The Barbary Pirates (17 page)

She hefted it with the same air of possessive ownership I remembered from America, ignoring the baleful looks of the dead man’s friends. “We set course for Tripoli,” she told Dragut. And then back to me. “We’ll talk again, after you’ve time to ponder your situation while locked in the hold. And if you don’t renew our partnership, then Omar the Dungeon Master will make sure that this time, now that I truly own you, you’ll not hold anything back.”

“Omar the what?”

“He’s one whose name is best not spoken aloud,” Dragut said, and shoved me toward the xebec’s shallow hold. “Or ever experienced.”

He turned to the others. “The blunderbuss and dueling pistols are mine!”

I and my three companions were hurled from our pampered position
in the stern down into the sail and water locker amidships. Our bed became hemp sails, and our furniture the water casks lashed atop the greasy bilge. The only light checkered down from the wooden grating overhead. Our momentarily helpless xebec swiftly got under way, the lean and the rush of water announcing we were on the way to Tripoli. The afternoon sun soon turned our cell into a stuffy oven. We’d gone from seeming triumph to certain doom.

Piracy and slavery might seem an odd base for an economy, but in fact have worked so well for the Barbary States (so-named for the barbarians who occupied North Africa after the fall of the Roman Empire) that they’ve had little incentive to develop anything else. Why work when you can steal with impunity? By raiding the weakest fringes of the Mediterranean Basin, the Barbary corsairs keep city-states like Tripoli supplied with cheap male labor and pretty harem women. Their richest captives can be ransomed off to buy whatever else is needed. The ships and towns of the most powerful nations such as Britain, France, and Spain are avoided out of wary fear: in 1675, the English admiral Norborough had burned Tripoli’s fleet as a warning. Weaker nations, however, find it more cost-effective to pay tribute than to try to catch the swift corsairs or assault their heavily fortified African cities. That tribute is not just money, but ships, cannon, and powder that turn North African ports into bristling hedgehogs of defiance. Cuvier might hope for ransom from the French government that had elevated him, but Smith, Fulton, and I had neither rich families nor high rank. That meant we were almost certain to die manacled: overworked, underfed, and rotten with disease.

I explained all this as gently as I could.

“What if we defy them?” Fulton sought to clarify.

“Their favorite discipline is the bastinado, where they tie the ankles, hoist up the feet, and flail them with two hundred strokes. Some slaves are crippled for life. If the beating is severe enough to render a man useless, he’s suspended from hooks on the city walls to die of exposure. Then the pirates sail out to capture more.”

“There’s no mercy?”

“Sometimes you can gain better treatment by conversion to Islam, a cultural surrender called ‘taking the turban.’”

“Then give me a Koran to swear to!”

“Unfortunately, you have to prove your submission through circumcision.”

Fulton studied me to see if I was joking, which I was not. “Every time I think you can’t make things any worse, your leadership becomes even more incompetent,” he finally said.

“All is not entirely lost.” I was, I suppose, our morale officer.

“What do you mean?”

“We have the American navy on our side.”

I crawled to the grating and stood as upright as I could in our cramped chamber, my face checkered by the light shining down. “Hamidou, I must give you warning!” I called.

The captain came over to stand on the grate, casting a shadow. “Silence, slave, before I cut off your tongue and more besides!” He was not at all the jolly skipper who’d sailed us down the Adriatic, and once again I remembered that I needed to modify my habitually optimistic appraisal of people. I noticed he’d tucked Cuvier’s dueling pistols in his belt, and no doubt was polishing Smith’s blunderbuss as well.

“The United States has sent a naval squadron in response to Yussef Karamanli’s declaration of war!” I warned. “Robert and I are American citizens. If you’re caught with us aboard, it could mean the gallows or worse. I’m only trying to warn you!”

He laughed. “So you think I should let you go?”

“It might be best for you as well as us. We could put in a good word.”

He pretended to consider. “No. If an American frigate could catch me, which it can’t, I will throw you Americans to the sharks, cut out the tongues of the two other infidels, and swear that Yankees were never aboard. This is more satisfying, I think.”

“Hamidou, we put our trust in you!”

“Yes. Better to trust in
me
than your own navy. Your ships draw too much water to get close to the shoals of Tripoli, and we slip in and out of your blockade like laces through a corset. Accordingly, the new commander, Morris, has abandoned the attempt and is hiding behind Britain’s skirts in Malta. Your squadron is already a failure, Gage, and all of Barbary is laughing at the United States—and soon, they will laugh at you as well! Allah rewards the faithful, and punishes the coward, as you can now see. Do not waste your time threatening me! Try to think of something useful to say to lessen your torment from Omar the Dungeon Master!” He translated our conversation for his crew, with enough editing to provide hearty comedy.

Why the prospect of my torture arouses such amusement I’ve never understood, but it seems a universal reaction among my enemies. I am, as I’ve said, affable—except when I have to shoot particularly horrid people—and don’t, in my opinion, deserve the rejoicing that always seems to accompany my capture.

“That didn’t seem to work,” I reported to the others unnecessarily, since they’d heard every word.

“We weren’t exactly counting on you,” assured Smith.

I took out the parchment I’d kept after Aurora threw it back. “This book of prayer hasn’t reformed these Muhammadans in the slightest.” I held it under the grating to look at its Latin script again, still puzzled why anyone would conceal it in the wall of buried ruins a hundred feet underground. Had I missed some kind of code, of the kind we’d deciphered amid the Dakota Indians in distant North America?

The dimness of the hold and pocks of light forced me to peer even more intently at what seemed a worthless old scrap of animal skin. It was then that I detected the faintest of curved lines like a whisper beneath the Latin script. Moving the parchment beneath the grating, I began to notice other tracings, almost invisible if you blinked.

“Cuvier, could you take a look at this? I think there’s something more to this parchment.”

The French savant sighed, heaved himself up from where he had slumped between the barrels, and crouch-walked to join me under the grating. Following my finger, he squinted at the script, bored at first, but then more intent. He took the scrap in his own hands and held it this way and that under the light.

Finally he pulled me away and whispered in the shadows. “I think it’s a palimpsest.”

“Thank God for that. A what?”

“In the Middle Ages, writing material was in short supply and parchment durable. To reuse it, they’d scrape off the old writing and copy some new text over it. Perhaps what the Knights meant to leave was not this list of prayers, but whatever was first under them.”

I began to have a glimmer of hope. Knowledge is power, and we’d need all the power we could muster against Aurora and her pirates. I scratched with my nail at the parchment, smearing some ink. “Then how can we get the new writing off?”

Cuvier stayed my hand. “Let me think for a moment.” He exhibited that look of pursed concentration that made him look so smart. Then he turned to the others. “Gentlemen, biology teaches that we must breach a water cask so we can drink all we can hold.”

“Why?” asked Smith.

“Because we have to do our very best to urinate on Ethan’s discovery.”

Slave masters aren’t in the habit of letting their captives drink their fill
of anything, so we had to take matters into our own hands, or feet. We had no way to open the cask bungs, given that we’d been robbed of tools, but Fulton felt in the gloom until he found a water keg wet from slight leakage. He had us quietly shift its companions until we could bring the barrel out. “If three of us stand on top and push off the deck beams above, we might be able to compress the staves to the point that they leak. The fourth can catch the flow.”

“Catch it with what?” I asked.

“I suggest our boots,” said Smith. “I had to bail a leaky canal boat once and found my footwear quite adequate for the purpose.”

“I can hardly bear to put my feet in my shoes, let alone drink from them.”

“Then we can forgo the experiment and spend the rest of our short lives in slavery and torture.”

“You have a point. Bottoms up.”

We balanced on the barrel, pressed down, forced a leak, collected the overflow in each of our boots—we weren’t friends enough to share, trust me—and drank as much as we could. It was satisfying to steal from Dragut, even if it was only water. We drank until we were bloated and could make our own water, a time-consuming task in the heat.

“Whose shoe should catch the piss?” Fulton asked.

“Ethan’s, of course,” Smith replied.

“Wait,” I objected, “why not yours?”

“Because I didn’t concoct this expedition. Besides, you’re the one who found a palimpsest.”

I did persuade them to take a vote but it went unanimously against me, so our production of urine was collected in my footwear, my companions taking great satisfaction in draining their bladders there. Then we began to scrub the parchment with urine, slowly sloughing the medieval ink away to reveal whatever was underneath.

It was a map, I saw, with a cross-hatching of lines and symbols atop a chart that looked like the outline of a coast. A bay with a narrow neck was shown, and an arcing line like a fence or boundary crossed the interior. The Templars, or whoever had plastered that wall, had left not a book of prayer but a guide to something, or somewhere. Just possibly it had something to do with this ancient weapon—this heat ray of Archimedes—that we’d seen painted. Unfortunately, there were no words on the map, giving no indication what it depicted. I’d produced a urine-soaked treasure map of a place we couldn’t identify.

“Why are there no words?” Fulton asked.

“It’s for men who already know where they’re going,” said Cuvier.

Smith studied it in the dim light. “It looks familiar, somehow.”

“You’re our map man, Smith.”

“I’d say volcanic terrain, by the look of the coastline, but that bay could be anywhere.”

“Not Thira,” said Cuvier. “There are no bays like that.”

“I think you’ve actually found something, Gage,” Fulton said. “Decipher it, man!”

“I’m fairly certain those lines and numbers mean something.”

“Yes?”

“Unfortunately, I’m quite poor at puzzles. I really shouldn’t be a treasure hunter at all.”

And then a shadow fell on the grating. “Gage! Aurora will see you now!”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I’ve been known to positively scamper to the side of an inviting woman
, but I left our dank hold in dread at the thought of conversing with Lady Somerset. Beauty she might be, but I still bore the calf scar where she’d stabbed me with an Indian spear. Her new pet looked ready to chew on my other shank, and I was in no mood for witty repartee about our past. Nonetheless, her flagship was tacking to pick me up, and apparently I was expected to leap aboard with lusty panache. But Dragut took one whiff of me and yanked me back to wash. “By Allah, did you miss the bucket, or piss yourself in fear?”

“I just smell like a pirate, Hamidou.”

I was stripped and doused with bracing seawater. Then I pulled my tired clothing back on, combed my hair with fingers as best I could, balanced on the rail while the two ships drew abreast of each other, and seized a line swung from a boom on Aurora’s vessel. I did feel some pirate dash, and saw how the trade had its attractions. But then I looked about the flagship.

Aurora’s vessel,
Isis
, was bigger than Dragut’s, with heavier artillery and a larger crew, but exhibited the housekeeping of an Ohio flatboat. Lines were uncoiled, brass had curdled green, canvas and crates were lashed haphazardly, and bits of food and empty bottles rolled in the corners. Off-duty pirates snored next to gun tackle. Chickens pecked at grain scattered under a lashed longboat.

An American frigate would turn this to matchwood in minutes, I decided. Too bad there wasn’t one about.

“I know it’s not your habit to eat pork, but have you thought of keeping pigs?” I addressed my captors. “You’ve already built a marvelous sty.”

“Silence, slave!” I got lashed across the shoulders for my wit, and then a pock-faced bosun shoved me to the door of the stern cabin, guarded by flanking blacks with the muscled bulk of buffaloes. The sentries were haughty as Mamelukes, and regarded me with disdain bordering on disbelief. They must have thought their mistress could attract better.

“Didn’t have time to dress.”

They wrinkled their noses, checked me for weapons, and shoved me through.

“I’ll tell you what she’s like,” I called back to her goblins.

The corsair’s cabin, high enough to stand upright in, was pleasantly cool. The stern window glass was open and a breeze filtered through grilled wooden shutters. A Persian carpet covered the deck, and more carpets and pillows were piled in the peripheries to provide some Oriental opulence. Aurora herself lay like Cleopatra in a hammock that swung to the rhythm of the waves. She’d shed her fighting clothes for a linen shift that did little to conceal the voluptuousness of her figure. An emerald necklace of Spanish design draped her fine neck, and the matching earrings picked up the color of her eyes. Her fingers were bright with rings, and enough bracelets, armbands, and anklets hung on her limbs to make her a candidate for an anchor, should we have an emergency. Despite my knowledge that she was a hateful harridan, her seductive allure persisted, her lips pursed as she sipped from a golden goblet. Damnation, I felt aroused. But Aurora also held a pistol, and was as different from Astiza as a cobra from a nightingale.