Ismail Kadare - The Siege

All bowed low as they left the tent.

The great muster drum had stopped. One of the commander-in-chief’s orderlies had brought him his white horse and was holding it by the bridle.

Meanwhile all the units had assembled. The great plain was covered with men, further than the eye could see. Never before had this army assembled such a huge number of soldiers for an attack. The hot wind that made the innumerable standards flutter and wave seemed intent on registering all the images that their emblems ever inspired in poets and chroniclers.

The Pasha came out of his tent. He raised his head. Low, pregnant clouds hovered uncertainly in the sky. He mounted, and with his orderlies and his aides-de-camp beside him, rode to the vantage point from which he usually observed the battles. A few moments later, he followed his custom of raising his right hand, the hand on which he wore his ring, and this gave the signal to start the attack. The air filled immediately with the sound of a thousand drums. With his weary, indifferent eyes he followed the first wave of volunteers as they went up to the wall, then the successive waves of azabs . It all went on in the ordinary way except that the battalions surging forwards were more numerous than before. The units reached the foot of the ramparts, and from their midst rose hundreds of ladders, like long wooden arms slowly falling (as in a dream, so it seemed) to lean against the walls. Then an impetuous flood of eshkinxhis overran the hacked and harried azabs in their rush towards the embankment. It was all proceeding as in previous assaults, and the thought that this was but a repetition plunged the Pasha into a mood of depression. He gave an order, then another. Then a third. The officer who had transmitted the first order came back. Then the second one returned. The third officer, on his return, looked very glum.

Over there beneath the wall, men could feel Death itself moving among them. The shiver that swept through the body of troops was a sure sign of the first blow of the reaper’s scythe. Then the men grew more hardened. The army’s reactions slowed down and became sluggish even as ever harsher blows fell upon it.

The Pasha understood all this, just as he instinctively respected the natural order of things and their necessary sequence.

The janissary units began to move, with their customarily grim faces and a whole firmament of stars and crescents waving above their heads. But hadn’t he sent them forward too soon?

He shook his head from side to side as if trying to dispel something that seemed like a fit of drowsiness. Everything was taking place at the proper pace, but in his mind a certain number of fixed points emerged which allowed him to measure the acceleration of time.

He was almost astonished to watch the elite dalkiliç troops surge forwards, as if it had not been by his own order that they were moving up to the front line of the assault.

He rubbed his forehead and nearly shouted out aloud, “There’s no need to hurry!” This impression of haste was prompted by a kind of sleepiness hovering in the air.

The death squad … They were still there in his mind, which was the starting point for everything. The squad, or rather, its anthem: “We are the grooms who wed Death!” That day he felt as he had never felt before how closely his own destiny resembled theirs. We have signed a pact with death, he said over to himself as he shouted aloud:

“The soldiers of death!”

After them, there was nothing left to throw into the fray, save the dome of the temple — in other words, himself.

He motioned to his orderly to hand him his breast-plate and his yatagan, then he lowered the visor of his helmet and cantered towards the rampart, followed by his aides-de-camp and a detachment of Moroccan desert warriors.

Every stride of his horse shortened the distance between him and the wall. He felt no fear. He just had a dry and sour taste in his mouth.

The wall came nearer. The nearer it came the higher it seemed to be, and the breaches looked ever more frightening. The battlements above, like the bared fangs of a monster, had begun crushing bodies. Between those implacable teeth his own bloody fate still struggled, and on them it hung.

The citadel came closer. It was the first time he had seen it so close up. Its shrouds of black pitch fluttered before his eyes. They covered whole stretches of wall and great lumps of stone, but they could not veil the entire body of the keep. Last spring, during the long march towards it, he had seen the castle in his dreams. It had come to him as a woman, maybe because the writers of ancient chronicles of war often tried to make their glorious captains’ thirst for conquest more convincing by depicting citadels in terms and images usually reserved for women. So the keep had come to him as a difficult woman. He embraced it, sweating from head to toe, but still she refused to yield to him. Her walls, towers, gates, limbs and eyes obsessed him, but they slipped through his fingers and got him in their grip in the end, so as to strangle him. Oddly, her sexual organ was not the main way in, as might have been expected, but was somewhere lower down, and probably in the beyond.

The huzzahs of tens of thousands of fighters hailing his arrival at the foot of the ramparts jerked him out of his torpor. Surrounded by his guards and the detachment of Moroccans, he joined the assault force. The wall was now close by. Sinister black drapes of congealed pitch swung around his head. Hundreds of janissaries, sipahi s, azabs , volunteers, eshkinxhis, dalkiliç and müslümans were scrambling up flaming ladders.

“Hurrah!” the Pasha cried out. “Forward!”

Nobody could hear him, but all saw him wave his hand, and from the foot of a hundred ladders soldiers fought each other to be the first to reach the top of the wall. They knew they were climbing the first rungs of their careers on these bloodied and already half-burned ladders. Upwards lay the path to promotion, wealth and a harem.

The Pasha felt the intoxication of battle. The drums, the banners, the smell of burning oil and hot pitch, the flaming ladders, the clouds of dust, the huzzahs, all this smoky, bloody riot enveloped him and went to his head like a strong drink. He rode along the wall with his escort of guards and aides-de-camp. Apparently the defenders recognised him, because they started aiming arrows and balls of flaming cloth at him, which fell all around with a piercing whistle. His guards put themselves at risk by forming a screen around him with their shields. One of the aides-de-camp riding close by him had a bloody neckband that grew steadily thicker. The commander-in-chief carried on galloping amid cries of “Long live the Pasha!” and invocations of the Prophet and the Padishah. Now and again he heard his soldiers shouting out the battle-cry of “Rome! Rome!” In a flash Giaour’s new posting came back into his mind, or rather, the associated rumour that said that if he was victorious here, then he, Tursun Pasha, would be given the task of taking Constantinople.

“Onwards!” he yelled once more. “Victory!”

There was an ever more frantic crush of soldiers at the foot of the ladders trying to get to the top of the wall. Looking up at the men climbing you sometimes saw shields, yatagans and occasionally human limbs fly up in the air and then fall to the ground, all apparently discarded by the attackers so as to lighten their load.

Suddenly the wall began to wobble, the towers slid terrifyingly over his head, the funereal drapes of congealed pitch with their bloody fringes flapped in a strong gust of wind and seemed about to engulf him. He fell. The sky went black. The guards formed a roof of shields over him.