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Sami Pasha had spotted a few clerks and guards loyal to Sheikh Hamdullah stationed at the entrance to the Castle’s prison complex. But there were no uniformed prison wardens patrolling the courtyard itself; they had all run away.

The wagon briefly stopped when its path was blocked, and two prisoners who had taken over the courtyard came to stand mere inches from Sami Pasha, arguing in a language he couldn’t understand. Once the wagon was on its way again, Sami Pasha thought to himself that the situation on the island was so dire now that realistically, if those two hoodlums had noticed that the old governor was right there beside them, so close that he could smell them and hear their labored breathing, they would have pulled him out of the wagon and hanged him themselves before Sheikh Hamdullah’s men had their chance. As the wagon approached the Venetian Tower, Sami Pasha saw four more rows of dead plague victims—sixteen in total—laid out on the ground with that same surprising sense of symmetry, and grimly realized that he was incapable of feeling any sorrow at the sight.

His death sentence had made him thoroughly selfish. Though perhaps the sight of other people dying did not upset him unduly because it seemed a sign that the afterlife was real, and that he would not be alone when he got there. The only thought in his mind now, and the source of his selfishness, was this: stay alive! When he returned to his cell, he must get hold of a pen and a piece of paper and write Consul George a letter.

But as soon as he was back in his cell, which seemed to have turned a strange shade of seawater blue in his absence, Sami Pasha began to cry, his body shaking with heaving, hiccuping sobs. He hoped nobody would see him in that state. Afterward he lay down on a pile of straw in the corner and managed by some divine miracle to sleep for about ten minutes. He dreamed that he was walking with his mother in his aunt Atiye’s back garden, and in this garden he saw daisies, a soft golden light, and a well. In the dream he was holding his mother’s warm hand while she pointed at the windlass on the well. There was an enormous lizard rattling noisily across the windlass, but the creature seemed friendly rather than frightening.

When he woke up, Sami Pasha realized that the rattling sound had been coming from a large crab that was wandering around among the cracks, boulders, and rocks near the wall of the cell that faced the sea, and thinking that this must be a sign, he felt a little better, telling himself that he would not be hanged after all, that he would be freed soon, and that if they had really meant to execute him they would not have brought him back here after the trial but taken him straight to the State Hall.

According to the Mingherian constitution, whose principal clauses Sami Pasha himself had drafted, no executions could be carried out until the Chief Minister—in this case Nimetullah Effendi with the felt hat—had approved the order. Nimetullah Effendi would of course act in accordance with Sheikh Hamdullah’s wishes. At that point the Pasha’s old friend Sheikh Hamdullah, with whom they’d had so many conversations about poetry and literature when the Pasha had first arrived on the island, would surely quash his rage and resentment and issue a pardon, allowing Sami Pasha to walk right out of the Castle and make his leisurely way back to his quarters. He wouldn’t rush on his way back home through the city. Nimetullah Effendi would come to visit him, and Sami Pasha would thank him for the pardon and make sure to mention the sheikh’s poetry collection Aurora. If they really meant to hang him, they would not have put him in this cell, and this thoughtful, charming crab wouldn’t have come all the way out of the sea to visit him.

Sami Pasha felt cheered when he thought of his wife and two daughters in Istanbul. He was still angry with his wife, whose endless prevarications—“I’ll be on the next ferry over” or “My father is unwell”—had left him alone in Mingheria for the last five years, and who clearly felt that as the daughter of a pasha she could treat him whichever way she wanted, yet for some reason he could not stop picturing her and their two daughters idling in the sun on the beach at Üsküdar. In this scene, it was as if Marika were in Istanbul too.

When Sheikh Hamdullah pardoned him, Sami Pasha would make peace with his old enemies, revive his friendships with the island’s consuls, extricate himself from every troublesome situation, and marry Marika, settling down for a quiet, uneventful life in a white house on that road in Ora that meandered down toward the sea with heavenly views at every turn, or perhaps even a little farther away in Dantela. Why hadn’t he done this before? He was full of remorse now for not having treated Marika better. One night, after a few glasses of cognac, he had summoned Coachman Zekeriya and taken Marika out for a moonlit drive in the armored landau, an experience which she had clearly found to be altogether enchanting. Yet even though she would beg him to take her again every month when the full moon was out, he had been so worried about what people might say that he had never done so, and now he was angry at himself for refusing her.

The cell door opened without warning. Sami Pasha emerged from his reverie to greet Sheikh Hamdullah, but when he saw instead the familiar faces of certain prison officers he had known for a long time, he understood what was to come.

“I would like to pray,” he said with a calmness even he was surprised to feel. “I must perform my ablutions.”

Both the Castle’s own mosque and the prayer room inside the prison were closed because of the outbreak. As he waited for a fountain and a prayer mat to be located for his use, picked a spot for his prayers, and recited verses he only half remembered, Sami Pasha was able to forget his pain for a while, if only because he was busy doing something else.

At dusk, they put him back in the same prison wagon as before, which had now come to take him from the tower. As it lurched forward, Sami Pasha saw that the dark, sinister corpse wagon had already arrived at the courtyard and was being loaded with the bodies he had noticed earlier, still laid out in a tidy row, but now stark naked after their clothes had been stripped off and incinerated. Hundreds of crows that had gathered on the chestnut tree in the courtyard began cawing frantically. There were corpses in front of the former Janissaries’ building too, piled up in a disorderly heap. The air did not smell of death, but of wet grass. The Chief Warden had ordered the dead prisoners’ bedding, mattresses, and blankets to be burned, though as this practice was now technically banned, they were calling it a “cleaning operation” rather than a quarantine measure. Those four or five lucky souls walking around the courtyard now, talking, resting, loading corpses, would still be here upon this world, looking up at this same sky, when the sun rose tomorrow morning—but Sami Pasha would be gone.

He banged his fists against the wooden walls of the wagon and shouted as loud as he could, but nobody noticed he was there. When his fingers began to hurt, and he felt too furious and too helpless to continue, he slumped to the floor and wept for a little while, then willed himself back to his feet and brought his eye right up to the air vent to look out at the streets of the city he had ruled for five years, and so sincerely loved. But it was too dark to see.

When he caught the smell of earth, grass, and seaweed in the air, he recognized the island’s characteristic scent and sank back to the floor of the wagon, tearfully praying for Allah to save him. He was full of regret now. There was no anger left in him, nor any pride or dreams of heroic redemption. All he felt was regret at his own stupidity. Which of his mistakes did he regret the most? Once again, former governor and former Chief Minister Sami Pasha told himself that he had wasted too much time on Ramiz, that he had taken things too seriously, that he should have accepted his transfer to another province as soon as the order had arrived. When the wheels of the prison wagon began to make a completely different kind of noise, he realized they must be on Hamidiye Bridge and sprang to his feet to look through the air vent again, staring at the majestic Castle he had just come out of, now bathed in a mysterious glow, and realizing that this was the last time he would ever set eyes on that glorious building.

We do not often find ourselves loving or hating the individuals who populate the pages of a history book. But we do tend to feel these emotions when we read novels. To avoid any further distress to our readers who may have grown fond of Sami Pasha (however few of them there may be), we shall refrain from entering here into a detailed account of how he sat in the cell inside the State Hall hoping either Sheikh Hamdullah or Nimetullah Effendi would come to pardon him, of the agony he suffered as he listened to the imam who had come to console him, of his mournful musings, and of his fear of death.

Until the very last moment, Sami Pasha clung to a hopeful and innocent belief that Sheikh Hamdullah would pardon him. Even when he saw the executioner, he was able to convince himself for a time that it must all be a ruse designed to scare him even more than he already was, and hide the fact that he was going to be pardoned.

Sami Pasha loathed the executioner Şakir because he was a thief and a drunk, and willing to hang people for money. He was so furious at the thought that his life was about to end at this man’s hands that he felt he might choke with it. With his arms bound in front of him, he landed a blow to the executioner’s back. He fought as hard as he could to get away, but Şakir quickly caught him by the neck.

“You must be strong, Your Excellency,” he said. “That is what befits you.”

Sami Pasha could feel the presence of the despicable villains who had come to watch his execution, hiding in the dark where they couldn’t be seen. He told himself that it didn’t matter what these cowards thought of him before he died. Life and the universe were more important. He managed to pull himself together.

But as he approached the gallows, his knees gave away and he fell to the floor, and Şakir—his breath reeking with wine—spoke to him with surprising tenderness. “Hang in there, Pasha!” he said. “Not long to go now—you’re nearly done!”

His voice was as soothing as if he were speaking to a child. And so, wearing his white execution gown, and with the noose wrapped around his neck, Sami Pasha bravely leaped into the void, crying, “Mother, I am coming!” Just before he died, the image of an enormous black crow with giant wings flashed in front of his eyes.

CHAPTER 68

As the wind blew across the newly rechristened Mingheria Square, a few people came by to look at Sami Pasha’s corpse swinging somberly in its white gown: children unafraid of death or of the outbreak, youths who’d run away from home, various enemies of the Pasha, Greek and Mingherian nationalists, and some of the journalists he’d sent to prison. Ramiz’s vengeful relatives from Nebiler village stood by the gallows to gloat and give thanks to Allah and were reprimanded by the police. Tarksis Effendi, whom Sami Pasha had locked up for four years on an accurate but unproven suspicion that he was smuggling historical artifacts out of the island, claimed that the body hanging in the square was not the Pasha’s, but was ushered away by the guards when he tried to check.

Those who had been fond of Sami Pasha, including Marika and the more prominent members of Arkaz’s Muslim and Greek communities, had locked themselves up in their homes and were waiting, as if petrified, to see what would happen next. Meanwhile, the theory that the plague could probably also be passed through the air had also begun to spread.

But this did not slow the pace of what historians have called state terror. Two days later, Sami Pasha’s corpse was lowered from the gallows and buried in a bed of Mingherian roses in Narlık Cemetery. In the early hours of the next day, while it was still dark, Bonkowski Pasha’s old friend Pharmacist Nikiforos was hanged in the same spot as Sami Pasha.

Şakir, the executioner, was far harsher and less sympathetic in his treatment of Pharmacist Nikiforos than he had been with Sami Pasha, berating the elderly pharmacist when his legs buckled in fear and responding to the old man’s desperate pleas with callous retorts like “It’s too late now” and “You should have thought about it sooner,” but Şakir’s behavior had nothing to do with the time he had been kicked out of Nikiforos’s pharmacy for stealing (of course no one had dared call the police on an executioner), nor with how much he’d had to drink the previous evening, and was instead a consequence of the fact that the wave of “state terror” we have spoken of had slowly turned into a movement against the island’s Greeks. Like all its predecessors, Nimetullah Effendi and Sheikh Hamdullah’s government too had soon begun to use the outbreak to subjugate and drive away the Greek population, and stop those who had already fled from ever returning, so that Muslims would come to constitute the majority of the island’s population. Some Greeks believed this was the real reason why the Telegraph Office still hadn’t been opened; if the ferry services resumed, Greeks would soon outnumber Muslims again.

But apart from wanting to alter the composition of the island’s population, Sheikh Hamdullah and his government officials’ ill treatment of the Greeks was also motivated by a sincere and deeply entrenched fear of Christians and unbelievers. Like mosques and lodges, churches and monasteries too were now free to resume their functions, but while most of the temporary “hospitals” that had been set up inside the grounds of many lodges had since been cleared, those in the monasteries remained in use, and patients were regularly carried out of the lodges in their hospital beds and relocated to green and spacious monastery gardens. Sheikh Hamdullah briefly even considered arranging a population exchange between the island’s Greeks and the Muslims who lived in Crete and Rhodes. Only Muslims were being offered government jobs now (despite there being no money left in the treasury), and Turks who were not native to the island could sometimes be given a rough treatment too, if not as bad as the Greeks. Nor was the new government in any hurry to evict all the people who had broken into empty homes in wealthy Greek neighborhoods like Ora, Flizvos, and Dantela, and illegally taken up residence there.

But on the surface of things, these were not the factors which led to the Greek pharmacist Nikiforos’s death sentence and immediate execution. Nikiforos had been condemned to the noose by confessions extracted from other suspects through the traditional torture method of bastinado. Princess Pakize and Doctor Nuri had read through the file Sami Pasha had given them before he fled the State Hall during his last night in the city, and studied all the evidence collected therein. Forbidden from leaving their guesthouse rooms, they’d had plenty of time on their hands, and largely unaware of the horrors unfolding in the city, they had spent their days engaging in playful and carefree conjecture.