The Janissary Tree (2 page)

Yashim
had many things--innate charm, a gift for languages, and the ability to open
those gray eyes suddenly wide. Both men and women had found themselves
strangely hypnotized by his voice, before they had even noticed who was
speaking. But he lacked balls.

Not
in the vulgar sense: Yashim was reasonably brave.

But
he was that creature rare even in nineteenth-century Istanbul.

Yashim
was a eunuch.

2

**************

In
the Abode of Felicity, in the deepest, most forbidden district of Top-kapi
Palace, the sultan lay back on his pillows and picked fretfully at the satin
coverlet, trying to imagine what could amuse him in the coming hours. A song,
he thought, let it be a song. One of those sweet, rollicking Circassian
melodies: the sadder the song, the brighter the melody.

He
had wondered if he could just pretend to be asleep. Why not? Ruler of the Black
Sea and the White, ruler of Rumelia and Mingrelia, lord of Anatolia and Ionia,
Romania and Macedonia, Protector of the Holy Cities, steely rider through the
realms of bliss, sultan and padishah, he had to sleep sometimes, did he not? Especially
if he was ever to reclaim his sovereignty over Greece.

But
he knew what would happen if he tried to pretend. He'd done it before, dashing
all the hopes and ambitions of the lovely
gozde,
the girl selected to
share his bed that night. It would mean listening to her sighs, followed by
timid little scratches against his thighs or his chest, and finally tears; the
whole harem would throw him reproachful glances for a month.

Soon
she'd be here. He'd better have a plan. Riding the rooster was probably safest:
he was quite fat, frankly, and he didn't want anyone hurt. If only he could be
lying in bed with Hadice instead, who was almost as cuddly as himself, having
his feet rubbed!

His
feet! On a reflex, he pulled his knees up slightly under the coverlet. Ancestral
tradition was all very well, but Sultan Mahmut II had no intention of letting
any fragrant Circassian girl lift the covers and start crawling up toward him
from the foot of his bed.

He
heard a slight commotion in the corridor outside. A sense of duty brought him
up on one elbow, arranging his features into a smile of welcome. He could hear
whispers. Last-minute nerves, perhaps? The swooning slave suddenly resistant? Well,
it wasn't likely. She'd got this far: almost to the moment she'd been trained
toward, the event she had given her life to attend. A jealous squabble was more
likely:
those are my pearls!

The
door opened. But it wasn't a bangled slave girl with swaying hip and full
breasts who entered. It was an old man with rouged cheeks and a big waist who
bowed and loped into the room on bare feet. Catching sight of his master, he
sank to his knees and began to crawl until he reached the edge of the bed,
where he prostrated himself on the ground. He lay there, mute and quivering,
like a big jelly.

"Well?"
Sultan Mahmut frowned.

Out
of the enormous body there came at length a voice, piping and high. "Your
magnifithenth, my lord, my mathter," the slave finally began to lisp. The
sultan shifted uncomfortably.

"It
hath pleathed God to catht a mantle of death over the body of one daughter of
felithity whothe dreams were about to be fulfilled by your magnifithenth, my
mathter."

The
sultan frowned.

"She
died?" His tone was incredulous. Also he was taken aback: was he so very
fearsome?

"Thire,
I do not know what to thay. But God made another the inthtwument of her
detheathe."

The
eunuch paused, groping for the proper form of words. It was awfully hard.

"My
mathter," he said at last. "She hath been stwangled." The sultan flopped back
onto the pillows. There, he said to himself, he was right. Not nerves at all. Just
jealousy. Everything was normal. "Send for Yashim," the sultan said wearily. "I
want to sleep."

3

**************

ASLEEP
or awake, the sultan was the Commander of the Faithful, chief of the Ottoman
armed forces, but it was many years since he had unfurled the standard of the
Prophet and put himself at the head of his soldiery, securing his throne by a
single act of nerve. His navy was commanded by the kapudan pasha, and his
troops controlled by the seraskier. The seraskier did not rise for Yashim, but
merely motioned him with dabbling fingers to a corner of the divan. Yashim
slipped off his shoes and sat down cross-legged, his cloak settling around him
like a lily pad. He inclined his head and murmured the polite greeting.

Clean-shaven,
in the new fashion, with tired brown eyes set in a face the color of old linen,
the seraskier lay awkwardly on one hip, in uniform, as though he had received a
wound. His steel-gray hair was cut close to his skull, and the red fez perched
on the back of his head emphasized the weight of his jaws. Yashim thought he
would be passable in a turban, but Frankish practice had instead dictated a
buttoned tunic, with blue trousers piped in red and a shoal of braid and
epaulettes: modern uniform for modern war. In the same spirit he had also been
issued a solid walnut table and eight stiff-looking upholstered chairs, which
stood in the middle of the room and were lit by candelabra suspended from the
coffered ceiling.

He
sat up and crossed his trousered legs so that the seams bulged. "Perhaps you
would rather we moved to a table," he suggested irritably.

"As
you wish."

But
the seraskier evidently preferred the indignity of sitting on the divan in his
trousers to the unpleasant exposure of the central table. Like Yashim himself,
he found sitting on a chair with his back to the room faintly disquieting. So
instead he drew a long sigh, folding and unfolding his stubby fingers.

"I
was told you were in the Crimea."

Yashim
blinked. "I found a ship. There was nothing to detain me."

The
seraskier cocked an eyebrow. "You failed there, then?"

Yashim
leaned forward. "We failed there many years ago, efendi. There is little that
can be done." He held the seraskier's gaze. "That little, I did. I worked fast.
Then I came back."

There
was nothing else to be said. The Tartar khans of the Crimea no longer ruled the
southern steppe, like little brothers to the Ottoman state. Yashim had been
shaken to see Russian Cossacks riding through Crimean villages, bearing guns. Disarmed,
defeated, the Tartars drank, sitting about the doors of their huts and staring
listlessly at the Cossacks while their women worked in the fields. The khan
himself fretted in exile, tormented by a dream of lost gold. He had sent others
to recover it, before he heard about Yashim--Yashim the guardian, the
lala.
In spite of Yashim's efforts, the khan's gold remained a dream. Perhaps there
was none.

The
seraskier grunted. "The Tartars were good fighters," he said, "in their day. But
horsemen without discipline have no place on the modern battlefield. Today we
need disciplined infantry, with muskets and bayonets. Artillery. You saw
Russians?"

"I
saw Russians, efendi. Cossacks."

"That's
the kind we're up against. The reason we need men like the men of the New
Guard."

The
seraskier stood up. He was a bear of a man, well over six feet tall. He stood
with his back to Yashim, staring at a row of books, while Yashim glanced
involuntarily at the curtain through which he had entered. The groom who had
ushered him in was nowhere to be seen. By all the laws of hospitality, the
seraskier should have offered the preliminary pipe and coffee; Yashim wondered
if the rudeness was deliberate. A great man like the seraskier had attendants
to bring him refreshment, as well as a pipe-bearer to select his tobacco, keep
the equipment in good, clean working order, accompany his master on outings
with the pipe in a cloth and the tobacco pouch in his shirt, and ensure the
proper lighting and draw of the pipe. Rich men who vied with one another to
present their guests with the finest leaf and the most elegant pipes--amber for
the mouthpiece, Persian cherry for the stem--would no more think of functioning
without a pipe-bearer than an English milord could dispense with the services
of a valet. But the room was empty.

"Less
than two weeks from today, the sultan is to review the troops. Marches, drills,
gunnery displays. The sultan will not be the only one watching. It will be--"
the seraskier stopped, and his head snapped up. Yashim wondered what he had
been about to say. That the review would be the most important moment of his
career, perhaps. "We are a young troop, as you know. The New Guard has only
been in existence for ten years. Like a young colt, we startle easily. We have
not had, Ali, all the care and training we might have wished for."

"Nor
always quite the success that was promised."

Yashim
saw the seraskier stiffen. In their newfangled European jackets and trousers,
the New Guard had been put through their paces by a succession of foreign
instructors,
ferenghi
from Europe who taught them drilling, marching,
presenting arms. What could you say? In spite of it all the Egyptians--the
Egyptians!--had dealt them humiliating reverses in Palestine and Syria, and the
Russians were closer to Istanbul than at any time in living memory. Perhaps
their victories were to have been expected, for they were formidable opponents
with up-to-date equipment and modern armies; yet there remained, too, the
debacle in Greece. No more than peasants in pantaloons, led by quarrelsome
windbags, even the Greeks had proved to be more than a match for the New Guard.

All
this left the New Guard with a single sanguinary triumph. It was a victory
achieved not on the battlefield but right here, on the streets of Istanbul; not
against foreign enemies but against their own military predecessors, the
dangerously overweening Janissary Corps. The Ottoman Empire's crack troops in
the sixteenth century, the Janissaries had long since degenerated--or evolved,
if you liked--into an armed mafia, terrorizing sultans, swaggering through the
streets of Istanbul, rioting, fire-raising, thieving, and extorting with
impunity.

The
New Guard had finally settled the account. Ten years ago, on the night of June
16,1826, New Guard gunners had pounded the Janissaries to pieces in their barracks,
bringing four centuries of terror and triumph to a well-deserved end.

"The
review will be a success," the seraskier growled. "People will see the backbone
of this empire, unbreakable, unshakable." He swung around, sawing the air with
the edge of his hand. "Accurate fire. Precise drill. Obedience. Our enemies, as
well as our friends, will draw their own conclusions. Do you understand?"

Yashim
shrugged slightly. The seraskier tilted his chin and snorted through his nose. "But
we have a problem," he said. Yashim continued to gaze at him: it was a long
time since he had been woken in the dead of night and summoned to the palace. Or
to the barracks. He glanced out the window: it was still dark, the sky cold and
overcast. Everything begins in darkness. Well, it was his job to shed light.

"And
what, exactly, does your problem consist of?"

"Yashim
efendi. They call you the
lala,
do they not? Yashim lala, the
guardian."

Yashim
inclined his head.
Lala
was an honorific, a title of respect given to
certain trusted eunuchs who attended on rich and powerful families, chaperoning
their women, watching over their children, supervising the household. An
ordinary
lala
was something between a butler and a housekeeper, a
nanny and the head of security: a guardian. Yashim felt the title suited him.

"But
as far as I understand it," the seraskier said slowly, "you are without
attachment. Yes, you have links to the palace. Also to the streets. So tonight
I invite you into our family, the family of the New Guard. For ten days, at most."

"The
family, you mean, of which you are the head?"

"In
a manner of speaking. But do not think I am setting myself up as the father of
this family. I would like you to think of me, rather, as a kind of, of--" The
seraskier looked uneasy: the word did not seem to come easily to him. Distaste
for eunuchs, Yashim knew, was as ingrained among Ottoman men as their suspicion
of tables and chairs. "Think of me--as an older brother. I protect you. You
confide in me." He paused, wiped his forehead. "Do you, Ali, have any family
yourself?"

Yashim
was used to this: disgust, tempered with curiosity. He made a motion with his
hand, ambiguous: let the man wonder; it was none of his business.

"The
New Guard must earn the confidence of the people, and of the sultan, too," the
seraskier continued. "That is the purpose of the review. But something has
happened which might wreck the process."

It
was Yashim's turn to be curious, and he felt it like a ripple up the back of
his neck.

"This
morning," the seraskier explained, "I was informed that four of our officers
had failed to report for morning drill." He stopped, frowned. "You must
understand that the New Guard are not like any other army the empire has seen. Discipline.
Hard work, fair pay, and obedience to a superior officer. We turn up for drill.
I know what you are thinking, but these officers were particularly fine young
gentlemen. I would say that they were the flower of our corps, as well as being
our best gunnery officers. They spoke French," he added, as if that concluded
it. Perhaps it did.