The Janissary Tree

[ 51 ]

The man who kills in the dark is not afraid of darkness.

He waits for it. It is reliable, it always comes.

Darkness is his friend.

His feet were bare, to make no sound. He knew he would make no sound.

Years ago, he was one of the Quiet Men. One of the elite. Now he watched the daylight ebb from the grating that lay overhead. In four hours’ time he would lift the grating as easily and silently as a feather, and begin his work. But now he would wait.

He remembered the day of selection. The colonel had sat with a rose on his lap and a blindfold over his eyes at the centre of the barracks hall and dared the men to approach him, one by one. To lift the rose—and return to their place. The reward: a commission in the sappers.

The stone floor of the hall was strewn with dried chickpeas.

Nobody had the dexterity and the patience that he had. His self-control. One or two others reached the rose: but their eagerness betrayed them.

They taught him how to move in the dark, making no sound. It was easy.

They taught him how to live underground. They buried him alive, breathing through a cane.

They explained to him how shadows worked, what the eye could see, the difference between movement and movement.

They ordered him to be a shadow. Live like a rat. Work like a miner. Kill like a snake.

Patience. Obedience. Time, they said, is an illusion: the hours pass like seconds, seconds can seem like lifetimes.

Inch forward under the enemies’ lines. Burrow into his defences like a rat. Listen for the enemy sappers, the countermines, the creaking of the props. Absorb the dark like a second skin. Kill in silence.

And if he was captured—it happened, that far forward of the lines—say nothing. Give nothing.

They didn’t talk much anyway. That suited him, too, he’d never been a talker. The sappers were the Quiet Men.

He hadn’t needed friends when he had the corps. He belonged. He shared faith. And the faith carried him through, didn’t it? Through the cramped tunnel. Beyond the cramped muscle. Over fear and panic into the timeless and immobile centre of all things.

Then came the Betrayal. The shelling of the barracks. Dust, falling masonry, splinters of stone. A wall that hung in the air before it fell. He remembered that moment: an entire wall, thirty feet high, blown from its foundations and sailing, hanging in the air.

He remembered how it flexed and buckled like the flanks of galloping horse. As if the air itself was thick as water. It was a moment that seemed like an eternity.

It gave him ample time, then, to seek the hollow and roll up into it.

Like a man entombed. But not dead. Breathing through an aperture in the rubble. Working the rubble gradually from head to toe like a worm coming up for the dew.

The grating overhead was now invisible. The sapper could see it, though, by moving his head just a fraction of an inch. By using the light that no one else could see.

He raised his chin. This was the time.

Patience was all that mattered.

Obedience was all that mattered.

People would die. People had to die.

Only death could sanctify the empire’s rebirth.

Only sacrifice could cleanse and protect the holy shrines.

The four pillars of the Karagozi.

The assassin felt in his pouch. He touched the ground with the palm of his hand.

And then, like a cat, he began to move.