“HELLO, stranger!”
It was almost a whisper. Ibou the librarian doubled up his long arm and waggled the fingers in greeting.
Yashim grinned and raised a hand.
“Off to work?” he asked in a low tone. By long-established custom, no one ever raised his voice in the Second Court of the palace.
Ibou cocked his head. “I’ve just finished, actually. I was going to get something to eat.”
Yashim thought he sensed an invitation.
“Well, I wish I could come with you,” he said. And then: “You’ve come out of the wrong door.”
Ibou gave him a solemn look, then turned his head. “It looks all right to me.”
“No, I mean from the archives. I—I didn’t know you could get through on this side.” Yashim felt himself blushing. “It doesn’t matter. Thanks for your help the other night.”
“I only wish I could have done more, efendi,” Ibou replied. “You can come and see me again, if you like. I’m on nights for the rest of this week.”
He salaamed, and Yashim salaamed back.
Yashim went into the harem by the Gate of the Aviary. He could never pass this gate without thinking of the valide Kosem, who two centuries before was dragged here from the apartments naked by the heels and strangled in the corridor. That had been the finale to fifty terrifying years in which the empire was ruled by a succession of madmen, drunkards, and debauchees—including Kosem’s own son Ibrahim, who had his rooms papered and carpeted in Russian furs, and rode his girls like mares . . . until the executioner came for him with the bowstring.
Dangerous territory, the harem.
He stepped into the guard room. Six halberdiers were on duty, standing in pairs beside the doors that led to the Court of the Valide Sultan and the Golden Road, a tiny, open alleyway that linked the harem to the selamlik, the men’s living quarters. The halberdiers were unarmed, except for the short daggers they wore stuffed into the sash of their baggy trousers; they carried halberds only on protective duty, as when on rare occasions they escorted the sultan’s women out of the palace. In the meantime they had a single distinguishing characteristic: the long black tresses that hung from the crown of their high hats as a token that they had been passed for entry into the harem. Yashim remembered a Frenchman laughing when the function of the hair was explained to him.
“You think a mane of hair will stop a man from seeing the sultan’s women? In France,” he had said, “it is the women who have long hair. Is it so that they cannot steal glances at a handsome man?”
And Yashim had replied, rather stiffly, that the halberdiers of the tresses went into only the more public areas of the harem, to bring in the wood.
He laid his fist against his chest and bowed slightly. “By the sultan’s order,” he murmured.
The halberdiers recognized him and stood to let him pass.
He found himself beneath the colonnade that ran along the western edge of the valide’s court. It had been raining, and the flagstones were gleaming and puddled, the walls greenish with damp. The door to the valide sultan’s suite was open, but Yashim stood where he was, turning the situation over in his mind.
What was it, he asked himself, that created danger in the harem?
He thought of the halberdiers he had just met, wearing their long hair like blinkers.
He thought of the chambers and apartments that lay beyond, as old and narrow as Istanbul itself, with their crooked turns, and sudden doorways, and tiny jewellike chambers crafted out of odd corners and partitioned spaces. Like the city, they had grown up over the centuries, rooms polished into place by the grit of expediency, rooms hollowed out of the main complex on a whim, even doorways opened up by what must have felt like the pressure of a thousand glances and a million sighs. None of it planned. And in this space, scarcely two hundred feet square, baths and bedrooms, sitting rooms and corridors, lavatories and dormitories, crooked staircases, forgotten balconies: even Yashim, who knew them, could get lost in there, or find himself looking unexpectedly from one window into a court he had thought far away. There were rooms in there no better than cells, Yashim knew.
How many people trod the labyrinth every day, unraveling the hours of their existence within the walls, treading a few well-worn paths that led from one task to the next: sleeping, eating, bathing, serving? Hundreds, certainly; perhaps thousands, mingling with the ghosts of the thousands who had gone before: the women who had lied, and died, and the eunuchs who pitter-pattered around them, and the gossip that rose like steam in the women’s baths, and the looks of jealousy and love and desperation he had seen himself.
His eye traveled around at the courtyard. It was only about fifty feet square, but it was the biggest open place in the harem: the only place where a woman could raise her face to the sky, feel the rain on her cheeks, see the clouds scudding across the sun. And there were—he counted them—seven doors opening into this court; seven doors; fifteen windows.
Twenty-two ways to not be alone.
Twenty-two ways you could be watched.
As he stood below the colonnade, staring at the rain, he heard women laugh. And immediately he said to himself: the danger is that nothing you ever do is a secret in this place.
Everything can be watched or overheard.
A theft can be observed.
A ring can be found.
Unless—
He glanced at the open door to the valide’s suite.
But the valide wouldn’t steal her own jewels.
He heard the door behind him open and turned around. There, puffing with the exertion and filling the doorway with his enormous bulk, stood the kislar agha.
He looked at Yashim with his yellow eyes.
“You’re back,” he piped, in his curiously tiny voice.
Yashim bowed. “The sultan thinks I haven’t been working hard enough.”
“The sultan,” the black man echoed. His face was expressionless.
He waddled slowly forward, and the door to the guard’s room closed behind him. He stood by a pillar and stuck out a hand, to feel the rain.
“The sultan,” he repeated softly. “I knew him when he was just a little boy. Imagine!”
He suddenly bared his teeth, and Yashim—who had never seen the kislar ăgha smile—wondered if it was a grin or a grimace.
“I saw Selim die. It was here, in this courtyard. Did you know that?”
As the rain continued to patter onto the courtyard, seeping through the flagstones, staining the walls, Yashim thought: he, too, feels the weight of history here.
He shook his head.
The kislar agha put up two fingers and pulled at his pendulous earlobe. Then he turned to look at the rain.
“Many people wanted him to die. He wanted everything to change. It’s the same now, isn’t it?”
The kislar agha continued to stare out at the rain, tugging on his earlobe. Like a child, Yashim thought vaguely.
“They want us,” he said in a voice of contempt, “to be modern. How can I be modern? I’m a fucking eunuch.”
Yashim inclined his head. “Even eunuchs can learn how to sit in a chair. Eat with a knife and fork.”
The black eunuch flashed him a haughty look. “I can’t. Anyway, modern people are supposed to know stuff. They all read. Eating up the little ants on the paper with their eyes and later on spraying the whole mess back in people’s faces when they don’t expect it. What do they call it? Reform. Well, you’re all right. You know a lot.”
The kislar agha raised his head and looked at Yashim.
“It may not be now, maybe not this year or the next,” he said slowly, in his mincing little falsetto voice, “but the time will come when they’ll just turn us out into the street to die.”
He made a flapping gesture with his fingers, as if he were batting Yashim away. Then he stepped out ponderously into the courtyard and walked slowly across to a door on the other side, in the rain.
Yashim stared after him for a few moments, then he went to the door of the valide’s suite and knocked gently on the wood.
One of the valide’s slave girls, who had been sitting on an embroidered cushion in the tiny hall, snipping at her toenails with a pair of scissors, looked up and smiled brightly.
“I’d like to see the valide, if I may,” said Yashim.