The Siege

  “Hurrah!” the Pasha cried out. “Forward!”

  Nobody could hear him, but all saw him wave his hand, and from the foot of a hundred ladders soldiers fought each other to be the first to reach the top of the wall. They knew they were climbing the first rungs of their careers on these bloodied and already half-burned ladders. Upwards lay the path to promotion, wealth and a harem.

  The Pasha felt the intoxication of battle. The drums, the banners, the smell of burning oil and hot pitch, the flaming ladders, the clouds of dust, the huzzahs, all this smoky, bloody riot enveloped him and went to his head like a strong drink. He rode along the wall with his escort of guards and aides-de-camp. Apparently the defenders recognised him, because they started aiming arrows and balls of flaming cloth at him, which fell all around with a piercing whistle. His guards put themselves at risk by forming a screen around him with their shields. One of the aides-de-camp riding close by him had a bloody neckband that grew steadily thicker. The commander-in-chief carried on galloping amid cries of “Long live the Pasha!” and invocations of the Prophet and the Padishah. Now and again he heard his soldiers shouting out the battle-cry of “Rome! Rome!” In a flash Giaour’s new posting came back into his mind, or rather, the associated rumour that said that if he was victorious here, then he, Tursun Pasha, would be given the task of taking Constantinople.

  “Onwards!” he yelled once more. “Victory!”

  There was an ever more frantic crush of soldiers at the foot of the ladders trying to get to the top of the wall. Looking up at the men climbing you sometimes saw shields, yatagans and occasionally human limbs fly up in the air and then fall to the ground, all apparently discarded by the attackers so as to lighten their load.

  Suddenly the wall began to wobble, the towers slid terrifyingly over his head, the funereal drapes of congealed pitch with their bloody fringes flapped in a strong gust of wind and seemed about to engulf him. He fell. The sky went black. The guards formed a roof of shields over him.

  Someone cried out:

  “The Pasha has been killed!”

  One of his aides-de-camp, the one with the bloodied neck, leaned over him.

  “Help me up,” the Pasha said. “I’ve not been hit.”

  “It’s his horse that died,” the other officer shouted out.

  Tursun Pasha stood up. With his feet on the ground he felt like he was in a hole.

  “The Pasha has been killed!” the same voice screamed again.

  He got on to another horse that someone had instantly brought to him, and spurred it to a gallop. His guards followed.

  “Pasha, sire, keep away from the wall,” one of the aides-decamp shouted to him. “The giaours have spotted you!”

  Arrows rained down even more thickly. But the Pasha did not move away from the wall. Once again he cantered alongside the wall at whose foot what people call a “war” was taking place. On this occasion it took the form of a human mass rising from below towards another mass of men overhead. Unseen like a demon behind a screen of smoke given off by pitch, the latter was doing all it could to prevent the former from climbing up. It was hitting it without mercy, setting it on fire, burning it to a cinder, chopping off hundreds of its arms and legs. But the rising mass did not falter or turn back. It went on rising, rung after rung, slipping on its own blood, clinging by its nails to the stone, and when its limbs were cut off, it instantly grew hundreds of new feet and new hands that sought only to go on going up and up …

  The nightmare went on until dusk. Then the fall-back drums rolled. Units beyond counting once again flooded back into the deserted camp and the Pasha waited in his tent for estimates of the day’s losses. Though it had not brought victory, the battle could still not be considered lost. Never before had such a large mass of men reached the top of the wall. Usually only a small number of men who got over the parapet came back alive, but those who stayed up there did not give their lives cheaply. And today’s assault must have cost the defenders a multitude of dead. Thirst had begun to do its work. A few more assaults of that degree of violence, and the decimated, thirst-tortured defenders would not be able to repulse the attack all the way along their wall. The Pasha needed a few more days of drought. Just a few days. That’s what he told himself, but at bottom he knew that a few days without rain would not be enough. Exhausted by such long-drawn-out tension, he sometimes indulged in absurd daydreams. He imagined how easy it would all be if after September came not October and November, but July and August. He fantasised about a crazy wind that would suddenly come and muddle up the seasons like autumn leaves. At other moments he thought that so much time had elapsed since the start of the expedition that a pile of things had sunk into oblivion, that passions had dulled, and that forecasts of victory and the timescale set had all been wiped from memory. He felt that way especially at night, when he went outside and cast his eyes on the huge camp with its tents, its stars and its brass, bronze and golden crescent moons giving a lugubrious imitation of the night sky. He mused that a whole chunk of the heavens had been forcibly brought down to earth and set to work amid the bloody business of men. As he gazed at length at the desert of the night he began to doubt whether somewhere in the far distance, beyond the roads and the clouds, there really still were towns containing offices cluttered with papers explaining the ins and outs of every case, the merits and the weaknesses of officials, including his own. At such times, when he stood facing the night alone, facts became detached from their consequences, the linkage between causes and effects went slack and anything seemed plausible. But dawn came with its cruel rawness, and everything — things, facts and the order of the days — recovered its logic. And he knew that logic was against him.

  His aides-de-camp brought him the first reports: three hundred and ten officers of all ranks killed. The number of non-ranking soldiers lost in battle was not yet known. He enquired about council members: all were safe. The thought that they paid too much attention to their own wellbeing made him feel downcast once again.

  But over the next days he would set them a challenge in self-preservation. He only needed a few dry days, nothing more. He now feared one thing alone: the sound of the rain drums. Their rumbling had not been heard for several months. If they were to strike up again now, it would be the end of everything.

  Sirri Selim sent him a short report. He had examined the innards of four Albanians who had fallen off the battlements and he could certify that they were suffering from lack of water far more acutely than the man captured during the previous attack. But no sign of disease. They were clearly not drinking the contaminated water any longer, so their thirst must have doubled, or even tripled. If only that could go on a little longer, dear God! he prayed. Still no figure for losses among the soldiers. Tursun Pasha ordered an increase in the number of sentries and put some battalions on alert. Night was falling, and a raid by Skanderbeg was to be expected. It was his usual time.

  The Pasha sat down to relax and he noticed that his elbow was stained with dirt. He hadn’t previously paid any attention to the soil of this place. He gazed at it as if in a trance. The aide-de-camp who came into the tent found him staring hard at the elbow of his sleeve.

  “Excuse me, sire,” he said, fearing he would be blamed for falling short in his duties, “I’ve only just noticed it myself. You must have dirtied your tunic when you fell …”

  But the Pasha’s mind was elsewhere. He was pondering the fact that soil is the same in any land on earth, the only difference being in what grows in it. His eyes were drooping, and the attending officer lowered his voice to a whisper. The commander-in-chief was nodding off to sleep. The officer quietly placed a light blanket over his master and tiptoed out of the tent.

  After the troubled nights he had had, the Pasha at last sank into deep sleep. An orderly brought him his supper, then aides-de-camp came to give him the figures for the day’s losses, but they all found him fast asleep. They did not wake him. One of them tucked the blanket over his master’s shoulders, then they
all carefully closed up the entrance to the tent and silently went their way.

  He spent several hours in calm and dreamless sleep. Later on, he did have a dream. He saw the rain drums all lined up on parade. Then they suddenly began to beat by themselves. He ordered them to stop, but they did not obey his command. They carried on beating a muffled beat. Then he ordered them to be punished. His guards launched into them, tore them to shreds with their lances and daggers, but still the drums kept on beating. The Pasha woke up. It was pitch-dark inside the tent. He moved an arm that had gone stiff and realised he had fallen asleep in his battle dress. He felt he was not yet properly awake because his ears were still buzzing with the thump of the drums he had seen in his dream. He threw off the blanket and sat up straight. What was that? The thudding noise had not stopped. So it wasn’t the afterglow of his dream. Far away, deep inside the camp, someone really was beating a drum. He heard a gentle swishing on the sloped sides of his tent, and then it all became clear in a flash. Rain.

  He stood up and stayed still for a moment at the foot of his divan. Then, stepping on the animal skins laid on the floor, he went to the entrance, pulled back the oilskin curtain, and went outside. The first glimmer of dawn threw a white haze over the horizon. The sentries who had been huddling by the side of the tent to keep out of the rain stood to attention as soon as they saw him and presented arms. But he didn’t even glance at them.

  A rich, thick smell of earth wetted by rain after a long drought rose from the ground. The sky was entirely overcast by heavy, stationary, grey-black clouds releasing a steady, even stream of rain. Regular autumn weather.

  Dawn was breaking.

  He gazed at the dark sky, then at the huge camp with its thousands of grey, triangular tents looking like funeral mounds erected over thirty thousand sleeping soldiers. He turned his back on all that and went inside. Then he woke one of his orderlies. The man was shaking.

  “Fetch Hasan,” the Pasha told him.

  A moment later Hasan was beside him. He was shaking as well.

  “Bring me Exher.”

  The eunuch bowed and left. He was back a moment later, holding the Pasha’s young wife by the hand. She had puffy eyes with horrible black bags underneath.

  “Listen,” he said. She wasn’t properly awake and he had to shake her roughly by the shoulder. “Listen!” he said again, pulling hard on one of her plaits to bring her terrified face closer to his. “If it’s a boy,” he said, jabbing a finger at the belly beneath her fine chemise, “if it’s a boy, you will name him after me.”

  The girl stared at him in terror.

  “Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sire.”

  “Now go away.”

  The eunuch came in and took the girl out.

  The Pasha stood still for a moment in the half-light. Then he asked his orderly to bring him a glass of water, which he did.

  “I’m going back to bed,” he said.

  He took a vial of sleeping draught from a casket by the head of his bed and poured it into a goblet.

  He thought how the powder, when it dissolved, would make the water go cloudy like a section of sky. There was sleep in that powder that would last one night, maybe two. He emptied another vial into the goblet. A thousand nights, he thought, a thousand years. He brought the goblet to his lips and drank its contents in a single gulp.

  He was still standing upright. Far away outside, the rain drums carried on with their mortal pounding. When he started feeling dizzy he reclined on the cushions and closed his eyes. Thoughts crowded into his mind untidily. He would have liked to have thought a sublime thought, but he could not. So that’s it, then, Ugurlu Tursun Tunxhaslan Sert Olgun Pasha! he said to himself. Then, before asking God for his mercy, he reflected on his life and wondered if it was really necessary to invent such a long name for a life that was so short, then he thought of the man for whose greater glory he had worked so hard — but in vain, alas, in vain! — and then, as if in a feverish delirium, he thought of this noisy world standing well back while his own soul wandered off in the rain.

  It began to rain at dawn on the first day of the month of Saint Shenmiter. I was about to relieve the sentries when the first drops began to fall, as heavy as tears.

  Day was breaking. I wanted to shout out loud, ring all the bells, wake up all our men, but I only thought about doing such things. All I did was lean my head on the stone wall and stay still in that position for a while. As they wettened, the granite blocks sweated out all the heat they had stored up through the summer and they also seemed to release, so to speak, all the anguish of that long season. They seemed to be coming alive, and it struck me that at any minute they would begin to breathe, moan and sigh.

  Somewhere in the heart of the Turkish camp the drums that speak of rain are beating. From up here we can see soldiers wrapping equipment in oilskins. Thousands of lances and emblems stick up like the spines on a hedgehog’s back from that huge dark camp that stains the land as far as the eye can see. Unusual activity can be seen around the tent of the commander-in-chief. Torch-bearers go in and out incessantly. It surely signals some important event: an urgent meeting, a sacking, or a death.

  O Heavens! Do not let up too soon! I hear myself praying. Thou who art ending this season of war, do not abandon us now, great Heaven of ours!

  THE LAST CHAPTER

  The closed carriage transporting the women of the harem moved along the road on its own. At the start of the journey it had travelled almost in convoy with another vehicle loaded with the deceased commander-in-chief’s arms and chattels, but after two days on the road the harem carriage had had to slow down because one of the women, Exher, was in pain, and so it fell back.

  It was drizzling. The women gazed dreamily at the muddy track dotted with the first puddles.

  “Look,” Ajsel said as she pointed to the right. “Up on the mountainside, you can see the small villages we noticed on our way here. Can you make out the church and its bell-tower?”

  “What a god-forsaken hole!”

  “What about the fortress? It can’t be far from here. Do you remember when we saw it? It was dusk, and the flag on top looked completely black.”

  “The fortress is a long way yet.”

  “Do you think so? I remember it being very near those villages,” Blondie said.

  “You’re getting it all muddled up. Let’s ask Lejla. She’s doing this trip for the second time.”

  “Don’t wake her up!”

  The carriage wheels kept up their monotonous creak and screech. Through the gently fluttering silk curtain they could see the silhouettes of Hasan and the driver.

  Ajsel carried on staring at the empty road and the dreary autumn landscape. Lejla was asleep and each time there was a bump in the road her head lolled so far to the side that it looked like it was about to come off her shoulders.

  “Look! Sappers!” Ajsel exclaimed. “They’re making a new bridge.”

  “They’re setting things up for the retreat,” Lejla blurted out.

  For a few minutes they watched men working in the rain.

  “Yet he will never go home!” Ajsel said.

  “He must have been buried today.”

  “Yes, that must be so. And now all this rain is falling on him.”

  Blondie raised her head slightly and then let it fall back. It was the first time they had spoken of their master after the event. They could still not quite get their tongues round it.

  “It was you who spent the last night with him, wasn’t it?” Ajsel asked. “Tell us, did he speak in his sleep?”

  “Yes,” Blondie said without moving.

  “And what was he saying?”

  “I couldn’t make it out. I don’t speak Turkish very well.”

  “Didn’t you catch anything at all? Perhaps he hinted at the reason for his act. Did you talk about Skanderbeg?”

  “I can’t really remember. Maybe he did mention that name. But he was constantly talking to the Sultan. He was explainin
g himself, awkwardly. He was saying he was innocent. He also spoke of Skanderbeg, but under his other name, the name of …”

  “The fearsome name of Geor-ge Cas-tri-ote?”

  “Yes, I think that was it.”

  “He always used to speak in his sleep,” Lejla mumbled.

  Blondie was about to say something more, but she changed her mind and lowered her gaze to the floor.

  “Girls! Look at the hanged men!” Ajsel shouted as she pointed out of the little carriage window.

  They all leaned over to get a look.

  “Are they the ones we saw on the journey out?”

  “Yes, the same.”

  “They’re nothing but skeletons now.”

  A flock of crows startled by the noise of the carriage flew off down the road.

  “When we came the other way, their bodies were still whole, so they must have just been hanged.”

  “How long will they be left up?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Further on we’ll see heads on stakes.”

  “No, we won’t, we must have gone past them during the night. The next landmark is the monastery with the three crosses.”

  “That’s right. I get it all muddled up.”

  “Maybe because we are going backwards.”

  The carriage shuddered to a stop. Rough voices shouted, “Halt! Give way!”

  “What’s going on?” they asked, in fear and trembling. It took them a while to grasp that a military convoy was coming past. Scouts had come ahead to clear the route. Their helmets and packs were soaked right through and slowed their pace. Their tired eyes looked as if they had gone blind.

  “They’ve got new equipment,” Lejla whispered. “Do you see their short swords? And the green helmets? It’s the first time I’ve seen ones like that.”