The Janissary Tree (9 page)

"Thousands?"

"I
knew a handful, so I gave them the work. Night duties. Discreet." He closed his
eyes and slowly shook his head. "I can't understand it. Ten years, and all
good, quiet men. Grateful for the work."

"So
what would they want a cauldron for, do you suppose?"

The
soup master opened his eyes and fixed them on Yashim.

"That's
what I don't understand. It was only a pretend cauldron, anyway. You can't do
it with a cauldron made of black tin. It would only be make-believe."

Yashim
thought of the dead officer, coiled in the cauldron's base.

"It
was always pretending, wasn't it?" Yashim asked. "That's what you said. Tripe
soup made of beans and bacon."

The
soup master looked at him in surprise and folded his hands.

19

****************

"You
must get Yashim back!" The valide sultan crooked her finger and wagged it at
her son. "We may all be murdered in our beds."

Sultan
Mahmut II, Lord of the Horizons, Master of the Black Sea and the White, put up
his hands and rolled his eyes. It was scarcely conceivable, he thought, that
three hundred able-bodied women--and in this sum he included his mother, for
sure--could be actually murdered, one by one, in the very sanctum of imperial
power.

All
the same, he allowed himself to play with the idea. He would keep the
delightful Hadice safely by his side at all times, and by the end, through a
simple process of elimination, they would know who the killer was. Then he and
Hadice would spring out among the throttled beauties and dispatch her. He would
announce that he was too shaken by the experience to take on any more
concubines; it would be unfair to them, he was far too old. He would marry
Hadice, and she would rub his feet.

"Valide,"
he said politely. "You know as well as I do that these things happen. There is
probably a very good explanation."

He
wanted to point out that it would almost certainly be a very trivial
explanation, but he sensed that his mother would feel slighted by the
insinuation. This was her realm, shared with the kislar agha, the chief black
eunuch, and everything that happened in it had to be serious.

"Mahmut,"
the valide said sharply, "I can think of a very good explanation. The murderess
wants you."

"Me?"
The sultan frowned.

"Not
in bed, you silly fool. She wants to kill you."

"Aha.
It was dark, and she mistook some ambergrised houri for her sultan and
throttled her before she realized her mistake."

"Of
course not."

"So
what was that girl, then? Strangling practice?"

The
valide sultan cocked her head. "Maybe," she admitted. "I suppose it might take
practice. I don't suppose many of the girls have done a lot of strangling
before they come."

She
patted the cushion beside her, and Mahmut sat down.

"I
was more worried that she might simply be hurrying the moment," the valide
continued. "She has her place in the order. Sooner or later she will be alone
with you. She wants it sooner. Then she can kill you."

"So
she knocks off the nice girl and moves up one on the list? I see."

"You
make it sound ridiculous, but I have been here a lot longer than you and I know
just how ridiculous things can turn out to be extremely serious. Trust me.
Trust a mother's intuition."

"I
trust you, of course. But what I don't see is why the murderess is in such a
rush. And by killing the girl she's slowed the thing down, anyway. After this,
I shan't have to see any of them for days. My nerves, Mother."

"It
makes the thing more sure. That unfortunate girl might have infatuated you. You
might have kept after her for weeks on end. She might have, I don't know,
rubbed your feet the way you like."

Mahmut
grinned ruefully: the valide knew everyone's secrets.

"And
there's the edict, isn't there? The great announcement. If you die, there will
be no edict. Don't tell me someone doesn't want to murder you over that!"

"To
get me out of the way in time, you mean?"

"Exactly.
I think you should send for Yashim right away."

"I
have. He's working on it."

"Nonsense.
He's not working on it at all. I haven't seen him here all day."

20

****************

YASHIM
had, in fact, found time to visit the harem that day. On his return from the
restaurant, he had gone in quietly, alerting no one, simply to see where the
body had been found and where the girl had lived.

Her
room, which she had shared with three other girls, had iron bedsteads and
several rows of pegs on which the girls hung their clothes and the bags that
held the scented soaps they were fond of, a few shawls and slippers, some
well-laundered strips of linen, and such bangles and jewels as they possessed. As
cariyeler,
harem maids, her roommates had not yet been advanced to the
rank of
gozde:
but they were hoping.

Two
girls had spread an old sheet across their bed and were busy depilating
themselves with a sticky yellow paste made of herbs, perfumed ash, and
quicklime that they took from a plain brass bowl on a small octagonal bedside
table. One of them, a redhead with green eyes and pale skin, was carefully
anointing herself with a spatula when Yashim came to the door and bowed. She
chucked her chin in a casual greeting.

"The
gozde's
bed?" Yashim inquired.

The
girl on her knees gestured with the spatula.

The
other girl, spreadeagled, raised her head and squinted down her body.

"They
ought to take her stuff out, poor thing," she said. "It's not very nice for
us."

"I'm
sorry," Yashim said. "I just want to see what there is." He ran his hands over
her clothes, then pulled two bags off the pegs and emptied their contents onto
the bed. "You must have been friends."

The
girl who was kneeling got off the bed and came across for a better look. She
had her elbow out, to keep the ointment on her armpit in the air, and with one
hand she tugged her black hair back into a ponytail. Her skin was olive, and
her Ups were dark like old wine, the same color as the nipples of her breasts,
rising in firm curves.

Yashim
glanced back and then stirred the belongings strewn across the empty bed.

"She
was my size," the girl said, reaching forward to pick up a bundle of
transparent gauze. "We all knew that."

The
girl on the bed giggled.

"She
was!" The girl shook the thing in her hand and then gathered it to her chest,
working her free arm so that it lay across one breast, the translucent silk
ribbons dangling against her tummy. There was something so innocent and so
obscene about the gesture, that Yashim blushed.

The
girl on the bed saved him from speaking. "Put it back, Nilu. It's too creepy. Have
you,
lala,
come to take her things away?"

Nilu
let the bustier flutter back onto the bed and turned to her friend.

Yashim
carefully surveyed the
gozde's
belongings.

"What
was she like?" he asked.

The
girl called Nilu climbed back onto her friend's bed; Yashim heard the mattress
creak. There was a silence.

"She
was--all right."

"Was
she a friend?"

"She
was nice. She had friends."

"Enemies?"
Yashim turned around. The two girls were sitting side by side, staring at him.

"Ow!"
The girl suddenly put a hand between her legs. "It's stinging!"

She
jumped off the bed, her pale breasts swinging, one hand clamped between her
slender legs.

"Come
on, Nilu. I've got to wash."

Nilu
reached for a towel on a peg.

"She
had friends," she said. She scampered to the doorway. "Lots of friends," she
added, over her shoulder.

21

****************

"WELL,
hello, precious."

The
speaker was a rawboned woman of about forty in a glossy black wig, a sequined
bustier with padded breasts, a long diaphanous skirt, and a pair of large
beaded slippers. She was also wearing half a pound of makeup. It made her look
older, Yashim realized with a slight pang.

But
it was what--eighteen years? They were both of them older than he had been when
he first came to the city in the retinue of the great Phanariot merchant-prince
George Mavrocordato. Mavrocordato had been quick to see where Yashims talent
lay, setting him to work at the ledgers for the sake of his cultivated hand,
sending him down to the port to pick up useful information, asking him to con
over the manifests and identify new articles of trade. Yashim had learned a
great deal, and with his gift for languages--a gift greater, if possible, even
than his employer's, who spoke Ottoman Turkish, Greek ecclesiastical and
demotic, Romanian, Armenian, and French, but Russian badly, and Georgian not at
all--he had made himself indispensable to the Mavrocordato clan. He'd discovered
a talent for being invisible, a knack of holding himself quiet and saying
little, so that people tended to overlook his presence.

But
while he was grateful for the long hours that kept his mind sharp, still the
old torment, all the worse for being fresh, had flourished in the heavy
atmosphere of trade and politics, a secret agony among secrets: to be a eunuch
was, for Yashim at that time, the grammar of a language he could not
understand. And so he had felt himself isolated in the most cosmopolitan
society in Europe.

He
had met Preen at a party that Mavrocordato threw for a pasha he wanted to
impress, hiring dancers for the evening. Yashim had been sent, afterward, to
pay them off, and he had found himself talking to Preen.

Of
all the traditions that bound Istanbul together, the long history of the
kdfek
dancers was probably the least celebrated and possibly the oldest. Some said
that they were descended--in a spiritual sense--from Alexander's dancing boys. The
foundation of Constantinople would have occurred almost a thousand years after
the
kdfek
tradition had migrated from its homelands in northern India
and Afghanistan to the frontiers of the Roman Empire. The
kdfek
were
creatures of the city, and the rise of a city on the banks of the Bosphorus
would have sucked them in like dust to a raging fire. What was certain was that
the Greeks had entertained these dancers, selecting them from the ranks of boys
who had been castrated before puberty and subjecting them to rigorous training
in the stylized arts and mysteries of the
kdfek
dance. They danced for
both men and women; under the Ottomans, it was usually for men. They performed
in troupes of five or six, accompanied by a musician who plucked at a zither
while they whirled and stamped and curved their wrists. Each troupe was
responsible for engaging new "girls" and training them. Many of them, of
course, slept with their clients, but they were adamantly not prostitutes, whom
they regarded as utterly wanton--and unskilled. "Any girl can open her legs,"
Preen had once reminded him. "The
kdfek
are dancers."

But
it was undoubtedly true that the
kdfek
were not too picky about their
friends. They stood on the very lowest rung of Ottoman society, above beggars
but with the jugglers, actors, conjurers, and others who made up
thedespised--and well-patronized--classof professionalentertainers.

They
had their snobberies--who doesn't?--but they lived in the world and knew the way
it turned.

Yashim
had at first been amused by Preen and her "girlfriends." He liked the open way
they spoke, the roguishness and candor, and in Preen he came to admire the
chirpy cynicism that concealed a heart plunged in romantic dreams. Compared to
the heavy secrecy and dark glances of the Phanariot aristocracy, Preen's world
was rough but full of laughter and surprises. And when at the outbreak of the rebellion
on the Peloponnese ominous shadows had gathered over the Greeks in Istanbul,
Preen had reacted to his proposals without a thought, either of her own danger
or of the prejudice flaring in the streets. For two days, she had sheltered
Mavrocordato's mother and his sisters, while Yashim arranged the ruse that
would carry them to the island of Aegina, and safety.

Sometimes
he wondered what she saw in him.

"Come
on in." She twirled from the door and returned to her face in the mirror. "Can't
stop, sweetie. The other girls'll be here in a moment."

"A
wedding?" Yashim knew the form. Many times since that year of drama he'd helped
Preen prepare for the weddings, the circumcision celebrations, the birthdays
for which people required the presence of the
kocek
dancers. And
Preen, in return, perhaps without quite knowing it, had prepared him for his
days: those new, flat days when agonies of lust and anger gnawed at him from
the inside, and all the better days that were to come.