Close to the shoreline of the Golden Horn, on the Pera side, stood a fountain set up by an Ottoman princess as an act of generosity, on a spot where the boatmen used to linger and drop their fares. Hundreds of fountains existed in the streets and squares of Istanbul, but this one was particularly old and lovely, and Yashim had admired it many times as he passed. Sometimes, in hot weather, he would rinse his face in the trickle of clear water that splashed down onto the tiled basin.
It was those tiles that now stopped him on the street, where he stood unnoticed and aghast in the stream of traffic passing along the shore: muleteers with their trains, porters under enormous sacks, two fully veiled women attended by a black eunuch, a bashi-bazouk on horseback, his sash stuffed with pistols and swords. Neither Yashim nor the ruined fountain attracted anyone’s attention: the crowd flowed around him, a man standing alone in a brown cloak, a white turban on his head, watching stricken as a trio of workmen in overalls and dirty turbans attacked the fountain with their sledgehammers.
It was not that Yashim lacked presence; his only lack was of something more definite. But he was used to passing unnoticed. It was as though his presence were a quality he could choose to display or to conceal, a quality that people would be unaware of until they found themselves mesmerized by his gray eyes, by his low, musical voice, or by the truths he spoke. Until then, though, he might be almost invisible.
The workmen did not look up as he approached. Only when he spoke did one of them glance around, surprised.
“It’s the bridge, efendi. Once this has gone, then the tree, there’ll be a way through here, see? Got to have a way through, efendi.”
Yashim pursed his lips. A bridge linking Pera to the main city of Istanbul had been talked about for years, centuries, even. In the sultan’s archives in Topkapi Palace Yashim had once seen a sepia design for such a bridge, executed by an Italian engineer who wrote his letters back-to-front, as if they were written in a mirror. Now, it seemed, a bridge was about to be built-the new sultan’s gift to a grateful populace.
“Can’t this fountain just be moved aside?”
The workman straightened his back and leaned on his sledgehammer. “What, this?” He shrugged. “Too old. New one’d be better.” His eyes slid along the shore. “It’s a shame about the tree.”
The tree was a colossus and a welcome patch of shade and shelter on the Pera shore. It had stood for centuries; in days it would be gone.
Yashim winced as a sledgehammer cracked down hard into the basin of the fountain. A chunk of stone broke away, and Yashim put out a hand.
“Please. A tile or two…”
He carried them away carefully, feeling the old mortar dry and brittle in his palm. The boatman who took him gliding across the Horn by caique spat on the water. “The bridge, it’ll kill us,” he said in Greek.
Yashim felt a shadow across the sun. He did not risk a reply.
Reaching home, he laid the tiles by the window and sat on the divan, contemplating the strong lines of the twining stems, the beautiful deep reds of the tulips, which had so often refreshed his eyes as the water of the fountain had refreshed his skin. Such flaming reds were unobtainable nowadays, he knew. Centuries ago the potters of Iznik had fanned their talents to such heights that the river of knowledge had simply dried up. Blues there always were: lovely blues of Kayseri and Iznik, but not the reds beloved of the heretics, who came from Iran and vanished in their turn.
Yashim remembered how he had loved such tiles, where they decorated the inner sanctum of the sultan’s palace at Topkapi, a place forbidden to all ordinary men. In the harem itself, home to the sultan and his family alone, many women had admired those tiles, and many sultans, too.
Yashim had seen them only because he was not an ordinary man.
Yashim was a eunuch.
He was still gazing at the tiles, remembering others like them in the cool corridors of the sultan’s harem, when a knock on the door announced the messenger.