The Janissary Tree

[ 124 ]

Bombardier Genghis Yalmuk slipped a finger beneath his chin strap and ran it round from ear to ear, to soothe the pressure. He had served in the New Guard for fifteen years, graduating from common soldiering to the artillery corps five years ago, and his only complaint in those fifteen years had been the headgear that soldiers were expected to wear: ferenghi shakos, with tough leather straps. Now he commanded a battalion of ten guns and their crews: forty men, in all.

He glanced over the Hippodrome and grunted. He’d slogged through the sand and heat of Syria. He’d been in Armenia, when the Cossacks broke through the infantry lines and charged his redoubt, with their sabres flashing in the sunlight and their horses foaming at the nostrils, and his commanding officer offering to shoot down any man who deserted his post. Battle, he’d learned, was days and hours of waiting, putting off thought, punctuated by short, savage engagements in which there was no time to think at all. Leave all that, he’d been told again and again, to the commanding officers.

Well, he was one of them now himself, and the injunction against thinking still held, as far as he could discover. His orders had come direct from the seraskier himself, who had been moving through the lines like a man demented, setting the position of the guns, instructing the troops, fixing elevations and exhorting them all to obedience. Genghis had no quarrel with that, of course, but he was a Stamboul man himself, not one of your Anatolian recruits, and he found it strange to be in his own city, under arms and idle while the place was bursting into flames.

He wished he’d been detailed to the Sultan Ahmet, perhaps, or the other, unidentified location deeper in the city, where the men would no doubt be tackling the fires head-on, instead of being told to train their guns every which way and stop the crowds from approaching the palace. But the seraskier had been very exact in his instructions. They had synchronised their timepieces, too, ready for the barrage that was to open in almost exactly one hour. The barrage whose purpose Genghis Yalmuk neither questioned, nor understood, but which the seraskier had personally prepared, working from gun to gun with a sheaf of co-ordinates as if his bombardier could not be trusted to fix the co-ordinates himself.

And meanwhile, he thought wretchedly, they were waiting again. Waiting while the city burned.

He caught sight of a man in a plain brown cloak speaking to two sentries outside the seraglio gate, and frowned. His orders were very clear, to keep civilians out of the operational area: this man must have slipped through the gate, from the palace. Genghis Yalmuk threw back his shoulders and started to march towards them. This fellow had better just slip back the way he’d come, and at the double, too, palace or no palace, or he’d know the reason why.

But before he had walked five yards the man in the brown cloak had turned and was scanning the ground; one of the sentries pointed, and the man began to walk towards him, holding up a hand.

“Look here,” Genghis began to say, but the civilian cut him short.

“Yashim Togalu, imperial service,” he said. “I need the seraskier, and fast. Operational need,” he added. “Vital new intelligence.”

Genghis Yalmuk blinked. The habit of obedience was very deeply ingrained, after all, and he had an ear that was tuned to the commanding style.

As for Yashim, he crossed his fingers.

For a moment the two men looked at one another.

Then Genghis Yalmuk raised his hand and pointed.

“Up there,” he said, crisply.

Yashim followed the direction of his finger. Over the walls and trees surrounding the great mosque. Beyond the minarets. Higher, and further away.

He was pointing at the dome of Hagya Sophia.

“Then I’m too late,” said Yashim, crisply. “I’m afraid I have to ask to see your orders.”