'Hape!' cried the odabashi, stung out of his shyness, 'You can put that where the monkey put the nuts. You're no oil-painting yourself, neither.'
The dead silence that followed this was broken at last by the bosun, who asked 'did the odabashi speak English?'
'Not a fucking word,' said the odabashi.
'No offence intended, mate,' said the bosun, holding out his hand.
'And none taken,' said the odabashi, shaking it.
'Sit down on this bag,' said the gunner.
'Why didn't you tell the Captain?' asked the carpenter. 'He would have been right pleased.'
The odabashi scratched himself, muttering something about being too bashful. 'I did speak up once,' he added, 'but he did not mind me.'
'So you speak English,' said the bosun, who had been staring heavily for some time, turning the matter over in his mind. 'How does that come about, if I may make so bold?'
'Which I am a janissary,' said the odabashi.
'I'm sure you are, mate,' said the carpenter. 'And very much to your credit, too.'
'You know how janissaries are recruited, in course?'
They looked at one another with perfectly blank faces, and all slowly shook their heads.
'Nowadays it is not so strict,' said the odabashi, 'and all sorts of odds and sods get in, but when I was a little chap it was all by what we call the devshurmeh. It still is, but not so much, if you understand me. The tournaji- bashi goes round all the provinces where there are Christians, mostly Albania and Bosnia, the others being what you might call scum, and in each place he takes up a certain number of Christian boys, sometimes more, sometimes less, whatever their parents may say. And these boys are fetched away to a special barracks where their pricks are trimmed pardon me the expression and they are learnt to be Mussulmans and good soldiers. And when they have served their time as ajami, as we say, they are turned over to an orta of janissaries.'
'So I suppose a good many janissaries talk foreign,' observed the carpenter.
'No,' said the odabashi. 'They are took so young and so far off they forget their language and their religion and their people. It was different with me. My mum was in the same town. She was from the Tower Hamlets in London, and went cook-maid with a Turkey-merchant's family to Smyrna, where she took up with my dad, a cake-maker from Argyrocastro, which made trouble with the family. He took her back to Argyrocastro, but then he died and the cousins put her out of the shop, that being the law, so she had to sell her cakes from a stall. Then the tournaji-bashi came round, and the cousins' lawyer gave his clerk a present to take me, which he did - took me right away to Widin, leaving her alone.'
'And she a widow-woman,' said the carpenter, shaking his head.
'It was cruel hard,' said the bosun.
'I hate a lawyer,' said the gunner.
'But I had not been a prentice-soldier in Widin six months before there was Mum with her stall of cakes outside the barracks: so we saw one another every Friday, and often other times; and it was the same in Belgrade and Constantinople when I was out of my time. Wherever the orta went. And so I never forgot my English.'
'Perhaps that was why they sent you here,' suggested the bosun.
'If it was, I wish I had cut my tongue out,' said the odabashi.
'Don't you like it here?'
'I hate it here. Present company excepted.'
'Why so, mate?'
'I always been in cities, and I hate the country. And the desert is ten times far worse than the country.'
'Lions and tigers, maybe?'
'Worse, mate.'
'Serpents?'
The odabashi shook his head, and leaning towards them he whispered 'Jinns and ghouls.'
'What are jinns?' asked the bosun, somewhat shocked.
'Fairies,' said the odabashi, after a moment's consideration.
'You don't believe in fairies, do you?'
'What, not when I seen a fucking great fairy in the old tower over there? This high,'- holding his hand a yard from the ground- 'with long ears and orange eyes? In the night it goes Uhu, uhu, and every time some poor unfortunate bugger cops it somewhere or other. No worse omen in this mortal world. I've heard it almost every night the last week and more.' He paused, and then said 'I didn't ought to have said fairies. Spirits is more like. Unholy ghosts.'
'Oh,' said the bosun, who might scorn fairies, but who, like most sailors and certainly all his shipmates in the Surprise, most heartily believed in ghosts and spirits.
'And what are ghouls?' asked the gunner in a low, almost furtive voice, dreading to hear yet drawing his bag closer.
'Ho, they are far, far worse,' said the odabashi. 'They often take the shape of young females, but the insides of their mouths are green, like their eyes. You see them walking about in graveyards sometimes, and after dark
