“You are really crazy. But I am even crazier for listening to you. Got that? So why don’t you say something, you jerk?”
The stranger had left. What a bloody jerk he was, the azab thought. He even pretended to be an eshkinxhi! How could they have put such soldiers in a hole like this? Sod that!
There was another long pause. More thunder could be heard, but this time it did not grow any louder. It was whirling around somewhere on the outskirts of the camp, getting fainter, then getting clearer, then fading away entirely. These ebbs and flows of the tide of sound went on for an interminably long time.
“I’m going up for a bit to see what’s happened,” someone said.
He could be heard trudging through the loose earth and then climbing the rungs of the ladder. The others waited for him to return. He came back.
“Well?”
“Looks like it’s calming down. It’s not yet dawn.”
Someone else moved in the dark.
“Are you leaving?” a voice asked. “As you like. I’m staying put a bit longer. We’ll meet again. As soon as the alert is given, run back here, you’ll find us where you left us.”
Çelebi wanted to stand up, but overwhelming weariness kept him still. The thought that he might not find his own tent standing, that his present shelter was likely to be the best he would ever find henceforth, made him want to close his eyes. He couldn’t have said whether he really was dropping off to sleep, or just seeming to do so. He could not stop seeing a white horse running round in his mind’s eye but he no longer knew which one it was, whether it was the horse of noon or the ancient horse of Murad at Kosove Polye. It seemed as if an entire season had elapsed since the early afternoon. He thought of the sheets of his manuscript trampled by horses’ hooves. But even they could not be more distressing or destructive than the Quartermaster’s account of the murder of the monarch. He’d tried to forget about it, but it was no good. He first tried to coax the thought away, then he tried to order it to leave his mind, but neither method worked. Then he sought to transform the story to some degree and to soften it, but it serried its ranks into an impregnable position … The great Sultan, Murad Han, was not killed by Christians but by his own viziers … A trickle of molten lead in his ear would probably not have hurt him more. It was a horror, a space slashed open, and an intoxicating doubt all wrapped in one.
He couldn’t work out why on a night like this his mind remained for no obvious reason firmly fixed on this vision. Then he thought he understood: he was on his own in the dark, in a quite unnatural place that was neither the ground, nor a tent, nor an office. A kind of nowhere place, a place truly beyond the reach of law, outside the world and the Empire. Maybe this was the first opportunity he had ever had to ponder at length on something he would never dare write down: the truth about the Battle of Kosovo! Hurry up! he told himself. Dawn will soon be breaking.
And that was how, in the bowels of the earth, he meditated the first canto: Sultan Murad Han on his white horse, when battle was done, towards dusk, inspecting the dead. Suddenly, a ragged Balkan with running sores rises up from the ground and tries to come close, supposedly to kiss his hand. The guards hold him back, but strangely the Sultan tells them to leave him be. Now the man approaches and, instead of kissing the proffered hand, he extracts from beneath the rags covering his otherwise naked body an even barer blade, then leaps up like a wild cat and plunges it straight into the Sultan’s heart. That’s the story you read in all the chronicles, but the Quartermaster cries out: Lies! How could you believe, you idiot, that on such a bloody day any infidel could have got so close to the Emperor? And how could you assume in addition that a wounded man could spring from the ground to the full height of a rider on horseback, and with a single blow get a knife through the Sultan’s breast-plate?
First counter-canto: a murder really did take place, a strange one indeed, a little before sunset, in front of dozens of witnesses. The man on the horse wasn’t Murad Han but his body double. And the man who knifed him wasn’t a Balkan but a dervish who had been specially trained for the job and was wearing a disguise. Help me, O Muse, he begged, help me with the second canto!
Second canto: the Sultan’s tent; the council of viziers surround the sovereign. A messenger runs up announcing the monarch’s death. The Sultan laughs; but the viziers frown. Why have your eyes gone as dark as ravens? “Because it is an evil omen,” the Grand Vizier declares. “When a shadow falls, its owner must fall too.” At which point they set upon him and stab him to death.
Second counter-canto: that is how this crime has been told for many a long year. They wanted us to believe that the Sultan had perished at the hand of a Christian … The body double’s guards and the killer dervish were slain on the spot to prevent the story being leaked … Come to my aid, O Muse, for the third canto!
Third canto: at the other end of the camp, a message reaches the heir to the throne, Jakup Çelebi. “Your illustrious father requests your presence.” On his way over he can hear people shouting, “The Sultan has been killed!” But the messenger reassures the prince: “His double has been slain, my lord.” Jakup nonetheless feels a sinister foreboding.
Third counter-canto: when they set off for Kosovo they had already laid plans to kill the monarch, whatever the outcome of the battle. The aim was to put on the throne not the elder son, in proper order of succession, but the younger son, Bayezit, for it was he who had the viziers’ preference. Help me, O Muse, to write my last canto!
Canto the last: Prince Jakup Çelebi enters his father’s tent. The Sultan’s corpse lies on the kilim. “But that’s my father!” the prince cries out. “They told me only his shadow had been slain!” “In this vale of tears we are all shadows,” one of the viziers says. Whereupon they slay Jakup as they had slain his father.
Counter-canto the last: the younger brother, Prince Bayezit, buries his face in his hands. He pretends not to understand, but he had actually known all about it for some time. They had promised to do it all without shedding blood, and he had pretended to believe them. He contemplates the funereal field of Kosovo stretching out before him and foresees that victors and vanquished will both be cursed for evermore. Cries rise in the far distance: “The Sultan has been slain!” The heralds again spread the false news that it is only the Sultan’s double who died, and, like his brother before him, he walks to his father’s tent. He goes in and sees the two bodies on the floor. My father and his double … he thinks. But at this point the assembled dignitaries bow down low and call him “Padishah”. He then realises that one of the bodies belongs to his brother Jakup. “We didn’t have a choice,” the Grand Vizier murmurs. “It wasn’t part of the plan.” The new monarch covers his tear-streaked face with his hands, but nobody will ever know what the tears were really made of and why they were shed …
“Forgive me, all-powerful Allah!” the chronicler sighed. He felt washed out as if he had committed an unpardonable crime. The same feeling he had had long ago as an adolescent when his friends had taught him how to have pleasure on his own. He played with himself all night long and by dawn he was emptied out and completely exhausted. “Forgive me, O Allah,” he prayed again, and he wanted there to be someone next to him, to cuddle and comfort him, like there used to be, but now there was nobody at his side. Sheer terror at being on his own made him stand up. He groped for the way out, and even managed to find it. Day was breaking when he emerged. The dawn was an impenetrable, purple-flecked grey that hid the horizon all around, and made everything seem unreal. He felt soil falling from his clothes as he walked. Anyone who had seen him at that point would have taken him for a corpse that had just climbed out of the grave. He raised his collar so as not to be recognised and hurried on. The camp seemed to be sleeping peacefully. There was no visible trace of what had just taken place. Çelebi felt as if he really had returned from the grave. In it he had buried his only chronicle that was hostile to the State. He took a deep breath, happy to be relieved of it. On the slant sides of the tents you could just mak
e out the dampness of morning dew, so alien to the hostility of men. Terror, screams, panic and thundering hooves had all been dissolved in millions of droplets, each one of which contained a sense of the end of night and the ineluctable dawning of day. But what he saw when he got a little further on was suddenly quite different. Laid out before him was a whole line of tents that had been knocked over, some of them slashed, with trampled banners on the ground among a dead horse and a human corpse lying face down. Çelebi shuddered. It was a sight of devastation that rent the heart. And further on there was another endless line of knocked-down tents looking as if they had been swept over by a gale. He came this way, he thought, as he hurried to leave the area and get back to his own tent. Then he heard the sound of irregular footsteps. Someone was limping towards him. It was the tall figure of a man leaning on a walking stick, of the kind blind men use. As he got nearer he made out who it was: Sadedin. He was muttering through his teeth. From time to time he waved a club, threateningly.
The day after they cut off our water, they sent a deputation to negotiate with us. Clad in their formal attire, the envoys waited outside the great gate for us to let them in. One of them held the flag of peace in his hand, another beat softly on a drum. From the battlements we shouted down to them to move away, or else our arrows would pierce them. Then the drummer shouted back at us:
“You benighted ones! Do you not hear this drum? The Padishah had it made from the skins of his enemies!” He struck it a few more times, then said: “We shall make more drums like these from your skins. Madmen! If you only knew the fate that awaits you!”
That was all the negotiation there was. It is still unbearably hot. The well we dug is almost dry. We are digging another one. We suffer from thirst. So this is the siege by thirst they so often mentioned in the negotiations that were held before the fight. You can build up stores of food, they told us, but you can’t stock water!
Fearing further attacks, they are digging trenches all day long and driving stakes into the ground all around their camp. Rumour has it that Gjergj hasn’t actually attacked. Oddly enough, their own chiefs are trying to quash such rumours. If they had an explanation for the chaos in the camp, then it would be to their benefit if such rumours turned out to be true. But if the only explanation for the mess is a general panic among the troops — that would hardly be to the army’s credit.
Black smoke rises all the time from their foundry. Apparently they are casting more cannon. Their engineers and technicians are just as fearsome as the janissaries that scale our ramparts. They want to deliver a fatal blow. They are taking advantage of the great heat and of the thirst that is devouring us. As if the moon were not enough for them, they think the sun is also on their side, and thus they reckon they are masters of the universe.
They are in a hurry. They want to have it over before the first rains. Because if it begins to rain …
We often look carefully at the sky. Not a cloud to be seen. An azure desert. Solitude.
CHAPTER TWELVE
They were on the attack again. Contrary to usual tactics, they had launched the action on the stroke of noon, when the heat was at its peak. A great horde of assault troops drenched in blood and sweat pressed up against the entire outer wall of the fortress, gesticulating, climbing ladders, climbing back down, retreating, rushing forwards, whirling, panting, and screaming over the thunderous noise of their cannon and the hundreds of drums that went on banging without a break. A thick pall of yellowish dust obscured parts of the tableau from time to time, just as it revealed others more horrible as it slowly moved away on the wind.
The sun beat down without mercy.
Disobeying the rules of war, Tursun Pasha had decided to attack at midday for an obvious reason: the besieged would be doubly punished by thirst. In the architect’s opinion (he had noticed that the Pasha, oddly, paid more attention to his views when he was angry with him), seven days with no external supply of water should have exhausted all the cisterns, however large they may be (under torture, prisoners had given varying numbers — some said there were four, others three). As for water from the well, it could not possibly be enough to meet the needs of the besieged and allow them to care for their wounded. In weather as hot as this, the architect emphasised, wounding them is even more useful to us than killing them. Tursun Pasha had to make a great effort not to scream back at Giaour: “You’re not going to start proposing yet more ill-advised stratagems, are you? Maybe you’ll try to persuade me to order my troops to take care when they’re fighting not to slay the foe, but just to wound him?” In the event, he did say something like that to the architect, but not roughly, only as a joke. Giaour replied: “Do as you think fit, sire.”
In spite of everything, it was the architect who had given the canniest advice about the timing of the attack. Most of the council had wanted to put it off even longer so as to let thirst do part of the work of the scimitar. Delay might seem sensible, he had said, and thirst will indeed assist the task, but they should not forget that it was past the middle of August and that people who knew the region reckoned that the rains would come very soon. A sudden shower could put everything in jeopardy.
The objection was enough to convince the Pasha to act on the architect’s advice. Moreover, even if the rain should hold off, he had his own deadlines for this campaign. He had put a ring of iron around the fortress, but he was as much in its grip as the defenders were. They may lack water, but he was short of time. The campaign could go on to the middle of the autumn at the latest, but no longer. The first frost usually brought the order to withdraw, and for him that would be the end.
He kept his eyes glued to a single spot, the main gate, where the surge was fiercest. The azabs had managed to erect another scaffold which they had covered with wet animal hides. The great reed screens hovered over the attackers’ heads, like rafts on a stormy sea. Sheltered by these devices, the soldiers had started battering the heavy door with their gigantic iron rams.
“The hinges are giving way already,” the Alaybey observed. “They don’t seem to have been properly repaired.”
“Repeat the order not to enter the inner courtyard,” the Pasha said.
An officer rode off towards the ramparts.
At the council of war held the previous night, someone had put the view that, since the attempt to batter down the main gate had failed first time round, it would be wiser not to try it again. But the Pasha objected that forcing open a main gate, even if it was of no practical use, served most of all to raise the attackers’ morale. Moreover, in consultation with Saruxha, he had devised a stratagem which required the main gate to be open in any case.
“Your magnificence,” the Pasha’s aide-de-camp whispered as he leaned towards his master, “the doctor requests an audience.”
“Now?” Tursun Pasha said without taking his eyes off the castle’s main door.
“Yes, now.”
“Bring him.”
Sirri Selim introduced himself, bent his great length down low twice over, and, thinking that the Pasha had still not noticed him, bowed a third time.
“Speak,” the Pasha said when a long shadow awkwardly darkening his feet alerted him to the presence of the doctor standing behind him. Speak, and may ill befall you if what you have to say is out of place, he added silently.
“Pardon me, sire, for disturbing you at such a moment …”
“Come to the point,” the Pasha cut in.
Sirri Selim swallowed his saliva. “We must take a prisoner from among the besieged,” he said, pointing towards the ramparts. “Alive if possible, wounded or not.” Realising he might be asking for too much, he paused, and then added, “But a corpse would do, just about. I will study the man’s innards and find out whether he has drunk any water, and if so, how much.”
A prisoner … During the first attack they had tried to capture one by every means at their disposal, but the effort proved extremely costly. It was not easy for a besieger to bring back a prisoner on his own down a bu
rning stepladder. Twice already a wounded prisoner struggling on his captor’s shoulders had made the pair of them fall to their deaths. A corpse was a different matter. You can throw a dead man down from the top of the ladder. A shattered body is much the same as one with a hole in its chest.
“An enemy corpse!” Tursun Pasha said without even a glance at Sirri Selim. “Bring me a prisoner, dead or alive, at any price!”
A few moments later he saw a handful of armed dervishes running towards the wall. They disappeared into the marauding throng. Then he caught sight of them again as they clambered up one of the innumerable ladders propped against the ramparts. But as his attention then became distracted by something else, he lost sight of the dervishes a second time. The battering rams pounding on the main gate were about to smash it open. A cloud of dust hung over the frantic scrum of soldiers ready to push through the creaking door. The cannon thundered in close sequence, and their missiles could be seen tearing down pieces of the main wall.
“That was gun number three,” the Quartermaster General said to Sirri Selim after the final blast.
The great door was about to give way.
“Have it torn off its hinges and brought to me here!” Tursun Pasha ordered.
It was a rather peculiar order. He was well aware that from a military point of view the capture of the door had no value, but symbolically it would be as important for raising the morale of his troops as it would be for casting the enemy into despair. The mayhem at the gate rose to a peak. The defenders must have guessed the attackers’ intention, because they now launched a shower of arrows on them. Without a door, nobody can sleep soundly, even in his own home, Tursun Pasha thought. He had a second messenger take the promise of a special reward to the attackers on the front line. The azabs and the mechanics, already fighting like men possessed, threw themselves even more wildly into the struggle. Many of them clung to the rungs of the ladders even in death, while others clambered furiously over them. Then, above the thousand noises of battle, there rose a great screeching that might have been a cry of joy or of alarm, and the gigantic wooden door fell on its back in a deafening clatter. Soldiers that had stepped aside as the door fell immediately rushed around it like ants. And in the end, by force of ropes, grappling hooks and dozens of bare brawny arms, it began to move slowly away from the wall. The infuriated defenders rained arrows and molten pitch on the men who were heaving the door away. The dead men whose fists were still clenched around its ironwork were dragged away along with it through the dust of the earth, but nobody took any notice of them. The captors — panting for breath, drenched in sweat, and covered in black powder-dust — hauled the ancient, heavy door out of the combat zone, shouting to the heavens as if they were carrying off a young bride.
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