"The Janissary Tree" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goodwin Jason)

The seraskier felt that he had made an effort to clarify the situation. Rumour was an insidious force. It had this in common with the passion for war: it could be, and needed to be, controlled.

Drill the men. Straighten the rumour. Keep the initiative and leave the enemy guessing. The eunuch suspected some kind of Janissary plot, but the seraskier had prudently decided to keep his terms vague. The implication was there, of course, between the lines.

A textbook approach.

The seraskier stood up and walked to the darkened window. From here he could look down on the city it was his duty to defend. He sighed. In daylight he knew it as an impossible jumble of roofs and minarets and domes, concealing a myriad crooked streets and twining alleyways. Now specks of lamplight blended in the dark, softly glowing here and there, like marsh-light shimmering over a murderous swamp.

He curled his fingers around the hem of his jacket and gave it a smart tug.

[ 43 ]

Yashim’s first waking thought was that he’d left a pan on the coals. He shot from the divan and stood unsteadily in the kitchen, rocking on his heels. He looked around in bewilderment. Everything was as it should be: the stove banked low, its hotplate barely warm; a stack of dirty pans and crockery; the blocks and knives. But he smelled burning.

From outside there rose a confused medley of cries and crashes. He glanced at the open window. The sky was lit with a glow like the early dawn, and as he watched an entire roofscape was suddenly picked out in silhouette by a huge roar of flame which shot upwards into the sky, and subsided in a trail of sparks. It was, he judged, barely a hundred yards away: one, maybe two streets off. He could hear the crack of burning timber, and smell the ashes in the air.

An hour, he thought. I give it an hour.

He looked round at his little apartment. The books ranged on the shelves. The Anatolian carpets on the floor.

“Ah, by the jewels!”

The blaze had broken out in an alleyway which opened out into the Kara Davut Sokagi. The mouth of the alley was blocked by a throng of eager sightseers, anxious householders, many of them bare-headed, and women in every stage of dishabille, though every one of them contrived to cover her nose and lips with a scrap of cloth. One woman, he noticed, had yanked up her pyjama jacket, exposing a delicious ripple of flesh around her belly while concealing her face. They were all staring at the fire, as if frozen.

Yashim looked around. In the Kara Davut, people were emerging from their houses. A man Yashim recognised as the baker was urging them to go back and fetch their buckets. He stood on a step beside the fountain at the head of the street, gesticulating. Yashim suddenly understood.

“Get these women out of here,” he shouted, prodding the men next to him. “We need a line!”

He jostled the men: the spell that had fallen over them was broken. Some of them woke up to the sight of their women, half-dressed.

“Take them over to the cafe,” Yashim suggested. He intercepted a young man running forward with a bucket.

“Give me that—get another!” He swung the bucket to a man standing nearby.

“Form a chain—take this and pass it on!”

The man seized the bucket and swung it forwards, into a pair of waiting hands. Another boy ran up to Yashim with a loaded bucket. The back of the line needed attention, Yashim realised. “You, stay here. Pass that bucket and be ready to take another.”

He darted back, seizing bystanders and hustling them into positions a few feet apart. More buckets were being produced; as fast as they came the baker swung them through the fountain and passed them down. Yashim ran along the chain, checking for gaps, and then on to the head of the line to make sure that empty buckets were being returned. For the first time he found himself in the alley.

The flames were gusting along the narrow street: as Yashim looked, a window burst in a shower of sparks and a long tongue of flame shot out and licked into the eaves of the neighbouring house. The flame retreated; but in a moment it had burst out again, tunnelled to its neighbour by the wind that was already being drawn like a bellow’s blast into the narrow opening of the alley. Yashim, standing several paces back, could feel the wind ruffling his hair even as he felt the heat on the side of his face. He felt powerless. Suddenly he remembered what had to be done.

“A break! A break!” He darted into the nearest doorway and found a whole family working the well in the backyard. “We must make a break—not here, across the street.” Nobody paid him the slightest attention: they were all busy fetching water, sloshing it onto the facade of their house which was already beginning to scorch and blister in the heat. “An axe! Give me an axe!”

The man of the house nodded to a woodpile in the corner of the yard. With a jerk Yashim flipped the broad-headed splitting axe out of the log where it had been buried and dashed out into the street.

“A break!” he yelled, brandishing the axe. Several bystanders stared at him. He turned on them. “Get your tools, people. We’ve got to take down this house.”

Without waiting for their reaction he whirled his body round with a shout and embedded the axe in the plaster infill. A piece the size of a hand fell away. He struck again: laths splintered and gave way. In a few minutes he had cleared a space large enough to wield an axe against the upright timbers. By now a few others had joined him: two men he sent through the house to check that there was no one still inside, and then to set to on the other side. He paused to catch his breath, leaning on the axe. The four men at work were stripped to the waist, the approaching firelight reflected in vivid glints in the sweat on their skin.

“Janissary work,” said one, through gritted teeth, as he chopped with the flat of his axe in short, savage blows against a tenon pin. The wooden pin was growing mashed at the end; the man made a few swift passes and cut it again, and with a heave on the flat of his axe sent it loose out the other side. Yashim gripped the pin and jerked it out.

The building gave a lurch. Several panels of plaster from the upper storey crashed down at their feet and exploded into a powder that was immediately whipped away by the rush of hot wind flaring down the street. Yashim glanced back. Two houses along, the fire was beginning to take hold. Sparks were flying past: one of the men he’d sent to the back of the house stuck his head out through a pair of uprights leaning at a drunken angle to the ground and hurriedly withdrew it. Everyone laughed.

“They’ll be out in a moment. And none too soon,” a man said. They scented victory: their mood had changed.

Sure enough, the two men appeared suddenly on the other side of the frame and darted out through the collapsed doorway.

“To think we used to get the Janissaries from the Beyazidiye Pound to do this for us!”

They were enjoying themselves now. A slithering crash from overhead told them that the joists had sprung: the planking of the upper floor leaned at an angle that was already putting pressure on the roof supports, forcing them up.

“It’s going wide!” Yashim bellowed. It was true: the whole frame of the house was sagging towards them, spinning around. “Watch out!” Yashim backed, darted forward down the street away from the fire. The others followed. At twenty yards they stopped to watch the whole frame of the house take a sudden lurch into the street like a drunk wheeling from the wall. The roof tiles seemed to hang suspended in the air until, with a crash that could be heard over the crackling of the fire and the shouts from the upper end of the street, the edifice fell with a sudden whump! and a scouring plume of dust and fragments picked up by the wind billowed towards them like an angry djinn.

Yashim hit the ground, cradling his head in his arms: it was like a desert sandstorm flying overhead. Someone nearby screamed. He pressed his face into the dirt, even as the storm of debris began to ebb. A few pieces of broken tile skittered along the ground and harmlessly struck his arms.

Cautiously he peered up over the crook of his elbow. Further along the street the fire still raged: it had caught up with them now, and the shutters of the last house standing blew open with a force that sent them rocking wildly on their hinges. But the flames that shot from the casements darted out in vain. Where there had been wood and eaves, there was only a black gap and a few stray timbers dangling from a skinny beam.

Someone stooped and helped him to his feet. He recognised the man with the axe: they shook hands and then, because the excitement had been intense and the labour was won, they embraced, three times, shoulder to shoulder.

“You did us a favour, my friend,” the other man said. He looked like a ghost, his face blanched by the dust. “Murad Eslek, me.”

Yashim grinned.

“Yashim Togalu.” Not Yashim the eunuch. “At the sign of the Stag, Kara Davut.” And then, because it was true, he added: “The debt is all mine.”

The note of cultivation in his voice caught the man by surprise.

“I’m sorry, effendi. In the dark…all this dust…I did not—”

“Forget it, friend. We are all one in the sight of God.”

Murad Eslek grinned, and gave Yashim the thumbs up.

[ 44 ]

Yashim stirred his coffee mechanically, trying to identify what still bothered him about the night’s events.

Not the fire itself. Fires were always breaking out in Istanbul -though it had been a close-run thing. What if he had left the window shut—would the smell of smoke have reached him in time? He might have gone on sleeping, oblivious to the jagged screen of flame dancing its way towards his street: roused when it was already too late, perhaps, the stairwell filled with rolling clouds of black smoke, the windows shattering in the heat…

He thought of the crowd he’d seen that morning, the women and children standing dazed in the street. Dragged from their sleep. By God’s mercy they, too, had woken up in time.

A phrase of the Karagozi poem leaped into his mind. Wake them.

The spoon stopped moving in the cup.

There was something else. Something a man had said.

Janissary work. To think we used to get the Janissaries from the Beyazidiye Pound to do this for us.

A Janissary fire-brigade had been stationed close to the Beyazit Mosque, the first and perhaps, in its way, the greatest of the mighty mosques of the sultans: for even Sinan Pasha, the master architect whose sublime Suleymaniyye surpassed Aya Sofia, acknowledged that the Beyazit Mosque had shown the way. But it wasn’t the mosque which mattered: it was its position. For the Beyazit Mosque straddled the spine of the hill above the Grand Bazaar, one of the highest points in Stamboul.

A unique vantage point. So unique, in fact, that it was selected as the site of the tallest and perhaps the ugliest building in the empire: the Fire Tower which bore its name. The bag of bones had been discovered only yards away.

And there had been another Janissary watch, across the city, operated from the Galata Tower. The Galata Fire Tower. High over the drain which held the nauseating corpse of the second cadet.

And at the Janissaries’ old centre of operations, the old barracks now razed and replaced with the imperial stables, there’d been a tower which Yashim could still vaguely recall.

Palewski had suggested that there could be a pattern to explain the distribution of the bodies—so if each body had been placed in the vicinity of an old fire-station, a Janissary fire-watch, a tower…Yashim probed the idea for a moment.

Fire had always been the Janissaries’ special responsibility. It had become their weapon, too. People were roused from their beds by the firemen’s tocsin. Wake them.

Where, then, had the other fire-station been? There were to be four corpses. There had to be four fire-stations. Four towers.

Perhaps, Yashim thought fiercely, he might still be in time.

[ 45 ]

The Kislar Agha had the voice of a child, the body of a retired wrestler and weighed eighteen stone. No one could have guessed his age, and even he was not completely sure when he had crawled from his mother’s womb beneath the African sky. A few pounds of unwanted life. Another mouth to feed. His face was covered in dark wrinkles, but his hands were smooth and dark like the hands of a young woman.

It was a young woman he was dealing with now.

In one of those smooth hands he held a silver ring. In the other, the girl’s jaw.

The Kislar Agha dragged the girl’s head sideways.

“Look at this,” he hissed.

She closed her eyes. He squeezed his hand tighter.

“Why—did—you—take—the—ring?”

Anuk squeezed her eyelids shut, feeling the stabbing tears of pain. His fingers had caved in on the soft part of her mouth and she opened it suddenly very wide. His fingers slipped between her teeth.

She bit down hard. Very hard.

The Kislar Agha had not screamed for many years. It was a sound he had not heard himself since he was a little boy in a Sudanese village: the noise of a piglet squealing. Still squealing, he brought his left hand up between her legs, sagging slightly for a better grip. Don’t mark the goods.

His thumb searched for the gate. His fingers stretched and encountered a tight bunch of muscle. His hand clamped shut, with iron force.

The girl gave a gasp and the Kislar Agha pulled himself free. He put his sore fingers under his armpit, but he did not let go.

He wriggled his fingers and the girl jerked her head back. The Kislar Agha pressed harder. The girl felt herself being pressured to roll aside, and she obeyed the pressure.

The eunuch saw the girl flip over and fling out her arms to meet the ground. He gave a sudden pull with the pincer of his hand.

Panting now, he dropped to his knees and began to fumble at the folds of his cloak.

He’d forgotten all about the silver ring.

He remembered only the need for punishment, and the itch for pleasure.

[ 46 ]

Preen had found it hard to believe what the imam seemed to be saying. A revival of the Janissaries? New Guard cadets found murdered in despicable ways?

She picked up a pair of tweezers and began to pluck her eyebrows.

She wondered, looking into the mirror, if the imam’s message had anything to do with the information she had brought her friend Yashim.

Murder.

Her heart skipped a beat.

Today she would take the line ever so slightly higher: she could always heighten the curve with kohl. She began to hum.

Nothing she’d heard in the mosque had anything to do with Yashim, or her, or that disgusting pimp.

She worked briskly with a practised hand along the arch of her brow, watching herself in the mirror.

But Yorg could be involved in anything. With anyone.

She’d only peddled a little ordinary gossip. It was nothing.

Though Yashim had been pleased. Gold dust, he called it.

But Yashim wouldn’t tell. She moved her hand and began on the other eyebrow.

Yorg would tell. Yorg would tell anything, if he was paid enough.

Or frightened enough.

Preen sucked in her breath. The idea of Yorg being afraid was, well, scary.

She lowered her tweezers and snapped up a piece of kohl between their jaws. Carefully she started to thicken the line.

What would Yorg do, she wondered, if he heard about the murdered soldiers? Not at mosque. The Yorgs of this world heard nothing at mosque. They wouldn’t even go.

But if he heard, and started putting two and two together?

The kohl wavered. The face in the mirror was very white.

He’d squeal, for sure.

[ 47 ]

Fire-officer Orhan Yasmit cupped his hands around his mouth and blew into them. It had been a filthy morning, not just because it was damp and cold but because the mist made it almost impossible for him to work properly. Who could spot a fire in this miasma? He could scarcely see across the Golden Horn.

He stamped a few times to warm up, then crossed the tower to the southern side and peered gloomily down towards the Bosphorus. On good days, the Galata Tower presented him with one of the finest views the city could afford, almost three hundred feet up above the Golden Horn, across to Stamboul with its minarets and domes, south to the Bosphorus and Uskiidar on the farther side—sometimes he could actually see the mountains of Gule, purple in the distance.

It was a solid tower of massive dressed stone, built by the Genoese almost five hundred years before, when the Greek emperor ruled in Byzantium and Galata was its Italian suburb. Since then it had survived wars and earthquakes—even fires. The face of the city had no doubt changed, as minarets replaced the spires, as more and more people settled in the burgeoning port, building their wooden houses cheek by jowl, fragile wooden houses crammed like dry tinder into the declivities of the seven hills. And they’d been kicking over their braziers, letting their candles tilt, sending out careless sparks for centuries, too. Hardly ten years ran by without some section of the city burning to the ground. That any of it still stood at all was a testament to the wisdom of the Genoese master-builders who erected the Galata Tower.

The trick with any fire was to catch it early, contain it quickly. And to use it wisely, in the Janissary days—to control and shape it to the Janissaries’ best advantage. Orhan Yasmit was too young to have known those days personally, but he had heard the stories. Oh, the Janissaries put out fires—in the end.

Orhan Yasmit leaned on the parapet, wondering how much longer it would be before he was relieved. He looked down. He had no trouble with vertigo. He liked to watch the people bustling back and forth so far below him: with the sun on his back there were times when he came close to feeling like a flying bird, skimming the rooftops and the marketplaces. From above, in their turbans, the people looked like birds’ eggs, rolling about beneath his feet: the foreigners with their small heads looked weird. More like insects.

Hearing footsteps, he eased himself off the parapet and turned around. He expected to see the duty fireman, but the man who stepped out onto the platform was a civilian, a stranger in a plain brown cloak. Orhan frowned.

“I’m sorry,” he said sharply. “I don’t know how you got in, but civilians aren’t allowed up here.”

The stranger smiled vaguely, and looked around.

“Two pairs of eyes are better than one,” he remarked. “I won’t detain you.”

Orhan could make nothing of this.

“You might say that we’re both working for the same service. I’m here for the seraskier.”

Orhan instinctively stood a little straighter.

“Well,” he said grudgingly, “it’s no use your being here anyhow. No one could see a thing on a day like this.”

Yashim blinked at the fog.

“No, no, I suppose not.” He went to the parapet and leaned out. “Amazing. Do you often look down?”

“Not much.”

Yashim cocked his head.

“I expect you hear stuff, though. I’ve noticed that myself. The way sounds can carry much further than you expect. Especially upwards.”

“True.” Orhan wondered what all this was leading up to.

“Were you on duty the day they found that body?”

“I was on the night before. Didn’t hear or see anything, though.” He frowned. “What do you want up here, anyhow?”

Yashim nodded, as if he understood. “This tower must have been here a long time.”

“Five hundred years, they say.” The fireman slapped a hand on the parapet. “The Stamboul Tower, Beyazit, that’s mostly new.”

“Mostly new?”

“There’s always been a fire-watch over there, see, but the tower used to be shorter. Good look-out over the bazaar and such, but to the east you’ve got the mosque, haven’t you, and that used to block the view that way. Didn’t matter so much, not with the Janissary Tower beyond to cover the ground.”

“Ah. I thought there’d been another fire-tower there—above Aksaray?”

Orhan nodded. “Proper job, by all accounts. Gone now, along with the tekke underneath and all the rest.”

“Tekke? What tekke do you mean?”

“Tekke, prayer-room, whatever. Like here, downstairs. For that Janissary Karagoz mumbo-jumbo. Oldest Karagozi tekkes in the city, apparently. That tower’s gone now, like I said. Got burned down during the—well, a few years back, you know what I mean? So what they did was, they raised the tower at Beyazit. To get the lift, see, over the mosque? Must have doubled its height, I reckon—and all in stone, now, like this one. The old ones were wood, and kept burning down. So there you are, we’ve got the two towers as good as the old three. Better, really, being all stone.”

“I’m sure. Go on. Tell me about the fourth tower.”

Orhan gave the stranger a look.

“There isn’t a fourth. Galata, Stamboul, that’s it.”

“There must be another. Yedikule, maybe?”

“Yedikule?” The fireman grinned. “Tell me who’d be sorry if Yedikule caught fire.”

Yashim frowned: the fireman had a point. Yedikule was the sink of the city, down in the south-east where the walls of Byzantium joined the sea. Apart from the dirt, and the feral dogs which prowled its mean, dark streets, the tanneries were there; also a grim edifice, old even when the Ottomans took Istanbul, known as the Castle of the Seven Towers, variously used as a mint, a menagerie and a prison, particularly the latter. Many people had died within its walls; still more had wanted to.

“But you can watch Yedikule from the new tower at Beyazit, effendi. Stamboul and Galata, like I told you. Cover the city.”

Yashim winced. The second verse of the poem swam into his head.

Unknowing

And knowing nothing of unknowing,

They seek.

Teach them.

He was obviously a slow learner.

“Look,” Orhan said affably. “You can ask old Palmuk, if you like.”

A whiskered face appeared in the hatch. Palmuk was not really old, only perhaps twice Orhan’s age, with thick white moustaches and a noticeable paunch. He came out of the hatch wheezing.

“Those bloomin’ stairs,” he muttered. Yashim noticed that he was carrying a paper twist of sugared buns. “No babies, then?” He winked at Yashim.

“Now, Palmuk, I don’t think the gentleman wants all that. He is from the seraskier.”

Palmuk took the warning with an exaggerated roll of his eyes.

“Oho, old Frog’s Legs, eh? Well, effendi, you tell him not to worry about us. We get cold, we get wet, but we do our duty, ain’t that right, Orhan?”

“You might not think it, effendi,” Orhan said, “but Palmuk’s got the best pair of eyes in Galata. You’d think he could smell a fire before it’s even started.”

Palmuk’s face twitched. “Steady, there, boy.” He turned to Yashim. “You wondering about them babies I mentioned? It’s fireman’s talk, that is. Baby—that’s a fire. A boy’s a fire on the Stamboul side. We hang out the baskets that way”—he gestured to four huge wicker baskets leaning against the inside of the parapet—“and that puts the lads in the right direction, see? A girl, that’s Galata-side.”

Yashim shook his head. However long you lived, however well you thought you knew this city, there was always something else to learn. Sometimes he thought that Istanbul was just a mass of codes, as baffling and intricate as its impenetrable alleys: a silent clamour of inherited signs, private languages, veiled gestures. He thought of the soup master and his coriander. So many little rules. So many unknown habits. The soup master had been a Janissary once. He looked at Palmuk again, wondering if he, too, wore a tattoo on his forearm.

“You’ve been a fireman a long time, then?”

Palmuk stared at him, expressionless.

“Twelve, thirteen years. What’s it about?”

Orhan said: “Gentleman wants to know about another tower. Not the old barracks place. A fourth tower. I told him there wasn’t one.”

Palmuk dug into his paper twist and took out a bun, looked at it, and took a bite.

“You did right, Orhan. You can cut along now, old Palmuk’s in command.”

Orhan yawned and stretched. “I could use a kip,” he said. “Fire in?”

“Warm and bright, mate.”

With a happy sigh, and a small bow to Yashim, Orhan lowered himself down the hatch and went off to enjoy the brazier in the fireman’s cuddy down below.

Palmuk took a turn round the walls, looking out and finishing his bun.

Yashim hadn’t moved.

Palmuk leaned over the parapet and looked down.

“Funny,” he said. “As you get older, you lose your head for heights. They ought to pay me more, don’t you think?”

He looked back at Yashim, his head cocked.

“Know what I mean?”

Yashim eyed the fireman coldly.

“A fourth tower?”

Palmuk bent over a basket and wedged his cone of buns between the wickerwork. Then he stood looking out towards Stamboul. He appeared not to have heard.

Suppressing a sigh, Yashim fished for his purse beneath the folds of his cloak. Selecting three coins, he chinked them together in the palms of his hand. Palmuk turned.

“Why, effendi, I call that handsome. A welcome contribution to the Fund.”

The money disappeared into a pocket of his tunic.

“It’s information you want, mate. Effendi. A hint to the wise, am I right? You’ve been handsome with me, so I’ll be handsome with you, as the saying goes. All right: there isn’t a fourth tower. Never was, as far as I know.”

There was a silence. The fireman ran a hand over his moustaches.

Their eyes locked.

“Is that it?”

The fireman shrugged. “It’s what you asked for, ain’t it?”

“Right.”

Neither man moved for a few moments. Then Palmuk turned his back on Yashim and stood by the parapet, looking south to the Bosphorus, lost in the fog.

“Mind the stairs as you go down, effendi,” he said, not looking round. “They’re slippery when it’s wet.”

[ 48 ]

It’s mine,” said the girl.

It was the only thing she’d said so far.

Yashim bit his lip. He’d been trying to talk to her for half an hour.

Lightly, at first. Where was she from? Yes, he knew the place. Not the exact place but…he drew her a picture in words. Mountains. Mist. Dawn creeping down the valley. Was that like it?

A blank.

“It’s my ring.”

Heavy: we don’t think it belongs to you. Serious suspicion, serious charge. Unless you tell us what you know it’ll be the worse for you, girl.

“It’s mine.”

Cajolery: come on, Asul. You have a life half the women in Circassia would die for. Whims granted. Luxuries. A safe and honourable and enviable position. A lovely girl like you. The sultan’s bed and then—who knows?

She pushed out her lips and turned her head, threading a curl with her fingers.

Yanked the curl savagely, pressed her lips together.

“My ring,” she blurted.

“I see. She gave it to you?” Yashim asked gently.

“Don’t believe a word,” the Kislar Agha interrupted. “They all lie like hyenas.”

Yashim raised his shoulders and swallowed his irritation. “Asul may answer as she pleases, but I hope it will be the truth.”

The kislar snorted. The girl flashed him a contemptuous look.

“She never gave it to me.”

“Um. But did you have some agreement, some understanding about the ring?”

The girl gave him a strange look.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. What does it matter anyway? She’s dead, isn’t she? Fucking fish food. What does it matter if I took the ring?”

Yashim frowned. Did he have to explain the idea of theft? There was something particularly repugnant about stealing from a corpse. A sacrilege. If she didn’t at least feel that, where could he begin?

“It may matter very much indeed. Was she dead or alive when you took the ring?”

But the gorgeous little face had clammed up again.

Yashim knew these mountaineers, raised among the far-off peaks of the Caucasus. Hard as their stony houses, as their frozen tracks in winter. Living on air, forever feuding with their neighbours. God had made them beautiful, especially their women: but he made them hard.

Wearily he put the question again. Alive? Or dead?

She made no response.

Perhaps she was right, after all. What did it matter? Yashim looked again at the ring in the palm of his hand. The dresser was right. It was no better than market tat, a plain band of silver, with a worn motif on the annulus which seemed to show two snakes swallowing each other’s tails.

He glanced at the girl. She was wearing bangles, a torque: all gold. Not unusual here, in the harem, where gold and jewels from across the empire went to satisfy the cravings of the women for—what had the valide called it—distinction? Yet he knew how objects like these could take on a resonance no outsider could ever detect or guess at: how they could become the focus of spite or jealousy in spite of their intrinsic worthlessness, the cause of livid arguments, rages, tears, fights.

The sultan’s women had been raised on the hardscrabble. What was death out there? Babies died. Women died giving birth to babies who died, and men got shot in the back for an unlucky word—or lived to be a hundred. Death was nothing: honour counted. In the mountain world they came from people took offence at the lightest word, and allowed feuds to develop into bloodshed over generations, long after their original causes were forgotten.

Was it possible, Yashim asked himself, for a feud like that to have been carried into the palace? The distance which separated the Caucasus from Istanbul was too great. More than geographical.

The snakes, what did they mean? Round and round they ran, forever swallowing their tails: a symbol of eternity, was it, derived from some impious mumbo-jumbo peddled by shamans in the mountains?

Yashim sighed. He had the feeling that he was stirring up problems where they didn’t exist, making trouble where it wasn’t needed. Wasting his own time. All he had achieved was to sharpen the animosity he detected flying between Asul and the Kislar Agha.

“That’s it,” he said. He bowed to the black eunuch and, taking him by the arm, drew him aside. “Five more minutes, kislar. Give me that. Alone.”

Looking into his bloodshot eyes, Yashim found it hard to know what he was thinking.

The kislar grunted.

“You are wasting your time,” he said. His eyes slid round to fasten on the girl.

“The lala will talk to you in private.” She glanced up, expressionless. “You know what we expect.”

And he left the room.

[ 49 ]

Asul watched the door close, and very slowly turned her eyes to look at Yashim. He had the feeling that she had never looked at him until now. Perhaps never really registered his presence in the room.

“Here,” he said softly. “Catch.”

The girl’s eyes followed the ring through the air. At the last moment, with a movement snake-like in its speed, she put out a hand. She clenched the ring in her fist, balled against her chest.

“I’ve seen you before,” she said in a small voice.

Yashim blinked slowly, but said nothing.

Asul glanced down, and uncurled her fingers. “He will take it from me again,” she said.

“But I will ask him not to,” Yashim said.

The girl almost smiled. A weary flicker of expression crossed her face. “You.”

Yashim pressed his palms to his face. “When you are hurt,” he began slowly, “when you have lost something—or someone—it makes you sad, doesn’t it? Sometimes change is good, and sometimes it makes us only want to cry. When you are young, it is hard to believe in pain or loss. But sadness is what makes us alive. The dead don’t grieve.

“Even here, there is plenty of sadness. Even in the Abode of Felicity. The Happy Place.”

He paused. Asul had not moved, except to rub the ring slowly between her fingers.

“You don’t have to say anything, Asul. Not now. Not to me. The sadness is yours, and only yours. But I want to give you something else, besides that ring.”

Asul raised her chin.

“Advice.” Yashim inclined his head, wondering how much he might say. How much she might understand. “Nothing can be changed, Asul. The loss is never repaired, the pain is never fully over. That is our fate, as men or women.

“Bitterness is not a better kind of grief, Asul. Grief has its place, but bitterness invades a wound like rot. Slowly, bit by bit, it shuts you down. And in the end, even though you are alive, you are really dead. I’ve seen it happen.”

Asul pressed her lips together. She glanced downwards, blinking. “Will I keep the ring?” Her voice was small, unsteady.

Yashim gazed at her, silent for a moment. A few minutes longer, and she would tell him what she knew. And with that single act of self-betrayal, perhaps, the bitterness would return.

He found the handle of the door.

“I will speak to the valide myself,” he said.

He needed to speak to her anyway, he thought. To fulfil a promise. To procure an invitation.

[ 50 ]

The seraskier clawed his way to the edge of the divan with his heels and clambered to his feet.

“You should have told me.” His voice was clipped, correct. “I did not ask you to speak to foreigners. Unbelievers.”

Yashim, sitting on the divan, put his chin upon his knees.

“Do you know why I brought you in? Do you think it was because I wanted discretion?” He glared at Yashim. “Because you’re supposed to be fast. My men are dying. I want to know who is killing them, and I don’t have a lot of time. It is one week exactly before the Review. Days have gone by, and you’ve told me nothing. You were quick enough in the Crimea. I want to see that right here. In Istanbul.”

The veins on his temples were pulsing.

“Poems. Taxi rides. They tell me nothing.”

Yashim got to his feet and bowed. When he reached the doorway, the seraskier said: “Those meetings were fixed up by me.”

Yashim’s cloak swirled. “Meetings?”

The seraskier stood against the window with his hands behind his back.

“Meeting the Russians. I’ve made it my business to see that my boys get an education. Present arms and salute your superior officer! Fine. Learn how to load a breech gun or to drill like a Frenchman? That’s the half of it. Someday we are going to be fighting the Russians. Or the French. Or the English.

“How do they think? How willingly do the men fight? Who are their heroes? You can learn a lot if you understand another man’s heroes.”

The seraskier cracked his knuckles.

“I could pretend that none of that matters. There was a time when we met our enemies on the field, and crushed them underfoot. We were very good. But times have changed. We are not as fast as we were, and the enemy has become faster.

“We can’t afford to ignore them—Russians, Frenchmen. Yes, even those Egyptians can teach us something, but not if we suck on narghiles here, in Istanbul, trying to imagine what they are like. It’s for us to go out and learn how they think.”

Yashim scratched his ear. “And you think your officers can learn all this by having coffee with the Russian military attache?”

The seraskier thought: he is not a military man. Not a man at all.

He spoke with exaggerated precision. “You asked me the other day if I spoke French. In fact I do not. Nowadays we have a book, a dictionary, which gives all the words in Turkish and French so that our men can read some of the French textbooks. This book never existed when I was young. Apart from the officers we engage to teach our men, I have never met a Frenchman. Or an Englishman or a Russian. And never, of course, any of their ladies. Of course not. I would not know how to—”

He broke off, gripping the air with outstretched hands.

“How to act. How to speak with them. You know? Thirty years ago the idea would not have occurred to me. Now I think about it all the time.”

“I understand.” Yashim felt a wave of pity for the seraskier, in his western kit, his efficient boots, his buttoned tunic. These were symbols he endured, not knowing exactly why, like one of those simpletons in the bazaar who feel that no medicine is good unless it causes them some pain. Magic boots, magic buttons. Ferenghi magic.

“Things are moving fast. Even here.” The seraskier rubbed a hand across his chin, watching Yashim. “The sultan recognises that our military review presents him with an opportunity. Next Monday, all the city will be watching. People will see the banner of the Prophet at the head of the troop. The jingle of cavalry, brightwork sparkling, beautiful mounts. There’ll be the deep lines of soldiery, marching in step. Whatever they think of us now, they’ll be moved. They will be impressed, I’m sure of that. Better still, it’s going to make them proud.”

The seraskier raised his chin with the population, and his nostrils flared as if pride were something he already smelled in the air.

“To coincide with the display, the sultan will issue an Edict. An Edict that will move us all along in the direction he wants us to take. It is up to us to support him. To try and learn the good things that the infidels can teach us now. Even, as you say, by having coffee with the Russians.”

But Yashim had stopped listening. “An Edict?”

The seraskier lowered his voice.

“You may as well know. Changes will be made in many areas. Equality of the people under a single law. Administration. Ministers instead of pashas, that sort of thing. It will follow the way the army has been reformed on western lines, and it will not be enough. Naturally.”

Yashim felt flattened. What did he really know about anything? In six days, an imperial Edict. An order for change. With an effort he pushed the thoughts that crowded in aside.

“Why the Russians? Why not send our boys to have tea with the English? Or drink wine with the French ambassador?” The seraskier rubbed a hand across the back of his enormous neck. “The Russians…were more interested.”

“And that didn’t strike you as being suspicious?”

“I’m not naive. I took a risk. The boys from the Guard were…what shall I say? Sheltered. I thought it safer for them to make some mistakes now, in Istanbul, than to be ignorant later, on the battlefield.”

Yet they might have survived a battle, Yashim thought. In Istanbul they didn’t have a chance.

[ 51 ]

The man who kills in the dark is not afraid of darkness.

He waits for it. It is reliable, it always comes.

Darkness is his friend.

His feet were bare, to make no sound. He knew he would make no sound.

Years ago, he was one of the Quiet Men. One of the elite. Now he watched the daylight ebb from the grating that lay overhead. In four hours’ time he would lift the grating as easily and silently as a feather, and begin his work. But now he would wait.

He remembered the day of selection. The colonel had sat with a rose on his lap and a blindfold over his eyes at the centre of the barracks hall and dared the men to approach him, one by one. To lift the rose—and return to their place. The reward: a commission in the sappers.

The stone floor of the hall was strewn with dried chickpeas.

Nobody had the dexterity and the patience that he had. His self-control. One or two others reached the rose: but their eagerness betrayed them.

They taught him how to move in the dark, making no sound. It was easy.

They taught him how to live underground. They buried him alive, breathing through a cane.

They explained to him how shadows worked, what the eye could see, the difference between movement and movement.

They ordered him to be a shadow. Live like a rat. Work like a miner. Kill like a snake.

Patience. Obedience. Time, they said, is an illusion: the hours pass like seconds, seconds can seem like lifetimes.

Inch forward under the enemies’ lines. Burrow into his defences like a rat. Listen for the enemy sappers, the countermines, the creaking of the props. Absorb the dark like a second skin. Kill in silence.

And if he was captured—it happened, that far forward of the lines—say nothing. Give nothing.

They didn’t talk much anyway. That suited him, too, he’d never been a talker. The sappers were the Quiet Men.

He hadn’t needed friends when he had the corps. He belonged. He shared faith. And the faith carried him through, didn’t it? Through the cramped tunnel. Beyond the cramped muscle. Over fear and panic into the timeless and immobile centre of all things.

Then came the Betrayal. The shelling of the barracks. Dust, falling masonry, splinters of stone. A wall that hung in the air before it fell. He remembered that moment: an entire wall, thirty feet high, blown from its foundations and sailing, hanging in the air.

He remembered how it flexed and buckled like the flanks of galloping horse. As if the air itself was thick as water. It was a moment that seemed like an eternity.

It gave him ample time, then, to seek the hollow and roll up into it.

Like a man entombed. But not dead. Breathing through an aperture in the rubble. Working the rubble gradually from head to toe like a worm coming up for the dew.

The grating overhead was now invisible. The sapper could see it, though, by moving his head just a fraction of an inch. By using the light that no one else could see.

He raised his chin. This was the time.

Patience was all that mattered.

Obedience was all that mattered.

People would die. People had to die.

Only death could sanctify the empire’s rebirth.

Only sacrifice could cleanse and protect the holy shrines.

The four pillars of the Karagozi.

The assassin felt in his pouch. He touched the ground with the palm of his hand.

And then, like a cat, he began to move.

[ 52 ]

Yashim leaned forward and fixed his eyes on page thirty-four of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. But it was no use. The book had been open on the same page for half an hour.

Whose law would it be? Would it be like the Prankish laws, which allowed the Greeks to have a country but denied the same convenience to the Poles? And would it work as well in the highlands of Bulgaria as in the deserts of Tripolitana?

The necessary leap? Perhaps. A single law for everybody, regardless of their faith, their speech, their parentage. Why not? He doubted that such a thing was sacrilegious, but then…plenty of others would think it was.

As he resolved these questions in his mind, Yashim won—dered who else, precisely, knew about the Edict. The sultan and his viziers, of course. High-ranking dignitaries like the seraskier himself, no doubt. The religious leaders—the Mufti, the Rabbi, the Patriarch? Probably. But the rank and file -priests and imams, say? No. And not the common people of the city. For them it was to be a surprise. As it had been for him.

He snapped the book shut, and closed his eyes, leaning back on the divan.

In the past few hours he had thought this through a dozen times. There was going to be trouble, he could be sure of that.

But there was something else, wasn’t there?

Something he knew was there, like a face in the crowd. Something he’d missed.

[ 53 ]

The man sat suddenly upright.

The assassin thought: he smells me. It made things more interesting. He’d been trained to infiltrate like an odour, not as a man. Now the odour clung to him.

The man sniffed.

Click.

Very slowly the man got to his feet. A knife in his hand.

Now where had that come from?

The assassin smiled. He felt for his pouch. His fingers closed on something hard.

The man with the knife stood crouching, craning his neck.

“Who’s that? What do you want?”

The assassin didn’t move.

A breeze caught the tattered curtain at the window and it flapped. The man with the knife wheeled round, then back again. He peered into the dark.

He craned his neck. Very slowly he turned his head.

He was trying to hear.

The assassin waited. Watching.

The man’s head moved through the midway point of its turn.

The assassin flicked his wrist and the cord snaked out. He plucked it back with a fierce grunt and the man with the knife was jerked off balance, scrabbling with both hands at his neck.

The assassin gave the cord another savage tug.

The man started sawing at the air, searching to cut the cord. The assassin stepped out of the shadows and pushed him down. He caught the knife-wrist and wedged his thumb between the tendons: the knife clattered to the floor as the hand spasmed open.

The assassin was astride him now. He put a hand to his belt and slid out a wooden spoon.

The man on the floor was choking.

The assassin slackened the cord for an instant. His victim gave a shuddering gasp, but it was a false respite. The assassin slipped the wooden spoon beneath the cord and began to twist it round.

[ 54 ]

A fat man, eager for sleep, felt himself rolled off the bed and hit the ground. He opened his eyes and saw a pair of women’s feet.

“All right, petal? Here’s your kit. Shove it on, love, I’m done. Go on.”

The fat man scrambled blearily into his robes. Get out, he thought. Five on the table, he’d be gone before she knew.

The woman watched him scurry through the door.

She was done for the night. Done with outside business, anyhow. No one would come now.

Upstairs would know the final customer had left. She was left with one more trick to turn, the worst.

Carrying her lamp she climbed the stairs. At the top she paused, hearing nothing.

Very slowly she pushed the door ajar. The room smelt terrible.

Silently she put in her head. She stretched out her hand, carrying the little lamp, and the shadows started to flicker round the room.

Months ago, the woman had lost her faith in God. She had begged, she had prayed, she had pleaded with Him night after night, and every dawn had brought the same answer. So she cursed him. Nothing changed. In the end, she had forgotten Him.

But what she saw now was like a revelation.

“Thank God,” she said.

[ 55 ]

Yashim went down to the water stairs at first light, still clutching the note which the kadi had written shortly after the morning prayer. By the time he was settled in the bottom of the boat, the note was limp with the exhalations of Istanbul’s morning damp, between fog and drizzle, but he didn’t need to read it again.

While the rower dragged busily at his heavy sculls and sent the caique skimming towards Seraglio Point, Yashim drew up his knees on the horsehair cushion and automatically let his weight settle on his left arm, to trim the fragile boat. A wooden spoon, the kadi had written: having seen the bag of bones and wooden spoons tipped out over his floor only yesterday, the coincidence had inspired him to inform Yashim.

Twenty minutes later, the rower turned the caique and backed it neatly against the Yedikule stairs in a flurry of backstrokes and shouts.

As soon as Yashim saw the little man sprawled face down in the mud with a wooden spoon bound tightly to the back of his neck he knew that this was not the fourth cadet. The corpse’s hands were by his ears, his knees slightly bent, and there was a curve in his back which made him look, Yashim thought, as if he were simply peering down into a hole in the mud.

Yashim rolled the corpse over and looked at its face.

The staring eyeballs. The protruding tongue.

He shook his head. The night watchman, who had been squatting close to the body for several hours, spat on the ground.

“Do you know him?”

The night watchman shrugged.

“Fings ‘appen, innit?” He glanced over at the corpse, and brightened. “Yer, good lad an’ all. Did some blokes a favour. Women, y’know, and all that.”

He scratched his head.

“Mind you, fackin’ tough.” His simple mind slipped into the reverse key. “Bit too ‘eavy, if you ask me. They didn’t like ‘im, not the women.”

Yashim sighed.

“These women. Are you saying he ran a brothel?”

“Yeah. Funny lookin’ geezer, too.”

Yashim walked away, squelching in mud up to his ankles. Up on the quay he saw the entrance to a courtyard and picked his way across a scattering of rubbish to a pump. He cranked the handle. A thin trickle of brown water dribbled from the spout.

People were stirring in the apartments around the courtyard. A shutter banged and a woman leaned out of an upstairs window.

“Hey, what you doin’?”

“I’m washing my feet,” Yashim muttered.

“I’m chuckin’ this bucket, so watch out.”

Yashim beat a hasty retreat, the mud still clinging to his feet. What a foul district this was!

He walked around the corner, hoping to find a cab or a sedan chair. Every doorway seemed to have its ragged beggar or snoring drunk: some of them stared blearily at Yashim as he walked past. The bars were supposed to close at midnight, but Yashim knew that they tended to stay open for as long as anyone had money to spend, finally pushing them into the street when their purses were empty and their guts were full. He couldn’t understand the attraction. Preen had once argued with him, saying that she enjoyed the bars, their mixture of happy and sad.

“Except for drunks, you can never tell who you’ll meet, or why they’re there. Everybody has a story. I like stories,” she had said.

Too many of those stories ended like this, Yashim felt, soaking up your own vomit in a cold doorway. Or head-down in the mud, dead, like that crookbacked brothel keeper he’d just seen, maintaining the tone of the neighbourhood.

Hadn’t Preen mentioned speaking to a hunchback?

A sleazy port-rat who made her feel dirty.

Who told her about the cadets meeting the Russian up at the Yeyleyi Gardens.

Her informant.

And down in the mud, freshly dead, a crookbacked pimp.

Not the victim, by any stretch of the imagination, of a crime of passion. The blow that fell too hard. The carving knife that simply came to hand.

No. It had been a professional killing. Someone who killed with a length of cord—and a wooden spoon.

Yashim broke into a run.

[ 56 ]

Every city has districts which teeter on the fringes of respectability, which have nothing to do with their proximity to the moneyed and desirable centre. However roomy the houses, however convenient they seem, they are always tainted in some indefinable way by the incessant passage of other people: people who take their lodgings by the week, or even by the night; people who come and go, and may or not come back again, and whose purposes are too fleeting and too diffuse to be properly understood. Nobody asks. Nothing is assumed. Services are paid for in advance, and trust is at a premium. Prices are always a bit higher than elsewhere, but the clientele are happy to save themselves a walk, or know no better, being strangers.

Preen, however, was something of a fixture, and paid rent accordingly. Her landlord had nothing to complain of: he barely knew of her existence, being sent out to a cafe where all day he played backgammon with other old fellows and was only asked back if his wife needed to vet a new applicant or frighten a recalcitrant lodger. Guarding her modesty, Preen’s landlady conducted most of her business by shrieking from behind a latticed screen at the foot of the stairs. There was a small window people could use to pay her: they held the money by the hole and she would snatch it up. If she needed to take a look she could press her eye against the lattice-work. Her own room behind was fairly dark.

At the moment she was watching a small black man struggling with a yoke, from which hung two swaying china pots. Paying no attention to the eyes he knew were watching him behind the screen, the man carried his burden past the door and ran bow-legged into the court outside. The landlady followed his movements with envy and irritation.

It wasn’t that the landlady wanted to haul slops to the drain every morning. It was that the little black man she had engaged to perform the task knew everything that was going on before she did.

The slop-carrier returned with his empty pots and set them down in a row beside the others to dry. He faced the lattice.

“Three gents in number five. Eight not slept in, but it smell werry bad.”

The landlady sucked in her lips and pushed them out again. Number five was let for the week, to a single gentleman. She’d have it out with him when they tried to sneak out later on. As for number eight, it wasn’t the first time she’d stayed out overnight. A bad smell was the reason she discouraged her tenants from bringing food into the premises.

If she had time, she thought, she’d go and get rid of whatever was festering in Preen’s room.

A man came in at the door. She recognised him as a friend of number eight.

She rapped on the lattice with her knuckles.

“You can save yourself the stairs,” she croaked, in what she hoped was a kindly tone. Number eight was her best tenant. “Gone out.”

Yashim squinted at the lattice.

“Gone out this morning, you mean?”

It was an unlikely idea. The slop-carrier picked up a mop and began to poke it around the corridor, grinning.

“Whatever,” the landlady replied. “She’s not there now. I can let her know you called, effendi.”

“Yes, thank you. And give her this message, will you?” He tore a leaf from a little notebook he carried, scribbled a few words and folded it. The flap in the lattice dropped down and a withered hand shot out to take the paper.

“It’s important she gets this as soon as possible,” Yashim added. “You don’t know where she’s gone?”

“I’ll see she gets it,” the landlady said firmly.

Yashim hesitated. Was there anything else he could do? He thought of going up to leave a message in her room, but it was too late for that. The crone at the lattice had the message, and the black servant had already wetted the corridor floor ahead.

He bid the lattice good-day, and went out into the street.

[ 57 ]

It was already dark when Preen got back to her boarding house. Not that she had done very much that day: the action had taken place last night, at a stag-night where alcohol had been served and Preen had agreed to take a drink herself, after the dancing. It broke one of her cardinal rules, but even cardinal rules are made to be broken, she’d thought, as one drink became two and the groom-to-be asked her agitated questions about the wedding night.

So she’d ended up staying over, sleeping late, and waking up with a hangover. The other guests had left long since, taking the groom with them: she had a faint recollection of hearing stifled laughter and groans in the early morning, before she rolled over and went back to sleep. A very fat Armenian woman, sniffing with disapproval, had made her some coffee, and she had spent the rest of the day at the baths with a towel over her head.

She’d stopped for a pastry on the way home, but the hangover had taken away her appetite and she only nibbled at the corner before she asked the vendor to wrap it. It was in her bag now, but really she only wanted to go upstairs and sleep. She pushed the door, and her landlady rapped immediately on the lattice.

“Message for you,” she screeched. The flap dropped, and Preen saw her hand shoot out clutching a folded note.

“Thanks,” she said. “May I have a light?”

“Urgent, he called it. It was that gentleman of yours who came by the other day. Nicely spoken. Here you are.”

She means Yashim, Preen thought as she took the candlestick. As usual, the candle was only a stub: the landlady was careful with things like that. She wondered if she should turn around and try to find Yashim right away: she certainly wasn’t going to be able to read the note, but she didn’t want the landlady to know that.

Perhaps, if she hadn’t been standing at the foot of the stairs with the candle, she would have gone to look for Yashim. Or if the landlady hadn’t added, in what passed for a confidential undertone, that she’d be grateful if everyone would remember not to take food upstairs—the smell in her room had disturbed the help.

Preen climbed the stairs slowly. At this time of year there was a perpetual draught in the old house and the stubby candle needed shielding. On the second floor she turned left down a low corridor past two doors, both shut and silent within, to reach the tiny, crooked flight of stairs that led to her own door. Gradually she mounted, following the sharp twist she never liked because it somehow put her at odds with the rest of the house, shutting her in. She glanced up and saw the door. In the narrow stairwell the shadows flickered like a troop of wild monkeys.

She stopped and sniffed. There was a smell, just as the landlady had said. For the first time she wondered what it might be. Perhaps a rat had died under the floorboards. She shuddered, and put out her finger.

And that was something else she didn’t like about those stairs, about that door: having to reach into the dark hole to finger the latch on the inside.

It was like sticking her finger into a dark mouth.

[ 58 ]

Yashim had returned to the Imperial Archives after leaving his message with Preen’s landlady. In daylight, with a weak winter sun filtering through the high windows, the place looked more ordinary, the atmosphere flatter. There was another reason for the change, too. Several archivists were in attendance, but Ibou the Sudanese boy was not among them. The Library Angel, Yashim thought.

The head archivist was a mournful fellow with drooping moustaches, not a eunuch but a superannuated graduate of the palace school.

“The divan is in session,” he explained gloomily. “Come back this afternoon.”

But Yashim did not want to come back that afternoon. “This is urgent,” he said.

The archivist stared at him with sad eyes. He looked infinitely put-upon, but Yashim suspected he was merely lazy.

“Help me now. You can break off if any orders come from the viziers’ council.”

The archivist nodded slowly, blowing out his cheeks.

“Put your request in writing. We’ll see what we can do.”

Yashim leaned his elbows on the reading desk and chewed at a pencil. Eventually he wrote:

“Istanbul fire-towers. Location details.” And then as an afterthought he added: “Summaries of renovation/maintenance costs 1650-1750,” as being more likely to turn up what he wanted to know.

The archivist acknowledged the paper slip with a brief grunt but made no effort to read it. It lay on his desk for over twenty minutes while he thumbed through a quarto volume of figures and Yashim paced to and fro by the entrance. Eventually he picked it up, glanced at it, and rang a bell.

His subordinates moved in imitation of their master’s ponderous ennui, shaking their heads and glancing up at Yashim now and then as if they suspected he had come merely to try their patience. At long last one of them disappeared into the stacks. He was gone about an hour.

“Nothing specific on location. There are two volumes of accounts, which refer to the fire-service in general. They straddle your stated time-frame. Do you want to see them?”

Yashim mastered an urge to pull the man’s nose.

“Yes, please,” he said evenly.

The archivist shuffled off. He came back with two surprisingly small books, smaller than Yashim’s own hand and bound in blue cloth. The older book, which roughly speaking covered a period from the beginning of the seventeenth century to 1670, was quite badly worn, and the signatures which bound the pages together were so badly rotted that pages slipped from position in clumps, threatening to slide out of the covers altogether.

The archivist frowned.

“I’m not sure we can allow you to examine this one,” he began.

Yashim exploded.

“I haven’t waited all morning to be told I’m incapable of keeping a few pages of a book in order. I’m going to look at the book here, on the bench. Not fan it about, or shake it, or chuck it in the air.”

Yet the books proved to be a disappointment. After half an hour Yashim had only turned up three references, two dealing with the Stamboul Tower, which had burnt down twice, and the other referring only in the vaguest way to the fire-towers, without numbering or naming them. Entries had been made in the books by many hands, which made the business of deciphering some of the older entries in particular both exacting and frustrating.

It was while he was trying to make out an entry written in particularly antiquated script that Yashim suddenly thought of his message to Preen. He had written it clearly enough, and if she followed his advice she would be probably be safely tucked up in some corner of the cafe in Belol Oglu, waiting for him and challenging the men to stare. That thought made him smile, but the smile died suddenly.

He had written Preen a warning, making his instructions clear. Stifling the poetics of the written word, exaggerating the loops of his script, he’d written a few lines that anyone could read, even a child.

Even, but only.

Only a literate child.

[ 59 ]

Preen poked her finger into the little black hole in the door and crooked it, feeling upwards for the slim wooden latch.

She felt it resting against the edge of her nail, and clicked it up. As the door swung open a sudden draught, laden with the unpleasantly sweet smell of rotten meat, snuffed out the candle in her hand. She gave a small cry of dismay and stepped backwards in the dark.

The swinging door struck against the side wall. At the same moment Preen felt something brush across her face, with a whirr like an insect against her skin. She jerked her head back, stumbled, and lost her footing on the top step of the darkened stairs. She fell with a crash, ricocheting off the back wall and plunging sideways down the narrow stairs.

Preen landed in a bruised tangle, her face pressed against the corridor floor. Her right arm throbbed. For a few seconds she did not move, hearing only the sound of blood pulsing in her head and the gasp of her own breath. In the darkness it sounded shockingly loud.

But then came a muffled crack behind her on the stairs, close to her feet, like the sound of someone testing their weight on a wooden step.

The sound of someone joining her in the dark.

Somebody was coming down the stairs, from her own room.

With a convulsive jerk, she pulled up her legs and somersaulted out into the corridor. As her weight fell upon her arm a jolt of pain seared upwards through her shoulder into her neck and she opened her mouth to scream.

But then the sound died on her lips.

[ 60 ]

Yashim, mounting the stairs two at a time, heard the crash of Preen falling backwards, and at the top of the stairs he grabbed the wall and swung himself round the corner into the corridor. The darkness disoriented him. He heard another movement in the passage and shouted:

“Preen!”

Without hesitation he took two steps into the dark. Only two—but they saved his life. He had got no further when he was suddenly smashed backwards with a force that seconds earlier would have catapulted him down the stairs. He felt a savage blow to his face and the breath knocked out of his lungs as he was hurled back against the wall.

Two things flashed through his mind as he retched for air. One, that he was already too late. Another, that the killer who had struck him and who was at this very moment flinging him—self down the darkened stairs, flight by flight, was not going to get away easily.

He put out a hand and gripped the banisters. The movement seemed to let air back into his chest; another brought him to his feet. For a moment he stood, heaving, and then with an oath he plunged down the stairs.

He reached the corridor on the ground floor and tore out of the entrance into the street, where he swivelled and glanced about. A black man he recognised from the morning lay sprawled in the dust, still holding two chamber pots aloft in either fist. He jerked his head and swung a pot over his shoulder. Yashim began to run.

There were still many people about, and while it was hard to see how many, or where they were until he was almost upon them, because it was very dark, something in the way people shrank back at his approach told Yashim that he was on the right track. A man runs through a crowd, he thought, and the crowd instinctively expects another, on his trail: quarry and hunter, the pursued and the pursuer, old as man himself, older than Istanbul. A picture of two snakes swallowing each other’s tails swam in his mind. He ran.

He reached the corner of the street and plunged left, guided by a sharp rage and an instinctive urge to climb, to take to the higher ground. Figures shrank away at his approach. At a corner lit by the torches of a coffee-house he caught sight of people turning their heads back to focus on him and he thought: I’m closing. But the streets were narrowing again. At a junction of three alleyways he almost paused, and almost lost his way: but then a faint something in the air, a sickly-sweet trace he had smelled before but couldn’t identify, gave him the lead he sought and, ignoring a well-lit empty alley and another he thought he recognised as a cul-de-sac, he plunged down the darkest and the meanest of them all. Whether he was trailing by instinct, or magic, or by signs he could not even pause to decipher—a faint incline, a preference for the dark over the light, an unreasoned and unexamined knowledge of the difference between a street and a dead-end which he had imbibed, as it were, from years of living in Istanbul—he did not know: had he stopped to think he would have stopped altogether, for the breath was flying to his lungs like an angry lizard: he could feel its scales upraised, its scrabbling claws.

He swerved to the wall and flung out his hand to meet it and stood for a few seconds, breathing heavily. Ahead, lights flickered and glittered red in the darkness, a string of little street shrines lit by candles glowing behind the coloured glass. He guessed where he was. And at that moment he realised, too, where he was going.

And he ran on with such a fierce, formless and glowing conviction that at the next alley he swerved suddenly to the right and almost knocked a man to the ground.

It was a glancing blow, shoulder to shoulder, but it made the man wheel; and as he wheeled, Yashim turned his head and caught sight of his face. It contained, he saw, a whole range of expressions—anger, confusion, and a spark of sudden recognition.

“The fire!” The man cried out, almost with a laugh.

Yashim waved an arm and sped on, but the man was at his back. “Effendi!”

Yashim recognised the voice. And at that very moment the alley made a sudden shallow curve and a light was burning at its far end: and right in his line of sight he caught a glimpse of what he already knew had been in his mouth all along, like the tail of a snake: a fleeting glimpse of a man who disappeared.

A voice came from behind: “I saw him! Let’s go!”

Yashim glanced sideways as the other man, fresh to the chase, loped up at his shoulder.

“Murad Eslek!” He panted. Yashim remembered the street on fire, the man black with soot who grinned and shook his hand.

Reaching an alley which offered a choice to run right or left, Yashim hesitated. He seemed to have lost his sense of direction: Eslek’s sudden appearance confused him. He was aware that he had been running for a long time. He sensed he was very close -but he felt his own anger and confusion, pounding heavy-footed down an ordinary alleyway in Istanbul. What he had taken for inspiration had suddenly resolved itself into commonplace: it had become no more than coincidence.

“The tanneries!” Yashim gasped. The scent had both eluded and directed him for what seemed like hours. He had smelled it the moment Preen’s killer made explosive contact with him at the head of the stairs. It had drawn him along the streets, sucked him instinctively into alleyways, urged him left and right and now, within sight of his prey, it enveloped him.

Doggedly, feeling the weight on his feet for the first time, Yashim trotted left at a junction of mean alleys. Even in the darkness he could see that the walls around him were not continuous. Here and there a dim glow told him that he was passing a dwelling of some sort, but for the most part he moved in darkness where the lane bled out into scrub, and goats and sheep were tethered and corralled into flimsy yards. He heard them shift, with a low tinkle of bells; once he stumbled into a gate where the lane curved. His companion had long since dropped away: his quarry was nowhere to be seen. Nowhere to be sensed.

The reek of the tanneries had blotted him out.

[ 61 ]

The first thing Yashim noticed, after the stench he was forced to suck down into his heaving chest, was the light.

It rose in eerie columns from the vats into which, across an area of several acres, the animal skins were lowered for boiling and dyeing. Against a forest of flickering torches, each vat threw out a spume of coloured vapour, red, yellow and indigo blending and slowly dissolving into the darkness of the night air. The air stank of fat, and burned hair, and worst of all the overreaching odour of dog shit used to tan the leather. A vision of hell.

A hell into which Yashim’s quarry had disappeared.

Yashim dropped to one knee and took a careful look around.

He’d heard about the tanning yard, and smelt it, too, but this was the first time he had seen it with his own eyes. A high wall enclosed a space about the size of a football field, and crammed together, almost touching at the rim, the vats lay embedded in a raised floor of clay and cement, which glinted greasily in the torchlight, and allowed the tanners to walk between them and stir their bubbling contents with a long pole. Moulded of clay, lined with tiles, each vat was about six feet across. Here and there crude derricks had been set up for hauling the heavy bundles of wet skins in and out of the dyes, and at the junction of each four vats, in a space that resembled a four-pointed star, circular iron grilles had been fixed, Yashim imagined, to feed air to the flues that ran underneath. Several of these grilles were visible from where he stood.

Of the assassin there was no sign, but Yashim knew that he was there, somewhere, hidden behind the lip of one of the vats, perhaps, or standing motionless against the shadowed walls. Yashim knew almost nothing about the killer, except that he could operate in the dark: it was in the dark that he had launched himself against him, in darkness he had killed Preen, in the night he had stolen in to garrotte the hunchback. The dark, Yashim thought, is this man’s friend.

He scanned the tannery again. It was surrounded by high walls: only at the farther end of the tannery across the dancing glow of colour could he see other darkened doorways. He did not think the killer had found time to reach them.

Yashim shifted focus to look at the vats closest to him. The colours in the steam were less vivid, perhaps because of the way the light caught them; it was only further out, as the pillars of steam overlapped, that they showed a rainbow iridescence. Some of the nearer vats appeared to be empty.

Yashim edged closer on bended legs, holding up the skirt of his cloak. He stepped out onto the clay. It was surprisingly slippery, beaded with droplets of steam and fat, and he moved cautiously, planting his feet with elaborate care. He could feel the heat from the vats but, yes, there were empty vats among them. They were drained, he now saw, by means of a wooden bung attached to a chain which ran up the inside of each vat and was secured by a metal loop at the rim. He had a vision of the killer dropping down into one of them: like the soldier lying dead in the cauldron at the stables, long ago.

He reached into his cloak and unsheathed the little dagger at his belt. For a moment its blade glinted fiercely in the weird light, and then dulled as the vapour which filled the air condensed on the cold metal. He held it out, the handle beneath his thumb and nestling into his curled fingers, using it like a pointer.

He put one foot on top of the grating, feeling a rush of hot air up his leg; he tried it with his weight and felt the grating rock, with an almost imperceptible metallic sound. He pushed again, a little harder. Again the same slight yielding to pressure, but this time the metal grille gave a distinct knock against the frame.

Yashim stepped back and crouched down to inspect the grating. It was about twenty inches in diameter, set with rounded iron bars about two inches apart. He raised his head, considering. There had been so little time to hide. Crouched in one of the empty vats, the killer would be caught like a bear in a pit: it would be only a matter of time before Yashim found him, and then…

He put out his hand and pushed the far side of the grating, watching it rock very slightly away from him. It was not properly bedded at one side, and by rocking it to and fro he worked out the pivotal point. Yashim ran his fingers along the edge and gave a grunt as his fingers closed on a small twist of cloth no bigger than a fingernail that protruded from the joint.

He stood up and stepped back, carefully, to take a flaming torch from a bracket in the wall. Once more he scanned the tannery, but nothing moved. By the grating he knelt down and thrust the torch against the grille.

Tunnels. These grilles had to be more than air-vents: they must also act as access-points to a network of tunnels for the tanners to feed the fires that boiled the water in the vats. The killer could have dropped down here into the tunnels: in his haste, though, a corner of his sleeve must have caught in the join as he replaced the grille overhead.

It has already been said that Yashim was reasonably brave: but that was only when he stopped to think.

Without a moment’s reflection, he heaved up the grille and swung his legs into the pipe. The next moment he was crouched at its base, about five feet below, peering in astonishment at what was revealed in the flickering light of his torch.

[ 62 ]

The assassin hung for a moment on all fours, to catch his breath. Strong: yes, he was very strong. But the running was for a younger man, perhaps; a man in training. He had not trained that way for ten years.

Move, he told himself. Crawl away from under the grating. For the first time in forty-eight hours he felt tired. Jinxed.

The mission had failed. He had waited for hours in that room, focusing on the door. Once or twice he had tried the latch, to see how long it took for the door to swing open. Darkness had come: his element.

He had heard her coming. He saw the light approach, watched with satisfaction as a finger snaked in to flick the latch. His hand coiled around the weight at the end of the twine.

And then, in the darkness, it had all gone wrong. The dancer stepped back, not forwards. The weight sliced through the empty air, and then the crashing. It would have been possible to go on—but someone had come.

If there’s any risk of being discovered, abort.

The assassin began to move again, silently, creeping away from the grating down the sluice. Forget the failure, he thought. Hide. Go to earth.

The movement consoled him. His breathing softened. Rest now. No one would follow him down here, and later he could rectify his mistake. Sleep now.

Sleep among the altars.

Each altar topped by a glowing brazier.

The air was fetid and warm.

The air was full of sleep.

The assassin squirmed through a low arch and found a clear space on the warm brick. He also found a day-old loaf of bread on the ledge of a brazier and stuffed a piece of it into his mouth. He took the stopper from an earthenware bottle and drank a long draught of warm water.

At last he stretched out on the warm bricks, clasping his hands behind his head.

And then, looking up at the curving belly of the vats, the assassin screamed.

[ 63 ]

Yashim saw he had been wrong about the spaces that lay below the vats. From what he could make out, a succession of air-wells all dropped to a huge and very low chamber, raised on shallow brick vaults. Between the vaults, at regular intervals, wide braziers were set on stacks of bricks to heat the tiled cauldrons overhead: in the dim and smoky light the cauldrons were suspended like the teats of a monstrous she-devil.

His eyes ran from the wooden bungs which hung like nipples to the brickwork that composed the floor on which he now crouched. In a way he had been right. He had expected a maze of tunnels, but what he found was the impress of a maze, as if the floor of the tannery had been scored by a huge wheel: as if the tunnels he had imagined had been abandoned when they were only a few inches high. They were thick with coloured grease.

He shuffled forwards, the torch in one hand, the knife in the other. He felt the grease pile up beneath his toes: looking down, he saw it gathered in a slick ridge at his feet. Looking ahead, he saw that the grease was actually moving sluggishly towards him. Someone had already sloshed it aside, in a faint but unmistakable track, and it was quietly oozing back, revealing its direction as it rolled.

Struck by an idea, he inched back to the air-vent and stood up. He put the torch on the ground above his head and gripped the edge of the grating, hauling himself back into the not-so-fresh air.

For the next five minutes, Yashim crept this way and that around the vats. He went to the far end of the tannery and removed the grating, thrusting his torch down the pipe. He watched the oozing grease for a few moments.

He went towards the centre of the tannery and fiddled with a rope attached to one of the derricks used for raising and lowering bundles of skins into the vats.

When he was ready, he put a hand on one of the chains that stretched out of the vats and yanked on it.

Then he dived for another, and another, pulling with all his might.

And somewhere in the distance, as if from underground, he heard a scream.

[ 64 ]

The assassin saw the first bung disappear.

Ten years before, he had watched a wall collapse on top of him, and counted that moment an eternity.

Now, for an eternity, he made no sound.

For an eternity he scrambled for an explanation.

And he rolled aside only when the bung was replaced by a black tube of scalding fat and water which exploded onto the brick.

It ricocheted onto his back, the hot fat clinging like needles.

And he screamed.

Spouts of heavy boiling dye erupted all around him. The culvert he lay in was suddenly filled with swirling liquid. In terror he ploughed his hands into the scalding torrent and fought his way to an opening. He reached up, placed his scalded hands on the grating, and heaved.

And as he dragged himself up out of the vent he scarcely noticed the coiled rope that cinched very tight against his burning ankles.

[ 65 ]

Yashim lunged on the counterweight and had the satisfaction of seeing the assassin swept from his feet. But as the slipknot ran up against the pulley, the arm of the derrick swung heavily towards him and the rope went slack. Yashim lunged further backwards to regain his hold but at that moment the rope bearing the assassin’s weight kicked between his hands, almost knocking him off his feet: the rope sped through his palms and he found himself suddenly scrabbling against the sweaty slope. He kicked with both feet: his left leg slithered off the edge and his foot touched boiling water. He jerked it back with a gasp, and went down on his side.

Flailing to regain a foothold on the slimy surface, Yashim saw the rope slowly oozing through his fingers, slick with grease. He made a lunge with his left hand and caught the rope, tight as a bar, a few inches higher up, hauling hand over hand until he was able to get into a crouch. For a moment he felt his sandals skating on the greasy floor, so he leaned back to balance the weight. Everything had happened so fast that when he finally looked up he could make no sense of what he saw.

A few yards ahead of him, something like a giant crab was working its pincers in a jet of pinkish steam.

Bound at the ankles, upside down, the assassin’s legs were opening and closing at the knee. His tunic had fallen over his head, but his arms were flailing upwards from the cloud of cloth, struggling to take a grip of his own legs. The hem of the tunic floated in a bath of dye. He was suspended directly over a boiling vat, where the derrick had carried him the moment it felt the weight of his body against its arm.

Yashim dragged at the rope and hauled himself upright, but the moment he slacked his hold on the rope the assassin dropped. Yashim hauled back, wrapping a length of rope around his waist and leaning back over the vat behind him.

I can’t let go, he thought.

The flailing man’s legs opened again. What was he doing? Yashim cast a glance over his shoulder: he was hanging out over a roiling tub of evil-smelling liquid. He could see the skins rolling over and over. He needed to keep his weight balanced there, keep his feet set against the rim of the vat, move them along the greasy ledge, and gradually bring the rope up hard against the derrick.

Then he saw what the man was trying to do: with a knife in his hands he was lunging upwards, scissoring his legs to close the distance, lunging at the knot with the blade.

He didn’t know where he was.

If the rope severed, the assassin would dive into the dye.

Yashim, meanwhile, was also hanging out over a vat of poisonous, boiling liquid. Only the assassin’s weight was keeping his feet on the rim of the vat.

And at any moment the rope would whip through the block and Yashim would plunge backwards into the boiling broth.

They were balanced.

The rope gave a thud, and sagged a quarter of an inch.

Yashim tightened his grip. He glanced across the pillars of purple and yellow and saw that the dark doorways at the far end of the tanneries were growing wider.

A knot of men detached themselves from the darkness of the door and began loping across the glistening surface of the tanneries towards him.

And from the direction they came from, and the way they moved, Yashim did not think that they looked very friendly.

[ 66 ]

The rope gave another jerk and Yashim scrabbled to keep his balance on the edge of the vat. His right foot lost its hold and for a moment he swung out over the scum. To regain his footing he had to pay out more rope until he was almost horizontal. He could feel the heat on the back of his neck, and the weight of the liquid seeping into his cloak.

It was not so much a decision as an instinct which made him haul savagely on the rope to regain his footing. The response of his human counterweight brought him momentarily upright: the assassin dropped and as the bundle hit the boiling water his legs convulsively scissored for the last time as the rope finally parted. Yashim floundered, his arms sawing the air while the assassin continued his descent into the vat. Regaining his balance, Yashim was in time to see one hand fling itself out of the pot before it sank into the churning water.

He had no time to consider what had happened. Avoiding the slippery surface between the vats, the men from the doorway were now fanning out into two lines around the edge close to the walls, to cries of ‘Block him!’ and ‘Close the entrance!’ Yashim began to scramble back in a zigzagging diagonal line towards the gate at the corner by which he had come in. But he had to move cautiously, while the others, further from the edge of the vats and with the wall to help them, were already closing in.

Several tanners were already at the gate when Yashim came past the grating he had first descended. He reached down and scooped up the grille in his left hand, like a shield; in the other he fingered the short-bladed knife. But he knew already that the gesture was futile. The men at the gate were hunched over their own knees, bow-legged, waiting for a fight. And the others, sensing their chance, had left the wall to approach him across the vats.

He whirled round. A man at his back lunged, and Yashim whipped him across the face with the knife. Another man closed and Yashim plunged the grille against him like an iron glove, knocking him back. Turning, he saw that the gate was infested with men: there was no escape in that direction.

He sensed a movement and turned, a little too late. He had only time to see a face blackened with rage before he felt a stunning blow over his right eye and he fell to the ground. He stuck out the knife blindly and waited for the man either to run upon it or dodge in and grapple with him, but when nothing happened he rolled round to raise the grating as a shield.

Just in time to see the black-faced man wheeled to the right by a tug on his arm. The man who was tugging ducked, rose like a fish and nutted the black-faced assailant expertly on the tip of his nose. The assailant dropped and the man who had delivered the blow turned to Yashim and grinned.

“Let’s get you the fuck out,” he said.

[ 67 ]

It was said that the battle—they only called it a brawl—continued long after Murad Eslek had helped Yashim punch, kick and slash his way out of the tanneries and into the silent darkness beyond.

As they groped their way down the alleys, small lights glowed behind shutters overhead. Now and then a door banged. Away in the distance a dog began to bark. Their footsteps echoed softly on the cobbles, thrown back by buildings asleep, and at peace. A cold wind carried the smell of damp plaster, and the lingering scent of the evening’s spices.

“Phew! You stink, my friend,” said Murad Eslek, grinning.

Yashim shook his head.

“If it hadn’t been for you,” he said, “there’d have been nothing left to smell. I owe you my life.”

“Forget it, effendi. It was a good scrap, and all.”

“But tell me, how—” Yashim winced. Now that the excitement was over his scalded foot was beginning to smart.

“Easy enough,” Eslek replied. “I sees you running like a demon—maybe you got robbed, or something. But when you started in for the tanneries it didn’t look so good—I mean, they’re rough, them guys. That’s when I started to think you were going to need some heavy artillery. So I whipped back and raised the boys. I went round a couple of caffs. Put the word out. Ding dong up the tannery? No problem. Why, when we came and saw what trouble you were in the lads moved in like donkeys on a carrot. Lovely job.”

Yashim smiled. They were back in the city by now. The streets were empty and it was too late, he thought, to get a bath. Eslek seemed to guess his thoughts.

“Me, I’m in transport. We work nights, effendi. Cover the markets—veg, mainly, and small livestock. I was going in there when we ran into each other again. There’s a hammam we use, open all night, which you as a gentleman might not know about. It’s small, yes, but I reckon it’s clean. Leastways save you going back and stinking up your own gaff. No disrespect,” he added hurriedly, “but them tanneries don’t half get into your skin. It’s the fat.”

“No, no, you’re perfectly right. I’d be grateful, really. But you’ve done so much for me this evening, I don’t want to take you out of your way.”

Eslek shook his head.

“Almost there,” he said.

At the door of the hammam they parted, with a handshake. Yashim had murmured—and Eslek had protested.

“Drop it, effendi. You came out all right for us on the night of the fire. I’ve got a wife and kiddies up the street what know as you did a grand job for them. I was going to swing round and see you—sign of the Stag, you said, right?—and thank you proper. My advice is, don’t go messing with them tanners any more. They’re dirty, effendi, and it ain’t just the fat.”

Yashim was grateful for the baths. Eslek was right: they were clean. The proprietor, a sallow old Armenian with a weary and intelligent face, even agreed to send a boy to fetch clean clothes from Yashim’s landlady while Yashim sluiced away the coloured grease that had sunk between his toes and the miasma of shit that clung to his skin. All the time he fought not to remember what he knew.

Yashim unwound his turban and scooped water over his hair. Preen was dead. He concentrated on his surroundings. When the attendant offered him a bar of soap it smelled, he noticed, of Murad Eslek. He touched his left cheek: tomorrow he’d have a black eye. He continued to use the scoop, rhythmically ladling the hot water over his head, massaging the soap into his scalp, behind his ears, over his aching neck. His ribs were bruised where the assassin had plunged against him on Preen’s corridor. And Preen was dead. Yashim jerked his head up, to watch the attendant bringing him a basin of cold water for his scalded foot. There was nothing he could do about his knee. It looked red, and felt sore. It would heal.

He forced himself to remember the chase through the alleys. Palewski had told him once how Napoleon had entered Italy, winning battle after battle with the Austrians, until he had felt that the earth itself was flying under his feet. He had felt the same, pursuing the man who had killed the hunchback, through the inclined alleys of Istanbul. Pursuing the man who killed Preen.

He had not been able to save the assassin, that was true. Otherwise he could have made him talk. To have learned -what? Details, names, locations.

Even now, he could not decide whether the killer had been aware of what was happening when he had struggled to cut the rope that bound him to the derrick. Yashim had been hoping to inch him back, away from the boiling vat. Had the killer known where he was? Was it suicide? Yashim was pious enough to hope it was not.

Yet he could not rid himself of the idea that the killer, like himself, understood that they were both at an end of the same rope: bound for minutes in perfect mutual understanding. He wanted us both to go together, Yashim suspected.

All he had really learned, instead, was how the third cadet to die had been boiled so that all his bones were clean. And that, he reasoned, was something he could have guessed. After all, the soup master had already told him how the Janissaries had come back to Istanbul, taking jobs that were out of the way. Watchmen. Stokers. Tanners. He remembered the scarred and blackened face of the man who knocked him down.

Was it for this that Preen had died?

Yashim squeezed his hair.

Preen was dead.

And why was the assassin so determined to die?

What was there, apart from the threat of justice, that made a man decide to die rather than talk?

Yashim could think of only two things.

One was fear.

The other was faith: the martyr’s death.

He pulled back suddenly, gasping for breath, his eyes stinging.

Preen had died alone, for nothing, in the dark.

Wise and wayward, loving and forever doomed, she died because of him.

He had asked her to help.

It wasn’t that. Yashim whined, teeth bared, his eyes screwed up tight, knocking his head against the tiled wall.

He had never properly taught her to read.

[ 68 ]

The morning dawned bright. On the street, Stambouliots congratulated one another on the re-appearance of good weather, and expressed the hope that the gloom which had settled over the city in the last week might finally be lifted. Optimists declared that the spate of murders seemed to have come to an end, proving that the message from the imams had worked. Pessimists predicted more fog ahead. Only the fatalists, who in Istanbul number hundreds of thousands, merely shrugged their shoulders and said that, like fire and earthquake, God’s will would be done.

Yashim made his way down early to the cafe on Kara Davut. The proprietor noticed that he was limping, and without a word offered him a cushioned divan off the pavement where he could still enjoy watching the doings on the street. When he had brought the coffees, Yashim asked: “Is there anyone who could take a message for me, and fetch an answer? I’d ask your son, but it’s pretty far.”

He gave the address. The cafe proprietor frowned and turned down his mouth.

“It is time,” he said gruffly. “Mehmed can go. Eh, hey! Mehmed!”

A little boy of about eight or nine bounced out of the back of the shop at his father’s shout. He bowed solemnly and stood looking at Yashim with his big brown eyes, rubbing one foot against his other leg.

Yashim gave him a purse, and carefully explained where to go. He told him about the old lady behind the lattice. “You should knock. When she answers, present my compliments. Give her the money, and tell her these are…expenses—for the lady Preen, in room eight. Whatever she says, don’t be frightened. Remember what you are told.”

The boy nodded and darted through the door, where a small crowd had gathered to watch a dervish perform his dance on the street. Yashim saw the boy dive unhesitatingly between the folds of their cloaks, and so away, down the street. A funeral errand, he thought; the father would not be pleased.

“A good boy,” he said, guiltily. “You should be proud.”

The father gave a noncommittal wag of his head and started polishing glasses with a cloth.

Yashim took a sip of coffee and turned to watch the performance in the street.

The dervish danced in the space defined by a ring of bystanders, who every now and then had to stand aside to let someone in or out of the cafe, giving Yashim a glimpse of the performer. He wore a white tunic, white puttees, and a white cap, and he flexed his hands and legs in time to some inner melody, his eyes closed. But the dancer was not entranced: from what Yashim could see, it looked like one of the simpler dances of the seeker after truth, a stylised rendition of Ignorance searching for the Way.

He put up a hand to rub his eyes and gave an involuntary yelp. He’d forgotten the bruising.

A fire-station. Another tower. His exploration of the files in the Imperial Archives had been inconclusive, to say the least. The references to fire-towers had been too scanty to work on: they did not signify anything either way. All you could say was that fire-towers existed; Galata, Beyazit. Everyone knew that. Perhaps he’d been reading in the wrong book.

If only he could get hold of that helpful young Sudanese. Ibou.

He’d gone looking for evidence of a fourth tower. He hadn’t found any.

Perhaps there wasn’t one.

What if the fourth location wasn’t a tower at all?

But if there wasn’t a tower, what was he looking for?

The second verse of the Karagozi poem came to his mind.

Unknowing

And knowing nothing of unknowing,

They seek.

Well, here he was. Unknowing, searching. And the refrain?

Teach them.

All well and good, he thought, but teach them what? Enlightenment? Of course, it would be that. But it meant nothing to him. As the poem said, he didn’t even know what he didn’t know. He could go round in circles like this for ever.

So who were these other people, the people who were supposed to teach? Teachers, simply. Imams, for example, dinning the Koran into their restless little charges with the cane. Ferenghi gunnery instructors, perhaps, trying to explain the rules of mathematics to a fresh-faced batch of recruits. And at the medreses, the schools attached to city mosques, clever boys learned the rudiments of logic, rhetoric and Arabic.

Outside on the pavement the dervish had finished his dance. He pulled a cap from his belt and passed through the cafe, soliciting alms. To everyone who gave him something, he put out a hand and murmured a blessing. Out of the corner of his eye, Yashim saw the proprietor watching with folded arms. He had no doubt that had the man been a simple beggar he would have shooed him away, maybe with a coin, but a dervish—no, the babas had to be given respect because they showed people the way. The path to a higher truth.

The dervish were teachers of higher truths.

The Karagozi, also, were teachers of their Way.

Yashim hunched his shoulders, trying to concentrate.

He’d had that verse in his head, recently. Unknowing they seek. Teach them. And he had said—or perhaps it was just a thought—that he must be a slow learner.

Where was it? He had an impression that he had, after all, learned something then. He had thought of that verse, and heard something useful. But the time and place eluded him.

He shut his eyes. In his mind he groped for an answer.

A slow learner. Where had he thought that before?

His mind was blank.

He had guessed that there were four towers. Old Palmuk, the fire-watcher, had denied it.

Then he remembered. It wasn’t the old man; it was the other one, Orhan. It was Orhan who had told him about the towers as they stood on the parapet of the Galata Tower, in the fog. He’d described the tower that was lost, and how they raised the Beyazit Tower to compensate. The old tower had burnt, he’d said: along with the tekke. A tekke, like the one downstairs.

So both towers had been furnished with a Karagozi tekke. He couldn’t yet be sure about the fire-tower at Beyazit, but a tekke was certainly where the truth was taught, as the Karagozi perceived it. Unknowing they seek. Teach them. And the tekkes in the fire-towers were, coincidentally, the earliest tekkes in the city.

“I’ve had the whole thing back to front,” Yashim announced. He stood up abruptly and saw a dervish blinking, smiling, putting out his cap for alms. The dervish’s cap swam under his nose.

Yashim walked out.

The dervish stretched out both his arms in blessing. In his cap he had seen a whole silver sequin.

[ 69 ]

“Charmante! Tout a fait charmante!

Eugenia blushed slightly, and curtseyed. There was no doubt in her own mind that the valide, who was reclining against cushions scattered around a window seat, must have been ravishing herself. With the soft light at her back she had the easy poise of a beautiful woman. And the cheekbones to go with it.

“I am so glad we were able to persuade you to come,” the valide continued, without a hint of irony. She raised her lorgnette and peered at Eugenia’s dress. “The girls will think you quite a la mode,” she pronounced. “I want you to sit here by me, before they come to devour you. We can talk a little.”

Eugenia smiled and took a seat at the edge of the divan.

“It was so kind of you to invite me,” she said.

“Men don’t think it, but there is so much we women can arrange, n’est ce past Even from here. Tu ne me crois pas?”

“Of course I believe you, valide.”

“And you Russians are very much in the ascendant these days. Count Orloff, your husband’s predecessor, was a good friend to the empire during the Egyptian crisis. He had a very plain wife, I understand. But no doubt they were very happy together.”

Eugenia’s eyes narrowed a fraction. “She was a Voronsky,” she replied.

“Believe it or not,” the valide said, “I have never been impressed by the claims of old family. Neither I nor my dear childhood friend Rose were precisely Almanac de Gotha. We were clever, and that counts for much more. She became Empress. Her husband Napoleon, of course, came from nowhere at all. The Ottomans, I’m delighted to say, have no snobberies of that kind.”

Eugenia blinked lazily, and smiled.

“Surely,” she said carelessly, “there’s one old family in the empire whose claims have to be respected?”

The valide put out a hand and rested it on Eugenia’s arm. “Perfectly right, my dear. But my son was brought up to defend those claims, rather than rely on them. It doesn’t matter if you’re the fifth or the twenty-fifth or—in Mahmut’s case—the twenty-eighth sultan of the Ottoman empire, and in direct descent from Osman Bey himself, if you can’t prove that the empire needs you. Mahmut has exceeded my expectations.

“I’d like you to meet him. He would be delighted by you, of course.” The valide saw the surprise in Eugenia’s expression, and laughed softly. “Oh, don’t be alarmed. My son is no Suleyman.”

Eugenia found herself laughing. Suleyman the Magnificent, the great Renaissance sultan, had fallen head over heels for a Russian courtesan, Roxelana. He wound up marrying her—the last time any sultan had married at all.

The valide gave her arm a squeeze. “And entre nous, he prefers them rather more upholstered. You’ll see.”

She raised her hand. As if by magic, two girls entered and bowed. One of them held a tray containing coffee in tiny china cups. The other, a narghile.

“Do you smoke?”

Eugenia gave the valide a startled look. The valide shrugged.

“One forgets. It is a harem vice, I’m afraid. One of several. Parisian fashions are another.”

She gestured to the girls, who set down the tray and the pipe. One of them knelt prettily at Eugenia’s feet and presented her with a coffee cup.

“The inspection has begun,” said the valide drily. Eugenia took the cup and murmured a thank you. The girl made no effort to move, but touched her hand to her forehead and addressed a few words to the valide.

“As I expected,” the valide said. “The girls have been wondering whether you would like to join them in the bath.”

[ 70 ]

As Yashim climbed the spiral staircase he was still elated by the news.

The boy had found him on the pavement outside the cafe. He stood very stiffly to attention and blurted out the message he had memorised on the run back from Preen’s landlady.

“The lady says your friend is not going to die and I should not ask about such things. She says she has hurt her arm and needs a lot of rest. She says…she says…”—he screwed up his face. “I cannot remember the other thing, but it was like the first bit. I think.”

Yashim had made him repeat the message. He stood stock still for several moments, then he laughed. “You’ve done very well -and brought me the best news. Thank you.”

The boy took the coin with grave ceremony and ran back into the cafe to show it to his mother. Yashim turned up the street and limped away in the direction of the Golden Horn, humming.

His mood didn’t change when he put his head through the hatch and saw old Palmuk, the fire-watcher, leaning on the parapet with his back turned towards him. On the contrary. With a smile he moved quietly onto the roof. He stood behind Palmuk and made a sudden grab for his waistband. Before the fire-watcher could react he had hoisted him over the parapet.

“Aaargh! Aaaargh! Don’t do that! Orhan! Aaaargh! Let go! You bastard. Oh. Oh. Me heart. Orhan?”

“It isn’t Orhan,” said Yashim levelly. “It’s the man you lied to yesterday. The tower? Remember? I think you said, too, that you don’t like heights. But what am I to believe?”

“I don’t like ‘em, effendi, I don’t. And I swear I never lied.”

Old Palmuk’s legs were thrashing about but his arms were too far over the parapet to reach back. Yashim gave him a little shove.

“No, please!” He was almost screaming now, the words coming in rigid little bursts. “What I said—I wanted the money. I’ll give it back.”

“A tekke,” Yashim shouted. “There’s a fourth tekke, isn’t there?”

But the man had gone limp. Yashim’s eyes narrowed. He wondered if it was a ruse. He’d pull him back and then—wham! Old Palmuk would be at his throat.

“Over you go, then,” he said loudly.

Either old Palmuk was in a faint or he was a very steely customer.

Yashim thought of the assassin, plunging himself into the boiling dye. He pulled old Palmuk back onto the roof.

The man’s face was the colour of putty. His eyes moved wildly to left and right, and he seemed to be having trouble breathing. He emitted a series of dry clicks.

Yashim laid him on his back and tore at the neck of his shirt. He massaged his chest, pumping with his forearms. A little colour returned to old Palmuk’s cheeks, and the rapid movement of his eyes slowed. At last he drew a long, shuddering wheeze and closed his eyes.

Yashim said nothing. Waited.

The old man’s eyes half-opened, and slid towards him.

“You didn’t ought to have done that,” he mumbled. “You took advantage, didn’t ya? Eh? Effendi?”

Yashim, squatting, rocked back on his heels and breathed hard through his nose.

“You lied to me,” he said coldly.

A sly grin spread over old Palmuk’s face, and he hiccupped mirthlessly.

“It’s what you wanted, innit?” He spoke very quietly. “Old Palmuk, serve the customer. Hey, Palmuk, tell us a story.” He closed his eyes again. “You didn’t ought to have done that.”

Yashim bit his lip. Last night he’d as good as murdered a man. And today—

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Palmuk put a hand to his chest and clawed at his shirt, crumpling the torn edges together.

“It was a new shirt, effendi.”

Yashim sighed.

“I’ll get you another. I’ll get you two. But first, tell me this. Did the Karagozi have a tekke at the Beyazit Fire Tower? Like the one here?”

Old Palmuk stared. “Tekke? The Beyazit Tower?” He began to wheeze. It took Yashim a moment to realise that he was laughing.

“What’s the joke?”

“A tekke at Beyazit, you said?” Old Pamuk rubbed his nose with the palm of his hand, sniggering. “There was a tekke there, all right. The whole tower was built on it.”

Yashim froze. “The Eski Serai?”

“It’s what I heard. Way back when, them Janissaries used to guard the old palace. It fell apart, didn’t it? But the Karagozi didn’t abandon the tekke. They found a way to keep it—protected, like. They got the whole fire-tower built atop of it, see?”

Yashim saw. “Another tekke, then. That’s what I need. The fourth.”

The fire-watcher cracked a smile. “There were dozens, effendi. Hundreds.”

“Yes. But for the fire-watchers? Was there…a special one?”

Old Palmuk wrestled himself upright. He swayed over his lap, shaking his head.

“I wish I knew, effendi. I wish I knew what you were on about. I don’t know who you think I am, but you’ve got the wrong man. I…I don’t know what you mean.”

He turned to look at Yashim, and his grey eyes were round.

“I used to be a gofer. On the docks.” He was nodding now, staring at Yashim as if for the first time. “Get this, effendi. I weren’t there.”

Yashim thought: it’s true.

I give the fellow money. I buy him shirts. And he really doesn’t know a thing.

[ 71 ]

Yashim found the Polish ambassador in a silken dressing gown, embroidered with lions and horses in tarnished gold thread, which Yashim supposed was Chinese. He was drinking tea and staring quietly at a boiled egg, but when Yashim came in he put up a hand to shield his eyes, turning his head this way and that like an anxious tortoise. The sunshine picked out motes of dust climbing slowly towards the long windows.

“Do you know what time it is?” Palewski said thickly. “Have tea.”

“Are you ill?”

“111. No. But suffering. Why couldn’t it be raining?”

Unable to think of an answer, Yashim curled up in an armchair and let Palewski pour him a cup with a shaking hand.

“Meze,” Yashim said. He glanced up. “Meze. Little snacks before the main dish.”

“Must we talk about food?”

“Meze are a way of calling people’s attention to the excellence of the feast to come. A lot of effort goes into their preparation. Or, I should say, their selection. Sometimes the best meze are the simplest things. Fresh cucumbers from Karaman, sardines from Ortakoy, battered at most, and grilled…Everything at its peak, in its season: timing, you could say, is everything.

“Now take these murders. You were right—they’re more than isolated acts of violence. There is a pattern, and more. Taken together, you see, they aren’t an end in themselves. The meal doesn’t end with the meze, does it? The meze announce the feast.

“And these killings, like meze, depend on timing,” he continued. “I’ve been wondering over the last three days, why now? The murders, I mean, the cadets. Almost by chance, I discover that the sultan is set to issue an Edict in a few days. A great slew of reforms.”

“Ah yes, the Edict,” Palewski nodded and put his fingertips together.

“You know about it?” Yashim’s argument collapsed in astonishment.

“In a roundabout way. An explanation was given to, ah, selected members of the diplomatic community in Istanbul a few weeks ago.” He saw that Yashim was about to speak, and raised a hand. “When I say selected, I mean that I for one was not included. It isn’t hard to see why, if I’m right about the Edict and what it means. One of its purposes—its primary purpose, for all I know -is to make the Porte eligible for foreign loans. Poland, obviously, is in no position to influence the bond market. So they left me out. It was essentially a Big Power arrangement. I heard about it from the Swedes, who got it from the Americans, I believe.”

“You mean the Americans were invited?”

“Odd as it seems. But then, you know what Americans are? They’re the world experts at borrowing money in Europe. The Porte wants them on side. Perhaps they can co-ordinate their efforts. And, to be frank, I don’t think the Porte has ever quite managed to work out whose side the Americans are on. Your pashas are still digesting the Declaration of Independence sixty years after the event.”

Palewski reached for the teapot. “The idea of a republic has always fascinated them, in a schoolboy sort of way. The House of Osman must be the longest-lived royal line in Europe. Some more tea?”

Yashim put out his cup and saucer. “I’ve been stupid,” he said. “I’ve been wondering who knew about the Edict. Foreign powers never occurred to me.”

“But foreign powers,” said Palewski, with patient cynicism, “are the whole point: Foreign Powers, foreign loans.”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

They drank their tea in silence for a moment, marked only by the ticking of the German clock.

“Your Janissaries,” Palewski said, after a while. “Do you still believe that they exist?”

Yashim nodded. “Like it or not, I’m sure. You saw them blotted out, you told me. Very well. Poland, as the world supposes, vanished fifty years ago. You can’t even find it on a map. But that’s not what you tell me. You say it endures. Poland exists in language, in memory, in faith. It lives on, as an idea. I’m talking about the same thing.

“About the fire-towers, I was only partly right. I made a link between the three fire-towers I knew about—the two still standing, as well as the one which was burned and demolished in 182,6—and the cadets, whose bodies all turned up nearby. I needed to find a fourth fire-tower, didn’t I? But I can’t. There never was a fourth tower. But I knew the pattern was right. The fire-towers had the hand of the Janissaries on them, just like these murders. It had to be right.”

“Perhaps. But without a fourth tower it makes no sense.”

“That’s what I felt, too. Unless there was something else about the fire towers that I couldn’t see—something that could link all three of them to another place which isn’t a fire-tower at all.”

Palewski thrust out his lower lip and sighed. “I hate to say it, Yash, but you’re skating on very thin ice. Let’s forget my reservations for a moment. You suspect the Janissaries of murdering these cadets, because of the wooden spoons and all the rest of it.” He wrinkled his nose. “The pattern of the fire-towers comes to you because the Janissaries once manned them, as the city’s firemen. Abandon the fire-towers, and what happens to your Janissary theory? Tell me that. You can’t have it both ways.”

Yashim smiled. “But I think I can. I found what I needed to know a couple of days ago, but it wasn’t until today that I saw how it all fits together. The Galata Tower housed a Karagozi tekke, a place sacred to the Janissaries. The lost watch tower at the Janissary barracks had one, too.”

“But the Beyazit Tower,” Palewski objected, “is modern. And that’s exactly what I mean. By the time it was built the Janissaries—and the Karagozi, too—were already history. Really, Yash, this Janissary obsession is only getting in your way.”

“I don’t think so. I just discovered that the Beyazit Tower was built smack on top of an old Karagozi tekke at the Eski Serai. So that makes three. What I’m looking for now is another Karagozi tekke—and I don’t even know where to start.”

Palewski groped on the table beside him and produced a set of leather boards. Inside was a single foolscap sheet of paper, folded in two, but loose. He opened the sheet and there, to Yashim’s surprise, was a meticulously executed bird’s eye view of Istanbul, in ink. Where the sky should have been, the air was thick with names, notes and numbers.

“You were asking for a map. Last night, I remembered Ingiliz Mustafa,” he said.

“English Mustafa?”

“He was actually a Scotsman. Campbell. He came to Istanbul about sixty years ago, to start up a school of mathematics for the artillerymen. Became a Muslim, too.”

“He’s still alive?”

Palewski snorted.

“No, no. I’m afraid evert the practice of Islam couldn’t do that for him. One of his pet obsessions was the holiness of Istanbul -how the city was steeped in faith. I daresay he became a very good Muslim, but you can’t easily overcome a Scottish training in the sciences. This map shows all the mosques, saintly tombs, dervish tekkes and such that he could locate in the city. He had it printed here, too.”

He dipped into the pocket of his dressing gown for a pair of reading glasses.

“Look, every holy place in the city has a number. The key is up here. Fourteen: Cammi Sultan Mehmed. Mehmed’s mosque. Twenty-five: Turbe Hasan. The tomb of Hasan. Thirty, look, Tekke Karagoz. And another one. Here, too.”

Yashim shook his head in disbelief.

“Only a foreigner would do something like this,” he said. “I mean it’s so…so…” He was going to say pointless, but thought better of it. “So unusual.”

Palewski grunted. “He wanted to show how his adopted faith was embedded in the very fabric of the city. Plenty of Karagozi tekke to choose from too.”

Yashim peered at the map for a while.

“Too many,” he murmured. “Which is the right one? Which is the fourth?”

Palewski leaned back with his fingers over his eyes, thinking. “Didn’t you tell me that the three fire-stations were also the oldest tekkes in the city? Isn’t that what the fire-watchers said?”

Yashim’s mind began to race. Palewski continued: “Perhaps I’m just saying this because I’m a Pole, and all Poles are at bottom antiquarians. This dressing gown, for instance. You know why I wear it?”

“Because it’s cosy,” said Yashim absently.

“Yes and no. It’s Sarmatian. Years ago, you see, we Poles believed that we were connected to a half-mythical tribe of warriors who came from Sarmatia, somewhere in central Asia. I suppose we didn’t know properly where we came from, and went looking for pedigree, if you like. There was a rage for it, and the supposed Sarmatian style—you know, silk and feathers and crimson leather. I found this hanging in a wardrobe when I came here. It’s a relic from another age. That’s what I like best about it. Every morning I envelop myself in history. In the fancied glory of the past. Also it’s jolly comfortable, as you say.

“Well, what makes me sit up is the thought that these tekkes are old, really old. Maybe the first ever established in the city. That’s your pedigree, if you like. That’s where your chaps might want to begin. Maybe the fourth tekke is also one of the original lodges in the city. The first, or the fourth, whatever. So you need to look for a tekke that’s as old as the other three you know about.”

Yashim nodded. The four original tekkes. It fitted: it was what traditionalists would want.

“Which might explain something else that’s been bothering me,” he said aloud. “Not the timing—that’s the Edict—but the number. Why four? If you’re right, if someone is going back to the beginning, trying to start over, then four’s the obvious number. Four is the number of strength, like the legs of a table. It’s a reflection of earthly order. Four corners of the earth. Four winds. Four elements. Four is bedrock.”

“And it’s going back, to the very origins of the whole Ottoman enterprise! Holy War—and Istanbul as the very navel of the world.”

Yashim could hear the soup master explaining that the Janissaries had built the empire: that they, under the guidance of the Karagozi babas, had won this city for the faith.

“Whenever things have gone wrong, people have stepped forward to explain that we’ve simply deviated from the true old ways, that we should go back and try to be what we were when the whole of Europe lay trembling at our feet.”

“Well,” said Palewski drily, “not the whole of Europe.”

“Poland excepted, the valiant foe.” A look of doubt crossed Yashim’s face.

“But how do we work out which was the original, fourth tekke? Your map here doesn’t give dates, even if anyone knew them.”

Palewski bit his nails.

“If we had an older map,” he said slowly. “A really good one, to cross reference with this one. Most of these tekkes, after all, wouldn’t exist. You might get somewhere by a process of elimination.”

He rubbed his palms together.

“It would have to be a very good map,” he mused. Then he shook his head. “To be honest, I’m not sure there’s anything early enough for you. I certainly don’t have such a thing.”

Yashim set his jaw, and stared into the fire.

“Does the name Lorich mean anything to you?” He asked quietly. “Flensburg. Fifteen something.”

Palewski’s eyes widened.

“How on earth, Yash? It’s the most astonishing panorama of the city ever made. Or so I’ve heard. I’ve never seen it, to be honest. There must have been several copies but you won’t find one here in Istanbul, that’s for sure.”

“An astonishing panorama,” Yashim echoed. “But you’re wrong, my friend. I think I know just where to find it.”

[ 72 ]

Half an hour later Yashim was standing in the portico of the Russian embassy, toying with the irritating reflection that know—ing was not altogether the same thing as finding. He was only half a mile from Palewski’s ambassadorial Residency, and scarcely twenty yards from the map which he had seen hanging in the gallery in the vestibule upstairs. But for all his ability to reach the map, it might have been in Siberia.

The ambassador, it appeared, was not at home. Yashim wondered if he kept Palewski’s hours: perhaps he was even now in bed with his luscious wife. The idea upset him, and he asked to see the First Secretary instead. But the First Secretary could not be contacted, either. It occurred to Yashim to ask to see the ambassador’s wife: but common sense, as well as inherited notions of propriety, ruled that out. Even Christian women didn’t come to the door for every man who knocked.

“Is there anyone I can speak to? It’s very urgent.”

The moment he heard the deliberate, military tread Yashim knew who could be found to speak to him. The crippled hand. The ugly scar.

“Good afternoon,” Potemkin said. “Won’t you come in?”

As he followed the young diplomat into the great hall his eyes flickered automatically to the stairs.

“The staff do not usually admit people without an appointment. I am sorry if you have been waiting a long time. The ambassador and his staff have a heavy workload today. His excellency is expected at the palace tonight. I am afraid it is impossible that they should be interrupted.”

He sounded nervous, on edge, Yashim thought. He said: “You may be able to help me. The other day I saw an interesting map outside the ambassador’s office, which I’d like to look at again. I wonder…?”

Potemkin looked puzzled. “A map?”

“Yes. By Melchior Lorich. It is hanging in the vestibule upstairs.”

“I am sure His Excellency would be delighted to show it to you,” Potemkin said, more smoothly. “If you would care to put your request in writing, I will personally see that it receives his attention.”

“Now?”

Potemkin managed a half-smile. “I’m afraid that’s impossible. Requests of this nature take, what, a month or so to organise. Perhaps we can cut it down, though. Shall we say three weeks?”

“I know the map is just there, up the stairs. I’ll disturb no one.”

Potemkin continued to smile, and said nothing.

“Fifteen minutes,” Yashim said desperately.

“You forget, monsieur, that this is a working embassy. It is neither a museum, nor a public gallery. But I am sure that His Excellency the Prince would be delighted to consider your request—in good time. In the meantime, unless you have anything else…?”

“I don’t suppose you have had a chance to look at the porter’s accounts yet,” Yashim observed sardonically.

“No,” the attache agreed softly. “Not a chance. Allow me to show you out, monsieur.”

[ 73 ]

The ambassador’s wife, at that very moment, was being helped to undress by five eager handmaidens, who took each garment as it was relinquished and examined it with varying degrees of excitement and admiration.

The valide’s suggestion that she should bathe with the women of the sultan’s harem, coming on top of her offer of a puff on the narghile, had temporarily robbed Eugenia of the power of speech. She was not easily nonplussed, but it had occurred to her immediately that the sultan might take it into his head to enjoy a bathe himself. Alternatively, that he might choose to enjoy the spectacle from a concealed lattice. Finally she wondered if the valide was simply teasing her.

“It’s quite all right,” the valide said. “The sultan never uses the women’s bath. The girls would be delighted, but if you’d rather not…”

That’s two of my three concerns answered, at least, Eugenia thought. “I’d be charmed,” she answered.

Minutes later she was laughing as the girls examined her stays, pulling funny faces. One girl puffed up her cheeks and blew. Another, to general merriment, mimed turning a little lock with a key. With a shrug of her firm, creamy shoulders, she demonstrated to Eugenia that Ottoman women enjoyed certain freedoms denied their European cousins. But when Eugenia stepped out of her petticoat, they stood back with what looked like sincere admiration for the effect—until they caught sight of her pubic hair. At this, with equal sincerity, they simply goggled in surprise. Then they helped her unlace, and escorted her into the bath.

Later, Eugenia was to reflect on the difference between a Turkish bath, and a Russian one. On her father’s estates outside Moscow she had often leaped from the steamy log cabin to gasp with pleasure in the snow, while the bathing attendants scrupulously beat her skin to a glow with a whippy bundle of birch twigs. In the harem bath the pleasure was attained without the pain, such as it was: the pleasure seemed infinite and curiously detailed. She was soaped, and rubbed, and massaged, and it seemed that no part of her body escaped the attentions of the girls, or of the stalwart woman who flexed her limbs, cracked her neck, and even bent her fingers and toes. It was only through a massive effort of will, which she afterwards half-regretted, that she conveyed her opinion of the hot wax and a razor which the bath attendant automatically produced. By the time she had bathed, and she was lounging naked on a sofa in the room beyond, surrounded by other women smoking, sipping coffee, and assessing their prize—and all her clothes—Eugenia had no idea how much time had passed. The chirruping of the women was very restful, and their birdlike cadences mingled with the smell of applewood and tobacco to take her back, when she closed her eyes, to a childhood in autumn, by a river far away, and not so long ago.

She was woken by a cool hand on her shoulder. Automatically she pushed herself upright and found the Kislar Agha staring down at her impassively. Then he nodded several times, and showed his little teeth, making a gesture that she was to rise.

She got up slowly, smiling to her new friends. They smiled back, but fleetingly, and helped her to dress. She climbed into her petticoat first, then wrapped her corset around her front. One of the girls laced it at the back; she would have preferred it tighter, but somehow the atmosphere of levity that would have let her ask the girl to pull harder was missing now. She glanced to where the chief black eunuch was standing by the door, his gaze flickering around the room. When she was dressed she tilted her chin and looked him lazily in the eye. He gave a barely perceptible bow, and opened the door.

When she regained the valide’s suite, she found the old lady on her divan, chatting with a plump middle-aged man who sat straddling a western chair, rocking it back and forth.

The sultan turned and rose with a slight effort.

“Princesse!” He bowed, took her hand and pressed it to his lips. Eugenia sank in a low curtsey.

“Bravo!” The valide clapped her hands. “You escaped, I see, dressed just as beautifully as before. The girls,” she explained, “might easily have stolen her clothes.”

“Her clothes?” The sultan looked confused. “But we send to Paris every year, valide.”

Eugenia laughed pleasantly.

“I think, Your Majesty, it’s not the clothes themselves we women find interesting. It’s the way they’re worn. And everyone,” she added, unable to think of a suitable epithet for the sultan’s women, “has been delightful.”

By everyone she did not include the Kislar Agha. The Kislar Agha gave her the creeps.

[ 74 ]

Back again?”

“Stanislaw Palewski,” Yashim announced, “we have exactly four hours. You are going to a party.”

Palewski smiled and shook his head.

“I know what you’re thinking: the ambassadors’ concert at the palace. All very tempting, but I don’t do them any more. These days, I—” He spread his fingers. “To be frank, Yash, it’s a question of dress.” He lowered his voice. “A question, you might say, of moth.”

Yashim held up an imperious hand. “We aren’t talking about those horrible beetling jackets you people all wear. You have the most splendid clothes, and four hours in hand. I have already sent for the tailor. Tonight, you are set to appear at the palace as the living embodiment of Polish history.”

“Eh?”

“You’re going as a Sar—what’s it?”

“Sarmatian?”

“Exactly.”

The Polish ambassador folded his arms stubbornly.

“Of all the fool ideas. Who do you think you are? My fairy godmother?”

Yashim blinked, and Palewski gave a dry chuckle.

“Never mind, it’s an old story.” He frowned. “What are you doing?”

For Yashim had raised his arms and flicked out his hands, taking a backward step, as if Palewski were the djinn he had just conjured up out of the thin air.

Palewski narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “I’m sorry, Yash. I’d do anything for you, you know that. But only within reason. As the ambassador of Poland to the Sublime Porte I have a higher responsibility. Mine is a fallen nation, I know that. But stubborn, sir, very stubborn.” He wagged a finger. “Call it pride, or vanity if you like—but I tell you this. Not for your sake—not even for the sake of the Black Madonna of Czestechowa herself—will I mingle with my peers in a mouldy old dressing gown.”

[ 75 ]

His Excellency is not at home,” the butler rumbled.

He stood with the door ajar, peering at the Turk who had rung the bell.

“I would prefer to wait,” Yashim said. “My time is of no consequence.”

The butler weighed up this remark. On the one hand, it implied a compliment to his master who was, of course, a busy man. On the other, nobody in Istanbul ever said quite what they meant. He studied Yashim. His clothes were certainly clean, if simple. He’d like to rub that cloak in his fingers, to make sure it was really cashmere, but yes…he might be a man of consequence, after all.

“If you will step in,” the butler intoned, “you may find a chair in the hall.”

Yashim did, and sat down on it. The butler closed the door behind them with an audible click. Yashim sat facing the door he had just come through, and two enormous sash windows that descended almost to the floor. The staircase to his left swirled up at his back to the vestibule overhead. The butler walked majestically across to a bewigged footman, in breeches, who stood solemnly at the foot of the stairs, and murmured a few words in Russian. The footman stared out straight before him, and made no response.

“I trust you will not have too long to wait,” the butler said, as he passed Yashim and disappeared through a door to his right.

Yashim sat with his hands folded in his lap.

The footman stood with his hands by his sides.

Neither of them moved for twenty minutes.

At the end of that time, Yashim suddenly started. He raised his head. Something had attracted his attention at the window. He leaned slightly to one side and peered, but whatever it was that caught his eye seemed to have gone. He kept a watch on the window nonetheless.

About thirty seconds later he was almost on his feet, staring. The footman’s eyes slid over him, and then to the window, but the window was black and revealed nothing to him.

But Yashim’s attention was called to something almost out of sight. Curious, he leaned further over to the right, to follow it better. From where he stood, the footman realised that he couldn’t see what the foreigner was looking at.

He wondered what it could be.

Yashim gave a little smile, whistled through his nose, and continued to watch, craning his head.

The footman rubbed his ringers against his palms.

The foreigner, he noticed, had jerked his head slightly, to keep up with the event occurring outside. It seemed to be moving away, out of his line of sight, because the fellow was leaning forward now.

Very slowly, Yashim leaned back in his chair. He looked puzzled. In fact, he simply could not imagine the significance of what he appeared to have seen.

Something within the grounds, the footman knew.

When there should be nothing. No one.

The footman wondered what it could have been. It had to be a light. A light in the dark, in the grounds. Going round the side of the embassy.

What would the butler have done? The footman glanced at the Turk, who was still sitting exactly where he had sat half an hour before. Wearing a slight frown.

Having seen something he hadn’t expected. That nobody else had observed.

The footman took a measured step forwards, hesitated, then continued to the front door and opened it.

He glanced to the left. The spaces between the columns of the portico were dark as pitch. He took a step out, and another, craning for a better view.

He sensed a darkness at his back and half turned. The Turk filled the doorway.

The Turk held out his hands, palms up, and shrugged. Then he gestured to himself and to the gatehouse.

“I’m going,” he said in Turkish.

The footman understood the gesture. His anxiety increased.

The Turk descended the steps.

The footman waited until he had cleared the portico, and then ran very quickly down the steps himself, and headed left, into the dark.

Privately he relished the little cold wind which hit him on the face but could not in a thousand years ruffle his artificial hair. Still he saw nothing. He darted to the corner of the building and looked down the side of the east wing.

It was as far as he dared to go.

[ 76 ]

Yashim sprinted back up the steps, crossed the empty hall and took the stairs three at a time. At the top he slowed and put his hand on the doorknob of the vestibule.

What if there was another footman, as before, standing sentinel in there?

He squeezed the handle and stepped inside.

The room was almost dark. Two candles burned in their sconces at the far side of the room, really too far away to be of any use to him. He turned to the right, gliding along the gallery. The oils were hard to make out, but as he passed one of them he paused. He stepped aside, to let the meagre light reveal it, and even though it was mostly shadow, the composition of figures closely grouped at its centre was unmistakeably that of the czar and his amorous czarina, with their little children.

He went back up the gallery.

Two shoulder-length portraits. A full-sized rendition of a man on a horse. A scene he could not decipher, including a river and a mass of men and horses surging towards it. Another portrait.

And he was back at the door. He could hear the footman banging the door downstairs.

He looked around in astonishment.

The vestibule still housed, as he remembered, a positive Parliament of Russian nobles, a Hermitage of royal heads. As for landscapes, well, many versts of the Russian steppe had been crammed in there, too, where Cossack hussars stooped in village streets to kiss their sweethearts farewell.

There wasn’t a map of Istanbul to be seen.

Where the map had been, he was looking at a portrait of a gouty czar.

He took a step closer. The czar looked surprised: perhaps he didn’t like to be ignored. Even in the feeble candlelight Yashim could still make out the faint outline of the frame, bleached against the painted woodwork.

They had got rid of the map.

Yashim hardly had time to register this appalling thought when he heard footsteps mounting the stairs.

Without a second’s hesitation Yashim lunged for the door at the far end of the room. The handle turned easily, and in a moment he was through.

[ 77 ]

The Russian ambassador put a monocle to his eye and then let it fall without a sound as his eye expanded in surprise.

“This I do not believe!” he muttered, to no one in particular. A Second Secretary, standing close by, stooped as if to gather up the remark and put it to his ear; however he heard nothing. He raised his head and followed his master’s gaze.

Standing by the entrance with a glass of champagne in one hand and a pair of kid gloves in the other was Stanislaw Palewski, the Polish ambassador. But he was like no Polish ambassador that the Russian had ever seen.

Palewski was dressed in a calf-length, padded riding coat of raw red silk, fantastically embroidered in gold thread, with magnificent ermine trim at the neck and cuffs. His long waistcoat was of yellow velvet: unencumbered by anything so vulgar as buttons it was held at the waist by a splendid sash of red and white silk. Below the sash he wore a pair of baggy trousers of blue velvet, stuffed into flop-topped boots so highly polished that they reflected the chequerboarding of the palace floor.

The boots, Yashim’s tailor had said defiantly, were beyond his help.

But now, thanks to a some judicious polishing of the ambassador’s feet, it was impossible to detect that the boots were holey at all.

“It’s an old trick I read about somewhere,” Palewski had earlier remarked, calmly blacking his toes with a brush. “French officers did it in the late war, whenever Napoleon ordered an honour guard.”

[ 78 ]

Yashim pulled the door closed behind him, releasing the handle gently so as to make no sound.

He was just in time: even as he put his ear to the door he could hear the other door being flung open. Someone marched into the room, and then stopped.

In five seconds they’ll be through this door, too, Yashim thought. He looked round, hoping to find a hiding place.

And realised immediately that the Russian ambassador’s gorgeous young wife, wearing a shimmering sable cape, was sitting at a mirror, gazing at him open-mouthed.

And apart from the fur, she was naked.

[ 79 ]

Prince Derentsov flung a look at the Austrian ambassador, a man with no visible neck, a vast moustache and a belly like a Bukovina wineskin. He had been standing with his back to the doors, so that Derentsov had the satisfaction of watching his reaction to Palewski as, noticing some change in the expression of the little man he was speaking to, he turned and caught sight of the Polish ambassador.

His heavy jaw dropped. His eyes bulged from his head. He went from sallow to a sort of imperial purple.

Silly fool, Prince Derentsov thought. Certainly the Pole’s coming here tonight, dressed like that, was a deliberate insult to the Powers that had silenced his bickering little nation forty years before. But that Austrian sausage-merchant’s reaction would give the Pole some satisfaction.

The Austrian was trying to catch his eye, dabbing a plump paw in the air like a wounded seal. Derentsov turned on his heel and began to speak to his Second Secretary.

The British ambassador, without disturbing his conversation, allowed his eyes to flicker now and then from his Austrian counterpart to Prince Derentsov. He tugged at his lip to restrain a smile.

The American ambassador said: “i’ll be danged!” He wanted to walk right up and shake Palewski by the hand, but he was new, not only to Istanbul but to the ways of diplomatic protocol. I’ll talk to that fellow before the evening’s out, he thought.

The French ambassador edged around slightly so that when Palewski moved into the room he quite naturally gravitated into the Frenchman’s little group.

And the imperial bandmaster, Giacomo Donizetti, being Italian and highly romantic, held a whispered discussion with the first violin. His programme of light German occasional music drew to a discreet end and, after a moment of rustling scores, the band launched into the latest Chopin polonaise. Some of the cleverer people in the ballroom broke into applause. Prince Derentsov, naturally, continued his conversation.

Sultan Mahmut chose this moment to enter the room. He heard the applause and, feeling his confidence revive—for he hated these international affairs—moved to speak to the French ambassador.

Later on he tried to explain it to his mother.

“I thought he looked damn fine. So did Concordet, I suppose. I wish we could have regiment like that, all sash and colour. Palewski looked like one of us.”

“That much I understand,” the Valide Sultan broke in crisply. “What I can’t understand is why you had to have him locked up.”

The sultan twisted his fingers.

“Don’t be ridiculous, valide. Nobody was locked up. I merely had him escorted to a side-room. I…I interviewed him later. Same with the Russian, Derentsov, and it was all his fault, suggesting the duel. Practically under my nose!”

The valide saw his point. It was on her advice, several years ago, that the sultan had issued a formal decree, backed by the ulema, forbidding the practice of duels within the empire. It was aimed principally at those stubborn Circassian mountaineers whose distant feuds occasionally brought heartache and anxiety into the sultan’s harem, and irritated the Valide Sultan; but it applied also to the touchy foreigners of Galata.

“The British ambassador brought Palewski within earshot of the Russian,” the sultan explained. “So it was his fault, too. I wasn’t there, but Stratford Canning apparently made some effort to catch Derentsov’s attention and the Russian swerved so abruptly that he elbowed Palewski’s glass and ended up with champagne all down his shirt. You know what they’re like. Well, you can imagine, anyway. Derentsov claimed he had been insulted. The Pole pulled out a handkerchief and started to swab Derentsov’s chest—hee hee hee!”

“Mahmut!”

“Well, it was funny, valide. The Russians have never once acknowledged Palewski’s existence. They always pretend they haven’t seen him. But here was Derentsov calling for pistols at dawn, and the Polish ambassador dabbing at him with a napkin!”

The valide, too, gave herself up to the humour of the situation.

“But what did the Pole say?”

Mahmut rocked about, his eyes closed.

“He said—hee hee hee—he said—ah ha ha—“Well in that case I accept the challenge and you can use your own handkerchief!” Hee hee hee!”

The Valide Sultan, who had not laughed for several years, felt carried along by her son’s laughter. It was many years since she had been to a party, but she knew how funny men could look together.

Sultan Mahmut simmered down first, with an occasional snort of hilarity interrupting his story.

“After that, I had to separate them. The Pole came away very politely. I talked to him, and let him go. Derentsov was snarling by the time I got to him—jabbered about infringement of his diplomatic rights and all that. I let him rant and then I said my piece about duels and the law, just as I’d told the Polish ambassador. I said that the mark of a civilised nation was its respect for the individual, and the individual’s respect for law, and that of course I understood that other nations had different principles, but that within the empire which I control duelling is forbidden. This, I said, is why we have laws—and laws, I added, that will be strengthened and clarified in a matter of days. In the meantime, I asked only for his apology.”

“And?”

“If his release had been dependent on his apology, valide, the Russian ambassador might still be waiting in that room. I took some mumbled words—curses, I’m sure—as a sign of contrition, and told him so. Then I suggested he go home, and walked out.”

“Flute, mon bravel You are very clever!”

The valide took her son by the ears, and gave him a kiss.

[ 80 ]

Before Yashim could recover himself, Eugenia had pointed with an imperious finger.

“You could try under the bed,” she said.

Yashim needed no second bidding. He fairly dived for the bed, and wriggled beneath it. He saw Eugenia approach the door in her bare feet; she plucked something from the bed as she passed. A silk peignoir swished through the air and swirled around her ankles.

There was a knock on the door. Yashim strained to hear, but all he could make out was Eugenia’s ‘nyet—nyet’ and a few murmured words. The door closed, and the feet stood again by the edge of the bed. Then the peignoir slid to the floor in a soft cloud, and the feet disappeared.

Eugenia was sitting in bed, right on top of him. She was waiting for her Turk to emerge. She wore a little smile, and nothing else.

Feeling ridiculous, Yashim scrambled to his feet and bowed.

“Forgive me, Excellency,” he said. “I lost my way. I had no idea—”

Eugenia pouted. “No idea, Monsieur Ottomane? You disappoint me. Come.”

She ran her hand down between her breasts. By the jewels, Yashim thought, she is lovely: lovelier than the girls in the sultan’s harem. Such white skin! And her hair—black as shining ebony.

She drew one knee up and the silk sheet rode up, exposing a long, slender thigh.

She wants me, Yashim thought. And I want her. Her skin: he longed to reach out and stroke it. He longed to inhale her strange, foreign fragrance, figure her curves with his own hands, touch her dark lips against his own.

Forbidden. This is the path of passion and regret.

This is where you cannot go. Not if you value your sanity.

“You don’t understand,” said Yashim desperately. “I’m a…a…” What was that word the English boy had used? It came back: “I’m a freelance.”

Eugenia looked puzzled.

“You want me to pay?” She laughed incredulously and shook her curls. Not only her curls. “What if I don’t?”

Yashim was confused. She saw the confusion on his face, and held up her hands.

“Come,” she said.

She put her hands flat on the bed, behind her back. Yashim groaned softly and closed his eyes.

Five minutes later, Eugenia had discovered what Yashim meant by freelance.

“Better and better,” she said, and threw herself back against the pillows. She raised a slender knee.

“So take me, Turk!” she gasped.

[ 81 ]

Far away, in the first great court of the sultan’s palace at Topkapi, the carriages rolled away across the cobbles and through the high gate, to disappear towards the Hippodrome and the darkness of the city. Only one fine carriage still remained, its driver motionless on the box, whip in hand, two footmen standing behind like men of stone, impervious to the light drizzle. As the wind whipped the torches hung up along the inner wall the flare caught the glossy black shellac of the carriage door and lit up the royal arms of the Romanovs with its double-headed eagle: the symbol that so many centuries before had originated in this very city.

If all was ghostly still in the Russian ambassador’s carriage, in the boudoir of the Russian ambassador’s wife matters had reached a distinctly lively crisis.

With a heave of her shoulders, Eugenia let out a long, satisfied sigh.

Moments later, she was smiling lazily into Yashim’s ear.

“I may be vain, but I don’t suppose,” she whispered, “that this is why you came?”

Yashim propped himself up. His eyes were squeezed shut, as though he were in pain. Eugenia put out a hand and stroked his damp forehead. “I’m sorry,” she said, simply.

Yashim blew out, and opened his eyes. Taking a deep breath, he said: “The—map—in—the—vestibule. Where’s it got to?”

Eugenia laughed, but when she caught the look in his eye she whipped aside and knelt on the bed.

“Are you serious?”

“I need to look at that map,” he said. “Before your husband gets home.”

“Him?” A look of scorn crossed her face. “He won’t come in here.” She bounced off the bed and retrieved her peignoir, tying the sash with an angry tug.

“He has never forgiven me for marrying him. And you have no idea how bored I am.”

Yashim frowned. It was hard to believe that the prince could keep his hands off his wife for a moment. But there it was. Perhaps he, Yashim, was no better than those westerners who imagined the sultan in a scented paradise of houris.

“I’ve been here six months. I never go out. I change my dress three or four times a day—for what? For who? The sentries? Once a week my husband hosts a very dull dinner.”

She gathered her black curls in one hand and raised them to the back of her head. Then she let the curls fall.

“At home there’s a ball every night. I see my friends. I ride out in the snow. I—oh, I don’t know, I laugh, flirt, talk about literature and the arts, everything. I suppose that’s why I seized on you. You were the first Turk I ever had a chance to speak to. My first Turkish lover.”

Yashim lowered his eyes. Eugenia laughed again.

“I’ll show you the map. It’s just there.”

She pointed over his shoulder. He looked round and there it was, leaning against the wall, the familiar shape of the city like an animal’s snout, rootling the shores of Asia.

“I need to compare,” he explained, reaching for his cloak. He took out Palewski’s map, unfolded it, and crouched down by the Hontius map, smoothing Palewski’s against the glass.

“I just can’t imagine what you’re up to, but can I help?”

She laid a hand on his shoulder.

Yashim explained.

“On this map, we have all the religious buildings in Istanbul as they stood about thirty years ago. The ones I’m interested in are the Karagozi tekkes—the symbol seems to be an Arabic letter B, like this.”

“They’re awfully difficult to make out,” Eugenia said, pouting. “It’s a complete forest of Arabic squiggles.”

Yashim’s eye swept the map. “Originally I was looking for a fire-tower, but I’ve had to change my mind. The old map, this one of yours, shows us all the buildings which were standing in 1599. By comparing the two, we should be able to work out where the oldest Karagozi tekkes were.”

“You mean if something shows up on both maps, it was built before 1599.” Eugenia bit her lip. “You’d do best to split the city into several strips, north-south, say, so that you know where you are and don’t miss anything out.”

“That,” Yashim said, “is a very clever idea. Let’s do it.”

Eugenia took Palewski’s map and folded it into four pleats. Then she turned the first pleat over, and they began to plot the tekkes.

After twenty minutes they had covered the first quarter of the city and dismissed about a dozen tekkes as being too modern. Yashim struck them off. They were left with two possibilities.

“Next strip,” Eugenia said.

They worked on.

“Some people might think this was an odd way to spend time with a half-naked Russian girl in the middle of the night.”

“Yes. I am sorry.”

“I like it.” Eugenia’s eyes crackled. She hugged her knees. “All the same, you might take me back to bed quite soon.”

They completed the second leaf. A possible candidate had popped up by the city walls, but this time it was the newer map which sowed the confusion, making it hard to say exactly which building had been the tekke.

“Halfway now,” Yashim reminded her.

“More than,” she said. “The city gets progressively thinner from here on, until it reaches Seraglio Point.”

“Quite true. Go on.”

About ten minutes later they identified the Stamboul Tower as a tekke.

“That’s good,” Yashim said. “It proves the system is working.”

“Pouf! I’m glad you told me now.”

The last fold of the map brought out the Galata Tower and also the old tekke in the Janissary headquarters, now buried beneath the Imperial Stables. As Eugenia had predicted they completed their comparison quicker, for not only did the city dwindle but much of it was covered with the palace and grounds above Seraglio Point. They found nothing there to surprise them.

“It’s late,” Yashim said. “I should go.”

Eugenia stood up and stretched, first on one foot, then the other.

“How? Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to you, but the embassy is locked at night. High walls. Vigilant guards. A mouse couldn’t get in—or out. Fortunately for me, you are not a mouse.”

With a flourish she slipped the sash from her waist. Her peignoir swung open and she gave a shrug of her shoulders and stepped from it.

“The pleasure is all mine,” Yashim said, with a smile.

“We’ll see about that,” she said, and held out a hand.

[ 82 ]

The master of the soup-makers’ guild took the ends of his moustache in either hand and tugged on them thoughtfully.

Then he picked up the ancient key which the guard had just returned and slipped it back onto the big ring.

He knew that the investigator from the palace had to be right: only the night watchmen could have organised the theft. But why? It had to be some foolish prank, he supposed. Maybe some sentimental ritual of their own. When he explained that one of the cauldrons had gone missing he had expected them to look shifty and ashamed. He had expected them to confess. Confide. He had hoped they would have confidence in him.

Only they stared at him blankly, instead. Denied it all. The soup master had been disappointed.

The soup master began again. “I am not looking for punishment. Perhaps the cauldron will be returned, and perhaps we need say no more about it. But—” he raised a heavy finger, “I am troubled. The guild is one family. We have difficulties, and we sort them out. I sort them out. It is what I do, I am the head of this family. So when some outsider comes to tell me about problems I know nothing about, I am worried. And also ashamed.”

He paused.

“A snooping fellow, from the palace, comes to tell me something that has happened in my own house. Ah—I’m getting through now, am I?”

He had detected a flicker of interest—but it hadn’t developed.

The soup master pulled at his moustaches again. The meeting disturbed him. The men weren’t exactly insolent, but they were cold. The soup master felt that he had run a risk for their sakes, giving them work when they were desperate; but there had been no answering gratitude on this occasion.

He stopped short of dismissing them, with an uneasy feeling that a wordless threat had been issued. That he should mind his own business—as if the theft of a pot, and the subsequent denials, weren’t his business entirely! But he could not simply dismiss them now. If they suffered, he might suffer. He could be accused of aiding and abetting the enemies of the Porte.

He crammed his massive hands together, kneading his fingers.

Was there no way of paying them back for their disloyalty? He thought of the eunuch.

The eunuch had some status in the palace.

The soup master wondered how he could become better acquainted with that man.

[ 83 ]

Yashim spent the morning visiting the three sites he had identified from the old map the night before. He hoped that something would strike him if he searched with an open mind.

A tekke did not have to be large, but a big space might provide a clue. A tekke did not, of itself, have to conform to any particular shape, yet a small dome might suggest a place of worship. So would, perhaps, a stoup for holy water, or a redundant niche, or a forgotten inscription over a doorway, in a corridor—little signs which might seem insignificant in themselves, but taken together would help to point him in the right direction.

Failing that, he could always ask.

The first street he visited was only gradually recovering from the effects of a fire which had burned so fiercely that the few stone buildings had finally exploded. Large, broken blocks still lay embedded in the ash that drifted listlessly up and down the charred-out street. Some men were poking in the ash with sticks; Yashim supposed they were householders, searching for their savings. They answered him slowly, as if their thoughts were still far away. None of them knew about a tekke.

The second place turned out to be a small, irregularly shaped square jTist within the city walls. It was a working-class district, with a fair number of Armenians and Greeks among the Turkish shopkeepers whose little booths were gathered along its eastern edge. The buildings were in poor repair. It was almost impossible to guess their age. In a poor district buildings tended to be repaired and recycled beyond their normal life-expectancy. Come a fire, and people built afresh in the same style as their fathers and grandfathers.

Across from the shops stood a small but sedate and clean mosque, and behind it a little whitewashed house where the imam lived. He came to the door himself, leaning on a stick, an old, very bent man with a straggling white beard and thick spectacles. He was rather deaf, and seemed confused and even irritated when Yashim asked him about the Karagozi.

“We are all orthodox Muslims here,” he kept saying in a reedy voice. “Eh? I can’t understand you. Aren’t you a Muslim? Well, then. I don’t see what—We are all good Muslims here.”

He banged his stick once or twice, and when Yashim got away he continued to stand there on his threshold, leaning on his stick and following him with his thick spectacles until he had rounded the corner.

From the shopkeepers he learned that a market took place in the square every other day. But as for any Sufi tekke, abandoned or otherwise, they only shrugged. A group of old men, sitting out under a tall cypress growing close to the base of the old wall, discussed the matter between themselves, but their conversation soon moved on to memories of other places, and one of them began a long story about a Mevlevi dervish he’d once met in Ruse, where he had been born almost a century ago. Yashim slipped away while the men were still talking.

By late morning he had reached the third, and last, of the possibilities suggested by Eugenia’s map, a tight knot of small alleys in the west of the city where it had been impossible to pinpoint, with any degree of accuracy, either the street or building the tekke had appeared to occupy.

Yashim wandered around, defining a kind of circuit which he spent more than an hour exploring. But these narrow streets, as always, yielded little: it was impossible to guess what was going on behind the high blind facades, let alone imagine what might have taken place there fifteen or a hundred years before. It was only at the last minute, when Yashim was ready to give up, that he accosted a ferrety man with a waxed moustache who was stepping out of a porte cochere, carrying a string bag.

The man jumped when Yashim spoke.

“Who do you want?” he snapped.

“It’s a tekke,” Yashim began—and as he said it he was struck by an idea. “I’m looking for a Sufi tekke, I’m not sure whose.”

The man looked him up and down.

“Doesn’t it make a difference?” He seemed genuinely surprised. “They aren’t all the same, you know.”

“Of course, I understand,” Yashim said peaceably. “In this case, I’m looking for a particular old tekke…I’m an architect,” he added wildly.

He had spent the morning asking people if they remembered a Karagozi tekke. He had supposed that a redundant tekke could become anything from a shop to a tea-room. It hadn’t occurred to him until now that the most likely fate for an abandoned tekke was to be adopted by another sect. A Karagozi tekke would become someone else’s.

“An old tekke.” The man swung his nose left and right. “There’s a Nasrani tekke in the next street. They’ve only been there ten years or so, but the building’s very old, if that’s what you mean.”

The Karagozi were banned ten years ago.

“That,” said Yashim, smiling, “is exactly what I mean.”

The man offered to show him to the place. As they walked along, he said: “What do you make of all these murders, then?”

It was Yashim’s turn to jump. A street dog got up from a doorway and barked at them.

“Murders?”

“The cadets, you must have heard. Everyone’s talking about them.”

“Oh, yes. What do you think?”

“I only think…what everyone says. It’s something big, isn’t it? Something about to happen.” He put his hand into the air as if feeling it with his pursed fingers. “I keep rats.”

“Rats.”

“Do you like animals? I used to keep birds. I loved it when the light fell on their cages in the winter. I kept them hanging, outside the window. The birds would always sing in the sunlight. In the end I let them go. But rats, they’re clever, and they don’t mind a cage. Plus I let them out, to run. You can see them stop and think about things.

“I’ve got three. They’ve been acting strangely these last few days. Don’t want to come out of their cages. I take them out, of course, but they only want to hide somewhere. If it was just one, I could understand. I get times when I don’t want to see people, too, just want to stay at home and play with my pets. But all three, just the same. I think they feel it, too.”

Yashim, who had never liked rats, asked: “What is it? What do they feel?”

The man shook his head.

“I don’t know what. People muttering, all closed up. Like I said, something’s happening and we don’t know what. Here you are, the tekke.”

Yashim looked round in surprise. He had passed the low, win-dowless box earlier. It looked like a warehouse or a store-room.

“Are you sure?”

The man nodded briskly. “There might be no one there, but they seem to be around in the evenings. Good luck.” He waved the string bag. “Got to pick up some food for the rats,” he explained.

Yashim gave him a weak smile.

Then he knocked hard on the double doors.

[ 84 ]

Yes, Karagozi.” The man continued to smile gently.

So this is it, Yashim thought. At the same time he looked about him with sudden curiosity. Was it here, then, that the Janissaries had indulged in their bacchanalian rites? Bibbing, and women, and mystic poetry! Or something more prosaic, like a chamber of commerce, where business deals were fixed up and the soldiers who had become traders and artisans talked about the state of the market, and what they could squeeze from it.

There was nothing superficially sacred about the place. As it stood, it could easily have been the warehouse that Yashim had originally mistaken it for, a plain, whitewashed chamber lit by high windows, with an oak table running down the middle and benches on either side. A banqueting hall, say. The walls were freshly whitened, but they seemed to have been painted once, to judge by the cloudy images he could still make out behind the lime.

“The walls were decorated?”

The tekkemaster inclined his head.

“Very beautifully done.”

“But—what, sacrilegious?”

“To our minds, yes. The Karagozi were not afraid to make representations of what God has created. Perhaps they were able to do this with a pure heart. Yet those who believe as I do would have found them a distraction. I cannot say that this is why we had them painted over, though. It was more driven by a concern to return to the old purity of the tekke.”

“I see. So wall painting was introduced into Karagozi tekkes more recently? It wasn’t the original idea?”

The tekkemaster looked thoughtful.

“I do not know. For us, the Karagozi occupation was an interlude we preferred not to commemorate.”

Yashim looked up at the coffered ceiling.

“Interlude? I don’t quite understand.”

“Forgive me,” the tekkemaster said humbly. “I have not made myself clear, so perhaps you are unaware that this was a Nasrani tekke until the time of the Patrona Rebellion. The Karagozi grew very strong at that period, and they needed more space: so we gave it over to them. Recent events,” he added, with the usual cir—cumspection, “allowed us to reacquire the building, and the pictures were covered, as you see.”

Yashim turned to him with a defeated look. The Patrona Rebellion had been in 1730.

“You mean, this tekke was built by your order? It wasn’t originally a Karagozi foundation at all?”

The man smiled and shook his head.

“No. And so you see, we move in circles. What is open will be closed.”

Five minutes later, Yashim was back in the street.

Palewski’s map, drawn up by the Scotsman Ingiliz Mustafa, identified the old tekke correctly—for the time it was drawn up. The Karagozi hadn’t built it, though: it wasn’t one of the original four tekkes.

But the principle had to be right.

Yashim thought again of the little square under the old Byzantine walls of the city.

He pictured it in his mind’s eye. The mosque. The row of shops. An old cypress against the weathered stonework of the walls.

The tekke was there. It had to be there.

[ 85 ]

Half an hour later Yashim approached the square up a long, straight alley from the south.

Straight ahead, beyond the mouth of the alley, he had a clear view of the splendid cypress where earlier he’d stood talking with the old men.

From where he stood, five hundred yards back, he could see what he couldn’t see before. He could see over the top of the tree.

Just behind its slender tip, in solitary semi-ruined splendour, a Byzantine tower rose from the massive city walls.

The Kerkoporta. The little gate.

Not many Stambouliots learned the story of the Conquest of 1453 in any detail. It was ancient history, almost four hundred years old. It had been the fulfilment of destiny, and the how, or why, of its successful capture from the defending Greeks was a matter of little interest or relevance to people living in Turkish Istanbul in the nineteenth century.

Only two sorts of people had maintained their interest, and told the story to whoever wanted to listen.

The Janissaries, with pride.

The Phanariots, with regret—though whether that regret was perfectly genuine, Yashim had never quite been able to decide. For the Greek merchant princes of the Phanar, when all was said and done, had made their fortunes under Ottoman rule.

Yashim could remember exactly where he’d been when he first heard, in detail, the story of the Turkish Conquest. The Mavrocordato mansion, in the upper Phanar district, was the grandest, gloomiest palace on its street. Locked away behind high walls, and built in a style of high rococo, it was the headquarters of a sprawling family operation which extended to the principalities of the Danube and the godowns of Trabzon, taking in titles civil and ecclesiastical on the way. The Mavrocordatos had produced over the centuries scholars and emperors, boyar overlords and admirals of the fleet, rogues, saints and beautiful daughters. They were fantastically rich, dazzlingly well connected, and dangerously well informed.

There had been seven of them around a table, and Yashim. Their faces expressed many different things—humour and bitterness, dread or jealousy, complacency and contempt: but there had been one lovely face, too, he still saw sometimes in his dreams, whose glance said more. Only the eyes were the same, blue and brooding; Yashim had understood then why the Turks feared the blue eye.

The table had been covered in an Anatolian carpet that must have taken years to make, so tightly was it knotted. Coffee had been served, and when the heavy curtains were closed and the servants had withdrawn George Mavrocordato, the heavy-jowled patriarch of the clan, had invited Yashim to make his report.

Afterwards, George had slowly crossed to the fireplace, and the rest of them drifted over to sit with him in total silence that was like a form of speech. Eventually, George’s ancient mother had smoothed the belly of her black silk dress, and beckoned him across.

And she had told him the story of the Conquest.

[ 86 ]

Now, stock-still in the alley, he remembered it all.

Above all he remembered her bitterness when she told him about the Kerkoporta. The little gate.

The siege had already lasted ninety days, when young Sultan Mehmed ordered a final assault on the walls. Exhausted and weak, the few thousand Byzantines who remained to defend their city heard the roll of the kettle drums, and saw the hills beyond the walls move as tens of thousands of Mehmed’s troops descended to the attack. Wave after wave broke on the thinly defended walls, raised a thousand years before: the Anatolian levies, the Bashi-Bazouks from the hills of Serbia and Bulgaria, renegades and adventurers from the whole Mediterranean world. With every assault that they repulsed, the defenders weakened, and still the attack came on, with Mehmed’s police standing at the rear with thongs and maces to discourage their retreat, the ladders crashing on the walls, the wild skirling of the Anatolian pipes, the fitful light of flares, and the sudden thundering crash of the Hungarian’s gigantic cannon.

All the bells of the city were tolling. As the smoke cleared from the breach in the walls where the invading troops lay dying; as the defenders rushed to reconstitute the rubble; as the moon struggled clear of a ribbon of black and flying cloud, Mehmed himself advanced at the head of his crack infantry, the Janissaries. He led them to the moat, and from there they advanced, not in a wild battering frenzy like the irregulars and Turks who had been flung against the walls all through the night but, in the hour before dawn, in steady and unwavering file.

“They fought on the walls, hand to hand, for an hour or more,” the old lady said. “Believing the Turks were failing. Even those Janissaries losing their momentum. It…it wasn’t so.”

Yashim had watched her lips working against her toothless gums. Dry eyed, she said:

“There was a little gate, you see, at the angle where the great old walls of Theodosius met the lesser walls behind the Palace of the Caesars. It had been blocked up, goodness knows how many years before. So little, that gate. I don’t think two men could pass through it abreast, but there—God’s will is infinite in its mystery. It was opened at the start of the siege, for sallies. A party had just returned from a sortie, and—would you believe it—the last man back forgot to bar the gate behind him.”

It was the discovery of the little gate rocking on its hinges—a tiny gap in the whole eight miles of massive wall and inner wall, a momentary lapse of attention in a story that had run for a thousand years—that turned the course of the siege. Some fifty Janissaries shoved through and found themselves between the double walls. But their position was desperately exposed, and they might still have been driven back or killed by the defenders had one of the heroes of the defence, a Genoese sea-captain, not been seriously wounded by a close shot at that very moment. His crewmen bore him from the walls; the Byzantines sensed that he had abandoned them, and gave a shout of despair. The Ottomans made a rush for the inner walls and a giant called Hasan surged over the stockade at the head of his Janissary company.

In ten minutes the Turkish flags were flying from the tower that stood above the Kerkoporta.

All this was four hundred years ago.

But now, rising behind the great cypress in the square, the tower of the Kerkoporta still stood, red and white and empty against the wintry blue sky.

The exact spot where fifteen hundred years of Roman history reached its bloody climax, as the last emperor of Byzantium tore off his imperial insignia and, sword in hand, vanished into the melee, never to be seen again.

The exact place where Constantinople, the Red Apple, the navel of the world, was won by the Janissaries for Islam and the sultan.

Old Palmuk had been right after all.

There was a fourth tower.

The fourth tekke.

Shaking his head at the memories he had summoned, Yashim walked forward into the winter sunlight.

[ 87 ]

The stone flight of steps which led up to the inner parapet of the first wall was invisible from the alley. To reach it, Yashim groped his way down an unmarked passage between two wooden houses built against the base of the wall. Reaching the top, he turned back and followed the parapet walk to the Kerkoporta Tower.

At parapet level there was a wooden door set in the masonry. It stood ajar, its hinges rusted, fastened to the jamb with a length of flaking iron chain which almost crumbled at Yashim’s touch. He pushed. The door trembled slightly. He put his shoulder to the planks and heaved, until the hinges screamed and the door swung inwards into the dark.

The floor was littered with dust, fallen mortar, and dried droppings. Lifting his sandalled feet with care, Yashim advanced by the slanting sunlight into the centre of the chamber, and looked around. The ceiling was lost in the shadows. The walls showed signs of having been plastered once, but now revealed layers of Roman brickwork interspersed with courses of stone, while in the farthest corner of the chamber a stone staircase spiralled up from the floor below and disappeared upwards.

He crossed to the staircase and peered down. A slight breeze seemed to be coming up towards him, suggesting that the room below had air and maybe light; it carried odours of damp masonry and straw. He felt for the step and began to descend into darkness, his left hand trailing cobwebs from the rough outer wall of the spiral.

For several steps he was in total darkness, and when he thought of the sun on the square, and the tradesmen sitting outside their shops only a few yards away, he knew that this was as lonely and silent a spot as anywhere in the whole of Istanbul.

Another winding turn of the spiral brought a slight change in the quality of the darkness, and as Yashim went on down, and down, it bled to a grey twilight, until he stepped off the lowest tread into a vaulted room, supplied by a shuttered window on either side; only the shutters were cracked, and set with glowing chips of sunlight.

The walls were dark with greenish damp, but they were still plastered, and peering close Yashim could make out shapes like the cloudy shapes he had seen under the whitewash in the Nasrin tekke that morning. He recognised trees, pavilions, and a river. A long oak table ran down the room, and there were benches pushed up against the walls.

He took a step forwards and ran a fingertip along the table top. It was clean.

Yet the chamber overhead was a mess of dust and rubbish.

He faced the window. The chinks of light made it too bright to see, so he raised a hand to block them out, and saw a door. It was locked from the outside.

He stood with his back to the door and surveyed the room. From here he could see beyond the table.

At the far end stood what looked like a wooden chest, with a flat lid.

Yashim crossed the room and stood beside it. The lid was at waist-height. He eased his fingers under the rim, and tried it gently.

The lid lifted smoothly, and he looked inside.

[ 88 ]

Stanislaw Palewski opened his mouth to groan, as he did every morning when he woke up. But the groan did not come.

“Ha!”

The events of the night before had returned to him with unexpected clarity.

He wriggled his toes and they appeared obediently at the foot of the bed, poking out from beneath the duvet he had long ago adopted, in the Turkish fashion. His toes looked very dirty, until he remembered how he had blacked them with a brush.

He recalled the execrable champagne that he had been about to punish the previous evening. Doubtless some sharp French house had unloaded a bushel of the bad vintage on the unsuspecting Porte, charging top whack and confident that they would not be exposed. After all, who could complain? Not the Turks, who weren’t supposed to drink the stuff. And the guests were hardly likely to make a fuss.

All the same, Palewski thought, he didn’t get champagne every day, and he could have drunk rather more if that stiff-necked Russian hadn’t been so clumsy.

He grinned.

Tossing his drink over Prince Derentsov had been, he thought, a gifted manoeuvre. But swabbing it down afterwards, to ensure the maximum discomfort, was little short of inspiration.

What did it matter if afterwards he got a dressing-down from the sultan himself? The Russian had almost certainly fared worse—it was he who laid down the challenge, after all, and broke the sultan’s injunction. Palewski had merely responded as a man of honour must.

He and the sultan had had an interesting discussion, too. Surprisingly frank and friendly, and all because he had spilt his drink and wore a dastardly but inordinately well-contrived apology for the Sarmatian finery of his distant predecessors.

The sultan liked the coat. He had recalled, with Palewski, the old days which neither of them had ever known, but which both of them imagined tinged with a glamour and success that neither Poland nor the empire had ever rediscovered. And the sultan had said, in a voice that sounded suddenly weary and unsure, that all the world was changing very fast.

“Even this one.”

“Your Edict?”

The sultan had nodded. He described some of the pressures that now forced him to make changes in the running of his empire.

Military weakness. The growing spirit of rebellion, openly fostered by the Russians. The bad example of the Greeks, whose independence had been bought for them by European Powers.

“I believe we are taking the right steps,” he said. “I am very positive about the Edict. But I understand, also, that there will be enormous difficulties in persuading many people of the need for these changes. Sometimes, to tell you the truth, I see opposition everywhere—even in my own home.”

Palewski was rather touched. The sultan’s home, as they both knew, contained about 20,000 other people.

“Some will think that I am going too fast. Just a few may think that I have gone too slowly. And sometimes even I am afraid that what I am trying to do will be so misunderstood, so mangled and abused, that in the long run it will be the end of…all this.” And he gestured sadly at the decorations. “But you see, Excellency, there is no other way. There is nothing else we can do.”

They had sat in silence together for some moments.

“I believe,” Palewski said slowly, “that we must not fear change. The weight of the battle shifts here and there, but the hearts of the men who fight in it are not, I suppose, any weaker for that. I also believe, and hope, that you have acted in time.”

“Inshallah. Let us hope together that the next round of changes will be the better for us—and for you.”

And he had thanked the ambassador again for listening to him, and they shook hands.

As the sultan left to visit the Russian prince, he had turned at the door.

“Forget the incident this evening. I have forgotten it already. But not our talk.”

Unbelievable. Even Stratford Canning, the Great Elchi as the Turks liked to call him, who helped prop up the Porte against the pretensions of the Russians, would have swooned with pleasure if the sultan had spoken to him so sweetly.

Palewski—who normally took mornings one thing at a time -clasped his hands behind his head on the pillow, grinned, wriggled his toes, pulled the bell rope for tea, and decided that the first thing he would do today was pay a visit to the baths.

And later, it being a Thursday, he would dine with Yashim.

[ 89 ]

As the lid swung up on well-oiled hinges Yashim took a cautious peek inside.

The light was dim, and the interior of the chest in shadow, but even so Yashim could recognise something that was as prosaic as it was unexpected.

Instead of the dead cadet he dreaded, a stack of plates.

Beside the plates lay a tray of rather finicky little glasses, turned on their rims to keep out dust. Next to them, a metal goblet covered with what proved to be a folded strip of embroidered cloth. And a book.

Yashim picked it up. It was the Koran.

Otherwise the chest was empty, and smelled of polish.

Yashim smiled, a little grimly.

They’re getting the caterers in, he said to himself. For a feast.

A Karagozi bacchanal.

He closed the lid quickly and made for the stairs. Halfway up he found himself swallowed in darkness and began taking the stairs two at a time, surging out of the spiral and across the chamber he had come in by, not caring that his flying feet raised a cloud of dust as he slewed over the floor. Out on the parapet he yanked the door closed, hooked the chain, and leaned back against the wall, breathing heavily. From where he stood he could look down into the branches of the elegant cypress tree.

How is it, he asked himself, that I can be frightened by a set of crockery?

Because, he thought, this time I’ve got it right. Three bodies turn up, close by three tekke. This would be the fourth. Established on the site of the Janissaries’ greatest triumph—the Conquest of Constantinople.

And the body was yet to come.

[ 90 ]

The first person Murad Eslek saw when he strolled into the cafe for his breakfast was Yashim effendi, the gentleman he had rescued from the tanners.

Yashim saw him grin and wave. He murmured something to a passing waiter, then he was sitting down beside Yashim and shaking hands.

“You’re well, inshallah? How’s the foot?”

Yashim assured him that his foot was getting better. Eslek looked at him curiously.

“And I believe you, effendi. Forgive me, but you seem like a watered rose.”

Yashim bowed his head, remembering the hours he and Eugenia had spent sheathing the sword last night. He thought of her gasping, flinging back her beautiful head and baring her teeth with frantic lust, almost overcome—as she had whispered to him—by the discovery of a man who could do more than feed her appetite: who could, in the hours they played together, awaken a hunger she had never known before. He hadn’t slept a wink.

He hadn’t slept too much the night before, either, the night that he’d dropped Preen’s assailant into the bubbling vat at the tannery. Since then he’d been constantly on the move—that second time to the Russian embassy, sending Palewski to the party to buy him time, pounding the streets in search of a tekke which meant nothing to anyone but him and—who? All the time his mind had been turning over the possibilities, tracking back over his encounters of the past week, looking for something he could take a grip on.

All the time trying not to think about what had happened last night. The pain, and the desire. The torment he had been powerless to resist.

He’d see what his friend Eslek could do to help him, and then he’d go to the hammam to revive. To wash away the dust of the Kerkoporta Tower. To ease his aching limbs, to dissolve his thoughts, and contemplate the presence of the demon he had fought so long and so hard to control.

Murad Eslek looked up from his coffee to see the expression on Yashim’s face.

“You all right?”

Yashim smoothed it away.

“I need your help. Again,” he said.

[ 91 ]

An hour before dusk, Stanislaw Palewski joined a group of men spluttering with indignation at the doors of the Hammam Celebi, one of the better baths of the city on the Stamboul side. It stood at the bottom of a hill, below a network of crowded alleyways whose relatively generous width suggested that this was, all the same, a prosperous district, neither so crammed that its houses almost jettied into their neighbours across the street, nor so grand that they were hidden behind walls, but a district of well-to-do merchants and administrators who liked to saunter down the streets in the evening, and sit discussing the day’s news in the numerous cafes and eating houses. It was not far, in fact, from the Kara Davut, and it was with the idea of stopping for a bathe en route to Yashim’s Thursday dinner that Palewski had crossed the Galata bridge on foot, at peace with the world, with two bottles of the bison grass tucked very chill, and snug in their wrappings, into the bottom of his portmanteau.

The Hammam Celebi was unexpectedly closed for cleaning. Disappointed bathers clutched bags of clean linen and fulminated gloomily against the management.

“They are saying to come back in one hour, or even two!” A man with an Arab headcloth complained. “As if I should spend my evening running up and down hills carrying clothes like a pedlar!”

Another man added: “And as if this wasn’t Thursday!”

Palewski pondered this oracular argument. But of course: tomorrow was a holy day for rest and prayer, to be tackled unspotted, at least on the outer side. Thursday night was always busy at the baths.

“Forgive me interrupting,” he said politely. “I don’t quite understand what the matter is.”

The men turned to look him up and down. If they were surprised or displeased to find a foreigner—and a ferenghi, to boot—with a plain intention of entering their bath, they were certainly too well mannered to let it show. And when it came to bathing, the procedure was, by long tradition, a democratic one. The hours for men to use the hammam were hours when they could be used by all men, infidel or believer, foreigner or Stambouliot.

A third frustrated bather, a man with a small paunch and a few grey curls peeping from his turban, politely offered Palewski an explanation.

“For some reason none of us can fathom, the bath people have taken it into their heads to clean out the hammam in the middle of a busy evening, instead of at night.”

A fourth man spoke up, quietly.

“It may be some sickness. It has never happened before. Perhaps we should be praising the bath manager, instead of being so angry. We should take their advice and return in a short while. As for carrying our linen about, there are many decent cafes in the district, where one could easily while away the time. Is it not so?”

The group slowly dispersed. Palewski couldn’t tell if they still meant to return, after the last man had raised the possibility of disease. He thought, probably, yes. The Turks, after all, are fatalists. Like me.

That the baths could be closed down because of sickness surprised him more than the probability that everyone would come back in spite of it.

He wondered what to do. On the one hand, he had been looking forward to rubbing the blacking off his feet. On the other, though the delay might not make him late for Yashim, he was not yet quite as fatalistic as the Turks in the matter of disease.

He decided to sit and have a coffee somewhere, keeping an eye on the hammam. If it re-opened, and the signs were good, he could choose whether to go in. If not, he would simply go on to see his friend at the appointed time, and save his feet for the pump later. Or tomorrow morning, more likely, he remembered, thinking of all the vodka in his bag.

He turned, walked a short way up the hill, and chose a coffee shop from where he could watch the door of the hammam without moving his head. He could even look across the dome of the baths, and over the roofs behind, to watch the sun set into the Sea of Marmara, gilding the rooftops and the minarets, the domes and the cypress trees.

[ 92 ]

Eslek had picked up fast, Yashim thought. He had not refused payment, to his relief: the task was crucial, too important to be carried out purely as a favour. He’d had his favour already, anyway. It was time to make returns.

He slipped off his clothes and handed them to the attendant, shuffling into a pair of wooden clogs to protect the soles of his feet from the hot stone. Inside the hot rooms of the hammam the floors were always dangerously slippery. Naked except for a clout around his hips he clip-clopped through the door into a large domed chamber filled with steam. The dome was supported on squinches which created semi-circular niches around the walls, where one could sit by a flowing spout of hot water that ebbed away downhill to the drain in the centre, scooping up the water to clean one’s body to the very depths of one’s pores.

Yashim stepped gratefully into the steamy room. He set his feet apart, arched his back, and stretched until the joints in his shoulders cracked. Then he ran his fingers through his black curls and looked around for somewhere to sit. He took possession of a niche, and sat on a small low bench with his back against the wall and his long legs stretched out in front of him. For several minutes he did not move, allowing himself to absorb the heat, feeling his sweat begin to run. At last he bent forward and picked up a tin scoop at his feet.

He stretched out an arm to fill the scoop, and very slowly tipped the water over his head. His eyes were closed. He loved the way the water sought out runnels through his hair and trickled, like soothing fingers, down his neck. He did it again. He heard a man laugh. He smelt the animal scent of clean skin. After a few more minutes he picked up a bar of soap and began to lather himself completely, beginning with his feet, working his way up his body to his face and hair.

He continued to pour the water over his head and shoulders. Eventually he began to wash the soap away, from top to toe, working at his skin with his fingers, watching the way the hairs on his legs followed the course of the water. It always reminded him of Osman’s dream, the dream in which the founder of the Ottoman dynasty had seen a great tree, whose leaves suddenly trembled and then aligned, as if in a wind, pointing a myriad sharp points towards the Red City of Byzantium. Finally he gave his feet a thorough kneading with his thumbs, and stood up and crossed to find room on the raised platform in the centre of the room.

He climbed up languidly onto the hot platform, the so-called belly of the hammam, spread out his towel, and lay on it, face down, his head turned to the left and his eyes closed. The huge masseur, bald as an egg, every ripple of his flesh hairless and shining, closed in, and began to work Yashim’s feet with great force and dexterity, rhythmically smoothing and digging at Yashim’s flesh until Yashim felt his whole body rocking up and down. Up and down. Head to toe on the burning marble.

Invisible shivers ran up his legs. He thought of the pile of plates. He saw Eugenia’s white breasts, a tangle of sheets, her lips swollen with the heat. This was another kind of heat, a heat which sucked at his will, sapped him of all his strength. Once or twice he kicked out, involuntarily, as he rose from the sleep he so desperately craved. “Salright,” he murmured to himself. A few minutes, then the masseur will tap him off the bench and wake him up. Sleep.

Slowly the room began to empty out.

The masseur kept on working on Yashim’s body.

Slowly, and more slowly.

There was only one man left in the hammam, asleep on a bench. The masseur raised his fingers from Yashim’s neck. Yashim didn’t move.

The masseur went over to the sleeping bather and scooped him up in his powerful banded arms like a little baby. The man started, and opened his eyes, but when the masseur set him down again he was in the tepidarium, facing a cold plunge. The masseur gave him a friendly little shove and he leaped into the cold tub, gasping and laughing. He’d been asleep!

The masseur shot the bolt of the hammam door and folded his huge arms over his chest.

Inside the hot room Yashim slept on, dreaming of melting snow.

[ 93 ]

How do I look now, old man?”

Fizerly looked his friend up and down with a critical eye.

“Capital, Compston. Or should I say, Mehmed? If we’re going out to explore the old city, just remember that you’re Mehmed from here on.”

Compston chuckled and looked at himself in the embassy mirror. Fizerly had been awfully clever with the turban—in the end, they’d arranged it so that not a hair of his blond head straggled out, and even if the balance of the turban had suffered slightly in consequence it wouldn’t show. “Just keep moving your head about like a good chap,” Fizerly had suggested, helpfully. Not Fizerly, that is. Ali. Ali Baba, at your service.

Compston-Mehmed giggled and rubbed a little more soot into his eyebrows.

“Let’s hope it doesn’t rain,” he said.

[ 94 ]

Palewski drank his coffee slowly, watching the sunset. Outside, the hubbub of traffic was subsiding, the porters going empty-handed uphill, a few small donkey carts returning to stables, while the numbers of people taking the evening air increased. Sometimes Palewski recognised them—a palace official he couldn’t name, a Greek dragoman linked to one of the Phanariot merchant houses, an imam looking exactly as he had looked fifteen years before, when Palewski had had a discussion with him on the history of the idea of the transmigration of souls. Later he saw a couple of juniors from the British embassy—Fizerly, he recalled, with the straggling whiskers, now smoking a Turkish cheroot, sauntering along with a boy in a curious sort of hat, apparently made out of various pieces of his underwear, nodding and laughing at his side. Palewski wondered vaguely what they were doing, dressed like children out of a nativity play. Nobody seemed to pay them much attention, and they strolled down the hill and disappeared round the corner of the baths.

How much Istanbul had changed in the thirty years he had known it! What was it that he had said to Yashim? He had said he mourned the passing of the Janissaries. Well, the past ten years had been particularly lively. Since the suppression of the Janissaries there had been nothing to restrain the sultan except the fear of foreign intervention, and the sultan was a born mod-erniser. He’d taken to the European saddle faster than anyone. The change that had come over the city went beyond the gradual but continuous disappearance of turbans and slippers, and their replacement by the fez, and leather shoes. That was a change which Palewski was romantic enough to regret, though he did not expect it to be complete in his lifetime—if only because the great city still drew people from every corner of the empire towards it, people who had never heard of sumptuary laws, or shoe-laces. But more people from outside the empire were coming in, too, and in the gradual rebuilding of Galata after the great fire there were oddities like the French glovemaker, and the Belgian who sold bad champagne, ensconced in their little shops, with tinkling bells, just as if they were in Cracow.

The door opened and a gust of cold air entered the fug of the cafe. Palewski recognised the man who came in, too, though for a while he couldn’t place him: a tall, bullish man in late middle age, distinguished by a white cloak. He was followed in by two European merchants Palewski had seen around, but not spoken to. He thought they might be French.

The three men took a table slightly behind Palewski’s line of sight, so it was a while before he glanced back and recognised the seraskier, who had shrugged back his cloak and now sat with booted legs tightly crossed, his blue-grey uniform jacket buttoned to the neck. He was toying with a coffee cup, listening with a slight smile to one of his companions who was leaning forward and making a point, quietly, with the help of his hands. French, then. Or Italian?

Palewski wondered if he might order another coffee himself. He looked down the hill: the doors of the baths were still shut, but another knot of men with bags of linen had gathered outside, presumably rehearsing the complaints he had listened to half an hour before. Cleaning the baths! On a Thursday night, too. Sacrilege! Scandal! Palewski grinned, and waved at the waiter.

Well, he could see that they were cleaning the baths—and thoroughly, too. The little air vent at the top of the dome was releasing a corona of white steam which rose, eddied and then trailed away in the dusk. Caught by the dying rays of the sun, the steam sometimes refracted a rainbow of colour. Very pretty, Palewski thought. Next came a stick, bound with a trailing white cloth, to riddle out the vent. Very thorough, Palewski thought. If they finish in time, I will certainly try my luck.

The waiter brought him a fresh coffee. Palewski leaned back to overhear the conversation going on behind him, but it was being muttered at a distance, over the bubble of pipes, the hiss of boiling water, and the murmur of low conversation around the room. Disappointed, he looked out of the window again.

How odd, he thought. The stick was still going up and down in the hole, and the scrap of cloth was fluttering with it, like a tiny flag.

There’s cleaning, Palewski thought curiously, and obsession.

And as he watched, the stick suddenly wavered and keeled over to one side. Stuck at an angle, the little white cloth waved and flapped in the evening breeze like a signal of surrender.

[ 95 ]

Yashim had been dreaming. He dreamed that he and Eugenia were standing naked, side by side in the snow, watching a forest fire crackle in the treetops. It wasn’t cold. As the fire advanced, the warmth increased, and the snow began to melt. He shouted ‘Jump!’ and they both leaped over the edge of the melted snow. He had no recollection of hitting the ground below, but he had started to run across the square towards the huge cypress. Eugenia was nowhere but the soup master reached out with his enormous hands and lit the cypress with a match. It burned like a rocket as Yashim held on to it, pressing his face against the smooth bark; but when he tried to pull away he couldn’t, because his skin had melted and stuck to the tree.

He coughed and tried to raise his head. His eyes opened. They seemed to be filmed over: his vision was foggy. He made another effort to raise his head and this time his cheek sucked against the hard top of the massage bench, where he lay in a pool of his own sweat. He rolled over, his whole body slithering on the bench, and swung his legs to the floor.

A dull pain throbbed through his feet, and it took him some moments to realise that the soles of his feet were burning against the stone floor. He sat back on the bench, legs raised, and looked round. There was nobody else there.

The steam was peeling away from the floor in angry ribbons, which blended into a fog that thickened as it approached the dome. Yashim found that he was breathing hard: the air was so hot and humid that every breath stuffed his throat like a rag, and brought him no relief. With a heavy hand he dashed the sweat from his eyes.

The fog felt curiously intimate, as if it were really a problem with his eyes, and this seemed to disorient him: he jerked his head about, searching for the doors. He saw his wooden clogs beside the massage bench. With his feet in the clogs he stood swaying for a moment, holding onto the bench; and then, like a man struggling through the snow, he staggered forwards towards the door. He fell against it, groping for a handle: but the door was as smooth as the walls.

No handle.

Yashim drummed with his fists, unable to shout, his breath sobbing through his teeth. No one came. Again and again he crashed against the door, throwing his whole weight behind his shoulder; but it didn’t budge, and the sound itself was flattened against the iron-bound oak. He sank into a squat, one hand against the door for support.

The heat rolling off the floor made it impossible to hold that position for very long. He stood up slowly; bent double, he pushed himself along the wall. The spigot in the first niche had stopped flowing. There was a scoop on the floor, but it contained only an inch of water and the metal was hot.

He could not guess how long he crouched there, gazing down between his arms at the water in the scoop. But when the water started to steam he thought: I’m being braised.

But I am thinking.

I must get out.

Gingerly he raised his head, for it felt as though it must burst at any minute: he needed to keep the water out of his eyes.

A faint pattern of light penetrated the fog above. It came from the pattern of holes let into the roof of the dome, and for a second Yashim wondered if he could somehow climb up and reach it, thrust his hands, maybe, and his lips against the holes.

You can’t climb the inside of a dome, he said to himself.

His eye followed the base of the walls, searching for anything that he could use.

He almost missed it: the long bamboo cane attached to the head of a mop, tucked up into the angle between the floor and the wall.

He could hardly pick it up: his fingers were puffy and hard to bend.

Yashim raised the flimsy cane with an effort. Too short.

Once more he started round the room. Twice he almost blacked out, and fell to his hands and knees: but the burning stone tortured him back to life, and he tottered on until he found the second cane.

Now he needed a strip of cloth to bind them together. He tore at a towel with his fingers and his teeth, whimpering now.

At last he managed to create a nick in the hem. Even tearing the cloth he was like a puny child, nearly too weak to raise his arms, but at last he had a bandage of cotton which he secured around the two bamboos. The remaining scrap he tied to the top of the pole, and then he began to raise it up. The bare end struck on the side of the dome. He scraped it upwards.

It was too short.

Through the vapour, against the dome, Yashim could hardly tell how short. His face was set in a rictus now, his teeth bared. He staggered across to the massage bench and clambered onto it. Every movement was an agony. As he raised his arms he noticed that they were almost purple, as if blood was starting to ooze from his pores.

He started to pump the stick up and down, up and down. At every stroke he felt that he was pumping the blood, too, through the pores in his skin. He faintly remembered that he needed to make the stick move, but he could no longer remember why this had seemed important, only that it was all the instruction he possessed. It was all he had left.

[ 96 ]

“Avec permission

The seraskier glanced upwards with a look of surprise. Then he smiled politely.

“Enchante, Excellence.”

“I’m so sorry to interrupt,” Palewski continued, “but I have just seen something rather strange and I wanted your opinion.”

“Mais bien stir.” The seraskier did not sound impressed. What he and the Polish ambassador found strange could be entirely different things. “What have you seen, Your Excellency?”

It occurred to Palewski that any explanation he could give would sound thin, even laughable. He turned to the seraskier’s companions.

“Would you excuse me? I’d like to borrow the seraskier for just one minute. Indulge me, effendi.”

The men made noncommittal gestures, but said nothing. The seraskier looked from them to Palewski with an impatient half-smile.

“Very well, Excellency.” He was on his feet. “My apologies, gentlemen.”

Palewski took him by the arm and steered him into the street.

“Something funny just happened at the baths,” he began. “First they closed them, quite suddenly, on a Thursday night.” He had seized on this detail, which had so baffled him at first, as being the oddest from a Turkish point of view. “They are supposed to be cleaning them out, but a minute ago I watched someone waving a flag out through a hole in the roof. I say a flag, because there is simply no other explanation I can think of. It looked like, well, a signal. And now it has stopped. D’you see, effendi? It may sound odd to you, but it really did look like that—as if someone had been signalling, and then was stopped for some reason. I wanted to go down there myself, but seeing you—well, I thought you could make an enquiry with greater weight.”

The seraskier frowned. It sounded like rubbish, of course, and whatever went on in a hammam was really no concern of his…and yet, the Pole was clearly agitated.

“For your sake, Excellency, we will go and ask,” he said, with as much gallantry as he could muster.

[ 97 ]

Yashim could hear voices. A tiny sliver of light cut into the darkness as he raised his eyelids a fraction of an inch. Something that soothed him pressed for a moment against his body, and was gone. Dim shapes moved in the light. Dreadful accident…stroke of

luck…Then someone was wiping his face with a cool wet cloth and Palewski’s own face swam into view.

“Yash? Yashim? Can you hear me?”

He tried to nod.

Palewski put a hand under his head and tilted him forwards.

“Drink this,” he said. Yashim felt the rim of a glass against his lips, but his lips felt huge. His fingers seemed to be in gloves, they were so hard to bend.

“Can he speak?”

It was the seraskier’s voice.

I am dreaming, Yashim thought.

Hands picked him up and moved him through the air. Then he was lying back again, covered with a blanket.

Palewski saw his friend settled on the litter and motioned to the bearers. To the seraskier he said: “I’ll take him to the embassy. He’ll be safe there.”

The seraskier nodded. “Please let me know how he is doing later.”

The litter-bearers shouldered their poles and followed the ambassador out into the night.

Yashim was aware of the jouncing of the litter as they threaded through the dark streets. He heard the slap-slap of the bearers’ feet and the jingle of little bells, and wondered how badly he was hurt. Sometimes the fabric of the litter rasped against his skin and he almost shouted out.

A runner had gone on ahead to give Palewski’s maid time to make up a bed and lay a fire; when they arrived she was already on the stairs with a wedge of fresh linen. Palewski took candles off a table in the hall to light the bearers’ way, and so expertly did they carry him that Yashim only knew they were going upstairs by the slope of the ceiling.

They transferred him to the bed. Palewski settled a fire in the stove that stood in one corner of the room, tiled with a design of twining blue flowers, while Marta appeared with a basin of cold water and a sponge, turning down the sheet so that she could dab delicately at Yashim’s inflamed skin.

Yashim felt nothing, only a wave of nausea that now and then clutched at his belly and made him retch. When he did, Marta cleaned him up without a word. He slept for a while, and when he woke she was there again, with a spoonful of liquid so bitter it made his mouth ache; but he swallowed and the nausea slowly dissolved.

Marta brought up a basin of warm water that smelled of lavender and honey. Yashim was breathing steadily now. By the light of the candles he watched the silent Greek girl with her straight brow and olive skin, standing over the basin, absorbed in her task. She took a pile of big linen napkins and one by one she soaked them in the basin, wrung them out, and spread them on a clothes rack to cool. Her straight black hair was gathered in two plaits, pinned to the side of her head; when she bent forwards he could see the little hairs on the nape of her neck as they caught the light.

When she was ready she took the first honey-scented napkin and folded it.

“Please close your eyes,” she said, in a voice as soft as a dove’s. She laid the napkin firmly over his forehead, and he felt her fingers smooth the damp cloth over his eyelids, and mould it across his nose and cheekbones.

“Can you roll onto your side? Here, let me help you.”

A moment later he felt another cool cloth pressed around his chin and neck and shoulder. His left arm was lifted, and Marta’s fingers smoothed another napkin over the side of his chest and his back.

“Try not to move,” she said. As she worked her way down his body Yashim began to find his sensations returning. He felt her palms on his buttocks and thighs, through the cool cloth. At length she reached his feet, and helped him roll onto his back to finish wrapping his right side.

“I feel like an Egyptian mummy,” Yashim croaked. She put a finger to his lips. His voice had sounded weak and strained: he even wondered if she had heard what he said.

He must have dozed, because suddenly he was afraid he was being smothered, unable to open his eyes, crushed by a fearful pressure on his chest and limbs. He gave a cry, and tried to struggle free, but two small hands pressed him back by the shoulders and a voice whispered softly: “I am here, don’t worry. It’s all right. It’s better now.”

For a moment he felt her breath on his lips, and then she had removed the bandage over his eyes and he opened them to see her standing over him with the napkin in one hand and a shy smile on her face.

He smiled back. For the first time since she had touched him, he was conscious of his nakedness; conscious that he was, once again, alone with a woman. He raised himself gingerly on one elbow, and she seemed to feel it, too, because she turned to the candle and said: “If you feel better, you should wash. The honey will be sticky. I will fetch what you need.”

She was gone for a minute. When she returned she carried a basin of warm water and a robe draped over her arm. She set the basin down by the bed and laid the robe near his feet.

“There is a sponge in the basin,” she explained.

As she turned to go, Yashim said: “My arm is still very stiff.”

She shot him a smile and for the first time he saw her serious dark eyes twinkle.

“Then you will have to wash slowly,” she said, sweetly. And was gone.

Yashim sighed, and heaved his legs off the bed in a rustling cascade of napkins.

He washed himself, as the girl had said, slowly.

Aware that there was little time. Wondering what had become of Murad Eslek. Wondering what Marta meant to his friend Palewski—and he to her.

[ 98 ]

What is the time?”

Yashim had opened his eyes to find Palewski perched at the foot of his bed, his elbows resting on his knees, looking patiently into his face.

“After midnight. Marta has gone to bed.”

Yashim gave him a weak smile as a stray thought entered his mind. To Palewski I am only half a man—but the half he likes. The half he can trust. And he decided never to tell his friend about what happened between him and Eugenia at the Russian embassy.

“I have to thank you, Palewski, for saving my life.”

“And I you, my old friend, for allowing me to hobnob for an hour or so with the sultan.” He clapped his hands together. “It was a capital party!”

Yashim looked blank. Palewski told him about Derentsov’s challenge and the intimate conversation he had held with Sultan Mahmut IV.

“I get the impression, Yash, that the sultan has sleepless nights over this Edict of his. It will make him a very lonely man. He makes a lot of enemies.”

Yashim nodded. “I’m beginning to think that murder is the least of it. And tonight, but for you, they would have killed me too.”

“You were in a public place.”

But Yashim said: “I forgot something I’d learned. Working in the stoke-holes of the baths was one of the jobs that Janissaries took up, if they survived the purge. Tell me, you saw my signal?”

Palewski recounted the series of events which had brought him and the seraskier to the doors of the baths.

“The seraskier?” Yashim put in. “If I hadn’t been half-dead -he’s the man I need to speak to. I ought to go and find him.”

Palewski put out a restraining hand. “Marta left me particular instructions, Yashim. She expects to find you here in the morning. You are her patient. Perhaps you would like to drink some tea? Or something stronger?”

Yashim closed his eyes. “I’ve found out where the fourth man is going to appear.”

Palewski looked anxious. “Good, good,” he murmured. He straightened his back. “I’m sorry, Yashim, but do you know what I think? None of us are players in this scheme. We’re witnesses, at best: even you. It’s too—” He searched his mind. “You told me you had the impression that it was like a feast prepared, meze and a main dish, remember. Well, I believe you were right. We’re guests. And it’s a dangerous party.”

He stood up carefully and approached Yashim, crouching beside his pillow.

“You aren’t going to find anyone alive. None of the other cadets were killed where you found them. You won’t find this one being cooked in front of your eyes, either. Take this rest. You can go off, if you feel fit, very early in the morning after Marta has seen to you again.”

Yashim stared at the ceiling. It was sensible advice. He’d lost the time he needed, and nothing would bring it back. He wanted so much to do as his friend suggested, sleep—and trust to Eslek. He could be at the Kerkoporta by first light.

It was sensible advice. But in one particular, at least, the Polish ambassador could not have been more wrong.

[ 99 ]

The provisioning of a great city, the kadi liked to remark, is the mark of a successful civilisation. In Istanbul it was a business that had been honed close to perfection by almost two thousand years’ experience, and it could truly be said of the markets of Istanbul that there was not a flower, a fruit, a type of meat or fish that did not make its appearance there in season.

An imperial city has an imperial appetite, and for centuries the city had commanded daily tribute from an enormous hinterland. Where the Byzantines had managed their market gardens on the approaches from Thrace and Asia Minor, the Turks, too, raised vegetables. From two seas—the warm Mediterranean and the dark, gelid waters of the Black Sea—it was supplied abundantly with fish, while the sweetest trout from the lakes of Macedonia were carried to the city in tanks. From the mountains of Bulgaria came many kinds of honey to be turned into sweets by the master sweet-makers of Istanbul.

It was a finely regulated business, all in all, from the Balkan grazing grounds to the market stall, in a constant slither of orders, inspections, purchases and requisitions. Like any activity that needs unremitting oversight, it was open to abuse.

The kadi of the Kerkoporta market had taken up his job twenty years before, and earned himself a reputation for severity. A butcher who used false weights was hanged at the doorway of his own shop. A greengrocer who lied about the provenance of his fruit had his hands struck off. Others, who had jibbed a customer, perhaps, or slipped out of the official channels to procure bargain stock, found themselves forced to wear a wide wooden collar for a few weeks, or to pay a stiff fine, or to be nailed by the ear to the door of their own shop. The Kerkoporta market had become a byword for honest deal—ing, and the kadi supposed that he was doing everything for the best.

The merchants found him officious, but they were divided as to the best way to deal with him. A minority were for clubbing together to manufacture some complaint against him from which he would be unlikely to recover; but the majority shrugged their shoulders and counselled patience. The kadi, some suggested, was merely establishing his price. Will not an ambitious carpet dealer wax lyrical over the colours and qualities and rarity of his carpet, as a prelude to negotiation? Will not a young wrestler hurl all his strength into the contest, while the older man uses no more than he actually needs to use? The time would come, they argued, when the kadi would start to crack.

The action brigade claimed that this man was different. The realists said he was human. And the subtlest minds of all quietly observed that the kadi had two daughters. The eldest, approaching the marrying age, was reputed to be very beautiful.

The kadi’s fall, when it finally came, was silent and absolute. The rumour of his daughter’s beauty was perfectly true; she was also meek, pious, obedient and skilful. It was these very qualities that caused the kadi such agony of mind, as he tried to choose a husband for her. He loved his daughter, and wanted the best for her; and it was because she was so good that he became so picky. It was because he was so picky that he eventually settled on a renowned teacher at the central medrese, a bachelor from an excellent wealthy family.

The kadi’s fortune was by no means equal to providing his daughter with the handsome dowry and memorable wedding festivities that the groom’s family customarily provided for their own daughters. They didn’t mind, of course; but it tormented the kadi. The cause of the torment was divined by the matchmaker, a shrewd old lady who chewed betel and wore a gold bangle for every union she had successfully negotiated: she tin—kled like a fountain when she moved. And she moved a lot: that is to say, she visited almost every house in the district on a fairly regular basis, and through one of these visits the Kerkoporta merchants learned of the kadi’s dilemma.

The affair was handled with delicacy and tact.

For fixing up a splendid wedding, and clubbing together to provide the girl with a stylish dowry, the merchants asked the kadi for nothing in return. Few markets were as well served as the Kerkoporta by its kadi, who had brought such order and regularity and honesty into the business that even a foreigner, as was widely known, could make purchases there in perfect confidence. Hardly anyone need even know that the dowry and the feast came as a private act of tribute from the market to the judge.

Nothing was said. No deals were struck, perish the thought. The kadi continued to do his job with rigour, as before. He wasn’t even particularly grateful.

He was simply weary. Being honest was tiring, but it wasn’t as exhausting as carrying on with what he knew: that he had connived with the merchants he was deputed to regulate.

He continued to sit in the market house, hearing cases, investigating abuses, frowning at supplicants and keeping his own counsel. But he no longer punished transgressions with such severity. He no longer really cared whether the merchants cheated their customers or not. If he found gold in his purse, or a freshly slaughtered sheep delivered to his door, it roused neither gratitude nor indignation.

He had another daughter, after all.

[ 100 ]

The donkeys drummed on the cobbles with their little hooves. The two- wheeled carts jounced and swayed behind them, with a noise like sliding pebbles. The thin beams of lamplight careered around the blank walls.

Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen.

Murad Eslek raised a hand. The night porter gave a nod and let the barrier swing gently back into the wooden block on the other side of the gate, closing the road.

Eslek called out a brief thanks, and followed his carts into the square.

Sixty or seventy donkey carts jostled through the narrow openings, arguing their passage with a dozen or so much bigger mule carts, a flock of bleating sheep, and vendors still arriving. Space was constricted by the empty stalls Eslek and his men had been putting up over the last couple of hours, each one topped by a lantern. Wagon eight, Eslek noticed, had overshot its stall: no use trying to back up, it would have to be led round again for a second try, when the others were out of the way. One of the stallholders, wrapped in a horse blanket tied on with string, was demanding to know where his delivery was: cart five had got swept away by an eruption of mule carts coming up from the city. Eslek could just about make it out, with its high stack of poultry cages swaying dangerously in the distance. But for the most part everything was in place.

He began to help unload the leading cart. Baskets of aubergines, jute bags of potatoes, bushels of spinach thumped onto the stall. When it was almost done, Eslek wheeled back and began the same routine with the cart behind. The trick was to finish unloading simultaneously, keep the train together, and move out in order. Otherwise it was all back and forth, and no rest till sun-up.

He darted across the square to the poultry cart. Just as he feared, it had got wedged in behind a mule cart loaded with sacks of rice and no one was paying any attention to the driver’s shouts. Eslek grabbed the mule’s halter and waved his arm at the driver standing in the cart, swinging the heavy sacks into the arms of a man on the ground.

“Hey! Hey! Hold it!”

The driver shot him a glance and turned to pick up another sack. Eslek drove the mule’s halter back: the mule tried to lift its head but decided to take a step backwards instead. The cart jolted and the driver, caught off balance, staggered back with a sack in his arms and sat down heavily.

The stallholder grinned and scratched his head. The driver leaped from his cart in a fury.

“What in the name of God—oh, it’s you, is it?”

“Come on, Genghis, get this rattletrap backed off half a mo, we’re stuck. Here, pull her up.” He gestured to the donkey cart driver, who was sitting on the cart board with his long driving stick poised and ready. The rice carter backed his mule cart, the donkey driver whacked the dust from the donkey’s flanks, and the little beast trotted forward.

“Cheers!” Eslek waved, then jogged alongside his cart with a hand on the board. “Second time this week, Abdul. You’re holding us all up.”

He brought the cart to the back of his own train, told the driver to grab a crate and with the stallholder’s help they unloaded, dodging up and down the line. Most of the stallholders were already arranging their stock; the scent of charcoal hung in the air as the street-food vendors lit their fires. Eslek felt hungry, but he still had to clear the carts out; it was another hour before he saw them all safely through the gate, where he paid off the drivers.

“Abdul,” he said. “Just keep your eyes open, understand? Those mule men look tough, but they can’t touch you. Not if you don’t give them a chance. Just stick to the tail of the man in front, keep your eyes straight. They’re all bluster.”

He walked back to the market. Now and then he had to flatten himself against the wall to allow other donkey carts to clatter by, but by the time he reached the square the first hubbub of the night had subsided. The vendors were busy with their arrangements of fruit and vegetables, vying against each other by building pyramids, amphitheatres and acropolises of okra, aubergines and waxy yellow potatoes, or of dates and apricots, in blocks and bands and fancy patterns of colour. Others, who had lit their braziers, were waiting for the coals to develop their white skin of ash, and using the time to nick chestnuts with a knife, or to load a thick skewer with slices of mutton. Soon, Eslek thought with a pang of hunger and anticipation, the meatballs would be simmering, the fish frying, the game and poultry roasting on the spits.

He, too, had another job to do before he could eat. Once he had checked with his vendors, and reckoned their bills, he took a tour of the perimeter of the market. He paid particular attention to dark corners, shadowed doorways, and the space beneath the stalls whose owners he did not serve. He looked men in the face, and recognised them quickly; and now and then he lifted his head to scan the market as a whole, to see who was coming in, and to watch for the arrival of any carts he didn’t know.

From time to time he wondered what was keeping Yashim.

A troupe of jugglers and acrobats, six men and two women, took up a position near the cypress tree, squatting on their haunches, waiting for light and crowds. Between them they had set a big basket with a lid, and Murad Eslek spent a while watching them from the corner of the alley beneath the city walls until he had seen that the basket really did contain bats, balls and other paraphernalia of their trade. Then he moved on, eyeing up the other quacks and entertainers who had crowded in for the Friday market: the Kurdish story teller in a patchwork coat; the Bulgarian fire-eater, bald as an egg; a number of bands—Balkan pipers, Anatolian string players; a pair of sinuous and silent Africans, carefully dotting a blanket spread on the ground with charms and remedies; a row of gypsy silversmiths with tiny anvils and a supply of coins wrapped in pieces of soft leather, who were already at work, snipping the coins and beating out tiny rings and bracelets.

He took another look across the market and thought of food, though he knew it would be a few minutes yet before he could eat. The air was already spiced with the fragrance of roasting herbs; he could hear the sizzle of hot fat dripping on the coals. He lifted a cube of salty white bread from a stall as he passed by, and popped it in his mouth; and then, since no one had rebuked him, he stopped a moment to admire the arrangement of the spit, worked by a little dog scampering gamely round inside a wooden wheel. Nearby he saw out of the corner of his eye a man flipping meatballs with a flat knife. He drew a few meatballs to the side of the pan, and Eslek stepped forwards.

“Ready, then?”

The man cracked a smile and nodded.

“First customer Friday is always free.”

Murad grinned. He watched the man scatter a few pitta breads on the hot surface of the pan, press them down with the blade of his knife and flip them over. He pulled one towards him and opened it up with a quick arc of the point and a sliding motion with the flat side.

“Chilli sauce?”

Murad Eslek’s mouth watered. He nodded.

The man took a dab of sauce on the end of his knife, spread it inside the bread, scooped up two meatballs and stuffed them home with a generous handful of lettuce and a squeeze of lemon.

With the kebab in two hands, Eslek sauntered happily through the stalls, munching greedily.

He saw nothing to surprise him. Eventually he went down the alley by the walls and found the dark passageway Yashim had mentioned. He mounted the steps carefully, and made his way back to the tower. The door was still on its chain as Yashim had left it. He sat down on the parapet, swinging his legs, licking his fingers, and looked down through the cypress at the market below.

The sky had lightened, and it would soon be dawn.

[ 101 ]

When Yashim opened his eyes again it was still dark. The fire in the grate had died out. Wincing slightly, he eased himself upright and slipped his legs over the edge of the bed. His feet felt bruised and swollen, but he forced himself to stand upright. After he had hobbled up and down the room for a few minutes, he found the pain was bearable. He found his clothes by accident, putting out a hand in the darkness to steady himself. They were neatly piled on a table where Marta must have placed them.

He took his cloak from the hall and stepped out into the early morning air. His skin was tender, but his head was clear.

He walked swiftly down towards the Golden Horn. The lines of the Karagozi poem circled in his head to the rhythm of his footsteps.

Unknowing

And knowing nothing of unknowing,

They sleep.

Wake them.

He quickened his pace to reach the wharves. On the quayside he found a ferryman awake, huddled into his burnous against the dawn chill, and once across he took a sedan chair and ordered the bearers to the Kerkoporta market.

[ 102 ]

I saw you arrive,” Murad Eslek explained. He’d recognised Yashim immediately, and rushed to greet him before he disappeared into the crowd. Now that the day had broken there were plenty of people milling past the stalls, filling their baskets with fresh produce. “I’ve been looking about, like you said. Nothing unusual. A few performers I don’t know, that’s about it. Quiet, everything normal.”

“The tower?”

“Yep, I checked it out. The door you told me about, it’s still on the chain. I’ve been up there for an hour.”

“Hmmm. There’s another door, though, from the other side. On a lower floor. I’d better take a look. You stay here and keep your eyes open, but if I’m not back in half an hour, bring some of your lads and come after me.”

“Like that, is it? Half a minute, I’ll get someone to go with you now.”

“Yes,” Yashim said. “Why not?”

It took them only a few minutes to reach the parapet. The porter Eslek had found stamped along incuriously behind Yashim, but he was glad of his presence: the memory of the dark stairs leading down to that clean chamber still made him shiver. He unlooped the chain and once more set his shoulder to the door.

The porter protested.

“I think we didn’t ought to go in there. It’s not allowed.”

“I’m allowed,” Yashim said shortly. “And you’re with me. Come on.”

It was darker this time, but Yashim knew where to go. At the head of the steps he put his finger to his lips and led the way down. The tekke was just as he’d left it the day before. He tried the door: it was still locked. The porter stood nervously at the foot of the stairs, looking round in surprise. Yashim went over to the chest and raised the lid. Same collection of plates and glasses. Still no cadet.

Yashim straightened up.

“Come on, we’ll go back now,” he said.

The porter needed no second bidding.

[ 103 ]

The effendi had told him to keep his eyes open, and Eslek had been doing just that for several hours. He wasn’t sure what he was looking out for, exactly, or how he would recognise it when he found it. Something out of the ordinary, perhaps, Yashim had suggested. Or something so very ordinary that no one would give it a second glance—except, he had explained, perhaps Eslek himself. Eslek knew what went where, and who might be expected at a Friday market.

He scratched his head. It was all very ordinary. The stalls, the crowds, the jugglers, the musicians: it was like this every time. The market was busier, it being a Friday. What had happened that didn’t happen every day of the week? The meatball man had given him a free breakfast, that didn’t happen to you every day!

Thinking about the meatballs had reminded him of something.

He tried to remember. He’d been hungry, yes. And he’d seen that the meatballs were done, hadn’t he, before anyone else? Seen that much out of the corner of his eye while he poached a cube of bread—

Eslek jerked his chin. The little cube of bread. Nobody had noticed. There’d been no one manning the stall, and the little dog running round to turn the spit. Something he’d never actually seen before today, not in the market, at least. But so what?

He decided to take another look. As he threaded his way through the crowd, he caught sight of the meatball vendor with the flat knife in one hand and a pitta bread in the other, serving a customer. But he was looking the other way. When Eslek reached him he was still standing, as though transfixed, and the customer was beginning to grumble: “I said yes to sauce.”

The vendor turned back with a puzzled look on his face. Then he looked down at his knife, and the bread in his hands, as if he wasn’t sure why they were there. His customer turned away with a snort.

“Forget it. Life’s too short.”

The meatball man seemed not to have heard. He turned his head and looked over his shoulder again.

Eslek followed his gaze. The little dog was still trotting in the wheel, with his tongue hanging out. But it wasn’t the abandoned dog which attracted Eslek’s attention so much as the meat hanging on the spit. It had been tightly bound to set it once the heat caught it; but with no one about to baste the meat, it was beginning to shrink. The pack of meat was gradually unravelling, stiffening, revealing to Eslek the shape of the beast it had once been. Two of its legs, paring away from the surprisingly slender body, were thick; the other two were smaller, wizened, in an attitude of prayer. It could have been a hare, except that that it was ten times bigger than any hare Eslek had ever seen.

The meatball vendor must have noticed him, because he sud—denly said: “I don’t get what’s going on. There’s been no one at that stall all morning, not since I come. The dog must be fair knackered.” He swallowed, and Eslek could see his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “And what the fuck’s on the spit?”

Eslek felt the hairs prickling on the back of his neck.

“I’ll tell you one thing, mate,” he growled. “It sure as shit ain’t halal.”

He put a hand up to his amulet and gripped it hard. The meatball vendor began to mumble something: he was praying, Eslek realised, running through the ninety-nine names of God while he stared in horror at the trunk and limbs of a human being, popping and blackening over the smouldering coals.

[ 104 ]

Yashim didn’t hear the shouts until he was almost out of the tower. He and the porter stood on the parapet, trying to see round the aged cypress tree. In a moment the space below them was thronged with people trying to get away, cramming into the alley, voices raised. He heard several people shout: “The kadi! Fetch the kadi!” and a woman screamed. One of the juggler’s wooden batons sailed up into the cypress and clattered down again, striking against the branches, as the crowd jostled against him.

Yashim looked out over the square. There was no point trying to get down there, he realised, while crowds were still pouring down the alley. Someone beneath him stumbled, and a basket of vegetables went flying. “Go! Go!” The porter was hopping from foot to foot.

He could see the kadi now, stepping out of his booth into a knot of men all gesticulating and pointing. Further to the left he saw that a ring had formed among the stalls, leaving one of them isolated in the middle. He glanced below. The crowd had stopped running. People were standing in little groups, while those closest to the mouth of the alley had turned around, and were craning their necks nervously to watch the square.

Yashim broke into a trot along the parapet, leaped down the steps and darted up through the passageway. Somebody clutched at his arm, but he shrugged them off, dodging his way back into the square between the knots of bystanders. As he ran towards the ring of men he saw Murad Eslek leading the kadi forwards. The men shuffled aside to let them through, and Yashim dashed through on their heels.

One glance showed him all he needed to see.

The kadi was speechless. The spit was still turning; at every turn one of the wizened arms flopped towards the ground. Yashim stepped forwards and put his hand on the wheel, and the little dog simply sank down inside it, panting.

“We need to rake out the fire,” Yashim said, turning to Eslek. “Get the porters, and a barrow. A donkey cart will do. We’ve got to get this…this thing out of here.”

Eslek closed his eyes a moment and nodded. “I…I never thought—” He didn’t finish his sentence but turned away to organise the porters.

The kadi, meanwhile, had started ranting at the crowd, waving his fists.

“Get away! Go back to work! You think I’m finished, do you? I’ll show you! Some kind of joke, is it?” He clapped his fists to his temples and stared at them all, rocking on his heels. In his market! Disgrace. Disgrace and shame. Who had done this to him?

He stalked forwards, and the men stumbled back to get out of his way. He strode to his booth and went in, slamming the door.

In the stunned silence which followed a few men, like Yashim, seemed to notice the smell for the first time. Pleasant, rich without being heavy, like veal. They, too, turned away.

The meatball vendor was loudly and violently sick.

Yashim saw Eslek returning with the porters, carrying brooms and rakes.

He spoke to him for a few minutes. He interviewed the meatball vendor, who was unable to stop himself shuddering.

No one had seen anything. As far as the meatball vendor was concerned, the spit was already running before he started setting up. He’d thought it strange, yes, but he had work to do and hadn’t given it another thought until after daybreak. He’d been concerned for the dog, really.

It was the dog that had caught his attention, at the first.

[ 105 ]

The valide’s jewels sparkled in the yellow light. In that greasy chamber they were the only objects that could catch the eye.

There was magic in them. The magic that conferred power. No one could look away from these jewels, any more than a rabbit could take its eyes off a snake.

The smooth fingers stole forward and stroked them.

Ferenghi magic, maybe. What difference could that make? The fingers stiffened. There might be words that needed to be said. Invocations. Incantations. That was an unforeseen possibility. This zigzagged figure that appeared on each of the jewels could be a word, perhaps, or a sound.

No. Possession was what mattered most. Whoever held the jewels enjoyed the power they conferred. Napoleon, to scatter even the armies of the faithful—everyone knew that he had luck beyond the ordinary share. Fool! He had parted with the jewels and his luck had changed. And the valide, too: she’d done well for herself ever since the jewels arrived. Clawed her way to the top, across a battleground far more dangerous than any the French emperor had ever faced, where whispers were lances, and knowledge battalions, and beauty marched in the ranks.

We knew all about that, didn’t we? Knew how hard it was to emerge standing from that melee, not to be kicked back, pulled down, to wither in obscurity. And then to reach one’s goal, to stand at the apex, to have complete power over creatures who grovelled and cringed at a single word!

Nothing could destroy that. No one could take that away.

Not with these in one’s possession.

And a pair of lips puckered and came forward to kiss the jewels.

[ 106 ]

Yashim curled his fingers around the little cup and stared down gratefully at the black liquid settled heavily inside. No spice and a hint of sweet. As he brought it to his nose, a shadow fell across the table and he looked up in surprise.

“Please,” he said, motioning to a stool.

The soup master placed his enormous hands on the table and sank his weight onto the stool. His eyes swung around the cafe, taking in the other customers, the two stoves, the glittering wall of coffee pots. He gave a sniff.

“The coffee smells good.”

“It’s fresh Arabica,” Yashim replied. “They roast the beans here every morning. Too many people buy the Peruvian kind, don’t you think? It is cheap, but it always tastes stale to me.”

The soup master nodded. Without moving his hand from the table he raised his fingers and nodded solemnly at the proprietor, who came forward bowing.

“Coffee, very sweet, with cardamom. No cinnamon.” The cafe owner walked over to his stove. “I don’t like cinnamon,” the soup master added.

They discussed the question politely until the coffee arrived. Yashim was inclined to agree with the soup master that cinnamon in bread was an abomination.

“Where do we get these ideas?” The soup master’s eyebrows shot up in perplexity. “For what?”

Yashim shrugged and said nothing.

The soup master put down his cup and leaned forwards.

“You wonder why I am here. Last night the guards did not show up for work. It is the first time. I thought you might be interested.”

Yashim cocked his head. He was wondering why the big man had come. He said: “I’d rather talk about the past. Twenty, twenty-five years ago. The Janissaries kicked up trouble, didn’t they? What did they do, exactly?”

The soup master ran his fingers over his moustache.

“Fires, my friend. We had men in the corps who could lead a fire easy as a gypsy with a bear. I said we—I meant they. I was not involved. But this was how they made their feelings known.”

“Where were the fires, mostly?”

The soup master shrugged. “In the port, in Galata, over here by the Golden Horn. Sometimes it was as if the whole city was smouldering, like underground. They had only to lift a cover somewhere and—whoosh! Everyone felt it. Danger all around.”

Like now, Yashim thought. The whole city knew about the murders. They understood what was happening. The place was tense with expectation. There were three days to go before the sultan proclaimed his Edict.

“Thank you, soup master. Did you notice the direction of the wind today?”

The soup master’s eyes suddenly narrowed.

“Off Marmara. The wind has been set from the west all week.”

[ 107 ]

The seraskier pursed his lips.

“I doubt it can be done. Oh, operationally, yes, perhaps. We could flood the city with the New Guard, a man at every corner, artillery—if we could get it through—in the open spaces. Such as they are.”

He scrambled to his feet and went to stand by the window.

“Look, Yashim effendi. Look at these roofs! What a mess, eh? Hills, valleys, houses, shops, all straggling around little lanes and alleys. How many corners do you think I could find out there? Ten thousand? Fifty thousand? And how many open spaces? Five? Ten? This is not Vienna.”

“No,” Yashim agreed quietly. “But nevertheless—”

The seraskier raised a hand to stop him.

“Don’t think I misunderstand you. And yes, I think something could be done. But the decision would not lie with me. Only the sultan can order troops into the city. Troops under arms, I mean. You think he can take this decision so fast?”

“He did thirteen years ago.”

The seraskier grunted. “Ten years,” he echoed. “Ten years ago the people were united with the sultan’s will. Nobody could deny that the Janissary menace had overwhelmed us all. But today—what do we know? You think Stambouliots will welcome my men with open arms?

“There is another thing I hesitate to point out. What happened ten years ago was not the work of a day. It took months, you could say years, to prepare for victory over the Janissary rabble. We have twenty-four hours. And the sultan is—older. His health is not so good.”

He drinks, you mean, Yashim thought. It was common knowledge. Everyone knew that M. Lebrun, the Belgian wine merchant in Pera, handled far more stock than the foreign community could account for. And what about the discovery only last year of a veritable mountain of long-necked bottles, in the woods close to where the sultan liked to take his family for picnics?

“There will be a Janissary insurrection,” said Yashim flatly. “I think it will take the form of a fire, or many fires, I don’t know. Either sooner or later the sultan will have to order in the Guards, to keep order and deal with the conflagration, and I for one would prefer it was sooner.” He stepped away from the window and turned to face the seraskier.

“If you won’t, I will try to talk to the sultan,” he said.

“You.” It wasn’t a question. Yashim could see the seraskier weighing him up. He stood with his back to the light, his hands clasped behind his back. The silence deepened.

“We will go together, you and I,” the seraskier announced at last. “But you, Yashim effendi, will make it clear to the sultan that this was your suggestion, not mine.”

Yashim stared at him coldly. One day, he thought, he would come across a man in the sultan’s service who was not a trimmer, who would stand up and stand out for his beliefs. But not today.

“I will take responsibility,” he said quietly.

I’m only a eunuch, after all.

[ 108 ]

Their footsteps echoed off the high walls of the seraglio as they walked across the first court. Usually on a Friday the place would have been busy, but a combination of grey skies and the suppressed tension hanging in the air had left the great court all but deserted. Ceremonial guardsmen stood to attention around the perimeter walls, as silent and immobile as the Janissary guards whose stillness had once struck chill into the hearts of foreign envoys. Yashim wondered if the New Guards were not, in their own way, more sinister: like German clockwork dolls rather than real men. At least the Janissaries had possessed their own swaggering panache, as his friend Palewski had pointed out.

His fingers closed on a scrap of paper tucked beneath his belt. Coming across the Hippodrome, he had swerved on an impulse from the bronze serpent and cut across the dirt to the Janissary Tree, knowing what he would find: the same mystic verses that had been puzzling him all week.

They had been pinned to the peeling bark. This was how the Greeks advertised their dead, Yashim thought, with a piece of paper nailed to a post or tree. He had pulled down the paper and studied it again.

Unknowing

And knowing nothing of unknowing,

They sleep.

Wake them.

A fire in the night, Yashim thought. A call to arms. But what did this mean?

Knowing,

And knowing unknowing,

The silent few become one with the Core.

Approach.

He folded the paper and tucked it into his belt.

[ 109 ]

The sultan kept them waiting for an hour, and when he met them it was not in the private apartments, as Yashim had expected, but in the throne room, a room that Yashim had seen only once fifteen years before.

He had not seen the sultan, either, for several years. Mahmut’s beard, which had been jet black, was red with henna, and the keen dark eyes had turned watery, sunk beneath folds of fat. His mouth seemed to have drooped into a pout of permanent disappointment as if, having tasted everything that money could buy in the world, he had found it all to be sour. He waved them in with a chubby hand, larded with rings, but made no effort to rise from the throne.

The room itself was as Yashim remembered it, a jewel box of the coolest blues, tiled from the floor to the apex of the dome in exquisite Iznikware, a frozen dream of a garden that twined and dripped and hung festooned around the walls.

Yashim and the seraskier entered stooping at the waist, and after they had advanced five paces they prostrated themselves on the ground.

“Get up, get up,” snapped the sultan testily. “About time,” he added, pointing at Yashim.

The seraskier frowned. “Your Imperial Majesty,” he began. “A situation has arisen in the city which we believe—Yashim effendi, and myself—to be of the gravest potential consequence to the well-being and security of the people.”

“What are you talking about? Yashim?”

Yashim bowed, and started to explain. He spoke of the Edict, and the murder of the cadets. He described a prophecy uttered centuries ago by the founder of the Karagozi order of dervishes—and caught the sultan’s warning frown.

“Be careful, lala. Be very careful of the words you choose. There are some things one cannot speak about.”

Yashim eyed him levelly. “Then I don’t think it will be necessary, sultan.”

There was a silence.

“No,” Mahmut replied. “I have understood. Both of you, approach the throne. We don’t want to shout.”

Yashim hesitated. The sultan’s words had reminded him of the last lines in the verse: The silent few become one with the Core. Approach. What could it mean? He took a step closer to the sultan. The seraskier stood stiffly beside him.

“What do you say, seraskier?”

“There may be upwards of fifty thousand men preparing to take to the streets.”

“And Istanbul could be burned to the ground, is that it? I see. Well, we must do something about that. What do you have in mind?”

“I believe, sire, you must let the New Guards occupy the city temporarily,” Yashim explained. “The seraskier is reluctant, but I can’t see a better way of guaranteeing public safety.”

The sultan frowned and tugged his beard. “Seraskier, you know the temper of your men. Are they ready to take such a step?”

“Their discipline is good, sultan. And they have several commanders who are level-headed and decisive. With your permission, they could take up positions overnight. Their presence alone might overawe the conspirators.”

Yashim noticed that the seraskier soundend less hesitant now.

“All the same,” the sultan observed, “it could become a battle, in the streets.”

“There is that risk. In those circumstances we would simply have to do our best. Identify the ringleaders, limit the damage. Above all, sultan, protect the palace.”

“Hmm. As it happens, seraskier, I hadn’t been planning to remain in the city.”

“With respect, sultan. Your safety can be guaranteed, and I think that your presence will help to reassure the people.”

The sultan answered with a sigh.

“I am not afraid, seraskier.” He rubbed his hands across his face. “Get the men ready. I will consult with my viziers. You can expect an order within the next few hours.”

He turned to Yashim.

“As for you, it is high time you made progress in our enquiry. Be so good as to report to my apartments.”

He dismissed them with a gesture. Both men bowed deeply and walked backward to the door. As they closed on the audience room, Yashim saw that the sultan was sitting on his throne, his fist bunched against his cheek, watching them.

[ 110 ]

Outside the door the seraskier stopped to mop his forehead with a handkerchief.

“Our enquiry? You should have told me that you were working on a case in here,” he muttered reproachfully.

“You didn’t ask. Anyway, as you heard, I gave yours priority.”

The seraskier grunted. “May I ask what the enquiry concerns?”

The seraskier was too brusque. On the parade ground it would do, perhaps: soldiers promised their unwavering obedience. But Yashim wasn’t a soldier.

“It wouldn’t interest you,” Yashim said.

The seraskier’s lips drew tight.

“Perhaps not.” He stared Yashim in the face. “I suggest, then, you do as the sultan said. As I will.”

Yashim watched the seraskier stepping briskly towards the Ortakapi, the central gate leading to the first court. It wasn’t a position he’d enjoy to be in himself. On the other hand, if the seraskier handled it well, both he and the Guard would emerge with honour. It was an opportunity to restore the reputation of the Guards, somewhat tarnished by their failures on the battlefield.

And a duty, too. Not just to the sultan, but to the people of Istanbul. Without the Guards, the whole city was in danger from the Janissary rebels.

There was no doubt in Yashim’s mind that the fourth murder had completed a stage, established the preliminaries. The old altars had been re-consecrated, in blood. The second stage was underway, Yashim felt sure of that.

Wake them. Approach.

What did it mean?

Within the next seventy-two hours, he sensed, they would all find out.

He saw the seraskier disappear into the shadow of the Ortakapi. Then he turned and headed for the harem apartments.

[ 111 ]

Hello, stranger!”

It was almost a whisper. Ibou the librarian doubled up his long arm and waggled the fingers in greeting.

Yashim grinned and raised a hand.

“Off to work?” he asked in a low tone. By long-established custom, no one ever raised their voice in the second court of the palace.

Ibou cocked his head.

“I’ve just finished, actually. I was going to get something to eat.”

Yashim thought he sensed an invitation.

“Well, I wish I could come with you,” he said. And then: “You’ve come out of the wrong door.”

Ibou gave him a solemn look, then turned his head.

“It looks all right to me.”

“No, I mean from the Archives. I…I didn’t know you could get through on this side.” Yashim felt himself blushing. “It doesn’t matter. Thanks for your help the other night.”

“I only wish I could have done more, effendi,” Ibou replied. “You can come and see me again, if you like. I’m on nights for the rest of this week.”

He salaamed, and Yashim salaamed back.

Yashim went into the harem by the Gate of the Aviary. He could never pass this gate without thinking of the valide, Kosem, who two centuries before was dragged here from the apartments naked by the heels, and strangled in the corridor. That had been the finale to fifty terrifying years, in which the empire was ruled by a succession of madmen, drunkards and debauchees—including Kosem’s own son Ibrahim, who had his rooms papered and carpeted in Russian furs, and rode his girls like mares…until the executioner came for him with the bowstring.

Dangerous territory, the harem.

He stepped into the guard room. Six halberdiers were on duty, standing in pairs beside the doors which led to the Court of the Valide Sultan and the Golden Road, a tiny, open alleyway which linked the harem to the selamlik. The halberdiers were unarmed, except for the short daggers they wore stuffed into the sash of their baggy trousers; they only carried halberds on protective duty, as when on rare occasions they escorted the sultan’s women out of the palace. In the meantime they had a single distinguishing characteristic: the long black tresses which hung from the crown of their high hats as a token that they had been passed for entry into the harem. Yashim remembered a Frenchman laughing when the function of the hair was explained to him.

“You think a mane of hair will stop a man from seeing the sultan’s women? In France,” he had said, “it is the women who have long hair. Is it so, that they cannot steal glances at a handsome man?”

And Yashim had replied, rather stiffly, that the halberdiers of the tresses only went into the more public areas of the harem, to bring in the wood.

He laid his fist against his chest and bowed slightly.

“By the sultan’s order,” he murmured.

The halberdiers recognised him, and stood to let him pass.

He found himself beneath the colonnade which ran along the western edge of the valide’s court. It had been raining, and the flagstones of the court were gleaming and puddled, the walls greenish with damp. The door to the Valide Sultan’s suite was open, but Yashim stood where he was, turning the situation over in his mind.

What was it, he asked himself, that created danger in the harem?

He thought of the halberdiers he had just met, wearing their long hair like blinkers.

He thought of the chambers and apartments that lay beyond, as old and narrow as Istanbul itself, with their crooked turns, and sudden doorways, and tiny jewel-like chambers crafted out of odd corners and partitioned spaces. Like the city they had grown up over the centuries, rooms polished into place by the grit of expediency, rooms hollowed out of the main complex on a whim, even doorways opened up by what must have felt like the pressure of a thousand glances and a million sighs. None of it planned. And in this space, scarcely two hundred feet square, baths and bedrooms, sitting rooms and corridors, lavatories and dormitories, crooked staircases, forgotten balconies: even Yashim, who knew them, could get lost in there, or find himself looking unexpectedly from one window into a court he had thought far away. There were rooms in there no better than cells, Yashim knew.

How many people trod the labyrinth every day, unravelling the hours of their existence within the walls, treading a few well-worn paths which led from one task to the next: sleeping, eating, bathing, serving? Hundreds, certainly; perhaps thousands, mingling with the ghosts of the thousands who had gone before: the women who had lied, and died, and the eunuchs who pitter-pat-tered around them, and the gossip that rose like steam in the women’s baths, and the looks of jealousy and love and desperation he had seen himself.

His eye travelled around the courtyard. It was only about fifty-foot square, but it was the biggest open place in the harem: the only place where a woman could raise her face to the sky, feel the rain on her cheeks, see the clouds scudding across the sun. And there were—he counted them—seven doors opening into this court; seven doors; fifteen windows.

Twenty-two ways to not be alone.

Twenty-two ways in which you could be watched.

As he stood below the colonnade, staring at the rain, he heard women laugh. And immediately he said to himself: the danger is that nothing you ever do is a secret in this place.

Everything can be watched, or overheard.

A theft can be observed.

A ring can be found.

Unless—

He glanced at the open door to the valide’s suite.

But the valide wouldn’t steal her own jewels.

He heard the door behind him open, and turned round. There, puffing with the exertion and filling the doorway with his enormous bulk, stood the Kislar Agha.

He looked at Yashim with his yellow eyes.

“You’re back,” he piped, in his curiously tiny voice.

Yashim bowed.

“The sultan thinks I haven’t been working hard enough.”

“The sultan,” the black man echoed. His face was expressionless.

He waddled slowly forwards, and the door to the guard room closed behind him. He stood by a pillar and stuck out a hand, to feel the rain.

“The sultan,” he repeated softly. “I knew him when he was just a little boy. Imagine!”

He suddenly bared his teeth, and Yashim—who had never seen the kislar smile—wondered if it was a grin, or a grimace.

“I saw Selim die. It was here, in this courtyard. Did you know that?”

As the rain continued to patter onto the courtyard, seeping through the flagstones, staining the walls, Yashim thought: he, too, feels the weight of history here.

He shook his head.

The Kislar Agha put up two fingers and pulled at his pendulous earlobe. Then he turned to look at the rain.

“Many people wanted him to die. He wanted everything to change. It’s the same now, isn’t it?”

The Kislar Agha continued to stare out at the rain, tugging on his earlobe. Like a child, Yashim thought vaguely.

“They want us,” he said in a voice of contempt, “to be modern. How can I be modern? I’m a fucking eunuch.”

Yashim inclined his head. “Even eunuchs can learn how to sit in a chair. Eat with a knife and fork.”

The black eunuch flashed him a haughty look.

“I can’t. Anyway, modern people are supposed to know stuff. They all read, don’t they? Eating up the little ants on the paper with their eyes and later on spraying the whole mess back in people’s faces when they don’t expect it. What do they call it? Tanzimat— the reform era. Well, you’re all right. You know a lot.”

The Kislar Agha raised his head and looked hard at Yashim.

“It may not be now, maybe not this year or the next,” he said slowly, in his mincing little falsetto voice, “but the time will come when they’ll just turn us out into the street to die.”

He made a flapping gesture with his fingers, as if he were batting Yashim away. Then he stepped out ponderously into the courtyard, and walked slowly across to a door on the other side, in the rain.

Yashim stared after him for a few moments, then he went to the door of the valide’s suite, and knocked gently on the wood.

One of the valide’s slave-girls, who had been sitting on an embroidered cushion in the tiny hall, snipping at her toenails with a pair of scissors, looked up and smiled brightly.

“I’d like to see the valide, if I may,” said Yashim.

[ 112 ]

By the time Yashim left the palace that Friday afternoon it was almost dark, and at the market by the Kara Davut the stallholders were beginning to pack up by torch light.

For a moment Yashim wondered if he should have gone to eat lunch with Ibou, the willowy archivist, for he had had nothing to eat all day and felt almost light-headed with hunger. Almost automatically he brushed the idea aside. Regrets and second thoughts seldom occupied him for long: they were futile emotions he had trained himself to resist, for fear of opening the floodgates. He had known too many men in his condition eaten up by bitterness; too many men—and women, too—paralysed by their second thoughts, brooding over changes they were powerless to reverse.

George the Greek came swarming out from behind his stall as Yashim stood picking over the remains of a basket of salad leaves. The sight seemed to drive him into a frenzy.

“What for yous comes so late in the day, eh? Buying this old shit! Yous an old lady? Yous keeping rabbits now? I puts everything away.”

He set his hands on his hips.

“What you wants, anyways?”

Yashim tried to think. If Palewski came to dinner, as promised, he’d want something reasonably substantial. Soup, then, and manti—the manti woman would have some left, he was sure. He could make a sauce with olives and peppers from the jar. Garlic he had.

“I’ll take that,” he said, pointing out an orange pumpkin. “Some leeks, if you have them. Small is better.”

“Some very small leeks, good. Yous making balkabagi? Yous needs a couple of onions, then. Good. For stock: one carrot, onion, parsley, bay. Is twenty-five piastres.”

“Plus what I owe you from the other day.”

“I forgets the other days. This is today.”

He found Yashim a string bag for his vegetables.

The manti woman was still at work, as Yashim had hoped. He bought a pound of meat and pumpkin manti, half a pint of sour cream in the dairy next door and two rounds of borek, still warm from the oven. And then, for what felt like the first time in days, he went home.

In his room he lit the lamps, kicked off his street shoes and hung his cloak on a peg. He trimmed the wicks and opened the window a fraction of an inch to clear the accumulated air. With an oil-soaked scrap of rag and a handful of dry twigs he started a fire in the grate and scattered a few lumps of charcoal on top. Then he started to cook.

He dropped the stock vegetables into a pot, added water from the jug, and settled it on the back of the stove to reach a simmer. He slid a ripple of olive oil over the base of a heavy pan and chopped onions, most of the leeks, and some garlic cloves, putting them on to sweat. Meanwhile with a sharp knife he scalped the pumpkin, scooped out the seeds and put them aside. Careful not to break the shell he scraped out the orange flesh with a spoon and turned it with the onions. He threw in a generous pinch of allspice and cinnamon, and a spoonful of clear honey. After a few minutes he set the pan aside and dragged the stock-pot over the coals.

He put a towel and a bar of soap in the empty water basin and went downstairs to the stand-pipe in the tiny back yard, where he unwound his turban and stripped to the waist, shivering in the cold drizzle. With a gasp he ducked his head beneath the spout. When he had washed he towelled himself vigorously, ignoring his smarting skin, and filled the water jug. Upstairs he dried himself more carefully and put on a clean shirt.

Only then did he curl up on the divan and open the valide’s copy of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. He could hear the stock bubbling gently on the stove; once the lid jumped and a jet of fragrant steam scented the room with a short hiss. He read the same sentence over a dozen times, and closed his eyes.

When he opened them again he was not sure if he had been asleep; there was someone knocking on the door. With a guilty start he scrambled to his feet and flung back the door.

“Stanislaw!”

But it wasn’t Stanislaw.

The man was younger. He was kicking off his shoes, and in his hand he carried a silken bow string, looped around his fist.

[ 113 ]

The seraskier walked briskly across the first court of the palace, and stepped out through the Imperial Gate, the Bab-i-Humayun, into the open space which separated the palace from the great church, now a mosque, of Aya Sofia. After the unnatural stillness of the palace he was struck by the returning noises of a great city: the rumble of iron-hooped cart-wheels on the cobbles, dogs worrying and growling at scraps, the crack of a whip and the shouts of mule-drivers and costermongers.

Two mounted dragoons spurred their horses forwards and brought up his own grey. The seraskier swung up gracefully into the saddle, settled his cloak, and turned the horse’s head in the direction of the barracks. The dragoons fell in behind him.

As they passed beneath the portico of the mosque, the seraskier glanced upwards. The pinnacle of Justinian’s great dome, second in size only to the basilica of St Peter’s in Rome, stood high overhead: the highest spot in all Istanbul, as the seraskier well knew. As they jogged along, he scanned the lie of the land for the hundredth time, mentally setting up his artillery batteries, disposing his troops.

By the time they reached the barracks, he had made decisions. To scatter his forces through the city would be futile, he reckoned; it might even increase the danger to his men. Better to choose two or three positions, hold them securely, and make whatever forays were necessary to achieve their ends. Aya Sofia was one assembly point; the Sultan Ahmet Mosque to the southwest would be another. He would have liked to put men into the stables of the old palace of the Grand Vizier, just outside the seraglio walls, but he doubted that the permission would be forthcoming. There was a hill further west which provided a clear trajectory towards the palace.

It was the palace, essentially, he had to think about.

Having regained his apartments, he summoned a dozen senior officers to a briefing.

He followed the briefing with a short pep talk. Everything, he said, depended on how they and their men conducted themselves over the next forty-eight hours. Obedience was the watchword. He had every confidence that together they could meet the challenge that had presented itself.

That was all.

[ 114 ]

Yashim made a grab for the door. The man on the threshold sprang forwards and for several seconds they fought for purchase, separated only by the thin door which lay between them. But Yashim had been caught off balance, and it was he who yielded first: he leaped away from the door and his assailant came barrelling into the room, almost stumbled, but whipped round fast to face Yashim at a sagging crouch.

A wrestler, Yashim thought. The man was completely shaved. His neck sloped into his big shoulders, which bulged from the arm-holes of a sleeveless leather jerkin. The leather was black and glistened as though it had been oiled. He was short-legged, Yashim noticed, his bare feet planted a yard apart on the rug, knees bent, slim-waisted. There was no sign of a weapon beyond the string in his right fist.

A man who could crack me apart without even trying, Yashim thought. He took a backward step, sliding his bare feet on the polished boards.

The man gave a grunt and lunged forwards, lowering his head like a ram, coming at Yashim with surprising speed. Yashim flung back his arm as he leaped backwards, and swept his hand across the kitchen block. His fingers felt the knife, but they only knocked it: it must have spun, for when he tried to close on the hilt his fingers met in the air, and as the wrestler’s huge shoulder crashed against his midriff he was rammed back hard against the block with a force that made his head whiplash. He gasped for breath and felt the wrestler’s arms fly upwards to pinion his own.

Yashim knew that if the wrestler got him in his grip he was finished. He lunged to the right, throwing all the weight of his upper body against the wrestler’s rising arm, flinging his own arms out at the same time to grab at the handle of the stock pot. With a wrench he snatched it up and swung it round over the man’s shoulder, but the lid was stuck and he had no room to do more than swing the pot and clamp it against the wrestler’s back before his arm was caught in his grip.

A band of leather was sewn round the collar of the man’s jerkin, and as the pot slid up the lid must have snagged against it. The man flipped back as the boiling stock sloshed over his neck, and let Yashim go.

The surprise on the assassin’s face when he slammed his taloned hand into Yashim’s groin and squeezed down hard was palpable. Certainly more palpable than Yashim’s groin.

The assassin jerked back his arm as if he’d been stung. Yashim slid his right hand up the assassin’s left arm as hard as he could and then brought his left down hard, gripping his wrist as he pivoted the man’s arm against his own hand. There was a crack and the arm went limp. The assassin clutched at it with his right, and in a moment Yashim had taken his right wrist out away from his body and with a heave sent the assassin curving in an arc which brought him round, doubled up, and his right arm in a tight half-nelson. The assassin had neither screamed, nor spoken a word.

Five minutes later, and the man had still not spoken. He had barely grunted. Yashim was at a loss.

And then Yashim saw why the man had failed to speak. He had no tongue.

Yashim wondered if the mute could write. “Can you write?” he hissed in the man’s ear. The look was blank. A deaf-mute? Long ago, in the days of Suleyman the Magnificent, it had been decreed that only deaf-mutes should attend the person of the sultan. It was a way of ensuring that nothing was overheard; that nothing they saw could be communicated to the outside world. They signed at one another instead: ixarette, the secret language of the Ottoman court, was a complex sign language which anyone, hearing or deaf, speaking or dumb, was expected to master in the palace service.

The palace service.

A deaf-mute.

Frantically, Yashim began to sign.

[ 115 ]

At the other end of the city, Preen the köçek dancer lay back on the divan, staring at the dark window.

A jet black wig of real hair, bolstered with horse-hair plucked from the tail, was draped over a stand. Her pots of make-up, her brushes and tweezers, stood unused on the dressing table.

Preen tried to wriggle her frozen shoulder. The bandages the horse-doctor had applied creaked. When it came to treating breaks and bruises, the girls always turned to the horse doctor: he had more practice and experience in a month than ordinary sawbones saw in a lifetime, as Mina said, because the Turks looked after their horses even better than themselves. He had probed Preen’s twisted shoulder, and diagnosed a sprain.

“Nothing broken, God be praised,” he said. “When my patients break something, we shoot them.”

Preen had laughed for the first time since her attack. Laughter wasn’t the only medicine the horse doctor used, either: he had salved her shoulder and neck with a preparation of horse chestnut. He had then applied the bandages and painted the result with hot gum.

“Tastes dreadful,” he observed. “And stops the loops from sagging and coming apart. Whether or not it is medically necessary, who knows? But I’m too old to change my prescriptions.”

The gum had set and dried, and now it creaked whenever Preen moved her shoulder. At least she could work her fingers: two days ago they had been swollen and immovable. Mina had come to help her eat, bringing the tripe soup she loved in an earthenware bowl. Apart from the horse doctor, and her friend Mina, Preen had no visitors: she had resolved to turn even Yashim away, should he come. Without her war-paint she felt sure that she looked a fright.

She looked different, certainly. Her own hair was cropped close to a downy fluff, and her skin was very pale; yet Mina could see in the shape of her head and the high-boned face more than a trace of the boy she had once been, eager and fragile at the same time. With her big brown eyes she had pleaded with Mina to stay the night, and Mina had curled up beside her friend and watched her sleep.

On the third morning Preen had had to tell her landlady that she had no intention of paying extra for her so-called guest. The conversation had been conducted through the door, because Preen refused to let the old woman come in.

“Perhaps I should deduct rent when I am not home for the night?” she called out. “It is your fault, anyway, that I have to have a nurse. I trusted you to keep an eye on people coming and going! And you let in a murderer!”

There was an outraged silence, and Preen grinned. Nothing could be more mortifying to the landlady than to be accused of slackness when it came to peering through her lattice. It was like doubting her faith.

That was earlier. Now Mina was coming in with bread and soup for their supper.

She helped prop Preen upright on the divan, and handed her a bowl.

“You’re missing a lot of excitement, darling,” she said, sitting on the edge of the divan. “A positive invasion of handsome young men.”

She arched her eyebrows. “Men in tight trousers! The New Guard.”

Preen rolled her eyes.

“Doing what, exactly?”

“That’s what I asked them. Taking up positions, they said. Well, I couldn’t resist it, could I? I said I could show them a few they hadn’t thought of.”

They giggled.

“But what does it mean?” Preen demanded.

“It’s for protection, apparently. All that plotting and killing, it’s coming to a head. Oh, Preen, I’m sorry—you look white as a sheet. I didn’t mean…I mean, I’m sure it’s got nothing to do with what happened the other day. Look, why don’t you ask your gentleman friend?”

“Which one? Yashim?”

“That’s right, dear. Yashim. Come on, eat your soup and put on your face. I’ll help you. You can walk, can’t you? We’ll get a chair and go and find him right now.”

The truth, of course, was that Mina was getting just a tiny bit bored of her nursing duties. She fancied an outing, especially when there was something exciting going on outside. So she was her most persuasive, and overruled Preen’s doubts.

“It’s just that…I don’t feel safe,” Preen admitted.

“Nonsense, darling. I’ll be with you, and we’ll find your friend. It’ll be fun, who knows? You’ll be perfectly safe going out. Just as safe as staying here. Safer.” Later, Preen was to remember that remark.

[ 116 ]

Yashim, as it happened, was already dealing with his second visitor of the evening.

Palewski had come up the stairs to sniff the aroma on Yashim’s landing, but for once he was disappointed. There was a faint smell of onions, he imagined, and perhaps boiled carrot, but the insubstantial clues failed to gel: it could be any number of recipes. Then he noticed the shoes, a pair of sturdy leather sandals.

Company, he supposed. He knocked on the door.

There was a slight delay, and the door opened an inch.

“Thank God it’s you,” Yashim said, pulling the door open and scooping Palewski through into the room.

Palewski almost dropped his valise in surprise. Yashim was holding a large kitchen knife, not that it mattered. What struck his notice instead was the body of a huge man, face down on the carpet, largely enveloped in a knotted sheet.

“I’ve got to do something about this maniac,” Yashim said shortly. “I’ve tied his wrists with the corner of a sheet but now I’m out of ideas.”

Palewski blinked. He looked at Yashim, and back at the body on the floor. He realised that the man was breathing hard.

“Perhaps what you need,” he said quietly, fumbling at his waist, “is this.”

He held out a long cord, made of twisted silk and gold thread.

“It went with my dressing gown. My Sarmatian finery, I should say.”

Together they bound the man’s wrists tightly behind his back. Yashim undid the sheet and wrapped it round his legs: the man was so docile that Palewski found it hard to credit what Yashim was saying.

“A wrestler?” Then he silently mouthed the word: “Janissary?”

“Don’t worry, he can’t hear, poor bastard. No, not a Janissary. It’s odder than that. Worse than I thought. Look, I have to reach the palace immediately. I don’t know what I could have done with this fellow if you hadn’t come. Will you stay? Keep an eye on him? Prick him if he tries to move.”

Palewski was staring at him in horror.

“For God’s sake, Yash. Can’t we get him to the night watch?”

“There isn’t time. Give me an hour. There’s bread and olives. You can leave him here after that. If he gets free, so be it -though you could try knocking him on the head with a saucepan before you go. For my sake.”

“All right, all right, I’ll stay,” Palewski grumbled. “But it’s not what I joined for, you know. One night, intimate conversation with the sultan. Next night, quiet evening with friends. Third night, silent vigil over murderous twenty-stone wrestling deaf mute. I think I’ll have a drink,” he added, sliding his valise closer.

But Yashim was hardly listening.

“It’s two I owe you,” he said over his shoulder, as he cleared the top flight of stairs in a single jump.

[ 117 ]

The Kara Davut was always busy on a Friday night. The shopkeepers and cafe owners set out lanterns above their doorways and after mosque families paraded up and down the street, stopping for a sherbet or an ice, queuing for hot street food and thronging the coffee shops. Children chased each other in and out of the crowds, shouting and laughing, only occasionally called to order by their indulgent parents. Young men gathered round cafe tables, those who could afford it sitting with a coffee, the others at their elbows chatting and trying to catch a glimpse of the local girls, decorously swathed in chador and yashmak, who walked accompanied by their parents, but all the time signalling with their gait and the movement of their heads and hands.

Yashim didn’t think he was imagining that the atmosphere tonight was different. The street was as full as ever, even more crowded than usual; but the children seemed quieter, as if they were playing on a shorter rein, and the knots of youths in the cafes seemed larger and more subdued than usual.

This impression of subdued expectation didn’t evaporate as Yashim hurried towards the palace. He had failed to find a chair, and guessed that the chair-men would contribute to the confusion approaching the city: if not ex-Janissaries, they were still a rough crew, the sort of men who went to swell a mob or serve the rabble if they scented an opportunity.

As he half-walked, half-jogged through the streets and alleys, he was surprised to meet no soldiers on the way, none of the little platoons the seraskier had forecast at every street corner. How soon would they secure the city?

He had an answer of a kind as he swept out of the maze of streets behind Aya Sofia and onto the open ground that lay between the mosque and the walls of the seraglio. A pair of uniformed guardsmen ran towards him, shouting: behind them he could see that the whole space was occupied by soldiers, some on horseback, several platoons in what looked like a drill formation, and others simply sitting quietly on the ground with their legs crossed, waiting for instructions. Beyond them he thought he could make out the silhouettes of mounted cannon and mortars.

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, mate. 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 finger.

“No. Who are you} I want your rank, and your number.” He didn’t know much about military organisation, 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 which 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 round. 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 swivelled, following the men’s gaze. Over their heads, beyond the silhouette of the great mosque, the sky had lightened like 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 eastwards, looking for a chair to carry Preen, at least. 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 round 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 only holding 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 blueish flames and the man wheeled round, 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 upwards, 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 round 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 turbanned 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 towards the Kara Davut.

They didn’t get so far. As they turned into the alley which 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 round. Together they fought their way back to the street corner, and took the turn to the right.

“We’ll go round behind the mosque,” Preen whispered in Mina’s ear.

They slackened their pace, partly to avoid the people running up the alleyway towards 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 raki 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 towards each other like members of a scattered regiment, plunging and burning through the obstacles which 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 Ortokapi 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 light. “Yashim Togalu, on the sultan’s service!”

They stepped warily aside to let him pass.

The wind which had been whipping his cloak against his legs was still: for a moment he marvelled 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 centre 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 which 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 upwards. The huge eaves jutted forwards 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 towards 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.

He called softly.

“Ibou?”

No answer. He called again, a little louder.

“Ibou? Are you there? It’s me, Yashim.”

The tiny candle at the far end of the room was snuffed out for a moment; then it reappeared. Someone had moved in the darkness.

“Don’t be afraid. I need your help.”

He heard the slap of sandals on the stone floor and Ibou stepped forwards into the light. His eyes were very round.

“What can you do?” he almost whispered.

“I need to use the back door, Ibou. Can you let me through?”

“I have a key. But -1 don’t want to go.”

“No, you stay. Do you know what’s happening?”

“I am new. I wasn’t asked—but it is some kind of meeting. Dangerous, too.”

“Come on.”

The little doorway gave onto the corridor in which the Valide Kosem had been dragged to her death. Yashim clasped Ibou’s hand.

“Good luck,” the young man whispered.

The door to the guard room was closed. Yashim opened it with a quick flick of the handle and stepped inside.

“I am summoned,” he announced.

Approach.

The halberdiers stood frozen.

They made no effort to stop Yashim opening the door, as though they were clockwork soldiers that someone had forgotten to wind.

For a moment he, too, stood transfixed, looking into the Courtyard of the Valide Sultan.

Then he took a step back and very softly closed the door.

[ 121 ]

The sleeping quarters of the harem slaves lay above the colonnade which spanned one side of the valide’s court: quietly trying the door, Yashim found himself in a small, bare chamber strewn with rugs and mattresses and dimly lit by a few short candles set on plates on the floor. The beds were empty: dark shadows at the latticed window showed him that the harem slaves were crowding there for a better view.

One of the slave-girls gave a gasp as Yashim stepped up behind her. He put a finger to his lips, and looked down.

Never in all his life would Yashim forget that sight. To the left, the Valide Sultan stood at the doorway to her apartments, at the head of a crowd of harem women that spilled from the doorway and lined the walls three deep: a hundred women, maybe more, Yashim guessed, in every state of dress and undress. Some, roused from their beds, were still in their pyjamas.

Across the courtyard, massed in their finery, stood the palace eunuchs, black and white. Their turbans sparkled with precious jewels, nodding egrets. There must have been three hundred men, Yashim guessed, rustling and whispering like pigeons roosting in a tree.

A silence fell on the eunuchs: they turned their faces to the doorway below Yashim’s window, and slowly they began to move aside, creating a corridor. Yashim could see them better now, even recognise a few faces: he saw sables, and kaftans of cashmere, and an imperial ransom of brooches and precious stones. They were more like magpies than pigeons, Yashim thought, drawn to everything that glittered, amassing their nests of gold and diamonds.

He reached up on tiptoe to see who was coming through the crowd, though he already knew. The Kislar Agha looked magnificent in an enormous dark pelisse so spangled with the moisture in the air that it sparkled. He walked slowly, but his tread was surprisingly light. His hand, clutching at the baton, was thick with rings. His face was lost beneath a great turban of whitest muslin, wrapped around the conical red hat of his office; so Yashim was unable to gauge his expression. But he saw how the other eunuchs lowered their eyes to the ground, as if they didn’t quite dare to look him fully in the face. Yashim knew that face, wrinkled like an ape: the bloodshot eyes, the fat, blubbery cheeks, it was a face that carried the stamp of vice, and wore its vice with an air of blank unconcern.

The eunuchs had now formed two wedges, leaving the Kislar Agha standing alone between them, facing the valide across the court. He didn’t raise his hands: he didn’t need to. Nobody stirred.

“The Hour has come.”

He spoke slowly in his high, cracking voice.

“We, who are the sultan’s slaves, proclaim the hour.”

“We, who are the sultan’s slaves, assemble for his protection.”

“We, who kneel beside the throne, uphold the sacrament of power.”

“We will speak with your son, our lord and master, the Shah-in-Shah!”

The chief eunuch’s voice rose as he cried out: “The hour has come!”

And a wavering cry rose from the ranks of the eunuchs: “The Hour! The Hour!”

The Valide Sultan never moved, except to tap one dainty foot on the stone step.

The chief eunuch raised his arms, his fingers curled like talons.

“The banner must be unfurled. The wrath of God and the people has to be appeased. He shall draw back from the abyss of unbelief, and wield the Sword of Osman in defence of the faith! It is the Path.

“It is written that the knowing shall approach, and become one with the Core. Caliph and sultan, Lord of the Horizons, this is his destiny. The people have risen, the altars are prepared. It is God who has awoken us, at the eleventh hour, the Hour of Restoration!

“Produce him!” He bellowed, in a terrible voice. He curled his fingers into loose fists and let them sink to his sides. His voice sank to a hoarse whisper. “Reveal the Core.”

Like Yashim, the Valide Sultan seemed to find the chief’s performance somewhat hammy. She turned her head to murmur something to an attendant, and Yashim saw her perfect profile, still clear and beautiful, and recognised the lazy look in her eyes as she turned back and focused on the chief eunuch. Lazy meant danger. He wondered if the Kislar Agha knew.

“Kislar,” she said, in a voice that rang with amused contempt. “Some of our ladies present are not at all well dressed. The night, I may point out, is chill. As for you, you are not suitably attired.”

She raised her chin slightly, as if inspecting him. The eunuch’s eyes narrowed in fury.

“No, kislar, your turban seems to be in order. But you do seem to be wearing my jewels.”

Good work, Yashim thought, bunching his fist. The valide certainly knew how to use information.

The chief eunuch’s nostrils flared, but he looked down quickly. Whether that movement—made, as it were, under the influence of a woman more powerful than him—put him off his stroke, or whether it was the sheer unexpectedness of the valide’s remarks, Yashim could not guess. But he opened his mouth and shut it again, as if he had a speech he couldn’t make.

The valide’s voice was like drawn silk.

“And you murdered for them, too, didn’t you, kislar?”

The eunuch raised a forefinger and pointed it at the valide. Yashim saw that he was trembling.

“They are—for my power!” he screeched. He was improvising now, drawn into an argument he didn’t mean to have, and couldn’t win. His power was lessening with every word he spoke.

Out of the corner of his eye, Yashim saw a white shape stirring close to the wall. A girlish figure sprang forwards, like a cat, and began to run towards the eunuch.

The eunuch didn’t see her immediately: she was blocked by his outstretched arm.

“Produce the sultan, or suffer the consequences!” The Kislar Agha screamed. Then his head turned a fraction, and at the same moment Yashim recognised the girl.

The girl who had stolen the gozde’s ring.

Yashim closed his eyes. And in that second he saw her beauti—ful, unyielding face again, when she had closed her mind to him.

Only now he recognised that look. A mask of grief.

A slave-girl gasped at his side, and Yashim opened his eyes. The girl had hurled herself upon the enormous eunuch: he swatted her aside like a fly. But she was on her feet in a moment, and for the first time Yashim saw that she carried a dagger in her fist, a long, curved steel like a scorpion’s sting. She sprang again, and this time it was as if the two embraced, like lovers: the slim white girl and the huge black man, staggering as she clung to him.

But she was no match for the kislar. His hands closed around her neck and with a tremendous thrust of his arms he pushed her off. His long fingers spread around her neck like a stain. Her feet kicked wildly but skidded on the wet stone. Her hands came up to his, clawing at them: but the Kislar Agha’s strength was far greater. With a grunt he flung her aside. She crumpled back against the floor, and lay still.

Nobody moved. Even the valide’s foot had stopped tapping.

Suddenly one of the women screamed and clapped her hand to her mouth. The Kislar Agha swung round, his head moving from side to side as if expecting another assault. Yashim saw the women shrink back.

The Kislar Agha opened his mouth to speak.

He coughed.

His hands went to his stomach.

Behind him the eunuchs stirred. Their chief started to turn towards them, and as he moved Yashim saw very clearly what had made the women scream.

The jewelled hilt of a Circassian blade.

The kislar spluttered as he turned, and then he began to twist towards the ground, his enormous torso slowly sinking as he wheeled. His legs gave way and he sank to his knees, still holding the hilt of the dagger in his abdomen, wearing the look of horrified surprise that he would take to the grave.

Yashim heard the thump as the Kislar Agha’s body pitched headfirst to the ground.

[ 122 ]

There was a momentary silence before the court erupted in pandemonium. The eunuchs swarmed towards the doors in a frenzy to escape, anything to put some distance between them and their fallen chief. Men were slithering and scrambling over each other to reach the doors, some running into the Golden Road, others pouring below the colonnade where Yashim could no longer see them. Doubtless those clockwork halberdiers would stand immobile as dozens of men fled to the sanctuary of their own quarters. Tomorrow you would not find one, Yashim reflected, who would admit to having been there that night.

They’d accuse each other, though.

There was one, at least, he could vouch for personally. He was glad that Ibou had chosen the right course, sticking to his world of musty texts and tattered documents.

The eunuchs had all but cleared from the court, leaving jewels, slippers and even their batons strewn across the flagstones. A few men had attempted to stem the rout at the first panic, dragging at the crowd, shouting encouragement. “It is still the Hour!” But the eunuchs had run like chickens in a yard, and the words of encouragement had died away. Everyone had gone.

Still the women had not moved, waiting for their mistress’s signal. The chief eunuch and the dead girl still lay on the gleaming flagstones like pieces seized from a giant game of chess -white pawn sacrificed for the black castle. It was a self-sacrifice, though. It had been her ring, all along. A token she had asked her lover to wear, Yashim supposed. There were other forms of love inside these walls than the love of a woman for a man—if the performance of the act could be considered love. What had the dresser told them? That this ring turned up here and there, with its esoteric symbol, its concealed meaning. It was clear enough, now. An endless circuit, snake swallowing snake. Frustration and excitement and pleasure in equal measure—and without issue.

The valide had stepped down into the courtyard, and the women were crowding round the body of the girl, lifting her up, moving her beneath the colonnades.

Even now, Yashim felt a pang of pity for the man who had killed her, and her lover, too. Only a few hours earlier they had spoken together, just where he lay now, and he had reminded Yashim of the murder of the sultan’s father, Selim, as he played music on the ney for the entertainment of the palace girls. It was his own predecessor who carried out the killing. Was this one of the traditions he was seeking to uphold: the murder of sultans by their Kislar Aghas?

But why did he take the valide’s jewels? Perhaps, in some crazy way, he had explained it himself: in his narrow, cunning, superstitious old mind he had come to associate the jewels with power, and stole them as a talisman, a juju that would see him through the greatest crisis of his career.

The slave-girls had crept out already. Yashim followed them, making his way down the steps and through the guard room to the corridor.

He paused with his hand on the handle of the archive door. What should he tell the young man?

He pressed the door and it opened. Ibou was standing just inside, holding a lamp.

“What happened? I heard shouts.”

He held up the lamp higher, to cast a light behind Yashim, into the corridor.

“What’s the matter?” Yashim asked.

Ibou peered over his shoulder. He seemed to hesitate.

“Are you alone? Oh. I…I thought I heard someone.” He put up his arm and fanned his face with his hand. “Whooh, hot.”

Yashim smiled.

“It will be soon,” he said, “if we don’t get the fires put out.”

“That’s true,” Ibou said, with a weak smile.

Yashim put a hand against the door jamb and rested his weight against it, staring at the floor. He thought of Ibou working on all alone while the eunuchs bayed for their sultan in the valide’s court. He thought of the little back door he’d just come through so conveniently, and of the knot of men he’d seen beneath the Janissary Tree outside. The timing was tight, wasn’t it? The uprising in the city, and the persuasion of the sultan. The conspirators would need some way to communicate—to carry news of the sultan’s mystical apotheosis to the rebels outside.

A go-between. Someone who could bring word from the closed world of the harem to the men on the outside who threatened the city.

He felt a great weight in his throat.

“What fires, Ibou?” he asked quietly.

Yashim didn’t want to see Ibou’s face. He didn’t want to learn that he was right, that Ibou was the hinge on which the whole plot turned. But he knew from Ibou’s stuttering effort to reply. From the simple fact that no archivist, corralled within the high walls of his archives room, could have seen or heard the fires that Yashim had seen lighted only moments before he entered the half-deserted palace.

Ibou had already known what would happen.

Reluctantly his eyes travelled upwards to the young man’s face.

“It didn’t work, Ibou. The chief eunuch is dead. You needn’t expect anyone else.”

He looked past the archivist down the darkened stacks towards the door. The lamp ahead twinkled and glistened. Yashim squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. The light burned clear.

Ibou turned and carefully set the lamp down on the table. He kept his fingers on the base, as though it were an offering, as though he were praying, Yashim thought. Ibou stared into the little ring of flame, and something in the sadness of his expression reminded Yashim of the man whose corpse lay neglected in the rain-swept courtyard outside. Years ago, the Kislar Agha must have been a man like Ibou. Soft and slender. Charming. Time and experience had made him gross: but once he had been lovely too.

“It isn’t over, Ibou,” he said slowly. “You have to tell them. Stop what’s happening. The Hour isn’t come.”

Ibou was breathing rapidly. His nostrils flared.

Very gently he took his fingers from the lamp. Then he put up a hand and pulled at his earlobe.

Yashim’s eyes widened.

“Darfur?” He said.

The young man glanced at him, and shook his head.

“There is nothing there. Huts. Crocodiles in the river. Little bushpig in the road, dogs. He told me I should come. I wanted to.”

Yashim bit his lip.

“I’ve got four brothers, and six sisters,” Ibou continued. “What else could I do? He sent us a little money now and then. When he became chief, he sent for me.”

“I see.”

“He is my mother’s uncle,” Ibou said. Yashim nodded. “My grandfather’s brother. And I wanted to come. Even at the knife, I was glad. I was not afraid.”

No, thought Yashim: you survived. Whether it was anger or desperation, one or the other would help you survive. In his own case, anger. For Ibou? A village of mud and crocodiles, the knife wielded in the desert, the promise of escape.

“Listen to me, Ibou. What’s happened has happened. You have no protector any more, but I will vouch for you. You must come with me now, and tell the men outside that the game is finished. The Hour has passed. Do this, Ibou, before many people die.”

Ibou shivered and passed his hand across his face.

“You…you will protect me?”

“If you come with me now. It has to come from you. Where are they waiting—beneath the Tree?”

“By the Janissary Tree, yes,” Ibou almost whispered.

We must go now, Yashim thought, before he has time to grow afraid. Before we are too late.

He took Ibou’s arm. “Come,” he said.

[ 123 ]

When they reached the Ortakapi Gate, Yashim checked his stride.

“Ibou,” he said in a low voice. “This is as far as I can go. My presence won’t do any good. You must say that the Kislar Agha is dead, and the palace is quiet. Just that. Understand?”

Ibou clutched his arm.

“Will you be here?”

Yashim hesitated.

“I have to find the seraskier,” he said. “There’s no danger for you: they expect the messenger. Now go!”

He patted Ibou on the shoulder, and watched as the young man sauntered through the gateway and headed for the group of men in the darker shadows of the planes. He saw the men stir and turn and, certain that Ibou had their attention, he slipped through the gate and made his way around the opposite wall of the first court, sticking to the shadows.

[ 124 ]

Bombardier Genghis Yalmuk slipped a finger beneath his chin strap and ran it round from ear to ear, to soothe the pressure. He had served in the New Guard for fifteen years, graduating from common soldiering to the artillery corps five years ago, and his only complaint in those fifteen years had been the headgear that soldiers were expected to wear: ferenghi shakos, with tough leather straps. Now he commanded a battalion of ten guns and their crews: forty men, in all.

He glanced over the Hippodrome and grunted. He’d slogged through the sand and heat of Syria. He’d been in Armenia, when the Cossacks broke through the infantry lines and charged his redoubt, with their sabres flashing in the sunlight and their horses foaming at the nostrils, and his commanding officer offering to shoot down any man who deserted his post. Battle, he’d learned, was days and hours of waiting, putting off thought, punctuated by short, savage engagements in which there was no time to think at all. Leave all that, he’d been told again and again, to the commanding officers.

Well, he was one of them now himself, and the injunction against thinking still held, as far as he could discover. His orders had come direct from the seraskier himself, who had been moving through the lines like a man demented, setting the position of the guns, instructing the troops, fixing elevations and exhorting them all to obedience. Genghis had no quarrel with that, of course, but he was a Stamboul man himself, not one of your Anatolian recruits, and he found it strange to be in his own city, under arms and idle while the place was bursting into flames.

He wished he’d been detailed to the Sultan Ahmet, perhaps, or the other, unidentified location deeper in the city, where the men would no doubt be tackling the fires head-on, instead of being told to train their guns every which way and stop the crowds from approaching the palace. But the seraskier had been very exact in his instructions. They had synchronised their timepieces, too, ready for the barrage that was to open in almost exactly one hour. The barrage whose purpose Genghis Yalmuk neither questioned, nor understood, but which the seraskier had personally prepared, working from gun to gun with a sheaf of co-ordinates as if his bombardier could not be trusted to fix the co-ordinates himself.

And meanwhile, he thought wretchedly, they were waiting again. Waiting while the city burned.

He caught sight of a man in a plain brown cloak speaking to two sentries outside the seraglio gate, and frowned. His orders were very clear, to keep civilians out of the operational area: this man must have slipped through the gate, from the palace. Genghis Yalmuk threw back his shoulders and started to march towards them. This fellow had better just slip back the way he’d come, and at the double, too, palace or no palace, or he’d know the reason why.

But before he had walked five yards the man in the brown cloak had turned and was scanning the ground; one of the sentries pointed, and the man began to walk towards him, holding up a hand.

“Look here,” Genghis began to say, but the civilian cut him short.

“Yashim Togalu, imperial service,” he said. “I need the seraskier, and fast. Operational need,” he added. “Vital new intelligence.”

Genghis Yalmuk blinked. The habit of obedience was very deeply ingrained, after all, and he had an ear that was tuned to the commanding style.

As for Yashim, he crossed his fingers.

For a moment the two men looked at one another.

Then Genghis Yalmuk raised his hand and pointed.

“Up there,” he said, crisply.

Yashim followed the direction of his finger. Over the walls and trees surrounding the great mosque. Beyond the minarets. Higher, and further away.

He was pointing at the dome of Hagya Sophia.

“Then I’m too late,” said Yashim, crisply. “I’m afraid I have to ask to see your orders.”

[ 125 ]

The seraskier leaned back against the lead casing of the buttress, and put his cheek to the smooth metal. He had not realised how excited he was. His face seemed to be burning like the city which lay about him, at his feet.

Out here, on the leads, he had the perfect view. From down below, Hagia Sophia seemed to rise in a single burst, the massive central dome supported on a buttressed ring that floated in the air over two half-domes on either side. This was how artists since time immemorial had pictured it, round-shouldered like so many mosques; but in this they erred. Built in the sixth century, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian’s great church was a reconciliation of two opposed forms. The great circle of the dome, rising on a round gallery of arches, thrust itself skywards through a lead-covered square. There was space at the four corners, where the pitch of the roof was slight, at most; and so it was from here, two hundred feet above the ground, that the seraskier saw across the Seven Hills, over the seraglio to the dark waters beyond, touched here and there by a bobbing lantern. Further west he imagined the water reflecting the flames that even now were shooting skywards, sending out brilliant showers of sparks, springing their way from rooftop to rooftop, consuming the wooden walls of the old portside houses, bursting through doorways, roaring down alleys. An unstoppable, purifying furnace fuelled by two thousand years of trickery and deceit.

The flames belonged to the city. All those long centuries they had smouldered, now and then breaking loose, feeding on the packed-up tinder that had been sifting into the shadows and the corners of Istanbul, its crooked angles dredged with dust and detritus and the filth of a million benighted souls. A city of fire and water. Dirt and disease. A city that stank on the water’s edge like a decaying corpse, too rotten to be moved, shining by the oily bloom of putrefaction.

He turned to the south. How dark the seraglio looked! Shuttered behind its ancient walls, how it brooded on its own eminence! But the seraskier knew better: it was a vulture’s nest, scattered with the filth and droppings of the generations, piled on the bones of the dead, filled with the insistent gaping cry of fledgelings warmed by their own excrement and fed with filth plucked from the surrounding midden of the city in which it had been built.

The seraskier stepped forwards to the gutter, and looked down into the square where his men were standing by their guns. Order and discipline, he thought: good men, moulded these last twenty years in proper habits of deference and obedience. They knew the penalty for stepping out of line. Order and obedience made an army, and an army was a tool in the hands of a man who knew how to use it. Without order you had only a rabble, that snarled and bit like a mad dog, ignorant of its purpose, open to every suggestion and prey to every whim.

Well, this night he would show the people who was stronger: the blind rabble and the vulture’s nest, or lead and shot and the power of discipline.

And when the smoke cleared, a new beginning. A brave new start.

He smiled, and his eyes glittered in the firelight.

Then he stiffened. He eased away from the wall and slid the pistol from his belt.

He cocked the firing pin and laid the barrel in a straight line, pointing back towards the arch.

Someone was coming up the stairs.

The shadow lengthened, and the seraskier saw the eunuch blinking as he turned his head from side to side.

“Well done, Yashim,” said the seraskier, smiling. “I wondered if you would come.”

[ 126 ]

The seraskier tapped his foot on the sloping roof.

“Do you know what this is? Do you see where we are?”

Yashim gazed at him.

“Of course you do. The roof of the Great Mosque. You see the dome, above your head? The Greeks called it Hagia Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom. One hundred and eighty-two feet high. Enclosed volume, nine million cubic feet. Do you know how old it is?”

“It was built before the days of the Prophet,” Yashim said cautiously.

“Incredible, isn’t it?” The seraskier chuckled. He seemed to be in the best of spirits. “And it took just five years to build. Can you imagine what an effort that must have required? Or what we could do with such energy today, applied to something actually worthwhile?”

He laughed again, and stamped his foot.

“How does something so old get to last so long? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s because no one, not even the Conqueror Mehmed himself, had the wit or courage to knock it down. Do I surprise you?”

Yashim frowned.

“Not entirely,” he replied quietly.

The seraskier looked up.

“Thousands of sheets of beaten lead,” he said. “Acres of it. And the pillars. And the dome. Just imagine, Yashim! It’s been weighing on us all for fourteen hundred years. We can’t even see beyond it, or around it. We can’t imagine a world without it. Can we? Do you know, it’s like a stench, nobody notices it after a while. Not even when it’s poisoning them.” He leaned forward. The gun, Yashim noticed, was still steady in his hand. “And it’s poisoning us. All this.” He waved a hand. “Year after year, habit piled on prejudice, ignorance on greed. Come on, Yashim, you know it as well as I do. We’re smothered by it, aren’t we? Tradition! It’s just grime that accumulates. Why, it even took your balls!”

Yashim could no longer see the seraskier’s face against the light of the fires at his back, but he heard him snicker at his own thrust.

“I’ve just come from the palace,” Yashim said. “The sultan is safe. There was a coup of sorts—”

“A coup?” The seraskier ran his tongue across his lips.

“Yes. The palace eunuchs, led by the Kislar Agha. They were set to turn back the clock. Re-instate the Janissaries. It was all in that Karagozi verse—remember?”

The seraskier blew out his cheeks. “Come, Yashim. This isn’t important. You know that, don’t you? Eunuchs. Sultans. The sultan’s finished. The Edict? Did you really think the Edict was going to make a difference? You saw him today, didn’t you, the old boozer? What makes you think any of them can do a thing? They are half the problem. The Edict is just another worthless piece of paper. Equality, blah blah. There’s only one equality under these skies, and that’s when you’re in the line, shoulder to shoulder with the men beside you, taking orders. We could have figured that out years ago, but we grew crooked.”

“The Janissaries?”

The seraskier gave an amused grunt.

“The Janissaries—and their Russian friends. Some of them, I gather, were living in Russian territory. And the rebels wanted Russian help.”

“Who warned you?” Yashim asked. “Not Derentsov?”

The seraskier chuckled. “Derentsov doesn’t need money. It was your friend in the cab. The scarface.”

Yashim frowned. “Potemkin…kept you informed?”

“Potemkin informed me, initially. But he was too expensive. And too dangerous.”

Yashim regarded the seraskier in silence. “So you found someone else to keep you up to date with the Janissary plot. Somebody safe, who wouldn’t be much noticed.”

“That’s right. Somebody cheap and inconsequential.” The seraskier grinned, and his eyes widened with delight. “I found you.”

“I gave you the timing of the rebellion.”

“Oh more, much more. You kept the plot alive, didn’t you? You helped to create the atmosphere I needed. Down there, a city in panic. They’re defeated already. The Janissaries. The people. And now the palace, too.”

He ran his hand around his chest: a gesture of relish.

“For you, I’m afraid, I have a choice prepared between life and death. Or should I say, between devotion to the state and…what, a romantic attachment to an outdated set of traditions.” He paused. “For the empire? Well, the choice is made. Or will have been made in”—he drew a glinting orb from his pocket—“approximately eighteen minutes. The choice between all this, this weight and history and tradition, this great weight squatting over us all like the dome of Justinian’s cathedral—and starting fresh.”

“But the people—” Yashim began to interrupt.

“Oh, the people.” The seraskier half-turned his head, as if he wanted to spit. “The world is full of people.

“We’re well placed, up here, aren’t we?” the seraskier went on. “To watch the palace burn. And with the dawn, a new era. Efficient. Clean. The House of Osman served us well in its time, yes. Reform? An Edict? Written in water. The system is too crazy and tottering to reform itself. We need to start fresh. Sweep away all this junk, these pantaloons, sultans, eunuchs, whispers in the dark. We have suffered under an autocracy that doesn’t even have the power to do what it wants. This empire needs firm government. It needs to be run by people who know how to command. Think of Russia.”

“Russia?”

“Russia is unassailable. Without the czar it could beat the world. Without all its princes and aristocrats and courts. Imagine: run by experts, engineers, soldiers. It’s about to happen—but not in Russia. Here. We need the Russian system—the control of labour. The control of information. That’s an area for you, if you like. I’ve said you’re good. The modern state needs ears and eyes. We’ll need them tomorrow, when the first day dawns on the Ottoman republic.”

Yashim stared. He had a sudden vision of the seraskier the first time they’d met, reclining so awkwardly on his divan in trousers and a jacket, reluctant to sit at the table with his back to the room. A fine western gentleman he made. Was that what all this was about?

“Republic?” He echoed the seraskier’s unfamiliar word. He thought of the sultan and the valide, and all those women in the court: and he remembered the glittering fanatical light in the eyes of the leading eunuchs, and the unexpected death of the chief.

The seraskier had known that they would gather together. And he, Yashim himself, had persuaded the sultan to let the artillery into the city.

“That’s right,” said the seraskier curtly. “We’ve seen those weak old fools for the last time. Blathering about tradition! Padding round in their own nest, like silly chickens. Defying history.”

He drew himself up.

“Think of it as…surgery. It hurts, of course. The surgeon’s knife is ruthless, but it cuts out the disease.”

Yashim felt his heart grow still. With it, his mind cleared.

The seraskier was still talking. “For the patient the agony brings relief,” he was saying. “We can be modern, Yashim: we must be modern. But do you really think modernity is something you can buy? Modernity isn’t a commodity. It’s a condition of the mind.”

Something stirred in Yashim’s memory. He clutched at it, an elusive shape, a form of words he’d heard before. The man was still talking; he felt the memory slipping away.

“It’s an arrangement of power. The old one is over. We have to think about the new.”

“We?”

“The governing classes. The educated people. People like you and me.”

No one, Yashim thought, is like me.

“People need to be directed. That hasn’t changed. What changes is the way they are to be led.”

None of us are alike. I am like no one.

I will stay free.

[ 127 ]

I’m going down, now,” the seraskier said quietly. “And you -you’ll stay up here, I’m afraid. I thought you might come with me, but it doesn’t matter.”

He gestured with his gun, and Yashim stepped out of the archway onto the sloping roof.

“Shall we just change places, slowly?” The seraskier suggested. They circled each other for a few seconds, and then the seraskier was in the arch.

“You see, I’m not going to shoot you. I still think you might want to change your mind. When the troops fall back. When this place starts to burn.”

But Yashim wasn’t really listening. The seraskier had seen his eyes stray from his face, and then widen, almost involuntarily. But he mastered an impulse to turn around. Deflection tactics were no more than he expected.

Yashim’s surprise was not at all affected. Behind the seraskier, up the stairs, two extraordinary figures had made a silent appearance. One was dark, the other fair, and they were dressed like believers, but Yashim could have sworn that the last time he had clapped eyes on these two they had been wearing frock coats and cravats in the British embassy.

“Excusez-tnoi,” the fair one said. “Mais—parlayvoo fran$ais?”

The seraskier spun round as though he had been shot.

“What’s this?” he hissed, turning a wary look on Yashim.

Yashim smiled. The fair young man was glancing round the seraskier, putting up a hand to wave.

“Je vous connais, m’sieur -1 know you, don’t I? I’m Compston, this is Fizerly. You’re the historian, aren’t you?”

There was a tinge of desperation in his voice which, Yashim thought, was not misplaced.

“They are officials at the British embassy,” he told the seraskier. “Much more modern than they look, I imagine. And efficient, as you say.”

“I’ll kill them,” the seraskier snarled. He jabbed his gun at them, and they shrank back.

“I wouldn’t if I were you,” Yashim said. “Your republican dawn could quickly turn into dusk if you bring British gunboats to our doorstep.”

“It’s of no consequence,” the seraskier said. He had regained his composure. “Tell them to get out.”

Yashim opened his mouth to speak but his first words were drowned by a muffled crump that sounded like a clap of thunder. The ground trembled beneath their feet.

As the sound of the explosion died away the seraskier jerked the watch from his pocket and bit his lip.

Too early, he thought. And then: it doesn’t matter. Let them begin the barrage.

He waited, staring at his watch.

Fifteen seconds. Twenty seconds. Let the guns fire.

The sweat had broken out on his forehead.

There was another bang, slightly fainter than the first.

The seraskier looked up and flashed a look of triumph at Yashim.

But Yashim had turned away. He was standing on the roof, hands held aloft, staring out over the city as the wind caught at his cloak.

Beyond him, the seraskier saw the burst of light. It glanced off the pillars of the dome, flinging Yashim into brilliant relief where he stood against the skyline. The seraskier heard the rumble of the guns which followed. There was another burst of light, as of an exploding shell, and another deep rumble, and the seraskier frowned. He knew what was puzzling him. The sound and light were the wrong way round.

He should have heard the guns roar, and then seen the light flash as the shell reached its target, The seraskier leaped from the archway and began to run, his feet making no sound on the thick lead sheets.

Yashim made a lunge for him, but the seraskier was too quick. In an instant he had seen what he had not expected to see, and with brilliant military intuition he had grasped precisely what it all meant to him. The guns were working the wrong end of the city, the shells exploding far away. He did not break stride. He shrank slightly as Yashim reached out, but a moment later he was over the gutters and half-running, half-sliding down the leaden roof of the supporting half dome.

He moved with a speed that was terrible to see. Yashim darted to the edge and began to lower himself down onto the conical roof, but the seraskier had already dropped from sight. Then he suddenly re-appeared, lower down, loping south across a cat-slide roof.

For a moment the whole city lay spread out beneath the seraskier’s feet. He saw again the dark mass of the seraglio. He saw the lights twinkling on the Bosphorus. He saw men and women streaming through the square beneath him, and in the distance the chutes of flame that peeled away from the sudden yawning gaps that the artillery was making in their path.

As for him, there was only one direction he could take.

For many years after that, an Armenian army contractor who married a rich widow who bore him six sons would tell the story of how he was almost crushed by an officer who fell on him from the sky.

“Not a common soldier, mind you,” he would end his story, with a smile. “God, in his Grace, sent me a general: and I’ve been dealing with them ever since.”

[ 128 ]

I need an escort, Palewski,” Yashim was explaining. “You know, somebody with an ‘in’ with the sultan. He’d expect that. And you two are very pally, aren’t you?”

It was Saturday morning. The rain which lashed against Yashim’s windows had been falling steadily since before dawn, much to the advantage of the New Guards struggling to extinguish the city fires. With the breaks their cannon had opened in the night, the fire had been contained to the area of the port, and although the damage was said to be serious, it did not approach the scale of 1817, or 1807, or of almost a dozen major fires which had broken out in that district in the previous century. And the port, when all was said and done, was not the most prized Istanbul quartier.

Palewski put up two fingers and touched his moustache, to hide a smile.

“Pally’s the word for it, Yash. I’ve a mind to present the sultan with a little something which arrived for me this morning, saved by providence from the fire in the port.”

“Ah, providence,” echoed Yashim.

“Yes. I happened to notice that stocks were getting rather low last Thursday, so I ordered another couple of cases out of bond immediately. What do you think?”

“Yes, I think that the sultan would appreciate the gesture. Not that he’d drink it, of course.”

“Of course not. No bubbles in it, for one thing.”

They smiled at each other.

“I’m sorry about the thug last night,” Palewski said.

Yashim yawned, shaking his head.

“I don’t know what you hit him with. He was gentle as a lamb when I got back. Preen and her friend were chatting away with him, you can’t believe. Not that he said much, naturally, but he seemed to be enjoying their company. Preen said she could take him to a doctor. I think she said a horse doctor, but there you are. He seemed very grateful when I explained it to him.”

“In mime?”

“In sign. It’s a language I learned when I was at court.”

“I see.” Palewski frowned. “I didn’t hit him, you know.”

“I know. I’m glad. Will you call for me at six?”

[ 129 ]

Yashim slept deeply until one o’clock, then dozed for another hour, sliding in and out of dreams where he heard only voices speaking to him in tones he knew and languages he didn’t understand. Once he saw the seraskier, talking perfect French with a light Creole accent, and lashed himself awake. Was it a dream that the seraskier had spoken to him in the language of his dreams? A condition of the mind. The phrase rolled around his head, and he sat up, feeling lightheaded.

He got up, leaving his cloak on the divan. The room felt warm, the stove was lit: his landlady must have crept up to light it while he was asleep. He picked up the kettle and settled it onto the coals. He took three pinches of black tea and dropped them into the pot. He found a pan by the stove with a few manti inside: Preen seemed to have cooked his supper and eaten it with her friend; and the mute, too, maybe. They’d saved something for him.

He set it on the stove and watched the butter melt, then stirred the manti with a wooden spoon. He thought of making a tomato sauce with the jar of puree, then decided that the manti were ready and he was too hungry, so he simply tipped them onto a plate and ground a few rounds of black pepper over them.

They were not excellent, he had to admit; slightly hard around the edges, in fact, but wonderfully good. He poured the tea, and drank it with sugar and a cigarette leaning back on the divan and watching the raindrops sparkling on the lattice: the rain had stopped and a weak wintry sunlight was making a last appearance before it faded for the night.

Palewski had been almost right, he thought. A dangerous party: always a guest, never a player. Only obliged to stand by, confused and helpless, as the old, grand battle raged, a battle that would never be won between the old and the new, reaction and renovation, memory and hope. Coming in too late, when last night’s manti were already curling at the edges. Until he spoke to the bombardier, who swung the guns in time.

After a time he began to look around the room, not stirring but glancing from one object to the next before he saw what he wanted. He reached out and took it in his hand, half-smiling: a little cloisonne dagger with no pommel, only its beautifully enamelled hilt and scabbard making a single crescent, tapering to a fine point. He slid the dagger halfway out, and admired the gleam of its perfect steel, then pushed it back, hearing the tiny click as it settled into the scabbard again.

Damascus steel, cold drawn, the product of a thousand years’ experience—and the finer it was worked, the less it showed the labour. It was not as they crafted such things now. He wondered if she’d know the difference, not that it mattered. It was a beautiful and satisfying thing. Dangerous, but protective too. Perhaps she’d look at it now and then, and in her white northern world of ice it would bring back some memory to make her smile.

For several minutes he weighed the dagger in his palm, thinking of it; and then he frowned and set it gently aside, and got up and washed in the basin as best he could.

[ 130 ]

We have orders to admit no one until the disturbance has subsided,” the butler intoned, placing his large body in the doorway of the embassy.

“There is no disturbance,” Yashim said. The butler merely pursed his lips.

Yashim sighed, and held out a small package. “Would you see to it that this reaches Her Excellency the Princess?”

The butler glanced down and sniffed. “And from whom shall I say it comes?”

“Oh—just say a Turk.”

“Yashim!”

Eugenia was coming slowly down the stairs, one hand floating by the rail and the other at her cheek.

“Come in!”

The butler stepped back and Eugenia took Yashim’s hands in hers and led him to the sofa. The butler hovered over her.

“That’s all right,” she said. “We’re friends.”

“From the gentleman, Your Highness.”

The butler handed her Yashim’s packet, and stood back.

“Tea for our visitor, please,” Eugenia said. When the butler had gone she dropped the packet on her lap, took hold of Yashim’s hands again and looked him steadily in the eye.

“I think…we are going home.” She flashed a sudden smile, and squeezed his hands. “Derentsov—my husband—is furious. And frightened. He thinks he’s been betrayed.”

Yashim nodded slowly.

“You know who it was, don’t you?” Eugenia tilted her head back and appraised him with a slow smile. “They all think that you don’t matter. But you are clever.”

She saw Yashim glance away. “Do you want to know?” he asked her, quietly.

She shook her head. “It would spoil everything. I have a duty to my husband, and there are some secrets I can’t keep. He was raving this morning, saying he’d been compromised. No choice but to resign. Determined to return us to St Petersburg, and face the czar.”

“And the balls, and the dinners, and the ladies with their fans. I know.”

“It will be hard.”

“But you have a duty to your husband.”

They laughed softly together.

“What is this?” She said, hefting the packet in her hand.

“Open it, and see.”

She did, and watched him showing her the tiny catch which slipped the dagger from its scabbard.

“It reminds me of something,” she said mischievously. “And someone.”

Their eyes met, and the mischievous look disappeared.

“I don’t think—”

“That we’ll meet again? No. But…I will always dream. Of you.”

“If I told the ladies of St Petersburg—”

“Don’t say a word.”

Eugenia shook her lovely head. “I won’t,” she said. “I never would.”

She leaned forwards, tilting her head slightly to one side so that a lock of her black hair swung free.

“Kiss me,” she said.

They kissed.

Russian or otherwise, a butler is a butler. He is unflappable. He is discreet.

Yashim had gone before he served the tea.

[ 131 ]

So it seems that the seraskier was right,” said Mahmut IV. “It’s good that we had him in the city. But what a terrible accident, just when everything was going so well.”

“Yes, sultan.”

“They say he fell. I suppose he’d climbed up somewhere for a better view. Fires to fight, and all that, eh?”

“Yes, sultan.”

“We’ll give him a splendid funeral, don’t worry about that. You two got along pretty well, didn’t you?”

Yashim inclined his head.

“Something new, he’d have liked that. Gun carriages, maybe, and a few platoons of Guards firing volleys over his grave. Show that the sultan doesn’t forget his friends. We might even name the fire-tower at Beyazit after him. Ugly object. Seraskier’s Tower. Hmm. The empire honours its heroes, you know.”

The sultan picked at his nose.

“I never liked him much. That’s the worst I can say of him. At least he knew his duty.”

Yashim kept his eyes fixed on the ground.

The sultan looked at him with narrowed eyes.

“My mother says that you did a great deal to prepare her for the ordeal she passed through last night. It seems to me you did very little.”

He snuffed. Yashim looked up and caught his eye.

The sultan blinked and looked away.

“Hrrmph. I suppose it was enough in the end. And frankly, the eunuchs are perfectly quiet now. Takes one to catch one, I imagine.”

He picked up a little whisk and began to twirl it between his fingers.

“The point is, I need someone in here, since the kislar’s gone. Someone who knows the ropes, but a bit younger.”

Yashim froze. It was the second job he’d been offered in the last twenty-four hours. The eyes and ears of the new republic? Now it was power and the promise of riches. The second job he didn’t want.

He began to say that he wasn’t young. He was white. Whiteish, anyway—but the sultan wasn’t listening.

“There’s an archivist,” he said. “New man. Keen, good looking, it’d frighten some of the old men, wouldn’t it? I can’t replace them all. And I could keep an eye on him, too. Reminds me of the kislar when he was young, before he started spooning up this tradition stuff and murdering the girls. He wasn’t in on the whole charade, either. That’s what I like. Give him a frock coat and a baton. That’s it. My man.”

Yashim felt a flood of relief. He had no doubt that Ibou would prove to be a perfect Kislar Agha; a little young perhaps, but time would offer its inevitable solution. At least he would vault straight over all the terrible compromises and feuds that had driven the former incumbent to the verge of madness as he clambered his way to the top. And he would be quick to learn his duty. Maybe even genuinely grateful.

“The sultan is most wise,” he said. It was better not to say more.

“Well, well.” The sultan rose from his chair. “This has been a most interesting discussion. To be honest, Yashim, I sometimes think you know more than you say. Which may be wise in its way, too. It is for God to know everything, and for us to learn only what we need.”

He scrabbled short-sightedly at the little table, and picked up a leather purse.

“Take this. The seraskier would no doubt have rewarded you, and in the circumstances the task is left to me.”

Yashim caught the purse in mid-air.

He bowed. The sultan nodded shortly.

“The valide wants a gossip, I understand. There was an Edict,” he added, “but it will have to wait after all. We’ll see the household settled before that. And the city, too.”

He waved a hand, and Yashim bowed as he withdrew.

[ 132 ]

Was there a twist?” The valide smiled. “I like a twist.”

“Yes,” Yashim said. He thought of telling the unvarnished truth, but knew that it would never make a proper story. “The seraskier was rotten to the core. He planned the whole thing.”

The valide clapped her hands.

“I knew it!” she cried. “How did you guess?”

“It was a number of little things,” Yashim told her. He told her about the seraskier’s awkwardness in western dress, and the way he had claimed to speak French, and then denied it. He told her how eager the seraskier had been to spread panic at the murders, at which the valide had nodded vigorously and said that he was obviously being used. How, exactly, had the men been murdered, she wanted to know?

And Yashim told her.

He explained that his friend Palewski had overheard him speaking French—he thought it was French—at a cafe one evening.

“When he denied all knowledge of it! Ha ha!” The valide wagged a finger.

He told her then about the Russian, Potemkin.

“What a villain!” the valide snorted. “Ruined by his scar, no doubt. He must have been charming, in his way, to lure the fellows into his carriage. But all the same,” she added, putting the image of the wounded charmer to one side, and considering the practicalities, “what did the Russians have to gain by getting involved?”

And Yashim told her.

“They’re poised for a takeover of Istanbul,” he said. “Ever since the days of the Byzantines they’ve dreamed of the city. It was the second Rome—and Moscow is the third. They wanted anarchy in Istanbul. They didn’t care how it happened—a Janissary coup, the seraskier going mad and proclaiming himself ruler, anything. If the House of Osman was extinguished, imagine the consequences! They’re camped a week or so away. They’d claim to be restoring order, or to be protecting the Orthodox, or to be being sucked into the vortex one way or another, it wouldn’t matter how. Just so long as they could occupy the city and provide themselves with a reasonable excuse afterwards, when the European Powers started kicking up a fuss. The French, the English, they’re terrified of letting the Russians in—but once they’re in, they’d be here to stay. Look at the Crimea.”

“What brutes!” the valide breathed. The Crimea had been taken by the Russians, by a combination of threats and stealth and bloody war. “They backed the Greeks, as well!”

“Everyone backed the Greeks,” Yashim reminded her soberly. “But certainly the Russians lit the spark there, too.”

The valide was silent.

“To think that all this was hovering over our heads while I dealt with the kislar in the palace,” she said after a pause. “I thought that was a drama, but it was a sideshow.”

“Not really,” Yashim suggested. “If the seraskier’s plans hadn’t come off—and they didn’t, did they?—there would still have been a revolution, but for you. A counter-revolution, as they call it, going back to the old ways.”

“It was the girl,” the valide pointed out. “I’ve seen plays, you know. When I was young, I saw them in Dominique. If I set the scene, she performed the final act. Thanks to you, Yashim.”

Yashim bowed his head.

The valide reached for a bag by her divan, and pulled the string at its mouth.

“I’ve got just the thing for you,” she said.

She fished inside the bag and brought out a book with paper covers.

She held it up between her two hands and let Yashim read the title, emblazoned in red.

“Pere Goriot,” he read. “By Honore de Balzac.”

“There.” She held it out. “Quite disgusting, I’m afraid.”

“What makes you give it to me?”

“They say it’s all the rage in Paris. I’ve read it now, and it’s all about corruption, deceit, greed, lies.”

She patted the cover of the book and held it out to Yashim.

“Sometimes, you know, I am so glad I never got to see France.”