Empire of Lies

60

They were shoved past huddled marksmen and grenadiers, around the front of a cannon, and onto an embrasure cut into the curtain-wall top and held there, in full sight of the city’s besiegers. The man to the immediate left of Kamal was a reed-thin soldier with angry red blotches on his face, who stank and seemed to be the leader of the mob. He took cover behind Kamal to avoid the snipers and started yelling something in a fiery tone, his words aimed at the unseen troops huddled in the trenches below and the fighters converging on the mounds of rubble to join the mêlée.

The man’s tirade caused the musket fire, sword clangs, and janissary war cries to die down, as did the clamor from the nearby military bands. Kamal couldn’t understand what he was saying, but given that the man was pulling him up by the hair and jabbing a finger at him and Nisreen, the man was clearly talking about them. His spittle flew into Kamal’s face as he continued his rant to raucous cheers and jeers from all sides. He was evidently taunting the Ottoman besiegers about the barbaric display that was about to take place.

The soldier pulled out a large knife from his belt and, with his grip still clamped on Kamal’s hair, yanked Kamal closer and pressed the blade against his neck, all while shouting out more angry words. A mad panic shot through Kamal, and he fought to wrest himself free, but he was too well restrained by too many of them. The effort only got him a driving punch to the kidneys and an elbow to the jaw.

Half-dazed, he heard Nisreen scream out, “Stop, please, stop. We’re here to help you. We’re here to save you.”

A sharp slap silenced her, which sent Kamal into a fit of rage.

“Listen to her, you bastards,” he roared. “Sobieski and Lorraine are here—they’re close—but they’re going to die if you don’t listen to—”

More incensed shouts and a couple of solid punches cut him short.

Groggy from all the battering, he found Nisreen and his gaze locked onto her. Her pained, downcast expression reflected the despair that had hollowed him out, but in that desperate instant, an unspoken message of appreciation and love passed between them, a moment of profound closeness that transcended the utter wretchedness of their state and cleared all the horror and misery from around them for a blissful few breaths—until it was interrupted by the blotchy-faced soldier, who raised his knife into the air and hollered something that seemed to announce the start of the bloodletting ritual.

Kamal saw Nisreen’s eyes flare out. Overcome with terror, she started shouting again for them to stop, but Kamal was too focused on the barbaric glint in his executioner’s eyes to make out her words—until other words broke through, not hers but a man’s, words that electrified the air and shifted the dynamic around them, causing the soldier to hesitate.

The man kept repeating his sharp, forceful missive, his tone powerful and defiantly unbending before the angry jeers fired back at him by the mob. Then Kamal saw him, a lone figure shoving his way through the crowd toward him.

The man was around Kamal’s age. He had dark olive skin and a thick black beard, but what was most striking about him was that he was in visibly better condition than the men he was pushing aside. He wasn’t a walking skeleton like the rest of them. His face was clear; his clothes weren’t tattered or covered in grime. He also wore a broad felt hat that sat low and covered his entire forehead, casting a dark shadow that shielded his face in a way that felt intentional.

A fierce argument broke out between him and the others. They shoved him back and jabbed angry fingers in his face and at Kamal and Nisreen, but the man held his ground and shouted them down before yanking the executioner’s arm away from Kamal. Ignoring the outcry and breathless from the strain of the confrontation, he pushed in closer to Kamal and, speaking in Ottoman Turkish, said, “Answer me quickly. What about Sobieski? What were you saying about him?”

“He’s near,” Kamal replied. “The relief army is near. But they’re going to get blown to bits before they reach you if you don’t listen to us.”

The man considered Kamal’s words for a charged moment, then turned to Nisreen, scrutinizing her.

“We’re telling you the truth,” she added. “We’re here to help you. The city’s close to falling as we speak. Why else would we be here?”

Suspicion and curiosity crossed his features as he kept his gaze on her; then he spun back to Kamal, his eyes darting around nervously, his tone urgent. “How do you know this? And how did you get inside the city? Why are you naked?”

Without warning, the air sizzled with a volley of arrows. Some streaked overhead while two of them found flesh and blood among the mob gathered on the rampart.

Urgent shouts rang out as musket fire now rained down on the wall and the men surrounding Kamal and Nisreen scrambled for cover. The bearded man in the felt hat rattled off some orders and repeated them more forcefully. They generated a grudging acceptance in the mob as the men dragged Kamal and Nisreen away from the embrasure and across the wall-walk in panic.

They all rushed back down the long flight of stairs, the bearded man leading and four men escorting them from behind. With mortar bombs now chasing the arrows and raining down more suffering on the ravaged city, the small group hurried through its narrow streets. A couple of houses were on fire, the water shortage making it impossible for their owners to put them out. The bell tower of a church a block to their left took a direct hit as they sprinted past. The street below was showered with chunks of stone before its bell crashed down in a deep, eerie thud.

Hugging the walls, they turned two more corners and reached the main square outside the cathedral. Several carts sat outside its main doors, and men were carrying in dead bodies. As they got closer, Kamal and Nisreen were overcome by an ungodly smell coming from the cathedral. It was far worse than what they’d smelled before and made the air almost unbreathable. From their reading, they knew its source: the city’s main cemetery was outside the fortified walls, and so the dead were being dumped in a huge vaulted space deep under the cathedral. The Ottomans had discovered thousands of skeletons and decomposing corpses in it after they’d taken over the city. Then Kamal remembered something else and, to steer his senses away, glanced at the cathedral’s bell tower, straining to see all the way up its four hundred and fifty kadems to the observers he’d read about, the ones who manned it. The tower was a crucial part of the city’s defense, and it had survived the siege and fall of the city, before the cathedral had been turned into a mosque. But the sun was strong and his eyes didn’t have time to focus before he was prodded away, hustled up the stairs of an imposing stone building that also fronted the main square, to the side of the cathedral.

Whatever grandeur the building had was long gone. A cannonball had punched a large hole through its façade, and the chunks of stone and debris inside its entrance hall hadn’t been cleared up. Broken furniture was strewn around, with fresh traces of a bonfire in one corner. It was as grimy as the men leading them through it, with traces of blood and filth smearing its marble floors.

They marched past the monumental central staircase and through a low doorway that squatted in the shadows next to it. The men grabbed a couple of torches from their wall mounts and used them to light the way down a narrow circular stairwell that led to a basement. There, Kamal and Nisreen were led down a dank corridor and shoved into a dark, windowless chamber.

They were ordered to sit on the floor. Nisreen looked uncertainly at Kamal. He tried to comfort her with a confident, patience-signaling nod, and they did as they were told. The stone floor was cool under their bare skin, and the room was damp, dusty, and littered with empty crates marked with names and dates. Kamal realized the space must have been a wine cellar, now long depleted.

The bearded man loomed over them, studying them intently. He pulled off his hat, ran a hand through his thick, matted hair, then asked, “Who are you?”

Kamal scowled at him, then glanced across at Nisreen. She was curled up and doing her best to cover herself, but her expression turned defiant when she looked back.

“Where are your manners?” Kamal asked the bearded man. “Give the lady some clothes, and then we can speak.”

The bearded man seemed affronted by Kamal’s outburst, but Kamal stared him down. After a short moment, the man relented and said something to the others. They hesitated; then he repeated his order, more firmly this time. One of them nodded and rushed out, then returned with a couple of long military coats that looked like they hadn’t had a wash in weeks. He handed one to Nisreen and gave Kamal the other.

As he stood up to pull on his coat, Kamal heard the bearded man issue another order to the others, who all turned away to give Nisreen some privacy. Surprised, Kamal looked a question at his inquisitor.

“We lost the luxury of manners many weeks ago,” the man told him. “But some of it survives.”

“Thank you,” Kamal replied. This time, he stayed on his feet. Nisreen did the same.

“So… who are you?” the man asked.

Kamal looked uncertainly at Nisreen. Answering that question was something they’d thought about, of course. It would be asked if and when they made it to Sobieski, and they had hoped to face that scrutiny in less extreme circumstances—dressed, for one thing. Giving a convincing answer was crucial. But thinking about it and actually living it were very different things.

“My name is Kamal Arslan Agha. I am—I was—a senior officer in the sultan’s Tashkeelat-i Hafiye.”

He and Nisreen had agreed that the best approach to any questioning was to stick as closely as possible to the truth. It was something he’d learned from his experience as an undercover agent. Nothing came across more credibly than a legend that was based on truth.

The bearded man looked confused. “I’ve never heard of it.” Which wasn’t surprising. The Hafiye hadn’t yet been created. It was Rasheed’s brainchild, part of his legacy, one of his timeless contributions to his adopted motherland.

“With good reason. We’re a secret detachment who serve the sultan. Our job is to uncover and stop any plots against him.”

The bearded man gave him a noncommittal grimace, as if he thought it could be plausible, but he had his doubts. “And her?” he asked, pointing at Nisreen.

“Nisreen Hatun is my sister-in-law. Her husband was my brother.”

“Was?”

“He was killed recently.” He paused just slightly, then added, “The sultan’s men killed him.”

“Along with our two young children,” Nisreen added, her voice cracking at the memory.

The bearded man’s expression softened immediately. Visibly troubled by the revelation, he said, “My condolences, hatun.”

“Thank you.”

Kamal watched Nisreen. He hated that they had to use the tragedy in this way and could see how much it pained her to be doing it, but it was the truth and it was important to use it to seed everything else.

One of the men stepped in with a question, his tone gruff, his stance confrontational. He obviously couldn’t understand the language Kamal and the bearded man were using and was losing patience. As he spoke, he was eyeing Kamal suspiciously, clearly itching to get back to the flaying. The bearded man hit back with some hard words, which led to a quick, heated argument before the man grudgingly fell silent and took a step back.

The bearded man turned to Kamal. “And what is it that you want to tell us that’s so important you would risk having my friend Franz here peel your skin off?”

Kamal felt a tinge of confidence. Perhaps they wouldn’t be flayed after all. “Sobieski, Charles of Lorraine, and their armies—they’re close. They’ve got Bavarian forces with them, too. The king and all the commanders are at the Castle of Stetteldorf as we speak.”

As he mentioned the castle’s name, he noted a ripple of curiosity among his captors. It was the one word they understood, apart from the names of the two commanders that he’d blurted before, up on the rampart. But the castle wasn’t a major landmark; it was an unremarkable local aristocratic residence, and it was on the north bank of the Danube, at the edge of any Ottoman or Tartar raiding ground. For him to throw out its name definitely got their attention.

“They’re going to hold a military review of all their forces in two days’ time, outside Tulln,” he pressed on. “But what they don’t know is that they’re going to be killed there. The king, Lorraine—all of them. They’re going to be blown up. And then their army is going to be ambushed. And after that… Vienna will fall.”

This elicited a grave scowl from his interrogator and shuffles of discomfort among the others. The same man as earlier grumbled aloud angrily, clearly demanding to know what Kamal was saying. The bearded man shut him down with a few crisp words and turned back to Kamal.

“How are they going to be killed?”

Kamal cleared his throat. “In two days, on Wednesday. Three couriers will arrive at the review on horseback. They will be trailing camels loaded with sacks of gunpowder. They will claim to be carrying a message and gifts from the sultan. The gifts are a massive explosion that will wipe them all out.”

The bearded man shifted uncomfortably. His men saw this and two of them spoke up this time, but he silenced them harshly. He was visibly perturbed by what he was hearing.

He asked Kamal, “And you know this how?”

“As a senior officer of the Hafiye, I was privy to all the planning for this campaign. And this was planned from the start. The relief army was actually suckered in. Why do you think they haven’t blown up a big charge under the Löbl bastion and stormed in already?”

This evidently troubled the bearded man. Since the beginning of the siege, the Ottoman sappers’ work had been concentrated on the two strongest bastions, the Löbl and the Burg—the Lion and the Castle—and the ravelin that sat between them. Of the twelve arrowhead-shaped bastions ringing the city, the ones by the Danube were the weakest, but the river was too near and too deep, which meant digging tunnels to explode mines under them wasn’t feasible. The Löbl and the Burg were chosen because the fields facing them were suitable for trenches, the ditch in front of them was dry, the wall between them was long, and their geometry was imperfect. The grand vizier’s tent compound was erected in the part of the Ottoman camp that faced them. The ravelin—the massive, thirty-foot-high triangular firing platform—that stuck out from the wall halfway between them had already been destroyed by mines, and the two bastions had also suffered heavy damage from underground explosives. They were hanging by a thread.

“The sultan wants Sobieski, Lorraine, and the others here, near Vienna, coming to its rescue, thinking they can save you,” Kamal continued. “He wants all of Christendom’s military pillars in one place. He wants to wipe them all out with one blow.” Kamal let it settle in, then added, “He wants to leave Christian Europe without its champions.”

The bearded man was visibly unsettled—but he also looked doubtful.

“We’ve been firing signal rockets into the sky every night for the past week, but so far we’ve had no reply. And yet you say the army is out there?”

“They’re there,” Kamal insisted. “Maybe they’re too far to see your rockets. Or they’re not answering you because they’re hoping to surprise Kara Mustafa. I don’t know. I just know they’re the ones who are going to be surprised. In the worst possible way.”

The bearded man pondered his words, nodding slowly to himself. “Assuming what you say is true… Why are you here? Why are you telling us this?”

“My brother was brutally murdered by the sultan’s men because they questioned his loyalty. He was just a doctor. A man who devoted his life to saving others. They didn’t hesitate to kill his children, too. They were all innocent.” He shook his head with genuine, heartfelt anger. “My sister-in-law managed to escape, as did I when they came after me. We had to run, and here we are.”

“Betraying your sultan, your people?”

Kamal shrugged. “Getting revenge for our loved ones. We are marked for death there anyway.”

“That’s a pretty extreme kind of revenge.”

“What they did was an extreme kind of evil. We have no life there anymore. Our hope is that if we help you save the city, you would allow us to start new lives here.”

The bearded man gave it a slow, pensive nod.

It was imperative that their motivation be convincing. Kamal and Nisreen had devoted a lot of time to honing it, and this was the moment of truth.

Nisreen took it as her cue to speak up. “They took what I cherished the most in life. I want to do the same to the sultan.”

The bearded man studied her for a long moment, then nodded, seemingly satisfied. “So the pasha knows the commanders are at Stetteldorf?”

Kamal nodded. “He has bands of Tartars and bashi-bazouks roaming the land and reporting back to him. Very little escapes them.”

The Tartars were nomads from the Turkish steppes who had settled in Crimea three centuries earlier and converted to Islam. Their leader, the khan, was allied to the Ottomans. Exceptional horsemen and archers, they lived for plunder, and their khan’s mission was to lead them into war zones where they could enrich themselves. They were notoriously brutal raiders, which was why the Ottomans deployed them as a force not just of reconnaissance but of psychological warfare. They plowed ahead of the Ottoman army, pillaging towns and farms before setting them ablaze. Those they didn’t kill would be ransomed off or taken away and sold into slavery.

The unruly bashi-bazouks performed much the same task. They were irregular Ottoman soldiers—unsalaried mercenaries who served the sultan in return for the spoils of war, whatever slaves and booty they could grab. They were equally undisciplined and barbaric—their name literally meant “damaged head”—all of which were qualities that served Kamal and Nisreen’s current predicament well.

“I’m still missing something… how did you get into the city? And why were you naked?”

Kamal kept his tone casual, to underplay the question’s importance. “We shadowed the army, intent on making a difference. After I found out about the meeting in Stetteldorf, we were making our way there when we were captured by a band of bashi-bazouks. They decided to have some fun and ripped my sister-in-law’s clothes off before…” He left the rest unsaid.

Judging by the bearded man’s expression, he didn’t seem surprised. “And you?”

Kamal let the question hang for a second and gave him a leading look, as if waiting for him to come to the obvious conclusion. “They weren’t partial to women.”

The man gave him a small wince. “But you managed to get away?”

“She’s my sister-in-law,” Kamal said, his tone dead even. “I wasn’t going to stand back. And we got lucky. They got into a brawl about who gets to go first. I made use of it.”

The bearded man looked at Nisreen, as if picturing the scene in his mind’s eye and assessing how much of a trophy she might have been for a gang of unruly bandits.

“But why come into the city?”

“We were naked, with no food or horses and with the rest of them on our tail. We had to move fast and find safety. Fortunately, it was under cover of darkness; otherwise, we wouldn’t be here.”

“How did you get into the city?”

“We swam across the river and climbed over the east wall. It’s the least protected side of the walls. We knew that right from the first days of planning for the siege. Two people in the dead of night, your exhausted defenders who can barely stay awake… perhaps we also got a bit lucky.”

“But coming here… if you wanted to warn Sobieski, this isn’t the place to do it. We’re surrounded.”

“Like I said, we didn’t have a choice. But we managed to get in. Which means we can get out. Can’t we?”

The bearded man didn’t reply. He was deep in thought, as he’d been since Kamal answered his first question. It was clear that he was still brooding over whether he believed what he was hearing. It was a lot to process—a barrage of shocking, disturbing statements.

“Your accent,” he finally said. “It’s… unusual.”

Kamal decided not to give it air. “No one’s ever had trouble understanding me. You certainly don’t.”

“Perhaps not.” He pondered it for a moment, then moved in closer and, keeping his eyes on Kamal, took his arm and pulled up his sleeve, exposing the incantation. Kamal didn’t resist.

The bearded man pointed at it. “And this? What is it?”

The incantation was tattooed in Arabic letters, but it meant nothing to anyone who didn’t understand Palmyrene. Kamal and Nisreen had discussed it. They knew it would likely come up and be hard to explain, so they had decided on the most plausible answer they could think of.

Kamal said, “It’s personal.” It was a blunt gambit, designed to goad his interrogator.

“I don’t think anything of yours is personal anymore.”

Kamal glanced across at Nisreen, then shrugged. “It’s our mutual pact.”

“Your pact?”

“Our revenge pact.”

“It’s not in your language.”

“No, it’s in Croatian. We hid out in the balkan,” Kamal said, using the Ottoman word for “mountain” that had ended up giving the whole region south of the Danube its name. “After escaping from Istanbul, in a small village near Sisak, the townspeople took pity on us and sheltered us. Their women and children had all these markings on them. They explained the significance of it, their belief that it could provide a spiritual defense from the Ottomans… and given what we were planning, I thought we could use some of it, too. They were happy to oblige us.”

The bearded man fell silent. He seemed overwhelmed by all the information while his men looked like they had reached the end of their tether at being kept in the dark.

Kamal broke the uneasy silence by asking him, “How is it that you speak our language so well?”

The question elicited an even more stumped look from the bearded man, but before he could reply, a series of explosions rocked the room. They were deep growls that rumbled in from somewhere near and were much bigger than anything they’d felt since they’d landed in the city.

The blasts shook the ground under them, cracking the walls and ceiling and showering them with dust and debris. Kamal grabbed Nisreen and pulled her close to shield her from danger. And although he didn’t know what had caused it, a crippling worry instantly seared through him: that the Ottomans’ plans had changed, that he and Nisreen were too late, and that the city was about to fall.