Was Resid’s friendship-his protection-an offer Yashim could afford to refuse?
Outside the vizier’s office, Yashim turned and walked a long way down a carpeted corridor, toward a pair of double doors flanked by motionless guards and a row of pink upholstered straight-backed chairs.
The guards did not blink. What did the sultan want, Yashim wondered, that Resid so palpably did not?
He took a chair and prepared to wait-but almost immediately the doors flew open and a white-gloved attendant ushered him into the presence.
5
Yashim had not seen the sultan for some years before his elevation to the throne. He remembered the skinny boy with feverish eyes who had stood pale and alert at his father’s side. He expected him to have grown and filled out, the way children do to their elders’ constant and naive astonishment, yet the young man seated on a French chair with his legs under a table did not, at a glance, appear to have changed at all. He was almost preternaturally thin and bony, with awkward shoulders and long wrists concealed-but not made elegant-by the arts of European tailors.
Yashim bowed deeply and approached the sultan. Only his brows, he noticed, had developed: heavy brows above bleary, anxious eyes.
The sultan screwed up his face and opened his mouth as if to scream, then whisked a handkerchief from the desk and sneezed into it loudly and unhappily.
Yashim blinked. In the Balkans, people said you sneezed whenever you told a lie.
“Our gracious parent always spoke highly of you, Yashim.” Yashim wondered if the compliment was hollow. Mahmut had been a tough old beast. “As our esteemed grandmother continues to do.”
Yashim cast his eyes down. The valide, Mahmut’s French-born mother, was his oldest friend in the harem.