The Janissary Tree
by Jason Goodwin
(2006)
It is 1836. Europe is modernizing, and the Ottoman Empire must follow suit. But just before the Sultan announces sweeping changes, a wave of murders threatens the fragile balance of power in his court. Who is behind them? Only one intelligence agent can be trusted to find out: Yashim Lastname, a man both brilliant and near-invisible in this world. You see, Yashim is a eunuch.
He leads us into the palace's luxurious seraglios and Istanbul's teeming streets, and leans on the wisdom of a dyspeptic Polish ambassador, a transsexual dancer, and a Creole-born queen mother. And he introduces us to the Janissaries. For 400 years, they were the empire's elite soldiers, but they grew too powerful, and ten years ago, the Sultan had them crushed. Are the Janissaries staging a brutal comeback?
The Janissary Tree is the first in a series featuring the most enchanting detective since Precious Ramotswe of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. Splendidly paced and illuminating, it belongs beside Caleb Carr's The Alienist and the historical thrillers of Arturo P�rez-Reverte.
[ 1 ]
Yashim flicked at a speck of dust on his cuff.
“One other thing, Marquise,” he murmured.
She gazed at him levelly.
“The papers.”
The Marquise de Merteuil gave a little laugh.
“Flute! Monsieur Yashim, depravity is not a word we recognise in the Academic.” Her fan played; from behind it she almost hissed: “It is a condition of mind.”
Yashim was already beginning to sense that this dream was falling apart.
The Marquise had fished out a paper from her decolletage and was tapping it on the table like a little hammer. He took a closer look. It was a little hammer.
Tap tap tap.
He opened his eyes and stared around. The Chateau de Merteuil dissolved in the candle light. Shadows leered from under the book-lined shelves, and from the corners of the room—a room and a half, you might say, where Yashim lived alone in a tenement in Istanbul. The leatherbound edition of Les Liaisons Dangereuses had slipped onto his lap.
Tap tap tap.
“Evet, evet,” he grumbled. “I’m coming.” He slipped a cloak around his shoulders and his feet into a pair of yellow slippers, and shuffled to the door. “Who is it?”
“Page boy.”
Hardly a boy, Yashim considered, as he let the spindly old man into the darkened room. The single candle guttered in the sudden draught. It threw their shadows around the walls, boxing with one another before the page’s shadow stabbed Yashim’s with a flickering dagger.
Yashim took the paper scroll and glanced at the seal, feeling the floor still moving beneath his feet, the lurching candlelight taking his mind back to a swaying lamp in a tiny cabin far out at sea, and the anxious hours spent scanning a dark horizon, peering through the drizzle for lights and the sight of land.
He broke the seal and tried to concentrate on the ornate script.
He sighed and laid the paper aside. There was a lamp. Blue flames trickled slowly round the charred cloth as he lit it with the candle. Yashim replaced the glass and trimmed the wick until the fitful light turned yellow and firm. Gradually the lamplight filled the room.
He’d been lucky to find a ship at all. The Black Sea was treacherous, especially in the winter, and the captain was a barrel-chested Greek with one white eye and the air of a pirate, but even at the worst moments of the voyage, when the wind screamed in the rigging, waves pounded on the foredeck and Yashim had tossed and vomited in his narrow bunk, he had told himself that anything was better than seeing out the winter in that shattered palace in the Crimea, surrounded by the ghosts of fearless riders, eaten away by the cold and the gloom.
He picked up the scroll the page had given him, and smoothed it out.
Greetings, etcetera. At the bottom he read the signature of the seraskier, city commander of the New Guard, the imperial Ottoman army. Felicitations, etcetera. He scanned upwards. From practice he could fillet a letter like this in seconds. There it was, wedged into the politesse: an immediate summons.
“Well?”
The old man stood to attention. “I have orders to return with you to barracks immediately.”
He glanced uncertainly at Yashim’s cloak. Yashim smiled, picked up a length of cloth, and wound it around his head. “I’m dressed,” he said. “Let us go.”
Yashim knew that it hardly mattered what he wore. He was a tall, well-built man in his late thirties, with a thick mop of black curls; a few white hairs, no beard, but a curly black moustache. He had the high cheekbones of the Turks, and the slanting grey eyes of a people who had lived on the great Eurasian steppe for thousands of years. In European trousers, perhaps, he would be noticeable; but in a brown cloak—no. Nobody noticed him very much. That was his special talent, if it was a talent at all. More likely, as the Marquise had been saying, it was a condition of mind. A condition of the body.
Yashim had many things—innate charm, a gift for languages, and the ability to open those grey eyes suddenly wide. Both men and women had found themselves strangely hypnotised 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 Topkapi 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 Fatima 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 towards 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 towards, 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.