XLIV
We walked ho.me through the early evening streets. The pilgrims were across the Sea in Asia now. It seemed they had taken the soul of the city with them. The muezzin’s call was lifeless. (“Hurry,” I told the porters. I had not realized it was so late.) What virtue could be claimed by turning the face and heart towards Mecca for the few brief minutes it takes to pray? Those of true virtue had given their prayers action and set their feet already on the pilgrims’ trail. We were left behind with but the form, the hollow shell of religion. Such was the dark feeling of premonition that came over me.
Oh, Allah, I prayed, be merciful to us now.
A dark figure pressed by me hurriedly in the narrow street. I noticed curiously the clink of chain mail and the knobbed helmet of a chiaus, an imperial bodyguard.
How odd, I thought. What cause has a chiaus to run? His will—his master’s will— is the supreme law of the land. He should have no cause to cover his tell-tale red trousers and chain mail with a dark cloak nor to run furtively like a thief.
We turned the corner then into our lane and the porters stopped with a jerk, uttering spells against evil. “Keep going! Keep going!” I told them, but had to shove one man quite roughly to make him obey.
Gul Ruh drew the curtain back inquisitively. “What is it, Abdullah?”
“Are you a whore that you must go showing yourself to every passerby?” I spoke to her more sharply than I ever had before. But I was not so afraid she would be seen as that she might see.
I hurried the sedan in through our gates, warning the porters they must not upset the harem by reporting what they had seen. I told the gatekeeper to fetch the master in a hurry, and one peek out of the gate was enough to give him wings.
Still, it seemed I stood a very long time alone in the dark street in the shadow of a dead man. At first I had thought my duty was to protect him from dogs or the desecration of human stares and jeers. But as the only live thing I saw—a lean, grey cat—skirted the lane as if were bewitched, I shivered and came to crave protection myself.
The holiest ones, I suddenly remembered, had all left us for Mecca that day. We were at the mercy of the influences of the Pit. The body swung from its hook as if, even though the life was gone, his spirit still stirred with an angry craving for justice and revenge.
At length the gate opened. I jumped at the sound as if it were the chains of a ghost. The master came out accompanied by three chiauses from the Porte he had lately been given as a bodyguard. The sight of their round-knobbed helmets made me remember the figure that had so quickly rushed by me and it touched my back with cold. I also remembered that when Sokolli Pasha had been given the guard he had been surprised and asked the Sultan: “Master, why do I need a bodyguard? I have always walked the streets with but a few unarmed attendants and feared nothing.”
Murad’s reply was evasive, but seemed to suggest that he knew things he was not telling.
The master was dressed in the plain, simple robe and small, loose turban he always retired to on the rare evenings he had to himself. I realized then that he must have been at his prayers. I could imagine him, kneeling on his rug, when the doorkeeper burst in out of breath, gasping the news: “Master, the Greek is dead. Hung from a lamp hook just outside our gate.”
For one brief moment, Sokolli Pasha would have lost his place in the recitation. Michael Cantacuzenos was the only man he would receive in that state of easy undress, the only man he trusted not to be influenced by the cloth of gold of his robes or a large gold band around his turban.
Cantacuzenos had been expected to arrive before the prayers so their talk could begin immediately after and go on long into the night. When the man had not come, Sokolli had rolled out his rug, anyway. Now when he heard the reason for the tardiness, it did cause him one brief stumble in form. But he soon found the words again: “Praise be to Allah, the Lord of the worlds, the Merciful, the Compassionate, the Ruler of the Day of Judgment. . .”And he did not even raise his hands from their prescribed place at chest level to indicate to the gatekeeper he must wait. He let the intensity of his prayer give that message, and the intensity also gave him fortitude, for he was able to step out of the gate minutes later and look on the street as calmly as he might have greeted his friend on the doorstep alive.
Christian priests were sent for to give the man the rites he had clung to in life. I heard one of them mutter: “That’s what comes of dealing with Turks and renegades. Even those who put on a show of protecting us, underneath, they are still not to be trusted.”
I was glad the master was not nearby then to hear that. It would have hurt him more than the death itself.
Before the priests arrived, however, the master’s chiauses climbed up and cut the body down. Seeing them there undoing what I had reason to believe comrades of theirs had
