The Janissary Tree

[ 24 ]

There’s a section of Istanbul, right up under the city walls at the head of the Golden Horn, which has never been fully built up. Perhaps the ground is too steep for building on, perhaps in the days of the Byzantines it was forbidden to build so close to the palace of the Caesars; so it had lingered on into the beginning of the nineteenth century as a sort of ragged wilderness, planted with rocks and scrubby trees.

If you knew where to look you could find men living there, and sometimes women, too; but it was unwise to poke about too diligently. Some of the denizens of this patch were more often abroad by night than by day, and at any hour an air of resigned criminality hung about the tired trees and the little caves and crannies where some of the city’s rubbish had been carefully drawn up to form a dismal kind of shelter. Benders, shacks and bustees artfully constructed by a shadowy people who had somehow slipped through the net of charity—or the hangman’s noose.

Now and again the city authorities would order a sweep-out of the hillside, but invariably most of its inhabitants would appear to have crept away, unseen. The sweeps turned up a lot of rubbish which was burned at the foot of the ravine, sometimes a corpse, a starving feral dog or someone too far removed from the world to do more than stare, with unseeing eyes, at this emanation of men from a city they had long since lost and forgotten. The noisy men, armed with long sticks, would finally depart; the hill-dwellers would silently sift back, and the creation of shelters would begin again.

Someone was now fumbling their way very slowly down the ravine, moving noiselessly and carefully from rock to rock. There was a little moon, but a heavy rolling bank of cloud blotted it out entirely for minutes at a stretch; and in one of those dark interludes the figure stopped, waiting, listening. “All quiet?”

The answer came in a whisper.

“All quiet.”

Two men groped past one another in the dark. The newcomer dropped feet-first into a shallow cave, squatted on his haunches and leaned his back against the wall.

Minutes later the cloud parted. The moonlight showed the man all he needed to see. A little opium box, propped against the wall. A dark pile of what he knew to be the uniforms. And at the back of the cave two men, trussed and gagged. The head of one was tilted back, as if he were asleep. But the eyes of the other man were flaring like the eyes of a terrified animal.

The newcomer glanced instinctively at the little box, grateful at least that the choice was made.