The Three Turks - Chapter III

The spring came to the kingdom with the most gladsome news; the Christian armies were victorious on every front. Although the lord was not in the service of his king in the war effort and thus was not able to share the spoils of war (due to the king's despise of him), the new season was an enjoyment for him as well. Because the men captured (and given to his command) were fully recovered and had even learned the language of the kingdom where they happened to reside as foreigners. And it was just the right time because three strong men could be a great help to sow and tend the fields. The serfs under his will were weak and mostly old, but those men had the robustness of soldiers (simply because they were soldiers), which could easily compensate for the lord's lack of manpower. He ordered them to be brought to his presence. Three men entered the hall with the same chain they had dragged with them when they first arrived. Yet, it was the only resemblance to the three barely living men they had been. They had grown healthy and strong again. Their wounds were either healed or scabbed. They were well-fed and clothed. Of course, their clothes were not of princes but of mere peasants. Still, they were not torn and were relatively clean. At the head, there was a Sipahi, a young cavalryman who had served in the Sultan's army, coming from his land in Anatolia; he was the most robust of all three. The latter was an Akinji, a son of the steppes, grassy plains, and thick forests. An adventurous soldier who had served in the servitude of the Khan in the north and the Sultan in the south. His one last campaign for glory, which was a failure, had been carried as a disappointment in his heart. The tail of the chain, following the former two, was a Janissary from the Sultan's Enderûn. In his first struggle of his newly adopted religion, he was captured by the enemy. Now, his hopes of becoming a pasha and returning to his village on the Greek shores were in turmoil. These were the men upon whom the lord fixed his hopes. When they were lined up in the center of the hall, they proudly refused to greet their master, despite the fact that they were bound to bend, a truth to which they would adapt over time. But at that moment, their master did not bother with their arrogance. On the contrary, he put a smile on his face with an unnoticing approach of a bourgeois, which possessed a great contradiction to his aristocratic origins, a situation that could only be explained through the financial struggle he had to endure after the loss of his master's good graces. He was still manifesting himself through the means of a noble, but a keen eye could see the resemblances between him and a widow of a middle-class baker who would do anything to save her bakery, which she held dear. Even his carefree lifestyle gave way to the relentless urge to realize an opportunity and the instinct to seize it. This was why he was not offended by these ill-mannered slaves of his, because he did not perceive them as humans but as three assets which he believed would be profitable.