The three-arched bridge
The receding Byzantine empire has left behind a patchwork of warring principalities, peopled by a volatile mix of Croats and Serbs, Bulgars and Magyars, Albanians and Greeks. The people here fight over everything, not just over pastures and sheep but even over the authorship of their countless legends. In one such gruesome tale, a castle under construction cannot be finished until a young mason's bride has been walled up alive in the half-completed rampart, one breast left exposed to suckle her growing infant even after she has died. This ghastly myth becomes a perverse reality when, in the spring of 1378, the construction of a bridge over a strategically important river is hampered by repeated acts of sabotage. A mason suspected in the crime is discovered one morning immured up to his collarbones under the first of the bridge's three stone arches, his head an shoulders peering out through a milky veil of plaster. As in the legend, his partial immurement permits construction to proceed. But his will not be the last human sacrifice on the bridge that breaches Europe's first line of defense against the threat of Islam. Inspired by Nobel Prize-winner Ivo Andric's Bridge on the River Drina, Ismail Kadare's newest novel to appear in English is a chilling parable of the Balkans' tortured past.