Though Hell Should Bar the Way - eARC

by David Drake

  “Sir!” I said. I’d have jumped to my feet except I was pretty sure my legs would dump me back on my arse, looking like a fool. “Sir, I’ve just been doing this until you gave me orders to do something else.”

  “You’ve clearly done very well,” Leary said, “but you’re technically a civilian and wouldn’t have to answer to anybody if you wanted to take a position on Saguntum. And before you answer, you should know that Resident Jimenez has made a strong request that I transfer you to the diplomatic service at the rank of Counsellor of Mission.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Indeed,” Leary said, bobbing his head. “I gather the status of the position varies depending on the importance of the world involved, but even on Saguntum you’d be the equivalent of a lieutenant commander in the RCN.”

  “Why in heaven’s name would Jimenez recommend that?” I said. I hadn’t seen the Foreign Ministry delegation since before the invasion. They’d been captured along with Perez and the civil government when the Kurfurstendamm landed.

  “I gather he’s convinced that you held Saguntum to its Friendship with the Republic while he and his staff were incarcerated,” Leary said. “And from what I’ve seen, he may have been right.”

  “No, sir,” I said. “Colonel Foliot was Saguntum until you came back and freed the civil government. He could be that now if he wanted to be. And he wasn’t going to cut a deal with the Alliance.”

  I wondered how much Maeve had to do with the Foreign Ministry offer. I wondered a lot of things about Maeve.

  Taking a deep breath, I got carefully to my feet. Leary and Hogg stood also.

  I said, “Sir, what I want to be is an officer of the RCN. If you can arrange it for me to reenter the Academy, I’ll be eternally grateful. I think this—”

  I waved sort of generally, indicating the harbor and the Rotherham now floating there. We’d heard the destroyer descending halfway through the hike, but it hadn’t occurred to me that it meant anything in particular for me.

  “—has been enough to make people forget my dad. I hope so, anyway.”

  Captain Leary pursed his lips over a thought.

  “Sir,” I said, “you don’t have to do that, do anything more for me to be eternally thankful. I’ll enlist as a common spacer if I have to and work my way into a commission that way.”

  “That’s not easy,” Leary said, “but you know, I think you might be able to pull it off. Still, I don’t think third-year cadet is really the best use of you. You’re aware that my current post makes me a commodore?”

  “Yessir,” I said. He was the captain in charge of a squadron; or in this case, flotilla, because they were destroyers.

  “The rank permits me to appoint a flag lieutenant,” Captain Leary said. “That’s a dogsbody, really, an aide who might have to do any bloody thing that might come up.”

  Hogg snorted. “And he means any bloody thing,” he said. “Except for women—them he can take care of himself.”

  Leary’s smile wasn’t directed at me; I’m not sure it was directed at anybody. “A range of duties, at any rate,” he said. “The choice out here is slimmer than it would be on Cinnabar, but even on Cinnabar I don’t think I could find a better man for the position than you’ve proven to be in the time I’ve known you. Do you want the job, Olfetrie?”

  “Sir,” I said. I was afraid I was going to cry, but that wouldn’t be the first time I’d embarrassed myself. “Sir, there’s some things I need to take care of here”—I wanted Monica in my life; forever, if that was possible. But if she wanted me as I hoped she did, she was getting an RCN officer—“but sir, yes. If you’ll have me.”

  I did start crying. I tried to salute when I remembered to, but as my hand rose. Captain Leary gripped and shook it.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Classicists won’t be surprised to learn that the idea for this book sprang from the events leading to the outbreak of the Second Punic War. I probably have more classicists among my readers than most other writers, but even so I doubt they’re a majority.

  Though that was the germ of the novel, the business of the book is more concerned with piracy. Pirates have become a big deal in recent years, but even when I was a kid there were plenty of child-accessible books about them. I particularly remember a big volume with what I now suspect were N. C. Wyeth plates. An image which is still vivid with me was of buccaneers in a small boat closing on the stern of a Spanish galleon.

  As I got older, I read quite a lot more about pirates—but these were the pirates of the West Indies and the East Coast of North America. There were pirates other places too—Captain Kidd operated in the Indian Ocean—but they were pretty much the same: They captured ships and stole the cargo, behaving with greater or lesser brutality to the crews and passengers.

  There were also the Barbary Pirates in the Mediterranean. I knew about them because one of the first steps the newly United States took on the international stage was to mount an expedition against them in 1801.

  A catchphrase of the day was, “Millions for defense but not one cent for tribute!” Pirates from North African ports were capturing American ships and holding the crews for ransom unless the US paid tribute to Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and the Kingdom of Morocco, as most European nations did. Instead, the US sent a naval squadron.

  Much like the 1968 Tet Offensive, the expedition had a considerable effect on public opinion back in the US, but considered simply as a military operation it was an expensive failure. There were quite a lot of heroic endeavors by American sailors—and I read about them with delight—but in fact the expedition’s major success was to burn one of its own ships in Tripoli harbor after the pirates had captured it. This was truly splendid exploit, but burning your own vessels isn’t a good way to force an enemy to change its ways.

  The Barbary Pirates continued to operate until France conquered the region later in the nineteenth century, but that’s another matter. The crucial thing, which I didn’t realize until I visited Algiers in 1981, is that the Barbary Pirates weren’t in the business of looting ships: They were capturing slaves.

  I’m not the only one who was ignorant on the subject. A few years ago I commented to an intelligent friend that the pirates captured European slaves in numbers comparable to the numbers of African slaves shipped to the Americas. (The real figure is more like a tenth, but this is still about a million European slaves.) He accused me of getting my facts from Fox News.

  Well, no. I’d noticed the wonderful tile work in many of the older buildings in Algiers (and since many such buildings have been converted to public use or into foreign missions, this isn’t as hard as it may sound). When I asked about it, I learned that charitable organizations in European countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were set up to buy back enslaved sailors.

  The Dutch, as one of the greatest trading nations of the period, provided a large number of both slaves and charities. Much of the ransoming was done with goods rather than gold, and the pirates turned out to be very fond of Delft tiles. The evidence is right there today for any visitor to see.

  When we visited Iceland a few years later, I learned that Barbary Pirates had captured the city of Vestmannaeyjar and carried the profitable part of the population off as slaves. (Old people were burned alive in the church.) Piracy was definitely big business, in North Africa as surely as in the Antebellum South.

  There’s quite a lot of information about the slave-based economies of the Barbary States. I prefer to get my history from primary sources—the history really isn’t as good, but it gives the reader a much better notion of how the culture felt, and that’s important from my standpoint. There are the accounts by ransomed slaves, by free Europeans working in the Barbary Kingdoms (generally in specialist trades like medicine or gunnery), and by European officials representing citizens of their nations in the kingdoms. I found a great deal of material.

  It’s important to remember that slavery was a business. The pirate kingdoms weren’t civilized
by modern standards (or even by those of the Antebellum South), but there were laws, and the trade in slaves was regulated by both law and custom.

  My purpose, as always, is to tell a good story. I hope I’ve done so here. But readers who recall that the human interactions I describe are neither invented or pre-invented (which is how I tend to think of Fox News) may learn some things they didn’t previously know.

  Dave Drake

  david-drake.com