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By Root 2952 0

ago thirteen thousand people had died here when the earth moved and broke the conduits from the Danube to the City, and the waters of the Golden Horn deluged Stamboul and Pera. Seven years ago the Bezestan, the round covered market to which they were now climbing, had been burnt to the ground, and all the houses beside it. Hence the rough shacks and booths which clung to the walls of the mosques, crowding the workshops already tucked into the arches of hammam and medrese. There were other streets, small and twisting and arcaded with pentises of wood, which were lined with booths: passing, one caught the smell of goat fat and uncured leather; of crushed sesame seeds or melting honey; or of new sawdust from a lathe shop making handles for hatches, with outside a stack of new wood, white and red-gold yew from Mengrelia, dripping and satiny in the wet.

The houses too, Jerott thought, looked temporary: some of white clay bricks and some wooden-framed, the timber filled with sun-dried clay brick, their latticed wooden balconies projecting over the street. They came in all sizes and shapes, but most had no more than two storeys, with a slanting roof of thick-ridged clay tiles, or flatter roofs sometimes planted with orange bushes and shrubs. And everywhere, open spaces and ruins: the arches and columns and fountains and baths, the churches and gardens of the city built to match Rome.

Gilles knew them all. Here was the Forum of the Bull: there the house of Concordia and the Temple of Thomas the Apostle. Under this plain the hot baths of Honoria and the Forum of Theodosius. There the baths of Achilles, which Justinian making the aqueduct remembered, and whose conduits he was able to use, so well in those days were the pipes and passages recorded, leading the great underground network of water to the city’s cisterns and fountains and baths. There, still standing, the historied column made by Arcadius, a hundred and forty feet high, with its spiral banded design celebrating the victory over the Scythians; and here the column, now pinned with iron and broken with fire, which once held the statue of Constantine Helios, whose sunny nimbus was framed by the nails that had pierced Christ on the Cross.

The rain had swept most people from the streets. Men went by barefoot, their burdens strapped to their heads, their splashed skirts kilted up to their calves: children played: a laden buffalo pressed by, and a tripe-seller’s donkey. Few beggars, for the crowded almshouses of the Mehmet Mosque took care of charity, loi, foi, nation que ce soit. Instead, sometimes, the crumbs of a rude justice: the bones and flesh of a criminal staked outside the house of the injured; or the cry, Yâ Fattâh! from the pavement where a paralytic crawled for his living. They turned a corner, into a street which was little but a quarry of broken stone and mud, with houses set like playing blocks in the dirt; or sometimes huddled two or three together among a scattering of winter bushes from which broken marble glimmered, the vestiges of some Byzantine palace or church.

Outside the biggest house, a square whitewashed structure with a rough wall enclosing a yard, Gaultier stopped, and the procession of packmules behind him. ‘Here?’ said Jerott, astounded.

‘It is not easy,’ said Georges Gaultier with asperity, ‘for a foreigner to obtain premises in Constantinople. Until I can find something better: here.’ Marthe did not look round, but he had the impression she was smiling. Then Gaultier opened the gate, and they moved inside and unloaded.

Such was the briskness of the whole operation, that within an hour Jerott found himself, deep in thought, on his way back to Pera again. From the little he had seen, Gaultier’s house was as unprepossessing inside as out.… The walls were plain and plastered; the floors wooden and uneven; the ceilings timbered and cursorily painted in a particularly nasty shade of mid-green. Even with the carpets and cupboards and bedding they had brought with them, it would hardly look, Jerott thought, like the Star in Bread Street. The ichneumon