by Seth Hunter
As soon as he stepped onto the roof, Spiridion detected the source of the disturbance, though he had already fingered the obvious suspect. It was the castle. Or to be more precise, the battery of 18-pounders on the ramparts facing out to sea. On this occasion they appeared to be firing blanks, almost certainly in salute to some important government or foreign vessel approaching the harbour. Spiridion shielded his eyes from the glare off the water and was rewarded by the sight of two vessels under a full press of sail at the very outermost of the series of reefs which extended from the harbour mole far out into the bay.
Even without the glass, he was able to identify the first of these by its fore-and-aft rig as the Meshuda, the flagship of the Pasha’s fleet. The other was ship-rigged and, despite the evident gunports, almost certainly a merchant vessel which the Meshuda had taken as prize. Lest there be any doubt about this, the flagship fired a rippling broadside in the familiar feu de joie that announced a profitable voyage and a triumphant return.
Spiridion took up his glass and focused it upon the captive. There were two flags at her masthead, and though they flapped limply in the scant wind, he was able to identify them as the flag of the Ottoman Navy, also used by the Pasha’s corsairs, and beneath it, denoting its surrender to the forces of Islam, the flag of the United States of America.
Spiridion closed the glass, his expression thoughtful. He knew what would happen next and was thankful it was none of his business. Though he had represented British interests in various parts of the Mediterranean, Spiridion had no official function in Tripoli. As far as the authorities were concerned – and anyone else who enquired during his frequent trips to the port – he was a ship-owner of Greek origin with trading interests in the Levant, currently staying at the British Consulate as the guest of the Consul-General, Mr Lucas. Unofficially, however, he was here on behalf of the British Admiralty to keep an eye on the French, whose recent activities in the region had given their lordships cause for concern. The capture of an American merchant vessel by the local corsairs, while deplorable, could have no possible bearing on this.
But then he thought again.
The arrival of a foreign prize in Tripoli invariably triggered a meeting of the Pasha’s Council – the Divan – under the supervision of the Pasha himself, to congratulate the victorious Captain and divide the spoils. All the foreign consuls were expected to attend, either to represent the captives and begin the laborious process of agreeing a ransom, or to remind the Pasha of his obligations to release those whose governments had had the foresight to pay in advance, as it were, with an annual subsidy. Even if the carrying vessel was American, some of its cargo might be owned by British merchants or some of its passengers subject to King George. In which case, the British Consul-General would be expected to make a powerful representation on their behalf, backed by the threat of force.
Mr Lucas, however, was ill and abed with one of the mild stomach upsets to which he was prone, and he would no doubt take kindly to an offer from Spiridion to represent him. Not least because the prestige of the British Crown, and therefore its representative in Tripoli, had been considerably diminished by the enforced absence of the British fleet from the Mediter ranean. If there was a humiliation in store, much better to confer it upon a relatively unknown Greek, rather than the representative of His Britannic Majesty.
Besides which, it was always useful to know the current mood at the castle. Who was in, who was out; what were the current state of relations with the Great Sultan in Constantinople. How much the French had increased their influence since the British withdrawal. It would give Spiridion an official pretext to do some nosing around. All he would need was the Consul’s authority in writing, and the services of his dragoman, that particular functionary of the region who acted as translator and guide and general mediator with officialdom.
Spiridion suddenly became aware of a presence behind him. A large presence. George Banjo was an African of impressive physical stature and considerable intellect who acted for Spiridion in the official role of manservant and bodyguard. In fact, he was rather more than that. Spiridion invariably intro duced him as ‘my associate, Mr Banjo’. He had until quite recently been a seaman – a gun captain – in His Britannic Majesty’s Navy. Having become involved in an altercation with one of the junior officers, who had had the temerity to instruct him in the art of firing a cannon, he had been obliged to jump ship at Corfu, in which crime he had been aided and abetted by no less a personage than the ship’s Captain, who was anxious to avoid hanging him. This, with a recommendation to Spiridion, who was then British Consul in Corfu, to assist the fugitive in making his way in the world.
Spiridion had done more than that. He had taken Mr Banjo into his service, for the former gun captain had many talents besides that of aiming and firing a gun, and Spiridion had many duties besides that of British Consul in Corfu. In fact, he was known to a select circle of officials in the British Admiralty – and regrettably to a small but growing number of Frenchmen – as the best source of intelligence in the Eastern Mediterranean. He had more need of accomplices than of servants, and George Banjo had proved his worth in a number of tricky situations, mostly in the role of bodyguard, but also as a courier and confidant. They conversed mostly in English, which Banjo had picked up during his time aboard the Unicorn, but he had since learned something of the Venetian dialect and even Greek.
‘I think we might make a visit to the castle,’ Spiridion confided in him now. ‘Please give my compliments to Nassif Malouf and ask if he would be good enough to attend to me in my rooms.’
Nassif Malouf was the Consul-General’s dragoman. A Lebanese by birth and a Muslim by religion, he could converse fluently in Turkish, Arabic, English, Greek and Persian. He also spoke reasonable French and Spanish and several of the Italian dialects. Mr Lucas had a very high opinion of him. Unfortunately, it could never be as high as Malouf’s opinion of himself. Like many men Spiridion had known who had a facility with tongues, he had an equal facility for deceit. Thus far the two men had masked their mutual suspicions with an elaborate show of politesse, but Spiridion found it a considerable strain at times and he detected the same tension in Malouf.
He appeared a little taken aback by Spiridion’s offer. But after a brief interval he returned with the Consul’s grateful thanks – and a letter of authorisation. It was no more than Spiridion had anticipated. Simon Lucas was not the most active of His Britannic Majesty’s representatives that Spiridion had ever encountered, and usually only bestirred himself if there was a prospect of significant personal gain. Which in this case there was not.
‘It would be useful to know something of the captured vessel before we present ourselves before the Divan,’ Spiridion instructed the dragoman. ‘Do you have someone you can send down to the harbour to discover what we can?’
By the time Spiridion had dressed in his official uniform, Malouf was able to supply the news that the prize was the Saratoga brig of Boston, taken off the south-western tip of Sicily, and laden with the produce of her recent cruise in the Levant and the Adriatic. He added that her most recent port of call had been Venice, where she had picked up a number of important passengers fleeing from the French.
This latter was of considerable interest to Spiridion, but it also struck a cautionary note, for his various business and official activities had obliged him to spend a great deal of time in Venice over the years, and there was a possibility that one or other of the passengers might recognise him as the former British Consul in Corfu, which was not, at this present moment in time, to be welcomed. His curiosity got the better of his caution, however – as it usually did – and as soon as the dragoman was ready, they set off for the castle with Mr Banjo and a pair of Janissaries as escort.
They were not the only ones. The streets of the harbour were crowded with dignitaries, merchants, and other interested parties making their way towards the castle by horse, donkey or on foot. Spiridion being new to the port, most of them were unknown to h
im – but he did recognise several of the foreign contingent who had, for various reasons, been brought to his attention. Among them, Father Maurice, Prior of the Catholic Fathers – a French Order who concerned themselves with the religious wellbeing of the Christian slaves – the Danish Consul, Monsieur Nissen, who normally represented the United States’ interest in Tripoli, and the French Consul Monsieur Pellatier, accompanied by one of the newcomers from Toulon whose presence in the port had so aroused Spiridion’s suspicions.
Elsewhere in the crowd, distinguished by their ornate ceremonial uniforms and as often as not by the elaborate plumage of their headgear, would be the representatives of Spain, Portugal, the Papal States, the Two Sicilies, Genoa, Sardinia and several of the lesser trading nations of the Mediterranean, all of whom might have reason to fear that their own nationals were among the passengers on the captured vessel, thus involving them in protracted and expensive negotiations for their release.
Among this flow of ubiquitous diplomacy moved the local interest groups: the Moors in their white woollen cloaks, Janissaries in muslin and silver embroideries, Jews in their obligatory black robes and hats, marabouts or holy men with the inevitable following of beggars and urchins. A jostling, bickering, braying, sweltering, itching horde of supplicants and officials, each with their attendant household or hangers-on, picking their way through the piles of rubbish and ordure, swatting at flies, swearing at the packs of scavenging curs that snapped at their heels and the heels of the donkeys on which they rode. A typical afternoon stroll in Tripoli, Spiridion reflected wryly, as he climbed the sandy track towards the castle, past the whitewashed, windowless walls of the houses, the open doors of the mosques and the dark, mysterious archways that led to the bazaars and bordellos. Past the coffee houses, where the old and the idle sat, smoking their pipes in the shade of fig and pomegranate trees and smiling wisely at all this activity, all this human progress, all this wasted energy, when all a man desired was at hand.
Upwards and onwards until, with the grim persistence of human progress, even in Tripoli, they reached their objective: the fulcrum and focus of it all, the source of all honour and the fount of all wisdom. Al-Saraya al-Hamra. Otherwise known, from its reputation as much as the colour of its stones, as the Red Castle.
Built by the Arabs and the Ottomans between the sixth and sixteenth centuries, but resting on much older foundations, al-Saraya al-Hamra was one of the great citadels of the Eastern Mediterranean. Its towering walls and bastions defended it from land and sea, foreign invader and rebel insurgent. Its outer ramparts encompassed a vast, sprawling labyrinth of chambers and courtyards, covered passageways, stone stair ways and archways, armouries and barracks, kitchens, stores and dungeons. It was the Pasha’s principal residence, the centre of his administration, the prison and chief execution place of his enemies, and the main barracks of his Janissaries – the Yeniçeri or ‘New Soldiers’ who had been the spearhead of the Ottoman advance across Asia, Europe and Africa. Formerly drawn from Christian children captured or bought from Asia Minor, converted to Islam and trained as crack infantry, they were now almost exclusively recruited from the slums of Constantinople and the seaports of the Levant where they were known colloquially, though not to their faces, as the ‘scum of the people’.
Only two narrow entrances gave access to the interior of the Red Castle. One, the Main Gate, was reached over a slender causeway that crossed the deep ditch separating the castle from its shabby protectorate; the other, the Marine Gate, which was used chiefly by the Pasha himself and his Taiffa, the Corporation of Corsairs, connected directly to the inner harbour where the fleet was moored and might, in extremis, be used for a swift getaway in the event of a military coup or popular uprising.
Both of which events were daily predicted by the sages in the coffee houses.
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 p
romise 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.