Ismail Kadare - The Siege

“I’ll be surprised.”

Çelebi was intrigued and turned around to look. The conversation was coming from a generously mustachioed, mounted akinxhi and a sapper standing next to him and leaning on the horse with his hand.

“Six hundred aspers is beyond your means,” the akinxhi said with deliberation, staring suspiciously at the sapper with his black eyes. “But tell me, would you perchance have been …”

The sapper’s face went crimson from the neck up.

The akinxhi showed his repulsion with a shrug.

“So that’s what it is! I never thought you would fall so low.”

The sapper said nothing.

“Have you heard? The caster of spells was thrown in irons this morning. Apparently he didn’t do his curse properly. When he put up his hands with palms facing outwards, he got the direction wrong and covered only half the citadel.”

“What are you saying?”

“When he was being chained up, he yelled: ‘Careful with my hands! They’re my working tools!’ It’s like worrying about your hair when you’re having your head cut off! There’s a rumour going round that all the suspects are going to be arrested.”

“They’ll only get what they deserve.”

“You’d have done better to steal or pillage instead of …”

“You have to understand me: I’m just dying to have a woman.”

“The way you’re going about it, you’ll end up losing your taste for the opposite sex.”

“Why?” the soldier asked in a worried voice. “Why?”

Their unit’s drum then began to roll, and the men formed into a column. Kurdisxhi went right past them on his imposing mount. He had an escort of soldiers accompanied by the Mufti. When they had almost passed by, Çelebi suddenly recognised Tuz Okçan. He was talking to an akinxhi who seemed to be making some kind of promise to him. Did he also sleep with his “mates,” as people called them nowadays? The chronicler looked up automatically towards the citadel and saw the ramparts streaked with long, funereal drapes of congealing pitch.

“ Bon voyage , Mevla!” the janissary’s voice rang out, once the soldier had recognised the chronicler. Çelebi waved a thank you. His heart was almost melting with gratification. It seemed that a warm wish of that kind was what he had really needed. “May luck be with you too,” he mumbled to himself.

Tuz Okçan stood for a while, watching the dust cloud raised by the horses. When the last unit had set off, he walked back to the camp. On his way he overheard groups of soldiers talking about the akinxhis they had just seen off, and going over the booty they had requested from them. Tuz Okçan was well aware that many of them had done deals with the marauders, involving the purchase of captive women. He’d heard tell by army veterans that when expeditions of that sort make it back, the camp usually turns into a great slave market, especially of women, for a period of days. With their crude tastes, soldiers would hurry to buy flowery dresses to drape over their prisoners. When they had slaked their desire, they would sell their captives on at the best price they could get and use the proceeds to buy another one. The departments that set up military campaign plans well in advance never forgot to include in the list of supplies, alongside food, cannon, blankets and camels, a few thousand flowery dresses for captured women.

The janissary had also been told that the trade in slave women was both a delight and a risky activity for novice soldiers. There was no such thing as a fixed price; the value of a girl fluctuated by the hour, usually depending on the number of women taken. There were no precise criteria for estimating the relative value of the slaves, either, since tastes in women were as varied as the origins of soldiers coming from many different parts of the Empire. Some liked them plump, with ripples of flesh around their midriffs, whereas others preferred them as skinny as rakes. Some were driven to ecstasy by a copious bosom, whereas others couldn’t stand the sight of such a thing. There was just as little agreement about height, eye colour, age, neck, arms and especially about the thickness of pubic hair.

The only preference almost universally shared was for blondes. Their price sometimes went so high that only ranking officers, or at most the death squad soldiers, who had the highest pay among troopers, could afford the luxury of buying one.

Prices were high when the expedition got back, but sometimes had fallen sharply by the next day. Soldiers who had spent the night with their new slaves tried to sell them on in front of their tents, regretting they had paid so much. Weary and disenchanted, they were prepared to let them go at half the price. Crafty traders who knew the game would then snap them up in great numbers, well aware that dark and sultry nights would soon return and drive the price back up again.

But prices fluctuated wildly even after initial needs had been satisfied. Sometimes they went up steeply. That happened when girls died from exhaustion on top of each other before they even got out of the soldiers’ tents, or else when they lost their minds.

As he re-entered the camp Tuz Okçan felt a shaft of regret in his heart as he remembered that he would not be able to take part in the exciting trade in captive girls. Members of the Janissary Corps were not allowed to own girls. He tried to console himself with the thought that, with his modest pay as a new recruit, he wouldn’t have been able to afford one anyway. Despite that, he thought, he could have managed, if he had gone shares with one or even two comrades. He’d been told it was common practice.

He strode in leisurely fashion among the tents. Other janissaries went by with happy looks on their faces, for it was pay day. As he sauntered towards the tent of his unit’s quartermaster, he worked out in his head how many months of his pay of forty-five aspers a month he would have to save up to accumulate two hundred, which was half the going price for a girl of average looks, and the third of the price of a blonde.

A girl’s valuation also fluctuated considerably in the mind of Tuz Okçan. By day, when he was striding forth, as he was now, he reckoned it was crazy to squander a year’s savings for a secondhand, no longer pristine woman. But there were stiflingly hot nights when he would have spent not a year’s pay, but all his life savings, to be able to enjoy the pleasure of the swallows’ nest. When he was aroused, he recalled a risqué song that he’d heard an old janissary recite: “It’s snowing, the wind’s howling/ A friend is yelling to find his friend” in which, to Tuz Okçan’s amazement, the first occurrence of “friend” was replaced by a word for the female sexual organ, and the second by the name of the male organ. So it was a woman’s sex that howled like a she-wolf on a snowy winter’s day, Tuz Okçan mused. But in his own mind there was nothing in the world that could be likened to a male organ gripped by wild lust. He had felt its fury. When it was blindly excited and foaming at the brim, it seemed to him that an erection could smash right through a woman’s belly, and it made his testicles hurt, hurt like mad, as they tried to slow him down, as if he was no more than a puking drunk.

Sometimes he was overcome with panic at the thought that he might perhaps never again have an opportunity to enjoy a woman, and at such moments he would have given not just his life savings, but several years of his life to escape such a fate.

He sighed a deep sigh and tried to think of something else.

For the second time in a week he noticed the new bread oven that had been set up on a platform not far from the ramparts. He was intrigued to see as he went past that several sentries had been detailed to guard it. In two or three places there were signboards prohibiting access to it. A rumour had gone round a few days before saying that an enemy agent had tried to poison the dough. That was apparently the reason for the heightened security. In addition, that must be the oven where bread was baked for the high-ranking officers, and so it was only natural it should be watched over with special care.