He put a towel and a bar of soap in the empty water basin and went downstairs to the stand-pipe in the tiny back yard, where he unwound his turban and stripped to the waist, shivering in the cold drizzle. With a gasp he ducked his head beneath the spout. When he had washed he towelled himself vigorously, ignoring his smarting skin, and filled the water jug. Upstairs he dried himself more carefully and put on a clean shirt.
Only then did he curl up on the divan and open the valide’s copy of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. He could hear the stock bubbling gently on the stove; once the lid jumped and a jet of fragrant steam scented the room with a short hiss. He read the same sentence over a dozen times, and closed his eyes.
When he opened them again he was not sure if he had been asleep; there was someone knocking on the door. With a guilty start he scrambled to his feet and flung back the door.
“Stanislaw!”
But it wasn’t Stanislaw.
The man was younger. He was kicking off his shoes, and in his hand he carried a silken bow string, looped around his fist.
[ 113 ]
The seraskier walked briskly across the first court of the palace, and stepped out through the Imperial Gate, the Bab-i-Humayun, into the open space which separated the palace from the great church, now a mosque, of Aya Sofia. After the unnatural stillness of the palace he was struck by the returning noises of a great city: the rumble of iron-hooped cart-wheels on the cobbles, dogs worrying and growling at scraps, the crack of a whip and the shouts of mule-drivers and costermongers.
Two mounted dragoons spurred their horses forwards and brought up his own grey. The seraskier swung up gracefully into the saddle, settled his cloak, and turned the horse’s head in the direction of the barracks. The dragoons fell in behind him.
As they passed beneath the portico of the mosque, the seraskier glanced upwards. The pinnacle of Justinian’s great dome, second in size only to the basilica of St Peter’s in Rome, stood high overhead: the highest spot in all Istanbul, as the seraskier well knew. As they jogged along, he scanned the lie of the land for the hundredth time, mentally setting up his artillery batteries, disposing his troops.
By the time they reached the barracks, he had made decisions. To scatter his forces through the city would be futile, he reckoned; it might even increase the danger to his men. Better to choose two or three positions, hold them securely, and make whatever forays were necessary to achieve their ends. Aya Sofia was one assembly point; the Sultan Ahmet Mosque to the southwest would be another. He would have liked to put men into the stables of the old palace of the Grand Vizier, just outside the seraglio walls, but he doubted that the permission would be forthcoming. There was a hill further west which provided a clear trajectory towards the palace.
It was the palace, essentially, he had to think about.
Having regained his apartments, he summoned a dozen senior officers to a briefing.
He followed the briefing with a short pep talk. Everything, he said, depended on how they and their men conducted themselves over the next forty-eight hours. Obedience was the watchword. He had every confidence that together they could meet the challenge that had presented itself.
That was all.
[ 114 ]
Yashim made a grab for the door. The man on the threshold sprang forwards and for several seconds they fought for purchase, separated only by the thin door which lay between them. But Yashim had been caught off balance, and it was he who yielded first: he leaped away from the door and his assailant came barrelling into the room, almost stumbled, but whipped round fast to face Yashim at a sagging crouch.
A wrestler, Yashim thought. The man was completely shaved. His neck sloped into his big shoulders, which bulged from the arm-holes of a sleeveless leather jerkin. The leather was black and glistened as though it had been oiled. He was short-legged, Yashim noticed, his bare feet planted a yard apart on the rug, knees bent, slim-waisted. There was no sign of a weapon beyond the string in his right fist.
A man who could crack me apart without even trying, Yashim thought. He took a backward step, sliding his bare feet on the polished boards.
The man gave a grunt and lunged forwards, lowering his head like a ram, coming at Yashim with surprising speed. Yashim flung back his arm as he leaped backwards, and swept his hand across the kitchen block. His fingers felt the knife, but they only knocked it: it must have spun, for when he tried to close on the hilt his fingers met in the air, and as the wrestler’s huge shoulder crashed against his midriff he was rammed back hard against the block with a force that made his head whiplash. He gasped for breath and felt the wrestler’s arms fly upwards to pinion his own.
Yashim knew that if the wrestler got him in his grip he was finished. He lunged to the right, throwing all the weight of his upper body against the wrestler’s rising arm, flinging his own arms out at the same time to grab at the handle of the stock pot. With a wrench he snatched it up and swung it round over the man’s shoulder, but the lid was stuck and he had no room to do more than swing the pot and clamp it against the wrestler’s back before his arm was caught in his grip.
A band of leather was sewn round the collar of the man’s jerkin, and as the pot slid up the lid must have snagged against it. The man flipped back as the boiling stock sloshed over his neck, and let Yashim go.
The surprise on the assassin’s face when he slammed his taloned hand into Yashim’s groin and squeezed down hard was palpable. Certainly more palpable than Yashim’s groin.
The assassin jerked back his arm as if he’d been stung. Yashim slid his right hand up the assassin’s left arm as hard as he could and then brought his left down hard, gripping his wrist as he pivoted the man’s arm against his own hand. There was a crack and the arm went limp. The assassin clutched at it with his right, and in a moment Yashim had taken his right wrist out away from his body and with a heave sent the assassin curving in an arc which brought him round, doubled up, and his right arm in a tight half-nelson. The assassin had neither screamed, nor spoken a word.
Five minutes later, and the man had still not spoken. He had barely grunted. Yashim was at a loss.
And then Yashim saw why the man had failed to speak. He had no tongue.
Yashim wondered if the mute could write. “Can you write?” he hissed in the man’s ear. The look was blank. A deaf-mute? Long ago, in the days of Suleyman the Magnificent, it had been decreed that only deaf-mutes should attend the person of the sultan. It was a way of ensuring that nothing was overheard; that nothing they saw could be communicated to the outside world. They signed at one another instead: ixarette, the secret language of the Ottoman court, was a complex sign language which anyone, hearing or deaf, speaking or dumb, was expected to master in the palace service.
The palace service.
A deaf-mute.
Frantically, Yashim began to sign.
[ 115 ]
At the other end of the city, Preen the köçek dancer lay back on the divan, staring at the dark window.
A jet black wig of real hair, bolstered with horse-hair plucked from the tail, was draped over a stand. Her pots of make-up, her brushes and tweezers, stood unused on the dressing table.
Preen tried to wriggle her frozen shoulder. The bandages the horse-doctor had applied creaked. When it came to treating breaks and bruises, the girls always turned to the horse doctor: he had more practice and experience in a month than ordinary sawbones saw in a lifetime, as Mina said, because the Turks looked after their horses even better than themselves. He had probed Preen’s twisted shoulder, and diagnosed a sprain.