The Janissary Tree

[ 125 ]

The seraskier leaned back against the lead casing of the buttress, and put his cheek to the smooth metal. He had not realised how excited he was. His face seemed to be burning like the city which lay about him, at his feet.

Out here, on the leads, he had the perfect view. From down below, Hagia Sophia seemed to rise in a single burst, the massive central dome supported on a buttressed ring that floated in the air over two half-domes on either side. This was how artists since time immemorial had pictured it, round-shouldered like so many mosques; but in this they erred. Built in the sixth century, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian’s great church was a reconciliation of two opposed forms. The great circle of the dome, rising on a round gallery of arches, thrust itself skywards through a lead-covered square. There was space at the four corners, where the pitch of the roof was slight, at most; and so it was from here, two hundred feet above the ground, that the seraskier saw across the Seven Hills, over the seraglio to the dark waters beyond, touched here and there by a bobbing lantern. Further west he imagined the water reflecting the flames that even now were shooting skywards, sending out brilliant showers of sparks, springing their way from rooftop to rooftop, consuming the wooden walls of the old portside houses, bursting through doorways, roaring down alleys. An unstoppable, purifying furnace fuelled by two thousand years of trickery and deceit.

The flames belonged to the city. All those long centuries they had smouldered, now and then breaking loose, feeding on the packed-up tinder that had been sifting into the shadows and the corners of Istanbul, its crooked angles dredged with dust and detritus and the filth of a million benighted souls. A city of fire and water. Dirt and disease. A city that stank on the water’s edge like a decaying corpse, too rotten to be moved, shining by the oily bloom of putrefaction.

He turned to the south. How dark the seraglio looked! Shuttered behind its ancient walls, how it brooded on its own eminence! But the seraskier knew better: it was a vulture’s nest, scattered with the filth and droppings of the generations, piled on the bones of the dead, filled with the insistent gaping cry of fledgelings warmed by their own excrement and fed with filth plucked from the surrounding midden of the city in which it had been built.

The seraskier stepped forwards to the gutter, and looked down into the square where his men were standing by their guns. Order and discipline, he thought: good men, moulded these last twenty years in proper habits of deference and obedience. They knew the penalty for stepping out of line. Order and obedience made an army, and an army was a tool in the hands of a man who knew how to use it. Without order you had only a rabble, that snarled and bit like a mad dog, ignorant of its purpose, open to every suggestion and prey to every whim.

Well, this night he would show the people who was stronger: the blind rabble and the vulture’s nest, or lead and shot and the power of discipline.

And when the smoke cleared, a new beginning. A brave new start.

He smiled, and his eyes glittered in the firelight.

Then he stiffened. He eased away from the wall and slid the pistol from his belt.

He cocked the firing pin and laid the barrel in a straight line, pointing back towards the arch.

Someone was coming up the stairs.

The shadow lengthened, and the seraskier saw the eunuch blinking as he turned his head from side to side.

“Well done, Yashim,” said the seraskier, smiling. “I wondered if you would come.”