down, and down, it bled to a grey twilight, until he stepped off the lowest tread into a vaulted room, supplied by a shuttered window on either side; only the shutters were cracked, and set with glowing chips of sunlight.
The walls were dark with greenish damp, but they were still plastered, and peering close Yashim could make out shapes like the cloudy shapes he had seen under the whitewash in the Nasrin tekke that morning. He recognised trees, pavilions, and a river. A long oak table ran down the room, and there were benches pushed up against the walls.
He took a step forwards and ran a fingertip along the table top. It was clean.
Yet the chamber overhead was a mess of dust and rubbish.
He faced the window. The chinks of light made it too bright to see, so he raised a hand to block them out, and saw a door. It was locked from the outside.
He stood with his back to the door and surveyed the room. From here he could see beyond the table.
At the far end stood what looked like a wooden chest, with a flat lid.
Yashim crossed the room and stood beside it. The lid was at waist-height. He eased his fingers under the rim, and tried it gently.
The lid lifted smoothly, and he looked inside.
[ 88 ]
Stanislaw Palewski opened his mouth to groan, as he did every morning when he woke up. But the groan did not come.
“Ha!”
The events of the night before had returned to him with unexpected clarity.
He wriggled his toes and they appeared obediently at the foot of the bed, poking out from beneath the duvet he had long ago adopted, in the Turkish fashion. His toes looked very dirty, until he remembered how he had blacked them with a brush.
He recalled the execrable champagne that he had been about to punish the previous evening. Doubtless some sharp French house had unloaded a bushel of the bad vintage on the unsuspecting Porte, charging top whack and confident that they would not be exposed. After all, who could complain? Not the Turks, who weren’t supposed to drink the stuff. And the guests were hardly likely to make a fuss.
All the same, Palewski thought, he didn’t get champagne every day, and he could have drunk rather more if that stiff-necked Russian hadn’t been so clumsy.
He grinned.
Tossing his drink over Prince Derentsov had been, he thought, a gifted manoeuvre. But swabbing it down afterwards, to ensure the maximum discomfort, was little short of inspiration.
What did it matter if afterwards he got a dressing-down from the sultan himself? The Russian had almost certainly fared worse—it was he who laid down the challenge, after all, and broke the sultan’s injunction. Palewski had merely responded as a man of honour must.
He and the sultan had had an interesting discussion, too. Surprisingly frank and friendly, and all because he had spilt his drink and wore a dastardly but inordinately well-contrived apology for the Sarmatian finery of his distant predecessors.
The sultan liked the coat. He had recalled, with Palewski, the old days which neither of them had ever known, but which both of them imagined tinged with a glamour and success that neither Poland nor the empire had ever rediscovered. And the sultan had said, in a voice that sounded suddenly weary and unsure, that all the world was changing very fast.
“Even this one.”
“Your Edict?”
The sultan had nodded. He described some of the pressures that now forced him to make changes in the running of his empire.
Military weakness. The growing spirit of rebellion, openly fostered by the Russians. The bad example of the Greeks, whose independence had been bought for them by European Powers.
