The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi (23 page)

“I think I heard them, Papa,” he whispered. “I couldn’t make out the words. But I believe they were shouting in Greek.”

After that day, the hippodrome became a place Danilo returned to again and again, sometimes with Judah on the way home from their Saturday morning prayers, often alone. In spite of hours poring over the vocabulary lists his mother had compiled for him, searching out the Greek words for “Hurrah,” “Faster,” and “Bravo,” he never was able to identify the sounds he thought he heard in his head. But, in the course of many visits, he began to see — with his eyes shut — dim at first, then increasingly clear, the faces of the Greeks, tier upon tier of them, the cords in their necks bulging as they shouted words of encouragement to their favorite charioteers. And, after some time had passed, he began, when he closed his eyes, to see himself rounding that corner mounted on a magnificent charger, galloping full tilt across the finish line, the victor in some grueling contest.

Never in the course of those flights of fancy did Danilo come close to hoping — even thinking — that such a thing might actually happen. But when the riding master at the Harem School offered him the opportunity to join the
gerit
team, he did rush to accept. And he did practice to perfect his aim and his horsemanship with unfailing perseverance throughout his years in the Harem School and now in the Sultan’s School for Pages. But this dogged pursuit of mastery, and the visions that came to him when he stood in the hippodrome with his eyes shut, ran on parallel tracks that had never met — until now, five years after he had first walked the
pista
with his father and heard a dim echo of the Greeks shouting in the stands.

And now, on this day of the
gerit
match between the Sultan’s team and the Grand Vizier’s team to celebrate Suleiman’s great victory, the two paths converged and Danilo del Medigo’s fantasy became reality.

19

THE GERIT CONTEST

In his villa in the Pera section of the city, the Venetian
bailo,
Alvise Gritti, was up at dawn scratching away at the report he wrote each week for his masters in the Venetian Senate.

“The Sultan’s victory celebration,” he wrote, “is a spectacle halfway between our Carnival and the Roman games. Today, all attention will center on the hippodrome, where a contest is planned, named after a three-foot javelin with a steel dart at the business end called a
gerit
. It is played by two teams on horseback: one from the Sultan’s School for Pages, the other from the Grand Vizier’s school of his pages.

“The
gerit
is the favorite sport of the Turks, and they play it the way they fight their wars. There is no manoeuvering. Each rider simply charges boldly and directly and, up close, hurls the
gerit
at his selected opponent with enough force to knock him off his horse. All hangs on the accuracy of the throw. Success is judged by the aggregate number of hits scored by the winning team and depends not on leadership or team play, as it would with us, but solely on horsemanship and the raw guts of each player. So once the match begins, it quickly turns into a chaotic melee with riders hurling their weapons wildly in all directions and often — because they wear no armor other than a leather jerkin — results in serious injury and sometimes death. The randomness of it all defies the reason of a thinking man.

“I know of nothing in Europe to compare with this
gerit
,” he continued, “which resembles a battle more than a jousting contest. That it should be the favorite sport of the Turks in both town and country, played enthusiastically by artisans and sultans alike, should tell us something about these people. By now, I have witnessed countless of these contests but have yet to fully grasp the point. To one not caught up in it early in life, the
gerit
is simply a war of each against all.

“To this mad display I will shortly repair. There is no avoiding it. I have been assigned a preferred seat in a balcony on the east side of the Grand Vizier’s palace overlooking the hippodrome. At least I will not be blinded by the setting sun at the end of the day. I am further honored by an invitation to dine in the Great Hall of the Grand Vizier’s palace, where those members of the winning team who have not been mutilated or killed will be rewarded by the Sultan, this to be followed by the typical Ottoman banquet of twenty courses or more. If I do not fall ill from sun poisoning or the surfeit of rich food without the digestive amelioration of even a single glass of wine, a report on the damned
gerit
will follow.”

Such were the expectations of Signor Gritti, a typical Venetian — vain, dyspeptic, and convinced that there was no other civilized spot on earth except his beloved Serenissima. For most Istanbulians — the citizens who would overfill the bleachers and bellow their hearts out that afternoon as their Greek and Roman predecessors did before them — the day held the expectation of a splendid entertainment. To Princess Saida, it promised rapturous fulfillment. To the Second
Kadin
, it meant her first time ever riding in a sedan chair like the Valide Sultan she intended to become. For Danilo del Medigo, today was the day he had been preparing for all his life.

Among his teammates, Danilo was known to be mild-tempered, even phlegmatic. Not one to give way to anger, cry out from pain, sulk in defeat, or gloat in victory. But, with it all, a fierce competitor. In his years on Suleiman’s
gerit
squad he had become something of a pet. “The kid with bronze balls,” they called him. But no one, not even the most hardened veteran, was ever totally immune to pre-game nerves. Danilo knew this. He had seen the evidence of it in the changing room. Still, he was unprepared when he lost his nerve for the first time.

On the short walk from Topkapi to At Maydani
(or Horse Square, as the hippodrome was still known to born-and-bred Istanbulians), his stomach abruptly turned into a hard knot and his breath began to come in short bursts. He barely made it through the giant arches that led to the dressing rooms underneath the course without stumbling. By then, his knees were weak and he felt a rising gorge of vomit in his throat. When the other contestants peeled off to check up on their horses, he quietly continued alone down the wide tunnel to the dressing room, hoping that his absence would not be noticed. He managed to get to the bucket just in time.

Panic was not familiar to him, but he recognized its symptoms.
This is not fear
, he told himself.
This is the fear of fear. The time to be afraid is when you are lying on the ground, too hurt to move, hearing the pounding hooves of the horses that are going to trample you to death. That is fear. What you are feeling now is a phantom. You can blow it away. Fill the belly with air, like a bladder. Suck the air in all the way down to the crotch. Hold it, hold it, hold it. Blow it out slowly. Repeat until the breath flows evenly.

Summoning the last of his resolve, he lay down flat and began a series of deep belly breaths. A few minutes of this drill and he was breathing normally. But he was still nauseated and woozy when the team began to arrive in the dressing room.

The captain, a giant who went by the name of Oxy, saw immediately that something was wrong. Danilo felt a comforting arm around his shoulder and heard softly in his ear, “Is your gut in a twist?”

He nodded, eyes downcast, ashamed.

“Here’s what I used to do. Lie on the bench. Flat. Now sit up. I’ll hold your feet so you don’t cheat. Up!”

Danilo groaned with the pain.

“Lower yourself slowly. I know it hurts, but do it. Again.” Oxy was implacable, impervious to the grunts and groans that issued from the bench as Danilo forced his rigid muscles to flex and relax, flex and relax. He had seen other athletes suffer through this exorcism before a match. Now he understood why they did it. He was not the only one who had ever panicked.

Slowly, as he gained control over his balky muscles, the cramp lessened and the only pain he felt was the terrible weight of Oxy sitting on his feet. Best of all, the whole thing had been handled so smoothly that nobody seemed to have noticed.

“Drink some water. No wine!” And Oxy was off to attend to captain’s affairs.

He sounds like my father
, Danilo thought.

By now, the temporary stands along the western side of the racecourse were filled, and those who missed out on the seating had spread out into the standing room above the north and south substructures. In bygone days viewing stands were permanently maintained on all four sides of the course and could accommodate a hundred thousand spectators. But that accommodation was abruptly cut in half when, just a few years into his reign, Suleiman appropriated a wide swath of land on the eastern border of the hippodrome for the site of the palace he was building for his Grand Vizier and boon companion, Ibrahim the Greek. Now, all that remained on the east side between the track and the magnificent stone edifice that housed the Grand Vizier was a narrow strip of lawn roped off today to give space and air to the Sultan’s viewing platform, thus reducing even further the seating capacity of the stadium. Still, from the vantage point of the riders emerging into the daylight from the underground vaults, it seemed as if the entire city of Istanbul was here today.

For all their numbers, it was a fairly quiet crowd that had been gathering since early morning. But when the first rider of the Sultan’s team galloped out of the cavernous depths of the substructure and stood before them framed in the center vault, the shouting began. Each player would have his moment of recognition in the stone doorway before he galloped around to take his place in the starting lineup — the Sultan’s team at the southern end of the arena, the Grand Vizier’s men on the north. Since there were twelve members on each team, the process was somewhat tedious, certainly a far cry from the farrago that Signor Gritti described in his report. But this was only the beginning. Like many events in Ottoman public life, the
gerit
tended to start slowly and gather momentum gradually until the moment when all hell broke loose.

Once the riders lined up at either end of the oval, the huge front doors of the Grand Vizier’s palace swung open and out came the Sultan’s musicians blasting appropriately raucous music (that is, Turkish rather than Persian). They were followed by a group of the Sultan’s senior pages, magnificently attired in crimson caftans, carrying a rolled-up length of cloth-of-gold fabric, which they unfurled and tossed expertly over a set of poles already in place around the raised platform, thereby creating a golden canopy for the Padishah.

Next to emerge, a second platoon of pages, holding high a golden throne, which they placed front and center under the canopy.

Now came the Grand Vizier, Ibrahim Pasha, accompanied by his own attendants, even more gorgeously dressed than the pages who preceded them. Compared to his attendants he was nothing special to look at — medium build, greasy hair, and a trace of kohl around the eyes — a typical Greek. But appearances are deceiving. He made his way to the platform and stood respectfully at the right of the throne. It would be unthinkable for anyone to seat himself ahead of the Sultan.

Now, for a change of pace, a contingent of Janissaries shambled in from the south end.

“Make way, make way,” bawled the heralds.

And the standing crowd, always respectful of Janissaries, parted like the Red Sea to let them through as they make their way along the
spina
and proceeded to surround the royal enclosure. The Sultan’s parade band played a flourish of trumpets. The horses lined up at either end of the stadium danced in anticipation. The stage was set for the chief actor in this tableau. In any setting that the Sultan condescended to honor with his presence, he was always the star attraction. Today, even his riders took second place to him.

All eyes were turned to the bronze doors of the Grand Vizier’s palace when they opened to reveal the Padishah, Father of All the Sovereigns of the World, resplendent on a milk-white steed. As always the poor beast had been stretched on a strap overnight to give it a slow, majestic gait.

Whenever the Sultan went out among his people — officially — he was always positioned above them, occasionally in a sedan chair, most often mounted on a horse. Today, when he dismounted, he stepped directly onto the raised platform so that not for a single moment was he on the same level as his people. Always raised, like a god.

Elegant, unsmiling, and ramrod straight, he bent to the waist, nodding first to the crowd at his right, then to the left. He raised his right hand.

On cue the Chief Herald stepped forward and in a stentorian tone announced, “Let the games begin!”

At a signal from their captains, the riders took off from a standing start toward the center of the field, driving their mounts furiously — but not so furiously as to overtake their captains. The etiquette of the game demanded that no player overtake his leader in this first rush, a stroke of luck for Danilo del Medigo. As he urged his horse forward, he wondered if he had done the right thing when he insisted on riding Bucephalus. He had been warned that the horse at this age was no longer a viable contestant in a speed race. And, when they took off, Bucephalus seemed sluggish. Was it the after-effects of the colic? Was the animal past his prime? Should he have requested a younger, faster, more agile mount? Then the
gerits
began to fly and there was no time for thinking.