Lord Byron's Novel Read Free Page B

mountains, and any man might show one or two such—but the mark upon Ali was of a new design, and all who saw it knew it.
    Upon his release from this cruel typographer, Ali sought out the company of his little love, and they two walked alone, and it may be that with her he permitted himself to shed a tear from pain, or perhaps he was brave Ali still. Surely she comforted him—and gazed with wonder upon the new mark—and fain would touch it—and he suffered her—for sharp and deep and lasting as it was, there was another and a deeper, in a place that could not be seen —he knew, but could not say!
     
    I N THE LAST DECADE of that century, the Empress of Russia, infamous Catherine, advanced, with her ministers, a scheme—one of many such, which persist among the Czars her heirs to this day—to overcome Constantinople and dissolve the Porte; and to advance this scheme, she compounded with the mountain peoples of Suli, and of Illyricum, and Albania, promising them freedom and the rule of their nations when the Turk their oppressor was defeated. They rose at her promise—who were accustomed to rise without any such—though now with greater fury, and in larger numbers. Not long afterwards, Great Catherine changed her mind—for she was, however Imperial, however Great, a woman —and the campaign against the Sultan was abandoned—and a treaty signed—and many marks of eternal peace and amity exchanged. The fighters of the Highlands were thereupon abandoned by their Russian allies, and the Sultan’s vengeance upon them was simply this, that he withdrew from their lands his own Governors and Generals, and gave rein to the freebooters and brigand chieftains, who had no longer any constraints upon their activities—which consisted only of robbing, murdering, slave-taking, extortion of tribute, and otherwise of contesting with one another, the best man to win. In this way the Sultan’s retribution was exacted for him, and he needed merely to watch and see which of the rivals would defeat the others, and pile their skulls upon the plain—on him the Sublime, the Merciful, could then bestow the title of Pacha.
    The tyger who ate all the other tygers bore the same name as our young hero, and would come to rule over wide lands, with his seat at Jannina—a pachalick greater than any forged there before him, and an army so large that the Sultan in Constantinople was pleased to call him vassal, without daring to demand much in the way of further duty from him. His fame spread widely, in the Gazettes and the foreign newspapers he was now and then called the Buonaparte of the East, he had even commendation from the other Buonaparte, whom he actually equalled in deeds, given that he had smaller compass— proportionally as many of heads removed, life-blood spilled, Widows and Orphans made, eyes put out, villages razed and livestock and vintage despoiled—though no more than the European’s were his wars and his arms able to dry a single tear, or cure the least sorrow: and so much for Greatness, in the little or in the large.
    This Pacha was preparing his armies to fall upon the lands that our Ali’s clan inhabited—for those stern people had refused allegiance to him, and to his titular overlord of the Porte. They had cut the throats of his messengers—this being the common response among those peoples when a request is to be declined—and the Pacha had grown impatient. He had a grandson, too, a pretty boy-Pacha, as bedight with jewels and daubed with paint as a Mayfair hostess—for the mighty of the East love so to adorn their cherished Sons, and it does not spoil their characters—at least this one’s was not spoiled, for he desired lands as fiercely as Papa did, and heads to chop off ditto, and enemies to spit and roast. The Cohorts were now readied, the turbanned soldiers gathered by the hundreds within and without the great courtyard of the palace at Tepelene, the kettle-drums were beat, the ululations were sounding