The Fire. Katherine Neville

slipping past them in the waters. Each slender caique was rowed by shadowy oarsmen – perhaps ten or twelve shadows per boat, more than thirty men in all. Their silhouettes swayed rhythmically.

      In horror, Haidée knew there could be no mistake where these boats were headed. There was only one thing that lay beyond the marsh – out there in the middle of the vast lake. These boats and their clandestine oarsmen were headed for the Isle of Pines, where the monastery lay: the island refuge of Ali Pasha.

      She knew she must reach the hamam at once – she must reach the shore, where the pasha’s horseman was waiting. She knew just what those terrified screams had meant – what the silence, and the small beacon fire that followed it, must signify. They were warnings to those awaiting the dawn, those who were waiting on that isle across the lake. Warnings by those who must have risked their lives just to light such a fire. Warnings to her father.

      It meant that the impregnable Demir Kule had been taken without a single shot. The brave Albanian defenders who had held out for two long years had been defeated, by stealth or treachery, in the dead of night.

      And Haidée understood what that meant: These boats slipping past her were no ordinary ships.

      These were Turkish ships.

      Someone had betrayed her father, Ali Pasha.

      

      Mehmet Effendi stood in darkness, high in the bell tower of the St Pantaleon monastery on the Isle of Pines. He held his spyglass, awaiting his first glimpse of dawn with uncustomary anxiety and trepidation.

      Such anxiety was uncustomary to Mehmet Effendi due to the fact that he had always known what each next dawn, in a long succession of dawns, was going to bring. He knew such things – the unfolding of future events – with a sharp precision. Indeed, ordinarily he could time them to within the fragment of a moment. This was because Mehmet Effendi was not only – in his civil role – Ali Pasha’s chief minister, he was also the pasha’s chief astrologer. Mehmet Effendi had never been wrong in predicting the outcome of a maneuver or a battle.

      The stars had not been out last night, and there’d been no moon to go by, but he hardly needed such things. For in these past few weeks and days, the omens had never been clearer. It was only their interpretation, right now, that still gave him pause. Though why should it? he chastened himself. After all, it was all in place, wasn’t it? Everything that had been foretold was coming to pass.

      The twelve were here, weren’t they? All of them – not just the general, but the shaikhs, the Mürsits of the order – even the great Baba himself, who’d been brought here from his near-death bed, by litter-bearers, over the Pindus range of mountains, to arrive just in time for this event. This was the event that had been awaited for more than one thousand years, since the days of the caliphs al-Mahdi and Harun al-Rashid. All the right people were in place – and the omens, too. How could it possibly go wrong?

      Waiting beside Effendi in silence was the general: Athanasi Vaya, head of the pasha’s armies, whose brilliant strategies had held the Ottoman armies of Sultan Mahmud II at bay these past two years.

      To accomplish this, Vaya had employed the freebooting Klepht banditti to guard the high mountain passes against intrusion. Then he’d deployed Ali Pasha’s crack Albanian Palikhari troops, in Frankish-style guerrilla warfare and sabotage. At the end of last Ramadan, for instance, when Sultan Mahmud’s officers were inside Janina’s White Mosque at their Bairam prayers, Vaya had ordered the Palikhari to demolish the place by cannonade. The Ottoman officers, along with the mosque, had been reduced to charcoal. But Vaya’s real stroke of genius involved the sultan’s own troops: the Janissaries.

      The degenerate Ottoman sultans – ensconced in their harems in the ‘Golden Cage’ of the Topkapi Palace at Constantinople – had always raised armies by imposing upon their outlying Christian provinces a levee called the Devishirme – the ‘Tax of Children.’ Each year, one in every five Christian boys was removed from his village, then taken to Constantinople, converted to Islam, and enrolled in the sultan’s armies. Despite the injunctions of the Qur’an against forcible conversion to Islam, or against selling Muslims into slavery, the Devishirme had existed for five hundred years.

      These boys, their successors, and their descendants had grown into a powerful, implacable force that even the Sublime Porte at Constantinople could not control. The Janissary troops, when not otherwise employed, did not blanch at setting the capital city aflame, robbing civilians in the streets – nor even removing sultans from their thrones. The sultan Mahmud II had lost his own two predecessors to such Janissary predations. He’d decided it was time to put a stop to it.

      But there was a twist to the plot – and it lay right here in the White Land. That problem was precisely why Sultan Mahmud had sent his armies here over the mountains, why they had laid siege to these lands for the past two years. Why their vast armies had been waiting outside the Castro to bombard the fortress of Demir Kule. But this problem also explained why they had not yet been successful – why the Janissaries had not demolished the fortress. And it was this problem that gave Chief Minister Mehmet Effendi and his companion more than a small bit of confidence tonight, as they stood here now, watching, in the bell tower of St Pantaleon, in the predawn light.

      There was only one thing on earth that the all-powerful Janissaries truly venerated – something they had continued to revere, over all the past five hundred years of their military corps’ existence. This was the memory of Haji Bektash Veli – the thirteenth-century founder of the mystical Bektashi order of Sufi dervishes. Haji Bektash was the Pir of the Janissaries – their patron saint.

      This was, in truth, why the sultan feared his own army so. Why he’d had to replenish the forces fighting here with mercenaries drawn from other pashiliks, elsewhere throughout his far-flung empire.

      The Janissaries had become a true menace to the empire itself. Like religious zealots, they swore an oath of allegiance drenched with secret mystical codes. Worse, they swore allegiance only to their Pir – not to the house of Osman or its sultan, trapped in his Golden Cage on the Golden Horn.

      I have trusted in God…(so began the Janissaries’ oath)

      We are believers of old. We have confessed the unity of Reality. We have offered our head on this way. We have a prophet. Since the time of the Mystic Saints we have been the intoxicated ones. We are the moths in the divine fire. We are a company of wandering dervishes in this world. We cannot be counted on the fingers; we cannot be finished by defeat. No one outside of us knows our state.

      The Twelve Imams, the Twelve Ways, we have affirmed them all: the Three, the Seven, the Forty, the light of the Prophet, the Beneficence of Ali, our Pir – the head sultan, Haji Bektash Veli…

      It gave Mehmet Effendi and General Vaya relief to know that the greatest Bektashi representative here on earth – the Dede, the oldest Baba – had traveled over the mountains to be here tonight. To be present for the event they had all awaited. The Baba, who alone knew the true mysteries and what the omens might portend.

      But despite all the omens, it seemed something may have gone wrong.

      Chief Minister Effendi turned to General Vaya in the darkened bell tower of the monastery. ‘This is an omen I do not understand,’ he told the general.

      ‘You mean, something in the stars?’ General Vaya objected. ‘But my friend, you’ve assured us that all is well in that department. We’ve followed your astrological injunctions to the closest. It’s as you always say: Con-sider means “with the stars”; dis-aster means “against them”!

      ‘Furthermore,’ the general continued, ‘even if your predictions are completely wrong – if the Castro is destroyed, with its millions in jewels and thousands of barrels of powder – as you know, we are all Bektashis here, including the pasha! They may have replaced their leaders with the sultan’s men, but even they haven’t dared to destroy us yet, nor will they attempt it, as long as the pasha holds the “key” that they all covet. And do not forget – we also have an exit strategy!’

      ‘I