The Drowning Guard: A Novel of the Ottoman Empire Read Online Free PDF Page A

bread into the stew. He hunched over his food, his hands glistening with grease as he packed the bread into his mouth with his open palm. A killing always made him ravenous, and he had been offered nothing to eat at the palace. “Come, you tell me what you would do, cook,” he said, pointing to his bowl for more stew.
    “I would sooner die as a man without blood on his hands than to kill night after night, a butcher of men.”
    “Cooks have big dreams. That’s why they remain cooks.”
    “And your dreams at night, Ahmed Kadir?” said the cook, slamming his ladle down on a dirty rag. “Do they come to visit you in your dreams?”
    “Who?” asked Postivich, looking up at the cook sideways, his chin still tucked over his food.
    “The drowned men. Do they beg you to spare their lives? Do they ask you to give last messages to their parents, their wives, their loved ones? Do they curse your newfound Allah as they evoke the true Christ’s name?”
    Postivich swept the bowl off the table with the back of his arm. It shattered on the floor. The men at the back table playing dominos stopped and looked up from their game.
    “No one visits me,” he growled. He grabbed the cook by the throat and the other Janissaries stood and moved towards him, one drawing his scimitar.
    “Release him, Kadir,” ordered one with a silver-edged dagger in his hand.
    Postivich eyed him and grunted, his grip loosening on the filthy wattles of the Greek’s throat.
    “I sleep like a suckled babe every night, cook,” he muttered, shoving the Greek hard against the wall. A chip of loose plaster broke off and sent dust spinning in the dim light. “It must be your good cooking,” he said.
    He nodded to the small group of men and they relaxed their grips on the daggers.
    Ivan Postivich left them and made his way back to his bunk.

    Esma Sultan could not sleep. The breeze coming off the Bosphorus was cooling and she could smell the jasmine and lemon of her gardens. She usually slept peacefully after her evenings of passion, exhausted physically. Her two favorite harem girls would wash her, dry her with white linen, and anoint her body with fragrant oils, as they begged her to recount in detail her moments of ecstasy, her ploys, and conquests.
    The men working in the palace and the gardens would shudder at the women’s laughter and turn away, saying a quick prayer to Allah.
    But this night had been different. Esma Sultan had performed her ablutions quietly and her dark looks had forbidden any trespass. The harem girls had kept their eyes fastened on the mosaics of the bath and not dared to speak, except to offer her tea and refreshment.
    This had been the first one to refuse her.
    Her nose wrinkled in disgust as she thought she smelled a foul undertone to the wind off the Bosphorus.
    She threw a gauze sleeve over her mouth and nose as the breeze stirred the linen curtains. Her stomach rose in her throat and she gagged.
    She recognized it as the smell of Death.
    The favorite sister of Sultan Mahmud II, Princess Esma Sultan had never been denied anything. She kept palaces at Macka, Eyup, and Sultanahmed inaddition to her sumptuous residence at Ortakoy. Last night’s Christian man, obtained in Bosnia on one of her slave raids, had entered the palace gates, neither surveying the unparalleled garden with its fountains nor raising his eyes to the formidable entry with its fluted columns and cornices. He had seemed blind to the lush tapestries and rugs that lined her inner chamber, and the jewels that adorned the Princess’s head, neck, arms, and hands.
    “Why have you summoned me?” he said through a slave girl interpreter.
    “Sit down, subject. Have you washed?”
    The man stared at her pointed silk tasseled shoes, and began stuttering in Serbo-Croatian.
    “Yes, Princess. I supervised the washing myself,” said the ivory-skinned eunuch at her right.
    “Was he given food and drink, Emerald?”
    “He refused both. His belly is as empty as a