Ismail Kadare - The Siege

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 .