The Siege

by Ismail Kadare

  “It’s our last try, Mevla,” the Quartermaster said. “We have done all that was in our power, but fate has hardly smiled on us. This is our last chance.”

  There was not a trace of irony in the Quartermaster’s words that Çelebi could make out. The declaration seemed deadly serious.

  “The fighting season is near its end,” the Quartermaster mumbled, almost melancholically. “Like your chronicle, there are not many pages left to write.”

  “What then? What will happen if …” Çelebi didn’t dare add: if we don’t take the citadel.

  The Quartermaster looked at him with his calm expression in which the chronicler could never make out the respective proportions of coldness and honesty.

  An orphanage for fallen stars: Sadedin’s phrase came back to his mind as if in a dream.

  “Then a new expedition will set out next spring,” the Quartermaster replied in a strange voice. “Battalions without number will march in line, with drums rolling and banners flapping in the breeze just like before,” he went on in the same odd tone. “They’ll advance day and night, on foot, on horseback, on camels, in carriages, until they reach these ramparts. Here” — the Quartermaster pointed to the ground — “they’ll see the traces left by our camp, all muddled and muddied by winter, but visible nonetheless. They’ll pitch their tents in the same places, and the same story will begin all over again.”

  The Quartermaster’s eyes gleamed evilly as he stared at the chronicler.

  “Don’t you want to know what will happen if the citadel doesn’t yield next year either?”

  The chronicler was in a cold sweat. He was certainly not crazy enough to ask such a scandalous question, but he also didn’t dare contradict his illustrious friend.

  “If the citadel does not fall next spring,” the Quartermaster said, “then another expedition will be launched in the spring of the year after next.”

  Çelebi didn’t know where to look. Sadedin — may the poor man go to the devil! — would have had an easier time with his glazed sockets!

  “Only this time it will be a much bigger army, and maybe the great Padishah himself will lead it.”

  The chronicler could feel sweat dripping from his brow.

  “The expedition,” the Quartermaster went on, “will be far more imposing, as is fitting for one led by the Emperor himself. It will have many more units attached to it and their commanders will be of higher rank. Our war council will be replaced by an assembly of viziers, pashas and emirs, Kara-Mukbil and Kurdisxhi will disappear in favour of the beylerbeys of Rumelia and Anatolia, Old Tavxha’s seat will go to the Grand Agha of the Janissary Corps, the Shehul-Islam will take the Mufti’s place, the astrologer who was flayed today will be supplanted by the astrologer of the Porte, and in your place, Mevla Çelebi, there’ll be the famous Ibn-Suleiman himself.”

  After a short pause the Quartermaster resumed his speech.

  “The thing is, the men will be the same and so will those walls. And death will still have the same colour and the same smell.”

  Çelebi’s blood ran cold. What if the Quartermaster started answering another question of his own making which his partner never had the slightest intention of asking? He waited in terror for a moment; then, as his host seemed disinclined to resume the conversation, he drew the conclusion that even highly placed people, however powerful they may be, know there are boundaries that may not be crossed.

  Gradually the cruel and candid look in the Quartermaster General’s eyes blurred and softened, and his face slipped back into its customary expression, save that it now betrayed a little weariness.

  The orderly brought in two glasses of syrup.

  “This war will go on for a long time,” the Quartermaster said. “Albania will be drained of all its energy. This is only the beginning.”

  He took a sip and gave a deep sigh.

  “Every spring,” he continued, “when the green shoots reappear, we will return to these parts. The ground will shake under our troops’ marching feet. The valleys will be burned and everything that grows or stands in them will be reduced to ashes. The prosperous economy of the country will be ruined. Thereafter the people round here will use the word ‘Turk’ to scare their children. And yet, as I’ve already told you, Çelebi, if we don’t overcome them on this first campaign, then we’ll need twice as many men to win at the second attempt, and three times as many at the third attempt, and so on. If they escape from this hell, then it will be very hard to annihilate them later on. They’ll become accustomed to sieges, to hunger and thirst, to massacres and alerts. Meanwhile their first-born will be children of war. And the worst of it is that they will become familiar with death. They will get used to it the way an animal that has been tamed no longer causes fear. So even if we do conquer them in battle, we will never overcome them. In attacking them, in striking at them without mercy, in throwing our boundless army at them without succeeding in laying them low, we are unwittingly doing the Albanians a great service.”

  The Quartermaster shook his head in bitterness.

  “We thought we were putting them to death. But in fact, we are making them immortal, and by our own hand too.”

  Çelebi was dazed.

  “Once, if I am not mistaken, I told you about Skanderbeg,” the Quartermaster went on. “He’s much talked about. He’s said to be the greatest warrior of our era, and he’s been called at one and the same time a lion, a renegade, a traitor to Islam, a champion of Christ, and who knows what else. As far as I can see all these epithets do apply to him, but I would prefer to describe him differently. To my mind he’s a man ahead of his time. We are striking at his visible part, but there is another part we can do nothing about, absolutely nothing, because it has escaped us already. For the moment he is dragging Albania into the abyss, believing that he is making his nation unattainable, in his own image, by making it also pass out of its own time into another dimension. He may well be right. It would be pointless for us to try to separate Skanderbeg from Albania. Even if we wanted to we would not be able to do it.”

  The chronicler strove as he listened to seize on a pause or a sigh long enough to allow him to change the topic and direction of the conversation. But as the Quartermaster General allowed himself to be carried away on the wings of his own words — a habit Çelebi was now familiar with — the chronicler could not get a word in edgeways.

  “What he’s working towards,” the Quartermaster continued, “is to give Albania a cloak of invulnerability, to give it a form which casts it up and beyond the vicissitudes of the present — a metaform, if I may say, which makes it able to resuscitate, or to put it another way, he is trying to prepare his nation for another world. I don’t know if you follow my drift … He is trying to crucify Albania, as their God was crucified, so that like Christ, Albania will be resurrected. He doesn’t care whether it is on the third day, the third century or the third millennium after his death that Albania rises! What matters is his vision of the future …”

  The Quartermaster sighed profoundly and lowered his eyelids, as if he too had had a vision.

  “Mevla, your chronicle is going to be long and gloomy,” he went on. He looked at the historian’s grey hair, and his glance gave comfort to the chronicler, as it seemed to him to be full of sympathy. “This siege has gone on a long time,” he added. “Autumn is nearly upon us. The assaults will get even more violent.”

  They chatted for a while about the change of season. For the moment there was no telltale sign of autumn, which existed only in their minds. But within the next few weeks, the plain would wake one morning and find itself spattered with thousands of puddles, big and small, blinking at the sky like so many worried eyes.

  “What’s Saruxha doing? I haven’t seen him for ages,” Çelebi asked, seizing what seemed like a good opportunity for redirecting the conversation.

  The Quartermaster stared at him for what appeared to be the time it took him to remember who Saruxha was.

  “He is still very upset. H
e spends his days at the foundry.”

  “He was very fond of his assistant.”

  “Yes, he was badly affected by the man’s death. He stays on his own these days.”

  “Is he working?”

  “Oh yes. He has conceived an implacable hatred for the human race, and it keeps him chained to his work. He’s planning a monstrously large new gun.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. But I’m afraid this campaign will be over before he has a chance to try it out.”

  “Perhaps the next expedition …” The chronicler didn’t finish his sentence.

  “Of course,” the Quartermaster agreed. “Next time, and the time after that, the gun barrels will get bigger and bigger.”

  The direct and evil glint came back into his eye.

  “By the way, Giaour the architect has apparently been summoned back to the capital. He’s been appointed to another job. Guess what?” The Quartermaster whistled through his teeth. “He’s been appointed architect to the siege of Constantinople!”

  “Why? Are we preparing for yet another siege?”

  “Yes, we are. And it seems that it will be the last of all. Byzantium will fall.”

  “May Allah hear your words!”

  “Yesterday we took delivery of the new war-cries to be uttered during the assault. What are you gaping at? Oh, of course, you didn’t know that the wording of the main slogans yelled during an attack are worked out up on high …”

  “That really is the first time I heard speak of such a thing,” the chronicler confessed.

  “Well, for decisive battles, the slogans come from the Centre. This time, one of the cries, which happens to be the most important one, is rather odd. The attackers are supposed to rush forwards chanting ‘Rome! Rome!’”

  “Really?”

  “I guess you understand the significance of that word. What it means is that while the Empire is girding itself finally to destroy the Eastern Rome, Constantinople, here it is refining the details and performing a dress rehearsal for its onslaught on the Western Rome, that is to say, on Europe … And when that happens, this field will be turned into a blood-soaked hammam …”

  When the clouds first appeared in the sky, as if waking from long slumber, the enemy attacked us even more furiously than before. We had been waiting impatiently for those clouds, and when they began to breast over the line of mountains surrounding us, we rushed to our church in great joy and rang the bells. But the clouds left as they had come, without bringing us rain, hail or anything at all. Those fitful, teasing clouds had only served to arouse the dragon.

  We knew that the most awesome army in the world was camped beneath our walls, but none of us imagined that its ability to attack us was inexhaustible. Like an avalanche or a roll of thunder coming not from on high but from beneath us, their army bears down on us and is set on grinding us to dust.

  At each onslaught they use engines of war we have not seen before — new kinds of ladders, assault towers on wheels, iron balls clad with spikes like hedgehogs, and all sorts of other diabolical inventions. During the last attack we saw some of their soldiers wearing hoods, and we thought it was just some new stratagem of theirs, intended like so many others to strike fear into our hearts. But we soon found out what it was really about. The hooded soldiers had hauled repugnant vermin to the top of our wall. Rats were thrown into one of our freshly dug wells. Two other wells were better guarded. As soon as the guards heard the cry of “Rats! Rats!” they covered the wells with great metal lids. Our blacksmiths are working day and night to make rat traps which are being set in as many places as possible. They clack shut all the time, and the noise keeps us from sleeping.

  They have tried everything to overcome us. God only knows what they will try next! But someone had to stand up and face this maniacal horde. As we have been chosen by history for this role, and we have accepted it, that means it is our fate and our cross.

  Day is dawning. The sky is overcast. But this time the clouds are of a different kind. They are heavy and laden with rain. Our men have gone up on top to see what is going to happen. They are whispering, as if they were in a sanctuary. The heavens that seemed to have abandoned us for so long now appear to be filling up. Along with the clouds, the divinities are coming back to us too. With their thundering chariots, their lances and the scales of Fate. Among them, the Good Fairy of Albania has apparently been seen, with the Bad Fairy scurrying behind her. Arberia’s hour is about to sound! Lord, do not abandon us!

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Inside the tent the atmosphere was hot, humid and stifling. With some effort, the chronicler penned a few more lines and then laid his head in his hands. He wasn’t in the mood for writing. The rumble of the cannon scattered his thoughts like a flock of crows. He read over his unfinished sentence for the tenth time: “In the raging storm of battle the crocodiles charged the ramparts again and again, but fate …” The raging storm of battle. It was a fair and fine image, but he wasn’t too sure about “crocodiles”. Raging storm evoked the sea most of all, but it’s a well known fact that crocodiles only live in rivers, so that strictly speaking he should have written “crocodiles in the stream of battle”. But the image of a river just wasn’t as strong as “raging storm,” which, by summoning up an image of the sea — of its constant noise, rolling waves and sudden fury — fitted a battle rather well. He would rather drop “crocodiles” than lose “raging storm”. Anyway, when he’d started on this passage and sought an image for soldiers swimming in the waves, he’d hesitated between several fish and beasts of the sea, but none of them seemed to fit the glorious combatants. “Fish” seemed too soft and smooth, “shark” too treacherous and greedy, “whale” too heavy and “octopus” far too repulsive. Whereas crocodiles, because of their strength and killing power, could indeed be likened to soldiers crawling towards the walls of the citadel, especially as their impenetrable and scaly skins were quite like soldiers’ shields.

  “In the raging storm of battle the crocodiles charged the ramparts again and again, but fate …” It was a hard sentence to finish off, and he had a headache. He was tempted to write “… did not smile on them,” but “smile” seemed the wrong word here. How could there be any smiles in the midst of such horrible butchery? He put his quill down and stared pensively at the pages he had written in a hand now weakened by age. One day, they would constitute the sole remains of all this blood spilled beneath a burning sky, of those thousands of dreadful wounds, of the roar of the cannon, of the yellow dust of forced marches, of the unending, nightmarish ebb and flow of assailants beneath the castle walls, of men clambering up ladders under showers of hot pitch and arrows, falling to the ground below, then clambering up again alongside comrades who don’t even recognise you because you are already disfigured by your injuries. Those pages were going to be the sole trace of the soldiers’ tanned hides, of these innumerable skins on which sharp metal, sulphur, pitch and oil had drawn monstrous shapes which, when the war was over, would go on living their own lives. To cap it all, these pages would also be the sole remnants of the myriad tents which, when they were dismantled, as they would be in a few weeks’ time, would leave thousands of marks on a wide empty space, looking as if it had been trampled by a huge herd of bizarre animals. Then, next spring, grass would grow on the plain: millions of blades of grass, utterly indifferent to what had gone on there, with no knowledge of all that can happen in this world.

  Çelebi tidied away the pages of his chronicle in a folder, got up and went out. The sky was overcast once again. There was a hot wind that grated on your throat. Now and again it raised a cloud of thick dust which it deposited on the tents. Soldiers lay on the ground outside not even trying to shelter themselves from the dust and wind. Resigned and grey, they were waiting for the roll of the big drum to call them to assemble in their units. It must be the fifth assault to be launched in a week. Even hardened veterans could not remember such a diabolical rhythm of attack. They all now knew that as the rain clouds gat
hered in density, they would be required to attack ever more fiercely, and more frequently.

  The chronicler wandered around the camp for some time without meeting anyone he knew. He observed the faces of nameless soldiers and officers drowsing in the humid, suffocating heat. Their eyes expressed endless weariness. The dust that rose from the dry ground seemed to have cast a veil of indifference over everything. Neither the Pasha’s pavilion, in front of which soldiers usually slowed their pace to stare with veneration at the tall metal pole topped by the brass crescent, the ancient emblem of the Ottoman Empire, nor the tent pitched next to it, the only one to be lilac in colour among the infinity of other tents, which tens of thousands of men had imagined as a shimmering purple cloud hovering over their stormy sensual desires, attracted anyone’s attention any more.

  The roar of cannon filled the air from time to time.

  Everyone was waiting.

  At last the chronicler saw someone he knew — Tuz Okçan. At first Çelebi felt pleased, but then he noticed that the officer’s face was extraordinarily pale. Okçan was walking slowly and what surprised the chronicler most was that the janissary had an armed escort.

  “Tuz Okçan, what’s happened to you?” he asked.

  “Nothing. I’m being taken to hospital.”

  “To hospital? Under armed guard? Wait a minute: weren’t you in the last assault?”

  “That’s the point,” the janissary replied with a bitter smile. “Somehow or other, when I opened the cursed rat cage with my knife, I got a graze.”

  A gleam of terror lit the chronicler’s eyes. The janissary took him by the sleeve.