“Where was your advice earlier, Huseyin Pasha?” Sultan Abdulhamid replied scornfully, although there was a tinge of compassion in his voice for his unfortunate adviser. “It’s too late now. The cow is out of the shed.”
“We can still save the shed, Your Highness,” Yorg Pasha broke in, bringing a humorless smile to the sultan’s lips.
Sultan Abdulhamid rose from his seat and went over to the window, where he stared out at the bright day, the newspaper dangling from his hand behind his back. No one in the room moved or spoke.
When Sultan Abdulhamid turned around, his face was in shadow. “Call it off,” he told his vizier. He threw the newspaper at him. It fluttered to the floor between them, and Vizier Köraslan crouched to retrieve it.
Feride received the news that Huseyin had gone to the palace with trepidation about his health but also relief. It signaled the return of his self-confidence and an end to her pity. She could think about what she meant to do next in this marriage. She went to her dressing room and found the ruby and silver hairpin Huseyin had given her. She put on the red velvet gown she knew Huseyin liked, then had her maid arrange her hair and draped a light silk veil across it, held coquettishly in place by the ruby pin. She called for a glass of wine, then took a book Doctor Moreno had given her about hospital administration to her private chamber to wait for Huseyin’s return.
85
Thirty professional soldiers, thirty-seven comrades, and fifteen local men manned the battlements against a seemingly endless mass of mounted tribesmen forming and re-forming outside the walls. Kamil examined them through his field glasses. The Kurds rode tough, spindly-legged horses that seemed too small to carry the weight of the men astride them but were agile and fiery. Above the men’s long mustaches, they wore turbans of tasseled cloth and fur hats. Bandoliers of ammunition crossed their chests, and their sashes bristled with daggers.
Suddenly the Kurds drew up and shouted among themselves, pointing at the regimental standard of Kamil’s imperial troops atop the wall. Then they wheeled about and galloped some distance away to a clearing by the forest. Kamil adjusted his field glasses. The horses clustered around two mounted men arguing. One of them, a Kurd, gesticulated angrily. The other was hidden by the mass of riders. After a few minutes, to Kamil’s bafflement, the Kurds turned and resumed their attack. Kamil kept his field glasses trained on the place where he had seen the argument occur, but by the time his line of vision cleared, the second man was no longer there. Before he could scour the countryside more closely, a bullet smacked into the stone beside him and he ducked for cover. They were under attack.
Kamil ordered the men and women on the monastery wall to fire only when the enemy was so close they could see their mustaches and not simply to spray the ground with bullets. Kamil sensed that the troops were playing with them. They would storm in like a wave on the shore, fire at the battlements, then retreat. He could hear them laughing and joking among themselves in their own language. Kamil could see the effect of their own efforts as a man here and there fell from his horse, but it was as ineffectual as shooting at a swarm of gnats.
A bullet grazed Apollo’s shoulder, but he insisted on remaining at his post. Victor had set up a medical station in a corner of the courtyard near the well, but at the moment he too was on the walkway that circled the top of the wall, crouched behind a piece of masonry with his rifle pointed at the men circling on their horses just out of range.
Kamil pointed. “They’re lighting torches.”
“The walls are stone and the roof is tile, so we should be all right,” Apollo told him, “although some of the windows are sealed with clay and straw.”
Kamil shouted to the men to aim at anyone carrying a torch before the rider came into throwing range. The torches that made it over the wall were immediately doused with water.
Victor ran back and forth, his left arm, which had been wounded while hunting, held stiffly by his side, sweat streaming from his face, as one after another of the defenders fell. Apollo was hit again in the shoulder. After the wound was bound up, he returned to his post, his face crumpling with pain at each retort of his rifle.
Vera went to check on Gabriel. He was barely conscious. She took the cloth from the woman caring for him and wiped the sweat from his forehead. She trickled water between his cracked lips. “Gabriel,” she whispered, “I’m here, but I have work to do.” She kissed his mouth. “Don’t worry. I’ll be back.” With tears in her eyes, she lowered his head back onto the quilt and took up her gun.
“I taught some of the women to use these,” she complained to Siranoush Ana, thinking about all the idle weapons in the storage room, “but Apollo says they’re not needed.” Several hundred women and children were crowded into the central hall. “Maybe he’s right. There are so many children.”
“Why should we wait?” The old woman stamped her foot. “We have eyes and we have hands. What do breasts have to do with it? Others can watch the children.” She summoned her daughters.
They assembled about forty able-bodied women. Vera demonstrated the basics of using a rifle and pistol, then grouped the inexperienced women around those she had trained in the villages. Men passing through the hall stopped in startled contemplation of a troop of armed women, but no one spoke against it.
Siranoush Ana held out her hand for a rifle. “My eyes are as sharp as a hawk’s.”
Kamil tried to stay near Elif during the battle but lost sight of her in the pandemonium. The tribesmen had set up a ladder against the outer wall. One of the comrades was killed as he pushed it away, but it was immediately set back in place. A face with a large mustache under a red-checked turban appeared over the wall. That’s when Kamil saw Elif again, as she swung her curved sword and neatly severed the Kurd’s head.
Stunned, Kamil stared at her. She saw him and flushed, then ran at him with her sword. He steeled himself, then felt a movement behind him and swung around just as Elif’s sword sliced into the arm of a man attacking him. Elif’s eyes met Kamil’s, and he shuddered at what he thought he had seen there. Bloodlust? Yet was hers any different from the faces of the men around him? He watched Omar gleefully kill one man after another, as if he were on holiday.
Other invaders were dashing down the stairs from the battlements now, their dun-colored cloaks billowing about them, rifles and daggers in hand. Their faces too had a look of satisfaction. Kamil wondered how they had scaled the wall, but the monastery was so old that they might well have clambered up some of the rubble surrounding it. He looked for someone who was commanding the invaders but saw only a maelstrom of jagged motion, glinting steel, and the startling crimson of fresh blood. Despite the frenetic activity, the air seemed caught up in silence, the shouts and screams of anguish background notes to a timeless hush.
Kamil took aim at a man running along the top of the wall toward Omar, an ax in his left hand, a knife in his right. His shot missed, but it alerted Omar, who spun around and ducked the ax. Grabbing his rifle by the barrel, he swung it at the man’s head. In a corner of the courtyard, Victor was kneeling over a wounded man, bandaging his arm, while Alicia held a cup to the man’s mouth. A Kurd appeared behind Victor, knife in hand. Kamil raised his rifle, aimed, and shot him. Victor jumped up and grabbed his rifle, placing himself in the path of three other men approaching, their eyes on Alicia.
To Kamil’s surprise, just then the monastery door opened and a troop of armed women emerged, grim-faced, others hesitant. A few glanced back, panicked, at the sound of the key locking them out to protect those still inside. Then they opened fire on the Kurds. Those who were too close or too inexperienced used the rifles as clubs. They were cut down by the amused tribesmen, but not before inflicting damage of their own. The stairs and courtyard were slippery with blood and blocked by bodies of men and women, some still alive but too weak to move out of the way.