The Barbary Pirates

by William Dietrich

  “As best as I could tell.”

  “For your son’s sake, I hope you’re right.”

  “Assuming we find it, how are we going to take it without having half of Sicily at our heels? Castello Maniace will blow your corsair out of the water if it comes to fetch the mirror.”

  “An interesting problem you should apply your mind to, if you want to save your son’s life. Remember, Ethan, our fate is your own.”

  Aurora hired a carriage that took us to Syracuse in style, all of us pretending to be on holiday during the European peace. Harry came along as my son, with me widowed should anyone ask. Osiris was our “servant,” a limping ogre vowing quietly to hurt Horus should I voice a wrong opinion or fail to endorse their latest skulduggery. Dragut was Aurora’s manservant and bodyguard, lest I be tempted to try to strangle the girl. Fortunately, our tight little contingent of domestic bliss was able to leave her slobbering mastiff behind. I hoped Sokar choked on a sailor’s femur by the time we got back.

  We were to search the city for clues and then rendezvous with more of the pirates in that ruined ancient fort of Euryalus, Greek for “nail head.” This castle, reputedly designed by Archimedes himself, had nonetheless fallen to the Romans in record time, which made me wonder again if the mirror was simple myth. But how to explain the peculiar mural at Akrotiri, on Thira?

  The new Italian city of Syracuse had long since buried the ancient Greek one, and there was little sign on Ortygia that Archimedes had ever walked there. One clue of continuity, however, was built into the city’s cathedral on the central piazza. The duomo had a baroque façade, erected after one of the periodic earthquakes that ravaged Sicily, but its sidewalls incorporated the pillars of an ancient Greek temple to Athena. It was a pragmatic recycling of faith and architecture that reminded me how new beliefs entwine with old.

  “It’s said that the gold of her statue would catch the morning sun and serve as a beacon to sailors when they were miles out to sea,” a waiter told us on the piazza as I kept trying to keep Horus in his chair instead of crawling around on the pavement. I don’t know how mothers keep track of their scamps. “While our duomo is closed in, the Greek temple was open to the air.”

  “Maybe that’s where Archimedes got his idea for his mirrors,” I theorized.

  “What mirror, Papa?”

  “The brightest mirror in the world. That’s what we’re looking for!”

  His little face beamed with delight. Aurora looked bored, her halfhearted attempts at acting matronly reminding me of a folktale witch who’d just as soon pop a child into the oven.

  To be playing the English squire with Aurora, Dragut, and Osiris was more than a little bizarre. I supped with a woman I loathed. She was absolutely imperturbable to my hostility and gloom, acting as if ours was the most natural reunion in the world. She knew this annoyed me, and enjoyed the annoyance. Hamidou searched me periodically to ensure I carried no weapon, and made certain I was aware of Cuvier’s dueling weapons in his own belt lest I try something rash. Osiris loomed over Harry. Cain and Abel had a cheerier partnership.

  At least propriety required that Aurora and I have separate rooms, given that we didn’t pretend to be married. Otherwise I was forced to fake fond union; there was no question of escape. “Your son’s fate rests with our success or failure,” Aurora said quietly over glasses of port in the evening, after little Harry had been packed off to bed in my room, Osiris standing guard like a golem in a nightmare. “Find the mirror, or condemn your family.”

  “All we had is an old map showing the city. It proves nothing.”

  “Then think! Where would the Greeks or Romans hide it? Where would the Templars find it? How has it been hidden for two thousand years?”

  I sighed. “Well, Archimedes got the idea from the Atlanteans, perhaps, or whoever it was that lived behind the mirror’s protection on Thira. Maybe the Greeks even found a mirror already ancient, ten thousand years old, and brought it to Syracuse. Who knows? But the Romans adopted every military idea they could find, and would have taken that one if it had worked—unless Archimedes hid it away.”

  “The Roman commander claimed the scholar’s death was an accident,” Dragut said, “an impulse by a common soldier who didn’t recognize the famous Greek. But maybe the mathematician really died for not telling them where the mirror was.”

  “It could have been melted down. Or thrown into the sea.”

  “Not destroyed,” Aurora insisted, “or the Templars would never have been interested. Think like Archimedes, Ethan! You know more than you’re telling us. The Romans had an army to find it. What did they miss?”

  “How the devil should I know?”

  “Because your son’s life depends on it.”

  “You think it helps when you keep threatening my innocent child?”

  “You’re the obstinate one, not me. I’ve asked for partnership since our beginning.”

  I sighed. “And now you have your wish.”

  She smiled, cold as an iceberg. “Exactly.”

  I actually had an idea. Above the city were the old Greek theater and the Roman arena, half buried now. I remembered a horseshoe shape on the map; could that refer to the old amphitheater? And then there was that angled line from the old Greek fort to a cross on the island of Ortygia. This meant something to the men who’d drawn it.

  There were also stone quarries from which the ancient city had been built. We hired a schoolteacher for information and were told that invading Athenians had been imprisoned there, many dying a ghastly death from hunger, exposure, and thirst. These limestone cliffs above the city were also riddled with caves. It was no place for a two-year-old, so I reluctantly agreed that Osiris could keep my lad occupied playing with the ducks at the Fountain of Arethusa, a freshwater spring that emerged near the edge of the sea in Ortygia. The ancient pool had been abandoned as a watering hole and recolonized by birds that Harry squealed at every time we passed. The ducks made up for his instinctual distrust of Osiris.

  The rest of us purchased lanterns and explored the quarries as if enthralled by ancient atrocities: there’s something ghoulish about tourism. The grottoes were pleasant escape from the heat of summer, the quarry pits shady from orange groves and musical from the trilling of birds. I kept my eye out for obvious burial places or hiding spots, but it seemed to me this was the first place any invader would look. We separated to make the task go faster, Dragut satisfied by now that I intended to cooperate to safeguard Harry. I explored one quarry cave after another, each as empty as those rooms on Thira. There were no murals, either.

  By midday I’d wearied of the task and took a break. I was trying an orange in the high grass under the cliff walls, wondering where the mirror might really be, when a sound crept into my depressed consciousness. Music like songbirds, I realized, but this was human, an ethereal melody that seemed to be floating off the cliffs. A woman was singing with a voice of angels, and the sweetness shook me out of my lethargy. Here was grace embodied by sound, sweet deliverance from my depressing captivity and this ancient quarry prison. I had to discover who the source of such loveliness was!

  I made my way toward a towering cave in white cliffs shaped like a gigantic pointed ear, its opening a good hundred feet high. This was the entrance to a deep cavern with a flat, sandy floor, and it was from there that the haunting aria came from. The sound was amplified by the walls, giving it a depth like a heavenly choir. The song was Italian, a strain from an opera.

  I walked in, my eyes adjusting to the dimness. What magic in a woman’s voice, given the right place! Yes, there she was in the rear of this excavation, lost in reverie, her voice lifted like an offering. Who could it be? And so I stealthily advanced, she turned, and…

  It was Aurora.

  I stopped, confused. The idea such music could come from my archenemy had somehow never occurred to me, nor the notion that she’d ever sung in her entire twisted life. Yet there she was, a little flushed, lips parted, eyes alight, and I was suddenly j
olted with memory of my initial attraction to her on the Canadian frontier. She had an overpowering, bewitching beauty, a sexual power that swamped the senses and blinded the mind. I still hated and feared her, but I still wanted her, too—and silently cursed myself for it.

  There was a moment of silence. Then:

  “I don’t often sing, but the acoustics were irresistible.”

  “You surprise me again, Aurora.”

  “We don’t know each other, Ethan, not really. Everything went badly too quickly in America. But we could.”

  “You killed my lover, Namida.”

  “You killed my brother. People die, Ethan, for all kinds of causes. But the quest for knowledge is eternal. That’s what we have in common.”

  “Why do you want to pretend that?”

  “Why do you resist it? It’s no different from your attraction to Astiza. When you wanted me, on Lake Superior, you couldn’t have me. Now that you can, you repudiate me. Which of us is confused?”

  How lovely she was, and how dangerous! I shivered, and hoped she didn’t see it. I did want her, but I also wanted to kill her, and would do so in an instant if Horus and Astiza weren’t at risk. Why hadn’t I insisted on staying with Astiza in the first place, three years before? Then none of this would have happened.

  Aurora stepped close, her scent a mix of perfume and sweat from the day’s exertions. “I could learn to be a mother, too. Do you think I’ve never wanted children? Do you think I don’t have feelings, like you?” She grasped my arm. “I could be like other women, Ethan. I could!” And for just a moment I glimpsed the desperation beneath her steel.

  I shook free. “Aurora, the last thing you’re like is other women. Harry has the good sense and instinct to be afraid of you.”

  “He’ll feel different when I make him a prince.” The stubborn yearning was pathetic, the determination unnerving. “You both don’t know me. Not all of me.”

  I knew enough, and looked away. “We should find Hamidou and decide what to do next,” I said, for lack of anything better to say.

  “The mirror is here somewhere, I can feel it,” she said. “Some great bronze thing, as bright as the sun, bringing fire like Prometheus and remaking the world.”

  “Somewhere.”

  “We’re going to find it, Ethan, and possess it together.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Dragut’s appearance saved me from having to continue that disturbing conversation. We gave up on the echoing cave, its walls too smooth and featureless to hide anything. Outside we climbed through tall grass and the hum of insects to the crest of the white quarries and looked back at the city below. The Mediterranean was dotted with sails, and I tried to imagine some mirror harnessing the sun’s power to set them all afire.

  “If this ancient invention worked, why did Syracuse lose?” I asked.

  “All weapons have vulnerabilities,” Dragut said. “Perhaps the Romans came at night, when there was no sun. Perhaps it didn’t work in the rain.”

  “And perhaps there was treachery,” Aurora said. “There is always someone willing to bargain away a city to save his own life.” She gave a glance as she said it, which annoyed me.

  “Or bargain for the life of his innocent family,” I replied. Did even my captors hold me in contempt for helping them?

  “But for medieval knights to be interested, the mirror must have somehow survived,” Aurora went on. “Somehow Archimedes knew the city must fall and he hid his machine. There is no record of the Romans capturing it. He secreted the mirror and either the Templars never found it, or they did so and hid it again. You saw the map, Ethan. You’re the key.” She smiled again, as if that might forestall any mutiny.

  But the map didn’t show anything obvious, not even a picture of the mirror itself. These pirates were chasing a pipe dream of opiates and legend. I tried to remember the parchment we ate, its taste all too vivid. “Well, there’s the cathedral.” I pointed downhill toward Ortygia and the towers and domes of the duomo. “There was a cross on the map at that point.”

  “I believe we could have found that landmark without your help,” Dragut said drily.

  “There was also a castle or fort on the map, probably this Euryalus: the one that Archimedes supposedly designed. Where is that?”

  “This way.” Dragut led us up a ridgeline past a tall, blocky mill to a plateau above the quarries. He pointed to a ridge in the distance. “It’s up there.” I saw a ramble of broken stone, with farms on the hill below. There were also the ruins of an old aqueduct that appeared to lead toward the mountains.

  I considered a moment, and then held my arms out with my thumbs pointed skyward. One was aimed at the fort, the other at the cathedral several miles away. That line from one to the other should be the roughly angled line I’d seen drawn on the old map. I walked to the lip of a low cliff and looked down. Below were the ruins of a Greek theater, built into the limestone hillside. This was the horseshoe on the map, I figured. The nearby caves might be the humps drawn on the old parchment. Numbers might be measurements. But where was the squiggle that was the river? This was dry country.

  “What is it you’re seeing?” Aurora asked. “What are you looking for?”

  I ignored her. “Listen,” I said to Dragut. “Do you hear water?”

  “It sounds almost under our feet.”

  We climbed back down to an earthen platform that formed the top rim of the Greek amphitheater. At its rear was a limestone cliff about forty feet high, again pocked with caves. The largest of these was directly behind the center of the theater, a half-moon with a stream issuing from a dark tunnel in the back. The water fell into a pool contained by a stone wall. The rock behind the little waterfall was bright green with slime.

  “Explain this, Hamidou.”

  “A spring,” he guessed. “Perhaps that’s why they built the theater here. The citizens would make their hot climb for a performance and at the top have fresh water to drink.”

  “They didn’t bring the theater to the spring,” Aurora said. “They brought the spring to the theater. This is below that aqueduct we saw. It feeds a tunnel that leads to this pool.” She pointed. “The water probably goes on to power that mill there, and then flows downhill to the city’s fountains. Clever.”

  “Water power is just the kind of thing that would have fascinated Archimedes.”

  “Yes,” Dragut said. “He invented a screw to lift water into irrigation canals.”

  “So perhaps he engineered this. Which means he might have known this aqueduct and tunnel intimately.” I studied the cave mouth the water was pouring out of. “Not big enough to hide a ship-burning mirror, however.”

  The other two watched me ponder, not sure if I was onto something or deliberately misleading them. I wasn’t sure myself, but I enjoyed that they were forced to trust me as much as I distrusted them. “Well. There was a line on the map that angled at this stream. I don’t have the slightest idea what it meant, but I think it might be worthwhile to take a look inside. The very fact that Roman soldiers would most likely not look inside a giant water pipe intrigues me.”

  “You’re going to climb in that hole?”

  “Yes. Hand me a lantern when I get up to the entrance.”

  “How do we know you aren’t going to try to run away through the tunnel?” Aurora asked.

  “Because your henchman holds my son, my dear. Your perfidy, your greed, your cruelty, and your ruthlessness are all keeping me perfectly in place.” I smiled sweetly and hopped over the low wall to splash across the thigh-deep pool to the little waterfall. As I expected, it was slippery, but by working up one side I was able to pull myself the ten feet up to the tunnel mouth, black as a nun’s habit. I squatted, water running past my boots, and called back to the others. “Now, a lantern!” I don’t like underground places, but I do have a certain expertise. There’s pride in having a skill besides cards, women, and wine.

  Dragut handed me up a lamp and I began duckwalking into a passageway four feet
high. Water splashed to my knees. The tunnel seemed wholly unremarkable, carved for the sole purpose of delivering what I was wading through. I was exploring because I didn’t know what else to do.

  I left daylight behind. The others shouted but I ignored them, squatting and thinking in the dark. It was good to be by myself for a moment. But this cave crawl seemed pointless—until I saw a sign in the lantern light and my heart jumped.

  A fat Templar cross, etched into the stone. No Archimedes did that, two and a half centuries before Christ was even born. Some medieval knight had crawled in here, too.

  For what?

  Now I went more slowly, looking carefully. The limestone was slick, cool, and featureless. Finally I saw a glow ahead. Was the aqueduct ending already? No, there was a shaft of light from above. I awkwardly made my way to it, thighs aching, and looked up. There was a carved crevice in the rock about one foot wide, extending across the ceiling of the tunnel. It rose, a vertical pocket like the sheath of a sword, toward the surface of the plateau we’d stood on earlier. At the top, stones had been placed to close most of this shaft so that the opening to the sky was only a foot square, too small for people to fall into or climb out of. So why make the pocket so big? There was nothing in it.

  I crawled on and in a hundred feet there was another slit, same as the first, carved upward in the ceiling. And another, and another. I counted six before finally stopping. The shafts served, I assumed, to equalize air pressure and encourage water flow in a channel that barely sloped. They also let in light for maintenance. Yet each one had been hollowed to enormous size and then closed back up at the top. It made no sense.

  Unless it did, to Archimedes.

  I reversed course and crawled back out the tunnel, skidding down the waterfall and landing in its pool with a splash. I climbed out, soaking, dirty, and puzzled.

  “You took a long time.”

  “It’s a long tunnel.” I poured water out of my boots. “There are man-made crevices in there that might have hidden something.” I drew a circle in the sand, and lines across it. “Suppose you divided the mirror into sections, like a pie. Perhaps you even cut each section into two or three lengths.”