The sultan frowned.
“She died?” His tone was incredulous. Also he was taken aback: was he so very fearsome?
“Thire, I do not know what to thay. But God made another the inthtwument of her detheathe.”
The eunuch paused, groping for the proper form of words. It was awfully hard.
“My master,” he said at last. “She has been stwangled.”
The sultan flopped back onto the pillows. There, he said to himself, he was right. Not nerves at all. Just jealousy.
Everything was normal.
“Send for Yashim,” the sultan said wearily. “I want to sleep.”
[ 3 ]
Asleep or awake, the sultan was the Commander of the Faithful, and chief of the Ottoman armed forces; but it was many years since he had unfurled the standard of the prophet and put himself at the head of his soldiery, securing his throne by a single act of nerve. His navy was commanded by the Kapudan Pasha, and his troops controlled by the seraskier.
The seraskier did not rise for Yashim, but merely motioned him with dabbling fingers to a corner of the divan. Yashim slipped off his shoes and sat down cross-legged, his cloak settling around him like a lily pad. He inclined his head and murmured the polite greeting.
Clean-shaven, in the new fashion, with tired brown eyes set in a face the colour of old linen, the seraskier lay awkwardly on one hip, in uniform, as though he had received a wound. His steel-grey hair was cut close to his skull, and the red fez perched on the back of his head emphasized the weight of his jaws. Yashim thought he would be passable in a turban, but Prankish practice had instead dictated a buttoned tunic, with blue trousers piped in red and a shoal of braid and epaulettes: modern uniform for modern war. In the same spirit he had also been issued with a solid walnut table and eight stiff-looking upholstered chairs, which stood in the middle of the room and were lit by candelabra suspended from the coffered ceiling.
He sat up and crossed his trousered legs so that the seams bulged. “Perhaps you would rather we moved to a table,” he suggested irritably.
“As you wish.”
But the seraskier evidently preferred the indignity of sitting on the divan in his trousers to the unpleasant exposure of the central table. Like Yashim himself, he found sitting on a chair with his back to the room faintly disquieting. So instead he drew a long sigh, folding and unfolding his stubby fingers.
“I was told you were in the Crimea.”
Yashim blinked. “I found a ship. There was nothing to detain me.”
The seraskier cocked an eyebrow. “You failed there, then?”
Yashim leaned forwards. “We failed there many years ago, Effendi. There is little that can be done.” He held the seraskier’s gaze. “That little, I did. I worked fast. Then I came back.”
There was nothing else to be said. The Tartar Khans of the Crimea no longer ruled the southern steppe, like little brothers to the Ottoman state. Yashim had been shaken to see Russian Cossacks riding through Crimean villages, bearing guns. Disarmed, defeated, the Tartars drank, sitting about the doors of their huts and staring listlessly at the Cossacks while their women worked in the fields. The Khan himself fretted in exile, tormented by a dream of lost gold. He had sent others to recover it, before he heard about Yashim—Yashim the guardian, the lala. In spite of Yashim’s efforts, the khan’s gold remained a dream. Perhaps there was none.
The seraskier grunted. “The Tartars were good fighters,” he said. “In their day. But horsemen without discipline have no place on the modern battlefield. Today we need disciplined infantry, with muskets and bayonets. Artillery. You saw Russians?”
“I saw Russians, Effendi. Cossacks.”
“That’s the kind we’re up against. The reason we need men like the men of the New Guard.”
The seraskier stood up. He was a bear of a man, well over six feet tall. He stood with his back to Yashim, staring at a row of books, while Yashim glanced involuntarily at the curtain through which he had entered. The groom who had ushered him in was nowhere to be seen. By all the laws of hospitality the seraskier should have offered the preliminary pipe and coffee; Yashim wondered if the rudeness was deliberate. A great man like the seraskier had
