But she had no plans to leave. She took no orders from the chief black eunuch.
The lady Talfa was not one of the late Sultan Mahmut’s slaves.
She was his sister.
New girls could come in. Her nephew Abdulmecid could move into his new palace chambers. But for now, and always, this harem was her home.
She stamped her foot. Where was Bezmialem? The sultan’s mother should have been here, taking control of her son’s girls. The young valide.
Talfa glared down the corridor and saw a familiar figure in a brown cloak.
“Yashim!” she cried. “Can’t you do anything? Can’t you stop all this-this noise?”
6
Yashim ordered the halberdiers to move the baggage to the carriages: the new girls were already beginning to paw at it themselves. The soldiers moved slowly, with infinite gentleness, eyes down: the women lunged and clung to their arms.
The women who served the late sultan were to leave for Eski Saray, the old Palace of Tears, for centuries a home for the harem beauties whose sultan had died. Some-the lucky ones, maybe-would marry, entering the harem of some Ottoman officer of the guard, or a pasha of the civil bureaucracy. The rest could hope for little more than to drag out their existence behind the walls of the Palace of Tears, forgotten and ignored.
Getting the luggage away made things easier: the women followed their belongings. Others-dragging their fingernails down their cheeks, or cramming their things into little sacks-felt suddenly resigned to do what Yashim suggested. They were drawn to him, just as the lady Talfa had been; they relied on him, as Ibou the chief black eunuch relied on him, instinctively. Against the bright plumage of the harem women, Yashim’s brown cloak was modest almost to invisibility. He spoke quietly, in a room that rang with shrieks and tears; his gestures were restrained. There was a stillness in Yashim that made the women pause and listen. His low voice wearied and fascinated them, as if it carried an echo of the burdens of life. It was the voice of a man, perhaps: yet Yashim was not, quite, a man himself. Yashim was a eunuch. By evening the women had taken to the carriages, and gone.
Upstairs, in her new room, Elif picked up her oud and began to play.
Farther along the corridor, a pale woman reclined on her divan, shading her eyes with the back of her hand.
Bezmialem had heard the pandemonium and locked her door. She sought only peace and seclusion.
At her moment of triumph, when her son returned to the palace as sultan, Bezmialem had a headache.
7
“Yashim efendi?”
The halberdier swung back the door of the gatehouse. Outside Yashim saw a small closed carriage, with another soldier holding the door.
“Please, efendi.”
“Where are we going?”
“We must be quick, efendi.”
Yashim climbed into the cab and the halberdier slammed the door. Yashim heard him shout something to the driver and then, with a lurch that shot him back into the buttoned leather seat, they were off. The carriage squeaked and swayed; Yashim wound his fingers around a leather strap in the dark. The windows of the cab were tightly curtained, but he could feel the drumming of the wheels on the cobbles and the slick lurch when they left hard ground for muddier, unpaved streets.
Yashim peeled a curtain aside and peered out. At first he could make nothing of the high, blank walls, until the carriage veered to the right, flinging him back again, and they rolled under the High Gate, which gave its name- Sublime Porte-to the Ottoman government.
The driver pulled on the reins; the cab’s pace lessened; the door was flung open and a young man in a Frankish uniform and cap saluted Yashim. As they bustled up the steps the young man’s sword clinked on the marble; then they were through the front door, scurrying down corridors where anxious faces peered at them in the candlelight, where doors opened noiselessly at their approach.
Yashim knew exactly where they were going. He’d been there before, to the private chamber of the grand vizier, the man who held the reins of the empire for his sultan’s sake.
The cadet threw open a door and ushered him in with a sweep of the hand.
8
A lamp was burning on a great mahogany desk.
“Come.”
The rumble of the vizier’s voice came from the divan, placed in an alcove at the far side of the room. Yashim half turned, in puzzlement.
“Husrev? Mehmet Husrev Pasha?”
As he approached the divan, he could make out a heavy figure sitting cross-legged in the half-light, wearing a Circassian shawl and a tasseled, brimless cap.
As the pasha gestured to the edge of the divan, his ring caught the light. It was a sign of office, but until now Yashim had seen the ring of the grand vizier on someone else’s hand.
“Changes, Yashim efendi,” the old pasha growled, as if he had read Yashim’s mind. “A time of change.”
Yashim settled on the edge of the divan. “My pasha,” he murmured. He wondered how the change had been made, what had become of Midhat Pasha. “I was detained at the palace. I offer you my congratulations.”
Husrev fixed him with a weary stare. His voice was very deep, almost a whisper. “The sultan is very young.”
“We must be grateful that he can draw upon your experience,” Yashim replied politely.
The old pasha grunted. He pressed his fingertips together in front of his face, brushing his mustache. “And at the palace?”
“Sultan Mahmut’s women were slow to leave.” Yashim bit his lip; it was not what he should have said. Not when Husrev himself had moved so fast.
Perhaps Husrev Pasha thought the same, because he gave a dismissive snort and slid a sheet of paper across the divan. “Report from the governor of Chalki. A dead man, in the cistern of the monastery.”
“Who was he?”
The pasha shrugged. “Nobody seems to know.”
“But-he was killed?”
“Perhaps. Probably. I want you to find out.”
“I understand, my pasha.” For the second time that day, he was being asked to do someone else’s job.
Husrev Pasha’s heavy-lidded eyes missed little. “Have I said anything to displease you, Yashim?”
Yashim took a deep breath. “Is it not a matter for the governor, my pasha? The kadi, at least.”
“Would I send for you if it was enough to direct the kadi? The governor?”
Yashim heard the anger in his rumbling voice. “Forgive me, my pasha. I spoke without thinking.”
To his surprise, the old vizier leaned forward and took his knee in his massive paw.
“How old are you, Yashim?”
“Forty.”
“I have seen what may happen when a sultan dies. When you were a little boy, Yashim. We thought the sky
