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

thought, the palace card was the wrong
one to try: every institution in the city had its pride. He decided on another
throw.
    "We
live in strange times. I'm not so young that I can't remember when things
were--better ordered, in general, than they are today. Every day, right here in
Istanbul, I see things I'd never have dreamed of seeing in my young days. Foreigners
on horseback. Dogs literally starving to death on the streets. Beggars in from
the countryside. Buildings removed to make way for strange mosques. Frankish
uniforms." He shook his head. The soup master gave a little grunt.
    "The
other day I had to return a pair of slippers that had cost me forty piastres:
the stitching was coming away. And I'd only had them a month!" That was quite
true: Yashim had bought the slippers from a guildsman. For forty piastres they
were meant to last a year. "Sometimes, I'm sorry to say, I think that even our
food doesn't taste quite the way it used to."
    Yashim
noticed the soup master's fingers clench and wondered if he'd gone a bit far. The
soup master put a hand up to his mustache and rubbed it between his finger and
thumb. "Tell me," he rumbled, "do you like coriander seed? In soup?"
    It
was Yashim's turn to frown. "What a peculiar idea," he said.
    Mustafa
the Albanian got to his feet with surprising agility.
    "Come,"
he said simply.
    Yashim
followed the big man onto the balcony around the courtyard. Below the
balustrade, under the arcade, men were busy frying tripe. Apprentices staggered
to and fro with buckets they'd filled from the well in the center of the court.
A cat slunk through the shadows, weaving between the legs of enormous chopping
blocks. Yashim thought: even the cat has its position here.
    They
descended a flight of stairs and came out into the arcade. A man wielding a
shiny cleaver looked up as they appeared, his eyes streaming with tears. His
cleaver fell and rose automatically on a peeled onion: the onion stayed whole
until the man swept it aside with a stroke of the blade, and selected another
from the basket hanging at the side of the block. Mechanically he began to peel
and chop it. Not once did he so much as glance down at his fingers.
    Now
that, Yashim thought with admiration, is a real skill. The onion man sniffed
and nodded a greeting.
    The
master entered a corridor and began fumbling at his belt for keys. At length he
felt what he was looking for and drew it out on a chain. He stopped in front of
a thick oak door, banded with iron, and placed the key into the lock.
    "That's
a very old key," Yashim remarked.
    "It's
a very old door," the master replied sensibly. Yashim almost added, "And none
the worse for that," but decided against it. The lock was stiff; the master
winced and the key slid sideways in the slot, depressing the necessary pins. The
door opened lightly.
    They
were in a large, low-ceilinged room, lit by an iron grating so high up in the
opposite wall that a portion of the ceiling had been sloped upward to meet it. A
few dusty rays of the winter sun fell on a curious collection of objects,
ranged in shelves along the side walls. There were wooden boxes, a stack of
scrolls, and a line of metal cones of varying sizes whose points seemed to rise
and fall like the outline of a decorative frieze. And there, at the back of the
hall, stood three enormous cauldrons.
    "All
our old weights," said the master. He was looking lovingly at the metal cones. Yashim
repressed his impatience.
    "Old
weights?"
    "Every
new master sees to it that the guild weights and measures are renewed and
reconfirmed on his appointment. The old ones then are stored here."
    "What
for?"
    "What
for?" The master sounded surprised. "For comparison. How else can any of us be
sure that the proper standards are being kept? I can place my weights in the
balance and see that they accord to a hair's breadth with the weights we used
at the time of the Conquest."
    "That's
almost four centuries ago."
    "Exactly,
yes. If the measures are the same,