The Janissary Tree (8 page)
Read The Janissary Tree Online
Authors: Jason Goodwin
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #Historical, #Mystery & Detective
"Efendi,
either we must try to find out what happened, or there is no point in my
proceeding with this case."
"Very
well. I will write you a chit."
"A
chit. Will that be enough, do you think? To talk, perhaps. In the murky place:
will a chit hold out?"
The
seraskier looked straight into Yashim's gray eyes. "I'll support you," he said
wearily.
****************
YASHIM
arrived early at the little restaurant beneath Galata Point and chose a quiet
alcove that overlooked the channel of the Bosphorus. The Bosphorus had made
Istanbul what it was: the junction of Europe and Asia, the pathway from the
Black Sea into the Mediterranean, the great entrepot of world trade from
ancient times to the present day. From where he sat he could watch the waterway
he loved so much, the narrow sheet of gunmetal that reflected back the shape of
the city it had built.
The
water was as ever thick with shipping. A mountain of white sail rose above the
deck of an Ottoman frigate tacking up the straits. A shoal of fishing smacks,
broad beamed and single masted, held out under an easterly wind for the Sea of
Marmara. A customs boat swept past on its long red oars like a scurrying water
beetle. There were ferries, and skiffs, and overladen barges; lateen-rigged
cutters from the Black Sea coast, houseboats moored by the crowded entrance to
the Golden Horn. Across the jostling waterway, Yashim could just make out
Scutari on the opposite shore, the beginning of Asia.
The
Greeks had called Scutari Chalcedon, the city of the blind. In founding the
city, the colonists had ignored the perfect natural setting across the water,
where centuries later Constantine was to turn the small town of Byzantium into
a great imperial city that bore his name. For a thousand years, Constantinople
was the capital of the Roman Empire in the east, until that empire had shrunk to
a sliver of land around the city. Ever since the Conquest in 1453, the city had
been the capital of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. It was still officially called
Constantinople, though most ordinary Turks referred to it as Istanbul. It
remained the biggest city in the world.
Fifteen
hundred years of grandeur. Fifteen hundred years of power. Fifteen centuries of
corruption, coups, and compromises. A city of mosques, churches, synagogues; of
markets and emporia; of tradesmen, soldiers, beggars. The city to beat all
cities, overcrowded and greedy.
Perhaps,
Yashim sometimes reflected, the Chalcedonians hadn't been so blind, after all.
He
had half expected the Albanian to stay away, but when he looked up there he
was, massive and grim, hitching his cloak. Yashim gestured to the divan, and he
sat down, pulling a string of amber prayer beads from his shirt. He counted
about a dozen with a massive thumb, looking straight at Yashim.
"Ali
Pasha of Janina," the soup master said. "The name means something to you?"
Ali
Pasha was the warlord who by guile and cruelty had built up a semi-independent
state in the mountains of Albania and northern Greece. It was fourteen years
since Yashim had seen his head displayed on a pillar at the gates of the
Seraglio.
"The
Lion," Mustafa rumbled. "We called him that. I soldiered in his army--it was my
country. But Ali Pasha was foxy, too. He gave us peace. I wanted war. In 1806 I
went to the Danube. That is where I joined the corps.
"The
Janissaries?"
The
soup master nodded. "As a cook. I was already a cook, even then. To fight--it's
not so much for a man. For an Albanian, it's nothing. Ask a Greek. But
cooking?" He grunted with satisfaction.
Yashim
clasped his hands and blew into them.
"I
am a man of tradition," the soup master continued, still slowly sliding the
prayer beads under his thumb. "For me, the Janissaries were the tradition. This
empire--they built it, didn't they? And it is hard for an outsider to
understand. The Janissary regiment was like a family."
"Every
regiment says that."
The
soup master shot him a scornful look. "They say that because they are afraid
and must fight together. That is nothing. There were men in the corps I loved
because they could handle a falcon, or make poetry, better than anyone in the
world before or since. Believe me. There was a brave fighter who trembled like
a leaf before each battle but fought for ten. We looked after each other, and
we loved each other--yes--they loved me because I could make them food anywhere,
the same way we loved the cobbler who would see us shod even when he had
nothing but bark and pine needles to work with. We were more than family. We
had a world within a world. We had our own food, our own justice, our own
manner of religion. Yes, yes, our own manner. There are various ways to serve
God and Muhammad. To join a mosque is one way, the way of the majority. But we
Janissaries were mostly Karagozi."
"You're
saying that to be a Janissary was to follow a form of Sufism."
"Of
course. That and all the other rituals of being a Janissary. The traditions."
The
traditions. In 1806 the sultan, Selim, had begun to train up a parallel army to
the Janissaries. In that respect it was a forerunner of Mahmut's New Guard. But
Selim, unlike Mahmut, had had little time to organize: the result was that when
the Janissaries rebelled against their sultan, they crushed him and destroyed
his re-formed army. The rebel Janissaries had been led by Bayraktar Mustafa
Pasha, commander on the Danube.
"So
you were there," Yashim suggested, "when Selim was forced off the throne, in
favor of his brother Mustafa."
"Sultan
Mustafa!" The Albanian ground out the title with scorn, and spat. "Girded with
Osman's sword, maybe, but mad like a dog. After two years the people were
thinking how to get Selim back. Bayraktar had changed his mind as well, like
all the rest of us. We were in Istanbul, at the old barracks, and for a night
we prayed for guidance, talking with the Karagozi dervishes."
"They
told you what to do?"
"We
stormed the Topkapi Palace the next day. Bayraktar ran through the gates,
crying for Selim."
"At
which point," Yashim recalled, "Mustafa ordered Selim to be strangled. Along
with his little cousin--just in case."
The
soup master bowed his head. "So it was. Sultan Mustafa wanted to be the last of
the House of Osman. Had he been the last, I think he would have survived. Whatever
else we might have been, we Janissaries were loyal to the house. But God willed
otherwise. Even though Selim was killed, the little cousin escaped alive."
Thanks
to his quick-thinking mother, Yashim reflected. At the crucial moment, with
Mustafa's men scouring the palace with their bowstrings, the crafty Frenchwoman
he now knew as the valide sultan had hidden her boy beneath a pile of dirty
laundry. Mahmut became sultan by the grace of a heap of old linen.
"You
were there?"
"I
was in the palace when they brought the boy to Bayraktar Pasha. I saw the look
on Sultan Mustafa's face: if he had seemed mad before, then--" The soup master
shrugged. "The chief mufti had no choice but to issue a fatwa deposing him. And
Mahmut became sultan.
"For
myself, I was tired of this kind of soldiering. Rebellion, fighting in the
palace, the murder of Selim." He gestured with his arm: "Back and forth, here,
there. I had enough."
The
soup master took a deep breath and blew the air through his cheeks.
"I
left the corps at the first opportunity. I was a good cook, I had friends in
Istanbul. In five years I was working for myself."
"Did
you give up your pay book, too?" Plenty of men had been on the payroll, drawing
a Janissary's wage and enjoying all the privileges of the corps without the
slightest intention of turning up for war. It was a well-known scam.
Mustafa
hesitated. "Not immediately," he admitted. "But within a few years I no longer
needed help, and I gave it in."
Yashim
doubted it but said nothing. The soup master twirled a loop of his beads in the
air and caught it again.
"You
can check the records. I ceased to be a Janissary in May 1815. It took courage.
You wouldn't understand."
Yashim
did his best. "They didn't want to let you go? Or you wanted the money?"
The
Albanian shot him a look of contempt. "Listen. I go where I want. Today is an
exception. I didn't need the money, I was doing well." Yashim blinked,
believing him. "I found it hard to break with them."
Yashim
leaned forward. "How did you do it?"
The
guild master spread his huge hands and looked at them. "I learned to trust
myself. I saw with my own eyes what had happened to the Janissaries, what they
had allowed to happen to the real tradition, the one that mattered. They no
longer served the empire."
He
looked up. "You think that's obvious? I was only waiting--many, like me, only
waiting;--for the tradition of service to come back to us. In the end, I decided
I could wait no longer. I saw that we were doomed to repeat our mistakes. You
think the Janissaries were lazy, cowardly, arrogant. The mutinies. The
interference."
The
soup master stroked his beard and narrowed his eyes at Yashim, who sat
transfixed.
"I
tell you, the men we hung upon the Janissary Tree were all too easily taken. When
we got angry, then someone fed us names, and we shouted: Kill him! Kill
so-and-so! They threw them to us. We thought it would go better after that.
"You
put coriander in the soup. Well, some people like it, some don't, some don't
even notice. Forget the people who don't like it. You add some beans. Some
carrots. The same thing. Some like it, some don't. But more people don't care
much either way. By the end, you can take out the tripe. Call it soup. Nobody
will know any better. Only a few."
He
tugged at his mustache.
"The
Janissaries were like that. Like a recipe that has been quietly changed. In the
city I made tripe and onion soup from tripe and onion. But in the barracks, so
to speak, they wanted me to believe in a kind of tripe and onion soup made of
beans and bacon. In the end, I had to leave."
Yashim
could admire the older man's guts. So much in this city was founded on
pretense: it took a certain kind of temper for a man to step aside. But then,
the Albanian hadn't stepped away entirely. Not if what Yashim suspected about
the guards at the guild was true.
"Your
old friends," he suggested.
"No,
no, they had no hold over me, not what you might think. They didn't blame me,
either. But they remembered me. Our lives went separate ways. But they
remembered."
He
picked up a pastry with a clumsy sweep of his arm and stuffed it into his
mouth. Yashim watched him deliberately chew it. His eyes were sparkling.
"The
fifteenth of June was the worst night of my life. I heard the cauldrons--we all
did, didn't we? Eighteen years the sultan had waited. Eighteen years for the
boy to become a man, and all that time with one resolve, to destroy the force
that had destroyed Selim."
Perhaps,
Yashim thought. But Mahmut's motives were more complex than mere vengeance for
his uncle's death. He wanted to rid himself of the men who had almost casually
brought him to the throne, as well: to expunge a debt, as well as avenge a
death. The Janissaries had crudely expected gratitude and took carte blanche. Yashim
could remember the cartoon that was stuck up on the palace gate one night,
showing the sultan as a dog led by a Janissary. "You see how we use our dogs,"
the notice ran. "While they are useful and let themselves be led, we treat them
well; but when they stop being of service, we kick them out into the streets."
"The
people of the city were scared. Boom boom! Boom boom! It was a frightening
sound, wasn't it? Night falling, and not a sound in the streets as we listened,
all of us. I went up onto my roof, treading like a cat. Oh, yes, there was a
tradition all right. They said the voice of the Janissaries was the voice of
the people. The men believed it. The cauldrons were beating for the empire, as
they'd beaten for centuries. Only the sound of the cauldrons drumming and the
barking of the pye-dogs in the streets.
"Look,
I stood on the roof and I heard the sound and I wept for those fools. I wept
for a sound. I knew I would never hear it again, not if I lived for a thousand
years."
He
wiped his hands over his face.
"Later,
after the killing and demolition, some of them came to me asking for a quiet
job. One of them had been living for days in a foxhole when they torched the
Belgrade woods to flush them out. They had to avoid their families and relatives,
for their sakes. They were lost. They were hunted. But we had broken bread
together. I gave them money and told them to slip away, get out of Istanbul. Nobody
would be interested in them anymore, not after a few weeks, a few months.
"And
slowly, some of them started coming back. Looking for quiet jobs, out of
sight--stokers, watchmen, tanners. I knew a few. There must have been thousands,
I suppose, unknown to me."
