Ismail Kadare - The Siege

He was walking away from it when he heard the sound of horses’ hooves coming up behind him. He turned around and was astonished to see a senior officer with an escort of three other officers trotting up to the oven. He stopped to watch. A few other soldiers did the same, and soon more joined them.

“The Pasha!” someone whispered.

Tuz Okçan opened his eyes wide. He had heard a lot about the commander-in-chief but had never seen him before. He stood up on tiptoe. There was whispering all around.

“How gloomy he looks!”

“Yes, he really does.”

“Who’s the other guy, on his right?”

“Don’t know. The one on his left is the Alaybey.”

“It’s the architect,” someone said.

“What a strange head he has! His face looks like an egg.”

“Now and again he has epileptic fits, apparently.”

“But he has no rival in the whole Empire, as far as his job is concerned.”

“I don’t doubt that. Epileptics are either idiots or geniuses.”

“Why are they going to the oven?”

“How should I know? That’s Government business.”

“People are saying that poison was mixed with the dough and they’re supposed to have launched an inquiry.”

“Poison?”

“Yes. Hadn’t you heard? You must be on another planet! Listen here: the poison is obviously bad enough, but there’s worse, so it seems. The caster of spells wasn’t acting on his own.”

“Well, well. The plot thickens …”

“That’s right, chum. And who can clear it up?”

A sentry came up to the knot of gossipers.

“Move on there,” he commanded. “Public assembly is forbidden in these here parts.”

The soldiers went their different ways.

Meanwhile the Pasha, the Alaybey and the architect had gone into the bake house together. The Pasha’s aide-de-camp and a sentry made up the rear of the party. Two guards stood watch outside.

The Pasha went down into the cellar behind a sapper carrying a torch to light his way. The search party followed behind. There was neither flour nor dough down there, for it was the secret entrance to the underground passageway. The bake house built over it was just camouflage. The chimney smoked day and night, but no bread was baked in it. Carts with their loads fully covered under canvas went in and out of the main door without interruption. Everyone believed them to be loaded with sacks of flour. Only a very fine ear could have worked out that they were in fact empty when they went in, but fully laden on return. What they carried was much heavier than bread: countless sacks of soil from the underground excavation, which they removed to a dump behind a distant wood.

The party plunged into the tunnel. Ventilation shafts had been put in and hidden on the surface inside tents that were under twenty-four-hour guard, but they were few and far between, so the air in the tunnel was heavy and stale. As they proceeded, the Pasha found it ever harder to breathe, but he pushed forwards with his inspection nonetheless. Buckets of oil-soaked ash placed at long intervals provided feeble lighting. Now and again they crossed the path of men pushing barrows full of earth.

In the half-light the Pasha looked like a ghost.

“Up to point here, struts. From point here, no struts,” the architect droned.

“He’s saying we should go no farther because the cribbing ends here,” the aide-de-camp translated.

They halted.

The Pasha looked up at the wide, sodden beams. He and the others could just hear the muffled sound of picks and axes being used a few dozen paces further on in the dark. The architect got a drawing out of his satchel. A guard brought a torch nearer to him, and Giaour tried to explain. The aide-de-camp provided a running translation:

“He says that the point we are at now is located twenty-five paces from the outside wall. The men at the cutting face are now no more than seven paces from the wall. Tonight they’ll be up to the foundations.”

The architect made a mark on his plan right next to the line that represented the wall.

The Pasha noted that the tunnel dipped downwards sharply from this point on. The gradient was so steep that men going up or down had to hang on to ropes anchored to the side walls. The light of torches could be seen lower down, as if at the bottom of a well, but it was all clouded by dust and made men look like the phantoms that whirling windstorms sometimes create.

Giaour the architect droned on and on.

“What he’s saying,” the aide-de-camp interpreted, “is that this slope is obligatory to allow the tunnel to pass under the foundations of the citadel with a clearance of at least half its own height. That way we will have to demolish only one span of the buried section of the wall.”

The Pasha was still staring at the human shadows. The dust was so thick at the cutting face that the hole made you think of the gates of hell.

“How long have they been working without a break in the fresh air?” the Pasha asked.

The Alaybey did not answer straight away.

“Apart from the sappers, the men have all been sentenced, so …”

“I understand,” the Pasha interrupted.

An acrid smell came in whiffs from the end of the tunnel.

“What’s that smell?” the Pasha asked with a grimace.

The architect explained:

“It is the smell of the brine we pour on the foundations to break down the mortar.”

The architect then pointed to another spot on the plan that the Pasha could not see very well through the smoke that was making his eyes sting. He waved his hand and the torch-bearer moved the lamp away.

“Once we have got through the foundations,” the aide-de-camp reported to him, “the passage will slope back up to its original level so as to reach the surface at the spot we have set for it to come out into the open.”

“How will you manage to hide the noise of the pickaxes?” the Alaybey asked.

The architect replied straight off.

“On the other side of the foundations the digging will have to be done by spading the soil.”

“It’ll be a long job,” the Pasha observed.

“He says it’s the only way to proceed without giving ourselves away.”

“How many days?” the Pasha asked laconically.

“Twelve,” the architect replied.

He filled out the picture by showing in which of the citadel’s dungeons the tunnel would exit, and how dozens of soldiers could spill forth from it in a short space of time. They would have to be able to defend the tunnel mouth until hundreds of others had come through behind them, even if the besieged were to discover the tunnel in extremis and raise the alarm.

The Pasha walked back towards the entrance with his escort behind him. It was already dusk when they emerged. The Pasha had a dreamy look in his eye as he crossed the camp to go back to his pavilion. Officers and men stood still with their eyes fixed as he went past. He went out and about in the camp only on rare occasions, and most of the men, including some officers, had not had a chance of setting eyes on him before.

The image of the dust-filled cavern was still in his mind when he got back to his tent. The world truly was like a building with three floors. Men on earth lived on the middle floor, mistakenly believing they had knowledge of things or even some power over them. In fact all was decided on the upper storey, in heaven, whereas secrets lay in misery beneath the ground. Like the dead … All the same he didn’t cease hoping vaguely that the dead would help them dig their tunnel right into the entrails of the citadel.

Once inside his tent he sat on the divan and skimmed through the day’s reports, which were of many different kinds. The Secret Service Agha’s daily report came along with a statement from a patrol about a squabble between two sanxhakbeys that had broken out the day before. Others dealt with matters of lesser importance: there was a request from the kadi to sentence to death two quartermasters who had sequestered the pay of dead soldiers (he couldn’t be bothered to read it all through, but satisfied himself by noting that the document was signed at the bottom by the Quartermaster General); four sentences for disobeying superiors; and other less severe punishments of soldiers and officers in the various different corps requested by the head of the camp on various grounds, mostly fist-fights and unruly behaviour. He hastily initialled the sentences but added in the margin, “Send below”. As he scrawled those words, which meant “to the tunnel,” he felt the well-known sensation of the powerful of the earth who can cast another man into the abyss. The idea that his own fate was also in the hands of another did not hold him back, but, on the contrary, put fresh energy into his view. He had long known that the world is but a pyramid of power, and the loser would always be the man who gives up the exercise of his own power before the other.