The pink minarets rose as slender as paintbrushes above the mosque in the deserted town square. There were eight of them, set amid 177 white domes, and could be seen, it was said, for seventy miles. But the paint was peeling now, and the latticed shadows of the courtyards passed across dried-up flowerbeds and dust-caked fountains.
Beyond, the Bosphorus was covered in brown cadavers, agitated at the pleasure of the winds and the waves. Sultan Seyfeddin Mehmet II cared little about the carnage his infidel wars had caused, and petulantly complained when his pazar caique, or imperial barge, had trouble nudging its way through the corpse-thick tides. His mother, the valide Dowager Sultana, controlled the city of the Golden Horn now (as mothers so often did in this region), and rarely left his side during the hours of light. At night she slept in a curved chamber of beaten gold-leaf, protected by twelve dwarves armed with scimitars taller than themselves.
The Sultan Seyfeddin had six brothers, but three had been garrotted, two banished to Albania, and the only one with any sense, the young favourite Beyazit, had been imprisoned in his quarters for the past eight scorching summers, to languish in his kafes, or cage, until his death, with only his sterile concubine for company.
The kingdom was, to put it mildly, in disarray. The Sultan’s armies had protected its borders at a terrible cost; the court was in chaos, the peasants were eating tree bark to survive and even most of the royal swans had been snared and baked by desperate farmers whose lands had been taken to provide military camps.
But life – such as it was – had to go on. The towns and villages of the land were quieter now because people were weak, and it required too much physical effort to move around the dusty landscape. Those camels and asses that had not been boiled for their flesh were worked until death came as a happy release. Desperate mothers defied the will of Allah and smothered their children at birth rather than bring them into such a world of misery.
And the Dowager Sultana was preparing for a wedding banquet. She had taken such delight in ordering everything, from the bolts of fine blue damask filled with crimson rose petals, to the little round almond cakes dusted with yellow icing sugar, that one would have thought she was to be the bride, but that dubious privilege belonged to Aimee, the girl who had been selected to marry the Sultan and secure an alliance with the kingdom’s southern borders.
It would mean that the Sultan Seyfeddin would have to turn his attention from the ladies of his seraglio, Circassian concubines on whom he nightly lavished amber wax and tulips, but it couldn’t be helped; the Sultan would eventually need to father a child, and that was something he couldn’t do with a slave girl. Aimee was ten, a little old as brides went in this part of the world (the Sultan’s father had married a girl of seven at the age of fifty-eight) but the kingdom could not afford to wait too long for an heir. Seyfeddin had no interest in love, or marriage, or art, or politics, or even his people. He was a child in the body of a corpulent thirty-five-year-old man, and chiefly delighted in playing practical jokes upon those in his power.
Once he had arranged to have his harem dressed in new chemises of orange silk, then ordered them brought to the royal bath house, where he secretly spied on them from a screened window. His tailors had removed the stitches from the garments and lined the seams with glue, which melted in the bath house heat, causing the chemises to fall apart and leave his ladies naked, whereupon he took great merriment in their anguish.
The Dowager Sultana had been unhappy with the court tailors ever since, and when she was unhappy, terrible things could happen to a courtier. Soon the north wall of the palace was covered in a skein of blood that dripped in strands from its dragging hooks, and there were no tailors left in the palace to torment, so she summoned a Janissary and commanded him to ride into the first village he could find that had not been wiped out by cholera, and locate a tailor who would make her a beautiful gown for the approaching wedding.
The Janissary questioned the villagers and was directed to a young man called Abdul Paizar, who lived with his wife and daughter in a clay hut at the end of a cracked white lane, the sides of which were littered with the carcasses of starved animals. The Janissary was shocked at the state of decay and poverty within the town, and hoped that the tailor would prove skilled enough to earn a future for himself and his family, for the Dowager Sultana could be generous when served well.
‘I understand you are the finest tailor in these parts,’ said the Janissary as he tried to calm his skittering mount outside the tailor’s house.
‘Though I say it myself, sir, there is no garment I cannot make.’
‘Then you have not been tested for a time, or at least you have not been rewarded,’ observed the Janissary as he regarded the tailor’s own ragged clothes and humble dwelling. ‘You will come with me to the palace at the command of the valide Dowager Sultana. If you do well, it will be the making of your fortune.’
And so it was that Abdul the tailor attended the Dowager Sultana, who showed him plans she had drawn up for a gown of her own design, with a tight bodice of spun gold and a long train of dyed purple goose feathers. Her royal modesty prevented her from being physically measured for a fitting, for the hands of a peasant could not approach the flesh of one who had been chosen by Allah himself, so the tailor was required to guess her size, and given that the Dowager was prone to dressing in layers of different materials, his task was far from easy.
It was a tricky situation; Abdul knew that if he made the bodice too loose, the Sultan’s mother would appear less attractive than her son’s intended bride, and would demand a suitable revenge on the tailor, something traditional and lingering that involved sharp hooks. If, on the other hand, he made a gown which was too tight, it would cause her discomfort, and she would not look suitably radiant, with the result that the street dogs would soon be feeding on the guts of the hapless tailor.
But Abdul was a smart young man, and came up with a solution to the problem; although his time was limited, his resources were not, and so he resolved to have the palace seamstresses make not one gown but ten, each of a slightly different size, so that the Dowager Sultana might find a span of material that exactly suited her girth.
The plan appeared to be a great success, and work proceeded well on the dresses. When all ten were completed shortly after midnight on the morning of the wedding, the tailor inspected the work of the seamstresses by lamplight, and approved each gown only after examining it in minute detail. He noticed that one of the dresses contained a faint flaw in the material, barely noticeable to the closest eye, but a flaw all the same. However, it was too late to start afresh on another gown, and besides, the flawed outfit had but a one in ten chance of being chosen.
It was the tailor’s misfortune to discover, several hours later, that the Dowager Sultana had picked the gown with the flaw.
Hardly anyone looked at the bride, for even though she was shy and slender, with the unblemished skin of a child not long removed from the womb, the Dowager Sultana had ordered her features to be hidden beneath a veil of dense reed-satin, and had refused her jewellery of any kind. She herself had been fitted in five-inch high panttobles, shoes which set her above the rest of the court, and braided plaits of gold wire laced with pearls.
The wedding took place in the orange-and-white-striped mosque, under a vast canopy of cerise velvet supported by four golden trees. Of course, the canopy was set at an angle, because no Ottoman wished to view his world with squares and corners and straight lines, for such arrangements smacked of death. Nothing was straightforward and direct in this world – not love, not war, not revenge.
The procession into the wedding banquet was led by the Provost and his officers, the judges, the Emirs, the Viziers, the Mufti, the Hautboys, the Musick, the Guardians of the Arsenal, the Treasurer, the Eunuchs and then the family of the bride, in order to show them their place in the pecking order of the palace.
Everything went well until the tailor noticed that the flawed sleeve on the Dowager Sultana’s gown had become snagged on the gold wire of her armband. It was enough to start the back of the bodice – which was far too tight – unravelling at great speed. The more the Dowager Sultana’s flesh shifted, the more the material was rent, until the courtiers behind her had begun to whisper and point. The mosque began to sink into unnatural silence, until only the Dowager Sultana was wondering what had happened.
To say that she lost face when she discovered what was happening is an understatement. She lost her reason, her dignity, her temper and finally her poise, collapsing off the high panttoble shoes with a crash.
After being flicked with wet rose petals in the seclusion of her bedchamber, she recovered sufficiently to order the tailor’s death, preferably by being roped to stallions straining in opposite directions.
It was the Sultan Seyfeddin who came up with a better idea. His practical joking had lately taken on a crueller edge – as the bridesmaids who had been made to cross a carpet laid over live coals could testify – and he had noticed that the tailor’s greatest concern was for the welfare of his beautiful daughter, Mihrisah, for he kept her likeness etched in ebony around his neck.
‘Tell me,’ the Sultan asked his Grand Vizier, ‘who is the ugliest man in the entire kingdom?’
‘Why, sir, there is no one more grotesque than our own munedjiin, our royal astrologer,’ replied the Grand Vizier. It was true; Ibrahim, the court astrologer, had been granted his powers as a child, when he had fallen from his father’s horse while out riding in the desert. The poor boy had been dragged for a quarter of a mile across the hot sands. The sun-scorched sands burned against his skin like a million fiery cinders, and fused to his face like streaks of molten glass. Ibrahim had now reached the age of two and twenty. Although he was strong and pleasing of body, it was said that his face could stop the six-faced Italian timepiece in the clock-hall beyond the main courtyard. None of the concubines (whose rooms overlooked the astrologer’s kiosk) would dare to peer out through their modesty-windows when Ibrahim was at work on his charts, for his desk faced their apartments.
So it was that the tailor’s daughter was married, against her will, to the ugliest man in the Sultan’s kingdom, as revenge for her father’s ineptitude, it being a long-held belief within the Ottoman Empire that the creation of suffering was an art as subtle as any other. On the night before her wedding, Mihrisah sobbed uncontrollably, for she felt she had brought disgrace to her family by being born a girl. The marriage ceremony was a small affair attended only by the lowest courtiers, who reported back to the Sultan that when she saw the face of her husband, Mihrisah made no sound at all. Rather, she accepted the calamity of her fate with great stoicism. One of the courtiers delivered his report in such a tone of respect that the Sultan had him defenestrated for treachery.
The tailor was kept on at the royal court as the Sultan’s personal tailor, and paid a handsome salary in order to give the Sultan’s revenge more bite; for Abdul could not share his newfound wealth with his daughter, who had been given an adjoining apartment to his, nor with his wife, who was forced to remain at home without food in the cholera-stricken village. In addition, the tailor was forbidden from addressing Mihrisah in any way. Nor could he speak to her gruesome husband.
Without his family, the tailor felt there was little point in remaining alive. His poor workmanship had doomed them all to a life of wretchedness, but if he killed himself for his honour, he risked putting their lives at risk, and so he lost himself in his work, and tried hard not to think about the horror of his daughter’s nights, or his wife’s desolate, wretched days. The world settled back into a slow and soporific curve, while the tailer sewed and watched and waited.
Soon Aimee, the Sultan’s young wife, was old enough to bear a child, and did so, producing a healthy son and an heir for her husband. A ceremony of celebration was announced, and the Sultan asked the tailor to stitch him a jacket finer than any made before, in order that he might impress his wife at the recommencement of their lovemaking.
On the morning of the celebration, Abdul presented his work to the Sultan. Carefully unwrapping the silken bag into which the jacket had been laid, he raised a truly extraordinary piece of work. He had seen the style on a painting that detailed the outfit of a Western visitor, and had noted the Sultan’s smile of approval. Slim of sleeve and narrower of waist than was usual in court clothes, it consisted of a single unbroken piece, like a second skin, that the tailor suggested would fill Aimee with delight. Moreover, its finish was of bright orange panels, overlapping like turtle scales, and it glinted in the morning sun, first ginger, then cherry, then hesperidian, light reflecting like a thousand phosphorescent sunsets.
Of course it found favour with the Sultan, for dark colours suggested the finality of death, and sunlight the converse. Seyfeddin was entranced and demanded to try it on at once, but Abdul insisted on making the fittings himself, and in a rare state of agitated vanity, the Sultan allowed him to touch the royal corpus. Once the jacket was correctly laced and buttoned, the Sulton summoned his mother to gain her approval.
The valide Dowager Sultana was not a woman known to express delight in the pleasure of others, but even she was thrilled by the tailor’s work. She circled her son like an overfed hyena, admiring the jacket from every angle.
‘It is magnificent, is it not? What incredible new material is this?’ the Sultan beamed, catching sight of himself in the great beaten-copper panels of his dressing room. He summoned his eunuch. ‘Bring my divan in here,’ he ordered. ‘I wish to rest in my celestial raiment until the commencement of the celebrations.’
‘I wouldn’t do that, your royal highness,’ warned Abdul. The Sultan was shocked – no one was allowed to speak out of turn in his presence.
‘You would not do what, pray tell me?’ he thundered.
‘You may not take rest, sire. You see, I made the jacket from a thousand scorpion tails, and I have sewn you into it, so that if you should put pressure on the jacket in any way, the tails – each one of which is threaded with gold and still contains its poison sac – will be drawn forward to sting you through the lining, and I can promise you that it will be a lingering death, as the scorpions I chose were of a middling size, and therefore as painful as they are poisonous. Any pressure, anywhere on the jacket, will cause you to be stung, and stung, and stung again. Only the bite of the desert tarantula is more agonising.’
The Sultan examined his left sleeve, and gently squeezed the plated material, which was segmented like a shrimp’s skin. As he did so, he saw the golden thread tighten, and watched in horror as one of the stings thrust itself through the silken lining of the jacket to press against the soft white flesh of his wrist and puncture it.
The tailor stepped back toward the doorway as the Sultan released a roar of horrified anger. ‘Take it off me!’ yelled Seyfeddin as the Dowager Sultana began to wail.
‘I will do no such thing, sir, although I assure you that I – and only I – could attempt to remove the jacket, for only I know where every sting lies, but I will not unless you grant a guarantee to release my daughter from her marriage.’
‘How dare you presume to dictate terms to me!’ yelled the Sultan. ‘Guards! Cut this traitor into a thousand symmetrical pieces!’
‘Wait,’ cried the Dowager Sultana, ‘if you harm him, you will never find a way to remove the jacket. You must show strength and rise to the challenge of this infidel.’
The Sultan glared at the tailor.
Abdul glared back.
It was a stalemate.
‘Very well,’ sneered the Sultan. ‘I’ll show you the power of a chosen Ottoman heir to the celestial ruler. A Sultan has power to control his body in a way that mere mortals cannot imagine. I shall never sleep again, but will remain standing, in defiance of your traitorous intent.’
And he did, right through the ceremony, through the night (after he had banished his puzzled wife to her bedchamber) and through the whole of the next day. His Janissaries built him a special post to lean his hands on, but toward the end of the third day the Sultan’s iron will failed him, and his eyes began to droop.
His mother ordered the apothecaries to mix chemical potions that would keep him awake, and when those began to fail, she jabbed him with pins, that he might be reminded of the deadly scorpion tails. The garment Seyfeddin had so admired glittered about him like the coils of a deadly snake, but still he refused to collapse. The Dowager Sultana confined the tailor to his quarters while she devised a suitably exquisite torture for him.
Who knows what might have happened? It seemed certain that the Sultan would eventually be overcome by the failings of his body, and that his mother would order the tailor’s death. But this was not what came to pass.
Instead, on the fourth night, as black and starless as the dark at the edge of the world, as the Sultan stood propped at his post and the tailor remained tethered in his apartment, a knock came at Abdul’s door.
‘My father, I must see you.’ Mihrisah stood on tiptoe to see the tailor through the shadowed stars of the door’s sandalwood grille.
‘My daughter, you must not speak to me.’ The tailor’s ankle chain would not reach far, so he called to her as loudly as he dared. ‘Haven’t I brought enough shame upon our family?’
‘I have a favour to beg of you.’ Her lips shone in the diamond-fretted squares that lined the grille. ‘I want you to release the Sultan from his coffin-coat.’
‘Why should I do such a thing after all that has passed between us?’ the tailor asked.
‘Because something extraordinary has happened,’ Mihrisah replied. ‘Seyfeddin may rule his kingdom with fists of iron, but even he holds no power over the human heart. You see, I have fallen in love with my husband. I know the court thinks him hideous, but beneath that deceiving surface lies the kindest disposition in all the world. You must not feel shamed for bringing dishonour upon our family, for you have brought me happiness, which I treasure above all other things.’
So the tailor called for the Sultan’s Janissaries, and requested an audience with his master, who was now barely able to stay awake, and therefore eager to find a solution to the challenge without losing face. Abdul agreed to remove the jacket, first exacting a promise from Seyfeddin and his mother that neither he nor anyone in his family would be punished. The Sultan agreed to the terms of the arrangement, and the tailor called for his scissors, carefully cutting him out of the viperous suit with a few well-placed snips. Shaking with relief and overcome by days of wakefulness, the Sultan collapsed onto his palanquin and was carried back to his bedchamber, where he slept for two days and two nights.
But the Dowager Sultana refused to allow the tailor to leave. ‘Only the Sultan can grant your pardon,’ she exclaimed with a crafty smile on her face, ‘and he is fast asleep, so here you stay.’
The tailor waited. On either side of him, palace eunuchs stared straight ahead with their swords folded in their arms. As the sun set, the smell of boiling almond rice drifted through the windows of the apartment, and the tailor pondered his fate.
When the Sultan finally awoke (and ordered an immense meal of goat baked with mandarins), he summoned the tailor to his council-room. Abdul began to fear the worst as soon as he saw the Seyfeddin approach with the Dowager Sultana walking behind her son. A thin, dangerous smile split her face like a knife-cut across an aged pomegranate. Both were dressed in fine black silk, the official shade of impending death.
The eunuchs approached in silent curving rows and placed a palanquin behind the royal couple. The tailor had heard that the ceremonial bench was used whenever an imaginative execution was to be ordered. As the Sultan produced a dark scroll from his shirt, Abdul’s suspicions were confirmed. But Seyfeddin’s revenge was to be even greater than he had feared, for he proceeded to read out two other names apart from the tailor’s, those of his wife and daughter.
As the proclamation reached an end, the Sultan and his mother seated themselves to announce the method of death. Their eyes widened.
Abdul waited with his breath held behind his teeth.
The Sultan and his mother were frozen side by side. Then they began to scream.
Afterwards, the tailor walked shakily past the oil-sheened eunuchs, who continued to stare straight ahead. They were forbidden to do anything without an order, so they stayed in their places, as they had been trained to do upon pain of death.
Nobody dared to follow him.
Eventually, Abdul reached a courtyard where he could no longer hear the screams of the Dowager Sultana or her son, and sat down in the sun before a pale dried-up fountain. One day, he decided, he would get all the fountains in the Palace working again, for he longed to hear the splatter of water on azure tiles.
He was a free man once more.
The scorpion jacket had proven such a success that he had experimented further while the Sultan slept. Upon his instructions, Mihrisah and her husband had ventured into the desert, and had returned with their wicker baskets filled. There were enough tarantulas within the baskets to completely cover the dark surface of the execution palanquin, even though sewing them into place had proven far more arduous than tailoring the tails of scorpions, because this time he was working with poisoned pincers, not single stings.
By now the blackened netherparts of the Sultan and his mother would be bloating with one of the most excruciating venoms known to the world’s apothecaries. They would eventually die in a fearful extrusion of lethal pus, but only after they had had time to reflect upon the cause of their fate.
Abdul followed the smell of roasting fowl to the royal kitchen. He decided to partake of a good meal before setting off to release the young Beyazit from his eight-year prison, and taking his place as court favourite to the kingdom’s first wise ruler in decades.