The Barbary Pirates

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 sailors,” 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.

One Sardinian sailor reacted to this indignity with such shock that he shoved an auctioneer and kicked out at a soldier, his chains clanking. At this outburst, the crowd roiled and churned like an ant nest poked with a stick. I braced for the beating, and indeed guards leaped forward to rain blows on the poor man until he was curled like a baby on the auction platform, sobbing in Italian for mercy. The savagery seemed disproportionate and wildly unrestrained, and yet this was but a preview of his real punishment.

There was a stir behind us and I turned. A man had appeared on a snow-white horse, surrounded by a troop of janissaries. He was in his thirties, I judged, handsome and fit, and dusty from some pleasure hunt that morning. Retainers had raptors hooded and tied to poles. When he halted, Negro slaves ran up to fan him with long-handled plumes.

Behind on another horse, her auburn ringlets cascading nakedly down in a display some Muslims would consider obscene, was Aurora Somerset, her lips slightly parted in excitement. She was watching the beating, quietly thrilled.

“It’s Karamanli,” Cuvier whispered. “Look at that emerald on his turban.”

“Big enough to pick him out in a crowd,” I admitted. “And give him a headache.”

“He likes order in his markets,” Dragut said. “This Sardinian will be made an example.”

The bashaw said something sharp to one of his officers and the message was relayed to the auction overseer. This man winced at the thought of lost profit, but then issued orders of his own. In an instant the groaning, bloody sailor was unlocked from his chains, hauled semiconscious to the edge of the platform, and then held by both arms while a huge iron hook swung down from the shadows above. Fortunately, the victim was too dazed to know what was about to happen to him.

We gasped, jerking the victim to attention, and then the implement was jammed through his back and shoved out through his belly like a gigantic fishhook, its point obscenely dripping blood.

He howled then—screeched as if in the very grip of demons.

And then he was hoisted, flapping frantically, blood sluicing down his nakedness while his eyes rolled back in their sockets from the unbelievable pain.

“For the love of God!” My companions were sobbing.

Twenty feet above the auction platform his ascent stopped. The sailor thrashed and squirmed, eyes bulging as he regarded the hook jutting from his guts, bloody droplets spattering the stones. Finally the convulsions slowed and he fainted, and then I noticed that he was not alone in hanging in the shadows above. Other cadavers, half rotted and dried, hung from similar hooks to warn what would happen if we resisted.

Certainly my own will collapsed. Escape? I could barely breathe.

I turned to look back at Aurora and Yussef. The woman licked her lips. The ruler of Tripoli nodded with grim satisfaction and then kicked his steed toward his castle gate, the pirate queen and his retinue following. “Now catch his eye,” I croaked desperately.

But my companions were in no mood to court this monster’s notice, and in any event we were too ragged and anonymous to gain his appreciation anyway. He passed into the shadows of his fortress without a glance, Aurora ignoring us as well. Then we were left, helpless and humiliated.

And yet our shame at being exhibited like animals was nothing compared with the infamy visited on the women. If old and shapeless they were bustled off to the laundries or bakeries with cursory bidding and swift transaction, but if young and at all lovely they were stripped naked to a roar of approval from the throng of sweating men. Then they were turned like a piece of glassware, propriety forgotten. If bidding lagged the auctioneer would lift a breast or bring a cane up between the thighs while the assembly roared and the shouted numbers went higher. It made no difference how much the damsels wept or shuddered, one even wetting herself in fear and mortification: they were lasciviously inspected before being bundled off to the buyer’s harem to be cleaned for his rape and enjoyment. We burned to avenge them, but what chance did we have? And if some of the women wailed at their fate, some of the captive men wept at an even worse future, knowing their existence would not be the dull luxury of the harem, but a monotony of dry bread, senseless beating, and crushing labor until death became sweet release.

We were dizzy from heat and angry excitement, swaying from thirst and hopelessness, and blinking against flies that swarmed to drink our last sweat. Finally our quartet of savants was shoved and whipped up the steps and onto the platform, the remaining buyers groaning and hooting at our lack of fitness. We did not appear to have half the endurance of a normal seaman. Who wants a scientist as a slave? The auctioneer began with a sigh of determination, barking and singsonging to the assembly. They shouted insults and mockery, hoping to drive our price down. The betting was that we’d go to the quarries and expire in weeks.

“We’re finally in hell,” Cuvier said, eyes closed against the mob. “Not Thira, but here.”

“No,” said Fulton. “Hell is coming.”

I looked where he was staring. The crowd’s noise abruptly hushed as a giant breasted the bidders with the heavy, swaying gait of an elephant. His shoulders were wide as a door, his bald head gleamed, and his torso was a crosshatch of tattoos and scar tissue. There was an odd paleness to him, like a cave being who rarely sees the sun. His eyes were tiny in his brutal and rumpled face, but they had the look of dull cunning the vicious sometimes muster. His hands and wrists looked capable of bending steel, his nose mashed, his lips heavy like a grouper’s, and his muscles swollen as if pumped full of bile. There was a muttering of fear as the crowd hastily parted, and then it was quiet enough to hear the creak of chain as the impaled sailor, still dripping blood, made his last instinctual twitching above this ghastly scene.

“It’s Omar,” I heard the pirates breathe. “The Dungeon Master.”

“Too ugly for a mother to love,” I whispered.

“Too ugly to have been born at all,” Cuvier amended. “He emerged, I’m guessing, like maggots from the dung.”

The giant pointed at us with a finger thick as a small pistol, and we realized we’d been noticed after all.

“Yussef Karamanli says the little ones are for me.”