What did it mean?
Within the next seventy-two hours, he sensed, they would all find out.
He saw the seraskier disappear into the shadow of the Ortakapi. Then he turned and headed for the harem apartments.
[ 111 ]
Hello, stranger!”
It was almost a whisper. Ibou the librarian doubled up his long arm and waggled the fingers in greeting.
Yashim grinned and raised a hand.
“Off to work?” he asked in a low tone. By long-established custom, no one ever raised their voice in the second court of the palace.
Ibou cocked his head.
“I’ve just finished, actually. I was going to get something to eat.”
Yashim thought he sensed an invitation.
“Well, I wish I could come with you,” he said. And then: “You’ve come out of the wrong door.”
Ibou gave him a solemn look, then turned his head.
“It looks all right to me.”
“No, I mean from the Archives. I…I didn’t know you could get through on this side.” Yashim felt himself blushing. “It doesn’t matter. Thanks for your help the other night.”
“I only wish I could have done more, effendi,” Ibou replied. “You can come and see me again, if you like. I’m on nights for the rest of this week.”
He salaamed, and Yashim salaamed back.
Yashim went into the harem by the Gate of the Aviary. He could never pass this gate without thinking of the valide, Kosem, who two centuries before was dragged here from the apartments naked by the heels, and strangled in the corridor. That had been the finale to fifty terrifying years, in which the empire was ruled by a succession of madmen, drunkards and debauchees—including Kosem’s own son Ibrahim, who had his rooms papered and carpeted in Russian furs, and rode his girls like mares…until the executioner came for him with the bowstring.
Dangerous territory, the harem.
He stepped into the guard room. Six halberdiers were on duty, standing in pairs beside the doors which led to the Court of the Valide Sultan and the Golden Road, a tiny, open alleyway which linked the harem to the selamlik. The halberdiers were unarmed, except for the short daggers they wore stuffed into the sash of their baggy trousers; they only carried halberds on protective duty, as when on rare occasions they escorted the sultan’s women out of the palace. In the meantime they had a single distinguishing characteristic: the long black tresses which hung from the crown of their high hats as a token that they had been passed for entry into the harem. Yashim remembered a Frenchman laughing when the function of the hair was explained to him.
“You think a mane of hair will stop a man from seeing the sultan’s women? In France,” he had said, “it is the women who have long hair. Is it so, that they cannot steal glances at a handsome man?”
And Yashim had replied, rather stiffly, that the halberdiers of the tresses only went into the more public areas of the harem, to bring in the wood.
He laid his fist against his chest and bowed slightly.
“By the sultan’s order,” he murmured.
The halberdiers recognised him, and stood to let him pass.
He found himself beneath the colonnade which ran along the western edge of the valide’s court. It had been raining, and the flagstones of the court were gleaming and puddled, the walls greenish with damp. The door to the Valide Sultan’s suite was open, but Yashim stood where he was, turning the situation over in his mind.
What was it, he asked himself, that created danger in the harem?
