The Laughter of Carthage - [Between The Wars 02]

by Michael Moorcock

  Orkhan Pasha asked when I could begin. I said I could start at once, given proper materials. I had unrolled my sheets of linen paper and was explaining likely unit costs and potential problems, when we were interrupted by a distant booming from the western perimeter. Strolling to the shutters, Orkhan Pasha opened them and peered through the lattice. Flashes of fire turned his face red and made his eyes as animated as a devil’s. ‘A Greek air attack,’ he said. ‘They’ve had wind of our mobilisation and are trying to slow us down. Now you can see how urgently we need your aircraft, M. Pyatnitski.’

  ‘They’re damned cowards.’ Çerkes Ethem wiped soft bread over his empty plate. ‘Like all Greeks. They hate to fight man-to-man. But what can you expect of British lapdogs?’ He grinned. ‘Not that it’s Greeks attacking us now. Do you think those flyers were born in Athens?’ He stuffed the bread in his mouth, chewed for a moment, then swallowed. He shook with amusement at his own wit. ‘The only way to get a Greek into the air is in a vulture’s beak!’

  The guns of Ankara were firing back, but it was field artillery, useless as anti-aircraft defence. I heard the whistle of bombs. I had hoped never to be so close to another battle in my life and for a moment felt sick. I made myself go to the window. This attack was nearer than most I had experienced in Russia. In the flashes from bombs and shells, from flares which seemed to cut across the sky at random, I saw horsemen galloping hell-for-leather through the roiling smoke. I never discovered what they hoped to achieve, unless they simply dared the planes to hit them. Turks love to die. Death must be so much preferable to most of them, I suppose.

  Orkhan Pasha turned away from the window with a shrug. He closed the shutters. ‘We have some planes,’ he told me, ‘but nowhere suitable for them to land and take off. That was why your idea appealed so much to us.’ He made an elegant lifting motion with both hands. ‘A man who carries his own machine on his back, who can rise into the air and come down again at will, like a bird, is exactly what we need. Certainly he can drop bombs and observe troop movements, but he can do much more. He can invade garrisons, occupy whole towns from within.’ His eyes became dreamy. I suspected he rolled hashish into his tobacco.

  Çerkes Ethem had no scruples about financial questions. ‘How much would it cost to equip, say, a thousand men in this way?’

  ‘If you had your own factory?’

  ‘They could be made in secret. In parts. Let’s say in the workshops of Scutari.’

  ‘You’ll see from this note here. I’d guess, if we placed a bulk order for the engines, that we’d get them for about fifteen sovereigns apiece. Then there are the propellers, the wings. All must be made by skilled engineers and from specific kinds of wood. Another fifteen pounds, if produced in quantity. Say thirty sovereigns each.’

  Çerkes Ethem began to scowl to himself. Orkhan Pasha let his chair drop forward. He dabbed at his eyebrow, removing a droplet of sweat. He looked almost desperately at his comrade, virtually willing him to speak and was then hugely relieved when the bandit said, ‘Thirty thousand in gold. Cheaper than a conventional plane. They cost about a thousand each.’ He pulled back his kaftan and drew a little, tasselled bag from his cummerbund. ‘There’s enough for four planes already!’ He shook with amusement. ‘The Greeks will give us more. And if they won’t, surely the Armenians will take pity on us.’ He winked at me. ‘This will get your factories going. We’ll let you have the rest shortly and we’ll make sure, incidentally, that you don’t betray us, Christian. The supply line will be easy enough. We’ll take the planes in boats up to Eregli, then bring them overland on mules. But first I suppose we’ll have to see one of your machines demonstrated.’

  ‘Naturally a prototype will have to be developed.’ I picked up the money. ‘But I would guess we could do that fairly quickly.’

  Orkhan Pasha placed a hand on my shoulder. He was smiling. ‘And we shall want to see you fly it. Yourself.’ He uttered a soft, well-bred laugh which acted as a suitable complement to Ethem’s snorts and roars and which, on another level, was infinitely more threatening. ‘Then we’ll know how much faith you have in yourself.’

  I resented their mistrust. ‘Enough to fly my first machine. I’m sure I’ve enough to test the next. Where can I begin? Have you machine shops here?’

  Orkhan touched the tips of his fingers to his forehead. ‘My friend, I believe you. There are a few repair sheds. But it would not be good to work in Ankara. Çerkes Ethem will take you to a better place.’

  I subsided, realising this plot was to be kept secret from their so-called President. My anger had clouded my judgment. Now I was to be dragged even deeper into the Anatolian interior.

  Çerkes Ethem put his unshaven face next to mine. ‘You can even help us raise the money. That is as it should be, eh, Christian?’

  He was to play variations on this moral irony (or what he perceived as one) for at least a further week. Three miserable days later, as my pony limped over a rocky mountain track, I was convinced I had become lost forever. The trousers of my suit had worn through, my overcoat had holes in three places, my hat was virtually useless, my shirt and underwear were crawling with vermin. My shoes had fallen apart and had been wrapped with rags and strips of leather so I probably resembled a very unsuccessful bandit, a leper or a wretched Hassidic rabbi. I was plunged in gloom. The gold Ethem had initially given me was tucked into my belt. When the bazhi-bazouk rode back to the end of the column from time to time he continued to remain, in his own way, extremely friendly. I was mounted on their oldest beast, behind the supply waggon. Ethem clearly enjoyed my misery. ‘Christian, this will give you all the more incentive to build yourself a flying machine!’

  No one else called me ‘Christian’ (or occasionally ‘Infidel’). I think he had a romantic notion of himself, like so many bandits, as a hero of popular fiction. His men, of course, loved him for it, probably quite as much as they would have loved Douglas Fairbanks or Rudolph Valentino had they ever had the opportunity to visit the cinema. Ethem had all the grand gestures, the flowery language, the bravado, the way of pulling at his white stallion’s reins to make it come to a swift, sliding stop. I do not believe he could read, but I was certain someone had once entertained him with the same boys’ adventure tales I had enjoyed in my childhood. His larger-than-life manner, however, almost certainly kept up the morale of his men, who were prepared to suffer any hardship or peril for him. It was easy to see why so many preferred him to the rather dour Kemal Pasha, with his notoriously long-winded sermons, his strict morality and his tendency to consider obscure political consequences. I believe Ethem was conscious of the impression he had made on his men and played it up, courting them with displays of humour and daring as another might court a woman.

  For this purpose, too, I was an ideal butt for his wit. His frequent calling upon Allah to save the poor infidel, his characterising me as the very symbol of decadent city life, gave his simple-minded brutes hours of amusement. For my own part I was glad to be presently useful to his ambitions. While I remained so, I did not have to fear for my safety. He continued, nonetheless, to keep me mystified about our destination and even became reluctant to let me know which day of the week it was. I began to suspect that he had no set plan at all, but was wandering the countryside in the hope of discovering something he needed. Twice he left me in the company of the women and carts, taking his men off towards a nearby village. He returned exhilarated while behind him the object of his destruction gave off tremendous volumes of black smoke. ‘I have just financed five new flying machines!’ he announced the first time and, the second: ‘Three more planes. Christian.’

  The villages were described by him either as ‘pro-Greek’ or merely ‘Armenian’. This was sufficient justification for his attacks. I suspected they were neither. Again I found myself wondering if it was to be my fate always to be the slave of some brigand. Attila was said to have kept philosophers about him for his own entertainment. But I used the time to advantage. My day-to-day knowledge of Turkis
h improved slightly, though most of Ethem’s men were to say the least laconic. But it had become possible for me to utter more than a simple Agim or Susadim when I was hungry or thirsty, and stand a fair chance of my more complicated notions being understood. And I began to make it clear to Ethem that time was running out. It was not cost-effective to drag me around with him on his raids like this.

  When for the third time the bandit rode off towards a town he was away longer than usual. I could hear shots and what seemed to be artillery fire: a full-scale battle, in fact. Once or twice, men returned in a hurry to drag boxes of fresh ammunition up onto their horses and gallop back over the hill. Ethem had evidently grown ambitious and was attacking a more difficult position. Then, some two hours after the firing subsided, several bandits came riding back to the carts hell-for-leather. One of them dismounted and ran to bring a horse to me, ordering me into the saddle. Rather reluctantly I complied, clinging to the bridle and the mane as the horse galloped off with the others over swampy, yellow ground. I felt sick, certain I must fall, but it was not long before we reached a good-sized town, with several well defined streets, tall buildings, a railway station and a telegraph. Half its buildings were already in ruins, presumably from previous battles, and many more were just beginning to burn. There were corpses everywhere. This time I barely held back my urge to vomit.

  In the main square groups of terrified citizens had fallen to their knees: they were arranged in ranks about an ornamental fountain, still placidly playing. Soaked through and grinning, Çerkes Ethem stood on the pedestal in the middle of the fountain, striking one of his more melodramatic poses. From out of a large Greek Orthodox church in the middle of a group of burning houses a line of men and women carried boxes and bundles. These people were either Greek, Armenian or both. Submissively, and to Ethem’s evident pleasure, they arranged their treasure along the edge of the fountain. His men still came and went through the smoke and the ruins, firing as they ran into buildings, whooping as they ran out. Even as I dismounted from my horse I saw one screaming young girl raped in the street by a fat bazhi-bazouk who had more trouble pulling down his breeches than controlling his prize. I averted my eyes.

  Çerkes Ethem noticed my discomfort. ‘See how gladly your co-religionists pay for your machines, Christian!’ He was in his element. He shouted something in dialect to one grinning lieutenant, then splashed back through the fountain to put his arm around my shoulders. ‘These people are ignorant. You mustn’t worry about them. Now I’ll show you why we fought so hard for this town.’ He guided me out of the square and down a dusty sidestreet, pausing with a benevolent gesture to display what was left of some kind of garage. On a bench just inside lay a small petrol engine, very similar to the one I had drawn in my designs. ‘Here’s your chance. You’ll stay for a day or two and build a plane in peace. They’ll be too scared to bother you. I’ll leave a couple of men.’

  Behind us the screams and firing began again. I was terrified, nodding dumbly by way of agreement and thanks. I wished desperately, with all my being, that I was not where I was, that I might never suffer such terror. How could I have escaped it in Russia merely to find myself plunged into it again in Turkey, where I had even less chance of survival? How I hated the Orient and all it meant!

  Ethem patted me on the back. ‘Tell Hassan what you need.’ He beckoned a boy of about fourteen from the shadows of the workshop. Hassan smirked at me. ‘I’ll be back in three or four days. Some Greek soldiers need killing.’ With a strange, avuncular gesture, he returned to the square.

  To shut out the awful sounds, which grew in variety and intensity as the day progressed, I made Hassan help me close the flimsy doors of the machine shop. I told him to bring lamps, to find people to clean the place. There were oily wood shavings on the floor, a few antiquated tools in a rack on the far wall. The place had probably been the only one in miles where people could find the services of a mechanic. Whoever had owned it had either been killed or had run away. There were very few spare parts, but a small crucible and bellows remained alive in one corner and here and there were the implements of the blacksmith’s craft, a clue to the workshop’s origins.

  Thankfully, I was able to do what I had done more than once in recent years, and make myself blind and deaf to anything but the immediate job in hand. I concentrated my attention first on the engine, to see how it could be properly adapted to turn the propeller. I now knew a great deal more about aerodynamics than when I built my prototype. By that evening, when Çerkes Ethem returned, I was beginning to get some idea of my problems and how they might be solved.

  ‘Work well, Christian,’ he said. He placed a large, embroidered bag on the bench. ‘This will keep you going until I’m back.’ The bag was full of dead fowls, part of a lamb, a leg of a goat, all just slaughtered. I was revolted. Hassan, on the other hand, was ecstatically grateful.

  The bandit left, displaying amusement as always, and a few moments later I heard him yelling to his men. There was that disturbingly familiar sound of rapid hoofbeats, followed by an equally familiar pall of silence; whereupon the wailing began.

  Not much later, my spirits improved considerably, for it had struck me suddenly and with some irony, that for all his cunning Çerkes Ethem had not allowed for a simple fact: Once I built my plane I could fly clear of his disgusting horsemen and their rifles, rise as magically as any Thief of Baghdad into the clouds, mocking all below, and be in Constantinople within a matter of hours! This cheerful notion set me to working with much greater confidence and enthusiasm; no longer was I building a war-machine for Islam: I was constructing the means of my own salvation.

  Over the next two days, supplied by what was left of the cocaine, I worked virtually without sleep. Hassan proved himself a conscientious if rather clumsy assistant. Trembling wood-carvers and carpenters were brought to me by the guards Ethem had left behind. I had seamstresses. The whole town (or at least its survivors) was at my disposal and as a result it was not long before almost every piece of equipment was assembled. Parts which could not be found or adapted were forged in the crucible. The propeller, of some local hardwood, was turned and polished to perfection, exactly as I had specified; the wings would have made Daedalus himself envious. It was remarkable how those townspeople lent themselves to the work (especially the Greeks and Armenians); it was as if some dim racial memory drove them to their task of aiding me in my escape from that modern equivalent of the Cretan monster. I became impressed by the correspondences as I worked, thinking that whereas Daedalus had built Minos a labyrinth, the maze I built my captors was one of illusion and abstraction in which they themselves might with chance become lost.