The Drowning Guard: A Novel of the Ottoman Empire (47 page)

The New Order of Topkapi, dressed in their European uniforms, watched uncomfortably, for the death of a brave soldier was never the desire of an honorable military man. There were calls from the crowd, and jeers and curses from Sufis who had the courage to shout their insults to the Sultan.

As Peri was led to the plane tree and the sack was removed from Postivich’s head, the executioner whispered a prayer to Allah and asked his victim’s forgiveness.

“You must serve your Sultan,” was the giant’s reply. “Go ahead and perform your duty bravely.”

The thick rope was placed around Postivich’s neck and underneath his chin and gently tightened as if his mother were straightening his collar before sending him off to school.

“Thank you for your kindness,” said Postivich.

The Sultan watched the executioner’s tenderness, scowling
.

Where was Esma Sultan? Why was she not here to witness the death of this traitor?

The crowd looked up at the Sultan, waiting for his order to proceed.

Where is my sister?

As the Sultan raised his hand to initiate the execution, a murmur rippled through the crowd.

Two veiled women galloped into the Hippodrome, their cloaks flying behind them.

The crowd watched motionless.

One approached the Sultan, grasping his hand in midair and yanking him off his feet before he could signal for the execution. The other raced towards Peri and the groom who held the reins. With a cry from the battlefields of the Serbian plains, she swung a scimitar, the blade slicing through the rope and then sinking deep into the chest of the fat white eunuch, who stood beside the executioner.

“Esma!” the Sultan screamed. “Treason!”

The only answer was her laugh, ringing in the air as the women galloped their horses out of the Hippodrome with Peri in pursuit, her rider swaying, hands tied behind his back.

Mahmud hesitated. The Kapikulu captain spoke, “Your orders, my Sultan?”

“Capture the women and bring them back alive. Do not harm them in any way or you shall be executed. Do not forget for an instant that my sister is an Ottoman Sultane.”

“And Ahmed Kadir?”

“Kill him on the spot.”

It was nearing sundown, and the women rode hard for the hills east of the city. Their horses’ shoes clattered on cobblestones and then thundered on hard-packed dirt. Wild dogs tried to pursue them, but were quickly outrun. The
orphan boys cheered as the three riders raced past the stables—and the boys upset a melon cart to slow the Kapikulu who pursued them.

A Serbian boy climbed onto a horse and bade two other boys to do the same. They rode along the riverside and doubled back to the stable, their beardless faces gleaming in the setting sun. The Solaks saw their silhouettes and followed them, while the trio of fugitives plunged into the River Lycus and rode off to the hills beyond.

When the Kapikulu captain finally realized his mistake, he cursed the boys and their heaving steeds, and raised his scimitar over his head.

The old Head Groom rode out, breathless from the chase.

“Sir, we are required to exercise the polo and cirit horses at top speed every day,” he said. “Why do you pursue us? Do you have a fatwa for these orphan boys of the charity of Aya Sofya and Esma Sultan?”

Three days later, there was still no sign of the women or Ahmed Kadir. There were many citizens who hated the Sultan for the massacre of the Janissaries and considered it a bad omen. There were humble homes and shepherds’ huts that were open to a hero who had escaped the Sultan’s wrath.

At Topkapi, as the sun set on the third day, the ailing Valide Sultan, Nakshidil, begged to receive her last rites. The city mourned the imminent loss of a woman who was known for her charity to the poor.

A eunuch accompanied Dr. Stephane Karatheodory and his female assistant into the Valide’s room. Once the room was secured and the eunuch sent to guard the entryway, the nurse stripped off her veil to show Nakshidil her pearl-glazed mouth and twisted grin.

“You have returned at last, Bezm-i Alem!”

“Irena. I am your Irena. And you shall rest in the peace of the arms of the Holy Virgin.”

“A woman’s embrace I would welcome,” Nakshidil said. “Forgive my son. He has too much of the Al-ilah in him and not enough of Diana.”

“His sons will not,” said Irena.

“You will bear his sons?”

“If you wish it so. Perhaps then I can stanch this bloodshed and curse upon Constantinople.”

Nakshidil coughed weakly.

“Lie back, Valide Sultane. You tire yourself with such emotion,” counseled the physician, signaling Irena to keep silence.

“No, no! Let her speak!” cried the dying woman, her hands clenched in fists of pain. “Where is Esma?”

“She has returned to her palace in Ortakoy. She is meeting with her brother to negotiate peace between them. He cannot forget that they have loved one another all their lives. As part of the agreement, I shall return to Topkapi as his wife and bear his children. And I shall be the Sultan Valide after you pass.”

Nakshidil grasped Irena’s hand. “Ah, my daughter! My grandsons shall have compassion.”

“That much I swear. They shall learn compassion and mercy, and the essence of the Women’s Verses.”

Nakshidil smiled blindly at the ceiling.

“If only I could write to my cousin Josephine,” she whispered.

Irena bent over the dying woman and kissed her forehead tenderly.

“Close your eyes, my Sultane. May you rest in peace.”

Pirot, Serbia
March 1831

F
ive years after the Massacre of the Janissaries, an old friend set out in search of Esma Sultan’s drowning guard. The road to the north was hard and frozen and the wind cracked ice from the branches of the plane trees, frightening the horse. The rider whispered soothing words, “
Kus, Kus
,” to his mount, wishing there had been an early spring rather than this hard frost on a strange road at the farthest fringe of the Empire.

There was no one to point out the way, but Ahmed the oarsman, now four years an officer with the Ottoman navy, was skilled at navigation. He blinked up at the North Star, clearly visible in the night of the new moon, and heard again the words the Sufi had spoken in the hushed and hurried conversation that had sent Ahmed riding into the night. Go north, the Sufi had whispered. The giant lives.

And now he was here, on this cold lonely road on the Serbian frontier. In the black of night, he was keenly aware of the breath and heartbeat of his horse, the sweat and warmth beneath his legs as the horse walked mile after mile through the empty countryside.

The village must be near
, he thought. The Sufi’s hastily sketched map was stuffed in his saddlebag, but Ahmed had memorized the route and the landmarks.

The mare, as if she shared his thoughts, broke into a trot and whinnied, the shrill sound startling Ahmed, sending a violent shiver up his spine.

In the same moment, a black coach caught up with him from behind, the clatter of its wheels emerging from the echo of the horse’s whinny, its side lanterns illuminating the patchwork of hoarfrost on the trees along the road.

Ahmed saluted, seeing the red crescent and star on the side of the coach, knowing that this was an Ottoman convoy. The turbaned driver didn’t acknowledge him, barely reining the horses wide enough to keep from clipping the rider. He sat grimly, eyes straining ahead, weary from the ten-day trip from Constantinople. His turban was grimy, splattered by the frozen mud churned up by the carriage wheels.

As the coach brushed by, the crimson velvet curtains parted and Ahmed saw an aquiline profile of a woman. He pulled his wool cloak around his face with one hand, keeping his horse in check with the other. He had no wish to be recognized.

When the Royal Coach had passed, he urged his horse into a canter, taking care not to follow too closely.

As he crested the hill, Ahmed surveyed the village below. A simple hamlet beside a stream, bordered by an orchard. The trees were bleached skeletons, frosted and glowing in the dancing light from the coach lantern.

Ahmed stopped his horse and watched the coach until it stopped in front of a thatched-roof hut at the edge of the trees. The coachman rubbed his freezing hands hard before descending to help his passengers.

A beam of light broke from the hut’s open door, and a giant of a man emerged. He stopped just outside the door and stood erect.

Two women emerged from the coach, the first wore a diaphanous veil. She turned, gazing at the little house, the stream, and the orchard. The huge man met her halfway to the coach, tenderly removing the yasmak and kissing her face, as a brother would. Her face glowed with pearl-like incandescence in the lantern light.

A moment later, the second woman emerged, taking the driver’s offered hand. She walked a few steps with imperious elegance towards the man and her traveling companion. Then she broke and ran to her lover and he to her. He swept her up in an embrace that hid them both from Ahmed’s view as they merged into a single figure. The coachman and the other woman turned away as well. It was a passionate moment that no other should witness, meant for no eyes but the lovers themselves.

Ahmed smiled down at them, and silently turned his horse back towards Constantinople.

TOLERANCE IN TURKEY

B
ezm-i Alem did indeed bear Mahmud II two sons, Abdulmecid and Abdulaziz. Abdulmecid became the first Sultan to grant equal status to Christians and to publicly deplore the slave markets.

“It is a shameful and barbarous practice,” said Sultan Abdulmecid, “… for rational beings to buy and sell their fellow human creatures. Are these poor creatures not our equals before God?”

Sultan Abdulmecid protected the Jews from the persecution of the Christians. He declared that the “Jewish nation will be protected and defended.” The Sultan decreed a Kosher kitchen and a Sabbath leave be instituted in the Imperial Medical School so as to encourage Jews to study to become doctors.

Most importantly, he wanted to unite people under the banner of humanity and the Turkish nation. The Sultan pronounced, “In one word… to nationalize all these fragments of nations who cover the soil of Turkey, by so much impartiality, gentleness, equality, and tolerance that each one finds its honour, its conscience and its security interested to cooperate in maintaining the empire.”

Never had anyone dreamed that such equality and altruism could have been championed by an Ottoman Sultan.

It was whispered in the Bazaar that the unprecedented kindness of the young Sultan was due to his mother and that the bloodshed of the Janissaries had at last dried and faded from the conscience of Topkapi. Bezm-i Alem became one of the most benevolent of all Valides in Ottoman history, aiding the poor and particularly the women of Constantinople.

Esma Sultan retired to her palace outside the Imperial City. On June 29, 1839, Sultan Mahmud II died in Esma Sultan’s house in Camlica, at the age of fifty-four. On July 15, only a month after the Sultan’s death, Kaptan Pasha Ahmed, a former officer in the Imperial Navy, sailed into the port of Alexandria, leading most of the Ottoman navy over to Muhammed Ali of Egypt. Europe sided with the Ottomans and came to their rescue, though parts of the Empire were lost forever.

And the drowning guard? He is a fictional character, not traceable in the Ottomans’ meticulous records of history. But, as the novel would say…

Some say he led a rebellion in Serbia that finally freed the territory from the yoke of Ottoman rule. Still others say he lived out his life in a northern village at the edges of the Empire, where he entertained a mysterious veiled woman on the new moon of certain months.

There were many in the Bazaar who swore they had seen a phantom giant riding the seven hills of Constantinople atop a grey-dappled horse every full moon, and that the dogs howl at his presence.

But then everyone loves a legend.

A
BLUTIONS
: In respect to Islam, the ritual bathing of Muslims in preparation for entering a mosque or before seeing the Sultan. The Koran also requires bathing before and after sexual relations.