The horse started neighing again. Its mane stood magnificently erect. It was shaking its withers and stamping on the ground more and more often. From the top of the castle wall the defenders watched in silence (at least, that was the impression that their unmoving heads produced) while thousands of soldiers pressing up to the fence held their breath. Some cried out wishes: “Let’s hope she does find it!” Others gave encouragement in beseeching and desperate tones: “O sacred horse, go on and find it!” Dozens of hoxhas and dervishes had kneeled on the ground to pray, holding the palms of their hands one against the other.
The horse whinnied. It seemed to pick up the scent of the river, and rushed off towards it once more. But the fence was sturdy and forced the animal to turn back. You could see steam rising from its exhausted body, you could see its nostrils quivering. A narrow streak of blood led away from its mouth. The mare was now cantering parallel to the fence a few paces from the soldiers, staring at them with its demented eyes.
The parapet was packed with defenders. It seemed every one of them had climbed up to the top. Some were waving crosses and icons.
Suddenly the horse stopped, pivoted around, put its head down, and plunged its muzzle into the ground. Then it trampled its hooves into the same spot with furious energy, raising great clumps of earth. But this time the horse did not move on. Quite the contrary: it stamped and nuzzled the ground with ever-greater fury and desperation. It was quickly enveloped in a cloud of dust. It soon seemed that a miracle was taking place: just like in a fairy story, the mare seemed to have been seized by a whirlwind and to have vanished into the heavens in a puff of smoke. As the dust cloud settled, the horse was indeed nowhere to be seen. A groan of terror and awe rose from a thousand breasts. Then from the midst of the moaning rose shouts of “She’s back! She’s come back!” and they were all so carried away that many of them raised their eyes to the heavens, expecting to see the horse float back down. But once the dust cloud had cleared completely, the horse could be seen by all, with its legs in the air, waving its hooves ever more feebly, and rubbing its back into the ground.
“That spot is to be excavated immediately!” the Pasha called out. The sapper’s captain, who had come closer in the expectation of just such an order, rushed over to his men, standing at the ready a few paces away, with their spades and picks on their shoulders. A breach was made in the fence and the captain led his sappers at the double towards the horse. When they got to the spot where it was still lying, they pulled it out of the way and started digging.
There was much ado among the defenders at the top of the high wall. Sinister curved shapes emerged from the battlements, then arrows whistled through the scorching air. Two sappers sank to the ground without a sound. The third to be hit was the captain.
Tursun Pasha closed his eyes. He felt worn out, but happy.
“At last!” he muttered. “At last.”
“Give the sappers some cover!” the Alaybey yelled.
Someone darted forwards. Commands were bawled, the breach in the fence was reopened, and a detachment of azabs, carrying their shields high before them, ran towards the diggers who had begun to flee, leaving their tools behind.
“The pipe is definitely there,” Tursun Pasha said. “The fact that they shot at us proves we are on to their water supply. But why are the sappers running away? Get them back on the job this instant! They must dig at top speed. We mustn’t leave them time to draw water! Quickly!”
“About — turn!” the Alaybey screamed as he went to intercept the handful of runaways. “Resume digging! At the double! Go!”
Under the command of an officer the azabs turned about and led the troops at running pace back towards the horse. The sappers followed on behind. When they got within range of the enemy, the infantrymen raised their shields and advanced with caution. By the time they reached the place where digging had been started, they formed on the fortress side an almost solid wall of shields, and waited for the sappers to come up behind them. Nobody seemed to pay the slightest attention to the men who had fallen beside the horse.
There were a few more shots from the battlements, but then, strangely enough, the defenders gradually vanished.
“They’ve gone back down to fill their water tanks,” a voice suggested.
The Pasha gave an order. Another detachment of azabs instantly advanced towards the sappers and gave them a second semicircle of cover from enemy fire.
The digging went on. People waited and worried. In the midst of the excitement, anxiety and sweat that afflicted everyone, only the architect’s face remained, as ever, unmoved. Now and again the Mufti nodded his head and uttered curses.
The sappers had now dug deep enough to be quite invisible to the onlookers. All that could be seen were spadefuls of earth flying up over the edge of the hole. And the more the pile of dug earth rose, the more you could read sheer terror in the eyes of all.
“At the siege of Hapsan-Kala, we had to dig for half a day,” Old Tavxha said, looking at one and then the other of his comrades as if to seek their pardon for this delay in the discovery of the water source.
Silence reigned. The hole was now very deep and earth was being hauled up in sacks. A man ran over with a ladder on his back. Some of the onlookers grew weary of waiting and drifted off, but their places were quickly taken by others. People you never usually notice in an army came to join the throng: kitchen workers, officers’ laundrymen, water carriers, embroiderers, knife grinders, all those whose tents were pitched on the other side of the river and who had come to be called the “othersiders,” and even the dwarves who had just been sent from the capital to entertain the troops.
The Pasha slowly cracked his knuckles. His right ear had started buzzing again. He took another look at the corpses lying around the sappers and leaned towards the Alaybey to whisper something to him. But just at that moment, from the place of excavation, a savage roar of joy could be heard. “Wa-a-a-ter!” yelled ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times over by the horde of soldiers who suddenly shook themselves out of the state of lethargy into which the cruel sun had plunged them. The cry snapped them out of it in an instant, as if the water itself had suddenly refreshed their scorched limbs and faces.
Tursun Pasha began to laugh. It was the first time he had allowed himself that pleasure since the beginning of the campaign. Everyone in his entourage was taken aback, and turned to look. It was unusual, even shocking. They had never imagined their commander-in-chief was capable of laughing, and like anything that overturns a generally held opinion, the Pasha’s guffaw aroused a kind of anxiety, almost a feeling of fear. Their leader’s face suddenly seemed strange, distant, and undecipherable.
Shouts of “the water, the water!” now rose on all sides in wild excitement. Soldiers kissed and hugged, picked each other up, bawled and howled like madmen. Dervishes began to dance.
The battlements were still deserted. The defenders had vanished. Only the look-outs could be seen moving slowly at the tops of the towers, like shadows quite alien to the world of men.
“Skanderbeg!” Tursun Pasha growled, as if he was drunk on revenge. “At last, I am going to crush you!”
He ground his teeth as if he was crushing the bones of his worst enemy, whose name he had just uttered for the first time in his life. At meetings of the war council and in other discussions, the Pasha always avoided saying Skanderbeg’s name and only ever referred to him as “that man”.
“Skanderbeg!” he mumbled again with repressed glee, slowly turning each letter of the name over on his tongue.
The Pasha’s smile slowly drained from his face like water on sand, and his expression resumed its familiar look which all around him understood. They cheered up as a result and the wave of joy that had come to them with a slight delay now overtook them entirely. They began to chatter noisily about this and that and congratulated each other heartily. The Mufti, Kurdisxhi and others kept looking towards the still imperturbable architect, and put on faces to make fun of him.
Old Tavxha stood stock-still. Cursing under his breath, he was proudly waiting for the others to come over and congratulate him.
The water had now flooded the pit and a puddle had appeared in the field. But the parched earth drank it in and the puddle did not grow any larger. Mud-covered sappers were busy all around it among their tools, the dead horse and the corpses of the soldiers who had been killed and who didn’t seem to matter to anyone.
Mission accomplished. Tursun Pasha turned around. Before leaving, he called out to the Alaybey, “Tonight, let there be feasting!”
His deputies followed in his wake.
“I don’t think the siege will last much longer now,” Saruxha said. “A pity, because we won’t have a chance of testing our third cannon.”
“I think you will,” the Quartermaster General replied. “And you’ll have time to test number four as well, if you intend to cast it.”
“How can that be? They’ve no more water. They won’t be able to hold out for more than a week.”
“I don’t know why, but I doubt that,” the Quartermaster went on.
“Well, you’ve given me some comfort, at least,” Saruxha said. “When I heard them shout ‘Water!’ just now, I thought I’d lost my third cannon already.”
“Are the moulds ready?”
“Yes, almost.”
They were wending their way through muddle and mayhem. Orders and cries could be heard all around: “Keep away from the pit!” “You’ll be shot at from the battlements!” “Keep away from the fence!” Sappers were bringing in the dead on stretchers. A larger group was coming in behind them — azabs hauling a stone-barrow, on which they had laid the dead horse. Soldiers stood aside to make way for the barrow and craned their necks to get a better view of the dead animal with its mud-spattered mane hanging over the side.
“She’ll be buried with full military honours, like the captain of the sappers,” someone said.
“They were right to say it was a sacred beast.”
“She’ll have a turbes. I heard the Pasha giving the order.”
“A mausoleum? That’s only fair. She deserves one.”
“Who’s going to be appointed to lead the sappers now?” a young janissary officer asked.
“Who knows? He’s the second one to fall. The poor lad hardly had any time to enjoy his job. He was in post for only three hours. Maybe his successor will have better luck!”
The Quartermaster caught sight of the architect a few paces ahead of him, walking alone, save for his bodyguard. Two young janissary officers also noticed him and burst out laughing.
“Maybe he knows a lot, but an old nag knows more than he does,” one of them said. “People like that are just leeches on the state. They’re all the same! They get themselves paid sacks of gold for doing bugger all.”
“They don’t fool the high command, actually. They’re taken on because they’re the best of a bad bunch.”
“Did you hear that?” one of the janissaries asked with a smirk. “The architect lost out to a knackered horse!”
The men guffawed. One of them turned round, but on catching sight of the Quartermaster and Saruxha, he whispered something to his comrades, and they all stopped laughing. Surprised at the sudden wave of silence, one of the officers also turned round, and guessed the reason for it. It was not to his taste. Wishing to show that a janissary is not afraid of speaking his mind, even to officials, however elevated their rank, he puffed up his chest and said at the top of his voice:
“Indeed, a horse may well be able to do things that a scholar can’t!”
Some of the janissaries grinned hesitantly.
The Quartermaster General went pale.
“Officer! Say that one more time, will you?” he cried out in fury. “Go on!”
“I was not talking about you, sir,” the officer said with hauteur.
“Lout! Boor! Stand still!”
The officer stopped walking and stared insolently at the Quartermaster General. The other officer and the men also came to a halt. The architect turned round and looked on at the scene impassively.
“Are you talking to me?” the officer sneered.
“Yes, I am,” the Quartermaster General said as he came up close. “And here is my answer!” He slapped the young man in the face with his leather fan.
The officer reached for his sabre, but the Quartermaster’s bodyguard leaped forwards as quick as a cat, and put his dirk between his master and the janissary. Saruxha’s bodyguard had also drawn his dagger. A muffled hum arose from the crowd that had assembled, for they had all seen the insignia sewn on to the long tunics worn by the Quartermaster and the master caster.
“Disarm this man!” the Quartermaster ordered.
The two guards manhandled the officer and took away his sword. The janissary looked all around as if he was seeking help. But the only response the crowd gave was another wave of muttering. The guards, with their arms in hand, awaiting orders, looked to their masters, and everyone realised that the fate of the bold officer now hung on the lips of the two imperial dignitaries.
“Off to prison with him!” the Quartermaster said. Seeing a high-ranking officer in the crowd, he called out to him: “Put this scoundrel under lock and key!”
The officer nodded agreement, and ordered two foot-soldiers to take the janissary off to jail.
“You did very well,” Saruxha said when they had moved on a few yards. “But maybe we should have told our guards to execute the man on the spot.”
“It comes to the same thing,” the Quartermaster replied. “The court martial will sentence him to death.”
“How ignorant can you get!”
“He interrupted us as we were talking most agreeably. But what were we talking about? Supplies, I believe … Alright. Let’s have a glass of syrup in my tent, there’s going to be lots of noise and I can’t bear that sort of thing.”
Saruxha accepted the invitation.
The feast had already started. Night was falling, and the drums had begun to roll in every corner of the camp. Soldiers flocked to where they thought the best entertainment would be. The Quartermaster and Saruxha almost collided with half-drunk azabs many times. Dervishes were trying to make a space where they could start dancing.
As they passed in front of the Pasha’s pavilion, they heard the delicate and velvety sound of cymbals, so different from the brutal roll of drums.
“A woman’s hand,” the Quartermaster said as he slowed his pace.
“Yes, it surely is.”
The lilac pavilion was more brightly lit than usual. For a second, their eyes gleamed with yearning for the magical delights it held.
“The Pasha’s having fun,” Saruxha said.
“He doesn’t do that very often.”
“I thought I’d noticed that he doesn’t enjoy distractions. That proves he’s particularly happy tonight. In the circumstances, he has every right to be happy!”
The cymbals tinkled on at a jolly pace, with occasional pauses, as if to tease the listener.
“If he doesn’t win this campaign, his star will dim for good,” the Quartermaster said.
“Do you think so?”
“I’m sure of it. If he’s beaten, the best he can hope for is banishment for life. As for the worst …” The Quartermaster drew a line with his forefinger under his throat.
Again they nearly fell over tipsy troopers. They were mucking about waving flaming torches, swapping dirty jokes, laughing out loud. Others were playing at leapfrog or else trying to balance on a kind of seesaw.
The Quartermaster didn’t try to hide his disdain. “I don’t like to see the army unbutton itself,” he said.
His own tent was pitched away from the mass, in a quiet spot. Soldiers who didn’t feel like taking part in the feast were sitting or lying in front of their tents, chatting among themselves. Somewhere, someone was singing a sad song. The lyrics were not easy to make out:
We’re on a new campaign
In a distant land
In desolate terrain …
The rolls of all the drums had merged into a single thundering rumble which reached their ears in waves, and then swept on and was lost in the vastness of the night.
On the threshold of his tent, the Quartermaster turned round and looked for a moment at the huge camp spread out from one horizon to the other, interspersed with thousands of triangular outlines made by the dull mauve of the tents.
“What’s on your mind?” Saruxha enquired.
“I’m thinking that we’ll have to come back and pitch our tents many more times in this part of the world.”
“Inevitable. We live in a time of war.”
“Listen,” the Quartermaster said, changing the topic suddenly. “At the war council I’m going to insist on launching the second assault without delay. And you are going to support me.”
“Sure. But what’s the hurry?”
“They are many,” the Quartermaster explained with a wave of his arm towards the myriad tents. “The grain won’t feed them all.”
Saruxha blew his nose.
“So, three or four thousand fewer mouths to feed?”
“That’s right,” the Quartermaster said. “What’s more, we might even win.”
“But every day they’re without water brings our victory closer,” Saruxha objected. “Time is on our side.”
“We’ve cut their water, but don’t forget they’ve cut our food,” the Quartermaster replied.
He gestured again towards the centre of the main camp where there was feasting and uproar.
“They’re rejoicing tonight, but they’ve no idea that in a few days they’ll go on half-rations.”
“Poor men,” Saruxha sighed. “There’s so much they don’t know.”
“A soldier’s lot.”
They went inside the tent. As time passed, they spoke less and less. Eventually Saruxha stood up to take his leave, and his host walked him back part of the way to his tent. The party was still going on in the distance, but less noisily now.
“Listen!” the Quartermaster said suddenly as he was about to say farewell to his friend. “Are my ears deceiving me? Or is that not the alert sounding?”