Three Arched Bridge

54

NEWS FOLLOWED HARD ON NEWS, as frequent and grim as clouds in a dark season. The Turks had launched a major diplomatic offensive. More than half the Balkan peninsula was now under the Ottoman crescent Three of the eleven lords of Arberia had also accepted vassalage, Throughout the Balkans, Turkish armies were on large-scale maneuvers in order to strike fear into those princes and dukes who still hesitated, The famous “Arbanon Line” of seven fortresses from Shkodér to Lezhé, which defended Byzantium from the Slavs, was crumbling. Byzantium itself had lost its vigor, The Balkan nobles — Albanians, Croats, Greeks, Serbs, Romanians, Macedonians, and Slovenes — sent their couriers sometimes to Venice and sometimes to Turkey, and sometimes in both directions simultaneously, to choose the lesser of the two dangers. They said that messengers left by one door, while at another entered drawers of straws and especially readers of shoulder blades, as people had recently called those who predict the approach or retreat of war by the color of a ram’s shoulder blade. It is said that immediately after one dinner, at which the reader of the shoulder blade was horrified by the reddish tinge of the bone, the count of the Skurajs sent messengers to the sultan. The Muzakas were also wavering, The stand of the Dukagjins was unknown. They had withdrawn into the depths of the mountains, as they usually did at such times, and were brooding behind the mists. There is always time to die, their forebear had said. However, the phrase has been considered ambiguous; it is not clear which is considered death, the acceptance of war or of vassalage. They had never been sycophants, but nevertheless at such times you must prepare yourself for anything.

Increasingly I remembered their emblems, with all their lions, manes, fangs, claws, and cockspurs, as if to determine the stands they would take* … Just as often I remembered the laughter of the two countesses on the bank of the Ujana e Keqe, when they flirted with the name of “Abdullahth,” and then their gossip about their sister-in-law Katrina, or “the queen” as they sarcastically called her, because her husband Karl Topia was a pretender to the long-vacant throne of Arberia, I remembered all these things and became as frightened of these dainty women as of the Turkish yataghan. I was frightened of the gifts and silks with which the Ottomans were so generous, and which the ladies coveted so much.

Some time ago, when the count of Kashnjet and the duke of Tepelené had been the first to accept vassalage, they had mocked those who had predicted disaster. You said that the Turks would destroy us and strip us and disgrace us, they said. But we are still masters of our lands.

Our castles are still where they were; our coats of arms, our honor, and our possessions are untouched. If you don’t believe us, come and see with your own eyes,

That is how they, and their ladies especially, wrote to other nobles. In fact it was true in a way. The Turk did not touch them. Nothing had changed, except for something that seemed tiny and unimportant, … This was the matter of the date at the head of their letters. Instead of the year 1378, they had written “hijrah 757,” according to the Islamic calendar, the adoption of which was one of the Ottomans’ few demands.

How unlucky they were, They had turned time back six hundred years, and they laughed and joked, How terrible!