The Siege

by Ismail Kadare

  Sirri Selim frowned.

  “An ocean of blood shall be spilled,” Sadedin cried hoarsely, “an ocean of fine Turkish blood.”

  Sadedin then turned around abruptly and left without saying farewell. Çelebi watched him move into the distance, tottering along with the help of his stick.

  “Is this execution going to happen or not?” the doctor asked.

  “I don’t think it will be long now,” Çelebi said. “I just saw the chef-de-camp going by.”

  Meanwhile a group of officers were noisily greeting one of their comrades who had visibly just returned from a long journey. They were gossiping excitedly, and Çelebi strained his ear to catch what they were saying.

  “So, what news from the capital?” a couple of the officers asked.

  “What you would expect,” the traveller replied. “The talk is all of this expedition. When people know you’ve come from Albania, the first thing they ask is whether you’ve set eyes on Skanderbeg.”

  “They fail to realise that if you do set eyes on Skanderbeg, you are very likely never to set eyes on anything else!” one of them quipped.

  They all laughed.

  “Look, here comes the Quartermaster General and Saruxha,” Sirri Selim remarked. “They must be on their way to a session of the war council.”

  The two high officials nodded a greeting without stopping, but Sirri Selim waved at them.

  “Heads are going to fall. Stay a while.”

  “And who is to be executed?”

  “Two spies. Apparently they were trying to filch your guns’ secrets,” Sirri Selim said. Then he added in a whisper, “Do you really know nothing about this?”

  “No,” Saruxha said in a rasping voice. “What’s all this spying business about?”

  “Well, that’s odd!”

  “Who is that man?” the Quartermaster General asked under his breath.

  “The new astrologer,” Sirri Selim answered. “Just got here from Edirne.”

  The Quartermaster General looked the astrologer up and down.

  “Do you really not know anything about the spies?” Sirri Selim asked the gun-maker once again.

  “I already told you, no,” the engineer replied.

  “You’ve got a sore throat. Did you catch cold?”

  “I suppose I must have.”

  Voices could be heard shouting from among the crowd. “Here they come! Here they come!”

  People pushed and shoved to get a better view. Cries of “Death to the spies” rose from all around.

  Two men with their hands tied were dragged on to the scaffold. The executioner climbed up behind them. The two convicts were almost naked and the marks of the torture they had undergone were clearly visible on their torsos.

  The Quartermaster General looked at them with some care.

  “I think I’ve seen those two somewhere else.”

  “Yes, they’re a pair of snoopers we sometimes saw near the foundry,” Çelebi said. “That one’s the redhead. Do you remember?”

  “That’s right,” Saruxha confirmed. “It really is them.”

  Men close by stretched their necks to listen in to the conversation.

  “So that’s why they went there every day!” Çelebi exclaimed. “The dogs! To think we treated them as good lads who were just being curious!” The executioner and his assistant were now untying the men’s hands.

  “No!” Saruxha replied. “It’s not true! Twenty years ago, I too peered over a fence to watch and admire the great Saruhanli casting cannon in his foundry. These boys aren’t spies any more than I was at their age!”

  The chronicler was thunderstruck. “What, then?”

  “Their thirst for knowledge, their curiosity has done for them,” Saruxha said. “Of course I could save the pair of them, but my throat hurts too much.”

  The drum had stopped sounding the call to assemble.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” Saruxha went on in his hoarse rasp. “Can’t you hear my voice? How can you snatch two people from the jaws of death without having to raise your voice at great length?”

  “That’s true,” the Quartermaster General agreed. “And the fate of thousands hangs on your good health. You have every right to look after yourself.”

  The executioner’s assistant laid the men’s heads on the block.

  “Look, there’s the architect!” said Sirri Selim. “Rushing about like a whirlwind, as usual.”

  Giaour dashed on past them without looking round.

  “We’re going to be late,” the Quartermaster remarked.

  They turned on their heels and moved away just as the executioner brought his axe down on one of the two necks. There was a movement in the crowd, and then a great roar arose.

  “They’re in a hurry to get to the meeting,” Sirri Selim muttered pensively. “I bet they’ll soon summon me too.”

  Çelebi didn’t dare ask the doctor what he meant by that.

  The executioner raised his axe a second time. It was the carrot-haired boy’s turn. And again the crowd shifted around, and again a thunderous roar arose.

  “No, they’ll surely not fail to call me in,” Sirri Selim said aloud, and then suddenly went red in the face.

  Çelebi was flummoxed. He didn’t know what attitude to adopt — show interest in Sirri Selim’s incomprehensible utterance, as politeness required, or else pretend not to have heard him thinking aloud. Although he was of a lower rank than the Quartermaster General, the doctor was a figure of some importance, and Çelebi cursed fate for putting him in his presence at such a delicate moment.

  “No, no mistake about it,” Sirri Selim added through his teeth, with his mouth in a twisted grin.

  Çelebi felt the blood running cold in his veins. He turned towards the astrologer, but he seemed completely indifferent to everything, and just carried on staring at the crowd.

  Meanwhile the Quartermaster and Saruxha were well on their way to the Pasha’s tent. They saw the architect rushing into the pink pavilion a few feet ahead of them.

  “It looks like he’s gone a bit crazy,” Saruxha observed.

  “He certainly has a few things to worry about,” the Quartermaster General commented. “The tunnel collapse was nearly the end of him.”

  “And you reckon he won’t have any more luck in the hunt for the aqueduct?”

  “I fear not.”

  “You’re in clover, you really are!” Saruxha exclaimed. “You just don’t have the same worries as we all do.”

  The Quartermaster General smiled.

  “Superficially, you’re right,” he answered calmly. “But did you stop to ask yourself why, over the last two days, thousands of men are hurriedly reaping the last of the wheat?”

  “That’s true,” Saruxha said. “I meant to ask you, but then it slipped my mind. What is going on?”

  “I’ll let you in on a secret only the Pasha and Alaybey are currently aware of.”

  Saruxha could barely stifle a cough, which always came to him when he was excited.

  “Skanderbeg has attacked and destroyed the Venetian caravans that were bringing our supplies,” the Quartermaster whispered.

  “He hit the Venetians? Good Lord …”

  “That’s right, it’s tantamount to declaring war on the Serenissima,” the Quartermaster said.

  Saruxha looked at him with amazement in his eyes.

  “He’s gone out of his mind!”

  “Maybe he has,” the Quartermaster replied. “But don’t forget, it may be a desperate act, but it’s the act of a lion in despair.”

  “You can call it despair or a lion’s anger, as far as I’m concerned, it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other. Anyway, laying your sabre on a sack of grain or a skin of oil doesn’t seem very leonine to me!”

  The Quartermaster burst out laughing and then shook his head as if to make his laughter go away. “I’m of a completely different persuasion. A general who destroys your supply train before attacking you is a true soldier.” />
  “I’m afraid we’re going to be late,” Saruxha said.

  They went into the tent one after the other with bowed heads. The full war council had been assembled. The only empty seat was the commander-in-chief’s. The captains and high officials were chatting quietly. Most of the others were silent, taking sips of syrup from a glass that was constantly refilled from a brass pitcher by a chaouch gliding among the council members like a shadow. Now and again they cast sidelong glances at the architect. But Giaour’s blank face failed to give them the satisfaction they sought in such circumstances, when all the weight of a difficult meeting seems to bear down on one man, and, as they watch him writhing, the others feel immense relief not to be sitting in his place. The man’s impassive appearance not only disappointed the council members who reckoned themselves deprived of a small pleasure to which they felt entitled, but irritated them, and thereby relieved them of all pity.

  The Pasha came in and took his seat. Everyone stopped speaking, and only the familiar scratching of the scribe’s writing instruments could be heard, less as a background noise than as a natural part of the silence of the universe.

  Then the Pasha spoke. He was brief. He stated that on this day the council must determine whether or not to continue the siege. Then he mentioned the problem of the aqueduct. All efforts to locate it had failed. As everyone must have realised, hopes of finding it were diminishing by the day. He praised the architect for having realised that the aqueduct that was found was a decoy, and especially for not having allowed them all to rejoice prematurely. “As the great architect that you are, you spared us a great disappointment, in other words, you saved us from an evil.” Nonetheless he refuted Giaour’s hypothesis that there was no other aqueduct.

  “You said yourself that the one you discovered was only a false lure, but now you tell us that there is no other. Well then, architect, tell us what the truth of the matter is. Is there a real aqueduct or not? I am asking you!”

  Giaour’s lips started mouthing words straight away.

  “Aqueduct is real, aqueduct is semblance, yes and no.”

  The Pasha held both his hands to his forehead and motioned to the architect to stop talking. Looking at the man with his cold and weary eyes he begged him to wait until he had finished thinking. The architect closed his mouth.

  “I praised you for those things in which you are praiseworthy, but all the same I am displeased with you,” the Pasha continued in a serious tone.

  As was to be expected, but only after hesitating for a while, he alluded, although not too insistently, to the tunnel. Without taking his eyes off Giaour, he observed that as far as the tunnel was concerned the architect, at a pinch, could be held to be not responsible for the collapse, since the sappers who were perhaps the reason why the tunnel was discovered were now, together with their captain Ulug Bey, buried under the ground, peace be to their souls, and could therefore not defend themselves; the failure of the search for the aqueduct, on the other hand, could only be imputed to him, and he had to answer for this to the war council. To finish off his speech, Tursun Pasha expressed the sour hypothesis that the architect Giaour had perhaps, “for some reason,” lost his ardour to cut off the supply of water to the Christians.

  The Pasha had spoken. In the utter silence that ensued all that could be heard was the scratching of the secretary’s quill as he put down on paper everything that had been said. They were all accustomed to this sound which was always identical, whether the words being transcribed were sharp or smooth, scorpion bites or soft summer wind. Those among the council members who were familiar with administrative accounts realised that the secretary was making his quill squeal more than was actually necessary. To judge by the serious face he made at such times, it wasn’t hard to guess that these silent pauses in which his pen scratching was the overriding sound gave him his sole opportunity in life to assert his own importance. Once someone started talking again, his very presence would be forgotten.

  The architect stood up. He began to speak, in truncated words strung together without pauses or intonation. His tiresome, toneless diction was somehow reminiscent of the desert. As they listened to him members of the council imagined that this man had been specially created to dry up rivers and springs, as he had done in fact, and to great effect, in the many previous campaigns that had won him considerable glory.

  He gave an account of his search. He explained to the council how he had based his work on a scrupulous examination of the surrounding terrain, noting the gradients of all the slopes, their degree of forestation, the composition of the subsoil, its level of humidity, and many other factors. This detailed survey was the basis for his orders to dig here rather than there (“dig where dig need, not dig where dig not need”). When these investigations led to the unearthing of a conduit which he immediately identified as a decoy (the trickle of water in it was so tiny that it would not have fooled anybody), he had insisted on going on until they located the real aqueduct. He had given orders for the river bed to be surveyed yard by yard so as to find some trace of it. His divers had been down, over a length of several leagues, but they found nothing. After that, and especially after Albanian prisoners had confessed under torture and until their dying breath that they did not know of any other pipe, he became convinced that the aqueduct they had unearthed was both the real one, and a false one.

  “Stuff and nonsense!” the Mufti interrupted. “That’s the second time we’ve been told such crazy rubbish. Pasha, sire, how can you tolerate this … this … making a fool of us? How can a pipe be both true and false at the same time? Are we to suppose that aqueducts have doubles, like human beings?”

  “Explain yourself,” the Pasha said to the architect.

  “I not make fun nobody. I explain,” Giaour responded.

  He stated that the aqueduct could be considered simultaneously true and false insofar as it was no longer in use. A course which carries water, he continued, is an aqueduct, as its name implies, but one which has ceased to do that and to fulfil its role is merely a pipe. The citadel had been supplied with water through the channel they had discovered up until the day of the army’s arrival. Then, for fear of it being found, they had themselves made it unusable.

  “Did they now?” the Mufti shouted. “And for what reason did they do that, Mr Architect? Why did they hasten to do what it would have taken us a great deal of trouble to do? Was it out of their deep respect for us and their desire to spare us toil and time?”

  Several members of the council started chuckling. Others nodded approvingly, meaning that they found the Mufti’s questions pertinent. One of the sanxhakbeys even declared: “That’s just what I was going to ask.”

  The architect didn’t blink. Only his mouth opened, and poured forth his usual blather of words as same-sounding as so many grains of sand.

  “You want know what made demolish pipe? Only reason is, afraid poison.”

  He explained that it often happens that the besieged, once they have closed the gates and all other visible and hidden forms of access to their garrison, fill their cisterns with fresh water and, from fear of having their water supply poisoned, cut their last link with the outside world — their aqueduct.

  A sly grin spread slowly over the wide expanse of the Mufti’s face. The others were very curious to see how this duel would turn out, for it seemed that for the first time this immensely learned man might bite the dust. The Mufti asked to speak again.

  “Let us suppose that is right,” he said. “In spite of everything, what I cannot grasp is why they gave up their water supply three months ago, when they could have left the decision to cut it off until the fatal moment (fatal for them, that is) when we would find the aqueduct.”

  “The old fox!” Saruxha said quietly in the Quartermaster General’s ear.

  “He’s not as dumb as he looks,” was the whispered reply.

  “It is obvious to all,” the Mufti continued, “that a cistern fed by a water pipe cannot be replenished once the pi
pe is cut, and it is no less obvious that if it has to be cut, the besieged will try to delay doing so for as long as possible. But according to you, the besieged we’re dealing with here are supposed to be mad enough to have cut off their own water before we even got here. That is what my poor brain cannot grasp.”

  “Your brain not grasp because your brain not know,” the architect threw back at him.

  “Don’t insult each other, but answer these two questions,” the Pasha broke in. “First: how do the besieged get their water? Second: why did they abandon their aqueduct prematurely?”

  Old Tavxha, Kurdisxhi and some of the sanxhakbeys broke out in narrow grins. Tahanka’s eyes were lit with a fierce glow. Kara-Mukbil’s expression was as gloomy as ever. Tursun Pasha and the Alaybey, for their part, hadn’t lost their grumpy expressions. As soon as they saw this, the sanxhakbeys wiped the smiles from their faces.

  All eyes were on the architect. The sound of the scribe’s scratchy quill seemed to make those glances even sharper.

  Giaour’s mouth went slack in a single movement, as it always did. He answered the first question simply: in his estimation, the defenders must have both a reservoir and a natural well inside the walls. To the second question he replied that the Albanians had disabled the aqueduct in advance out of fear that it would be discovered secretly, and not openly as had been the case. We could have kept our discovery hidden, he continued, so as to transmit poison or some horrible disease through the pipe. Indeed, that was how he had poisoned the defenders of Xhizel-Hisar, ten years before; the same method had been used at Tash-Hisar a year later, as it had been used at Aleppo, twelve miles away, to infect the fortress with cholera. He cited the names of other besieged garrisons and citadels that had been brought low by water, a weapon more fearsome than the sword.

  One by one the members of the council were overcome by stupefaction. They had no idea that Old Eggface, as they called him behind his back, could be so tough. They had lost all hope of seeing him bite the dust, and they felt exhausted. Tursun Pasha’s face also expressed weariness. You’ll go back to prison, he thought, but you’ll come out stronger, as you always do. Who knows what will happen to the others … But the Pasha could not believe his ears: the architect was now calling for an immediate assault.