The Siege Read online

  They looked at him with admiration.

  “This is where the most modern war the world has ever known is about to be waged,” he concluded, staring at the chronicler.

  Çelebi was worried.

  “The Padishah’s priority at present is to force the Balkans into submission,” the Quartermaster commented. “Obviously, he will spare no expense to achieve his aim.”

  “This is my right-hand man,” Saruxha said as he turned towards a tall, pale and worn-out young man who was coming towards them.

  The young man glanced nonchalantly at the visitors, made a gesture that could barely be understood as a greeting, and then whispered a few words in the engineer’s ear.

  “You’re amazed I picked that lad as my first assistant, aren’t you?” Saruxha asked when the youngster had walked off. “Most people share your view. He doesn’t look the part, but he is extremely able.”

  They said nothing.

  “In this shed we will cast four other, smaller cannon, but they will be no less fearsome than the big one,” the engineer went on. “They are called mortars, and they shoot cannon-balls in a curved trajectory. Unlike cannon which hit the walls straight on, mortars can rain down on the castle’s inner parts from above, like a calamity falling from the heavens.”

  He picked up a lump of coal and piece of board from the ground.

  “Let’s suppose this is the castle wall. We put the cannon here. Its shot takes a relatively straight path” — he drew a line — “and hits the wall here. But the shot from the mortar or bombard rises high in the sky, almost innocently, if I may say so, as if it had no intention of hitting the wall — and then falls almost vertically behind it.” With his hand, which the chronicler thought he saw shaking a little, he made out the shape of the two arcs in the air. “Bombards make a noise that sounds like the moaning of a stormy sea.”

  “Allah!” the chronicler cried out.

  “Where did you learn how to do all this?” the Quartermaster General asked.

  The engineer looked at him evasively.

  “From my master, Saruhanli. I was his first assistant.”

  “He’s in prison now, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Saruxha replied. “The Sultan had him put away in the fortress of Bogazkezen.”

  “And nobody knows why?” the chronicler ventured timidly.

  “I know why,” the engineer replied.

  The Quartermaster General raised his eyes and glanced at Saruxha with surprise.

  “Recently, the poor old man’s mind began to wander. He refused to make cannon of larger calibre. He claimed it was impossible, but in fact, as he told me, he didn’t want to do it. If we make them even bigger, he would say, then the cannon will become a terrible scourge that will decimate the human race. The monster has come into the world, he said by way of explanation, and we can’t put it back where it came from. The best we can do is to keep its barrel no bigger than it is now. If we enlarge it further, the cannon will devour the world. The old man stopped experimenting. That’s why the Sultan had him arrested.”

  The engineer picked up a piece of clay and rubbed it until it turned to dust, and said, “That’s what’s happened to him.”

  The other two men nodded.

  “But I have a different view of the matter,” the engineer explained. “I think that if we give in to scruples of that kind, then science will come to a halt. War or no war, science must advance. I don’t really mind who uses this weapon, or against whom it is used. What matters to me is that it should hurl a cannon-ball along a path identical to my calculation of the trajectory. The rest of it is your business.” And on that abrupt note, he stopped.

  “I’ve been given to understand that the money for making this weapon was donated by one of the Sultan’s wives for the salvation of her soul,” the Quartermaster General said, obviously intending to change the topic of conversation.

  “For the salvation of her soul?” Çelebi asked, thinking the detail worthy of figuring in his chronicle. “Is it expensive?” he added after a pause, astounded at his own temerity.

  “He’s the one to know,” the engineer said, pointing at the Quartermaster. “All I can tell you about is the gun’s range and firepower.”

  The chronicler smiled.

  “Oh yes, the big gun costs a lot of money,” the Quartermaster said. “A very great deal. Especially now that we are at war, and the price of bronze has soared.”

  He narrowed his eyes and made a quick mental calculation.

  “Two million silver aspers,” he blurted out.

  The chronicler was awe-struck. But the figure made no impact whatever on the master caster.

  “To pay that much for the salvation of one’s soul may seem prohibitively expensive,” the Quartermaster said, “but if the cannon-balls break through those ramparts in a few days’ time, they’ll be worth their weight in gold.”

  An ironical smile hovered over his face.

  “At the siege of Trabzon,” he continued, “when the first cannon, which was much smaller than this one, shot its first ball, many of those present thought the barrel had grunted ‘Allah!’ But what I thought I heard though the roar, maybe because I think about it all the time, was the word ‘Taxation!’”

  Once again the chronicler was struck dumb. The engineer, for his part, started to laugh out loud.

  “You don’t realise the full meaning of that word, nor how many things, including the siege of this fortress, depend on it,” the Quartermaster observed.

  “Well, when the gun fires,” the engineer said, “I don’t hear it say ‘Allah!’ or ‘Taxation’ at all. All I think about is that the power and noise of the explosion are the product of the amount of gunpowder packed behind the cannon-ball combined with the precise diameter and length of the barrel.”

  The Quartermaster General smiled. Çelebi, for his part, pondered on his having become friendly with powerful and learned men, and wondered how long he could keep up conversations of this kind, which rose into spheres he had never previously encountered.

  “Let’s go outside for a breath of air,” the Quartermaster suggested.

  Saruxha walked with them as far as the door.

  “People say that these new weapons will change the nature of war,” the chronicler said. “That they’ll make citadels redundant.”

  Saruxha shook his head doubtfully.

  “Indeed they might. People also say they will make other weapons obsolete.”

  “Who are the ‘people’ saying these things?” the Quartermaster butted in. “You don’t believe these cannon can overcome the fortress all by themselves, do you?”

  “I certainly wish they could,” Saruxha replied, “because they are, at bottom, my creations. However, I take a rather different view. I think that although the guns will play a role in the victory, what really matter are the soldiers of our great Padishah. It is they who will storm the fortress.”

  “Quite right,” the Quartermaster General said.

  “The cannon will have at least one other effect,” Saruxha added. “Their thunderous noise will spread panic among the besieged and break their courage. That’s a considerable help, isn’t it?”

  “It’s very important,” the Quartermaster agreed. “And I’m not thinking only of those wretches. The whole of Christendom trembles when it hears speak of our new weapon. It has already become a legend.”

  “I would walk with you for a while,” Saruxha said, “but this evening I’ve still got a thousand things to do. Casting should begin around midnight.”

  “Don’t apologise, and thank you,” the visitors replied almost in unison.

  Meanwhile night had fallen and fires had been lit here and there around the camp. Beside one of them, somewhere out there in the dark, someone was singing a slow and sorrowful chant. Further off, two ragged dervishes were mumbling their prayers.

  They walked on in silence. The chronicler thought how strange it was that men of such different kinds should all be serving the Padishah, brought
together by war in this god-forsaken spot at the end of the world.

  They could still hear chanting in the far distance, and could just about make out the refrain: “O Fate, O Fate …”

  Dead calm. But the calm weighs heavily on us, as it always does in times that are pregnant with the unknown. Sometimes it seems to us that the army camped all around has nothing to do with us. You could easily imagine that our citadel and the Ottoman camp just happen to find themselves facing one another in the middle of the peneplain and that they will soon stop taunting each other. But we know it is too late already. Of the citadel and the army, one will be annihilated.

  They are ready for the assault. From our position we can see them preparing their ladders, ropes, hooks, rams, pikes — in short, all the engines of war, from the most ancient to those that have been invented in the last three or four years.

  Smoke rises day and night from their foundry. That is where they are casting the new weapon which is apparently going to be tried out on us for the first time. We told our men that a new device is never as terrible as feared, but it’s clear they’re shaken. At night our partisans send us messages of encouragement from beacons they light on the mountains. But in bad weather we can see neither the mountains nor the beacons, and we feel as if we are suspended over a black abyss.

  Sometimes, when we are tired of spying on the camp, we keep our eyes fixed on the sky for hours on end. It seems that this prolonged concentration has induced barely credible visions in some among us. They insist they have seen the Good Fairy of Albania flitting through the clouds as well as other gods armed with spears and pitchforks or else holding the scales of Fate in their hands. Others claim they have also seen the Bad Fairy.

  These hallucinations, no doubt caused by weariness and waiting, are perhaps distant reminiscences of the time when the Albanians, like all other peoples of the Balkan Peninsula, believed in a multiplicity of gods. Many of us are convinced that these divinities are not only gathered in the heavens above us, but will sway the outcome of battle, as they did in the past. They hope that the heavens which have been less clement to us, for who knows what reason, will look on us more kindly and take our side, as they did long ago. We shall hear the rumbling of the wheels of the celestial chariots and the rustling of their wings, so they say, and we no longer know whether the outcome of the fight and the fate of each of us will be fixed on this blackish earth or up on high, among the clouds.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The council met on Sunday afternoon. When the Pasha came into the pavilion, the functionaries were already present, seated in a semicircle on cushions laid against the sides of the tent. With sombre visage, without glancing at anyone, he strode to his seat.

  The scribe dipped his quill in the inkpot and then held it in mid-air over the sheets of paper laid out before him. He shifted slightly to make himself more comfortable but as he did so, knocked his elbow, and a drop of black ink spilled on to the sheaf. He quickly wiped the blot with the cuff of his sleeve so no one would notice it, because a black spot could be interpreted as a bad omen intentionally put upon the paper by fate.

  “I want your final views on the most auspicious moment for launching the assault. But before we make a decision on this matter, I want to tell you that, though I am touched by your shared concern for my personal safety,” pointing to Aslanhan Begbey and the Mufti of the army, “I definitely reject your proposal to provide me with a decoy, or body double, as they are called these days.”

  He looked straight into the faces of the two men he had named, searching for the slightest trace of malice, but he was quickly persuaded that they had no ulterior motive and had come up with the idea of a double only because it was the fashion of the day.

  The Pasha thought the two soldiers looked a little upset. I don’t think they are really worried about keeping me alive, he thought. But despite that, he had no reason to be cross. He had been an officer himself, and he knew that soldiers are perfectly happy to have doubles of their commander whom they can allow themselves to despise and even to insult under their breaths without taking too great a risk. What they wouldn’t think about was that by sneering at the commander-in-chief’s stand-in they would acquire a habit of disrespect. When, one day, the real commander appeared before them, he might get unexpected reactions … if not worse, he thought. Any old time they could claim that Tursun Pasha was his other … that’s to say, just a shadow … while his corpse, buried under two yards of earth …

  The commander-in-chief massaged his forehead with the palm of his hand. He had slept badly, tossing and turning all night long, and now he had a migraine.

  “Let’s get back to the attack,” he said sternly. “Speak!”

  He did not like long meetings and made his distaste quite clear. He crossed his arms on his chest and waited. There was such silence that you could hear the scratching of the scribe’s quill as he wrote down the Pasha’s words.

  Saruxha was the first to speak. Without any of the usual courtly preambles — council members were not accustomed to his informal manner — he declared:

  “My cannon can be ready by tomorrow, but the mortars won’t be there until Tuesday. That’s the day when I’ll be able to set off the cannonade. I’ll need a full day to take down those walls.”

  “Next!”

  It was the Mufti’s turn. He had first consulted the astrologer on the position of the celestial bodies.

  “Gazi Tursun Pasha!” he said with an obsequious bow of his head. “After listening to the dream-interpreter and the astrologer,” he went on, waving at the latter, who was squatting in the corner looking scared, “I am of the opinion that the attack should be launched tomorrow.”

  “What an idiot!” the engineer muttered.

  “Tomorrow, the position of the stars with respect to the moon will be particularly favourable,” the Mufti went on. “Whereas on Tuesday, it will turn unfavourable. In addition, Allah granted me a dream last night. I saw a moonlit scene in which a crocodile attacked a black ox and ate its heart. The black ox must represent the fortress, and, as you know, tomorrow the moon is full.”

  “Dolt!” Saruxha muttered once again. The Quartermaster General had to tug on his sleeve.

  “Next!” the Pasha said.

  “I don’t understand,” the engineer butted in. “What does the Mufti really believe? That we’ll bombard the citadel before we attack it, or afterwards?”

  The Quartermaster almost tore the engineer’s sleeve off.

  The Mufti didn’t even bother to reply. He and Saruxha exchanged frankly hostile stares. The Pasha’s dark glance barely touched them before alighting on the Alaybey. He wanted his opinion as well. The Alaybey did not have a vote on the war council and his official position was subordinate to many of its formal members, but he was the Sultan’s special envoy and for that reason feared by all. He guessed that the Pasha wanted the dispute quashed, and he made a skilful contribution to the debate.

  “As for the bombardment, I think it should be less drawn out than Saruxha proposes. If our firepower has not breached the walls by the middle of the day, it will not do so in the afternoon. If the cannonade begins at first light, I think we should storm the citadel a few hours later, as soon as the guns have stopped firing, so as not to give the enemy time to recover from the terror that our new arm will have struck into its heart.”

  The Alaybey had skirted round the issue and not committed himself to any one of the positions being advanced. Tursun Pasha thought he had spoken sensibly, but at that moment what he wanted above all else was to settle the timing of the attack.

  “Next!” he said.

  “My janissaries are weary of waiting,” Old Tavxha declared. “We must attack tomorrow!”

  “Tomorrow!” Kurdisxhi echoed, in an extremely high-pitched voice.

  The rush of blood to his face demonstrated his exasperation even more than his voice. He was unhappy that Tursun Pasha had still not allowed his akinxhis out of camp to sack the surrounding countryside. But
the Pasha knew from experience that if they were allowed to pillage before the day of the assault, then the booty they would gather would bring the instinct of preservation to the fore and thus diminish their thirst for battle. He wanted the citadel to be not just a monster to be vanquished, but a prize that all would hanker after.

  The Quartermaster General asked to speak.

  He bowed low, and then, in carefully chosen words and with compliments to those who had spoken before him, he cleverly demolished all their arguments, save the engineer’s. He deplored the fact that men did not behave in accordance with the signs that Allah gave them. They do not do this knowingly, but because heavenly messages are often beyond the capacity of our feeble minds, and unable to penetrate our blind eyes and deaf ears!

  The Pasha noticed the flashes of hatred darting from the eyes of the Mufti towards the speaker. Kurdisxhi and Old Tavxha looked on wide-eyed as they concentrated on finding the treasonable flaw that might be hidden in such orotund words.

  The Pasha realised that two opposing groups had now constituted themselves among his council. Hatred, scorn and irony were now being expressed almost openly by each group towards the other. He reckoned that the engineer and the Quartermaster General were thinking correctly, but for all the confidence he had in their intelligence, he was not sure of their hearts. As for the captains, it was the other way round, he trusted their courage more than their wisdom. But it was no use being convinced that the experts were right when he could not easily join their camp against the opinion of the Mufti and his two powerful captains. He was now waiting for the third military leader, Kara-Mukbil, and for the architect Giaour to speak out. It wasn’t hard to guess which side they would take. The soldier would side with his comrades, and the architect would join the experts. The position was not going to change. He was going to have to take the decision himself, because he did not usually take any more account of the opinion of the sanxhakbeys than he did of the eshkinxhi commander, the deaf-mute Tahanka, who always looked as fierce as a man about to launch an assault, even one bound to lead to defeat. Since the Alaybey had got himself off the hook, the Pasha realised he would have to cut the knot himself.