The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi (12 page)

Absentmindedly, he reached over for a handful of feed and held it out. And Bucephalus, either because he had a forgiving nature or because he was feeling peckish, accepted the peace offering, then lay down on his bed of hay and was soon fast asleep.

By now, the sun was up. A weary Danilo trudged back to his bed vowing to put all other thoughts out of his mind and concentrate on preparing himself for the upcoming contest. The empty pallets all around him gave evidence that most of the pages in his
oda
were still out carousing the stews of Galata. Very well for them. But he was a member of the Sultan’s first team. Twenty-four hours from now, he would be riding into the oval of the hippodrome as thousands cheered. His coaches had placed their faith in him. His teammates depended on him.

Inshallah
, he repeated aloud, trying to evoke in himself some sense of being in the hands of a higher power. But the words that seemed to bolster up his teammates didn’t work for him. His god did not interfere in horse races. If he did well in tomorrow’s
gerit
, it would not be because Allah had willed it but because he, Danilo del Medigo, had proven himself worthy. This night had been a mistake. He ought to have spent it resting his mind and body. But it was not in his nature to regret things done that could not be undone. What he needed now was a day to restore his tired muscles and clear his mind of any impediment that might cloud his judgment on the field. Sleep.

He was about to fall on his pallet fully clothed when he caught sight of a sheet of vellum pinned to the quilt, hand-written and stamped with the Sultan’s
tugra.
It was a
firman
entitling the bearer to a place in Divan Square, where a select group of courtiers would gather that afternoon to welcome the Padishah home from his Austrian wars. An invitation from the Sultan was tantamount to a summons. But mostly the boy was thinking of his father, who would be searching the crowd eagerly for the sight of him. He must be there, behind the velvet rope, when his father rode by in Suleiman’s train. There would be no long day of rest for him.
Better sleep fast
, he told himself as he closed his weary eyes.

8

ON THE EVE

ISTANBUL

OCTOBER 23, 1532

Every year on an April day after Ramadan, the vast conglomeration of men, animals, weapons, and baggage trains that constitute the Ottoman war machine gathered in a field north of Istanbul. They came together, the British consul reported to his masters, as though they had been invited to a wedding. War was a season to them, he observed, like winter.

The previous spring, on a day sanctioned by the court astrologer as most auspicious, the Ottoman army led by the Sultan had set off on campaign to Austria. Their goal: plunder territory to add to an expanding empire that had already yielded them more land than the Romans controlled at the height of their power. Today, after a long, hard campaign that took him halfway across Europe to the gates of Vienna, Suleiman the Magnificent was coming home.

To prepare the crowds gathered on the streets of Istanbul to greet him, heralds had spent the evening trumpeting news of his capture of the Austrian town of Guns on the return journey. No one dared to question how it was that the Sultan failed to take Vienna and was forced by the onset of winter to raise his siege of the Austrian capital and return home. That detail of the campaign was not spoken of. Not in his palace. Not in the streets. Not even in that breeding ground of gossip and rumor, the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul. What would be celebrated today was that, once again, the campaign season had ended in a glorious victory for their Padishah, Defender of Islam and the Shadow of God on Earth. The Austrian stronghold of Guns had been captured. No mention of Vienna.

The Padishah’s welcome promised to be tumultuous. The Turks were proud of their victorious sultans. And the sultans in their turn took care to provide a celebration, lasting at least a week, of parades and games and music and dancing and free food.

The heralds had not yet announced the exact hour of the Sultan’s arrival on the streets of the city from his staging area across the Bosphorus. But, in spite of strenuous efforts to keep it secret, news of his imminent appearance had somehow filtered across the waterway, floated down into the Grand Bazaar, and was rapidly spreading through the streets of Istanbul.

“Have you heard? The Padishah will arrive today.”

“They say he has already decamped at Üsküdar.”

“I have it from a reliable source at the palace. He will not be home until tomorrow morning.”

As he trudged across town the black eunuch named Narcissus paid no attention to the whispers. In his position as chief steward to the Sultan’s mother, the Valide Sultan, he was party to every detail of the monarch’s itinerary, both at home and abroad. Suleiman kept in daily contact with his mother. When he was on campaign, he wrote to her every day. When he was in residence at his walled domain in Topkapi Palace, he visited her daily at the Old Palace where she ruled his harem. During his long absences on campaign, he appointed her his Regent. And because Narcissus had this great lady’s complete confidence, the black slave knew everything she knew, every intimate detail of her life including the precise hour at which her son would cross over the Bosphorus from the staging area at Üsküdar to parade through the streets of the city.

Like all eunuchs, Narcissus tended toward obesity. It was a long, hot climb for him from the harem to Topkapi Palace. But Narcissus soared above the buzz of the streets, buoyed by the vast sea of rumor and gossip that surrounded him. As he climbed the steep winding road to Palace Point, rivulets of perspiration ran down his plump face. Partly it was the unseasonable heat of the autumn day that made him sweat, partly nerves. Periodically he would reach down to pat into place the small pouch that hung from his girdle. That silken sheath contained an item that, should it be discovered, could cause great distress to the sender. As for the effect of such a discovery on the messenger, Narcissus shuddered at the thought of the beating he would suffer if the pouch at his waist were to fall into the hands of some officious palace guard. He could feel the sting of the
bastinado
on the soles of his feet just thinking of it.

Once he had reached the summit, the overheated slave took a moment to wipe his brow, plan his next move, and survey the scene that stretched out before him. Many years ago when this summit was captured from the Byzantines by the Ottoman conqueror, the peak had been flattened to accommodate a citadel — the last stand, if need be, for the defense of the city. But seven decades of Ottoman rule had slowly erased all evidence of its military past, and now, viewed from its towering Imperial Gate, Topkapi Saray
stretched ahead in an adjoining series of three enclosed courtyards, each separated from the other by a gated wall. Behind the massive ramparts that enclosed the entire
saray
there was no single structure to house the monarch. Instead each court contained a scattering of airy kiosks and pavilions dotted about like stone tents, giving the whole place a closer resemblance to a nomadic encampment than to a European-style palace.

Narcissus encountered no difficulty passing through the Imperial Gate into the first of the palace’s three courts, a huge rectangle that extended for a thousand feet called the Procession Court. Traditionally every citizen of the Ottoman Empire — slave or free — had the right to petition the Sultan in his palace. As a consequence, the Procession Court was always packed with a generous sampling of the palace clientele: petitioners on foot, ambassadors bearing gifts, carts loaded with twittering Circassian virgins, and hundreds of palace personnel scurrying about like a colony of ants, all weaving their way between horses and groups of swaggering Janissaries in white turbans and yellow boots.

A keen eye could also spot the occasional ghostly figure of one of the Sultan’s security guards, who went by the name Men in Black because they did double duty as hangmen and executioners, hangings and executions being a routine part of life in the First Court. What was missing from the scene on this day was the fairly common sight of a severed head on an iron spit, thrusting up out of the conical top of one of the towers of the medieval gate, left there to blacken in the sun as a warning to anyone who incurred the Sultan’s displeasure.

In this mélange, one single, fat, black eunuch hardly merited attention. But at the next gate, the so-called Gate of Welcome at the far end of the Procession Court, two tall crenelated towers silently proclaimed the end of public access and the beginning of extreme vigilance. At the Gate of Welcome (who among the sober Ottomans could have chosen this ironic designation for the site where the occasional human head is mounted on a pike?), all must dismount except the Sultan himself and, of course, his mother, the Valide Sultan. Even the Grand Vizier dismounted at the Gate of Welcome and walked into the Second Court in his stockings.

Although the Gate of Welcome presented a direct entry to his destination, Narcissus had no intention of risking an encounter with its notoriously unwelcoming guardians. Instead, once through the gate he veered sharply left toward the old Christian Church of Irene, which was currently enjoying a Muslim incarnation as an armory. Smooth as an eel, he slithered in and out among a number of small kiosks toward the outer wall of the palace beyond the church.

A devotee of beauty, the pleasure-loving Narcissus was sorely tempted to linger a moment and enjoy the gardens, scattered with flowers, shaded by casual groupings of orange trees, bisected by winding paths, spicy with the scent of jasmine, and soft to the foot. These were the touches that gave the palace its cognomen, the Abode of Bliss.

But Narcissus had no time for bliss. He headed straight for a small opening in the outer wall known as the Boot Gate, which he had been told was likely to be unguarded this day. Everyone in the Sultan’s service had been conscripted to help prepare the capital for the victory parade. With a good part of the palace staff thus seconded to the procession route, it was all but certain that he would find an unimportant post like the Boot Gate neglected. And, to be sure, when Narcissus pushed aside the vines that concealed the little arch, he found it completely unmanned and was able to stroll unhindered into the wild moraine beyond the walls.

Here, in stark contrast to the manicured palace grounds within, the terrain had reverted to its true nature: a rock-strewn, prickly undergrowth with only the occasional neglected orchard to recall the days when the early Ottoman sultans raised fruit for their tables in their own backyard. In this virtual wilderness, Narcissus could traverse the full length of the palace grounds outside the walls, unimpeded by the guardians of either the Gate of Welcome or the last of the three gates, the Gate of Felicity. There, at the end of the summit, he only had to scale the wall to regain access to the Sultan’s private grounds undetected.

Narcissus was well acquainted with the dense thicket that surrounded the citadel and quickly located the outer pathway known to its familiars as the Eunuch’s Path, so-called because it was customarily used by palace slaves bent on errands of dubious legitimacy. When they spoke among themselves of this walkway, the students in the dormitories of the School for Pages located in the Third Court told tales of sneaking along the Eunuch’s Path in the dark night and being tripped, pricked with thistles, and beaten bloody by the evil jinn
who hide out in tree trunks.

Narcissus was not put off by such tales. As he zigzagged between patches of light where the sun slanted down through breaks in the foliage, he was secure in his knowledge that jinn
never operate by daylight, only by night. What did frighten him were the Janissaries who stood guard over the Third Court and would as soon kill an intruder as look at him.

An even more immediate concern was how he would scale the wall to get back into the palace grounds. Would it still be there, that ancient, creaky fruit ladder that had served him and so many before him?

Narcissus sank to his knees and uttered a short prayer:
Please let the ladder be in its place
. Having been raised a Christian, he had never fully espoused the religion to which he was converted by the circumcision knife. He did not read the Koran, did not pray five times a day, had never been to Mecca and did not plan to go. But he did ask the Prophet for help when he needed it. And today the Prophet, in his mercy, obliged. There, propped up against the stump of a dead pear tree, stood the old ladder. The poor thing was so ancient that no one had ever judged it worth removing.

Taking care to move silently, Narcissus carried the ladder to the wall, making certain he was not within sight of the guards in the wheeled kiosk that patroled the hillside. Then he mounted the creaky ladder step by careful step, pulled the ladder up behind him, and repositioned it on the inside of the wall. When the pages of the Sultan’s school executed this part of the manoeuver they simply jumped from the top of the wall to the soft ground below. But Narcissus was no athlete, and he had to go carefully so as not to soil or damage his caftan, a gift from the Valide Sultan.