Ismail Kadare - The Siege

“What about you, Kara-Mukbil?” Tursun Pasha asked. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know yet,” he said. He cast his sad eyes around the assembly, trying to uncover the real reasons behind what was going on. The switching of roles frightened him more than the walls of the fortress.

“What if we tried our luck one more time with the aqueduct?” Old Tavxha asked.

They could hardly believe their ears. Nobody could have dreamed that the fearsome Agha of the Janissary Corps, a man who seemed to have been born for fire and blood, would start talking about pipes and water supplies. He realised that he alone could now bridge the abyss of silence that his words had created. He slowly rubbed his forehead with his stumpy, gnarled fist.

“Many years ago,” he went on, “at the siege of Hapsan-Kala, we found the aqueduct by a most curious means. We didn’t use any of that paperwork or those accursed drawings. We found the water with a horse.”

“What was that?” the Alaybey asked.

“An aged sipahi showed us how to do it,” Tavxha resumed. “It’s very simple. We fed a horse very well for four days but didn’t give it anything to drink. Then we let it roam free around the citadel. A really thirsty animal can find the trace of water in even the driest ground. Believe you me, a thirsty horse is more reliable than any architect!”

The Mufti and the sanxhakbeys burst out laughing. Tursun Pasha waved his hand to bring the council to order.

“So that’s how we found the aqueduct at Hapsan-Kala,” Tavxha concluded. “Why not do the same thing here?”

They began to discuss the idea. To begin with they were far from sure, but came to take it more and more seriously as the discussion proceeded.

“Every akinxhi knows from his own experience that a horse can find a hidden spring, especially if the animal is thirsty,” Kurdisxhi declared. “But can it locate a water pipe? I’ve never heard tell of such a thing.”

“There were thousands of us at Hapsan-Kala who saw it happen!” Tavxha exclaimed angrily.

Kurdisxhi stuck to his guns.

“However many you were, I’m still sceptical.”

The Alaybey raised his voice to ask the architect if an aqueduct could at any point in its passage under the ground give off enough dampness to alert the nostrils of a thirsty horse. The architect replied that he had never dealt with horses in his life and knew nothing about their physiology, but as far as pipes were concerned, the amount of humidity they could leak depended on what they were made of. He explained that if the watercourse was made of sandstone, as was customary for aqueducts, then it could indeed seep, but that if it was a pipe made of lead, then obviously minor leakage was ruled out.

They talked about nothing else until the end of the meeting. When the council broke up, night had fallen. They came out of the tent one by one and went off in groups of two or three in different directions, except for the architect who, as was his habit, walked back to his tent on his own, with his bodyguard trailing him like a shadow.

A few paces away, a very tall man stood watching them emerge from the Pasha’s tent. It was Sirri Selim.

For three days now they have been busy with a task that appears incomprehensible. Under the burning sun, thousands of shirtless soldiers are raising a high fence all around the citadel. We cannot imagine what use such a fence may have .

They have stopped all the other works in progress. They are no longer building their wheel-mounted towers, or their three-pronged pyramid ladders, and they do not seem to be looking for the aqueduct either. For the time being they are slaving away at their fence .

We have been racking our brains for two days trying to work out the deeper reason for what looks like a whim. Are they worried about our messengers streaking off somewhere in the dark? Are they trying to forestall a surprise attack from our side? But there are so many gaps in the fence that it wouldn’t seriously impede our messengers, or an attack. So what does it mean? Is it something superstitious, along the lines of the curses and spells we have so much trouble understanding? Or is it just to make fun of us? The fence actually looks quite like a sheep pen. They may want us to think that as we are shut in like sheep, so we shall die, like lambs to the slaughter, and so on .

For some while now we have become very suspicious, even of each other. Our priests urge us to avoid sin and remind us of sackcloth and ashes, but to no avail. People fly off the handle for nothing and lose their tempers at the slightest pretext. Yesterday, our commander Count Vrana — Vranakonti, as we call him — had the Prela brothers thrown in jail for disobedience. It began quite stupidly. Gjon Prela was claiming that the sun had always been against us, and maybe that was why all the songs of the region begin, “The sun shines brightly but gives no warmth,” when someone butted in, saying, “So maybe you prefer the Ottoman moon?” and from one riposte to another the swords came out .

In fact there are many here who do think that fate is against us .

In spite of the heat of the midday sun, throngs of curious soldiers wandered up to the great fence around noon. It had been put up so speedily that many of them had not yet had occasion to see it. The first sight disappointed them. It was just an ordinary fence, barely higher or sturdier than a garden gate. Nonetheless, they were expecting to witness a great spectacle. Even if the fence itself was nothing special, what was about to happen on the other side, in the no-man’s-land that lay between fence and fortress, was going to be out of the ordinary. Rumours galore had been doing the rounds for the previous couple of days, and had reached their peak that morning. There were forecasts in abundance, but solid information was unobtainable. Some men said it was all to do with the hunt for the water pipe, but they were unable to explain the connection between a fence and a buried watercourse. Others maintained that the citadel was going to be struck with a spell, and prayers and holy water sprinkled on the fence would limit its effect to the closed-off area. Yet others offered different explanations based on the songs and legends of their homeland or of the places where they had done long service.

But when they saw a squad of senior officers come from the main camp and then a detachment of desert warriors followed by the commander-in-chief’s personal guard, and when finally the Pasha himself came and took up his position on the little podium from which he had observed the initial assault, everybody was convinced that something exceptional was about to happen. Lined up behind the Pasha, in order of precedence, stood the Alaybey, Old Tavxha, the Mufti, the Quartermaster General, Saruxha, Kurdisxhi, Kara-Mukbil, the architect, Tahanka and the other members of the war council. Some way behind them stood the sanxhakbeys, the captains of the death squads and of the dalkiliç , the imams, the chef-de-camp, the head of intelligence, the chief kadi, Sirri Selim, the astrologer, the new commander of the sappers, Saruxha’s assistant, the head gunner, the drum major, the first dream-interpreter, the keeper of the seals, and so forth. Still further back stood an even denser mixed group in which you could make out scribes, doctors, hoxhas, sipahi s, technicians and officers of various ranks. Çelebi was among the latter set. He stretched out his neck towards the group in which Sirri Selim was located, and wondered if he would be better advised to go over and join him, or if such a gesture on his part would be taken amiss. He was wary of the jealousy of officials. The thought of such pettiness had often spoiled the pleasure he took in his walks with the Quartermaster General and with Saruxha. That was why in the end he decided not to budge from where he was standing.