The Barbary Pirates (16 page)

Smoke bloomed from the hull of one of the corsairs, there was a shriek of shot, and a waterspout erupted where a cannon ball dropped, just fifty yards off our stern. My heart began to hammer. The trouble with sea fights is that there’s nowhere to hide.

“No,” Cuvier declared, looking more like a determined grenadier than a zoologist. “We’re going to fight. Beasts of prey look for easy victims. So do bullies. But scratch the lion and he’ll back off looking for easier meat. Let’s crouch beneath the bulwark, wait until they draw near, and then give a broadside with your light guns and our arms. It will throw them into confusion. If we can cut up their rigging, maybe we can escape.”

“You’re willing to risk your life?” Dragut asked.

“I’d rather sell it here than in a slave market.”

“You are mad, Christians. But very brave, too. All right.” He snapped orders to his crewmen. “You Europeans take your place just by the bulwark there, where the protection is best. We will ready behind you, with matches for the cannon. I’ll watch for the precise moment and we will rise as one and fire! Every shot must hit to throw them into disorder. Then you must help us with the lines to draw off and escape.”

Ever notice how organizers put followers in the front rank, and them behind? But it didn’t seem the time to argue choreography. The pirate corsairs were coming on fast, lateen-sailed vessels larger than the xebec but just as swiftly built, and crammed with men. As we crouched I could peek through a hawser hole at the mob of them, stripped to the waist except for earrings and armlets of gold. Some were bearded and turbaned. Others were shaved bald, muscles bulging, painted with tattoos or decorated with great mustaches. All of them were roaring and clashing steel for our maximum demoralization. Were these the ships I’d seen at Thira? The animal smell of them came across the water, plus oil and spices, the smell of Africa.

“Hold your fire until the last moment,” Dragut counseled. “Remember, we get only one volley! We must wait until they are close as possible!”

“Damnation,” Smith muttered. “I felt less confined in a canal ditch.”

“Your blunderbuss will give them pause,” I encouraged. “Georges, fire both your pistols at once. Fulton, you’ve lost your pipes. Do you need a gun?”

“I’ve got an ax to cut their boarding lines,” he said. “And maybe we can swing the boom to knock some of them back. A pendulum can accumulate tremendous power.”

“Just what Archimedes would advise.” I turned back to Hamidou. “Ready when you are!”

He nodded encouragingly and laid his cutlass on the flat of his hand.

The nearest corsair loomed to fill all my view, its sails almost black, its crew balanced on the railing, twitchy as colts.

“Steady,” I murmured. I’d already picked a target for my longrifle, a big brute of a pirate who looked to be their captain. Then, because of the time it took to reload, I’d slash at any boarders with my rapier. We’d sting like a scorpion. “When you give the word, Dragut.” I tensed, ready to rise and fire.

It was then that I felt the annoyingly familiar press of a gun barrel at the nape of my neck. “And the word is ‘surrender,’ Ethan Gage,” he said cheerfully. I realized I’d never told him my whole name and yet he knew it, the devious bastard. “Take your finger from your trigger, please, and lower your longrifle to the deck, so that I do not have to shatter your spine.”

I glanced sideways. My companions also had guns to their heads, held by our own crewmen. We’d been betrayed, from beginning to end! Had the Venetian gondoliers simply been herding us to this treacherous vessel from the start? Our arms thumped on the deck.

Then there was a crash of wood as the two ships mated, and a shout as a rank of half-naked, unwashed pirates poured across, their bare feet lighting like cats. In seconds we were yanked backward, our arms wrenched and our feet bound.

Dragut looked at me with amazement. “You didn’t get off even a single shot. I expected more from the hero of Acre and Mortefontaine.”

“When I finally do, I’ll aim at you.”

“Alas, I think the time for that is past.”

“What base treachery is this?” cried Smith.

“I believe, gentlemen, that we have once more been led into a trap by our esteemed guide, Ethan Gage,” said Cuvier.

“But why not just seize us yourselves back at Thira?” I asked our captain.

“It was you who had the rapier to my eye, not vice versa. We didn’t really expect you to escape from the island.”

“And because I wanted the pleasure of seizing you myself!” cried a new voice. A lithe new pirate swung on a line from the enemy poop and lightly landed on ours, this one beardless and dressed in sea boots, greatcoat, and bloused trousers that were a century back in style, as braided and gaudy as a Caribbean buccaneer’s. The newcomer wore a magnificent broad-brimmed plumed hat and held a jeweled sword in a fine-fingered hand. A broken, ominously broken second sword was tucked in a wide leather belt, along with twin pistols. As the buccaneer hopped down to the xebec’s main deck, some of the other scoundrels flinched as they made room, and we soon saw why. With a leap a black hound cleared the gap between the two vessels and followed his master onto our deck, landing with a heavy thump with feet skittering for new purchase. This muscular beast was a short-haired, thick-snouted mastiff, ugly with slobber and hanging jowls, a dog that bristled at the sight of us and growled with the purr of Hell’s Cerberus. Its eyes were yellow, its flanks scarred, its tail chewed, and the whole package was uglier than the fleas that inhabited it.

The owner plucked off the feathered headgear and gave a sweeping bow.

A torrent of auburn ringlets cascaded down around our captor’s shoulders—a woman!—and she gave a seductive smile I remembered all too well, even as my heart fell like a barometer in a hurricane. “I told you we weren’t through, Ethan.”

I gaped in shock, revulsion, and fear, frozen by that still-beautiful face, that athletically graceful figure, those long, white fingers holding a blade that sparkled silver. How vividly did I now remember the broken sword tucked in her belt, which her brother had shattered on my longrifle. She was as bewitching as I remembered, too: the high cheekbones, the feline gaze, the wicked dance of her eyes. It was Aurora Somerset, the English aristocrat who had tupped and tormented me on the North American frontier.

“Aurora?” was all I could manage, stupidly.

My companions looked at us curiously.

“I’ve joined the Barbary pirates,” she said, as if that weren’t obvious enough. “I thought it would bring us together.”

PART TWO

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Aurora Somerset was one of the loveliest women I’d ever met. She
was also one of the most dangerous, the most perverted, and the most insane, a murderess who killed my Indian lover, Namida, tried to slay my voyageur friend, Pierre, and left me alive in the North American wilderness only because she wanted to follow me to new secrets.

As threatened, here she was, fully recovered from her trauma and apparently in charge of an ill-tempered dog and several shiploads of feral pirates, most of them pledged to a religion that dictated women stay subservient and out of sight. Well, nobody is consistent.

My companions were merely dumbfounded. I knew enough to be terrified.

I’d met Aurora on my journey west to seek Norse artifacts with the late Magnus Bloodhammer. I was predictably blinded by her beauty and made a fool of myself, as men are wont to do. The upshot was my capture, near torture, escape into the wild, and final showdown in which I killed the man who was both Aurora’s half brother and her lover, Lord Cecil Somerset. She and I did our best to kill each other, too, but in the end I was wounded and she was insane, and the only solace I had from that nightmare was the likelihood that the wilderness would swallow her up and I’d never see her again.

Time and distance had let me believe that.

Now, as inexorably persistent as the Rite itself, she was back.

One might expect trauma to rob her of her prettiness and harden her features. Instead, she was as physically alluring as ever, an ocean goddess of tumbling hair, green eyes, pursed lips, and a cleanliness out of all proportion to her environment: Venus, emerging from the sea. Had she been primping before she swung aboard? There was an eerie changelessness about her that made me suspect some pact with the devil, so perfect was her skin, so athletic her grace as she whirled on deck, so bright her maniacal eyes. She was immortal, I feared, an Antaeus who only grew stronger with every defeat.

Aurora Somerset was the reason I’d reformed.

“I thought you’d tired of me,” I managed. She’d had nearly a year to dream up fresh torments, and Lord knows the girl had a better imagination than I did. I felt sick at what this reunion would lead to.

She walked to me, cutlass lifted like a serpent’s silver tongue to hover under my chin as the ship rolled in the waves, her lips curled in a twist of faint contempt, her eyes intense as a jaguar’s, while her dog eyed me for breakfast. “You’re a hard man to forget, Ethan Gage. So durable. So ruthless. So careless. So stupid. I’ve been following you, anticipating you, marveling at you, and got that signet ring I discovered into the hands of the French and Fouché with the expectation they would turn to the wayward American to determine what it means. You are ever so predictable! Well, you can give the ring back. And now you’ve brought company!” Her eyes danced with calculation as she eyed my savants, and I didn’t know if she was dreaming of bedding them or torturing them. Probably both. “You read something in North America that brought you to Thira, and now you’ve found something, I’m betting, that I and my allies are looking for.”

“Allies?
You
have friends?”

I’d managed to annoy her. “More than you know.”

“You must mean the lunatic Egyptian Rite.”

“That, and the Tripoli corsairs, our newest comrades. Their bashaw saw the advantage of ancient secrets long before Bonaparte and Fouché.” She nodded to the assembly of pirates, as motley a bunch of thieves and miscreants as can be found outside a parliament. They had the hygiene of sewer rats and the disposition of a wounded bull, but then I’m used to bad company. She turned to Dragut. “What did they find?”

“A manuscript, my lady.” So our captain had been in her employ from the beginning: ready to pluck us from pursuit in Venice and from caves at Thira. This rendezvous had been planned for months. Why get dirty when Ethan Gage will crawl through the mouth of Hades for you?

“A manuscript? What does it say?”

“I wouldn’t presume to read it before you.” He pointed. “The American has it.”

“Where is it?” she demanded of me. “Give it up!”

“Your manners haven’t improved since our last time together.”

“Or your impudence! Come, turn it over! The ring, too!”

Her monster of a dog started barking with the volume of a wolf pack, and I flinched despite myself. Why do people insist on bringing along their pets? I considered trying to hurl the parchment into the sea, but given what it said, what was the harm? “Here: What you’ve followed me for seven thousand miles for. It might improve you.”

There is something to be said for the upbringing of the high bred. She was, it seemed, literate in Latin. Apparently young ladies of the English nobility learn more than just shooting and sadism. She read for a moment, her pirates shuffling like a restless classroom, and then looked at me in disbelief. “Are you trying to make me a fool?”

“That’s all we found, Aurora. Dig down yourself if you don’t believe me, but the ancient rooms under Akrotiri were as empty as a beggar’s stomach. Except for this. I hoped it was a treasure, too—this is hardly what I came for—but I could have saved myself the trouble by simply buying a preacher’s pamphlet outside the Palais Royal. If there was ever anything of value down there, I suspect Knights Templar took it centuries ago. We’re both chasing ghosts.”

She stood a moment, debating whether to believe me. Finally she threw the parchment at my feet. I picked it up. It was, I supposed, a souvenir of Thira. She kept the ring. “Very well. And, yes, a wasted trip for you and your friends, but not necessarily for me.” She turned to her shipmates. “We’ll sell them as slaves!”

To that they gave a hearty cheer, which meant they got a share from hocking us. Everybody loves a profit.

“Where’s his gun?” she then asked. There was some discomfort among Dragut’s men as my longrifle—the same one that had killed Cecil Somerset—was brought out. “That weapon is mine,” she snapped. “You can have the others.”

“It’s scuffed and nicked but a fine piece,” one of the pirates objected. “It’s ours to take, not yours, under Barbary law.”

“It slew my brother. Give it over.”

The sailor, with the scars of more than a few fights, wasn’t about to buckle easily to this woman’s whim. He turned to his captain. “Hamidou, we captured them! She has no right!”

Dragut was shaking his head.

And as the poor sailor turned back in anger, debating just how truculent to be, Aurora’s monster dog sprang. It was a blur of black, snarling like a lion, and the man was down yelling as the dog bit his hands and face, pinning him with furious weight. The rifle skittered away but no one dared touch it; the other pirates instinctively jumped back. The poor victim writhed, his thrashing arm trying to get to his knife while the other hand clawed at the dog’s face, but then the hound got past his guard and plunged his snout at the poor devil’s throat. Its big black head thrashed as if it had been given a rag doll, and blood from a severed artery made a jet that shot three feet in the air. Men were at once shouting, pleading, betting, and laughing, ill-bred ruffians that they were.

The pirate twitched and jerked a final time, and died. A red pool spread like a blot.

“Sokar, heel!”

The mastiff backed off, jaws foamy with blood and saliva. It was growling, looking at me with its yellow eyes.

Trembling slightly, Dragut stooped to pick up my rifle and gave it to the demented woman. “His weapon, my lady.”