The Barbary Pirates (21 page)

I was taken past horrid iron machines stained dark with blood, and heavy doors with small barred windows from which insane gibbering escaped. How can people invent such places, let alone administer them? Then we turned into a side rat hole and he pushed me ahead down a tight spiral to a new chamber lit by a tiny slit far, far above. The single ray of light just emphasized the grotto’s darkness, its vaulted ceiling stained black by the smoke of two millennia of torches. There was a rude wooden table in the chamber’s center, with manacles at each of its corners. To one side was the glow of a forge on which sat a bubbling pot, giving off noxious fumes. Iron implements were thrust into the coals. My courage, never all that vast to begin with, was starting to shrivel.

I was slammed down on the table and chained helplessly in place, my throat and belly and privates exposed to whatever deviltry this dim monster could invent. Never had I felt so helpless! The tiny window made things worse, reminding me there was a different world beyond. From a beam overhead swung metal implements designed to pierce, pinch, and cut. I wanted to scream already, and nothing had yet been done.

“Soon you will talk more than you believed possible.” Omar, clinical as a doctor, pumped air into the coals with a bellows, sparks dancing. He slipped on a heavy leather glove and lifted out an iron bar like a fireplace poker and brought it over to where I helplessly waited.

He held it above my eyes, letting me see its glow. “Each time I do this, I learn ways to prolong the pain. Victims can live for days. Yes, Omar is not as clumsy as he once was!” The hulking brute nodded. “By the time I’ve had the last of your friends, I will make it last a very long time indeed; so long that I will become bored before they finally die.”

“We wouldn’t want that,” I managed. My throat was dry as dust, my muscles cracking from tension. “Finish us quickly, is my advice.”

“You are lucky you are first, while I am still learning. We will experiment with pain. And a handsome man like you needs a mirror, so I will bring one after my branding so that you can weep at the ruin I make of your face. My goal is to make you even more hideous than me. You will blister and infect, but I keep maggots to eat the corruption. It makes you last longer.”

“Thank goodness for maggots.” It was a wheeze.

“I am told you pride yourself with women, so I have tools to mutilate those parts as well. The groin is a locus of agony, and always elicits the greatest screaming.”

I was near to fainting. “Can’t you just kill me? Beheading, Smith read.”

There was a hiss and I jumped, the poker thrust into a pail of water and then reinserted in the coals. “Why would they need the skill of a Dungeon Master to do that? Anyone can hack off a head with a sword. It is torture that is an art. The shame of mutilation. The peeling of flesh.”

“Omar, please, I’ll pay anything…”

He was rummaging about, clanging and clattering his tools of torment. I squeezed my eyes shut. I could hear the scrape of coals, and smell the fumes. Something hissed like acid. Then there was a long silence. I tensed to wait for the first excruciating assault.

“Of course,” Omar said as if the idea had just occurred to him, “there is one other way.”

My eyes opened. “What? What?”

“Perhaps you would once more speak to the mistress.”

“Mistress?”

“The pirate queen, Lady Somerset.”

I was sweating. “Yes, yes! To her and Yussef! We’re the kind of men who should be ransomed, not tortured! Omar, let me see them, please! I’ll explain it is all a misunderstanding! We are really quite valuable!”

“I think they will find you as annoying as I do, and give you back to me to do as I wish. Unless you please them very much.”

“But that’s exactly what I do! I please people!”

“While you talk with them I will think of new ways to hurt your friends, in case you can’t come to agreement. I would like to hurt your friends very much.” He grinned like a maniac.

“No, don’t hurt my friends! Let me talk to Aurora!” By thunder, I’d tup the girl sideways and upside down, clenching my teeth while I did it, if that’s what it took to get off this torture table. No need to talk about ancient mirrors when I could just rely on my charm…

Suddenly janissaries entered and the manacles were unlocked from my shaking limbs. I felt utterly depleted, even though not a scratch had been inflicted. Omar lumbered off to attend to some other wretch while the Tripolitan guards hauled me upright with looks of disgust. I was shuddering. None of
them
called me pretty.

“Strip off your rags, American,” they ordered.

My hands were shaking so badly that they ripped my garments for me. Then they sluiced me with buckets of water again, the same rude bath I’d had on Dragut’s pirate ship. Filth streamed off until I finally stood abject and naked, shivering, ashamed at my weakness, and terrified of what might come next.

“Put these on.”

I was dressed in Moorish bloused trousers and a sleeveless vest, my chest bare, and given sandals for my raw feet. Maybe I’d have to turn Muslim after all! Then four of the soldiers formed a little box around me and we went up a flight of stairs. Realizing it must lead to the castle, I began to take note of where we were.

My escorts didn’t speak. The passage grew less gloomy as we climbed, arrow slits giving light, and I couldn’t help but have my hopes soar, even as trepidation grew. What was the point of seeing Aurora again? What could I agree to without betraying my country? Why had I been hauled out of the pit instead of someone more famous and reputable, like Cuvier? Because I was the weakest? But I had a reputation as a hero of Acre! None of it made sense. I blinked against the growing light, realizing just how dark and troll-like our lives had become. I felt confused, exhausted, and desperate.

A door opened, small enough that we had to squeeze through. Two soldiers filed before me, two behind. This corridor wasn’t much broader than my shoulders and again had no light except from an oil lamp. Was this a secret passageway? We came to an iron grill at the end that my escorts unlocked and then locked behind. Then we climbed a winding set of stone stairs. Yet another door was unbolted, this one wood, and at first I thought beyond was more darkness. But no, it was simply a tapestry covering the door. The cloth was swept aside and I was pushed through into some kind of reception room, this one brilliant to my eyes even though the sunlight was filtered through wood-grilled windows. I blinked. There was blue sea and sky beyond, and my heart quickened, even as I tensed for a sudden blade or shot. Were my captors simply giving me a last cruel glimpse of this sweet earth before sending me off it?

Not yet.

Aurora wasn’t there. Instead, I was face-to-face with Hamidou Dragut, our traitorous sea captain. He lounged on a cushion in what I realized was the richly decorated throne room, picking from a bowl of figs. My stomach growled at the sight of them. The room’s floor was strewn with thick Persian carpets and its marble walls were decorated with incised Arabic script that quoted the Koran. There was a gilded throne chair, the cerulean silk of its cushion embroidered with gold and its legs and arms studded with jewels. In one corner of the chamber was a leopard, lying on the cool floor and held to a pillar by a golden chain. Behind was its brass cage. The cat looked bored.

I’d come from hell to an odd little heaven.

Dragut looked me up and down. “She will be very disappointed. The pit has not improved you.”

I worked to keep any quaver from my voice. “Aurora Somerset is always disappointed. It’s her nature.”

“Don’t let your tongue betray your last remaining chance, American.”

Sometimes I can’t help myself, and my grit was slowly coming back. I was jealous he had figs and I was starving. “To be a slave to that woman, like you?”

He darkened. “I am no slave, and would die before becoming one.”

I took breath. “Tripoli is a nation of slaves. I could tell that much just marching from the harbor. Endless castes, each man quailing before the other, and your women bagged and hidden as if they carried the plague. You’ve never tasted freedom in your life, Dragut.”

“On the contrary, Monsieur Gage!” It was a new voice and I swung around. A door to the throne room opened and in strode the man I’d seen in the slave market on his white horse, Bashaw Yussef Karamanli himself. He was, as I’ve said, fit and handsome, a dagger in his sash and a sword at his side, and carried with him that confidence that comes from being born to royalty. Two powerful guards, one blond and one black, flanked him. His sword belt was studded with diamonds, and his turban had that jewel the size of a robin’s egg—emerald enough, I guessed, to put me in high style the rest of my life if I could ever find a way to snatch it. He also had the ruthless look that is inevitable to men who cling to power in dangerous places. He plopped onto the European throne chair while a janissary gave a blow to the back of my legs, forcing me to my knees before him. My head was wrenched down in obeisance.

“In this country each man enjoys the freedom of knowing his place and role, unlike the chaos of democracy,” Yussef went on with a scholarly air. “And our women have a freedom yours can’t imagine. Yes, they are covered, but that means they can go anywhere in the city without being recognized, meaning they are free from malicious gossip and disapproving eyes. Behind the veil they have a liberty no American or French woman enjoys. They are mistresses of their houses, and in the cool of the evening they emerge on the screened roofs to talk and sing in a world free of harassment from men. No woman can keep secrets more readily than a Muslim woman, no woman is happier, and no woman is better protected by her husband. You will see if you take the turban. We have a harmony, a serenity, unknown in Europe.”

My head came up. “I’ve experienced Aurora’s serenity.”

“Ah. Lady Somerset is…unique. And no Muslim.”

“And she has nothing to say to you, at least not yet,” Dragut said. “That will await some sudden birth of reason on the part of yourself and your companions. No, I brought you up to confer first with someone quite different, to see if we cannot be partners.”

“We have nothing you want to know.”

“From four savants? I’m skeptical of that.”

“And if we did, it will die with us. I insisted on honor.” I’m inclined to exaggerate, if nobody is around to correct me.

“Did you?” He licked his fingers of the stickiness of the figs and suddenly sprang up. He wore, I saw, Cuvier’s two pistols in his sash. The guards were similarly armed, and looked ready to spring. Everyone had weapons enough to rob a mail coach, meaning I was not exactly trusted. “I appreciate men of honor,” Dragut said. He rapped on the door Yussef had come through. “They can be trusted to do the right thing.”

There was the sound of a lock being turned, a creak, and the heavy door swung open. A pale, corpulent, hairless slave—a eunuch, I guessed, the gelded men allowed to attend a harem—marched into our meeting place with pretentious authority, as if his rank exceeded that of the pirate captain and soldiers before him. But he fell before Yussef, his forehead touching the floor. And then another figure came through to slip around the eunuch and stand in a shaft of dazzling sunlight, like the apparition of an angel.

All sense left me then, and I heard a roaring in my ears. My knees went weak.

It was Astiza, my lost love from Egypt, as beautiful as ever.

With her, dressed like a little sultan, was a boy of just over two years. He looked at me with bright, cautious curiosity.

“Hello, Ethan,” Astiza said. “This is your son, Horus.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Astiza was as striking as I remembered. She’s a Mediterranean beauty
,
Greek and Egyptian, her hair silk and piled for this reunion, held in place with a golden pin. She has eyes to drown in, dark and deep, and they shone with a bright intelligence that might frighten some men but captivated me. She was not as conventionally beautiful as Aurora Somerset but had a thousand times more character, the set of her lip or the waiting question of her eyes hinting at a depth of emotion the English noblewoman had no knowledge of. There was bright steel in Astiza, but vulnerability, too, and while she always seemed ready to slip away (that independence!) she once had need of me as well, as baffled by her attraction to me as I was by my longing for her. We had electricity. We understood each other’s hopes in an unspoken way I’d never shared with another woman. Slim, poised, draped in Arabian finery, her sandals silver and her jewelry braided gold, she seemed a dream after the ghastliness of Omar and the horror of his dungeons.

Yet my appraisal was done hurriedly because my stunned stare necessarily went to the wee creature beside her. This was a lad not much beyond the nursery, shorter, I guessed, than Napoleon’s Little Red Man, with a shock of unruly hair that mimicked my own in a way both enchanting and disturbing. My son! I wasn’t aware I had one. He had Astiza’s hypnotic eyes and upright stance, and my own cheekiness. He didn’t shy behind my old lover’s skirts but looked at me with that optimistic wariness children use with strange but promising adults. I might have a present—or, I might be of no use whatsoever. And damn if the tyke’s face didn’t look a bit like mine, too, a point I registered with both apprehension and pride.

“My son?” It came out as a croak.

“I suspected pregnancy when we were in Temple Prison in Paris.”

“You didn’t share this rather momentous information?”

“I didn’t want it to dissuade you from bringing me to help stop Alessandro Silano and his Egyptian Rite treachery. And later, when Napoleon spared us…you’re a man who’s destined to go his own way, Ethan. I knew we’d have a reunion. I just didn’t expect it to be like this.”

“What are you doing in Tripoli?” My questions were thick, my mind reeling, my purpose confused. I was a father? By Thor’s thunder, was I supposed to marry the girl? And was I supposed to be pleased, or disturbed? I couldn’t remember old Ben Franklin having anything to say about this.