albanian hadn’t stepped away entirely. Not if what Yashim suspected about the guards at the guild was true.

  “Your old friends,” he suggested.

  “No, no, they had no hold over me, not what you might think. They didn’t blame me, either. But they remembered me. Our lives went separate ways. But they remembered.”

  He picked up a pastry with a clumsy sweep of his arm and stuffed it into his mouth. Yashim watched him deliberately chew it. His eyes were sparkling.

  “The fifteenth of June was the worst night of my life. I heard the cauldrons—we all did, didn’t we? Eighteen years the sultan had waited. Eighteen years for the boy to become a man, and all that time with one resolve, to destroy the force that had destroyed Selim.”

  Perhaps, Yashim thought. But Mahmut’s motives were more complex than mere vengeance for his uncle’s death. He wanted to rid himself of the men who had almost casually brought him to the throne, as well: to expunge a debt, as well as avenge a death. The Janissaries had crudely expected gratitude and took carte blanche. Yashim could remember the cartoon that was stuck up on the palace gate one night, showing the sultan as a dog led by a Janissary. “You see how we use our dogs,” the notice ran. “While they are useful and let themselves be led, we treat them well; but when they stop being of service, we kick them out into the streets.”

  “The people of the city were scared. Boom boom! Boom boom! It was a frightening sound, wasn’t it? Night falling, and not a sound in the streets as we listened, all of us. I went up onto my roof, treading like a cat. Oh, yes, there was a tradition all right. They said the voice of the Janissaries was the voice of the people. The men believed it. The cauldrons were beating for the empire, as they’d beaten for centuries. Only the sound of the cauldrons drumming and the barking of the pye-dogs in the streets.

  “Look, I stood on the roof and I heard the sound and I wept for those fools. I wept for a sound. I knew I would never hear it again, not if I lived for a thousand years.”

  He wiped his hands over his face.

  “Later, after the killing and demolition, some of them came to me asking for a quiet job. One of them had been living for days in a foxhole when they torched the Belgrade woods to flush them out. They had to avoid their families and relatives, for their sakes. They were lost. They were hunted. But we had broken bread together. I gave them money and told them to slip away, get out of Istanbul. Nobody would be interested in them anymore, not after a few weeks, a few months.

  “And slowly, some of them started coming back. Looking for quiet jobs, out of sight—stokers, watchmen, tanners. I knew a few. There must have been thousands, I suppose, unknown to me.”

  “Thousands?”

&nb
sp; “I knew a handful, so I gave them the work. Night duties. Discreet.” He closed his eyes and slowly shook his head. “I can’t understand it. Ten years, and all good, quiet men. Grateful for the work.”

  “So what would they want a cauldron for, do you suppose?”

  The soup master opened his eyes and fixed them on Yashim.

  “That’s what I don’t understand. It was only a pretend cauldron, anyway. You can’t do it with a cauldron made of black tin. It would only be make-believe.”

  Yashim thought of the dead officer, coiled in the cauldron’s base.

  “It was always pretending, wasn’t it?” Yashim asked. “That’s what you said. Tripe soup made of beans and bacon.”

  The soup master looked at him in surprise and folded his hands.

  19

  ****************

  “You must get Yashim back!” The valide sultan crooked her finger and wagged it at her son. “We may all be murdered in our beds.”

  Sultan Mahmut II, Lord of the Horizons, Master of the Black Sea and the White, put up his hands and rolled his eyes. It was scarcely conceivable, he thought, that three hundred able-bodied women—and in this sum he included his mother, for sure—could be actually murdered, one by one, in the very sanctum of imperial power.

  All the same, he allowed himself to play with the idea. He would keep the delightful Hadice safely by his side at all times, and by the end, through a simple process of elimination, they would know who the killer was. Then he and Hadice would spring out among the throttled beauties and dispatch her. He would announce that he was too shaken by the experience to take on any more concubines; it would be unfair to them, he was far too old. He would marry Hadice, and she would rub his feet.

  “Valide,” he said politely. “You know as well as I do that these things happen. There is probably a very good explanation.”

  He wanted to point out that it would almost certainly be a very trivial explanation, but he sensed that his mother would feel slighted by the insinuation. This was her realm, shared with the kislar agha, the chief black eunuch, and everything that happened in it had to be serious.

  “Mahmut,” the valide said sharply, “I can think of a very good explanation. The murderess wants you.”

  “Me?” The sultan frowned.

  “Not in bed, you silly fool. She wants to kill you.”

  “Aha. It was dark, and she mistook some ambergrised houri for her sultan and throttled her before she realized her mistake.”

  “Of course not.”

  “So what was that girl, then? Strangling practice?”

  The valide sultan cocked her head. “Maybe,” she admitted. “I suppose it might take practice. I don’t suppose many of the girls have done a lot of strangling before they come.”

  She patted the cushion beside her, and Mahmut sat down.

  “I was more worried that she might simply be hurrying the moment,” the valide continued. “She has her place in the order. Sooner or later she will be alone with you. She wants it sooner. Then she can kill you.”

  “So she knocks off the nice girl and moves up one on the list? I see.”

  “You make it sound ridiculous, but I have been here a lot longer than you and I know just how ridiculous things can turn out to be extremely serious. Trust me. Trust a mother’s intuition.”

  “I trust you, of course. But what I don’t see is why the murderess is in such a rush. And by killing the girl she’s slowed the thing down, anyway. After this, I shan’t have to see any of them for days. My nerves, Mother.”

  “It makes the thing more sure. That unfortunate girl might have infatuated you. You might have kept after her for weeks on end. She might have, I don’t know, rubbed your feet the way you like.”

  Mahmut grinned ruefully: the valide knew everyone’s secrets.

  “And there’s the edict, isn’t there? The great announcement. If you die, there will be no edict. Don’t tell me someone doesn’t want to murder you over that!”

  “To get me out of the way in time, you mean?”

  “Exactly. I think you should send for Yashim right away.”

  “I have. He’s working on it.”

  “Nonsense. He’s not working on it at all. I haven’t seen him here all day.”

  20

  ****************

  YASHIM had, in fact, found time to visit the harem that day. On his return from the restaurant, he had gone in quietly, alerting no one, simply to see where the body had been found and where the girl had lived.

  Her room, which she had shared with three other girls, had iron bedsteads and several rows of pegs on which the girls hung their clothes and the bags that held the scented soaps they were fond of, a few shawls and slippers, some well-laundered strips of linen, and such bangles and jewels as they possessed. As cariyeler, harem maids, her roommates had not yet been advanced to the rank of gozde: but they were hoping.

  Two girls had spread an old sheet across their bed and were busy depilating themselves with a sticky yellow paste made of herbs, perfumed ash, and quicklime that they took from a plain brass bowl on a small octagonal bedside table. One of them, a redhead with green eyes and pale skin, was carefully anointing herself with a spatula when Yashim came to the door and bowed. She chucked her chin in a casual greeting.

  “The gozde’s bed?” Yashim inquired.

  The girl on her knees gestured with the spatula.

  The other girl, spreadeagled, raised her head and squinted down her body.

  “They ought to take her stuff out, poor thing,” she said. “It’s not very nice for us.”

  “I’m sorry,” Yashim said. “I just want to see what there is.” He ran his hands over her clothes, then pulled two bags off the pegs and emptied their contents onto the bed. “You must have been friends.”

  The girl who was kneeling got off the bed and came across for a better look. She had her elbow out, to keep the ointment on her armpit in the air, and with one hand she tugged her black hair back into a ponytail. Her skin was olive, and her Ups were dark like old wine, the same color as the nipples of her breasts, rising in firm curves.

  Yashim glanced back and then stirred the belongings strewn across the empty bed.

  “She was my size,” the girl said, reaching forward to pick up a bundle of transparent gauze. “We all knew that.”

  The girl on the bed giggled.

  “She was!” The girl shook the thing in her hand and then gathered it to her chest, working her free arm so that it lay across one breast, the translucent silk ribbons dangling against her tummy. There was something so innocent and so obscene about the gesture, that Yashim blushed.

  The girl on the bed saved him from speaking. “Put it back, Nilu. It’s too creepy. Have you, lala, come to take her things away?”

  Nilu let the bustier flutter back onto the bed and turned to her friend.

  Yashim carefully surveyed the gozde’s belongings.

  “What was she like?” he asked.

  The girl called Nilu climbed back onto her friend’s bed; Yashim heard the mattress creak. There was a silence.

  “She was—all right.”

  “Was she a friend?”

  “She was nice. She had friends.”

  “Enemies?” Yashim turned around. The two girls were sitting side by side, staring at him.

  “Ow!” The girl suddenly put a hand between her legs. “It’s stinging!”

  She jumped off the bed, her pale breasts swinging, one hand clamped between her slender legs.

  “Come on, Nilu. I’ve got to wash.”

  Nilu reached for a towel on a peg.

  “She had friends,” she said. She scampered to the doorway. “Lots of friends,” she added, over her shoulder.

  21

  ****************

  “WELL, hello, precious.”

  The speaker was a rawboned woman of about forty in a glossy black wig, a sequined bustier with padded breasts, a long diaphanous skirt, and a pair of large beaded slippers. She was al
so wearing half a pound of makeup. It made her look older, Yashim realized with a slight pang.

  But it was what—eighteen years? They were both of them older than he had been when he first came to the city in the retinue of the great Phanariot merchant-prince George Mavrocordato. Mavrocordato had been quick to see where Yashims talent lay, setting him to work at the ledgers for the sake of his cultivated hand, sending him down to the port to pick up useful information, asking him to con over the manifests and identify new articles of trade. Yashim had learned a great deal, and with his gift for languages—a gift greater, if possible, even than his employer’s, who spoke Ottoman Turkish, Greek ecclesiastical and demotic, Romanian, Armenian, and French, but Russian badly, and Georgian not at all—he had made himself indispensable to the Mavrocordato clan. He’d discovered a talent for being invisible, a knack of holding himself quiet and saying little, so that people tended to overlook his presence.