The Drowning Guard: A Novel of the Ottoman Empire (40 page)

The Sultan’s face writhed in anger and he dismissed his Vizier abruptly. Alone in the Royal Reception Room, Mahmud paced the floor, his slippered feet rasping over the intricately woven carpets.

Ivan Postivich awoke, his right leg in a fire of pain. The festering wound sent hot pulses up the leg and into his groin.

He opened his crusted eyes and saw he was swathed in imperial sheets. He shivered nevertheless and wondered why it was so cold and dank in the middle of July.

He could hear whispering in the far reaches of the room, but the voices echoed as if he were in a cavernous tomb. Perhaps he had been mistaken for dead and brought to a vault, he thought. He smelled the humidity, the coolness of the grave, and heard the drip of water somewhere in the distance.

A rustle of linens and footsteps approached him. A Greek-accented voice spoke in Serbo-Croat.

“You are safe, Ivan Postivich. Your sister has sent you here to Esma Sultan’s private cisterns where I can care for you in secrecy.”

The Sultan’s doctor, Stephane Karatheodory, lifted up the sheets and probed the wound.

“You are lucky that the blood loss was not more,” he said, his fingers unwinding the dressing.

A woman’s gentle hand reached behind Postivich’s neck and tilted his head towards a silver cup of water. He drank greedily and did not look up until he had drained every drop.

“More, I beg of you,” he whispered and only then did he realize that his
sister, Irena, was already refilling the cup. As he turned to watch her, he felt something around his neck shift and slip against his chest.

It was the golden cross of the Greek Orthodox Church.

“You were brought to me by the dervishes,” said the doctor, as he continued to attend to the wound. “They found you at the gates of Et Meydan, shot through the leg with a burning timber across your back. The Sultan has put a high price on your head as if the reward of thousands upon thousands of dead Janissaries weren’t enough to sate his bloodlust.”

“Good doctor, I beg you, say no more,” whispered Irena. “You risk your life and that of your family by attending to my brother. Even the cistern may have ears.”

The doctor nodded and with his trembling hands pulled the last of the dressing from the wound.

Ivan Postivich winced as the blood-soaked rag tore away, pulling at the flesh.

“My mare, Peri,” he croaked. “Does she still live?”

Irena bent close to his ear. “Do not speak. The effort costs too dearly.”

But even as she spoke, Postivich screamed in pain. The doctor had forced a hot poker against his flesh to cauterize the wound. As his cry reverberated, he lost consciousness. His scream faded to silence and the dripping stream of water was once more the only sound that broke the silence.

Ivan Postivich did not know how much time passed as he lay in the deep chambers of Esma Sultan’s palace, delirious from the fever of the infection in his wound.

He heard voices and saw visions and fought enemies he couldn’t see. One night—though night was no different from day deep in the cavern—he sat up, thrashing against the sheets, wet with his perspiration. He was still caught in the memory of a dream. He had been surrounded by dancing women who moved softly and seductively, laughing at him. Then their steps became heavy, impossibly loud, like the roll of thunder overhead. It was that thunder that had awakened him.

Awake, he found that he was dressed in a palace tunic, embroidered with the Ottoman crimson and gold. He felt his face and knew that he had been shaved while he slept and he marveled that he had not awakened.

At his side were a jug of water and cup. He drained the cup five times before he had slaked his thirst.

Now he looked around, seeing that the candles lit only a small part of the vast palace cistern. There were torches scattered through the darkness that must have lighted a passageway to the palace. Shifting spears of green light clashed on the vaulted walls, reflecting off the deep pools of water.

Again, he heard the thundering. This time he was not dreaming. A bat zigzagged overhead, startled at the vibration.

An old voice cursed in Turkish and from the darkness came a man he recognized, a stooped old gardener from the palace. The gardener walked laboriously towards him, muttering.

“You are awake at last,” he said. “How soundly sleeps the giant, how fecund are his dreams!”

“What is that roar overhead? It sounds as if elephants move above us!”

“The cave exaggerates sounds,” said the old man, his eyes bleary with age. “For surely they are not elephants. Ha!”

With that, the gardener turned away and stomped off again.

“Stop!” commanded Ivan Postivich. “Where do you go?”

“Follow me and you shall see the secret of the thunder.”

Ivan Postivich thought the man must be touched with madness, but he followed him anyway. The stones bit into his bare feet, tender from bedrest. His thigh was stiff and sore, almost beyond bearing, but still he was able to drag himself at almost the same pace as the gardener. Together they limped and shuffled through the flickering torchlight.

At last they came to a ladder, rough-hewn rungs lashed to two oak logs. The gardener climbed awkwardly up the creaking rungs to the top and pushed with one hand on a trapdoor.

The door groaned open and moonlight spilled into the darkness like molten silver. Ivan Postivich struggled up the ladder, wrinkling his nose at the stench of the old man’s breath that lingered in the stale air.

The full moon shone fiercely and Postivich blinked and shaded his eyes from the moonbeams.

The gardener gestured from the shadows of the immense jasmines.

Postivich followed the gesture and saw the flowing white garb of riders on horseback. They swung long graceful mallets that swept elegantly through the air and sent a small white ball down the grassy field with a sharp click that resounded in the night.

“Polo?” he said, wondering if he was still under the spell of his fever.

As he sucked in the sweet mingled aromas of the blooming gardenia and jasmine, he heard the gardener’s laugh, ringing with a tone of certain madness.

“You see!” he said, bringing his dirty fingers to his toothless mouth in joy. He limped away to the shed where he kept his tools and began raking the grounds as if it were early morning.

Ivan Postivich sunk to the ground, his leg too tired to support him any longer. He focused on one player, graceful and tall in the saddle, riding with an agility that sparked a dim memory. He tried to force his mind to focus and remember.

But it wasn’t until he heard the unforgettable laugh as the white ball flew through the upright posts, that he realized it was his sister, who reined her horse with such innate skill and gentle hands.

And in that same moment, he recognized the litheness of all the riders and the high, ringing tone of their laughter and shouts. They were all women. And then, one more voice, lower and rougher in tone. It was the old Turkish Horse Master, applauding Irena’s goal, the only male among the eight women riders.

Another rider rode up next to Irena, reached out and caressed her cheek. Esma Sultan leaned over kissed Ivan Postivich’s sister in joy.

I
van Postivich grew stronger each day. The greenish light of the cistern was unearthly, reflected through a filter of algae and lingering on patches of moss that lined the cavern walls. Its constancy and silence brought healing peace, for no one would search the palace of an Ottoman princess, not even the Sultan himself.

Those who cared for him brought news of the failed revolt and carnage. Thousands upon thousands of Janissaries had died in the Et Meydan inferno, their charred remains left for the ever-ravenous dogs. Any who escaped the flames had been hunted down and brought to the Hippodrome to be hanged. It was rumored that the Sultan was so murderous in his
rage and so greedy in his revenge, delivering prisoner after prisoner to Allah, that the executioners were not allowed to carry off the corpses from the field of death. Hundreds of bodies, in various stages of decay, lay mounded on the ground and the Sultan inspected each one from his horse, red with fury that none was the man whose death he coveted.

“We cannot go on until the bodies have been carried off,” whispered an executioner to the Vizier, wiping his brow. “You see how deep the ground is in corpses! The next prisoner could stand on the backs of his dead brothers and never feel the noose!”

“Seek more wagons, then, to cart off their blasphemous flesh,” ordered the Vizier. “Find men with stronger backs and quicker hands. The Sultan’s rage cannot be quenched until it has seen the dead eyes of the giant, Ahmed Kadir.”

Ivan Postivich heard the tales with a heavy heart. He walked about the pools of the cistern, contemplating not just his own future, but that of all Constantinople.

“The Sultan has decreed that the Janissaries and all those who joined them shall die,” said a young servant boy who stripped the sheets each day and served Postivich in a makeshift hamam. He stood over a large kettle of water heating over a fire.

“You alone are blessed by Allah,” the boy said, his eyes red from the stinging smoke. “The Sultan’s New Order has ransacked the houses of Constantinople and even searched the wells and cellars. They have found scores of hidden soldiers and all have been dragged to the Hippodrome to be slaughtered—along with those who had given them shelter,” said the boy dipping a bucket in the steaming kettle to bathe the corbaci.

“The Sultan has announced from the pulpit of Sultan Ahmed Mosque that the very word ‘janissary’ is never to be uttered on pain of death as it is forever cursed by Allah.”

Concentrating on his story, the boy did not test the temperature of the water before he poured it on the bather’s back.

Ivan Postivich screamed as the scalding water cascaded over his still-tender flesh.

“Forgive me, Corbaci!”

The eunuch, Poppy, who supervised the ablutions swiftly boxed the ears of the servant boy.

“You stupid boy! The Head Eunuch himself has requested the finest care for the royal prisoner and you burn him like the ignorant peasant you are!”

Ivan Postivich whirled around, forgetting his pain.

“Prisoner?”

Poppy straightened his spine, standing as tall as his stunted frame would allow.

“You are a house prisoner,” Poppy said stiffly. “And you receive the hospitality of the Ottomans. Yet there are some who think your blood should have already mingled with that of the other traitors in the mud of the Hippodrome.”

Ivan Postivich realized by the stiff shoulders and twitching mouth that Poppy had spoken on impulse and was distressed to have done so. The little
man tightened his lips as if making a silent pledge not to speak again and turned away.

The young servant, on the other hand, looked as though he had much more to say. Ivan Postivich could see his eyes glittering in the firelight. Still, he only nodded quickly to the giant, gathered up his towels and buckets and walked off into the darkness.

When Dede Mustafa entered the audience chamber, Irena rushed to him and fell to her knees. She clasped his hand and kissed it and he pressed his finger against her forehead.