The Janissary Tree (4 page)

Outside,
the light, such as it was, was fading; inside, it had never, apparently, risen.
Palewski wondered briefly whether sunlight had penetrated to this spot at all
in the past fifteen hundred years: the sunken doorcase, he had long suspected,
was early Byzantine work, and he had no reason to imagine that the dark wooden
handrail, to which he was now clinging as he swung blindly but unfalteringly
upstairs, was anything but Byzantine itself, like the stone of the house, and
the window embrasures, and the very probably Roman vaulting overhead.

At
the head of the stairs he paused to catch his breath and analyze the peculiar
mixture of fragrances seeping through the lighted crack at the foot of the door
in front of him.

Yashim
the Eunuch and Ambassador Palewski were unlikely friends, but they were firm
ones. "We are two halves, who together become whole, you and I," Palewski had
once declared, after soaking up more vodka than would have been good for him
were it not for the fact, which he sternly upheld, that only the bitter herb it
contained could keep him sane and alive. "I am an ambassador without a country
and you--a man without testicles." Yashim had considered this remark, before
pointing out that Palewski might, at a pinch, get his country back, but the
Polish ambassador had waved him away with a loud outbreak of sobs. "About as
likely as you growing balls, I'm afraid. Never. Never. The bastards!" Soon
after that he had fallen asleep, and Yashim had employed a porter to carry him
home on his back.

The
impoverished diplomat sniffed the air and adopted a look of cunning sweetness
that was entirely for his own benefit. The first of the smells was onion; also
chicken, that he could tell. He recognized the dark aroma of cinnamon, but
there was something else he found it hard to identify, pungent and fruity. He
sniffed again, screwing his eyes shut.

Without
further hesitation or ceremony he wrenched open the door and bounded into the
room. "Yashim! Yashim! You raise our souls from the gates of hell! Acem
Yahnisi, if I'm not mistaken--so like the Persian fesinjan. Chicken, walnuts,
and the juice of the pomegranate!" he declared.

Yashim,
who had not heard him come up, turned in astonishment. Palewski saw his face
fall.

"Come,
come, young man, I ate this dish before you were weaned. Tonight, let us give
it in all sincerity a new and appropriate name: The ambassador was out of
humor, and now is delighted! How's that?"

He
presented the bottles to his host. "Still cold, you feel! Marvelous! One day I
shall take a light and go down into that cellar and find out where the icy
water comes from. It may be a Roman cistern. I shouldn't be surprised. What a
find!"

He
rubbed his hands together while Yashim, smiling, handed him a glass of vodka. They
stood for a moment looking at one another, then tossed back their heads
simultaneously, and drank. Palewski dived on the mussels.

It
was going to be a long evening. It
was
a long evening. By the hour of
the dawn prayer, Yashim was aware he had only nine days left.

7

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

THE
Street of the Tinsmiths ran slightly above and to the west of the Mosque of
Rustem Pasha, itself half buried in the alleys and crooked passages that
surround the southern entrances of the Grand Bazaar. Like most of the artisans'
quarters, it consisted of a narrow funnel of open workshops, each no bigger
than a very big closet, where the smiths worked with forge, bellows, and
hammers over the standard articles of their trade: tin pots, little kettles,
weakly hinged or plainly lidded boxes of every size and shape, from the tiny round
tins used for storing kohl and tiger balm to banded trunks for sailors and the
linen trade. They made knives and forks; they made badges and insignia,
spectacle frames and ferrules for walking sticks. Every one of them worked at a
specialism, rarely if ever straying from, say, the remorseless production of
amulets designed to contain a paper inscribed with the ninety-nine names of God
to, for example, the perpetual manufacture of pin boxes. These were guild
rules, laid down hundreds of years before by the market judges and the sultan
himself, and they were broken only under very special circumstances.

Would
the manufacture of an enormous cauldron, Yashim wondered, constitute a special
circumstance?

The
tin market was not a place for the crowds who infested some of the other
industrious highways of Istanbul: the food markets, the spice bazaars, the
makers of shoes. Even the Street of the Goldsmiths was busier. So Yashim walked
along easily in the middle of the street and attracted few glances. Once the
smiths had satisfied themselves that he was a stranger, they thought no more
about him: they hardly cared to notice if he was rich, poor, fat, or thin, for
no man alive was likely to bring them any greater profit than the modest profit
they enjoyed by the terms of their guild membership. No one was going to stop
by and offer to buy--at a wild price-- any of their humdrum manufactures. The
regulations of the guild were fixed: there was a quality, and a price, neither
more nor less.

Yashim
knew all this. For the moment he merely watched. Most of the smiths worked in
the opening of their shops, closest to the light and air and away from the
smoky furnaces that blazed in the background. From here, tapping incessantly
with their hammers, they slowly pushed out a succession of little products. He
glanced up: the usual arrangement of latticed windows overhead advertised the
dwelling places of the men, their wives, and their children. The apprentices,
Yashim thought, would sleep in the shops.

He
took a turn into a courtyard and looked back. Up an alley thick with rubbish,
the upper stories were approached by rickety staircases leading, in every case,
to a mean doorway hung with a faded strip of carpet or a blanket cut into
ribbons against the flies. Which left, he imagined, the flat roofs where the
women could go in the day to get some air, unobserved. And at night, who used
those roofs? Enough people, he supposed: you could never be sure. With a shrug
he dismissed a faint idea and returned his inspection to the courtyard.

The
sound of hammers beating against the tin was fainter here: it broke upon the
courtyard like the musical note of frogs tinkling in a nearby lake. Few smiths
were working in the alcoves of the courtyard itself: it served, instead, as a
caravanserai where tin merchants brought the raw materials of the trade and
sold it, at need, to the smiths outside. Here were piled thick sheets of tin in
apparently random shapes, and their owners sat among them on low stools in
quiet contrast to the arrhythmic tintinnabulation of the street beyond, sipping
tea and telling their beads. Now and again one of them would make a sale; the
tinsmith cut the sheet, the tin merchant weighed it out, and the smith carried
it away.

Yashim
wandered out for a last look. The bigger objects--lanterns, in the main, and
trunks--were being assembled on the ground outside the shops. But Yashim was
satisfied that nowhere, either inside or out, was there a place where a
cauldron with a base big enough to fit a man could be discreetly built.

Someone,
he thought, would have seen.

And
that person, he thought, would have been legitimately puzzled. Why, in the name
of all things holy, should anyone want to make a cauldron out of tin?

Of
such a size, too! The biggest cauldron anyone had seen since-- when?

Yashim
froze. All around him the tinsmiths beat out their meaningless birdlike paean
to industry and craftsmanship, but he no longer heard. He knew, in a flash,
when that moment had been.

Ten
years before. The night of June 15,1826.

8

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

YASHIM
felt conspicuous as soon as the thought flashed upon him. It was as if the
knowledge had made him glow.

In
a nearby cafe, the proprietor brought him a coffee while Yashim looked with
unseeing eyes down the street. The noise of the tinsmiths insistently hammering
had melded with a memory of that terrifying sound, ten years ago, of the
Janissaries battering on their upturned cauldrons. It was an age-old signal
that nobody in the palace, or in the streets, or in their homes in the city
could misunderstand. It was the mother of all dins, and it hadn't meant that
the Janissaries wanted more food.

It
meant that they wanted blood.

Up
through the centuries that driving and sinisterly insistent sound of the
Janissaries beating on their cauldrons had been the prelude to death in the
streets, men torn apart, the sacrifice of princes. Had it always been so?
Yashim knew well what the Janissaries had achieved. Each man was selected from
a levy of the empire's toughest, likeliest, most wide-awake Christian boys. Brought
to Istanbul, renouncing the faith of the Balkan peasants who had borne them,
swearing allegiance as slaves to the sultan mounted at their head, they became
a corps. A terrifying fighting machine that the Ottoman sultans had unleashed
against their enemies in Europe.

If
the Ottoman Empire inspired fear throughout the known world, it was the
Janissaries who carried the fear to the throats of the unbelievers. The
conquest of Sofia and Belgrade. Istanbul itself, wrested from the Greeks in
1453. The Arab peninsula and, with it, the Holy Cities. Mohacs, 1526, when the
flower of Hungarian knighthood was cut down in the saddle and Suleiman the
Magnificent led his men to Buda, and on, fleetingly, to the gates of Vienna. Rhodes
and Cyprus, Egypt and the Sahara. Why, the Janissaries had even landed in
France in 1566 and spent a year in Toulon.

Until--who
could say why?--the victories dried up. The terms of engagement changed. The
Janissaries sought permission to marry. They petitioned for the right to take
up trades when there was no fighting, to feed their families. They enrolled
their sons into the corps, and the corps grew reluctant to fight. They were
still dangerous: loaded with privilege, they lorded it over the common people
of the city. Designed to die fighting at the lonely borders of an
ever-expanding empire, they enjoyed all the license and immunity that the
people and the sultan could bestow on men who would soon be martyrs. But they
no longer sought to martyr themselves. The men who had been sent to terrify
Europe made a simple discovery: it was easier--and far less dangerous--to
terrorize at home.

The
palace made efforts to reason with them, efforts to discipline them. In 1618,
Sultan Osman tried to overturn them: they had him killed, as Yashim knew, by
the compression of his testicles, a mode of execution that left no traces on
the body. Special man, special death. It was considered fitting for a member of
the imperial family. Later still, in 1635, Murad IV rounded up thirty thousand
Janissaries and marched them to their deaths in Persia. But the corps survived.

And
slowly, painfully, the Ottomans had come to realize that they could no longer
properly defend themselves. Unreliable as they were, the Janissaries still
insisted on being the supreme military power: they had become unassailable. The
common people were afraid of them. In trade, they exploited their privileges to
become dangerous rivals. Their behavior was threatening and insolent, as they
swaggered through the city streets, fully armed and wielding sticks, uttering
loutish blasphemies. Outside the Topkapi Palace, between Aya Sofia and the Blue
Mosque, lay an open space called the Atmeidan, the ancient Hippodrome of the
Byzantines. In it grew a huge plane tree to which the Janissaries always
rallied at the first sign of any trouble, for the blotched and peeling trunk of
the Janissary Tree stood at the center of their world; as the palace lay at the
center of Ottoman government, and Aya Sofia at the heart of religious faith. Beneath
its branches the Janissaries divulged their grievances and secrets, and plotted
mutinies. From the swaying limbs of the tree, too, they hanged the bodies of
men who had displeased them: ministers, viziers, and court officials sacrificed
to their bloodlust by a terrified succession of weak and vacillating sultans.

Meanwhile,
lands conquered by the sultan's armies in the name of Islam were being lost to
the infidels: Hungary, Serbia, the Crimea. In Egypt, Ali Pasha the Albanian
built on the experience of the Napoleonic invasion to train the fellahin as
soldiers, Western-style. And when Greece disappeared, from the very heartland
of an empire where every other man was Greek by speech, it was the final blow. The
Egyptians had held the fort for a while: they were to be commended. They had drill
and discipline; they had tactics and modern guns. The sultan read the message
and began to train his own, Egyptian-style force: the seraskier's New Guard.

That
was ten years ago. The sultan issued orders that the Janissaries should adopt
the Western style of the New Guard, knowing that they would be provoked and
affronted. And the Janissaries had rebelled on cue. Caring only for their own
privileges, they turned on the palace and the fledgling New Guards. But they
had grown stupid as well as lazy. They were loathed by the people. The sultan
had made ready. When the Janissaries overturned their cauldrons on the night of
Thursday, June 15, it took a day to accomplish by modern means what no one had
managed to achieve in three hundred years. By the night of the 16th, efficient
modern gunnery had reduced their mutinous barracks to a smoldering ruin. Thousands
were already dead: the rest, fleeing for their lives, died in the city streets,
in the forests outside the walls, in the holes and lairs they crept into to
survive.