Reaching home, he laid the tiles by the window and sat on the divan, contemplating the strong lines of the twining stems, the beautiful deep reds of the tulips, which had so often refreshed his eyes as the water of the fountain had refreshed his skin. Such flaming reds were unobtainable nowadays, he knew. Centuries ago the potters of Iznik had fanned their talents to such heights that the river of knowledge had simply dried up. Blues there always were: lovely blues of Kayseri and Iznik, but not the reds beloved of the heretics, who came from Iran and vanished in their turn.
Yashim remembered how he had loved such tiles, where they decorated the inner sanctum of the sultan’s palace at Topkapi, a place forbidden to all ordinary men. In the harem itself, home to the sultan and his family alone, many women had admired those tiles, and many sultans, too.
Yashim had seen them only because he was not an ordinary man.
Yashim was a eunuch.
He was still gazing at the tiles, remembering others like them in the cool corridors of the sultan’s harem, when a knock on the door announced the messenger.
4
Resid Pasha tapped his polished boot with a swizzle stick.
“The Sultan Mahmut, may he rest in peace, was pleased to order the construction of the bridge.” He pointed his stick at the divan. “The old city and Pera have been too much apart. That is also the view of the padishah.”
“Now Pera will come to Istanbul,” Yashim said, “and we will know no peace.”
Resid pursed his lips. “Or perhaps the other way around, Yashim efendi.”
“Yes, my pasha,” Yashim said doubtfully. He took a seat, cross-legged, on the divan. “Perhaps.”
He tried to picture Pera subsiding into dignified silence, as the sober pashas and the minarets and the cypresses of old Istanbul spread their leisurely influence across the bridge, stilling the perpetual scrimmage of touts, tea boys, porters, bankers, shopkeepers, and sailors that milled through the Pera streets. Where would the cypresses find space to grow, between the Belgian hatters and the Greek peddlers, the steam presses and the foreign crowds? Old Ottoman gentlemen brought their families to Pera now and then, and led them in stately astonishment through crowds of every nationality and none, staring into the big glass windows of the shops on the Grande Rue, before embarking again for home.
“I understand that you know many languages,” Yashim added pleasantly.
Yashim did not know Resid well. The young vizier belonged to another generation at the palace school, the generation that studied French and engineering; his training had taken him beyond the boundaries of the empire. Resid’s mother was from the Crimea, an exile; his family were poor. He was in his midtwenties, maybe four or five years older than the sultan he served, but reputed to be a hard worker, pious without ostentation, quick thinking, and very sure of himself. Certainly he had advanced very rapidly under the eye of the old sultan, who insisted that he learn languages and had sent him on missions to Paris and Vienna, for Mahmut had lost confidence in the official dragomen, or interpreters, most of whom were local Greeks. No doubt he had considered him, too, a useful influence on his son.
The pasha shrugged. “Languages, of course. It saves time.”
Yashim lowered his eyes. He spoke eight languages perfectly, including Georgian, and loved three: Greek, Ottoman, and French.
“The sultan has called for you, Yashim efendi. He is aware of the services you have rendered to his house. It was I who reminded him.”
Yashim inclined his head politely. There had been times when old Mahmut would roar for Yashim and present him with some dilemma that suited Yashim’s peculiar talents. Many things in the harem, and beyond, had required his attention, not all of them mere peccadilloes. Theft, unexplained deaths, threats of mutiny or betrayal that struck at the very stability or survival of the oldest ruling house in Europe-Yashim’s job was to resolve the crisis. As unobtrusively as possible, of course. Yashim knew that the air of invisibility that surrounded him should also envelop the mysteries he was called upon to penetrate.
“And I would remind you, Yashim efendi, that the sultan is very young.”
Yashim almost smiled. Resid Pasha’s only visible affectation was a small mustache that he waxed with care, but his chin was smooth and soft. He wore the stambouline, that hideous approximation of Western dress that the old sultan had officially prescribed for all his subjects, Greek, Turk, Armenian, or Jew, and that people were still learning to adopt. Yashim, long ago, had decided not to bother.
“Sultan Mehmet was young four centuries ago, Resid Pasha, when he took this city from the Greeks.”
“But one would say that Mehmet had more experience.”
Is that what you have? Yashim wondered. At twenty-five-experience?
“Mehmet judged his interests very well,” Resid continued. “He also overruled advice. But times have changed, I think.”
Yashim nodded. It was well put.
“Each of us must strive to serve the sultan’s best interests in our own way, Yashim. There will be occasions, I am sure, when you will be able to serve him with your special talent for peering into men’s hearts and minds. Many others-it is natural and no shame to them at all-serve him by their mere alacrity.”
His dark eyes searched out Yashim’s.
“I understand,” Yashim murmured.
The young vizier seemed unconvinced. “We Ottomans have many generations of understanding the ways of princes, Yashim. They give us-the sultan is pleased to give us his orders. And we say, the sultan has said this, or this. It shall be done. Among these orders, though, we have recognized a class of-what? Watery commands. Written on water, Yashim.”
Yashim did not stir a hair.
What is written on the water cannot be read.
“I believe the sultan will receive you this afternoon.” Resid raised his hand in a vague gesture of dismissal. “You will have many opportunities to show-alacrity,” he added. “I can see that it shall be so.”
Yashim stood and bowed, one hand to his chest.
The elevation of the new sultan, like the rising of a planet, was creating new alignments, shifts in the weight and composition of the cabals and cliques that had always flourished in the palace around the person of the all- powerful sultan. Resid had been singled out for advancement by Mahmut; now Abdulmecid had confirmed his father’s choice.
Was Resid’s friendship-his protection-an offer Yashim could afford to refuse?
Outside the vizier’s office, Yashim turned and walked a long way down a carpeted corridor, toward a pair of double doors flanked by motionless guards and a row of pink upholstered straight-backed chairs.
The guards did not blink. What did the sultan want, Yashim wondered, that Resid so palpably did not?
He took a chair and prepared to wait-but almost immediately the doors flew open and a white-gloved attendant ushered him into the presence.
5
Yashim had not seen the sultan for some years before his elevation to the throne. He remembered the skinny boy with feverish eyes who had stood pale and alert at his father’s side. He expected him to have grown and filled out, the way children do to their elders’ constant and naive astonishment, yet the young man seated on a French chair with his legs under a table did not, at a glance, appear to have changed at all. He was almost preternaturally thin and bony, with awkward shoulders and long wrists concealed-but not made elegant-by the arts of European tailors.
Yashim bowed deeply and approached the sultan. Only his brows, he noticed, had developed: heavy brows above bleary, anxious eyes.
