The Barbary Pirates

by William Dietrich

Silence.

  It felt lonely.

  “Gentlemen, are you dead?” I finally ventured.

  “For God’s sake, Gage,” Smith groaned.

  “But I’m not dead, either. Isn’t that a curious phenomenon, Cuvier?”

  “Maybe we are dead,” Fulton said. “Maybe this is what death is like, especially after you’ve killed men in bitter violence. Maybe this is hell.”

  “No, there’s air coming in here,” I insisted. “Has to be. Not light, but air.”

  “What are you saying?” Smith asked.

  “That there’s some leak in this box. Feel with your hands to see if you can find it. Maybe there’s more to this sarcophagus than we initially realized.”

  We scrabbled with our fingers but could find nothing. I looked in vain for a crack of light, but since there was none, the air, if it really was coming in, had to be from the unlit below. “I think there’s a hollow under this box,” I insisted. “Put your noses down and sniff for better air.”

  “Gage…”

  “Wait,” said Cuvier. “It does seem fresher here at this end.”

  “Maybe we can dig,” Smith said. “Ethan, do you have your silly sword?”

  “It’s a rather elegant rapier.”

  “Let’s try scraping and prying with the thing.”

  Getting it clear of its scabbard wasn’t easy, given our tight packing. Then we had to twist it around to get the point to the head of the sarcophagus where Cuvier was breathing.

  “Ow!”

  “Sorry. If you angle it this way…”

  “Which way? I can’t see a damn thing.”

  “Don’t poke my bagpipes.”

  “Just hold still a moment. There we go, steady…aw. Careful, Georges, here comes the tip!”

  I began scraping the weapon at the joint between the sides of the sarcophagus and the floor, feeling above it with my fingers. Wait, was there a mark? I felt a diamond shape inscribed in the stone, small and shallow, but eerily recognizable. A diamond, or was it an overlapping compass and square, ancient symbol of Freemasonry? My, that fraternity got around! I stabbed at the stone beneath it, looking for an opening. Suddenly there was a click.

  And then, before I could cry warning, we were plunging into a void of utter blackness.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It was a miracle none of us were impaled by my sword. We hit a slope and slid in the dark, hardly knowing which way was up, weapons clattering, and Fulton’s theory about us having descended into hell seemed all too terrifyingly true. Yet at last we, sword, blunderbuss, longrifle, and bagpipes rolled to some kind of bottom—just how deep I never knew.

  There was air, dusty but breathable. And it was hot, just like an entryway to Hades.

  “Georges? William? Robert?”

  “It just gets worse and worse,” one of them groaned.

  “Is everyone still alive?”

  “How do we tell?”

  “Well, we’re here, I think. So the ring showed something after all. The sarcophagus wasn’t the treasure, it was only the trapdoor to it. All we have to do is keep our wits about us, discover whatever secrets are down here, and find a way back out.”

  “Our wits! We can’t see a thing.” I think it was Cuvier.

  “Ethan, we fell several seconds straight down before hitting that slope,” Fulton said. “I doubt we can climb back up to that tomb, and what good would it do us if we did?”

  “When our enemies open it, they’ll see which way we’ve gone,” Smith added.

  “Perhaps, or perhaps my sword tip triggered a spring,” I said. “The bottom opens, but then springs back. They may open the sarcophagus to find us and, instead of our corpses, it will be empty once more. They’ll think it a miracle or, more likely, that we were never in there in the first place and gave them the slip. Quite ingenious on our part, really.”

  “Why should they care?” asked Fulton. “We’re doomed anyway. We’ve gone from one grave to a bigger one.”

  “No, I run around in these underground places all the time,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “There’s something down here, maybe something that hasn’t been seen since medieval times. I think there was a Freemason mark where I triggered the collapse of the trapdoor. This may be a Templar tunnel, my friends.”

  “Templars?” Smith groaned. “What are you talking about?”

  “Apparently that group of Crusader knights was on the trail of some ancient mysteries and succeeded for a time in finding some. I discovered one in the Near East, in a lost city, and another in the American wilderness. They seem to have been systematically reassembling the past. After the Saracens drove the Christians from the Holy Land, the Knights set up strongholds in places like Cyprus and Malta. Perhaps they came here, too, and built that hidden door for later generations who never came. We may not be in peril, but in luck. We’re on the cusp of rediscovering what Napoleon and Fouché really sent us to find, some ancient weapon of a lost civilization. Maybe we’ll win a prize.”

  There was a long silence in the dark. Then the Frenchman spoke again, slowly, carefully. “You realize that we are all completely insane?”

  “If so, then Napoleon is, too. Think about it. He’s heard rumors of a weapon connected with Og and Atlantis, and takes a chance by sending us here. I didn’t much believe the legends myself, when we saw the poverty and rawness of this island, but a tomb with a trap? With a Masonic engraving? Come, my friends, there has to be a reason. We’ve tumbled into a pit, it’s true, but perhaps a pit with a reason for being. I know we’re bruised, bloody, without food or water, and lost in pitch blackness without a clue where to go, but fortune may actually be smiling on us.” I grinned in the dark. “I’m quite excited, actually.”

  Silence, again. I hoped they hadn’t crept away.

  “Before we can find buried treasure,” I continued briskly, “we have to decide which way to go. My hope is the slope we just tumbled down leads to a tunnel we can follow without any junctions, caverns, or drops. We can hold hands, taking turns groping through the dark.”

  Groans. “I’m not holding your hand,” Fulton said. “We’ll light a candle.”

  “Candle?”

  “I kept one when we ignited my fire hose.”

  “You had a taper?” Cuvier asked. “Why didn’t you light it in the sarcophagus?”

  “There was hardly a point. There was nowhere to go and the flame would use up the oxygen.”

  “All Americans are lunatics,” the zoologist muttered. “Not just Gage.”

  “Well, I can make a flash in the pan of my longrifle,” I said cheerfully. “Let’s gather some lint to have something to better catch the wick.”

  So we did, and some priming from my powder horn and a pull of the trigger produced what was in the darkness a blinding flash, which ignited a ball of lint we in turn used to light Fulton’s candle. With no holder, we stuck the wax shaft temporarily in the barrel of Smith’s blunderbuss. Then we inspected ourselves for damage. We were filthy, torn, and raw from scrapes in our tumbles, but surprisingly intact. The very tip of my rapier was bent slightly and our weapons knocked about, but nothing—including our bones—seemed to be seriously broken. The candle illuminated a steep dirt slope, down which we’d tumbled. The sarcophagus was far out of sight above. In the other direction was a narrow tunnel, just high enough to stoop in, that twisted through lava rock.

  The tube led downward, toward Hades.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Our underground way twisted like a worm. At times the ceiling was high enough to stand freely and at other times we had to crawl, always fearing we’d come to a dead end. The walls bulged in and out irregularly, casting doubt that medieval knights had carved it.

  “They apparently used nature’s casting,” Cuvier said. “It’s probably a lava tube. Volcanoes will sometimes have pipes through which molten rock flows. When this island was a volcano, this may have been a conduit from the central peak to the sea.”

  “The island is still a volcan
o,” Smith corrected.

  “Does that mean lava could flow through here now?” Fulton asked worriedly.

  “Only if there were an eruption,” Smith said. “But if there were, we’d be suffocated by gas or cooked by heat long before any lava came.”

  “I see.”

  “Or earthquakes could collapse the tunnel on top of us,” added Cuvier.

  “Heated water could boil us alive,” suggested Smith.

  “Or scald us to death with steam,” agreed Cuvier.

  “At Mount Etna, onlookers have been killed by flying rock.”

  “At Vesuvius, they’ve found corpses petrified by the ash.”

  The two savants seemed to be enjoying themselves. “I love science, don’t you Robert?” I asked Fulton.

  “It’s much more sensible to work with things you can control, like machines.”

  And so we explored, bunched up behind our little candle. It not only provided light but gave us assurance, by burning, that there was still breathable air.

  “If we’re alive, there has to be an outlet drawing air somewhere, eh?” I asked the others.

  “Yes,” said Cuvier. “Perhaps the size of a door. Or, the size of your finger.”

  “Well, yes.”

  Twice we slid down rubble chutes, seeming to creep closer and closer to some kind of hell. I was hot, but how much was my imagination? I wiped my sweat and noticed how dry my throat was. Then we crawled over a sill and our horizontal path momentarily ended. We had come to a vertical shaft that led both up and down, smooth and round like a well. I looked up, but the top was dark and presumably sealed. There was no easy way to climb up there. I ripped a scrap from my shirt, lit it with the candle, and dropped it down. There was a dirt floor twenty feet below, and the tunnel led on from that.

  “The shaft isn’t wide,” I said. “If we jam ourselves across, we can inch our way down. I’ll go first, and when I get partway you can pass the blunderbuss and candle.” The wax had already burned halfway.

  Somewhat awkwardly, we made our way to the bottom of this well and came upon a surprising discovery. The tunnel that continued on from the shaft was braced with timbers! It appeared to be an excavated mine instead of a natural passage. The wood looked very old, dry, and cracked, but protected from rot by the dryness of the warm passageway. There was a pile of excavated sand and crude rusted tools.

  “Somebody’s been down here before us,” I said. “And not thousands of years ago, either. I think this shaft used to be an alternate entrance from the surface.” I looked up. “Too bad there’s no ladder.”

  “Perhaps this foolishness is not altogether pointless,” Cuvier admitted.

  “The bracing hardly looks strong enough to hold up tent fabric, let alone the earth,” Fulton warned. “This is crude engineering, very old and weak.”

  “But I’m guessing it’s been here since medieval times,” I said. “Why would it fall down today after hundreds of years?”

  “Because we’re here, causing vibration and noise,” Cuvier said.

  “So let’s whisper, and not brush anything.”

  And so we went cautiously on, and came upon the street.

  It was not a normal street of course—we were somewhere under the surface of Thira—and yet it was. Some kind of miners—medieval knights was my guess, probably Templars—had dug down to the flat, sandal-worn flagstones of an ancient thoroughfare. The mine ceiling was overhead, and our light was pitiful until Cuvier took the gray, paper-dry wooden handle of a medieval shovel, wrapped our handkerchiefs on the end, and lit them with the candle, giving us the flare of a torch. With this new light we could see that a slope of volcanic ash and rubble made up one side of the street, still covering part of whatever city had been buried thousands of years ago when the island exploded. On the street’s other side, however, was the excavated stone wall of an ancient building, with a door and room beyond. Straight ahead, our flagstone lane dead-ended at a slope of sand and rubble that almost entirely plugged the tunnel, except for a small crevice at its top. Cool air blew through that crack.

  “The men who uncovered this probably used the well shaft to lift the dirt they dug out,” Smith theorized. “Then they lidded it and, to hide any hint of the location, used that lava tube to connect this place to a very distant one, the church. Perhaps there was no church then, and the holy place was built around the entrance with the sarcophagus-turned-altar constructed to disguise it. It looks as if they were planning to come back, but didn’t.”

  “Another eruption drove them away, perhaps,” Cuvier suggested. “Or some kind of attack or war.”

  “The Templars were crushed and scattered in 1307,” I said. “Friday the thirteenth.”

  “And this buried room—probably a buried city—was lost and forgotten,” Smith speculated.

  “Until this race between you and the Egyptian Rite to uncover these old secrets,” said Fulton.

  This was not a race of my choosing. I’d been dragged into this mess by winning a medallion in a Paris card game more than four years before, and my life has been uncomfortably tumultuous, and annoyingly unprofitable, ever since. Yet I also felt swept up in something historical. The Knights Templar had been annihilated by a king and a pope desperate to learn the secret of their power, and their discoveries were scattered. Now interest in the past had been revived. We lived in an age of revolution and reason, and yet legend and the occult are a respite from the headlong scientific rush of 1802. The modern world was changing so fast! And was there really something down here that could tip the balance of power in the Mediterranean?

  “From experience, I’d say it best that we now poke around,” I announced. “Treasure tends to be found that way.”

  So we stepped through a doorway into one of the excavated rooms and encountered not at all what I expected.

  There were no machines here, and indeed no furniture of any kind. But instead of the austere whiteness I might expect of Greek architecture, we encountered a garden of blazing color. The walls were covered with murals, and murals of an ethereal beauty that seemed like a memory of a paradise long forgotten. The vines of flowers wound sensuously toward an implied sun, the petals glowing in gold, red, and purple. Antelopes and birds were drawn with sinuous lines as perfect as the fall of a river, prancing and flying across ocher meadows. Monkeys leaped from twisting trees. Galleys as graceful as racing shells were hung with garlands. A naked youth posed with a bundle of fish caught from a pristine sea. A graceful maiden lovely as a cameo, serene as a dove and with a waterfall of dark hair, gestured delicately while clad in a complex layered dress of lovely colors.

  How different from the dramatic, stern stiffness of murals in Egyptian temples! Or even the angular, white grandeur in pictures I’d seen of the ruins of the Acropolis in Athens. In Egypt, warriors had marched and trod enemies underfoot. But these people were not just peaceful, they displayed a peace that suggested they’d never known war at all. It reminded me of Magnus Bloodhammer’s dreams of an Eden not yet poisoned by the apple and the Fall.

  “If we’re looking for ancient war machines, I think we’ve got the wrong address,” I murmured. “This looks like a pacifist arcadia.”

  “Gorgeous, aren’t they?” Cuvier said. “The life in these murals! How many modern painters could capture that?”

  “Our portraits are darker,” Smith agreed. “Northern Europeans overdressed and overfed, with moody skies and harnessed horses. What a little heaven these people must have had in contrast, before the volcano blew.”

  “Is this Atlantis, then?” asked Fulton.

  “It’s something very old and very different from Greece or Egypt,” I said. “I have no idea what it is. They don’t just look happy, they look confident. But they don’t look warlike at all. Why would the Egyptian Rite expect to find a weapon down here?”

  “We still don’t know we’re in the right place.”

  “But that tomb, that trapdoor, that tunnel? It’s all very deliberate.”

  “May
be whatever we hoped to find has already been moved.”

  “I don’t think so. I’m not sure anyone has been down here since medieval times.”

  “There are more doorways. Let’s keep looking.”

  The building seemed mazelike, as illogical in its organization as it was beautiful in its décor. Room opened to room with no organizing hallway or unifying atrium. It was hivelike. We passed painted ships with oars splayed like the legs of water bugs, papyrus reeds clumped in the sun, athletes boxing, and girls running. And we were going in our little cone of flickering light from one room to another when suddenly Fulton called, “Wait!”

  We stopped.

  “I think I saw something peculiar in the last room.”

  We went back. The inventor pointed to a frieze near the ceiling. It was a horizontal, scrolling picture of a flotilla of ships, not very different from others we’d seen before. It suggested that whoever built this now-buried place had been sailors, which was logical for island dwellers. Had they been able to sail away when the volcano blew? Had they founded new civilizations elsewhere, even in America?

  “There’s something odd up there,” Fulton said, pointing.

  There was a shape like a crescent moon painted to one side of the gliding ships, and beams of sunlight or moonlight emanating from its concave side to illuminate the little navy.

  “It’s the moon, don’t you think?” I proposed.

  The inventor shook his head. “Look, it’s attached to an elegant curved frame of some kind, as graceful as their murals of flowers, but attended by small figures. This isn’t a celestial object, gentlemen. It’s some kind of machine.” His finger traced the rays emanating from the crescent and followed them to one of the ships. There was a blossom of color above the vessel that I’d assumed was a representation of a dyed sail, but Fulton, perhaps mindful of his peculiar use of his bagpipes, had discerned something else. “I think it’s setting these ships on fire.”

  I felt a chill then, as if I’d seen the snake undergirding Eden. People had lived here in peace, yes. But perhaps their peace was sustained behind the shield of some kind of weapon so terrible that it could ignite any enemy vessel that approached too close.