The Janissary Tree

[ 58 ]

Yashim had returned to the Imperial Archives after leaving his message with Preen’s landlady. In daylight, with a weak winter sun filtering through the high windows, the place looked more ordinary, the atmosphere flatter. There was another reason for the change, too. Several archivists were in attendance, but Ibou the Sudanese boy was not among them. The Library Angel, Yashim thought.

The head archivist was a mournful fellow with drooping moustaches, not a eunuch but a superannuated graduate of the palace school.

“The divan is in session,” he explained gloomily. “Come back this afternoon.”

But Yashim did not want to come back that afternoon. “This is urgent,” he said.

The archivist stared at him with sad eyes. He looked infinitely put-upon, but Yashim suspected he was merely lazy.

“Help me now. You can break off if any orders come from the viziers’ council.”

The archivist nodded slowly, blowing out his cheeks.

“Put your request in writing. We’ll see what we can do.”

Yashim leaned his elbows on the reading desk and chewed at a pencil. Eventually he wrote:

“Istanbul fire-towers. Location details.” And then as an afterthought he added: “Summaries of renovation/maintenance costs 1650-1750,” as being more likely to turn up what he wanted to know.

The archivist acknowledged the paper slip with a brief grunt but made no effort to read it. It lay on his desk for over twenty minutes while he thumbed through a quarto volume of figures and Yashim paced to and fro by the entrance. Eventually he picked it up, glanced at it, and rang a bell.

His subordinates moved in imitation of their master’s ponderous ennui, shaking their heads and glancing up at Yashim now and then as if they suspected he had come merely to try their patience. At long last one of them disappeared into the stacks. He was gone about an hour.

“Nothing specific on location. There are two volumes of accounts, which refer to the fire-service in general. They straddle your stated time-frame. Do you want to see them?”

Yashim mastered an urge to pull the man’s nose.

“Yes, please,” he said evenly.

The archivist shuffled off. He came back with two surprisingly small books, smaller than Yashim’s own hand and bound in blue cloth. The older book, which roughly speaking covered a period from the beginning of the seventeenth century to 1670, was quite badly worn, and the signatures which bound the pages together were so badly rotted that pages slipped from position in clumps, threatening to slide out of the covers altogether.

The archivist frowned.

“I’m not sure we can allow you to examine this one,” he began.

Yashim exploded.

“I haven’t waited all morning to be told I’m incapable of keeping a few pages of a book in order. I’m going to look at the book here, on the bench. Not fan it about, or shake it, or chuck it in the air.”

Yet the books proved to be a disappointment. After half an hour Yashim had only turned up three references, two dealing with the Stamboul Tower, which had burnt down twice, and the other referring only in the vaguest way to the fire-towers, without numbering or naming them. Entries had been made in the books by many hands, which made the business of deciphering some of the older entries in particular both exacting and frustrating.

It was while he was trying to make out an entry written in particularly antiquated script that Yashim suddenly thought of his message to Preen. He had written it clearly enough, and if she followed his advice she would be probably be safely tucked up in some corner of the cafe in Belol Oglu, waiting for him and challenging the men to stare. That thought made him smile, but the smile died suddenly.

He had written Preen a warning, making his instructions clear. Stifling the poetics of the written word, exaggerating the loops of his script, he’d written a few lines that anyone could read, even a child.

Even, but only.

Only a literate child.