Lempriere's Dictionary (64 page)

Prussian communiqués to their envoy at the Porte, intercepted and deciphered at the Vienna Correspondence office, proposed a realignment at the heart of Mitteleuropa. Pushed through on the back of the old Austro-Hungarian terror, a Prusso-Turkic alliance, it was an equitable system of
swaps giving Danzig and Torun to the Prussians, Galicia to the Poles and Moldavia to himself. Unspoken behind this smooth exchange was the Prussian commitment to Turkish reclamations, backed with force if necessary. The Hertzberg Plan hung like bait over his borders, drawing the surrounding powers to press their armies against them. In his dreams, frontiers bent and distorted under the pressure like a jointed trapezium in which he was spread-eagled, bound hand and foot, wriggling, being slowly squeezed as the angles contracted while Catherine looked on coolly and spoke of over-extended supply lines, crop failures in the Ukraine, unavoidable delays. Her hand moved with a practised motion between her legs, a sharp
click
and a nail-paring fell just-audibly to the floor. She advanced and he could see the polished teeth champ behind lips glistening and gorged with blood, his own member rising in suicidal obedience
click, click, click
her mute ukase now quite clear: to couple the risen fruit of Austria with the wide Russian mouth. As the trapezium closed, she squatted to draw him in and up, a brief blind nosing of her innards before the serrated edges tickled his uneasy head, took a serious grip about the root and
Click!

He awoke and saw at the level of his groin silvery trails run this way and that across the sheets, as of playful snails. He rose still throbbing and deciphered his glistening idiogram thus: the war did not go well.

Cryptic slime. Mapped via a camera obscura onto the counsels and committees, scribal offices and divans of the Sublime Porte at Constantinople, the Emperor’s nocturnal emissions take us direct to the heart of the Turkish war-machine. Strange to tell, Joseph’s soiled bed linen provides an exact model of the Porte’s internal dialogues, a flow-chart of memoranda and communiqués, detached recommendations and unassigned brevets, a map of its most secret and tortuous deliberations. Observe en route the Austrian advances across the frontiers of Moldavia and Wallachia, the forays conducted from strengthened garrisons at Boza and Penitska and the unwelcome flight of the Moldavian
hospodar
. Witness Venetian moves under the gout-ridden admiralship of Chevalier Emo to drive the Turkish squadron currently harassing shipping between Lissa and Ancona out of the Adriatic and into the Ægean archipelago. Take note of General de Vens’ gritty skirmishes on the banks of the Save opposite Belgrade, the ravages of camp-fever in the garrisons on the Unna, the piles of unburied dead, the headless torsos found by scouts in the villages west of the Drave, the massacre of a Turkish prisoner-column only two days’ march from the camp at Karlstadt, the wounded lying in no man’s land within range of Belgrade’s cannon whose cries keep the men awake at night, Christian and Turk alike listening, wishing death as a mercy. Horrible cries of men and the smell, the stink made by men dying and the dead men
becoming crow meat, brute matter and ground, the dog-grass will grow very thick here. This is the war in April. Maintain altitude, descend slowly over the Golden Horn, level out above the glittering waters of the Bosporus, trail the messages which pass between the onion-domes and pointed towers of Constantinople. Follow the cryptic slime.

Already a number of extraordinary consultative assemblies had spilled out of the afternoon divan with the express purpose of resolving this issue. A vicious triangular war had started up between the
Beylik, Ruus
and
Tahvil
offices within the Supra-office of the Imperial Divan. Their purse-bearers avoided each other in the corridors and sought ingenious extensions of neglected functions to legitimize their right to sole administration of the growing crisis. (The
Beylik
section placed it under the heading “Capitulatory Privileges granted to Foreign Governments” and minor scribal officers more used to the donkey-work of checking fine print in border treaties grew bewildered as the correspondence piled up.) The Translator pressed hard on the issue, from personal motives it was suspected, and the Bailiff opposed him. The Reis Effendi took an interest and the Grand Vezir appointed a loyal lieutenant or
kaymakam
to oversee his interests in the matter. Various palace functionaries, stewards and corresponding secretaries had a hand in the business whose complexity now demanded a dazzling compromise if the interests of all parties were to be honoured. The issue was the continued detention of Peter Rathkael-Herbert, the Imperial Internuncio. The compromise was a crate.

In the second week of April, a square-rigged two-master lumbered into the harbour at Constantinople. The sloop
Tesrifati
on detachment from the Ægean squadron was captained by a fresh-faced graduate of Gazi Hassan’s naval school at Midilli. Halil Hamit had taken his first command expecting a well-oiled fighting machine ready to fire off the
Tesrifati
’s fourteen gun broadside, manoeuvre skilfully through the narrow channels of the archipelago and live for days or weeks on nothing more than a sniff of the enemy and the hope of engagement. He had found a leaking tub crewed by malcontents, stocked with rotting fish and damp powder. The last was unimportant as only three of the
Tesrifati
’s twenty-eight guns could be relied upon to fire without blowing up itself, its gun crew and, conceivably, the ship’s magazine. Expecting well-drilled obedience, he had found consent by inertia at best, habitual defiance at worst. They were debtors, conscripts, petty thieves,
kif
and opium addicts to a man. Sweet fumes now lingered on the lower deck. Limping into harbour, Hamit rehearsed his report. It was terse. “Two months sailing between Lissa and Ancona. Nothing sighted.” The
Tesrifati
docked and Hamit watched his crew shuffle down the gangplank. To a man, he loathed the sight of them. Surely, he hoped against hope, surely they would desert.

Two days later and all the crew were aboard. Every single one. They had been delivered in manacles the previous night having been caught en masse boarding a frigate bound for Trebizon. They were chained below decks right now. Hamit himself had to oversee the revictualling. He watched as old barrels of rotten fish were unloaded and new ones put in their place. A cargo of saltpetre for the arsenal at Midilli was stowed all about the lower deck, this being the purpose of his recall, as he understood it. Its destination called to him, recalling days climbing rope ladders and nights studying trigonometry under the cruel but fair supervision of the sergeants with their unusual and comforting punishments, their shaggy caresses in the Ægean moonlight….

Hamit was suddenly distracted from these fond recollections by a crate swinging over the side. Roughly five feet square, it landed with a thump on the quarterdeck. An official from the
Beylik
section of the Office of the Imperial Divan wanted him to sign something.

‘There has been a slight change of plan….’ began the official as he scribbled.

Within the hour, the cargo stowed, the crew unmanacled and instantly idle, the
Tesrifati
ran through the strait of Bosporus before a gentle following wind. Hamit stood below decks contemplating the crate. It was to be delivered to Liverre forthwith. That was his overriding command and he was not to concern himself with its contents. After that, duty on the Ægean patrol would resume. Hamit’s crew looked on sullenly. Unchaining them he had had to choke back the impulse to apologise for their discomfort. They looked hungry. They would not meet his eye. They were waiting for a calamity. Now, Hamit gave the crate an encouraging pat. Instantly a voice from within began shouting.

‘I demand safe conduct! I demand access to the Venetian ambassador, proper facilities, a translator, my possessions, an audience with the Divan….’ The demands went on for some time. Hamit listened to them as they grew less strident, ending forlornly with, ‘I am the Imperial Internuncio to the Sublime Porte and I demand water.’ Then, ‘Water please,’ then, ‘Please,’ and then silence once more. Halil Hamit weighed up his duties, then went to fetch a crow-bar, a cup and a pitcher of clear cold water for his guest.

The crate was where the extreme ends of the debate had finally met, middle ground between sending back the Internuncio’s severed head in a burlap sack and escorting him to the border with all possible pomp in compensation for his imprisonment, now explained as a junior official’s ghastly mistake. Of course the implications ran much further. Decapitation of the Internuncio would suggest reckless warmongering, in line with recent gains in Transylvania and the late Drave massacres, a strong
hint that the Turkic forces were prepared to fight until doomsday. An escort, on the other hand, betokened appeasement and a quick end to a war which helped no-one. The stalemate around Belgrade and various anti-Ottoman insurrections within Serbia supported this line. Within the heady atmosphere of the crate, an unstable compromise was found. If the Internuncio survived, all well and good. If not, well, he was the enemy after all. The crate marked a nodal point in the war. Trails converged here, all the arguments and counter-arguments within the Porte, balances of policy and practice, and from the altitude of the gulls wheeling noisily above it was possible to see in the
Tesrifati
’s phosphorescent wake one last correspondence with the Emperor’s soiled bed linen, a final spurting vector of the glistening cryptic slime as it shot prophetically towards a fate stranger even than these.

A mutinous capsule toiling on the spread sea, the
Tesrifati
was one beacon amongst many as night descended over Europe. Peasant-mutterings over the
robot-labour
draft, a rebellion amongst the dwarves of a Magdeburg circus, Anabaptist ferment in Thuringia, these too wink in and out, on and off. And there are others. The configuration is still unclear in April, but as popular ferment grows, such outbreaks will become more frequent, the beacons more numerous until a long-destined shape emerges from lines implied between one point and another, as a message sent by heliograph confirms the network of stations, relaid from mountain-top to campanile, from watch tower to platform in flashes, bright junctions of
x
and
y
directed to precise degrees of arc in accordance with exact timetables of transmission and reception. Compared to the network which supports its brief and flickering life, the message itself seems of little import, just as the letter itself is nothing to the mighty Thurn und Taxis postal system and the leg-capsule negligible compared to the flight of the carrier pigeon. So, the message emerging this April night is secondary at best to the means of its emergence, which is the system. The problem is scale, human unit to geopolitical mass, monoculture to Euro-system. Coming volcanic eruptions will seem random and totally out of the blue to mortal observers despite literally aeons of warning through regular seismic motions of the earth’s plates - but how to relate the explosive violence, the rain of molten debris shooting through thousands of feet per second to the inches per century tectonic creep which preceded and caused it? The middle terms are missing and only primitive augury fills the gap. Can the Emperor’s bed linen truly portend the voyage of the
Tesrifati
this April night? Charlatans grow prosperous on these discontinuities. For lack of a sufficiently lofty vantage-point, haruspices resort to reading entrails and bird-flights, all kinds of geomancy and weird divination are practised. Quite innocent structures and arrangements become potent as indices prefiguring
catastrophe and other forms of disorder. Take, as an instance, the orange trees.

In Le Notre’s plan it was quite clear. The orange trees ran in straight lines, a double terrace on either side of the gardens, away from the back of the palace towards the artificial lake. Louis’s first tutor of mathematics had told him that parallel lines met at a point infinitely distant from the observer or more obviously at the foot of the throne of God. Louis preferred the second metaphor and recalled it often, linking it vaguely with his own divine right. Looking out over the terrace after the levée, he derived a faint comfort from the neatly sculpted orange trees in their cubic slatted pots which ran in rows towards the lake. If he screwed up his eyes, the lines met and God was in the lake.

The first change came a month ago, a subtle realignment to begin with but growing more noticeable towards the end of March. By April it was indisputable. The orange trees were converging. His first thought was an over-zealous sycophant busily rearranging them by moonlight, waiting only for a favourable sign to declare himself. Or herself. Accordingly, he smiled a lot in the vicinity of the orange trees, clapped his hands, pointed, said ‘ha!’ in a joyful tone. No-one came forward. The gardeners perhaps. A guard was placed on the orange trees but no underlings were caught. The orange trees, which once peaceably affirmed his topmost position in the order of things, now only added to his worries.

The pattern repeated itself. In the Vendée, renegade tax officers had taken to brigandage, enforcing their own covert tariff-system through the organisation he had supposedly abolished. Officers sent to stamp out this fiscal subversion were hounded with violence, their families threatened. A clamorous Parlement had quieted itself when he announced the abolition and afterwards he had felt reconfirmed, serene in his placement. Now the business had turned on him. He heard the words ‘tax reform’ with acute unease and wondered what disaster his next helpful measure would occasion. Standing still, he was aware that matters moved of their own accord. Moving himself, everything stopped. Orange trees again.

His plan to revive the watchmaking trade (women watchmakers) was encouraging and at least the new Board of Marine Affairs was safely appointed. Still events conspired against him. Reports of the Bank’s directors coming to blows at their general meeting had reached the press and the resignation of Monsieur Caburrus had seemed to endorse those reports. Various agencies took delight in recalculating the deficit from Necker’s figures which rose and rose as the new amounts were published on a weekly basis. Apparently he had sanctioned taxes called ‘vingtièmes’ which the Parlements of Toulouse, Rouen and Montpellier now refused to pay. Small riots were taking place in these towns, and others where his
arrêt
met its usual hostile reception. The works at Cherbourg were horren-dously delayed and the costs, four, perhaps five millions, rising by the month. This at least was the Marine Board’s pigeon. Vaudreuil and Bougainville had delegated extraordinary powers to their secretaries to bring the project in on time and under budget. They had left the week previously. On secondment from the Finance Office where their labyrinthine damage-limitation exercise on the deficit had drawn universal if slightly baffled praise, Monsieurs Duluc and Protagoras would proceed from Cherbourg to La Rochelle. Here some other task awaited them. Vaudreuil set great store by them, even the Cardinal gave his recommendation. The deficit was still huge, naturally, but how much worse might it have been without their efforts? He dreaded to think.