So their wariness — and this bothers George, seems to proviso and moderate still further this already mitigated man — is only a sort of extemporized battle plan. First they will kill him. Easy work. No sooner said than done. What are the odds? Twenty against one? Twenty-five? He is momentarily outraged — more Englishness; perhaps his fellow recruits have his number after all — by the sheer unfairness of his situation. Even the Soup Man, who has complimented him, who has given him high marks for his alertness (though to tell the truth he had not quite taken in at the time what his commander had meant), has sanctioned his slaughter. (And this English too, his complacent pride not so much in distinguishing himself as in pleasing a superior.) So. They will kill him. Steal his bribegold, Khoraghisinian’s. Harvest their corpses for anything of value — matches, a heel of bread, rope, the oranges both carry. What holds them back is what comes next. The free-for-all, that winner-take-all frenzy of their terrible tontine arrangements. Surely, Mills thinks, this is why they stare at him, glance furtively at one another. They are sizing each other up, remembering the power in that one’s fingers, this one’s arms. Dead reckoning will, viciousness. Savages, Mills thinks. They’re savages.
The Soup Man sees Mills squat over Khoraghisinian’s body, the dead man momentarily disappearing beneath the flowing cape George Mills wears. He sees Mills’s quick movements but they’re obscured by his robe and he cannot make them out. Quite suddenly there is blood, but it seems almost of a different color and viscidity than that which flows from the wounds of punctured men. He can’t tell, but it seems cooler.
Mills is standing. He turns in what seems to the troopers a magic circle. Khoraghisinian’s entrails lie gleaming in his left hand. The shit-encrusted bribegold shines in his right. He holds out both.
“We were friends,” he intones. He speaks extra slowly in his new, barely mastered tongue so that he may be understood. He turns so that all might hear him. He means to mollify them with guts and gold and stench. He means to curry favor, to bribe them with atrocity. “We were friends,” he says again of the man whose body he has just mutilated. “At the last minute, at the last minute I remembered something he told me once when we were on fire guard. ‘Bribegold must be well hidden.’ We were friends. He was wily. I frisked his shift and groped his robes. I did his duds like a dowser. ‘Well hidden,’ he said. And it came to me he must have swallowed it. See,” Mills says and he raises his arms still higher, bringing his palms together in which Khoraghisinian’s bowels slosh, collision and shift like so much damp, dark, swollen seaweed beneath his offering, the surgical, amputate bribegold steaming like carrots in soup.
It is just then that the muezzin calls from his tower and the Janissaries sink to their bellies as if shot. Only Mills, the pagan, gentile infidel, fails to prostrate himself at once. Then he too lowers himself, but he cannot remember the prayers. All that rings in his head is a nursery rhyme from childhood. He recites, first to himself and then aloud, “Little Jack Horner.”
It was meaningless as the violence in Punch-and-Judy shows. One man had fallen that day. Hardly anyone had escaped injury. There were no doctors. They didn’t take prisoners and they didn’t have doctors.
“Sir!” Mills says smartly as he reports to the Meat Cut.
The Soup Man and Latrine Scrub drift over. Seeing that it is Mills who has been singled out, other officers join the group. The Superior and Inferior Scullions, two Water Carriers, a Cook and Pastry Cook, the Salad Man and three Steam Table Men. There are a handful of noncommissioned officers as well — Waiters and Dining Room Orderlies, Dishwashers and Busboys.
Mills waits for the Meat Cut’s instructions, and though he does not know what the man will say to him he knows it won’t be pleasant. Perhaps he will be ordered to dredge latrines. Or work the potato gardens. Or clean prayer rugs. Or groom the mascot. Or stuff the mattresses. Or bathe officers.
Neither the officers nor the troopers have forgotten — or for that matter understood — his actions on the day of the practical when first he sneezed Khoraghisinian to death and then prospected his friend’s body, as he himself doesn’t understand much of the hocus-pocus of his position or the official status of the Corps. As he barely understands the parodic kitchen or menial nomenclatures of the officers’ titles. Steam Table Men, Meat Cuts, Pastry Cooks, Inferior Scullions, Latrine Scrubs, Butcher Boys and all the rest. As he barely understands the reasons for eschewing ordnance, guns, bows and arrows, weapons even the most modest armies have at their disposal, savage tribes do. Or comprehends even the mission of the Janissaries. There has not been a major engagement in years, and although there have been “incidents,” most of these have been political, demonstrative in nature, militant, bloody and editorial, often in support of the Sultan’s policies but just as frequently in opposition. (He knows now that Mahmud II is not an emperor at all but a sultan and somehow this knowledge has altered something important in his life. He had been the loyal subject of a king. The King had had his reasons — which Mills not only retrospectively understands but actually respects — to question his loyalty and had tricked him into what George thought of — Ottoman Empire had sounded grand to him, Ottoman Emperor had — as a lateral subordination, a sort of transfer of allegiance, collateral and fixed as the equivalency of currencies or the official provisions for exchanging prisoners, diplomats. But the subject of a sultan? For all that he has seen Yildiz Palace, George feels somehow desertized, sand-abandoned, wrapped in Persian rug, the lavish and decadent wall hangings of a tent. And though, except for patrols, bivouacs and marches, he can’t have been away from the fort for ten weeks altogether, he feels oddly nomadic. It is because he works for a sultan, sheiks and pashas, and thinks of the solid fortress, the brick barracks in which he sleeps, as an oasis, of the water he drinks, though it’s sweet and plentiful as water from any English lake, as collected, trapped, sluiced toward his mouth and throat and belly by gates and gravity, by a sort of clever and desperately engineered husbandry. Somehow, since the Emperor became a sultan, he is always parched now.) Nor is their function ceremonial. They rarely parade and when they do it is chiefly before the reviewing stands of other Janissaries. Never do they make a contingent in the pomp and pageantry of the Court. Their officers (for all the queer deference of their official designations) do not much talk to them or offer explanations, so they have no very clear idea either of short-or long-term goals. Newspapers and periodicals are not permitted inside the fort, and all they really know about what is expected of them relates to style, history. Whenever the Soup Man addresses the Janissaries (since the day of their bloody practical the one-time recruits are full-fledged Janissaries, integrated with troops who have spent years in the Corps), it is to remind them of their odd traditions, the queer pantheon of their heroic bullies.
“Remember,” he says, “Godukuksbabis who slaughtered all the cows in the village of Szarzt. Pray for Tchambourb, of blessed memory, who villained the women of Urfa and drove their goats twelve miles through dangerous country to drown them in the Euphrates. Recall Abl Erzuz who captured the children of Tiflis, stripped them of their clothing, and led them on a forced march up the icy, precipitate slopes of Mount Ararat, where they fell thousands of feet to their deaths in nameless crevasses and lost, lonely fissures. Celebrate Van and all his glorious brother Janissaries who stole everything of value in the city of Plovdiv and bequeathed a life of poverty to all its inhabitants.”