The Barbary Pirates

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, staggering 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.”

“You don’t seem to like our Dungeon Master.”

“He should not have called a North Man little.” Pierre watched the lizard feed. “They have truly ugly animals here in Africa.”

“I think it came from the East Indies. And a leopard chewed a dog, upstairs.”

“Probably a giraffe in a tower, and a warthog in an antechamber. Too bad your zoologist friend, Cuvier, did not come ashore to catalog it all.”

I was recovering my breath and wits. “By the sling of David, how did you learn to throw like that?”

“A rock in the forest can save powder and gain dinner, too. Indians learn to throw. I was going to teach you, had you ever learned to paddle properly, but I cannot instruct everything at once. You know it remains amazing, donkey, how many unpleasant enemies you seem to accumulate.”

“I’m equally astounded. I try to be friends with everybody.”

“Yes, we are people of good will, you and I, but I suspect that by now there are hundreds more here in Tripoli hoping to kill us. If only everyone could be like Pierre Radisson! Well, come. We have many more things to destroy before we can make good our escape.”