The Siege

  As they walked towards his tent they saw endless columns of soldiers returning from the ramparts. Dreadful fatigue was written on the faces and in the weary movements of these men. Many were supporting wounded comrades-in-arms, whose singed heads lolled strangely on their shoulders. The Quartermaster turned away his eyes two or three times so as not to see the ghastly wounds that metal, pitch and stone had combined to make.

  They tried to get there by way of a side alley, but it was a waste of effort. The combatants were streaming back towards their tents from all directions, and in gloomy silence. As the sun sank towards the horizon and bathed the sky in an orange glow, the great camp looked like a giant sponge imbibed with sweat and blood.

  “The time is not particularly favourable for an approach of this kind,” the Quartermaster said, “but let us try, all the same.”

  The Alaybey was alone in his tent. He listened attentively to what the Quartermaster had to say, without changing his sombre expression in the slightest. Saruxha did not say a word. When the Quartermaster had finished, the Alaybey went on staring at the same spot on the kilim. They guessed there was nothing they could expect from him. Then he told them that he would have considered it a great honour to be able to come to the aid of eminent men of science such as they were. He understood completely that the execution of such a skilled metal-caster was contrary to the true interests of the Padishah and of the Empire in general, especially as an age of new armaments had dawned, and that the number of gunsmiths in the entire Empire could be counted on the fingers of one hand. However, he considered that he would not be well advised to plead this case with the Pasha. They must know that themselves. He asked them to imagine the state of mind of men who had spent hours on end desperately attacking inexpugnable ramparts, getting slashed by lances and scorched by pitch, and had then been mown down from behind by cannon from their own side, cannon in which they had placed such high hopes. It would not be easy to reason with those men at a time like this, especially as many of them were also suffering from sunstroke — even leaving out the fact that Tavxha was involved.

  At the name of the hated captain of the janissaries, Saruxha spat out a curse.

  As they were leaving, the Alaybey advised them to seek an audience with the Pasha themselves, though for his part he did not hold out much hope of success.

  Once they had left the Alaybey’s tent, Saruxha declared excitedly: “Let’s go to see the Pasha! Let’s go straight away, because if we don’t that scum is quite capable of executing the lad on the spot!”

  They almost ran to the tent of the commander-in-chief. Two sentries with their axes at the ready stood outside the door.

  “We have to see the Pasha,” the Quartermaster said curtly to an orderly who came out to deal with them.

  “The Pasha is tired,” the orderly said. “He has given orders not to be disturbed.”

  “Tell him it’s an urgent matter,” Saruxha insisted. “I am the Chief Engineer and my friend is the Quartermaster General.”

  “I know who you are,” the young officer said with a bow, and he went back inside the tent.

  The two sentries looked at the visitors out of the corners of their eyes. The blades of their axes gleamed in the last light of the setting sun.

  The orderly came back after a few minutes had passed.

  “The Pasha has a sore throat and cannot see you.”

  Saruxha reached for his throat as if he had just been attacked.

  “Tell him that we … we …”

  But the orderly had gone. Saruxha caught the sidelong glance of one of the sentries.

  “We’d better go,” the Quartermaster said.

  They went away. They walked slowly. They no longer had any reason to hurry. The flat ground in front of the ramparts, which had been but a few hours earlier the scene of horrendous uproar accompanied by hundreds of war drums, lay abandoned and silent. All that was left there was the useless debris of the great iron gate that had been hauled as far as the outskirts of the camp.

  As they walked they came across a long line of tumbrels setting off to gather the dead.

  Their steps took them unthinkingly towards the quarter of the camp where the janissaries had pitched their tents. They walked in silence, as if they did not ever want to get where they were going.

  They shuffled hesitantly, even when they came across a large crowd of janissaries among whom something still seemed to be going on. But now the men were beginning to disperse in two and threes. So it must be all over. They wandered nonetheless towards the assembly even as it broke up. The men who were still there all had blank and distracted expressions on their faces. Some looked dazed, and held hatchets or yatagans in their hands. The Quartermaster General and his friend Saruxha noticed the wide shoulders of Tavxha who was in the process of departing, with his men in his train. They came closer, and as they looked for the victim’s body, they saw sappers spading something on to a stretcher. That something was no longer a body, nor was it limbs, or even parts of limbs, but earth, flesh, bone and stone pounded into a pulp by the demented thrashing of yatagans and hatchets.

  They could not take their eyes off the stretcher as the horrible mess was shovelled on to it. A few janissaries who were still standing around gazed with astonishment at the two council members. Hatred had left their eyes. They now looked only stunned, and immensely tired. The Quartermaster General stared at them. A few moments earlier they had been beating the caster with all the disgust and all the fear that the mystery of science, which so tortured their minds, inspired in them. In dismembering the technician they believed they were freeing themselves from the grip of the terror of the unknown. They would only be free of it for a while, for the same terror would soon seep back into their minds and preoccupy them once again. For the sake of mental peace they would then set off to find another head to smash …

  The Quartermaster General and Saruxha walked away without saying a word. The sun was setting. The first tumbrels bearing the dead were now coming back into the camp. In some cases, there was blood dripping through the planks on to the wheels. The camp was virtually lifeless. A battalion of sappers, bearing shovels and picks, passed by. Presumably they were off to dig graves.

  A voice greeted them from behind, but neither man paid any attention to it at first.

  “Hail there, effendis,” Sirri Selim repeated, for it was he, striding hurriedly along.

  “Hallo,” the Quartermaster answered.

  “What is the matter?” the doctor asked.

  No answer.

  “I’m going straight to the Pasha,” Sirri Selim answered without having been asked. “I’ve thought of another way of robbing them of their water.”

  They didn’t respond to that remark either. The doctor was now beside them and his shadow, distorted by the evening light, seemed monstrously oversized. Bizarrely, his face and long neck had gone purple.

  “You think war is made only with cannon and calculations!” he blurted out bitterly, accelerating his pace. Then, when he was already several strides ahead of them, he turned around to confront them with a question.

  “What about rats, effendis? Haven’t you ever thought about rats?”

  “He must have had too much sun,” the Quartermaster muttered.

  Saruxha said nothing.

  They were now in the heart of the camp. They had never seen it so empty. A team of doctors was just coming out of Kurdisxhi’s great tent. Another squad of sappers was on its way to the mass grave.

  They launched a furious attack on us, like the first time, and, like the first time, we repulsed them. We were dazed by the merciless heat and were dying of thirst. But in spite of that we held on.

  At the worst point of the battle, fate decreed that one of their cannon — the most fearsome of all — not only failed to shatter our inner gate, but fell in the midst of their own men. Upon which, the attack was abandoned.

  For some days now jackdaws have been circling above the ramparts and also lower down. The dead have b
een removed from the field, but apparently the smell of blood still hangs in the air. The sight of these birds and their screeching disturb us, but we have too little water to use it to wash away the blood.

  From here we can see their exercise grounds where their men are trying out new kinds of ladders. They run up and down, wave their arms and hang on the rungs with a diabolical sort of grappling-iron. They sometimes do their training with a torch in one hand. It looks as if they are preparing for a night attack.

  For our part, we have thought about all possible eventualities. We have had the remains of our fallen incinerated. Their ashes have been placed in urns, which we have buried deep underground, so that, whatever happens, our enemies will not be able to find them and desecrate them, as is their wont.

  They know we are agonisingly short of water, but to increase our suffering they have installed a kind of fountain at the spot where they cut the aqueduct. Naked soldiers splash and play shamelessly in the water all the scorching day long.

  To undermine our morale, or else to boost their own, they sometimes use childish tricks. For example, yesterday they came up to what is now the open space in front of our main gate bearing a white flag. They stopped as if the gate really was still there in front of them, and they pretended to knock at the door, but obviously they were knocking on thin air. When our sentries drew their bowstrings, they closed the visors of their helmets, and the way our arrows bounced off them told us that under their silken tunics they were wearing chain mail.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Pasha paid no attention to what they were saying. Each spoke in turn of the losses their own units had taken, then gave his opinion of the appropriate means to be used to carry the fight forwards, and also his view of the latest suggestion from Sirri Selim, who was attending the war council for the first time. But the Pasha’s mind was exclusively occupied with the Alaybey’s latest report, which had reached him that very morning. As he read the close-packed lines of the scribe’s small, neat hand, he thought he could hear rising from them the deep-throated, rousing swell that his army had made but two months before, but with a sound that was now more rough and resentful, and beneath the cheering he could make out more clearly what he had only dimly perceived at that earlier stage, and that was the sound of what people call war-weariness. His long experience of campaigning had taught him to lend an attentive ear to that chord. On all the many expeditions he had led, he had always waited for it to emerge, like an old but fearsome acquaintance. Nothing frightened him more: not the failure of his attacks, nor acts of indiscipline, nor the insubordination or the infighting among his captains, nor blasphemy against the name of Prophet, nor insults hurled at his own person, nor fear itself, nor even the first symptoms of plague — nothing scared him more than this black cloud silently closing in and raining down on the faces, eyes, hands, voices and weapons of his men. Of course he knew it would come, on this as on all campaigns, even though he had done everything in his power to keep it at bay as long as possible. The first signs had appeared some six weeks before, straight after the failure of the first attack, but had dissipated fairly quickly. Summary judgments, rumours about secret investigations, the discovery and sentencing of the spies who had had their eye on the new gun, the squabbles over the women captives, a ghost said to be prowling late at night by the river bank, the arrival of performers from the capital (the star dancer had fallen in love with a soldier in the death squadron and both of them were in despair that they could never marry) and especially the hunt for the aqueduct and its final discovery — all these things had no doubt helped to put off the black cloud. But the Pasha knew that the weariness in question could not be held at bay for ever. It was always in the offing, somewhere near, all around. He had never feared its coming so much as he did now. And it was indeed upon them. He hadn’t seen premonitory signs of the sort he had noticed six weeks earlier. He could now see war-weariness before his eyes, an all-pervading dust as ancient as war itself.

  They were talking about the next assault. The Quartermaster General declared himself emphatically in favour of renewed and repeated assaults so as to give the exhausted and desiccated Albanians no opportunity to recuperate. The Pasha was well aware that the Quartermaster’s main worry was that their own supplies of food were running low. Skanderbeg’s night raid had spoiled some of their stocks, particularly their vats of honey and rice. The Quartermaster spoke scathingly about those among them who, though they were surely right to consider it important to protect the part of the camp where the cannon, the elite troops and the leaders’ tents were located (“my own included,” he added), were criminally indifferent to the fate of the storehouses, as if they belonged to nobody. On the night of the raid, he went on, the honey had been spilled on the ground and it broke his heart to see it all messed up by horses’ hooves.

  “May I presume that this was not a clever ploy invented by one of our commanders to slow down the enemy’s advance?” he asked in a clearly sarcastic tone.

  The officer in charge of camp security went pale. In a confused and sour attempt at self-justification, he declared himself amazed that members of the war council put the same price on a mere foodstuff such as honey as they did on the blood of Turkish soldiers. With an expression of disgust on his face, the Quartermaster told the man they were at a meeting of the war council, not at a hotair contest. Since he looked as though he was about to say something even harsher, the Alaybey stepped in and declared that never before had such parallels been made at a council meeting. He added that seeing that the rules of the Empire required the allocation of a ration of honey to every soldier immediately prior to an attack, to give him strength, it was clear that this mere foodstuff was of military value, and that was the point that the Quartermaster had intended to make.

  Tursun Pasha urged them to get back to the issue of the attack. Someone mentioned the astrologer.

  “And what does the man of magic say?” the Pasha asked with unhidden irony.

  No one answered. The Pasha repeated the question, turning to the Mufti, who was normally in close contact with astrologers.

  Silence.

  “Our troops are getting torn to shreds on the battlements,” the Pasha said in a voice that was beginning to become hoarse. “And that man can’t even be bothered to make predictions! Have him flogged in public and then sent to work in the mass graves, like his predecessor.”

  They weren’t much surprised by sudden outbursts of this kind. The Pasha was openly resentful of all the inspectors and functionaries dispatched from the capital. He reckoned that most of them were only there to observe his fall, and so he took any pretext for getting his own back on them.

  After a short pause for the scribe to note down the punishment meted out to the astrologer, the members of the council resumed their deliberations. Some were against repeat attacks on the fortress. In their view it was better to wait until Sirri Selim’s plan had had its full impact and the wells and the defenders were infected. The Pasha followed the discussion for a while, but then his attention was once again distracted.

  Someone mentioned clouds.

  “Alas, our great Padishah cannot give orders to the clouds,” the Quartermaster said, as a way of countering Kara-Mukbil, who had spoken against the proposal to attack again straight away. “One fine day they can come over the horizon and a sudden shower may then quench the defenders’ thirst, despite all our long efforts to make it unbearable.”

  Rain! Never had rain been so constantly on the Pasha’s mind as it had these past two weeks. He excoriated it and tried to banish it from his thoughts, but to no avail. Looking at a clear, majestically blue sky under the command of a blazing sun, he sometimes thought that rain had disappeared for ever from the entire surface of the world. Yet he knew that at that very moment, while they were being stifled by heat, somewhere else, in other lands, rain was falling quietly, steadily, as depressingly as death itself. It was far away for the time being, but perfidious clouds did not need many hours to bring it to
them and drown their efforts in hateful spittle.

  “They’re hoping for rain,” the Quartermaster went on. “On one of their towers they have set up rotating tin plates by means of which they can predict the weather. That means they are near the end. We have to hurry.”

  At these words, the meeting collapsed into confusion and everything sank once again into muddle and dispute. The first targets of attack were the sanxhakbeys. All eyes were then trained on the Mufti, who looked overwhelmed and knocked out. He had taken the punishment of the astrologer as a personal affront, and was choking on his own anger. Suddenly, he asked to be allowed to speak.

  “Everything that has happened has a sole and single cause,” he declared gravely. “Licentiousness! The army has fallen prey to licentiousness. Apparently that evil cross is doing its devilish work. Our religious spirit is being weakened. Atheism is spreading. During the last attack a large proportion of the eshkinxhis were drunk. Degeneration can be seen all around, but our officers are turning a blind eye.”

  The Mufti urged them all to get a grip on things before it was too late. He requested that reading the Koran be made obligatory, that alcoholic beverages be banned, and that the sale of captive women and the presence of prostitutes be similarly forbidden. He wanted no more performers to be sent from the capital. Ottoman soldiers had no need of bottom-waggling whores or of strutting young perverts showing off the latest fashions.

  “There is one more thing,” he continued, looking straight in Tursun Pasha’s eye. “It is in the army’s interest, and in yours, too, to get rid of the wives you brought here with you. That is all.”

  Such a heavy silence ensued that even the scribe did not dare break it with the noise of his quill.

  “Snake in the grass!” the Pasha hissed silently. His eyes gleamed more brightly than the ruby on his ring. Everyone held their breath. They knew that of all possible conflicts within a war council, outright hostility between the military and the religious commanders was the one that could have the direst effect. It was as if the great Padishah, who held both temporal and spiritual power, was tearing himself apart.