The Janissary Tree

He picked up the scroll the page had given him, and smoothed it out.

Greetings, etcetera. At the bottom he read the signature of the seraskier, city commander of the New Guard, the imperial Ottoman army. Felicitations, etcetera. He scanned upwards. From practice he could fillet a letter like this in seconds. There it was, wedged into the politesse: an immediate summons.

“Well?”

The old man stood to attention. “I have orders to return with you to barracks immediately.”

He glanced uncertainly at Yashim’s cloak. Yashim smiled, picked up a length of cloth, and wound it around his head. “I’m dressed,” he said. “Let us go.”

Yashim knew that it hardly mattered what he wore. He was a tall, well-built man in his late thirties, with a thick mop of black curls; a few white hairs, no beard, but a curly black moustache. He had the high cheekbones of the Turks, and the slanting grey eyes of a people who had lived on the great Eurasian steppe for thousands of years. In European trousers, perhaps, he would be noticeable; but in a brown cloak—no. Nobody noticed him very much. That was his special talent, if it was a talent at all. More likely, as the Marquise had been saying, it was a condition of mind. A condition of the body.

Yashim had many things—innate charm, a gift for languages, and the ability to open those grey eyes suddenly wide. Both men and women had found themselves strangely hypnotised by his voice, before they had even noticed who was speaking. But he lacked balls.

Not in the vulgar sense: Yashim was reasonably brave.

But he was that creature rare even in nineteenth-century Istanbul.

Yashim was a eunuch.

[ 2 ]

In the Abode of Felicity, in the deepest, most forbidden district of Topkapi Palace, the sultan lay back on his pillows and picked fretfully at the satin coverlet, trying to imagine what could amuse him in the coming hours. A song, he thought, let it be a song. One of those sweet, rollicking Circassian melodies: the sadder the song, the brighter the melody.

He had wondered if he could just pretend to be asleep. Why not? Ruler of the Black Sea and the White, ruler of Rumelia and Mingrelia, lord of Anatolia and Ionia, Romania and Macedonia, Protector of the Holy Cities, steely rider through the realms of bliss, Sultan and Padishah, he had to sleep sometimes, did he not? Especially if he was ever to reclaim his sovereignty over Greece.

But he knew what would happen if he tried to pretend. He’d done it before, dashing all the hopes and ambitions of the lovely gozde, the girl selected to share his bed that night. It would mean listening to her sighs, followed by timid little scratches against his thighs or his chest, and finally tears; the whole harem would throw him reproachful glances for a month.

Soon she’d be here. He’d better have a plan. Riding the rooster was probably safest: he was quite fat, frankly, and he didn’t want anyone hurt. If only he could be lying in bed with Fatima instead, who was almost as cuddly as himself, having his feet rubbed!

His feet! On a reflex he pulled his knees up slightly under the coverlet. Ancestral tradition was all very well, but Sultan Mahmut II had no intention of letting any fragrant Circassian girl lift the covers and start crawling up towards him from the foot of his bed.

He heard a slight commotion in the corridor outside. A sense of duty brought him up on one elbow, arranging his features into a smile of welcome. He could hear whispers. Last-minute nerves, perhaps? The swooning slave suddenly resistant? Well, it wasn’t likely. She’d got this far: almost to the moment she’d been trained towards, the event she had given her life to attend. A jealous squabble was more likely: those are my pearls!

The door opened. But it wasn’t a bangled slave-girl with swaying hip and full breasts who entered. It was an old man with rouged cheeks and a big waist who bowed and loped into the room on bare feet. Catching sight of his master, he sank to his knees and began to crawl until he reached the edge of the bed, where he prostrated himself on the ground. He lay there, mute and quivering, like a big jelly.

“Well?” Sultan Mahmut frowned.

Out of the enormous body there came at length a voice, piping and high.

“Your Magnifishensh, my lord, my mashter,” the slave finally began to lisp. The sultan shifted uncomfortably.

“It has pleased God to catht a mantle of death over the body of one daughter of felithity whothe dreams were about to be fulfilled by Your Magnificenth, my master.”