The Janissary Tree (5 page)

It
was a trauma, Yashim reflected, from which the empire still waited to recover. Certain
people might never recover at all.

9

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

A
man with grime up to his elbows and a leather apron was working on a lantern in
the street outside his shop. With a pair of tongs he crimped the tin sheets,
fixing them together with a speed and dexterity Yashim was content simply to
admire, until the man looked up questioningly.

"I've
got something slightly unusual I'd like a price for," Yashim explained. "You
seem to make large objects."

The
man grunted in agreement. "What is it you want, efendi?"

"A
cauldron. A very big cauldron--as tall as me, on legs. Can you do it?"

The
man straightened up and pulled his hand over the back of his neck, wincing.

"Funny
time of year for a big cauldron," he remarked.

Yashim's
eyes widened. "You can do it? You've done it before?"

The
smith's answer took him by surprise. "Do it every year or so. Big tin cauldrons
for the Soup Makers' Guild. They use them for the city procession."

Of
course! Why hadn't he thought of that? Every year, when the guilds-men process
through the streets to the Aya Sofia, each guild drags a juggernaut loaded with
the implements of their craft. The guild of barbers have a huge pair of
scissors and offer free haircuts to the crowd. The fishmongers make their float
like a ship and stand casting nets and hauling on the ropes. The bakers set up
an oven and toss hot rolls to the people. And the soup makers: huge black
cauldrons of fresh soup, which they ladle out into clay pannikins and
distribute to the crowd as they go along. Carnival.

"But
a tin cauldron wouldn't take the heat or the weight," Yashim objected.

The
smith laughed.

"They're
not real! The whole float would collapse if they were real. You don't think,
efendi, the barber cuts people's hair with that giant pair of scissors? They
put a smaller pot of soup inside the tin cauldron and just make believe. It's
for a laugh."

Yashim
felt like a dim-witted child.

"Have
you made one of those cauldrons recently? Out of season, even?"

"We
make the cauldrons when the guild orders them. The rest of the year, well"--he
spat on his hands and picked up the tongs--"it's just lanterns and such. The
cauldrons get a bit battered and they split, so we make more at the right time.
If you're looking for one, I'd talk to the soup men's guild if I were you." He
looked at Yashim and creases of amusement showed around his eyes. "You're not
the mullah Nasreddin, are you?"

"No,
I am not the mullah." Yashim laughed.

"Sounds
like some kind of prank, anyway. If you'll excuse me..."

10

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

THE
girl lay on the bed in her vestal finery, her eyes closed. Her hair was
elaborately braided, fastened with a malachite clasp. Perhaps it was the kohl,
but her eyes seemed very dark, while the skin of her beautiful face seemed
almost to glitter in the slatted sunlight that filtered through the shutters of
the room. Heavy tassels of gold thread hung from the gauze scarf she wore
around her breasts, and her long legs were encased in pantaloons of a satin
muslin so fine it was as though she were naked. A small golden slipper dangled
from the toe of her left foot.

The
tongue that protruded slightly between her rouged lips suggested that she
needed more than a kiss to waken her now.

Yashim
bent over and examined the girl's neck. Two black bruises on either side of her
throat. The pressure had been severe, and she'd been killed from in front: she
would have seen the killer's face before she died.

He
glanced down at the girl's body and felt a pang of pity. So flawless: death had
made her like a jewel, lustrous and cold, her beauty beyond all power of touch.
And, he thought sadly, I will die like her: a virgin. More mangled, in my case.
He quickly blocked the thoughts: years ago they had maddened and tormented him,
but he had learned to control them. They were his thoughts, his desires, and so
he could sheath them like a sword. He was alive. That was good.

His
eyes traveled over her skin. The pallor of death had left it like cold white
butter. He almost missed the tiny suggestion that she was not, after all,
absolutely without a flaw. Around the middle finger of her right hand he
spotted the very slight trace of a narrow band where the skin had been
squeezed. She had worn a ring; she was not wearing it now.

He
raised his head. Something in the atmosphere of the room had changed--a slight
shift in pressure, perhaps, a shift in the balance of the living to the dead. He
turned quickly and scanned the room: hangings, columns, plenty of places for
someone else to hide. Someone who had already killed?

Out
of the shadows a woman glided forward, her head slightly cocked to one side,
her hands outstretched.

"Yashim,
cheri! Tu te souviens de ta vieille amie
?"

It
was the valide sultan, the queen mother herself: and she spoke, he noticed
without surprise, in the voice of the Marquise de Merteuil. It was she who had
given him the book. In his dreams, the marquise spoke French with what Yashim
was not to know was a Creole twang.

She
took his hands and pecked him on the cheek, three times. Then she glanced down
at the lovely form laid out in death for his inspection.

"C'est triste,"
she said simply. Her eyes came up to meet his. "Poor you."

He
knew exactly what she meant.

"
Alors
,
you know who did it?"

"Absolutely.
A Bulgarian fisherman."

The
valide sultan put a pretty hand to her mouth.

"I
was about fifteen."

She
waved him away, smiling.

"Yashim,
sots serieux.
The little girl's dead and--don't shout now--also my
jewels have gone. The Napoleon jewels. We are all having a very bad time in the
appartements."

Yashim
gazed at her. In the half-light she looked almost young; in any light she was
still beautiful. He wondered if the dead girl would have looked so good at her
age--or would have survived so long. Aimee--the sultan's mother. It was the role
that every woman in the harem fought for: to sleep with the sultan, bear a son
and, in due course, engineer his elevation to the throne of Osman. Each step
required a greater concentration of miracles. The woman in front of him had
possessed a singular advantage, though: she was a Frenchwoman. One miracle
under her belt from the start.

"You're
not telling me that I never showed you the Napoleon jewels?" she was saying. "Well,
my God, you are the lucky man. I bore everyone with these jewels. I admire
them, my guests admire them--and I'm quite sure they all think them as ugly as I
do. But they came from the Emperor Napoleon to me.
Personnellement!"

She
darted him a roguish look.

"You
think--sentimental value? Rubbish. They are, however, part of my
batterie de
guerre.
Beauty is cheap within these walls. Distinction, though, comes at
a price. Look at
her.
Not all the mountains of Circassia could produce
a creature so lovely again--but my son would have forgotten her name in a week. Tanya?
Alesha? What does it matter?"

"It
mattered to somebody," Yashim reminded her. "Somebody killed her."

"Because
she was beautiful? Pah, everyone is beautiful here."

"No.
Perhaps because she was about to lie with the sultan."

She
eyed him suddenly: at times like this he knew exactly why she was valide, and
no one else. He held her gaze.

"Perhaps."
She gave a pretty little shrug. "I want to tell you about my jewels. Ugly, very
useful--and worth a fortune."

He
wondered if she needed money, but she had read his thoughts. "One never knows,"
she said, tapping him on the arm. "Things are never quite as one expects."

He
bowed slightly to acknowledge the truth of her remark. In his life, it was
true. In hers? Without question: and with an unexpectedness that was fantastic.

Fifty
years before, a young woman had boarded a French packet en route from the West
Indies to Marseille. Raised on the Caribbean island of Martinique, she was
being sent to Paris to complete her education and find a suitable husband.

She
never arrived. In the eastern Atlantic her ship was taken by a North African
xebec, and the beautiful young woman became the prisoner of Algerian corsairs. The
corsairs presented her to the dey of Algiers, who marveled at her exotic beauty
and her white, white skin. The dey knew she was far too valuable to be
retained. So he sent her on, to Istanbul.

But
that was only half the story, the half that was merely unusual. Over the
centuries, other Christian captives had made their way into a sultan's bed. Not
many; some. But the whim of destiny is powerful and inscrutable. On Martinique,
young Aimee had been almost inseparable from another French Creole girl called
Rose Tascher de la Pagerie. A year after Aimee set out on her fateful voyage to
France, young Rose had followed. Same route: a luckier ship. Reaching Paris,
she had weathered revolution, imprisonment, hunger, and the desires of
ambitious men to become the lover, the wife, and finally the empress of
Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of France. Aimee, the friend of Rose's youth, had
vanished to the world as the valide sultan. Rose was Empress Josephine.

One never knows.

She
reached up and gave him a chaste kiss. At the door she turned.

"Find
my jewels, Yashim. Find them soon--or I swear I'll never lend you another novel
as long as I live!"

11

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

In
the rain, in the night, even a city of two million souls can be quiet and
deserted. It was the dead hour between the evening and the night prayers. A
rat, its wet fur glistening, scrambled out of an overflowing drain and began to
scuttle along the foot of a building, looking for shelter. The rising water
pursued it almost imperceptibly.

Slowly
the puddle rose, from one cobble to the next, probing the joints for a means of
escape. When it found one, it began to trickle through, blindly but unerringly
seeking its path downhill. From time to time it stopped, pooled, and started
over, insistently seeking its own way to the Bosphorus, lining the banks of its
own clear trail with mud, twigs, hairs, crumbs. It spread across a lateral
street but pooled again on the other side where a flight of stone steps ran
down to the Mosque of the Victory, just newly completed on the shore.

The
rain, continuing to fall, continued to back up against the drain. At the hour
of the morning star, the janitor of the mosque sent two workmen to trace the
torrent that was threatening to seep into the cement floors and spoil the
carpets. They hitched their woolen cloaks over their heads with their elbows
against the rain, and started up the steps.

About
two hundred yards uphill, they found a section of road that had turned into a
pond and cautiously probed the muddy water with their rods.

Eventually
they located the drain and started work trying to unblock it: first with the
rods and later, standing up to their chins in the freezing, filthy water, with
their hands and feet. The obstruction was a soft package of some sort, so
tightly bound with cords that neither man, slipping footfirst into the icy murk
for a few seconds at a time, could get a proper purchase on it. At last,
shortly before daybreak, they managed to guide a rod between the package and
the wall of the drain, and lever it away far enough to let the water escape
with a gurgle.

The
workman who leaned in up to his chest and gripped the obstruction finally saw
what looked at first like a gigantic turkey, trussed for roasting.

What
he saw next made him a very sick workman indeed.

12

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

YASHIM
rolled out of bed, slipped on a djellaba and slippers, took his purse from a
hook, and went down into the street. Three turns brought him to the Kara Davut
Sokagi, where he drank two cups of thick, sweet coffee and ate a
borek,
layers of honeyed pastry fried in oil. Often in the night, at the time when people
tend to lie awake and follow their plans out until they drift away into a happy
sleep, Yashim thought of moving from his rooms in the tenement to somewhere
bigger and fighter, with proper views. He'd designed a small library for
himself, with a comfortable, well-lit alcove for reading, and a splendid
kitchen, too, with a room off the side for a servant to sleep in--someone to
riddle up the fire in the morning and fetch him his coffee. Sometimes it was
the library that looked out over the blue Bosphorus, sometimes it was the
kitchen. The water threw soothing patterns of light onto the ceiling. An open
window caught a glimmer of the summer breeze.