The sapper’s face went crimson from the neck up.
The akinxhi showed his repulsion with a shrug.
“So that’s what it is! I never thought you would fall so low.”
The sapper said nothing.
“Have you heard? The caster of spells was thrown in irons this morning. Apparently he didn’t do his curse properly. When he put up his hands with palms facing outwards, he got the direction wrong and covered only half the citadel.”
“What are you saying?”
“When he was being chained up, he yelled: ‘Careful with my hands! They’re my working tools!’ It’s like worrying about your hair when you’re having your head cut off! There’s a rumour going round that all the suspects are going to be arrested.”
“They’ll only get what they deserve.”
“You’d have done better to steal or pillage instead of …”
“You have to understand me: I’m just dying to have a woman.”
“The way you’re going about it, you’ll end up losing your taste for the opposite sex.”
“Why?” the soldier asked in a worried voice. “Why?”
Their unit’s drum then began to roll, and the men formed into a column. Kurdisxhi went right past them on his imposing mount. He had an escort of soldiers accompanied by the Mufti. When they had almost passed by, Çelebi suddenly recognised Tuz Okçan. He was talking to an akinxhi who seemed to be making some kind of promise to him. Did he also sleep with his “mates,” as people called them nowadays? The chronicler looked up automatically towards the citadel and saw the ramparts streaked with long, funereal drapes of congealing pitch.
“Bon voyage, Mevla!” the janissary’s voice rang out, once the soldier had recognised the chronicler. Çelebi waved a thank you. His heart was almost melting with gratification. It seemed that a warm wish of that kind was what he had really needed. “May luck be with you too,” he mumbled to himself.
Tuz Okçan stood for a while, watching the dust cloud raised by the horses. When the last unit had set off, he walked back to the camp. On his way he overheard groups of soldiers talking about the akinxhis they had just seen off, and going over the booty they had requested from them. Tuz Okçan was well aware that many of them had done deals with the marauders, involving the purchase of captive women. He’d heard tell by army veterans that when expeditions of that sort make it back, the camp usually turns into a great slave market, especially of women, for a period of days. With their crude tastes, soldiers would hurry to buy flowery dresses to drape over their prisoners. When they had slaked their desire, they would sell their captives on at the best price they could get and use the proceeds to buy another one. The departments that set up military campaign plans well in advance never forgot to include in the list of supplies, alongside food, cannon, blankets and camels, a few thousand flowery dresses for captured women.
The janissary had also been told that the trade in slave women was both a delight and a risky activity for novice soldiers. There was no such thing as a fixed price; the value of a girl fluctuated by the hour, usually depending on the number of women taken. There were no precise criteria for estimating the relative value of the slaves, either, since tastes in women were as varied as the origins of soldiers coming from many different parts of the Empire. Some liked them plump, with ripples of flesh around their midriffs, whereas others preferred them as skinny as rakes. Some were driven to ecstasy by a copious bosom, whereas others couldn’t stand the sight of such a thing. There was just as little agreement about height, eye colour, age, neck, arms and especially about the thickness of pubic hair.
The only preference almost universally shared was for blondes. Their price sometimes went so high that only ranking officers, or at most the death squad soldiers, who had the highest pay among troopers, could afford the luxury of buying one.
Prices were high when the expedition got back, but sometimes had fallen sharply by the next day. Soldiers who had spent the night with their new slaves tried to sell them on in front of their tents, regretting they had paid so much. Weary and disenchanted, they were prepared to let them go at half the price. Crafty traders who knew the game would then snap them up in great numbers, well aware that dark and sultry nights would soon return and drive the price back up again.
But prices fluctuated wildly even after initial needs had been satisfied. Sometimes they went up steeply. That happened when girls died from exhaustion on top of each other before they even got out of the soldiers’ tents, or else when they lost their minds.
As he re-entered the camp Tuz Okçan felt a shaft of regret in his heart as he remembered that he would not be able to take part in the exciting trade in captive girls. Members of the Janissary Corps were not allowed to own girls. He tried to console himself with the thought that, with his modest pay as a new recruit, he wouldn’t have been able to afford one anyway. Despite that, he thought, he could have managed, if he had gone shares with one or even two comrades. He’d been told it was common practice.
He strode in leisurely fashion among the tents. Other janissaries went by with happy looks on their faces, for it was pay day. As he sauntered towards the tent of his unit’s quartermaster, he worked out in his head how many months of his pay of forty-five aspers a month he would have to save up to accumulate two hundred, which was half the going price for a girl of average looks, and the third of the price of a blonde.
A girl’s valuation also fluctuated considerably in the mind of Tuz Okçan. By day, when he was striding forth, as he was now, he reckoned it was crazy to squander a year’s savings for a secondhand, no longer pristine woman. But there were stiflingly hot nights when he would have spent not a year’s pay, but all his life savings, to be able to enjoy the pleasure of the swallows’ nest. When he was aroused, he recalled a risqué song that he’d heard an old janissary recite: “It’s snowing, the wind’s howling/ A friend is yelling to find his friend” in which, to Tuz Okçan’s amazement, the first occurrence of “friend” was replaced by a word for the female sexual organ, and the second by the name of the male organ. So it was a woman’s sex that howled like a she-wolf on a snowy winter’s day, Tuz Okçan mused. But in his own mind there was nothing in the world that could be likened to a male organ gripped by wild lust. He had felt its fury. When it was blindly excited and foaming at the brim, it seemed to him that an erection could smash right through a woman’s belly, and it made his testicles hurt, hurt like mad, as they tried to slow him down, as if he was no more than a puking drunk.
Sometimes he was overcome with panic at the thought that he might perhaps never again have an opportunity to enjoy a woman, and at such moments he would have given not just his life savings, but several years of his life to escape such a fate.
He sighed a deep sigh and tried to think of something else.
For the second time in a week he noticed the new bread oven that had been set up on a platform not far from the ramparts. He was intrigued to see as he went past that several sentries had been detailed to guard it. In two or three places there were signboards prohibiting access to it. A rumour had gone round a few days before saying that an enemy agent had tried to poison the dough. That was apparently the reason for the heightened security. In addition, that must be the oven where bread was baked for the high-ranking officers, and so it was only natural it should be watched over with special care.
He was walking away from it when he heard the sound of horses’ hooves coming up behind him. He turned around and was astonished to see a senior officer with an escort of three other officers trotting up to the oven. He stopped to watch. A few other soldiers did the same, and soon more joined them.
“The Pasha!” someone whispered.
Tuz Okçan opened his eyes wide. He had heard a lot about the commander-in-chief but had never seen him before. He stood up on tiptoe. There was whispering all around.
“How gloomy he looks!”
“Yes, he really does.”
“Who’s the other guy, on his right?”
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“Don’t know. The one on his left is the Alaybey.”
“It’s the architect,” someone said.
“What a strange head he has! His face looks like an egg.”
“Now and again he has epileptic fits, apparently.”
“But he has no rival in the whole Empire, as far as his job is concerned.”
“I don’t doubt that. Epileptics are either idiots or geniuses.”
“Why are they going to the oven?”
“How should I know? That’s Government business.”
“People are saying that poison was mixed with the dough and they’re supposed to have launched an inquiry.”
“Poison?”
“Yes. Hadn’t you heard? You must be on another planet! Listen here: the poison is obviously bad enough, but there’s worse, so it seems. The caster of spells wasn’t acting on his own.”
“Well, well. The plot thickens …”
“That’s right, chum. And who can clear it up?”
A sentry came up to the knot of gossipers.
“Move on there,” he commanded. “Public assembly is forbidden in these here parts.”
The soldiers went their different ways.
Meanwhile the Pasha, the Alaybey and the architect had gone into the bake house together. The Pasha’s aide-de-camp and a sentry made up the rear of the party. Two guards stood watch outside.
The Pasha went down into the cellar behind a sapper carrying a torch to light his way. The search party followed behind. There was neither flour nor dough down there, for it was the secret entrance to the underground passageway. The bake house built over it was just camouflage. The chimney smoked day and night, but no bread was baked in it. Carts with their loads fully covered under canvas went in and out of the main door without interruption. Everyone believed them to be loaded with sacks of flour. Only a very fine ear could have worked out that they were in fact empty when they went in, but fully laden on return. What they carried was much heavier than bread: countless sacks of soil from the underground excavation, which they removed to a dump behind a distant wood.
The party plunged into the tunnel. Ventilation shafts had been put in and hidden on the surface inside tents that were under twenty-four-hour guard, but they were few and far between, so the air in the tunnel was heavy and stale. As they proceeded, the Pasha found it ever harder to breathe, but he pushed forwards with his inspection nonetheless. Buckets of oil-soaked ash placed at long intervals provided feeble lighting. Now and again they crossed the path of men pushing barrows full of earth.
In the half-light the Pasha looked like a ghost.
“Up to point here, struts. From point here, no struts,” the architect droned.
“He’s saying we should go no farther because the cribbing ends here,” the aide-de-camp translated.
They halted.
The Pasha looked up at the wide, sodden beams. He and the others could just hear the muffled sound of picks and axes being used a few dozen paces further on in the dark. The architect got a drawing out of his satchel. A guard brought a torch nearer to him, and Giaour tried to explain. The aide-de-camp provided a running translation:
“He says that the point we are at now is located twenty-five paces from the outside wall. The men at the cutting face are now no more than seven paces from the wall. Tonight they’ll be up to the foundations.”
The architect made a mark on his plan right next to the line that represented the wall.
The Pasha noted that the tunnel dipped downwards sharply from this point on. The gradient was so steep that men going up or down had to hang on to ropes anchored to the side walls. The light of torches could be seen lower down, as if at the bottom of a well, but it was all clouded by dust and made men look like the phantoms that whirling windstorms sometimes create.
Giaour the architect droned on and on.
“What he’s saying,” the aide-de-camp interpreted, “is that this slope is obligatory to allow the tunnel to pass under the foundations of the citadel with a clearance of at least half its own height. That way we will have to demolish only one span of the buried section of the wall.”
The Pasha was still staring at the human shadows. The dust was so thick at the cutting face that the hole made you think of the gates of hell.
“How long have they been working without a break in the fresh air?” the Pasha asked.
The Alaybey did not answer straight away.
“Apart from the sappers, the men have all been sentenced, so …”
“I understand,” the Pasha interrupted.
An acrid smell came in whiffs from the end of the tunnel.
“What’s that smell?” the Pasha asked with a grimace.
The architect explained:
“It is the smell of the brine we pour on the foundations to break down the mortar.”
The architect then pointed to another spot on the plan that the Pasha could not see very well through the smoke that was making his eyes sting. He waved his hand and the torch-bearer moved the lamp away.
“Once we have got through the foundations,” the aide-de-camp reported to him, “the passage will slope back up to its original level so as to reach the surface at the spot we have set for it to come out into the open.”
“How will you manage to hide the noise of the pickaxes?” the Alaybey asked.
The architect replied straight off.
“On the other side of the foundations the digging will have to be done by spading the soil.”
“It’ll be a long job,” the Pasha observed.
“He says it’s the only way to proceed without giving ourselves away.”
“How many days?” the Pasha asked laconically.
“Twelve,” the architect replied.
He filled out the picture by showing in which of the citadel’s dungeons the tunnel would exit, and how dozens of soldiers could spill forth from it in a short space of time. They would have to be able to defend the tunnel mouth until hundreds of others had come through behind them, even if the besieged were to discover the tunnel in extremis and raise the alarm.
The Pasha walked back towards the entrance with his escort behind him. It was already dusk when they emerged. The Pasha had a dreamy look in his eye as he crossed the camp to go back to his pavilion. Officers and men stood still with their eyes fixed as he went past. He went out and about in the camp only on rare occasions, and most of the men, including some officers, had not had a chance of setting eyes on him before.
The image of the dust-filled cavern was still in his mind when he got back to his tent. The world truly was like a building with three floors. Men on earth lived on the middle floor, mistakenly believing they had knowledge of things or even some power over them. In fact all was decided on the upper storey, in heaven, whereas secrets lay in misery beneath the ground. Like the dead … All the same he didn’t cease hoping vaguely that the dead would help them dig their tunnel right into the entrails of the citadel.
Once inside his tent he sat on the divan and skimmed through the day’s reports, which were of many different kinds. The Secret Service Agha’s daily report came along with a statement from a patrol about a squabble between two sanxhakbeys that had broken out the day before. Others dealt with matters of lesser importance: there was a request from the kadi to sentence to death two quartermasters who had sequestered the pay of dead soldiers (he couldn’t be bothered to read it all through, but satisfied himself by noting that the document was signed at the bottom by the Quartermaster General); four sentences for disobeying superiors; and other less severe punishments of soldiers and officers in the various different corps requested by the head of the camp on various grounds, mostly fist-fights and unruly behaviour. He hastily initialled the sentences but added in the margin, “Send below”. As he scrawled those words, which meant “to the tunnel,” he felt the well-known sensation of the powerful of the earth who can cast another man into the abyss. The idea that his own fate was also in the hands of another did not hold h
im back, but, on the contrary, put fresh energy into his view. He had long known that the world is but a pyramid of power, and the loser would always be the man who gives up the exercise of his own power before the other.
He set aside the two longest reports, to read carefully later. The first was from the Quartermaster General and dealt with the state of the reserves of food and cash. The second was the work of the Alaybey. It gave a picture of morale among the troops. It was detailed, and was based on a wide range of information provided by the numerous underlings of Tabduk Baba. Together with the Alaybey’s own suggestions and conclusions, the report contained dozens of accounts of everyday events, and snatches of conversations overheard among soldiers gave substance to the Alaybey’s views. There was even an appendix with the lyrics of a song recently heard around the camp. As he glanced through the report, the Pasha saw that this endless recitation of mundane actions and utterances expressed a lukewarm and resentful attitude that was utterly incompatible with the straight lines, rules, ranks, standards, cornets and everything else that constituted the grandeur of war. It was like rising damp, permeating and rotting the great edifice of his army. And although the Alaybey put it indirectly and with a great deal of circumlocution, the situation was obvious. His experience as a leader had taught him that during a siege such a state of mind always arises in the end if after a defeat men are left without anything to do. The besieged fortress towered over his huge camp every day, his men saw it at reveille every morning just as they saw it at dusk every evening. He knew it would weigh on their spirits ever more heavily. He also knew that in such circumstances faint hearts can be rallied by creating imaginary dangers, by launching allegedly secret inquiries (like the one targeting the caster of spells, which had everybody trying to divine what the man’s fate would be), by setting up trials and by holding spectacular executions, or by prompting disagreements among the generals, to which most soldiers and officers were already accustomed. He was certainly able to do all those things, and he would have done them if there was not, deep down beneath the ground, the foundation of all his hopes — a tunnel snaking forwards every day. A quick victory on a calm night, without too much bloodshed or toil, would be doubly precious in the present apathy, now that the bulk of his troops were giving way to the insidious disease of war-weariness.