The Barbary Pirates

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The moon rose orange over the desolate island, as big as the captured mirror itself, and then as it climbed and brightened, the sea and ship turned silver. The Egyptian Rite contingent had commandeered the hold below the main deck, and its hatch glowed orange as well. The pirates drew uneasily toward the bow and muttered to each other about serving under the shadow of Satan, pagans, and Christian blasphemers. Cutthroats they might be, but Aurora and the Egyptian Rite unnerved them. These self-styled exalted ones seemed more ruthless than any buccaneers, and the Moors were nervous.

I wasn’t about to reassure. “These men and women are the disciples of hell, Dragut,” I told my captor. “You’re dooming your own souls to consort with them.”

“Silence, American. No man is more confused about good and evil than you.”

“Do you think they’ll use their mirror solely on Christian enemies? Aurora wants to control the world, and the Ottoman Turks are closer than Europe. You’re equipping a diabolical monster who will prey on your own people.”

“I have no people. I, Hamidou Dragut, rely on myself.”

“Nonsense. You’ve sold your manhood to power-mad pagans.”

“As you are about to sell yours!”

“I have no choice. My God, to use my son to blackmail me into marrying her? So she can play harridan the rest of my life? Where’s the sense in that?”

“Those people obey a different law. There’s nothing we can do when we’re in their world, and down that hatch is their world. Like all of us, you made the bargain you must. Aurora promises she can give Tripoli victory. Perhaps, as they said, it is written.”

“I don’t think it’s written for a bundle of blasphemers to turn the planet on its head. Tripoli is going to infuriate England and France into a war against it, Dragut. This woman you’ve allied yourself to is going to pull all of you down with her.”

“No, she promises we’ll be rich. You can’t see a future even when it’s a temptress!”

“I see the future, and it’s all on fire.”

And then Osiris appeared, stumping across the deck with that limp that continued to give me some satisfaction. Maybe I could chop away at other body parts, too. He looked at me with distaste. “It’s time, American. I’m to take you on a trip through the underworld to judge you worthy, as dictated by the Egyptian Book of the Dead.”

“Underworld?”

“When the British cornered Blackbeard in the Carolinas, he forced his crew into the hold and lit matches so the smoke and stink would give them a preview of hell. He wanted his sailors to fear the afterlife so much that they’d never surrender to the gallows. The inferno caused them to fight like demons, out of terror. We of the Rite have a different kind of journey, to purify and inform. It will prepare you for Aurora.”

“What, I’m to be a vestal virgin now?”

He gestured toward the hatch with its lurid light. “Virginity, I presume, is out of reach. What we weigh is your courage and your soul.”

“Weigh my soul! Your own is a lump of coal!”

“This is about you and Aurora.”

Sometimes the only thing to do is play along and look for the odd chance. So I went over to the opening, considered the haze of incense and smoke drifting from the hatch, and decided to take a stroll in Hades after all. With Osiris behind me, I descended to the deck below, hot and smoky from a hundred flickering candles.

What I encountered was a dreamworld, populated by creatures from a pharaoh’s nightmare. The Rite’s members—I assumed that’s what they were—had donned the heads of a witch’s bestiary. Their robes were white, black, and scarlet, and their heads were of jackals, hawks, serpents, dogs, and lions. The eye sockets were blank cutouts, utterly unrevealing, and their cloaks so shapeless as to leave me uncertain if the wearer was man or woman. Beaks and white teeth gleamed in the haze of this hell, and fingers decorated with long, artificial talons clacked and tapped as they reached out for me, pulling me down and in. I coughed, eyes streaming, while they turned me in dizzying circles. Odd music, pagan and primitive, came from their pipes and drums. Some potion was pushed upon me and I drank, increasing my disorientation.

Finally I was pushed to stumble deeper into their gathering, the man-beasts pulling at my sleeves. A gypsy crone loomed, and whether a noble lady in costume or some witch from the Carpathians, I know not. She held a tiny brass scale. “Shall we weigh your sins on one pan, and a feather on the other, pilgrim?” she asked with a glassy gleam to her eyes. She laid a fluff of down. “The crocodile consumes those whose good deeds don’t tip the scale in their favor.”

“I did my best.”

She laughed, shrill and disbelieving.

And then a dragon lurched out of the throng and grunted, brought up short by a bright yellow leash.

Not a dragon, exactly, but the biggest and ugliest lizard I’d ever seen. It was some kind of primeval monster a good eight feet long, with darting forked tongue and bright pink mouth lined with bloody teeth. He was terrifying as a crocodile! The beast lunged at my crotch, nostrils flared, and as I fell backward the assembly shrieked with delight. This was a real animal, its feet armed with wicked claws, but nothing like I’d ever seen or imagined. Its skin was made up of glittery scales as dry and hard as chain armor, and the monster smelled of rotted meat. The beast was medieval nightmare come to life, its tail swishing on the deck.

“The dark forests of the world have all kinds of creatures that men have half dreamed of,” Osiris whispered in my ear. “We brought this one from the jungles of the Spice Islands, where the boundary between world and underworld is not as firm as we think. Nor is the barrier to heaven as absolute as established religions would have us believe. Strange beings watch us, and sometimes can be summoned. Demons can give power.”

I thought of Napoleon’s Little Red Man and shivered, despite myself. The animal-headed denizens of this hazy hold were murmuring at my hesitation, and I was determined not to give them the satisfaction of seeing me retreat.

“It’s just a damned lizard.”

“Give your soul to us, Ethan, and we’ll erase the boundary between hell and heaven. You’ll live in an eternal now of endless power over all men, and all women, and worship magic and depravity. Fiends and angels will be your slaves. Nothing will be forbidden, and no whim denied. Evil will be indistinguishable from good, and justice will be what you decide it to be.”

“Isis and Osiris!” the bizarre throng cried.

“Come with me past the dragon, to a new kind of light!”

We pushed toward the stern of the ship, the great lizard regarding me with pitiless gaze as it yanked against its tether, its tongue testing the air for carrion. The animal was something from those depths of time that Cuvier longed to discover.

I think the bestial past should sleep.

Now filling my dazed sight were the costumes of ravens, bears, toads, blind moles, sharp-toothed wolverines, and horned bulls, nostrils wide. Hands pawed me. People chanted my name. Hands horny and scaled slid over the torsos of other costumed animals, and snouts sucked on pipes of pungent smoke. Monsters caressed, and turned in little dances. And then I was being pushed up another companionway, still choking on the swirling mist, and into the ship’s stern cabin.

Aurora Somerset waited.

Here another hundred candles blazed, the cabin dancing with light, hot and close. Shimmering silks had been hung to turn it into a Persian pavilion, the deck paved with the arabesques of intricate carpets. Corners were stuffed with pillows and bright scarves. There were figurines of long-forgotten gods watching from the shadows: a jackal-headed Anubis, a hawklike Horus, a hideous gaping thing I guessed might be Baal, and of course a sculpted snake with gold and green scales that must be my old friend Apophis, serpent of the underworld and counterpart to the dragon Nidhogg of Scandinavia. Aurora stood erect, draped with a blue velvet robe trimmed in gold, the tumble of her red hair aflame in the candlelight. Her throat and ears and fingers were arrayed with Egyptian jewelry, and her eyes lined with kohl and her lips with vermilion. She was regal as a queen and disturbingly exotic, like some false copy of Astiza. I realized there was a half circle of men in the cabin who had formed behind me, naked to the waist and wearing counterfeit Masonic aprons below that. They shuffled to push me forward, Osiris directly at my back. And then I saw a small, overdressed child to Aurora’s left, who stood in recognition as I came into the light and gave a half-hopeful, half-fearful smile and squeak.

“Papa!”

Harry was dressed like some kind of midget potentate, with silly turban, baggy pants, and jeweled vest. The absurdity broke my heart. We were props in a play, tools of an occult fantasy, and I knew all this must end very badly. Thank the ghost of George Washington that Astiza wasn’t here to see all this! Or old Ben Franklin, either, who had little use for mysticism or folderol, although he did like a good party.

“Come over here, Harry,” I tried, swaying from my disorientation.

“No,” Aurora said in a tone of imperious command. “Stay, my son.”

The boy hesitated.

“Your father must come to us.”

So forward I went, as Osiris slipped around to stand behind Aurora and take the cloak off her shoulders with his own jeweled fingers. The intake of breath by the men in the room was audible, for the diaphanous shift of Egyptian linen she wore, cinched at the waist by a linked belt of solid gold, left nothing to the imagination. Aurora was as beautiful as ever, ripe as a peach, and some trick of the light seemed to give her white-gauze body an odd glow, as if she were supernatural. She smiled triumphantly, her look possessive.

“Behold, Isis and Athena!” Osiris cried. “The black Madonna and the white, goddess of the earth, queen of the sea, bringer of the light! We elevate her to replace the fallen, and consecrate to her a new husband and new son, so that she might take her place as leader of the Egyptian Rite and founder of a sublime tyranny! All princes shall someday bow before her, and all knights of the Rite shall be glorified as she is glorified, and rule in her name. She is mother, she is harlot, she is priestess, she is seer, and her mate shall be her servant for all eternity!”

Well, the harlot part I could agree with, but I was damned if Aurora Somerset was going to go around without proper underwear pretending to be Harry Gage’s mother, or my master. I was snapping more awake. This entire ceremony was not just illusionary, it was ridiculous. It didn’t surprise me that Dragut’s Barbary pirates were nowhere to be seen. They knew blasphemy when they saw it, and my guess was they were perched on the bowsprit waiting fearfully for Allah to put a quick end to this ludicrous affair. Except no divine lightning bolts sang down, and no false idols toppled. I was stuck in a nightmare for which there seemed no awakening, with a pack of enthusiasts who seemed several thousand years out of sync. Now a woman who first spurned me and then speared me was proposing permanent matrimony, so long as it was certain that I’d be utterly miserable till death do us part.

“Shall we unite the sacred”—Osiris pointed at Aurora—“and the profane?” You can guess where he pointed next, and I was none too flattered by it.

“It is prophesied!” the men in the crowded cabin shouted.

“Shall we unite the Wisdom and the Fool?”

“It is prophesied!”

“Earth mother, do you take this seed?” The bald-headed bastard pointed at me.

“I do.”

I waited politely for the question to be put to me so I could spit back. And waited. But I was of no consequence, you see, which was Aurora’s point.

“Then I pronounce this union made when it is consummated on the Altar of Apophis below and witnessed by the Heir of Unity here.” He gestured at Harry.

“Now just a damn minute…” I began, not at all amused at the notion I was supposed to perform with this witch in front of one hundred of her closest friends, not to mention my toddler son! Even barristers make more sense than that. But then a wooden bit was slapped in my mouth before I could object further and its leather thongs twisted tight against the back of my head: a wedding custom different from most, I’d wager. Aurora stepped near, gorgeous as the moon, repulsive as a serpent’s fangs, and whispered her particular brand of venom in my ear. “This is the start of your eternal degradation, my dear. You will copulate with me before our assembly and our dragon to seal our marriage on an idolatrous altar. If you don’t, I will hurt our son.”

There’s a way to put you in the mood.

“You’ll see,” she continued. “I’m going to make you love me.”

And then she passed by to begin to descend to the hold I’d come from, and where people seemed to be losing clothing of their own in a heretic’s idea of Mass and matrimony.

I was doomed to some kind of new humiliating captivity just marginally better than Omar’s.

And then a voice called warning from the deck outside.

“American ship!”