We reached the port. As if the walls that separated it from the city enclosed another world, a dazzling calm lay upon the water and the ships, the quays and the distant sea rocks.
The sun beat down, and the only shade to be found was on the water, beside the bulk of the ships, but no one was able to enjoy it. I walked over to a mahona that was laden to bursting, and still a line of men, like processionary caterpillars, was loading barrels, cases, wooden planks, bales of cotton. One was herding animals that had somehow survived against the odds. Goats, most of them. The pigs, unclean animals, had been killed and left to rot, along with the carcasses of many poor human wretches.
On the deck were men who looked as if they might be Venetian. I shouted, cupping my hands around the sides of my mouth.
“Weigh anchor, as quickly as you can! There’s no time for more!”
Some of them leaned forward, craning their necks, demonstrating that they hadn’t heard. The wind was blowing in my direction.
“Go, I tell you. Force your captains, you’re in the majority.”
A man shouted back, his voice carried clearly on the wings of the wind.
“We can’t sail these ships on our own. Not many of us are seamen. Who are you? Why would a Turk and two Moors be worried about our fate?”
“I used to be a Venetian, and I tell you that you must go, right now. If you see no way, try and come up with something.” The men looked at me in alarm, and then started talking excitedly to one another.
Mukhtar called my name. I had heard her voice very seldom, and was surprised, as if I’d been caught doing something wrong. Her eyes glittered, the color of honey. She pointed toward the fort that the Turks had built on the hill behind the port to check the embarkations.
A yelling mob was approaching. Armed men were also coming from the citadel side, a human landslide down the side of a mountain.
I drew my dagger and started cutting the hawsers that secured the ships to their moorings. Hafiz helped me with swift blows of his sword, running along the dock. I picked up a long pole, and together we tried to push the boat away from the shore.
The ship moved, and the gangway connecting the deck to the quay fell in the water with a great splash, but the vessel was too heavy and could not get under way.
Mukhtar called out again. As when a great galley bursts into flames in the quay the rats run along the hawsers to the dock, so the mob hurtled down from the citadel and attacked the ships, one by one, gradually drawing nearer to the place where we were standing. On the fort side, the charging men moved more slowly, and they still had a long way to come. The men on the deck of the mahona ran shouting towards the stern. They had worked out at last what fate awaited them.
I gesticulated and shouted at them again to leave, before Hafiz dragged me away, forcing me to turn my back on what was about to happen.
We climbed back up toward one of the minor access routes leading to the city. The Greeks who had decided to stay were being carried out of their houses. The screams of the women subjected to the law of the victors echoed heartrendingly from one house to the other. But many rapes occurred in the light of the sun, in the middle of the road. There was nothing we could do, and our knees buckled in despair.
Suddenly, behind a gap in a wall, we came upon a little boy. He was quivering, crouching like a rabbit, his face covered with dust, his clothes in rags.
Mukhtar held out her open hand. The boy shrank back and pressed himself even harder against the wall. I spoke Italian to comfort him. “Don’t be afraid.”
Lost, the little boy looked round. He must have been six or seven. Emaciated, eyes wide, skin diaphanous, almost spectral. He must have been in hiding for months.
“Hands off. This booty is ours,” a voice croaked.
They had emerged from an alleyway, a dozen sinister faces. I recognized the man who had pointed at me in the distance with the tip of his blade. I threw myself between them and the little boy, my dagger in my fist. Hafiz bent his knees and drew his saber.
Mukhtar unlaced something under the sash around her waist. It was the weapon that I had seen glittering in Bandirma.
The looters were startled by the tangle of blades whirling toward them. A cascade of blades descended, and the blood spurted vividly. They laid hands on their weapons, but before they could draw, one of them was struck by Hafiz’s curved saber. The young warrior moved like a beast of prey, crouching down on his legs.
The man who had spoken hurled himself at me. I parried, our blades giving off a grim clang. I tried to kick him in the belly; he repelled the blow. Then he tried to circle me to grab the child, and I brought down my dagger on his outstretched hand. He drew back with an animal cry, blood splashing his leather jerkin. He shouted something at those of his companions who were still capable of fighting, and they began to arrange themselves in a circle around us. The child’s body trembled, leaning against mine.
We heard a shot, then another. The leader of the gang fell forward, followed by one of his companions. The circle of enemies opened up, spewing insults and curses.
I saw Ismail, his pistols still smoking, then Ali, his unsheathed scimitar flashing in the sun’s rays, dealing murderous blows to any looters who came within range. The others scattered like jackals at the arrival of a lion.
I picked up the little boy, who clung to me with all the strength he had, and we hurried toward the beach. Only when we were outside the city did we stop to catch our breath. From a distance, we saw the horde attacking the last of the ships, the one we had urged to leave. It had managed to pull away from the quay, but not to take to the sea. The looters held it back with ropes and grapnels, and were climbing up the plank. In a furious voice, Ismail gave us an order.
“Let’s go. There’s nothing we can do here now.”
10
A massacre calls for revenge. Murder cries out for murder. Man washes out with innocent blood the blood the guilty shed, until a horrendous stain spreads over the earth.
After our failure to stop the carnage, after the sacking of the ships, Ismail withdrew into silence. We waited for the order that would allow us to leave the port, but Lala Mustafa had other things to do: tyrannize and humiliate Bragadin. He had had him shoved and kicked to the southern side of the walls, where the last attacks had taken place, and ordered him to fill the breeches opened by the cannon. The plain was still scattered with corpses; the stench reached our nostrils even on the ship. Bragadin shoveled and mixed, tortured by a pointless task, with black crusts where his ears had once been.
Lala Mustafa wasn’t thinking about the ships on the Beach of the Gardens. He was thinking about pushing that exhausted man all the way down to the port and having him tied to the main yard of a galley. Then he planned to hoist him aloft, again and again, onto the stern of a kadirga, so that he could await the arrival of the Christian fleet on the horizon.
“So, Captain. No ship in sight?”
Better check again, and again, amid the shouts, laughter and insults.
Lala Mustafa wasn’t thinking about us, the emissaries of one of the commanders of the venture. He was thinking of leaving this man, defeated and betrayed, in a tent, untended, with his wounds infected and flies buzzing around his head.
In the days that followed, a funereal calm fell upon the city and its surroundings, reduced now to misery. Men cling to life with all their might; they are like flowers or weeds that put down roots in the sparse soil on the rim of a ravine and hope that the next storm won’t carry them off. The Greeks who remained in the city were trying to resume the course of their own lives, trusting that their new master would, in a time of peace, show a face less terrible than the one he wore in a time of war.