Three Arched Bridge by Ismaíl Kadaré Read Free Book Online

were thrown nobody could tell where, and then with redoubled force hurled themselves against the unfinished stone piers. They carried with them not only tree stumps and stones, but goats, wolves, and even drowned snakes that resembled the emblems and terrifying symbols of an army. They stormed the bridge head-on, were repulsed, lunged from the left, poured from the right, and foamed wildly below the piers. But the stone piers took no notice, Only then did people notice the master-in-chief still poised above the planks stretching from one pier to another, studying the angry surge of the Ujana e Keqe. Some people claim that he sometimes laughed.
    It was clear that the Ujana e Keqe had failed in its first contest with the stone yoke they were casting over it. The debris it had swallowed, along with a drunken mason who the waves seized, I do not know how, were not much of a revenge. The water surged on, wilder than ever, and the Ujana e Keqe, colored by the clay it carried, seemed stained with blood.
    People looked at the stone teeth planted in the water, and pitied the river. It will rise again, they said; it will recover from its summer sickness, and then well see what havoc it will wreak.
    But two weeks passed, the river rose still higher, its waves grew stronger, and its roar grew deeper, but still it did nothing to the bridge.

18
    T HE SECOND MONTH OF AUTUMN was cold as seldom before. After the first flood, the waters of the Ujana e Keqe cleared and reverted to their usual color, between pale blue and green. But this color, familiar to us for years, now seemed to conceal cold fury and outrage.
    The laborers, laden with stones and buckets of mortar, moved like fiends among the planks and beams. The river flowed below, minding its own concerns, while the workmen above minded theirs.
    Throughout October nothing of note occurred. A drowned corpse, brought by the waters from no one knew where, collided with one of the central piers, spun around it a while, and vanished again. It was on that very day that there dimly emerged from among the mass of scaffolding and nailed crossbeams something like a bow connecting the two central piers. Apparently they were preparing to launch the first arch.

19
    O N THE THRESHOLD OF WINTER , along with the first frosts, wandering dervishes turned up everywhere. They were seen along the high road, by the Inn of the Two Roberts, and farther away, by the Fever Stone, Travelers arriving from neighboring principalities said that they had seen them there too, and some even said that Turkish dervishes had been seen along the entire length of the old Via Egnatia. Sometimes in small groups or in pairs, but in most cases alone, they ate up the miles with their filthy bare feet.
    Early yesterday morning I saw two of them walking with that nimble gait of theirs along the deserted road. One led the way, the other followed two paces behind, and I looked at their rags, so soiled by the dust and the winter wind, and asked almost aloud, “Why?”
    Who are these vagrants, and why have they appeared throughout the peninsula at the same time, on this threshold of winter?

20
    F ROST COVERED THE GROUND . Two wandering bards had stayed three consecutive nights at the Inn of the Two Roberts, entertaining the guests with new ballads. The ballads had been composed on the subject of the Ujana e Keqe and were inauspicious. What you might call their content was more or less as follows: The naiads and water nymphs would never forget the insult offered to the Ujana e Keqe, Revenge might be slow., but it would come.
    Such ballads would be very much to the taste of the people from “Boats and Rafts*” Yet now that they had lost their battle and the bridge was being built, not one and not a thousand ballads could help them, because so far no one has heard of songs destroying a bridge or a building of any kind.
    Since their final departure, defeated and despondent, the “Boats and Rafts’, people had been