The Barbary Pirates

by William Dietrich

  The owner plucked off the feathered headgear and gave a sweeping bow.

  A torrent of auburn ringlets cascaded down around our captor’s shoulders—a woman!—and she gave a seductive smile I remembered all too well, even as my heart fell like a barometer in a hurricane. “I told you we weren’t through, Ethan.”

  I gaped in shock, revulsion, and fear, frozen by that still-beautiful face, that athletically graceful figure, those long, white fingers holding a blade that sparkled silver. How vividly did I now remember the broken sword tucked in her belt, which her brother had shattered on my longrifle. She was as bewitching as I remembered, too: the high cheekbones, the feline gaze, the wicked dance of her eyes. It was Aurora Somerset, the English aristocrat who had tupped and tormented me on the North American frontier.

  “Aurora?” was all I could manage, stupidly.

  My companions looked at us curiously.

  “I’ve joined the Barbary pirates,” she said, as if that weren’t obvious enough. “I thought it would bring us together.”

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Aurora Somerset was one of the loveliest women I’d ever met. She was also one of the most dangerous, the most perverted, and the most insane, a murderess who killed my Indian lover, Namida, tried to slay my voyageur friend, Pierre, and left me alive in the North American wilderness only because she wanted to follow me to new secrets.

  As threatened, here she was, fully recovered from her trauma and apparently in charge of an ill-tempered dog and several shiploads of feral pirates, most of them pledged to a religion that dictated women stay subservient and out of sight. Well, nobody is consistent.

  My companions were merely dumbfounded. I knew enough to be terrified.

  I’d met Aurora on my journey west to seek Norse artifacts with the late Magnus Bloodhammer. I was predictably blinded by her beauty and made a fool of myself, as men are wont to do. The upshot was my capture, near torture, escape into the wild, and final showdown in which I killed the man who was both Aurora’s half brother and her lover, Lord Cecil Somerset. She and I did our best to kill each other, too, but in the end I was wounded and she was insane, and the only solace I had from that nightmare was the likelihood that the wilderness would swallow her up and I’d never see her again.

  Time and distance had let me believe that.

  Now, as inexorably persistent as the Rite itself, she was back.

  One might expect trauma to rob her of her prettiness and harden her features. Instead, she was as physically alluring as ever, an ocean goddess of tumbling hair, green eyes, pursed lips, and a cleanliness out of all proportion to her environment: Venus, emerging from the sea. Had she been primping before she swung aboard? There was an eerie changelessness about her that made me suspect some pact with the devil, so perfect was her skin, so athletic her grace as she whirled on deck, so bright her maniacal eyes. She was immortal, I feared, an Antaeus who only grew stronger with every defeat.

  Aurora Somerset was the reason I’d reformed.

  “I thought you’d tired of me,” I managed. She’d had nearly a year to dream up fresh torments, and Lord knows the girl had a better imagination than I did. I felt sick at what this reunion would lead to.

  She walked to me, cutlass lifted like a serpent’s silver tongue to hover under my chin as the ship rolled in the waves, her lips curled in a twist of faint contempt, her eyes intense as a jaguar’s, while her dog eyed me for breakfast. “You’re a hard man to forget, Ethan Gage. So durable. So ruthless. So careless. So stupid. I’ve been following you, anticipating you, marveling at you, and got that signet ring I discovered into the hands of the French and Fouché with the expectation they would turn to the wayward American to determine what it means. You are ever so predictable! Well, you can give the ring back. And now you’ve brought company!” Her eyes danced with calculation as she eyed my savants, and I didn’t know if she was dreaming of bedding them or torturing them. Probably both. “You read something in North America that brought you to Thira, and now you’ve found something, I’m betting, that I and my allies are looking for.”

  “Allies? You have friends?”

  I’d managed to annoy her. “More than you know.”

  “You must mean the lunatic Egyptian Rite.”

  “That, and the Tripoli corsairs, our newest comrades. Their bashaw saw the advantage of ancient secrets long before Bonaparte and Fouché.” She nodded to the assembly of pirates, as motley a bunch of thieves and miscreants as can be found outside a parliament. They had the hygiene of sewer rats and the disposition of a wounded bull, but then I’m used to bad company. She turned to Dragut. “What did they find?”

  “A manuscript, my lady.” So our captain had been in her employ from the beginning: ready to pluck us from pursuit in Venice and from caves at Thira. This rendezvous had been planned for months. Why get dirty when Ethan Gage will crawl through the mouth of Hades for you?

  “A manuscript? What does it say?”

  “I wouldn’t presume to read it before you.” He pointed. “The American has it.”

  “Where is it?” she demanded of me. “Give it up!”

  “Your manners haven’t improved since our last time together.”

  “Or your impudence! Come, turn it over! The ring, too!”

  Her monster of a dog started barking with the volume of a wolf pack, and I flinched despite myself. Why do people insist on bringing along their pets? I considered trying to hurl the parchment into the sea, but given what it said, what was the harm? “Here: What you’ve followed me for seven thousand miles for. It might improve you.”

  There is something to be said for the upbringing of the high bred. She was, it seemed, literate in Latin. Apparently young ladies of the English nobility learn more than just shooting and sadism. She read for a moment, her pirates shuffling like a restless classroom, and then looked at me in disbelief. “Are you trying to make me a fool?”

  “That’s all we found, Aurora. Dig down yourself if you don’t believe me, but the ancient rooms under Akrotiri were as empty as a beggar’s stomach. Except for this. I hoped it was a treasure, too—this is hardly what I came for—but I could have saved myself the trouble by simply buying a preacher’s pamphlet outside the Palais Royal. If there was ever anything of value down there, I suspect Knights Templar took it centuries ago. We’re both chasing ghosts.”

  She stood a moment, debating whether to believe me. Finally she threw the parchment at my feet. I picked it up. It was, I supposed, a souvenir of Thira. She kept the ring. “Very well. And, yes, a wasted trip for you and your friends, but not necessarily for me.” She turned to her shipmates. “We’ll sell them as slaves!”

  To that they gave a hearty cheer, which meant they got a share from hocking us. Everybody loves a profit.

  “Where’s his gun?” she then asked. There was some discomfort among Dragut’s men as my longrifle—the same one that had killed Cecil Somerset—was brought out. “That weapon is mine,” she snapped. “You can have the others.”

  “It’s scuffed and nicked but a fine piece,” one of the pirates objected. “It’s ours to take, not yours, under Barbary law.”

  “It slew my brother. Give it over.”

  The sailor, with the scars of more than a few fights, wasn’t about to buckle easily to this woman’s whim. He turned to his captain. “Hamidou, we captured them! She has no right!”

  Dragut was shaking his head.

  And as the poor sailor turned back in anger, debating just how truculent to be, Aurora’s monster dog sprang. It was a blur of black, snarling like a lion, and the man was down yelling as the dog bit his hands and face, pinning him with furious weight. The rifle skittered away but no one dared touch it; the other pirates instinctively jumped back. The poor victim writhed, his thrashing arm trying to get to his knife while the other hand clawed at the dog’s face, but then the hound got past his guard and plunged his snout at the poor devil’s throat. Its big black head thrashed as if it had been g
iven a rag doll, and blood from a severed artery made a jet that shot three feet in the air. Men were at once shouting, pleading, betting, and laughing, ill-bred ruffians that they were.

  The pirate twitched and jerked a final time, and died. A red pool spread like a blot.

  “Sokar, heel!”

  The mastiff backed off, jaws foamy with blood and saliva. It was growling, looking at me with its yellow eyes.

  Trembling slightly, Dragut stooped to pick up my rifle and gave it to the demented woman. “His weapon, my lady.”

  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 pirat
es. 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.