The Drowning Guard: A Novel of the Ottoman Empire (4 page)

Until that night, Esma’s attendant Bezm-i Alem had not seen this giant called Ahmed Kadir, except from a distance. He was a man from Serbian stock who had emerged as the
corbaci
, the captain of the Kapikulu Cavalry, forswearing his religion, his family, his past, even the possibility of marriage, to serve the Sultan.

Bezm-i Alem had watched him from the walls of the palace on sleepless nights, as he accompanied his victims, the blue boat emerging from the mouth of the Golden Horn into the Bosphorus. Only on moonlit nights could she see him and his doomed charge, but more than once, even on the darkest nights, she could hear the death wails of the men, carried on the still air across the water.

Those moments haunted her and she found herself crying silently at the cruelty. Nothing in her own painful life had made her cry since she was a little girl, but somehow these innocent men’s deaths moved her more than she could stand. She was glad that no one witnessed her tears, for they would surely have been construed as weakness—a dangerous defect in the Ottoman world.

The servant girl knelt on the cool tile floors of the harem and prayed to the Virgin for the men’s souls. She could never reconcile Esma Sultan’s kindness to women with her inhuman cruelty towards men, and realized she was powerless to change her mistress.

The thought of the drowning guard who sent these men to their death filled her waking hours and dreams at night. How he must hate the woman who had damned his own soul in her foul service!

Nazip had attended Esma Sultan in the audience chamber. The Sultane had forbidden Bezm-i Alem to enter, though she had pleaded to have a closer look at the man who had so captivated her imagination. For once in her indulged life with Esma Sultan, the Ottoman Princess had denied Bezm-i Alem’s request and ordered her to remain with the other women of the harem behind the screen.

“I do not wish you to see him, ever,” she commanded. Bezm-i Alem nodded, her jaw clenching until her teeth ached. She longed to know this giant of a man, this Serbian rebel who had incurred the wrath of the Sultan himself, but she also understood she must accept the order of Esma Sultan.

Nazip was standing, in rapt attention in the shadows of the room, near the serving tables. She was there ostensibly to serve the mistress, but Bezm-i Alem knew this was a favor shown to her by Esma, to see and hear the giant speak.

Every woman of the harem peered into the audience room, hidden behind the filigreed wall screens, eyes pressed against the carved porphyry.

“He is as large as the great plane tree at the Hippodrome! Surely no Turk nor Arab has a stature to match his,” gasped Leyla. “He is a freak of nature!”

“Shh!” Bezm-i Alem admonished, waving her hand, but not willing to move her eye from the curlicued hollow of the screen.

Bezm-i Alem drank in every feature, studying his large-boned Serbian face and the fierce blue of his eyes as he listened to Esma’s words. He curled his lip like a dog in an inaudible snarl, remaining silent, enduring her presence only because he was forced to do so or die.

If not under the vigilant eye of the Solaks, Bezm-i Alem felt sure he would leap for the Sultane’s throat like a wolf. Instead he bowed his massive head and studied the floor. The harem girl noticed how he challenged Esma Sultan, subtly but clearly, despite their great discrepancy in station.

Bezm-i Alem wondered how he must feel, the deaths of so many men on his hands. The Sultan had assigned him to Esma Sultan’s palace, so there was no recourse. He had somehow dishonored himself and had fallen from favor at Topkapi, or so the rumors in the harem had it. He had been stripped of his command of the Kapikulu Cavalry Orta and even denied the right to ride his own horse. Bezm-i Alem—indeed the entire Court at Topkapi—missed his skill on the cirit field, watching him rein his great grey mare in pursuit of his opponent, rising like a tower in his stirrups to hurl his jereed at the retreating
rider, then, atop his galloping mare, circling the Hippodrome in a victory lap. He inspired legions of young riders, made old men break into toothless smiles, and moved ambassadors’ wives to clap their gloved hands in muffled delight.

Now he faced Bezm-i Alem’s mistress with smoldering hatred. And she, sensing his displeasure, engaged him far longer than she would normally deign to speak to a man. Perhaps she enjoyed his suffering—this game appealed to her.

Show caution, mistress!
Bezm-i Alem thought
. He will leap for your throat, my Sultane. He still has the heart of a Serbian rebel and his rage must strain his will.

The one-eyed cook had saved the drowning guard some stewed lamb simmered in paprika. The old Greek focused his eye on the giant, muttering to himself and spitting twice on the filthy floor. Ladling the lamb into a terra-cotta bowl, he whispered, “Did you drown another one tonight?”

Ivan snarled at the words and grabbed the cook’s arm. “Your business is to cook,” he hissed.

The Greek’s green eye stared back at him through a blurry haze of cataract. “And your business is to murder innocents.” He set the bowl in front of the janissary and turned back to his oven.

“And how, cook, would you handle your post, if the Princess commanded you to carry out the same order?” growled Postivich, dipping his crusty bread into the stew. He hunched over his food, his hands glistening with grease as he packed the bread into his mouth with his open palm. A killing always made him ravenous, and he had been offered nothing to eat at the palace. “Come, you tell me what you would do, cook,” he said, pointing to his bowl for more stew.

“I would sooner die as a man without blood on his hands than to kill night after night, a butcher of men.”

“Cooks have big dreams. That’s why they remain cooks.”

“And your dreams at night, Ahmed Kadir?” said the cook, slamming his ladle down on a dirty rag. “Do they come to visit you in your dreams?”

“Who?” asked Postivich, looking up at the cook sideways, his chin still tucked over his food.

“The drowned men. Do they beg you to spare their lives? Do they ask you to give last messages to their parents, their wives, their loved ones? Do they curse your newfound Allah as they evoke the true Christ’s name?”

Postivich swept the bowl off the table with the back of his arm. It shattered on the floor. The men at the back table playing dominos stopped and looked up from their game.

“No one visits me,” he growled. He grabbed the cook by the throat and the other Janissaries stood and moved towards him, one drawing his scimitar.

“Release him, Kadir,” ordered one with a silver-edged dagger in his hand.

Postivich eyed him and grunted, his grip loosening on the filthy wattles of the Greek’s throat.

“I sleep like a suckled babe every night, cook,” he muttered, shoving the Greek hard against the wall. A chip of loose plaster broke off and sent dust spinning in the dim light. “It must be your good cooking,” he said.

He nodded to the small group of men and they relaxed their grips on the daggers.

Ivan Postivich left them and made his way back to his bunk.

Esma Sultan could not sleep. The breeze coming off the Bosphorus was cooling and she could smell the jasmine and lemon of her gardens. She usually slept peacefully after her evenings of passion, exhausted physically. Her two favorite harem girls would wash her, dry her with white linen, and anoint her body with fragrant oils, as they begged her to recount in detail her moments of ecstasy, her ploys, and conquests.

The men working in the palace and the gardens would shudder at the women’s laughter and turn away, saying a quick prayer to Allah.

But this night had been different. Esma Sultan had performed her ablutions quietly and her dark looks had forbidden any trespass. The harem girls had kept their eyes fastened on the mosaics of the bath and not dared to speak, except to offer her tea and refreshment.

This had been the first one to refuse her.

Her nose wrinkled in disgust as she thought she smelled a foul undertone to the wind off the Bosphorus.

She threw a gauze sleeve over her mouth and nose as the breeze stirred the linen curtains. Her stomach rose in her throat and she gagged.

She recognized it as the smell of Death.

The favorite sister of Sultan Mahmud II, Princess Esma Sultan had never been denied anything. She kept palaces at Macka, Eyup, and Sultanahmed in
addition to her sumptuous residence at Ortakoy. Last night’s Christian man, obtained in Bosnia on one of her slave raids, had entered the palace gates, neither surveying the unparalleled garden with its fountains nor raising his eyes to the formidable entry with its fluted columns and cornices. He had seemed blind to the lush tapestries and rugs that lined her inner chamber, and the jewels that adorned the Princess’s head, neck, arms, and hands.

“Why have you summoned me?” he said through a slave girl interpreter.

“Sit down, subject. Have you washed?”

The man stared at her pointed silk tasseled shoes, and began stuttering in Serbo-Croatian.

“Yes, Princess. I supervised the washing myself,” said the ivory-skinned eunuch at her right.

“Was he given food and drink, Emerald?”

“He refused both. His belly is as empty as a dried gourd.”

The Princess cocked her head.

“Have you not tasted the fresh figs from my own garden?”

“I have no appetite,” answered the man, his eyes fixed firmly on the floor. He looked up briefly, imploring help from the slave girl, but she stared blankly back at his pleading eyes.

The Princess studied his face. It was finely molded, an almost noble look on the head of a peasant. He had been acquired five days before. His sisters, both beautiful and fair, had been sold to a Pasha for a good sum.

“You are not as fair as your sisters. But you are comely.” Her finger stroked his cheek. She turned his head with a pivot of her wrist, as if she were examining a pet.

The man raised his head suddenly. “You have news of my sisters?”

“Of course. But I will only exchange news for something of value to me.”

“What do you want?”

“You will take a bite of the fig I offer you from my own hand and I will tell you of your sisters.”

She nodded to Emerald who disappeared down the hall.

“They are alive, then.”

“Wait. I will tell you after you are refreshed. You must also drink some tea. Then you will hear all I have to tell on the subject.”

The Princess clapped her hands, her eyes never leaving her guest’s face.

Emerald reappeared with a harem girl, each bearing a tray. One contained three large purple and green figs, along with a silver knife. The other held an ornate silver tea service.

“Now admire the beauty of the most magnificent fruit in all Constantinople.” Esma Sultan cupped her right hand and placed the fig in her palm. With her left hand she slowly turned the fruit by the stem, making it pirouette.

“See the marvelous fig, how the skin begs to wrinkle from its own weight, so ripe for eating.” The Princess sliced the fig into quarters, the creamy rose-color flesh exposed against the dark skin.

She flicked a look at her red-haired handmaid and nodded, initiating a secret ritual between them.

“Take this,” said the Princess, holding a piece between her delicate white fingers. “Open your mouth.”

The man hesitated and then dropped open his jaw. She tucked the fruit inside and then, before he could draw back, slipped a finger into his mouth, and let it linger against his tongue, before she slipped it out, slippery with the juice of the fruit.

“Good,” she murmured and the freckled harem girl who had delivered the tea tray laughed.

The man looked around stunned. He stared at his slippered feet and the rich silk tunic in which the eunuch had dressed him. The billowing white pants were sashed at the waist with a maroon and gold corded belt.

“Your sisters were sold to a dear friend of mine, Pasha Mustafa Efendi. He will treat them well and their lives will be much easier than what they knew in their village. I suspect they will become fat and content within a year’s time and bear him strong Muslim children.”

“They are a part of his harem?”