The Bellini Card (33 page)

She turned reluctantly from the window.

Yashim bowed. “I must apologize, signora, for the intrusion. The box is empty.”

She tucked back a strand of her hair.

“How disappointing,” she said quietly. She dismissed Antonio with a wave of her hand.

When he had gone she said, “I suppose that you have come to kill me, pasha efendi, the way you killed the others.”

“No, Contessa. I hope I have come to save you.”

She gave a small smile. “No one can save me. It is written—surely, as an Ottoman, you know that.”

She put a hand under her hair and swept it up, exposing her slender neck.

Yashim held up his empty hands.

“No bowstring, Contessa. You sent to Istanbul—and I am here.”

She glanced at him, sideways, her hand slipping slowly from her neck so that her hair fell in golden sheaves.

Yashim knew more than enough about pretty girls. The sultan’s harem, where he could come and go at will, was full of girls whose charms were those of any young animal. They had clear eyes, and smooth skin, and the form and figure of nymphs released into the real world, supple and glowing. Their feelings raced across their lovely faces, registering each moment of happiness or jealousy or fear with a perfectly unguarded openness. Pretty girls: you smiled to see them, like puppies chasing their own tails.

But the contessa was a woman.

“I sent to Istanbul?” She pushed off from the windowsill and crossed the room. “You seem very sure, my pasha—I don’t know your name, I’m afraid.”

“I am Yashim,” he replied with a short bow. “I serve the sultan.”

It was rather less than the truth, but it was not quite a lie.

“You sent Sultan Abdülmecid a message—you made an offer. The Bellini portrait of his ancestor.”

For a moment she checked herself. “Is that what you told them? Boschini. Barbieri. And now they’re dead.”

And then a foil was in her hand.

“For myself, I may determine the time and the place,” she said, raising the point of the foil.

There was no button on the tip.

“Com’era, dov’era,”
she murmured.
“In guardia.”

He saw her lift her knee, and then she was on him in a blur, a whirl of stamping feet and lifted shoulders—and a blade sparked by his ear as Yashim launched himself to the ground.

He rolled, twice, and the point of the blade skittered across the marble at his feet.

He sprang up, twisting and backing. The contessa had recovered her position: she stood with her left hand free, feet apart, breathing through parted lips. For a second he thought that the blade had snapped from the hilt, before he saw the point swing out only inches from his eyes.

As Carla lunged, Yashim whipped his head sideways and, at the same second, he took a step forward, against his instinct to pull back. They were almost beside each other, flank to flank. Yashim cracked his right arm down and felt his sleeve brush hers as she let her arm drop. She came out of it with a sweep of the foil, away from him, using the weight of the sword to bring her around.

She had her elbow back, drawing the tip of her foil away. Yashim saw it retreating through the air, like a mosquito, and flung himself into a left-hand roll.

The contessa sprang through his wake, making a diagonal pass that would deliver her at his right.

For a moment, as he raised his head, Yashim was disoriented.

Two things ran through his mind.

One was a remark about fencing he had read once in a French novel. “The art of fencing consists in two things, and two things only: to give, and not to receive.”

The other was: ignore the tip and watch the feet.

The feet! Slamming both hands onto the floor, Yashim flung out one foot across the marble in an arc, hooking the contessa’s feet and sweeping them from under her.

She rolled backward and sprang to her feet. Yashim was standing again. They were about six feet apart.

She rubbed her hand across her hip.

Her blue eyes glittered.

Blue eyes: Yashim raised a fist and uncoiled two fingers, the old sign to ward off the evil eye.

The contessa understood it. She began to smile.

Her smile broke into a snarl and she clapped her feet to the ground and sprang.

Yashim saw the point of her sword flying through the air.

The point!

He parried, chopping down as the blade soared toward his chest.

She must have been surprised as the tip moved: he saw her eyes travel to the point. But in a moment she was on him again, flicking the point almost effortlessly upward, toward his abdomen. He sliced down, and as the blade struck his forearm he stepped forward and sideways and felt her hair slip through the fingers of his left hand.

He almost had her.

She curvetted around again, slipping her head to one side, drawing back.

His hand was empty. The other was bleeding.

There was no edge on a foil’s blade, of course: only the point could kill. But the contessa’s foil moved fast enough to draw blood.

“You are confused about the rules, pasha efendi,” Carla said. She had adopted her guard again.

Yashim was watching her feet.

“I follow the pattern,” he said shortly. As he spoke he took a step toward her, hand spread, and then, as she turned the nails of her sword hand uppermost, he stepped back again, lightly and to one side.

She eased herself around to face him again, half turning her hand: now her nails were down.

He wondered if she would allow him to make the same maneuver twice.

He hoped so, for behind her, now slightly to her right, was the collection of weapons he had made Palewski describe, in minute detail, as they sat together in the smoke of la signora’s kitchen.

And beneath him, laid out in colored marble on the floor, was the pattern he already knew.

They had been following it from the beginning. Breaking ground and giving ground, back and forth—and always to the side. An endless knot, inexorably rotating.

He needed two more points. Two more would bring him around, but the next was the hardest. The pattern was not completely regular. The next point of the pattern brought you closer in, unguarded on either side.

He raised his hand to his turban, in perplexity.

Carla didn’t wait for him to finish the move.

There is an attack in fencing called the flèche: properly performed, it is the killer stroke, if any stroke may be so called. The feet come together; the body is launched; blade and body are concentrated behind the point with enormous speed and, regardless of the attacker’s build, also huge strength.

Carla’s flèche was properly executed. Quite suddenly she had become the arc, and the point of her foil was traveling through the air precisely as the move suggests. She was an arrow.

And Yashim, like the fatalist he never was, had time only to bow his head.

T
WENTY
years had passed since Yashim first entered the palace school. He had been a young man already, four or five years older than his companions, those inexperienced, beardless youths whose pranks and chatter had tormented him in those first few months of indifference and despair. He was admitted as a favor: his father could think of no other way to heal the terrible damage that his enemies had wreaked upon his son. Perhaps, too, he was sent away because he so forcibly reminded the old governor of his wife, Yashim’s mother, the beautiful Elena.

Elena had been in the cave. She was dishonored, and then she was killed. His father’s enemies had reserved for Yashim, however, a yet more exquisite torture. The act itself lasted only seconds; it involved only pain. But the bitterness of that moment would mock him all his life.

Sportively gelded by his father’s enemies, Yashim had brought his
pain and his despair to the palace school in Istanbul, and they had meted out unremitting discipline, constant training of body and mind. Yashim entered a world ruled by the rod, a world of hard wooden beds, floggings, cold baths, and weekly expulsions. The old eunuch who governed them was a martinet, capricious, exacting, manipulative, mildly predatory. To the least talented he was unfailingly kind, before he kicked them out. To those who showed true promise he was a scourge. Yashim did everything well, but it was three years before they discovered what he did better than anyone. Before he made himself indispensable.

At first he had resisted the regimen, scarcely capable of believing in the possibility of redemption, and doubting that there was anything left in him to redeem, as though he had already died. His spirit was indeed dead. He was surly and slow. He didn’t sneer at the old teacher, or at the acres of cold calligraphy they were forced to ingest, or the games of wrestling and
gerit
. He was a cultivated young man, stronger, faster, more experienced than the others. He simply didn’t care.

The old eunuch started waking him early, an hour before the other boys, in the dead watch of the night. He woke him with a crack of his silver-tipped rod across the legs. “You have less time than the others. We must make more.” Sometimes he made him run. Sometimes he would recite the Koran. At night, when the other boys talked in whispers, Yashim fell asleep exhausted.

Yet slowly, without knowing why, he had found himself waking up. He learned to channel his agony of mind into the discipline imposed upon him by the old
lala
and stopped being afraid of doing well. Train the body and cultivate the mind, and the heart will follow: that was the old Ottoman precept.

Out of the myriad accomplishments he had been expected to attain, the recitals, the music and the languages, the rhetoric and algebra and deportment and logic, the horsemanship, archery,
gerit
, Yashim retained only fuzzy memories of the wrestling school.

Yet even that had perhaps been expected by the palace school. By study, after all, anyone could learn the Koran; anyone could learn to pull a bow with craft and effort. But for the men who were to direct the
energies of the empire mastery of all arts was not an end, only a beginning. To remember a thing was nothing. What counted was the power to use it.

Yashim’s knowledge of the Sand-Reckoner’s diagram was scarcely available to him in thought: it was ingrained at a level of instinct.

The woven bands of an endless knot belonged to the invisible machinery of his mind.

Twenty years on, in a palazzo in Venice, the instinct came alive.

W
HEN
the point of the foil, aimed at Yashim’s chest—sixte, in the necessary jargon—touched the bulbous floret of the turban that covered his head, it released Yashim from a burden he had been carrying since early morning and allowed him, at the same time, to slide forward, holding the muslin in his hand.

With his turban skewered by the foil, Yashim sidestepped and advanced, in three mildly unbalanced steps. As he moved he whirled the length of muslin around himself, as though he were striking a gong, and at his back the contessa’s blade, embedded in the folds, was swept from her hands.

It struck the floor with a metallic clang and skittered, spinning, until it thudded against the wall beneath the window.

Yashim did not watch it go, as Carla did. He used the opportunity to spring and grab the pimpled leather hilt of the nearest weapon, which happened to be a Turkish scimitar.

Only then, in an effort of self-preservation, did he glance around.

To his surprise the contessa was standing hand on hip, watching him.

She had made no effort to retrieve her foil.

The scimitar was firmly wired to the wall. Yashim reluctantly released his grip and dropped his hand.

The contessa smiled.

“I always seem to be meeting sabreurs,” she said.

“Sabreurs?”

She gestured to the scimitar. “You conquered eastern Europe with that. The ancestor of our saber. The Hungarians adopted it, as they adopted everything else you brought to the battlefield. Hussars. Dragoons. Military bands. We fight like with like, Yashim Pasha.”

“Yes,” Yashim said. He stooped to retrieve a length of turban. He wound it around his bleeding hand and tore it with his teeth. “Yes, of course.”