The Fire

The pasha had never issued such a command before. It could not be disobeyed. Haidée was dressed for the trek, in thick kashimir pantaloons and fur-lined boots. But her odalisques – frozen here in indecision upon the bridge – were trembling more from fear than from the cold, unable to move. Sheltered as she’d been in her twelve years, it was clear to young Haidée that these ignorant country girls would prefer the warmth and relative safety of their harem, surrounded by fellow slaves and concubines, to the icy winter lake with its dark and unknown dangers. In truth, she’d prefer it herself.

Haidée silently prayed for a sign of what those terrified screams had meant.

Then, as if in answer to her unspoken request, through the dark morning mist across the lake she could make out the fire that had flamed up like a beacon, illuminating the massive form of the pasha’s palace. Projecting into the lake on its spit of land, its crenellated white granite walls and pointed minarets shimmering in the mist, it seemed to rise from the waters: Demir Kule, the Iron Castle. It was part of a walled fortress, the Castro, at the entrance to the six-kilometer lake and it had been built to withstand the onslaught of ten thousand troops. In these past two years of armed siege by the Ottoman Turks, it had proven impregnable.

Just as impregnable was this strip of craggy, mountainous terrain – Shquiperia, the Eagle’s Country – a wild, unconquerable place ruled by a wild, unconquerable people who called themselves Toska – ‘coarse’ – after the rough, volcanic pumice that had formed this land. The Turks and Greeks called it Albania – the White Land – for those rugged, snowcapped mountains that protected it from attack by land or sea. Its inhabitants, the most ancient race in southeastern Europe, still spoke the ancient tongue – older by far than Illyrian, Macedonian, or Greek: Chimaera, a language comprehended by no one else on earth.

And the wildest and most chimaerical of these was Haidée’s father, red-haired Ali Pasha – Arslan, ‘the Lion,’ as he was called from the age of fourteen, when, alongside his mother and her band of brigands, he’d avenged his father’s death in a ghak, a blood feud, to recover the town of Tebelen. It would be the first of many such ruthless victories.

Now, nearly seventy years later, Ali Tebeleni – Vali of Rumelia, Pasha of Janina – had formed a sea power to rival Algiers and captured all the coastal towns down to Parga, once possessions of the Venetian Empire. He feared no power, east or west. He himself was the most powerful force in the far-flung Ottoman Empire, after the sultan in Constantinople. Too powerful, in fact. That was the trouble.

For weeks now, Ali Pasha had been sequestered, along with a small retinue – twelve of his closest supporters and Haidée’s mother, Vasiliki, the pasha’s favorite wife – in a monastery at the middle of the enormous lake. He was awaiting his pardon from the sultan, Mahmud II, in Constantinople – a pardon now eight days overdue. The only insurance against the pasha’s life was the hard, stony fact of Demir Kule itself. The fortress, defended by six batteries of British mortar, was also packed with twenty thousand pounds of French explosives. The pasha had threatened to destroy it, to blow it to the skies – along with all the treasures and lives within its walls – if the sultan’s promised pardon was not forthcoming.

Haidée understood that it must be for this very reason the pasha had ordered her to be brought to him, under cover of darkness, at this final hour. Her father needed her. She vowed to quell any fears.

But then in the deathly silence Haidée and her chambermaids heard a sound. It was a soft sound, but infinitely terrifying. A sound borne very close by, only meters from where they stood, sheltered here among the high grasses.

The sound of oars, dipping into the water.

As if with one thought, the young girls held their breath and focused upon that lapping sound. They could nearly touch its source.

Through the dense, silvery fog, they could just make out three longboats slipping past them in the waters. Each slender caique was rowed by shadowy oarsmen – perhaps ten or twelve shadows per boat, more than thirty men in all. Their silhouettes swayed rhythmically.

In horror, Haidée knew there could be no mistake where these boats were headed. There was only one thing that lay beyond the marsh – out there in the middle of the vast lake. These boats and their clandestine oarsmen were headed for the Isle of Pines, where the monastery lay: the island refuge of Ali Pasha.

She knew she must reach the hamam at once – she must reach the shore, where the pasha’s horseman was waiting. She knew just what those terrified screams had meant – what the silence, and the small beacon fire that followed it, must signify. They were warnings to those awaiting the dawn, those who were waiting on that isle across the lake. Warnings by those who must have risked their lives just to light such a fire. Warnings to her father.

It meant that the impregnable Demir Kule had been taken without a single shot. The brave Albanian defenders who had held out for two long years had been defeated, by stealth or treachery, in the dead of night.

And Haidée understood what that meant: These boats slipping past her were no ordinary ships.

These were Turkish ships.

Someone had betrayed her father, Ali Pasha.

Mehmet Effendi stood in darkness, high in the bell tower of the St Pantaleon monastery on the Isle of Pines. He held his spyglass, awaiting his first glimpse of dawn with uncustomary anxiety and trepidation.

Such anxiety was uncustomary to Mehmet Effendi due to the fact that he had always known what each next dawn, in a long succession of dawns, was going to bring. He knew such things – the unfolding of future events – with a sharp precision. Indeed, ordinarily he could time them to within the fragment of a moment. This was because Mehmet Effendi was not only – in his civil role – Ali Pasha’s chief minister, he was also the pasha’s chief astrologer. Mehmet Effendi had never been wrong in predicting the outcome of a maneuver or a battle.

The stars had not been out last night, and there’d been no moon to go by, but he hardly needed such things. For in these past few weeks and days, the omens had never been clearer. It was only their interpretation, right now, that still gave him pause. Though why should it? he chastened himself. After all, it was all in place, wasn’t it? Everything that had been foretold was coming to pass.

The twelve were here, weren’t they? All of them – not just the general, but the shaikhs, the Mürsits of the order – even the great Baba himself, who’d been brought here from his near-death bed, by litter-bearers, over the Pindus range of mountains, to arrive just in time for this event. This was the event that had been awaited for more than one thousand years, since the days of the caliphs al-Mahdi and Harun al-Rashid. All the right people were in place – and the omens, too. How could it possibly go wrong?

Waiting beside Effendi in silence was the general: Athanasi Vaya, head of the pasha’s armies, whose brilliant strategies had held the Ottoman armies of Sultan Mahmud II at bay these past two years.

To accomplish this, Vaya had employed the freebooting Klepht banditti to guard the high mountain passes against intrusion. Then he’d deployed Ali Pasha’s crack Albanian Palikhari troops, in Frankish-style guerrilla warfare and sabotage. At the end of last Ramadan, for instance, when Sultan Mahmud’s officers were inside Janina’s White Mosque at their Bairam prayers, Vaya had ordered the Palikhari to demolish the place by cannonade. The Ottoman officers, along with the mosque, had been reduced to charcoal. But Vaya’s real stroke of genius involved the sultan’s own troops: the Janissaries.

The degenerate Ottoman sultans – ensconced in their harems in the ‘Golden Cage’ of the Topkapi Palace at Constantinople – had always raised armies by imposing upon their outlying Christian provinces a levee called the Devishirme – the ‘Tax of Children.’ Each year, one in every five Christian boys was removed from his village, then taken to Constantinople, converted to Islam, and enrolled in the sultan’s armies. Despite the injunctions of the Qur’an against forcible conversion to Islam, or against selling Muslims into slavery, the Devishirme had existed for five hundred years.

These boys, their successors, and their descendants had grown into a powerful, implacable force that even the Sublime Porte at Constantinople could not control. The Janissary troops, when not otherwise employed, did not blanch at setting the capital city aflame, robbing civilians in the streets – nor even removing sultans from their thrones. The sultan Mahmud II had lost his own two predecessors to such Janissary predations. He’d decided it was time to put a stop to it.

But there was a twist to the plot – and it lay right here in the White Land. That problem was precisely why Sultan Mahmud had sent his armies here over the mountains, why they had laid siege to these lands for the past two years. Why their vast armies had been waiting outside the Castro to bombard the fortress of Demir Kule. But this problem also explained why they had not yet been successful – why the Janissaries had not demolished the fortress. And it was this problem that gave Chief Minister Mehmet Effendi and his companion more than a small bit of confidence tonight, as they stood here now, watching, in the bell tower of St Pantaleon, in the predawn light.

There was only one thing on earth that the all-powerful Janissaries truly venerated – something they had continued to revere, over all the past five hundred years of their military corps’ existence. This was the memory of Haji Bektash Veli – the thirteenth-century founder of the mystical Bektashi order of Sufi dervishes. Haji Bektash was the Pir of the Janissaries – their patron saint.

This was, in truth, why the sultan feared his own army so. Why he’d had to replenish the forces fighting here with mercenaries drawn from other pashiliks, elsewhere throughout his far-flung empire.

The Janissaries had become a true menace to the empire itself. Like religious zealots, they swore an oath of allegiance drenched with secret mystical codes. Worse, they swore allegiance only to their Pir – not to the house of Osman or its sultan, trapped in his Golden Cage on the Golden Horn.

I have trusted in God…(so began the Janissaries’ oath)

We are believers of old. We have confessed the unity of Reality. We have offered our head on this way. We have a prophet. Since the time of the Mystic Saints we have been the intoxicated ones. We are the moths in the divine fire. We are a company of wandering dervishes in this world. We cannot be counted on the fingers; we cannot be finished by defeat. No one outside of us knows our state.

The Twelve Imams, the Twelve Ways, we have affirmed them all: the Three, the Seven, the Forty, the light of the Prophet, the Beneficence of Ali, our Pir – the head sultan, Haji Bektash Veli…

It gave Mehmet Effendi and General Vaya relief to know that the greatest Bektashi representative here on earth – the Dede, the oldest Baba – had traveled over the mountains to be here tonight. To be present for the event they had all awaited. The Baba, who alone knew the true mysteries and what the omens might portend.

But despite all the omens, it seemed something may have gone wrong.

Chief Minister Effendi turned to General Vaya in the darkened bell tower of the monastery. ‘This is an omen I do not understand,’ he told the general.

‘You mean, something in the stars?’ General Vaya objected. ‘But my friend, you’ve assured us that all is well in that department. We’ve followed your astrological injunctions to the closest. It’s as you always say: Con-sider means “with the stars”; dis-aster means “against them”!

‘Furthermore,’ the general continued, ‘even if your predictions are completely wrong – if the Castro is destroyed, with its millions in jewels and thousands of barrels of powder – as you know, we are all Bektashis here, including the pasha! They may have replaced their leaders with the sultan’s men, but even they haven’t dared to destroy us yet, nor will they attempt it, as long as the pasha holds the “key” that they all covet. And do not forget – we also have an exit strategy!’

‘I fear not,’ said Mehmet Effendi, handing his spyglass to the general. ‘I cannot explain it, but something seems to have happened. There has been no explosion. The dawn is nearly here. And a small bonfire is burning, like a beacon, across the lake.’

‘Arslan’ Ali Pasha, the Lion of Janina, paced the cold, tiled floor of his monastery chambers. He’d never been so terrified in all his life – though not for himself, of course. He had no illusions about what would soon become of him. After all, there were Turks at the other side of the lake. He knew their methods all too well.

Well, he knew what would happen – his head on a pike, like his two poor sons who’d been foolish enough to trust the sultan. His head would be packed in salt for the long sea voyage, then brought to Constantinople, as a warning to other pashas who’d got themselves too far above their station. His head, like theirs, would be stuck on the iron prongs, high on the gates of the Topkapi Palace – the High Gate, the ‘Sublime Porte’ – to dissuade other infidels from rebellion.

But he was no infidel. Far from it, though his wife was a Christian. He was terrified for his beloved Vasiliki, and for little Haidée. He could not even bring himself to think of what would happen to them the very moment that he was dead. His favorite wife and her daughter – now there was something the Turks could torture him with – perhaps even in the afterlife.

He remembered the day he and Vasiliki had met – it was the subject of many a legend. She had been the same age then as Haidée was now – twelve years old. The pasha had ridden into her town that day, years ago, on his prancing, caparisoned Albanian stallion, Dervish. Ali had been surrounded by his broad-chested, long-haired, gray-eyed Palikhari troops from the mountains, in their colorful embroidered waistcoats, shaggy sheepskin capotes, armed with daggers and inlaid pistols tucked in their waist sashes. They were there for a punitive mission against the village, under orders from the Porte.

The sixty-four-year-old pasha himself had cut a dashing figure, with his ruby-studded scimitar in hand and, slung on his back, that famous musket inlaid with mother-of-pearl and silver – a gift of the emperor Napoleon. That was the day – was it seventeen years ago already? – when young Vasiliki had begged the pasha to spare her life and her family’s. He’d adopted her and brought her here to Janina.

She’d grown up in splendor in his many palaces, their courtyards replete with splashing marble fountains, shady parks of plane trees, oranges, pomegranates, lemons, and figs, luxurious rooms filled with Gobelin carpets, Sevres porcelains, and Venetian glass chandeliers. He’d raised Vasiliki as his own daughter and loved her better than any of his own children. When Vasiliki was eighteen, and already pregnant with Haidée, Ali Pasha had married her. He’d never regretted that choice – until today.

But today, at last, he would have to tell the truth.

Vasia. Vasia. How could he have made such a mistake? It must be his age that explained it. What was he? He didn’t even know. Eighty something? His leonine days were over. He would not live to be much older. Of that, he was sure. It was too late to save himself, or even his beloved wife.

But there was something else – something that must not fall into the clutches of the Turks, something critical: something more important than life and death. That was why the Baba had come all this long, long way.

And that was why Ali Pasha had sent the boy to the hamam to collect Haidée. The young boy Kauri, the Janissary – a πεµπτoσ, a pemptos, a ‘fifth’ – one of those boys of the Devishirme, those one in every five Christian boys who’d been collected each year, over these past five hundred years, to replenish the Janissary ranks.

But Kauri was no Christian: He was Islamic from birth. Indeed, according to Mehmet Effendi, Kauri himself might be a part of the omen – perhaps the only one upon whom they could rely to complete this desperate and dangerous mission.

Ali Pasha only hoped to Allah that they were not too late.

Kauri, in a panic, hoped precisely the same.

He lashed the great black stallion ahead along the darkened lake shore, as Haidée clung to him tightly from behind. His instructions had been to bring her to the isle with as little fanfare as possible, under cover of darkness.

But when the pasha’s young daughter and her frightened maidservants arrived at the hamam and told him of the ships that were already rowing across the lake – Turkish ships – Kauri threw such precautions to the wind. He quickly understood, regardless of what his orders might have been, that as of this moment the rules had certainly changed.

The intruders were moving slowly, trying to remain silent, the girls had told him. Just to reach the isle, the Turks would have to cross a good four miles of water, Kauri knew. By circumventing the lake on horseback himself, to where Kauri had lashed down the small boat among the rushes at the far end, it would cut their own travel time in half – just what they needed.

Kauri had to reach the monastery first, before the Turks, to warn Ali Pasha.

At the far end of the enormous monastery kitchens, the coals blazed in the oçak, the ritual hearth beneath the sacred soup cauldron of the order. On the altar to the right the twelve candles had been lit – and, at center, the secret candle. Each person who entered the room stepped across the sacred threshold without touching the pillars or the floor.

At the room’s center, Ali Pasha, the most powerful ruler in the Ottoman Empire, lay prostrate, facedown upon his prayer rug, spread upon the cold stone floor. Before him on a pile of cushions sat the great Shemimi Baba, who had initiated the pasha so many years ago: He was the Pirimugan, the Perfect Guide of all Bektashis throughout the world. The Baba’s wizened face, brown and wrinkled as a dried berry, was suffused with an ancient wisdom attained through years of following the Way. It was said that Shemimi Baba was more than one hundred years old.

The Baba, still swathed in his hirka for warmth, was plumped upon his pile of cushions like a frail, dry leaf that had just floated down from the skies. He wore the ancient elifi tac, the twelve-pleated headdress given to the order, it was said, by Haji Bektashi Veli himself, five hundred years ago. In his left hand, the Baba held his ritual staff of mulberry, topped with the palihenk, the sacred twelve-part stone. His right hand rested upon the recumbent pasha’s head.

The Baba looked about the room at those who were kneeling on the floor around him: General Vaya, Minister Effendi, and Vasiliki, the soldiers, shaikhs and Mürsits of the Bektashi Sufi order, as well as several monks of the Greek Orthodox Church, who were the pasha’s friends, Vasiliki’s spiritual guides – as well as their hosts, these many weeks, here upon the isle.

To one side sat the young boy, Kauri, and the pasha’s daughter, Haidée, who had brought the news that had prompted the Baba’s call for this meeting. They’d stripped off their muddy riding cloaks and, like the others, performed their ritual ablutions before entering the sacred space near the holy Baba.

The Baba removed his hand from Ali Pasha’s head, completing the blessing, and the pasha arose, bowed low, and kissed the hem of the Baba’s cloak. Then he knelt along with the others in the circle surrounding the great saint. Everyone understood the severity of their situation, and all strained to hear Shemimi Baba’s critical next words:

‘Nice sirlar vardir sirlardan içli,’ began the Baba. There are many mysteries, mysteries within mysteries.

This was the well-known Doctrine of the Mürsit – the concept that one must possess not just a shaikh or teacher of the law – but also a mürshid or human guide through the nasip, the initiation, and through the following ‘four gate-ways’ to Reality.

But Kauri thought in confusion, how could anyone imagine such things at this moment, with the Turks perhaps only moments away from the isle? Kauri glanced surreptitiously at Haidée, just beside him.

Then, as if the Baba had read these private thoughts, the old man suddenly laughed aloud: a cackle. All those in the circle looked up, surprised, but another surprise was just to come: The Baba, with much effort, had planted his mulberry stick in the pile of pillows and hoisted himself ably to his feet. Ali Pasha leapt up at once and was rushing to help his aged mentor, but he was whisked away with a flutter of the old man’s hand.

‘Perhaps you wonder why we are speaking of mysteries like this, when we have infidels and wolves nearly at our door!’ he exclaimed. ‘There is only one mystery we need speak of at this moment, just before dawn. It is the mystery that Ali Pasha has guarded for us so well for so long. It is the mystery that itself has now placed our pasha here on this rock, the very mystery that brings the wolfish ones here. It is my duty to tell you what it is – and why it must be defended by all of us here, at any cost. Though those of us in this room may find different fates before this day is over – some of us may fight to the death or be captured by the Turks for a fate that may prove worse than death – there is only one person, here in this room, who is in a position to rescue this mystery. And thanks to our young fighter, Kauri, she has arrived here just in time.’

The Baba nodded with a smile at Haidée, as the others all turned to look at her. All but her mother, Vasiliki, that is – who was looking across at Ali Pasha with an expression that seemed to mingle love, trepidation, and fear.

‘I have something to tell you all,’ Shemimi Baba went on. ‘It is a mystery that has been handed down and protected for centuries. I am the last guide in the long, long chain of guides who have passed this mystery on to their successors. I must tell the story swiftly and succinctly, but tell it I must – before the sultan’s assassins arrive. You must all understand the importance of what we are fighting for, and why it must be protected, even unto our deaths.

‘You all know one of the famous hadis or reputed sayings of Muhammad,’ the Baba told them. ‘These famous lines are carved above the threshold of many Bektashi halls – words that are attributed to Allah Himself:

I was a Hidden Treasure, therefore was I fain to be known, therefore I created creation, in order that I should be known…

‘The tale that I am about to tell you involves another hidden treasure, a treasure of great value, but also great danger – a treasure that has been sought for more than one thousand years. Only the guides, over the years, have known the true source and meaning of this treasure. Now I share this with you.’

Everyone in the room nodded: They understood the importance of the message that the Baba was about to impart to them, the very importance of his being here. No one spoke as the old man removed the sacred elifi tac from his head, set it down in the pillows, and shed his long sheepskin cloak. He stood there amid the cushions dressed only in his simple woolen kaftan. And leaning upon his mulberry staff, the Baba began his tale…

The Tale of the Guide

In the year of the Hegira 138 – or by the Christian calendar, AD 755 – there lived, at Kufa, near Baghdad, the great Sufi mathematician and scientist, al-Jabir ibn Hayyan of Khurasan.

During Jabir’s long residence in Kufa, he wrote many scholarly scientific treatises. These included his work The Books of the Balance, the work that established Jabir’s great reputation as the father of Islamic alchemy.