Ismail Kadare - The Siege

“They’ve cut off his hands,” the Quartermaster General murmured as he watched the body swoop down to the bottom again.

The second man was bent double and didn’t even get to stretch out his arm. The soldier behind him clambered over his dead body with the skill of a cat and jumped over the parapet to the other side.

A Turkish fighter had at last set foot inside the fortress. Tursun Pasha closed his eyes. Don’t retreat, my soldier! he implored silently.

When he opened his eyes two more fighters were on the parapet. One withdrew, and the other was thrown down, knocking another soldier off the ladder in his fall. The archers had stopped shooting now, for fear of hitting their own men. Taking advantage of the situation, dozens of defenders suddenly reappeared. Tursun Pasha thought their lances were longer than ordinary ones. In any other circumstance he would have asked what this new weapon was and where it had been forged, but his curiosity was instantly dissipated.

“At the double, send in the eshkinxhis !” he shouted.

He watched the hindquarters of the horse bearing the herald who sped off to deliver the command.

The cheers of the eshkinxhis reached him in successive waves from somewhere near the right tower. At first he thought he could make out Tahanka’s voice screaming above the others, but he soon realised it was only a buzzing in his own ears.

There were now dozens of ladders set against the wall, bearing more or less dense bunches of men. On some of them the bodies of the dead still hung on in strange poses.

“Look at those hanging corpses,” the Quartermaster General said to the chronicler. “The carpenters did a hasty job, and left lots of nails sticking out.”

Çelebi listened in amazement.

The forward thrust of the attackers grew more violent around the right tower. The bat-wing symbol on the crown of their helmets seemed to help them climb up. One ladder that was alive with soldiers swung back and fell into the void, but another one was put up straight away in its place.

“People who have heard Tahanka roar in battle say there is nothing more terrifying,” the Quartermaster added.

“Ah! The demons!” someone from among the Pasha’s silent retinue cried out.

At that moment several bright lights flashed on the ramparts, shot out like comets, and then fell, one by one, on to the attackers.

“Fire-bombing demons!” someone muttered. Now there was a phrase that would embellish his chronicle, Çelebi thought. He said it over to himself again: fire-bombing demons. He mustn’t forget it.

The crowd at the foot of the wall swayed like a stormy sea each time one of these comets shot out from behind the parapet.

“They’re balls of rags soaked in a mixture of resin, sulphur, wax and oil,” the Quartermaster General explained to the chronicler. “They make burns that never heal up entirely.”

The chronicler knew that, just as he knew many other things he pretended not to know, so as not to deprive his distinguished friend of the pleasure of explaining them to him.

“Never ever heal,” he repeated with a deep frown.

The Quartermaster General pulled up his wide sleeve to show his bare left forearm. Çelebi could barely mask a grimace.

Some of the ladders now seemed deserted. Attackers carried on storming up the others, holding their shields over their heads for protection. Down below, men ran to take shelter beneath the testudos while waiting their turn to go to the wall. Some fighting had broken out on the top of the rampart. Two of the long ladders had caught fire in several places. Another one split in two down the middle. But the number of ladders increased by the minute.

A herald galloped up.

“Burxhuba has been killed!” he yelled from a distance.

Nobody said anything.

Cannon-balls fired by the mortars constantly whistled over the defenders’ heads. They were still falling inside the citadel, but the fateful moment was not far off when they would start to fall on the wall itself.

“If Saruxha manages a direct strike on the parapet, then he’s a genius,” the Quartermaster General said. “But he’s being cautious, and quite right too. Just a few paces off target, and our own men will be pulp.”

A cannon-ball then hit the parapet dead on. The bunch of defenders preparing to repel a new wave of attackers was annihilated. Dismembered body parts rained down together with lumps of masonry.

“Bravo!” someone standing behind the Pasha cried out.

The almost entirely demolished parapet at the spot where the mortar had struck stayed empty for a moment or two. The azabs rushed into the breach and were quickly in command of the rampart walk. One of them unfurled a standard. Cheers rose from all around, in a deep-throated clamour. The flag fluttered for a moment, but then something happened: long black lances emerged from all around the men, a struggle ensued, and then the flag disappeared as if it had been whisked away by a gust of wind.

Meanwhile, to the left of the main gate, a horde of attackers thrust forwards towards the great breach. Some climbed along on wide ladders, others were moving screens towards the places where molten pitch and fireballs were hitting the ground. Many azabs had caught fire and were running away with their arms flailing, looking like giant torches. Some of them rolled themselves on the ground to put out the flames that were consuming them. Others pranced about like lunatics among the throng which parted in terror to leave them passage, then crawled along the ground, got up, fell again, and finally groaned until their last breath. Smoke still rose from the dead as if their souls were not finding it easy to quit the body.

Çelebi had been wondering for a while about how to find an image that would properly translate the sight of these burning men. He thought of comparing them to moths fluttering round a cresset, but the word “moth” hardly seemed adequate to suggest the ardour and heroism of these fighters. However nothing else occurred to him, and, in addition, if he likened the fires of a holy war to the candle of Islam, as he had read in ancient chronicles, then the word “moth” might do in the end. He could call these soldiers “the moths of the Sacred Candle”.

Suddenly the earth shook and a terrific clap of thunder cut off the train of his thoughts. The Pasha and his retinue turned towards where the noise had come from. Something had happened somewhere near the artillery. A great column of black smoke rose into the sky in that quarter. An officer rushed off at a gallop.

Everyone behind the Pasha started asking questions in muffled tones.

A few moments later the officer came back.

“One of the mortars has exploded,” he reported. “Many men killed, and many others wounded.”

“And the master caster?” the Pasha asked.

“He is unharmed.”

The Pasha turned back towards the citadel and nobody dared say another word.

He ordered fresh troops to move up to the assault. As he watched the Persian and Caucasian regiments dashing towards the walls to relieve the azabs and the eshkinxhis (as for the volunteers, they were for the most part no such thing), the commander-inchief thought to himself that it was still too soon to send in the elite units of the dalkiliç , which he usually threw into battle after the janissaries.

The assault was now in progress along the entire length of the citadel’s surrounding wall. There were hundreds of ladders large and small reaching up to the parapets or to the edges of the breaches opened in the masonry. They sucked up a proportion of the flood of soldiers swirling at their feet and raised them to the top of the wall. And as soon as those scorched and bloodied men clambered over the parapet or through the breach, they threw away their shields so as to brandish their adzes and swords. The shields, dripping with pitch and molten wax, fell on top of the soldiers following behind, and they screamed as they tried to avoid being hit by the falling objects.