Ismail Kadare - The Siege

The cannon again thundered in turn and after the last detonation the Quartermaster again turned to Sirri Selim and said, “That was gun number three.”

“I recognised the noise myself this time,” the doctor said, staring at a place on the parapet where a bunch of dervishes was fighting hand to hand with the enemy.

“He’s aiming lower every time,” the Quartermaster observed.

“So he is,” Sirri Selim agreed, still staring at the dervishes.

In the vacant area between the camp and the assault troops, the messengers galloping back and forth seemed ever more sparse. Convoys of stretchers bearing the wounded dashed back from the foot of the castle wall. A small detachment of soldiers with drums set off from the camp side to replace the front ranks who had been pierced and torn by arrows and were now silent or else groaning more or less mortally depending on the gravity of their wounds.

“They’ve got one! They’ve got one!” Sirri Selim exclaimed softly as he narrowed his eyes to see better what was going on in the distance.

The Quartermaster General looked in the same direction.

“Ah, my eyes deceived me!” the doctor said a little later.

But again he shouted out, with a wild look in his eyes, “There he comes! There he comes!” but he was wrong once again. Finally, a dervish really did appear on the top of the wall with a body over his shoulder. With feline agility, the dervish grasped the top of a ladder and without dropping his load began to climb down. He must surely have been shouting out that he was carrying a prisoner on orders from the Pasha, because the janissaries on their way up swung to the side to let him pass. The ladder was burning in two or three places and azabs had already brought up another one to replace it, but the dervish managed to reach the ground just before it collapsed. He was lost to sight for several minutes, then re-emerged among the crowd of soldiers, with the prisoner still on his back.

“Here he comes! He’s coming over!” Sirri Selim shouted out loud.

The Pasha and his deputies turned to look where the doctor was pointing. The dervish was running towards them, despite having a man on his back, and raising a cloud of dust beneath his bare feet. His swarthy face dripping with sweat came into view. His chest was heaving as he greedily sucked in the scorching air. Blood dripping from his neck streaked his naked torso, but there was no way of telling whether it was his own blood or the blood of the anonymous corpse he was carrying. The foreigner’s fair-haired head lolled about on the dervish’s iron shoulder.

“Put him down!” Sirri Selim ordered, sounding fierce all of a sudden. His long neck and face had turned purple.

In a final heave, the dervish raised the prisoner over his shoulder, bent forwards and dumped him on the ground. Sirri Selim kneeled over the body and rapidly examined his chest, his face, his mouth and his eyes.

“He is still alive!” he exclaimed.

“Alive?”

“Yes, but almost dead.”

He opened the prisoner’s mouth and looked at his tongue.

“Is he thirsty?” the Pasha asked.

“Yes, he is, sire, but now we’re going to see just how thirsty.”

Sirri Selim reached into his pocket, took out his paring knives, leaned over the body and set to work. Some of those present looked away. Most of them had witnessed great slaughters, yet they went pale at the sight of what the medic was now doing. For the first time they learned that the progressive, slow mutilation of a body can be a hundred times more affecting than the sudden impact of a lance or sword. Sirri Selim worked for many minutes on the naked corpse. When he stood up, his hands and forearms were spattered with blood. Holding them wide apart so as not to stain his tunic, he went up to the Pasha.

“They are fairly desiccated — dehydrated, as my colleagues say — but they are still drinking a little water,” he said.

The exhausted Pasha blinked and took a deep breath. Then he waved his hand, and the body was taken away. The panting dervish was still standing around.

“Reward this man,” the Pasha said, and then, with weary eyes, tried to get a view of the entire length of the walls where the assault was in progress. The overall picture had not altered. There was still unceasing and chaotic movement, hundreds of ladders, some with soldiers on them, some abandoned, others burned to a cinder, and still the same yellow dust whirling and whirling around and falling back on to sweat-drenched, cut and wounded bodies. The sun was beginning to decline but the heat remained merciless. The Pasha’s eyes clouded over from fatigue. Every now and again he almost fell asleep, and only the roar of the guns brought him back to himself.

A messenger galloped up.

“Uç Tunxhkurt has been killed!” he announced curtly.

The Pasha turned his head towards the East Tower, where the eshkinxhi s were massed. The troops looked as if they were moving clumsily, as in a dream, but the Pasha was well aware what was really going on over there and how much effort and determination lay beneath their apparent lethargy.

To reassure himself he took his eyes off the eshkinxhis and looked lower down towards the foot of the ramparts, where waves of azabs led by Kara-Mukbil were still bearing the brunt of the assault. He had once commanded that unit himself, and he knew what it meant to be on what he called the underfloor of an attack. To be forever pulling back burning ladders and raising new ones, often to fall off them and never rise again, to be shot by a stray arrow, to be hit by pitch or sulphur, and, last and worst of all, to get trampled by your own side, by akinxhis , janissaries, dalkiliç , death squadrons, and not only have no right to complain about it, but to be obliged to look on with admiration at those who were climbing up to glory while remaining down below, the lowliest of the low, to die a death which like the life you had led would ever be unknown …

Old Tavxha had moved his janissaries several paces back from the empty space previously occupied by the main door and which strangely seemed even more fearsome now. Crouching under the cover of screens, many of which were now alight, his men were waiting for the order to charge into the courtyard, towards the inner gate.

On the parapets the eshkinxhi s were furiously struggling to gain possession of the rampart walk, but had not yet succeeded. There were still not very many who had got up over the parapet. Most of them got knocked off the ladders on their way up, and those who managed to find a fingerhold in the stonework at the top were savagely beaten, but they hung on, until, as they finally had to loosen their grip, they pulled a dead or wounded defender down with them into the abyss. It was too soon for the dalkiliç to come into the fray, and by the same token much too soon for the army’s true elite, the serden geçti , or soldiers of death.

As if to remind survivors of the existence of a higher plane where the blows struck were closer to those of the Lord, the cannon began to roar in sequence.

A cloud of dust burst from a breach made in the inner door.

“Saruxha’s going to try to use his cannon-balls to smash down the whole doorway,” the Quartermaster said to Sirri Selim.

The doctor said nothing. He seemed to be deep in thought.

“He’ll have a hard time doing that,” a one-armed sanxhakbey muttered.

“It’s hard to do, surely, but our gunners will pull it off splendidly,” the Quartermaster replied. “They have a new kind of cannon, which they are using for the first time.”

The sanxhakbey shook his head dubiously.

“There’s nothing more tricky,” he objected. “They have to aim very low, and that’s dangerous.”