The Siege

by Ismail Kadare

  The cannon again thundered in turn and after the last detonation the Quartermaster again turned to Sirri Selim and said, “That was gun number three.”

  “I recognised the noise myself this time,” the doctor said, staring at a place on the parapet where a bunch of dervishes was fighting hand to hand with the enemy.

  “He’s aiming lower every time,” the Quartermaster observed.

  “So he is,” Sirri Selim agreed, still staring at the dervishes.

  In the vacant area between the camp and the assault troops, the messengers galloping back and forth seemed ever more sparse. Convoys of stretchers bearing the wounded dashed back from the foot of the castle wall. A small detachment of soldiers with drums set off from the camp side to replace the front ranks who had been pierced and torn by arrows and were now silent or else groaning more or less mortally depending on the gravity of their wounds.

  “They’ve got one! They’ve got one!” Sirri Selim exclaimed softly as he narrowed his eyes to see better what was going on in the distance.

  The Quartermaster General looked in the same direction.

  “Ah, my eyes deceived me!” the doctor said a little later.

  But again he shouted out, with a wild look in his eyes, “There he comes! There he comes!” but he was wrong once again. Finally, a dervish really did appear on the top of the wall with a body over his shoulder. With feline agility, the dervish grasped the top of a ladder and without dropping his load began to climb down. He must surely have been shouting out that he was carrying a prisoner on orders from the Pasha, because the janissaries on their way up swung to the side to let him pass. The ladder was burning in two or three places and azabs had already brought up another one to replace it, but the dervish managed to reach the ground just before it collapsed. He was lost to sight for several minutes, then re-emerged among the crowd of soldiers, with the prisoner still on his back.

  “Here he comes! He’s coming over!” Sirri Selim shouted out loud.

  The Pasha and his deputies turned to look where the doctor was pointing. The dervish was running towards them, despite having a man on his back, and raising a cloud of dust beneath his bare feet. His swarthy face dripping with sweat came into view. His chest was heaving as he greedily sucked in the scorching air. Blood dripping from his neck streaked his naked torso, but there was no way of telling whether it was his own blood or the blood of the anonymous corpse he was carrying. The foreigner’s fair-haired head lolled about on the dervish’s iron shoulder.

  “Put him down!” Sirri Selim ordered, sounding fierce all of a sudden. His long neck and face had turned purple.

  In a final heave, the dervish raised the prisoner over his shoulder, bent forwards and dumped him on the ground. Sirri Selim kneeled over the body and rapidly examined his chest, his face, his mouth and his eyes.

  “He is still alive!” he exclaimed.

  “Alive?”

  “Yes, but almost dead.”

  He opened the prisoner’s mouth and looked at his tongue.

  “Is he thirsty?” the Pasha asked.

  “Yes, he is, sire, but now we’re going to see just how thirsty.”

  Sirri Selim reached into his pocket, took out his paring knives, leaned over the body and set to work. Some of those present looked away. Most of them had witnessed great slaughters, yet they went pale at the sight of what the medic was now doing. For the first time they learned that the progressive, slow mutilation of a body can be a hundred times more affecting than the sudden impact of a lance or sword. Sirri Selim worked for many minutes on the naked corpse. When he stood up, his hands and forearms were spattered with blood. Holding them wide apart so as not to stain his tunic, he went up to the Pasha.

  “They are fairly desiccated — dehydrated, as my colleagues say — but they are still drinking a little water,” he said.

  The exhausted Pasha blinked and took a deep breath. Then he waved his hand, and the body was taken away. The panting dervish was still standing around.

  “Reward this man,” the Pasha said, and then, with weary eyes, tried to get a view of the entire length of the walls where the assault was in progress. The overall picture had not altered. There was still unceasing and chaotic movement, hundreds of ladders, some with soldiers on them, some abandoned, others burned to a cinder, and still the same yellow dust whirling and whirling around and falling back on to sweat-drenched, cut and wounded bodies. The sun was beginning to decline but the heat remained merciless. The Pasha’s eyes clouded over from fatigue. Every now and again he almost fell asleep, and only the roar of the guns brought him back to himself.

  A messenger galloped up.

  “Uç Tunxhkurt has been killed!” he announced curtly.

  The Pasha turned his head towards the East Tower, where the eshkinxhis were massed. The troops looked as if they were moving clumsily, as in a dream, but the Pasha was well aware what was really going on over there and how much effort and determination lay beneath their apparent lethargy.

  To reassure himself he took his eyes off the eshkinxhis and looked lower down towards the foot of the ramparts, where waves of azabs led by Kara-Mukbil were still bearing the brunt of the assault. He had once commanded that unit himself, and he knew what it meant to be on what he called the underfloor of an attack. To be forever pulling back burning ladders and raising new ones, often to fall off them and never rise again, to be shot by a stray arrow, to be hit by pitch or sulphur, and, last and worst of all, to get trampled by your own side, by akinxhis, janissaries, dalkiliç, death squadrons, and not only have no right to complain about it, but to be obliged to look on with admiration at those who were climbing up to glory while remaining down below, the lowliest of the low, to die a death which like the life you had led would ever be unknown …

  Old Tavxha had moved his janissaries several paces back from the empty space previously occupied by the main door and which strangely seemed even more fearsome now. Crouching under the cover of screens, many of which were now alight, his men were waiting for the order to charge into the courtyard, towards the inner gate.

  On the parapets the eshkinxhis were furiously struggling to gain possession of the rampart walk, but had not yet succeeded. There were still not very many who had got up over the parapet. Most of them got knocked off the ladders on their way up, and those who managed to find a fingerhold in the stonework at the top were savagely beaten, but they hung on, until, as they finally had to loosen their grip, they pulled a dead or wounded defender down with them into the abyss. It was too soon for the dalkiliç to come into the fray, and by the same token much too soon for the army’s true elite, the serden geçti, or soldiers of death.

  As if to remind survivors of the existence of a higher plane where the blows struck were closer to those of the Lord, the cannon began to roar in sequence.

  A cloud of dust burst from a breach made in the inner door.

  “Saruxha’s going to try to use his cannon-balls to smash down the whole doorway,” the Quartermaster said to Sirri Selim.

  The doctor said nothing. He seemed to be deep in thought.

  “He’ll have a hard time doing that,” a one-armed sanxhakbey muttered.

  “It’s hard to do, surely, but our gunners will pull it off splendidly,” the Quartermaster replied. “They have a new kind of cannon, which they are using for the first time.”

  The sanxhakbey shook his head dubiously.

  “There’s nothing more tricky,” he objected. “They have to aim very low, and that’s dangerous.”

  “I know that,” the Quartermaster said.

  There was another barrage of fire. Gun number three hit the walls above the inner door, a few cubits to the right, enlarging the breach that had already been made there.

  “The next shot will be a bull’s-eye!” the Alaybey trumpeted to the world at large.

  After the last round, the janissaries had again moved up towards the gaping entrance to the castle, keeping themselves under the cover of their huge reed screens.


  “Tavxha’s getting ready,” the one-armed sanxhakbey observed. “Get on with it, you old blockhead!” he muttered to himself.

  “They’ll launch an attack more terrible than a tidal wave!” someone standing behind them said, raising the stakes.

  The handful of dignitaries watching the battle shuddered. They were waiting for the next cannonade. None of them now cared what was happening all along the wall. Collapsing ladders, sudden surges and retreats: all that had happened a hundred times already in the deafening racket of the battle drums. Everyone’s attention was on the area around the main gate, where Tavxha’s men, drawn up in squares, were waiting for the right moment to attack.

  The mortars fired, one after the other. Their projectiles rose up over the battlements and fell on the other side, in the heart of the citadel. Then big guns one and two roared, and everyone held their breath, waiting for the now familiar thunder of gun number three. It hadn’t been fired yet.

  The janissaries were now jostling up to the main entrance through which a part of the courtyard could be seen. It was completely deserted. Javelins, arrows and rags soaked in flaming pitch and oil fell uninterruptedly on their testudos, but the janissaries did not yield. Apparently guessing that the enemy were readying themselves to attack the inner door, the defenders raised the tempo of their efforts to repulse them. But at other points around the wall, azabs, eshkinxhis and volunteers were maintaining terrible pressure and making it impossible for the besieged to pull any of their men back from the front line.

  The Pasha still did not give the go-ahead for the dalkiliç to advance, nor did he yet send in the last remaining death squadron. He was waiting for the blast of the third big gun. It had still not been fired.

  “Why doesn’t he fire?” “What’s Saruxha up to?” Questions like these, spoken not shouted, were being repeated all around with increasing impatience. The Pasha sent an officer on horseback off to the battery. But the messenger had barely gone a hundred paces when the roar of gun number three shook the ground. They were all so wound up with expectation that they thought the explosion had been louder than it really was. It was immediately followed by an unusual screeching whistle tearing through the air very low, just above their heads. They were anxiously watching the outcome, expecting the cannon-ball to burst through the inner door, when they saw it crash down right in the middle of the Janissary Corps.

  “Oh …!” the Pasha exclaimed in a tone that was not at all customary.

  The janissaries, who had been standing in serried ranks up to that point, suddenly pulled apart in all directions. Total confusion reigned in front of the main entrance. Officers ran up from every side trying to assess the exact level of losses.

  Old Tavxha galloped back on his black horse, raising a great cloud of dust. From afar he started yelling. Two bodyguards closed in on the Pasha to protect him. The Agha of the janissaries slid off his horse as if he were in a state of collapse. He was yelling at the top of his voice, spluttering and muddling up Mongolian with Turkish, so that his meaning was, at first, more to be guessed at than properly understood. The gesticulations he made with his stubby hands to accompany each expression made it look as if he wanted to strangle someone. When he stopped shouting quite so loud, people had to admit that he had more or less said what they all expected to hear from him.

  “We’ve been taken for a ride by those pigs, those traitors, those Christians!” he started yelling again. “You see? Now they’re mowing us down from behind with their cannon-balls! Can we put up with that? No, we cannot, a hundred times no!”

  “How many dead?” the Pasha asked.

  Tavxha was so incensed with anger that he could hardly breathe.

  “Dozens, hundreds of dead! I want revenge for my janissaries, the sons of Kara-Halil. I want the guilty man. Yes, Pasha, sire, I demand the head of the guilty party. My janissaries call for the guilty man!”

  “They shall have him,” the commander-in-chief replied.

  “This instant!” Tavxha boomed. “They want him now! They are beside themselves. They want to judge the man themselves. Give him to me!”

  “Let the man responsible be found this instant,” the Pasha ordered. “Summon the chaouch-bashi!”

  The chef-de-camp came running.

  “Find the guilty party and arrest him forthwith, whoever he is,” the Pasha said. “You will give him over to the janissaries. It is their right, they can do what they will with the man.”

  “Pasha, sire,” the Quartermaster interrupted, looking as white as a sheet. “What if … what if the man is … none other than Saruxha?”

  Tursun Pasha raised his eyes to the sky as if to say, I can’t do anything about that.

  The chaouch-bashi led a detachment of azabs off to the gun battery to arrest the guilty man.

  “The Devil himself sabotaged this action,” Tursun Pasha said aloud, as if he was talking to himself. He knew there was no point carrying on with the assault without the janissaries. He gave the order to beat the retreat.

  The harassed battalions withdrew in turn beneath the still powerful sun and the Pasha turned away and went back to his pavilion. The Quartermaster General promptly made his way to the gun emplacement. On the way there he came across a group of janissaries led by Tavxha and the chef-de-camp, all of them howling like a pack of wild dogs. In their midst he saw Saruxha’s assistant, tied hand and foot, and looking quite livid. Three or four officers were dragging him along the ground. The young man raised his terrorstricken eyes to the Quartermaster, imploring him to come to his aid. But the group was walking fast and the Quartermaster was not tortured by that look for very long. His attention was quickly caught by the sound of a furious voice that he knew well. It was Saruxha, running behind the janissaries, with his own orderly behind him.

  “Stop, you lousy brutes! Let him go, I tell you! You will answer for this with your lives!”

  “Saruxha,” the Quartermaster said to him gently as he grabbed his sleeve. “Listen to me for a minute.”

  “Let go of me! He’s got nothing to do with it! Stop!”

  The Quartermaster General almost had to run to keep up with the master caster.

  “Wait! There’s no point running after them. Don’t you see that you’ll achieve nothing? Listen to me!”

  “No! Stop, you lousy brutes! Tavxha! Chaouch-bashi! You’re no better than animals, you disgusting vermin! Stop, I tell you!”

  The janissaries just kept on going at a spanking pace and not one of them even turned his head. The Quartermaster reckoned that if he didn’t restrain Saruxha, he would launch into them with his fists and have to pay a high price.

  “Saruxha, my brother, calm down, please.”

  He tried to hold him back and signalled to his guard to help him. The guard came up but did not dare lay a hand on a member of the council.

  “Tavxha Tokmakhan, you filthy pig, you sinister fool, you pile of shit, I shall smash your fat head! I’ll fire a cannon at your janissaries as soon as I can! I’ll demolish the lot of you without mercy! I’ll do in the whores who are your mothers, every last one of them!”

  With great difficulty the Quartermaster finally managed to control the master caster. Saruxha was foaming at the mouth. His pupils were fixed wide open. “Rub his forehead,” the Quartermaster told his orderly. He himself wiped the spittle from Saruxha’s lips. Saruxha’s attempts to get free were gradually weakening. But his head with its protruding veins remained turned in the direction where the janissaries had dragged his assistant, and his words had now become incomprehensible because his voice had gone completely hoarse.

  When the detachment passed out of sight, Saruxha began to moan as if he had been wounded.

  “How will I manage without him?” he sobbed. “Those animals are going to kill him. Tell me, how can I manage without him?”

  “We’ll take counsel,” the Quartermaster said. “We’ll try to save him.”

  “What door will you knock on? To whom can we turn?” Saruxha whimpered. “It’s
like a desert here.”

  “We’ll have a think about it,” the Quartermaster said again.

  Saruxha shot a dark look at his friend, trying to fathom whether he really had some hope, or was just consoling him.

  “They’ll be sorry for killing him, but by then it will be too late,” he added sadly.

  The Quartermaster wondered who might be capable of interceding with the Pasha to save the deputy caster. He was certainly willing to plead the case, but he wouldn’t pull enough weight, since his close friendship with Saruxha was no secret. Someone more distant was needed. Kurdisxhi would have been just the right man, but he was mouldering in his tent recovering from two serious wounds he had suffered in the course of Skanderbeg’s last raid. Kara-Mukbil would not be well received because of his known mistrust of Old Tavxha. Anyway, after this exhausting attack in which he and his azabs had taken the brunt of the fighting, it would be absurd to speak of saving the life of one man to someone who had just seen hundreds lost all around him. As for the Mufti, that was out of the question: he would probably rub his hands with glee at the death of an expert. There was only one man of influence left who might just be approachable: the Alaybey.

  “Let’s go and see the Alaybey,” the Quartermaster said. “Maybe he can help us.”