The Lake of Sorrows (2 page)

Finally capitulating, tears of helplessness in her eyes, Haynitsa sank down onto the extravagant bed in her tent. It was large, soft, and furnished with the finest silk, scented with flowers and herbs to bring peace to even the most anguished mind - and on this night, as on almost all nights, it failed again.

The chill and darkness of the tent faded into hot, midday sun, and the stench of cooking-fires and horse manure from her brother’s encamped army yielded to the smell of sun-baked rock and fir trees. The grasslands below the Kelcyre slopes shimmered before her, and she sighed in contentment, savoring the warm caress of sunlight on her skin. Her mount, a fine walnut-brown mare, nibbled lazily at a patch of shrub.

“Yes, life can be good for the women of strong men.” The voice of Haynitsa’s mother, the formidable lady Hamko, was uncharacteristically mild. Sitting on her horse beside her daughter, Hamko had at least the ghost of a smile on her face.

Haynitsa’s smile was the smile of youth, full and free of care. A great beauty she was not, women who were delicate roses did not survive long among the Tepeleni, but when she favored young men with that smile, she could make a goatherd thug feel like writing verse. “And we are the women of a strong man, mother. Sometimes I think I will never want to marry. What man can protect me like Alhi?”

She turned her head to glance proudly towards the town of Becisht in the distance. Alhi’s ever-growing band of brigands had taken residence there only a few months ago, but already the lesser chieftains were sending their greetings and offering their daughters to the renowned Alhi - and, lately, their sons as husbands for the young lady Haynitsa.

It amused them all that, even though Hamko was still a lady who could make men turn their heads when they were sure Alhi did not see it, noone had dared propose to
her.

Hamko’s own smile grew a touch stronger, fortified by pride. “Yes, I am making a man of your brother. But I shall still have to make a bride of you one day. Even your brother will need allies.”

“Allies, mother? He is not at war any more.”

“A man such as your brother is always at war, my daughter, never forget that. What lesser men call peace is just the lull between battles.”

“But he has subdued all the villages. Who is left to fight?”

“You are growing too old to remain a child, Haynitsa. That is why I brought you out here for a chat.”

She allowed herself an impish giggle. “And I thought my dear mother was growing old and kind and wanted to savor the sun with me.”

Hamko shook her head firmly. “The kind never grow old, Haynitsa. When you have subdued an enemy, you exact tributes from him. When he has forgotten how you subdued him, he will forget his tributes. Then you subdue him anew, exact new tributes - and he forgets again. It never stops.”

The giggle forgotten, Haynitsa spoke in a tiny voice. “It has been years since you had Alhi … subdue the Voriates peasants anew.”

“There you go again, daughter, weeping over that Voriates scum! I have let you prattle about that too often! For the last time, had we been less harsh towards them, other villages would have done as they did. Now it has been years since such firmness was necessary -
because
we were firm back then.”

Haynitsa shivered slightly, despite the sun’s warmth. “I cannot forget the stories our men told when they came back, mother. Burning children — “

“Warriors like to scare women with tales of their ferocity, daughter. But the sister of Alhi will have to learn to listen to such tales without remorse, nay, with elation. I do.” Hamko made her best attempt at motherly comfort. “The peasants will bury their dead and rebuild their villages - ‘twas no more than three of them, when all is said and done, and Hornovo could scarcely even be called a village. And, since then, all the villages of the Voriates have paid their tributes.”

Shuddering, Haynitsa abruptly tugged at her horse’s reins, and turned the animal onto the path back towards Becisht.

And then she froze in her saddle, for suddenly, from behind a clump of bushes and trees on her right, she saw a dozen rake-thin men in tattered peasant clothing emerge. At a run. Despite the distance, her young eyes could readily make out the triumphant, hateful smiles on their faces.

“Mother!” That one word was all she had time for, before well-aimed arrows from the peasants’ bone bows laid low the womens’ steeds.

Freeing herself from her horse, Hamko dragged her daughter free of
her
fallen mount and both broke into a run towards the town of Becisht. But it was hopeless. The peasants might have been as ugly as the women were beautiful, but they were also hardened by toil where the women were softened by affluence.

The peasants took their own, savoring time chasing their prey, but when they realized that Becisht would soon be within earshot, they closed in. Hamko pushed her daughter away, shouting at her to run faster, and turned on the men, snarling and clawing.

The men laughed at her and caught them both and fell on them like hungry vultures. Repellent men, long deprived of smooth, freshly-bathed woman’s flesh. Their stench and grating voices suffused the burning, dust-choked air. “Gardiki!” “Hornovo!” “Leckie!” One after the other, the men dishonored the two women, not once but many times, snarling the names of burnt-down villages, of slain fathers and brothers and sons, of ravished wives and butchered children.

The men forgot themselves in the pleasures of their revenge and only saw the men of Becisht when Alhi’s warriors dragged the sweating serfs off their victims, cutting first the peasants’ manhoods, then their throats.

Hamko, rising painfully from the dust, watched this with neither pleasure nor revulsion, only an icy, distant look in her eyes.

Her daughter, weeping without tears, slowly dragged herself to her feet. But, on this day, she truly became her mother’s daughter, so even as the first vultures appeared above the peasants’ corpses, she spoke to the warriors in a terrible voice. “Where is my brother Alhi? We need him. These beasts spoke the names of their villages as battle-cries and we shall make those villages cry blood in return!”

Alhi’s fierce warrior brigands recoiled in horror from her face, but, swelling with pride, Hamko answered for them in the same voice as her daughter. “He will come, Haynitsa. Patience. All in good time. The day he will demand blood for blood will come.”

Fury drove Haynitsa’s voice to a feral shriek. “Not the day! Today! Today, mother! I want to see them burn — the scum that sent these animals to do this to us. Burn their villages. Burn themselves. All of them. Ravish their whores! Burn — “

“Haynitsa!”

Strong, but gentle arms closed around her. She clawed at them, trying to tear them off her. “No! Burn them, I say! Burn!”

“
Haynitsa!
It is I, Alhi. Wake up!”

Chill and dark and the stench of horse and firewood crashed in on her senses, and the gravelly voice of her brother filled her ears, his bristly beard scratched her face, and his warm, burly arms all but squeezed the sobbing away from her quivering body.

“D
o not cry, sister. It was just your nightmares.”

Haynitsa forced her eyes open, and found herself looking over her brother’s bull-like shoulder. He was sitting on the edge of her bed, crushing her in his embrace, and behind him stood the ramrod figure of the captain of his guard, the veteran Tahir. It was he who had brought Alhi, as he was one of the few men who dared enter the tent of his Pasha-to-be unbidden.

With the experience born of many a similar night, Alhi waited until her tremors subsided and her tears were spent. “Cry no more, sister. The nightmares are gone.”

She hissed back at him. “They will never be gone. Not as long as those animals’ last village still stands!”

He held her at arms’ length, trying to meet her vehement gaze - and could not. “Hornovo and Leckie are gone, sister. Even their ashes are scattered to the four winds. Men, women and children all went down by the knife. None of them will ever brag of a father or grandfather that violated the lady Hamko and despoiled the lady Haynitsa.”

“Gardiki!” The word was a vehement challenge.

He looked up, forcing himself to look deeply into her eyes. “I made enemies when I razed Hornovo and Leckie, sister. It sowed
too
much fear — no buying off the conqueror with plunder or tribute, noone left to bury the dead and rebuild the homes and have new children. Noone! The fear of becoming nothing but forgotten ashes creates enemies. Many. I defeated them all. And I was ready for Gardiki, sister. But then the Sultan made me Pasha. Our family will be safer than ever - but I cannot burn villages at will any more.”

“An oath sworn to one’s mother on her deathbed should weigh heavier on a man’s soul than a gaudy title from a Sultan!”

“Mother made me swear I would avenge you fully, yes, and I shall. But she also made me a man fit to be a Sultan in my own right! This
Pashalik
is but the first step. That is what she wanted most of all!” Haynitsa snarled at him, but he shook her so hard her head wobbled drunkenly on her shoulders. “If that devil sickness had not turned her womb to pestilent stone, she would be sitting here beside us, telling you just that! She came to me in my tent this night, she — “

“I do not care! I want to see Gardiki burn! I want to see their menfolk hang like rotting fruit from the trees. I want to see their women ravished, as I was, and their children sold into slavery. I want to have the memories of having seen all that, so that I can summon them to drive away my nightmares whenever they assail me. I want to
sleep,
brother! People say I am going mad — they do not know the half of it! I would have killed myself long ago, had I not feared I would become like our mother, with my nightmares still clawing into my back.”

She began to wail and scream incoherently, lashing out at her brother with abandoned ferocity. He ignored it, even though there was the strength of madness in the blows, and roughly embraced her. “Cry no more, sister. Tomorrow we ride into Yannina, and I will be Pasha. And when - not if! - the Gardiki scum give me half a pretext, I shall make them weep blood.”

A
nd so, on a glorious summer day in 1788, Alhi triumphantly rode into the a flower-strewn city of Yannina as the Ottoman empire’s Pasha of Hyperus, Thessaly and Central Greece, second in rank only to a Sultan. The men, women and children of his capital were massed on the sides of the streets that led to the palace, loudly cheering their new ruler - twice as loudly on whatever side of the street he happened look towards.

His guard captain rode on the Pasha’s left side, wrinkling his nose at the pungent sweetness of all those flowers being trampled beneath the hooves and boots of the army as it marched leisurely through the streets to the city palace. “By Allah, my Pasha, I am beginning to think they are trying to smother us to death.” He sneezed.

On Alhi’s right side, his son Muhtar, who had been seventeen years old for little more than a week, laughed the laugh of a grown man. “Poor old Tahir, forget your nose and use your eyes. Have you noticed how exquisite their women are?”

A young hawk of a lad, already taller than his father, Muhtar was dressed in all the finery of a colonel of his father’s army. His still-beardless face had the good looks his mother had once had, and his seventeen-year old frame already showed signs of the brawn that his father still had. The girls and young women of Yannina found it hard to remember he was an enemy, and their shining eyes made him feel so very much like a man.

The Pasha himself joined in the laughter. “You will remember, my son, that soon you will be my Bey, commanding my army when it takes the field. Matters of state will keep me from such pleasures, except in grave cases. You should not ride into a conquered city like a star-struck youth and gape at women. You should bear yourself like a fearsome warrior and make
them
gape at
you.
”

Muhtar straightened up, but only for a moment, then yet another pretty face caught his attention. “But we did not conquer Yannina, father. It was a gift, a prize from the Sultan.”

“Indeed my son. But a prize won by all the
other
cities, those we did conquer. Conquests are the stepping-stones to
Pashaliks
and even to Sultanates. Never forget that.”

“Never, father.” The young Bey-to-be spoke absent-mindedly, drinking in ever more of the Yannoite ladies’ beauty, and his father grinned and winked at his captain, like one proud goatherd to another.

“They
are
planning to kill us with pleasure! But I expect you men to refuse such a gratifying death.” Standing on the battlements of Yannina palace, Tahir shot a challenging gaze at the lieutenants of the guard. They nodded, if a bit reluctantly, and could not help glancing enviously at the feeding frenzy in the courtyard below, as Tahir descended the stairs to report to his Pasha.

Alhi’s army had marched into the palace to find the main courtyard filled with tables, and these covered with cloth and more flowers - and food and wine, the best of Yannina, and a cornucopia of it.

The army had all but disintegrated at the sight, and only a barrage of shrilly barked orders from their commanders had been able to hold the men in check until all of the army was inside the courtyard. Then the officers had let their men loose, or the men had let themselves loose with the officers’ unneeded blessing shouted after the fact.

Only Tahir had been able to keep his men of Alhi’s guard under control, and Alhi knew it had been bought with a handsome purse of gold for each guardsman on the eve of the arrival in Yannina. That, and a strong reminder that the guard would stay in the palace and thus live in luxury every day, so perhaps they could allow their lesser brother soldiers one day of splendor?

This combination of gold and pride had won over the men, and now the guardsmen watched their fellow warriors with blasé contempt from the battlements, where they alone had been posted to towers and guns, to keep Yannina’s new ruler and his army safe.