The Janissary Tree

[ 48 ]

It’s mine,” said the girl.

It was the only thing she’d said so far.

Yashim bit his lip. He’d been trying to talk to her for half an hour.

Lightly, at first. Where was she from? Yes, he knew the place. Not the exact place but…he drew her a picture in words. Mountains. Mist. Dawn creeping down the valley. Was that like it?

A blank.

“It’s my ring.”

Heavy: we don’t think it belongs to you. Serious suspicion, serious charge. Unless you tell us what you know it’ll be the worse for you, girl.

“It’s mine.”

Cajolery: come on, Asul. You have a life half the women in Circassia would die for. Whims granted. Luxuries. A safe and honourable and enviable position. A lovely girl like you. The sultan’s bed and then—who knows?

She pushed out her lips and turned her head, threading a curl with her fingers.

Yanked the curl savagely, pressed her lips together.

“My ring,” she blurted.

“I see. She gave it to you?” Yashim asked gently.

“Don’t believe a word,” the Kislar Agha interrupted. “They all lie like hyenas.”

Yashim raised his shoulders and swallowed his irritation. “Asul may answer as she pleases, but I hope it will be the truth.”

The kislar snorted. The girl flashed him a contemptuous look.

“She never gave it to me.”

“Um. But did you have some agreement, some understanding about the ring?”

The girl gave him a strange look.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. What does it matter anyway? She’s dead, isn’t she? Fucking fish food. What does it matter if I took the ring?”

Yashim frowned. Did he have to explain the idea of theft? There was something particularly repugnant about stealing from a corpse. A sacrilege. If she didn’t at least feel that, where could he begin?

“It may matter very much indeed. Was she dead or alive when you took the ring?”

But the gorgeous little face had clammed up again.

Yashim knew these mountaineers, raised among the far-off peaks of the Caucasus. Hard as their stony houses, as their frozen tracks in winter. Living on air, forever feuding with their neighbours. God had made them beautiful, especially their women: but he made them hard.

Wearily he put the question again. Alive? Or dead?

She made no response.

Perhaps she was right, after all. What did it matter? Yashim looked again at the ring in the palm of his hand. The dresser was right. It was no better than market tat, a plain band of silver, with a worn motif on the annulus which seemed to show two snakes swallowing each other’s tails.

He glanced at the girl. She was wearing bangles, a torque: all gold. Not unusual here, in the harem, where gold and jewels from across the empire went to satisfy the cravings of the women for—what had the valide called it—distinction? Yet he knew how objects like these could take on a resonance no outsider could ever detect or guess at: how they could become the focus of spite or jealousy in spite of their intrinsic worthlessness, the cause of livid arguments, rages, tears, fights.

The sultan’s women had been raised on the hardscrabble. What was death out there? Babies died. Women died giving birth to babies who died, and men got shot in the back for an unlucky word—or lived to be a hundred. Death was nothing: honour counted. In the mountain world they came from people took offence at the lightest word, and allowed feuds to develop into bloodshed over generations, long after their original causes were forgotten.

Was it possible, Yashim asked himself, for a feud like that to have been carried into the palace? The distance which separated the Caucasus from Istanbul was too great. More than geographical.

The snakes, what did they mean? Round and round they ran, forever swallowing their tails: a symbol of eternity, was it, derived from some impious mumbo-jumbo peddled by shamans in the mountains?

Yashim sighed. He had the feeling that he was stirring up problems where they didn’t exist, making trouble where it wasn’t needed. Wasting his own time. All he had achieved was to sharpen the animosity he detected flying between Asul and the Kislar Agha.

“That’s it,” he said. He bowed to the black eunuch and, taking him by the arm, drew him aside. “Five more minutes, kislar. Give me that. Alone.”

Looking into his bloodshot eyes, Yashim found it hard to know what he was thinking.

The kislar grunted.

“You are wasting your time,” he said. His eyes slid round to fasten on the girl.

“The lala will talk to you in private.” She glanced up, expressionless. “You know what we expect.”

And he left the room.