This time, war was at the gates of Akulgo.
Shamil and his men were ready. Among the natural fortresses of Dagestan, they had not chosen this one by chance. Like a rocky island rising out of the sea, the peak of Akulgo stood at the heart of a desert of stones, an immense piton broken in the middle by two unequally high plateaus encircled on three sides by the loop of a raging river. Twin auls clung to the summit, separated by a deep, narrow canyon with a rushing mountain torrent at its floor. The two villages were joined by a suspension bridge that crossed the gorge.
Old Akulgo was located on the lower part. Once bombarded by Fazi the Louse, it had been reconstructed and fortified under the supervision of Polish deserters. The narrow alleyways and the jumble of houses, stacked one atop another, their successive flat roofs like miradors, had transformed the whole into a compact bastion. New Akulgo was higher up, its back to the mountain, with only the tower of Surkhaï, a terrible keep that protected the rear of the village and dominated the entire valley, above it. Shamil’s house was on the front line, overhanging the abyss and blocking any attack. There, through the only arrow slit in the family redoubt, an excited Jamal Eddin watched the operations in the giaour camp behind his father and Yunus.
For the past three months, Shamil had tried to avoid a siege. He had raided the enemy at the rear and practiced scorched-earth tactics, burning his own fields, rendering his own trails impassable, leaving the houses in his path in ruins. Sweeping down on the villages around them, the infidels found no people, no livestock, no chickens, nothing to eat or pillage. Only ashes. General Pavel Khristoforovitch Grabbe, Fazi the Louse’s replacement at the head of the army, had no choice. If he did not want his troops to starve, he would have to retreat to the forts in the rear. But that was impossible. The czar’s orders were to advance, advance, advance, despite losses and shrinking food supplies, advance. Nicholas I had been humiliated by the imam’s snub during his imperial voyage to Tiflis, and the czar was not one to forget an insult. He demanded a definitive victory at any price. Attack this nest of fanatics, take Shamil dead or alive, wipe out the murids, and crush any semblance of resistance in the Caucasus. Forever.
From the arrow slit, Jamal Eddin watched the column of refugees on the mountain, a stream of men and beasts fleeing before the infidels and trying desperately to reach the fortress. Yunus said they were more useless mouths to feed and should be turned away, but Shamil demanded that they be welcomed and protected. The flow of beings seemed to act accordingly, as though aware of the debate between the imam and his deputy. They sped up, jumping over the holes and obstacles placed as deterrents on the path, then stopped as though those blocks were suddenly insurmountable. Among the donkeys, sheep, and goats, Jamal Eddin saw the occasional figure of a horse, the hat of a rider. But most of them were old people on foot, children so young that their heads scarcely rose above the sea of animals, and women bent over under sacks of provisions.
Their advance caused small landslides here and there. Pebbles rolled down the hill, boulders tumbled down to the river, and patches of rock toppled, carrying with them man and beast. The caravan stopped and watched silently when that happened. Strange forms floated in the river now. The swift current carried balls of black, hooves in the air, with bloated bellies, down past the rows of immaculate tents. Sometimes long panels of fabric caught on the buffalo horns or the legs of cows floating on their backs. Brown, white, and blue, they were the veils of girls who had drowned. Like sails, they filled with air before being sucked to the river bottom by the swirling current. The caravan continued.
At this point in their misfortune, the men of the Caucasus had nothing left to lose but their dignity and the hope of finding protection behind the ramparts of Akulgo. They all knew the peak was impregnable. How could the Russians come this far? Even they, even the Russians knew it.
From dawn until nightfall, the giaours watched the movements on the ground, the cliffs, and the ridges. They seemed to be perpetually looking up, with binoculars and the telescopic spyglasses that fascinated Jamal Eddin, faraway specks of reflected silver along the black shelf of the river bank. But this evening, the fading twilight played instead upon the bayonets of the fresh troops parading down the shore. Their blades gleamed and flashed like a thousand lightning bolts, capturing the sun in a forest of steel.
The arrival of supplies that had broken through Shamil’s blockade forced him to rethink his strategy. Now that these dogs had full stomachs, it would be impossible to attack them without huge losses. Raiding the camp, destroying their saps, and burning their footbridges were no longer viable tactics.
Worse still, the defeat of the tribes of the northeast, on whom Shamil had counted to trap the assailants in a pincer action, was a major loss of support for Akulgo. And to add to that, the defeat of the Chechen allies had freed the czar’s army to converge upon Dagestan with its artillery.
The cries of relieved soldiers, already drunk, rose all the way to the austere bastion, filling Jamal Eddin with impatient excitement for the battle to come. He listened to the cheers that greeted the arrival of pieces of high-caliber ordnance, three campaign cannons, and several cases of munitions. Though he could not measure the consequences, he sensed the gravity of the moment. All the details of this eve of combat became firmly fixed in his memory. He could have cited the number of white flecks on the field below, recognized the breed of the horses and the ranks of the officers by their stripes, described the colors of the regiments and their drums that marked the hour. He could have described the smoky odor of Yunus, standing beside him, the odor of leather and sweat. Yunus had just returned from a tour of inspection of their defenses at Old Akulgo. He remembered the green robe Shamil wore as he harangued his followers one last time at the mosque. Jamal Eddin was aware of the variations in their voices, the smallest nuances in their tones, the intensity of the emotions behind the ostensible calm.
For the first time he recognized in his father, his tutor, and all the men this tension that had not left him since the death of Bahou-Messadou, this blend of joyous apprehension before the demands of God, this exaltation at the prospect of serving Him.
“Yunus, take care to have goatskins brought up from the river, as many as you can, to fill jars and jars. Store them in the grottos behind the village. Don’t forget about firewood and fodder, or about the livestock. We have enough food supplies to hold out for three months, but not enough water in the wells to make it through the summer. And there’s not much time left to finish preparations, less than three days. After that—”
“After that,” said Yunus, casting an accusing eye over the line of refugees. “After that, there will be four thousand of us at Akulgo. And of the four thousand, how many warriors old enough to fight?”
“A quarter.”
Yunus motioned toward the Russians with his chin.
“And them?”
“Around eleven thousand. Without counting the militia of the traitors who have gone over to them—about four thousand hypocrites.
“Total?”
“Fifteen thousand of them, a thousand of us.”
“A thousand against fifteen thousand?” the child asked, amazed. “And we’re going to fight them?”