The Janissary Tree (40 page)

This
has the makings of a complete disaster, he thought fiercely--an opinion
confirmed on the spot, as the two soldiers ran up to block his way.

"The
way is closed! You must go back!" They were holding their guns across their
chests.

"I
have urgent business at the palace," Yashim snapped. "Let me through."

"Sorry.
These are our orders. No one is to come through here."

"The
seraskier. Where is he?"

The
nearest soldier looked uneasy. "Couldn't say. He'll be busy anyways."

The
second soldier frowned. "Who are you?"

Yashim
saw his chance. He jabbed a ringer.

"No.
Who are
you?
I want your rank and your number." He didn't know much
about military organization, but he hoped he sounded better than he felt. "The
seraskier is going to be very unhappy if he gets to hear about this."

The
soldiers glanced at one another.

"Well,
I don't know," one of them muttered.

"You
know who I am," Yashim asserted. He doubted that, very much, but there was an
angry edge to his voice that wasn't faked. "Yashim Togalu. The seraskier's
senior intelligence officer. My mission is urgent."

The
men shuffled their feet.

"Either
you take me to the Imperial Gate right now, or I will speak to your commanding
officer."

One
of the soldiers glanced around. The Imperial Gate loomed black and solid in the
darkness only a hundred yards away. The corps commander--he might be anywhere.

"Go
on, then," said the soldier quickly, with a jerk of his head. Yashim walked
past them.

After
he'd gone, one of the men let out a sigh of relief.

"At
least we didn't give our names," he remarked.

118

***********

YASHIM
felt the hairs prickling on the back of his neck as he picked his way among the
soldiers waiting patiently on the ground. At any minute he expected to be
challenged again, delayed again. A shout was all it would take.

There
it came. One shout, and another. He saw the men around him turn their heads.

But
they weren't looking at him.

Another
shout: "Fire!"

Yashim
swiveled, following the men's gaze. Over their heads, beyond the silhouette of
the great mosque, the sky had lightened Uke an early dawn. A dawn rising in the
west. A dawn rising upwind of the city of Istanbul. As he watched, he saw the
light go yellow and flicker.

For
a few seconds he stood transfixed.

Around
him the men strained uneasily, taking up their rifles, awaiting the order to
rise.

Yashim
broke into a run.

119

***********

The
flap in the lattice dropped open with a click as Preen and Mina reached the
corridor at the foot of the stairs, but they sailed past it without a word,
noses in the air. On the street they nudged each other and giggled.

For
ten minutes they walked eastward, looking for a chair to carry Preen. Preen
seemed to have recovered her poise on leaving the house, leaning only slightly
on Mina's arm, looking hungrily around as if she had been in bed for a month
instead of a couple of days. A few men threw them curious glances, but finally
she could bear it no longer.

"Where
are the handsome soldiers, then?" she demanded.

Mina
snorted. "And I thought you wanted to come out to get reassurance from your
friend! Really, Preen!" Then she looked around and shrugged. "There were dozens
of'em earlier, honest. I can't say I'm not a bit disappointed myself. Oh, where
are all the chairmen?"

"That's
all right," said Preen, smiling and patting her friend's arm. "I'm getting on
all right now."

There
was a buzz of excitement in the street behind them, like a sudden cooing of
pigeons, Preen thought. She turned her head to see a man running up the alley,
pumping his arms and flinging out his chest: he wore a beard and a high red cap
with a white pennant flying from its crown. In each fist he carried a flaming
torch.

"Fire!
Fire!" he bellowed suddenly. He swerved to the wall: there was a sound of
breaking glass, and the man lunged, reappeared and sped across the alley.

"Fire!"

He
was holding only one brand now, but there was a bottle in his other hand and he
was sloshing gobbets of liquid from it over a doorway. "Fire!"

"What
are you doing?" Preen screamed, breaking away from Mina, who had clapped a hand
to her mouth.

She
put out her hands without thinking and felt the bruise ripen in her shoulder.

The
man touched the brand to the door: as Preen reached him it sprouted a lovely
mass of bluish flames, and the man wheeled around, grinning wildly.

"Fire!"
he roared.

Preen
slapped him hard across the face with her good hand. The man jerked his head
back. For a moment he narrowed his eyes, and then he dodged down and sped past
her, up the street, before she could think what to do next.

Preen
threw an alarmed look at the doorway: the blue flames suddenly started to spit.
Some were turning yellow as they licked upward, snapping at the old wood.

"Mina!"

Mina
hadn't moved, but she was looking from Preen to the other side of the street,
where a shattered window was leaping in and out of view as the flames guttered
and shrank inside.

"Let's
go back!" Mina wailed.

Preen
acted on impulse. People were already running in the street, in both
directions. A few had stopped and were making an effort to smother the flames
creeping around the doorway. But even as they beat the fire with their cloaks,
flames had started to shoot from the window opposite.

"No!
Go on, to Yashim's!" she shouted. She glanced back: a light seemed to hover at
the corner of the alley, and then a wall of turbaned men with flickering
torches surged around the corner, blocking the alley. "Run!"

The
pain in her shoulder seemed to fade away as she began to run uphill. After a
moment she put out a hand and rested it on Mina's shoulder. Both dancers
stopped and kicked off their shoes, those two-inch pattens on which they liked
to totter into male company, and both, as women will, snatched them up and
carried them as they ran barefoot through the alleyways toward the Kara Davut.

They
didn't get so far. As they turned into the alley that led to the open space
beneath the Imperial Gate, they flung themselves into a packed crowd of men,
jostling and elbowing against each other. Almost immediately they were hemmed
in by other people running up behind them: Preen grabbed Mina by the arm and
spun her around. Together they fought their way back to the street corner and
took the turn to the right.

"We'll
go around behind the mosque," Preen whispered in Mina's ear.

They
slackened their pace, partly to avoid the people running up the alleyway toward
them, partly because among so many people Preen felt unwilling to surrender
herself to the panic that was already developing around them.

But
at the next crossroads they had to push and shove their way through the crowd,
and turning her head left, back west, Preen saw the flicker of fires smoking on
the hill above.

Beyond
the crowd the side street was also heaving with men, and women, too, some of
them leading children, trying to protect them from the constant buffeting of
people running back and forth. Everyone seemed to be shouting, screaming to
make way, bellowing about fire.

Two
men, running into each other from opposite directions, suddenly stopped
shouting and fell to exchanging blows.

A
man called Ertogrul Asian, who had just poked his head out from his doorway,
got a smack on his ear from a wooden box carried by a man dodging down the
alley close to the wall.

A
printer who ran into the street was carried away by a tide of people racing for
the next corner.

A
little boy in a nightshirt, who would one day sit as a deputy in the Kemalist
National Assembly and spend an evening drinking raid with an air ace called Baron
von Richthofen, had his little hand popped out of his mother's grip and was
scooped up and passed overhead by total strangers for several minutes before he
found himself being pressed to her bosom again, an experience he could later
recall perfectly from other people's memories.

Alexandra
Stanopolis, a Greek girl of marriageable age, had her bottom pinched sixteen
times and hoarded the secret to her death in Trabzon fifty-three years later,
when she finally revealed it to her daughter-in-law, who herself died in New
York City.

A
notorious miser known as Yilderim, the Thunderbolt, lost a wooden chest he was
carrying to a cheerful thief who later found it contained nothing but a silk
scarf with a very tight knot in it; the miser died later in an asylum and the
thief in Sevastopol, of dysentery, still wearing the knotted scarf.

Several
hundred worshippers at the great mosque, formerly the church of Hagia Sophia,
found themselves trapped inside the building and had to be escorted in batches
by armed troops who led them to an alleyway beneath the Seraglio and told them
to find their own way home. Two of the worshippers, swathed in their ostlers'
cloaks and hiding their frightened faces underneath their hoods, quailed at the
soldiers' appearance and in the melee around the great door followed instead a
notorious army deserter into a former side chapel of the cathedral, where they
sank down behind a column and communicated in nervous glances. Their names,
unusual for Muslims, were Ben Fizerly and Frank Compston.

And
all the while, west of the city, the fires raged and raced toward each other
like members of a scattered regiment, plunging and burning through the
obstacles that lay between them. So that Stanislaw Palewski, Polish ambassador
to the Sublime Porte, with a kitchen knife in one hand and an eye on the
window, retrieved the golden threaded cord to his dressing gown and without a
word to the man stirring on the carpet beat a hasty retreat to Pera, across the
Golden Horn.

In
times of crisis, he told himself, foreign representatives needed to make
themselves available at their embassies.

120

***********

As
Yashim ran across the First Court of the Seraglio, he noticed that it was
almost completely deserted: with the New Guard installed in the square and
preventing anyone from crossing, it was something he might have expected. The
few men who remained seemed to have gathered beneath the great plane tree. The
Janissary Tree. Yashim shot them a nervous glance as he scuttled over the
cobbled walk, his brown cloak billowing behind him.

At
the Ortakapi Gate, five halberdiers of the selamlik, not wearing curls, stood
forward in a body to challenge him. Two of them held pikes in their hands; the
others were armed only with the dagger, but their cloaks were pinned back and
they stood legs akimbo with their right hands cradling the hilts stuffed into
their pantaloons.

"Bear
up, men!" Yashim cried as he stepped into the fight. "Yashim Togalu, on the
sultan's service!"

They
stepped warily aside to let him pass.

The
wind that had been whipping his cloak against his legs was still: for a moment
he marveled at the great space that opened up in front of him before he plunged
down an alley of cypress, struck by the still blackness of the trees, by the
darkness that enveloped him almost at the center of Ottoman power. Only the
thin spark of a lamp at the far end of the tunnel prevented him from succumbing
to the frightening atmosphere of a wood at night.

He
burst out of the alley and crossed swiftly to the portico of the last, most numinous
gate of all the gates that defined the power of the Sublime Porte: the Porte
del" Felicita, the Gateway of Happiness, which led from the workaday Second
Court where viziers, scribes, archivists, ambassadors kicked their heels or
rapped out the orders that controlled the lives of men from the Red Sea to the
Danube. Beyond it lay the sacred precincts of the Third Court, where one
enormous family led an existence made precious by the presence of the sultan,
the shah-in-shah, God's very representative on Earth.

The
representative's doors, however, were firmly closed.

His
fist made no echo on the iron-studded gates: he might have been beating stone. Exasperated,
he took a few steps back and looked upward. The huge eaves jutted forward ten
feet or more, in classical Ottoman style. He ran his eyes along the walls. The
outer walls were built up with the imperial kitchens, a long series of domes,
like bowls stacked on a shelf: there was no way through there. He turned to the
left and began to walk quickly toward the archives.

No
one challenged him as he placed his hand on the inlaid doors and pushed. The
door creaked back, and he stepped into the vestibule. The door ahead stood
slightly ajar, and in a minute Yashim was back in the familiar dark archive
room.