“Coffee, very sweet, with cardamom. No cinnamon.” The cafe owner walked over to his stove. “I don’t like cinnamon,” the soup master added.
They discussed the question politely until the coffee arrived. Yashim was inclined to agree with the soup master that cinnamon in bread was an abomination.
“Where do we get these ideas?” The soup master’s eyebrows shot up in perplexity. “For what?”
Yashim shrugged and said nothing.
The soup master put down his cup and leaned forwards.
“You wonder why I am here. Last night the guards did not show up for work. It is the first time. I thought you might be interested.”
Yashim cocked his head. He was wondering why the big man had come. He said: “I’d rather talk about the past. Twenty, twenty-five years ago. The Janissaries kicked up trouble, didn’t they? What did they do, exactly?”
The soup master ran his fingers over his moustache.
“Fires, my friend. We had men in the corps who could lead a fire easy as a gypsy with a bear. I said we—I meant they. I was not involved. But this was how they made their feelings known.”
“Where were the fires, mostly?”
The soup master shrugged. “In the port, in Galata, over here by the Golden Horn. Sometimes it was as if the whole city was smouldering, like underground. They had only to lift a cover somewhere and—whoosh! Everyone felt it. Danger all around.”
Like now, Yashim thought. The whole city knew about the murders. They understood what was happening. The place was tense with expectation. There were three days to go before the sultan proclaimed his Edict.
“Thank you, soup master. Did you notice the direction of the wind today?”
The soup master’s eyes suddenly narrowed.
“Off Marmara. The wind has been set from the west all week.”
[ 107 ]
The seraskier pursed his lips.
“I doubt it can be done. Oh, operationally, yes, perhaps. We could flood the city with the New Guard, a man at every corner, artillery—if we could get it through—in the open spaces. Such as they are.”
He scrambled to his feet and went to stand by the window.
“Look, Yashim effendi. Look at these roofs! What a mess, eh? Hills, valleys, houses, shops, all straggling around little lanes and alleys. How many corners do you think I could find out there? Ten thousand? Fifty thousand? And how many open spaces? Five? Ten? This is not Vienna.”
“No,” Yashim agreed quietly. “But nevertheless—”
The seraskier raised a hand to stop him.
“Don’t think I misunderstand you. And yes, I think something could be done. But the decision would not lie with me. Only the sultan can order troops into the city. Troops under arms, I mean. You think he can take this decision so fast?”
“He did thirteen years ago.”
The seraskier grunted. “Ten years,” he echoed. “Ten years ago the people were united with the sultan’s will. Nobody could deny that the Janissary menace had overwhelmed us all. But today—what do we know? You think Stambouliots will welcome my men with open arms?
“There is another thing I hesitate to point out. What happened ten years ago was not the work of a day. It took months, you could say years, to prepare for victory over the Janissary rabble. We have twenty-four hours. And the sultan is—older. His health is not so good.”
He drinks, you mean, Yashim thought. It was common knowledge. Everyone knew that M. Lebrun, the Belgian wine merchant in Pera, handled far more stock than the foreign community could account for. And what about the discovery only last year of a veritable mountain of long-necked bottles, in the woods close to where the sultan liked to take his family for picnics?
“There will be a Janissary insurrection,” said Yashim flatly. “I think it will take the form of a fire, or many fires, I don’t know. Either sooner or later the sultan will have to order in the Guards, to keep order and deal with the conflagration, and I for one would prefer it was sooner.” He stepped away from the window and turned to face the seraskier.
“If you won’t, I will try to talk to the sultan,” he said.
“You.” It wasn’t a question. Yashim could see the seraskier weighing him up. He stood with his back to the light, his hands clasped behind his back. The silence deepened.
“We will go together, you and I,” the seraskier announced at last. “But you, Yashim effendi, will make it clear to the sultan that this was your suggestion, not mine.”
Yashim stared at him coldly. One day, he thought, he would come across a man in the sultan’s service who was not a trimmer, who would stand up and stand out for his beliefs. But not today.
“I will take responsibility,” he said quietly.
I’m only a eunuch, after all.
[ 108 ]
Their footsteps echoed off the high walls of the seraglio as they walked across the first court. Usually on a Friday the place would have been busy, but a combination of grey skies and the suppressed tension hanging in the air had left the great court all but deserted. Ceremonial guardsmen stood to attention around the perimeter walls, as silent and immobile as the Janissary guards whose stillness had once struck chill into the hearts of foreign envoys. Yashim wondered if the New Guards were not, in their own way, more sinister: like German clockwork dolls rather than real men. At least the Janissaries had possessed their own swaggering panache, as his friend Palewski had pointed out.
His fingers closed on a scrap of paper tucked beneath his belt. Coming across the Hippodrome, he had swerved on an impulse from the bronze serpent and cut across the dirt to the Janissary Tree, knowing what he would find: the same mystic verses that had been puzzling him all week.
They had been pinned to the peeling bark. This was how the Greeks advertised their dead, Yashim thought, with a piece of paper nailed to a post or tree. He had pulled down the paper and studied it again.
Unknowing
And knowing nothing of unknowing,
They sleep.
Wake them.
A fire in the night, Yashim thought. A call to arms. But what did this mean?
Knowing,
And knowing unknowing,
The silent few become one with the Core.
Approach.
He folded the paper and tucked it into his belt.
[ 109 ]
The sultan kept them waiting for an hour, and when he met them it was not in the private apartments, as Yashim had expected, but in the throne room, a room that Yashim had seen only once fifteen years before.
He had not seen the sultan, either, for several years. Mahmut’s beard, which had been jet black, was red with henna, and the keen dark eyes had turned watery, sunk beneath folds of fat. His mouth seemed to have drooped into a pout of permanent disappointment as if, having tasted everything that money could buy in the world, he had found it all to be sour. He waved them in with a chubby hand, larded with rings, but made no effort to rise from the throne.
The room itself was as Yashim remembered it, a jewel box of the coolest blues, tiled from the floor to the apex of the dome in exquisite Iznikware, a frozen dream of a garden that twined and dripped and hung festooned around the walls.
Yashim and the seraskier entered stooping at the waist, and after they had advanced five paces they prostrated themselves on the ground.
“Get up, get up,” snapped the sultan testily. “About time,” he added, pointing at Yashim.
The seraskier frowned. “Your Imperial Majesty,” he began. “A situation has arisen in the city which we believe—Yashim effendi, and myself—to be of the gravest potential consequence to the well-being and security of the people.”