If you knew where to look you could find men living there, and sometimes women, too; but it was unwise to poke about too diligently. Some of the denizens of this patch were more often abroad by night than by day, and at any hour an air of resigned criminality hung about the tired trees and the little caves and crannies where some of the city’s rubbish had been carefully drawn up to form a dismal kind of shelter. Benders, shacks and bustees artfully constructed by a shadowy people who had somehow slipped through the net of charity—or the hangman’s noose.
Now and again the city authorities would order a sweep-out of the hillside, but invariably most of its inhabitants would appear to have crept away, unseen. The sweeps turned up a lot of rubbish which was burned at the foot of the ravine, sometimes a corpse, a starving feral dog or someone too far removed from the world to do more than stare, with unseeing eyes, at this emanation of men from a city they had long since lost and forgotten. The noisy men, armed with long sticks, would finally depart; the hill-dwellers would silently sift back, and the creation of shelters would begin again.
Someone was now fumbling their way very slowly down the ravine, moving noiselessly and carefully from rock to rock. There was a little moon, but a heavy rolling bank of cloud blotted it out entirely for minutes at a stretch; and in one of those dark interludes the figure stopped, waiting, listening. “All quiet?”
The answer came in a whisper.
“All quiet.”
Two men groped past one another in the dark. The newcomer dropped feet-first into a shallow cave, squatted on his haunches and leaned his back against the wall.
Minutes later the cloud parted. The moonlight showed the man all he needed to see. A little opium box, propped against the wall. A dark pile of what he knew to be the uniforms. And at the back of the cave two men, trussed and gagged. The head of one was tilted back, as if he were asleep. But the eyes of the other man were flaring like the eyes of a terrified animal.
The newcomer glanced instinctively at the little box, grateful at least that the choice was made.
[ 25 ]
Yashim threw back his head as the moonlight came streaming through a break in the cloud. It seemed to him, as he stood with two hands touching its bark, that the tree was taller than he remembered: the black and twisted limbs corkscrewed upwards overhead, a nest of branches so thick and so high that even the moonlight struggled to break through between them.
The Janissaries had chosen this tree as their own. Some happy instinct had led them to adopt a living thing, in a part of the city that was stiff with monuments to human grandeur. Compared to this massive plane tree, Topkapi seemed cold and dead. To his left, Yashim could make out the black silhouette of the palace erected long ago by a vizier who thought himself to be all-powerful, before he was strangled with the silken bow-string. To the north lay Aya Sofia, the Great Church of the Byzantines, now a mosque. Behind him stood the Blue Mosque, built by a sultan who beggared his empire to have it done. And here was this tree, quietly growing on the ancient Hippodrome, generous with its shade in the heat of the day.
Nobody had tried to blame it for what it had come to represent: the jeering power of the Janissary corps. That, Yashim reflected, was never the Turkish way. The same instinct that prompted the Janissaries to adopt the tree made the people reluctant to do away with it now that the very name of the Janissaries was consigned to oblivion. People liked trees, and they disliked change: the Hippodrome itself was proof of that. A few steps away stood an obelisk with incised hieroglyphs, which a Byzantine emperor had brought from Egypt. Further on, there was a massive column erected by some Roman emperor long ago. There was also the celebrated Serpent Column, a bronze statue of three green twining serpents that once stood at the Greek Temple of Apollo at Delphi. The serpents’ heads were missing now, it was true: but Yashim knew that the Turks could hardly be blamed for that.
He smiled to himself, remembering the night in the Polish residency when Palewski, drunk and whispering, had revealed to him the astounding truth. Together they had peered by candlelight into the depths of a vast and elderly armoire, where two of the three heads, which had been a wonder of the ancient world, lay on a pile of dusty linen, practically untouched since they were snapped off the column by some revelling youths in the Polish ambassador’s suite a century ago. “Too dreadful,” Palewski had murmured, shuddering at the sight of the brazen heads. “But too late, now. What’s broken is better not mended.”
So the Janissary tree remained. Yashim leaned his forehead against the peeling bark, and wondered if it were true that a tree’s roots were as long and deep as its branches were high and wide. Even when a tree was felled, its roots continued to live, sucking up moisture from the ground, forcing new growth from the stump.
It was only ten years since the Janissaries had been suppressed. Many had been killed, not least those who barricaded themselves in the old barracks when the artillery was brought up and reduced the building to a smoking shell. But others had escaped—if the Albanian soup master were to be believed, more than Yashim would have guessed.
And that was only counting the regiments stationed in Istanbul. Every city of the empire had had its own Janissary contingent: Edirne, Sofia, Varna in the west; Uskiidar, Trabzon, Antalya. There were Janissaries established in Jerusalem, in Aleppo and Medina: Janissary regiments, Janissary bands, Karagozi imams, the works. From time to time, their power in provincial cities had allowed them to form military juntas, who controlled the revenues and dictated to the local governor. How many of those still existed?
How many men had formed the corps?
