The Drowning Guard: A Novel of the Ottoman Empire Read online

  “The Princess Esma, the Royal Sultane, has summoned you,” snapped the guard. “And do not think our Sultan concerns himself with your pride. He holds you in no high regard. Has he not stripped you of your cavalry command and assigned you here?” He flashed a tight, mocking smile. “What is a Kapikulu cavalryman without a horse?”

  Postivich had to fight to control his anger. The loss of his cavalry command was the deepest wound of his life. The unfairness—the shame—that had brought him to this very moment was almost more than he could stand. But wounds are a soldier’s life and he knew he must bear this one.

  With an angry wave of his hand the guard dismissed the janissary to the company of the Head Eunuch. This servant was nearly as tall as Postivich himself and held his head proudly erect, in the manner befitting a confidant of the Royal Ottomans. The bare skin of his arms shone in the torchlight, glossy like a black viper newly shed. “You shall be prepared for your audience. I am Saffron.”

  Ivan Postivich was led to a courtyard fountain where the Head Eunuch supervised his washing by grunting now and then with satisfaction or swinging a copper lantern towards a neglected square inch of dirty flesh. The night spun away each time the eunuch focused light on the janissary’s newly white skin, the filth rinsing off on the cobbled stones.

  Postivich bit his tongue as the eunuch handed him a sponge, insisting he scrub again. The janissary understood the rituals of bathing before entering the royal chambers; he had been raised in a Sultan’s court at Topkapi. But bathing before seeing a woman—this he had only done before sex as was mandated by the Koran and the Prophet Mohammed. A man’s bathing and circumcision honored Allah; that women were spared a soldier’s stinking body and a filthy foreskin was an unintended consequence.

  Ivan Postivich dried himself with a fine linen sheet. He tossed it, damp and wrinkled, back to the Head Eunuch.

  “Does your mistress require such standards of cleanliness of all her male visitors?” growled Postivich.

  “My mistress’s requirements are none of your business, janissary,” said Saffron. “Watch your tongue tonight or you will leave bound in a sack.”

  The janissary was finally ushered into the Royal Chamber a little after midnight. Hundreds of lanterns glowed in the darkness of the domed room. Candles from an elaborate French chandelier flickered, lighting vividly colored tiles and casting shadows on the thick velvets of the divans and cushions. The chamber was vast, with intricately carved moldings, perforated cornices rising in white plaster and pearl alabaster. Sandalwood incense burned, a heady scent that spoke of the furthest reaches of the Ottoman Empire.

  The Head Eunuch shoved the janissary to his knees as he stared at the opulence of the cavernous room.

  “Approach the Sultaness,” he hissed. “Or I sharpen my sword against your neckbones.”

  Postivich shuffled forward, his knees scuffing the straw mats laid over priceless carpets. It was a long, humiliating journey to the divan on which the Sultaness reclined, her head listlessly raised from a pillow to watch him approach.

  She was indeed the sister of Mahmud II. She had inherited her high cheekbones and auburn hair from her Christian mother, but her aquiline nose was pure Ottoman, a gift of her father, Sultan Abdulhamid, and his forefathers. In the capricious candlelight, her eyes looked black, but were in fact the deep brown of mahogany. Below them, shadows of blue showed through her translucent skin, the telltale signs of fatigue and illness.

  The Sultaness raised her chin as he bowed, his head touching the floor that smelled of lemon blossoms mixed with the faintest odor of sweating feet.

  “Stand now, janissary.”

  Her voice was low and authoritative. It was also female and its register was foreign to a janissary who had lived only among fighting men for the past two decades.

  The janissary rocked back on his heels and, keeping his head lowered, raised his body on his massive legs. The Princess must have been impressed with his height as it uncoiled above her, but she showed no sign of it.

  “Tell me. Did you—drown a man last night?”

  Postivich raised his eyes to meet hers.

  “As you ordered, Sultane,” he said. “I followed my orders explicitly. The man was put to death.”

  Esma Sultan took a deep breath and held it and looked beyond him, into the shadows where the candlelight did not flicker.

  “What did the infidel say?” she finally whispered.

  Infidel indeed, he thought. He could smell her now, a scent masked by the sandalwood and lemon oils, the musk of her woman’s body. Despite the danger, despite the knowledge that this woman was the Sultan’s sister, he felt himself aroused.

  The only women he had seen unveiled in the years since his circumcision had been prostitutes. His body was conditioned to the only response it knew.

  He cursed the Ottoman emperors, one by one, back to Mehmed the Conqueror, for his body’s mutiny. That an unveiled woman—Sultaness or otherwise—dressed in a gauzy linen tunic, should address a janissary was surely against the Sheriat, the rules of Islam that govern even the Ottoman sultans, with its holy word.

  “Speak, I say! What said the infidel in the moment of his death?” As she spoke, he could see the outline of her breasts, trembling.

  Ivan Postivich spoke clearly to the mosaic floor, not daring to raise his eyes, for fear he would falter. As he began his story, he thought of the saltwater on his fingertips and the sign of the cross he had drawn across the prisoner’s forehead. He could not comprehend the gesture that came so spontaneously to his hands just before he snapped the stranger’s neck.

  None of this would ever be known to anyone, he promised himself. This much of a gift he would give the dead man who had extracted his Christian name.

  “Very little, your Sultaness. Only a few Latin words offering up his soul to his infidel god.”

  He portrayed an uneventful execution, a stoic, silent prisoner. As he spoke he contemplated his words and story as one with the mosaic floor and the geometric figures on the rugs. Simple, but perfectly matched, he thought, never daring to look straight at the Princess’s eye. A pattern of facts that made a perfect, elegant design, one piece fitting into the next.

  “Are you sure you have told me every detail?” Her arched eyebrows now diving low over her eyes. Her eunuchs and the other Janissaries who guarded her palace were far more subservient than this giant of a man.

  The soldier shifted his weight on the cool floor and wondered at how the palace locked out the cruel heat of summer and the suffering of the world.

  “Look at me, janissary,” commanded the Sultaness, her dark eyes boring into him. “Tell me the last words of the drowning man!”

  Postivich raised his eyes reluctantly and again felt his organ quicken under his tunic and sash. He cursed himself for his impulses and stared into her eyes in defiance.

  Eyes of death, thought Ivan Postivich, though he registered the handsome beauty of her lineage. This Ottoman whore commands me to grovel in front of her and tries to intimidate me with her imitation of a man’s authority! I am not one of the Christian boys she finds for the night, but a janissary with rights guaranteed by the sanctity of the Sheriat. Should she lay a hand on me without just provocation, the Janissary Corps would burn her palace and sever her brother’s head, just as they did his cousin before him.

  Ivan Postivich thought of the man he had drowned last night. The man’s last words haunted him.

  What was your Christian name? He saw the condemned man mouthing the words inches above the sea where he would lie for eternity. These last cries, these last seconds on Earth would remain his secret and Allah’s. This murderess would never hear the story of the humiliation of her victim, his body’s stench of terror before death. The humiliation and agony would be drowned in the depths, as was the man.

  The janissary fastened his gaze on the finest work of Persia’s blind weavers who created this miracle under his feet, as he remained silent.

  The Sultaness let the silence dra
w out, staring at a small ruby, the shape of a teardrop, in the palm of her hand.

  “Bah!” she uttered suddenly, clutching at the jewel savagely and then flinging it into the dark recesses of the room.

  An Ottoman plays with precious jewels and men’s lives as if they were a child’s toys, thought Postivich.

  “You bring me nothing! You are useless to me. You, like all Janissaries, are corrupt and faithless to your Sultans and the Ottoman Empire you profess to serve!”

  Ivan Postivich smiled inwardly, a warm satisfaction spreading through his body.

  “Your Sultaness,” said the janissary, his eyes lowered. “I have searched my mind for more observations and have found none. The prisoner surrendered himself to be placed in the cloth bag, the stones piled over his feet. He did not even twist in the bag as we heaved him over the side. He seemed resigned to his fate and the protection of his Christian god.”

  The Princess pursed her lips, which without paint looked bloodless. The brightness of her eyes, within black kohl rims, sought him out, like night creatures.

  “No screams. A cry for a loved one, perhaps? A regret, a confession? Did he not beg for my mercy, as they all do?” she pleaded, her voice ragged in desperation. “You lie, janissary!”

  “He disappeared silently into the Bosphorus, the water closing over him like the lid of a coffin.”

  The janissary’s defiance made her eyes flick suddenly towards the soldier, and the muscles tighten around her jaw. For the first time that night, she stopped to observe him as a man. Light brown hair and broad Slavic bones. This man was a giant compared to the other Serbs and Croats and Greeks who surrounded her as Janissaries. He was even taller than the Head Eunuch. She could not see his eyes with his head bowed to the floor.

  She knew they must be blue. Blue like her own mother’s eyes.

  “He was stoic as befits Your Highness’s”—the janissary hesitated, if only for a second—“standards.”

  She focused her eyes on the strong chin of the Serb.

  She remembered now, the day the Pasha had delivered him to the Topkapi. The lad was a carefully selected slave from the devshirme, the “gathering” of Christian youth, taken from their homes to serve as Janissaries, years after the practice had officially been abolished. Pasha Imad had picked this one out, a boy of only seven, having heard tales of a young boy, already a giant, and his beautiful sister. He had been delivered to the Sultan’s palace as a gift from the Pasha, when Esma Sultan was still a girl. She wondered if he had been one of her father’s “favorites” when he was but a child.

  “Standards?” she said, quickly. “Is a common janissary now to appraise the tastes of the Sultan’s favorite sister?”

  Ivan Postivich felt a cold shock seize his spine, despite his newfound pleasure in antagonizing this woman before him. The Ottoman Princess was looking at him now, not as an unknown soldier who had carried out a nightly chore, but as a man who had made an observation in her presence—a judgment. His choice of words could cost him his life, but a growing anger replaced his fear when he thought how she had made him a murderer. He suppressed the great urge to spit in her face.

  “Speak, janissary, or have your tongue cut from the back of your throat,” shouted her personal bodyguard, moving towards him with vengeance.

  “Do not touch him, guard. Let him speak,” she commanded sharply.

  “Your Princess,” said Postivich, his gaze returning to floor again, “I confuse high Ottoman with the barbarous Slavic tongue of the army. I—”

  “You have been brought up in the palace since you were a boy. You speak Ottoman as well as I. You think I don’t remember you as a child, you colossal fool! I have seen you play cirit and polo on the imperial grounds—you were the Pasha’s gift to my father long before you rode your horse on campaigns as a Kapikulu cavalryman. Speak now or suffer before Allah.”

  Ivan Postivich straightened his bowed neck and forced himself to breathe. His next words could be his last and he chose them as carefully as weapons on the battlefield.

  “My tongue is clumsy with the language of Allah and the Sultans. My race is not worthy of the language of imperial divinity, O Sultane.”

  The Princess’s eyes sparkled in amusement and the hard gleam of the huntress receded into the black depths. She relaxed her rigid back against the velvet draped divan.

  “The Persians would murder you for what you have just said,” she mused. “They claim their own tongue cleaves to Allah’s ear.” Satisfied with his quick answer, her lips curled, almost imperceptibly, up towards her high cheekbones. “But you have won your life with your agility in Ottoman, and recovery. Your grace belies your size. Who would guess an oafish giant astride a mare could avoid the cirit spear with such grace?”

  Postivich did not answer. His silence at the compliment amused her. She was accustomed to the fawning slaves and foreign ambassadors who indulged her, hoping Esma Sultan would speak favorably to her brother. This janissary was different.

  “I have marveled with the rest of the Topkapi Court at how you could swing under your horse at a gallop to avoid your opponent’s jereed,” she continued. “The Horse Master taught you well.”

  “The Horse Master was a gifted man,” replied the janissary. “He spent great effort and time in my instruction and I will never forget him. He and your cousin Selim III were great men and I mourned their passing.”

  Praise for the current Sultan, Esma’s brother, Mahmud II, was conspicuously absent from his utterance. The cavernous silence of the great hall magnified the insult, but Postivich’s lips pressed tight refusing to say more.

  “I see that you are uncomfortable in my presence,” said the Sultaness, her smile and the memory of the janissary’s war games fading now. “I give you leave to go.”

  Postivich bowed, backing towards the door.

  “Wait. I’ve seen your shadow many nights now, janissary, through the lattice to my gardens. What fate has placed you so far from your orta to serve me?”

  He swallowed and answered.

  “It was the Sultan’s wish.”

  Esma Sultan looked at the giant thoughtfully.

  “What is your name?”

  He hesitated, wondering if giving the Princess his name would mark his fate.

  “Pasha Mustafa named me Ahmed Kadir, Sultane.”

  Despite having been given the name at seven years old, after his circumcision, Ivan Postivich had never accepted it, though no one knew him by any other. His true name had been discarded as a matter of course, as had his religion, family, and foreskin.

  “You do not look an ‘Ahmed.’ Perhaps the Pasha had run out of names when your turn came,” she smiled. “No. You are not an Ahmed, I am quite sure of it. I shall call you—‘Biscuit.’ ”

  Her freckled handmaid, hidden in the corner until now, laughed, suddenly filling the cavernous audience chamber with the sound of startled birds.

  The Sultaness turned towards her and raised her chin at the janissary, her face full of mirth. She looked no longer an Ottoman ruler, but a woman.

  The janissary had no time to react, for two bodyguards seized his arms and pulled him away like a prisoner. They led Ivan Postivich, twitching with indignation at their touch, through the mother-of-pearl doors that led out of the Princess’s private council.

  One of the guards who had seized his arm roughly now released Ivan and gave him a hard shove that sent his great body stumbling across the mosaic floor into the hall, shaking the wooden grille with his thunderous footsteps. He heard the startled cries and then a titter of laughter from the Princess’s harem just beyond the intricately carved screen.

  “You are lucky you still have breath, janissary,” said the turbaned guard, spitting on the polished tiles. A young page scurried and wiped the floor clean with a lemon-scented rag.

  The guard looked at the boy in disgust, his thick lips curled up under his black mustache. He had wanted the satisfaction of seeing his saliva glisten at the janissary’s feet.


  “Speak an opinion to the Princess again and you will be feeding the fish of the Bosphorus with your pagan Christian flesh, you Serbian dog!”

  The guard stalked off to return to the Princess’s inner chamber.

  Postivich felt a tug on his sleeve and saw the other guard motioning him to a far corner of the room under an enormous palm tree.

  “That you should arouse a princess’s regard enrages his Turkish soul,” whispered the fair-skinned guard, his mouth working quickly over the words in Serbo-Croatian. He gave a furtive look at the dark screen, knowing that the harem sat listening but would not understand the guttural dialect of the Janissaries. “You should know that a janissary has no eyes or ears, and only a tongue when the Sultan wills it.”

  “Every night she sends her servant, the small white eunuch, for details of the murders,” whispered Ivan. “This night there were none to give him.”

  “Then next time, invent them, my friend, and spare your miserable life.”

  The guard turned and disappeared through the doors towards the royal council chamber.

  Ivan Postivich walked to the outer courtyard of the palace. He heard horses clattering on the stones and saw fine Turkish and Arab steeds come through the palace gates. The lead rider was a grizzled old man with hide as tough as an elephant’s. He led a string of three ponies on each side. On their backs were ragged children riding bareback, their naked heels clapping at the horses’ sides, making them prance and crow-hop. One black mare reared high, pawing at the night air, and her rider slid off her back to a volley of profanity, whistles, and laughter.

  A Solak captain approached. The children slid off their mounts, naked bellies buffing the sheen on the well-kept horses.

  “Old man, did you not receive the news? Esma Sultan is not well—there is no game tonight. Return to the stables and take these filthy urchins with you!”

  The head groom signaled to his squad of children.

  “Remount your horses. We will return to our beds early tonight,” he smiled. “Go on, move the horses out of here before I get kicked by that blood-cursed stallion!”