the terms of their guild membership. No one was going to stop by and offer to buy—at a wild price—any of their humdrum manufactures. The regulations of the guild were fixed: there was a quality, and a price, neither more nor less.
Yashim knew all this. For the moment he merely watched. Most of the smiths worked in the opening of their shops, closest to the light and air and away from the smoky furnaces which blazed in the background. From here, tapping incessantly with their hammers, they slowly pushed out a succession of little products. He glanced up: the usual arrangement of latticed windows overhead advertised the dwelling places of the men, their wives and their children. The apprentices, Yashim thought, would sleep in the shops.
He took a turn into a courtyard and looked back. Up an alley thick with rubbish, the upper storeys were approached by rickety staircases leading, in every case, to a mean doorway hung with a faded strip of carpet, or a blanket cut into ribbons against the flies. Which left, he imagined, the flat roofs where the women could go in the day to get some air, unobserved. And at night, who used those roofs? Enough people, he supposed: you could never be sure. With a shrug he dismissed a faint idea and returned his inspection to the courtyard.
The sound of hammers beating against the tin was fainter here: it broke upon the courtyard like the musical note of frogs tinkling in a nearby lake. Few smiths were working in the alcoves of the courtyard itself: it served, instead, as a caravanserai where tin merchants brought the raw materials of the trade and sold it, at need, to the smiths outside. Here were piled thick sheets of tin in apparently random shapes; and their owners sat among them on low stools in quiet contrast to the arrhythmic tintinnabulation of the street beyond, sipping tea and telling their beads. Now and again one of them would make a sale; the tinsmith cut the sheet, the tin merchant weighed it out, and the smith carried it away.
Yashim wandered out for a last look. The bigger objects -lanterns, in the main, and trunks, were being assembled on the ground outside the shops. But Yashim was satisfied that nowhere, either inside or out, was there a place where a cauldron with a base big enough to fit a man could be discreetly built.
Someone, he thought, would have seen.
And that person, he thought, would have been legitimately puzzled. Why, in the name of all things holy, should anyone want to make a cauldron out of tin?
Of such a size, too! The biggest cauldron anyone had seen since—when?
Yashim froze. All around him the tinsmiths beat out their meaningless bird-like paean to industry and craftsmanship, but he no longer heard. He knew, in a flash, when that moment had been. Ten years before. The night of 15 June 1826.
[ 8 ]
Yashim felt conspicuous as soon as the thought flashed upon him. It was as if the knowledge had made him glow.
In a nearby cafe, the proprietor brought him a coffee while Yashim looked with unseeing eyes down the street. The noise of the tinsmiths insistently hammering had melded with a memory of that terrifying sound, ten years ago, of the Janissaries battering on their upturned cauldrons. It was an age-old signal that nobody in the palace, or in the streets, or in their homes in the city, could misunderstand. It was the mother of all dins, and it hadn’t meant that the Janissaries wanted more food.
It meant that they wanted blood.
Up through the centuries that driving and sinisterly insistent sound of the Janissaries beating on their cauldrons had been the prelude to death in the streets, men torn apart, the sacrifice of princes. Had it always been so? Yashim knew well what the Janissaries had achieved. Each man was selected from a levy of the empire’s toughest, likeliest, most wide-awake Christian boys. Brought to Istanbul, renouncing the faith of the Balkan peasants who had borne them, swearing allegiance as slaves to the sultan mounted at their head, they became a corps. A terrifying fighting machine that the Ottoman sultans had unleashed against their enemies in Europe.
If the Ottoman empire inspired fear throughout the known world, it was the Janissaries who carried the fear to the throats of the unbelievers. The conquest of Sofia and Belgrade. Istanbul itself, wrested from the Greeks in 1453. The Arab peninsula and with it, the Holy Cities. Mohacs, 152.6, when the flower of Hungarian knighthood was cut down in the saddle and Suleiman the Magnificent led his men to Buda, and on, fleetingly, to the gates of Vienna. Rhodes and Cyprus, Egypt and the Sahara. Why, the Janissaries had even landed in France in 1566, and spent a year in Toulon.
Until—who could say why?—the victories dried up. The terms of engagement changed. The Janissaries sought permission to marry. They petitioned for the right to take up trades when there was no fighting, to feed their families. They enrolled their sons into the corps, and the corps grew reluctant to fight. They were still dangerous: loaded with privilege, they lorded it over the common people of the city. Designed to die fighting at the lonely borders of an ever-expanding empire, they enjoyed all the licence and immunity that the people and the sultan could bestow on men who would soon be martyrs. But they no longer sought to martyr themselves. The men who had been sent to terrify Europe made a simple discovery: it was easier—and far less dangerous -to terrorise at home.
The palace made efforts to reason with them. Efforts to discipline them. In 1618 Sultan Osman tried to overturn them: they had him killed, as Yashim knew, by the compression of his testicles, a mode of execution which left no traces on the body. Special man; special death. It was considered fitting for a member of the imperial family. Later still, in 1635, Murad IV rounded up 30,000 Janissaries and marched them to their deaths in Persia. But the corps survived.
