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The captain mentioned that it would be only another six hours before they reached Mingheria, and Bonkowski Pasha asked the Doctor and Prince Consort whether he had ever been to the island before.

“I have not, for there have never been outbreaks of cholera or yellow fever or other infectious diseases there,” Doctor Nuri replied.

“I have not been either, regrettably,” said Bonkowski Pasha. “But I have researched it extensively. Pliny described in great detail in his Naturalis historia the island’s utterly distinctive vegetation, its flora, its trees and flowers, and its steep volcanic peak, as well as the rocky coves that line its northern shore. Even its climate is unique. Many years ago I prepared a report for your esteemed uncle, His Highness the Sultan, on the prospects for rose cultivation there—in this place I have never before had a chance to visit!”

“What happened then, Your Excellency?” asked Princess Pakize.

Bonkowski Pasha gave a rueful, pensive smile. Princess Pakize silently concluded that even the Royal Chemist must at one point have suffered the consequences of the apprehensive sultan’s fears and castigations, and proceeded to ask the question she and her husband had already so often discussed: Could it really be a coincidence that the Ottoman Empire’s two most renowned quarantine specialists had happened to meet one night in the Sultan’s private passenger ship as it sailed through the waters off Crete?

“I assure you that it is indeed a coincidence!” said Bonkowski Pasha. “Nobody, not even the Governor of Smyrna, Kâmil Pasha of Cyprus, knew that the nearest ship heading in the direction of the island would be the Aziziye. I would of course have liked to come with you to explain to the Muslims of China why it is essential that they should obey quarantine rules and other modern conditions and restrictions. To accept quarantine is to accept westernization, and the farther east one travels, the more tortuous the matter becomes. But our Princess must not lose heart. I promise you that there are canals in China too, just like in Venice, and indeed far-larger and longer ones, and graceful little boats that can sail all the way into people’s homes and mansions, just as we see upon the Bosphorus.”

The newlyweds’ admiration for the chemist pasha only grew to hear that he was as knowledgeable about China as he was about Mingheria, despite having been to neither. But the dinner did not last for much longer, and at its conclusion, husband and wife returned to their cabin, which, with its French and Italian coffee tables, clocks, mirrors, and lamps, resembled a room in a royal palace.

“I fear that something has upset you,” said Princess Pakize. “I can see it in your face.”

Doctor Nuri had perceived a note of derision in the way Bonkowski Pasha had kept addressing him as “Pasha” that evening. As tradition dictated, Abdul Hamid had made him a pasha as soon as he had married the Princess, but Doctor Nuri had hitherto been able to avoid using the title. Hearing older, high-ranking, influential men—actual pashas, in other words—calling him “Pasha” flustered Doctor Nuri, who felt he did not really deserve the honorific. But they soon agreed that Bonkowski Pasha was not the kind of person who would make that sort of mean-spirited insinuation, and quickly forgot all about the matter.

Princess Pakize and Doctor Nuri had been married for thirty days now. For many years they had both dreamed of finding a suitable partner to marry, but had long given up hope that they would ever meet the right person. Only two months had elapsed between the day when Abdul Hamid, following a moment of sudden inspiration, had arranged for them to be introduced and the day of their wedding, and if they were quite so happy, the reason was evidently that they had both found so much more pleasure in lovemaking and sexuality than either of them had expected. Ever since they had set sail from Istanbul, they had spent most of their time in bed inside their cabin, and neither of them had ever thought there was anything unusual about this.

They woke up before dawn the next day when the sound of the ship, not unlike a wail, began to die down. Outside, it was still completely dark. In its approach to Arkaz, Mingheria’s largest city and administrative capital, the Aziziye had followed the ridge of the tall, sharp Eldost Mountains that stretched from the north to the south of the island, and once the Arab Lighthouse’s pale beam had become visible to the naked eye, the ship had veered west toward the port. There was a large moon in the sky and a silver shimmer over the water, so from their cabins the passengers could now see, like a phantom rising in the darkness behind Arkaz Castle, the shape of the White Mountain, considered to be the most mysterious among the various volcanic peaks that populated the Mediterranean Sea.

When Princess Pakize spotted the sharp spires of the majestic Arkaz Castle, they climbed on deck for a better view of the scene in the moonlight. The air was humid but mild. A pleasant scent of iodine, kelp, and almonds came from the sea. Like many small seaside towns across the Ottoman Empire, Arkaz did not have a large jetty and dock, so the captain put the engines in reverse in the waters off the Castle and began to wait.

There followed a strange and heavy silence. Husband and wife shivered in the thrall of the resplendent realm before them. The inscrutable landscape, the mountains, the silence beneath the moonlight, were imbued with a wondrous intensity. It felt as if beyond the silver glow of the moon there were another source of light that had bewitched them and that they must search for. For a time the newlyweds observed the glorious, shimmering view as if it were the true source of their wedded bliss. In the darkness ahead they saw the lantern of an approaching rowing boat, and the slow, deliberate motions of its boatmen. Bonkowski Pasha and his assistant materialized at the top of the stairway on the lower deck. They seemed to be standing very far away, as in a dream. The large black rowboat the Governor had sent pulled up to the Aziziye. They heard footsteps and the sound of people speaking in Greek and Mingherian. The rowing boat took Bonkowski Pasha and his assistant on board and vanished back into the darkness.

The newlyweds and a few other passengers in the captain’s quarters and on the deck stood for a long time looking out at the view of Arkaz Castle and of Mingheria’s spectacular mountains, which had inspired so many Romantic travel writers and seemed to belong in the pages of a fairy tale. Had the passengers of the Aziziye looked more closely at the southwestern bastions of the Castle, they would have seen the light of a torch burning inside a window. Parts of the stone-built Castle complex dated from the era of the Crusades, others from periods of Venetian, Byzantine, Arab, and Ottoman rule, and for centuries, one section had been employed as a prison. Now, in an empty cell two floors beneath the room where that torch was burning, a guard—or, in the modern parlance, a “warden”—named Bayram Effendi, a prominent figure in those parts of the great Castle, was fighting for his life.

CHAPTER 3

When Bayram Effendi had felt the first symptoms of illness five days ago, he had not taken them seriously. He had developed a fever, his heart rate had sped up, and he’d felt shivery. But it was probably just a cold he’d caught that morning from spending too much time walking around the Castle’s windy bastions and courtyards! In the afternoon the next day his fever returned, but this time it was accompanied by fatigue. He had no desire to eat anything, and at one point he lay down in the stone courtyard, looked up at the sky, and felt that he might die. It was as if someone were hammering a nail into his skull.

For twenty-five years Bayram Effendi had been a guard in the prisons of Mingheria’s famous Arkaz Castle. He had seen long-serving convicts chained up and forgotten about in their cells, watched handcuffed inmates walk in a line in the yard for their daily exercise, and witnessed the arrival of a group of political prisoners Sultan Abdul Hamid had locked up fifteen years ago. He remembered how primitive the prison used to be in those days (though in truth it still was), and wholeheartedly trusted and supported the attempts that had recently been made to modernize it, to turn it into an ordinary prison or perhaps even a reformatory. Even when the flow of money from Istanbul was interrupted and he had to go for months without pay, he wouldn’t rest unless he had personally attended the prisoner count every evening.

When he was struck again the next day, as he walked through one of the prison’s narrow passageways, by the same shattering exhaustion, he decided not to go home that night. His heart was beating alarmingly fast now. He found an empty cell, where he lay writhing in pain on a bed of straw in the corner. He was shivering, too, and had developed an unbearable headache. The pain was located near the front of his head, in his forehead. He wanted to scream, but he was convinced that if he kept quiet, this strange agony would somehow disappear, so instead he gritted his teeth. There was a press, a roller, upon his head, squeezing it flat.

So the guard spent the night in the Castle. He would do this sometimes—when he had a night shift, say, or if he’d had to deal with a minor riot or a scuffle—instead of going back to his house a ten-minute ride away on a horse-drawn gig, so his wife and his daughter, Zeynep, were not concerned by his absence. The family was in the midst of various preparations and negotiations for Zeynep’s imminent wedding, which meant there were quarrels and long faces at home every night, with either the guard’s wife or his daughter ending up in tears.

When Bayram Effendi woke up in the cell the next morning and inspected his body, he found near his groin, just above and to the left of his perineum, a white boil the size of his little finger. It looked like a bubo. It hurt when he pressed on it with his thick index finger, as if it were filled with pus, but reverted to its original shape as soon as he took his finger away. The bubo didn’t hurt unless he touched it. Bayram Effendi felt oddly guilty. He was lucid enough to know that this boil was connected to the fatigue, the tremors, and the deliriousness he had been experiencing.

What should he do? A Christian or a government clerk or a soldier or a pasha in his position would go to a doctor or to a hospital if there was one. When there was an outbreak of diarrhea or contagious fever in a prison dormitory, that dormitory was quarantined. But sometimes, a defiant dormitory chief would put up a fight against quarantine measures, and his fellow prisoners would suffer the consequences. In the quarter century he’d spent in the Castle, Bayram Effendi had seen some of the old Venetian-era buildings and courtyards on the seafront used not just as dungeons and jailhouses but as customhouses and quarantine facilities (known in the olden days as lazarettos) too, so he was not unfamiliar with these matters. But he was also aware that no quarantine measure could protect him now. He could feel that he had fallen into the grip of some uncanny force, and he slept and slept, moaning and raving in his terrified, unconscious state. But the pain kept returning in waves, until he realized despairingly that the force he was grappling with was far greater than he was.

The next day he managed to briefly gather some strength. He joined the crowds at the Blind Mehmet Pasha Mosque for midday prayers. He saw two clerks he knew and embraced them in greeting. He tried with much effort to follow the sermon but struggled to understand it. He felt dizzy and nauseated, and he could barely sit upright. The preacher didn’t mention the disease at all and kept repeating that everything that happened was the will of God. As the crowds dispersed, Bayram Effendi thought he might lie down on the mosque’s carpets and kilims to rest for a while and suddenly realized he was drifting out of consciousness, about to faint. When they came to wake him up, he summoned whatever energy he had left to hide the fact that he was unwell (though perhaps they already knew).

By now he could sense his own imminent death, and he wept, feeling that this was an injustice and demanding to know why he had been singled out in this way. He left the mosque and went to see the holy man in the neighborhood of Germe who handed out prayer sheets and amulets and was said to talk openly about the plague and the mystery of death. But the fat sheikh whose name Bayram Effendi couldn’t remember didn’t seem to be there. Instead, a smiling young man in a lopsided fez issued Bayram Effendi and two others, who, like him, had come from the midday payers, a consecrated amulet and a prayer sheet each. Bayram Effendi tried to read the writing on the prayer sheet, but he couldn’t see properly. He felt guilty about this and became agitated, knowing that his death was going to be his own fault.

When the sheikh eventually arrived, Bayram Effendi remembered that he had just seen him at the midday prayers. The holy man was indeed very fat and had a beard as long and white as his hair. He smiled kindly at Bayram Effendi and began to explain how the prayer sheets were to be used; at night, when the plague demon manifested itself in the darkness, one must recite thirty-three times each the following three names of Allah: Ar-Raqib, Al-Muqtadir, and Al-Baaqi. If the prayer sheet and the amulet were pointed in the direction of the demon, even nineteen repetitions could be sufficient to repel the scourge. When he realized how gravely ill Bayram Effendi was, the sheikh drew back from him a little. This did not escape the prison guard’s notice. The sheikh explained that even if there was no time to recite the names of God, he could still achieve a good result by wearing the amulet around his neck and placing his right index finger over it just so. More precisely, he should use his right index finger if the plague boil was on the left-hand side of his body, and his left index finger if the boil was on the right-hand side. The sheikh also told him that if he began to stutter, he should hold the amulet in both hands, but by that point Bayram Effendi was finding it difficult to keep track of all of these rules and decided to return to his home nearby. His beautiful daughter Zeynep wasn’t there. His wife started crying when she saw how sick he was. She made his bed with sheets fresh from the linen cupboard, and Bayram Effendi lay down; he was shaking uncontrollably, and when he tried to speak, his mouth was so dry that the words would not come out.

There seemed to be a storm breaking inside his head. He kept twitching and jerking where he lay, as if someone were chasing him, as if something had startled or angered him. His wife Emine wept even harder at the sight of these strange spasms, and when he saw her tears, Bayram Effendi understood that he was going to die soon.

When Zeynep came home in the early evening, Bayram Effendi rallied for a time. He told them that the amulet around his neck would protect him, then fell back into a delirious sleep. He had a series of strange dreams and nightmares; now he was rising and falling with the waves of a roaring sea! Now there were winged lions, talking fish, and armies of dogs running through fire! Then the flames spread to the rats, fiery demons who tore rosebushes apart with their teeth. The pulley of a water well, a windmill, an open door kept turning and turning, and the universe contracted. Drops of sweat seemed to be falling from the sun onto his face. He felt restless; he felt like running away; his mind alternately raced and froze. Worst of all, the hordes of rats that just two weeks ago had shrieked and wailed their way through the dungeons, the Castle, and all of Mingheria, invading kitchens and devouring all the straw and cloth and wood in their path, now seemed to be chasing him through the prison corridors. Worried that he might recite the wrong prayer, Bayram Effendi tried to outrun them instead. He spent the final hours of his life shouting with all the strength he had to make himself heard to the creatures he saw in his sleep, yet he struggled to make a sound. Zeynep was kneeling beside him now, trying to contain her sobs as she watched over him.