Ismail Kadare - The Siege

“I would walk with you for a while,” Saruxha said, “but this evening I’ve still got a thousand things to do. Casting should begin around midnight.”

“Don’t apologise, and thank you,” the visitors replied almost in unison.

Meanwhile night had fallen and fires had been lit here and there around the camp. Beside one of them, somewhere out there in the dark, someone was singing a slow and sorrowful chant. Further off, two ragged dervishes were mumbling their prayers.

They walked on in silence. The chronicler thought how strange it was that men of such different kinds should all be serving the Padishah, brought together by war in this god-forsaken spot at the end of the world.

They could still hear chanting in the far distance, and could just about make out the refrain: “O Fate, O Fate …”

Dead calm. But the calm weighs heavily on us, as it always does in times that are pregnant with the unknown. Sometimes it seems to us that the army camped all around has nothing to do with us. You could easily imagine that our citadel and the Ottoman camp just happen to find themselves facing one another in the middle of the peneplain and that they will soon stop taunting each other. But we know it is too late already. Of the citadel and the army, one will be annihilated .

They are ready for the assault. From our position we can see them preparing their ladders, ropes, hooks, rams, pikes — in short, all the engines of war, from the most ancient to those that have been invented in the last three or four years .

Smoke rises day and night from their foundry. That is where they are casting the new weapon which is apparently going to be tried out on us for the first time. We told our men that a new device is never as terrible as feared, but it’s clear they’re shaken. At night our partisans send us messages of encouragement from beacons they light on the mountains. But in bad weather we can see neither the mountains nor the beacons, and we feel as if we are suspended over a black abyss .

Sometimes, when we are tired of spying on the camp, we keep our eyes fixed on the sky for hours on end. It seems that this prolonged concentration has induced barely credible visions in some among us. They insist they have seen the Good Fairy of Albania flitting through the clouds as well as other gods armed with spears and pitchforks or else holding the scales of Fate in their hands. Others claim they have also seen the Bad Fairy .

These hallucinations, no doubt caused by weariness and waiting, are perhaps distant reminiscences of the time when the Albanians, like all other peoples of the Balkan Peninsula, believed in a multiplicity of gods. Many of us are convinced that these divinities are not only gathered in the heavens above us, but will sway the outcome of battle, as they did in the past. They hope that the heavens which have been less clement to us, for who knows what reason, will look on us more kindly and take our side, as they did long ago. We shall hear the rumbling of the wheels of the celestial chariots and the rustling of their wings, so they say, and we no longer know whether the outcome of the fight and the fate of each of us will be fixed on this blackish earth or up on high, among the clouds .

The council met on Sunday afternoon. When the Pasha came into the pavilion, the functionaries were already present, seated in a semicircle on cushions laid against the sides of the tent. With sombre visage, without glancing at anyone, he strode to his seat.

The scribe dipped his quill in the inkpot and then held it in mid-air over the sheets of paper laid out before him. He shifted slightly to make himself more comfortable but as he did so, knocked his elbow, and a drop of black ink spilled on to the sheaf. He quickly wiped the blot with the cuff of his sleeve so no one would notice it, because a black spot could be interpreted as a bad omen intentionally put upon the paper by fate.

“I want your final views on the most auspicious moment for launching the assault. But before we make a decision on this matter, I want to tell you that, though I am touched by your shared concern for my personal safety,” pointing to Aslanhan Begbey and the Mufti of the army, “I definitely reject your proposal to provide me with a decoy, or body double, as they are called these days.”

He looked straight into the faces of the two men he had named, searching for the slightest trace of malice, but he was quickly persuaded that they had no ulterior motive and had come up with the idea of a double only because it was the fashion of the day.

The Pasha thought the two soldiers looked a little upset. I don’t think they are really worried about keeping me alive, he thought. But despite that, he had no reason to be cross. He had been an officer himself, and he knew that soldiers are perfectly happy to have doubles of their commander whom they can allow themselves to despise and even to insult under their breaths without taking too great a risk. What they wouldn’t think about was that by sneering at the commander-in-chief’s stand-in they would acquire a habit of disrespect. When, one day, the real commander appeared before them, he might get unexpected reactions … if not worse, he thought. Any old time they could claim that Tursun Pasha was his other … that’s to say, just a shadow … while his corpse, buried under two yards of earth …

The commander-in-chief massaged his forehead with the palm of his hand. He had slept badly, tossing and turning all night long, and now he had a migraine.

“Let’s get back to the attack,” he said sternly. “Speak!”

He did not like long meetings and made his distaste quite clear. He crossed his arms on his chest and waited. There was such silence that you could hear the scratching of the scribe’s quill as he wrote down the Pasha’s words.

Saruxha was the first to speak. Without any of the usual courtly preambles — council members were not accustomed to his informal manner — he declared:

“My cannon can be ready by tomorrow, but the mortars won’t be there until Tuesday. That’s the day when I’ll be able to set off the cannonade. I’ll need a full day to take down those walls.”

“Next!”

It was the Mufti’s turn. He had first consulted the astrologer on the position of the celestial bodies.

“Gazi Tursun Pasha!” he said with an obsequious bow of his head. “After listening to the dream-interpreter and the astrologer,” he went on, waving at the latter, who was squatting in the corner looking scared, “I am of the opinion that the attack should be launched tomorrow.”

“What an idiot!” the engineer muttered.

“Tomorrow, the position of the stars with respect to the moon will be particularly favourable,” the Mufti went on. “Whereas on Tuesday, it will turn unfavourable. In addition, Allah granted me a dream last night. I saw a moonlit scene in which a crocodile attacked a black ox and ate its heart. The black ox must represent the fortress, and, as you know, tomorrow the moon is full.”

“Dolt!” Saruxha muttered once again. The Quartermaster General had to tug on his sleeve.

“Next!” the Pasha said.

“I don’t understand,” the engineer butted in. “What does the Mufti really believe? That we’ll bombard the citadel before we attack it, or afterwards?”

The Quartermaster almost tore the engineer’s sleeve off.

The Mufti didn’t even bother to reply. He and Saruxha exchanged frankly hostile stares. The Pasha’s dark glance barely touched them before alighting on the Alaybey. He wanted his opinion as well. The Alaybey did not have a vote on the war council and his official position was subordinate to many of its formal members, but he was the Sultan’s special envoy and for that reason feared by all. He guessed that the Pasha wanted the dispute quashed, and he made a skilful contribution to the debate.