“Your old friends,” he suggested.
“No, no, they had no hold over me, not what you might think. They didn’t blame me, either. But they remembered me. Our lives went separate ways. But they remembered.”
He picked up a pastry with a clumsy sweep of his arm and stuffed it into his mouth. Yashim watched him deliberately chew it down. His eyes were sparkling.
“The fifteenth of June was the worst night of my life. I heard the cauldrons—we all did, didn’t we? Eighteen years the sultan had waited. Eighteen years for a boy to become a man, and all that time with one resolve, to destroy the force which had destroyed Selim.”
Perhaps, Yashim thought. But Mahmut’s motives were more complex than mere vengeance for his uncle’s death. He wanted to rid himself of the men who had almost casually brought him to the throne, as welclass="underline" to expunge a debt, as well as avenge a death. The Janissaries had crudely expected gratitude, and took carte blanche. Yashim could remember the cartoon that was stuck up on the palace gate one night, showing the sultan as a dog led by a Janissary. “You see how we use our dogs,” the notice ran. “While they are useful and let themselves be led, we treat them well; but when they stop being of service, we kick them out into the streets.”
“The people of the city were scared. Boom boom! Boom boom! It was a frightening sound, wasn’t it? Night falling, and not a sound in the streets as we listened, all of us. I went up onto my roof, treading like a cat. Oh, yes, there was a tradition all right. They said the voice of the Janissaries was the voice of the people. The men believed it. The cauldrons were beating for the empire, as they’d beaten for centuries. Only the sound of the cauldrons drumming, and the barking of the pye-dogs in the streets.
“Look, I stood on the roof and I heard the sound and I wept for those fools. I wept for a sound. I knew I would never hear it again, not if I lived for a thousand years.”
He wiped his hands over his face.
“Later, after the killing and the demolition, some of them came to me asking for a quiet job. One of them had been living for days in a foxhole when they torched the Belgrade woods to flush them out. They had to avoid their families and relatives, for their sakes. They were lost. They were hunted. But we had broken bread together. I gave them money and told them to slip away, get out of Istanbul. Nobody would be interested in them any more, not after a few weeks, a few months.
“And slowly some of them started coming back. Looking for quiet jobs, out of sight—stokers, watchmen, tanners. I knew a few. There must have been thousands, I suppose, unknown to me.”
“Thousands?”
“I knew a handful, so I gave them the work. Night duties. Discreet.” He closed his eyes and shook his head slowly. “I can’t understand it. Ten years, and all good, quiet men. Grateful for the work.”
“So what would they want a cauldron for, do you suppose?”
The soup master opened his eyes and fixed them on Yashim.
“That’s what I don’t understand. It was only a pretend cauldron, anyway. You can’t do it with a cauldron made of black tin. It would only be make-believe.”
Yashim thought of the dead officer, coiled in the cauldron’s base.
“It was always pretending, wasn’t it?” Yashim asked. “That’s what you said. Tripe soup made of beans and bacon.”
The soup master looked at him in surprise, and folded his hands.
[ 19 ]
You must get Yashim back!” The Valide Sultan crooked her finger and wagged it at her son. “We may all be murdered in our beds.” Sultan Mahmut II, Lord of the Horizons, Master of the Black Sea and the White, put up his hands and rolled his eyes. It was scarcely conceivable, he thought, that three hundred able-bodied women—and in this sum he included his mother, for sure—could be actually murdered, one by one, in the very sanctum of imperial power.
All the same he allowed himself to play with the idea. He would keep the delightful Fatima safely by his side at all times and by the end, through a simple process of elimination, they would know who the killer was. Then he and Fatima would spring out among the throttled beauties and despatch her. He would announce that he was too shaken by the experience to take on any more wives; it would be unfair on them, he was far too old. He would marry Fatima, and she would rub his feet.
“Valide,” he said politely. “You know as well as I do that these things happen. There is probably a very good explanation.”
He wanted to point out that it would almost certainly be a very trivial explanation, but he sensed that his mother would feel slighted by the insinuation. This was her realm, shared with the Kislar Agha, the chief black eunuch, and everything which happened in it had to be serious.
“Mahmut,” the valide said sharply. “I can think of a very good explanation. The murderess wants you.”
“Me?” The sultan frowned.
“Not in bed, you silly fool. She wants to kill you.”
“Aha. It was dark, and she mistook some ambergrised houri for her sultan and throttled her before she realised her mistake.”
“Of course not.”
“So what was that girl, then? Strangling practice?”
The Valide Sultan cocked her head.
“Maybe,” she admitted. “I suppose it might take practice. I don’t suppose many of the girls have done a lot of strangling before they come.” She patted the cushion beside her, and Mahmut sat down.
“I was more worried that she might simply be hurrying the moment,” the valide continued. “She has her place in the order. Sooner or later she will be alone with you. She wants it sooner. Then she can kill you.”
“So she knocks off the nice girl and moves up one on the list? I see.”
“You make it sound ridiculous, but I have been here a lot longer than you. I know just how ridiculous things can turn out to be extremely serious. Trust me. Trust a mother’s intuition.”
“I trust you, of course. But what I don’t see is why the murderess is in such a rush. And by killing the girl she’s slowed the thing down, anyway. After this, I shan’t have to see any of them for days. My nerves, mother.”
“It makes the thing more sure. That unfortunate girl might have infatuated you. You might have kept after her for weeks on end. She might have, I don’t know, rubbed your feet the way you like.”
She gave him an arch look. Mahmut grinned ruefully: the valide knew everyone’s secrets.
“And there’s the Edict, isn’t there? The great announcement. If you die, there will be no Edict. Don’t tell me someone doesn’t want to murder you over that!”
“To get me out of the way in time, you mean?”
“Exactly. I think you should send for Yashim right away.”
“I have. He’s working on it.”
“Nonsense. He’s not working on it at all. I haven’t seen him here all day.”
[ 20 ]
Yashim had, in fact, found time to visit the harem that day; but he had gone in quietly, alerting no one, simply to see where the body had been found, and where the girl had lived.
Her room, which she had shared with three other girls, had iron bedsteads and several rows of pegs on which the girls hung their clothes and the bags which held the scented soaps they were fond of, a few shawls and slippers, some well-laundered strips of linen, and such bangles and jewels as they possessed. As cariyeler, harem maids, her room mates had not yet been advanced to the rank of gozde: but they were hoping.
Two girls had spread an old sheet across their bed, and were busy depilating themselves with a sticky green ointment they took from a plain brass bowl that stood on a small octagonal bedside table. One of them, a redhead with green eyes and pale skin, was carefully anointing herself with a spatula when Yashim came to the door and bowed. She chucked her chin in a casual greeting.