Ismail Kadare - The Siege

“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.

The captain of the azabs asked to be allowed to speak. To the Pasha’s astonishment, Kara-Mukbil gave his support to the engineer. He did not say much. He reckoned the citadel should not be stormed until it had suffered a major bombardment from every one of the available guns. That way many lives would be saved. In conclusion he recommended that the assault should not begin before the walls had been breached in several places to a significant width. His last words were:

“The greater the wounds in the wall, the lighter our men’s injuries will be.”

“Shame on you, Kara-Mukbil, for speaking thus!” Old Tavxha cried out in his deep-throated voice.

Kara-Mukbil went puce with anger. He was the youngest of the captains, and Tavxha’s reproach cut him to the quick.

“And what should I be ashamed of?” he roared angrily. “You’re in favour of attacking because you know my azabs will be the first in line. They will fall like flies, and your janissaries will walk over their dead bodies to take the castle.”

Old Tavxha waved his short arm agitatedly.

Although he was not a resentful man, Kara-Mukbil’s eyes flamed with anger. When he grasped that Tursun Pasha was not going to intervene, he raised the tone of his onslaught on Tavxha.

“You wouldn’t say that if the order of battle was the reverse. If your janissaries made up the front line, I’m sure you’d think as I do, and not pretend to be indignant.”

“The rules of war were established by the great Padishah,” Tavxha replied curtly. “It is not for us to doubt them.”

Kara-Mukbil said nothing.

If the architect were now to put forward a convincing reason for delaying the assault, the Pasha now thought, he would take the experts’ side.

“Let us hear the architect!” he said.

Giaour began to speak, and not a muscle moved in his masklike face. Anyone hearing him for the first time would be flabbergasted. He didn’t have a speech defect or a stammer, but the words he uttered in his toneless voice issued from his lips like a string of icy, shiny beads.

“Cannon hit main junction point second tower and also right wall middle main door left wall first tower …”

He was pointing out the weaknesses in the citadel’s construction, which were invisible to the untutored eye but which his studies had taught him to see as through a pane of glass. As he amputated the suffixes and prefixes from some of his words, moreover, his speech reminded the soldiers present, who had experience of great carnage, of the remains of mutilated bodies.

The architect came to the end of his contribution as abruptly as if he had cut it off with a knife. What emerged from the long string of his lifeless words was a single point: he did not support the view of his usual allies. Tursun Pasha was barely able to stifle a sigh. Everything was going the wrong way in his council of war. As he listened to the sanxhakbeys, who stuck to the “hard” line, as was to be expected, since they knew it was the only way of protecting themselves from any consequential mistake, the Pasha watched the Alaybey’s face out of the corner of his eye. Clearly, even now that a divergence of views was manifest, the Alaybey had no intention of swaying the debate to one side or the other. The thought that this attitude might have been laid down for him by secret orders from above froze Tursun Pasha’s heart. Yes, they must have suggested what attitude he should adopt, even if it hadn’t been said in so many words: if there’s a quarrel, don’t take sides.

Fifteen hundred, maybe two thousand of his fighters’ lives hung on the Alaybey’s lips. May they also lie on your conscience! Tursun Pasha thought, and forthwith he uttered his decision.

“Tomorrow before first light the cannon will launch a barrage of fire at the fortress walls. We will storm the citadel in the afternoon, as soon as the heat of the day begins to slacken. Troops are to be forewarned tonight. Let the drums sound throughout the camp, let the shehs address the soldiers and may the spirit of battle be enhanced by all the usual means. Troops will be sent to rest at midnight.”

He paused for a moment, and then concluded.

“I have spoken.”

Everyone stood up, bowed to their commander, and filed out of the tent. The astrologer, who thought he was the principal cause of the dispute that had arisen, made himself scarce. He knew that even when they suffer temporary defeat the mighty are always more powerful than their subordinates, and it seemed to him more prudent to keep out of sight than to flaunt his pride in the fact that his own prediction had prevailed.