The Siege

by Ismail Kadare

  “Maybe they aren’t looking in the right place?” Lejla suggested.

  She was the only one of the four to have heard of such things before, even though the previous campaign she had been on had not needed to take such steps.

  “The sappers dig where the architect Giaour tells them,” the eunuch said. “He’s supposed to know all the secrets of earth and water.”

  “Talk talk, Hasan! Bring water quick!” the blonde girl shouted.

  “Immediately, ma’am,” the eunuch replied.

  He went out, and the clatter of empty pitchers moved away into the distance.

  Exher was leaning her head on her forearm.

  “How are you feeling?” Ajsel asked her. “Do you want to vomit again?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve gone white again.”

  “Does he know you’re pregnant?” Lejla asked.

  “Hasan must have told him.”

  “They have a weakness for children conceived on campaign,” Lejla remarked.

  She spoke as if in a daydream. She was on the point of adding something, but seemed to hold back.

  “And why is that?” Exher asked.

  Lejla didn’t answer the question directly but said, “Especially if it is a boy …”

  “So why do they have a special fondness for such children?” Exher asked again.

  Lejla lowered her eyes. “I don’t really know,” she said. “Perhaps it’s because they come into being amid devastation and death, on which their fathers’ whole existence is grounded. Or else it may be because by spreading grief all around they incur a debt towards life, and are therefore glad to be able to return to it a tiny part of what they have taken away.”

  “He is very glum these days,” Ajsel observed. “Haven’t you noticed?”

  “That’s right. He never smiles.”

  “But I like men of mystery,” Exher blurted out.

  “He has ear trouble,” Ajsel added. “A week ago, when I slept with him, he suddenly put his hand to his right ear. When I asked what was wrong, he told me he could hear buzzing in his head.”

  “With the din of battle and the banging of all those drums, how could he not have trouble with his ears?” Exher said.

  “But I don’t think that’s what’s making him grumpy,” Lejla objected. “What’s getting him down is the outcome of a battle that seems to have no end.”

  “And the collapse of the tunnel also upset him greatly,” Exher added.

  “The tunnel? Of course it affected him. Actually, I think that’s where it all began …”

  Rattling buckets could be heard coming nearer outside. It was the eunuch. They rushed over to him as soon as he came inside the tent.

  “Hold your horses, you witches!” Hasan shouted at them.

  He finally got them into the compartment of the tent that was used for steam baths. For a long while the women’s laughter mingled with the sound of spilling water.

  Once they had relaxed they came back into the main tent and started to do up their hair.

  “Hasan, tell us all the news!” Lejla said.

  The time after a bath was when Hasan was at his most fluent. He chatted about whatever came into his head, in no particular order, pell-mell. All over the camp people were talking of nothing but the imminent trial of the spell-caster. He was supposed to be mainly responsible for the failure of the first assault. Learned men from the Palace of Great Damnation in the capital had arrived at the camp, bringing instruments and little lengths of string that were to be used to establish the man’s guilt. Proper measurements had been made, and had persuaded the estimators that the spell had been badly cast. A curse made with the palm of the hand had to be as precise as a shot with a bow, because the slightest error in aim increases in magnitude the further the arrow flies. So when the curse reached the citadel, it just glanced off the right hand wall and a great deal of its force frittered away in empty space and fell to ground on some far-off beech-wood or meadow, which would surely wither in a couple of years’ time, but what good was that to anyone? The fortress would remain intact.

  “Well, Hasan, that’s all very complicated, isn’t it?” Exher sighed.

  “Wait a moment!” the eunuch said. “Things are even more complicated than they seem. To begin with, the spell-caster was suspected of having made a crass mistake, but what we’re now learning is that none of this happened by chance … Under torture, his assistants, first of all, and then the man himself admitted they had acted knowingly, that they are in cahoots with enemies of the state, and there’s even a rumour that they’ve got their own men planted in the council of war. If none of that was made public knowledge up to now, it was probably so as to lull the traitors into a false sense of security, and then — clack! — close the trap on them like rats.”

  “Come on, Hasan,” Lejla said. “Why are you boring us with all this nasty business? Go get us some juicy fruit instead. We’re parched.”

  “Tell us something more amusing!” Exher insisted.

  “Amusing? The whole army is gossiping about Kurdisxhi and Karaduman! They’ve fallen in love with the same boy, and are at daggers drawn …”

  Almost simultaneously the four women lowered their gaze with that touch of melancholy aroused by a revolting act that nonetheless retains something of the beauty it smothers.

  Hasan chatted on interminably about trivia but the women were hardly paying attention any more, as their minds had been diverted to thoughts of a squabble of which they would be the object. They were well aware that if such a dispute broke out, it would not be settled in the field, to the sound of clashing sabres, but in the marketplace, over a matter of price, and to the tinkling of silver coins.

  “Well! That’s enough for now!” Hasan said. “Put your legs up one more time, because I didn’t examine you properly when we were in the hammam just now. I’ve the impression that your little nests have gone darker already and that in a few days they’ll be as black as the crows. Especially yours, Lejla and Ajsel. Get ready, we’ll clean you up.”

  “Pfui!” Ajsel said. “So soon?”

  “I’ve noticed that the little bush grows faster in summer,” Hasan pointed out. “Come on, girls, let’s get on with it. Otherwise Hasan will get the blame.”

  “And is she going to always be allowed to keep her forest?” Exher asked, nodding towards Blondie.

  The foreign wife smiled mockingly as she listened to the conversation.

  “On such matters, the decision is his,” Hasan answered. “Orders are orders. You three: as smooth as a mirror. That one: don’t touch a hair on her … head, as you might say. And do you know why?” he asked in a whisper. “Because she is fair. They all drool like dogs when they come across a blonde girl with dark pubic hair … If it were as fair as her head, you’d see me shaving away. But there you are: hers is black … I remember when I was working for a beylerbey, my master once bought a blonde girl of much the same kind as this one. He was dying to have her in bed with him. As I was washing and perfuming her inside the hammam, he called to me from outside the door: ‘Make sure you don’t shear her fleece! Otherwise you know what’ll happen to you!’ But he called me back after dinner. He was in a lousy mood and looked upset. He said grumpily: ‘Shave her, like the others.’ I guessed straight away what the reason for his mood was: unlike most blondes, she had pubic hair that was as fair as the hair on her head. I’d never seen a prettier little brush. Like a ray of sunlight had fallen between her legs. And I swear to you I had tears in my eyes when I shaved her, as if I was cropping fenugreek, and my teardrops fell like dew where my master’s seed should have been sprinkled. I cursed him under my breath. ‘Why the devil don’t you appreciate this golden honey down? Why do you prefer a thicket as dark and frightening as a bottomless pit? Because all you are yourself is a crow and an abyss! That’s why!’”

  They were relaxed and ready to drop off to sleep after their bath, but that didn’t stop the eunuch from prattling on. Silence even seemed to stimulate him.
He told old stories about his former mistresses. He had fond memories of them all.

  “In Izmir,” he said, “I had one who was without compare. Her voice was as sweet as the rahat loukoum between her thighs. Anyway, I can read my mistresses’ hearts the way I can read their sex, it’s all the same to me. All of them were either completely angry with their eunuch, or else they had nothing but smiles for him. ‘Bow, bow, Black eunuch, you son of the night,’ I used to say to myself. The masculine power all around us was so implacable that I felt a perverse kind of pleasure in being mistreated by the women of my harem. ‘Hit me, ladies,’ I used to say, ‘flay me, piss on my head while you chatter to each other!’ It seemed to me that they would draw some comfort from doing so, that it would console them for their own fate. ‘Why are you so sad, Hasan?’ they would sometimes ask. That’s what my ladies were like. They would notice if a passing cloud in the sky felt unhappy! Some of them now lie in their graves. Sometimes I go and visit them in the cemetery of the Lower Plain. And I would weep for them aloud if the whole place wasn’t under surveillance. Because the world and its men are getting harder and harder. But God’s punishment is also drawing nearer. In the camp no one sleeps peacefully at night any more. You can hear groans that are supposed to be coming up from underground. Last Sunday, towards dawn, the earth began to shake as if they were all going to come scrambling out, all covered in mud, out of the hole where they were buried alive. After forty days, forty more must pass, then forty weeks, for the earth to calm down again. Because everything happens at a slower pace for the earth than for men. True peace will only come back to it after forty years.”

  A blinding sun streams down, as if it had suddenly been aimed at us. No cloud to protect us, not even a smear of mist in the sky. It seems we have been abandoned entirely; our sentries no longer even see fairies or sprites. Maybe they are resting on a hill somewhere? From daybreak the sky seems to have been emptied of its heavenly substance.

  Down below, on the plain, they are reaping the early wheat. Scythes and sickles sparkle in the far distance with a fierce and threatening glare, as if they were felling not ears of wheat but the heads of men. We who planted the seeds we were fated never to harvest are much downcast. For herein is that saying true, as is written in the Gospel According to St John, that “one soweth and another reapeth”. The scythe we do not use ourselves has really fallen on the world as on the Day of the Apocalypse.

  The plain all around our citadel is now pocked with holes and dark trenches dug in the search for the aqueduct. The leader of the search, an architect they call “The Christian,” is sufficiently cunning to have guessed straight away, when on the third day they came on an aqueduct, that it was the old one, no longer in use, and he ordered the work to continue until the other one, the right one, had been found.

  But nobody knows where the right one runs, not even we ourselves. All we know is that one of George Castrioti’s first concerns was to build new aqueducts to serve all his fortresses. To keep their location secret, the trenches were dug by prisoners. Last year they ended up making such a labyrinth of ditches and tunnels that no one could tell which of these courses actually brought water into the citadel. And it is entirely possible that none of them does, that the one that fulfils the function is a completely different one, that cannot be seen. The enemy has placed all its hopes in discovering the true source of our water. But as we ourselves do not know where our water comes from or how it reaches us, we believe nobody else can find out either. The fearsome Christian appears in our dreams nonetheless, and so we have started to dig a deep well beneath the dungeons of our citadel, in case we have to face even harder times than these.

  The siege has been upon us for nearly two months. The sight of the enemy has tired our eyes. They wander around in their tens of thousands all across the plain down below — an endless throng that is constantly on the move. Where can this vast horde come from? How do they manage to communicate with each other and act in concert? Where are they going? For what reason? People who have visited their land say that women are scarce in those parts, and are hardly ever seen. So who gives birth to them? Are they children of the desert?

  CHAPTER NINE

  Çelebi was jealous of the half-undressed men lying outside their tents. It was suffocatingly hot, and, if dignity and propriety had not forbidden it, he too would have liked to take off his clothes. In practice, none of the soldiers knew who he was. They were surely just as ignorant of the fact that among them was a historian whose task was to make the campaign immortal. Because of his costume he was sometimes mistaken for a doctor and sometimes for a soothsayer, but that was hardly surprising since most of the soldiers did not even know the word “history”.

  “What do those drums mean?” he asked a group of soldiers.

  “A beheading,” they answered without even looking up at him.

  Men were crowding around the open space left between the tents where executions usually took place. Since he had nothing better to do, Çelebi joined the crowd. That morning he had been for a walk in the plain around the camp. The landscape was beautiful, but the ditches and trenches pitting the ground had spoiled his walk. Here and there in the grass he came across arrows, which had apparently come down in recent battles. He stooped to pick one up. He had never held a weapon in his hand before, and it seemed odd to him that a mere stick of wood with a little iron tip could cause anyone’s death.

  “Who is going to be beheaded?” he asked another soldier a little further on.

  “No idea,” the trooper replied with a shrug. “A pair of spies, I think.”

  The drum kept on calling men to assembly. The herald’s voice could be heard in the distance. Çelebi noticed the tall shape of Sirri Selim coming towards him with someone else. The doctor greeted him.

  “Well, how are you, Mevla? How’s the chronicle going?”

  The chronicler bowed down low.

  “Don’t you know each other?” Sirri Selim said with a broad gesture towards Mevla and the other man. “This is Mevla Çelebi, our historiographer.”

  The unidentified man gave the chronicler a supercilious look.

  “And this is our new astrologer. He’s just come in from Edirne.”

  Çelebi looked at him with the same curiosity he had for anyone coming from the capital.

  “Any news from Edirne?” he asked in a gentle tone, pretending not to have noticed the newcomer’s haughty air.

  “No,” the astrologer said. “It’s hot.”

  The chronicler could see the new man wasn’t keen on talking. In his mind’s eye he glimpsed the old astrologer’s corpse all covered in mud and rubble, and he thought better of giving way to his feeling of irritation with the new one. If he takes himself too seriously, he’ll end up in the same state, Mevla thought.

  “What’s this crowd for?” the doctor enquired.

  “Apparently they’re going to execute a pair of spies.”

  “Really? Spies?” a passing janissary asked.

  “And what did they spy on?” Sirri Selim asked as he moved towards the place where the drum-roll was coming from.

  The other two followed in his footsteps.

  “I don’t know,” the chronicler answered.

  “I can tell you!” a dervish shouted out from behind them. “They are two spies who tried to steal the secret of our big guns!”

  The chronicler then noticed Sadedin among the throng. He was being pushed and shoved. He’d often seen him wandering around the camp with a white stick, and most times he didn’t speak to him, as he didn’t know what to say, but this time, seeing the sturdy poet being knocked about like this, he felt sorry for him.

  “Do you see the blind man over there being pushed around?” he asked Sirri Selim.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s Sadedin, the poet. He lost his sight in the battle.”

  The new astrologer still showed no interest in what Mevla was saying, and didn’t even turn to look.

  “I’ll go and get him,” th
e chronicler said. “I can’t bear to see him being manhandled like that.”

  “In his condition, why doesn’t he go back to Turkey?” Sirri Selim asked.

  “He’s composing a great poem about the campaign. He wants to be here when the citadel falls,” Çelebi explained.

  The chronicler went over to the poet and after a while brought him back.

  “All around can be heard the feet of military men!” Sadedin declaimed in his thundering baritone. “It is an exalting sound!”

  The astrologer cast a condescending glance at him.

  “Many centuries ago, in Ancient Greece,” Sirri Selim said, “there was a blind poet just like you.”

  Sadedin turned his blank sockets towards the doctor.

  “His name was Homer, and he wrote a great epic about a garrison called Troy, which the Greeks destroyed,” Sirri Selim went on. “Two months ago, Prince Mehmet, our future Sultan, said in a speech that God had designated the Turks as the avengers of Troy.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” the blind man said. “My name is Sadedin. I used to be called Nightingale Sadedin, but the nickname never was to my liking.”

  “Wouldn’t you have liked to be called Sarperkan Tol-Keleç Olgunsoy?” the chronicler suggested.

  “I never had a chance to bear that name,” Sadedin answered. “But this war has turned Nightingale Sadedin into Blind Sadedin. That’s what everyone calls me now.”

  He swept his hand over his forehead as if trying to wave aside something that was irritating or terrifying him. When he’d finished, the chronicler saw something deathly in the gesture.

  “I hear the feet of military men!” the poet said again. “We advance at night. Nothing can stand in the way of night with the crescent moon in its middle. The barren earth trembles beneath our boots.”

  Sirri Selim smiled. “I like you,” he said.

  Sadedin said nothing.

  “Turkish blood will wet the dust of three continents,” the poet went on. “It is written that our blood should course through our soldiers’ veins no more, but should spring from their wounds until the earth is drenched with it!”