Empire of Lies

by Raymond Khoury

  “I’ll finish it for you, hayatim,” he murmured. “And once it’s done, I’ll come back and give you a proper burial.”

  He took one last glance at her forearms. He had misgivings about the risk of leaving her there, given the tattoos. If she were found, the incantation would be vulnerable to discovery, even if whoever came across it wouldn’t understand what it was without trying it. But Kamal couldn’t face dealing with it now. It was all too raw in his mind, and time was pressing. He’d deal with it when they returned, after it was all done.

  They pulled the carpets back over her, too. Once they were done, the slight rises in either corner of the tent were barely discernible.

  The two men crept up to the entrance curtains of the tent.

  “Ready?” Kamal asked Kolschitzky.

  The Pole took a reassuring feel of his scabbarded, jewel-encrusted yataghan, then his expression morphed into a powerful imitation of Rasheed’s intense frown, and he barked, “Gidelim.”

  Let’s go.

  Kamal nodded his approval, sucked in a deep breath, and stepped through the curtains.

  He emerged outside the tent. It was pitch-black save for the faint light coming from a few torches set up around the edges of the enclosure’s perimeter. The captain wasn’t around, but three janissaries stood guard by its gate, at ease and talking. They were far enough away that it would be hard for them to be able to make out the specific features of Kamal’s face.

  “The pasha’s horse. Saddle it up and bring it here, with another for me. Quickly,” he yelled out to them, using the precise diction that Kolschitzky had taught him.

  The men looked over, taken aback by the late-night order. Rasheed wasn’t known to ride off in the night. In fact, Kamal had read in accounts of the siege that he rarely left the camp.

  “Move,” Kamal ordered insistently.

  The men scurried away and soon came back with two horses. The first of them, evidently Rasheed’s, was a magnificent animal—slender, long-backed, with sloping quarters and long, muscular legs. Its black coat had a metallic sheen that shimmered in the light of the torches and was topped by an opulent velvet saddle adorned with precious stones and gilded embroidery and linked to gold-plated stirrups.

  The attendant janissaries quickly positioned Rasheed’s horse outside the tent’s entrance and placed a small stepped platform alongside it. Turning away from the men, Kamal disappeared back into the tent, then reappeared holding open the tent flap from which Kolschitzky stepped out. The janissaries dropped their heads in respectful bows. Wearing a scowl and walking with purpose, the Pole said nothing. Instead, he let Kamal help him step up the platform and climb onto the horse. Kamal then mounted his own, only giving the man holding its reins a stern nod. Then they both trotted out of the enclosure without uttering a word.

  None was needed. Rasheed was the sultan’s valued advisor, his philosopher-royal. To the janissaries, he was royalty. They were there to serve, not to question—especially not when it came to a man who had an aura of mystique and a reputation for unconventional methods.

  Rasheed’s enclosure was at the rear of the camp, next to the grand vizier’s compound. Both sat on high ground, from which Kara Mustafa and Rasheed could observe the progress on the bastions, safely out of reach of the defenders’ cannon. Being at the rear of the camp meant Kamal and Kolschitzky didn’t have long to travel before they had left the long rows of tents behind and were galloping away into the darkness.

  Once the camp was well behind them, Kolschitzky slowed his horse to a trot and got his bearings. Even in the pale light of the moon, the narrow Vienna River had a clearly discernible glow that snaked away into the woodlands.

  “We’ll follow the river to Purkersdorf; then we’ll veer north and follow the Gablitzbach up into the hills. As long as the moon doesn’t act shy on us, it shouldn’t be too hard to stay on course.”

  “Just get us there,” Kamal told the Pole. “I’ve lost too much to fail here.”

  Kolschitzky held his gaze. “I’ll get you there, and we’ll see this through. If only so you’ll have no excuse but to explain what the hell is going on.”

  Kamal nodded. “It’s a deal.” Then he gave his mount a squeeze with his calves and set off.

  * * *

  They rode through the night.

  They crossed the scrubland before climbing up the uninhabited, heavily wooded hills, skirting the valleys that cut across them and snaking through forests of beech and oak crisscrossed by streams. They were always on alert in case they came across Ottoman irregulars like the ones that had captured them but knew that those raiders tended to lie still at night. They hoped to steer clear of advance Christian forces, too—dressed as they were, they couldn’t risk wasting time proving their intentions to any of their reconnaissance patrols.

  Dawn was still hours away by the time they navigated the ridges that topped the hills and began descending the gentler slopes toward Tulln. The farther down they rode, the safer they felt, but they were still advancing cautiously, their eyes scanning the night for any sign of life. Then they were on the plains, riding faster now, a soft yellow glint backlighting the contours of the hills they’d left behind.

  The flicker of distant bonfires acted as beacons to draw them in during the final hour of their journey. They knew it could only be the army of Christendom, and it wasn’t long before they were intercepted by a patrol of Bavarian horsemen. Kolschitzky stunned them by pulling off his turban and speaking to them in perfect German while Kamal watched in silence. The Pole did know what to say. After being relieved of their sabers and having their hands tied behind their backs as a precaution, they were escorted back to the Christian encampment.

  Even with darkness still trouncing the encroaching light, the epic scale of the army the pope had assembled was unmistakable. An endless swarm of troops—Austrians, Bavarians, Saxons, Franconians, and Poles—was massed outside the small town, a sea of tents arrayed across the wide plains that stretched back to the bank of the Danube. And at the center of it all stood the grand compound of its leader, the king of Poland.

  The man Kamal had come all this way to see.

  The easier part was done.

  The battle that followed would decide the fate of the world.

  74

  The day that again changed history began as unremarkably as any other.

  The sun broke cover and overwhelmed the darkness, spreading its munificent light across the land, while life, it all its manifestations, unfurled itself from protective sleep and ventured out to seek sustenance.

  On that particular day, however, something else was taking place. In this pastoral corner of the world, on either side of the glorious foothills of the Wienerwald, two massive legions of men, armed and trained for maximal bloodletting, were marching into battle.

  And as had happened before, in a stolen history none of the battle’s participants were aware of, the army of Christendom prevailed once again.

  Sobieski had listened.

  And acted.

  Charles, the Duke of Lorraine, was instrumental in convincing the king to believe the visitors. The emperor had put Charles, his brother-in-law, in command of the imperial army before the siege had begun. The duke was Viennese and knew Starhemberg well, and Kolschitzky’s detailed report about the count’s heroic efforts and the desperate situation inside the besieged city was too convincing to ignore. But what probably clinched it was that Sobieski was able to listen to Kamal’s arguments firsthand, without the need for an interpreter: before becoming king, Sobieski had spent years in Istanbul as a diplomatic envoy to the sultan’s court. He had learned to speak the language there, and Kamal’s commitment and his thorough knowledge of Kara Mustafa’s plans for the next day were, like Kolschitzky’s grim update, too compelling to brush off.

  The commanders quickly drew up their new battle plans.

  The ceremonial review was shelved. Instead, the army was roused from sleep and marched off at speed toward the high road that climb
ed the Vienna Woods.

  The suicide bombers never made it to the ceremonial review that never happened. Instead, they were ambushed by Habsburg marksmen, who were utterly perplexed by the enormous firebomb their musket balls triggered.

  The Ottoman army that was to follow the bombing never made it to the empty encampment in the plains of Tulln. It was taken by complete surprise on the slopes outside Vienna, with the Ottoman camp still in sight in the plain behind it. Sobieski had also used his time as an envoy in Istanbul to study Ottoman military traditions, and it was a body of knowledge he would now put to good use.

  His army—the mounted hussars and dragoons charging ahead of the infantry—seized the ridges and spread out across the hilltops of the Vienna Woods several hours before the Ottoman troops had planned to reach them. The advance wasn’t easy, with steep slopes and narrow passages of loose ground to contend with. Bringing the light artillery was left until last, so as not to delay the movement of the troops. The cavalry found the climb hardest. In many places, the hussars had to dismount and lead their heavy horses up the pockmarked landscape on foot. Still, the pope’s men had pressed on, committed to their sacred mission.

  And then they attacked.

  On the hills that overlooked Vienna, in full view of the Ottoman encampment and the walls of the besieged city, the Polish musketeers and their allies rained fire on the advancing Ottomans, taking them by surprise before the cavalry—almost ten thousand horsemen—stormed down and cut them to pieces.

  Kara Mustafa’s men, by now drained and demoralized by the months of siege, just ran.

  The Polish hussars, who led the charges, were a terrifying sight: fierce warriors whose deadly reputation preceded them, they wore burnished steel armor, carried overlong lances, and rode massive horses. They also had tall wooden frames of eagle and ostrich wings strapped to their backs that gave off an eerie whistle as they galloped into battle. Surging as one in long, tightly packed lines, with wheeled field guns spewing fire from above, they looked like avenging angels of death as they impaled the fleeing Ottoman troops on the tips of their lances or cut them down with the long, triangular swords strapped to their wrists.

  There was slaughter everywhere: on the high road that snaked up the mountain, on the pathways that veered off from it, in the forest, on the scrubland approaches to the foothills, and in the vineyards farther down the slopes that led back to the camp. Wave after wave of Christian fighters swept down from the high ground, a rampaging army of liberation delivering death under a white flag emblazoned with a scarlet red cross.

  The retreating Ottomans found their progress stymied by the steep slopes, the rocky terrain, and the fields of densely entangled grapevines. The camp itself didn’t have any defenses set up facing the attackers coming from the Vienna Woods. All of its fortifications faced the other way, directed at the city walls. There was no shelter behind which to regroup, and those that did reach the camp didn’t stop there: they just kept running, abandoning everything and hitting the road to Buda, mostly on foot, with only a lucky few on horseback.

  Kara Mustafa also fled. After hastily grabbing his treasure chest and the green Standard of the Prophet, the holy banner that the sultan had presented him at the outset of his campaign, he barely managed to escape on horseback with a few of his bodyguards.

  The encampment was now ripe for the taking.

  The massacre didn’t take long.

  In a few hours, the entire camp was reduced to a mass graveyard. For miles around, the ground was littered with corpses and soaked with blood. In between the killing, the liberators also freed the thirty thousand men, women, and children that the Ottomans had rounded up from towns and villages close to Vienna. Kara Mustafa had ordered them killed before he’d fled the camp, but his men hadn’t had enough time to carry out his orders.

  The relief army’s victory was complete, with Sobieski and his allies having suffered an astoundingly low number of casualties.

  Vienna was saved.

  But it was much more than that.

  The Ottoman Empire had suffered a devastating defeat, the worst in its illustrious history. It was a defeat that would trigger a series of wars that would last a century and usher in the beginning of its long decline. The reconquest of territory seized by Islam over hundreds of years would now begin, with the victors’ minds awash with heady dreams of even liberating Constantinople itself.

  * * *

  Kamal and Kolschitzky weren’t far from Sobieski when he led his victorious troops through Vienna’s Scottish Gate.

  Everyone turned out to greet him. To a rousing clamor of trumpets and kettledrums, Starhemberg and the rest of the city’s officials welcomed him with resounding cheers while a huge crowd of grateful survivors showered their savior with cries of gratitude and rushed up to kiss his hands and feet.

  Leading one of the grand vizier’s prized horses and trailing the captured Ottoman banners, the Polish king acknowledged the crowd’s screams of “Long live the king” with gracious waves before proclaiming, “Venimus, vidimus, deus vicit” (“We came, we saw, God conquered”).

  It was evident, though, that the city’s scars would take a long time to heal. So many had died. Almost every building had been disfigured by the war. Disease was still rampant, so much so that its tentacles would soon ensnare the liberators.

  But before the rebuilding, the townspeople and the refugees could console themselves with the great pillaging that was to be had, for the Ottoman ghost city was a trove of riches. Tens of thousands of tents had been left behind, along with a sea of horses and over a hundred thousand heads of cattle that included Anatolian buffalo, camels, cattle, sheep, and goats. There was more artillery, gunpowder, and ammunition than they’d ever seen, with muskets and gold-mounted sabers aplenty and endless stockpiles of grain.

  The Polish cavalry went in that same night, the spoils of victory being theirs to savor first.

  Kamal and Kolschitzky accompanied them. Kamal wasn’t there for the booty. Accompanied by his Polish companion, he rushed straight for Rasheed’s tent, reaching it before the hussars stripped it. Under the carpets, he found Nisreen’s body just where he’d left it the night before.

  She looked pale, and her skin had a green hue to it, but mercifully the bloating and smell of decomposition hadn’t progressed.

  At first, Kamal could barely reach out to touch her. He just sat there and stared, crushed by a profound sadness.

  Kolschitzky stood back and waited, giving his new friend time to process. Then, softly, he stepped forward and said, “We should move her now.”

  Kamal nodded.

  She was rigid and cold to the touch as they wrapped her in one of the smaller carpets. They took her to the city’s cemetery, on the north side of the city, outside the fortifications. But before he could bury her, Kamal needed to do one last thing. A cripplingly painful task, but one he felt had to be done. And he needed to do it away from Kolschitzky’s eyes.

  Asking him for a moment of privacy, he pulled out a dagger. Then, with trembling fingers, he cut lines across the tattooed words on her forearms, making sure they became illegible, each stroke of the blade simultaneously slicing a deep gash through his heart.

  He’d felt no such pain when he’d taken care of the markings on Rasheed’s body back in the tent.

  After washing her, he performed the burial ritual on his own. He’d managed to scrounge a white sheet, which he wrapped her in, and some rope to fasten it around her. With Kolschitzky standing in silence beside him, he recited the funeral prayer. Then they laid her down to rest under a plain stone marker, on which he had inscribed one simple word: hayatim.

  My life.

  * * *

  Kara Mustafa’s end was equally solemn. But when it came, it was swift and merciless.

  He made it to Belgrade. Although he suffered several more military humiliations on the way, it was news of the failure outside the walls of Vienna that spurred the sultan to take the action that would surprise no one, leas
t of all the grand vizier himself.

  After noon prayers on that fateful day, he took off his robes and his turban and kneeled on the ground. Two imperial executioners then placed a silk cord around his neck and, standing on either side of him, pulled. He died quickly and without resistance. The skin was then stripped off his head, stuffed with dry straw, and placed in a velvet bag that was sent back to the sultan, along with the Holy Standard of the Prophet that the sultan had entrusted to him.

  As this was happening, church bells across Europe were ringing, in a curiously serendipitous moment of rejoicing.

  It was December 25, 1683.

  75

  Under a balmy late-summer sky, Kamal and Kolschitzky spent the rest of the night watching the pillaging from the sanctity of one of the bastions that overlooked the encampment.

  Below, the camp was a frenzy of activity, an anthill of torch-carrying looters feasting on anything they could carry.

  “What about you?” Kamal asked Kolschitzky. “Don’t you want your share? They’re picking it clean.”

  Kolschitzky chuckled. “I already told Starhemberg what I wanted. He was a bit puzzled, but he agreed.”

  “What did you ask for?”

  “The Turks left behind a huge stockpile of coffee beans. Thousands of sacks.”

  “And he gave them all to you?”

  “No one else wants them. They have a sour taste. They’re disgusting to eat.”

  “So why do you want them?”

  “They don’t know what they are, but I do,” Kolschitzky smiled.

  Kamal laughed. The Viennese didn’t know coffee. At least not yet. Kolschitzky, after years spent in Istanbul, did.

  The city could look forward to a long tradition of coffeehouses.

  “What I really want, though,” Kolschitzky added, “is for you to keep your promise. I need to understand what I saw.”