ASLEEP or awake, the sultan was the Commander of the Faithful, chief of the Ottoman armed forces, but it was many years since he had unfurled the standard of the Prophet and put himself at the head of his soldiery, securing his throne by a single act of nerve. His navy was commanded by the kapudan pasha, and his troops controlled by the seraskier. The seraskier did not rise for Yashim, but merely motioned him with dabbling fingers to a corner of the divan. Yashim slipped off his shoes and sat down cross-legged, his cloak settling around him like a lily pad. He inclined his head and murmured the polite greeting.
Clean-shaven, in the new fashion, with tired brown eyes set in a face the color of old linen, the seraskier lay awkwardly on one hip, in uniform, as though he had received a wound. His steel-gray hair was cut close to his skull, and the red fez perched on the back of his head emphasized the weight of his jaws. Yashim thought he would be passable in a turban, but Frankish practice had instead dictated a buttoned tunic, with blue trousers piped in red and a shoal of braid and epaulettes: modern uniform for modern war. In the same spirit he had also been issued a solid walnut table and eight stiff-looking upholstered chairs, which stood in the middle of the room and were lit by candelabra suspended from the coffered ceiling.
He sat up and crossed his trousered legs so that the seams bulged. “Perhaps you would rather we moved to a table,” he suggested irritably.
“As you wish.”
But the seraskier evidently preferred the indignity of sitting on the divan in his trousers to the unpleasant exposure of the central table. Like Yashim himself, he found sitting on a chair with his back to the room faintly disquieting. So instead he drew a long sigh, folding and unfolding his stubby fingers.
“I was told you were in the Crimea.”
Yashim blinked. “I found a ship. There was nothing to detain me.”
The seraskier cocked an eyebrow. “You failed there, then?”
Yashim leaned forward. “We failed there many years ago, efendi. There is little that can be done.” He held the seraskier’s gaze. “That little, I did. I worked fast. Then I came back.”
There was nothing else to be said. The Tartar khans of the Crimea no longer ruled the southern steppe, like little brothers to the Ottoman state. Yashim had been shaken to see Russian Cossacks riding through Crimean villages, bearing guns. Disarmed, defeated, the Tartars drank, sitting about the doors of their huts and staring listlessly at the Cossacks while their women worked in the fields. The khan himself fretted in exile, tormented by a dream of lost gold. He had sent others to recover it, before he heard about Yashim—Yashim the guardian, the lala. In spite of Yashim’s efforts, the khan’s gold remained a dream. Perhaps there was none.
The seraskier grunted. “The Tartars were good fighters,” he said, “in their day. But horsemen without discipline have no place on the modern battlefield. Today we need disciplined infantry, with muskets and bayonets. Artillery. You saw Russians?”
“I saw Russians, efendi. Cossacks.”
“That’s the kind we’re up against. The reason we need men like the men of the New Guard.”
The seraskier stood up. He was a bear of a man, well over six feet tall. He stood with his back to Yashim, staring at a row of books, while Yashim glanced involuntarily at the curtain through which he had entered. The groom who had ushered him in was nowhere to be seen. By all the laws of hospitality, the seraskier should have offered the preliminary pipe and coffee; Yashim wondered if the rudeness was deliberate. A great man like the seraskier had attendants to bring him refreshment, as well as a pipe-bearer to select his tobacco, keep the equipment in good, clean working order, accompany his master on outings with the pipe in a cloth and the tobacco pouch in his shirt, and ensure the proper lighting and draw of the pipe. Rich men who vied with one another to present their guests with the finest leaf and the most elegant pipes—amber for the mouthpiece, Persian cherry for the stem—would no more think of functioning without a pipe-bearer than an English milord could dispense with the services of a valet. But the room was empty.
“Less than two weeks from today, the sultan is to review the troops. Marches, drills, gunnery displays. The sultan will not be the only one watching. It will be—” the seraskier stopped, and his head snapped up. Yashim wondered what he had been about to say. That the review would be the most important moment of his career, perhaps. “We are a young troop, as you know. The New Guard has only been in existence for ten years. Like a young colt, we startle easily. We have not had, ah, all the care and training we might have wished for.”
“Nor always quite the success that was promised.”
Yashim saw the seraskier stiffen. In their newfangled European jackets and trousers, the New Guard had been put through their paces by a succession of foreign instructors, ferenghi from Europe who taught them drilling, marching, presenting arms. What could you say? In spite of it all the Egyptians—the Egyptians!—had dealt them humiliating reverses in Palestine and Syria, and the Russians were closer to Istanbul than at any time in living memory. Perhaps their victories were to have been expected, for they were formidable opponents with up-to-date equipment and modern armies; yet there remained, too, the debacle in Greece. No more than peasants in pantaloons, led by quarrelsome windbags, even the Greeks had proved to be more than a match for the New Guard.
All this left the New Guard with a single sanguinary triumph. It was a victory achieved not on the battlefield but right here, on the streets of Istanbul; not against foreign enemies but against their own military predecessors, the dangerously overweening Janissary Corps. The Ottoman Empire’s crack troops in the sixteenth century, the Janissaries had long since degenerated—or evolved, if you liked—into an armed mafia, terrorizing sultans, swaggering through the streets of Istanbul, rioting, fire-raising, thieving, and extorting with impunity.
The New Guard had finally settled the account. Ten years ago, on the night of June 16, 1826, New Guard gunners had pounded the Janissaries to pieces in their barracks, bringing four centuries of terror and triumph to a well-deserved end.
“The review will be a success,” the seraskier growled. “People will see the backbone of this empire, unbreakable, unshakable.” He swung around, sawing the air with the edge of his hand. “Accurate fire. Precise drill. Obedience. Our enemies, as well as our friends, will draw their own conclusions. Do you understand?”
Yashim shrugged slightly. The seraskier tilted his chin and snorted through his nose. “But we have a problem,” he said. Yashim continued to gaze at him: it was a long time since he had been woken in the dead of night and summoned to the palace. Or to the barracks. He glanced out the window: it was still dark, the sky cold and overcast. Everything begins in darkness. Well, it was his job to shed light.
“And what, exactly, does your problem consist of?”
“Yashim efendi. They call you the lala, do they not? Yashim lala, the guardian.”
Yashim inclined his head. Lala was an honorific, a title of respect given to certain trusted eunuchs who attended on rich and powerful families, chaperoning their women, watching over their children, supervising the household. An ordinary lala was something between a butler and a housekeeper, a nanny and the head of security: a guardian. Yashim felt the title suited him.
“But as far as I understand it,” the seraskier said slowly, “you are without attachment. Yes, you have links to the palace. Also to the streets. So tonight I invite you into our family, the family of the New Guard. For ten days, at most.”
“The family, you mean, of which you are the head?”
“In a manner of speaking. But do not think I am setting myself up as the father of this family. I would like you to think of me, rather, as a kind of, of—” The seraskier looked uneasy: the word did not seem to come easily to him. Distaste for eunuchs, Yashim knew, was as ingrained among Ottoman men as their suspicion of tables and chairs. “Think of me—as an older brother. I protect you. You confide in me.” He paused, wiped his forehead. “Do you, ah, have any family yourself?”
Yashim was used to this: disgust, tempered with curiosity. He made a motion with his hand, ambiguous: let the man wonder; it was none of his business.
“The New Guard must earn the confidence of the people, and of the sultan, too,” the seraskier continued. “That is the purpose of the review. But something has happened which might wreck the process.”
It was Yashim’s turn to be curious, and he felt it like a ripple up the back of his neck.
“This morning,” the seraskier explained, “I was informed that four of our officers had failed to report for morning drill.” He stopped, frowned. “You must understand that the New Guard are not like any other army the empire has seen. Discipline. Hard work, fair pay, and obedience to a superior officer. We turn up for drill. I know what you are thinking, but these officers were particularly fine young gentlemen. I would say that they were the flower of our corps, as well as being our best gunnery officers. They spoke French,” he added, as if that concluded it. Perhaps it did.
“So they had attended the engineering university?”
“They passed with top marks. They were the best.”
“Were?”
“Please, a moment.” The seraskier raised a hand to his forehead. “At first, in spite of everything, I thought like you. I supposed they had had some adventure and would reappear later, very shamefaced and sorry. I, of course, was ready to tear them into strips: the whole corps look up to those young men, do you see? They set, as the French say, the tone.”
“You speak French?”
“Oh, only a very little. Enough.”
Most of the foreign instructors in the New Guard, Yashim knew, were Frenchmen, or others—Italians, Poles—who had been swept into the enormous armies the Emperor Napoleon had raised to carry out his dreams of universal conquest. A decade since, with the Napoleonic Wars finally at an end, some of the more indigent remnants of the Grande Armée had found their way to Istanbul, to take the sultan’s sequin. But learning French was a business for the young, and the seraskier was pushing fifty.
“Go on.”
“Four good men vanished from their barracks last night. When they did not appear this morning, I asked one of the temizlik, the cleaners, and found out that they had not slept in their dormitory.”
“And they’re still missing?”
“No. Not exactly.”
“What do you mean, not exactly?”
“One of them was found tonight. About four hours ago.”
“That’s good.”
“He was found dead in an iron pot.”
“An iron pot?”
“Yes, yes. A cauldron.”
Yashim blinked. “Do I understand,” he said slowly, “that the soldier was being cooked?”
The seraskier’s eyes nearly bulged out of his head. “Cooked?” he echoed weakly. It was a refinement he had not considered. “I think,” he said, “that you should just come and take a look.”