The Janissary Tree (31 page)

Yashim
turned to him with a defeated look. The Patrona Rebellion had been in 1730.

"You
mean this tekke was built by your order? It wasn't originally a Karagozi
foundation at all?"

The
man smiled and shook his head. "No. And so you see, we move in circles. What is
open will be closed."

Five
minutes later, Yashim was back in the street.

Palewski's
map, drawn up by the Scotsman Ingiliz Mustafa, identified the old tekke
correctly--
-for the time it was drawn up.
The Karagozi hadn't built it,
though: it wasn't one of the original four tekkes.

But
the principle had to be right.

Yashim
thought again of the little square under the old Byzantine walls of the city.

He
pictured it in his mind's eye. The mosque. The row of shops. An old cypress
against the weathered stonework of the walls.

The
tekke was there. It
had
to be there.

85

***********

HALF
an hour later, Yashim approached the square up a long, straight alley from the
south.

Straight
ahead, beyond the mouth of the alley, he had a clear view of the splendid
cypress where earlier he'd stood talking with the old men.

From
where he stood, five hundred yards back, he could see what he hadn't been able
to see before. He could see over the top of the tree.

Just
behind its slender tip, in solitary semi ruined splendor, a Byzantine tower
rose from the massive city walls.

The
Kerkoporta. The little gate.

Not
many Stambouliots learned the story of the Conquest of 1453 in any detail. It
was ancient history, almost four hundred years old. It had been the fulfillment
of destiny, and the how, or why, of its successful capture from the defending
Greeks was a matter of little interest or relevance to people living in Turkish
Istanbul in the nineteenth century.

Only
two sorts of people had maintained their interest and told the story to whoever
wanted to listen.

The
Janissaries, with pride.

The
Phanariots, with regret--though whether that regret was perfectly genuine,
Yashim had never quite been able to decide. For the Greek merchant princes of
the Phanar, when all was said and done, had made their fortunes under Ottoman
rule.

Yashim
could remember exactly where he'd been when he first heard, in detail, the
story of the Turkish Conquest. The Mavrocordato mansion, in the upper Phanar
district, was the grandest, gloomiest palace on its street. Locked away behind
high walls, and built in a style of high rococo, it was the headquarters of a
sprawling family operation that extended to the principalities of the Danube
and the godowns of Trabzon, taking in titles civil and ecclesiastical on the
way. The Mavrocordatos had produced over the centuries scholars and emperors,
boyar overlords and admirals of the fleet, rogues, saints, and beautiful
daughters. They were fantastically rich, dazzlingly well connected, and
dangerously well-informed.

There
had been seven of them around a table, and Yashim. Their faces expressed many
different things--humor and bitterness, dread or jealousy, complacency and
contempt: but there had been one lovely face, too, he still saw sometimes in
his dreams, whose glance said more. Only the eyes were the same, blue and
brooding; Yashim had understood then why the Turks feared the blue eye.

The
table had been covered in an Anatolian carpet that must have taken years to
make, so tightly was it knotted. Coffee had been served, and when the heavy
curtains were closed and the servants had withdrawn, George Mavrocordato, the
heavy-jowled patriarch of the clan, had invited Yashim to make his report.

Afterward,
George had slowly crossed to the fireplace, and the rest of them drifted over
to sit with him in total silence that was like a form of speech. Eventually, George's
ancient mother had smoothed the belly of her black silk dress and beckoned
Yashim across.

And
she had told him the story of the Conquest.

86

***********

Now,
stock-still in the alley, he remembered it all.

Above
all he remembered her bitterness when she told him about the Kerkoporta. The
little gate.

The
siege had already lasted ninety days, when young sultan Mehmed ordered a final
assault on the walls. Exhausted and weak, the few thousand Byzantines who
remained to defend their city heard the roll of the kettledrums and saw the
hills beyond the walls move as tens of thousands of Mehmed's troops descended
to the attack. Wave after wave broke on the thinly defended walls, raised a
thousand years before: the Anatolian levies, the Bashi-Bazouks from the hills
of Serbia and Bulgaria, renegades and adventurers from the whole Mediterranean
world. With every assault that they repulsed, the defenders weakened, and still
the attack came on, with Mehmed's police standing at the rear with thongs and
maces to discourage their retreat, the ladders crashing on the walls, the wild
skirling of the Anatolian pipes, the fitful light of flares, and the sudden
thundering crash of the Hungarian's gigantic cannon.

All
the bells of the city were tolling. As the smoke cleared from the breach in the
walls where the invading troops lay dying, as the defenders rushed to
reconstitute the rubble, as the moon struggled clear of a ribbon of black and
flying cloud, Mehmed himself advanced at the head of his crack infantry, the
Janissaries. They advanced, not in a wild battering frenzy like the irregulars
and Turks who had been flung against the walls all through the night, but in
the hour before dawn he led them to the moat.

"They
fought on the walls, hand to hand, for an hour or more," the old lady said. "Believing
the Turks were failing. Even those Janissaries losing their momentum. It--it
wasn't so."

Yashim
had watched her lips working against her toothless gums. Dry-eyed, she
continued: "There was a little gate, you see, at the angle where the great old
walls of Theodosius met the lesser walls behind the Palace of the Caesars. It
had been blocked up, goodness knows how many years before. So little, that
gate. I don't think two men could pass through it abreast, but there--God's will
is infinite in its mystery. It was opened at the start of the siege, for
sallies. A party had just returned from a sortie, and--would you believe it--the
last man back forgot to bar the gate behind him."

It
was the discovery of the little gate rocking on its hinges--a tiny gap in the
whole eight miles of massive wall and inner wall, a momentary lapse of
attention in a story that had run for a thousand years--that turned the course
of the siege. Some fifty Janissaries shoved through and found themselves
between the double walls. But their position was desperately exposed, and they
might still have been driven back or killed by the defenders had one of the
heroes of the defense, a Genoese sea captain, not been seriously wounded by a
close shot at that very moment. His crewmen bore him from the walls; the
Byzantines sensed that he had abandoned them and gave a shout of despair. The
Ottomans made a rush for the inner walls and a giant called Hasan surged over
the stockade at the head of his Janissary company.

In
ten minutes, the Turkish flags were flying from the tower that stood above the
Kerkoporta.

All
this was four hundred years ago.

But
now, rising behind the great cypress in the square, the tower of the Kerkoporta
still stood, red and white and empty against the wintry blue sky.

The
exact spot where two thousand years of Roman history reached their bloody
climax, as the last emperor of Byzantium tore off his imperial insignia and,
sword in hand, vanished into the melee, never to be seen again.

The
exact place where Constantinople, the Red Apple, the navel of the world, was
won by the Janissaries for Islam and the sultan.

In
spite of old Palmuk, there was a fourth tower.

The
fourth tekke.

Shaking
his head at the memories he had summoned, Yashim walked forward into the winter
sunlight.

87

***********

THE
flight of stone steps that led up to the inner parapet of the first wall was
invisible from the alley. To reach it, Yashim groped his way down an unmarked
passage between two wooden houses built against the base of the wall. Reaching
the top, he turned back and followed the parapet walk to the Kerkoporta Tower.

At
parapet level there was a wooden door set in the masonry. It stood ajar, its
hinges rusted, fastened to the jamb with a length of flaking iron chain that
almost crumbled at Yashim's touch. He pushed. The door trembled slightly. He
put his shoulder to the planks and heaved, until the hinges screamed and the
door swung inward into the dark.

The
floor was Uttered with dust, fallen mortar, and dried droppings. Lifting his
sandaled feet with care, Yashim advanced by the slanting sunlight into the
center of the chamber and looked around. The ceiling was lost in the shadows.
The walls showed signs of having been plastered once, but now revealed layers
of Roman brickwork interspersed with courses of stone, while in the farthest
corner of the chamber a stone staircase spiraled up from the floor below and
disappeared upward.

He
crossed to the staircase and peered down. A slight breeze seemed to be coming
up toward him, suggesting that the room below had air and maybe light; it
carried odors of damp masonry and straw. He felt for the step and began to
descend into darkness, his left hand trailing cobwebs from the rough outer wall
of the spiral.

For
several steps he was in total darkness, and when he thought of the sun on the
square, and the tradesmen sitting outside their shops only a few yards away, he
knew that this was as lonely and silent a spot as anywhere in the whole of
Istanbul.

Another
winding turn of the spiral brought a slight change in the quality of the
darkness, and as Yashim went on down, and down, it bled to a gray twilight,
until he stepped off the lowest tread into a vaulted room, supplied by a
shuttered window on either side; only the shutters were cracked and set with
glowing chips of sunlight.

The
walls were dark with greenish damp, but they were still plastered, and peering
close Yashim could make out shapes like the cloudy shapes he had seen under the
whitewash in the Nasrani tekke that morning. He recognized trees, pavilions,
and a river. A long oak table ran down the room, and there were benches pushed
up against the walls.

He
took a step forward and ran a fingertip along the tabletop. It was clean.

Yet
the chamber overhead was a mess of dust and rubbish.

He
faced the window. The chinks of light made it too bright to see, so he raised a
hand to block them out and saw a door. It was locked from the outside.

He
stood with his back to the door and surveyed the room. From here he could see
beyond the table.

At
the far end stood what looked like a wooden chest with a flat lid.

Yashim
crossed the room and stood beside it. The lid was at waist height. He eased his
fingers under the rim and tried it gently.

The
lid lifted smoothly, and he looked inside.

88

***********

STANISLAW
Palewski opened his mouth to groan, as he did every morning when he woke up. But
the groan did not come.

"Ha!"

The
events of the night before had returned to him with unexpected clarity.

He
wriggled his toes and they appeared obediently at the foot of the bed, poking
out from beneath the duvet he had long ago adopted, in the Turkish fashion. His
toes looked very dirty, until he remembered how he had blacked them with a
brush.

He
recalled the execrable champagne that he had been about to punish the previous
evening. Doubtless some sharp French house had unloaded a bushel of the bad
vintage on the unsuspecting Porte, charging for something better and confident
that they would not be exposed. After all, who could complain? Not the Turks,
who weren't supposed to drink the stuff. And the guests were hardly likely to
make a fuss.

All
the same, Palewski thought, he didn't get champagne every day, and he could
have drunk rather more if that stiff-necked Russian hadn't been so clumsy.

He
grinned.

Tossing
his drink over Prince Derentsov had been, he thought, a gifted maneuver. But
swabbing it down afterward, to ensure the maximum discomfort, was little short
of inspiration.

What
did it matter if afterward he got a dressing down from the sultan himself? The
Russian had almost certainly fared worse--it was he who laid down the challenge,
after all. He broke the sultan's injunction. Palewski had merely responded as a
man of honor must.

He
and the sultan had had an interesting discussion, too. Surprisingly frank and
friendly, and all because he had spilled his drink and wore a dastardly but
inordinately well-contrived apology for the Sarmatian finery of his distant
predecessors.