As the sound of the explosion died away the seraskier jerked the watch from his pocket and bit his lip.
Too early, he thought. And then: it doesn’t matter. Let them begin the barrage.
He waited, staring at his watch.
Fifteen seconds. Twenty seconds. Let the guns fire.
The sweat had broken out on his forehead.
There was another bang, slightly fainter than the first.
The seraskier looked up and flashed a look of triumph at Yashim.
But Yashim had turned away. He was standing on the roof, hands held aloft, staring out over the city as the wind caught at his cloak.
Beyond him, the seraskier saw the burst of light. It glanced off the pillars of the dome, flinging Yashim into brilliant relief where he stood against the skyline. The seraskier heard the rumble of the guns which followed. There was another burst of light, as of an exploding shell, and another deep rumble, and the seraskier frowned. He knew what was puzzling him. The sound and light were the wrong way round.
He should have heard the guns roar, and then seen the light flash as the shell reached its target, The seraskier leaped from the archway and began to run, his feet making no sound on the thick lead sheets.
Yashim made a lunge for him, but the seraskier was too quick. In an instant he had seen what he had not expected to see, and with brilliant military intuition he had grasped precisely what it all meant to him. The guns were working the wrong end of the city, the shells exploding far away. He did not break stride. He shrank slightly as Yashim reached out, but a moment later he was over the gutters and half-running, half-sliding down the leaden roof of the supporting half dome.
He moved with a speed that was terrible to see. Yashim darted to the edge and began to lower himself down onto the conical roof, but the seraskier had already dropped from sight. Then he suddenly re-appeared, lower down, loping south across a cat-slide roof.
For a moment the whole city lay spread out beneath the seraskier’s feet. He saw again the dark mass of the seraglio. He saw the lights twinkling on the Bosphorus. He saw men and women streaming through the square beneath him, and in the distance the chutes of flame that peeled away from the sudden yawning gaps that the artillery was making in their path.
As for him, there was only one direction he could take.
For many years after that, an Armenian army contractor who married a rich widow who bore him six sons would tell the story of how he was almost crushed by an officer who fell on him from the sky.
“Not a common soldier, mind you,” he would end his story, with a smile. “God, in his Grace, sent me a general: and I’ve been dealing with them ever since.”
[ 128 ]
I need an escort, Palewski,” Yashim was explaining. “You know, somebody with an ‘in’ with the sultan. He’d expect that. And you two are very pally, aren’t you?”
It was Saturday morning. The rain which lashed against Yashim’s windows had been falling steadily since before dawn, much to the advantage of the New Guards struggling to extinguish the city fires. With the breaks their cannon had opened in the night, the fire had been contained to the area of the port, and although the damage was said to be serious, it did not approach the scale of 1817, or 1807, or of almost a dozen major fires which had broken out in that district in the previous century. And the port, when all was said and done, was not the most prized Istanbul quartier.
Palewski put up two fingers and touched his moustache, to hide a smile.
“Pally’s the word for it, Yash. I’ve a mind to present the sultan with a little something which arrived for me this morning, saved by providence from the fire in the port.”
“Ah, providence,” echoed Yashim.
“Yes. I happened to notice that stocks were getting rather low last Thursday, so I ordered another couple of cases out of bond immediately. What do you think?”
“Yes, I think that the sultan would appreciate the gesture. Not that he’d drink it, of course.”
