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their enemies scattering in panic before them.
    Now the Sipahis would ride into battle as had the troops of the Khan. They, too, inspired such fear in their enemies that some battles were won at the news of their approach. Whole armies fled when they heard that the Sultan Selim’s Janissaries and Sipahis were marching in their direction.
    Two Sipahis had been waiting for word from the Pasha for several days. During that time, they never left their post, nor did they sleep for more than an hour at a time. Their food was brought to them on Piri Pasha’s orders, and they were ready to move at his word.
    Piri moved through the camp, appearing to refresh himself in the brisk mountain air. He showed no sign of the terrible events of this day. More than ten thousand Janissaries and Sipahis were gathered in this camp outside the city of Edirne. The night was peaceful with the low noises and stirrings of a great orderly encampment. Water carts rumbled by, and night soil was removed from the latrines. Everywhere in the camp there was complete order. Tents were lined up in perfect rows; not a scrap of garbage ever hit the ground.
    Cooking fires crackled under giant copper pots. Piri could hear the quiet murmur of men talking in respectfully low voices, lest they disturb the sleep of their Sultan. Nowhere was laughter heard, for this might incite the wrath of the Pasha at this terrible moment in his Sultan’s reign. Smoke drifted through the trees, and among the tents. The wind carried the smoke away from the camp, down along the fading green hills of that early autumn evening. There was a softness in the air that would soon be replaced with the cold, wet winds of winter.
    Piri approached the camp of the Sipahis, and settled himself near a trough where two of the horsemen were silently gambling with wooden dice by the light of their dying cooking fire. He stood a while and watched. In their uniforms and the settling darkness, all the soldiers looked alike. The two men had been handpicked by the Pasha. One Sipahi, Abdullah, was a young sword bearer. He was thebest rider in his corps, and his was the best mounted corps on Earth. The other was not a Sipahi at all. He was Achmed Agha, Commander of the Army. Achmed had pulled a cape over his uniform, and looked for all the world like an older version of the Sipahi with whom he gambled.
    Piri waited a few minutes longer. He was an old man now, and felt every year of it. He never thought that this job would fall to him, for he believed that he would have died long before Selim. But, the cancer that ate at the Sultan’s organs cared nothing for age, taking Selim’s life when he was still in his forties.
    Piri sighed in the darkness, and stretched his aching shoulders. How he longed for the peaceful life. How he wanted to return to his home and his treasured tulips. He saw himself tending his garden, perhaps adding some more roses to it this year. He wanted to see again the wonderful view of Istanbul across the waters of the Golden Horn. But, there was a job to do first. He, and only he, could protect the succession. Only he could assure the survival of the empire.
    He moved toward the two soldiers. “It is much too late an hour for gambling such as this!” Piri spat out the word sa’at , hour. This was the prearranged signal that the time had come, that the Sultan was dead. The two soldiers stopped immediately. Abdullah wrapped the wooden dice in a leather sack, which he stuffed into his robes. Then Achmed Agha bowed his head and whispered, “May Allah smile upon his soul…and upon you, Piri Pasha, and upon all of us.”
    This high-ranking officer knew the great dangers of the next few days.
    Piri took a piece of paper upon which was scrawled a few words in his own hand. Then he said, loudly enough to be overheard by the nearby horsemen, “See that the Kabarda Horses are accounted for and correct!” There was contempt in his voice. The other soldiers who overheard him believed that