Lord Byron's Novel

by John Crowley

  For there was another child who was also given into the old man’s care—a girl, whose name was Iman, not more than a year older than Ali, orphaned like himself—or so they believed and said, what time they spoke of it, which was not often—for as children do, they thought not to ask the world why and wherefore they had come to be as they were, content to know themselves, and one another, as they knew the heat of the sun, and the taste of the mountain’s water-springs. Her hair was as the raven’s wing, but her eyes—as is not uncommon in that land—were blue, not the blue of our Anglo-Saxon blondes but the blue of the deep Sea—and into those frank and wide orbs, so seldom cast down, Ali fell entirely. Poets talk of maidens’ eyes, and divagate endlessly upon them, and we are to understand that by those liquid spheres they mean to indicate all the beloved object’s parts and attractions—which we are free to speculate upon. Yet Ali was hardly conscious of what other charms his little goddess possessed—in her eyes he did indeed drown, and could not, when she looked upon him, look away.

  In another, colder clime, Ali forgot progressively that language he had first lisped in, and grown up to speak; but he never forgot what she said to him, or what he answered; the words were not as other words, they seemed as though minted in gold, and even long after to speak them over to himself was to enter a little treasure-house where they alone were kept. Of what did they two speak? Of everything—of nothing; they were silent, or she spoke, and he answered not; or he boasted wildly, his eyes upon hers, to see if his tale would keep her—and she listened. ‘Iman, go thou the long way—these flints will cut thy feet.’—‘Ali—Take this bread of mine, I have enough for two.’—‘What do you see in that cloud? I see a hawk with a great beak.’—‘I see a fool who makes hawks out of clouds.’—‘I must go for water. Come with me—I sha’n’t be long—Take my hand and come!’

  They two were the only souls in that land—each the only object of the other’s thought. As two swans take their turns to lift their wide wings and thresh the air, and walk upon the water for each other’s delight—what they spoke of was of no matter—so that their intercourse continued, and was repeated. She—imperious as a queen, bare-foot though she was—could cause and did cause suffering when she chose—perhaps only to test her power, as one might test a stick against a hapless blossom; soon enough she was sorry, and they again compounded, with many caresses and offerings of kindness.

  It may be averred that a passion of such degree is not possible in one so young—for Ali had hardly reached his second decade—and it is perfectly logical for them to think so who have never felt it—such ones we may not persuade, and so do not address:—whoever has known such a feeling in earliest youth has known a singular power, and will keep a memory of it in his inmost heart, which—though against it no other and later may be measured—yet it will be the Touchstone against which all others will be struck, to see if they be true gold, or counterfeit.

  Throughout that time it was seen that Ali—though in truth the lad took no particular notice of it—was marked in an especial way; favours and gifts came upon him from sources unclear—a delicacy of victuals—a bright scarf for his head—a look of approval or of interest from his elders. On his reaching a particular anniversary—though which year in his short life it was, he did not know, for an uncertainty surrounded his birth-date as it did his true ancestry—he received, from the same font of benefactions, an old pistol, which he was proud to stick in his belt, only sorry that it must reside there all alone, where all men of the least standing carried two at a minimum and a dagger or short sword beside. He never had occasion to discharge this piece, having no powder given him along with it—and this was likely to have been a lucky thing, as in that country such old weapons—though finely worked upon the stock in silver—were often neglected in their barrels, and locks—and commonly burst—or burned the hand that used them.

  Thus armed in manly wise, and having a firm compact with his Iman, he went to the han to seek out the old shepherd, who was in his eyes the rule and wisdom of his world, and finding him among the men around the common fire, told him that it was his intention to have the girl for his wife.

  ‘That you cannot,’ said the old one, responding as gravely as he had been demanded of. ‘For she is your sister.’

  ‘How is it she can be my sister?’ Ali responded. ‘My father is unknown, and who my mother was, that matters not.’ Indeed it mattered much—to him—who that lady might have been—and in his throat there came a catch when he made this bold dismissal—he must rest his hand upon his weapon, and set his feet apart, and lift his chin, so it would not be noticed; but in the legal sense he was correct, and the old man acknowledged it with a nodding of his head: no inheritance comes through the mother alone.

  ‘And yet she is your own clan and kin,’ said he to Ali. ‘She is your sister still.’ For among those clans of Albania’s mountains, brother and sister can name any blood relation in the same generation, and a connexion in the tenth or even the twelfth degree is forbidden. And now round the fire those who sat on the men’s side—and those on the other side spinning their distaves—had taken notice of Ali’s suit, and he heard laughter.

  ‘I will have no other, I say, and so says she,’ he said in a big voice, at which the laughers laughed the more, and nodded and puffed their pipes, as though delighted that one so young should kick against the pricks,—or because they thought it a great jest that such a claim should be asserted, which never could be made good. Ali thereupon—knowing himself for the first time mocked because he knew not the world’s ways—which were not his own—looked upon them all in anger, and—lest he weep—turned on his heel, and went out, pursued by further and louder cackles of glee; and for a time he would speak to no one, and answer naught when spoken to: even if it were Iman herself.

  A little later he received a mark of distinction different in kind from those he bore already. On a certain night he was taken among the women, and the eldest beldame laid bare the boy’s arm, and with her best and sharpest needle—the old shepherd guiding her hand with his words—she punctured repeatedly the skin of Ali’s right arm. The blood welled darkly at each small wound, and yet the boy grit his teeth—and would not cry out—and at length was formed there a rayed circle, and within it a serpentine mark that might be seen to be a sigma—tho’ for sure not by those unlettered folk. The old woman, humming and clacking with her tongue to soothe the boy, daubed the place now and again with a clout of lamb’s-wool, and studied her work as any craftsman might, and here deepened and there enlarged—till Ali nearly fainted—though no complaint had yet escaped his lips. Then finally his tormentor took a pinch of gunpowder, and rubbed it in the pin-holes she made—let whoso has had gunpowder by any chance touch an open sore bethink him what Ali felt then, as the beldame’s thumb pressed the stuff in, and rubbed it well, and mingled it so with flesh and blood as to color it forever. Then—as we see on the limbs of the sailors of all nations, not excepting our own most civilised one—there was impressed upon Ali’s right arm a mark that (supposing the arm remained attached to the body, a thing not to be regarded as certain in that land, or among those people) could never be erased. A common thing it is indeed in those mountains, and any man might show one or two such—but the mark upon Ali was of a new design, and all who saw it knew it.

  Upon his release from this cruel typographer, Ali sought out the company of his little love, and they two walked alone, and it may be that with her he permitted himself to shed a tear from pain, or perhaps he was brave Ali still. Surely she comforted him—and gazed with wonder upon the new mark—and fain would touch it—and he suffered her—for sharp and deep and lasting as it was, there was another and a deeper, in a place that could not be seen—he knew, but could not say!

  IN THE LAST DECADE of that century, the Empress of Russia, infamous Catherine, advanced, with her ministers, a scheme—one of many such, which persist among the Czars her heirs to this day—to overcome Constantinople and dissolve the Porte; and to advance thi
s scheme, she compounded with the mountain peoples of Suli, and of Illyricum, and Albania, promising them freedom and the rule of their nations when the Turk their oppressor was defeated. They rose at her promise—who were accustomed to rise without any such—though now with greater fury, and in larger numbers. Not long afterwards, Great Catherine changed her mind—for she was, however Imperial, however Great, a woman—and the campaign against the Sultan was abandoned—and a treaty signed—and many marks of eternal peace and amity exchanged. The fighters of the Highlands were thereupon abandoned by their Russian allies, and the Sultan’s vengeance upon them was simply this, that he withdrew from their lands his own Governors and Generals, and gave rein to the freebooters and brigand chieftains, who had no longer any constraints upon their activities—which consisted only of robbing, murdering, slave-taking, extortion of tribute, and otherwise of contesting with one another, the best man to win. In this way the Sultan’s retribution was exacted for him, and he needed merely to watch and see which of the rivals would defeat the others, and pile their skulls upon the plain—on him the Sublime, the Merciful, could then bestow the title of Pacha.

  The tyger who ate all the other tygers bore the same name as our young hero, and would come to rule over wide lands, with his seat at Jannina—a pachalick greater than any forged there before him, and an army so large that the Sultan in Constantinople was pleased to call him vassal, without daring to demand much in the way of further duty from him. His fame spread widely, in the Gazettes and the foreign newspapers he was now and then called the Buonaparte of the East, he had even commendation from the other Buonaparte, whom he actually equalled in deeds, given that he had smaller compass—proportionally as many of heads removed, life-blood spilled, Widows and Orphans made, eyes put out, villages razed and livestock and vintage despoiled—though no more than the European’s were his wars and his arms able to dry a single tear, or cure the least sorrow: and so much for Greatness, in the little or in the large.

  This Pacha was preparing his armies to fall upon the lands that our Ali’s clan inhabited—for those stern people had refused allegiance to him, and to his titular overlord of the Porte. They had cut the throats of his messengers—this being the common response among those peoples when a request is to be declined—and the Pacha had grown impatient. He had a grandson, too, a pretty boy-Pacha, as bedight with jewels and daubed with paint as a Mayfair hostess—for the mighty of the East love so to adorn their cherished Sons, and it does not spoil their characters—at least this one’s was not spoiled, for he desired lands as fiercely as Papa did, and heads to chop off ditto, and enemies to spit and roast. The Cohorts were now readied, the turbanned soldiers gathered by the hundreds within and without the great courtyard of the palace at Tepelene, the kettle-drums were beat, the ululations were sounding from the Minaret, when a visitor, a Bey from the northern lands the Pacha had earlier conquered, appeared and begged for an audience—for he had a boon to ask—and a story to tell—and when, in an upper room the pipes had been called for and lit, and the lengthy compliments paid, and the coffee drunk—he told it.

  A dozen years before, this Bey related, he was traversing those lands which (as everyone well knew) the Pacha now intended to subdue and attach to his pachalick. His purpose in journeying there had been that he might shoot, if he could find one, a son of a family in that region, with whom his own family was in blood—engaged in a blood feud whose beginning the eldest of their families could not remember, and whose end might come never, for when the brave and desperate men of one family despatched a son or cousin in the first or the tenth degree of the other—with a single shot, commonly, for they take careful aim; or perhaps with the edge of an ataghan suddenly cold against the throat; at night by the lonely path, or in the public market at the blaze of noon—then it became the duty of the other to renew the vengeance.

  (As in other matters, the Albanians are by us accounted ‘lawless’ for their incessant feuds, in which blood must answer blood; yet they are in fact bound, like the Greeks of Æschylus, by the sternest of Laws, from which there is no appeal. Of murder they have a horror no different from that of other peoples, and for the taker of life there is ample and swift punishment—when the murderer can be found—but still the higher law of Honour knows no exceptions, and to fail to fulfill it is universal and inexpungible shame. Our laws—when we choose to obey them at all—lie far more lightly upon us.)

  Thus, the Bey explained, he had done the deed of vengeance expected of him, and cleansed his Honour, and thereupon had fled into the hills, hotly pursued by his victim’s relatives, who were intent on taking their turn in the game, and removing an opposing man from the board. His horse having stumbled and been lamed, he was on foot—suffering severely from thirst and hunger—and growing delirious. He sought a Cave into which he might creep, knowing his enemies were near, but was unable to go further—he heard the sound of their horses drawing nigh, and their voices crying upon him—and he readied himself for a brief defence, and likely death. Then there came another noise—the sound of another troop of horse, coming from another direction—and as he watched, this new company appeared before him, interposing themselves between him and his pursuers. The Captain of this troop was an Englishman, though such were at that time so rare in the fastnesses of Albania that the frightened Bey did not recognize this—his scarlet tunic frogged in gold, his high boots and white gloves, were outlandish indeed though dusty and soiled and out at heel, and his followers a mixed party of hired Suliote warriors, a few men in red like their leader though not so splendid, and a Turkish sipahi. What caused them to take the embattled Bey’s side in his quarrel, the Bey himself did not know, but their numbers—and the Suliote guns—and the British soldiers—all persuaded the pursuing band to slink away. The grateful Bey, making deep obeisance before the Englishman, felt himself taken up and looked upon with a Gaze neither warm nor cool—neither reassuring nor alarming—the indifferent gaze of a beast, or a head carved in stone: at which the Bey felt his heart turn cold within him. Nevertheless he made it known to his saviour that all he had was now his, his Life and Goods were his to command, and that he desired nothing more than to offer his oath of Brotherhood in perpetuity—which the Englishman was seemingly disposed to accept. That evening, then, the much-restored Bey and the great Englishman became Brothers, in the usual fashion—that is, they pricked each a forefinger, and dropt a few drops of blood—the Bey pleased to observe that the other’s was as red as his own, and thus that he was a man and not a Jinn—into a cup of wine, of which they both drank.

  ‘Now,’ the Bey asked of his new relation (for the ritual they had partaken of made them as truly kin as if they had been sired by the same Father), ‘tell me, if you will, why you have come into this country, and where you go.’—‘That I shall not,’ said the Englishman (he spoke through the Turk, who alone was fluent in both tongues), ‘for the reasons are not such as would bring honour to you to know. Where I go, I know not, for I confess to you that at this moment I know not where I am.’—‘As to that,’ said the Bey, ‘I can instruct you; and now my house, which is not two days’ travel away, is yours; go there, give to my steward this ring, and you shall receive all that you require. For myself, I must avoid the place, as my enemies will wait upon me in that neighbourhood; but when they have been disappointed in their aim, and gone away, then you and I will meet there again.’—‘Done,’ said the Englishman; and in the dawn they parted ways.

  Some time later, when the Bey felt it safe to return to his house, he found it not as he had left it. The Englishman and all his troop had gone, after making free, as it seemed, with the Bey’s stores and his stable. His Wife—the youngest of his three, the best-beloved, the most beautiful, the blue-eyed—hid from him, in fear—or shame—or both, and the reason became clear enough in time: whether by force or suasion, the great Redcoat had helped himself to the one thing belonging to his Brother that he might not, and there would be fruit of his transgression.

  The unhappy Bey,
out of respect for the brotherhood he still and irrevocably held with the Englishman, would not slay this wife on the spot, as another man might, and as he had every right to do—and here the Pacha nodded in entire agreement—but instead contained his anger, and waited, till the child was born, a goodly lad, and well-made—after which the poor woman was unprotected, and shortly suffer’d the long-postponed wrath of her husband. Her child he soon sent away to the far limits of that country, with an old Shepherd for his only protector: to this old man the Bey communicated a certain sign, with which, if the boy lived, he desired him to be marked.

  Now the years had passed—the Bey’s own sons had fallen to the horrid exigencies of feud, and one by one been murdered by the sons and grandsons of the men their father and their uncles and grandsires had long ago murdered; and the Bey repented of his stern rigor in that time—he better remembered his beloved wife, so like a gazelle, and his love for her. Therefore he asked that he be allowed to accompany, or precede, the Pasha’s forces into that land, and seek out the boy—whom he would know by the mark he bore, which the Bey now drew in the dust of the floor for the Pacha to study—and whom he intended to restore to his House, and take for his own. And should any of the Pacha’s soldiers come first upon him, if he be in arms, the Bey begged that the boy’s life be spared, and that he be remanded to him.

  The Pacha heard his supplicant out—and ply’d him subtly with further questions—and fell to thinking, and to tugging at his wonderful beard, and stroking it and smelling of it, as though wisdom might come to him of itself out of it; and he clapped his hands for his servants to fill his guest’s pipe and cup, and intimated that what he asked might be done, if it were possible—the Bey would have his answer in time—and he then went on to speak of other matters.