The Janissary Tree (18 page)

The
seraskier felt that he had made an effort to clarify the situation. Rumor was
an insidious force. It had this in common with the passion for war: it could be,
and needed to be, controlled.

Drill
the men. Straighten the rumor. Keep the initiative and leave the enemy
guessing. The eunuch suspected some kind of Janissary plot, but the seraskier
had prudently decided to keep his terms vague. The implication was there, of
course, between the lines.

A
textbook approach.

The
seraskier stood up and walked to the darkened window. From here he could look
down on the city it was his duty to defend. He sighed. In daylight he knew it
as an impossible jumble of roofs and minarets and domes, concealing myriad
crooked streets and twining alleyways. Now specks of lamplight blended in the
dark, softly glowing here and there, like marshlight shimmering over a
murderous swamp.

He
curled his fingers around the hem of his jacket and gave it a smart tug.

43

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

YASHIM'S
first waking thought was that he'd left a pan on the coals. He shot from the
divan and stood unsteadily in the kitchen, rocking on his heels. He looked
around in bewilderment. Everything was as it should be: the stove banked low,
its hot plate barely warm; a stack of dirty pans and crockery; the blocks and
knives. But he smelled burning.

From
outside there rose a confused medley of cries and crashes. He glanced through
the open window. The sky was lit with a glow like the early dawn, and as he
watched, an entire roofscape was suddenly picked out in silhouette by a huge
roar of flame that shot upward into the sky and subsided in a trail of sparks. It
was, he judged, barely one hundred yards away: one, maybe two streets off. He
could hear the crack of burning timber and smell the ashes in the air.

An
hour, he thought. I give it an hour.

He
looked around his little apartment. The books arranged on the shelves. The
Anatolian carpets on the floor.

"Ali,
by the jewels!"

The
blaze had broken out in an alleyway that opened out into the Kara Davut. The
mouth of the alley was blocked by a throng of eager sightseers, anxious
householders, many of them bareheaded, and women in every stage of dishabille,
though every one of them contrived to cover her nose and lips with a scrap of
cloth. One woman, he noticed, had yanked up her pajama jacket, exposing a
ripple of flesh around her belly while concealing her face. They were all
staring at the fire.

Yashim
looked around. In the Kara Davut, people were emerging from their houses. A man
Yashim recognized as the baker was urging them to go back and fetch their
buckets. He stood on a step beside the fountain at the head of the street,
gesticulating. Yashim suddenly understood.

"Get
these women out of here," he shouted, prodding the men next to him. "We need a
line!"

He
jostled the men: the spell that had fallen over them was broken. Some of them
woke up to the sight of their women, half dressed.

"Take
them over to the cafe," Yashim suggested.

He
intercepted a young man running forward with a bucket. "Give me that--get
another!" He swung the bucket to a man standing nearby. "Form a chain--take this
and pass it on!"

The
man seized the bucket and swung it forward, into a pair of waiting hands. Another
boy ran up to Yashim with a loaded bucket. The back of the line needed
attention, Yashim realized. "You, stay here. Pass that bucket and be ready to
take another."

He
darted back, seizing bystanders and hustling them into position a few feet
apart. Some professional water carriers were already in attendance, as their
duties required. More buckets were being produced; as fast as they came, the
baker swung them through the fountain and passed them down. Yashim ran along
the chain, checking for gaps, and then on to the head of the line to make sure
that empty buckets were being returned. For the first time he found himself in
the alley.

The
flames were gusting along the narrow street: as Yashim looked, a window burst
in a shower of sparks and a long tongue of flame shot out and licked into the
eaves of the neighboring house. The flame retreated, but in a moment it had
burst out again, tunneled to its neighbor by the wind that was already being
drawn like a bellow's blast into the narrow opening of the alley. Yashim,
standing several paces back, could feel the wind ruffling his hair even as he
felt the heat on the side of his face. He felt powerless. Suddenly he
remembered what had to be done.

"A
break! A break!" He darted into the nearest doorway and found a whole family
working the well in the backyard. "We must make a break--not here, across the
street." Nobody paid him the slightest attention: they were all busy fetching
water, sloshing it onto the facade of their house, which was already beginning
to scorch and blister in the heat. "An ax! Give me an ax!"

The
man of the house nodded to a woodpile in the corner of the yard. With a jerk,
Yashim flipped the broad-headed splitting ax out of the log where it had been
buried and dashed out into the street.

"A
break!" he yelled, brandishing the ax. Several bystanders stared at him. He
turned on them. "Get your tools, people. We've got to take down this house."

Without
waiting for their reaction, he whirled his body around with a shout and
embedded the ax in the plaster infill. A piece the size of a hand fell away. He
struck again: laths splintered and gave way. In a few minutes he had cleared a
space large enough to wield an ax against the upright timbers. By now a few
others had joined him: two men he sent through the house to check that there
was no one still inside, and then to set to on the other side. He paused to
catch his breath, leaning on the ax. The four men at work were stripped to the
waist, the approaching firelight reflected in vivid glints in the sweat on
their skin.

"Janissary
work," said one through gritted teeth, as he chopped with the flat of his ax in
short, savage blows against a tenon pin. The wooden pin was growing mashed at
the end; the man made a few swift passes and cut it again, and with a heave on
the flat of his ax sent it loose out the other side. Yashim gripped the pin and
jerked it out.

The
building gave a lurch. Several panels of plaster from the upper story crashed
down at their feet and exploded into a powder that was immediately whipped away
by the rush of hot wind flaring down the street. Yashim glanced back. Two
houses along, the fire was beginning to take hold. Sparks were flying past: one
of the men he'd sent to the back of the house stuck his head out through a pair
of uprights leaning at a drunken angle to the ground and hurriedly withdrew it.
Everyone laughed.

"They'll
be out in a moment. And none too soon," a man said. They scented victory: their
mood had changed.

Sure
enough, the two men appeared suddenly on the other side of the frame and darted
out through the collapsed doorway.

"To
think we used to get the Janissaries from the Beyazidiye Pound to do this for
us!"

They
were enjoying themselves now. A slithering crash from overhead told them that
the joists had sprung: the planking of the upper floor leaned at an angle that
was already putting pressure on the roof supports, forcing them up.

"It's
going wide!" Yashim bellowed. It was true: the whole frame of the house was
sagging toward them, spinning around. "Watch out!" Yashim backed, darted
forward down the street away from the fire. The others followed. At twenty
yards they stopped to watch the whole frame of the house take a sudden lurch
into the street like a drunk wheeling from the wall. The roof tiles seemed to
hang suspended in the air until, with a crash that could be heard over the
crackling of the fire and the shouts from the upper end of the street, the
building fell with a sudden
whump!
and a scouring plume of dust and
fragments picked up by the wind billowed toward them like an angry djinn.

Yashim
hit the ground, cradling his head in his arms: it was like a desert sandstorm
flying overhead. Someone nearby screamed. He pressed his face into the dirt,
even as the storm of debris began to ebb. A few pieces of broken tile skittered
along the ground and harmlessly struck his arms.

Cautiously
he peered up over the crook of his elbow. Farther along the street the fire
still raged: it had caught up with them now, and the shutters of the last house
standing blew open with a force that sent them rocking wildly on their hinges. But
the flames that shot from the casements darted out in vain. Where there had
been wood and eaves, there was only a black gap and few stray timbers dangling
from a skinny beam.

Someone
stooped and helped him to his feet. He recognized the man with the ax: they
shook hands and then, because the excitement had been intense and the labor was
won, they embraced, three times, shoulder to shoulder.

"You
did us a favor, my friend," the other man said. He looked like a ghost, his
face blanched by the dust. "Murad Eslek, me."

Yashim
grinned. "Yashim Togalu." Not Yashim the Eunuch. "At the Sign of the Stag, Kara
Davut." And then, because it was true, he added, "The debt is all mine."

The
note of cultivation in his voice caught the man by surprise.

"I'm
sorry, efendi. In the dark--all this dust--I did not--"

"Forget
it, friend. We are all one in the sight of God."

Murad
Eslek grinned and gave Yashim the thumbs-up.

44

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

YASHIMstirred
his coffee mechanically, trying to identify what still bothered him about the
night's events.

Not
the fire itself. Fires were always breaking out in Istanbul--though it had been
a close thing. What if he had left the window shut--would the smell of smoke
have reached him in time? He might have gone on sleeping, oblivious of the
jagged screen of flame dancing its way toward his street: roused when it was
already too late, perhaps, the stairwell filled with rolling clouds of black
smoke, the windows shattering in the heat...

He
thought of the crowd he'd seen that morning, the women and children standing
dazed in the street. Dragged from their sleep. By God's mercy they, too, had
woken up in time.

A
phrase of the Karagozi poem leaped into his mind.
Wake them
.

The
spoon stopped moving in the cup.

There
was something else. Something a man had said.

Janissary
work.
To think we used to get the Janissaries from the Beyazidiye Pound to
do this for us.

A
Janissary fire brigade had been stationed close to the Beyazit Mosque, the
first and perhaps, in its way, the greatest of the mighty mosques of the
sultans: for even Sinan Pasha, the master architect whose sublime Suleymaniye
surpassed Aya Sofia, acknowledged that the Beyazit Mosque had shown the way. But
it wasn't the mosque that mattered: it was its position. For the Beyazit Mosque
straddled the spine of the hill above the Grand Bazaar, one of the highest
points in Stamboul.

A
unique vantage point. So unique, in fact, that it was selected as the site of
the tallest and perhaps the ugliest building in the empire: the Fire Tower that
bore its name. The bag of bones had been discovered only yards away.

And
there had been another Janissary watch, across the city, operated from the
Galata Tower. The Galata Fire Tower. High over the drain that held the
nauseating corpse of the second cadet.

And
at the Janissaries' old center of operations, the old barracks now razed and
replaced with the imperial stables, there'd been a tower that Yashim could
still vaguely recall.

Palewski
had suggested that there could be a pattern to explain the distribution of the
bodies--so if each body had been placed in the vicinity of an old fire station,
a Janissary fire watch, a tower... Yashim probed the idea for a moment.

Fire
had always been the Janissaries' special responsibility. It had become their
weapon, too. People were roused from their beds by the firemen's tocsin.
Wake
them.

Where,
then, had the other fire station been? There were to be four corpses. There had
to be four fire stations. Four towers.

Perhaps,
Yashim thought fiercely, he might still be in time.

45

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

The
kislar agha had the voice of a child, the body of a retired wrestler, and he
weighed more than 250 pounds. No one could have guessed his age, and even he
was not completely sure when he had crawled from his mother's womb beneath the
African sky. A few pounds of unwanted life. Another mouth to feed. His face was
covered in dark wrinkles, but his hands were smooth and dark like the hands of
a young woman.

It
was a young woman he was dealing with now.

In
one of those smooth hands he held a silver ring. In the other, the girl's jaw.