The Janissary Tree

[ 119 ]

The flap in the lattice dropped open with a click as Preen and Mina reached the corridor at the foot of the stairs, but they sailed past it without a word, noses in the air. On the street they nudged each other and giggled.

For ten minutes they walked eastwards, looking for a chair to carry Preen, at least. Preen seemed to have recovered her poise on leaving the house, leaning only slightly on Mina’s arm, looking hungrily around as if she had been in bed for a month instead of a couple of days. A few men threw them curious glances, but finally she could bear it no longer.

“Where are the handsome soldiers, then?” she demanded.

Mina snorted.

“And I thought you wanted to come out to get reassurance from your friend! Really, Preen!” Then she looked round and shrugged. “There were dozens of ‘em earlier, honest. I can’t say I’m not a bit disappointed myself. Oh, where are all the chairmen?”

“That’s all right,” said Preen, smiling and patting her friend’s arm. “I’m getting on all right now.”

There was a buzz of excitement in the street behind them, like a sudden cooing of pigeons, Preen thought. She turned her head to see a man running up the alley, pumping his arms and flinging out his chest: he wore a beard and a high red cap with a white pennant flying from its crown. In each fist he carried a flaming torch.

“Fire! Fire!” He bellowed suddenly. He swerved to the wall: there was a sound of breaking glass and the man lunged, reappeared and sped across the alley.

“Fire!”

He was only holding one brand now, but there was a bottle in his other hand and he was sloshing gobbets of liquid from it over a doorway. “Fire!”

“What are you doing?” Preen screamed, breaking away from Mina who had clapped a hand to her mouth.

She put out her hands without thinking and felt the bruise ripen in her shoulder.

The man touched the brand to the door: as Preen reached him it sprouted a lovely mass of blueish flames and the man wheeled round, grinning wildly.

“Fire!” he roared.

Preen slapped him hard across the face with her good hand. The man jerked his head back. For a moment he narrowed his eyes and then he dodged down and sped past her, up the street, before she could think what to do next.

Preen threw an alarmed look at the doorway: the blue flames suddenly started to spit. Some were turning yellow as they licked upwards, snapping at the old wood.

“Mina!”

Mina hadn’t moved, but she was looking from Preen to the other side of the street where a shattered window was leaping in and out of view as the flames guttered and shrank inside.

“Let’s go back!” Mina wailed.

Preen acted on impulse. People were already running in the street, in both directions. A few had stopped and were making an effort to smother the flames creeping round the doorway. But even as they beat the fire with their cloaks flames had started to shoot from the window opposite.

“No! Go on, to Yashim’s!” she shouted. She glanced back: a light seemed to hover at the corner of the alley, and then a wall of turbanned men with flickering torches surged around the corner, blocking the alley. “Run!”

The pain in her shoulder seemed to fade away as she began to run uphill. After a moment she put out a hand and rested it on Mina’s shoulder. Both dancers stopped and kicked off their shoes, those two-inch pattens on which they liked to totter into male company; and both, as women will, snatched them up and carried them as they ran barefoot through the alleyways towards the Kara Davut.

They didn’t get so far. As they turned into the alley which led to the open space beneath the Imperial Gate, they flung themselves into a packed crowd of men, jostling and elbowing against each other. Almost immediately they were hemmed in by other people running up behind them: Preen grabbed Mina by the arm and spun her round. Together they fought their way back to the street corner, and took the turn to the right.

“We’ll go round behind the mosque,” Preen whispered in Mina’s ear.

They slackened their pace, partly to avoid the people running up the alleyway towards them, partly because among so many people Preen felt unwilling to surrender herself to the panic that was already developing around them.

But at the next crossroads they had to push and shove their way through the crowd, and turning her head left, back west, Preen saw the flicker of fires smoking on the hill above.

Beyond the crowd the side-street was also heaving with men, and women, too, some of them leading children, trying to protect them from the constant buffeting of people running back and forth. Everyone seemed to be shouting, screaming to make way, bellowing about fire.

Two men, running into each other from opposite directions, suddenly stopped shouting and fell to exchanging blows.

A man called Ertogrul Asian, who had just poked his head out from his doorway, got a smack on his ear from a wooden box carried by a man dodging down the alley close to the wall.

A printer who ran into the street was carried away by a tide of people racing for the next corner.

A little boy in a nightshirt, who would one day sit as a deputy in the Kemalist National Assembly and spend an evening drinking raki with an air ace called Baron von Richthofen, had his little hand popped out of his mother’s grip and was scooped up and passed overhead by total strangers for several minutes before he found himself being pressed to her bosom again, an experience he could later recall perfectly from other people’s memories.

Alexandra Stanopolis, a Greek girl of marriageable age, had her bottom pinched sixteen times and hoarded the secret to her death in Trabzon fifty-three years later, when she finally revealed it to her daughter-in-law, who herself died in New York City.

A notorious miser known as Yilderim, the Thunderbolt, lost a wooden chest he was carrying to a cheerful thief who later found it contained nothing but a silk scarf with a very tight knot in it; the miser died later in an asylum and the thief in Sevastopol, of dysentery, still wearing the knotted scarf.

Several hundred worshippers at the great mosque, formerly the church of Hagia Sophia, found themselves trapped inside the building and had to be escorted in batches by armed troops who led them to an alleyway beneath the seraglio and told them to find their own way home. Two of the worshippers, swathed in their ostlers’ cloaks and hiding their frightened faces underneath their hoods, quailed at the soldiers’ appearance and in the melee around the great door followed instead a notorious army deserter into a former side-chapel of the cathedral, where they sank down behind a column and communicated in nervous glances. Their names, unusual for Muslims, were Ben Fizerly and Frank Compston.

And all the while, west of the city, the fires raged and raced towards each other like members of a scattered regiment, plunging and burning through the obstacles which lay between them. So that Stanislaw Palewski, Polish ambassador to the Sublime Porte, with a kitchen knife in one hand and an eye on the window, retrieved the golden threaded cord to his dressing gown and without a word to the man stirring on the carpet beat a hasty retreat to Pera, across the Golden Horn.

In times of crisis, he told himself, foreign representatives needed to make themselves available at their embassies.