They ordered him to be a shadow. Live like a rat. Work like a miner. Kill like a snake.
Patience. Obedience. Time, they said, is an illusion: the hours pass like seconds, seconds can seem like lifetimes.
Inch forward under the enemies’ lines. Burrow into his defences like a rat. Listen for the enemy sappers, the countermines, the creaking of the props. Absorb the dark like a second skin. Kill in silence.
And if he was captured—it happened, that far forward of the lines—say nothing. Give nothing.
They didn’t talk much anyway. That suited him, too, he’d never been a talker. The sappers were the Quiet Men.
He hadn’t needed friends when he had the corps. He belonged. He shared faith. And the faith carried him through, didn’t it? Through the cramped tunnel. Beyond the cramped muscle. Over fear and panic into the timeless and immobile centre of all things.
Then came the Betrayal. The shelling of the barracks. Dust, falling masonry, splinters of stone. A wall that hung in the air before it fell. He remembered that moment: an entire wall, thirty feet high, blown from its foundations and sailing, hanging in the air.
He remembered how it flexed and buckled like the flanks of galloping horse. As if the air itself was thick as water. It was a moment that seemed like an eternity.
It gave him ample time, then, to seek the hollow and roll up into it.
Like a man entombed. But not dead. Breathing through an aperture in the rubble. Working the rubble gradually from head to toe like a worm coming up for the dew.
The grating overhead was now invisible. The sapper could see it, though, by moving his head just a fraction of an inch. By using the light that no one else could see.
He raised his chin. This was the time.
Patience was all that mattered.
Obedience was all that mattered.
People would die. People had to die.
Only death could sanctify the empire’s rebirth.
Only sacrifice could cleanse and protect the holy shrines.
The four pillars of the Karagozi.
The assassin felt in his pouch. He touched the ground with the palm of his hand.
And then, like a cat, he began to move.
[ 52 ]
Yashim leaned forward and fixed his eyes on page thirty-four of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. But it was no use. The book had been open on the same page for half an hour.
Whose law would it be? Would it be like the Prankish laws, which allowed the Greeks to have a country but denied the same convenience to the Poles? And would it work as well in the highlands of Bulgaria as in the deserts of Tripolitana?
The necessary leap? Perhaps. A single law for everybody, regardless of their faith, their speech, their parentage. Why not? He doubted that such a thing was sacrilegious, but then…plenty of others would think it was.
As he resolved these questions in his mind, Yashim won—dered who else, precisely, knew about the Edict. The sultan and his viziers, of course. High-ranking dignitaries like the seraskier himself, no doubt. The religious leaders—the Mufti, the Rabbi, the Patriarch? Probably. But the rank and file -priests and imams, say? No. And not the common people of the city. For them it was to be a surprise. As it had been for him.
He snapped the book shut, and closed his eyes, leaning back on the divan.
In the past few hours he had thought this through a dozen times. There was going to be trouble, he could be sure of that.
But there was something else, wasn’t there?
Something he knew was there, like a face in the crowd. Something he’d missed.
[ 53 ]
The man sat suddenly upright.
The assassin thought: he smells me. It made things more interesting. He’d been trained to infiltrate like an odour, not as a man. Now the odour clung to him.
The man sniffed.
Click.
Very slowly the man got to his feet. A knife in his hand.
Now where had that come from?
The assassin smiled. He felt for his pouch. His fingers closed on something hard.
The man with the knife stood crouching, craning his neck.
“Who’s that? What do you want?”
The assassin didn’t move.
A breeze caught the tattered curtain at the window and it flapped. The man with the knife wheeled round, then back again. He peered into the dark.
He craned his neck. Very slowly he turned his head.
He was trying to hear.
The assassin waited. Watching.
The man’s head moved through the midway point of its turn.
The assassin flicked his wrist and the cord snaked out. He plucked it back with a fierce grunt and the man with the knife was jerked off balance, scrabbling with both hands at his neck.
The assassin gave the cord another savage tug.
The man started sawing at the air, searching to cut the cord. The assassin stepped out of the shadows and pushed him down. He caught the knife-wrist and wedged his thumb between the tendons: the knife clattered to the floor as the hand spasmed open.
The assassin was astride him now. He put a hand to his belt and slid out a wooden spoon.
The man on the floor was choking.
The assassin slackened the cord for an instant. His victim gave a shuddering gasp, but it was a false respite. The assassin slipped the wooden spoon beneath the cord and began to twist it round.
[ 54 ]
A fat man, eager for sleep, felt himself rolled off the bed and hit the ground. He opened his eyes and saw a pair of women’s feet.
“All right, petal? Here’s your kit. Shove it on, love, I’m done. Go on.”
The fat man scrambled blearily into his robes. Get out, he thought. Five on the table, he’d be gone before she knew.
The woman watched him scurry through the door.
She was done for the night. Done with outside business, anyhow. No one would come now.
Upstairs would know the final customer had left. She was left with one more trick to turn, the worst.
Carrying her lamp she climbed the stairs. At the top she paused, hearing nothing.
Very slowly she pushed the door ajar. The room smelt terrible.
Silently she put in her head. She stretched out her hand, carrying the little lamp, and the shadows started to flicker round the room.
Months ago, the woman had lost her faith in God. She had begged, she had prayed, she had pleaded with Him night after night, and every dawn had brought the same answer. So she cursed him. Nothing changed. In the end, she had forgotten Him.
But what she saw now was like a revelation.
“Thank God,” she said.
[ 55 ]
Yashim went down to the water stairs at first light, still clutching the note which the kadi had written shortly after the morning prayer. By the time he was settled in the bottom of the boat, the note was limp with the exhalations of Istanbul’s morning damp, between fog and drizzle, but he didn’t need to read it again.
While the rower dragged busily at his heavy sculls and sent the caique skimming towards Seraglio Point, Yashim drew up his knees on the horsehair cushion and automatically let his weight settle on his left arm, to trim the fragile boat. A wooden spoon, the kadi had written: having seen the bag of bones and wooden spoons tipped out over his floor only yesterday, the coincidence had inspired him to inform Yashim.
Twenty minutes later, the rower turned the caique and backed it neatly against the Yedikule stairs in a flurry of backstrokes and shouts.
As soon as Yashim saw the little man sprawled face down in the mud with a wooden spoon bound tightly to the back of his neck he knew that this was not the fourth cadet. The corpse’s hands were by his ears, his knees slightly bent, and there was a curve in his back which made him look, Yashim thought, as if he were simply peering down into a hole in the mud.