No answer. He called again, a little louder.
“Ibou? Are you there? It’s me, Yashim.”
The tiny candle at the far end of the room was snuffed out for a moment; then it reappeared. Someone had moved in the darkness.
“Don’t be afraid. I need your help.”
He heard the slap of sandals on the stone floor and Ibou stepped forwards into the light. His eyes were very round.
“What can you do?” he almost whispered.
“I need to use the back door, Ibou. Can you let me through?”
“I have a key. But -1 don’t want to go.”
“No, you stay. Do you know what’s happening?”
“I am new. I wasn’t asked—but it is some kind of meeting. Dangerous, too.”
“Come on.”
The little doorway gave onto the corridor in which the Valide Kosem had been dragged to her death. Yashim clasped Ibou’s hand.
“Good luck,” the young man whispered.
The door to the guard room was closed. Yashim opened it with a quick flick of the handle and stepped inside.
“I am summoned,” he announced.
The halberdiers stood frozen.
They made no effort to stop Yashim opening the door, as though they were clockwork soldiers that someone had forgotten to wind.
For a moment he, too, stood transfixed, looking into the Courtyard of the Valide Sultan.
Then he took a step back and very softly closed the door.
[ 121 ]
The sleeping quarters of the harem slaves lay above the colonnade which spanned one side of the valide’s court: quietly trying the door, Yashim found himself in a small, bare chamber strewn with rugs and mattresses and dimly lit by a few short candles set on plates on the floor. The beds were empty: dark shadows at the latticed window showed him that the harem slaves were crowding there for a better view.
One of the slave-girls gave a gasp as Yashim stepped up behind her. He put a finger to his lips, and looked down.
Never in all his life would Yashim forget that sight. To the left, the Valide Sultan stood at the doorway to her apartments, at the head of a crowd of harem women that spilled from the doorway and lined the walls three deep: a hundred women, maybe more, Yashim guessed, in every state of dress and undress. Some, roused from their beds, were still in their pyjamas.
Across the courtyard, massed in their finery, stood the palace eunuchs, black and white. Their turbans sparkled with precious jewels, nodding egrets. There must have been three hundred men, Yashim guessed, rustling and whispering like pigeons roosting in a tree.
A silence fell on the eunuchs: they turned their faces to the doorway below Yashim’s window, and slowly they began to move aside, creating a corridor. Yashim could see them better now, even recognise a few faces: he saw sables, and kaftans of cashmere, and an imperial ransom of brooches and precious stones. They were more like magpies than pigeons, Yashim thought, drawn to everything that glittered, amassing their nests of gold and diamonds.
He reached up on tiptoe to see who was coming through the crowd, though he already knew. The Kislar Agha looked magnificent in an enormous dark pelisse so spangled with the moisture in the air that it sparkled. He walked slowly, but his tread was surprisingly light. His hand, clutching at the baton, was thick with rings. His face was lost
