Empire of Lies

4

Lying in his hospital bed, Ayman Rasheed eyed the anesthesiologist intently, looking for a reaction.

As the man pulled back his gown, Rasheed saw surprise and confusion along with the reaction he liked most of all: fear. Which was good. The doctor wasn’t just unsettled by what he’d seen. He was scared.

And fear, as Rasheed knew, made people clam up and keep their mouths shut.

The tattoos were always going to be a problem. He’d known that all along, but he had no choice. In all these years, he’d been very careful about whom he’d allowed to see them. He’d stopped shaving his torso long ago, since he no longer needed them, but they were still visible. The surgeon, the anesthesiologist, others potentially—they would be wondering about them, asking themselves questions. And the Hafiye—his brainchild, the agency he had created after the dust of conquest had settled, to help ensure the empire’s survival—had its tentacles everywhere.

The good news was that it was unlikely any of them would understand their relevance. He hoped that they would think it curious but not much more. That they would think he was some kind of freak, someone on the fringes of society, an eccentric. Tattoos had been a common sight in the world he’d left behind, more and more so with each generation, but he didn’t know if they were as popular in this new world, in the one he’d helped create.

Either way, he didn’t intend to stick around too long or answer any questions they had. Once he was fixed, once the operation was done and he’d recovered enough strength, he’d go back and leave them even more confused than they now were.

The crisis had struck him the day before, at his summer palace of Versailles. It had happened at the tail end of a long, formal lunch with some visiting British dignitaries.

He’d felt increasingly dizzy for days, exhausted after the most trivial effort. For a tough, solid man like him, it was far from the norm. The fatigue and shortness of breath had got worse until, two days before the Versailles event, he’d started coughing up blood. Then at the lunch, just as the servants were bringing out great platters of fruit and pistachio and honey desserts, he felt his heart race suddenly and uncontrollably and saw his own panic reflected in the horrified faces around the table. He turned pale and tried to rise out of his chair, only to collapse to the floor amid screams of alarm from his staff and guests.

He was rushed to his chambers. He tried asking for them to hurry with fetching the hekimbaşı, his chief physician, but his speech was slurry and he could barely remember the man’s name. The right side of his face felt numb, and his right arm had virtually no strength in it. Once at his bedside, the assembled physicians seemed stumped and could do little to make him feel better as his vision grew blurrier and the room darkened around him.

Miraculously, though, Ayman Rasheed had started to feel a bit better a few hours later. But he knew something was very, very wrong. He also knew he couldn’t count on his physicians to take care of it. They were, by his modern standards, clueless.

It wasn’t through a lack of will or effort: medicine and science, built on a foundation of ancient Greek texts, had taken pride of place since the earliest days of the empire. The Ottomans had been the first to inoculate their children against smallpox, a practice they began in the late 1600s, long before anyone else. It was simply a question of progress. They just weren’t there yet. Eighteenth-century Islamic medicine wasn’t yet aware of viruses and bacteria. It was still based on Galenism, a tradition that considered illness to be an imbalance in the four elemental humors that composed the human body: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. And although Rasheed had brought a lot of advanced knowledge back from his world, most of it had been in the art of war, not in medicine.

He knew it was going to take more than the herbs and distillations in their pharmacopoeias to cure him. There was no time to waste.

He needed modern medicine. But he had to play it safe.

He got his janissary corps to rush him back to his Paris palace, where he locked himself in his chambers after issuing strict instructions that he was not to be disturbed. He spent a fretful night waiting. He also calculated the exact amount of days he needed to factor in to arrive there one day after his last visit. Then, just before dawn, he slipped out of the Louvre through a hidden passage and made his way to the banks of the Seine, as he had done more than once before.

There, by the edge of the river, he had uttered the long sequence of Palmyrene words—the ones he’d had decades to memorize—and jumped.

He was relieved to hear that his condition was treatable. He’d made the right decision, no doubt. He would have died had he not made the jump. The surgeon had confirmed it.

Despite his great discomfort, it felt good to be there again. It had been years since he’d been back, and seeing it again gave him a boost. After all that time, the empire was still there. Under strain, perhaps, but still there. It had endured, against the odds, resisting the vagaries of time and despite powerful foreign enemies at its borders and a vast array of religious and ethnic groups within them—even if those groups had shrunk over the centuries because of conversions.

He could proudly claim to have had a lot to do with that endurance.

He’d avoided coming back for—how long had it been? Almost a decade. He’d seen how the empire was going through tough times—due to the Americans, Rasheed had discovered, a fact that greatly displeased him. They were wrecking his world again, although this time it was more of an indirect consequence, made worse by the hotheaded tyrant currently occupying the throne in Istanbul.

Perhaps he needed to do something about that.

It had been on his mind since his last couple of visits, but he’d ultimately chosen to turn his back on his legacy, retreat to the comforts of his cosseted life as governor, and leave fate to run its course.

The truth was, he’d achieved so much, and he was tired. He was enjoying the fruits of his work, payback for the harsh times that had rained down on him before that fateful discovery in Palmyra a lifetime ago. It also hadn’t helped that in 2017—this 2017, now referred to throughout the empire as 1438, following the Islamic calendar—he was nobody. An anonymous man by deed and by choice, needing to be cautious at all times, fearful of discovery, and, even before his health had deteriorated, unsure he had the energy or the will to try to affect the course of events and help steer the empire back to better days. Whereas back in the eighteenth century, he had it all. He was powerful, he was feared, he was revered. He was considered a visionary, a genius. He enjoyed a spectacular life, ruling over the Paris eyalet, one of the jewels of the empire, second only to Istanbul itself. Even the sultan held him in utmost respect. It was a far more satisfying and enjoyable place and time to inhabit.

But now he was back. Not by choice. And, with a bit of luck, not for long.

He knew they would treat him, of course, regardless of the tattoos, regardless of his silence, regardless of their not knowing the first thing about him.

Hospitals in the Ottoman Empire—known as darusshifas, which meant “houses of cures”—were charitable institutions that followed the Islamic moral imperative to treat everyone, regardless of their status or even their religion. Rasheed had no reason to think this practice had changed over the centuries, and on a previous visit, anticipating a need just like the one that had brought him to this hospital, he had checked out the Hurrem Sultan and had been pleased to be proved right.

Watching the anesthesiologist examine him, Rasheed didn’t think he would be a problem. Rasheed knew how to read men, and the look of fear in the man’s eyes told him all he needed to know about him. He was weak. A lamb, a follower, a man without much of a spine.

The surgeon, however, was different. He seemed to be more sharply observant than his colleague. Rasheed knew he’d need to remain alert to any nuanced shifts in his behavior.

When the man had introduced himself, Rasheed had been surprised to realize he was obviously a Jew. He’d met quite a few since landing in the sultan’s chamber all those years ago. The Ottomans had welcomed them with open arms after the Spaniards had expelled them during the Inquisition, and Rasheed had grown to appreciate or disdain them as he would any other person, according to their individual merits and regardless of their religion. But he also knew their numbers in the empire had dwindled over the centuries. Although the empire was tolerant of other faiths and allowed them to worship freely, this tolerance was based on a precept of order that assumed the superiority of Muslims over non-Muslims. Conversion to Islam was not forced, but over the centuries the Ottomans had put in place burdens—taxes, being ineligible for any government post, even limitations on what colors of clothing could be worn—directed at non-Muslims as powerful enticements to convert.

At first, Christians and Jews had resisted the notion, even if it meant they would be second-class citizens. But after Vienna, Rome, and Paris fell, their resolve to hang on to their birth religions weakened, then collapsed. The cohabitation and interdependence of the different faiths gave way to mass conversions.

Faith was the primary organizing principle of Ottoman society, and with time there was no ethnic consciousness left. That was very much part of Rasheed’s grand design. He knew it was the greatest threat to stability; he had experienced it firsthand back in his original homeland, a lifetime ago. He’d seen its blood-soaked effect across the entire region.

Yes, the endurance of the empire owed him a great deal indeed, he thought, as he considered the two men who would help settle that debt and enable him to go back and live out the rest of his days in splendor.

Nothing—nothing—was going to interfere with that.