He regretted the words the moment they had left his mouth. In no circumstances were the young permitted to take part in conversations. They were to stand off to the side and remain silent in the presence of their elders. Expecting to be punished and dismissed, the little boy faltered under his father’s stare.
“Don’t believe that God is with the greatest number, Jamal Eddin,” he replied. “God is with the good, and the good are always less numerous than the evil.”
“But all the same, down there, they’re swarming by the thousands. When we—”
“Look around you. Aren’t there more bad horses than good, more weeds than roses? If there are more weeds than roses, does that mean we shouldn’t pull them out, but let them proliferate until they smother the flowers? And if the enemy is more numerous than we are, does that mean that, instead of fighting them, we should let them proliferate until they strangle us? Don’t ask me why the nonbelievers thrive and multiply, why they send fresh troops and replacements as fast as we kill them. For millions of poisonous mushrooms in the forest, how many trees grow? How many, Jamal Eddin? Just one. Just one beautiful tree that grows and spreads. I am the roots of the tree of liberty, our naïbs are the trunk, our murids the branches. Go shut the gates of the city with Yunus. The siege of Akulgo can begin. Even at ten, even at two against fifteen thousand, God willing, we shall win!”
A deluge of fire rained down. The Russians bombarded nonstop, pouring hellfire on the handful of defenders who clung to the summit. Their strategy was clear: surround the piton and cover their advances with cannon fire.
After a month of shelling, they had reached the narrow gorge between the two villages, invaded the river, and cut off the Montagnards’ water supply. Now they were trying to scale the canyon.
Their telescopes swept over the peak tirelessly. The shelters, caves, and grottos of the subterranean network that protected the people were invisible, but they picked out the ledges that their own shells had carved out of the mountain and began to plan how to scale the rocks. A hundred and twenty feet separated each of the three breaches, which the Montagnards had immediately invested. The Russians in the valley sought a way to blow them out, but the angle and the distance of the vertical shots diminished their capacity for accuracy. A stroke of luck eliminated the problem as the boulders above came crashing down, crushing the Montagnards in one blow.
There was no sign of life above, not a breath of air or a movement.
Suspended by long ropes along the rock face, the sappers resumed their ascent from rock spur to rock landing, all the way to the tower of Surkhaï.
It looked like a deceptively simple task, but though the besieged knew how to die, they were born again from the ashes.
Above the sappers’ heads, a band of children pelted them with rocks. Their shrill voices penetrating the air, they used sticks as levers and forced the broken boulders over the cliff onto their attackers. The youngest ones, Jamal Eddin and Mohammed Ghazi, picked up the small stones the boulders had crushed and lapidated the invaders with them. The sweat that dripped into the boys’ eyes and the swarms of flies and mosquitos swirling around them scarcely diminished the accuracy of their aim, which was sharpened by hatred. Behind them, hordes of women, disguised as warriors to fool the enemy, rushed forward in successive waves, brandishing their kinjals. They cut the ropes and massacred the men hanging onto them with pitiless fury. Slashing their hands and drawing deep gashes across their faces, they slit their throats and sent them plummeting to the bottom of the canyon. Young and old, they fought like wildcats, imbued with the same battle fever and passion as their sons and little brothers. A deafening new salvo eclipsed the sound of their cries. The cannon fire swept over the ridge, indiscriminately mowing down Christian sappers and Muslim fighters. As usual, the children simply disappeared, crawling into their holes until the next assault.
Forty days and forty nights of bombardment had made this butchery an ordinary daily occurrence. The cannon smoke that blocked out the clouds and the sound of explosions, like artificial thunder, were now part of the landscape of Akulgo.
Down below, in the harsh light, the smashed cadavers rotted in piles, stuck in the twists and turns and puddles of the river. So far, the Russians had suffered over a thousand casualties. In his tent, the obstinate General Grabbe paced up and down as he went over his plan: take the jutting ledges that the cannons had cut in the rock face, no matter what the cost, and from there the donjon that protected the two villages. He knew, as did Shamil and the hundred warriors enclosed by the thick walls, that if he could take the tower of Sukhaï, the upper city would have no rear defenses. He would be able to shell Akulgo from the summit and from all sides.
But Grabbe’s companies advanced, one after the other, and died in vain. Those fine days of the torrid summer of 1839 cost the Russians dearly.
But they cost Shamil even more dearly.
The double line of ramparts had been broken. Only a few fetid drops of water remained in the wells. The fallen lay dead in the ruins or under small piles of pebbles. Even the earth and the sand had disappeared from Akulgo, and burying the corpses became impossible. No one even considered throwing them into the ravine. Though the men, women, and children were not afraid of dying on the battlefield, they were appalled at the thought of their bodies being abandoned dishonorably, without a grave, left to the beasts by their brothers and sons. At the moment, only the wives were there to protect the deceased from the vultures.
A hot, red sun burned the coarse-grained rock until it was incandescent, and the putrid stink of decomposing bodies became unbearable. The nights brought no cool air and no rest. The exhausted naïbs descended to the river in relays, bringing up water under the cover of the sentinels’ fire, while the women wore themselves ragged repairing the fortifications damaged during the day.
Exposed to gunfire by these tasks, those who had survived the siege so far fell by the dozens. At least they had ceased to suffer. There was no more water, no more food, not even firewood to cook the soles of their boots. Dysentery and typhus had finished off the wounded and struck down the survivors with colic and fever. But of all their afflictions, the pestilent stench of rotting flesh was the worst.
The stench, the vermin, and the thirst.
It was 104 degrees in the shade.
On the burning piton, the clefts, the ledges, and the landings, the rocks no longer reflected the changing colors of daylight. The entire peak was streaked with the purple and black of blood and flies.
Three battalions struggled to take the tower.
Impeccable in his summer whites, his cap jammed down tight over his bald head, his telescope stuck to his eye, General Grabbe surveyed the operations from the camp. Thick beads of sweat stood out on the tufts of gray whiskers that adorned his cheeks at the corners of his mouth. This cursed tower that he had been shelling for weeks should have long since fallen—and buried all its occupants in the ruins. But day after day, the same war cries, the same resistance, the same hail of rocks, and the same volleys of gunfire greeted his battalions. Stumbling over the cadavers of comrades that blocked the way before and behind them, they could neither advance nor retreat on the steep, narrow trail. They couldn’t even take cover. And they were being decimated.
The general listened carefully to the clamor rising over and over from the donjon. A great opera lover, he concentrated on counting the voices. Of a hundred combatants, there couldn’t be more than a dozen left in there. With each attempt, the howling became more tenuous and shrill. Patience.