Read Online The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin - Free Book Online Page A

notice. Forget the people who don't like it. You add some beans. Some
carrots. The same thing. Some like it, some don't. But more people don't care
much either way. By the end, you can take out the tripe. Call it soup. Nobody
will know any better. Only a few."
    He
tugged at his mustache.
    "The
Janissaries were like that. Like a recipe that has been quietly changed. In the
city I made tripe and onion soup from tripe and onion. But in the barracks, so
to speak, they wanted me to believe in a kind of tripe and onion soup made of
beans and bacon. In the end, I had to leave."
    Yashim
could admire the older man's guts. So much in this city was founded on
pretense: it took a certain kind of temper for a man to step aside. But then,
the Albanian hadn't stepped away entirely. Not if what Yashim suspected about
the guards at the guild was true.
    "Your
old friends," he suggested.
    "No,
no, they had no hold over me, not what you might think. They didn't blame me,
either. But they remembered me. Our lives went separate ways. But they
remembered."
    He
picked up a pastry with a clumsy sweep of his arm and stuffed it into his
mouth. Yashim watched him deliberately chew it. His eyes were sparkling.
    "The
fifteenth of June was the worst night of my life. I heard the cauldrons--we all
did, didn't we? Eighteen years the sultan had waited. Eighteen years for the
boy to become a man, and all that time with one resolve, to destroy the force
that had destroyed Selim."
    Perhaps,
Yashim thought. But Mahmut's motives were more complex than mere vengeance for
his uncle's death. He wanted to rid himself of the men who had almost casually
brought him to the throne, as well: to expunge a debt, as well as avenge a
death. The Janissaries had crudely expected gratitude and took carte blanche. Yashim
could remember the cartoon that was stuck up on the palace gate one night,
showing the sultan as a dog led by a Janissary. "You see how we use our dogs,"
the notice ran. "While they are useful and let themselves be led, we treat them
well; but when they stop being of service, we kick them out into the streets."
    "The
people of the city were scared. Boom boom! Boom boom! It was a frightening
sound, wasn't it? Night falling, and not a sound in the streets as we listened,
all of us. I went up onto my roof, treading like a cat. Oh, yes, there was a
tradition all right. They said the voice of the Janissaries was the voice of
the people. The men believed it. The cauldrons were beating for the empire, as
they'd beaten for centuries. Only the sound of the cauldrons drumming and the
barking of the pye-dogs in the streets.
    "Look,
I stood on the roof and I heard the sound and I wept for those fools. I wept
for a sound. I knew I would never hear it again, not if I lived for a thousand
years."
    He
wiped his hands over his face.
    "Later,
after the killing and demolition, some of them came to me asking for a quiet
job. One of them had been living for days in a foxhole when they torched the
Belgrade woods to flush them out. They had to avoid their families and relatives,
for their sakes. They were lost. They were hunted. But we had broken bread
together. I gave them money and told them to slip away, get out of Istanbul. Nobody
would be interested in them anymore, not after a few weeks, a few months.
    "And
slowly, some of them started coming back. Looking for quiet jobs, out of
sight--stokers, watchmen, tanners. I knew a few. There must have been thousands,
I suppose, unknown to me."
    "Thousands?"
    "I
knew a handful, so I gave them the work. Night duties. Discreet." He closed his
eyes and slowly shook his head. "I can't understand it. Ten years, and all
good, quiet men. Grateful for the work."
    "So
what would they want a cauldron for, do you suppose?"
    The
soup master opened his eyes and fixed them on Yashim.
    "That's
what I don't understand. It was only a pretend cauldron, anyway. You can't do
it with a cauldron made of black tin. It would only be make-believe."
    Yashim
thought