The Flag of Freedom (9 page)

It was towards the Main Gate of this fortress that the various processions and less official assemblies made their slow and fractious progress. While the Consuls perspired and fretted in their official uniforms, their dragomans engaged in heated exchanges with the guards to establish their precedence over all the local supplicants and each
other. On the walls above, more guards peered down and occasionally spat onto the heads below, especially if they recognised someone – and above
them
, the seagulls soared and swirled and shat – and added their fiendish chorus to the already hellish din.

Spiridion caught Mr Banjo's eye. Neither spoke or betrayed by the flicker of an expression what they were thinking, but both knew. For they enjoyed a curious rapport, these two, despite all the distinctions of race and birth and background. Spiridion was a native of Zante, one of the seven islands of the Ionian Sea, which had until recently been a part of the Venetian Empire. His father had been a local merchant, trading mainly in sponges. As a young man Spiridion had assisted him in this enterprise but had soon tired of its limitations and branched out on his own. He had become the skipper of a small schooner, trading with the Levant, and by the time he was thirty he was the owner of a small fleet. His association with the British had originally been a matter of self-interest, for the British had succeeded the Venetians as the foremost mercantile power in the region. But he had soon been drawn into something else: something that was more difficult to define. A combination of power and profit and piracy, perhaps. The British, of course, had no wish to define it. They would keep it as vague and as ambiguous and as unthreatening as possible, until suddenly the world would wake up and find itself entirely occupied by their trading posts and their garrisons and their factories and their ships. Most of all by their ships.

Spiridion knew what they were up to – he was part-Greek and part-Venetian – but he was not immune to their
charm. Or the sense of being a valued ally in some elusive enterprise that transcended commerce and religion and politics and even nationality: the Great Adventure – everyone can join in, unless you are French.

And George Banjo, he was … what? George was not his given name, nor was Banjo, though it might be a rough trans lation of it, a seaman's cheerful rendition of the unpronounceable. He was a native of Yorubaland, on the western coast of Africa, a chief's son who had been taken as a slave and transported to Spanish Louisiana until his freedom was bought by the same British Captain who had assisted in his desertion off Corfu. Flotsam, really, swept by the tides of Empire. He rarely spoke of his past, even less of his future. He did not seem to want to go back to Africa, not the part he had come from, at any rate. He liked the sea. It represented a kind of freedom for him, even on a British man-of-war which was more often than not a floating prison. He liked guns. He liked food, and women and good company. And for the time being he liked Spiridion Foresti. Mr Banjo, too, had developed a taste for adventure.

Like all adventurers, the two men preserved a certain objectivity, a feeling of detachment from their surroundings and situation. They did not consider themselves to be above their fellow humans or even that much apart from them. On the contrary, their various experiences – George as slave and seaman, Spiridion as seaman and spy – had obliged them to adapt to many different environments and circumstances. They had a gift for survival, for making the best of things, for falling on their feet. With this came a wry sense of the absurd, not so much the absurdity of their
fellow humans, but more of the situations in which they so often found themselves. So that as they lingered among the madding crowd at the barbican, under the remorseless sky, and the spitting guards, and the shitting seagulls, they felt rather like the readers of a book who had unexpectedly found themselves projected as characters and participants into the story they were reading.

That is what the exchange of glances meant as they waited outside the castle gate.

Admitted at length through the narrow entrance, they followed the dragoman into the office of the Grand Kehya, the Pasha's chamberlain, where their papers were examined. These being approved, though not without the usual objections and protestations, the scarcely veiled insults and threats, the inevit able exchange of currency, or the promise of future favours, they were conducted by guards through a labyrinth of dark passages that led into the secret heart of the Pasha's castle.

As a citizen of Venice and a Greek who had spent most of his life trading in the Levant, Spiridion probably knew as much about the workings of the Ottoman Empire as any man in Europe, but he still did not know
why
it worked. Its methods and practices were so bizarre, so apparently self-destructive, it was a wonder to him that it worked at all.

From their origins as nomadic horsemen on the plains of Anatolia, the Ottomans had expanded across Asia and North Africa and up through the Balkans to the very gates of Vienna. They had long since lost this momentum. The Empire had been in decline for at least 100 years. However, the Great Sultan in Constantinople still ruled over a vast
territory of some 30 million peoples, from the Caspian Sea to the shores of the Atlantic. Except that he did not rule in any real sense of the word. Some said he did not even rule in Constantinople, or even in his own palace of Topkapi, where the real rulers were the court eunuchs, or the women of the harem. And beyond the walls of the palace, the Empire was ruled by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individual officials – satraps, beys or warlords, pashas and regional governors. Officially, they were appointed by
firman
, or decree, of the Sultan. In practice, they often seized power by military coup or assassination, ruled by extortion and the threat of more violence, and were confirmed in office by the Sultan – or more likely his court eunuchs – on payment of a large bribe. It was a kind of formalised brigandage. But then most governments were, Spiridion reflected, as he followed his guide through the corridors of the Red Castle.

He was aware of its sinister reputation. It was here, among these dark corridors, and the haunted chambers that led off them, that most of the political murders which characterised the Karamanli dynasty were committed. Many a guest, invited to a banquet or reception, had met a grisly end in one of these gloomy passages. A shadowy figure would step out of some recess or doorway with knife or garrotte, and after a few moments of futile struggle the corpse would be dragged to one side ready for the next victim. It was said that as many as 300 of the Pasha's enemies had been disposed of in this manner,
at one sitting
.

It was unlikely to happen on this occasion, however, for the main purpose of this particular summons was extortion, and though the Pasha could, and frequently did,
extort money from the dead, it was a once and for all withdrawal, whereas the payment of ransoms could continue for some considerable time.

Even so, it was an essential feature of the Ottoman system that anyone entering the presence of the ruler should fear that he would never emerge from it alive. It was part of the mind torment that ensured the complete subservience to his will. Thus, the walls of the buildings themselves were pervaded with such an air of gloom and despondency, such a sense of betrayal and treachery, of unseen suffering and secret murder, that the courtier, supplicant or foreign ambassador invited to enter such a web would feel himself to be completely in the power of the monstrous spider at the heart of it. And grateful to him if, on this occasion, he was merely spat out, like a pip, without his skin.

Thus Spiridion was led through a network of passages, twisting and turning this way and that, up stairs and down stairs, through heavy, iron-plated doors – locked at sunset, Spiridion had been told, to divide the castle into a myriad different compartments – into tiny courtyards, open to the sky but barred with iron gratings that only emphasised the resem blance to a prison, until he arrived at length – at unnecessary length, he suspected – into the audience chamber of the Pasha.

The contrast was startling, as indeed it was meant to be. A large, almost cavernous room, with beams of light filtered through narrow arched windows set very high in the walls; the walls themselves gleaming with tiles and mirrors in ornate designs; sweet-smelling herbs burning in long-legged holders, the smoke twisting and turning like
phantom snakes in the beams of sunlight; the great expanse of floor covered with sumptuous Turkish carpets and cushions and – unusually in the Levant – chairs: carved and gilded chairs from France, a sign of status in the Orient, like the mirrors, as if in some reflection of the Sun King in distant Versailles. Before the Revolution.

The centre of all this magnificence was the throne, a simple enough affair padded out with tasselled cushions and raised on a dais at one end of the room. It was currently empty. On each side of it and all around the walls stood heavily armed guards. Opposite the throne but at a healthy distance from it, sat the members of the Divan, in their finery, with the Grand Kehya occupying a table in the centre with his clerks and his paperwork. And huddled in a group at the far end of the room were the captives from the
Saratoga
– in chains and under close guard.

There were about 100 of them, by Spiridion's reckoning, including a number of women and children, presumably the passengers the Consul's dragoman had told him about, who had fled Venice after its surrender to the French. Spiridion kept his head down, near the back of the hall, but his covert surveillance established that several of them were indeed known to him personally. He recognised two senators and a judge – also one wealthy merchant with whom he had done business from time to time. But so far as he was aware, none them knew him as anything but a merchant from Zante who acted as British Consul in the Seven Isles. Even so, he was subject ing them to a more intense inspection when he was distracted by the dragoman whispering in his ear. Most of what he said was unintelligible but Spiridion picked up the words ‘Murad Rais'.

Murad Rais. Yes. There he was, the Captain of the
Meshuda
, standing to one side of his captives with several of his officers. Spiridion had heard of Murad Rais from various sources both within and without the British Consulate, where Rais was also known as Peter Lisle, or Lilly, the Scottish seaman who had turned renegade.

According to one story, he had been a master gunner who had deserted from a British frigate visiting Tripoli. Another story had him as the mate of a British merchant ship. Yet another, the mate of the
Meshuda
when it was an American vessel, a schooner called the
Betsy
. Whatever the truth of the matter, he had converted to Islam and so impressed the present Pasha that he had appointed him Captain of the
Meshuda
and later, when his exploits had made him famous – or infamous – throughout the Mediterranean, he had promoted him to Admiral of the Fleet.

Murad Rais was a smallish man with a red beard and earrings – every inch the pirate. He could have been Drake or one of his fellow Elizabethan seadogs, Spiridion thought, had it not been for the turban and the flowing robes and baggy trousers, a curved dagger at his belt – or at least the sheath, for weapons were forbidden in the court of the Pasha. He looked a little troubled, Spiridion thought, for a man who had just returned to the port in triumph. He kept glancing towards his captives as if they were a burden to him and not a supplement to his already considerable fortune.

A deep and rhythmic drumbeat announced the imminent arrival of the Pasha. Was it Spiridion's imagining, or did it send a shiver of apprehension running through the crowded room? Certainly, there was a tension, a collective stiffening
of fibres, a nervous adjustment of dress. The drumbeat grew louder and with it the shriller sound of pipes and timbrels. Moments later the musicians marched in, closely followed by a file of Janissaries in their steel helmets and breastplates. Then came the
Agha
carrying the Pasha's staff of three horsetails – in homage to the nomadic origins of the Ottoman Turks and a mark of the Pasha's dignity as a senior potentate of the Empire, equal in rank to the Governors of Baghdad and Budapest.

Then finally, as the music ceased and the courtiers and ministers and supplicants prostrated themselves, and the foreign representatives bowed as low as was possible without actually touching the floor with their heads, the Pasha himself entered the hall.

Yusuf Karamanli was a short, fat man of about thirty, and though he wore the bejewelled turban, the embroidered robes of an Ottoman satrap, he had a fair, almost rosy complexion, with pale blue eyes and a thin blond beard. To Spiridion he looked like one of those young men from England or Germany when they turn up in Venice, the highlight of the Grand Tour, wearing the costume they have bought for Carnival.

It was said that he took after his mother, who had been born in the Ottoman province of Georgia, in the Caucasus – at least, in his appearance. Unhappily for his subjects, he had nothing of her gentle, passive nature. For although he exuded an air of humorous and relaxed charm – quite the jolly prince, in fact – he was frequently possessed of violent rages. Spiridion, when they were described to him, had wondered if it was all part of the act, the elaborate subterfuge of a man who knew himself and his people very
well and was well-versed in the power of theatre to impress them. For Yusuf Karamanli, appearances to the contrary, was, in fact, a cold and calculating killer.

He came from a long line of what were known in Tripoli as Khuloghlis – literally, in Turkish,
the sons of slaves
. In reality, they were the sons of Turkish officials who had taken Arab wives, and they formed an elite warrior caste similar to the Janissaries. But unlike the Janissaries, who fought on foot, the Khuloghlis were horsemen – splendid horsemen for the most part – who lived under the control of their own elected Aghas, mainly in the oases outside the towns.