The Siege

  “Sarperkan, bitter blood. Yes, I think it’s beautiful.”

  A crowd had assembled somewhere on their left.

  “There’s a fight,” the astrologer said. “Let’s take a look.”

  They moved towards the knot of men.

  “What’s going on?” Sadedin asked a janissary.

  The soldier shrugged his shoulders. Seeing their unusual attire, the men let them through. Two soldiers of death were squabbling with a small group of akinxhis.

  “Soldiers of death?” Tuz Okçan said. “Where are they?”

  “It’s those two over there,” an azab said. “They nearly did each other in with knives.”

  At the janissary college, Tuz Okçan had often heard about the famous corps of the serden geçti. Their rule was never to return from an assault except as the victors. It was the first time he had seen any.

  “They are the most glorious corps of the entire army, even more glorious than the dalkiliç.”

  “I think they’re pretentious,” the astrologer said.

  “That’s because of the privileges they are rightfully granted as soldiers of death,” Sadedin said.

  “Do they really have a rule that prevents them ever coming back from a defeat?” Tuz Okçan asked.

  “They do,” Sadedin replied curtly. “If they return in defeat, then they are murdered by their own comrades … I was once present at such a bloodbath. May I never see anything like it again!”

  “We’d do better to move on,” Mevla Çelebi butted in. “The fight could flare up again.”

  Voices among the crowd cried out: “Chaouch-bashi! Chaouch-bashi!”

  The chef-de-camp rode up with a squad of military police in his wake.

  “They’ll put them in irons,” a sapper said.

  Sadedin turned round abruptly.

  “Who’s the donkey who said you can arrest a serden geçti?”

  “I am,” the sapper said.

  “So clod-hoppers are allowed to have an opinion, are they?”

  “I’d rather dig holes than lose my balls,” the sapper shouted back, apparently taking their strange dress to mean they were eunuchs.

  Men laughed in the half-light.

  “Come and find out if I’ve got any, you cow-pat.”

  Mevla Çelebi began to pull at Sadedin’s sleeve.

  “Come on, you’re not going to get into a fight with a peasant.”

  “Quite right, let’s get out of here,” the astrologer said.

  From further off came again the sound of horses’ hooves, and an order: “Shut your filthy mouth!”

  Apparently the fighting had flared up again.

  “They’re taking a real hiding!” someone shouted out. “They’re being fried alive!”

  “Let’s move on,” the astrologer repeated.

  They left without looking round.

  The full moon had now risen high in the sky and dimmed the brilliance of the bonfires. The whole camp was humming and brimming over with life. Soldiers bumped into each other as they walked this way and that. Some had grown tired of listening to the hoxhas’ prayers and were watching the dervishes dance, while others, having had enough of the show, had gone to listen to a pep-talk by a sheh. Sadedin stopped in front of a knot of men and then, all of a sudden, with shaking hands and eyes burning like coals, he began to declaim, or rather to bawl, his poem.

  “Did you like it?” he asked his comrades as soon as he had finished.

  “A lot,” the janissary replied. “It warms your blood.”

  “That’s exactly what I am after,” Sadedin said. “I want to inflame our soldiers.” He emptied the gourd. “On the one hand, there are poets who lisp tearful doggerel about pretty birds and paradise. On the other hand, I am a poet who seeks only to serve the great Padishah. My heaven is the hell of war!”

  They weren’t sure where they were any more. The camp area they had reached was occupied by a sizeable unit whose men spoke a language they could not understand.

  “Caucasian troops,” Çelebi whispered.

  “What was that? Louder!” Sadedin shouted.

  “Let’s go back,” the astrologer suggested. “We’ve gone quite far enough as it is.”

  They turned about and retraced their steps, making their way through the crowds with difficulty. Around the great campfires veterans were telling young recruits about past wars and tales of derring-do.

  In the shadow of a large tent, set back from the milling throng, they saw some men lying on the ground. They had propped their heads on short-handled axes and were singing the same sorrowful chant that they had heard once before. Apparently it was a recent composition, originating in the marches of the Empire, which is where the saddest dirges usually came from. The astrologer turned towards the source of the singing, but the soldiers’ faces could not be made out in the dark. The beating of the drums and the thousand other noises of the camp also prevented him making out the words. But as he moved off, he did catch a line:

  “O Fate, O Fate, O cursed Fate …”

  They wandered for a long while among the noisy crowds, speaking barely a word, which they could hardly hear above the tumult.

  “Listen! I think that’s a priest talking about the local women!” the janissary said, drawing the poet closer to him. They slowed their pace. It was true. A sheh was thundering on about Albanian women. It was the same man they had heard a little earlier speaking about flags.

  “We shall strip their wives and daughters of their shameless white garments and dress them in the noble black mantle blessed by our faith. We shall cover their faces with a veil and stop their sly eyes from casting licentious glances at men while offering themselves just as scabrously to their sight.”

  Tuz Okçan still had in his mind Sadedin’s words about these women’s bellies. He had never before felt such burning desire. Apparently, approaching battle heightened the desire for sensual pleasure like nothing else.

  “The most bewitching, the most lascivious parts of a woman,” the sheh bawled on hoarsely, “are the eyes, alongside hair. The unveiled eyes of a woman are more entrancing than her naked body …”

  Tuz Okçan suddenly felt like bursting into tears, for no reason he could fathom. He had never heard so many obscenities in his life. But nothing had stirred him up more than Sadedin’s words.

  “… By tearing them from their barbaric customs and endowing them with our own grandiose costumes, we shall turn their souls away from the evil path, in whose wake their bodies will follow …”

  The janissary was overcome once again with a need for tears. He almost leaned on Sadedin’s arm and asked him: “So what will come of the swallows’ nest?” The image of curly pubic hair was sucking up his whole mind like a whirlwind.

  “Won’t make a bit of difference,” Sadedin said, putting his lips to the janissary’s ear.

  “What?”

  “Changing customs … Bit by bit, with the passing years, their traditions will wilt and fall like apple blossom. They’ll get used to our ways. So used to them, in fact, that if, God forbid, we ever had to leave these lands, they would find it very hard to readjust.”

  The poet continued to soliloquise for a long while. He had a fine deep voice, but the general racket and the noise of the drums made it hard for Tuz Okçan to grasp all that he said. The faces of the dervishes darkened and brightened in alternation. Fascinated soldiers stood round them in circles, clapping in time with the drums and screaming in unison with the dancers.

  A number of the dervishes fell to the ground. Only some pulled themselves up to a squatting position, panting for lack of breath; the others stayed flat on the ground, as if in a cataleptic fit. Soldiers dripping with sweat started sobbing. Other men ran round and round.

  “What a marvellous night!” Sadedin exclaimed, as if he had been blinded by it. He lifted his gourd to his lips for the last time, and then threw it at the feet of the crowd.

  What we were given to witness on the eve of the attack was more horrible than any battle
, worse than any carnage. When we heard their drums roll at dusk, we first thought that, contrary to all known principles of modern war, they were perhaps about to launch a night raid. But we soon saw that what they were trying to do, once they had got their equipment ready for the assault, was to raise their soldiers’ morale.

  At the first beats of their drums, the sight that greeted our eyes was unbearable. Such madness we had never imagined — neither in the orgies of ancient times, whose memory has come down to us through the generations, nor in the wildest carnival nights in our own villages. Shouting, screaming, praying and dancing, men offered themselves up for sacrifice, made exhibitions of themselves in which, as we were to learn later on, severed heads carried on talking as if still in delirium; soldiers wailed as if they were night owls and banged their drums dementedly. All those noises wafted up to our castle like stinking vapours.

  The light of the moon seemed to trouble and excite them at the same time. What we saw spread out beneath us was Asia in all its mysticism and barbarity, a dark grave getting ready to swallow us all.

  A putrid wind was blowing up from the plain. Despite going to pray before the icon of the Virgin, our hearts sank. The cross that rises above our chapel seemed very pale, as if it had gone white with fear. But these feelings did not weaken in the slightest our determination to fight to the end. On the contrary, never before had we felt so convinced that death would be far sweeter than the gloom and treachery laid out down below in plain sight.

  Our low spirits had another cause as well. There were so many of them! As many as the pebbles on a beach. And they were trying to extend their empire so the sun would never set on it, that’s to say, so that night and day would be perpetually and simultaneously contained within its boundaries. They believed that when they had achieved that objective (when they had “tied the yellow tigress and the black wolf to the same chain”), they would also rule over time itself.

  That would really be the end of the world. The day God forbade, as people say in our land.

  Towards midnight the hullabaloo stopped, and a deathly silence reigned.

  Dawn had not quite risen when the East Tower raised the alarm. The sentinels had noticed the gleam of torches and suspicious movements around the cannon. Our men followed instructions and left their posts to gather in the underground shelters. There we prayed with great fervour to Christ and Our Lady right up to the moment when a mortal thunder seemed to shatter heaven and earth alike. Thereupon, an infernal explosion made the ground shake beneath us. Someone yelled: “The new weapon!” Then we heard screams, then the sound of men running who knows where.

  The war had begun.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Giaour the architect was pointing his finger at a particular spot on the great plan of the citadel he had laid out on his lap.

  “Must strike again wall left side main door hope big breach that side.”

  The Pasha turned towards his aide-de-camp with a gesture of irritation. The architect’s way of speaking, which gave him a migraine even in normal times, had become quite unbearable in the noise of cannon fire.

  “What he’s saying is that we need to shake the wall to the left of the main gate some more,” the aide-de-camp translated in a low voice. “He hopes a few more direct hits will open a large breach at that point.”

  “Bring the engineer back,” the Pasha ordered.

  One of his orderlies galloped off.

  The Pasha stared sullenly at the castle walls. In many places the parapet had been shattered. There were large cracks in the walls too, but he was not satisfied with them. He had expected more from those cannon. For the tenth time he took the chart from the architect’s hands and pored over the spots marked in red ink. The cannon-balls had in fact come very near to hitting the targets directly. After each explosion the Pasha raised his eyes towards the wall that had been hit in the hope of seeing a gaping hole, which never materialised. It was past noon. The assault should begin in a couple of hours.

  He handed the chart back to the architect with a gesture signifying that there was nothing more to say. The suspicion that the architect might have miscalculated merged instantly with the thought that he was maybe in the pay of the giaours, a thought prompted, without any real reason, by the man’s very name. He had in fact already been arrested three times just because of his name, but it seems he was cleared of all charges as unceremoniously as he had been accused, the only difference for him now being that the elaborately constructed imputations of guilt had taken root and become difficult to pull out entirely. Not only had he been declared innocent three times in a row, but after each release from prison his personal standing had risen even higher.

  Several members of the war council were standing behind the Pasha and the architect. They said nothing and merely looked in the same direction as their leader.

  The engineer came in with his assistant, swearing under his breath. As he came close, everyone noticed that the fringe of his hair was singed. His assistant had a blackish patch between his eyebrows.

  “Engineer!” Tursun Pasha said without even turning towards the man. “Where are the breaches we have been waiting for all day?”

  “They’re over there!” Saruxha said, waving his arm towards the citadel’s walls.

  The Quartermaster, standing behind the commander along with the sanxhakbeys, bit his lip. The Pasha turned his bony face around abruptly.

  “I don’t see them.”

  Saruxha wiped his brow.

  “I fired according to instructions,” he said tartly. “My guns hit the designated spots. We’ve not shut our eyes for four days and four nights. I don’t know what more you expect of me, sire.”

  The Pasha looked carefully for a moment at the worn-out faces of the master caster and his number two. He noticed the burned hair on Saruxha’s forehead.

  “I expect breaches,” he said in a slightly more accommodating tone.

  “You expect them to come from me alone, Pasha. But ask him for them as well,” he replied, pointing to the architect.

  Giaour was looking on with complete indifference, as if none of this concerned him at all.

  “Must fire again wall left door …” he rattled on in his unwavering voice.

  “That’s enough,” the Pasha said. “Sort it out between yourselves. I need the walls breached.”

  The Quartermaster took a step forwards.

  “Pasha, sire,” he said in a honeyed tone, spying from the corner of his eye the slight quivering of the map that the commander-in-chief had between his fingers, “do not forget that huge breaches were made today by our cannon — in the hearts of those miserable rebels.”

  The Pasha sighed deeply. For maybe the hundredth time, his weary eyes scanned the vast plain where his innumerable soldiers were taking up their positions for the assault. Messengers on horseback were darting all over the camp. Here and there the throng made way for rolls of thick rope, ladders, crowbars, defensive screens called testudos, sections of reed fencing, and battering rams. Kara-Mukbil rode up on horseback, passed a message to the Pasha, and rode off again at high speed. Saruxha and his assistant conferred with the architect for a few minutes and then moved off in their turn.

  “Why can’t we hear gun number two any more?” the Pasha asked without turning round.

  Everyone shrugged. An orderly, standing at the ready, promptly galloped off towards the battery.

  Clouds of dust hung over the walls. Not a soul could be seen behind the parapets. According to one of the doctors who specialised in nervous disorders, such a mind-numbing bombardment should have left the defenders suffering from the equivalent of a brain injury. With every blast of the cannon the Pasha hoped to see the white flag of surrender rise through the dust cloud. It was only a faint hope, but he clung to it nonetheless.

  The orderly who had gone off to get news from the cannon came back.

  “Gun number two missed its target three times in a row. The gunners are trying to find out why,” he said without dismoun
ting.

  “The gun must have been possessed by the demon!” the Mufti declared, drawing closer to the Pasha’s shoulder.

  By age-old military tradition, that meant that the cannon would have to be fustigated. The Pasha didn’t approve of the practice, but that did not stop him giving the order to apply the appropriate punishment.

  The orderly set off once again to deliver the order.

  Little time remained before the appointed hour for the storming of the citadel. Without a word to anyone, the Pasha went into his tent to have a short rest.

  The Quartermaster General took the opportunity to leave the sanxhakbeys and to go over to the artillery. After only a few steps he came across Çelebi standing at his usual position near the Pasha’s tent, hoping to pick up a detail or two for his chronicle.

  “Mevla, let’s go and see what’s up,” he said.

  The chronicler was only too happy to fall in behind. The Quartermaster General was worried about his friend Saruxha. He was sure the engineer would rebel against the Pasha’s order, and he had to go and calm him down before it was too late.

  “Today is my day off,” the Quartermaster General said. “I was planning to watch the fight. I guess you were, too. It’s your big day, after all. What you would rightly call a ‘historic occasion’!”

  The chronicler didn’t know what to say so he just kept a smile on his face as long as he could. He was aware that when he kept his lips in a fixed position his expression turned into a gloomy scowl, but he couldn’t help that.

  When they reached the small enclosure watched over by sentries, they found that the gun’s fustigation had already begun. Two bare-chested, Herculean Blacks were lashing the still-smoking barrel. Beneath the gun carriage, among the struts and props, lay Saruxha’s assistant, banging away with a hammer, trying to loosen a moving part that seemed to have jammed. The master caster stood a few feet away, muttering curses.

  “Can you see what they’re doing?” he shouted out as he pointed to the gun. “It drives me mad. And don’t forget to put this piece of unspeakable stupidity in your chronicle!” he added, to Çelebi.