Ismail Kadare - The Siege

“They’ve not stopped climbing,” the Quartermaster General said pensively. His tone seemed to say: they are climbing, but what’s the use? “It seems to me we are fighting a losing battle,” he added in a dull voice.

“A losing battle,” the chronicler repeated to himself. The words were so terrible as to stick in your throat.

The eshkinxhis pressed on obstinately up the escarpment. Many fell from their ladders into the void, but that didn’t stop others from returning to the attack. Their red turbans looked as if they had been bloodstained in advance.

The strongest thrust was still being played out at the main gate. The assailants had massed around it, and in the midst of that awful swarm there arose, incomprehensibly, a kind of wooden hut. The azabs threw wetted goatskins on top of it to stop it catching fire. Men rushed under it and used a great iron battering ram to try to knock a hole in the gate, while sappers and müslümans attempted to smash the hinges with huge metal bars.

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.