Pan Michael: An Historical Novel of Poland, the Ukraine, and Turkey

  CHAPTER XLVI.

  When the earth had grown dry, and grass was flourishing, the Khan movedin person, with fifty thousand of the Crimean and Astrachan hordes, tohelp Doroshenko and the insurgents. The Khan himself, and hisrelatives, the petty sultans, and all the more important murzas andbeys, wore kaftans as gifts from the Padishah, and went against theCommonwealth, not as they went usually, for booty and captives, but fora holy war with "fate," and the "destruction" of Lehistan (Poland) andChristianity.

  Another and still greater storm was gathering at Adrianople, andagainst this deluge only the rock of Kamenyets was standing erect; forthe rest of the Commonwealth lay like an open steppe, or like a sickman, powerless not only to defend himself, but even to rise to hisfeet. The previous Swedish, Prussian, Moscow, Cossack, and Hungarianwars, though victorious finally, had exhausted the Commonwealth. Thearmy confederations and the insurrections of Lyubomirski of infamousmemory had exhausted it, and now it was weakened to the last degree bycourt quarrels, the incapacity of the king, the feuds of magistrates,the blindness of a frivolous nobility, and the danger of civil war. Invain did the great Sobieski forewarn them of ruin,--no one wouldbelieve in war. They neglected means of defence; the treasury had nomoney, the hetman no troops. To a power against which alliances of allthe Christian nations were hardly able to stand, the hetman couldoppose barely a few thousand men.

  Meanwhile in the Orient, where everything was done at the will of thePadishah, and nations were as a sword in the hand of one man, it wasdifferent altogether. From the moment that the great standard of theProphet was unfurled, and the horse-tail standard planted on the gateof the seraglio and the tower of the seraskierat, and the ulema beganto proclaim a holy war, half Asia and all Northern Africa had moved.The Padishah himself had taken his place in spring on the plain ofKuchunkaury, and was assembling forces greater than any seen for a longtime on earth. A hundred thousand spahis and janissaries, the pick ofthe Turkish army, were stationed near his sacred person; and thentroops began to gather from all the remotest countries and possessions.Those who inhabited Europe came earliest. The legions of the mountedbeys of Bosnia came with colors like the dawn, and fury like lightning;the wild warriors of Albania came, fighting on foot with daggers; bandsof Mohammedanized Serbs came; people came who lived on the banks of theDanube, and farther to the south beyond the Balkans, as far as themountains of Greece. Each pasha led a whole army, which alone wouldhave sufficed to overrun the defenceless Commonwealth. Moldavians andWallachians came; the Dobrudja and Belgrod Tartars came in force; somethousands of Lithuanian Tartars and Cheremis came, led by the terribleAzya, son of Tugai Bey, and these last were to be guides through theunfortunate country, which was well known to them.

  After these the general militia from Asia began to flow in. The pashasof Sivas, Brussa, Aleppo, Damascus, and Bagdad, besides regular troops,led armed throngs, beginning with men from the cedar-covered mountainsof Asia Minor, and ending with the swarthy dwellers on the Euphratesand the Tigris. Arabians too rose at the summons of the Caliph; theirburnooses covered as with snow the plains of Kuchunkaury; among themwere also nomads from the sandy deserts, and inhabitants of cities fromMedina to Mecca. The tributary power of Egypt did not remain at itsdomestic hearths. Those who dwelt in populous Cairo, those who in theevening gazed on the flaming twilight of the pyramids, who wanderedthrough Theban ruins, who dwelt in those murky regions whence thesacred Nile issues forth, men whom the sun had burned to the color ofsoot,--all these planted their arms on the field of Adrianople, prayingnow to give victory to Islam, and destruction to that land which alonehad shielded for ages the rest of the world against the adherents ofthe Prophet.

  There were legions of armed men; hundreds of thousands of horses wereneighing on the field; hundreds of thousands of buffaloes, of sheep andof camels, fed near the herds of horses. It might be thought that atGod's command an angel had turned people out of Asia, as once he hadturned Adam out of paradise, and commanded them to go to countries inwhich the sun was paler and the plains were covered in winter withsnow. They went then with their herds, an innumerable swarm of white,dark, and black warriors. How many languages were heard there, how manydifferent costumes glittered in the sun of spring! Nations wondered atnations; the customs of some were foreign to others, their armsunknown, their methods of warfare different, and faith alone joinedthose travelling generations; only when the muezzins called to prayerdid those many-tongued hosts turn their faces to the East, calling onAllah with one voice.

  There were more servants at the court of the Sultan than troops in theCommonwealth. After the army and the armed bands of volunteers marchedthrongs of shop-keepers, selling goods of all kinds; their wagons,together with those of the troops, flowed on like a river.

  Two pashas of three tails, at the head of two armies, had no other workbut to furnish food for those myriads; and there was abundance ofeverything. The sandjak of Sangrytan watched over the whole supply ofpowder. With the army went two hundred cannon, and of these ten were"stormers," so large that no Christian king had the like. TheBeglerbeys of Asia were on the right wing, the Europeans on the left.The tents occupied so wide an expanse that in presence of themAdrianople seemed no very great city. The Sultan's tents, gleaming inpurple silk, satin, and gold embroidery, formed, as it were, a cityapart. Around them swarmed armed guards, black eunuchs from Abyssinia,in yellow and blue kaftans; gigantic porters from the tribes ofKurdistan, intended for bearing burdens; young boys of the Uzbeks, withfaces of uncommon beauty, shaded by silk fringes; and many otherservants, varied in color as flowers of the steppe. Some of these wereequerries, some served at the tables, some bore lamps, and some servedthe most important officials.

  On the broad square around the Sultan's court, which in luxury andwealth reminded the faithful of paradise, stood courts less splendid,but equal to those of kings,--those of the vizir, the ulema, the pashaof Anatolia, and of Kara Mustafa, the young kaimakan, on whom the eyesof the Sultan and all were turned as upon the coming "sun of war."

  Before the tents of the Padishah were to be seen the sacred guard ofinfantry, with turbans so lofty that the men wearing them seemedgiants, They were armed with javelins fixed on long staffs, and shortcrooked swords. Their linen dwellings touched the dwellings of theSultan. Farther on were the camps of the formidable janissaries armedwith muskets and lances, forming the kernel of the Turkish power.Neither the German emperor nor the French king could boast of infantryequal in number and military accuracy. In wars with the Commonwealththe nations of the Sultan, more enervated in general, could not measurestrength with cavalry in equal numbers, and only through an immensenumerical preponderance did they crush and conquer. But the janissariesdared to meet even regular squadrons of cavalry. They roused terror inthe whole Christian world, and even in Tsargrad itself. Frequently theSultan trembled before such pretorians, and the chief aga of those"lambs" was one of the most important dignitaries in the Divan.

  After the janissaries came the spahis; after them the regular troops ofthe pashas, and farther on the common throng. All this camp had beenfor a number of months near Constantinople, waiting till its powershould be completed by legions coming from the remotest parts of theTurkish dominions until the sun of spring should lighten the march toLehistan by sucking out dampness from the earth.

  The sun, as if subject to the will of the Sultan, had shone brightly.From the beginning of April until May barely a few warm rains hadmoistened the meadows of Kuchunkaury; for the rest, the blue tent ofGod hung without a cloud over the tent of the Sultan. The gleams of dayplayed on the white linen, on the turbans, on the many-colored caps, onthe points of the helmets and banners and javelins, on the camp and thetents and the people and the herds, drowning all in a sea of brightlight. In the evening on a clear sky shone the moon, unhidden by fog,and guarded quietly those thousands who under its emblem were marchingto win more and more new lands; then it rose higher in the heaven, andgrew pale before the light of the fires. But when the fir
es weregleaming in the whole immeasurable expanse, when the Arab infantry fromDamascus and Aleppo, called "massala djilari," lighted green, red,yellow, and blue lamps at the tents of the Sultan and the vizir, itmight seem that a tract of heaven had fallen to the earth, and thatthose were stars glittering and twinkling on the plain.

  Exemplary order and discipline reigned among those legions. The pashasbent to the will of the Sultan, like a reed in a storm; the army bentbefore them. Food was not wanting for men and herds. Everything wasfurnished in superabundance, everything in season. In exemplary orderalso were passed the hours of military exercise, of refreshment, ofdevotion. When the muezzins called to prayer from wooden towers, builtin haste, the whole army turned to the East, each man stretched beforehimself a skin or a mat, and the entire army fell on its knees, likeone man. At sight of that order and those restraints the hearts rose inthe throngs, and their souls were filled with sure hope of victory.

  The Sultan, coming to the camp at the end of April, did not move atonce on the march. He waited more than a month, so that the watersmight dry; during that time he trained the army to camp life, exercisedit, arranged it, received envoys, and dispensed justice under a purplecanopy. The kasseka, his chief wife, accompanied him on thisexpedition, and with her too went a court resembling a dream ofparadise.

  A gilded chariot bore the lady under a covering of purple silk; afterit came other wagons and white Syrian camels, also covered with purple,bearing packs; houris and bayaderes sang songs to her on the road.When, wearied with the road, she was closing the silky lashes of hereyes, the sweet tones of soft instruments were heard at once, and theylulled her to sleep. During the heat of the day fans of peacock andostrich feathers waved above her; priceless perfumes of the East burnedbefore her tents in bowls from Hindostan. She was accompanied by allthe treasures, wonders, and wealth that the Orient and the power of theSultan could furnish,--houris, bayaderes, black eunuchs, pagesbeautiful as angels, Syrian camels, horses from the desert of Arabia;in a word, a whole retinue was glittering with brocade, cloth of silverand gold; it was gleaming like a rainbow from diamonds, rubies,emeralds, and sapphires. Nations fell prostrate before it, not daringto look at that face, which the Padishah alone had the right to see;and that retinue seemed to be either a supernatural vision or areality, transferred by Allah himself from the world of visions anddream-illusions to the earth.

  But the sun warmed the world more and more, and at last days of heatcame. On a certain evening, therefore, the banner was raised on a loftypole before the Sultan's tent, and a cannon-shot informed the army andthe people of the march to Lehistan. The great sacred drum sounded; allthe others sounded; the shrill voices of pipes were heard; the pious,half-naked dervishes began to howl, and the river of people moved on inthe night, to avoid the heat of the sun during daylight. But the armyitself was to march only in a number of hours after the earliestsignal. First of all went the tabor, then those pashas who providedfood for the troops, then whole legions of handicraftsmen, who had topitch tents, then herds of pack animals, then herds destined forslaughter. The march was to last six hours of that night and thefollowing nights, and to be made in such order that when soldiers cameto a halt they should always find food and a resting-place ready.

  When the time came at last for the army to move, the Sultan rode out onan eminence, so as to embrace with his eyes his whole power, andrejoice at the sight. With him were his vizir, the ulema, the youngkaimakan, Kara Mustafa, the "rising sun of war," and a company of theinfantry guard. The night was calm and clear; the moon shone brightly;and the Sultan might embrace with the eye all his legions, were it notthat no eye of man could take them all in at once,--for on the march,though going closely together, they occupied many miles.

  Still he rejoiced in heart, and passing the beads of odoroussandal-wood through his fingers, raised his eyes to Heaven in thanks toAllah, who had made him lord of so many armies and so many nations. Allat once, when the front of the tabor had pushed almost out of sight, heinterrupted his prayer, and turning to the young kaimakan, KaraMustafa, said,--

  "I have forgotten who marches in the vanguard?"

  "Light of paradise!" answered Kara Mustafa, "in the vanguard are theLithuanian Tartars and the Cheremis; and thy dog Azya, son of TugaiBey, is leading them."