The Janissary Tree

[ 11 ]

In the rain, in the night, even a city of two million souls can be quiet and deserted. It was the dead hour between the evening and the night prayers. A rat, its wet fur glistening, scrambled out of an overflowing drain and began to scuttle along the foot of a building, looking for shelter. The rising water pursued it almost imperceptibly.

Slowly the puddle rose, from one cobble to the next, probing the joints for a means of escape. When it found one, it began to trickle through, blindly but unerringly seeking its path downhill. From time to time it stopped, pooled, and started over, insistently seeking its own way to the Bosphorus, lining the banks of its own clear trail with mud, twigs, hairs, crumbs. It spread across a lateral street but pooled again on the other side where a flight of stone steps ran down to the Mosque of the Victory, just newly completed on the shore.

The rain, continuing to fall, continued to back up against the drain. At the hour of the morning star the janitor of the mosque sent two workmen to trace the torrent that was threatening to seep into the cement floors and spoil the carpets. They hitched their woollen cloaks over their heads with their elbows against the rain, and started up the steps.

About two hundred yards uphill they found a section of road which had turned into a pond, and cautiously probed the muddy water with their rods.

Eventually they located the drain, and started work trying to unblock it: first with the rods and later, standing up to their chins in the freezing, filthy water, with their hands and feet. The obstruction was a soft package of some sort, so tightly bound with cords that neither man, slipping foot-first into the icy murk for a few seconds at a time, could get a proper purchase on it. At last, shortly before daybreak, they managed to guide a rod between the package and the wall of the drain, and lever it away far enough to let the water escape with a gurgle.

The workman who leaned in up to his chest and gripped the obstruction finally saw what looked at first like a gigantic turkey, trussed for roasting.

What he saw next made him a very sick workman indeed.