The Janissary Tree
by Jason Goodwin
(2006)
It is 1836. Europe is modernizing, and the Ottoman Empire must follow suit. But just before the Sultan announces sweeping changes, a wave of murders threatens the fragile balance of power in his court. Who is behind them? Only one intelligence agent can be trusted to find out: Yashim Lastname, a man both brilliant and near-invisible in this world. You see, Yashim is a eunuch.
He leads us into the palace's luxurious seraglios and Istanbul's teeming streets, and leans on the wisdom of a dyspeptic Polish ambassador, a transsexual dancer, and a Creole-born queen mother. And he introduces us to the Janissaries. For 400 years, they were the empire's elite soldiers, but they grew too powerful, and ten years ago, the Sultan had them crushed. Are the Janissaries staging a brutal comeback?
The Janissary Tree is the first in a series featuring the most enchanting detective since
[ 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.
“Flute! Monsieur Yashim, depravity is not a word we recognise in the Academic.” 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 decolletage and was tapping it on the table like a little hammer. He took a closer look. It
He opened his eyes and stared around. The Chateau de Merteuil dissolved in the candle light. 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 leatherbound edition of
“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 draught. 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, feeling the floor still moving beneath his feet, the lurching candlelight taking his mind back to a swaying lamp in a tiny cabin far out at sea, and the anxious hours spent scanning a dark horizon, peering through the drizzle for lights and the sight of land.
He broke the seal and tried to concentrate on the ornate script.
He sighed and laid the paper aside. There was a lamp. Blue flames trickled slowly round the charred cloth as he lit it with the candle. Yashim replaced the glass and trimmed the wick until the fitful light turned yellow and firm. Gradually the lamplight filled the room.
He’d been lucky to find a ship at all. The Black Sea was treacherous, especially in the winter, and the captain was a barrel-chested Greek with one white eye and the air of a pirate, but even at the worst moments of the voyage, when the wind screamed in the rigging, waves pounded on the foredeck and Yashim had 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.
