corps, as well as being our best gunnery officers. They spoke French,” he added, as if that concluded it. Perhaps it did.
“So they had attended the engineering university?”
“They passed out with top marks. They were the best.”
“Were?”
“Please, a moment.” The seraskier raised a hand to his forehead. “At first, in spite of everything, I thought like you. I supposed they had had some adventure and would reappear later, very shamefaced and sorry. I, of course, was ready to tear them into strips: the whole corps look up to those young men, do you see? They set, as the French say, the tone.”
“You speak French?”
“Oh, only a very little. Enough.”
Most of the foreign instructors in the New Guard, Yashim knew, were Frenchmen, or others—Italians, Poles—who had been swept into the enormous armies the Emperor Napoleon had raised to carry out his dreams of universal conquest. Fifteen, ten years ago, with the Napoleonic Wars finally at an end, some of the more indigent remnants of the Grande Armee had found their way to Istanbul, to take the sultan’s sequin. But learning French was a business for the young, and the seraskier was pushing fifty.
“Go on.”
“Four good men vanished from their barracks last night. When they did not appear this morning, I asked one of the ban-jee, the cleaners, and found out that they had not slept in their dormitory.”
“And they’re still missing?”
“No. Not exactly.”
“What do you mean, not exactly?”
“One of them was found tonight. About four hours ago.”
“That’s good.”
“He was found dead in an iron pot.”
“An iron pot?”
“Yes, yes. A cauldron.”
Yashim blinked.
“Do I understand,” he said slowly, “that the soldier was being cooked?”
The seraskier’s eyes nearly bulged out of his head. “Cooked?” He echoed weakly. It was a refinement he had not considered.
“I think,” said the seraskier, “you should just come and take a look.”
[ 4 ]
Two hours later, Yashim had seen just about all that he wanted to see for one morning. For any number of mornings.
Summoning a lantern bearer, the seraskier walked him eastwards through the empty streets, following the city’s spine towards the imperial stables. Outside the Beyazit Mosque torches flickered in the dark; they passed the Burnt Column close to the entrance to the Grand Bazaar, now shuttered and still, holding its breath as it guarded its treasures through the night. Further on, near the Sehzade Mosque above the Roman aqueduct, they ran across the night watch, who let them go when he saw who it was. Eventually they reached the stables. The stables, like the Guard itself, were new. They had been erected close below the ridge, on the southern side, on an area of ground which had been vacant since the suppression of the Janissaries ten years before, when their vast and rambling barracks had succumbed to bombardment and conflagration.
They found the cauldron, just as the seraskier had described.
It stood in a corner of one of the new stables, surrounded by bedding straw and lit by large, globular oil lamps suspended on heavy chains from the tie beam way overhead. The horses, the seraskier explained, had been
