Free The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin Page B

this way and that, following her reflection in the mirror.
    "Not
old?"
    "Certainly
not," said Yashim quickly.
    Preen
put her fingers to her cheek and gently pushed the skin up. She let it drop,
and Yashim saw her look at him in the mirror. Then she smiled brightly and
turned to face him.
    "Fixing
a party?"
    Yashim
grinned and shook his head. "Looking for information."
    She
raised a finger and wagged it at him. An enormous ring studded with cut glass
winked in the light: one of the brash confections of the bazaar called "burst
neighbors" for the envy they were supposed to inspire. "Darling, you know I
never betray a confidence. A girl has her secrets. What kind of information?"
    "I
need a quick line on the gossip."
    "Gossip?
Why on earth would you come to me?"
    They
both laughed.
    "Men
in uniform," Yashim suggested.
    Preen
wrinkled her nose and made a moue.
    "The
New Guards, from the Eskeshir Barracks."
    "I'm
sorry, Yashim, but the thought revolts me. Those tight trousers! And so little
color. To me they always look like a bunch of autumn crickets hopping to a
funeral."
    Yashim
smiled. "Actually, I want to know where they
do
hop. Not the men so
much as the officers, Preen. Boys from very good families, I'm told."
    He
left it hanging.
    Preen
raised her eyebrows and touched her hand to the back of her hair.
    "I
can hear the girls now. No promises, but I'll see what I can do."
    22
    ***********************
    The
room was tiny, more like a cell, sparsely furnished with a pine footstool, a
sagging rope bed, and a row of wooden hooks from which hung several large bags,
bulking black in the yellow light. The room had no windows and smelled fetid
and damp, a queasy amalgam of scent and sweat and the oil that smoked blackly
from the lamp.
    The
person whose room it was moved swiftly toward the bags and fumbled at the neck
of the smallest, fingers groping around inside before closing on another, smaller
bag, that they proceeded to pull out, plucking at the drawstrings. The contents
fell onto the mattress with a soft, metallic chink.
    A
pair of glittering black eyes stared with hatred at the jewels that glittered
back. There was a golden chain bearing a dark lapis. There was a silver brooch,
a perfect oval, set with diamonds the size of new peas. There was a bracelet--a
smaller version of the gold chain, its clasp hidden beneath a ruby anchored to
a silver roundel--and a pair of earrings. There was no doubting where the jewels
had originated. On every face, painstakingly inlaid into the lapis, between the
diamonds, over the ruby, that loathsome and idolatrous symbol,
Z
or
N,
zigzagging back and forth, crooked as the man.
    That
was the way it had all begun, for sure. It wasn't easy to follow the exact
steps--those Franks were cunning as foxes--but Napoleon had been the author of it
all. What was it that the French kept pressing on the world? Liberty, equality,
and something else. A flag with three stripes. There was something else. No
matter, it was all lies.
    That
flag had fluttered over Egypt. Men like scissors had gone about scratching,
scraping, digging things up, writing it all down in little books. Other scissor
men, led by a half-blind infidel, had burned their ships within the shadow of
the pyramids, and Napoleon himself had run away, sailed off in the night. Then
those infidels had marched and starved, thirsted for water, and died like flies
in the deserts of Palestine.
    But
that was only the beginning. You would have thought, wouldn't you, that
everyone would see the folly of the foreigners? But no: the Egyptians tried to
be more like them. They'd seen how the French had gone about, behaving like the
masters in the dominion of the sultan. They put it down to the trousers, to the
special guns the French had left behind, to the way the French soldiers had
marched and wheeled, fighting like a single body in the desert, even while they
were dropping like flies.
    New
ways. New stuff that came out of little books. People always scribbling