The Snake Stone (13 page)

I
T
was late in the evening when Yashim arrived at the gate of Topkapi Palace. Two halberdiers scrambled to their feet as he entered, and one of them placed his foot carelessly over a pair of dice on the stones.

“Quiet times,” Yashim murmured.

The halberdiers grinned foolishly. Yashim went past them and into the first, more public court of the palace. He crossed the cobbles in the shade of the planes, remembering when the great court had been full of people—soldiers respectfully dismounting, the standing grooms, the pashas coming to and fro, surrounded by their retinues, cooks bawling out orders, flunkeys darting everywhere on errands, cartloads of provisions rolling slowly toward the imperial kitchens, turbaned kadis gravely discussing the judgments of the day, oblivious to the noise, harem carriages rattling off toward some sheltered picnic spot by the Sweet Waters, Black Eunuchs trotting home with their shopping in a string bag, a swaggering group of Albanian irregulars, trying not to look awed, with pistols in their sashes, little boys staring up at the collection of severed heads displayed on the column, and around them, between them, the ordinary people of Istanbul, whose conversation was an underlying murmur like the sea.

The court was silent; only the gardeners squatted at their quiet tasks, beneath the swaying branches of the planes.

Where, Yashim wondered, had it all gone? Not to Besiktas, certainly, the sultan’s new Frankish palace on the Bosphorus, where sentries in kepis stood to attention outside little boxes, close to the railings. At Besiktas, carriages turned in smartly across the raked gravel, wheels crackling on the stones, and people in stamboulines got out, went up the steps, and disappeared.

Across the First Court stood the Gate of Felicity, whose conical towers could be seen from the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn. He wondered if it was still the Gate of Felicity, now that it no longer opened into the dwelling place of God’s Shadow on Earth. Could one still count oneself happy to pass through that gate, yet no longer able to share the same ground as the sultan himself?

As soon as he had phrased the question in his mind, Yashim knew it wasn’t the ground that he was thinking of, but the shadow of protection under which he had always operated. The sultan trusted him. A word would save him—but the word would not come from a sick man, far away in his palace on the Bosphorus. The French ambassador’s report would pass into other hands. Yashim’s involvement with the archaeologist would seem, at best, foolish. The slur would mark him like a stain on his character, a faint question mark over his good judgment.

He knocked, and waited. After a while the wicket gate opened, and an old halberdier of the tresses, a man he knew, welcomed him in without ceremony.

“The valide, it will be, efendi. She’s expecting you?”

Yashim nodded. Only a few years ago—it seemed a lifetime—he would have been challenged instantly and whisked through with the certainty that a hundred pairs of eyes were watching him enviously from behind! The old man fished up a bunch of keys and led Yashim across the Second Court, fiddling with them in his hand.

“I have ’em all now, efendi,” he said cheerfully. He payed them out as they walked: the key to the kitchens, the key to the stable block. “This one,” he said, holding a huge iron key up to the light, “you’d never guess.”

“The grain bins,” Yashim said.

“That’s right, efendi. That’s the one. The grain bins. Heavier than the grain now, I expect. This little one?”

“I’ve no idea,” Yashim admitted.

The old man chuckled. “I’ll show you something, efendi. Just you watch.”

They stopped at a small door set into the farther wall of the Second Court. To their left stood the divan room, with its vast jutting eaves, where the great pashas had discussed the business of an empire that stretched from the gates of Vienna to the Pyramids. Kingdoms had been broken in that hall; armies raised for glory, and for defeat; the fate of whole races settled; men had been honored or destroyed by a word, a sign, a stroke of the pen. Now it was empty.

The halberdier fitted the key into a tiny lock. With a single twist the door swung open.

“Surprised, efendi? That’s right, that little key.”

There was no need to say any more.

Yashim went inside. The entrance to the harem was like a street in miniature, open to the sky for the next few yards, with the windows of the Black Eunuchs’ apartments projecting over the paving stones. Only it was a street of perfectly polished marble, with fountains that flowed from niches in the walls; and it was utterly silent.

The door closed behind him. He heard the
slap-slap
of slippers on the flags, and an old black man in a beautifully embroidered kaftan and a vast white turban came around a corner, fanning himself with a fan made of reeds.

“Hello, Hyacinth.”

“Oy, oy, Yashim. It’s getting late.”

“I’m sorry.” Only two or three years earlier, this would have been the most important time in the life of the harem: the hour of gossip and intimacy over food, when thousands of succulent dishes would stream from the palace kitchens to the sultan’s apartments; the hour, above all, of the
gözde
’s final preparations, bedecking, perfuming, calming the nerves of the girl fortunate enough to have been selected to share the sultan’s bed that night. The whole harem would have fluttered and twittered like a forest of little birds.

The stillness was audible now.

“Ask the valide, Hyacinth, if she will receive me.”

“
C’
EST
bizarre
, Yashim. As he gets older, my son grows more and more infatuated by the European style—yet I, who was born to it, find that I prefer the comforts of oriental tradition. He hardly comes here anymore, only to see me. His new palace delights him. I find it looks like a manufactory.”

Yashim inclined his head. The Queen Mother was propped up on her sofa against a cloud of cushions, with the light as ever artfully arranged behind her head, a blind drawn across the little side window, and a shawl across her legs. She walked rarely now, if at all; yet her figure was still graceful and the shadows on her face revealed the beauty she had once been and still, in a sense, remained. Beneath a kaftan of silk velvet she wore a fine chiffon robe whose collar and sleeves were embellished with the most delicate Transylvanian lace; the lace, Yashim recalled, was made by nuns. The swirl of her turban was fixed in place by a diamond and emerald aigrette. Her hands were white and delicate. Did the valide not know that her son was dying at Besiktas?

“I am very old, Yashim, as you well know. Topkapi has been my home—some would say my prison—for sixty years. It, too, is old. Well, the world has moved on from us both. By now, I like to think, we understand each other. We share memories. I intend to die here, Yashim, fully dressed. At the sultan’s palace at Besiktas I’d be popped into a nightgown and tucked up in a French bed, and that would be an end of it.”

Yashim nodded. She was perfectly right. So many years had passed since a young woman, the captive of Algerian corsairs, had been delivered here, to the harem quarters of the aged sultan Abdul Hamit, that it was easy to forget how well the valide knew the European style. Aimée Dubucq du Riviery, a planter’s daughter on the French island of Martinique: she was a Frenchwoman. The same inscrutable law of destiny that had taken her to the sultan’s seraglio, where she had finally emerged as valide, had led her childhood friend, little Rose, to the throne of France, as Josephine, Napoleon’s own empress.

A nightgown. A tight French bed. Yashim knew how the Europeans lived, with their mania for divisions. They parceled up their homes the way they segregated their actions. The Franks had special rooms for sleeping in, with fussy contraptions created for performing the act itself, and all day long these bedrooms sat vacant and desolate, consoled by the dust rising in the sunlight—unless they belonged to an invalid. In which case the invalid herself shared the loneliness and desolation, far away from the household activity.

The Franks had dining rooms for dining in, and sitting rooms for sitting in, and drawing rooms for withdrawing into—as if their whole lives were not a series of withdrawals anyway, tiptoeing from one room and one function to the next, changing and dressing all over again, forever on the run from engagement with real life. Whereas in an Ottoman home—even here, in the harem—everyone was allowed to float on the currents of life as they sped by. People divided their lives between what was public and what was reserved for the family, between selamlik, the men’s quarters, and haremlik: in the poorest homes, they were divided only by a curtain. If you were hungry, food was brought in. If you wished to sleep, you unfolded your legs, reclined, and twitched a shawl over yourself. If you were moody, someone was sure to drop in to cheer you up; ill, and someone noticed; tired, and nobody minded if you dozed.

The valide took the book and raised an eyebrow.

“I may seem terribly old to you, Yashim, but I do hope you aren’t wondering whether I knew the author.”

Yashim giggled. The valide reached for a pair of spectacles and put them on. She glanced warningly at Yashim over the rims. “I have my vanities,
quand même
,” she said.

Yet Yashim was too delighted with the novelty of seeing a woman in spectacles to consider their effect on the valide’s beauty. He knew her for a reader, of course; but the spectacles made her seem, well, magnificently wise.

She examined the brown leather cover of the little book at some length, turning it this way and that. She ran a slim finger behind the boards and opened the first page. She tilted her head.

“I do not think,” she said, “it is the sort of book which would interest us. For a start, it’s not in French.
De Aedificio et antiquitae Constantinopolii
,” she read slowly. The hand holding the book sank to the cushions. “Dancing. Deportment. The interminable tragedies of Monsieur Racine.” She paused. “It was a long time ago, Yashim, and we were educated—to adorn, not to be scholars. I think it’s Latin,” she added with a little shiver.

Yashim, who had already guessed as much, tried to conceal his disappointment. “I thought—perhaps—you would be familiar with it.”

“Latin, Yashim?” The valide gave a bright little laugh. “But no, you are right. I’m sorry, it is so long ago.” She ran a finger beneath an eyelid, to wipe away a tear. “How silly of me. I was thinking of my mother. A very clever woman. Not in my way, of course. She was a dreamer,
idéaliste
. Father wanted us to be pretty. But my mother—she did try to teach us something, beyond dancing and the use of our fans. Even Latin.” She smiled sadly. “I think it was always too hot.”

She looked up almost shyly. “I have not spoken of them for many years,” she said. She removed her glasses and set them down on the carpet beside her. “The edifices and antiquities of Constantinople,” she said, handing the book back. “I’m not much help. You probably already know when it was published.”

“In Rome, in 1560.”

The valide gave Yashim a long look. “There is something going on between you and your friend Palewski,
n’est-ce pas
?”

“Valide?”

She tut-tutted and wagged a finger. “Tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk. Palewski is a well-educated man, and he was brought up in a Catholic country. A cold country, where it is easy to learn Latin, among other things. I think his Latin would be better than mine. Why do you not consult him? He is your friend.”

Yashim looked away. “Monsieur Palewski has put me in an awkward situation,” he said stiffly.

“I see. It was his intention to do so?”

Yashim shook his head. “No.”

The valide cocked her head to one side. “Friendship is an opportunity, Yashim, and our lives are short. Have you spoken to him?”

“I have not.”

“
Flûte!
Don’t be such a fool, young man. Take this book to your friend.” She smoothed the shawl around her shoulders. “Now I am tired.”

She closed her eyes and let out a great sigh.

“Latin!”