Authors: Wu Ming
Altai: A Novel (25 page)
Ismail opens his eyes, looks around in the candlelight. Instead of his legs and torso, he sees layers of cloth. His body has disappeared; a merchant must have bought it in exchange for these coarse wool blankets.
He doesn’t know what’s happening. A man’s dark face casts a shadow over his own.
Ismail lets himself drift back. Visions of angels, of djinns spilling from the earth in the form of distorted men and demons. Then his body returns, the empty skin filling like a sausage case being stuffed with mince, or as if someone were blowing into it. From his pelvis to his feet, his legs are constantly moving, his ribs opening and closing; his breathing is difficult; his limbs a willow’s shaken by a raging storm.
I’m thirsty!
This is his voice. It is not from within his prostrate body that he can hear it. But it is his, he recognizes it.
Seventy palms, twelve springs. It is here that the weary Israelites took courage.
“I’m thirsty!”
It is his mouth, the one that is shouting. He sees it in the fragment of mirror, the one he brought with him from Yemen so that he would recognize himself at the end of the journey. The mirror hangs in the air, then falls like a snowflake.
The oasis of Elim. The people of Israel had their hunger assuaged by manna.
“I’m thirsty.”
Ali holds the water to the old man’s mouth, steadies his head as Hafiz finishes the prayer.
And when our signs are rehearsed to them with evidences their only argument is to say, “Bring our fathers, if ye speak the truth.”
Mukhtar is unable to sit still, filled with childish excitement. The Sufi’s face spreads into a tremulous smile as his eyes fill with tears. “You’ve come back, old man! God is great!”
Confused, Ismail asks where he is. “You were on the edge of the other world, and I was dejected because your infidel body would go on suffering, and suffering far worse, in Gehenna. But God, the Patient and the Eternal, must have other plans for you. And for us who follow you.”
The old man’s voice is thin but clear. “For how long . . .”
“Three days, Ismail, just like in Elim. Three days of fever and delirium. Hafiz has been reciting the Book all that time. Whenever you went to sleep, I was afraid it would be forever.”
“I dreamed of a rainbow . . .”
“Now eat, old man. And thank God, a thousand times for each one of his names.”
As we awaited information about the fleet, fresh news came in from Italy. After months of difficult negotiations, Pope Pius V had persuaded Philip of Spain to join forces with La Serenissima, to face up to the Ottoman threat in the Mediterranean. The pontiff had contributed a dozen galleys, and the three Christian fleets had chased and waited for one another for weeks, from Zara to Corfu, from Otranto to Messina, finally meeting in Candia, whence they had set off together on the big expedition.
“Yes, but they aren’t heading straight for Cyprus. Our whole fleet is there. You’ll see, they’ll strike in Dalmatia first, or in Negroponte.”
I spent my days in the port and outside the Arsenal, waiting for firsthand news, aware that the distance was already making “news” old. Until that moment, in my job, I had always gathered information in the cities, where every event can be discovered in only a few hours. Now, though, I was interested in a world that seemed to dwell somewhere in the future, ten or twenty days on, the traveling time that separated me from Cyprus, and even more from the Adriatic.
In Constantinople two topics held the floor wherever more than three people came together: the makeup of the enemy fleet, and its chief aim. Everyone was convinced that the Christians had more ships than the Sultan. It was rumored that there were almost two hundred galleys and about a dozen galleasses. As to their target, a fortune-teller from Abkhazia told the wife of Muezzinzade Pasha that the Franks would strike at the mouth of the Dardanelles, and in the barbershops they were already studying a way to transport Orban the Hungarian’s huge bombard across the strait.
Then, the same day, it was announced that Venice and her allies had thrust into the Dodecanese, making straight for Cyprus, but when they reached Castelrosso they turned back, after learning that Nicosia had already fallen.
The troops of Lala Mustafa Pasha had entered the Cypriot town after a furious attack on the bastions I had told them about, the ones that Savorgnan hadn’t been able to reinforce. Nasi proposed to toast this news with the finest wine.
It was the eighth day of Rabi’at Thani in the year 978. Two hours after morning prayer, the occupation was complete. The great cathedral in Nicosia was stripped of bones and relics and turned into a mosque.
“I don’t understand these Christians. They say that churches are the house of God, and then they fill them up with bones and dried-up corpses.”
In Galata, fights broke out between Franks of various nations who accused each other of the failure of the Christian fleet. For a long time the
kahvehanes
were full of tales of the atrocities committed in Nicosia, and the comments on those tales: “They’re complaining that the pigs had their throats slit, but they’re the ones who eat those filthy creatures.”
The news traveled via dispatch riders, by beacon signal, on the wings of messenger pigeons, from the mouths of the returning wounded. Everyone seemed to have a friend, a relative or an acquaintance who had just returned from Cyprus. As I sifted what I overheard, even the vox populi finally came up with important details.
That was how I picked up the rumor of a Venetian reprisal. The peasants of the village of Lefkara had converted to Islam and placed themselves under the protection of the Sultan. The Christians had burst in at night, massacred the inhabitants and set fire to their houses. “Fanatics. Mad infidel fanatics,” I thought for a while. If Venice could still punish people on Cypriot soil, it meant that taking the island from them would be harder than we’d thought.
Yet the Sultan’s troops were already gathering around Famagusta. Ma
ğ
usa, as the Turks call it: three miles of walls circled by a big trench. Apart from a single bastion, its system of defense was antiquated, no match for the new siege artillery. From the vantage point of Palazzo Belvedere, the fortress looked like a thin shell, which I imagined poised between a present full of expectations and a huge, radiant, tremendous future.
Lala Mustafa invited the captain-general of the stronghold, Marcantonio Bragadin, rector of Famagusta, to surrender. He sent him a bag of partridges, which was rejected. Then the pasha changed registers, and along with an order to surrender immediately he sent Bragadin the putrefying head of Niccolo Dandolo, governor of Nicosia.
When victory is near, it seems good to exalt the virtues of your enemies. So in the autumn, we were able to praise the hopeless courage of Bragadin and the few people shut up in Famagusta, because we were sure that the city would soon fall, just as we were certain that winter was close and that the Lord, from above, watched over the fates of men.
But even then, some said, “Brave? What do you mean brave, that fellow’s just a fanatic. Did they send him a fleet? No. So why doesn’t he just eat the partridges and go and digest them in Venice?”
I walked through the city, startled that every activity continued undisturbed. The comings and goings of human beings, business, prayers, the peace of Friday. The cycle was repeated without interruption; people seemed to be breathing normally, not raggedly as I was. I would have liked all obstacles to be past and ourselves in the safety of the kingdom that awaited us. I forced myself to stay calm, took deeper breaths, drank a glass in a tavern of the port, my ears pricked.
Often I found myself thinking of Dana, but made my mind drift elsewhere, lest I admit to myself that I missed her. I had given her up out of suspicion, fear, loyalty to Yossef Nasi and the cause of my people. I hadn’t repented; I just felt sad. Arianna had taught me a harsh lesson, and never again would I risk being betrayed.
The cold, the wind and the rain came, and began torturing Constantinople, as if she were the city that had to fall, rather than Ammochostos. “Emerging from the sands.” The Greek name of Famagusta seemed to refer to the Sultan’s fleet. Military operations were in abeyance, waiting for the season of fine weather to return. Most of the fleet came back from Cyprus to winter in the Golden Horn.
Nasi was spending more and more time at the Seraglio, trying to cement his friendship with Selim, and perhaps also to control Selim’s moods, to lighten his spirit. The delay in his forecasts no longer seemed to worry him very much.
“In the spring, Manuel. In the spring,” he repeated. In his voice I heard the same tension that had taken hold of me, but it was true, we had to be patient.
Donna Reyna was patient, anyway. After Dana’s departure, she had been confined in her own part of the palace. I hadn’t bumped into her for months.
Ismail also led a secluded life, on the opposite shore of the Bosphorus. When I asked Nasi what he was doing there, he approached the window and studied Asia, beyond the stretch of sea. Black clouds bared their teeth above the strait.
“He’s waiting, as we all are. But not for news of the war.”
“What, then?”
“To find the answer that he came here to seek.”
We then discovered that the old man had fallen ill, a bad tertian fever, and he had lain in bed for weeks, convalescing, without letting us know. In that difficult situation I realized that Nasi really loved this man: He was worried, he went to Scutari several times and wanted his doctor to visit his friend, even though the danger was over.
The weeks passed, and winter reached its peak. Then, one day during Ramadan, the news arrived that sixteen galleys, on the orders of Gianantonio Querini, had surprised the port of Famagusta and managed to force the blockade, sinking three Turkish ships. They supplied the beleaguered town with food, ammunition and soldiers, then set off again, unmolested.
The ships of La Serenissima had arrived when no one expected them. Selim had the bey of Chios decapitated for not keeping watch over the waters of his island. He stripped the bey of Rhodes of the honor of flying the imperial banner on his flagship and keeping his lantern lit on the quarterdeck.
“Not that they did us much damage, mind you, but it certainly isn’t a good sign for our Sultan.” And others bad signs would come.
After months of preparations and a few sporadic attacks undertaken to keep from dying of boredom, as the blossoms unfurled on the branches our fleet resumed the war. In anticipation of this, the authorities of Famagusta cast out the town’s “useless mouths”: women, children, the old and the infirm swarmed into the streets by the hundred. The besieging army let them pass, in fact it offered many of them food, either as an insult to the enemy, or out of pity.
The useful mouths remained on the walls: the mouths that spat fire. And a few days later they began to shout, and their roars shook the Ottoman armies.
On the twenty-second day of Dhu’l-Qa’dah, Lala Mustafa decided to view the troops from a distance that he considered safe: three miles from the city’s bastions. The spectacle was intended to impress the besieged, show them the power of the Sultan’s army: two hundred thousand men at arms, with skins and banners of all colors, and horses, and cannons, and swords glittering in the sun—a vast expanse of flesh and metal. The plain they trod must have been laughing with pride, superiority, the hunger for conquest.
Then, all of a sudden, came distant noises, a sound like hammering in the wind, and after a moment a rain of iron and stone, columns of dust and earth rising to the sky, bodies being crushed or hurled through the air. The Sultan’s sublime army was suddenly clutched in the hands of a demon. The perfect order of the most powerful military force in the world had been shattered by Venetian cannon, whose shots had devoured the three miles of distance in a snap of the fingers, defying the boastfulness of the Turks. Shouts of enthusiasm from the distant loopholes had accompanied the chaotic retreat of the foot soldiers and the rout of the flower of the Ottoman cavalry.
It was more than sneering defiance. Coming after Querini’s incursion the previous winter, it was clear to everybody that the Ottoman war machine was showing cracks.
“Old Mustafa’s beard is falling out! Not even in Malta did things like that happen to him.”
“Yet some people are clearly dragging their heels. Two hundred thousand soldiers against two thousand, two hundred cannons against fifty, and in seven months we can’t make mincemeat of them?”
A few weeks later, I learned of the arrival of a delegation from La Serenissima, charged with the task of negotiating an exchange of prisoners with the Grand Vizier. They were led by the brother of the archbishop of Famagusta, who belonged to the faction in favor of peace and who had his supporters in both the Grand Council of the Republic and the Divan.
Don Yossef had said that the time for diplomacy was over, and yet Sokollu didn’t seem to be of the same opinion. You could be sure that under the table he was plotting with Venetian delegates to forge an agreement over Cyprus.
I was filled with dull rage. For the first time I felt my faith in Nasi’s plan wavering. Only the fall of Famagusta would put an end to the plots against us.
In fact it was another piece of news that sent the Venetian delegation back. It came on afternoon of distant lightning that sounded like a battle in the middle of the sea.
I ran all the way through the rain to Palazzo Belvedere. The news was doubtless going around the city, and I hadn’t much hope of being the first to bring it. I looked for Nasi in vain in the library and in his rooms. The servants told me he was at the Topkapi Palace. I stood there dripping, steam rising from my clothes. Then I dropped to the floor.
When I heard him striding back in I got up, meeting him in the middle of the room, looking into his eyes. I didn’t need to ask him if he knew; his grim expression said everything. He withdrew to the library, and I was about to follow him when the protecting figure of David Gomez appeared in front of me.
“Better to leave him alone,” he said.
“Listen to David, Signor Cardoso. He knows my husband better than anyone.”
We turned around. Donna Reyna had appeared beneath the portrait of her mother, as if she wanted to force us to notice the resemblance. The hostile glance that she exchanged with Gomez before he left didn’t escape me.
“Bad news, I suppose.”
“The pope and Venice have gained the support of other powers besides Spain,” I replied. “Florence, Genoa, the knights of Malta, the Duke of Savoy . . . they have all sealed a pact. They call it the Holy League. It’s a new crusade, and they say it’s bound for Cyprus.”
“So I’ll be a queen in name alone?” Her tone rekindled the fury that had been smoldering in me for days.
“If you can’t love him, at least try to respect him!”
“Who says I don’t love him?” she retorted.
“You have an odd way of showing it.”
She shook her head disconsolately. “Even if I wanted to, he wouldn’t let me. You don’t know anything about this family, Signor Cardoso. You see what appears on the surface, the face that everyone in this house shows to others.”
“I see a man with a big plan, a stubborn man with danger on all sides.”
Reyna sighed, and her shoulders slumped. “Go to him, since you can. And stay by his side.” There was no rancor in her words, but there was a hint of bitterness.
I leaned against the library door. No sounds came from inside. I knocked but received no reply, and decided to go in anyway.
The map of Cyprus was spread out on the big table. Beside it, a jug of wine. Nasi was holding a glass. He looked up from the map and beckoned me in.
“Who am I, Manuel?” he asked.
I walked over to the table.
“You are Yossef Nasi, Duke of the Cyclades, prince of Europe, favorite of the Sultan. Future king of Cyprus.”
“That’s the question: What we will be tomorrow,” he said, pointing to one of the shelves. “What do you see up there, Manuel?”
I saw an object that I knew: “Takiyuddin’s optical tube.”
“A gift from our Syrian friend,” Nasi explained. “To see the Cypriot victory in all its magnificence. Nicosia had just fallen; conquest seemed imminent. How different it all seems now.”
I had never seen him in such a dark mood. I struck my fist on the table to force him to look at me. “Why is Famagusta not yielding, Yossef? What if someone has been deliberately impeding the war? Have you thought of that?”
He sighed, as if he had seen that question coming. He said nothing.
“How can you stay here waiting while someone is trying to blow our plan sky-high?”
At last he stirred himself: “What do you think I should do? I can’t fight the war instead of the Turks. Leaving Constantinople is out of the question. If I left, the coast would be clear for Sokollu to set Selim against me.”
“Then send me down there.” He seemed struck by this request. “We have to know what’s happening,” I added. “Let me be your eyes.”
Nasi filled his glass again, and drained the wine in one gulp. A drop slipped into his beard and fell from his chin. His hand darted out to keep the map from being stained, and his elbow struck the jug.
The wine spread quickly over the drawing of the island. A shiver ran down my spine and an image rose up from my memory, a color, as intense as I had left it years ago. My father’s blood. The blood-letting bowl overturning at my feet. I had helplessly retreated to the wall while the dark stain spread across the floor, as if pursuing me into that corner. The servant had hurried to throw a rag on the floor, and the surgeon had beckoned me over to him. I knew from his face that old De Zante was about to leave forever, as tormented by the treatment as he was by the illness. I put my ear to the pale lips that had kissed the cross a moment before.
“Always trust in God and in the strength he gives you.”
Nasi got up and squeezed my shoulders, seeking in my face a confirmation of the determination that had animated my words. At last he said, “So be it. You will be my ambassador. But you can’t go alone; you will need someone with you. Someone we can trust.”
