The Ghost Rider (14 page)

“Doruntine,” he said, “was in fact brought back by Kostandin.”

Stres stiffened, expecting some sound – laughter, jeers, shouts, an uproar of some kind, even a challenging cry: “But for two months you’ve been trying to convince us of the contrary!” Nothing of the kind came from the crowd.

“Yes, Doruntine was brought back by Kostandin,” he repeated as if he feared that he had been misunderstood. But people’s stupefaction was evidence enough that his words had reached them. He thought that their silence was perhaps excessive, as it can be in response to fear.

“Just as I promised you, noble sirs, and you, honoured guests, I will explain everything. All I ask is that you have the patience to hear me out.”

At that moment Stres’s only concern was to keep his mind clear. For the time being he asked for nothing more.

“You have all heard,” he began, “some of you before setting out for this gathering, others on your way here or upon your arrival, of the strange marriage of Doruntine Vranaj, the marriage that lies at the root of this whole affair. You are all aware, I imagine, that this far-off marriage,
the first to be consummated with a man from so distant a country, would never have taken place if Kostandin, one of the bride’s brothers, had not given his mother his word that he would bring Doruntine back to her whenever she desired her daughter’s presence, on occasions of joy or sorrow. You also know that not long after the wedding the Vranaj, like all of Albania, were stricken with unspeakable grief. Yet no one brought Doruntine back, for he who had promised to do so was dead. You are aware of the curse the Lady Mother uttered against her son for his violation of the
besa
, and you know that three weeks after that curse was spoken, Doruntine at last appeared at the family home. That is why I now affirm, and reaffirm, that it was none other than her brother Kostandin, in accordance with his oath, his
besa
, who brought Doruntine back. There is no other explanation for that journey, nor could there be. It matters little whether or not Kostandin returned from the grave to accomplish his mission, just as it matters little who was the horseman who set out on that dark night or what horse he saddled, whose hands held the reins, whose feet pressed against the stirrups, whose hair was matted with the highway dust. Each of us has a part in that journey, for it is here among us that Kostandin’s
besa
germinated, and that is what brought Doruntine back. Therefore, to be more exact I would have to say that it was all of us – you, me, our dead lying there in the graveyard close by the church – who, through Kostandin, brought Doruntine back.”

Stres swallowed.

“Aha!” the archbishop thundered from his seat, “at last you confess to your own part in this abomination!”

“All our parts …” Stres said, as he tried to make his meaning clear, but the archbishop’s voice overrode his own.

“Speak for yourself!” the prelate yelled. “And by the way, I would really like to know where you were between 30 September and 11 October. Where were you, exactly?”

Stres kept his composure but his face had turned as white as a sheet.

“Answer, Captain!” someone shouted.

“All right, I’ll tell you,” Stres responded. “During the period alluded to I was on a secret mission.”

“Aha! More mysteries!” the archbishop screamed. “So be it! But so we may know the truth of the matter, we would like you to tell us what the mission consisted of.”

“It was the kind of job that even we officers seek to forget once it is done. I have nothing to add.”

This time the rumbling of the crowd that echoed from the walls took longer to abate. Stres took a deep breath.

“Noble sirs, I have not yet finished. I would like to tell you – and most of all to tell our guests from distant lands – just what this sublime power is that is capable of bending the laws of death.”

Stres paused again. His throat felt dry and he found it hard to form his words. But he kept speaking just the same. He spoke of the
besa
, of its spread among the Albanians. As he spoke he saw someone in the crowd coming towards him, holding what seemed to be a heavy object, perhaps a stone. They’re already coming, he thought, and with his elbow he touched the pommel of his sword beneath his cloak. But as the man drew nearer, Stres saw that it was one of the Radhen boys, and that he carried not a stone to strike him with, but a small pitcher.

Stres smiled, took the pitcher and drank.

“And now,” he went on, “let me try to explain why this new moral law was born and is now spreading among us. The question is this: in these new conditions of the worsening of the general atmosphere in the world, in this time of crime and hateful treachery that could be called
unbelief
, who should the Albanian be? What face shall he show the world? Shall he espouse evil or stand against it? Shall he disfigure himself, changing his features to suit the masks of the age, seeking thus to assure his survival, or shall he keep his countenance unchanged … I am a servant of the state and have little interest in the personal aspects of Kostandin’s journey, if in fact there are any. Each of us, commoners and lords alike, be we Caesar or Christ, is the shroud of unfathomable mysteries. But, functionary that I am, I have spoken of the general point, the one that concerns Albania. Albania’s time of trial is near, the hour of choice between these two faces. And if the people of Albania, deep within themselves, have begun to fashion institutions as sublime as the
besa
, that shows us that Albania is making the right choice. Albania aims to keep its eternal image. That’s the main thing, to my mind. She will keep her face not by retreating from the world like a wild animal at bay, but by joining the world. It was to carry that message to Albania and to the world beyond that Kostandin rose from his grave.”

Once more Stres’s glance embraced the numberless crowd that stretched before him, then the stands to his right and left. He thought he saw the gleam of tears here and there. But the people’s eyes were, in fact, empty.

“But it is not easy to accept this message,” he went
on. “It will require great sacrifices by successive generations. Its burden will be heavier than the cross of Christ. And now that I have come to the end of what I had to tell you” – and here Stres turned to the stands where the envoys of the prince were seated – “I would like to add that, since my words are at variance with my duties, or at least are at variance with them
for the moment
, I now resign my post.”

He raised his right hand to the white antler insignia sewn on the left side of his cloak and, pulling sharply, ripped it off and let it fall to the ground.

Without another word he descended the wooden stairway and, his head held high, walked through the crowd, which parted at his passing with a mixture of respect and dread.

From that day forward, Stres was never seen again. No one, neither his deputies nor his family, not even his wife, knew where he was – or at least no one would say.

At the Old Monastery the wooden grandstands and platform were dismantled, porters carried off the planks and beams, and in the inner courtyard there was no longer any trace of the assembly. But no one forgot a word that Stres had spoken there. His words passed from mouth to mouth, from village to village, with unbelievable speed. The rumour that Stres had been arrested in the wake of his speech soon proved unfounded. It was said that he had been seen somewhere, or at least that someone had heard the trot of his horse. Others insisted they had caught a glimpse of him on the northern highway. They were sure they had recognised him, despite the dusk and the first layer
of dust that covered his hair. Who can say? people mused, who can say? How much, O Lord, must our poor minds take in! And then someone said, his voice trembling as if shivering with cold:

“Sometimes I wonder if he didn’t bring Doruntine back himself.”

“How dare you say such a thing?”

“What would be so surprising?” the man answered. “As for myself, I have not been surprised by anything since the day she returned.”

As was only to be expected, the old dispute over local versus foreign marriages arose once again. Proponents of local marriages now seemed likely to prevail, but the other faction proved obstinate. Each side had its own explanation of the dead man’s ride. The distant marriage faction emphasised respect of the besa and obviously saw Kostandin as its standard bearer. The other side treated his journey as an act of repentance, in other words as a resurrection intended to make good a fault. A third group, who saw in the man’s long ride an attempt to reconcile opposites – distance and proximity – that had torn him apart as much as his incestuous yearnings, was much less prominent.

With the idea of local marriage constantly gaining ground, the sad story of Maria Matrenga was quoted more and more often, despite the fact that, like some predestined counterweight, Palok the Idiot wandered around the village alleyways ever more visibly.

When the poor yokel was found dead one fine morning, people’s initial distress was quickly replaced by an understanding that his murderers would never be identified. The incident was accounted for, as many are,
in two different ways. Supporters of distant marriages maintained that Palok had been slaughtered by his own kin, that is to say by defenders of local unions, so as to remove from the street this visible evidence that did their cause harm every day of the week. But their adversaries obstinately insisted that the killing had been done by the supporters of exogamy, so as to show that even though their ideals were on the wane, they were still prepared to defend them, even by spilling blood.

All the same, despite this new bone of contention, things proceeded as they always do when a simpleton is killed, for unlike cases where dogs are put down, they often lead to reconciliation. Tension between the two factions went into sharp decline.

While time now seemed to be on the side of local marriages, an event took place which could have seemed ordinary in any other season, but was not at all normal in mid-winter. A young woman of the village married and left to join her husband in some far-off place. Everyone was shocked to hear talk of a new Doruntine at such a time of year. People thought that after the uproar over all that had taken place in the village, the bride’s family would break the engagement or at least put off the wedding for a while. But the ceremony took place on the appointed day, the groom’s relatives came over from their country, which some people said was six days away, while others said eight. After they had done with all their feasting and drinking and singing of songs, they took the young woman away with them. Almost the entire village walked with them from the church, as they had done years before with sorry Doruntine, and seeing the bride looking so beautiful,
almost wraith-like in her white veil, many must have wondered whether on some moonless night some ghost might not go and bring her back home again. But the bride, for her part, astride her white horse, showed not the slightest sign of worry about her fate. People watching her leave nodded their heads, saying, “Good Lord, maybe young brides nowadays like that sort of thing, maybe they like riding at night, hanging on to a shadow, through the dark and the void …”

Tirana, October 1979

The following pages contain an extract from
The Siege
, one of Ismail Kadare’s masterpieces, an unforgettable account of the clash of two civilisations and a timeless depiction of individual pain, uncertainty and fear that resonates today.

It is the early fifteenth century and as winter falls away, the people of Albania know that their fate is sealed. They have refused to negotiate with the Ottoman Empire, and war is now inevitable.

The Siege
tells the enthralling story of the weeks and months that follow – of the exhilaration and despair of the battlefield, the constantly shifting strategies of war, and those whose lives are held in the balance. For those trapped inside the citadel, and for the Pasha, technicians, artillerymen, astrologer, blind poet and his harem of women outside, the siege is inescapable and increasingly oppressive. From this dramatic setting Kadare has created a profound novel that is as moving as it is compelling.

“A brilliant historical novel by one of the world’s greatest living writers.”

Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of
Young Stalin

“Brilliant … A candidly prophetic novel of our age.”

Irish Times

“Great books, books that last, are shape-shifting books.
The Siege
is about what it is about – a siege in the fifteenth century. It is also a universal evocation of human violence.”

Sunday Times

£7.99

ISBN 978 1 84767 122 6

As winter fell away and the Sultan’s envoys departed, we realised
that war was our ineluctable fate. They had pressured us in every
way to accept being vassals of the Sultan. First they used flattery,
promising us a part in governing their vast empire. Then they
accused us of being renegades in the pay of the Frankish knights,
that is to say, slaves of Europe. Finally, as was to be expected,
they made threats
.

You seem mighty sure of your fortresses, they said to us,
but even if they are as sturdy as you think, we’ll throttle you
with an altogether more fearsome iron band – hunger and thirst.
At each season of harvest and threshing, the only seeded field
you’ll see will be the sky, and your only sickle the moon
.

And then they left. All through March their couriers
galloped as fast as the wind bearing messages to the Sultan’s
Balkan vassals, telling them either to persuade us to give in,
or else to cut off all relations with us. As was to be expected,
all were obliged to take the latter course
.

We were alone and knew that sooner or later they would
come. Many times in the past we had faced attacks from our
enemies, but lying in wait of the mightiest army the world had
ever known was a different matter. Our own minds were perpetually
abuzz, but our prince, George Castrioti, was preoccupied
beyond easy imagining. The inland castles and coastal keeps were
ordered to repair their watchtowers and above all to build up
stocks of arms and supplies. We did not yet know from which
direction they would come, but in early June we heard that they
had begun to march along the old Roman road, the Via Egnatia,
so they were heading straight towards us
.

One week later, as fate decreed that our castle would be
the first defence against the invasion, the icon of the Virgin
from the great church at Shkodër was brought to us. A hundred
years before it had given the defenders of Durrës the strength to
repulse the Normans. We all gave thanks to Our Immaculate
Lady and felt calmer and stronger for it
.

Their army moved slowly. It crossed our border in mid-
June. Two days later George Castrioti came with Count Musaka
to inspect the garrison one last time, and to give it his blessing.
After issuing final instructions, he left the castle on Sunday
afternoon, followed by his escort and the officers’ womenfolk
and children, so as to place them in safety in the mountains
.

We walked alongside them for a while without speaking.
Then we made our adieus with much feeling and went back
into the keep. From look-outs on our towers we watched them
climb up to the Plain of the Cross, then we saw them re-emerge
on the Evil Slope and finally disappear into the Windy Ravine.
Then we closed the heavy outer doors, and the fortress seemed
to have gone mute now that we could no longer hear the voices
of our youngsters inside it. We also battened down the inner
sets of doors and let silence reign over us
.

On June 18, at daybreak, we heard the tolling of the bell.
The sentinel on the East Tower announced that a yellowish
cloud could be seen in the far distance. It was the dust kicked
up by their horses
.

The first Turkish troops came beneath the walls of the fortress on June 18. They spent the day pitching camp. By evening the entire army had still not arrived. New units kept on coming in. A thick layer of dust lay on men, shields, flags and drums, horses and wagons, and on the camels laden with bronze and heavy equipment. As soon as each marching group came on to the plain that lay before the garrison, officers from a special battalion would allocate a specific camping site, and the weary soldiers, under orders from their leaders, would busy themselves with setting up the tents before collapsing inside them, half-dead from fatigue.

Ugurlu Tursun Pasha, the commander-in-chief, stood alone outside his pink pavilion. He was watching the sun set. The huge camp throbbed with the noise of horseshoes and a thousand voices, and with its long lines of tents, it looked to him like a giant octopus which would stretch out one tentacle after another and slowly but surely encircle and suffocate the castle. The nearest tents were less than
a hundred paces from the ramparts, the furthest were beyond the horizon. The Pasha’s lieutenants had insisted his pavilion be placed at least a thousand paces from the castle walls. But he had refused to be so far away. Some years earlier, when he had been still a young man and of less elevated rank, he had often slept less than fifty paces from the ramparts, almost at the foot of the besieged citadel. Later on, however, in successive wars and sieges, as he rose in rank, the colour of his tent and its distance from the walls had changed in tandem. It was now pitched at a distance slightly more than half of what his lieutenants recommended, that is, at six hundred paces. That was a lot less than a thousand, all the same.

The Pasha sighed. He often did that when he took up quarters before a fortress that had to be taken. It was a reflex prompted by the first impression, always the deepest, before he became accustomed to the situation – it was rather like getting used to a woman. Each of his apprehensions began the same way, and they always also ended with another sigh, a sigh of relief, when he cast his last glance at a vanquished fortress, waiting, like a small and dusky widow, for the order for restoration, or for final demolition.

On this occasion, the citadel that soared up before him looked particularly gloomy, like most of the fortresses of the Christians. There was something odd, or even sinister, in the shape and lay-out of its towers. He had had that same impression two months earlier, when the surveyors responsible for planning the campaign had brought him drawings of the structure. He had spread out the charts on his knees many times, for hours on end, after
dinner, when everyone else in his great house at Bursa was sleeping. He knew every detail of the lay-out by heart, and yet, now that he was at last seeing it with his own eyes, it aroused in him a sense of foreboding.

He glanced up at the cross on the top of the citadel’s church. Then at the fearsome banner, the two-headed black eagle whose outline he could barely make out. The vertical drop beneath the East Tower, the wasteland around the gallows, the crenellated keep, all these other sights gradually grew dark. He raised his eyes to take another look at the cross, which seemed to him to give off an eerie glow.

The moon had not yet risen. It struck him as rather odd that the Christians, having seen Islam take possession of the moon, had not promptly made their own emblem the sun, but had taken instead a mere instrument of torture, the cross. Apparently they weren’t as clever as people claimed. But they had been even less bright in times when they believed in several gods.

The sky was now black. If everything was decided up on high, why did Allah put them through so many trials, why did he allow them to spill so much blood? To one camp He had given ramparts and iron doors to defend itself, and to the other, ladders and ropes to try to overcome them, and He was content just to be a spectator of the ensuing butchery.

But the Pasha didn’t rebel against fate and he turned around to look at his own camp. The plain was gradually being drowned in darkness and the myriad white tents appeared to hover above the ground like a bank of fog. He could see the different corps of the army laid out
according to the plan that had been agreed. From where he was standing, he could see the snow-white flags of the janissaries, and the copper cauldron they hung on top of a tall pole. The raiders, or
akinxhis
, were taking their horses to drink in the nearby stream. Further on lay the endless tents of the
azabs
, as the infantry units were called; beyond them were the tents of the
eshkinxhis
, the cavalry recruited for this campaign; then, further on still, the tents of the swordsmen known as
dalkiliç
, then the quarters of the
serden
geçti
, the soldiers of death, then the
müslüman
or Muslim troops, and the prettier abodes of the
sipahi
, the regular cavalry. Spread out behind them were the Kurdish units, then the Persians, the Tartars, the Caucasians and the Kalmyks, and, even further off, where the commander’s eye could no longer make out any clear shapes, there must have been the motley horde of the irregular volunteers, the exact number of whom was known to no man. Everything was gradually falling into order. A large part of the army was already sleeping. The only noise to be heard was the sound of quartermasters unloading supplies from the camel trains. Crates of bronze pieces, cauldrons, innumerable sacks bursting with victuals, gourds of oil and honey, fat cartons full of all kinds of equipment, iron bars, stakes, forks, hempen ropes with hooks on their ends, clubs, whetstones, bags of sulphur, and a whole array of metal tools he could not even name – all now came to rest in growing piles on the ground.

At the moment the army was swathed in darkness but at the crack of dawn it would shimmer like a Persian carpet as it spread itself out in all directions. Plumes, tents, manes, white and blue flags, and crescents – hundreds and
hundreds of brass, silver, and silk crescents – would burst into flower. The pageant of colour would make the citadel look even blacker beneath its symbolic instrument of torture, the cross. He had come to the end of the earth to topple that sign.

In the deepening silence the sound of the
azabs
at work on the ditches became more noticeable. He was well aware that many of his officers were cursing through their teeth and hoping that as he was himself half-dead from fatigue he would give the order to halt work on the drains. He clenched his jaw just as he had when he had first spoken about latrines at a meeting of the high command. An army, he said, before it was a marching horde, or a swathe of flags, or blood to be spilled, or a victory or a defeat – an army was in the first place an ocean of piss. They had listened to him open-mouthed as he explained that in many cases an army may begin to fail not on the field of battle, but in mundane details of unsuspected importance, details no one thought about, like stench and filth, for instance.

In his mind’s eye he saw the drains moving ever closer to the river, which would wake in the morning looking dull and yellow … In fact, that was how war really began, and not as the
hanums
in the capital – the ladies of high society – imagined it.

He almost laughed at the thought of those fine ladies, but oddly, a sense of nostalgia stopped him. It was the first time he’d noticed himself having feelings of that kind. He shook his head as if to make fun of his own plight. Yes, he really did miss the
hanums
of Bursa, but that was only part of it. What he missed was his distant homeland,
Anatolia. He had often thought of its peaceful, lazy plains during the long march through the Balkans. He had thought of it most of all when his army had entered the land of the Shqipetars and first seen its fearsome peaks. One morning before noon, when he was drowsing on horseback, he had heard the cry from all around: “
daglar,
daglar
”, but said in a special way, as if expressing fear. His officers raised their heads and looked to the left, then to the right, as if they were trying to get a better view. He too gazed at the mountains at length. He’d never seen any like them before. They reminded him of ghastly nightmares unrelieved by waking up. The ground and the rocks seemed to be scrambling madly towards the sky in mockery of the laws of nature. Allah must have been very angry when he created this land, he thought, and for the hundredth time since the start of the campaign he wondered if his leadership of the army had been won for him by his friends, or by his enemies.

In the course of the journey he had noticed that the mere sight of these mountains could make his officers agitated. They spoke more and more often of the plain they hoped to see before them as soon as possible. The army moved slowly, for now it hauled not only its arms and supplies, but also the heavy shadow of the Albanian mountains. The worst of it was that there was nothing he could do to be rid of it. His only resource was to summon the campaign chronicler and to ask him how he was going to describe the mountainous terrain. Trembling with fear, the chronicler had said that in order to portray the Albanian landscape he had assembled a series of terrifying epithets. But they hadn’t met with the Pasha’s approval,
and he ordered the scribbler to think again. Next morning, the historian appeared before him, his eyes bloodshot from the sleepless night he had spent, and read him out his new description. High mountains, he declaimed, that reached even higher than crows can fly; the devil himself could barely climb up them, the demon would rip his sandals on their rocks, and even hens had to have their claws shod with iron to scale them.

The Pasha had found these images pleasing. The march was now over, night had fallen, and he tried to recall the phrases used, but he was tired and his weary mind could think of nothing but rest. It had been the longest and most exhausting expedition of his soldiering life. The ancient road, which was impassable in several places and which his engineers had repaired as fast as they could, bore the strange name of Egnatia. It went back to Roman times, but seemed to go on for ever. Sometimes, in the narrow gorges, his troops had stayed stuck until sappers cut a detour. Then the road became passable once more, and his army resumed its slow and dusty advance, as it had on the first, third, fifth and eighth day prior. Even now, when it was all over, that thick and unpleasant layer of grey dust still hung over his memory.