Status Updates From Yeniçeri Ağacı

There was no doubt in Yashim’s mind that the fourth murder had completed a stage, established the preliminaries. The old altars had been re-consecrated, in blood. The second stage was underway, Yashim felt sure of that.

The dervish danced in the space defined by a ring of bystanders, who every now and then had to stand aside to let someone in or out of the café, giving Yashim a glimpse of the performer. He wore a white tunic, white puttees, and a white cap, and he flexed his hands and legs in time to some inner melody, his eyes closed. But the dancer was not entranced: from what Yashim could see, it looked like one of the simpler

The first thing Yashim noticed, after the stench he was forced to suck down into his heaving chest, was the light.
It rose in eerie columns from the vats into which, across an area of several acres, the animal skins were lowered for boiling and dyeing. Against a forest of flickering torches, each vat threw out a spume of coloured vapour, red, yellow and indigo blending and slowly dissolving into the darkness

The most sought-after eunuchs at the palace came from the Sudan and the Upper Nile, lithe, hairless boys whose femininity belied their enormous strength and even more colossal powers of survival. Hundreds of boys, he knew, were taken every year from the Upper Nile and marched across the deserts to the sea. Only a few actually arrived. Somewhere in the desert, the operation was performed;

Across the jostling waterway, Yashim could just make out Üsküdar on the opposite shore, the beginning of Asia.
The Greeks had called Üsküdar Chalcedon, the city of the blind. In founding the city, the colonists had ignored the perfect natural setting across the water, where centuries later Constantine was to turn the small town of Byzantium into a great imperial city which bore his name.

Fifty years before a young woman had boarded a French packet en route from the West Indies to Marseilles. Raised on the Caribbean island of Martinique, she was being sent to Paris to complete her education, and find a suitable husband. She never arrived. In the eastern Atlantic her ship was taken by a North African xebec, and the beautiful young woman became the prisoner of Algerian corsairs.