The Siege

by Ismail Kadare

  Another messenger, black with dust, came back from the battle zone.

  “Begbey Bozkurtoglu is dead!” he shouted.

  No one uttered any comment, but everyone’s face froze on hearing the word “dead” used by the messenger instead of “killed”. Apparently he was a Kalmyk who had had trouble learning Turkish properly.

  “Wait!” Tursun Pasha called out when the courier had already turned his horse around to ride off. “Repeat what you just said.”

  “Begbey Bozkurtoglu is dead,” the messenger yelled out as loud as he could. “Died of a fit …” he added after a pause.

  “A heart attack,” the Quartermaster General murmured. “May his soul rest in peace.”

  The three remaining mortars were now firing uninterruptedly and their cannon-balls were still falling inside the citadel, but the screams of the wounded and burned were so loud that they could be heard from the observation platform. The sun had begun to go down. The Pasha could not take his eyes off the huge shapeless mass of his army, writhing and palpitating around the citadel like a living, warm-blooded and bleeding beast. The smell of burned flesh was awful.

  A horseman came riding towards them at a gallop. The Pasha recognised the rider at a hundred paces. It was Kara-Mukbil. He held the reins in one hand, for the other was holding his blood-soaked jaw.

  “My azabs are being wiped out,” he shouted without dismounting. “Where are the janissaries?” His voice was rough and harsh.

  Tursun Pasha looked at him severely and waved his arm towards the ramparts.

  “Your place is over there, Kara-Mukbil,” he said.

  Kara-Mukbil was on the point of answering back, but instead pulled in the reins, put one hand back to his jaw, made his horse circle in a fit of rage, and raced off, with his orderly following, towards the place he had come from.

  The Pasha waved his hand. An aide-de-camp came up to him.

  “Send in the janissaries,” he said without moving his head.

  A few moments later the elite units began to move, slowly at first, then at ever-greater speed, towards the great wall. Their hurrahs rang out. As they drew near to the ditch, they began to run, brandishing lances and all their weaponry.

  The racket of tambourines and kettle-drums rose to a peak. The janissaries crossed the ditch that was now half-choked with the corpses of azabs and volunteers. Like an avalanche of steel splitting in two, half of them rushed towards the battlements, and the other half threw themselves at the main gate. Their appeals to Allah and to the Padishah drowned the hubbub for a moment. They did not stop at the foot of the wall, they broke through the mass of azabs, braved the arrows and flaming resin raining down in a shower of sparks on to their helmets and shoulders, and leaped on to the soot-blackened, pitch-stained and now broken-toothed ladders. All who were watching from afar were anxious to see what would happen when the janissaries finally reached the parapet. More defenders suddenly appeared in the arrow slits when the first janissaries sprang over the top like wild cats. Behind them came an uninterrupted line of their comrades. A few ladders had caught fire. The attackers hastened up the rungs to get to the top before the ladder crumbled in flames. Azabs rushed to replace the charred ladders and knots of janissaries quickly sprang on to the new ones. Other soldiers pulled burning bodies off the roof of the shelter set up in front of the main gate. Despite being protected by wetted animal skins, it had caught fire several times, but the azabs had managed to extinguish it each time. From all around rose the cry: “The gate! The gate!” With streaks of pitch forming drips like black tears on it, the sombre, almost ghostly main door still held out against an ogre that it seemed no force in the world should be able to resist. The bludgeons falling on its hinges made a deafening noise. The thunderous crash of the battering ram was accompanied each time by a long-drawn-out “heave-ho!” An extended cheer meant that at last the main gate was beginning to yield. The front line of janissaries did not even wait for the door to be demolished before rushing in through the first crack. More followed them in an irresistible surge. The onslaught was so forceful that within seconds the huge leaf of the main gate door had been swept aside as if it had been a piece of scrap.

  Everyone in the Pasha’s retinue began to pray under their breath. They were not averse to showing their enthusiasm more openly, but the unmoving back of their leader seemed to forbid them from raising their voice. Alone among them, the architect gave a desperate shout:

  “Not go door there, dangerous trap, not go door, quick, about turn!”

  “What’s the old bird croaking about now?” someone blurted out.

  But the Pasha had grasped what Giaour meant. He knew that the main gate gave on to a narrow, trapezoid internal courtyard, and at the bottom of the courtyard stood another door, a little smaller, but presumably just as strong as the outer gate. He also knew that his men would feel they were trapped like rats in a barrel. He expected them to be slaughtered and yet, as he saw the unstoppable wave of janissaries crashing onwards, he nurtured the hope that maybe his men could make a miracle happen. The janissaries, in their hundreds, carried on surging into the courtyard. Nobody could see what was happening inside. You could only hear muffled echoes of the screams from inside the citadel. They had a strange quality, no doubt caused by the walls surrounding the courtyard.

  Another mounted messenger rode up in a cloud of dust.

  “Hata has been killed,” he said, and, like previous messengers, he promptly turned about and disappeared in the same direction he had come from.

  Tursun Pasha knew that the decisive moment was upon him. He now had to intensify the onslaught all along the main wall so as to draw the greatest possible number of defenders to the top of the citadel. It was the only way to relieve the janissaries caught in the rat-trap of the inner yard.

  Now is the time, he thought, almost saying it aloud. Every battle reached a point of this kind, and a leader’s luck consisted in recognising it amid the chaotic flow of time. Neither too soon nor too late, he repeated to himself. In his mind he felt a combination of clarity and void that scared him stiff.

  He gave several orders in succession. The crack troops of the Tartars threw themselves into the fray, and in their wake came the Mongols and the Kalmyks, men whose fury was aroused by the mere sight of masonry, since in their view of the world war consisted solely of a confrontation between tents and walls.

  For a while it seemed that the fresh troops committed to the battle were about to be swallowed up by it, as a river is swallowed by the sea, but a few minutes later their standards could be seen waving from the tops of the ladders.

  The dalkiliç! He felt he was keeping them clenched between his teeth. And so he was. He just had to open his jaw to unleash their destructive fury. In his mind war often seemed like a many-storeyed building, with a frame, a roof, and a crown to top it all. As in all things the main requirement was to stick to the right order. To combine speed and advance.

  “The dalkiliç!” he shouted, adding under his breath, “May it happen as it has been written!”

  He did not have much material left after the dalkiliç to complete the building. His house was nearly finished.

  The squads of dalkiliç, weighed down by the heavy fringes that their military rank required on their banners, raced towards the two towers, on the left and the right.

  The Pasha looked towards the setting sun. It was late enough to look at the sun straight on. He knew that many of his badly wounded men would carry its fading image to the hereafter.

  Tiger-striped yellow back-plates emerged on the parapet. Just one more push, Tursun Pasha thought. O Fate, give them just one more push!

  All he had left to throw into battle was the mere handful of men who formed the death squads. They incarnated his last hope: the crown of the roof, the crowning glory of battle.

  He hesitated. What then? he wondered. He closed his eyes and prayed silently: May Allah protect them! Then, in an almost muffled voice, he gave the order. “The serden geçti! First
and second divisions!”

  The chronicler could not believe his ears. A quiver of excitement ran through the small group gathered behind the Pasha. Bug-eyed, as if gazing at extraterrestrial creatures, they stared at the soldiers of death running forwards beneath their blue banners. Their crest-pieces and the plumes attached to their knee guards were similarly of the colour of the heavens.

  Çelebi felt a lump in his throat. They were already wearing celestial signs, as if to make it easier for the All-Powerful to recognise them when He would choose to take them up on high.

  Tursun Pasha thought that the noise of combat had slackened so as to allow the unique tone of the serden geçtis’ clarions to ring out. He watched them until they merged with the human mass that had nothing more to expect. He imagined some of them giving them passage out of respect, and others grinding their teeth as they thought, You’ll be losing your fame very soon too!

  The death units had moved to the foot of the rampart and were beginning their ascent. “Now you’ll see what stuff an Ottoman soldier is made of!” The Pasha uttered these words to a half-human, half-avian creature that had come to represent the Albanian in his mind when he was feeling downcast.

  The sun was setting. It seemed that the attack, having become twice as violent, was achieving its objective. There were now many more defenders to be seen on the top of the wall. That should make things easier for the janissaries who thus far had been stuck in the inner courtyard. Old Tavxha had nothing to complain about. Nor would he be able to reproach the Pasha with having spared the princes of his army.

  He caught sight of them out of the corner of his eye when they reached the right-hand tower. It occurred to him — but only faintly, palely — that he had perhaps sent them into battle too soon. He lowered his gaze towards the main gate. Attackers were still massing through it. Above the sea of men was a swarm of ladders, ropes and battering rams. Down below they must have already heard that the soldiers of death had reached the top of the ramparts. From its foundations to its summit, the enemy citadel was now entirely in the grip of his army.

  The Pasha was on tenterhooks as he hoped to hear at any moment the shout announcing that the second door had fallen. But the noise from the courtyard was uniform and monotone, like a constant rumble of thunder. He knew that every minute spent inside the yard cost his army hundreds of men. He could see them in his mind’s eye standing on top of their dead comrades, he could see the cobblestones already carpeted with blood and flesh. But he did not abandon hope of hearing the cry of victory. The huge crowd that had plunged into the castle must have had some effect. Yes, it must have.

  He looked again at the walls. The sun had now gone down completely in the west and the men still fighting on the rampart looked more and more like shadows.

  His eyes left them and returned to the main gate.

  Most of the serden geçti must now have left the world of the living. So, are you pleased with yourself for having them slaughtered? he asked himself inwardly. He was no longer sure whether he had sent these soldiers of death into battle out of necessity, or whether he had sacrificed them to others’ jealousy.

  It was now almost night and the battered gateway looked like the mouth of an oven.

  “It must be hell in there right now,” the Quartermaster General whispered to the chronicler.

  Çelebi was petrified. Now and again a whiff of charred flesh reached them on the wind.

  “Our men won’t be able to eat meat again for several days,” the Quartermaster went on. “It’s always like that after butchery of this kind.”

  “Allah!” the chronicler exclaimed. But he also wondered how the Quartermaster could be obsessed with logistics to the point of thinking about the savings he would make on food from such a horror.

  Tursun Pasha had folded his arms and was looking at the plain. A courier with his visor down, as befits a man bearing bad news, was coming towards him, maybe to announce the death of Tavxha. Behind him came another messenger bearing who knows what news. But he didn’t need dispatches to tell him that the fire of the attack was on the wane and could not be rekindled. He could see that the sad moment of all battles was upon him, when charred ladders, now almost entirely devoid of men, collapse as if they had had their legs cut off. He didn’t cast another glance at the rest of the rampart. A constant muffled noise still emerged from the courtyard, sounding like a huge cauldron on the boil. For Tursun Pasha, not just the citadel, its walls and towers, but the whole world was concentrated in the glowing hole of the gateway, where his own fate lay nailed to the threshold, lit alternately by a sinister shadow and by a blood-flecked gleam.

  God! he thought. What a catastrophe! What a disaster!

  He stayed in that state for a long while.

  When he finally admitted that he had no reason to hope any longer, he gave the order to retreat.

  As he got back in the saddle he felt his nervous tension give way to a mortal torpor. Without a word to anyone he went back to his tent.

  Bugles sounding long blasts with sharp pauses, as if their throats had been cut, gave the signal for retreat.

  “Accursed citadel!” a sanxhakbey muttered gruffly.

  Their first onslaught was as I shall tell it. God only knows what fate holds in store for us hereafter.

  They began by bombarding us most dreadfully, and then they attacked the ramparts in rolling waves, like storm tides thrown up by an earthquake. Although we had been expecting it for months, many among us, when we saw them come upon us like a torrent of molten steel, screaming and waving their weapons, with their emblems and the instruments of death they had threatened us with for so long, reckoned we would never again see the light of day.

  They surely imagined, for their part, that their fearsome thunder would drive many of us out of our minds. We were in fact stunned and almost deaf when we went up to the top of the wall while they set about climbing it from the outside. The first to cross swords with an Ottoman yatagan was Gjon Bardheci, whose soul has gone to meet our Holy Virgin. Men who were close to the duel report that the clash of blades made an unusual sound. Like church bells. Then came carnage, and many times we thought we were lost and would drag all our own people and our whole land down with us.

  When their bugles sounded the retreat we kneeled and gave thanks to God and to the good fairies who had rescued us. Only then did we notice that the church was half-ruined and that the cross on the steeple had fallen off, as if it had sacrificed itself for us. Despite everything, in the midst of ruins, scorched and bloodied as we were, we sang a “ Te Deum” and prayed for the salvation of the fallen.

  Night has now come and those who are nearer to heaven than earth are making confession and taking communion. As we have not enough space to bury them we shall incinerate their bodies tomorrow and will keep their ashes in urns, in accordance with ancestral tradition.

  Prince George sends us messages by means of beacons lit on the mountain-tops, but we can only see them dimly through the mist and clouds. Despite everything, we are different this evening from what we were in the morning and for us many things have changed for ever. We answered steel with steel, horror with horror, death with death. Often rivers of their blood fell on to our faces, just as we also rained blood down upon the enemy. Many events that can never be told or put into words have taken place, especially involving the soldiers of death who, in a blind fury, knowing that they could not return alive, fought with the savagery of wolves, but fell to our blades in the end.

  Now their camp is shrouded in silence and darkness. All we can hear is the creaking of their tumbrels coming right up into our courtyard to collect their dead and wounded. The first cart flew a white flag, but we would not have attacked even if the sign had been absent: it is to our advantage to have the bodies taken away so that their miasma does not suffocate us and so that the wheeling crows stop driving us mad. Tomorrow we will perhaps make an exchange of the dead — those of our men who fell at the foot of the rampart against theirs who died at the top. But
tomorrow is another day. Today is still night, and the silence of the dark is broken only by the groaning of dying men who lie all around and by the sound of burned-out ladders collapsing to the ground.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When the Pasha left, the group of sanxhakbeys who had stood in line behind him throughout the assault broke up. The Quartermaster General and Çelebi found themselves alone. It was quite dark. The citadel could barely be made out. As soon as the bugles had sounded the retreat and no more pitch or flaming oil fell from the parapet, the fortress was swallowed up by the night as if by a magic spell. The shouting and hubbub of the fight gave way to a muted hum that sounded like giants mumbling. A huge beast with a thousand legs and arms seemed to be rubbing itself without interruption on the ground.

  The Quartermaster General gave a deep sigh.

  “Let’s get going, Mevla!”

  The chronicler followed him without saying a word. They took the main path through the centre of the camp. The Quartermaster General’s orderly trotted behind them like a shadow. The camp was dark and quiet, and most of the tents were still empty.

  They wandered for a while with no particular aim in mind. Now and again the chronicler heard the sound of voices giving orders, sending men to this place or that. Two mounted heralds passed by. Many carts moved about on creaky axles, and from further off came the beat of marching boots — hundreds of boots.

  What’s happening? Mevla Çelebi wondered. Who is giving the orders? Is it not all over?

  A messenger went past in a rush of wind. Further on they heard the clap of galloping hooves, then anxious voices shouting orders. The chronicler’s consternation subsided as a strange new feeling encroached upon it — that of admiration tinged with sorrow for his country’s power. The commands and the ordered movements in the night demonstrated that even in this dark hour there were men in control of the situation, men in command.