The Janissary Tree

[ 114 ]

Yashim made a grab for the door. The man on the threshold sprang forwards and for several seconds they fought for purchase, separated only by the thin door which lay between them. But Yashim had been caught off balance, and it was he who yielded first: he leaped away from the door and his assailant came barrelling into the room, almost stumbled, but whipped round fast to face Yashim at a sagging crouch.

A wrestler, Yashim thought. The man was completely shaved. His neck sloped into his big shoulders, which bulged from the arm-holes of a sleeveless leather jerkin. The leather was black and glistened as though it had been oiled. He was short-legged, Yashim noticed, his bare feet planted a yard apart on the rug, knees bent, slim-waisted. There was no sign of a weapon beyond the string in his right fist.

A man who could crack me apart without even trying, Yashim thought. He took a backward step, sliding his bare feet on the polished boards.

The man gave a grunt and lunged forwards, lowering his head like a ram, coming at Yashim with surprising speed. Yashim flung back his arm as he leaped backwards, and swept his hand across the kitchen block. His fingers felt the knife, but they only knocked it: it must have spun, for when he tried to close on the hilt his fingers met in the air, and as the wrestler’s huge shoulder crashed against his midriff he was rammed back hard against the block with a force that made his head whiplash. He gasped for breath and felt the wrestler’s arms fly upwards to pinion his own.

Yashim knew that if the wrestler got him in his grip he was finished. He lunged to the right, throwing all the weight of his upper body against the wrestler’s rising arm, flinging his own arms out at the same time to grab at the handle of the stock pot. With a wrench he snatched it up and swung it round over the man’s shoulder, but the lid was stuck and he had no room to do more than swing the pot and clamp it against the wrestler’s back before his arm was caught in his grip.

A band of leather was sewn round the collar of the man’s jerkin, and as the pot slid up the lid must have snagged against it. The man flipped back as the boiling stock sloshed over his neck, and let Yashim go.

The surprise on the assassin’s face when he slammed his taloned hand into Yashim’s groin and squeezed down hard was palpable. Certainly more palpable than Yashim’s groin.

The assassin jerked back his arm as if he’d been stung. Yashim slid his right hand up the assassin’s left arm as hard as he could and then brought his left down hard, gripping his wrist as he pivoted the man’s arm against his own hand. There was a crack and the arm went limp. The assassin clutched at it with his right, and in a moment Yashim had taken his right wrist out away from his body and with a heave sent the assassin curving in an arc which brought him round, doubled up, and his right arm in a tight half-nelson. The assassin had neither screamed, nor spoken a word.

Five minutes later, and the man had still not spoken. He had barely grunted. Yashim was at a loss.

And then Yashim saw why the man had failed to speak. He had no tongue.

Yashim wondered if the mute could write. “Can you write?” he hissed in the man’s ear. The look was blank. A deaf-mute? Long ago, in the days of Suleyman the Magnificent, it had been decreed that only deaf-mutes should attend the person of the sultan. It was a way of ensuring that nothing was overheard; that nothing they saw could be communicated to the outside world. They signed at one another instead: ixarette, the secret language of the Ottoman court, was a complex sign language which anyone, hearing or deaf, speaking or dumb, was expected to master in the palace service.

The palace service.

A deaf-mute.

Frantically, Yashim began to sign.