The Janissary Tree (42 page)

"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 doorjamb 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 traveled upward 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 toward 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 anymore, 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 around from
ear to ear, to soothe the pressure. He had served in the New Guard for ten
years, graduating from common soldiering to the artillery corps five years ago,
and his only complaint in those ten 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 sabers 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 synchronized 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 coordinates as if his bombardier could not be trusted to
fix the coordinates 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:"t 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 toward
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
toward 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.

Yashim
followed the direction of his finger. Over the walls and trees surrounding the
great mosque. Beyond the minarets. Higher, and farther away.

He
was pointing at the dome of Aya Sofia.

"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 realized how excited he was. His face seemed to
be burning like the city that lay about him, at his feet.

Out
here, on the leads, he had the perfect view. From down below, Aya Sofia 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
skyward 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. Farther west he imagined the water reflecting the flames that
even now were shooting skyward, 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 fueled by two thousand years of trickery and
deceit.

The
flames belonged to the city. All those long centuries they had smoldered, 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 fledglings 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 forward to the gutter and looked down into the square where
his men were standing by their guns. Order and discipline, he thought: good
men, molded these last few 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
toward 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.