He thought of the halberdiers he had just met, wearing their long hair like blinkers.
He thought of the chambers and apartments that lay beyond, as old and narrow as Istanbul itself, with their crooked turns, and sudden doorways, and tiny jewel-like chambers crafted out of odd corners and partitioned spaces. Like the city they had grown up over the centuries, rooms polished into place by the grit of expediency, rooms hollowed out of the main complex on a whim, even doorways opened up by what must have felt like the pressure of a thousand glances and a million sighs. None of it planned. And in this space, scarcely two hundred feet square, baths and bedrooms, sitting rooms and corridors, lavatories and dormitories, crooked staircases, forgotten balconies: even Yashim, who knew them, could get lost in there, or find himself looking unexpectedly from one window into a court he had thought far away. There were rooms in there no better than cells, Yashim knew.
How many people trod the labyrinth every day, unravelling the hours of their existence within the walls, treading a few well-worn paths which led from one task to the next: sleeping, eating, bathing, serving? Hundreds, certainly; perhaps thousands, mingling with the ghosts of the thousands who had gone before: the women who had lied, and died, and the eunuchs who pitter-pat-tered around them, and the gossip that rose like steam in the women’s baths, and the looks of jealousy and love and desperation he had seen himself.
His eye travelled around the courtyard. It was only about fifty-foot square, but it was the biggest open place in the harem: the only place where a woman could raise her face to the sky, feel the rain on her cheeks, see the clouds scudding across the sun. And there were—he counted them—seven doors opening into this court; seven doors; fifteen windows.
Twenty-two ways to not be alone.
Twenty-two ways in which you could be watched.
As he stood below the colonnade, staring at the rain, he heard women laugh. And immediately he said to himself: the danger is that nothing you ever do is a secret in this place.
Everything can be watched, or overheard.
A theft can be observed.
A ring can be found.
Unless—
He glanced at the open door to the valide’s suite.
But the valide wouldn’t steal her own jewels.
He heard the door behind him open, and turned round. There, puffing with the exertion and filling the doorway with his enormous bulk, stood the Kislar Agha.
He looked at Yashim with his yellow eyes.
“You’re back,” he piped, in his curiously tiny voice.
Yashim bowed.
“The sultan thinks I haven’t been working hard enough.”
“The sultan,” the black man echoed. His face was expressionless.
He waddled slowly forwards, and the door to the guard room closed behind him. He stood by a pillar and stuck out a hand, to feel the rain.
“The sultan,” he repeated softly. “I knew him when he was just a little boy. Imagine!”
He suddenly bared his teeth, and Yashim—who had never seen the kislar smile—wondered if it was a grin, or a grimace.
“I saw Selim die. It was here, in this courtyard. Did you know that?”
As the rain continued to patter onto the courtyard, seeping through the flagstones, staining the walls, Yashim thought: he, too, feels the weight of history here.
He shook his head.
The Kislar Agha put up two fingers and pulled at his pendulous earlobe. Then he turned to look at the rain.
