Jason Goodwin - The Bellini card

Carla’s fleche was properly executed. Quite suddenly she had become the arc, and the point of her foil was traveling through the air precisely as the move suggests. She was an arrow.

And Yashim, like the fatalist he never was, had time only to bow his head.

Twenty years had passed since Yashim first entered the palace school. He had been a young man already, four or five years older than his companions, those inexperienced, beardless youths whose pranks and chatter had tormented him in those first few months of indifference and despair. He was admitted as a favor: his father could think of no other way to heal the terrible damage that his enemies had wreaked upon his son. Perhaps, too, he was sent away because he so forcibly reminded the old governor of his wife, Yashim’s mother, the beautiful Elena.

Elena had been in the cave. She was dishonored, and then she was killed. His father’s enemies had reserved for Yashim, however, a yet more exquisite torture. The act itself lasted only seconds; it involved only pain. But the bitterness of that moment would mock him all his life.

Sportively gelded by his father’s enemies, Yashim had brought his pain and his despair to the palace school in Istanbul, and they had meted out unremitting discipline, constant training of body and mind. Yashim entered a world ruled by the rod, a world of hard wooden beds, floggings, cold baths, and weekly expulsions. The old eunuch who governed them was a martinet, capricious, exacting, manipulative, mildly predatory. To the least talented he was unfailingly kind, before he kicked them out. To those who showed true promise he was a scourge. Yashim did everything well, but it was three years before they discovered what he did better than anyone. Before he made himself indispensable.

At first he had resisted the regimen, scarcely capable of believing in the possibility of redemption, and doubting that there was anything left in him to redeem, as though he had already died. His spirit was indeed dead. He was surly and slow. He didn’t sneer at the old teacher, or at the acres of cold calligraphy they were forced to ingest, or the games of wrestling and gerit. He was a cultivated young man, stronger, faster, more experienced than the others. He simply didn’t care.

The old eunuch started waking him early, an hour before the other boys, in the dead watch of the night. He woke him with a crack of his silver-tipped rod across the legs. “You have less time than the others. We must make more.” Sometimes he made him run. Sometimes he would recite the Koran. At night, when the other boys talked in whispers, Yashim fell asleep exhausted.

Yet slowly, without knowing why, he had found himself waking up. He learned to channel his agony of mind into the discipline imposed upon him by the old lala and stopped being afraid of doing well. Train the body and cultivate the mind, and the heart will follow: that was the old Ottoman precept.

Out of the myriad accomplishments he had been expected to attain, the recitals, the music and the languages, the rhetoric and algebra and deportment and logic, the horsemanship, archery, gerit, Yashim retained only fuzzy memories of the wrestling school.

Yet even that had perhaps been expected by the palace school. By study, after all, anyone could learn the Koran; anyone could learn to pull a bow with craft and effort. But for the men who were to direct the energies of the empire mastery of all arts was not an end, only a beginning. To remember a thing was nothing. What counted was the power to use it.

Yashim’s knowledge of the Sand-Reckoner’s diagram was scarcely available to him in thought: it was ingrained at a level of instinct.

The woven bands of an endless knot belonged to the invisible machinery of his mind.

Twenty years on, in a palazzo in Venice, the instinct came alive.

When the point of the foil, aimed at Yashim’s chest-sixte, in the necessary jargon-touched the bulbous floret of the turban that covered his head, it released Yashim from a burden he had been carrying since early morning and allowed him, at the same time, to slide forward, holding the muslin in his hand.

With his turban skewered by the foil, Yashim sidestepped and advanced, in three mildly unbalanced steps. As he moved he whirled the length of muslin around himself, as though he were striking a gong, and at his back the contessa’s blade, embedded in the folds, was swept from her hands.

It struck the floor with a metallic clang and skittered, spinning, until it thudded against the wall beneath the window.

Yashim did not watch it go, as Carla did. He used the opportunity to spring and grab the pimpled leather hilt of the nearest weapon, which happened to be a Turkish scimitar.

Only then, in an effort of self-preservation, did he glance around.

To his surprise the contessa was standing hand on hip, watching him.

She had made no effort to retrieve her foil.

The scimitar was firmly wired to the wall. Yashim reluctantly released his grip and dropped his hand.

The contessa smiled.

“I always seem to be meeting sabreurs,” she said.

“Sabreurs?”

She gestured to the scimitar. “You conquered eastern Europe with that. The ancestor of our saber. The Hungarians adopted it, as they adopted everything else you brought to the battlefield. Hussars. Dragoons. Military bands. We fight like with like, Yashim Pasha.”

“Yes,” Yashim said. He stooped to retrieve a length of turban. He wound it around his bleeding hand and tore it with his teeth. “Yes, of course.”

“And the saber won the battle of Waterloo,” she added. “It’s not in fashion now.”

He wound the remainder around his head.

When he felt properly dressed he said, “I am not a pasha.”

She stepped forward and rang a bell. “Coffee, Antonio.” To Yashim she said, “The people of Venice seem to think you are a pasha. You gave them something they have missed for many years. In my eyes you are a pasha, even with your empty box.”

Yashim thought he detected a glint of amusement-a cruel amusement-in those beautiful blue eyes. The pasha-with his empty box! Yashim, the eunuch.

“Contessa-I-” He found himself stumbling. “The Armenians’ Koran. I recognized the hand.”

She put her finger to her lower lip and stood there, thinking.

“You knew the pattern,” she said.

“I was trained to it,” Yashim replied. “And so, as it seems, were you.”

“I’m sorry about your hand.”

“I doubt it.”

She laughed. “You were better than me, Yashim Pasha. I thought-I hoped I would learn something about you. Less than I imagined.” She paused, lowering her lids. “You never attacked. Perhaps I should have let you take that saber.”

“It was stuck to the wall,” Yashim pointed out.

“But that’s not it,” she went on, in a fascinated voice. “You hid yourself. How did you do that?”

Yashim shrugged. “I was lucky.”

“Don’t condescend to me.”

Yashim paused. “Perhaps I used you.”

“Used me? How?”

“I’m afraid you were almost too good, Contessa. I’m no expert on foil, or fencing, but I saw how you moved your feet. The way you advanced to attack. It looked faultless. Only you didn’t concentrate on your opponent.”

“I hope you don’t think I underestimated you.”

Yashim shook his head. “That’s not it. It’s rather that you didn’t estimate me at all. Afterward, you think I hid. I’d say-you didn’t really look.”

Yashim could see her blush. She bit her lip.

“You’re saying that I was showing off?”

“You’re conscious of your power,” he said evenly. “And you are beautiful, of course.”