How did one man ever become so powerful? Omar Mehmet Shay-Tarrazin was the last thin trickle in a long dark bloodline winding down through the centuries from the offspring of Suleyman the Magnificent himself. His family had ruled in every shy corner of the East, and though depleted still planned to continue its rule far into the future, until fate intervened.
Shay-Tarrazin's wife, Melek (the woman chosen by Allah, his grandfather, and his father in that order) had been raised solely for the purpose of betrothal to the Sultan, and was so finely bred that she could walk no more than five paces without requiring assistance. But one hot morning she died in childbirth, and her sickly son only survived the ordeal until sunset. Now there was no-one pure enough to continue the line without polluting it, so Shay-Tarrazin made do with his plump young concubines and his ivory stallions, and watched his power slowly settle until he relied entirely on the news of couriers for his dealings with the outside world, and hardly ever left the grounds of his palace. His wealth and status allowed him a life beyond all restriction, and yet it was filled with so many rules, laws, arrangements and appointments that he became a prisoner of his own making.
It happened that the Sultan was newly fascinated by the concept of time. Like many royal rulers he was seized by fads, and longed to make sense of a world he mostly witnessed through the tortoiseshell latticework of the throne-room. Having grown bored with the wonders of astrology, biology and alchemy (and having cremated the practitioners of all three sciences whom he had invited to the palace to instruct him) he turned to more ethereal concepts, and discovered time. He liked the idea very much. It was tantalisingly intangible, unlike biology, which had required the dissection of living animals, or alchemy, which had blackened the walls of his temples and filled the orange-orchards with the stench of smouldering sulphur.
Shay-Tarrazin knew that time would only exist in its measuring, so he started collecting clocks of every size and description, from a microscopic Russian gold chimer to a twenty-two-foot-high gilded Ormolu state-clock that took fifteen men to carry it. There were Austrian clocks with dancing figures that popped from doorways and fought duels with tigers. There was a German clock featuring an enamel tableau in which an executioner beheaded his kneeling victim on the quarter-hour. There was a set of Siberian winter-solstice clocks that fitted inside each other like wooden dolls. There was a Castilian clock that predicted the weather with miniature globes of coloured water, and a Brazilian timepiece that measured the passing moments by the fall of tiny purple gems. There was a Belgian celestial clock depicting the movement of the heavens, topped with a gold-chased orrery. There were Portuguese ceramic clocks, Chinese Coptic balsa clocks, booming British grandfather clocks, imperial Ottoman clocks inlaid with mother-of-pearl and decorated with panels of Kutahya tiles, clocks in polychrome, walnut and stained glass – it made the head spin to even think about them.
There were nine hundred and ninety-nine of them.
And they all required winding.
So enamoured did the Sultan become with the concept of time that he came to rely upon it completely. Before the idea had been explained to him, the daily business of his kingdom had been ordered by the position of the sun, so that no work was ever undertaken after dark, and tasks were completed eventually, with no sense of haste or urgency. Life was allowed to run its natural, unhurried course. But once Shay-Tarrazin had installed time in his palace, he and his courtiers, their retinue, the concubines, consorts, servants, cooks and porters were all capable of being late. And as being late upset the running of the kingdom, it became an offence punishable by beheading or cremation. The Sultan was not a wise man, or a fair man, or even a good man, but his empire ran well and provided commercial intercourse with the world, advancing business and society, and making the globe spin a little faster on its axis.
So it became absolutely imperative to keep the clocks wound.
For this purpose, the Sultan sent five dozen of his guards to search the city for a reliable man, someone with a sense of routine and responsibility. Sabin Darr was such a man. He was twenty-two years old, had a wife and three small children each as handsome as he, and earned a living as a carver and furniture repairer of no small ingenuity. He dwelt in a small orange house in the green foothills of the river basin, and was taken by surprise when the king's men hammered at his front door with the butts of their daggers.
While his family cowered behind their modesty curtains, Sabin Darr stood before the guards and answered each of their questions as truthfully as he could. It quickly became clear that he was the man for the job, but as he proved reluctant to join them, three of the king's men slipped between the curtains and ran his wife and children through with their sabres. Hearing their cries above the slither of steel, Sabin ran back to find his sandals splashed with the blood of his family. Half-blinded by grief and fury he watched as the guards dropped torches of burning pitch on to the roof of his house, and bade him mount the horse they had set aside for the first part of his journey to the clockhouse of Shay-Tarrazin. For Sabin Darr, time stopped on that terrible day.
The Sultan himself came out to greet the slender caique that docked before the steps of his palace. He explained why he needed Sabin Darr. The job had to be performed by someone with no social ties. It was demanding and all-consuming. Every single clock and watch had to be wound each day, and there were so many that it would require every hour of daylight to perform the task. Those that were slow or fast would have to be recalibrated until they were as accurate as the most immaculate timekeeper in the palace. Some clocks required ladders to reach their winding mechanisms. Some had winders that were so microscopically tiny and fine that special tweezers had to be used to turn them. Some clocks had processions of mechanical figures with joints that seized up in the warm dry air, preventing their steady movement. They had to be cleaned and lubricated. Some clocks had keys that were hidden away in elaborate decorations, and required the solving of a puzzle to free them. Some could only be wound at certain hours of the day, because their winding holes were in their faces, and the hands passed over them, preventing access. Yet others were not wound by conventional keys at all, but by the balancing of vials of oil and water, by filling with sand, by the displacement of marble pebbles, by the resetting of tumblers, by the stacking of ball-bearings, and by turning upside down.
Sabin was set to work in the great hall of the clockhouse, which had been built in a raised piazza beyond the main courtyard of the palace, above the shining blue Bosphorus, and he learned how to keep time. His task was arduous. There were only just enough minutes in the day to wind every single clock before the chimes of six rang out. Each night as the sun settled inside banks of heated crimson dust, he raced to refresh the final mechanism and only just succeeded. His winding schedule was so exact that the spring of each timepiece was fully unwound upon reaching it.