The Janissary Tree Read online

  The Janissary Tree

  Jason Goodwin

  1

  **************

  Yashim flicked at a speck of dust on his cuff.

  “One other thing, Marquise,” he murmured.

  She gazed at him levelly.

  “The papers.”

  The Marquise de Merteuil gave a little laugh.

  “Flûte! Monsieur Yashim, depravity is not a word we recognize in the Académie.” Her fan played; from behind it she almost hissed, “It is a condition of mind.”

  Yashim was already beginning to sense that this dream was falling apart.

  The marquise had fished out a paper from her décolletage and was tapping it on the table like a little hammer. He took a closer look. It was a little hammer.

  Tap tap tap.

  He opened his eyes and stared around. The Château de Merteuil dissolved in the candlelight. Shadows leered from under the book-lined shelves, and from the corners of the room—a room and a half, you might say, where Yashim lived alone in a tenement in Istanbul. The leather-bound edition of Les Liaisons Dangereuses had slipped onto his lap.

  Tap tap tap.

  “Evet, evet,” he grumbled. “I’m coming.” He slipped a cloak around his shoulders and his feet into a pair of yellow slippers, and shuffled to the door. “Who is it?”

  “Page boy.”

  Hardly a boy, Yashim considered, as he let the spindly old man into the darkened room. The single candle guttered in the sudden draft. It threw their shadows around the walls, boxing with one another before the page’s shadow stabbed Yashim’s with a flickering dagger. Yashim took the paper scroll and glanced at the seal. Yellow wax.

  He rubbed his finger and thumb across his eyes. Just hours ago he’d been scanning a dark horizon, peering through the drizzle for lights and the sight of land. The lurching candlelight took his mind back to another lamp that had swayed in a cabin far out at sea, riding the winter storms. The captain was a barrel-chested Greek with one white eye and the air of a pirate, and the Black Sea was treacherous at this time of year. But he’d been lucky to find a ship at all. Even at the worst moments of the voyage, when the wind screamed in the rigging, waves pounded on the foredeck, and Yashim tossed and vomited in his narrow bunk, he had told himself that anything was better than seeing out the winter in that shattered palace in the Crimea, surrounded by the ghosts of fearless riders, eaten away by the cold and the gloom. He had needed to come home.

  With a flick of his thumb he broke the seal.

  With the scent of the sea in his nostrils and the floor still moving beneath his feet, he tried to concentrate on the ornate script.

  He sighed and laid the paper aside. There was a lamp screwed to the wall and he lit it with the candle. The blue flames trickled slowly round the charred cloth. Yashim replaced the glass and trimmed the wick until the fitful light turned yellow and firm. Gradually the lamplight filled the room.

  He picked up the scroll the page had given him and smoothed it out.

  Greetings, et cetera. At the bottom he read the signature of the seraskier, city commander of the New Guard, the imperial Ottoman army. Felicitations, et cetera. He scanned upward. From practice he could fillet a letter like this in seconds. There it was, wedged into the politesse: an immediate summons.

  “Well?”

  The old man stood to attention. “I have orders to return with you to barracks immediately.” He glanced uncertainly at Yashim’s cloak. Yashim smiled, picked up a length of cloth, and wound it around his head. “I’m dressed,” he said. “Let us go.”

  Yashim knew that it hardly mattered what he wore. He was a tall, well-built man in his late thirties, with a thick mop of black curls, a few white hairs, no beard, but a curly black mustache. He had the high cheekbones of the Turks, and the slanting gray eyes of a people who had lived on the great Eurasian steppe for thousands of years. In European trousers, perhaps, he would be noticeable, but in a brown cloak—no. Nobody noticed him very much. That was his special talent, if it was a talent at all. More likely, as the marquise had been saying, it was a condition of mind. A condition of the body.

  Yashim had many things—innate charm, a gift for languages, and the ability to open those gray eyes suddenly wide. Both men and women had found themselves strangely hypnotized by his voice, before they had even noticed who was speaking. But he lacked balls.

  Not in the vulgar sense: Yashim was reasonably brave.

  But he was that creature rare even in nineteenth-century Istanbul.

  Yashim was a eunuch.

  2

  **************

  In the Abode of Felicity, in the deepest, most forbidden district of Top-kapi Palace, the sultan lay back on his pillows and picked fretfully at the satin coverlet, trying to imagine what could amuse him in the coming hours. A song, he thought, let it be a song. One of those sweet, rollicking Circassian melodies: the sadder the song, the brighter the melody.

  He had wondered if he could just pretend to be asleep. Why not? Ruler of the Black Sea and the White, ruler of Rumelia and Mingrelia, lord of Anatolia and Ionia, Romania and Macedonia, Protector of the Holy Cities, steely rider through the realms of bliss, sultan and padishah, he had to sleep sometimes, did he not? Especially if he was ever to reclaim his sovereignty over Greece.

  But he knew what would happen if he tried to pretend. He’d done it before, dashing all the hopes and ambitions of the lovely gozde, the girl selected to share his bed that night. It would mean listening to her sighs, followed by timid little scratches against his thighs or his chest, and finally tears; the whole harem would throw him reproachful glances for a month.

  Soon she’d be here. He’d better have a plan. Riding the rooster was probably safest: he was quite fat, frankly, and he didn’t want anyone hurt. If only he could be lying in bed with Hadice instead, who was almost as cuddly as himself, having his feet rubbed!

  His feet! On a reflex, he pulled his knees up slightly under the coverlet. Ancestral tradition was all very well, but Sultan Mahmut II had no intention of letting any fragrant Circassian girl lift the covers and start crawling up toward him from the foot of his bed.

  He heard a slight commotion in the corridor outside. A sense of duty brought him up on one elbow, arranging his features into a smile of welcome. He could hear whispers. Last-minute nerves, perhaps? The swooning slave suddenly resistant? Well, it wasn’t likely. She’d got this far: almost to the moment she’d been trained toward, the event she had given her life to attend. A jealous squabble was more likely: those are my pearls!

  The door opened. But it wasn’t a bangled slave girl with swaying hip and full breasts who entered. It was an old man with rouged cheeks and a big waist who bowed and loped into the room on bare feet. Catching sight of his master, he sank to his knees and began to crawl until he reached the edge of the bed, where he prostrated himself on the ground. He lay there, mute and quivering, like a big jelly.

  “Well?” Sultan Mahmut frowned.

  Out of the enormous body there came at length a voice, piping and high. “Your magnifithenth, my lord, my mathter,” the slave finally began to lisp. The sultan shifted uncomfortably.

  “It hath pleathed God to catht a mantle of death over the body of one daughter of felithity whothe dreams were about to be fulfilled by your magnifithenth, my mathter.”

  The sultan frowned.

  “She died?” His tone was incredulous. Also he was taken aback: was he so very fearsome?

  “Thire, I do not know what to thay. But God made another the inthtwument of her detheathe.”

  The eunuch paused, groping for the proper form of words. It was awfully hard.

  “My mathter,” he said at last. “She hath been stwangled.” The sultan flopped back onto the pil
lows. There, he said to himself, he was right. Not nerves at all. Just jealousy. Everything was normal. “Send for Yashim,” the sultan said wearily. “I want to sleep.”

  3

  **************

  ASLEEP or awake, the sultan was the Commander of the Faithful, chief of the Ottoman armed forces, but it was many years since he had unfurled the standard of the Prophet and put himself at the head of his soldiery, securing his throne by a single act of nerve. His navy was commanded by the kapudan pasha, and his troops controlled by the seraskier. The seraskier did not rise for Yashim, but merely motioned him with dabbling fingers to a corner of the divan. Yashim slipped off his shoes and sat down cross-legged, his cloak settling around him like a lily pad. He inclined his head and murmured the polite greeting.

  Clean-shaven, in the new fashion, with tired brown eyes set in a face the color of old linen, the seraskier lay awkwardly on one hip, in uniform, as though he had received a wound. His steel-gray hair was cut close to his skull, and the red fez perched on the back of his head emphasized the weight of his jaws. Yashim thought he would be passable in a turban, but Frankish practice had instead dictated a buttoned tunic, with blue trousers piped in red and a shoal of braid and epaulettes: modern uniform for modern war. In the same spirit he had also been issued a solid walnut table and eight stiff-looking upholstered chairs, which stood in the middle of the room and were lit by candelabra suspended from the coffered ceiling.

  He sat up and crossed his trousered legs so that the seams bulged. “Perhaps you would rather we moved to a table,” he suggested irritably.

  “As you wish.”

  But the seraskier evidently preferred the indignity of sitting on the divan in his trousers to the unpleasant exposure of the central table. Like Yashim himself, he found sitting on a chair with his back to the room faintly disquieting. So instead he drew a long sigh, folding and unfolding his stubby fingers.

  “I was told you were in the Crimea.”

  Yashim blinked. “I found a ship. There was nothing to detain me.”

  The seraskier cocked an eyebrow. “You failed there, then?”

  Yashim leaned forward. “We failed there many years ago, efendi. There is little that can be done.” He held the seraskier’s gaze. “That little, I did. I worked fast. Then I came back.”

  There was nothing else to be said. The Tartar khans of the Crimea no longer ruled the southern steppe, like little brothers to the Ottoman state. Yashim had been shaken to see Russian Cossacks riding through Crimean villages, bearing guns. Disarmed, defeated, the Tartars drank, sitting about the doors of their huts and staring listlessly at the Cossacks while their women worked in the fields. The khan himself fretted in exile, tormented by a dream of lost gold. He had sent others to recover it, before he heard about Yashim—Yashim the guardian, the lala. In spite of Yashim’s efforts, the khan’s gold remained a dream. Perhaps there was none.

  The seraskier grunted. “The Tartars were good fighters,” he said, “in their day. But horsemen without discipline have no place on the modern battlefield. Today we need disciplined infantry, with muskets and bayonets. Artillery. You saw Russians?”

  “I saw Russians, efendi. Cossacks.”

  “That’s the kind we’re up against. The reason we need men like the men of the New Guard.”

  The seraskier stood up. He was a bear of a man, well over six feet tall. He stood with his back to Yashim, staring at a row of books, while Yashim glanced involuntarily at the curtain through which he had entered. The groom who had ushered him in was nowhere to be seen. By all the laws of hospitality, the seraskier should have offered the preliminary pipe and coffee; Yashim wondered if the rudeness was deliberate. A great man like the seraskier had attendants to bring him refreshment, as well as a pipe-bearer to select his tobacco, keep the equipment in good, clean working order, accompany his master on outings with the pipe in a cloth and the tobacco pouch in his shirt, and ensure the proper lighting and draw of the pipe. Rich men who vied with one another to present their guests with the finest leaf and the most elegant pipes—amber for the mouthpiece, Persian cherry for the stem—would no more think of functioning without a pipe-bearer than an English milord could dispense with the services of a valet. But the room was empty.

  “Less than two weeks from today, the sultan is to review the troops. Marches, drills, gunnery displays. The sultan will not be the only one watching. It will be—” the seraskier stopped, and his head snapped up. Yashim wondered what he had been about to say. That the review would be the most important moment of his career, perhaps. “We are a young troop, as you know. The New Guard has only been in existence for ten years. Like a young colt, we startle easily. We have not had, Ali, all the care and training we might have wished for.”

  “Nor always quite the success that was promised.”

  Yashim saw the seraskier stiffen. In their newfangled European jackets and trousers, the New Guard had been put through their paces by a succession of foreign instructors, ferenghi from Europe who taught them drilling, marching, presenting arms. What could you say? In spite of it all the Egyptians—the Egyptians!—had dealt them humiliating reverses in Palestine and Syria, and the Russians were closer to Istanbul than at any time in living memory. Perhaps their victories were to have been expected, for they were formidable opponents with up-to-date equipment and modern armies; yet there remained, too, the debacle in Greece. No more than peasants in pantaloons, led by quarrelsome windbags, even the Greeks had proved to be more than a match for the New Guard.

  All this left the New Guard with a single sanguinary triumph. It was a victory achieved not on the battlefield but right here, on the streets of Istanbul; not against foreign enemies but against their own military predecessors, the dangerously overweening Janissary Corps. The Ottoman Empire’s crack troops in the sixteenth century, the Janissaries had long since degenerated—or evolved, if you liked—into an armed mafia, terrorizing sultans, swaggering through the streets of Istanbul, rioting, fire-raising, thieving, and extorting with impunity.

  The New Guard had finally settled the account. Ten years ago, on the night of June 16,1826, New Guard gunners had pounded the Janissaries to pieces in their barracks, bringing four centuries of terror and triumph to a well-deserved end.

  “The review will be a success,” the seraskier growled. “People will see the backbone of this empire, unbreakable, unshakable.” He swung around, sawing the air with the edge of his hand. “Accurate fire. Precise drill. Obedience. Our enemies, as well as our friends, will draw their own conclusions. Do you understand?”

  Yashim shrugged slightly. The seraskier tilted his chin and snorted through his nose. “But we have a problem,” he said. Yashim continued to gaze at him: it was a long time since he had been woken in the dead of night and summoned to the palace. Or to the barracks. He glanced out the window: it was still dark, the sky cold and overcast. Everything begins in darkness. Well, it was his job to shed light.

  “And what, exactly, does your problem consist of?”

  “Yashim efendi. They call you the lala, do they not? Yashim lala, the guardian.”

  Yashim inclined his head. Lala was an honorific, a title of respect given to certain trusted eunuchs who attended on rich and powerful families, chaperoning their women, watching over their children, supervising the household. An ordinary lala was something between a butler and a housekeeper, a nanny and the head of security: a guardian. Yashim felt the title suited him.

  “But as far as I understand it,” the seraskier said slowly, “you are without attachment. Yes, you have links to the palace. Also to the streets. So tonight I invite you into our family, the family of the New Guard. For ten days, at most.”

  “The family, you mean, of which you are the head?”

  “In a manner of speaking. But do not think I am setting myself up as the father of this family. I would like you to think of me, rather, as a kind of, of—” The seraskier looked uneasy: the word did not seem to come easily to him. Distaste for eun
uchs, Yashim knew, was as ingrained among Ottoman men as their suspicion of tables and chairs. “Think of me—as an older brother. I protect you. You confide in me.” He paused, wiped his forehead. “Do you, Ali, have any family yourself?”

  Yashim was used to this: disgust, tempered with curiosity. He made a motion with his hand, ambiguous: let the man wonder; it was none of his business.

  “The New Guard must earn the confidence of the people, and of the sultan, too,” the seraskier continued. “That is the purpose of the review. But something has happened which might wreck the process.”

  It was Yashim’s turn to be curious, and he felt it like a ripple up the back of his neck.

  “This morning,” the seraskier explained, “I was informed that four of our officers had failed to report for morning drill.” He stopped, frowned. “You must understand that the New Guard are not like any other army the empire has seen. Discipline. Hard work, fair pay, and obedience to a superior officer. We turn up for drill. I know what you are thinking, but these officers were particularly fine young gentlemen. I would say that they were the flower of our corps, as well as being our best gunnery officers. They spoke French,” he added, as if that concluded it. Perhaps it did.