Free The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin

slippers, some
well-laundered strips of linen, and such bangles and jewels as they possessed. As
cariyeler,
harem maids, her roommates had not yet been advanced to the
rank of
gozde:
but they were hoping.
    Two
girls had spread an old sheet across their bed and were busy depilating
themselves with a sticky yellow paste made of herbs, perfumed ash, and
quicklime that they took from a plain brass bowl on a small octagonal bedside
table. One of them, a redhead with green eyes and pale skin, was carefully
anointing herself with a spatula when Yashim came to the door and bowed. She
chucked her chin in a casual greeting.
    "The
gozde's
bed?" Yashim inquired.
    The
girl on her knees gestured with the spatula.
    The
other girl, spreadeagled, raised her head and squinted down her body.
    "They
ought to take her stuff out, poor thing," she said. "It's not very nice for
us."
    "I'm
sorry," Yashim said. "I just want to see what there is." He ran his hands over
her clothes, then pulled two bags off the pegs and emptied their contents onto
the bed. "You must have been friends."
    The
girl who was kneeling got off the bed and came across for a better look. She
had her elbow out, to keep the ointment on her armpit in the air, and with one
hand she tugged her black hair back into a ponytail. Her skin was olive, and
her Ups were dark like old wine, the same color as the nipples of her breasts,
rising in firm curves.
    Yashim
glanced back and then stirred the belongings strewn across the empty bed.
    "She
was my size," the girl said, reaching forward to pick up a bundle of
transparent gauze. "We all knew that."
    The
girl on the bed giggled.
    "She
was!" The girl shook the thing in her hand and then gathered it to her chest,
working her free arm so that it lay across one breast, the translucent silk
ribbons dangling against her tummy. There was something so innocent and so
obscene about the gesture, that Yashim blushed.
    The
girl on the bed saved him from speaking. "Put it back, Nilu. It's too creepy. Have
you,
lala,
come to take her things away?"
    Nilu
let the bustier flutter back onto the bed and turned to her friend.
    Yashim
carefully surveyed the
gozde's
belongings.
    "What
was she like?" he asked.
    The
girl called Nilu climbed back onto her friend's bed; Yashim heard the mattress
creak. There was a silence.
    "She
was--all right."
    "Was
she a friend?"
    "She
was nice. She had friends."
    "Enemies?"
Yashim turned around. The two girls were sitting side by side, staring at him.
    "Ow!"
The girl suddenly put a hand between her legs. "It's stinging!"
    She
jumped off the bed, her pale breasts swinging, one hand clamped between her
slender legs.
    "Come
on, Nilu. I've got to wash."
    Nilu
reached for a towel on a peg.
    "She
had friends," she said. She scampered to the doorway. "Lots of friends," she
added, over her shoulder.
    21
    ****************
    "WELL,
hello, precious."
    The
speaker was a rawboned woman of about forty in a glossy black wig, a sequined
bustier with padded breasts, a long diaphanous skirt, and a pair of large
beaded slippers. She was also wearing half a pound of makeup. It made her look
older, Yashim realized with a slight pang.
    But
it was what--eighteen years? They were both of them older than he had been when
he first came to the city in the retinue of the great Phanariot merchant-prince
George Mavrocordato. Mavrocordato had been quick to see where Yashims talent
lay, setting him to work at the ledgers for the sake of his cultivated hand,
sending him down to the port to pick up useful information, asking him to con
over the manifests and identify new articles of trade. Yashim had learned a
great deal, and with his gift for languages--a gift greater, if possible, even
than his employer's, who spoke Ottoman Turkish, Greek ecclesiastical and
demotic, Romanian, Armenian, and French, but Russian badly, and Georgian not at
all--he had made himself indispensable to the Mavrocordato clan. He'd discovered
a talent for being invisible, a knack of holding