The Snake Stone Read Free Page B

talk,” he said.

7
    I N the palace at Besiktas, with its seventy-three bedrooms and forty-seven flights of stairs, the Shadow of God on Earth, Sultan Mahmut II, lay dying of tuberculosis—and cirrhosis of the liver, brought about by a lifetime’s devotion to reforming his empire along more Western, modern lines, and bad champagne chased down with spirits.
    The sultan lay back on the pillows of an enormous tester bed hung with tasseled curtains, and gazed through red-rimmed eyes at the Bosphorus below his window, and the hills of Asia across the straits. He had, he dimly knew, a world at his command. The fleets of the Ottoman sultan cruised in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea; the prayers were read in his name at the Mosque in Jerusalem, in Mecca and Medina; his soldiers stood watch on the Danube by the Iron Gates, and in the mountains of Lebanon; he was lord of Egypt. He had wives, he had concubines, he had slaves at his beck and call, not to mention the pashas, the admirals, the seraskiers, voivodes, and hospodars who governed his far-flung empire in trembling or, at least, respectful obedience to his will.
    In his thirty years as sultan, Mahmut had presided over many changes to the Ottoman state. He had destroyed the power of the Janissaries, the overmighty regiment that opposed all change. He had adopted riding boots and French saddles. He had told his subjects to stop wearing the turban, if they were Muslims, and blue slippers, if they were Jews, and blue caps, if they were Greeks: he had meant all men to receive equal treatment, and to wear red fezzes, and the stambouline, a cutaway coat.
    The results were mixed. Many of his Muslim subjects now reviled him as the Infidel Sultan—and many of his Christian subjects had developed unrealistic expectations. Those Greeks in Athens—they had actually rebelled against him. After seven years of fighting, with European help, they had created their own, independent kingdom on the Aegean. The kingdom of Greece!
    As for the champagne and brandy, they had eased some of the anxiety that the sultan experienced in his efforts to update, and preserve, the empire of his forefathers.
    And now, at the age of fifty-four, he was dying of them.
    His hand moved slowly toward a silken cord whose tassels brushed against his pillows, then it fell again. He was dying, and he did not know whom he could ring for.
    The sun pulled slowly around, now slanting from the west. There were others he remembered, not just names, but the faces of men and women he had known. He saw the old general Bayraktar, with his furious mustaches, and the astonishment on his face when he burst into the old palace all those years ago and hoisted Mahmut out of a laundry basket to make him sultan. He saw his uncle Selim dead, in a kaftan stained with the blood of the House of Osman, and his favorite concubine, Fatima, alive: fat, cheerful, the one who rubbed his feet the way he liked and expected nothing. He remembered another general who had fallen to his death, and the faces of men he had seen in crowds: a sufi with a gentle smile, a student in the grip of loyalty, clutching the Banner of the Prophet; a Black Eunuch, down on his knees; a Janissary who had cocked his fingers at him, like a pistol, and winked; the pale whiskers of Calosso, the Piedmontese riding master, and the downcast eyes of Abdul Mecid, his son, who had a chest like a girl’s waist; and the beard of the Patriarch—what was his name?—who took the cross of office from his hands, and died twirling at the end of a rope in the hot sun.
    There was another face, too…His hand moved out, his fingers groped for the tassel.
    But when the slave arrived, bowing, not looking up, Sultan Mahmut could not remember who it was he had wanted to see.
    “A glass…the medicine…there, that’s it,” he said.
    “Dr. Millingen—” the slave began.
    “—is my doctor. But I am sultan. Pour!”

8
    “T AKE care on these stairs, monsieur. They are very