Gomez wasn’t there to distill the words of the storyteller Meddah Masun for me, in the kahvehane on the Golden Horn where I had spent many afternoons, while I was still getting to know the capital of the empire. The Egyptian Yassir and a friend of his from Bursa tried to translate and explain, but I hadn’t come to listen to fables about animals.
After Ismail and his friends left, I went back to walking the streets of the city, and Galata in particular, to listen to rumors and pick up information, the only medicine I knew to cure my obsession, the sense of loss that lurked in my soul, the suspicion that I was irremediably missing something.
I had frequented that café while waiting for my audience at the Divan, my first encounter with the Giant. Now I was coming back, after seeing him for a second time, and it was that old Bosnian who dominated my thoughts.
Sokollu Mehmet Pasha. I couldn’t help thinking that the presumption with which he had received us, reeling off figures and reminding us that the war wasn’t over, contained a threat. Since the day of our meeting, that suspicion had never left me. Every tiny detail I encountered spoke to me of him, reflected his face, like a skillfully positioned little mirror. Even the story about the ducks related by the storyteller.
The migrating birds were us, the Jews, the wandering people. The rotten tree trunk on which we would settle was Cyprus. Yossef Nasi was in search of a kingdom, and he had instead been presented with a list of debts. In seeking his island of vines and olives, he had financed its sacking and destruction.
Lala Mustafa and Piyale Pasha had also settled on it, in search of redemption for their defeat in Malta, but they had found only a Pyrrhic victory. Cyprus had drained the imperial coffers. Now the grand admiral Muezzinzade Ali Pasha was preparing to face the Christian fleet, with the support of the Grand Vizier.
All of Sokollu’s political adversaries were engaged in an expensive conflict whose outcome was uncertain. They had wanted it, craved for it, in the face of all his resistance. Now all they could do was take it to its conclusion. Just like me.
Sokollu knew this. He had let us all embroil ourselves in the fate of the military venture, and now he was waiting for the test of truth on the surface of the water.
He was the crocodile and I was the bird who saw him opening his mouth too late.
However, Muezzinzade Ali could still crush the Christians and consolidate the expensive victory of Cyprus. In that case, Yossef Nasi might yet have a hope of getting back into Selim’s good graces and being readmitted to his presence.
According to reliable sources, the Sultan now had more ships than the Holy League. A little Ottoman boat with black sails had infiltrated the port of Messina at night and recorded that aside from the war galleys, the Christians had all kinds of vessels on the roads, anything that was fit to sail, even eleven Venetian galleasses. Venice had decided to put those clumsy giants back in the water, a choice that seemed strange to me.
But superiority of numbers might be meaningless. The Persian wars would have taught them that. Xerxes’s army, the biggest of all time, had lost against little Greece and. .
I felt a shock; my thoughts began rearranging and channeling themselves into a new direction. In Famagusta, Ismail had compared Bragadin to Leonidas.
After defeating the sovereign of Sparta, the Persians had faced the Athenian Themistocles. Thermopylae had been followed by the battle of Salamis. Xerxes’s fleet was destroyed in that stretch of water. Themistocles lured them into the straits, where the skill of the Persian and Phoenician pilots proved to be useless. He allowed himself to be pursued there, pretending to abandon camp, before launching his surprise attack. Deception had been the key to victory. The Athenian wooden walls had resisted, as predicted by Apollo through the mouth of the Pythia.
I wondered which oracle Sokollu had consulted, which priestesses. I thought of the women, of the whirl of messages that flowed along an invisible bridge between Constantinople and Venice.
I picked up the kettle in front of me and poured hot water on the tea leaves at the bottom of my cup. I had had enough coffee, and the hubbub of my reflections was enough to keep me awake. I remembered the kettle in Takiyuddin’s office, the one that turned the spit with its puffs of steam. Man can come up with strange machines. I remembered Nasi’s quip: “Would you ever have thought that a kettle could roast chickens?”
I watched Yassir and his friend talking to each other and realized that I wasn’t being the best dinner companion. I kept quiet, drinking my tea and pursuing abstruse lines of thought. Then I excused myself, left some coins on the table and went outside.
It wasn’t yet dark, and Galata was already filling up with noisy crowds. I crossed the Golden Horn by the usual caïque and started to climb the imperial road. The Old City was more silent and tranquil, apart from the packs of dogs wandering about the gardens and alleyways.
I arrived near the hippodrome, where I had seen the army filing past as they left for Cyprus. I remembered the huge bombard that had closed the parade. The symbol of the power of Turkish fire, forged by a Christian engineer in 1453. It was said that Orban had offered his services first to the Byzantine emperor and after being refused had turned to Mehmed II, who without demur had agreed to finance the work. The frightened features of Anton Varadian, the Armenian I met in Venice, assembled themselves in my mind. He, too, had passed from one side to the other. Before establishing himself on the lagoon, he had served the Sultan. Craftsmen care little for the destinies of states, or for faith: They go wherever they will find a patron willing to subsidize their craft. Just so, Takiyuddin had moved to Constantinople because the Sultan wanted to put him under his protection and finance his contraptions. I smiled to myself, thinking again of his incredible kettle.
A moment later I stopped in the middle of the street, transfixed by a thought, oblivious of the passersby who were hurrying home.
Who would come up with the idea of using a kettle to make anything but tea? A man of ingenuity. An engineer. Varadian had left Constantinople because the Turks weren’t willing to finance his experiments.
“Don’t undervalue machines,” Nasi had said when I arrived at Palazzo Belvedere. The phrase started buzzing incessantly around in my head. I noticed a mangy dog sniffing my leg, gave it a kick and started walking again, retracing my steps. Faster, this time, following the rhythm of my thoughts.
Varadian carried out experiments at the Lido. I had seen them. He was studying ways of making cannons more stable at the moment of firing. It was his obsession.
What had Fitch said when introducing his cannon? I tried to remember. His words were there, in my trained mind, and I just had to find them.
“You could arm a whole fleet with them, if it weren’t for the recoil that prevents their being used on ships.”
The recoil. The backward momentum of discharge. A cannon needs space, exactly what is missing on ships. The Turks aren’t interested in that. The Turks venerate the Big Cannon, they want huge pieces of artillery, to be used on the ground, to blow out the bellies of fortresses.
But the Venetians are interested in recoil. “Their power lies in the fleet.” Sokollu’s voice quickened my pace still further, merging with Nasi’s: “Where the force of an army can’t reach, ingenuity can.”