“It’s been drumming like that for a little while already,” his orderly said.
“Yes,” Saruxha agreed. “That is the call to arms.”
They strained their ears. The great drum was beating somewhere deep inside the camp, each of its beats overriding the rattle and bang of the party drums.
“Skanderbeg!” the Quartermaster exclaimed.
They listened intently once more. From somewhere far away to their left could be heard the distant sound of uproar. From the darkness came sporadic echoes of different voices shouting “Silah bashna! Alarm!”
“Saruxha, come and spend the night in my tent,” the Quartermaster offered. “This part of the camp is safe.”
“I have to go and see what’s happening at the foundry,” the master caster said.
“Your foundry’s not at risk either.”
“It would still be better if I went back,” Saruxha objected.
“I advise you to stay. This night we are on alert.”
Saruxha wavered. The great drum carried on sounding the call to arms without a pause.
“Skanderbeg must have learned that we cut off the water,” the Quartermaster said thoughtfully. And, after a moment’s silence, he added: “The tiger has pounced!”
They finally cut off our water. To begin with, when the white horse started running round and round like a curse on our ramparts, we took it for irrational behaviour on their part — a magical practice or a primitive rite. Only the count, who stayed up late that night straining to decode the messages that are sent to us by means of beacons on the mountain-tops, knew what it was all about. The signals spoke of the fence, and obviously of water too. While we joked away on the battlements, he went to church to pray. Gossip spread, and though we carried on amusing ourselves, we gradually succumbed to anxiety. Although we did not yet know the whole truth, we were plagued by fear and came out in a cold sweat.
The count’s face was yellow when he came back up to see us at the top of the wall, and he looked down on the enemy camp with desolation in his eyes. He had not been afraid of their new weapon, but he seemed terrified of that horse. Later on, when it was all over, he explained that the aqueduct had been designed to follow a paradoxical path that made it undiscoverable by human minds. But once men had stepped aside and entrusted the task to an animal, he was sore afraid. In this circumstance instinct would be more effective than intelligence.
When they saw water spurt from the pit and turn it into a brackish puddle, our daughters burst into tears, then they all went to the chapel together to pray to the Holy Virgin.
The other side celebrated the water cut-off late into the night. Trumpets, drums, flutes, bagpipes and who knows what other instruments made a diabolical noise and filled the night with a hellish racket. It went on and on until we heard their alarm drum banging. Having apparently learned that they had cut our water, our Castrioti finally set upon them.
It is past midnight. Their huge camp is in convulsion, it is gasping for breath as if it were being hacked to death. George is down there among them. He is striking and harassing them as only he knows how. The night is pitch-dark and we cannot see anything. We can only feel his breath. We have all taken up our positions behind our great gate, and are ready to open it and launch a counter-attack as soon as the order comes. From the battlements a woman has started to yell: “George, George, avenge us and kill them all!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The chronicler had only just fallen asleep when the first alarm woke him up. He had spent a gloomy evening. In a camp entirely given over to noisy merrymaking, he had tramped up and down without meeting anyone of his acquaintance. He gave up looking for a friend, went back to his tent and tried to get some sleep. But he couldn’t. He felt painfully alone, and the sounds of carousing going on outside just made it worse. Two or three times he nearly got up to go out again, but when he remembered the fruitless walk he had taken earlier on, he decided to stay in bed. Then he just waited for the noise of the festivities to abate, hoping that once things had quietened down he would be able to get to sleep. But sleep actually stole up on him before the party was over. The white horse seeking out water kept on running round the fortress in ever slowing circles, wrapping his mind in its web of dream. Then the no-man’s-land on the other side of the fence suddenly reminded him of the plain of Kosovo — except that the white horse now had a rider, and that rider was Sultan Murad. The monarch gazed with desolate eyes on the dead who lay all around when suddenly … “Good God! No!” he moaned out loud, and woke up in an instant. The noise in the camp had changed. He went outside his tent and cocked his ear. The great alarm drum was banging somewhere in the heart of the camp. One by one, the other drums were stopping. Cries of “Hazerol!” and “Silah-bashna!” rang out all around. Mevla Çelebi got dressed in a hurry. He felt cold sweat on his brow. He went out. The party drums had now fallen silent, and the camp was swathed in terrifying darkness. All that could still be heard was the deep boom of the drum that signalled the alert. Çelebi could make out the sounds of running feet, of weapons being readied, commands and the clatter of hooves speeding away. Soldiers came out of their tents with their weapons in their hands and ran to their units’ assembly points like fleeting shadows hastening to a meeting of conspirators. He was seized with fear. Why were they running around like that? Where were they going? He stood outside his tent, quite petrified, not knowing what to do. There was a suspicious calm in the space immediately around him. He could hear feet moving away at speed. Someone shouted “Quicker! Quicker!” Then silence again. Why was this part of the camp being evacuated? As the thought struck him like a shard of ice, he started running automatically behind the others who were fleeing. He had no idea how long he ran. He only stopped when he felt there were enough people around him. It was a veritable exodus. Janissaries, volunteers, azabs, eshkinxhis, all in arms, were trying to track down their units by torchlight. You couldn’t tell whether they were preparing to retreat or to go on the attack. Raucous shouts, calls and orders bawled out by commanders rose on all sides.
“The fourth battalion has left!”
“Seems they’ve attacked the janissaries’ quarters.”
“Fifth eshkinxhi battalion, here!”
“Kara-Mukbil is fighting them to the death!”
“To the foundry! They’re attacking the foundry!”
“Back! What is your unit? Second battalion? Then retreat!”
“The Albanians have opened the gate!”
“They can’t have. Keep your mouth shut!”
“Bakerhan is dead!” someone screamed like a madman, at the head of the group that was falling back in chaos.
“Get back! Where are you going?”
“Skanderbeg!”
“Back, I said!”
“Skanderbeg! Skanderbeg!”
“What are you shouting about, you scoundrel? Here! Have this!”
The chronicler heard the dull thud of a blade entering a body, and then the sound of a man collapsing to the ground.
“The akinxhis! Here come the akinxhis!”
Kurdisxhi’s great mane of hair, gleaming in the torchlight, flashed past at the head of a mounted squadron.
“Get back! Get back!” an officer screamed.
“Join your units!”
“The sipahis! The glorious sipahis!”
Sipahis galloped past and disappeared into the night on the tail of the akinxhis.
The chronicler’s heart was ready to burst. The flower of the army was valiantly rushing to the front to repulse the enemy. He was ashamed of having yielded to fear a few moments before. He watched with admiration as the Moroccan tabors rushed towards the area where that beast Skanderbeg was wreaking havoc. But his joy was brief. The mass of men whose voices, arms and orders had dispelled his fear suddenly melted away before his eyes at incredible speed. The weapons, the voices and the commands were all swallowed up by the dark and very soon Mevla Çelebi realised that he was alone on a path that might very soon be tak
en by the marauding tiger.
He started running, not knowing which way he was going. He just had to get away from that spot which was being abandoned like a sinking ship. All around he could hear men calling and urging each other on, but in the black night he could not make out exactly where they were coming from. More like the voices of ghosts than of living men, the cries were carried off by the dark wind of the night.
He soon found himself once again in a crowd. He couldn’t tell if this dense pack of men was running away from the fight, or looking for it. It too quickly dispersed and the chronicler once more found himself on his own. He could now see all over the camp that men were coming together like bees to a swarm, then moving around, then dispersing, without rhyme or reason, like fluffy white clouds on a windy day. On a night of panic such as this, there was nothing to rely on.
He ran on and on. His legs took him instinctively towards the middle of the camp, where the commander-in-chief’s tent stood. He heard people calling and commanding, then from out of the darkness came an extraordinary, terrifying sound of heavy breathing which drowned out all other noise. Tahanka! the chronicler thought.
The Pasha’s tent was dark. Yet he saw messengers coming and going. Çelebi reckoned the Pasha was inside, but that the lights had been shaded so the tent would not be visible. He had collected himself now, and noticed that all around the tent were hundreds of desert warriors standing silently with their long lances at the ready. They made him feel safer. He sat down on the ground beside an alleyway. All sorts of noises could be heard in the distance, but here, at least, it was quiet. Mounted messengers galloped up, stopped dead in their tracks, slid straight out of the saddle, then ran on. Praise be to God for having allowed him to find safe haven! But this relative calm did not last long. He felt as if something was crawling forwards and moving in the dark. More and more desert warriors were swelling the detachment. From behind him, someone shouted out an order. A distant rumble of thunder seemed to be drawing nearer.
Çelebi could feel the drops of sweat on his forehead. What if that tornado were to strike the tent of the commander-in-chief? He sat up straight. Yes, of course. The tent was obviously the target. Yes, it was aiming to get here, and nowhere else. He was overcome with terror once again. He started to run. Ah, if only he could find a spot to hide! A really safe place, a bolt-hole, a hole in the ground … His mind was working fast. The abandoned tunnel! The bread oven! (Mevla! Have you only just realised that the oven was camouflage for the entrance to the tunnel?) He hastened towards the broken-down building. The rumble behind him was getting nearer. Quickly! Quickly! Now he’s got there at last. Nobody around. He goes inside. Feeling his way, shaking from head to toe, he finds the ladder. He climbs down. The rungs are ice cold. Further down. Pitch-black. A bitter odour of mud. He thinks of the astrologer. Suddenly, beneath his feet, in the dark, he felt something move. A snake! he thought, in terror, and he had already started to dash back up when from down below someone said quietly:
“Careful! You’re treading on us.”
He was petrified.
“You’d better sit down,” the same person said in a placid tone.
Çelebi couldn’t make sense of it all. He thought he felt something else move a little further on. He heard a sneeze.
“Where are you from?” the voice said.
“Me? From here … accidentally …” the chronicler stammered.
“It’s alright,” the voice replied. “I know the kind of accident you mean. But you had a bright idea. You’re not stupid!”
Çelebi didn’t answer.
“Have no fear,” the man went on gruffly. “We’re not hiding here so as to give you away. Crows don’t pick out each other’s eyes. I’m from the fourth azab battalion. Eleven years in the ranks. I worked out long ago that I’d lay low down here if Skanderbeg mounted a night raid. Dying on the walls is fine by me, but getting mown down in the crush really isn’t worth it. So at the first sound of the alert I ran out of my tent. Off you go, old azab, I said to myself, time to find your hidey-hole. Then once I got here I found friends. They’d been even quicker off the mark than I had.”
As if to confirm the azab’s explanation, someone nearby hiccupped.
“Sit down,” he went on. “Make yourself at home. Nobody will bother you down here.”
Çelebi found a little hump to sit on.
“You a sapper?” the azab asked.
“Yes,” the chronicler answered.
“Thought so. You must have worked here, obviously.”
By the time Çelebi felt like having a chat, as everyone does in due course once danger has passed, the azab had fallen silent. The chronicler didn’t dare speak first. He was afraid his voice might be recognised. He was ashamed. At the very moment when battle was raging, he, the historian, the writer of the chronicle destined to immortalise the stirring deeds of the campaign, was crouching like a rat in a hidden tunnel waiting for it all to calm down.
“Up there it must be sheer murder,” the azab muttered, as if he was reading Çelebi’s thoughts.
The chronicler didn’t know what to say. They could hear banging on the ground above them, sometimes quite clearly, sometimes less so. There was a long pause, then the noise began again, far away to begin with, then getting nearer and nearer.
“They’re coming this way,” the azab mumbled.
They held their peace and strained their ears. The banging was getting nearer, and was turning into the sound of horses galloping. They were even nearer now, right on top of them. The ground began to shake. The chronicler huddled up.
“They’re right above us,” the azab declared.
The sound of hooves above their heads became a terrifying din. He put his hand into his hair to shake out the earth he thought must have fallen into it and mumbled prayers until the thunder moved away once again.
Someone sighed deeply. Çelebi was relieved and was about to raise his voice when from the far distance the sound of trampling became faintly audible, and then grew steadily louder.
“Another wave,” the azab said.
They all held their breath. The noise got so loud they thought the ground over the roof of the tunnel would collapse on them.
“Skanderbeg!” a voice cried out.
The chronicler thought that the latest wave would go on breaking for ever; worse still, it seemed to be besieging him ever more tightly, as a fever narrows a throat. Then when the noise abated and finally disappeared, allowing him to assume that there would be no further assault, Çelebi became aware of the calm and steady voice of the azab, who had probably been speaking for a while already without worrying whether anyone was listening to him or not.
“Eleven years in uniform. You reckon that’s a lot, don’t you? And who knows how much longer I’ll have to serve? We’re veterans, and it’s about time we were given the land that was promised us. Before we left for this campaign we were told we’d be allocated the land around the fortress when we’d taken it. I come from Anatolia, but I’ve been far and wide. I’ve fought in the plains of Karabogdan, at Stara Planin and Tarabullur, in Bulgaria and Bosnia, and I’ve even been as far as Szemendre, in Hungary. There’s good land everywhere, and each time we pitch camp, I wonder what could be grown in the area and what the soil is like, compared to the other places where we’ve fought. You’re a sapper, so you shouldn’t be surprised by all that. You’re a man of earth and mud too, aren’t you, except that you don’t honour the land, you make it submit to outrage, like people say, and then you grumble when it takes its revenge, like it did in this tunnel when it caved in on your comrades. Anyway, what was I saying? Ah, yes, about land. So they promised us we’d be given plots around the fortress, and when we got here the first thing I did was to look carefully at the soil. I scooped it up in my hand, crumbled it and smelled it. It’s good earth. Wheat ought to grow easily here. But what’s the use? It’s foreign soil. I don’t know why it doesn’t cheer my heart, but it doesn’t, and it leaves a feeling of emptiness in my brea
st. It’s foreign soil, after all. You know what I mean? It even smells different.”
The sound of dragging feet could be heard coming from the entrance. Someone was climbing down the ladder. The azab stopped chatting. Everyone held their breath. A man was groping his way into the tunnel.
“Careful, chum, or you’ll trample us,” the azab said.
“Ah!” said the newcomer, scared out of his wits.
“No point moaning, sit down, you’re fine just where you are,” the azab said. “Where are you from?”
“Ninth eshkinxhi battalion,” the man replied in a voice strangulated by fear.
“What’s going on up there?”
“Better not ask.”
“It seems the Albanians have tried to break out. Do you know anything about it?”
“No. All I know is that people are slaughtering each other.”
“I can imagine.”
“No, you can’t. It’s worse than anything you could imagine.”
“How can it be worse?”
“Oh, trust me. It is worse.”
He fell silent, but from his heavy breathing you could sense he wanted to say something more.
“Come on, spit it out,” the azab said. “Why is it so bad?”
“Because … As far as I could tell … there is no attack going on up there.”
“You’re crazy. If we haven’t been raided, what the hell is going on?”
“I have no idea. Maybe it’s a fake alarm. Or a mistake. At any rate, it’s a total mess, and nobody understands anybody else.”
“And why would that be worse than a night raid?”
“Because … when you’re attacked, you know what you’re up against. But this … it’s impossible to give a name to it. It’s like fever, delirium. No Skanderbeg! That’s what people are saying. He hasn’t been here for a while. Somebody else named Gjergj has taken his place. And he is quite something.”