The Barbary Pirates

by William Dietrich

  Not yet.

  Aurora wasn’t there. Instead, I was face-to-face with Hamidou Dragut, our traitorous sea captain. He lounged on a cushion in what I realized was the richly decorated throne room, picking from a bowl of figs. My stomach growled at the sight of them. The room’s floor was strewn with thick Persian carpets and its marble walls were decorated with incised Arabic script that quoted the Koran. There was a gilded throne chair, the cerulean silk of its cushion embroidered with gold and its legs and arms studded with jewels. In one corner of the chamber was a leopard, lying on the cool floor and held to a pillar by a golden chain. Behind was its brass cage. The cat looked bored.

  I’d come from hell to an odd little heaven.

  Dragut looked me up and down. “She will be very disappointed. The pit has not improved you.”

  I worked to keep any quaver from my voice. “Aurora Somerset is always disappointed. It’s her nature.”

  “Don’t let your tongue betray your last remaining chance, American.”

  Sometimes I can’t help myself, and my grit was slowly coming back. I was jealous he had figs and I was starving. “To be a slave to that woman, like you?”

  He darkened. “I am no slave, and would die before becoming one.”

  I took breath. “Tripoli is a nation of slaves. I could tell that much just marching from the harbor. Endless castes, each man quailing before the other, and your women bagged and hidden as if they carried the plague. You’ve never tasted freedom in your life, Dragut.”

  “On the contrary, Monsieur Gage!” It was a new voice and I swung around. A door to the throne room opened and in strode the man I’d seen in the slave market on his white horse, Bashaw Yussef Karamanli himself. He was, as I’ve said, fit and handsome, a dagger in his sash and a sword at his side, and carried with him that confidence that comes from being born to royalty. Two powerful guards, one blond and one black, flanked him. His sword belt was studded with diamonds, and his turban had that jewel the size of a robin’s egg—emerald enough, I guessed, to put me in high style the rest of my life if I could ever find a way to snatch it. He also had the ruthless look that is inevitable to men who cling to power in dangerous places. He plopped onto the European throne chair while a janissary gave a blow to the back of my legs, forcing me to my knees before him. My head was wrenched down in obeisance.

  “In this country each man enjoys the freedom of knowing his place and role, unlike the chaos of democracy,” Yussef went on with a scholarly air. “And our women have a freedom yours can’t imagine. Yes, they are covered, but that means they can go anywhere in the city without being recognized, meaning they are free from malicious gossip and disapproving eyes. Behind the veil they have a liberty no American or French woman enjoys. They are mistresses of their houses, and in the cool of the evening they emerge on the screened roofs to talk and sing in a world free of harassment from men. No woman can keep secrets more readily than a Muslim woman, no woman is happier, and no woman is better protected by her husband. You will see if you take the turban. We have a harmony, a serenity, unknown in Europe.”

  My head came up. “I’ve experienced Aurora’s serenity.”

  “Ah. Lady Somerset is…unique. And no Muslim.”

  “And she has nothing to say to you, at least not yet,” Dragut said. “That will await some sudden birth of reason on the part of yourself and your companions. No, I brought you up to confer first with someone quite different, to see if we cannot be partners.”

  “We have nothing you want to know.”

  “From four savants? I’m skeptical of that.”

  “And if we did, it will die with us. I insisted on honor.” I’m inclined to exaggerate, if nobody is around to correct me.

  “Did you?” He licked his fingers of the stickiness of the figs and suddenly sprang up. He wore, I saw, Cuvier’s two pistols in his sash. The guards were similarly armed, and looked ready to spring. Everyone had weapons enough to rob a mail coach, meaning I was not exactly trusted. “I appreciate men of honor,” Dragut said. He rapped on the door Yussef had come through. “They can be trusted to do the right thing.”

  There was the sound of a lock being turned, a creak, and the heavy door swung open. A pale, corpulent, hairless slave—a eunuch, I guessed, the gelded men allowed to attend a harem—marched into our meeting place with pretentious authority, as if his rank exceeded that of the pirate captain and soldiers before him. But he fell before Yussef, his forehead touching the floor. And then another figure came through to slip around the eunuch and stand in a shaft of dazzling sunlight, like the apparition of an angel.

  All sense left me then, and I heard a roaring in my ears. My knees went weak.

  It was Astiza, my lost love from Egypt, as beautiful as ever.

  With her, dressed like a little sultan, was a boy of just over two years. He looked at me with bright, cautious curiosity.

  “Hello, Ethan,” Astiza said. “This is your son, Horus.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Astiza was as striking as I remembered. She’s a Mediterranean beauty, Greek and Egyptian, her hair silk and piled for this reunion, held in place with a golden pin. She has eyes to drown in, dark and deep, and they shone with a bright intelligence that might frighten some men but captivated me. She was not as conventionally beautiful as Aurora Somerset but had a thousand times more character, the set of her lip or the waiting question of her eyes hinting at a depth of emotion the English noblewoman had no knowledge of. There was bright steel in Astiza, but vulnerability, too, and while she always seemed ready to slip away (that independence!) she once had need of me as well, as baffled by her attraction to me as I was by my longing for her. We had electricity. We understood each other’s hopes in an unspoken way I’d never shared with another woman. Slim, poised, draped in Arabian finery, her sandals silver and her jewelry braided gold, she seemed a dream after the ghastliness of Omar and the horror of his dungeons.

  Yet my appraisal was done hurriedly because my stunned stare necessarily went to the wee creature beside her. This was a lad not much beyond the nursery, shorter, I guessed, than Napoleon’s Little Red Man, with a shock of unruly hair that mimicked my own in a way both enchanting and disturbing. My son! I wasn’t aware I had one. He had Astiza’s hypnotic eyes and upright stance, and my own cheekiness. He didn’t shy behind my old lover’s skirts but looked at me with that optimistic wariness children use with strange but promising adults. I might have a present—or, I might be of no use whatsoever. And damn if the tyke’s face didn’t look a bit like mine, too, a point I registered with both apprehension and pride.

  “My son?” It came out as a croak.

  “I suspected pregnancy when we were in Temple Prison in Paris.”

  “You didn’t share this rather momentous information?”

  “I didn’t want it to dissuade you from bringing me to help stop Alessandro Silano and his Egyptian Rite treachery. And later, when Napoleon spared us…you’re a man who’s destined to go his own way, Ethan. I knew we’d have a reunion. I just didn’t expect it to be like this.”

  “What are you doing in Tripoli?” My questions were thick, my mind reeling, my purpose confused. I was a father? By Thor’s thunder, was I supposed to marry the girl? And was I supposed to be pleased, or disturbed? I couldn’t remember old Ben Franklin having anything to say about this.

  “I was captured, like you.”

  “What kind of a name is Horus?” She hadn’t conferred on that, either.

  “A quite noble name of an Egyptian god. You know that.”

  “I just always imagined having a Jack or a Tom or something.” I was rambling, while I tried to take it all in.

  “You weren’t around to consult.” Her tone was cool, and tarnation if I didn’t feel guilty about the entire situation. But I hadn’t planned this or wanted it! I just wanted her, and I still did, didn’t I? Of course I did, I wanted to leap the gap between us, but a child gave new gravity to the situation. New purpose to every glance and word. Wha
t was my duty here?

  Dragut and Karamanli were looking at me with amusement.

  “How were you captured?”

  “Kidnapped in Egypt. I’d returned to Dendara for my studies of the past when Bedouin raiders took us. Ethan, all this from the beginning—with Silano and the medallion, the Book of Thoth, your mission in North America—has been an attempt by our enemies to reconstruct the power discovered in the Middle Ages by the Knights Templar. They are reassembling the lost powers of a very ancient world, a world that preceded the one we know and that started our own civilization. Secrets lost for millennia are being bent toward evil.”

  “That’s not true,” Dragut said.

  “The more I studied in Egypt the more I understood the vastness of their design, and I hoped the hieroglyphs of Dendara would reveal how all this secret history came about. But before I could work, Horus and I were kidnapped. We were ridden into the desert by Bedouin and I thought we’d be ransomed from there, but instead we were sold in a slave market to men who wore medallions of a pyramid entwined with a snake. It was Apophis all over again. They took us to the coast, threatening to harm Horus if I tried any witchcraft. Then we were chained to a corsair and sailed here, where I was brought to Karamanli’s harem.”

  “My God. Are you a concubine?”

  She shook her head. “I wasn’t captured for him. I was captured for you.”

  “For me?” I was more confused than ever.

  “To persuade you, if you failed to cooperate. All this has been planned for many months, Ethan, by some pirate captain who has some scheme I don’t understand. A devil in league with Hamidou Dragut here.”

  “A devil-ess,” I corrected heavily. “The pirate is a woman.”

  “A woman!”

  “We have some history.”

  Her look was less than happy. “I see.” In an instant many things had become clear to her, such as why she was in this predicament at all.

  I swallowed. “Perfectly horrid, I assure you. The plague, Inquisition, and Reign of Terror were holidays compared with Aurora Somerset. I was asking about you in Paris, Astiza, really I was—I wrote Ashraf about you, too—which is how my friends and I got into this mess. I came to find you. And now, to meet you here, with…Horus.” I blinked at the boy. “I’m more than a little astounded.”

  “Who that?” the boy piped up.

  “It’s your papa, I told you.”

  “He come stay?” His voice lifted at the end of each question, and he seemed quite the proficient talker for his age, which I was swiftly calculating must be just over two. I couldn’t help but have some satisfaction at the precocious little prodigy I’d spawned, as well as new alarm at the question he raised. I loved Astiza, yes, but a family and domesticity? Everything was happening too fast.

  “No, my sweet. He’s going to save us by going away.”

  “Go where?”

  “Where other people tell him to go.”

  “Now what are you talking about?” I interrupted.

  “As we’ve explained, we need your help and partnership, Ethan Gage,” Dragut said. “We could let Omar the Dungeon Master explore what you know, but one is never certain if the information elicited through torture is entirely honest. Much better for all, we think, is your voluntary help in achieving our mutual ends.”

  “Mutual ends!”

  “Ethan, this was not my idea,” Astiza said. “I’m as helpless as you. But these cultists, these fanatics, are as ruthless as the pirates they employ.”

  “You have two choices, Monsieur Gage,” Dragut explained. “You can return to the dungeon and let Omar have his way. He, at least, will enjoy it. Perhaps we’ll learn something useful, and while by the end you’ll be broken and insane, Aurora and I can investigate whatever clues he has wrung out of you. Should you make this choice to end your life in hideous pain, Astiza will become a concubine to the highest bidder, and your son will be sold into a harem of a different sort. There are beys who run to that taste, and are always looking for young boys to initiate. We will put Horus there.”

  “Where, Mama?”

  “Hush, baby.”

  “Mother and son will both be concubines until her master tires of his latest toy and turns Astiza out to more menial slavery. I think Somerset intends that it be the worst kind of crippling labor. And so your little family ends, you in a torture chamber, she as a scullery slave, and Horus, perhaps, as eunuch after his service to pederasts. Your courage, if you want to call it that, will have destroyed everyone around you.”

  “What about my friends below?” My tone was hollow.

  “They will never emerge from the pit. Since Bonaparte sent them, we dare not risk his wrath by trying for ransom. We take care not to capture people from nations with powerful navies. Better that they simply disappear, presumably lost at sea, unfortunate casualties of a doomed treasure quest with the unreliable Ethan Gage. They were last seen fleeing Venice and, poof, they are gone!”

  “You bastard. You will fry in hell!”

  At that a guard sprang forward and lashed at me with a whip, which stung like the very devil. Worse, the crack of the lash terrified poor little Horus, who now did duck behind his mother’s skirts, whimpering. My own eyes watered from the pain but I was damned if I was going to cry in front of my son. Family has a way of giving spine to a man.

  “The other choice,” Dragut went on smoothly, as if nothing had happened, “is to do what our federation has suggested from the beginning. There was something on that sheepskin you collected because it had disappeared by the time we took you out of the hold. You found a clue, Gage, and then destroyed it. Admit it.”

  “No more than a city, which you could guess anyway.”

  “Syracuse?”

  I nodded as if didn’t matter. “Where Archimedes lived.”

  “But then why destroy the parchment? And how did you do it?”

  “We ate it.”

  He smiled. “Which means it held more than a city. Take us to the mirror of Archimedes, Gage, and save both yourself and your family. Astiza and your son will be released to go back to Egypt if they wish, never to be molested by us again.”

  “And my companions?”

  “They will be released and put on a ship back to France before today’s sunset. You will not have to meet them, and they will have no idea what bargain you made. Their nightmare will become an adventure they will recount at the supper table for the rest of their lives. Napoleon will probably reward them for having tried, and praise Yussef Karamanli for his mercy.”

  “And me?”

  “You will make your own choice, and it will be a real choice, not coerced. If the mirror works, you can join an alliance that is seeking to re-create the magic and power of the Knights Templar and dominate the world for good. I assure you the Egyptian Rite could run our planet far better than the grasping princes and warlords that rule it now. Mark my words, men like Bonaparte will wreak havoc! The mirror will make Tripoli impregnable to naval attack by even the greatest of powers, and behind it we will build a new utopia.”

  “Like the murals of Akrotiri,” I murmured.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Something I saw once.”

  “Or, you can throw away the opportunity to remake the world and go back to your old corruption, where you will be regarded as traitor to your country and all civilized nations. You will be despised and friendless. The best you might hope for is impoverished exile in Egypt with Astiza. Once we have the mirror, what you choose is of no moment to me.”

  By the beard of Solomon, wasn’t this a fix? Condemn the son I hadn’t known I had to slavery and rape, snuff out not only my own life but that of Astiza and my three savants—or, betray my nation when it was at war with Tripoli. I couldn’t remember old Ben offering any advice on this kind of dilemma, either, except his comment about patriots hanging separately if they didn’t hang together.

  It was as if Yussef read my thoughts. “Do not flatter yourself that you hold the key to victory
or defeat, Monsieur Gage,” the bashaw spoke up. “We will find what we seek one way or another—the Rite assures me of that. You simply speed things along and, by doing so, spare your family. If your nation really has a chance in its war with me, why are its ships hiding in Malta?”

  Why indeed? Where in hell was that incompetent commodore, Richard Valentine Morris?

  “It’s not treason to embrace the idealism of the Egyptian Rite,” Dragut added.

  Aurora’s odd patience with me at sea was now explained. It had been planned from the beginning for me to turn traitor to the United States in order to save my young son. The slave market, the pit, the torture chamber—all were to soften me up for this unholy bargain. They sensed I knew more than I’d admitted, and had given me the one choice I couldn’t refuse.

  It didn’t help that I felt guilty for putting the woman I loved (and our child!) in utmost peril. If I had the fidelity of a flea I never would have gotten entangled with Aurora Somerset in the first place, and she wouldn’t be plaguing us now. There would have been no kidnapping of Astiza, and no devil’s bargain. “Beauty and folly are old companions,” Ben Franklin said.

  Well, the pirates were a long way from having a death ray and the only possible plan was play along. If I said no we were doomed, but if yes? Maybe my luck would turn. I’m a gambler, after all. I began to fantasize about turning this death ray on them.

  “All I have are rather vague clues. I’m not very good at puzzles.”

  “But you could help, no?”

  “Yes. What do I have to do?”

  “Find the mirror for us.”

  “And Astiza and Horus?”

  “They will be released unharmed, as promised. But not until the weapon is in Tripoli. Until then, Astiza remains in the harem as a prisoner.”