The Barbary Pirates

by William Dietrich

  I could hear the baying of the mastiff and the skitter of its nails on the marble flooring as it chased after us. I slammed the throne room door, threw its light latch, and watched the wood stretch like canvas as the big dog slammed against the other side, howling and slavering. I’d little time to reload, but I could buy a few seconds. “Save our boy! Past that tapestry is a stair to the dungeon! A companion waits there!” I had just time to pour powder, but not yet ram patch and ball. Then there was a gunshot, the edge of the door exploded into splinters, and the frenzied dog burst through, howling for blood.

  My longrifle club met the dog midleap. The animal grunted as I knocked it to one side of the room, and I prayed I’d cracked a rib.

  Aurora burst through the doorway after her pet, hair flying, mouth wide as a banshee’s, a pistol smoking and Dragut’s sword held high. “I’ll kill you all!”

  But Astiza, instead of fleeing, had thrust Horus in one corner. Now she grabbed the edge of one of the carpets and yanked. Lady Somerset fell, cursing like a sailor, and Astiza pounced, wrestling for the sword. The women rolled, bit, and scratched. They were a blur of struggling limbs and tangled hair, fighting at a pitch of wild fury. The dog came at me again as I fished for a bullet and this time it leaped to catch my rifle in its teeth, chewing and growling. I was knocked backward, landing on the pillows, and the beast was astride me, one hundred pounds of quivering malevolence, breath hot, flecks of foam flying, its growls primeval. I tried to use the weapon to twist his head away from mine, but its neck was as strong as my arms.

  “Mama!” It was poor Harry, crying amid the chaos. I could hear a frenzied snarling and realized that Yussef’s leopard was banging against its own cage, frantic at the sight of the black mastiff that had invaded its domain.

  Aurora used the hilt of her sword to clout my woman, stunning her, and then tried to pry her wrists free of Astiza’s desperate hands so she could run her through. With the ferocious protective instincts of motherhood Astiza twisted back and with a cry from both women the sword suddenly flew free, ringing as it fell on marble tiles.

  Then the real havoc happened, a blur of animal reflexes.

  With a yowl the spotted leopard suddenly shot free of its cage and the dog launched itself off me to meet it. The mastiff was as big as the cat and probably expected it to bolt, but instead the leopard twisted and the two collided at the apex of their leaps, spinning in the air. If the dog was powerful, the leopard was swift. They writhed, dueling with their jaws. Then the mastiff yelped, suddenly terrified as the leopard caught at its throat. The two animals tumbled over each other on the Persian carpets, the leopard hissing and tearing. The dog frantically pawed the air, its legs no match for the cat’s lethal claws.

  “Sokar!” Aurora screamed and heaved Astiza to one side, my lover’s head striking a marble pillar. Harry’s mother slumped, dazed. “Your bastard let the leopard out!” Aurora crawled for her sword and then turned toward little Harry, her eyes completely mad as the boy shrank in the corner. I finally fed a bullet in the muzzle and began ramming the shot, but squeezing the lead down the tight barrel takes an eternity. Aurora rose like a crazed Valkyrie, wild with frustration as she aimed to stab my son, and now I was scrambling to stop her, trying to think of a distraction.

  “Save your dog!”

  At my cry Aurora twisted, confused, her purpose momentarily incoherent, and then suddenly stepped toward the fighting animals, presumably to kill the cat. It was the only sacrificial thing I ever saw her do.

  So the leopard sprang, ten feet through the air in a perfect gyration of predation, and flew past her sword arm to land against her body, claws gripping flesh and jaws splayed wide to close over her face.

  Aurora didn’t even have time to scream. There was a sickening crack of bone as the leopard bit, and her head disappeared under the animal’s.

  Behind them the ugly dog was in ruins, its throat and flanks pumping blood.

  Aurora thrashed frantically on the floor, Yussef’s pet leopard on top of her and pinning her down. The beauty that had transfixed me in America was being clawed to ribbons, each swipe leaving parallel red streaks and ribbons of flayed flesh. Her feet slid frantically on the rugs and marble, heels making streaks of blood. Then the cat was at her throat. Her face had already caved, her eyes gone. I finally reloaded, but there was no need to waste a precious shot as leopard and victim twisted. Her head flopped loose, her neck bitten half through. Finally she went limp, the big cat batting at her and growling, and then there was a bustle at the door as eunuchs and janissaries crowded to see. They halted abruptly at the sight of the freed leopard, frozen by the bloody tableau.

  I shot the biggest one, a great goon of a mulatto guard, and then the angry animal leaped again, there was a shout as the guards surged backward in terror, and the cat disappeared through the door. We heard a fusillade of shots, punctuated by snarls.

  I picked up the dazed Astiza to shove her toward the rear tapestry and escape, but she staggered away from me and nonsensically grabbed an antique shield from the wall. It was a carved and filigreed thing of polished bronze and probably quite valuable, but the last kind of anchor we needed at a time like this. Had the blow to her head left her daft? But then I saw my own souvenir—Yussef’s head-dress from the back of the leopard cage! I grabbed, picked up little Harry, pulled Astiza again, and finally we staggered past the tapestry and through the hidden dungeon door. I slammed home its locking bar before tumbling down these narrower stairs with my longrifle and blunderbuss, shaken by the wild fierceness of what I’d seen. Astiza’s chest was heaving with exertion and shock.

  “Papa, I let lion out,” Harry confessed.

  “Good boy! You saved your Mama. And me.”

  “Will it eat us?”

  “It’s dead. And so is Aurora,” I told Astiza, who’d finally set the shield down. She was shaking with exhaustion and excitement.

  Above, we could hear guards pounding on the door I’d barred, and then shots as they fired through it. It would hold until they fetched axes or gunpowder.

  Astiza closed her eyes and took little Horus to hug even tighter. By thunder, the boy had pluck! He was a clever little tyke, too, given to my rather improvised luck. I’d just have to keep an eye out that he didn’t copy the side of me I’m trying to reform.

  “I could hear her face breaking inside its jaws,” Astiza said. She shivered. “She was the wickedest woman I’ve ever met. The old demons possessed her, Ethan. The ones I thought had been banished to the deepest part of the earth. The Egyptian Rite summoned the succubus back and they took over her soul and her mind.”

  “Bad animals, Papa.”

  “There’s wildness in fierce animals no human can come close to,” I said. “But unlike people, they kill without sin.”

  She hugged me, the three of us a tight cluster. “Ethan, I wasn’t sure you’d come back. To have Horus return and not you…”

  “And leave my family?” I grinned. “I’m a papa now!”

  “I didn’t know what you were aiming at with that shot.”

  “I didn’t know what I’d do if I missed the tether.”

  “If Horus had been hurt, I didn’t want to live.”

  “He hasn’t had an easy time of it since he met me, has he? Which is why I’d like a little more payback before we leave. There’s a mirror, Astiza, big as a courtyard, and they’re planning to turn it against the American navy. Have you heard about it in the harem?”

  “All of Tripoli has heard of it. Yussef is beside himself with pride. We’ve watched its erection from the harem windows.”

  “We have to destroy it before we go or it will burn the schooner coming to rescue us. Its reach is longer than a cannon shot. Is there a way to get inside the fort where it is?” I untied the collar from around her neck and cast it aside.

  “No. There’s a warren of streets between palace and fort, and hundreds of soldiers and Somerset’s fanatics. Please, Ethan, for Horus’s sake let’s go! How much more can a child
take?”

  “We can’t go. The sun’s almost up and they’ll set us afire. We have to fight it through. I’ve got a companion below who can help look after you and Harry, and another with a bomb to destroy the mirror. Robert Fulton is eccentric, but he’s smarter than Lucifer. If we can get close enough, we’ll blow it to flinders.”

  She bit her lip. “I don’t know if a bomb will do, but I have a different idea. It’s why I took this shield. If light can be focused by one disk, why not reflected by two? Maybe we can block the ray.”

  “And then what?”

  “Turn it against them. You carry the shield, I’ll carry Horus. Let’s find these friends of yours and give the Egyptian Rite a taste of their own terror.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  I feared we might have provoked uproar in the tunnels below, given the shooting and tumult above, but the prison corridors were eerily quiet. Pierre had managed to release hundreds of men, sharing keys with those captives fit enough to unlock still more comrades. As the prisoners were freed they overpowered the guards not blocked off by the gates we’d closed. Now they crouched silently in their oppressive hive, trembling from anticipation, waiting for the right moment to rush the entrance. This, Pierre had instructed them, must be just before we attempted to destroy the deadly mirror and escape ourselves for the harbor. The chaos, all of us hoped, would shield each other’s flight.

  True criminals were usually executed or trimmed of hands or feet, so these men were mostly captured Christians awaiting ransom or auction. We didn’t know if we were giving them a chance of freedom or hopeless riot. We simply knew we had to do all we could against Tripoli. Some of the prisoners were too weak and tortured to move, but even these were carried into the passageways by their fellows, the wretches blinking and disheveled. Their cellmates would not leave them behind. The crippled looked at us with wan hope, and their mere presence was inspiring. In the only way we had, we were striking back at slavery.

  “There’s a deep pit in the dungeon’s deepest level where I and the savants were kept,” I told Pierre. “Is it empty of victims?”

  “I’ve been rather busy with these others, if you would care to count.”

  “I’m going to see. I’ll not leave anyone in that hellhole.”

  “We don’t have time!” Astiza said.

  “It’s like being buried alive. Come, Pierre, let’s finish emptying Hades!”

  “I had no idea Hades was so big, donkey.”

  “This is what happens when no one fights the devil.”

  I reloaded my weapons, giving Pierre the blunderbuss. To Astiza I loaned Pierre’s pistol to watch over Harry. Then Pierre and I descended farther, finding a few more cells and sending saved souls stumbling past us toward the light.

  “Have you encountered the Dungeon Master?” I asked.

  “I picked up a rock in case we meet your Goliath. But at some point the surviving guards thought better of it and withdrew, I think. Even your troll doesn’t want to face a hundred men he tortured.”

  We reached the small cavern at the prison’s lowest level and its rancid pit, its stench making me want to vomit. Had I really survived down here? I heard a clank of chain and leaned cautiously over the edge to see. It was dark, of course, and I saw only an odd unblinking eye looking up at me.

  “Hello?”

  No answer.

  “Pierre, I need a torch.”

  Then there was a sudden agitation in the pit below, mute but frenzied, and suddenly a leap up the side. I got a glimpse of scale and lizard claw and then a chain yanked tight as the monster fell again into the blackness. I lurched backward. It was the nightmare from the ship’s hold! We’d found the dragon again.

  Then my companion yelled. “Mon dieu! Even homelier than you!”

  “The lizard?”

  “Your jailer!”

  I spun around. It was Omar, filling the doorway to this chamber like a swollen bull and holding my friend with a forearm the thickness of a log locked around Pierre’s chest and arms. The Frenchman was purpling. A heavy steel chain hung from Omar’s other fist, his bulk making its links look almost delicate.

  “I wait for you,” the Dungeon Master rumbled. “I woke because the weeping stopped. Something is very different in my lair, I sense.” He sniffed the rancid air with his brutish, broken nose, as if freedom had a smell. “So I think, maybe the one they wouldn’t let me have has foolishly come back as they promised. Do you remember my table, pretty one?”

  “We’re not as helpless this time, Omar,” I said as I raised my rifle. “Let my companion go.”

  “All right.” He hurled Pierre at me to spoil my aim, the voyageur sprawling at the edge of the dungeon pit, and then quicker than a cobra strike—unbelievable speed for such a large man—the chain lashed out and caught my rifle muzzle. I fired, but my bullet just seared his shoulder. The chain wrapped my barrel and yanked the weapon from my hands, slamming it against the dungeon wall and snapping its neck. My precious longrifle fell into dust, the butt hanging like a broken hinge, held at the trigger by a single screw.

  “You monster!”

  Omar laughed, picking up the broken longrifle. “You miss, little man.”

  “Little man!” Pierre cried in indignation.

  He tossed my gun past us down into the pit and I winced as I heard it scrape and clatter. It was the gun I’d labored on for long days in Jerusalem with Jericho and Miriam, the weapon that had carried me through Acre and Egypt, the rifle that had defended us during the relentless chase of the Ojibway and Dakota on the American frontier. It made a greasy splash at the bottom. “You can share with dragon.” Then he laid his chain on his shoulders and picked up Pierre’s fallen blunderbuss. The torturer loomed like a titan, tendons inflated, his eyes a squint of hatred and triumph, his mouth a pitiless smirk as he stepped toward us. “This gun can hit both.”

  A bellow came from that damned monstrous lizard, no doubt waiting for dinner. Yussef Karamanli had assembled a satanic zoo! The agitated animal bounced off the pit walls, trying to process in its primitive brain why the shattered rifle had fallen from our struggles above.

  “You can jump into the pit and try your luck against the dragon,” Omar said. “Or you can let this shotgun knock you in.”

  “Let us go, Omar,” I tried, “or there are two hundred prisoners that will take vengeance on you if they know you’ve harmed us.”

  “What will they know? You will be in the lizard’s belly. Besides, the Christian dogs will be running the other way to escape. Yes, Omar has long planned this. I am not stupid like people think.” He gestured impatiently with his head. “Jump.” He fingered the links on his neck. “I do not like guns because they are too quick. If you don’t jump, maybe I will drive you in with my chain.”

  “Don’t give the bastard the satisfaction, Ethan,” said Pierre, his eyes bright and watchful. “Make him shoot.”

  “That gun will kill us instantly.”

  “Exactly. A mercy.” Pierre’s eyes scanned the floor of the chamber and he picked up a chunk of stone. “You think us little men, giant?” He hefted the rock. “This is what a little man can do, Goliath!” And he threw with perfect aim, the missile bouncing off the Dungeon Master’s forehead. Omar actually stepped back, his eyes squinting in pain and confusion. Then another rock, and another.

  “How many little men have you bullied in your lifetime, ogre?” Pierre challenged. Another rock, this one on Omar’s cheek, and I saw the white spark of a piece of tooth flying. There were roars below as the lizard thrashed and spun.

  “How many have you never given a chance to fight back?”

  Omar howled and lifted his fat gun. Blood was running from his forehead as he squinted at Pierre. The mouth of the blunderbuss looked wide as a cannon, and I tensed for the spray of balls.

  Pierre seized me. “Turn away!”

  There was a boom, flash, and crack—and the blunderbuss blew up. Pieces flew in all directions and Omar shrieked, hands to his blinded face, stag
gering in shock.

  “Now, seize his chain!” We’d been stung with fragments from the explosion, but not seriously wounded. Each of us desperately seized the end of the chain draped on the Dungeon Master’s shoulders and threw a turn around his neck and pulled. He lurched and stumbled past us, blind, bleeding, and crying. The other end of the chain rattled down into the pit.

  The lizard, enraged, leaped to take the metal in its jaws and fall back.

  The weight jerked Omar over the lip of the chasm.

  The ogre fell yelling. There was a thud and muddy splash as the Dungeon Master struck the bottom of his well, and then cries like the ones he elicited from his victims as the bizarre beast, ravenously hungry, went at him. Omar howled, and the two thrashed and snarled in the darkness below, chain rattling as they wrestled.

  “It would have been easier for him if he’d died from the backfire,” the Frenchman said, peering over.

  “My God, did you know the blunderbuss was going to explode?”

  “Of course. I didn’t have a sling to deal with Goliath, but when he seized me I jammed a rock tight in the barrel. Then more rocks to throw, to annoy him enough to fire.”

  “Couldn’t you have confided? I just aged ten years.”

  “You’re terrible at keeping a secret.”

  I staggered to fetch a torch, cautiously crept to the lip again, and looked over. Omar was sprawled on his back, eyes wide and sightless, face shredded, his mouth making faint mewing noises as the dragon fed on his torso. His hands had seized the barrel of my longrifle for a club but only bent it in agony.

  “I’ve lost my gun again.”

  “And I do not care to fetch it back for you,” Pierre added.

  I watched the lizard tail thrashing back and forth as it gorged.

  “The animal may eat his fill before the real monster expires,” the voyageur predicted with the harsh experience of the wilderness traveler. “He’ll chew out the soft parts first, the ones that kill slowly so the other meat stays fresh. The ogre will die in hours or days, but if not the muck will seep into his wounds and give him sepsis. That would be a more fitting end for a torturer, I think.”