believing him. “I found it hard to break with them.”
Yashim leaned forwards.
“How did you do it?”
The guild master spread his huge hands and looked at them.
“I learned to trust myself. I saw with my own eyes what had happened to the Janissaries. What they had allowed to happen to the real tradition, the one that mattered. They no longer served the empire.”
He looked up.
“You think that’s obvious? I was only waiting—many, like me, only waiting—for the tradition of service to come back to us. In the end, I decided I could wait no longer. I saw that we were doomed to repeat our mistakes. You think the Janissaries were lazy, cowardly, arrogant. The mutinies. The interference.”
The soup master stroked his beard and narrowed his eyes at Yashim, who sat transfixed.
“I tell you, the men we hung upon the Janissary Tree were all too easily taken. When we got angry, then someone fed us names, and we shouted: Kill him! Kill so-and-so! They threw them to us. We thought it would go better after that.
“You put coriander in the soup. Well, some people like it, some don’t, some don’t even notice. Forget the people who don’t like it. You add some beans. Some carrots. The same thing. Some like it, some don’t. But more people don’t care much either way. By the end, you can take out the tripe. Call it soup. Nobody will know any better. Only a few.”
He tugged at his moustache.
“The Janissaries were like that. Like a recipe that has been quietly and completely altered. In the city I made tripe and onion soup from tripe and onion. But in the barracks, so to speak, they wanted me to believe in a kind of tripe and onion soup made of beans and bacon. In the end, I had to leave.”
Yashim could admire the older man’s guts. So much in this city was founded on pretence: it took a certain kind of temper for a man to step aside. But then, the Albanian hadn’t stepped away entirely. Not if what Yashim suspected about the guards at the guild were true.
“Your old friends,” he suggested.
“No, no, they had no hold over me, not what you might think. They didn’t blame me, either. But they remembered me. Our lives went separate ways. But they remembered.”
He picked up a pastry with a clumsy sweep of his arm and stuffed it into his mouth. Yashim watched him deliberately chew it down. His eyes were sparkling.
“The fifteenth of June was the worst night of my life. I heard the cauldrons—we all did, didn’t we? Eighteen years the sultan had waited. Eighteen years for a boy to become a man, and all that time with one resolve, to destroy the force which had destroyed Selim.”
Perhaps, Yashim thought. But Mahmut’s motives were more complex than mere vengeance for his uncle’s death. He wanted to rid himself of the men who had almost casually brought him to the throne, as well: to expunge a debt, as well as avenge a death. The Janissaries had crudely expected gratitude, and took carte blanche. Yashim could remember the cartoon that was stuck up on the palace gate one night, showing the sultan as a dog led by a Janissary. “You see how we use our dogs,” the notice ran. “While they are useful and let themselves be led, we treat them well; but when they stop being of service, we kick them out into the streets.”
“The people of the city were scared. Boom boom! Boom boom! It was a frightening sound, wasn’t it? Night falling, and not a sound in the streets as we listened, all of us. I went up onto my roof, treading like a cat. Oh, yes, there was a tradition all right. They said the voice of the Janissaries was the voice of the people. The men believed it. The cauldrons were beating for the empire, as they’d beaten for centuries. Only the sound of the cauldrons drumming, and the barking of the pye-dogs in the streets.
“Look, I stood on the roof and I heard the sound and I wept for those fools. I wept for a sound. I knew I would never hear it again, not if I lived for a thousand years.”
He wiped his hands over his face.
“Later, after the killing and the demolition, some of them came to me asking for a quiet job. One of them had been living for days in a foxhole when they torched the Belgrade woods to flush them out. They had to avoid their families and relatives, for their sakes. They were lost. They were hunted. But we had broken bread together. I gave them money and told them to slip away, get out of Istanbul. Nobody would be interested in them any more, not after a few weeks, a few months.
“And slowly some of them started coming back. Looking for quiet jobs, out of sight—stokers, watchmen, tanners. I knew a few. There must have been thousands, I suppose, unknown to me.”
