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.