Well, he was one of them now himself, and the injunction against thinking still held, as far as he could discover. His orders had come direct from the seraskier himself, who had been moving through the lines like a man demented, setting the position of the guns, instructing the troops, fixing elevations and exhorting them all to obedience. Genghis had no quarrel with that, of course, but he was a Stamboul man himself, not one of your Anatolian recruits, and he found it strange to be in his own city, under arms and idle while the place was bursting into flames.
He wished he’d been detailed to the Sultan Ahmet, perhaps, or the other, unidentified location deeper in the city, where the men would no doubt be tackling the fires head-on, instead of being told to train their guns every which way and stop the crowds from approaching the palace. But the seraskier had been very exact in his instructions. They had synchronised their timepieces, too, ready for the barrage that was to open in almost exactly one hour. The barrage whose purpose Genghis Yalmuk neither questioned, nor understood, but which the seraskier had personally prepared, working from gun to gun with a sheaf of co-ordinates as if his bombardier could not be trusted to fix the co-ordinates himself.
And meanwhile, he thought wretchedly, they were waiting again. Waiting while the city burned.
He caught sight of a man in a plain brown cloak speaking to two sentries outside the seraglio gate, and frowned. His orders were very clear, to keep civilians out of the operational area: this man must have slipped through the gate, from the palace. Genghis Yalmuk threw back his shoulders and started to march towards them. This fellow had better just slip back the way he’d come, and at the double, too, palace or no palace, or he’d know the reason why.
But before he had walked five yards the man in the brown cloak had turned and was scanning the ground; one of the sentries pointed, and the man began to walk towards him, holding up a hand.
“Look here,” Genghis began to say, but the civilian cut him short.
“Yashim Togalu, imperial service,” he said. “I need the seraskier, and fast. Operational need,” he added. “Vital new intelligence.”
Genghis Yalmuk blinked. The habit of obedience was very deeply ingrained, after all, and he had an ear that was tuned to the commanding style.
As for Yashim, he crossed his fingers.
For a moment the two men looked at one another.
Then Genghis Yalmuk raised his hand and pointed.
“Up there,” he said, crisply.
Yashim followed the direction of his finger. Over the walls and trees surrounding the great mosque. Beyond the minarets. Higher, and further away.
He was pointing at the dome of Hagya Sophia.
“Then I’m too late,” said Yashim, crisply. “I’m afraid I have to ask to see your orders.”
[ 125 ]
The seraskier leaned back against the lead casing of the buttress, and put his cheek to the smooth metal. He had not realised how excited he was. His face seemed to be burning like the city which lay about him, at his feet.
Out here, on the leads, he had the perfect view. From down below, Hagia Sophia seemed to rise in a single burst, the massive central dome supported on a buttressed ring that floated in the air over two half-domes on either side. This was how artists since time immemorial had pictured it, round-shouldered like so many mosques; but in this they erred. Built in the sixth century, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian’s great church was a reconciliation of two opposed forms. The great circle of the dome, rising on a round gallery of arches, thrust itself skywards through a lead-covered square. There was space at the four corners, where the pitch of the roof was slight, at most; and so it was from here, two hundred feet above the ground, that the seraskier saw across the Seven Hills, over the seraglio to the dark waters beyond, touched here and there by a bobbing lantern. Further west he imagined the water reflecting the flames that even now were shooting skywards, sending out brilliant showers of sparks, springing their way from rooftop to rooftop, consuming the wooden walls of the old portside houses, bursting through doorways, roaring down alleys. An unstoppable, purifying furnace fuelled by two thousand years of trickery and deceit.
The flames belonged to the city. All those long centuries they had smouldered, now and then breaking loose, feeding on the packed-up tinder that had been sifting into the shadows and the corners of Istanbul, its crooked angles dredged with dust and detritus and the filth of a million benighted souls. A city of fire and water. Dirt and disease. A city that stank on the water’s edge like a decaying corpse, too rotten to be moved, shining by the oily bloom of putrefaction.
He turned to the south. How dark the seraglio looked! Shuttered behind its ancient walls, how it brooded on its own eminence! But the seraskier knew better: it was a vulture’s nest, scattered with the filth and droppings of the generations, piled on the bones of the dead, filled with the insistent gaping cry of fledgelings warmed by their own excrement and fed with filth plucked from the surrounding midden of the city in which it had been built.
The seraskier stepped forwards to the gutter, and looked down into the square where his men were standing by
