“Well?” Sultan Mahmut frowned.
Out of the enormous body there came at length a voice, piping and high.
“Your Magnifishensh, my lord, my mashter,” the slave finally began to lisp. The sultan shifted uncomfortably.
“It has pleased God to catht a mantle of death over the body of one daughter of felithity whothe dreams were about to be fulfilled by Your Magnificenth, my master.”
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 master,” he said at last. “She has 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, and 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 colour of old linen, the seraskier lay awkwardly on one hip, in uniform, as though he had received a wound. His steel-grey 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 Prankish 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 with 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 forwards. “We failed there many years ago, Effendi. 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, Effendi. 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, drill, 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, ah, 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, fer-enghi 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. Once the Ottoman Empire’s crack troops, the Janissaries had degenerated—or evolved, if you liked—into an armed mafia, terrorising sultans, swaggering through the streets of Istanbul, rioting, fire-raising, thieving and extorting with impunity. Outgunned and outdrilled by the armies of the west, stubbornly they had clung to the traditions of their forefathers, contemptuous of innovation, despising the common soldiers of the enemy and rejecting every lesson the battlefield could teach, for fear of their grip loosening. For decades they had held the empire to ransom.
The New Guard had finally settled the account. Ten years ago that was, on the night of 16 June i8z6: the Auspicious Event, as people were careful to refer to it. Right here, in Istanbul, 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, unshakeable.” He swung round, 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?”