The Janissary Tree (11 page)

So
the Janissary Tree remained. Yashim leaned his forehead against the peeling
bark and wondered if it was 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 was 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;
Scutari, 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, which 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 burnooses closely around 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
modeled 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
that took up space in the center of the room were invisible in the gloom. Down
one side of the room ran a low reading bench, with a line of cushions, and far
away, almost lost in the echoing darkness, was a very small point of fight 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 exaggerated sway of his walk,
Yashim realized, 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 favor 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.

"Shh!"
He raised one hand to his lips and fanned the air with the other. His eyes
rolled from side to side, pantomiming caution. Yashim grinned. At least he knew
something about the Auspicious Event.

"Do
you want names? Or only numbers?"

Yashim
was surprised.

"Numbers."

"You'll
want the digest, then. Don't go away."

He
turned and teetered away into the darkness. At length, Yashim saw the distant
candle begin to move, swaying a little until it disappeared. Behind the stacks,
he supposed.

Yashim
did not know the archive well, just well enough to understand that its
organization was comprehensive and inspired. If a vizier at the divan, or
council meeting, needed a document or reference, no matter how remote in time
or obscure by nature, the archivists would be able to locate it in a matter of
minutes. Four or five centuries of Ottoman history were preserved in here:
orders, letters, census returns, tax liabilities, proclamations from the throne
and petitions running the other way, details of employment, promotion and
demotion, biographies of the more exalted officials, details of expenses,
campaign maps, governor's reports--all going back to the fourteenth century,
when the Ottomans first expanded out of Anatolia across the Dardanelles, into
Europe.

He
heard footsteps returning. The candle and its willowy bearer appeared out of
the darkness. Apart from the candle, Ibou's hands were empty.

"No
luck?" Yashim could not keep a trace of condescension out of his voice.

"Mmm-mmm,"
the young man hummed. "Let's just take a look."

He
turned up a series of wall lights above the reading bench and knelt on a
cushion. Above the bench itself ran a shelf containing nothing but tall, chunky
ledgers with green spines, one of which the boy pulled down with a thud and
opened on the bench. The thick pages crackled as he turned them over, humming
quietly to himself. Eventually he ran his finger down a column on the page and
stopped.

"Got
it now?"

"We'll
get there eventually," Ibou said. He closed the ledger with a heavy
whump!
and lifted it lightly back into place. Then he sauntered over to a set of
drawers built into the wall near the door and pulled one out. From it, he
selected a card.

"Oh."
He looked at Yashim: it was a look of sadness. "Out," he said. "Not you. You're
nice. I mean the records you wanted."

"Out?
To whom?"

"Tsk,
tsk. That's not for me to say."

Ibou
waved the little card in front of his face as if he were opening and shutting a
fan, with a flick of the wrist.

"No.
No, of course not." Yashim frowned. "I was hoping, though--"

"Yes?"

"I
wondered if you could possibly tell me what revenue the beylic of Varna derived
from--from mining rights in the 1670s."

Ibou
put his lips together and blew. He looked, thought Yashim, as if he were about
to give the figures from memory.

"Any
particular year? Or just the whole decade?"

"Sixteen
seventy-seven."

"One
moment, please."

He
popped the card facedown on the open drawer, picked up the candle, and in a
moment had vanished behind the stacks. Yashim stepped forward, picked up the
card and read:

Janissary
rolls; 7-3-8-114; digest: fig., 1825.

By
command.

He
put back the card, puzzled.

A
minute later, as he and Ibou pored over a thick roll of yellowing parchment
that smelled powerfully of sheep skin and on which, to his infinite lack of
interest, various sums and comments were recorded relative to the Varna beylic
for the year 1677, he popped the question.

"What
does "By command' mean, Ibou? The sultan?"

Ibou
frowned. "Have you been peeping?"

Yashim
grinned. "It's just a phrase I've heard, somewhere."

"I
see." Ibou's eyes narrowed for a moment. "Don't touch the scroll, please. Well,
it could mean the sultan. But it probably doesn't. It certainly won't mean, for
instance, the halberdiers of the tresses, or the gardeners, or any of the
cooks. Obviously we'd put them in, by their rank and place."

"Then
who?"

Ibou
gestured slyly to the parchment roll. "Are you interested in this, or is it
just an excuse to come and chat?"

"It's
just an excuse. Who?"

The
archivist carefully rolled up the parchment. He tied it again with a length of
purple ribbon and picked it up.

"Just
let me set everything in order."

Yashim
chuckled to himself as he watched the boy prowling, loose limbed and
insufferably fluid, over to the drawers. He tucked the card back into its
place, ran the drawer shut with his long fingers, and disappeared into the
stacks with the candle. God help the older men! He'd never known such coquetry.
But he was also impressed. Ibou looked and sounded like a bit of African fluff,
but he certainly knew his way around. And not just among the dusty records,
either, as he could see.

He
came back very quickly.

"By
command," Yashim prompted.

"The
imperial household. The sultan, his family, his chief officers."

"The
imperial women?"

"Of
course. All the sultan's family. Not their slaves, mind you."

"By
command." Yashim mused. "Ibou, who do you think wanted the book?"

"I
don't know." He frowned. "Could it be--" He shrugged, gave up.

"Who?
Who are you thinking of?"

The
archivist flipped his hand dismissively. "No one. Nothing. I don't know what I
was going to say."

Yashim
decided to let it pass.

"I
wonder, though, where I could find out what I want to know."

Ibou
cocked his head and gazed at one of the lamps on the wall.

"Ask
one of the foreign embassies. I shouldn't be surprised."

Yashim
began to smile at the sally. But why not? he wondered. It was exactly the sort
of information they would be likely to have.

He
looked curiously at Ibou. But Ibou had raised the back of his hand to his chin
and was gazing, innocently, at the lamp.

27

****************

"DAMN!"
Preen hadn't thought of money.

Yorg
the Pimp thought of nothing else.

"What,
kdfek
dancer, are we just sitting around together having a drink? Swapping
tales? No. You come across and ask me for some information. Something you want,
perhaps I have. A trade."

He
gave her a crooked smile and tapped his head. "My shop."

To
Preen, it looked as though Yorg's information was stored elsewhere: in his
hump. Poisonous stuff, and he was full of it.

"What
do you want?" she asked.

Yorg's
eyes clicked past her like a lizard's. "You've got friends, I see."