Shadow of God Read Free Page A

more surrounded the tent. Another ring of twenty Janissaries stood at attention in an outer circle, creating a formidable wall of warriors. The young men were dressed in dark-blue jackets and baggy, white pants. Their caps were tapered white cylinders, each holding a tall, white heron’s feather in its band. They wore high boots of soft, brown leather, and were armed with jeweled dirks in their belts; in the left hand some carried sharp pikes on six-foot wooden poles. All wore long, curved scimitars, inscribed in Arabic with the words “I place my faith in God.”
    Piri dragged the heavy brazier closer to Selim’s body. The tent was warm, but still Selim shivered in his broken sleep. His body had been racked with pain for the last several months, and the Sultan now spent most of his time asleep. His doctor had given him ever-increasing doses of opium so that now his sleep was disturbed less and less by the lightning jabs of pain. Still, he would awaken suddenly and cry out in the night, as the cancer ate him from within.
    Piri knew that the end was near, and had made all the appropriate arrangements. Many lives would hang upon Piri Pasha’s judgment. An empire could fall with a single mistake.

    Piri Pasha was the Grand Vizier of the House of Osman, rulers of the Ottoman Empire since 1300 A.D. For eight years, he had been the ear and the right hand of the Emperor. He was both friend and confidant to Selim Yavuz. He had, from the very first day of his duties, kept absolute faith with the trust Selim had placed in him.
    Selim had named Piri Pasha the “Bearer of the Burden,” for so great was his load that a lesser man would have faltered long before.In the eight years of service, Piri had no thought but for the welfare of his master, the Emperor; and of the Empire. Now that Selim’s death was near, Piri had much to do.
    The story of Selim’s short life had been written in blood. It was the blood of his times and the blood of his people. It was written, too, in the blood of his father and the strangled breath of his brothers. These deaths were the result of the law of Selim’s grandfather, Mehmet, Fatih; Mehmet, the Conqueror.
    An early unwritten Ottoman law had directed the newly crowned emperor to slay all his siblings, their children, and all but his own ablest son. The eldest did not necessarily succeed to the throne. It was hoped that in this way the new Sultan, by leaving only one heir alive, could prevent wars of succession that might endanger the Empire. Selim’s grandfather, Mehmet, had codified this tradition in the Law of Fratricide. Under the Law of Fratricide, all the possible heirs to the throne must be strangled with the silken cord from an archer’s bow. A knife or sword could not be used, for it was a sacrilege to shed royal blood. Mehmet, himself, had strangled his infant brother to death upon his own succession to the throne.
    When Selim’s father, Bayazid II, ascended to the throne, he, too, fell under this law of the Ottomans; but not as he had expected.
    Bayazid was a more reticent and gentle man than his father, Mehmet. He was loath to carry on, as his father had, the continuous wars to expand the Empire. Mehmet had challenged the great powers of the Shiite Muslims of Persia, going to war with Shah Ismail, their ruler. The Shiite religious doctrines seemed to Mehmet a dagger at the backs of the orthodox Sunni Muslims of Turkey.
    But, Bayazid had no taste for war. When he succeeded Mehmet as Sultan, he retired to the safety of Istanbul, and the Palace.
    Selim was the youngest of Bayazid’s five sons, and his favorite. Two of his other sons had died in childhood, and only Selim seemed suited for the succession to Sultan. But, Selim was impatient with his father, and longed to resume the wars his grandfather had started. So, at age forty, after a failed rebellion against Bayazid, Selim and his family went into self-imposed exile in the Crimea, north of the Black Sea. His wife, Hafiza, was the