George Mills

1

It wasn’t religious this time, it was political and historical.

And maybe if I wasn’t the thinking man’s George Mills was the vocal one’s one. A witness, in a dynasty of witnesses, one more chump who crewed history, whose destiny it was to hang out with the field hands, just there, you see, in range and hard by, but a little out of focus in the group photographs, rounded up when the marauders came, feeding the flames, one more wisp of smoke at the Inquisitions, doing all the obligatory forced marches, boat folks from the word go, but nothing personal on anybody’s part. Not the government’s, not the rebels’. Certainly not our own.

My own taling meant for more than just the story hour, that kid’s garden of lullaby and closed circle of our family tradition. Your father-to-son disclosures I mean, all archived confidence and my spooked clan’s secret recipes. And if I was different it’s because I seemed to clamor for audience as well as style. Because we Millses have always had the latter. The former, too, if you come right down to it. Maybe particularly the former, even if it always turns out to be, as it always does turn out to be, some knee-jounced, lap-settled, thumb-sucking babe child who can’t get over any of it, who takes it all in, who takes it, terrified and relieved too that nothing, nothing whatsoever, is all that will ever be expected of him. That the only thing he has to do is remember that primal incident in the Polish forest when Guillalume fixed forever the Millsian parameters and gave us — never mind revolution, never mind reform bills, modern times or the inchworm creep of hope — our Constitution. And one thing other of course: to be ready to spill it all out when the babe child was on the other knee as it were, meanwhile perfecting his style — which we Millses have always had — rendering the story to his own inner ear if he were still without issue, perfecting his nuance as another might perfect his French for a trip abroad, and taking care to get the magic parts pat.

Because we’re not even a joke. After all these years, all these centuries. Not fabled in song and story, not even a joke. Our name, till I came along, never even in the papers. Our eyewitness unrecorded, our testimony not so much ignored as never even overheard, the generations sworn to secrecy, or if not actually sworn at least inclined that way. Content enough with our secret handshakes and coded bearing, our underground railway ways.

Which is just as well could be. Or so the story goes. Our version of it anyway, the way I heard it, how it came down to me, our baton-passed history apostolically successioned. Tag, and you’re it.

Maybe we should have tried America, put in some time in the New World. Or maybe not. It’s all new world for our kind anyway, ain’t it? See why I began by implying I was the thinking man’s George Mills? Not because I was any smarter than those other guys, God knows, but because I was capable of all this alternative, but-on-the-other-hand understood like some spiffy grammatical usage. My lot calls that thinking. Your lot too probably. (There I go again.) And if I had this Millsian perspective that lends detachment and magnanimous neutrality, perhaps it’s really because…This isn’t what I wanted to talk about.

It wasn’t religious this time, it was political, historical. Perhaps the King himself opened the door.

I don’t say answered. Opened. Perhaps he was on his way out as I was already knocking. Anyway, now I think of it, I must have startled him (despite his size, which was immense, he was big around as a kiosk) a good deal more than he startled me. I had the advantage, you see, of not knowing he was the King. (What advantage did he have? The man about to step out, nothing on his mind, to judge from his whistling, but his mood, calling, as was his destiny, all the shots of his daily round, and submissive at details as a tool, the arrangements already delegated, assigned, giving over his entire person like a horseman a heel for a hoist. And there I was, blocking his way, stuck in the doorway like an insurrectionist, a man, to look at me, to judge from my seedy clothes and peasant’s seamy appurtenances, the countryman’s straw helmet still on my head, the loose smock that could have concealed weapons, the rude boots like someone’s who might have been in his mutiny suit, for rebellion dressed, a far-flung Jacobin say, some Luddite-come-lately uniformed for sedition and putsch.) Advantage to the hick. (Because what really alarmed him, I learned later, too late, was not my crummy clothes or savage bearing — he was King of Great Britain and Ireland, King of Hanover; he knew our homespun, had closets of the stuff made to order for the bumpkin balls and bog-trots, the hayseed hoedowns and rustic masquerades of his youth — but my simple failure to bow and scrape, to make a leg or flat out kneel. What did I know? My fourth day in town. To me he looked like any other fat, well-groomed London gentleman of breeding. Where were his crown and sceptre? His sash and ribbons? His sword? The feather in his cap no higher than any other man’s. [Indeed, he was bareheaded.] And where, for that matter, were all the King’s men? Some of them? Any? One? His appearance less regal finally than a footman’s. Less regal than the livery of the men who drove the carriages in the streets. [Which was what I’d thought I’d do, why I’d come to London, with no weapons but only my letter of introduction greasy and rumpled under my smock that explained my presence at that particular door — it was not even the front door — at the very time when the man I did not yet know was my sovereign was about to emerge from it.] Dressed in long trousers, the plain style that had just come in, vestless, his neck unadorned save for a wide black circle of cloth that served as cravat.)

So we did this mutual side shuffle, feinting and parrying like swordsmen, like men before mirrors. I would have bowed if he’d given me a chance, displayed nape like a white flag, bobbed and bowed, ducked and dithered. Why not? It costs nothing to give way to squires, even when they’re coming out servants’ entrances, and it pleases them so.

“Stand still, damn ye,” the old fellow said.

And I did, recovering my balance like a tumbler. He looked me over, asked my name.

“It’s George,” I said.

“George,” he mocked.

“Aye,” I said. Then, haughtily, as he’d been scornful: “George, son of George. Son of George, son of George, son of George. George, son of George to the forty-second or forty-third power if it comes to that.”

“And does it come to that?”

“It sure does.”

“British?”

“As the day is long.”

“Bow to the King,” hissed the aging dandy.

“What? Where? Here?” Startled, reflexive, bent as in cramp. Taking, before him, a kind of cover, as if shells had gone off, rockets, explosives, sunbursts of majesty. (A Mills first, an historical highlight, whose eight and a half centuries had been a kind of preparation for just such a moment. The subject is subjects. The subject is subjects! Who’d lived always in monarchical climes the low-liege life. Assured of kings as a Christian of God but who’d yet to see one. Never mind been in one’s presence, had actual audience. Glimpsed his coach I mean, spotted retainers. Living centuries on a small island since practically the invention of kings, ringed by their circumstance and circumscribed by their ordinance, hemmed by decree, paying the rates and loyal at the levy, doing the death duties and making good on the ransoms, prizing the special commemorative coins and celebratory postage like heirloom, and coming up with the surtaxes and VAT’s, the excise and octroi, all tolls all told and the taxes on war and peace and all the royal expeditions. Excused from nothing yet and exacting from ourselves what they’d tax collectors to exact. Among the poorest of their subjects and withal over the years and down through the reigns and dynasties — how we told time — contributing to their collective, cumulative well-being at least one gold spoke on at least one golden wheel that turned the coach we had yet to see.) I grabbed the sleeve of the old guy’s coat and yanked.

“Get down, Guv! Get down for the sovereign!”

And, groveled as spider, did this dance of good citizenship. Palace farce. For the handkerchief that came off in my hand when I’d grabbed his wrist was embroidered with a silken seal of majesty, his royal monogram in king’s tailored cursive, HMGIV like Roman numerals of state. By this time, too, recognizing elements of the declined, devalued handsomeness in the aging face from the mint, intact perfection of his image on my coins. (Thinking: Not merely a man, not merely even an important man, but actual animate money.)

We aren’t stupid. It was so unexpected. Indeed, I got the picture before the King did, and made my adjustments, all my Kentucky windage reassignments of perception, the King himself still preoccupied with a king’s terrors — mutiny, red menace, rout and regicide. It was my duty to calm him.

Practically prostrate, I called soothingly to him. “Sire,” I crooned. Calling him autarch, calling him dynast, calling him King, my mind all over him with all the stored-up honorifics of a captive race.

“Guv?” he said. “Guv?”

“A figure of speech, Father.”

“To the forty-third power?”

“Or forty-second. More likely forty-second. Almost assuredly forty-second.”

“Gee,” he said wistfully, “we’re only George the Fourth. Great Great Grandfather wasn’t born till 1660.”

No. It was my duty to comfort him. And still obeisant, my body language spelling Kick Me, I proceeded to betray a couple dozen generations just like that, appropriating his figures, confiscating for my low use his own long, lazy, highborn inherited primogenitive courtship patterns — their kings’ prerogatives of annulment and divorce, eschewing girl children, all the extended foreplay and monkeyshine monarchics that come with reign, their fiat history and command performance arrangements — thereby appending years to, and actually doubling, our own regulation Mills-size generations. But for all my extemporized mathematics I could only squeeze us to the twenty-second or so power, a figure unacceptable to the parvenu Hanoverian. (Do I sound too larky? Wait. Have patience. I get mine.)

“You’re some upstart pretender, ain’t you?” His Majesty said.

“No, sir. I swear it.”

“Yes you are. You’re one of those wicked, wretched claimants.”

“Me? In these rags?”

“A clever disguise.”

“I’m your loyalest subject.”

“My closest follower?” the King asked slyly.

“Sir?”

“Come come, you’re not stupid. You’re a spy.”

“I never am,” I told him forcefully. But you don’t disagree with a king, and added, “Your Royal Highness.”

“Oh yes,” he said disconsolately. “Our Royal Highness indeed. Our Real Whoreness. Our Rogue Whoness.”

“I may not listen to treason, sire.”

“Treason,” the King said miserably.

“Who disparages my king treasons my country.”

Then, changing his mood once again: “How did you find the safe house?”

“The safe—?”

“Whom did you bribe? The neighbors, was it?”

“Sir, I don’t even know the neighbors.” And I looked around. We were standing in the kitchen. Or what would have been the kitchen if there’d been a stove, cooking implements, even a kitchen table. It was without furnishings. Through the open door at the back of the room I could glimpse other vacant rooms. “Would this be your castle then?” I asked, trying to keep the misgivings and nervousness out of my voice, for the place I’d seen from the outside was barely larger than the croft cottages at home, and I’d begun to suspicion that the gentleman was some mad imposter. George IV, or whoever he was, studied me a moment.

“Restored,” he said. “What do you think? Not too busy?”

“Sir, I don’t think so.”

“We’re so pleased.”

Well we’re not stupid. And of course I knew that it wasn’t Buckingham House and that the King — if he was the King, for by this time I had more than doubts — was bantering with me, but how do you banter with royalty, or with madmen either, if that’s what it came to? I haven’t the gift of humoring people. (Or of hiding motives either, wearing my interiority on my sleeve like kings their handkerchiefs. I had actually taken a penny out of my purse and was glancing from it to the “king” as a man might check a map against the very landscape he stands in.) And now the man who claimed to be George IV had drawn a pistol and was pointing it at me. I could see that the handle was encrusted with jewels that formed the same same seal I’d seen on his kerchief.

“Who gave us away?” he asked sadly.

“But no one did,” I said, and tried to explain what I was doing there and told him of my desire to drive carriages. “I’m here to guide coaches, sir. To handle traps and landaus, phaetons and broughams and tilburies. To make my profession in curricles, cabriolets, all the gigs and all the buggies. All the buckboards and berlins. I mean to follow my star in whitechapels, in shays and clarences, in shandrydans and charabancs. I would take my place behind the horses.” The man watched me carefully. “I’m into traffic,” I said shyly. And told him nothing of my having no destination of my own, just my vague wish to go where other men went. And breathed no word about my hackman’s heart. But mentioned Squire’s letter in my behalf which I carried under my blouse, offering to show it to him, already beginning to raise the loose garment when he extended the pistol, thrusting it forward in the close quarters, aiming as if it were his turn in a duel.

I closed my eyes. “Oh, I hope you are the King, Your Highness,” I told him. “I hope you outrank everyone on this island. All the islands, all the continents, all the world. I hope this murder is sanctioned by divine right and ain’t just the heatless, heartless, whimwham of just some anybody brokeheart bedlamite.”

“You don’t acknowledge the Hanoverian legitimacy! You, you—”

Of course it was possible that he was George IV and crazy too. There was plenty of precedent on the books. The rumors about his father, for example.

“I’m a Mills. If you’re George Hanover I’m your subject. None loyaler. I’ve pledged allegiances. I’ve sworn oaths.”

“Commoners don’t swear oaths.”

“Millses do.”

“They’re not required.”

“Millses require them.”

And that’s when I told him some of our history, the long story I’d been memorizing and then rehearsing all my life. Since I’d first heard it. Bringing in details about my life I hadn’t memorized only because no one had ever related them to me, and hadn’t known I’d been rehearsing only because I thought of nothing else. Who was only eighteen years old and without a son and so had no one to tell it to but a king in his sixties. Not the whole story of course, only an overview, the themes and highlights, the way my father had introduced it to me.

“Oh, oaths,” he said dismissively when I’d finished. “All fealty’s faked submission holds. I know all about that. Why God limbered the neck and hinged the knee. You think kings care for your crawled compliance and cross-my-hearts? Or put much stock in dubious duty’s danced obedience?

“We were Prince of Wales,” he said. “Then Prince Regent. Ceremonially sworn ourselves, hands on Bibles, hands on hearts. On state occasions to Father cried ‘God save the King!’ when all we meant was ‘Happy birthday.’ Zeal just informed politics lying low. Lying.

“Come come, George the Forty-third—”

“Twenty-second.”

“Indeed,” he said shrewdly, “Twenty-second. Using our king’s packed calibrations, statecraft’s Celsius metrics. Come come, George. (See? I speak to you as George to George and put away my pistol. I couldn’t use it anyway.) Come come then. What is it you want? Why do you lie in wait for me at my safe house?” Then his face darkened and I knew he was the King. Not his resemblance to the face on my penny nor his expensive accessories, nor even his strange manner of speech, but the suffusion itself, the royal blood heavy as sap with mood. “You’ve come from Brighton! You’re a reveler! Something’s happened to Maria!”

“Maria?”

“Mrs. Fitzherbert,” he said.

“Mrs. Fitzherb—”

And suddenly his hands were at his throat as if he meant to do himself an injury. Pulling clumsily at his neck scarf — he was King all right, valet-tended, no more familiar with the loops and intricacies of his complicated adornments than a babe in a nursery — unwinding, it seemed, bolts of the stuff, twirling it away from him like noose, like lariat, a dark silk spiral that rose over his face and head like black smoke. A huge diamond fastener rolled on the floor against his shoe. He kicked it furiously away from him. And now his hands were at his collar tearing at the precious cloth, murderously ripping it, and I thought: Why, he’s choking, the King of Great Britain, Hanover and Ireland is choking, and rushed to his side, though I didn’t know what to do, or no, knew well enough what to do but was reluctant to do it, too timid to pound the back of a king — even a king in extremis — as if he were just some pal in a tavern. So I stood there gawking, gawky, close up as some morbid witness, and could only moan over and over like an idiot, “God save the King, God save the King!”

And now, having stripped himself of cravat and torn his shirt, his hands tightened about folds of actual skin, working his neck as if he meant to strangle himself, me still incapable of interfering with him and able only to mutter my mad “God save the King’s,” and then, in crazy desperation, suddenly recalling his words. Leaning even further forward, my lips almost in his ear. “Happy birthday,” I prompted, “happy birthday, George IV.”

“Help,” he gasped. “Help us for God’s sake. We can’t get the damned thing.” It was that “us” and “we” that got me. A king bent on wringing his own neck and still mindful of the royal grammar, his brain still locked on the King’s English, his sovereign’s syntax. That was when the loyalest subject in the land raised his hands against his king, the two of us co-conspirators in his regicide. I placed my strong young hands over his fat old weak ones, as yet adding no additional pressure of my own, intending only to encourage him in his efforts, a new form, a sort of King’s touch in reverse. Touching the King. He stared up at me with a wild eye and squawked through the muffling medium of our two pairs of hands, our twenty tight-knit fingers. “Are you — are you trying to kill us? Take your hands off me—us—you — you Stuart!”

My hands dropped to my sides and His Majesty rubbed his neck, which by this time was quite red. Then he asked if I would get the clasp. He was referring to a fine gold chain which hung around his neck and from which a locket was suspended. I raised my hands but when he saw them he seemed to change his mind again and, waiting till he was calmer, managed to undo it himself. Before he handed it over to me he pressed a button at its top and the locket sprang open.

“There,” he said. “That’s Maria — Mrs. Fitzherbert.”

The locket contained a miniature of a beautiful young girl. “This child is married?” I asked.

“What? Oh. Well. She was younger when the portrait was made. She’s close to seventy now,” he said. “Then you don’t know her, do you?” I shrugged and returned the King’s necklace. “You’re not come from Brighton. You’re not in costume. You’re not from the revels,” he said, disappointed.

“These are my clothes, Majesty,” I said, and was reminded of the tapestry condition that Greatest Grandfather Mills had spoken of to Mills’s horse centuries before in the salt mine.

“Yes,” he said. “Of course they are.”

“We dress this way.”

“Yes.”

“For the mowing.”

“Oh yes.”

“For the tilling and toiling.”

“Yes, yes.”

“For the rubers and turnips.”

“Yes,” he said, “we know.”

“For the cabbage and kale.”

“Naturally.”

“For the beans and the beetroots.” (Because I couldn’t stop.)

“Certainly.”

“For reaching the fruits, their ripe rife rums and boozy brandies.”

“All right,” the King said.

“Never for revels.”

“No,” he said.

Because I couldn’t stop, you see. Or not couldn’t, wouldn’t. Who had never had audience. Not in forty-two or forty-three generations. Say forty-three. (Almost certainly forty-three. Forty-three absolutely.) Who’ve these passive, heirloom hearts you see, handed down father-to-son, father-to-son, father-to-son ad infinitum, who not only had sat out each riot, rebellion and revolt, every mutiny and coup d’etat from Wat Tyler’s defeated heroics to the fizzled Gunpowder Plot, but who’d never even signed a neighbor’s petition or written a letter to the editor. Who couldn’t stop, you see. Who might have in a palace or stately home, but not here in this unfurnished croft cottage of a “safe house”—who still didn’t understand the term but took it to mean something gay, something spoofy and nostalgic, with carefully blended choruses of pretend peasants holding flower baskets and singing opera — with its rude, spic-and-span meagerness.

“Never for fêtes, never for galas.”

“No, of course not.”

“Not for affairs, not for occasions.”

“I see.”

“We dress up.”

“We understand,” he said. “We do.”

“We break out the cambric, we let loose the lace.”

“If you’re finished?” the King said.

“What picks up stains.”

“Quite.”

“What blemishes easy, what soils in the air.” And stopped now. Not because I had gone too far, or even far enough, but because grievance made me breathless, took my wind away I mean. Seeing how easy it was, how even someone like myself, who’d seen no kings but only heard of them, gone all logy with my ancient, sluggish heritage and languid beefs, had only to wait — whether he wanted to or not, whether he was interested or not — to float in his patience, treading it like shallow water, and one day not opportunity but accident itself would knock. Not chance, not even time laying about and lining things up — accident, bad odds, the pot-luck of doom and fate. And what made me breathless was that I perceived that all that differentiated me from the king killers and historical tuckpointers was inclination.

King George IV did not perceive this.

King George IV wanted me calmer, to talk me down from my resentment.

“I suppose you’re pious?” he said.

“Pious?”

“Religious.”

“No, not really.”

“Civic-minded then.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m civic-minded.”

“French things? Social contracts, the Rights of Man?”

“I’m English. I don’t take with wog ways.”

“No,” the Hanoverian said suspiciously. And explained to his subject what a safe house was.

I wasn’t far off.

What King George IV told George XLIII:

“Kings aren’t born. They’re made. In the sense that contingency heirs thrones. The first-born could be an idiot; an inopportune girl; someone too sickly for the times; at odds with the ministers, current events, the Cabinet — All manner of things can come between an apparency and a crown.

“But consider a prince. Assume what he assumes. That all will go well. That one day the King will die and, in the nature of things, he will be King.

“Now. There are only two sorts of kings. The battlers and the good time Charlies. You could look it up, but we assure you that history bears us out. (Shall we sit on the floor? Standing winds us. — There. Thank you, George. Oh, that’s much better. Much.)

“Of course the battlers have practically disappeared from the thrones they used to sit on like so many saddles. I mean the warrior kings, the conquerors — Bonaparte, of course, but he was no proper king; more to the point he was never a prince — the horseback heroes, all that pup tent royalty with their iron-assed, cavalry sensibilities and real estate hearts. I don’t mock them. I don’t. They made the world, its true cartographers, and did all this not from Heaven but from ambush. On maneuvers, campaigns, sieges, blockades. On scorched earth in the dead of winter. With billets for palace and trenches for fort. With rations for banquets and their kingdom front lines. So I don’t mock them. I don’t. But if they made the world, they broke it too. Surely the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse was a king.

“Well — battlers are chiefly dead now. The chiefly dead. And they fell not necessarily in the wars they lost but rather in the wars they won. Dead of politics and delegation and the piecemeal amelioration of the world. The battlers are dead, long live the good time Charlies!

“Princes I mean. Those ritual babes, those ceremonial children. In their toy tailoring, their plaything regalia. Up on their ponies, pulled in their dog carts. Taking trays in their bedrooms, their lunches from hampers on summer’s golden bivouacs. Outranking their music and dancing masters. Calling the tune. Outranking all their masters. Outranking, for that matter, the King himself who, for all his now ornamental power, his own now baubled governance and ascendancy, owed no greater obligation to his so-called kingdom than simple, subservient fatherhood. Who could chastise and even discipline — my father once shot the dog who pulled my cart — but could never repudiate, never disown. (Who could in effect, Mills, write no will, all that having been done for him by the very principles of succession that the battlers had battled for. Who would die, as it were, intestate as the lowest pauper in the land. And incidentally, George XLIII, did you enter this into your equations when you so rapidly calculated the twenty-year differential between a king’s generation and a commoner’s? It was because kings knew — they’d been princes themselves, remember — how much harder it would go with them once their children were born, how their already depleted authority would be even further adulterated by their coddled kin. It could have been some vaguely flickering memory of the look on a prince’s father’s face — I can still recall the foiled temper on my own father’s face when he shot the dog that pulled me about the royal park — his watered anger, his niggled rage. We battle passion, we good time Charlies, by fathering bastards.)

“We had it made. Princes, princes did. And lived with impunity like favored pets. It was sybaritic but don’t say no good ever came of it. There are always spin-offs, Mills. They trickle down. Sooner or later they do, they trickle down. Why, education, education was invented for us! Toys, lad, toys and gewgaws! Cakes and cookies, chocolates and collections! The most important artisans and cooks and engravers doing their best to keep us entertained. Great inventors pressed us to accept their original working models. (The first candle, the first candle was made for a seven-year-old Italian prince because he was afraid of the wall torches that flared in his nursery!) Those were the glory days, Mills. Those were the glory days, kid. We had this privately engraved stamp collection. (I would have been fourteen or fifteen by then.) Young Bill Blake was awarded the commission. (Hogarth was dead, and anyway I’d never really liked the wallpaper he sketched for my nursery.) He did this absolutely top-hole job, wizard work, wizard. A personalized postage on which our head was represented as the Crown Prince of three or four dozen imaginary kingdoms. Will I ever forget the New Jerusalem ha’penny? Coins were similarly minted for us and with them I purchased great pleasure of some of the most beautiful women in England and the Continent. Will I ever forget those ladies, most of them courtesans, cousins, dowager princesses — all of them older?

“Because even at nine and eleven and thirteen I was still wet-nursing. I couldn’t give up the tit. I’ve never given it up. (Enemies whisper it’s why I’m so fat and that could be the case. Science may side with their slanders. I’ve too well known the nipple’s weighty nourishment, the breast’s milky syrups, its rich creams and thick butters. All its queer cheeses, its chest junkets and bust custards. We’re addicted to tit. We love the taste we mean.) Though we’d never drawn Charlotte Sophia’s, our mother’s, milk. But this ain’t a mother thing, we think, only obsessive thirst annihilating itself at the very wellhead of lixiviate, suffocate whelm.

“It was how I met Maria.

“This would have been forty-one years ago. I would have been twenty-two, Maria six years older. And it would have been at a ball, and I would have been strolling down the formal presentation line, barely glancing at the men’s bowed kowtows and carefully observing the revealing curtsies of the women. Examining, I mean. Holding their hands and by a subtle pressure of my own keeping them down, availing myself of stunning vistas of bosom, controlling honor’s duration and causing those ladies to heat and blush as surely as if I had kindled their dry white flesh with the oxygens of my gloves. Although some never took color at all, their breasts pale as lime, fixed as paint or whitewash. (Or as if, I thought when I detected among them some recent mother, all the blood in the world could neither stain nor stanch the tide of such milk. I was neither prospecting for virgins nor inspecting for trollops, these little litmus tests of mine not so much science as interested, even-handed, even innocent forays into Nature, as a man might engage to witness sunsets, say.)

“Maria was the most charmingly endowed woman I had ever seen. But she was no flusher.

“If she had been I might not have ventured — though I may have, covered as a bed by my prince’s privilege and anything-goes protocol and all my good time Charlie dispensations — to have offered my proposal.

“ ‘Would you,’ I whispered, still on that inverted receiving line which was my style and preference and down which I ambled as if I were the only invited guest in some stuffed tenement of princes and princesses, ‘be my wet nurse? I will give you Tom Gainsborough’s Blue Boy.’

“ ‘Sir, I have no milk.’

“ ‘My mistress then. I will give you a house in Brighton and five thousand a year.’

“ ‘Sir, I have a husband.’

“ ‘Two thousand for the husband. Could even a king say fairer?’

“ ‘Sir, I cannot.’

“ ‘Madam, I’m a generous prince.’

“ ‘Sir, I’m a virtuous woman.’

“ ‘You did not redden.’

“ ‘Redden?’

“ ‘When I leered your breasts, when I squinnied your nipples. When I leisurely look-see’d and gave them the once-over and the glad eye. You did not redden, madam! You did not plum or peach! I might for rise have well as ogled the stitch of your frock!’

“ ‘Then, sir, might I have glowed indeed for it is the very principle of propriety, if not of virtue itself, that the scrutiny of one’s fashion in high company can betoken only the awry and amiss. I would, in such a circumstance, have warmed under the gaze of a tailor or the glance of a seamstress.’

“ ‘I am no tailor, madam. I am no seamstress. I’m Prince of Wales and I attentioned your tits. You did not redden!’

“ ‘Then, sir, I am no scarlet woman,’ Mrs. Fitzherbert told me softly.

“This was still on the line, still ceremonial. That the others who had yet to be presented had entirely ceased the customary buzz they do even at Court, even in the presence of the King himself, let alone a mere Prince of Wales who wouldn’t be Regent for another twenty-seven years or King for another thirty-six, ought perhaps to have given us pause or made one or the other of us a bit more cautious. Indeed, I suppose that at this point I should have smiled at Mrs. Fitzherbert’s clever grace note, clicked what I had for heels, bowed, and gone on to the next person waiting to be presented. Or, rather, I suppose it’s what you suppose. But the splendour of our arrangements, their true civility and grandeur, is actually quite opposite. Court must, simply must, have its gossip, its exclusionary spice. Well, do you understand, Mills, that gossip and rumor are always more or less horizontal, that, like certain species of fish, they swim only their customary strata and rarely attempt the antipathetical depths? Now, it ain’t in Newton, but it’s true as physics that in fixed societies like our own, nasty stories neither ascend nor descend but stay within their class of origin. It’s why we have to spy on you people. It’s why you’re cordoned off on state occasions; it’s why there’s crowd control, squeeze play, spurs on horsemen; cosh, curb and roped-off street — all rule’s royal leash law, all order’s rerouted traffic, all rank’s union shop. It ain’t assassination we fear, the villain’s and madman’s bullet at close quarters; it’s just hard by, at hand, stone’s throw, simple spit distance earshot.

“So, if anything, we were not more circumspect but less, not less garrulous but more. Is the Prince a clam? Is he an oyster? He brims with prate! He glibs with gush! And this was audience indeed, this was! This primed, fervent, rubberneck, avid, all-ears bunch. My true subjects, Mills, and not your remote, long-range, arm’s-length lot. The group. Our crowd. And I as much their subject this night as they mine. We were soliloqual, Mills!

“ ‘It is your breastplate, madam, those fleecy ramparts, that so astonish us. How may things which to our vision appear such soft and lenient stuff prove so intractable, so stony ground in the campaign of a prince? No no, don’t answer. We would not hear prattle of husbands and virtue, or passion talked down as if’twere only an obligation owed to pledge like the gambler a game debt or the poor student’s circumstanced promise to redeem a watch from some pawnshop Jew. Is this your honor, madam? Is this your merciless, inconsequent, merely proscriptive character? I’ll teach you character, ma’am, and it’s nothing to do with promises, declarations, assurances, covenants or nitwit oath. Honor is simply not contractual, Fitzherbert! It does not blindly undertake action in a future it cannot yet understand at the sacrifice of the only tense in which it may reliably do anyone any good at all. Which is the present. Which is the present, Mrs. Madam Fitzherbert!

“ ‘Honor is ardor. It is dash and fire and thrill. It is the obligation skin owes blood, teeth appetite. My organ’s duty to my mood. It is entirely obsessive and endures no third parties. It welcomes no middlemen.’

“ ‘The Prince of Wales is hot tonight,’ said a guest.

“ ‘He is. He is,’ we acknowledged. ‘We have our honor on us and we fly it like the colors.’

“ ‘And do you know, madam, in what my honor subsists? Why in my peculiar, spangled lust. In the singularity of my ruling passion, my most feeling fetish. Which we neither hide nor hinder, watch nor ward. Why should we? Is the Prince custodian of his ruling passion or only the lowly drayman of his drives?’

“ ‘Hear hear!’ said honored guests. And “Three cheers!’ And ‘Give three times three!’

“ ‘I asked to milk you, madam. No husband but husbandman plain enough. Oh, plain. Plain, quite plainly. I’ve this sweet tooth for softs, this yen for your puddings. George the Famished, George the Parched. Georgie the pap prince. Feed us, ma’am. Slake the slake rake! Sow, sew this rip!’

“And ‘Ahh,’ mouthful’d the fellowship. And ‘Ooh,’ oratoried the witnesses.

“And still no more crimson than an eggshell. Why you, sir, are more raddled. Fitzherbert herself was glacial as pack ice. She said she’d pray for me.

“Pray for me, dun God with her demon orthodoxy! (Did I mention, Mills, that she was Catholic? She was Catholic, churched as a pope.)

“ ‘Do it then, madam,’ I told her coolly. ‘You know our prayers. You may say them for us!’

“And turned away politely to make the rest of my devoirs, saying my ‘So glads’ and ‘How pleaseds,’ aloof and indifferent as an already king.

“I learned she lived at Richmond and sent with my compliments my private yacht to fetch her. It came back empty. I sent it out again a week later, laden with gifts. The Gainsborough I’d promised, precious jewels, rare ivories. It came back empty, my gifts unopened. In a month I sent the ship out once more, this time with specific instructions to proffer my prince’s compliments to Lord Fitzherbert and to invite him and his amiable wife to stay at Buckingham House with my family and myself. There was no ‘Lord’ Fitzherbert of course, and what I offered was not so much a bribe as the promise of a bribe. Titled Catholics were practically unheard of in the country at this time. I knew my man and what I was doing. The appeal was not so much to his ambition as to his churchianity. The bark returned empty.

“And empty again when I dispatched it to Pangbourne, where I’d learned the Fitzherberts summered with a colony of their coreligionists.

“The King had of course heard of my efforts and their failures. How could he not? All society knew what I was up to. All it had to do was glance out its window whenever it heard a ship go by. The chances were excellent it would be the royal bark plying its unsuccessful trade route, hauling its unwanted merchandise about its watery itinerary like some failed merchantman. My mad king father was not yet mad. He was only angry. The truth, George, is that he missed his princedom, his own long-gone good time Charlie days when he had all the honors of a king but none of his dubious duties. They had been pushing him in the colonies. They were pushing him in France. The truth is, Mills, I pissed him. All he had for amusement in those days was my lust’s blunting against Mrs. Fitzherbert’s obdurate recalcitrance.

“He summoned me and offered a father’s advice in the throne room at Buckingham. He even removed the crown from his head before he spoke.

“ ‘Son,’ he said, ‘it disheartens us to see you so sobersides at a time in life when you should be all waggish and sportive. It tarnishes our comfort to perceive in you the mopes and melancholies of a distrait heart. We would have you cock-a-hoop, all frisk and frolic, and miss the horse laugh whoopee which was your once wont. Give us a chortle, love. Cackle a snigger for us. Titter — no offense, old son — titter your smirk. What? No? Not in we? Then send again to Richmond. I know what you demand of Mrs. Fitzherbert, and what you offer — paintings and pretties, jewelry and gewgaw. The woman is pious, mavourneen. She’s serious, treasure apple. You don’t go up in public to a pious, serious, high-minded woman like this and order her to put her titties in your mouth. What, in public? A sensitive, religious, married lady? It isn’t the way, it’s not how it’s done. You must be gentle, you must be discreet. You must offer reassurances. You must say: “Madam, I shall have my teeth pulled. The grinders and incisors, the molars and canines. All — all shall come out. I vow you, ma’am, then only will I chew and nibble, suck and gum!” Send to Richmond, lad; send to Richmond, son. We’ll make a picnic Thames-side and wait and wait till the cows come home.’ And laughed like a loon.

“I did send to Richmond, had already sent for her when my father had sent for me. When the yacht returned Mrs. Fitzherbert was on it, standing near the bowsprit and, with her generous, billowy, partially exposed bosoms, looking for all the world like the very figurehead on the ship’s very prow.

“I clambered aboard and took her in my arms.

“ ‘My darling,’ I said. ‘My dearest, you’ve come.’

“ ‘Fitzherbert’s dead,’ she whispered. ‘Tomorrow we’ll be married secretly by the priest. Then, suckling, shall you enjoy your little milkmaid to her bright twin pails’ sweetest residuals!”

“We dress up,” the King said. “We dress up, too. And lead free will these dumb show lives, our tastes a step behind our palates and our very existence revue, vaudeville, cabaret. And even our highest behaviors only simple ‘turns,’ studied as set piece, blocked as tableau. Sequenced as music hall and timed as spectacle. We don’t want walls and floors, ceilings and rooms but back cloths, stages, flats and scrim. Not property but props. Not bad luck but tragedy, not even happiness, only comedy. So we dress up. Good time Charlie, the merry-andrew. The milkmaid. The milkmaid milkmade man.

“Yes. Well. We were married. Secretly. You spoke of oaths. We swore oaths. As heavily pledged as debtors. Proclaiming and promising, vowing, professing. All intention’s by-all-that’s-holy’s.

“We honeymooned at Pangbourne while the royal yacht stood by. We boarded the ship and sailed to Scotland. We sailed to Ireland, where we anchored off a lovely blue bay. You could see palm trees.

“The marriage was secret, known only to the priest and to one or two of Maria’s friends. I like to think that those of our class who lived along those shores must have seen the ship and guessed it on some romantic errand, engaged in some pretty myth — all spurned love’s Flying Dutchman. We dress up. Oh yes.

“Well. Even someone as apparently arbitrary as a prince or king with his edicts and decrees and his ipse dixit say-so style lives a life proviso’d and ordinanced as any tavern keeper’s. And if there’s more loophole than loop to my bonds — I could, for example, have shot you before without bringing any more trouble upon myself than if I had sent my meat back to my chef — there is a special pandect of law for royalty.

“The Settlement Act forbids any of the King’s issue under the age of twenty-five to marry without first obtaining the consent of the King. This would have been forty years ago. I would have been twenty-three. The consent of the King? I knew better than even to ask for it. My only hope was to present my father with a fait accompli, thinking he’d think that the scandal which surrounded our relationship, and whatever embarrassment it may have caused him, might best be smoothed over by a royal announcement that we were now married.

“They had pushed him out of the colonies, they were pushing him in France. They were pushing him in his own Parliament. Now my father was now not only angry, he was actually mad.”

“Please, sir,” George Mills interrupted, “that was a rumor. Even our sort heard it. His political enemies…”

“Third was a lunatic, Forty-third. George was crazy, George,” George IV said quietly.

“More loophole than loop, the laws bleeding into their crimes like loose and leaking bandages. French leave law. Because it was out of his hands now. Out of his hands and out of his head. And he wasn’t embarrassed. And they didn’t — I mean his ministers, I mean his council — even have to use the Settlement Act. More loophole than loop.

“There was a sort of conference to which I was invited. There weren’t even barristers there, only a sort of solicitor from the Customs Office whom they’d rounded up at the last minute.

“The solicitor asked if I had reached my twenty-fifth birthday when I had been secretly married. He asked if I had obtained my father’s consent. Then Mrs. Fitzherbert — he called her Mrs. Fitzherbert — was not my wife, was she? It was ’is opinion, the solicitor said, that the hact of 1701 was not even happlicable. The act did not have to be enforced because under the very provisions of the rule the marriage was regarded as invalid! Law squalid and stinky as secret passageway. Dodge and diddle law, gull and bubble precedent.

“ ‘They call you Mrs. Fitzherbert,’ I told her.

“ ‘Do they?’ Maria said. ‘How very odd. It’s divorce Catholics don’t recognize, not death.’

“I built the safe house in Putney one year after the year they did not even bother to dissolve our marriage. It’s an out-of-the-way sort of place, and the house itself is not much different from its neighbors. As you see it backs on the river. We came ashore in rowboats now, dugouts. We were probably seen. But ordinary people don’t much gossip about the great. They don’t know anything to say. As for the rest, the ruling classes, they know it all but are discreet. They talk behind our backs but only amongst themselves.

“We lived on and off here several years. We were very happy.

“A prince’s credit is long, but it is not infinite. There were debts. There are always debts. It’s empty now, but once this house was furnished like a palace. I did not buy, I commissioned. The greatest cabinetmakers worked for us, the greatest sculptors, the finest painters. One room was floored and walled and ceilinged entirely in delft. Josiah Wedgwood made our plates and pottery following Maria’s sketches. Dick Sheridan wrote comedies using plots I myself suggested. I discovered a young woman in Bath, Jane Austen, and commissioned her to write novels for us. We gave her a general idea of the subject matter and the tone we were interested in and she fleshed out the rest. We sat on the finest furniture to be had in Europe and read aloud to each other. Delightful, delightful.

“Only our bedroom would have seemed eccentric. It was fitted out, as you may have guessed, like a dairy. The mattress and pillows were stuffed with ordinary hay, which we changed daily. I even had lovely little Chippendale milking stools made for us. Well. It was all delightful.

“And expensive. The bills mounted, though I was able to stall my creditors for a time on the basis of my great expectations. Then, suddenly, all together all at once it seemed, they began to hound me, coming not to Buckingham House but directly to Putney. Even Miss Austen, though I must say that of them all she was the shyest and seemed quite embarrassed to be here.

“I was not even sent for this time. I arranged for the meeting and went to the ministers myself.

“ ‘The King is not improved,’ the Chancellor of the Exchequer said.

“ ‘Isn’t it time you began to cast about for a suitable consort?’ the Lord Chancellor asked.

“ ‘You’re Prince Royal now. You may yet be Prince Regent before you’re King,’ the PM said.

“ ‘What is your view, counselor?’ asked the Lord Privy Seal.

“ ‘Oh my view,’ he said. ‘Hi wouldn’t ’ave no proper view now, would hi? My view’s strickly the law. The law’s what hi go by. It wants a hagreement.’ This from the Custom’s Office solicitor.

“ ‘What does?’ the Prime Minister asked.

“ ‘Why the law does, your honor. It wants a hagreement. What we call a tort, a contrack.’

“ ‘But isn’t a tort…’ I started to ask.

“ ‘It’s like this, i’n’t it? Law’s a hagreement entered into voluntarily by two parties. Hi except ’ighway robbery and murder and such because that hain’t law so much has what we call broken law. Now the Prince ’ere comes to us game as you please hand wants us to push some bill through Parliament to pay off ’is debts. Now if we was to do hit hit might be what we call a favor but hit wouldn’t be law. Not proper law. Dere’s no quo for the quid, if you gavver my meanin’. It wants a hagreement. Now, if ’e was to marry…’

“They did not get their agreement.

“The creditors came. They came with bailiffs and bum-bailiffs, with beadles and tipstaffs, with sheriffs and constabulary, process servers, catchpolls and Bow Street runners. I could see the Lord Chancellor and the solicitor off by themselves in a carriage parked behind a string of removal vans.

“To give them their due, the creditors seemed almost as shy as Miss Austen and, with the removal men, went quietly about their work. Silently the delft room was dismantled. Silently the Wedgwood was collected, the furniture. Sheridan was there and tried to make me a gift of the plays I’d commissioned. There was consultation among the constabulary and process servers who then sent one of the runners out to speak to the Lord Chancellor’s carriage. When the man returned, he whispered something to a policeman who came over to Sheridan who then turned to me and shrugged helplessly.

“ ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Sheridan said.

“ ‘It’s all right, Dick,’ I told him, and handed over his manuscripts. ‘We’ve read the plays. They’re wonderful plays. We’ll remember them always.’

“ ‘Oh we will, Richard. We will,’ Maria said.

“ ‘As for the rest of you,’ I called, ‘one day I shall be King. I’ll not forget what you’ve done to us this day. You, draper, and you, cabinetmaker, can forget all about your By Appointment to His Majesty crest. All of you can.’

“For reply they looked down listlessly at their feet and seemed to shuffle apologetically.

“For some reason they didn’t enter the bedroom and left it intact.

“ ‘They’ve left us all we really need, sweetheart,’ I told Maria.

“ ‘Oh yes,’ she said and we went there and I sucked at her dry breasts and somehow they were moist now and what I sipped tasted like tears.

“Well,” King George said. “It was the following year. This would have been thirty-three years ago. It was my birthday. I wouldn’t be Regent for eighteen more years, King for another twenty-eight. It was my birthday. The house was furnished now with some of Maria’s things from Pangbourne; the rest came from her house in Richmond. There were crosses on the walls. It was my birthday. We had always exchanged gifts. Though I was still in debt — princes and good time Charlies are never out of it it seems — I was not borrowing so much now since being humiliated by the creditors. I had given her some small thing, I don’t even remember now what it was. She looked at me for a moment and went over to her writing desk, where she sat down and appeared to write something out. It couldn’t have taken her more than a minute. When she had done she handed it to me. I looked at it and laughed.

“ ‘What’s this then?’ I said.

“ ‘A check.’

“ ‘Well I see it’s a check. Is that the sort of gift you’d give me on my birthday? A check?’

“ ‘Did you read it?’

“ ‘No.’

“ ‘Read it.’

“ ‘It’s for five hundred fifteen pounds, eight shillings.’

“‘Yes.’

“ ‘What an odd sum. Five hundred fifteen pounds, eight shillings. Maria, is this the amount you think will bring me out of debt? Darling, I owe thousands.’

“ ‘I know that.’

“ ‘Maria, I don’t want your money for a gift.’

“ ‘It isn’t a gift. I did not get you a gift.’

“‘What is it then?’

“ ‘The price you paid to have this house built.’

“ ‘You’re giving me my own house? Oh, darling, that’s very sweet but really I can’t…’

“ ‘He said I’d have to ask you for the title. He said if you don’t have it or it’s not handy you could write something down on a paper making it over to me.’

“ ‘He said? Who?’

“ ‘That solicitor,’ she said, and began to cry.

“I went to him that afternoon. He was not at the offices in Parliament, where all our other meetings had taken place. The Lord Chancellor told me I might look for him at the Customs House.

“It was a dirty, dingy building smelling of brine and brackish water, of filthy contraband and sodden wood. I found him shirt-sleeved in some petty clerk’s office.

“ ‘What’s this then?’ I demanded, waving the check at him.

“ ‘Ahh,’ he said, ‘did you sign hover the deed then, my prince?’

“ ‘No I didn’t sign over the deed. I’m trying to get some explana—’

“ ‘Well no matter,’ he said. ‘You’ve haccepted the money and in law that’s a principle that shows your hintent to make a hagreement.’

“ ‘What are you talking about?’

“ ‘Your own good, sir, your own good. You built that house in Putney in the year of our Lord 17 hand 86. This is 17 hand 92. That’s six years, Prince George.’

“ ‘Say what you’re talking about or I’ll kill you.’

“ ‘That wouldn’t be law, sir.’

“I went for his throat.

“ ‘Law, sir,’ he gasped. ‘Common law, sir. Common law marriage.’

“I took my hands from about his neck. ‘Common law marriage?’

“Because there is no law finally, there are only arrangements. They had used the Settlement Act to arrange my bachelorhood, a sort of biding, buttoned spinstership of standby, wait-list eligibility. And repossessed our household goods to arrange, or so I thought at the time, simple, hobbled, clip-wing, rub-and-bottleneck let and hindrance.

“ ‘Oh no, sir,’ the solicitor explained later, ‘that would have been vitchious. The law his not vitchious. We done that for the presumption. The law wants a hagreement hand a presumption. What reasonable men might hinfer has to da troof of your and Mrs. Fitz’s situation based on probable reasoning hin da absence huv, or prior to, hactual proof or disproof. If we’d let you ’ang on to the furniture, all them pricey, pretty penny harticles and hinventory what you’d put togevver, dere might be some reasonable man or huvver oo’d ’ave taken it into ’is ’ead that you’d hactually hintended to make ha ‘ome togevver hafter the fashion of a ’usband and wife.’

“ ‘You left the bedchamber undisturbed.’

“ ‘We did, sir. Hafter the fashion of a man wif a maid.’

“Maria’s check had been written to neutralize one more presumption. The solicitor explained that since I had paid for the house and lived with her in it I had seemed to imply that I regarded her as my wife. If they had not acted before the sabbatical year, our arrangement, under English common law, might have been considered a bona fide marriage. By getting her to pay for the house…

“ ‘I’ll tear up the check,’ I said, and did so, in a dozen dozen bits and pieces before the solicitor’s eyes.

“ ‘Oh, sir,’ he said sadly, ‘Hi’m afraid dat were not wise. You see, sir, you’re a debtor, and, hunder law, debtors are wiffout certain rights. Dey may not muterlate monies due deir creditors. ‘Hif a penny come deir way dat penny must be paid.’ Dat his de law, sir, so noble has your action was, befitting a sweet and noble prince like yourself, may I say, sir, it was not wise? Dough Hi ’ope an’ pray dat if Hi ’ad de honor, sir, to be hin your position Hi would ’ave done de same — if Hi was has hig’orant of de law as you are, Prince.’

“So we were undivorced and unannulled for the third time.

“We continued to meet for a time, but both of us could see that what all official England had contrived to turn into an affair was finally and effectively doomed. For one thing, now that Maria owned the house she wanted to redecorate the bedroom.

“Are you too uncomfortable on that bare floor? The remainder is quickly told.

“Now I had reason to borrow again. I had not realized how much money I had not been spending while Maria had been taking up so much of my time. Unattached, I began to resume some of my old pursuits. I was gambling again. There were fine new race horses to buy for my neglected stables. My appetites became again as grand as they’d been in my fledgling good time Charlie days. My wardrobe once more took on its old princely significance. And there was Brighton. There’d always been Brighton of course, but now I had begun once again to host the magnificent feasts and balls that had so distracted me when I was younger, affairs which for the most part Maria and I had attended as guests during the period of our closest alliance. So there were debts. And reason enough to seek out assistance.

“ ‘There’s that girl in Italy,’ the Chancellor of the Exchequer said.

“ ‘His cousin?’ the Lord Privy Seal said.

“ ‘Caroline,’ said the solicitor.

“This would have been thirty years ago. The marriage was contracted and I got my money.

“ ‘They’re forcing me to marry a woman I cannot care for.’

“ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Maria said. ‘It’s death Catholics recognize, not divorce.’

“ ‘Don’t you see?’ I told the ministers. ‘You’ve made me a bigamist.’

“ ‘You’re Prince huv Wales, sir,’ the solicitor said. ‘Take has many mistresses has pleases you.’

“ ‘Caroline’s the mistress,’ I muttered.

“ ‘Queen Caroline his your consort, sir,’ the solicitor said. ‘When she comes to term England will ’ave han heir.’

“Heiress he should have said. Princess Charlotte was born the following year. I asked the queen to taste her milk, which otherwise would have just gone begging anyway. She quite refused. It couldn’t have been very good milk.

“ ‘One thing,’ I asked Maria when Caroline returned to Rome the year the Princess was born. ‘What pressures did they apply? Did they threaten the Catholics? How did they get you to do it?’

“‘Write the check?’

“ ‘Yes.’

“ ‘That solicitor explained it. It had been a prince’s house. The home of the man who would be King of England. He pointed out what a good investment it was.’

“ ‘Oh Maria,’ I cried.

“ ‘Oh George,’ she said, ‘it’s divorce Catholics don’t recognize, not reality.’

“This would have been almost twenty-nine years ago. The Young Pretender would have been dead eight years by this time. Did you say something, Mills? No? I thought you said something. Stuart eight years gone. Still, she would not have been entirely lonely in Italy, would she? Would she, Mills?

“Now what’s all this about some damned squire’s letter you claim to carry about with you under your blouse?!”

Which was when the man who could claim — for himself and for everyone in his family who had come before — never to have signed a neighbor’s petition or written a letter to the editor or raised the mildest embarrassing question in public, let alone seen his name in the papers or done anything at all to make anyone nervous, produced from his very person, as the King of Great Britain, Ireland and Hanover warily watched, a document, character reference, personality sketch, which at once testified to his, Mills’s, rude ambitions and to his squire’s (“squire” because the man was merely a modestly prosperous small freeholder in Mills’s district, some younger son of some younger family) cheerful disdain of, and sniffy scorn for, George Mills and George Mills’s curious goals. The letter was not a hoax. (The man to whom it was addressed was actually known to the writer, and had actually lived in London, though now, three years dead, was no longer in a position to do anything for the young aspirant. And anyway, the directions he had given Mills, though careful and precise, were quite inaccurate, based both upon a lightly liquored memory and a flaw peculiar to the writer which caused him, whenever he was in the capital — occasions rare enough to strike him as occasions — not only to become overly excited but to lose, if not all sense of direction, at least that part of it which oriented him as to the side of the river he actually stood on at any given moment. Here was the fluky fortuity: that he had somehow managed to describe to Mills, even providing him with a hand-drawn map, which not only replicated the area to which George had come — with the exception of the house itself which was considerably smaller and in a different style than the one he’d described, a discrepancy George, who understood him, put down to the squire’s sense of his own importance — but which was correct in all particulars save this: that the place George wanted was on the other side of the river in Fulham and not on this side in Putney.)

So the letter was no hoax. George Mills, fearing one, had even tampered the crude seal and read it, understanding well enough its heavy sarcasm and the dubious light in which he was portrayed, but putting it in this light, figuring it this way:

His sort don’t mean my sort harm. They’re afraid. As they might be afraid of Vandals or Visigoths. As they might be afraid of trained bears doing comic turns on the high street. They’ve heard things. Stuff about rough ways, muck about manners. They fear for their game, for their gardens and daughters. They misdoubt our religion, and put it about our condition is our character. They think we drink too much and dance makes us crazy.

His jokes are just nervous. All to the good in the end. Serving my purpose. ’Cause he don’t mean me harm, not real harm. One toff to another.

Now the King will read it. Who to the fellow what wrote it is like me to some dog dead in the road. He’ll know. And discount the jokes and mark down the leg pull, all that lively pokebanter, all that scoff-merry and scoldbutt. He’ll know. He’s a king.

King George IV took the greasy letter his subject handed him and, when he saw to whom it was addressed, began to read the letter of introduction as if it were some document intercepted by agents and delivered by urgent and pressing couriers.

He read:

Forgive if you can my blatant impertinence in addressing you in this way about a matter of absolutely no importance and of no small irrelevance, it being the very rule of scientific displacement that that which is of no weight, which is no thing, saving of course our souls, which at all events are, if not by the laws of God then, to our shame, to our shame, at the very indiscreet least by the practices of men, more than we are inconvenienced to believe is good for us, “matters” of substance delayed, due bills to which, through the best grace of that same Divine Agency, accrue no interest, compound or even simple, though admittedly such “small” matters being the exception—the exception, nota bene—while that to which I now direct your offhand attention still participates in that aforementioned phylum or category relating to the antichronistic, metachronous and just plain out of date, and distracts in almost inverse mathematical degree to the extraneous pressures it puts upon us and has, for weightiness, no more power to signal fish than a sinker of soap bubble.

The damned thing’s in code, the King thought. And read on.

Thus the stone in our shoe. Thus idle, vagrant worries which turn us from all true and dutiful concerns to peripheral speculation, random and curious as sudden unexampled messages from the villagers, their puny command-performance performances, shoddy balls, recitals, bumpkin dramatic entertainments and mystery plays, all those abrupt summonses at which our attendance is owed more to custom than obligation. Thus, in brief, all subtly finessed attentions to the self. Welcome enough, and noble enough too, Laird knows, when such attentions are diverted to God and Country, but disconcerting as a fly on your face when all that’s at stake are the caterwaulings of silly young boys whose voices have not yet changed. Thus then this.

Laird? the King thought. Laird knows?

Which I cannot continue without first making certain courteous and proper, albeit, I do assure you, good fellow, entirely sincere inquiries regarding the healths and happinesses of your lovely lady and your remarkable bairn. It has of course been some time since I have been in your wonderful city. After the current reignant first brought Johnny Nash up from Brighton to do his royal imperial his Regent Street for him, but not since it was completed. Completed not, I’m relieved to hear, in the hybrid rajah cum emir cum mehtar cum, I-don’t-know, chinoiseried cacique so many of us had at first feared (after the expensive vulgarity of Brighton itself), but a toned-down and at least vaguely European architecture. I’m even told by some who have actually seen it that it reminds them of a sort of classical Greece, Athens say, if Time hadn’t trashed it. I’ve seen prints of course. Athens indeed! We’ve lost a toned-down Oriental fantasy to a tarted-up Mediterranean one. At least the street appears broad enough. Which must be welcome to one in your profession.

Thus then this.

Bairn? he thought. Remarkable bairn?

The piece of work you see before you calls itself George Mills. I must tell you at the outset that while he is not entirely native to our neighborhood, he has been in residence hereabouts four years, since 1821 I believe, doing agriculture, the sowing, mowing, tilling, gleaning, threshing, reaping and picking so peculiarly designated to his race and class of stoopers and benders. Though he claims in his more defensive moments family — or, rather more particularly, genealogy. It is a long and sometimes tedious story and if you would hear it you will have to hear it from him. If you regard it as his command performance, recital or dramatic entertainment, as, in short, your own capital call to custom, you will have discharged something so close to obligation that only a talmudic philosophe might tell you the difference.

Four years? 1821? The year Wife Cousin Caroline died, the year after I received my crown and she popped back from Italy to claim her “rights” as Queen Consort. Where was that solicitor now that England needed him? Now that even I needed him? The bill to dissolve the marriage and deny her claims actually introduced and passed in Lords, though she died before it could be put to the vote in Commons. In Commons! When did I grow old who never gave a fart for scandal? Who asked perfect strangers to wet-nurse me and tweaked the tits of titled grandmas? Tweaking before barristers and retainers and the not-so-loyal opposition and even on her deathbed even my wife cousin’s milkless, bloodless old dugs. Our daughter would have been dead four years. Caroline would have been sixty-seven. Where was that damned solicitor? It would never have gotten as far as Lords or Commons with him on the case. He wouldn’t have needed any bills and petitions to quitclaim. She’d be alive today. She’d be alive and back in Italy and thankful to God that the laws he would have told her she’d violated didn’t apply there. Seventy-one and alive and happy and cultivating her olive and lemon trees, taking their juices, at least their odors, at least some extract of them in her pores now so that if I ever saw her again and rubbed her breasts out of passion or even only its phantom, the skin on my hands would at least have come away with the remnant oils of the breathing, breeding earth. So where was that jurisdictional solicitor, that legislature and police force and magistracy of a man?

“Sowing, mowing, tilling, gleaning, thrashing, reaping and picking,” he read.

Picking? Picking?

“…his command performance,” he read. “…your own capital call to…obligation.”

He looked at Mills sadly.

When did I grow old? he wondered again. When did good time Charlie become the battler king?

But this was later, this was afterward, when George Mills, driven to understand his predicament, had gone over it a hundred times in his head, when he had ceased thinking of it in terms of the artifact he now knew it to be, a pretentious letter of introduction, and began to look at it as the one man in the world must have done who not only had never been intended to read it but who, now that Mills understood what he had done by showing it to him, was the single person it should at all costs have been kept from. Mills would never forgive himself. But this was a later construction. Now the King was reading about him, and Mills was beside himself in dizzy, crazy glee.

The King read. The damage was done and the King read.

I know him to be, for his sort, a hard enough worker in precisely those areas his sort, though qualified for by Nature and Nature’s God, too often and too often too deliberately neglects when push comes to dig. It may even be a sort of unwitting deception on my part, a benefit of the doubt too generously given (though we both know that if no doubt had its generous benefit, there wouldn’t be a king left on his throne or a satrap on his elephant in all the world), but I actually believe the baggage to have some ambition and even a kind of quality. Though, admittedly, of a most irregular and not immediately recognizable, or recognized, sort.

Mills was never regularly employed on my holdings. Like many of the peasants hereabouts he found it more to his taste and, quite frankly, to ours in this backwater, more rattleborough than riding, to declare himself rather more the day laborer than the tenant farmer, though my managers tell me that he always appeared whenever he was scheduled and went through the motions of his motions with no complaint and some enthusiasm. One has gone so far as to declare that if we had more like him we might actually manage to bring in a crop now and again.

But to the point.

He first called my attention to himself one day when I was driving past on the road in the quaint little cabriolet which I think I may have spoken of, either to you or to Ann, when I last visited your fair city — can five years have passed since that golden time? While I was still some distance off I glimpsed this callow, raw-boned gawk standing at the edge of a field. To speak truth I might not have noticed him at all, would not have noticed him at all — well you know the people, how they partake in their very aspect of the landscape itself, seeming as much to belong there as the scrawny trees against which they lounge for shade, as much a part of it as the clayish soil which hides their boots (the pun intended of course; what else has an exile like myself to do than make word games?), dry and dusty as the leaves, more like a sort of crop than a sort of man — if it had not been for the fact that he must have heard me coming even before I spotted him and snapped to with an alacrity which would have been alarming had it not been so dextrous and, well, practiced. When he whipped off his cap and bowed low as a serf in my direction. I swear, old friend, that even if I had not noticed the gesture, I would have heard its whoosh and snap two furlongs off. He startled me. He startled my horse, and I was already reining in, on the verge of a decision to turn to go back the way I had come lest he should prove a highwayman. What checked me was the thought that I had probably passed his confederates and, if I had, they would have done me, running me to ground like some damned fox. Why, by the very act of so suddenly reining in I had probably already lost the momentum I needed. Using my whip, I pressed the horse on and in that moment decided that if the murderous son of a bitch should take but one step out into the road I would run him down.

But damn me, old friend, if the worthy not only did not take that step but held his bow and scrape like some foppish frozen commissionaire till I had passed. This was two furlongs, mind. In that field he looked at once like some sculpture of rural servility and a piece of organic camouflage. Well. He was there the next day, not in the same field of course — he was no shirker — but the next one over. When he bowed in that way and flourished his cap he might have been a border guard of some picturesque country famous for its wines say, not so much questioning credential as already recognizing it two furlongs off and — I cannot say waving one on; he never moved a muscle after that ridiculous show of moving them all at once — seemed to encourage me past some imaginary finish line that could have been his own bent being. And there the next. And the next. Always advancing, mind, daily breaching the front lines of his tasks. And now I was deliberately slowing the horse, bringing it down from the full-out gallop of that first startled day to a canter the second and then to a walk and finally to a sort of lazed limp. I wanted to see how long he would hold that servile pose. It was scientific. (I have to have more than puns and word games; I have to have human nature itself, in nothing like the abundance in which it thrives in London of course. That’s understood. That’s given. Oh, soon shall I have to quit this lumpen, oafish exile and return once again to civilization! I swear it to you, I positively envy the bearer of this letter!) Not could, would. Could he could have done forever. It was would I was interested in.

We had left my fields long ago and for some time now had been on the land of tenant farmers working for the country’s greatest landowner, a gross Dutchman whose family cannot have been in England over a hundred years. His holdings are, as I have indicated, immense. Armies of peasants work for him. As always, the strange boy preceded me, those two constant furlongs fixed as if they had been struck off by surveyors’ sticks and levels, as if I were one end of the reading and he the other.

At this most lackadaisical pace the horse and I had assumed, I had some hope of catching the young man’s eye. I seemed to see him staring at me, his eyes fixed on mine as if I led a procession, but whenever we came abreast he looked away, his face in my direction but the eyes off center, gazing elsewhere so that his features took on the marked, pinched ones on a blind man’s face. One day I even tipped my hat to him. He blushed but made no more response than that involuntary one of his blood. On another day I bid him hello. The blush went deeper but I got no answer. My God, I thought, he’s mute.

You have never had the pleasure of being in my country, though I know I have invited you — I invite you now — nor do I scold so much as condone your decision to stay put in town. That is where all proper gentlemen properly belong, but if you had come here you would have seen that it is all a gerrymandered fiction of contiguity. Farmers, even real farmers like the dumb Dutchman I alluded to above, live miles from their holdings like absentee landlords, so as we moved deeper and deeper into the Dutchman’s hectares we were coming closer and closer to my own home.

Which is where on the last day of our strange courtship he was waiting for me.

I had not even got down from the cabriolet when the piece of goods straightened and approached me. I cannot say that his hat was in his hands, I cannot say where it was. These humble types have a way with their hats (and with their hands too I shouldn’t wonder). Why I remark this at all is that for days now he had been playing the milepost for me as I rode by and now his deference seemed as absolute as an act of aggression. If he had stepped out into the road that first day to halt my progress I could not have been more alarmed. Yet apparently he meant no harm, for all he did once he approached was done with an appropriate respect and shyness.

“Sir,” says he, and so awkward as positively to seem to be directing his remarks into the horse’s behind. “Sir, er, ah, uh,” he says as if trying out strange new vowels he’d learned. “Squire…”

“Yes,” says I. “What is it?”

“I am a good worker,” says the brute.

“You are certainly excellent at finding the edge of a field and planting yourself in it,” says I.

“You may ask Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones or any of them. I am a good worker.”

“Yes, well, I congratulate you,” says I, and remind him, “yet it is only what God expects of all of us.”

“But, sir, I am no farmer,” he says with some warmth.

“No,” says I, “you are a scarecrow.”

“Sir?”

“Never mind. What is it you want?”

“To be your coachman. To drive your coach.”

“What, this?” say I, indicating the topless, two-wheeled, one-horse carriage in which I sat.

“Yes, sir.”

“You are a coachman?”

“I would be,” says he, “oh, squire, I would be!”

“Then must you first study your trade and learn to recognize what a coach exactly is.”

In brief, old friend, he had no more idea as to the various sorts of vehicles that abound in his profession than I had regarding the whereabouts of his hat.

I told him I was a busy man. I told him he must go to the blacksmith and there make inquiries about the kinds of conveyances there be. I told him he must go to the inns and taverns along the post roads and there observe them. I told him he must undertake to learn what he could of harness and tack. “Why it is as necessary that you brief yourself in these matters,” I told him, “as for a sailor to learn about ropes and rigging, sails and stars.” Then, bethinking myself of you, I thought to add that if he could successfully demonstrate to me that he had become possessed of at least the basics of his would-be profession, I had an acquaintance in London who ran the most important public hack and livery system in all of England to whom I might recommend him.

Naturally I thought never to see him again.

He was back within the week, his mouth stuffed with definition, speaking so blithely of barouche, phaeton and sociable, buckboard, calashe, brougham and droshky that one would have thought he was as accustomed to equipage as he was to the very straws he sucked on. We went to my stables, where he challenged me as to the wisdom of using a particular thickness of harness on an animal whose feet had been shod with a certain shape of nail.

We went for a ride in the cabriolet. He drove. Brilliantly.

Of course I am reluctant to foist upon you someone whom you may not absolutely require, yet I did give my word and as the fellow, on the evidence, at least seems teachable, I overreach myself to the point that, amateur though I may be as to the requirements of the London livery trade, I send you an aspirant I have every reason to believe is one upon whose loyalties you may absolutely rely and who may, at the very least, do you some good on the new broad avenues of Regent Street.

In the hope that we may all soon meet again in the shining city, and in the further hope that such reunion prove propitious and jubilant, I remain ever your servant and now procurer …

The country’s greatest landowner?

A gross Dutchman whose family cannot have been in England over a hundred years?

The King read and reread the prolix letter.

The pun intended? What pun? What word games? What had he missed? Why had he grown so old?

Exile? Exile?

George Mills waited while the King read.

Waited patiently. No: humbly. No: proudly. No: all atwitter. No: all of them. All of them all at once. Not one time thinking, He’s going to do something for me. Not one time.

While the King read and reread, while he examined the anomalies and ambiguities, while he pored over the double Dutch double entendre, the political acrostic he took the letter to be. But the man is dead, he thought. Discovered and assassinated they told me. The most important public hack and livery system in all of England and all its jarvey spies and post-boy plotters shut down, under new management. (The wonder of their plain arrangements! King George thought. They had simply to overhear my clerks and ministers as they drove them down Pall Mall or along the embankment. And spring and summer the best time for spying they told me, during the mild weather, the carriage windows open to the breezes, and our Stuart enemies all ears on a fine day. Secrets lost to the warm front, to balm and ease. Very Nature a co-conspirator.) Not even understanding all of it, confused by their complicated shenanigans, by all held historical grudge, devotees, faction, the partisan life and the boring obsession of blood. Blood, he thought. Blood and milk. He didn’t care a damn really. It was simply inconvenient to abdicate. And he would miss a king’s perks. He had to admit. The handsome expense account, the lovely tributes. But I don’t understand my enemies! The pains they take, the troubles and lengths they go to. And why would they send me this, this aspirant? (Yet his mind nagged: It could be a mistake; I could be attributing to machination what perhaps ought to be put down to the simple disfigurement of style.) Still, he thought, I suppose I have to resist. Who’s King here anyway?

And Mills not only not thinking: He’s taking too long, he’s probably going to do something for me. But not even thinking: He’s taking too long, he’s probably going to do something to me.

The King looked up from the letter Mills had shown him and, seeing the expression of sly puzzlement on the young man’s face, mildly asked, “What?”

“Oh, sir,” George said, reddening, evasively shrugging.

“What?” he repeated.

“Well it’s just …”

“What? It’s just what?”

“What you told me. You know. All those things. About yourself.”

“Didn’t I also say that our nasty stories neither ascend nor descend but stay within their class of origin?”

“Yes, sir. Yes, sir, you did.”

“Well,” the King said, “there you are. It would seem you’re one of us then, George.”

“Oh, sir. You’re teasing me, ain’t you, sir?”

George IV considered him. “Yes,” he said finally, “I suppose I am.” Then, “You’re our loyal subject you said.”

“Sir, I am,” Mills said.

“Your family swears oaths you said.”

“Millses are pledged to their kings.”

“Yes,” he said, “yes. Look,” he said, striking the document he’d been reading, “your squire’s misinformed. This fellow’s dead.”

“Oh?” he said. “Was it sudden, sir?”

“It was very sudden,” the King said, “but it was over three years ago.”

“Oh,” George said, saddened, not for the dead gentleman, whom he’d never met, or even for himself, so much as for the squire with his frayed, retrograde connections and his sad, dated influence.

“There go your plans, eh?”

“Well …”

“I think I might put you in the way of something.”

“You, Your Highness?”

“It would be chiefly ceremonial of course and not really in your line, but as you’ve just been disappointed and as you’re close by … Would you, do you think you could undertake a mission for us?”

2

They know, I think, that they’re exotic. They must know. Not as the Chinaman is exotic, or the Jew, or red Indian, or savage African. Because, though I’ve never been to the places where such reside, I’ve seen their travelers. Even in England. In parades and circuses, in tailor shops where the government bought my outfits. Coming out here, too. On shipboard a black man poured my tea. And maybe because they were among strangers — here I’m the stranger — they seemed, well, cautious, watchful as boxers. But that’s not it. Unless it’s that these people, in the Jew’s place, the nigger’s, wouldn’t know enough or maybe even care enough to be cautious, though God knows they’re suspicious enough, even among their own. No one trusts anyone. The men doubt the women, the women the men. When a child falls and bruises himself in the street he doesn’t run to his mum for comfort. Sisters don’t look to their brothers to protect them, sons won’t enter a room if their father is in it.

And that’s not it either.

Maybe it’s God.

I’m Church of England but the fact is vicars make me uncomfortable. Whenever I go — which is rare — I go to see society, to hear the choir and watch the gentlemen and gawk as they hand their ladies into and out of the carriages. (It’s where I first spotted Squire.) I mean I don’t belong. (And maybe it’s queer for a Mills to make this admission. It was Greatest Grandfather, after all, who was the indirect deputy of the King himself when he went on that First Crusade. And didn’t I come here myself in the first place at George IV’s request?) So I’m supposed to be Church of England, though I might be more at home as a chapel-meeting Methodist or even as a dissenter, one of the sects. But I’ve been in even fewer chapels than churches, for if vicars and services make me uncomfortable, ministers and everything low church embarrass me. I’m not religious or even much of a believer so much as this snob of God. If there is a God He’s an aristocrat. He’d have gone to the best schools and He’d speak in low tones this absolutely correct accent. He’d sound like the vicar and never shout or even raise His voice like all those others with their full lungs and loud, harsh words prole as low company. So maybe it’s God, their version of Him, makes them so wild, more exotic than gypsies. So maybe it’s God, some pierced-eared, heterodox, heresiarchical, zealous, piratical avatar.

And that’s not it either.

Nor their fierce, rumpus-raveled history, incoherent as rout, mob, high wind.

It’s pride!

I came to Constantinople with a king’s courier, a tall lad named Peterson, not much older than myself, and though we shared the same table on shipboard during the first seating, he was a subdued, taciturn fellow and didn’t enter into conversation easily. I thought at first it was because he was queasy, for I often saw him with his head hanging over the stern rail and caught him throwing up as I returned to my cabin after dessert and coffee and perhaps a brandy. I was nauseous as the courier but had never tasted such fine rare food and was determined not to lose it.

He sometimes summoned me to his cabin or occasionally came to mine, never to chat but to rehearse me in the protocols, my small, silly performance that seemed hardly worthy, even to me, of such expense, so long a voyage. When I questioned him he cut me off and asked me to demonstrate yet again my polished, practiced salaam.

“You’ve seen me do the thing a hundred times.”

“Show me.”

“You know I’ve got it pat.”

“Mahmud II runs a tight court. Show me.”

“Oh very well.” I began the gyrations with my hand, bowed low and ended the fruity salutation with my right palm pressed to my forehead. “There you have it, my sultan.” I thought he was going to be sick.

“Your right palm? Your right?”

“I’m teasing.”

“This is serious. No teasing. Show me.”

I did it again, this time finishing as he’d instructed me.

“You pull something like that before Mahmud …”

“Whoosis, what’shisname, is five years old already. I don’t get it.”

“Abdulmecid. The boy’s name is Abdulmecid.”

“I don’t get it. Abdulmecid’s over five years old. He’s almost gone on six. George IV’s his godfather. Why’d the King wait so long to send him his gift?”

“How often do I have to explain?” the King’s man said with some exasperation. “Islam’s different. The godchild must thank the emissary personally. He has to be able to speak.”

“It’s queer.”

“Excuse me,” Peterson said and rushed from the cabin. Through my porthole I could see him being sick.

My own collywobbles, determined as I was not to lose the unaccustomed delicacies, I still managed to suppress, by an act of the will transforming nausea into a noxious diarrhea, the magnificent broths, gorgeous fowls, grand game and exquisite sweets and pastries metamorphosed into a yellowish, stenchy paste.

Now, when I saw Peterson, I tried to commiserate. “Rough trip,” I’d say.

“It’s not a rough trip,” he’d shoot back. “The sea’s gentle as a lap.”

“It appears calm today,” I’d say, “but there are swells.”

“In your brains,” he’d manage, and vomit violently into the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Often, after my salaams, there would be additional exercises, “the Walk of Prostration,” a difficult, almost acrobatic negotiation in which the one approaching the throne has somehow to give off a full-blown ceremony of obsequious, barehead awe, an impression that he hats-in-hand for all mankind, for everything in fact, for whatever life there might be on other planets as well as all there is on this one, the whole while making his salutations and progressing a corridor the length, could be, of two or three good-sized tennis courts at angles of humility which defy gravity. (Not, at that, too difficult a maneuver for a Mills.)

But our cabins were too small and Peterson sometimes insisted that we go up on deck where I might better practice the movement, the suspirant motion of the ship making everything even more difficult, much to the amusement of the sailors and the other passengers. Peterson would stand fifteen or twenty feet in front of me, walking backward, drawing me on.

“Palace architecture was at least partially designed for just this purpose,” he’d explain, “its long throne rooms, the slight pitch of its slippery marble floors. It fair delights a potentate to see men bellyflop.”

“Why do you do these things?” a fellow passenger might ask.

And before I could respond Peterson would answer, “His Majesty’s business.” And rush to the rail, where he would be sick again.

We never took the goldfoil-wrapped gift out on deck with us for fear the wind would knock it from my hands and soil the handsome package with its golden cords. Indeed, when I made my salaams and practiced “the Walk of Prostration,” I always used a box which replicated in size and weight the one that Peterson kept locked safe in his courier’s diplomatic pouch.

He had shown me the splendid original once or twice and I was more than a little curious as to what it contained. His Royal Highness’s descriptions of a prince’s playthings had piqued my interest.

“What’s in it, Peterson?”

“I don’t know I’m sure.”

“Well let’s open it up then and see what the King got the little guy.”

“We can’t do that, Mills.”

“Why can’t we then? Ain’t I one of Nature’s true-born shipping clerks? I could pop that parcel open, toss its contents about and button it all up again as if the gift, box, foil, gold string and all were part of the same single piece of material, like a doll carved from driftwood say, or a bench from stone.”

“His Majesty’s business. Against all diplomatic procedure.”

“You removed it from the pouch. Ain’t that against all His Majesty’s messenger boy diplomatic procedure too?”

His face was whiter than the canvas sails which drove the ship through the Aegean and toward the Dardanelles.

“Hey,” I said, “not to worry. I’m no blurt tattle.” But he had run to the rail to pitch his insides. “Hey,” I tried to reassure him, “hey, do I look like some blab squeak? You think I’d peach on a pal? I ain’t no snitchwhisper, what do you think?” But he was retching now something beyond the contents of his stomach, something beyond digestion itself. “We’ll forget about what the King sent whoosis — Abdulmecid. It’s none of my business. I shouldn’t have asked. If even one person knows it can ruin the surprise.”

They’re called Janissaries.

They’re called Janissaries and they’re this elite corps, very famous, very feared.

For their cruelty.

They’ve existed as a fighting force since the second half of the fourteenth century and were originally recruited from among young Balkan Christians, often made over to the Ottoman Empire by the parents themselves according to a policy known as devshirme, a human payment collected in lieu of taxes. These “tribute children,” as they were known, were dispersed among Muslim families, who instructed them in the ways of Islam. When the local mullahs were convinced they were ready, they were converted and formally sworn to repudiate their parents, a ceremony which involved a vow to take, if the state required it, the lives of everyone in their family, from a mother or father to a distant cousin. If they were considered fit enough for the rigorous life of a Janissary, they were sent to Constantinople and received into the Corps. This was not actually a formal induction. There was no formal induction; no loyalty oath was ever sworn to the Sultan or any representative of the Empire, only a pledge of celibacy. Then the recruit simply began his training. If he survived he was a Janissary. If he died, as many did, during the course of his preparations, his corpse was used to help train the others.

They were — we are — slaves.

Because the King knew his man, understood to his giblets and neckbones not just the proximate character and quality of each royal counterpart and political analogue throughout Europe and the Orient, but the taste and aroma of his very soul. Because he knew him as a cordon bleu chef knows vegetables, meat.

It wasn’t the length finally, it was the height. Slender pillars, high as trees, vaulting into heavy blocks of shrewd color faceted as gem which supported a great fanned ceiling like some Persian rug in stone. The height, the weight of the height.

Peterson presented his letters to the Grand Vizier’s secretary, who started to call for a translator. The courier shook his head vigorously. “No,” he said. “They’re in Turkic. In Turkic.”

The secretary looked up. “Eh?”

“In Turkic,” Peterson repeated, and made a great show of writing in the air. “Turkic.”

The man smiled and duplicated Peterson’s gesture. He held up the letters. “Turkic?”

Peterson nodded and I looked at His Majesty’s courier.

We were told to return to the embassy and wait for instructions.

As Christians are distrusted and are discouraged from having official, long-term connections with the Ottoman government, the British ambassador to the Court of Mahmud II is a Jew.

“I am Moses Magaziner,” the ambassador said, a shaggy-bearded, great hook-nosed old fellow with long curling earlocks and a shiny black skullcap that seemed cut from the same bolt of gabardine as his jacket and trousers. “Is His Majesty vell?”

“Quite well, thank you, Mr. Ambassador,” Peterson said.

“Oy, tenks God,” the ambassador said. “His veight, he’s vatching his veight?”

Peterson frowned. “No one can know for certain, sir, but his intimates estimate he’s above twenty-two stone by now.”

“Tventy-two stone. A good eater. He vas alvays a good eater.”

“Indeed,” Peterson said.

“Vell,” the ambassador said, rubbing his hands together, “you boys come a lung vay. You’re ready a little lunch?”

“I know I am, Mr. Ambassador,” I said.

“Dot’s nice,” Moses Magaziner said affably. He indicated Peterson. “Your mate, the langer locksh, the skinny merink, he’s also ready a nibble grub?”

“At your convenience, sir,” Peterson said.

The strange diplomat shrugged the large, fringed prayer shawl that fell like a scarf about his arms and shoulders and clapped his hands twice. “Mrs. Zemlick,” he told the maternal-looking woman who appeared in the doorway, “tell Gelfer lunch for three. The state dining room.” The woman smiled at us, nodded and left. “Very pleasant, very refined. A doll,” Magaziner said when she’d gone, “a regular baleboste. I vish only the best for Yetta Zemlick.” He sighed. “Listen,” he said, “a heppy steff is a busy steff.”

“She seems quite cheery,” I said.

His Highness’s representative shrugged. “A vidow. A vidow voman finf years. I vould like to arrange maybe a shiddech vit her and the tchef. Don’t be shy, hev a fig.” Magaziner held a bowl out to us. I accepted but Peterson declined. “You don’t like figs?” Magaziner said, “try a date. Sveet like sugar.”

“I’m afraid I should ruin my appetite,” Peterson said coolly and Magaziner looked as if he were surprised to discover that Peterson possessed one.

“He’s had a rough time with his stomach, Mr. Ambassador,” I said. “The voyage.”

“Oh yes,” he said, “the woyage.” Mrs. Zemlick reappeared in the doorway and waited till she caught the ambassador’s eye. “Lunch, Mrs. Zemlick?” He turned to us. “Vell gents,” he said, rising, “soup’s on.”

In the state dining room Moses Magaziner recited Hebrew prayers over each course that the servant, Eli Nudel, set before us. Peterson and I looked down at our laps.

“You don’t got an eppetite for brisket, Mr. Peterson? You hardly touched.”

Peterson mumbled something that was difficult to hear.

“He says he filled up on soup,” Eli Nudel said. “He says he’s all shtupt from cholleh.”

“Eli,” Magaziner said, “bring me vat Mr. Peterson don’t finish, Gelfer Moonshine’s feelings shouldn’t be hurt.” Then he turned to us as he sopped up gravy with his bread. “Don’t feel bad, young man,” he told Peterson. “If you ken’t you ken’t. Oy, everybody’s a prima donna. I’m not referring to you, Mr. Peterson. I can tell, you are an angelface. It’s Gelfer Moonshine, my tchef. He’s a pick-of-the-litter, vorld-cless, A-number-vun tchef but he gets depressed if a person don’t eat up everyting on his plate. I tell him, ‘Gelfer, it’s not you. Sometimes ve got a guest his stomach ain’t accustomed to traditional cooking.’ I tell him, ‘Gelfer, cheer yourself, sometimes a fella’s hed a woyage didn’t agree mit him.’ ” Eli Nudel had been serving the coffee and was standing now beside Peterson, who seemed oblivious to the man.

Magaziner went on. “I tell him, ‘Gelfer, all right, maybe she’s too old to hev any more children, and all right, maybe she ain’t a beauty, but nobody could deny Yetta got a smile on her punim could light up the shabbes candles. And what about you, Gelfer Moonshine? You got it in your head you’re the Supreme Being’s gift to the ladies? You’re fifty-one years old, your bek aches, your feet get sore, you got a constipation could choke a horse. A nice person like Yetta could be a comfort to you. That time her son and son-in-law came to the embassy mit the grendbabies ven the mumsers ver making a pogrom, you saw for yourself. Like horses they ate, may the Lord, blessed be His name, make His countenance to shine upon them.’ Two tiny little girls, Mr. Mills, Mr. Peterson, couldn’t be seven years old, eight tops, and they ate for a regiment. Vat dey couldn’t finish Gelfer made up to shlep in a beg. You’ll take a cup coffee, Mr. Peterson?”

“What? Oh. Yes please. I don’t seem to see the — Would you have such a thing as cream?”

Moses Magaziner looked at him. “Dairy mit brisket, Peterson?” he asked sharply, then abruptly changed the subject. “Vell,” he said softly, “how’d it go at the pelace? Dey taking good care you boys?”

“We had a preliminary interview this morning with the Grand Vizier’s First Secretary. He told us to await further instructions.”

“Ah,” Moses Magaziner said, “further instructions. You speak the lingo, Mr. Peterson?”

“Sir?”

“Turkic. You hev Turkic?”

“Guidebook Turkic. Nothing more. Nothing as fine as I’m certain yours is, Mr. Ambassador.”

“Me? I talk Yiddish to them.”

Peterson raised his napkin to his lips. For some time now he had been looking quite ill. “I say, would you excuse me, sir? It seems …”

He never finished his sentence. Eli Nudel hurried him away and Magaziner and I were left alone.

“So,” Magaziner said. “So so so.”

Mills grinned at him shyly.

“Yes?” Magaziner said.

“It was delicious,” Mills said.

“My pleasure.”

“I particularly liked the pudding. What did you call it, ‘lucksh and cook’?”

“Kugel. Lockshen kugel.”

“That’s it,” Mills said. “Lockshen kugel. It was delicious. It was all delicious. It was my first state lunch. My friend’s been off his feed.”

“Your friend?”

“Peterson. Mr. Peterson.”

“Oh yes,” Moses Magaziner said, “Mr. Peterson.”

“The halvah was wonderful too. With the coffee. I loved the halvah. Is that right, halvah? I’m very ignorant. I don’t know the names of these aristocrat dishes.”

“Halvah, yes,” the ambassador said. “Tell me again, Mr. Mills. King George sent you as his personal emissary with Abdulmecid’s gift? The letter the courier showed me vas a little unclear.”

“Yes, sir. Queer, ain’t it? Me a boob and all.”

The ambassador waved off George’s self-deprecation and questioned him further. He seemed particularly interested in the circumstances surrounding their meeting, and when Mills began to repeat what the King had told him of his relationship with Maria he stopped him at once. “Skip all that,” he said. George assumed it was because it was gossip with which the man was already familiar and was at a loss as to what else to tell him. “Vat did you say? Vat did you told him?” Mills recounted his reasons for coming to London, mentioned the useless letter of recommendation his squire had sent with him but did not go into detail because he was still ashamed for the proud man he had so conscientiously pursued with respect, waiting each day for the cabriolet (which he still thought of as the squire’s carriage) to pass, planting himself beside the road those two furlongs before it not because he was afraid he’d miss it but because he enjoyed watching it, seeing it come. Not telling Magaziner any of this either, burdened by his queer guilt for the squire’s failed liaisons and associations.

So he told him what he had told the King, blocking out for him a general idea of Millsness, what he had been rehearsing not since he’d first heard it, since what he’d first heard he had no need to rehearse, had remembered, would always remember, but what had happened since, describing the circle, his ring of the wood, the tree, going over it — Magaziner was impatient, waving him quickly through certain passages, slowing him down at others, actually leading Mills’s story like a conductor, directing it like traffic — as even now, speaking to the ambassador, he was at once telling the tale and living some new part of it, the telling, living, remembering and rehearsing additional increments he knew it would have made him dizzy to contemplate if he had dared. (He didn’t need to dare. The strange pressures and weathers of his life had already acclimatized him to conditions and practices that were no longer even second nature but something actually biologically autonomous.) Magaziner stopped him. “Forty-third? He called you Forty-third?” Mills nodded. “Go on.” George backed and filled, telling the story randomly, stumbling a little, not permitted to do it as he’d rehearsed it in his head but forced by Magaziner to improvise, by Magaziner who interrupted him, conducted him, taking him forward to the voyage, the practice sessions in the cabin, Peterson’s silence at table, the courier calmly taking food into his stomach that moments later he would give up to the sea. Redirecting Mills another time to what George had said to the King, what the King to George, but always refusing the gossip, not as much shocked by it as bothered that it should have come up at all, asking George what he’d said, whether he’d encouraged it, Mills swearing he hadn’t, insisting his own embarrassment to Magaziner. “Yes?” Mills nodded. “Go on.” George related some more details. Magaziner raised a finger to his lip. Mills stopped. “ ‘There you are,’ he said? ‘It would seem you’re one of us? It would seem you’re one of us then, George?’

“Ah, Mr. Peterson,” the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire said, “fillink better?”

“Yes, thank you, sir.”

“Dot’s nice. Dot’s terrific.”

In the morning he accompanied George and the courier to the government carriage that had been sent for them. Peterson climbed in first and George handed the golden package in to him to hold for a moment before he got in beside him.

Just as he was about to do so, as he was raising one foot onto the carriage’s metal stirrup, the ambassador briefly embraced him and almost imperceptibly slipped something into his jacket pockets. It was halvah wrapped in two of the fine linen napkins from the embassy service.

So it was the height even more than the length.

“Well, old buns, it was more than eiver acherly. Dere I was den, weren’t I? A great green nineteen-year-old gawm what never got no closer to de movers an’ shakers ’n a trooper’s widow to de mighty King of Spine. What never till dat day in Putney”—Mills telling a small circle of his intimates in a corner of the kitchen, near the tripe barrels and offal buckets, speaking their language, the broken brogue of barracks and parade ground, a sort of Ottoman-Persian-Yiddish he’d picked up from his mates in the year to year and a half he’d been there, a dialect (and of course it would be low, bits and pieces of what the locals had brought with them from Tripoli and the Crimea, from Hungary and Mesopotamia, from Crete and the Balkans, from Thrace — places, some of them, Mills would not have been able to locate on a map, not because he was such a poor geographer but because, except for his thoroughgoing knowledge of his own antecedents, he was such a rotten historian, the nations and kingdoms having changed hands and names since the great days of the Ottoman Empire, the Empire itself having rearranged if not the lands themselves then their borders, so that what he spoke, had learned to speak, was a lingo of the disinherited and misbegotten, a patois which finally proved tougher than those old arbitrary state lines of demarcation themselves, the nations and kingdoms having been reabsorbed elsewhere, restaked, changed like partners in a dance, taken like trumps in bridge) which still retained neologisms centuries after the countries that originally contributed them were no longer required (some of the more gung-ho among them would have said “permitted”) to serve. He couldn’t have held up his end of a conversation either in Turkic (the official language of the Court) or in Farsi (the language spoken by most of the people). What he spoke, if poorly, was an elitist tongue: Janissary. A language (which he would actually attempt to render, if a sworn celibate like himself ever got the chance to get them, to his progeny in a chipped pidgin, some bent bloopered, crooked Cockney) the now greatly reduced but still fierce force shared (perhaps five thousand men could speak it), no matter their mother tongue, only among themselves — a grammar like a password, a syntax like a signal—“ ’ad never e’er even seen a king much less haddressed one. Who now ’ad saw not only ’is first king but a certificated courier too, as well as a hambassador in a hembassy and most of ’is hoficial ’ouse’old staff an’ not only dat but a first secretary to a grand vizier (an’ you may throw in too, if you’d haccount for my toney turnout, a Savile fooking Row tailor). An’ caught a glimpse in de far off, an’ just as I was bending to my Prostration Walk, of de Hemporer of de Hottoman Hempire an’, by ’is side, Abdulmecid, de godkid, de Hemporer in Whiting. It was ever so much more den a poor boy could bear.

“De courier ’ad goon to stan’ next old Mahmud ’imself — may Halla ’crease ’is camels an’ rise de horanges in ’is hoāses — an’ on an preharranged sidgnal, winkies me for’d oo, ’igh church dat was, on’y now begins to take hin wot ’igh church ’mounts to, in dis wool. Usin’ de goldern packadge for balance, sendin’ it hout hinches afore me as a man down de mine might send de rays huv ’is lampern. Like some bloke on an ’igh wire I was. Feelin’ me way an’ doin’ dis piecemeal shuffle. Bloody ridiclus. Me eyes on de groun’, on de runner, de Horiental carpet wif its dizzy spaghetti an’ red rose geometrics till I were sick at stomk an’ might ’ave thrown up my own self if I thunk it wouldink show. Acherly thinkink: Yar. Dat’s wot dese flower arrandgements is — vomit, tummy rosettes, barf bouquets. An’ navigatink by de acheral pull a gravity oo ’ad wanted to guide carriages, to ’ave the tug of bits, an’ make my ’ands felt in an ’orse’s mouf. The gravities loose, flowink like wind thoo a draughty house. Feelink it. Hin my nauseated stomk, hup my ’eavy leggings, hon my ’ands wot ’eld de goldern package. Hall at once. Goin’ thoo me like ha dose a salts. Oo ’ad wanted de control of reins an’ ’ad dem now, but transformed, see? Redistribted like. Oo pulled ’isself alorng dat runner of decorated rug by reaction, resistance to the hints of heaving, falling, dropping. So dat I was like some long, deep, earthboundried hanimal, er snake say, hor a worm, dealink with space by constankly making dese adjustments of muscle, forever ’itching me pants so to speak. Wot all der time felt de high weight of de complicated ceilink threaten my neck like a guillotine.

“An’ knew I was close when I could ear ’em whisperink. De Hottoman Hemperor. De Hottoman Hemporer hin Whiting.

“Peterson ‘eld my packadge whilst I did my salaam.

“Startink at me belly an’ brinkink it hever ’igher, I spun me left hand habout an’ brung it to rest wit me palm on me fore’ead.

“The two potentates, ’im wot was in power an’ ’im wot was in whiting suddenly silent. Wartching me close now oo before ’ad barely give me de odd ogle. I haccepted de box from Peterson wot we’d brought all de way from Blighty an’ shoved it toward Abdulmecid, oo proved to be a strapping tall spotty-faced lad, much holder in happearance dan de five years ’e was reported to be. An’ me thinkin’ to meself, If ’is gardfather was on’y whiting for ’im to get big ernough to be tanked for ’is gift in Hinglish instead oov Islam ’e might ’ave sent it years ago. ’e’s big ernough now, God bless ’im, to say ‘Thank you so very very much’ in Hinglish, German, or Chinese eiver.

“When ’e’d taken it from me I repeated me salaam as Peterson ’ad hinstructed me ter do, an’ now de Hemperor was growling in Hottoman Hempirese.

“Peterson spoke up in wot must ’ave been the same language an’ turns to me.

“ ‘You,’ ’e shouts, ‘what are you on about then, you great scummy gonad? You press your left hand to your forehead? Your left? You salute His Majesty with the same hand with which you wipe your arse?!’

“By dis time Abdulmecid has got ’is packadge hopen an’ is lookin’ at me wif murther in ’is ’eart, an I don’ ’ave to see no Court records to know ’e ain’t been five years old for nine or ten years now, do I?

“ ‘What?’ says Peterson. ‘What?’

“ ‘It’s nappies,’ Abdulmecid says, standin’ arn de goldfoil wrappings. “It’s bloody fucking nappies,’ says Abdulmecid bin ’is perfect Hinglish.

“ ‘Seize him!’ roars ’is dad hin ’is. ‘Seize him and send him for a Janissary!’

“I look to Peterson for an hexplanation, but all ’e can do is shake ’is ’ead real sad like. ’e’s got dat same look on ’is dial wot I’ve seen when ’e’s about to come down wif the sicks.

“ ‘Wot?’ I arsk all confused like, ‘wot?’

“But I can see de guards comink. It’s just the job, i’n’t it? Dey grab me an’ start ter ’ustle me orf ter de flowery dell.

“Peterson wot ’as run orf quick as dammit ’oldink ’is sweet linen snotrag in front of ’is mouf turns an’ lifts ’is duster long ernough ter sing out ‘ ’is Majesty’s bidness! ’is Majesty’s bidness!’ an’ ’e’s doin’ twenny in a ten-mile zone ergain. But de Hemperor’s lads ain’t exactually takin’ their time eiver, are they, an’ pretty soon we’ve caught up wif ’im, an’ I think uh oh, e’s for it too, is Peterson, but dey don’ evern try ter stop ’im. ‘Wot?’ I arsk again as they’re bum’s rushin’ me past ’im. ‘Wot, for Gard’s sake?’

“ ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are all dead, kid,’ Peterson says in a white whisper an’ goes all sick on the carpet.”

3

“You, Mills!” cries the Meat Cut.

“Mills? Who shouted Mills?” calls the Latrine Scrub.

“Sir, I did,” the Meat Cut admits.

The Soup Man watched his junior officers.

Mills was reluctant to approach the Meat Cut with the Soup Man so visible, but Paradise Dispatchers were all about the yard and had heard what amounted to a direct order. If he did not respond, one of the more eager among them might well have taken it into his head to do something about it. They resented him for a Christian, and though Mills had formally repudiated his religion over a year before and had become, if not for all the world then for all his comrades to see, a practicing Muslim, he could not, however hard he tried, keep the disgust from his face whenever he and his brothers-in-arms — an odd term, since it was the boast of the special service into which he’d been impressed by Mahmud II that they never used anything as effete as weapons, that their killing scrimmages were conducted with nothing more elaborate in the way of tools than might be found on the ordinary strangler or murderer — garotte collars and neckwrings, daggers and slingstones, brass knucks and brickbats, throwsticks and coshes, matches, fuel, the rocks in one’s tunic, the hangman’s fat hemps — prostrated themselves for sunrise, morning, midday, afternoon and evening prayers. The fecal stench that came through the soiled, thin clothing in the tightly formed ranks of worshippers was terrific, and, if his expression was hidden by his earth-pressed face, he could never suppress the sound of his gagging.

Bufesqueu, a not unsympathetic Balkanese of approximately his own age and tenure in the Corps, had chided him for it.

“We’re most of us converts, Mills. I myself was a very devout Greek Orthodox. You know what I miss most?”

“No,” Mills said.

“The incense.”

“I miss everything,” Mills said gloomily.

“It’s a good thing we’re buddies, Mills. Talk like that could be construed as treasonous. Anyway it would be better for you if you got into the spirit of things. When we’re stretched out nose to arsehole on the prayer rugs, pretend it’s incense.”

“Incense,” Mills said.

“Sure incense. Certainly incense. Of a sort. Of a kind. Raging candlesticks of bowel. The guts’ aromatics. Fart fragrance. The piss perfumes and come colognes, all the body’s musks and effluents. It makes it easier.”

“Easier.”

“The celibacy. Sometimes I whiff the great poisoned cloud of dirt and intimacy we make and I imagine myself among women, entire overwhelming harems of them, hordes, their menstrual smell, their stinky mystery. It’s deep I am, deep and lost down salty holes. Down and dirty. I bite the ground I lie upon and chew the earth until it turns to mud in my mouth. And they put me down for a religious zealot because the others have risen and I’m still praying. Oh yes. Not to lose my hard-on till I’ve come.”

“Bufesqueu!”

“Why, Trooper, you’re blushing! You’re actually blushing.”

“You’re bloody outrageous you are.”

“Oh, am I?” said his friend. “You’d best brush up on those vows you took, mate. You know what they mean in this outfit by celibacy? They mean the pure, true pukka gen. Pope, Patriarch, Ayatollah and Lord Swami Guru Indian Chief. Not only can’t you get it off with a woman, you can’t get it off with a man or animal either. You can’t pull pud or touch yourself downtown or even think dirty jokes much less tell them. They hang for wet dreams here, and all that’s left for a lad is to make them think he gets off on God. That’s why I’m sopping when I rise from the rug. Incense, think incense, and make a wish, Mills.”

And the odd thing, Mills thought, was that despite everything — George IV’s tricks and the courier’s treachery, Abdulmecid’s and the Emperor’s misplaced rage, his forced conscription with all its concomitant hardships — he had got into the spirit of things. That he understood the source of his fierce loyalties, could trace them back forty-two or so generations to a strange curse delivered by a pampered young nobleman in a Polish wood who, for the authority to deliver it, had only a fair approximation of his greatest grandfather’s number and none at all, really, of the old man’s descendants (and who, at the time, did not really believe that either of them would live long enough to get out of their scrape in time even to get descendants), mitigated not at all his dumb cheer or caused him a moment’s pang. Cursed were the meek. He knew that. So be it. The last would never be first. He knew that. He knew everything, his low-born essence, his unswerving blue obedience and commissionaire’s style — everything. He could not help himself, would not. He was proud to be a Janissary. Proud of hardship, humiliation, his hardcore elite corps humility. So he had got into the spirit of things. And if he was no model soldier — I’m not, he thought, I’m not even good at it — he understood esprit de corps. None better. And valued most what he’d been forced to put up with. What few men living had had to endure, what most would have rebelled against out of hand, turning them tattles, turning them traitors. But not Mills. A hero of hardship, a big shot of bane and outrage.

There were the free-for-alls, the battles royal construed as preparation, training. The Soup Man’s cynical dictum: “Janissaries are brothers. A true Janissary will lay down his life for his brother as casually as he would stand him a beer or buy him his breakfast. If an enemy slays his colleague, even in the act of self defense, even protecting his family, deflecting a torch, say, from the thatched lean-to where his babes lie sleeping; or wrenching the firebrand from a corpsman’s hands with which he’d have ignited a wife’s pubic hair simply to take the chill out of the air, then the surviving Janissary is obligated by the laws of God and the traditions of his company not only to avenge his fallen comrade but to read that comrade’s original intent and to atrocify and consummate even to the nth degree his chum’s lewd scheme. He must perfect death and touch the bottom of punishment. He must annihilate all the friends of the family and, years later, should he meet someone in a peaceful street who, in a certain cast of light, merely resembles his cohort’s killer or perhaps, by a word or gesture, so much as reminds him of his former teammate, or even only of the incident, then must the veteran Janissary dispatch him at once and with the same concentrate rage and fury at his disposal as had been available to him on the initial occasion of his wrath. If the wrath is not there he must pray for it. If his prayers are unanswered then he must make indifference do, and call on reserves of insouciance and apathy to hone his cruelty and generate out of neutral nonchalance the worst usages of his imagination. We are Janissaries, on the fence, middle of the road in every cause, and patriots only to each other.”

And dropped his handkerchief, the signal on the day of their practical, for the recruits to attack each other. Mills, watching for the handkerchief to fall, touch the actual ground, was distracted for that fraction of a piece of a second it took Khoraghisinian, a friend, a young lad from his own barracks with whom he spoke on fire guard and after lights-out in his newly acquired makeshift Janissary diction of deep things, lost things, of home and absences, loved ones, of plans (mere desires now, simple idle longings, yearnings) and the high mysteries of the starry sky and the pungent, sacred memories of kitchen smells, the breads and sweets and savories of childhood, to drop on his neck from a tree’s low limb and scratch at his eyes with its brittle, leafless, wintry sticks. Before Mills could recover, Khoraghisinian had shoved handfuls of steaming, acidic horse dung into his eyes and nostrils and smeared it across Mills’s astonished mouth and tongue. Blinding George, choking him, leaving him breathless, gagging, gasping. Felling him, turning him over and, still in those split seconds it took Mills to recognize the source of the attack (permitting him to think Khoraghisinian — Khory), driving the twigs up his nose, hammering them home with his fists and frozen turds.

It was his sneezes that saved him. Sudden, furious, reflexive and unwilled. His entire body was behind them, some good immunological angel so repudiate to the foreign matter trapped in his face that the sneezes brought his neck and head up like the solidest of uppercuts, roundhouses and haymakers, brutally butting Khoraghisinian and catching him, who was already leaning over to receive them, smack in the center of his nose, between his eyes, on each temple and, stretching to evade Mills’s repetitive jackhammer blasts, full in the throat. Khoraghisinian’s neck was broken, the bridge of his nose. His eyes had been pounded deep beneath their sockets and smashed like egg yolks, spread like jelly. Khoraghisinian had been killed instantly.

“Excellent. Good recovery, excellent,” the Soup Man called from his horse. “Fine alertness, Muslim.”

Now, still dazed, Mills used his good friend as a kind of fort — Fort Khoraghisinian, Camp Khory — arranging his old friend’s body about him like a rampart and flattening himself behind it. The melee continued about and above him, a strange, pointless and issueless battle which Mills dreamily contemplated from the shieldy security of his pal’s corpse. He had not bothered — or thought: he was still stunned, still bound by the low conscientiousness of shock — to rub the dung from his eyes and his steaming, teary vision was distorted, not blurred or dulled so much as squeezed and biased with a queer, buckled clarity, like someone’s behind strong new prescription lenses. He perceived the incredible sharpness of blunt objects and instruments, so that rocks seemed thorny to him, cudgels torn from trees serrated, ordinary belts and bits of clothing — buttons, shoelace — sawtoothed. All about him he perceived the cusp of detail. The faces of his companions assumed a sort of tooled devastation. Their awled eyes and axey chins and spiky noses. Their scalpeled teeth and the hair on their heads brambly as barbed wire. Their nettled flesh, the fierce briery and cutting edge of their expressions. Even the sky — it was a bright day — seemed capable of stinging. Only the fighting had no point.

The combatants engaged and disengaged tempestuously, almost restlessly. They flung themselves upon and away from each other as if impatiently seeking something specific and valuable in one another. They were. Their opponent’s weakness like buried treasure. If an adversary seemed capable of absorbing a body blow, his challenger quickly withdrew it, administered instead sharp kicks to the shins, the groin. If he withstood these his assailant abandoned him, changed tactics, sought a more vulnerable victim, great fistfuls of whose hair he might pull at almost as if he were riding bareback at full gallop and clinging to the mane to keep from falling. (Mills wondering how he, the assailant, could bear the pain, the sword edge sharpness of the hairy, glassy shards. He looked for stigmata, bloody palms.)

Meanwhile the Soup Man barked out commands, abuse, encouragements.

“Are you blind? Don’t you see Suleiman has fallen? That he’s rolled to the sidelines? Go after him. Put him out of the picture.

“You, Taurus Konia, you foul mistress of a mildewed eunuch, you sleazeball, you slimy slop jar of an excuse for a man, bite the scuzzy son of a bitch!

“That’s it, that’s the way, Mills, that’s the way to do it. Khoraghisinian’s dead. Use him, use him! Hide in your buddy, use him, live off the land! Did you rob him yet? What? No? What are you waiting for?

“What are the rest of you Muslims waiting for? A comrade has fallen. Have you forgotten the bribegold he carries in case he’s taken prisoner? And what about the rations that must still be on him? It’s not yet lunchtime, the muezzin hasn’t yet called us to midday prayer. His cinch is still good and would make a glorious noose. Are you just going to stand there and let Mills gobble up all the spoils? Rush him. Rush him, you pussies!”

Which brought him out of his daze. Which refocused his eyes. Which detranced him and canceled his lassitude, his tourist’s glum stun, his protective shock like a blast of first aid.

The Janissaries were coming for him and, still behind the fallen Khoraghisinian, he brought himself up on his hands and knees and began to lunge and lurch about like an animal — not like a dog or anything even remotely domestic, nor, for that matter, even like an animal in the wild. Rather he seemed to them, must have seemed to them, like someone stricken with a dazzling terror. But terror would not have stopped them, not even if it had been accompanied — as it was accompanied — by anything so spectacular as the noises now issuing from George Mills’s mouth, if an instrument ordinary as a human mouth could be said to be capable of producing such sounds. Surely, they thought as they pulled up short of the galvanically compelled man loose and lurching now as live wire, he produces those noises in his vitals, his organs, his liver and lungs, his spleen and kidneys and guts and glands.

“After him,” the Soup Man bellows. “Do you think he’s haunted?” But even the commander’s horse shies.

The Janissaries do not think he’s haunted. They recognize the animal analog they had previously perceived. Mills is not terrified. He is outraged. His brutality now is the brutality of bereavement, his bestiality somehow, well, maternal. As though Khoraghisinian were his cub, Khoraghisinian’s corpse something to be defended to the death, all affined biological kindred’s interdictive, no-trespass taboo.

“The bribegold, the bribegold!” the Soup Man calls out. “He carries it too. Fan out, surround him. Smother the bastard.”

And a few of the Janissaries begin to drift away from the main body. Slowly.

They sweep so widely about the flanks of Khoraghisinian’s tautly drawn bow of a form that they seem almost to disperse. Silently, and so very gradually, they sneak-shuffle past him so Mills, glaring round at them, seems to freeze their motion with a glance as if they were subjects in a boy’s game. As soon as he looks elsewhere they are on tiptoe again. Even the Soup Man is silent. Even his horse does not stir. Someone snickers and Mills darts a look behind him, but this time the troopers don’t even bother to suspend their motion. He sees that he is encircled. Taurus Konia holds a dagger in his hand. Suleiman grins from the sidelines where somehow he has managed to survive his tormentors. The Soup Man watches impassively. And sees—

Mills not so much standing, regaining his feet, as actually rearing, rampant as a furious figure in heraldry. He seems suddenly so fierce he might be mortally wounded perhaps, or seized by a peremptory madness. The dung he has not even bothered to remove has dried on his face, assumes some tribal quality of ultimate warpaint. A few bare twigs hang from his nose like an extra row of teeth.

This is the Christian, his fellow recruits think, the fastidious Englishman. How he is transformed!

But he does not apprehend his effect. If Mills is posturing he does not know it. For all the redeemed clarity of his vision, he is unaware of how he must appear to them, is not so much furious or fierce or outraged or maddened or even exalted by his terror as simply alarmed. That they are suddenly so wary — he sees this — he attributes to the complexity of their situation. He has observed their fitful skirmishes, the way they have sought quick advantage, their trial-and-error, upperhand experiments, their sudden disengagements, the violent storms and subsidences of their almost tropical hostility. Their to’s and fro’s like compass work. If they are wary now, he thinks, it is of each other, not of him. He they could dispose of in minutes, seconds. What threat could one Englishman — and that one a Mills, a forty-second or so generated, underwilled survivor on the strength not of strength but of loyalty, good behavior, all the quiet citizen virtues — possibly pose to these elite Paradise Dispatchers?

So their wariness — and this bothers George, seems to proviso and moderate still further this already mitigated man — is only a sort of extemporized battle plan. First they will kill him. Easy work. No sooner said than done. What are the odds? Twenty against one? Twenty-five? He is momentarily outraged — more Englishness; perhaps his fellow recruits have his number after all — by the sheer unfairness of his situation. Even the Soup Man, who has complimented him, who has given him high marks for his alertness (though to tell the truth he had not quite taken in at the time what his commander had meant), has sanctioned his slaughter. (And this English too, his complacent pride not so much in distinguishing himself as in pleasing a superior.) So. They will kill him. Steal his bribegold, Khoraghisinian’s. Harvest their corpses for anything of value — matches, a heel of bread, rope, the oranges both carry. What holds them back is what comes next. The free-for-all, that winner-take-all frenzy of their terrible tontine arrangements. Surely, Mills thinks, this is why they stare at him, glance furtively at one another. They are sizing each other up, remembering the power in that one’s fingers, this one’s arms. Dead reckoning will, viciousness. Savages, Mills thinks. They’re savages.

The Soup Man sees Mills squat over Khoraghisinian’s body, the dead man momentarily disappearing beneath the flowing cape George Mills wears. He sees Mills’s quick movements but they’re obscured by his robe and he cannot make them out. Quite suddenly there is blood, but it seems almost of a different color and viscidity than that which flows from the wounds of punctured men. He can’t tell, but it seems cooler.

Mills is standing. He turns in what seems to the troopers a magic circle. Khoraghisinian’s entrails lie gleaming in his left hand. The shit-encrusted bribegold shines in his right. He holds out both.

“We were friends,” he intones. He speaks extra slowly in his new, barely mastered tongue so that he may be understood. He turns so that all might hear him. He means to mollify them with guts and gold and stench. He means to curry favor, to bribe them with atrocity. “We were friends,” he says again of the man whose body he has just mutilated. “At the last minute, at the last minute I remembered something he told me once when we were on fire guard. ‘Bribegold must be well hidden.’ We were friends. He was wily. I frisked his shift and groped his robes. I did his duds like a dowser. ‘Well hidden,’ he said. And it came to me he must have swallowed it. See,” Mills says and he raises his arms still higher, bringing his palms together in which Khoraghisinian’s bowels slosh, collision and shift like so much damp, dark, swollen seaweed beneath his offering, the surgical, amputate bribegold steaming like carrots in soup.

It is just then that the muezzin calls from his tower and the Janissaries sink to their bellies as if shot. Only Mills, the pagan, gentile infidel, fails to prostrate himself at once. Then he too lowers himself, but he cannot remember the prayers. All that rings in his head is a nursery rhyme from childhood. He recites, first to himself and then aloud, “Little Jack Horner.”

It was meaningless as the violence in Punch-and-Judy shows. One man had fallen that day. Hardly anyone had escaped injury. There were no doctors. They didn’t take prisoners and they didn’t have doctors.

“Sir!” Mills says smartly as he reports to the Meat Cut.

The Soup Man and Latrine Scrub drift over. Seeing that it is Mills who has been singled out, other officers join the group. The Superior and Inferior Scullions, two Water Carriers, a Cook and Pastry Cook, the Salad Man and three Steam Table Men. There are a handful of noncommissioned officers as well — Waiters and Dining Room Orderlies, Dishwashers and Busboys.

Mills waits for the Meat Cut’s instructions, and though he does not know what the man will say to him he knows it won’t be pleasant. Perhaps he will be ordered to dredge latrines. Or work the potato gardens. Or clean prayer rugs. Or groom the mascot. Or stuff the mattresses. Or bathe officers.

Neither the officers nor the troopers have forgotten — or for that matter understood — his actions on the day of the practical when first he sneezed Khoraghisinian to death and then prospected his friend’s body, as he himself doesn’t understand much of the hocus-pocus of his position or the official status of the Corps. As he barely understands the parodic kitchen or menial nomenclatures of the officers’ titles. Steam Table Men, Meat Cuts, Pastry Cooks, Inferior Scullions, Latrine Scrubs, Butcher Boys and all the rest. As he barely understands the reasons for eschewing ordnance, guns, bows and arrows, weapons even the most modest armies have at their disposal, savage tribes do. Or comprehends even the mission of the Janissaries. There has not been a major engagement in years, and although there have been “incidents,” most of these have been political, demonstrative in nature, militant, bloody and editorial, often in support of the Sultan’s policies but just as frequently in opposition. (He knows now that Mahmud II is not an emperor at all but a sultan and somehow this knowledge has altered something important in his life. He had been the loyal subject of a king. The King had had his reasons — which Mills not only retrospectively understands but actually respects — to question his loyalty and had tricked him into what George thought of — Ottoman Empire had sounded grand to him, Ottoman Emperor had — as a lateral subordination, a sort of transfer of allegiance, collateral and fixed as the equivalency of currencies or the official provisions for exchanging prisoners, diplomats. But the subject of a sultan? For all that he has seen Yildiz Palace, George feels somehow desertized, sand-abandoned, wrapped in Persian rug, the lavish and decadent wall hangings of a tent. And though, except for patrols, bivouacs and marches, he can’t have been away from the fort for ten weeks altogether, he feels oddly nomadic. It is because he works for a sultan, sheiks and pashas, and thinks of the solid fortress, the brick barracks in which he sleeps, as an oasis, of the water he drinks, though it’s sweet and plentiful as water from any English lake, as collected, trapped, sluiced toward his mouth and throat and belly by gates and gravity, by a sort of clever and desperately engineered husbandry. Somehow, since the Emperor became a sultan, he is always parched now.) Nor is their function ceremonial. They rarely parade and when they do it is chiefly before the reviewing stands of other Janissaries. Never do they make a contingent in the pomp and pageantry of the Court. Their officers (for all the queer deference of their official designations) do not much talk to them or offer explanations, so they have no very clear idea either of short-or long-term goals. Newspapers and periodicals are not permitted inside the fort, and all they really know about what is expected of them relates to style, history. Whenever the Soup Man addresses the Janissaries (since the day of their bloody practical the one-time recruits are full-fledged Janissaries, integrated with troops who have spent years in the Corps), it is to remind them of their odd traditions, the queer pantheon of their heroic bullies.

“Remember,” he says, “Godukuksbabis who slaughtered all the cows in the village of Szarzt. Pray for Tchambourb, of blessed memory, who villained the women of Urfa and drove their goats twelve miles through dangerous country to drown them in the Euphrates. Recall Abl Erzuz who captured the children of Tiflis, stripped them of their clothing, and led them on a forced march up the icy, precipitate slopes of Mount Ararat, where they fell thousands of feet to their deaths in nameless crevasses and lost, lonely fissures. Celebrate Van and all his glorious brother Janissaries who stole everything of value in the city of Plovdiv and bequeathed a life of poverty to all its inhabitants.”

On one occasion even Mills has been singled out.

“Think,” the Soup Man had said in what passed among them for public occasions, the boring convocations of garrison life, “of George Mills, who sniffled a man to death and then ransacked his guts for booty, who plundered a pal’s bowels as a highwayman might go through his pockets. Think of Mills, whose blows were blows and for whom another man’s flesh was of no more consequence than a handkerchief. Think of Mills’s ingenuity and cough your enemies into submission. Drown them in your blood, smart their wounds with your tears. Disease and contagion them. Give them your colds and your cancers and, when you fall, fall on them. Rupture them with your weight. Recall George Mills, my treasures, and remember that cruelty is as real a legacy as the family silver.”

Fearing reprisal, he’d shuddered. But there was no reprisal, is none. True enough, he gets the shit details, but since when has a Mills been without shit details? So, to answer Bufesqueu once more, he was in the spirit of things and, if he couldn’t claim actually to enjoy the jobs that fell to him — he loathed them, they insulted his nostrils as much as the prayer cycles in which he found himself — there was that ancient business of the family curse, his old hereditary hardships like recipes in his keeping. Perhaps what he prayed for down on that rug was for them to keep it coming, to keep the pressure on, to keep it up. Perhaps all he wanted out of life was to do his duty. (He was not yet twenty-one years old.) It was, he understood, what most men wanted, the difference between himself and others being that he left it to others to define that duty. Demanded they define it. As if, like any truly despairing man, he would do anything, anything at all, just to get the chance to thunder his smug, contemptuous There, you see? at them. He was, that is, at home only in his outrage. And he almost hoped aloud as he awaited the Meat Cut’s orders that it would be an officer this time, that it would be the Meat Cut himself whom he’d have to follow, soap in hand, to the huge soup kettles in the barracks square.

Imagining the conversation:

“Tonight is the eve of the Rabaran, Mills.”

“Sir! The eve of the Rabaran, sir!”

“In my village, when I was a boy, husbands would bathe their wives, wives their husbands, parents children, children pets. Even the old, even the poor, had their bath partners. It was a community scour, Mills. I was still Christian then of course and had no more understanding of this ceremony than the Muslims had of our saints and martyrs. Indeed, I was a sneaky, oafish sort of boy, not even a very good Christian, and I took the occasion to satisfy my lustful curiosity. Together with other gentiles of my age and sort, I snuck off to the river, where many Muslim families went for their ritual cleansing. There we would deploy ourselves behind boulders and trees and spy on the women as they unpinned their chadors, the young girls who rubbed handfuls of lather into their clefts. I didn’t understand then that even if we’d been discovered they’d never have driven us off, that we’d have been invited to find our own bath partners and join them. That on the eve of the Rabaran the cleanliness that must not be hidden from God need not be hidden from men, even from foolish, curious children. Do you understand what I’m telling you, Mills?”

“Sir! I understand what you’re telling me, sir!”

“That there’s nothing shameful in a holy scour. That the cleanser is blessed as the cleansed. That it’s a privilege to brisk and shine another’s affairs, to polish his business as one would one’s own.”

“Sir! I understand, sir!”

“Of course you do. Others mightn’t, but you do.”

“Sir! I do, sir!”

“Who stuck his hands past the wrists into a colleague’s intestines. Now there’s no need to blush. There’s no reason to go all girly on me, George.”

“Sir! No reason, sir!”

“Of course not. You were doing your duty. You were doing your duty in his duty. Do I have it? Is that about it?”

“Sir! You have it. That’s about it, sir!”

“Well of course. And we understand that if it weren’t the eve of the Rabaran I wouldn’t be asking you to bathe me?”

“Sir! We understand, sir!”

“And that even if it is Rabaran eve we still wouldn’t ask if these were places we could comfortably reach ourselves?”

“Sir! We understand, sir!”

“And that I choose you only because you’ve been there before?”

Requiring that he — the Meat Cut — speak to him in ways that even the King George IV himself would never speak to him. And requiring that Mills answer in ways that King George wouldn’t, indeed couldn’t, ever permit himself to demand. Already aggrieved. Hoping if it weren’t the Meat Cut then some lesser officer, or noncommissioned officer perhaps — a Waiter or Busboy — or even someone from the ranks, a Paradise Dispatcher like himself. Or something to do with the mascot — maybe the mascot was his best bet — Mills commanded to entertain it, to throw sticks for the old blind dog and fetch them himself when the arthritic animal wouldn’t move. (And could imagine that conversation too, not conversation, really, just plain boorish ragging: “Would you look at the bloody-minded beast? Do you see him frolic? Did you e’er see such pep? When Shep goes we won’t even have to replace him. What do you think, Konia? Mills for mascot when old Shep gets demobbed?” “There’s advantages and disadvantages.” “Well I see the advantage. Shep could fetch good as any when he was healthy, but he never did get the hang of throwing. What disadvantage could there be?” “Well, there’s his age.” “His age?” “A human’s lifespan is seven to one compared with a dog’s. Shep’s ninety right now in human terms. Suppose Mills is made mascot, suppose he enjoys it, suppose he takes it in his head he’s only technically human, that only some rare vagary of Nature put him in pants in the first place? My God, don’t you see? He could will himself beast. He’s already five sixths of the way there. On a dog’s diet he could live to be three hundred and fifty!” “There’s that,” Konia’s collaborator admits. “There’s more.” “More, Konia?” “This one don’t have Shep’s temperament. He’s vicious.” Because he’s a living legend by now, so accredited ever since the day the Soup Man chose to single him out for his deeds — of yes, deeds, lifted forever beyond anything as normal as actions or reactions — which is all they were finally: reactions, hard, simple, knee-jerk — and into rhetoric, semiofficial shoptalk, regulation Lister bag company scuttlebutt whenever men stopped by for a cool drink of water — along with Van and Abl Erzuz and Tchambourb and Godukuksbabis and all the rest of that Star Chamber lot of cutthroat bullies.)

A living legend? A living joke.

Okay, he thinks. Swell. Why not? So be it. I’m your man. Fine. I’m your dogsbody. Of course. You want me to bath down the whole naked, goddamn garrison? Every last mutt and horse on campus and all the slops in all the tripe barrels and offal buckets, too, by running them bit by fucking bit through the blue collar saliva in my poor man’s mouth? Sir! If that’s what you want, sir!

And is as close at this moment to harboring a pure revolutionary thought as anyone in the entire history of the world.

And is still waiting on the Meat Cut for the man’s command, which he still hopes will be as devastating as the officer can make it, and prays that he still has whatever it takes neither to blench nor blink when he finally hears it.

He finally hears it.

He blenches. He blinks.

“Mills,” says the Meat Cut. “I say, George, why don’t you take the rest of the day off and go into town for a bit? Take your friend with you.”

“Sir? Into town, sir? Town?”

“Dress uniforms. To show the flag. Take your pal, you know, the one that survived. Bufesqueu. Take Bufesqueu.”

It didn’t need newspapers, it didn’t need periodicals, it didn’t need chalk talks or elaborate background briefings by the officers. It didn’t even need the barracks wisdom and tittle-tattle of a Bufesqueu for Mills to understand that they had just been condemned to death. There were no provisions in the military code for Janissaries to be discharged. (There were Paradise Dispatchers in Mills’s own company in their seventies and eighties.) The reasons were obvious and, in an odd way, peculiarly compassionate.

It was not just that a veteran Janissary, celibate, old, failing and without family, ill equipped to do business in the outside world, would be lost as a civilian. He would be torn to shreds. This much came through the crazy pep talks of the Soup Man. They were despised as much as they were feared. This was their glory, their elitism.

And Mills well enough understood their ultimate mission. They all did. It was not so much to protect the state as to suppress the people. Indeed — those frequent demonstrations against the government — it was to suppress the state as well. (Though Mills had never seen it, there was something that terrified people and government both: the symbolic moment of Janissary rage when the troopers hauled the tremendous cauldrons in which they boiled soup out of the mess and into the square and upended them.) At the height of their strength two centuries earlier there had been upward of a hundred and thirty thousand troops in the Corps. Now there were barely five thousand, all of them concentrated in the huge and possibly impenetrable fortress where Mills had trained and until now lived as a prisoner. But this was the point. Not that their ranks had been diminished by a hundred and twenty-five thousand men, but that with two hundred years to work it out, a hostile government had been unable to abolish an organization of just five thousand that it openly feared and had little use for — except on those occasions when it meant to punish the people.

So they would be killed. Certainly Mills would be. He was the living legend after all. At least so far. Bufesqueu himself had said as much.

“How do they know?” Mills asked.

“How do we get hashish? How do we get halvah? Where do the fashions come from the fellows like to wear at parties? How do we get the forbidden boozes? Where do the rifles come from?”

“We don’t have rifles.”

“We don’t, no. The officers do. To use against us if we make trouble.” And when George looked at him in disbelief, Bufesqueu went on. “Kiddo, kiddo, it’s a Byzantine world. There’s plots and intrigues under every fez. There’s bucks to be made and merchants to make them. You want to know the real reason our outfit still exists?”

“We’re the greatest fighting force in the world.”

“The real reason.”

“That is the real reason. Man for man and hand to hand no one can touch us.”

“Listen to this bird,” Bufesqueu said. “He’s marching off to a town where the first guy to spot him will already be thinking not how to kill him but how best to dispose of his body after he’s dead, and his heart’s in his head and his head’s up his ass. What, you’re a snowman? You got coals for eyes? Open them up, you’re melting. Kickbacks!”

“Kickbacks?”

“Sure kickbacks, of course kickbacks! Kickback kickbucks! The fix is in. The fix has always been in. The two-hundred-year-old fix. The peddlers vigorish the Busboy, the Busboy kicks back to the Steam Table Man, the Steam Table gives to the Meat Cut, the Meat Cut slices off a piece for the Soup Man, the Soup Man ladles it out to the Grand Vizier, the Grand Vizier sees to the Sultan and the Sultan gave at the office. And that’s why we continue to exist! You know what’s the best business there is?”

“I don’t know anything,” George Mills said.

“The best business there is is a deprived, captive population. A prison’s a good business. A garrison like ours is. Mom and Pop stores on desert islands.”

“If you’re so smart why ain’t you rich?”

“I am rich. They say they let you keep Khoraghisinian’s bribegold.”

“They say I captured it in a fair fight,” Mills said gloomily.

“More snowmen.”

“But me? How would they know about me?”

“In town you mean? The good people who want to kill you, who want to hide your face?”

“Yes.”

“George, George, those walls only look impenetrable.”

“Money talks.”

“Talks? It sings soprano. But it didn’t need any money to make you famous. Penny dreadfuls tell your story. There’s broadsides and chapbooks and solos for cello. The ruthless, Christian Janissary from Blighty Limey Land. The folks hate you, Mills!”

“I’m done for.”

“Nah, I have a plan.”

They were caparisoned, their formal uniforms more like frock than battle dress. In their flaring knee-length skirts and high bodices they seemed rather like warriors on vases, urns. Percale as sheet or pillowslip, even their fabrics felt sumptuary, voluptuous. Though he had the reputation, Mills did not feel vicious. And if he’d had no knowledge of what Bufesqueu had described as the Janissary’s Byzantine arrangements — indeed, he’d only first heard of them moments before — he felt, in his Attic, high-stepper uniform, more raiment than clothing, more gown than garment, oddly venal, sharp and shady. (Already memorizing it, figuring ways it could be rendered.) But then, recalling his jeopardy — Bufesqueu he figured was there for the ride, along as a witness, no more (suspicion reinforcing his new Tammany heart) — chiefly he felt foolish, vulnerable as a traffic cop. “Oh yes?” Mills said. “A plan?”

They were on the open plain that ringed their fort — men watched from the ramparts and parapets — land that had once been valuable and held some of the city’s most venerable buildings. As recently as Mills’s induction the year before, a sort of grandstand and playing field had stood there, but over the years, as the original defilement became a parade ground, the parade ground an entrenchment, the entrenchment a breastworks, the breastworks a camp, the camp a fortification and the fortification the fortress that the Janissaries now permanently occupied, there had been a sort of piecemeal retreat, gradual as balding, of the old residences and public buildings. Now, however, they left the open area and entered the city proper, slicing into it through a failing neighborhood. Here, Mills guessed, the vendors and profiteers lived whom Bufesqueu said supplied his colleagues with their black market contraband. (I didn’t know, he thought. Sitting aloof and ignorant on my double bribegold. Starving for halvah and they didn’t even tell me, wouldn’t, not even Bufesqueu. Sent to halvah Coventry.)

A few women and old men returning from market spotted them and were already whispering among themselves, gesturing and, so far at least, only vaguely pointing in their direction. Boys saw them, watched silently, their faces expressionless. Dogs barked. “It better be good,” Mills said into his hand as if he were coughing.

“Trust me,” Bufesqueu said.

“Sure,” Mills said, out of sight now of the Janissaries on the battlements but still closely scrutinized by Bufesqueu.

“When I give the word,” Bufesqueu said.

“Sure,” Mills said, “the word.” (And thought: The word will be Mills. Hey, everybody, here’s George Mills that you heard so much about. Come and get it!)

“Just watch me,” Bufesqueu said. “When I give the signal.”

“When you drop the handkerchief?” Mills said.

Bufesqueu glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. “Just watch me,” he said.

They might have been strolling in the park, Bufesqueu slowing his pace and Mills slackening his own in order not to get out in front of him, when Bufesqueu suddenly began to run full out, shouting as he came. “Blitzpounce!” he shouted. “Thrustrush! Raid-grapple!” They were Janissary commands for attack and Bufesqueu was yelling them at the top of his lungs. “Flakshoot!” he screamed. “Swipeslam! Flailshove! Harrywaste!”

The people divided before them and Mills fell in beside his friend, matching him stride for stride. Bufesqueu continued to shout. “Sallystorm! Knockstrike!” he shouted.

“Chargepelt!” Mills joined in. “Lungehavoc! Siegescorch!”

Now the crowd was taking actual flight, disappearing into passageways, alleyways, niches, hiding in the bays and cubbyholes of architecture like matadors behind the barriers in bullrings.

Leaving Bufesqueu the final word. “Charge, men!” he roared so passionately even Mills looked around to see if they were not the vanguard of a full-fledged invasion.

The trouble was it was a city, that as they cleared one street their sheer noise attracted new groups in the next. The good part was the new groups saw the old ones disperse, and, when the pair was close enough for their war cries to be distinguished, they’d already gotten the message and begun to scatter. There wasn’t a soul in the streets who hadn’t himself either been beaten by a Janissary or known or heard about someone who had. Beaten or killed, beaten and killed. So what worked in their favor was history, time’s and memory’s bad press.

And they looked as they advanced like engines of destruction, like some great avenging avalanche of trouble and death, some spilled Vesuvius of molten bad news and worse intentions. Guzo Sanbanna himself was a witness that day and later admitted that it seemed to him that nothing, no one, could have stopped them. “I ran myself,” Guzo would say, “with one thought for my life and another for my profits!”

The trouble was they were only human first and Janissaries second. That the spirit was willing but the flesh was an old story. That charges like theirs, even with the adrenalin flowing like a chemical bonanza, could not be maintained. Already Mills was winded, already Bufesqueu was. The good part was traffic was already beginning to back up, that, seeing the townspeople scatter, lunging recklessly in front of the rearing nags, drivers and passengers alike called from their carriages to the fleeing crowds. Mills could hear them. And the isolated replies of brave men: “An attack,” they called back over their shoulders as they fled. “Janissaries,” they shouted, “the entire force.” “Janissaries, including that legion recalled from Africa.” “Janissaries!” they cried. “Janissaries on a rampage! They’ve overturned their soup kettles in the square!” “I heard someone say that Mills himself is leading the charge!”

So what they had going for them was rumor, rumor and panic and the prepped fear which greased them, which perspired imaginations all round — so alarmed were the Constantinopolans that out of some inspired sense of emergency the news was passed instantly from neighbor to neighbor, leaping neighborhoods, entire arrondissements and administrative quadrants of the city, flashed across the Bosporus from Europe to Asia so that they already knew at Yildiz Palace — and caused what had only been a traffic jam to become a sort of evacuation.

The trouble was they were exhausted. For two blocks now they had ceased their war cries altogether and for once they had seemed, had anyone troubled to look, more the pursued than the pursuers. For half a block — Mills had pulled up first — they had stopped running entirely. Winded, they leaned up against a shop window and vomited. The clerks and people who’d run inside to escape might have captured and killed them easily but their sudden appearance on the other side of the glass had only served to startle and frighten them further. Perhaps they thought that the vomit and spew which issued so violently from their stomachs and throats was only a sort of Janissary way of spitting. At any rate, no one thought to investigate when Mills and Bufesqueu pulled away from the window and staggered on a few steps. “What — what,” Mills panted through the foul bile that burned his throat, “do we — do we do now?” And Bufesqueu, who did not have the strength to reply, pointed vaguely toward the road.

Where doors hung ajar on abandoned carriages and the driverless horses that pulled them backed and filled or turned halfway round in the street to stare into the faces of other horses, milling about, or frozen in maneuvers — they seemed more burdened now that their drivers and passengers had quit them, hobbled by their loose reins like so many leathery trip wires and the dead weight of their vehicles — which gave them the actual appearance of loiterers.

Mills understood at once. Thinking: Here’s something I can do. Here’s something I can do if I can still do it. “All right,” he told Bufesqueu, indicating the Overland, “go on, get in.”

But Bufesqueu pulled the shades and slammed the carriage doors shut and climbed up to sit beside Mills on the driver’s bench.

“Great,” George said. “Two Janissaries. Now we make twice as big a target.”

“Someone who knows the city has to tell you where to go. I pulled the shades.”

“Fine,” George Mills said. “Now the sun won’t fade the upholstery.”

“I pulled the shades,” he repeated. “They’ll think we’re carrying God knows who. The Soup Man himself probably. Turn left,” Bufesqueu said. “Make a right at that mosque.”

No one stopped them. No one interfered. Everyone had heard of the invasion and thought that the two Janissaries topside the Overland with its tightly drawn shades drove God knew who, the Soup Man himself probably.

Bufesqueu directed Mills past the logjam of vehicles and into the broader avenues. He told him which turn-off to take in traffic circles, guided him into narrow lanes that widened into grand boulevards. Mills was actually beginning to enjoy the ride when Bufesqueu instructed him to pull up before a thick wrought-iron gate surrounded on all sides by a high stone wall. “All right,” he said. “You can stop now. We’re there.”

Mills did not yet know that it was the harem of Yildiz Palace.

Guards were there to challenge them. They stared at the Janissaries’ uniforms.

“You girls want something?” one said, leveling his rifle at them.

“Hey you,” Bufesqueu said, “watch your language. All we ever did was swear off. We never took no low shave like the rest of you capons.” Mills poked Bufesqueu with his elbow.

“I’ll measure my dick against both you young ladies. I’ll put one of my balls on the ball scale and bet you double or nil it’s heavier than all four of yours put together.”

“Big deal,” Bufesqueu said, “you got fat balls.” The second guard laughed and Bufesqueu put a finger to his lip to silence him and jumped down from the driver’s bench. “Sir!” Bufesqueu snapped suddenly. “Yes, sir!”

Mills supposed his friend would be shot before his feet touched the ground, but all that happened was that the Balkanese ran about to the blind side of the carriage, opened the door and stuck his head in. Mills grinned sheepishly at the two guards but both stared quizzically at the drawn black shade on their side of the locked Overland. They appeared to be straining to overhear. Mills strained too and was just able to make out brisk guttural murmurs, and then, seconds later, Bufesqueu’s crisp, military “Sir! Yes, sir!” and the door slam smartly.

When Bufesqueu reappeared the two guards had already lowered their rifles. The Balkanese climbed back beside Mills and turned to the first guard, the man who had challenged them. Bufesqueu glared at him. “Himself wants to know what’s causing the delay. Unlock the gate,” he said.

“Where’s your authorization?”

“Why don’t you stick your face in that carriage and find out yourself where’s my authorization? Then, if we can anybody find the stub of a prick or two whole entire balls between us, we can have that little weigh-in you were so anxious about. Open the gate!”

The first guard glanced anxiously at the carriage’s drawn shade and turned to the second guard. “Go on,” he said. “Better unlock it.”

Mills shook his head when they were safely inside the extensive grounds. “That was a close one. How’d you have the nerve to talk to those fellows like that?”

“Not close.”

“No? Even the horses were getting nervous.”

“Service rivalry,” Bufesqueu said. “Not close.”

“Oh,” Mills said.

“Look, Snowman,” Bufesqueu said sharply, “how long am I going to have to carry you? We’ve been in this chickenshit outfit practically the same time but I’ve got all the answers and you’ve got all the questions. It’s simple. Soldiers and sailors are supposed to hate each other. Every branch of the services is supposed to hold the other branches in contempt. It’s sanctioned. It’s how the mother fuckers induce pride.”

“I don’t hold sailors in contempt.”

“No,” Bufesqueu said. “You don’t hold anyone in contempt. How you ever got to be the cruel Janissary is beyond me.”

“I told you about that,” Mills said softly.

“Yeah,” Bufesqueu said.

He wanted to ask Bufesqueu where they were but he was ashamed. Instead he tried to concentrate on the directions the guard had given Bufesqueu at the gate when he’d asked him how to find the Kislar Agha.

It was like fairyland. Where their own grounds had been barren — except for the tiny patches of cultivated forests and jungles and special terrains used for their training exercises — these were universally lush. Everywhere there were formal gardens with plashing fountains that made an almost sensible music as the water dropped from varying heights back into their basins. There were fabulous mosaic forms, intricate spires and minarets, round arches like giant keyholes, great domes that might have been dull and massive but refracted light in such a way that they seemed more like precious stones than bits of functioning architecture. Domes like crown jewels. Emerald domes, diamond domes, ruby.

Here and there Persian rugs were spread about on the grass. They could have been flying carpets.

Everywhere he looked there were Negro gardeners to tend the arranged landscapes, dark-colored technicians to adjust the fountains, men who might have seemed fat if they had not been so obviously powerful. He saw other blacks, dressed in strange colors, in rich, queer fabrics he’d never seen before. They hurried along pine needle pathways and carried fine silver trays covered with damask cloths toward low-roofed, beautifully tiled buildings. With their pitchy skins against the deep green background of the clipped, splendid lawns they looked almost like the exotic, carved and painted barks of some of the elaborate, topiary trees.

I’ll say one thing, Mills thought, these sailors live well!

“This is it,” Mills said with forced cheer. “Where they said that Kislar Agha is we’re looking for.” He pulled into a long, curved driveway, eased the horses to a gentle stop and brake-locked the Overland, hoping that Bufesqueu had noticed his skill. Bufesqueu said nothing, of course, and Mills leaped down from the bench first. He did not ask his friend what a Kislar Agha was, or where they were, or what they were doing there in the first place.

He was determined to change his friend’s ideas about him and, though he had no notion yet of why they’d come, to beat Bufesqueu and get to the Kislar Agha guy first. He hadn’t a clue what he would tell him, could only imagine his poses, his folded arms and knowing smirk. Perhaps, while waiting for the lightning to strike, he would kibitz the black boys, let the Kislar Agha bloke, and Bufesqueu too, see who they were dealing with.

(Because he’d already forgotten the danger, because this was an adventure, because it had been an adventure since he’d first started out for London to make his way in the world, before: since he’d accepted that letter of introduction which had been obsolete before it was written. Because it was all adventure: his meeting with King George, his — he understood this now — expulsion from England, his journey with the spy, Peterson, and his meeting with the Jew ambassador and the complicated betrayal at Mahmud’s Court; all, all of it adventure; being given over to the mullahs, to the Janissaries, killing Khoraghisinian and becoming a living legend, all of it — being sent down with Bufesqueu to take Constantinople with no more weapons between them than their two full-dress Janissary suits; the confiscation of the Overland and the grand ride they’d had, vulnerable and open-air’d as a Roman triumph; the business with the guards at the gates, even the peaceful drive through this voluptuary candyland. Because it was all adventure and he was an adventurer and an adventurer did not so much forget danger as acknowledge and then ignore it, that only then could he be vouchsafed immunity. Because it was all adventure and he lived now within some rhythm of action and respite which were as much the physical laws of adventure as ebb and flood tides were the governing physics of the seas. And because his feelings had been hurt, and there was no room or way to accommodate fear and sulk in the same place at the same time.)

Mills entered the building.

“The Kislar Agha,” George demanded of a huge fat black fellow in sheer, billowing trousers that tapered tightly at the ankles. He was shirtless and his full, hairless chest was barely covered by a light vest. He glanced at the man’s shoes, smooth and soft and slightly curling at the toes like a jester’s slippers. George lightly touched the Negro’s turban. “Hair not dry yet, darling?” And leaned toward him. “Let the air out of your pants, why don’t you?” he whispered. “Get your toes fixed. You look like some pansy-assed Nancy boy.”

The black man lifted Mills off the floor by the neck and quietly choked him. “Is this the way you address the assistant Chief Eunuch in the Sultan’s harem?” he asked mildly.

Mills’s frightened, high-pitched squeals brought another black man, even larger, into the room.

“Let him go, Suliem. I said let him go!”

Reluctantly the giant withdrew his strangler’s hands from Mills’s neck and George dropped a good half foot to the floor.

“What’s this all about?” the Kislar Agha demanded.

And before George Mills could say “Service rivalry,” Bufesqueu had come up behind him and flung him aside.

“I’m Bufesqueu and he’s Mills,” he said, “and we’re deserters from the Janissaries seeking sanctuary.”

4

Which was how George Mills and Bufesqueu, his protector and benefactor, came to live as the only unimpaired males in the largest full-service harem in the world.

What he couldn’t get over were the scents.

As if they lived in a basket of fruit or box of wondrous candy. As if they lived in a great garden or amongst the savory headwinds of the juiced seasons. As if they lived in a kitchen or spicery, in a bakery, or within some balmy climate of luxurious merchandise pliant as trousseau. He sniffed the cloves, civets and gums of carpentry, the jeweler’s musky metals, the pomander of gemstone. In the groves and greenery of the planet. All cosmetics’ pervasive attars.

But there was more that he couldn’t get over:

King, he thought. King and Courier, Ambassador, Soup Man and Sultan and Sultan-in-Waiting. Chief Eunuch too, he thought. It was getting to be quite a list.

Or the fact, though he had forgotten the danger, that they were alive at all. His throat was still sore from Suliem’s attempt to choke him. But at last he was beginning to get his voice back. For days he had been silent as a giraffe. So silent that when Fatima, one of the slaves who attended the harem women, came into the laundry where he and Bufesqueu had been assigned to work, he had been unable to answer the woman’s questions regarding a particular satin sheet her mistress had inquired after. Mills had seen the sheet in question and had gone to fetch it, handing it to her wordlessly.

“Oh dear,” she said, “it’s been starched, hasn’t it? Lady Givnora specifically asked that it be laundered in rose water with no starch but only a touch of unscented olive balm to take the roughness off.” She held an edge of the sheet to her nostrils. “Why, this is lemon curd. Smell for yourself.” Mills pressed the sheet to his nose. “Well?” Fatima said. Mills shook his head. “Can you tell me why my mistress’s orders weren’t followed?” Mills shook his head. Fatima glowered at the new man and ordered the sheet to be re-washed. “Do you think you people can get it right this time?” Mills nodded and with a pen carefully noted her requirements as Fatima looked on, a gradual sympathy reflected on her thin face. “Oh my,” she said, “you can’t talk at all, can you?” Mills shook his head. “Poor guy,” Fatima said. “They really did a job on you, didn’t they?” Mills nodded. “Yes,” she said, “I know. It must have been one of the deepest bits of barbering in the entire history of this plantation.” Mills looked at the thin slave. “Clipped ballocks, jolly roger, bush, asshole and all, did they? They couldn’t have left you with enough strings, snails and puppy dog’s tails to make a noise when you fall downstairs.” Mills shook his head vigorously and tried to talk but his throat was still too raw. “Don’t go on about it, luv,” Fatima said. “I can’t hear you. I doubt anyone can, even your co-boy sopranos in these wildwoods. Maybe you sing your own song now, like those dogs whose screaks can’t be heard by other folks, only by a few fellow doggies who pick up the frequency on clear, cold nights when reception is good. See to the sheet, will you, luv?” Mills nodded.

He salved his throat with honey and licorice, coated it with sweet oils and unguents. When the week was up he sought out Bufesqueu.

“They think I’m a eunuch,” he rasped.

“Lord bless you, boy, why wouldn’t they? What’s the good of plumbing if it’s always leaking? No sooner do I rise in the morning than I rise in the morning. I remember where I am and start spilling my seed like some hungover farmer. I come into the laundry here and see their frillies and unmentionables and my piece starts to melt like a burning candle. Jeez, George, will you just look at this trim? The bedgear and belly dance togs and all the sweet else? I tell you, kid, even their soiled veils give my glands something to think about. I’m losing weight. Pounds and inches. I was better off down on that prayer rug.”

“Maybe you should have thought of that,” Mills said hoarsely.

“Because you can never get enough,” Bufesqueu said, not hearing him, not listening. “Because you can never get enough. Not if you lived till the end of the world. No one can. Not if you were Sultan Mahmud II himself and all his helpers. Not if you were not only irresistible to quiff but positively necessary to their welfare, like air or money. Because you can never get enough. Not if you were dying and the priest was already giving you last rites. Hell,” Bufesqueu said, “you’d already be in bed anyway, wouldn’t you? What would be the point of wasting perfectly wonderful machines like a bed and pillows, sheets and covers, on anything drab and ordinary as death? Maybe that’s why they administer last rites — because you’re in that damn bed all alone, and even if you know you can’t ever get enough it’s a sin not to try.”

“It’d be worth your life to try in this place,” Mills scraped.

Bufesqueu looked at him. “Listen to him,” he said. “His voice is cracking on him all over again. Well, why not? He’s in this harem a week and it’s a new puberty. I shouldn’t wonder if my own voice didn’t start to do duets with itself. Not to worry,” he said abruptly, heartily. “We’ll get it all straightened out. Weren’t we grand? Weren’t we grand though?”

He meant their two-man invasion of Constantinople, the pair of them taking the city by storm. Mills smiled. They were grand. No Mills since the first George Mills had been grander, and even if his own had only been a sidekick’s grandeur — briefly he wondered if it were enough to lift the curse — a crony henchman’s auxiliary one, Bufesqueu couldn’t have done it by himself. It had been his name, the living legend’s, that had been passed in the street. George was satisfied. They had taken Constantinople together.

They’d done more, and this was something else he couldn’t get over.

The Janissaries no longer existed. When Mills and Bufesqueu had been ordered to town, when Bufesqueu’s defiant war cries had first rung in the streets and panicked the Ottomans, there’d been a fire storm of alarm. Rumors had flashed from street to street like signal fires. Before Mills and Bufesqueu even spotted the abandoned Overland, the Sultan had heard of the incursion at Yildiz Palace. Malamud’s information had been no sounder than anyone else’s of course, and when he’d been informed that the Janissaries had overturned their soup kettles the Sultan convened the chiefs of staff of the entire military. What he was thinking was how best to save Yildiz. But by this time the story had taken on additional detail, an oblique verisimilitude. It was rumored that the soup had actually been at the boil, that most of an entire phalanx of Janissaries had been scalded along their shins and calves in the effort. In the hasty consultation that followed, the outraged Sultan advised his advisers he now concluded that because the soup had been still hot when it had been spilled, the action had to have been a precipitate one, an angry gesture of the moment. He was heartened, too, by news of the scaldings, and was supposed to have said: “They haven’t thought this one out. Some incendiary must have roused them. We must counterattack now. While their passion prevails over their strategy. Before their third-degree burns heal. Send in the cannon. Reduce the fort to rubble!”

So they were feeling pretty good, Mills and Bufesqueu. Splendid, in fact. Two reluctant recruits who not only had conquered a major world capital but in the act of conquering it had turned round and conquered by way of ricochet the very force in whose name they had done it. And if five thousand men had died in the Sultan’s surprise bombardment — if, indeed, a week after the event, perhaps a couple of hundred of their former comrades were still smoldering — it was nothing either of the condemned men cared to take on his conscience. Bufesqueu because he genuinely believed the other Janissaries had repudiated women, Mills because he had not once chosen in all the time he had lived.

Fatima came in for towels and looked, in passing, in the direction of Mills’s crotch. She shook her head sadly. “Please stop that,” Mills said, and Fatima stared at him, clapping her hands to her mouth in astonishment.

“It’s grown back?” asked the superstitious woman.

“Sure,” George said, “you think they can keep a good man down?”

So, though he didn’t know it, among certain of the staff at least, he continued to be a living legend.

Bufesqueu, of course, was in seventh heaven. “In the country of the blind,” he liked to say, patting his pants and winking, “the one-eyed man is king.”

But so far neither Bufesqueu nor George had come within even hailing distance of the Sultan’s harem girls, let alone seen one. If this was a torment to the former, to the latter it was something of a comfort. George had not so far forgotten his danger as to lose respect for it entirely. He complimented himself on his Millsian ability to appreciate and honor a taboo. If he had swallowed whole whatever guidelines his Janissary superiors had laid down for him, if his credulity had kept him down range of the black marketeers who Bufesqueu said visited their fort almost daily to take orders for the cold comforts they dispensed for bribegold and a portion of a Janissary’s small pay, he had at least managed, if innocently, if ignorantly, to abide by the rules, to live within the letter, to the last crossed t, to the last dotted i, of the laws of appearance. This, Mills thought, was what preserved them. To view things otherwise was subversive not only to those who held power over them, and not only to their own sort, but more importantly to themselves, to one another, to every Mills who’d ever lived under the curse of kind. He understood what was permitted and behaved himself.

Now a sultan’s harem, Mills thought, a sultan’s harem was just the last place on earth one should think about running amok. And if that sultan also happens to be one of your emperor sultans, as this one is, with sway not only over entire countries and populations but over entire climates as well, from deserty Africa to the frozen Kush, then that sultan is one hell of an important man; and if, without batting an eyelash, he can cannonade a complete elite corps off the face of the world simply because it was rumored that they might have spilled some soup, and if he’s gone to the trouble of becoming a sultan emperor in the first place with all the expense of men and materiel that takes just so he can have dibs on two or three hundred of the prettiest girls in all those respective countries, populations and climates, and if he’s taken the additional pains to house them all in one place where he can keep his eye on them, and in a style like this where the girls themselves don’t do a thing, not wash a bowl, dry a dish, make a bed, fix a meal, rinse something out in the sink of an evening or even just pick out their own clothes, what they think suits them best, shows off their color or makes them less hippy; and if he’s gone to the further bother of training up specialist surgeons who have nothing better to do than cut the nuts off fellows who themselves have nothing better to do than see to it that the two or three hundred girls don’t either, then that sultan is not only one hell of an important man but one hell of a jealous one, too. And I for one, Mills thought, who changed my life and sealed the fates of maybe five thousand others because I happened to throw him a salute with the wrong hand, I for one, who already have, don’t want any part of him. I already took those vows to stay on the wagon. What harm will it do me to keep them? No sir. It don’t bother me that I may be losing Bufesqueu’s respect, or that old Fatima used to think of me as just one more steer around this place. I don’t want no part of him, and I don’t want no part of them.

What he didn’t know was that he was more a living legend than ever.

Alib Hakali asked to see them, and he and Bufesqueu left the laundry where for almost a month now their official assignment had been to fold sheets for the harem. “Maybe he wants to put us to work doing something else. After all we’re trained Janissaries. We’re wasted in that laundry. Maybe he wants to try us out guarding the ladies. Wouldn’t that be something?” Bufesqueu said, patting his pants and nudging him. “I mean there’s nothing wrong with the nig-nog slave broads, but those harem women must be wondrous. I tell you, George, in the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.”

Mills forbore to answer. He said nothing in response to Bufesqueu’s rhapsodies as his friend went on about their possible new duties.

A eunuch stepped stolidly in front of them, barring their way.

“Bufesqueu and Mills to see the Kislar Agha as ordered,” Bufesqueu told him and the man moved aside.

It was the first time either of them had seen the Chief Eunuch since Bufesqueu had asked for sanctuary. Even reclining, fat and sassy as some Sumo Santa Claus, his black bulk spilling over the pillows he pressed against on his heavily reinforced litter, he was as large as Mills remembered him. He sucked on a hookah and watched benignly as first Bufesqueu and then Mills offered their deferential salaams. Without bothering to remove his water pipe he absently returned their greeting, a huge hand briefly flickering from black to pink like flash cards turned in a stadium.

“If you’re worried about the guards,” he said, setting the hookah back on its stand and exhaling a thick steam of sweet smoke, “they’re gone. The Overland has been burned. I took care of the guards.”

“The guards, Kislar Agha?” Bufesqueu said.

“Chief Eunuch. We won’t mince words. Call me Chief Eunuch. At the gate, the guards at the gate. I pulled the tongues out of their necks personally. I broke their bones in my torture chambers. I tore their equipment off with my hands.”

Mills flinched.

“Why do you pale? They were bad guards. You’d never have gotten past good ones.”

“Torture chambers, Chief Eunuch?” Bufesqueu said.

“This is the best-equipped seraglio in the world,” he said. “We have fourteen mosques on the grounds. We have two hospitals and an arsenal with the latest weapons. We’ve kitchens and bakeries and the finest schools. We’ve sports fields and stables, conference rooms and hospitality suites. We’re centrally located and close to a major body of water. Why shouldn’t we have torture chambers too?” He sat up abruptly, effortlessly, showing none of the strain heavy people reveal when they move in furniture. He leaned forward conspiratorially. “The torture chambers bother you? Relax please. You think I’d send two incompetent guards to a torture chamber? Of course not. That’s for the big fish.” He held out his right hand. “This,” he said, and extended the left, “and this. These are my torture chambers.”

Bufesqueu nodded and Mills stared. The Chief Eunuch laughed merrily. “No,” he said, “you don’t understand. You think I’m trying to intimidate you, to threaten obliquely like some fat Mex bandit with silver teeth. I didn’t call you here to threaten you. I called you here to comfort you. That about the guards should have taken a load off. They’d have talked. Your whereabouts would have gotten back to the Sultan. Oh, Lawd, dis nigger be misunderstood sho ’nuff.

“Because I’ll tell you why you’re here and it’s got nothing to do with sanctuary.

“I was fourteen years old when the slavers captured me. Fourteen! Do you know what that means? Do you?”

Mills shook his head.

“You don’t? What were you like when you were fourteen? Did you have a girl? A crush on the teacher?”

Mills shook his head.

“No? Then I bet you wrung it out. What about it? Did you wring it out?”

Mills blushed.

“Sure you did. You still wring it out.”

Mills shook his head fiercely.

“No? Why’d God give you hands? Why’d God give you hands you don’t wring it out?”

“I wring it out,” Mills said shyly.

“I never wrung it out,” the Chief Eunuch said. “I was fourteen. In my tribe, among my people — the beasts in the jungles, the parasites in the turds, the great apes and lions, the slavers and mortality tables — you were a man when you were eleven. I never wrung it out because I already had a wife. The real thing, you know? The genuine article. Absolute pussy.

“So I already had a wife when the slavers got me. Listen, am I breaking your heart? You think this is some love story I’m feeding you? That I pine for lost love, our burr-headed kid? Or maybe you think you’re way ahead of me. That they took her too, that she’s here now perhaps, the Sultan’s favorite with her jackknife fucks. Why would I tell you? Why would I tell white boys? You Christers! What, you’re going to deny your faith? Jesus, you Christers! It’s all a little barbaric, ain’t it? The idea of a harem. Or maybe you don’t think it’s barbaric, only wasteful. You Christers. To tell you the truth, if you want the opinion of one fatted, sufflated, darky gelding, it isn’t. It isn’t barbaric. If you’re the Sultan himself it ain’t even wasteful.

“I was fourteen years old. I’m talking about full-blown puberty. I’m talking about interest and appetite and lust and prurience, all the successive sexual steps like the diatonic scale. Because there ain’t any blade long enough or keen enough either to cut that out of a man. They buried me up to my chest in the sand for three days to let my wounds heal. But desire don’t flag. It swarms like the hair on the kopf of a corpse. And I still want to wave it around like an amputated hand, or lean my weight on it like a missing leg. So I walk around with this hard-on of the head. Alib Hakali,” Alib Hakali said. “Alib Hakali, the spayed spade.

“All right. You can go now. Watch your step.”

“What was that all about then?” Mills asked his reality master when they were alone.

“I’m not sure,” Bufesqueu said. “I think he was trying to tell us that he understands.”

“I don’t know.”

“Those guys at the gate,” Bufesqueu said, shuddering.

“I know.”

“I mean why’d he have to do that? He must want us around.”

“Why?”

Bufesqueu shrugged. “You know,” he said speculatively, “all the rest of those freemartins, they must be the same way he is.”

“Horny? You think?”

“Why not? If those slavers picked them after they was already ripe. Why not? If he’s telling the truth. If he ain’t one in a million like some bloke in a textbook. That’d be awful.”

“Hey,” George said, “I bet that was what he was trying to tell us.”

“There must be some way,” Bufesqueu said. “There must be some way Nature has of getting to a eunuch.”

“He was warning us,” Mills said.

“Warning us, hell. He was teasing us.”

This was the table of organization:

At the bottom of the chain were the female slaves, women like Fatima who served not only the harem women but their eunuch overseers as well. Above them were the novices, females new to the seraglio who may or may not have slept with the Sultan. Above these were the officially decreed favored ladies, and above the favored ladies were women who had already mothered one or more of the Sultan’s children, called royal prince or princess but of no more real rank than the female slaves. At the top of the chain was the Valide Sultan, the Sultan’s mother, a figurehead who maintained a residence in the seraglio, which she rarely visited except for those two or three times a year when she presided as hostess at teas. Officially she was also headmistress of the harem schools, but in actuality had even less to do with these — they were for the royal princes, and the curriculum dealt entirely with court protocol and was administered by women who had never been presented there: the female slaves, the novices — than she had with any of the other functions of the seraglio.

It was the Chief Eunuch’s show. With his private army — the guards had been part of it — he ran the seraglio like a small country, supervising everything from deciding the menu to choosing which woman would be sent that night to the Sultan, and for all that they had a table of organization, for all that they were centrally located and had schools and riding stables — by tradition the Chief Eunuch was awarded three hundred or so horses for his personal use, one for each woman in the harem proper — there was little for any of them — the women, the eunuchs and slave girls — to do. Mills would learn this.

One day a woman came into the laundry where Mills was folding sheets. His arms raised, extended, he held a piece of sheet in his teeth, leveraging it with his upraised chin to fold down the middle. He was arched backward to keep the bottom of the sheet from touching the floor. He was watching the sheet’s edges, trying to align them, when she spoke.

“My,” she said, “it’s grand you’re so tall, that you’ve such long arms and strong jaws. It must be ever so sublime to have such balance.”

“It’s bloody marvelous,” Mills said, still not looking at her. “If I wasn’t so lovely endowed, the goddamn sheet could go all untidy from dragging along the ground and some bimbo might get bedsores from calf to ass. Bufesqueu’s on break. He’s in back watching the laundresses.”

“What a manly voice,” she said. “If I had such a voice I’d boom out work songs while I toiled. Would you know any sheet-folding work songs you could sing for me?”

Mills turned to look at her and thought she was smiling at him behind her veil. She was a large woman, older than the slaves he had seen, and it occurred to him that she might be one of the women from the harem. Not a novice certainly, since novices were usually in their teens and, to judge from her looks, what was visible to him above the veil that covered the lower half of her face, probably not one of the favored ladies. It was possible she was the mother of some royal prince or princess. “Was there something I could help you with, ma’am?” he asked, looking over her shoulder for the eunuch who would be sure to accompany her.

“And so gallant!” she exclaimed.

“There are some extra sheets and pillowcases in the back. If I asked someone I’m sure I could …”

“Blankets!” she said. “A dozen of those special thick woolly blankets.”

“A dozen,” George said. It was high summer.

“I’ll wait,” she said.

“I could only find one,” he said when he returned. “The rest are in storage.”

“Aren’t you kind to take all that trouble,” she said. “You know,” she said, “I could use some sheets. Eight might just do it. And some pillowslips too. Sometimes it gets so warm of an evening I’ll wake in my bed and it’s soaked so with perspiration it’s just impossible to fall back to sleep. If I had extra linens …”

“Oh sure,” George said. “Sheets is no problem.”

“Lovely,” she said.

“Eight sheets,” George said, taking them from a pile he’d already folded. “And eight pillowcases.”

“Super,” she said. “There is just one problem.”

“There is?”

“This pile. It’s so heavy. I don’t think I could carry it back by myself.” Mills had seen slave girls half the size of this woman lift baskets of wet wash that had to weigh over a hundred pounds. “Your eunuch?” he suggested.

“I’m a daughter of the harem,” she said.

“A daughter …”

“One of the Sultan’s daughters,” she said shyly.

A royal princess, Mills thought, adding to his list.

“I have no status,” she said. “Eunuchs don’t even bother to guard us.” She actually closed an eye and winked at him. Mills thought of Bufesqueu’s country of the blind.

“Well,” he said, “I have no status either. I can’t leave my post.”

“I meant with the others,” she said. “I’m certain I have status over you.”

“Oh me,” Mills said, picking up the blanket and pillowslips, picking up the sheets. “Me,” he said, “sure.”

She led him across soft lawns, she led him across paths of crushed pine cones. Eunuchs saw her and waved familiarly. They went by a schoolhouse where the royal princes were learning their lessons in court protocol. The windows were open and Mills could hear one of the younger children reciting, “One may walk in the palace with his head covered if my father, the Sultan, is away on state business.” George glanced into the open windows over the stack of laundry he carried. Nine royal princes, he thought. “Evrevour?” the teacher said. Evrevour rose to stand beside his desk. “One has no right to chew his food after my father, the Sultan, has already swallowed,” Evrevour was saying as they walked on.

It was odd. He had a sense of shortcut, a feeling not that he had been here before (though quite possibly he’d viewed the same buildings and grounds when he’d driven through the seraglio in the Overland; he and Bufesqueu had never felt comfortable enough in their surroundings to stroll through them freely and, except for the laundry and tiny apartment near it in the eunuchs’ dormitory where they ate and slept, they had not yet established landmarks), but that he’d had this experience. Then he remembered. It must have been the way George Mills and Guillalume had felt when, leaving it to the horses, they had ambled, drifting toward Poland. Mills had no more reserves. It wasn’t adventure anymore since adventure depended upon the adventurer’s sense of goals, some spunky checklist of arrangements and priorities — some “There, that’s done” notion of progress. Mills had nothing left. When the woman reminded him that he had no status there, he had acknowledged the truth of the statement and come along. He knew she was up to something. He didn’t much care. And the sense of shortcut he felt was as much a sense of falling downhill as it was of greasing distance. He had a fate and was rushing toward it. It was just that he was so indifferent to what it might be.

So indifferent that when the woman said, “In here will be fine. Watch yourself, there are steps. Oh good, wasn’t it clever of you not to trip,” he already knew where she had taken him — to the harem — and might almost have said what was about to happen. It made no difference anymore. When she said, “Oh, just leave those there. Llwanda will bring them up later,” he put the blanket and sheets and pillowcases down on the table she indicated and straightened up to listen to what she would say next.

“That was hard work,” she said, “you must be all overheated from carrying such a load. If you’ll just step through those doors, Mally will fetch you cold water.”

“Sure,” Mills said.

Though his eyes weren’t shut he felt like asking if he could open them when he entered the room. Except that he didn’t really feel anything. Then he did.

They were in a sort of lounge. Though he’d never seen any — he’d been excluded, Bufesqueu had told him, by the traffickers themselves — the room corresponded to some notion of pornography lining his head like bone. Behind the room’s appearance, governing its design and appurtenances, dictating its appointments and vaguely tiered arrangements, was the manifestation of some blue will, some peephole, parlor car resolution. If earlier he’d had a sense of shortcut, now he had a conviction of threshholds forever sealed behind him, of borders crossed and compromised. He was like an accidental traveler in dream and had just exactly that mixture of dread and joy the dreamer sometimes feels, fearful of discovery, but pleased he has been lured where he is.

The room was spacious, its size incremented by treillage and light, the openwork lattice of a wall through which he could see blue water lavished by swans and geese like a pond flower garden. There were gorgeous, opulent couches, their plush backs and arms curved as alphabet. There were frames of unfinished embroidery and fat pillows on the marble floor like a soft sausage of lion and leopard. Here and there folding screens were covered with starkly realistic paintings that made a sort of intimate, high-minded documentary — lone figures of women soaping themselves, pinning their hair, stepping tentatively into water, holding fans and examining themselves in mirrors. Mills had the feeling sperm might be boiling in the lamps that glittered in the wall sconces.

What added to his sense that he had stepped into a brothel, and contributed to his idea of some carefully controlled sexual climate, was the presence in the lounge of so many women of different races. Orientals were there and Negresses, white women and women pink as pork. And a feel of laze, of timeless tea party.

He was the only man there, and, though he was certain he was expected, no one spoke to him or even looked at him directly. Indeed, they seemed deliberately to ignore him and even the woman who had brought him dropped the pretext of getting him water. Briefly it occurred to him that he was as much on display as the women, and though he had not been with so many females (if ever) in more than a year, and though there were no eunuchs about, he knew these were the Sultan’s women and were as reluctant to stare at him as he was at them.

He knew Bufesqueu would chide him if he learned he’d entered the harem and never even looked at the girls, so despite his restraint he glanced at them nervously, quickly registering an impression of bulk, of clothing too tight, of arms dripping with weight.

“Well,” he said, clearing his throat and making ready to leave, the word vaguely aimed at the Royal Princess.

“See?” a familiar voice said. “Did I lie? Did I exaggerate?” It was the slave woman, Fatima, and she stepped from behind a screen. “Now you must give Fatima what you promised, my mistresses.”

“Oh no, not yet,” one of the pork pink women said. “Eunuchs speak. Mine pipes like a magpie on all manner of subjects. Sometimes I have to kiss him on the lips just to get him to stop.” The rest of the women giggled and Mills flushed thickly.

“In a voice deep as this one’s?” Fatima challenged. “Why there’s no comparison.”

“He was singing work songs when I found him in the laundry,” the Royal Princess said. “I heard his deep bass voice. Go on, Mills, show them.” They were playing him, George knew. He was going to be seduced. Seduced and killed. When the eunuchs found his body he would already be dead. The Royal Princess would testify against him as blithely as she had lied about his singing. She would say that he had charged into the harem and attacked them. They’d never dare not to accept her version of the proceedings and, despite himself, a part of Mills was outraged on behalf of the deceived Sultan.

But then he thought how to save himself. The eunuchs! he thought. They would have to be about. And began, even as they coaxed and teased him, to sing in a voice loud and deep as he could muster, crazed, desperately improvising:

“Fold the sheet, fold the sheet.

See how neat I fold the sheet!”

He looked about to see which of the eunuchs would respond to his cries. Perhaps he’d be familiar, one of the fellows from his dorm. The women stared at him.

“Fold the sheet, fold the sheet.

I want to eat, I fold the sheet!”

“What did I tell you,” Fatima asked triumphantly, “would you find a voice like that on a eunuch?”

“Can’t find nothin’ on no eunuch,” a hefty black woman said.

“What a lovely low voice,” Fatima marveled.

“All right,” a large Oriental woman said listlessly, “he’s no countertenor, but all I’m hearing is volume.”

“Sure,” someone else said, “nobody ever put no one in trouble with just noise.”

The women seemed skeptical, ready to leave, when Fatima thrust herself forward again. “Ladies, ladies,” she said. “And aren’t I as far from home as any of you? And don’t I know from experience the difference between coiled rope and taut? Just because I’m a slave and not some fine lady-in-waiting like the rest, do you think I’ve lost memory, senses and all the kit and caboodle of my normal nature and ain’t able to distinguish between capons and roosters? And haven’t I been around these castratos long enough to know what I’m talking about? Ain’t they just about all I got to look at on this damn desert island? Can’t I recognize from one sight-see of their crotch when they sit, no more shape down there than a cloudless sky, that nobody’s home, that their wounds, if they even are wounds anymore, are all sealed like empty envelopes, shiny and slippery as scars, hairless as gemstone, smooth as fat? And ain’t I even been flashed by a few of these sports, their limp machinery dangling like busted thumb and no more flexed than buds in snow, just all broke, shriveled retrograde flesh like old folks’ skin?

“Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t you hear him? When has a eunuch commanded such growl? Or are your ears accommodate only to the higher registers, the piggy squeals and sharp shrills of all noise’s unbailed din? But didn’t you feel these very marble floors vibrate? And if your ears don’t tell you, what about your eyes? Look, just look.” She stepped beside Mills and touched the planes of his face, raised his shirt and pointed out his ribs. “See? See how sleek? Look at his sharpish elbows, feel his pointy knees. There are angles to this one, some hard geometry of maleness.” She touched the front of his pants and, pinching an imaginary inch between her fingers, made as if to trace the length of his cock. Terrified, Mills was not unstirred as she drew her hand slowly up the inside of his thigh. “There’s lust and longitude to him,” she said, and, cupping his testicles, started to squeeze. “Bags and bones.”

Mills winced and tried to pull away. The women, impressed, watching closely, gasped at his pain. They spoke aloud, shocked by his distress into their original tongues. (Because he knew two languages now. No, three. English, Janissary, and Harem.) Fatima released him and stood by his side, showing him off like an accomplishment, flourishing for him like a lesser acrobat. Suddenly she went into a sort of incantation, sounding nothing at all like the clownish woman who had spoken to him in the laundry. “Because there are some men like paradigms,” she intoned, “their manhood burned into them like brands in cattle. Concupiscent, prurient, bawdy boys with heated hearts never cooled to room temperature.” And was speaking to him now, her voice low, almost a whisper. “Flirts,” she said, “philanderers, rakes and rips. Randy as pirates, ruttish as goats. Skittish as scarlet and wicked as wanton, filthy as folly and scabrous as smut. Lawless libidos, loose and licentious. Gross and coarse. Dissolute. Dirt. Salacious seducers, carnal as meat. Naughty as nasty and vulgar as vile.” She reached out to touch him and shook her head, signaling him not to cry out or back away.

Fatima begins to stroke him. “Filth and defilement, lickerish lust. Whoremonger, wencher, womaner, wolf. Satyr and ravisher, fucker and lech. Steam and steam the stews of the heart. Who keeps the knock shop and flaws the flesh. You rapist. You ruiner. You wrecker, you lewd. They pulled off your balls, but they grew back like hair. Like nails they grew back, healed as young skin or second-growth teeth.” His trousers swell where she strokes him and the superstitious concubines look on in awe, silenced. Abruptly Fatima withdraws her hand, and Mills whines helplessly.

“Well,” she said, “there you are, my mistresses. What do you say to old Fatima now?”

They said nothing and continued to stare at George, not so much fearful as fascinated, almost, he thinks, devout.

“Because some men,” Fatima explained, “have itch and need so powerful they can’t be scratched, even by the Sultan or the Sultan’s surgeons, the Sultan’s men. Cutting don’t do no good. You’d have to kill them to drop their erection. They spoke of this back home but until Mills came I didn’t believe it, had never seen it. I still don’t understand how it works, but maybe the erection is inside, starting at the bellybutton, say, or the high erogenous zones, the skin at his nipples, the roof of his mouth. You can’t burn it out or cut it out, because all that happens when you try is that the need grows downward, falling toward earth, closing on the very dirt and filth you tried to keep it from when you trimmed the hedge by clipping it in the first place.

“Anyhow, that’s how some account for it, though maybe it’s just pride and will and determination, and Mills here ain’t no more manly than those other eunuchs, only more set in his ways. I don’t know,” she said, “I don’t know. But I don’t have to, do I? I told you about him and even worked out with Lady Givnora how best to get him here and prove my claims, and I think it’s just mean and shameful if you don’t give me my treat like you promised.”

All the odd power Mills had sensed in the woman seemed suddenly to have deserted her and she was only Fatima again, a woman too old to have to do any of this, too old to have to hold his balls in her hand.

The Royal Princess who had brought him put a heavy arm around Fatima’s shoulder. “Now, Fatima,” she said, “of course you’ll get your treat.” And she put a hand inside her robe and brought something out which Mills thought he recognized. She instructed the other women to do the same.

“Oh, thank you, my lady!” Fatima said and hurriedly pressed pieces of the halvah they had given her into her mouth. “Oh thank you,” she said again, her lips flecked with flaking candy. “Mnn,” she said, “it’s delicious.” The overweight women seemed indifferent to her enjoyment.

The seraglio was overstaffed. There was little to do. When he finished his work in the laundry, usually in the early afternoon, he was through for the day. He could return to the dormitory, talk to the eunuchs or, like Bufesqueu, chat up the slave girls.

By his own admission Bufesqueu wasn’t getting anything off them. They seemed, he said, frightened to have sex with him.

“They’re scared of the eunuchs,” he explained. “Listen,” he said, “could I borrow some of your bribegold?”

“Why not,” George said, “what’s there to spend it on?”

“I’ll be damned,” Bufesqueu said when he returned it a few days later. “I never saw anything like it. The sons of bitches are incorruptible.”

“Which sons of bitches?”

“The eunuch sons of bitches. I tried to pay them off, maybe they could get lost for an hour or two, but they weren’t having it. Listen,” he said, “could I have some of that back again? I ain’t ever paid for it yet, but there’s just so much a man can take.”

He’s the one, George thought, not me. He’s the one whose hard-on starts up around his ears.

“Here,” Bufesqueu said, returning the bribegold a second time. “I added this to my own but the sons of bitches are absolutely incorruptible.”

“The eunuchs,” George said.

“No, man, the slave girls.”

“Hey,” Bufesqueu said another time, “can I hit you up once more? I think I found a live one.”

“Sure,” George said, “why not? You always pay your debts.”

Bufesqueu had a broad smile on his face when he returned that night to the dormitory. “It was terrific,” Bufesqueu said. “I won’t say it didn’t hurt to put out the dough, but after all this time it was worth it.”

“Eunuch or slave girl?” George asked.

“Slave lady, man. Slave woman, slave grandma. It was that old broad, Fatima.”

Mills hadn’t told Bufesqueu about his experience in the harem. He didn’t want to be needled. In his place, Bufesqueu would have said, if he’d had his opportunities …

“Fatima?” George said. “Wasn’t she surprised to find out that, you know, you still have your balls?”

“The way I went at her? I think she was surprised I only have two.”

“She didn’t want to show you off?”

“Show me off? Maybe. If the whore could charge money.”

“Hey,” Bufesqueu said a day or two later, “I may have to borrow more of that bribegold.”

Which he was willing to let him have though Bufesqueu could not have said what use Fatima could have made of money.

They lived, all of them, in a closed shop. Only the Chief Eunuch was free to come and go as he pleased. Even the guards at the gate, though Bufesqueu and Mills were so preoccupied at the time neither had noticed, were shackled and attached by long chains to the gates they guarded. A harem girl might leave the grounds of the seraglio but only to go to the Sultan’s bedroom and she had to be escorted there by a eunuch through a passageway that led from the Valide Sultan’s house to Yildiz Palace.

So not only was it a closed shop, it was also a sealed one.

Though they had the run of the grounds now and could go almost anywhere they wished. Mills liked to hang about the extensive stables. With the Chief Eunuch’s permission he was sometimes allowed to exercise the horses and, on occasion, even to hitch them up to the elaborate, exotic vehicles he had only read about until now.

But with no one actually to drive for, soon even this diversion lost its appeal. As everything did. He no longer dreamed his cabby dreams, no longer often thought about England. If he regretted anything it was that he might not live to get a son to whom, like the Millses before him, he could tell the story he continued to live and even, in private now, to rehearse. Bufesqueu he had told it to long ago, telling him all, telling him everything, bringing his tale up to the time their lives had begun to coalesce and willing to go over even that part of their history, if only for practice, had only Bufesqueu been willing to listen, Mills reserving to himself only that part of the story which dealt with his trip to the harem. He realized now it was not the fear of a scolding that caused him to withhold this incident from his friend — the man had taught him much, saved his life, George owed him; of course he could have his bribegold — but that if it ever got out, and too many people already knew — Mills dreaded another summons to the interdicted harem — he would be castrated. Then, even if he lived, there could be no son. His tale would go untold. And what a tale, he thought. Kings and sultans had shaken him down, royal princesses, slaves and high officers had. He had nothing to be ashamed of. Except his bachelorhood. Except his sonlessness.

For his part Bufesqueu continued to go to Fatima, returning one night and tossing the remains of George’s double portion of bribegold down on the cot.

“What’s the matter?” Mills asked.

“I’m saving you money,” Bufesqueu said. “If I ask for more bribegold don’t give it to me.”

“What’s the matter, what’s wrong?”

“I didn’t mind that she was old,” Bufesqueu said bitterly. “I didn’t even mind that I was paying for it. But I’ll be damned if I’ll pay out any more of your hard-earned blood money bribegold to some old whore who’s too fat to fuck back.”

“Fatima?”

“You could hitch her to one of those carriages you get such a kick out of. Though I don’t think she’d move.”

“Fatima?”

“You said it, Fatima. Fat- ima.”

“Fatima?”

“What’s wrong with you, Mills? They run out of nuts to cut on around here? They started on eardrums now too?”

“Fatima’s not fat.”

“No? You seen her lately? You could rupture yourself holding her hand.”

“Where do you get it?” George demanded. “The harem girls?”

“Get what? Take your hands off me. What do you think this is?”

“Where do you get it, Fatima? Who sells you the halvah?”

When he threatened to report her activities to the Kislar Agha, she confessed. Her supplier, she said, was Guzo Sanbanna.

“We could borrow equipment,” Mills told his friend. “We could go down to that field and play soccer.”

“No thanks, George, I don’t think so. But you go if you want to.” He was biting a fingernail, examining it.

“Suffi ben Packka’s in hospital again. Maybe we ought to pay him a visit.” Suffi was a eunuch whose wound had never healed properly.

“Jeez,” Bufesqueu said, “the mood I’m in, the way I feel, I don’t think I could cheer anyone up, even a eunuch.”

Bufesqueu had become melancholic since he’d stopped seeing Fatima. He was nervous and listless at once.

“I could teach you to drive a team,” Mills offered. “Hey, why don’t I do that?”

“Thanks, George. I appreciate what you’re trying to do but I don’t think I could concentrate. Really, George, thanks.”

“It’s just that, you know, you shouldn’t wallow.”

“I’ll be all right,” Bufesqueu said. “I’m sorry I’m such bad company. I’ve got time on my hands.” He forced a thin smile.

“Listen,” Mills said, “I’ve still got the rest of my bribegold left. Maybe you should take it and, well, you know.”

“No,” Bufesqueu said. “Out of the question.”

“No, not with Fatima. Somebody else.”

“Who, man? Don’t you think I tried? It’s absolutely no go.” He pulled a hair from his head and, using it like floss, tried to run it through his teeth. He set it down and looked at George. “You know,” he said, “when she began to blow up like that, I thought maybe I’d knocked her up.”

George nodded solemnly.

“But she’s too old,” Bufesqueu said.

Mills held his chin sagely.

“I even asked if she’d missed her period.”

And raised an eyebrow.

“You know what she said?”

He shook his head.

“She hasn’t had a period in five years.”

“Well,” Mills said, “that lets you off.”

“It was the fucking,” Bufesqueu said. “I fucked her to fat.”

“We could drop in on a class,” Mills said. “You know, not take it for credit. I don’t think they’d object to auditors.”

“I have this high-caloric jism. Fatima must have told them. That’s why they tell me I can shove my bribegold.”

“All right,” Mills said and watched his old pal, the flashy Janissary who had taken Constantinople and was eating his heart out, destroying himself. And he told him about the harem.

Bufesqueu was in seventh heaven again, happier than Mills had ever seen him. He raved about the girls and invited George along whenever he went for a visit.

“I can’t,” Mills said. “It’s too dangerous.”

“Listen,” Bufesqueu said, “nothing happens. They’re running some Arabian Nights scam over there. But like I always say, ‘In the country of the blind.’ You’ve just got to be patient is all. They’ll come round. But they’re really charming. A little heavy, but what the hell, right? They ask for you all the time, you know. You must really have charmed them. They still talk about that hard-on you had.”

“He told us to watch our step. It’s too dangerous.”

“Yeah, well, you know what I think? This harem thing is an old business. I mean it’s really an ancient institution. Who’d think that in a civilized world such things could go on? I mean, really George, eunuchs? Concubines? Novices? Favorite ladies? I mean slaves, for God’s sake! Or even sultans for that matter. I’ll tell you the truth, George, I honestly think it’s had its day. It was all very well when everyone rode around on a flying carpet, but in the nineteenth century? It’s all but finished. They’re all gone soft. All right, individually, individually they’re incorruptible and won’t give me a tumble, but as a group? As a group they’re flawed as old Rome. How much more time can it possibly have? Fifty years? Sixty? These are the final days, George, and more especially the last nights, if you know what I mean. Just like the Janissaries. The last nights of the final days and I don’t want to miss a minute of the outrageousness. I don’t want to miss a second. Come on, Georgie, what do you say?”

“I’ve got a class,” Mills said.

He’d been taking lessons in Court protocol with the Sultan’s bastard children. For aristocrats they seemed surprisingly docile. At first, as he had on the day Lady Givnora had brought him to the harem, Mills stood at the window and listened, but when their teacher saw him she motioned him in and asked his business.

“I have this interest in protocol,” Mills said.

The children giggled. Even their teacher smiled.

“Yes,” George said, “I suppose that’s funny.”

“Well it is,” a young man said. “I mean I’m going to be twenty and I’ve been coming to the schoolhouse all my life. You know why? I keep getting these crushes on my teachers. But I’ve never even been to Court. I’ve never seen my father.”

“I have,” Mills said quietly, “I’ve seen your father.”

“What, you? You work in the laundry.”

“I was even presented at Court once,” he said.

“You never were,” the young man said.

“Perhaps he’d like to tell us about it, class,” the slave girl said. “Would you? Would you like to tell us about it?”

“So you see,” George said when he’d finished, “if I’d known more protocol I wouldn’t be in the fix I’m in today.”

They listened carefully to everything he said and, when he’d done, even asked questions. They wanted to know what the throne room looked like. They were curious about the furniture. They asked him to describe their half brother, Abdulmecid, and to suggest, if he could, what sort of voice their father had. Was it deep? Was it breathy? Could Mills list any mannerisms for them he might have noticed?

At the end of the two hours — even their teacher was taking it all in — he was asked to return.

“Well,” George said, agreeably conscious that he was giving stipulations to the highborn, “only if I get to listen next time.”

He soaked up the protocol lessons.

“Did you know,” he asked Bufesqueu, “that only someone who has been to France may inquire after the Sultan’s health?”

“Oh,” Bufesqueu said, “why’s that?”

“I don’t know,” George admitted, “it’s tradition and it goes back thirteen hundred years.”

“You know more than any of them, Mills,” Bufesqueu told him once. “You’re the one who ought to teach that course.”

George shrugged deprecatingly.

“No, you should.”

“It’s not my place,” he said shyly.

Though it was probably true. The school he’d attended that first day was not the only one in the seraglio. He went to all of them. Some teachers were better than others but each had something to teach him. He absorbed it all.

He learned other things too. About the Sultan’s strange, sluggish, unacknowledged children. Evrevour, the little boy he’d heard that first day he’d passed the schoolhouse, had become a sort of friend.

“I have seventy-four half brothers,” Evrevour told him. “I have eighty-one half sisters. You think it’d be fun, so many children.”

“It isn’t?”

“We have to be very careful about the incest,” Evrevour said.

“They’re burned out on birthday cake,” Mills told Bufesqueu.

“You ought to hang out with me in the harem, George,” Bufesqueu said.

“Too dangerous.”

“That’s the thing. It really isn’t.”

“He told us himself.”

“The Kislar Agha? He’s a pussycat. You should get to know him. Sometimes he comes to the salons.”

“The Kislar Agha does? Salons?”

“Salons, teas, open house. I don’t know what you’d call them exactly, but sure, he’s there. Lots of the eunuchs are. And I’ll tell you something else, George. They’re not bad fellows. They’ve got some great stories to tell. There’s marvelous talk.”

Mills thought his friend was under a spell, a kind of enchantment. He thought they all were. When he saw them in the harem — he agreed to go when a eunuch brought Ali Hakali’s invitation to him personally in the laundry — they, the men as well as the women, seemed immensely sociable, hugely cheerful, terribly gay. He did not see the Kislar Agha.

“Oh, there you are, Mills,” Bufesqueu said, rising up off his cushion like a host when he spotted George. “Perhaps you can settle a little argument for us.”

“It isn’t an argument, Tedor. We weren’t arguing,” a eunuch Mills didn’t recognize said.

“It’s about the female slaves,” Bufesqueu said. “Qum el Asel contends they’re actually improved by servitude while I hold that whatever civilizing effects their condition provides, is motivated by the universal hope of getting on, being noticed by their mistresses, et cetera. It’s merely public relations, a sort of show business, a means to an end rather than the end itself.”

“Oh please, Tedor,” Qum el Asel said. “Ends? Means? Mean you to end so meanly, man?” He looked at the harem women and George followed his glance. They batted their eyelashes, silently fluttering their gauzy veils with their tiny poutlike breaths. “I mean,” and he looked at them again before he continued, “toward what end should any discussion strive? Fact, I should say.

“All right, what are the facts? You take a girl out of the jungle — I know, I know, many of these girls are as white as you are, Tedor — out of her village then, whatever tiny patch of cultivated wide spot in the road — all right, I know, some of these ladies are from no farther off than downtown Constantinople — she’s accustomed to distinguish by the name of ‘home,’ but anyway you take her, and, to this point, probably all she’s learned of the observable world is how to prepare a couscous or, if she is from that jungle, the local mean sanitation practices for — please forgive me — wiping her behind.

“But what happens? You steal the girl or perhaps buy her from her parents or a surviving brother (and I’ve known of cases, girls right here at Yildiz incidentally, where the seller has actually been a bona fide husband), and introduce her into a totally alien milieu, say the Yildiz seraglio, though it could be anywhere really, the British Empire, suburban San Francisco, the Argentinian pampas, and all of a sudden, if she’s assigned to the kitchen say, she’s learning new recipes, preparing alien dishes in alien pots and pans and eating the alien leftovers with an alien cutlery. She’s learned, you see, her experience broadened perforce by force itself.

“Multiply this. Compound it by all the techniques indigenous to whatever culture she’s been entrusted to and you have a girl — enslaved she may be — who is indisputably more cultured and knowledgeable than her unsold sister in the sticks. You have more. You have a girl who’s probably more knowledgeable than the woman in whose charge she finds herself if only because she knows — please, you must forgive me, Tedor, but it was you who introduced this business of ends—two ways of wiping her behind while the mistress knows only one.”

Several of the women applauded, their left hands making a delicate brushing motion against their right. Others blew against the veils which covered their mouths, briefly exposing bits of naked jaw, chin, flashes of mouth, the mysterious flesh paler than the skin which covered their cheeks and the thin strand of brow just visible beneath their chadors.

“Qum gets that round, Tedor,” a woman said. Bufesqueu nodded in pleasant agreement. “Have you anything to add, Mr. Mills?”

George shook his head.

“I can lift five of you at once,” a big eunuch said.

“Five of us? At once? Oh, I don’t think so. Your arms aren’t long enough to fit around five,” said the Oriental woman whom Mills had seen there the last time.

“Yes,” he said, “five.” A dozen women volunteered and the eunuch who would be doing the lifting began to choose among them.

“Sodiri Sardo’s picking only the lightest,” a fat Negress whose name was Amhara objected.

“Oh no,” the eunuch said and chose Amhara too. He led her to a chair and directed the others to sit on her lap, arranging them in the order of their size.

“See? He doesn’t have to get his arms around all five of us,” said the woman on top.

“I didn’t know there was a trick to it,” the Oriental said.

“It isn’t a trick, it’s strength,” the eunuch said. “Is everyone ready? Don’t squirm now.”

The women, clumsily balanced, were stacked in a heap of diminishing laps. They couldn’t stop giggling. The other eunuchs moved around them, professionally estimating Sodiri Sardo’s task as they might a golf ball along a difficult lie.

The big eunuch squatted, one arm under the black woman’s thighs, the other behind her back. “All right,” he said, “I’m going to pick everyone up now. Stay still as possible.”

He lifted them easily and crossed the room with them. He set them down carefully.

There were more brush strokes of applause, more veil blowing.

“Sodiri’s strong,” a eunuch admitted, “but let him try that stunt with me underneath and the girls in my lap.”

“Are you saying I can’t?” Sodiri challenged. “Go on then, sit in the chair.”

They started to arrange themselves again, the eunuch on the bottom this time. “Amhara got to hold all of us last time,” a woman said. “She’s not that much heavier than I am. You rest, Amhara. The girls can sit on my lap.”

“Horsey shit,” Amhara said.

Amhara sat on top of the woman who had displaced her and the others piled on top of her.

“You ready now?” Sodiri asked. “They ready, En Nahud?”

“Not quite,” the eunuch said. “They’ve got the giggles. Let them calm down first.”

“Go on,” Amhara said, “see can you pick us up.”

He picked them up.

“See can you carry us cross the room and back,” Amhara said in the air.

He carried them across the room and back.

“See can you climb the stairs,” En Nahud said.

Sodiri climbed a few stairs at the rear of the lounge. He set everyone down. The women who had been carried professed astonishment. They shook their heads vehemently, their veils flaring like the ballooning skirts of dancers.

“Did you think he could do it?” they asked each other.

“No,” they answered, shaking their heads wildly, raising the edges of their veils, “did you?”

“No! Did you ever see someone so strong?”

“No! Never! Not!” they answered, doing that thing with their heads again. “How about you?”

“Negative! No! Not me! Not one time! Eunuchs are the strongest!”

Which gave Bufesqueu his opening.

He discoursed on the proposition of whether it was possible for eunuchs to rupture.

Bufesqueu was brilliant, locating his argument scientifically but saving his great point till the end of his speech when he announced in a low, husky voice that if eunuchs couldn’t rupture it had to be because they were without testicles. He drew the word out and mentioned it repeatedly. He need hardly point out, he said, the women, too, were without tesssticles but had love holes where tesssticles would go if they were men, and everyone knew that women with love holes — he called them love holes — could rupture. He said “love holes” repeatedly also.

There was additional applause, tunes genteelly whistled into veils, astonishment registered by a forceful constriction of the brows, a general female giggling and swooning, heads vigorously thrown back till veils were hiked midnose.

They loved, they said, metaphysical discourse.

Someone raised the metaphysical question of whether or not eunuchs could expose themselves. Debate raged angrily on both sides of the question. Mills thought the eunuchs might come to blows.

Yoyu, the Oriental woman, interceded shyly.

Theory, she said, was all well and good when one had recourse only to theory, but might she point out that here they were with an entire roomful of eunuchs. It was rather like arguing whether rain were falling outside when all one had to do was look out the window, she said.

The eunuchs ceased their quarrel and looked from one to the other.

“Yoyu is right,” En Nahud said. “The only thing left to decide is which of …”

“Let Mills!” said Bani Suwayf, the young woman who had exchanged places with Amhara.

He could almost do it, Mills thought. He was so terrified by the strange goings on in the lounge that his testicles were completely retracted, his penis no more surfaced than the scab on the peel of an orange.

But Sodiri Sardo had already dropped his trousers.

“Aaaiieee,” said the girls, and Sodiri adjusted his pants.

“He is built like a soccer ball,” Yoyu said, modestly averting her eyes.

The women laughed.

“He’s seamed like one too.”

“He sure wasn’t flashing.”

“More like mooning.”

Mills could see the big eunuch was getting angry. Even muscles seemed to flush.

The women laughed so hard their veils were askew again, dangling from one ear, or hanging beneath their chins like bibs.

“Hsst,” Mills said, poking Sodiri Sardo’s hard belly with his elbow. The strongman turned to him fiercely. “No no, look,” he whispered. The eunuch glared impatiently in the direction Mills pointed. “Nostrils,” George whispered. “And look there. Those are lips, man! Male lips! Huh? Huh?” The big fellow nodded. “Huh?” George said. “Huh?” Sodiri squinted. “How about those teeth? Would you look at the gums on that one? Is she built? Huh? Huh?”

“Were you staring at our mouths?” one of the women asked. They had arranged their masks again. “I asked if you were staring at our mouths,” she repeated coolly.

“Nothing human is alien to me,” Mills mumbled lamely.

It was time to go, George knew, but Bufesqueu was in no hurry. And neither, evidently, were the eunuchs. Nor, for that matter, the ladies themselves.

So the salon continued its philosophic investigations, what Bufesqueu had called their “marvelous talk.” The men and the women. The men and the women and the eunuchs.

They discussed whether what a sultan felt toward his favored ladies might not actually be a form of love.

They discussed whether what the concubines felt toward their round-the-clock, day-cared-for children was.

Bufesqueu laid down a premise: that a woman in a harem necessarily entered a sultan’s bed, particularly a sultan who was also the head of a vast empire, with a certain amount of fear. In such circumstances, he speculated, was it possible to achieve orgasm?

“Define your terms,” Bani Suwayf said.

Was fate a question of bone structure, an individual geometry that made one woman a concubine and the other a slave?

Were all human skills acrobatic, Sodiri Sardo’s strength acrobatic and the girls’ jackknife fucks too?

“Horsey shit,” Amhara said.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Mills told Bufesqueu. They were back in their dorm.

“You worry too much, George. It’s very simpatico.”

“We’ve got to get out of here.”

“No way, pal. That private army the Kislar’s always talking about? They’re deployed outside the walls. They’re over them like graffiti.”

“We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Look here, Mills. Look here, George. Don’t you think I know what you’re up to? Your problem’s written all over your face. You want a kid so bad, knock up one of the harem girls. Take her aside and rape the cunt. They catch you, they take your balls off. Big deal, it makes you strong.”

“A son. It’s got to be a son.”

“Yeah,” Bufesqueu said, “I see what you mean. You get one shot. If it’s a girl or it don’t take, then — pffftt.”

“We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Maybe you could adopt.”

“We’ve got to get out of here, Bufesqueu.”

“Yeah, well, I know it. Don’t you think it’s all I think about morning, noon and night? In the laundry or out? Don’t you think it’s all I think about?”

He didn’t, no. Because he understood now what the Chief Eunuch had warned them of on the occasion of their interview.

Complacency, lassitude, getting used to things. The piecemeal slide of the heart. All submissive will’s evolutionary easement. Seventh heaven was seven heavens too high. They were having, Mills knew, the time of their lives. (Even the smells, he thought. Balmed, luxurious as jungle, sweet and fruity as tropic, as florid, shrubby produce. He’d had a cold a week — fever, runny eyes, headache, stuffy nose. The pampered, lovely smells had still insinuated themselves onto his very breath, caught on his tongue, snagged on his teeth, so that what he tasted, its flavors overriding the very food he chewed or liquids he drank, was like some perfumed, sexual manna, the gynecological liqueurs. A sort of climate raged in him, headwinds, the fragrance in his head, mingling sweetly with the ache in his bones, swooning his soupy sleep like delicious ether. And he’d experienced, as he experienced now, as he’d experienced that first time in the harem — why did he have the impression that he had come not among women but into some vast and sensual female wardrobe? — a useless and cozy semitumescence, idle and abstracted.) And they could live there comfortably, whatever the mysterious authority for their dispensation, in their strange sanctuary forever, for as long as their lives, immune as diplomats, tenured in tease and tea party, servicing some ideal of fairy tale pornography, as, when they’d been Janissaries, they serviced some ideal of epic viciousness.

Complacency. Acceptance. Bufesqueu was used up. Had probably been used up on those Janissary prayer rugs. “Incense” he’d said to a Mills too dumb to scoff.

Mills had his first conviction and suddenly seemed dangerous, even to himself.

He sought out Fatima.

“All right,” he said, “his name is Sanbanna. I want to see him. I want to find out what’s going on.”

And Fatima mollifying him, all over him with her slave’s flattery as earlier she’d been all over him with her hands. “He’s only a tradesman, Master. A niggling peddler. Foolish women dicker in the millets with him over kurus. A street Arab. Common as straw. It isn’t drama, Lord. It’s barely negotiation. He’s a cheat, Honesty. A rascal, Righteousness. Let Fatima do for you.”

“I want to see him, Fatima.”

And changed her tack. “What, you think only the males in this place get operations? The women too. The royal princesses have their wombs cut out. They lose breasts. Or their faces are so disfigured beneath their veils that not even a eunuch will look at them.”

“The royal princesses?”

“And offending slaves, offending slaves do. There are harem women, some of them once highly regarded concubines, some of them once favored ladies, who insulted the Sultan, who didn’t writhe enough to suit His Majesty, or who entered his bed by the side rather than raise the coverlet at the foot and hold it to their faces to crawl the bed’s length like some veiled reptile, who’ve been carved into fright masks and sent out into the world again. Think, Boss, if they cut off a hungry man’s hands for picking up lost coins in the gutter, what would they do to a woman’s lips for speaking out of turn or returning unlawful kisses?”

“What did they do to you, Fatima, when you lay with Bufesqueu?”

“I disfigured myself,” the now grotesque fat woman said. “Shameless, shameless,” she said. “Oh,” she said, “I’m such a greedy greedy girl. I’m so hungry. Oh, I have such a sweet tooth. Bribegold. Will you give me bribegold?”

He gave her the last of his bribegold. In a week or so, she said, when Guzo Sanbanna might next be expected, though he made no regular rounds, she said, she would introduce him, she promised.

Three weeks went by and still no Sanbanna.

“You’ve put on a few pounds,” Mills said. “Where is he, Fatima?”

“I hoard,” she said. “He’s old, he could die, so I hoard.”

She came into the laundry. Bufesqueu spotted her and went into the back.

“The Kislar Agha wants to see you,” she said.

“Hey, Bufesqueu,” Mills called.

“Not Bufesqueu. He didn’t ask to see Bufesqueu.”

Four months earlier a summons from the Kislar would have terrified him, but Bufesqueu was right, the man wasn’t a bad fellow. At the salons — he was no regular, and neither was Mills, but he came to their affairs perhaps once every three weeks, always on the afternoon preceding an evening when a virgin was scheduled to attend the Sultan — the Chief Eunuch was often the most amusing man there, outdoing Bufesqueu and Qum el Asel himself on the thorny philosophical points they so loved to raise. Nor was the sexual horseplay, though not proscribed, so much in evidence when the Kislar was there. Although the sexuality of these afternoons was even more forthright than any Mills had witnessed when the great eunuch was absent.

Ostensibly the love lessons — everything they did could be perceived as instruction; Mills was fascinated (when he wasn’t terrified), as he was by all protocols — were for the benefit of the young virgins among them. It fell to the women to tell these girls which things seemed most to please the Sultan, which parts of his body she was forbidden to kiss or to touch, which she was encouraged to, what obeisance she was required to make after he climaxed, what she must do to protect the Sultan’s skin from the blood or, if there were danger of spilled semen contacting his body, which remedial actions were permissible, which taboo. It seemed there were dozens of things for a virgin to remember, not the least of which was the virgin’s “tribute.” This was some new technique or position she was required to bring to his bed should the Sultan require it, some clever trick he’d never seen or heard of before. (Comprehensive lists, updated each time a new virgin paid a visit to the Sultan, were posted in all the dormitories in the harem, and it was an offense punishable by death if a virgin attempted to contribute something which another virgin had already offered. It did a girl no good to rely on the man’s faulty memory, since duplicates of all lists kept by the women were kept by the potentate.

“He old, honey,” Amhara might say. “He an old man. Likely he won’t do more than ask can you tell him your moves.”

“I’m not here,” the Chief Eunuch would explain, “to embarrass anyone. I’m here to choose one of you and I’m here to protect you. I don’t believe that women by nature are either more or less duplicitous than men. We’re only human, alas, and if I’m privy to these discussions it’s not, in this instance at least, prurience which draws me. Rather it’s my conviction, one or two steps up from belief, that the nature of any organization is built on the principle of self-interest. In a harem the natural enemy of a woman is another woman. The mothers are jealous of the favored ladies, the favored ladies are jealous of the novices, and everyone is jealous of the virgins. Only in sexual organizations like our own, you see, does the jealousy leak downward.

“I’m fairly certain you’ve already been briefed but suspicious enough to believe that it’s only because I was expected. If I didn’t show up on these occasions it wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility that these ladies could fail to tutor you in what’s expected. You could fault tonight, you could die. In any event I trust a review can do no harm, and I enjoy our chalk talks. — Yoyu?”

“Sir?”

“Would you be kind enough to recite for Shariz the Prayer of Virgin Gratitude?”

So he followed Fatima.

In his office the Kislar Agha was speaking to a short man in a striped gown just long enough to trip over should he step rather than shuffle. He wore a small fez — it could have been cut for a child — from which the tassel had come loose. “Oh, Mills,” the eunuch interrupted himself, “come here a moment, would you?” And then to the man: “Show Mills, won’t you? Fatima’s right, he’s the one with whom you should be taking up this point. Thanks, Fatima, it was a good idea, your bringing Laundry into the discussion.”

“Laundry,” the man said, “you’ve seen one of these?” He produced a strange, toylike object from inside his caftan. “Now this is only what we call a ‘mock-up.’ It’s scale, however, and should give you a pretty good idea. In real life this particular item goes forty-five by sixty. You’ve seen this?”

Mills shook his head.

“No? See, Kislar Agha? Even Laundry ain’t seen nothing like it. It’s brand new but I’m not offering you no novelty item. I don’t take nothing away from novelty goods, but in Yildiz? They don’t look right in a palace, novelty goods. They’re a masses thing — kickshaw, straws and pins.”

“Get on with it, Guzo.”

Guzo? This? This was Guzo Sanbanna?

“I’m piquing his interest, Kislar. In my line you don’t get nowhere you don’t pique their interest. All right, Laundry, you want to take a guess what this mock-up is a mock-up of?” He handed Mills the model, which, now it was in his hands, he saw was actually two components, one on top of the other, the first a sort of cloth-covered frame, the second a thick rectangular pad which fit on it. “Can you guess? Remember, it’s only a model.”

Mills shook his head.

“I’ll give you a hint, Laundry. What’s the dimensions of your sheets?”

George shrugged.

“It’s a box spring and mattress!” Sanbanna said as if delivering a punchline.

“A box spring and mattress,” Mills repeated dully.

“You’ve never heard of mattresses?”

“Sure,” George said. “I’ve heard of mattresses.”

“Well the box spring fits under them! On a bed frame! It gives back support! You know, before the Industrial Revolution none of this would have been possible. Look — here, give me, I’ll show you, this cloth part snaps off — rows of coil springs! Just imagine what one of these could do for the backs of all those favored ladies you got around here. Or the novices. Or anyone else for that matter whose back takes a beating from time to time. Why, sleeping on one of these is like sleeping on a cloud! For the rest of your life you wake up refreshed!

“And I’ll tell you something else. With these new firm support mattresses there’s never any sag. You’re healthier, more cheerful. They put a spring in your step. They help keep you regular.”

Sanbanna lowered his voice. “The whores of Amsterdam, where this product was researched and developed under the supervision of the world’s most distinguished orthopedic scientists, the biggest men in the field, the whores of Amsterdam have been using these box spring and mattress sets on an experimental basis for months now. The incidence of pox has never been lower and some of the girls claim literally to have doubled their business. I can’t vouch for that part of course, but I saw the biggest smiles on those Dutchmen’s faces when I was up there last time. Ear-to-ear. I thought their damn faces were cracking. Here, you can look at my passport you don’t believe I was up there.” He shoved an Empire passport under Mills’s nose and snatched it back quickly. His lowered voice was laced with confidentiality. “Listen, I know the Sultan is no ordinary john. What, are you kidding? A carte blanche guy with the pick of the litter? I’ll let you in on something, Laundry. This is strictly a company store in a strictly company town and what makes its owner happy can’t help but trickle down and make some of its clerks happy too. Am I talking out of turn here, Kislar? Am I out of line on this?”

Mills looked at the Chief Eunuch.

“Guzo’s enthusiastic,” the Kislar Agha said, “but we’ve been doing business with him for years now.”

“Did I steer you wrong on the baby doll nighties? Did I steer you wrong on the filmy lingerie? Tell him, Kislar.”

“He’s not the purchasing agent, Guzo. He folds sheets in the laundry.”

“Yeah,” he said, “and don’t know their size. I can’t help it,” Sanbanna said, “I believe in my products. I’m this progress ambassador.”

A king, Mills thought, a sultan. Princes and princesses. A progress ambassador.

“He folds sheets, Guzo.”

“Well the question is sheets. Sheets are what’s under discussion. Look, I’ll lay my cards on the table. What are we talking about? Two or three hundred box springs and mattresses? My foot we are! We’re talking revolution! A sleep revolution! Sure, I want to sell you the box springs and mattresses. And of course it would be a feather in my cap to bring two hundred sets on line in Yildiz Palace Seraglio. But the real feather in the cap would be to get my box spring and mattress under the Sultan’s ass!

“Think! Who does the fucking? Those two hundred or so girls? The Sultan does the fucking. Those favored ladies are lucky if they see him three or four times a year. The mothers of those kids got stretch marks on them like lines on rulers. Maybe they have relations twice a year. As for the novices … Well, I don’t have to tell you. So it’s the Sultan. This is the man with the smile on his face! That’s the direction of my thinking. The box spring and mattress under his back! If I could tell the world its greatest lover only trusts his body to one of these babies — well, I don’t have to tell you! That’s where the plumage in the millinery is!”

“Guzo,” the Chief Eunuch said, “our seraglio is not a test kitchen.”

“So I asked myself, I asked myself, ‘Sanbanna, you got a problem. How does a person like yourself, less than a commoner, get next to the sultan of the Ottoman Empire? How do you advise such a person?’ ‘Good will. Word of mouth, Guzo,’ I told myself. ‘That’s the way to handle it. Let the broads do the job.’ ” He was staring directly into Mills’s eyes.

“He folds sheets, Guzo,” the Kislar said.

“Forgive me, Kislar, haven’t we been talking about sheets? Didn’t I ask him sheet dimensions? Ain’t that what our whole deal hinges on? Ain’t that why we called Laundry in for consultations?”

“But, Guzo, he doesn’t know.”

“Maybe because it never came up. Maybe because Laundry’s too conscientious for idle speculations. Maybe because he was never bored enough to say to some co-worker, ‘Hey, pal, for the hell of it, why don’t we get a tape and measure the goddamn things?’ ”

“They won’t fit,” George Mills said. “They’re only forty by sixty.”

“You shouldn’t listen to crap, George,” Sanbanna said.

“They won’t fit your whatchamacallits. They’re five inches too narrow in the width.”

“Why did you want to see me?”

George looked at him closely. “It’s not important,” he said.

“Sure it’s important,” Sanbanna said.

“No,” Mills said. Suddenly he was very tired. “I thought maybe I ought to talk to the man who’s making these women so fat.”

“Sure,” Sanbanna said.

George studied him a moment. He went on, keeping his voice flat, draining all curiosity from it. “They, you know, nibble.”

“They gorge.”

“Probably when, you know, the eunuchs aren’t around.”

“They cram it down.”

“Not that, you know, I’ve ever actually seen them.”

“They pack it away,” Sanbanna said. “They wolf the stuff!”

“Even Fatima. Even Fatima’s, you know, put on a few pounds since I’ve been here.”

“She’s a guzzle gut. She’s a gourmand glut gobble.”

“She lives high,” Mills said.

“Not because it’s contraband,” Sanbanna said, “not even because it’s cheap or plentiful.”

“It’s strange,” Mills said, almost to himself. “He’s a sultan. Any race you can think of.”

“Yes,” Sanbanna said.

“Every body type. Women with bones under their faces like fine welts, women with bone structures like log cabins.”

“Yes.”

“And their hair,” Mills said. “My God, their hair soft as down or rough as the stuffing in bad furniture.”

“That’s right.”

“He’s the fucking Sultan. He wants girls, he invades countries with armies, for Christ’s sake. He sends generals out with glass slippers. He has an entire empire to choose from. There’s pageants and beauty contests. Miss African Village, Miss Sand Dunes. Miss Off-Shore Islands.”

“Yes,” Sanbanna said.

“They’re all fat!”

“Not even to get out of it,” Sanbanna said, “not even to make themselves unattractive or too heavy to handle.”

“No,” Mills said.

“Not even because they’re bored,” Sanbanna said. “But because halvah and the delicatessen I’m able to bring in are the only things still available to them that tickle their palates. Who knows? Maybe the palate is the only organ they have that’s still alive. Maybe that’s what burns out last. Everything mortified but the nerves of the mouth, the sweet and sour synapses.”

Suddenly Mills shuddered with questions. “Cheap?” he said. “Plentiful?”

Sanbanna looked at him. “Fatima shook you down?”

“I gave her my bribegold,” he said and could have bitten his tongue in half. The man didn’t seem to have heard. “Listen,” Mills said, “I’ve seen them giggling, I’ve watched them carry on.”

“Eunuchs,” Sanbanna said contemptuously.

“Not the eunuchs, the women.”

“I’m talking about the women,” Sanbanna said.

“The women?”

“Didn’t I already tell you it’s a company town?”

“All right,” Mills said, “good will, word of mouth. You get on their bright side. They talk up the merchandise to the Kislar Agha. They say swell things about the dry goods. Then what?”

“Come on, Mills,” Sanbanna snapped, “you said it yourself. Forty by sixty. They don’t even fit. What do you suppose just a contract for new sheets would be worth in this place? Wouldn’t I be jumping up and down if I was who you think I am? Or are you some eunuch too? Big time Paradise Dispatcher!”

“Hey,” Mills said.

“Hey yourself. Why not? Why wouldn’t you be? Everyone else around here is. The prickless princes and parched princesses. The favorites and novices and slaves. Who ain’t a eunuch? Your pal Bufesqueu? Come on, he’s spoony as the rest of them. They’re a loony, loopy, lovelorn lot, Mills. All the screw-loose steers, all the hindered heifers. What a picture!”

“Eunuchs in love,” Mills said.

“Who said anything about love? Lovesick ness! Sentiment. Rapture and craziness. Doting. Dottiness. Fan mail and fantasy. Coquetry, swoon, languish and yearning. Ogle. Intrigue and eye contact. The heart’s round robin. Who mentioned love? There ain’t enough love in this place to wet a dream.”

And Mills thinking maybe it was a part of adventure when perfect strangers told you things, when they took trouble with you. Or perhaps straight talk was only a kind of condescension. Sanbanna would never have spoken this way to the Kislar.

“Well?” said the halvah trader.

“Gee, Guzo,” Mills said, “you know the part I don’t get?”

“You? You don’t get any of it.”

“Who made you candy man?”

“George Fourth,” Sanbanna said.

Mills stared at him. Moses Magaziner returned his gaze. “Oh no,” Mills said, “no no. This isn’t the way a world works. No no. You can’t get me with that stuff. What, there’s magic in the moonlight? No no. Look,” Mills said earnestly, almost severely, “sometimes things happen and you’d have to give long odds. Sure, and throw in a point spread just to get someone into position where he can’t afford not to take your bet. Freaky things. Not just coincidence but coincidence called. In expectation! Jolts and starts and thunderclaps, percentage and probability not just caught unaware or caught napping but caught napping unaware with its pants down. I mean out-of-the-blue-you-could-have-knocked-me-down-with-a-feather stuff, things so improbable as to be imponderable. Junk, you know? A fire at the ball game or an earthquake in the park. So farfetched and implausible it would be like spitting in God’s eye. One chance in a million would be a dead cert, foolproof, sure thing, safe bet, lead pipe cinch next to what I’m talking about. Or not talking about. Because what I am talking about you can’t talk about. Because if you could,” and he was weeping now, “because if you could, you could talk about everything, think about anything. Lovely things would happen, spectacular things. Friends like women who love you. Like lawyers who can save you or doctors that can heal. Everything would work out. The world would come true. I don’t mean God or saying your prayers. I don’t even mean hope. Hell, you could make a wish over a lousy birthday candle and it wouldn’t even have to be your birthday and the candle wouldn’t even have to be stuck in a cake. Shit, it wouldn’t even have to be lit!”

“All right,” Moses Magaziner said, “you wanted to see me, see me.”

“All right? Yes? All right? Didn’t you hear anything I said?”

“All right,” Magaziner said.

“Why?” he asked. “Why you?”

“You’re the believer,” the Jewish British ambassador dressed like a street Arab said. “You’re the hopeful one. What do you believe? What do you hope?”

“That you’re a spy, that you work for our king. I don’t know, that your eye is on the sparrow.”

“All right,” he said, “I’m a spy, I work for my king. Sure, sometime. Sometime my eye is on the sparrow.”

“I get it,” Mills said. “Good will. Word of mouth. The harem’s best-kept secrets traded for candy.”

“Schmuck,” Magaziner said, “have you never measured any despair but your own? Why not candy?”

“Why not? Because they don’t have secrets.”

“They sleep with the Sultan. What’s the matter with you? You never heard of pillow talk? Look, I’m busy. I’m a man of affairs. It’s already midafternoon. I’ve got a courier waiting and I still haven’t looked at the diplomatic pouch. Tonight Yetta Zemlick and I are entertaining the Spanish embassy, and if I don’t get back soon to approve the arrangements Gelfer Moonshine is going to have conniptions. So don’t hock me about likelihoods and probabilities. What do you want?”

“What do you think I want, Moses?” Mills cried. “I want to get out of here! I want you to part those eunuchs like the Red Sea!”

“Nah,” he said, “too risky. I’m a foreign national. We ain’t allowed to interfere in the domestic affairs of other empires. Here, have some halvah. No, go ahead, there’s plenty more where that came from.”

Mills stared after him as the old man walked off. At the door to the laundry Magaziner turned. “Listen,” he said, “it’s a long shot, longer than you think, not the sure thing, shoe in, when-you-wish-upon-a-star crap you were talking about. His Majesty don’t want you. He wouldn’t authorize air from petty cash to get you back. He still thinks you’re some Pretender or other. Maybe he’s right. He don’t need subjects like you. So it’s a long shot. So long it ain’t even mathematics. But if you ever do manage to escape, drop by the embassy, why don’t you? Maybe I can get you on a ship.”

“I figured it out,” he told Bufesqueu an hour later. “We can make our break. Be ready after dinner.”

“What, tonight? I was going to see Yoyu tonight. Everybody’s going to be there. They say even the Valide Sultan may put in an appearance. They’re expecting me. Why don’t you come too, George? The women are going to play cards. The girl with the lowest score has to take her veil off for ten minutes.”

“I think we can make it. Watch me. Do what I do.”

“Gee, George, it sounds like a nifty plan. It really does. I wish you’d spoken up sooner. The eunuchs have been telling me about this game. It’s supposed to be really something to see.”

“We can get out of here,” Mills said. “The odds are a little tight, but I think we can make it. We just have to be careful not to panic.”

“Hey,” Bufesqueu said, “you didn’t say anything about odds.”

“Forget the odds, Tedor. What were the odds when you took Constantinople? Why do I say Constantinople? You took the whole entire Ottoman Empire that day. What were the odds against that?”

“You know that novice, Debba Bayuda? You know — the tall one. The one they say is this far away from becoming a favorite lady. Well the morning line on old Debba is that she’s almost as gorgeous as she is rotten at cards.”

“How long do you think they’ll leave us alone? Sooner or later they’ve got to castrate us.”

“Yeah,” Bufesqueu said. “In a way you can’t blame them.”

“Are you coming with me?”

“Hey,” Bufesqueu said, “I really wish I could.”

Mills looked at his friend. “If I make it,” he said, “they’ll cut your balls off.”

Bufesqueu, embarrassed, looked down at his shoes. “Yeah, well,” he said shyly, “it’s like part of their dress code.”

Inside the Valide Sultan’s residence Mills squared his shoulders and knocked on the big door in the rear hallway. Beyond it was the short passageway that led to Yildiz Palace. He knocked on it five times rapidly, paused for as long as it took to recite the invocation to Allah that began the evening prayers, then rapped again, slowly, eight more times. Straining, he was just able to make out voices, then, moments later, footsteps. He adjusted his regimentals, the full-dress Janissary uniform laundered now and clean as it had been on the day it was issued.

A large man dressed in a fantastical costume was standing on the other side of the big oak door. The Palace Invigilator. Two armed guards stood behind him, their rifles pointed at George’s chest.

Mills held up his empty hands and turned in a slow circle.

“You’re a Janissary,” the Invigilator said.

“These are my campaigns,” Mills said. “Khash, Bejestan, Krym and Inebolu. Victories at Khash and Krym, wounded in Bejestan, taken prisoner at Inebolu.”

“Where are your ribbons?” the Invigilator demanded.

He looked at the citations stitched on the guards’ uniforms, the medals and chains of entitlement that hung from the Invigilator’s neck.

“Burned ’em,” Mills said. “Burned the ribbons and buried the medals when I disgraced myself at Inebolu by being captured instead of outright killed.”

“Escaped or ransomed?” the Invigilator said.

“Exchanged,” Mills said, “for thirty-seven lads from the enemy side.”

The guards murmured to each other. The Invigilator hushed them and turned back to face Mills. “You came through the doorway of our Sultan’s mother,” he said harshly.

“ ‘As did my father, so does his son,’ ” Mills said, quoting the proverb.

The Invigilator nodded. “State your business,” he said with some kindness.

“Mind yours!” Mills shot back.

“Put up your rifles,” the Invigilator commanded the guards. “I’d better get the Imperial Chatelain,” he told Mills.

The guards came to attention as Mills and the Invigilator brushed past them, Mills slightly in the lead, the Invigilator studying him from behind to see, in a final test, if he could thread his way through the complicated building to the office of the Imperial Chatelain.

Near the grand staircase — he was trading on instinct now, not only what he remembered of the palace on his single brief visit there almost two years before, and not even only what he had pieced together from the hours and hours of protocol lessons he’d attended (“I’m told that if one is observant,” an instructor had mentioned in class, “he can read the rugs as savage Indians might follow trails in a forest.” Fringe, it had to do with fringe, fringe and color, Mills thought, but couldn’t remember what it had to do with fringe and color, and then, where the fringe seemed thickest and whitest, actually inspired, thinking: Of course! It would be lushest where it was least traveled), but some felt tickle in the guts and blood, his way suffused with actual magnetic essences, some lodestar ceremony of the atmosphere that pulled at the hairs on his legs and guided and tugged his bowels — he could no longer hear them behind him.

Mills turned round. The Invigilator, halted with the guards at a crossroads of corridors, had drawn his scimitar. One guard’s rifle was aimed at his head, the other’s trained dead center on his belly.

“Kill him,” the Invigilator said, “he doesn’t know the way.”

Mills closed his eyes.

(“ ’Corze Oy ‘uz prayn,” Mills would say later. “ ’Corze Oy ’uz prayn ’n’ didn’ evern know who I erz prayn at! Jeezers er Arler er de Jew Gard eiver. ’Corze Oy ’uz prayn ’n yer natchurl instink whan yer makin’ yer praise is ter shut yer eyes ’corze yer don’ wan’ ter be lookern hat de Lord’s own face when yer aksin’ ’im ter save yer arse! ’Corze dat’s protcool, ’corze dat’s protcool, too. Yer nose in de dirty ’n der arse what wants savin’ up hin de hair like soom fooking flame held up in de sky like han off’rin’. ’Corze dere ain’t nought han athist ’n Vauxhall. Nill nought none, I don’ care whatcher say. ’N it’s on’y just Mum Nature’s own natchurl protcool yer shoot fram yer eyes whan yer prayn yer praise. Ye loook away joost like yerd loook way from sun. ’N de protcool oov Christers de same. Kneelern, ’ead bowed, er beatin’ yer titties. All of it protcool. Protcool ev’y time. Why Gard deigned, I guess, ter gimme ’is Sign.”)

“Hold!” Mills hollered before they could fire. “I’ve stripped her bed!” he told them in protocol.

“Hold your fire!” the Invigilator said, countermanding his earlier order. “Go,” he told one of the guards, “check.” Which was protocol too.

The guard was back in minutes. He carried his rifle, barrel pointing toward the floor. Behind him a trail of undischarged shells lay scattered on the runner. He had unbuttoned the flap of his ammunition pocket and was disposing of the last of his shells when the other guard saw him and began to do the same. The guard who had gone to check nodded gravely, and the Invigilator lay his scimitar across the strip of Oriental carpet where he stood. Which was also protocol.

Because it was all protocol. The thirteen knocks on the door, the Invigilator’s protocol questions and Mills’s protocol claims — his burning the ribbons and burying the medals — the fantastical man’s protocol harshness when Mills said he’d been exchanged for thirty-seven of the Empire’s enemies and his protocol kindness in response to the Janissary’s protocol proverb. Because it was all protocol. Mills’s protocol rudeness, the protocol moment of protocol truth when they’d let Mills precede them (because an honest subject would know the way without being told), all of it, all protocol. Because you couldn’t draw two unprotocol’d breaths in a row in this, or, for Mills’s money, any other empire either, which was why he’d granted to God what everybody agreed belonged to God — the Sign, the providential deign-given Sign, which was only careful planning, knowing one’s onions, the known onions of protocol, knowing it was tradition, going back centuries, thirteen could be, maybe more, and that the first to learn of a royal’s death had the right to strip the bed, signifying not only grief but continuity too, and not only grief and continuity, but the grief part absolutely of the highest, purest order, pure because often as not removed from all consanguineous ties and arrangements, the shrill, pure grief of subjects, bystanders, citizens — good clean taxpayer grief!

Because it was all protocol, and why wouldn’t Mills know about it? Since it was for people like him that protocol was invented, back doors and servants’ entrances, folks on whom the protocol was piled sky high, who walked around stooped over from its weight, the burden of so much precedence and protocol turning their stances into the very image of a protocol’d people, like men and women carrying each other miles piggyback. Why shouldn’t he know? Learn? Be on a perpetual lookout for dead royals? (Hadn’t Moses Magaziner himself quoted odds so long they would be outside the realm of what wouldn’t even be mathematics?) Strip their beds and tell the first one he saw higher than he but still low enough in the order for it not to matter much to, someone “without” anything really at stake — and this was where the continuity part came in — the bad news?

So they changed places. Mills and the Invigilator, Mills and the guards. Not physically of course, though the shoe was sure enough on the other foot, but psychologically, Mills no longer responsible by law and protocol to the guards and Invigilator — in theory the grief getting precedence now, the upper hand — just four guys, two pairs of bereaved working stiffs too shocked, again in theory, to know what they were doing, even though what they were doing was their duty. Because grief was the ultimate duty sanctioned, even ordained, by protocol.

“You’ll want to let the Grand Vizier know,” a guard said solemnly. (Because it was all protocol.)

“What?” Mills said. “Oh. Yeah. Right.”

“He’s left for the night,” the Invigilator told him sadly.

“I can’t still catch him?”

“He was going to the country,” the other guard said. “To his residence there.”

“I hate to have to be the one …”

The guards nodded. The Invigilator put his hand on Mills’s arm.

So he protocol’d his way out the front door of Yildiz Palace and was protocol’d into an Imperial coach standing in the spectacular driveway and told the driver to take him to the British embassy, where he asked for and was granted a political sanctuary which was never violated the whole two months it took Moses Magaziner to get him aboard a French ship which was bound (since Magaziner had said “my” and not “our” king, and evidently Mills really was no longer a British citizen) for America.

Which was also protocol.