The Bellini Card

86

Twenty years had passed since Yashim first entered the palace school. He had been a young man already, four or five years older than his companions, those inexperienced, beardless youths whose pranks and chatter had tormented him in those first few months of indifference and despair. He was admitted as a favor: his father could think of no other way to heal the terrible damage that his enemies had wreaked upon his son. Perhaps, too, he was sent away because he so forcibly reminded the old governor of his wife, Yashim’s mother, the beautiful Elena.

Elena had been in the cave. She was dishonored, and then she was killed. His father’s enemies had reserved for Yashim, however, a yet more exquisite torture. The act itself lasted only seconds; it involved only pain. But the bitterness of that moment would mock him all his life.

Sportively gelded by his father’s enemies, Yashim had brought his pain and his despair to the palace school in Istanbul, and they had meted out unremitting discipline, constant training of body and mind. Yashim entered a world ruled by the rod, a world of hard wooden beds, floggings, cold baths, and weekly expulsions. The old eunuch who governed them was a martinet, capricious, exacting, manipulative, mildly predatory. To the least talented he was unfailingly kind, before he kicked them out. To those who showed true promise he was a scourge. Yashim did everything well, but it was three years before they discovered what he did better than anyone. Before he made himself indispensable.

At first he had resisted the regimen, scarcely capable of believing in the possibility of redemption, and doubting that there was anything left in him to redeem, as though he had already died. His spirit was indeed dead. He was surly and slow. He didn’t sneer at the old teacher, or at the acres of cold calligraphy they were forced to ingest, or the games of wrestling and gerit. He was a cultivated young man, stronger, faster, more experienced than the others. He simply didn’t care.

The old eunuch started waking him early, an hour before the other boys, in the dead watch of the night. He woke him with a crack of his silver-tipped rod across the legs. “You have less time than the others. We must make more.” Sometimes he made him run. Sometimes he would recite the Koran. At night, when the other boys talked in whispers, Yashim fell asleep exhausted.

Yet slowly, without knowing why, he had found himself waking up. He learned to channel his agony of mind into the discipline imposed upon him by the old lala and stopped being afraid of doing well. Train the body and cultivate the mind, and the heart will follow: that was the old Ottoman precept.

Out of the myriad accomplishments he had been expected to attain, the recitals, the music and the languages, the rhetoric and algebra and deportment and logic, the horsemanship, archery, gerit, Yashim retained only fuzzy memories of the wrestling school.

Yet even that had perhaps been expected by the palace school. By study, after all, anyone could learn the Koran; anyone could learn to pull a bow with craft and effort. But for the men who were to direct the energies of the empire mastery of all arts was not an end, only a beginning. To remember a thing was nothing. What counted was the power to use it.

Yashim’s knowledge of the Sand-Reckoner’s diagram was scarcely available to him in thought: it was ingrained at a level of instinct.

The woven bands of an endless knot belonged to the invisible machinery of his mind.

Twenty years on, in a palazzo in Venice, the instinct came alive.