The Barbary Pirates

by William Dietrich

  “It was Yussef who declared war on us.”

  “Because your baby nation doesn’t understand the way of the world and pay rightful tribute! The United States should give us what we demand. It will be far cheaper than senseless defiance. You’ll see.”

  “I can’t say we have faith in your advice, Dragut, given that you’ve lied, betrayed, and enslaved us.”

  “Ah! You are lucky that Hamidou Dragut is the one who captured you, and not a truly hard man like Murad Reis!”

  “The traitor Scot?” Smith asked.

  “He took the turban, but is dour and gloomy like his homeland. I will put in a word for you but he is not merciful like me, Hamidou. Murad chose valor under the Crescent over slavery under the Cross. Now he is captain of all our corsairs, renowned for his courage, cleverness, and cruelty. Every slave has that opportunity! In your backward nations, slavery is a life’s torment, the work of Negroes you despise. In our enlightened nation it is but a step to wealth and even freedom for those who convert to Islam! Our Christian slaves live the life of the damned, but Muslim slaves can rise as high as their masters. Such is the wisdom of Allah.”

  “Not one of us will ever become a Mussulman,” Cuvier vowed, “even we savants who question Scripture.”

  “Then you must be ransomed to bankrupt your families, or sentenced to the quarries, or given over to Omar the Dungeon Master. Are you savants not men of reason? Listen to me well: Only reason can save you now.”

  Cannon fired salutes as we neared the city. Aurora’s flotilla answered in turn, each puff of smoke from the forts followed a second or two later by one from us, the bangs echoing across the lovely turquoise water. Swarms of dockworkers, slavers, soldiers, and veiled wives assembled on the quay as we glided between the reefs. Horns blew from the city walls and drums beat out a tattoo. Our ship tied up and great rattling chains, each set as heavy as two pails of water, were dragged aboard by starved-looking slaves and manacled around our ankles and wrists, the weight holding our arms down and our hands cupped as if we were trying to cover our privates. This forced pose was not entirely inappropriate because our clothes were ragged after the caves of Thira. Dirty, unshaven, and thin, we looked like the wretched slaves we’d become. My scientist companions gloomily surveyed the churning mob waiting to escort us to the slave markets. Reason! We had one card left, but didn’t dare play it. We thought we knew the place to which the palimpsest map referred.

  It was Smith, with his love for geography, who’d figured it out. He told me when I’d been returned to the hold of Dragut’s ship after meeting Aurora. “We had it backward, Ethan,” he explained in a whisper as we made for the African coast. “This inlet here isn’t a bay, it’s a peninsula, as if the map is drawn in a mirror. And once I realized that, everything else became plain. I know of one harbor in this part of the world with that shaped protrusion, and it is Syracuse on Sicily, where Archimedes did his calculations and wielded his mirror. This curved line here is not drawn on land, but on the sea. Fulton suggested what that detail might represent.”

  “I think that’s the limit of the mirror’s effectiveness,” the inventor said. “Within that line, the mirror’s rays were strong enough to set attacking Roman galleys on fire.”

  “The symbols may refer to places on land the makers of this map wanted to record,” Smith went on. “The hiding place, perhaps, of the mirror of Archimedes. Caves, forts, a church.”

  I looked. There was a cross on the peninsula, and a castlelike symbol a good distance from town. A line was drawn from cross to castle, but it angled at a horseshoe-shaped mark. Where the line bent, there was a wavy line like a symbol for a river. Nearby was an oval, little humps that could mark huts or caves, and arrows with odd symbols and meaningless numbers.

  “I think the Templars drew this after they rediscovered the mirror,” Smith whispered, “and hid it on Thira in a place only they knew: some underground catacombs, perhaps.”

  “So we have something to bargain with!” I exclaimed.

  “Absolutely not,” Cuvier countered. “Are you going to help turn a terrible weapon over to pirate fanatics?”

  “Not turn it over. Just use what we know to get out of this fix, somehow.”

  “I’d rather be enslaved than give the barbarians a clue that might result in the destruction of the French navy,” my friend vowed.

  “Aye, and the British navy, too,” said Smith. “Come, Ethan, your own nation is at war with these devils. We can’t tell them where this death ray is.”

  “Where is it?” I peered at the map.

  “We don’t know exactly, but sooner or later they would figure that out. Just pinpointing the city makes discovery far easier. Your frigates would become infernos, and your countrymen would fry. We can’t trade that for freedom. Death before dishonor, eh?”

  “Of course.” I swallowed. “Still, a little hint might not hurt.”

  Fulton shook his head. “Any modern inventor could probably improve on the Greek design. We dare not even tempt them.”

  By the whiskers of Zeus, I’d fallen in with honorable men! That’s always a risky thing—not to mention novel. “But they’ll take the palimpsest from us and maybe come to the same conclusion,” I tried. I’m not craven, just practical.

  “The only thing to do,” Cuvier said, “is memorize this scrap to the closest detail and then destroy it. Then the key will be in our brains, not an underground tunnel or a piece of animal skin.”

  “Destroy it how? We can’t throw it into the sea from down here.”

  “No, and we can’t bring the obscuring prayers back, either. The only thing I can think of, my friends, is to eat it.”

  “After we’ve washed it in piss to see the design?”

  “Nothing wrong with a little urine, Ethan,” the scientist assured. “Less toxic than bad well water. Maidens used it to wash their hair. Besides, the palimpsest is long dried now. Seasoned, you might say.”

  “Eat a palimpsest?” I looked with dismay. “How?”

  “A little at a time, I suspect. It’s not like we have salt and pepper.”

  And so we did, and by the end I had a sore jaw from chewing and a knotted gut from too much parchment and not enough vegetables. Why can’t I find normal treasure, like gold doubloons or a queen’s tiara?

  Our morose chewing of this cud did put us in a philosophical mood, and when men ponder the mysteries of the universe the first thing that comes to mind is women.

  I’d explained my unsuccessful audience with Aurora Somerset and given hints of our unhappy history, which seemed to surprise no one. Females, we agreed, were more bewitching than a treasure map and explosive as a keg of gunpowder.

  “It’s odd how dangerous they are, given that men are so clearly superior,” Smith said with honest puzzlement. “In strength, in courage, and in intelligence, the evidence of our gender’s advantage is indisputable.”

  “Not entirely,” Fulton cautioned. “I know many a man who’d quail at the prospect of childbirth.”

  “Certainly women have strengths of their own,” the Englishman allowed. “Beauty, to cite the most obvious. My point is that despite our own male brilliance, the hens seem to get the upper hand over the peacock. Quite baffling, really.”

  “Upper wing,” I corrected. “If the metaphor is peacock.”

  “It’s really a product of natural history,” Cuvier opined. “Now the male, it is true, has the instinct to be unfaithful. While monogamy is advantageous for the survival of children, in terms of procreation it’s in a buck’s best interest to mount as many damsels as possible.”

  “Here, here,” I said.

  “So that should keep men in a position of superiority,” Smith said. “If his heart is broken by one mate, he simply transfers his energies to the next. Look at Gage there, a perfect example of serial infatuation, faithlessness, and poor judgment.”

  I opened my mouth to clarify but Fulton cut me off.

  “Fighting stags risk dying in combat, but the winner gain
s a harem,” the inventor agreed. “The bull rules the pasture, and the ram his ewes. Male superiority, gentlemen, is the rule of the barnyard, and it should be the rule of the salon.”

  “And yet it is not,” Cuvier cautioned. “Ethan, for example, is the kind of man who has endless problems with women, given his flea-like frenzy, inability to plan for the future, rank opportunism, and hapless disloyalty. In his case, the advantage is to the fair sex. When does one hunt a stag? In the rutting season, when the animal’s brain is positively addled by lust and he can’t get anything right.”

  “Ethan again,” Fulton agreed.

  “The woman, in contrast, has a far weightier task than simple copulation,” Cuvier went on. “While a loose bull like Gage might charge around the pasture, wearing out over this skirt and that, the female has but one chance to get it right. Just a single man will impregnate her, and so her choice of the stud is crucial to her own well-being and that of her child. As a result, she approaches relationships with the acumen of an Alexander and the strategy of Frederick the Great. Her brilliance at this dance is honed from earliest childhood, and faced with her ruthless strategy and judicious selection, we men are but helpless pawns. It is she who controls our success or failure, she who maneuvers to bring the right mate to her boudoir, she who calculates not just physical attractiveness but money, intelligence, and power, and sets in place a bewildering set of flanking maneuvers and ambushes that turn the hapless male to befuddled acquiescence. At the same time, she must convince the male that the entire affair is his idea.”

  “We are no match,” Smith agreed with a sigh. “We are rabbits to their fox.”

  “Or at least hapless romantics like Ethan are,” said Cuvier.

  “They weigh our inheritance, our reputation, our prospects, and our hygiene,” Fulton confirmed. “It’s little wonder Gage here has such trouble with his Astiza and this Somerset, to just begin the list. It’s a hopeless mismatch.”

  “I am hardly a victim, gentlemen.” My pride was being stung.

  “Perhaps not,” said Cuvier, “but the farther you stay from women, Ethan Gage, the safer all of us will be.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  So here I was on a stone quay at the edge of Africa in the hot midday sun, dragging an anchor’s worth of iron, appalled at the idea of trying to rekindle passion with Aurora Somerset, and facing the fate they whisper about in Mediterranean taverns. Our captivity was Muslim payback for their expulsion from Spain, the blood of the Crusades, and their whipping at Lepanto and Vienna a couple of centuries back. Every war breeds the next one. The four of us might be the despair of any parish prelate, given our rather liberal views on religion and Scripture, but to the pirates we were Christian dogs, about to get a preview of the hell we’d earned by not converting to Islam.

  Someday I was going to learn not to go on errands for Napoleon Bonaparte.

  “What is our plan again?” whispered Fulton.

  “Well, I was going to ransom us with what we know, but an outbreak of moral rectitude among the four of us put an end to that scheme. I see only two ways out. One is to run like the very devil when we have the chance.”

  Fulton looked down at his manacles. “I think they’ve anticipated that.”

  “The other is to appeal to reason. I don’t trust our pirate queen for a moment, lads, and so we need to see the king of this place, one Yussef Karamanli, and convince him just how important we really are.”

  “Isn’t he the one who shot one brother and exiled another on his way to the throne? The one who’s declared war on our own United States? The one whose grandfather had his janissary guards strangled, one by one, as they came in the door of a thank-you banquet?”

  “He’s no George Washington,” I allowed. “In the end, however, pirates are always businessmen. You savants represent the brightest minds in Europe. We’ll figure out some harmless task to impress him, earn his gratitude, put him in our debt, and then be sent on our way. With presents, perhaps.”

  “Your optimism is ludicrous,” Smith said.

  “If we prove truly useful, he’ll never let us go,” Cuvier added.

  “Maybe Napoleon will rescue us then.”

  “Napoleon has no idea where we are.”

  “Then look for any chance of escape, gentlemen.”

  “Punishable by excruciating death, I’ve read,” Smith warned. “We really don’t have a chance, if I recall.”

  “Well,” I said doggedly, “I’ll think of something.”

  They sighed.

  With that and the crack of whips we shuffled forward, bunched with a second group of captives pushed off another ship. Some of these were sobbing women. Our vine of chain was locked together and we were pushed, stumbling, past hogsheads of sugar, pipes of wine, and casks of nails into the city proper, passing from blinding sunlight to the canyonlike shadows of a street of Africa, awnings casting them in shade. We were lashed through crowds of jostling soldiers, shouting merchants, shrouded women, braying donkeys, and snorting camels. We shuffled with bare feet on the manure-spotted sand of the street to the blare of horns and beat of drums. High overhead the red, green, and white banners of Tripoli floated to taunt anyone dreaming of freedom. From the alcoves, the poorest Muslim beggars made sure to strike and spit to ensure that our mood was even worse than theirs. We were jeered until we shrank into ourselves like the intimidated spirits we were. Our weapons were gone, our boots stolen—I made sure Dragut himself took my urine-soaked shoe—and half our buttons plucked off. We were thirsty, starved, sunburned, and whipped, and as pitiable a lot as you’ll see this side of a cannibal campfire. I kept looking for opportunity, and finding none.

  Tripoli did bring back memories of Alexandria and Cairo. Here were the coffee shops, the old men squatting at the entrance to puff at six-foot hookah pipes as we stumbled by, the air heavy with hashish and incense. There were taverns, too, run by freed Christians and patronized by Muslims who sat in dark shadows to imbibe forbidden alcohol.

  The Turkish and Arab women we passed were veiled, their robes shapeless, so that only the beauty of their almond eyes hinted at the charms within.

  Tripoli also had a large colony of Jews who’d been expelled from Spain in Columbus’s day. By decree the Jews were dressed in black, and forced to go barefoot if they crossed in front of a mosque. Most of the beggars were missing hands or arms, their extremities having been chopped off and the stumps dipped in pitch after conviction of some crime. Street urchins ran with us, too, yelling taunts and laughing at our shackled misery. High above, the eyes of more women peered down at us from the grilled windows of harems and apartments.

  I preferred Philadelphia.

  “There’s a hierarchy in Tripoli you would do well to memorize,” said Hamidou as his sailors jabbed us forward. “The rulers and janissary soldiers are Turks, answerable to the Sublime Porte in Istanbul. They are the ones allowed to wear the red fez wrapped with muslin. Below them are Arab merchants, the descendants of the desert warriors who conquered North Africa more than a thousand years ago. Beneath the Arabs are the Moors, the Muslims driven from Spain by the Christian knights. Then the Levantines, the Greeks and Lebanese who do menial jobs. The Jews are also refugees from Spanish intolerance, and they are our lenders. And finally, at the bottom, you slaves make up a fifth of our population. The government language is Turkish and Arabic, and the street talk is the Lingua Franca of the Mediterranean, a mix of all the dialects from around that sea.”

  We clanked by a market. There were ranks of silvery fish, mounds of bright spices, carpets, cloaks, leather, silks, figs, raisins, olives, grain, and oil. There was brass and iron cookware, finely tooled saddles, sweetly curving daggers, oranges, pomegranates, grapes, onions, anchovies, and dates. Everything was for sale, including me.

  “How much am I worth, exactly?” I asked. “As a slave, that is.”

  He considered. “Half the price of a pretty woman.”

  “But you can’t just mean to auction us off like common sail
ors,” I reasoned. “We’re learned men.”

  “You’re Christian dogs, until you convert.”

  The slave market of Tripoli was a stone platform under the wall of Yussef’s central citadel, and perhaps his entertainment was the lamentation that rose from the hopeless. We queued next to its steps while a mob of bidders inspected us, since we represented a potentially shrewd investment. Our sale price would go to our pirate captors, but there was a chance a buyer might turn a profit not just from our labor but from ransoming us to higher-bidding relatives in Christendom. The bashaw’s own representatives were resplendent in jeweled turbans and upturned slippers. They were there to take the prettiest for the harem and the most able for whatever household duties needed filling after the last purchase had finally expired of overwork and disease. Other buyers included swarthy Berber chieftains from the hinterlands, military overseers needing brute labor to complete battery work, galley masters looking to replenish their banks of oars, carpet makers who needed quick fingers and fresh eyes, and dyers, water carriers, wheat growers, tanners, drovers, and masons, all with whips and manacles of their own. The system was built entirely on coercion instead of free enterprise and I’d announce in a second that it couldn’t work, except that the Barbary kingdoms had been defying the navies of Europe for three hundred years. My own United States depended on slavery in its south, and by all reports its most enthusiastic practitioners were quite wealthy.

  The captives ahead were auctioned like cattle. Muscles were ordered tightened to judge strength, mouths forced open with wedges of stick, bellies prodded, feet lifted, and clothes rudely ripped to hunt for boils, rashes, or other signs of disease. We were all forced to prove, by prancing, that we didn’t suffer from gout. In some cases trousers were tugged down to judge the size of the genitals, as if the poor captive was to be put to stud.