“What is not?” Francisco shrugged. “He is a drunkard, a bully and a raving lunatic. He counts a day wasted in which he does not have someone strangled, or better yet kill the wretch himself. At the moment he is convinced that purity of Islam will make his empire the equal of Suleiman the Magnificent’s, and so wine and coffee are illegal in Istanbul at last news. Any who disagree, die. He reminds me of a phrase I recently heard Harry Lefferts use: ‘shoot a fellow for lookin’ at me funny.’ ”
Mike nodded. Francisco’s impersonation of Harry’s hillbilly tones was good. “Sounds like Harry. One day I’m going to have me a talk with that boy. Assuming he survives Amsterdam and . . . later ports.”
“Oh, no—I rather think Harry was warning his men—pack of pirates, rather—off doing that.” Francisco smiled. The friendship that had grown up between the quiet Jewish intellectual and the swaggering—but increasingly suave—hillbilly hard-ass was notorious in the world of Grantville’s dark-lanternists.
Mike raised an eyebrow. “You surprise me. Still, it’s of a piece with the way Harry’s—hold on, where were we?”
Francisco held up a hand. “The digression was my fault. Now, where Harry sees the value in restraining his gorier impulses, the sultan revels in them. He genuinely will shoot a man for looking at him—looking at all, that is.”
“So he might take another notion tomorrow?”
“No. Insane, but rational, is my assessment. Of course, I last saw him when he was still a child and under his mother’s regency, but—no, leave that aside. Where the sultan’s actions may proceed from insane premises, the conclusions and his resolution are remorselessly rational in their deranged context. Mike, have you read Hume’s work on this subject? It falls to be published in only a few decades.”
“Francisco, I cherish my bone-dumb hillbilly ignorance. Unless it’s useful, in which case make sure I get a copy. But for the moment, let’s see if I’ve got this right. We figure he’s taken the notion that we’re bad news and won’t shift unless we make him feel he wants to?”
“Just so. And I think the Hume might be passé in your case, Mike.”
Mike harumphed noisily. “Whutaiver,” he said, in his best hillbilly drawl. “Don’t be telling Frank Jackson about that, willya? The man’s looking at me like a dangerous intellectual as it is. Anyway, who put the notion in there, then? His own courtiers, religious leaders, who?”
“Worse. The French.”
“Why in the hell—and I ask this in a spirit of pure inquiry—is the sultan taking the word of the French for a single damned thing?” Mike rubbed at eyes grown raw and gritty with a long day’s work. “Forgive me, Francisco, if there is something in what you’ve written that covers this, but . . .”
“I know. We are all at a busy time. What with—” He waved a hand that took in everything from Bohemia to the British Isles, Sweden to Spain. “We are all busy. Now, perhaps some coffee? This discussion may be protracted.”
“Sure,” said Mike, “a last one for the evening while you tell the story.”
Eventually, coffee in hand, Francisco sat on the sofa that was there for the more informal meetings. He looked at it and barked. “Ha!”
“What?” Mike frowned over the rim of his mug.
“Sofa. Kiosk. Divan.” He raised his mug in ironic toast. “Kaveh. Coffee. The amount of your language that comes from the Empire—the real Empire, not this cheap imitation Holy Roman thing—”
Mike snorted, nearly having an accident with his coffee.
Francisco continued remorselessly. “All these words in English that started in Turkish. There are probably more, but I have only been here a little less than two years. But I keep hearing little drips of home in a shower of English.”
And then he sighed, once, and deeply. “They are all that really survive of the Refuge of the World, as we call it, in your twentieth century’s strongest culture. The nation that is there called ‘Turkey’ was only built, I understand, by sweeping away the rotting shell that it had become. But the glory that was, and still is! Mike, for all that Christian kings of this time talk of dividing the world between them, they are a sorry pack of scoundrels at best. Robber barons, if that. Not all put together could they match the Moghul khan, or the Ming emperor of far Cathay. And even they are as nothing compared to the Sultan of the Two Seas. It is still the strongest empire in the world. Hah! What a thing it is, to know the fate of an empire and mourn the glory it yet has.”