The Barbary Pirates

CHAPTER EIGHT

Napoleon promised we could accomplish our mission in a month or two. And indeed, with Europe in peace and the roads mostly dry in high summer, we made our way overland from Paris to Venice in a mere two weeks, traveling south through France and then east across the new Cisalpine Republic that Napoleon had created after his victory at Marengo. I saw no evidence we were being followed. Of course our enemies, if they hadn’t given up, might guess exactly where we were going, given that Osiris, Marguerite, and Fouché all seemed more aware of what was going on than we were. Our quest was probably about as secret as a failure of contraception in the ninth month. On the other hand, perhaps we’d discouraged the Egyptian Rite or Fouché had delayed them, and the entire trip would be a holiday lark.

While my companions were less than happy at being drafted and blamed me for Bonaparte’s coercion, they were also excited about traveling at French government expense. Cuvier had been entrusted with our allowance, though like all pursers he was hard to persuade to spring for the nobler vintage of wine or choicer haunch of meat. “I have to account for your consumption at the end of all this,” he’d grumble, “and I’m damned if I know how to explain to the ministry why this wheel of cheese was necessary over that one—which is cheaper and a hundred grams heavier, as well.”

“I thought you French put food above art, or even love,” Smith said.

“But when it comes to expenditures, our accountants have the taste of the English.”

I didn’t complain. I was aware that I was riding in a coach, with no assignment but to get somewhere, when so many people were not. We’d pass long rows of peasants scything at dusk, or stable boys mucking out horse stalls with sunburned shoulders, or a maid parting a sea of chickens that closed up behind her as she left a trail of scattered grain. I thought how different, how safe and how dull, to be tied to one place and have one’s days dictated by the turn of the seasons. I’d walk to stretch in the evenings, eating a piece of fruit, and if I came upon a boy who seemed smart or a mademoiselle who was pretty, I might show them my longrifle and even help by shooting a crow out of a tree. They treated such a diversion like magic, and me like an exotic visitor from another world.

The savants were apprehensive but excited. They’d see a geologically dramatic island at the edge of the Ottoman Empire, dabble in political intrigue, and maybe make an archaeological discovery or two. Certainly our mission was more thrilling than academic meetings. The truth was that I still had some reputation as a hero, and the scholars hoped a little of my dash might rub off. I couldn’t blame them.

We settled into roles: I the not-entirely-trusted-yet-redoubtable guide, Cuvier our paymaster and skeptical supervisor, Smith the make-the-best-of-it dogged Englishman always ready to shoulder more than his share of luggage or responsibility, and Fulton our tinkerer, who proved fascinated by every waterwheel and canal lock. The inventor helped pass the time by sketching out schemes to improve the suspension of our coach, all of which the driver dismissed as impractical or too expensive.

We also discussed, from boredom, the need to rewrite the history of the world.

“What we know is that rocks have been laid down and worn away over eons,” Smith said. “But how? By catastrophe, like a volcano or great flood, or the patient erosion of wind and rain? And why all that fuss at all, before we humans even appeared in Creation? What was God’s point?” He picked up rocks at every way station, marked their type on his map of France—the stones all looked the same to me, but he told them apart like a drover picks out his cattle—and then tossed them out the coach window.

“We also know that there were many creatures alive on earth that no longer exist,” Cuvier said, “many of them gigantic. Did Creation start with more variety and greater grandeur that has since been thinned and shrunken by time? That seems a peculiar kind of progress. Are we the pinnacle of Creation, or its shrunken fruit? Or have animals actually changed from one kind into another, as suggested by Saint-Hilaire? I find his proposal ridiculous for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that we have no idea how such a mutation could occur.”

“He told me that odd idea in Egypt,” I put in, cradling my longrifle between my legs. It wasn’t just nervous habit; I’d been robbed on the stage before. “More interesting to me is the question of how civilization got started, and whether marvelous things were once known and then forgotten after the fall of the Roman Empire. Some of my acquaintances have suggested that myths of the ancient gods actually refer to early beings who somehow taught mankind how to grow, build and write, and by doing so lifted us out of the mud. The Egyptian Rite thinks the knowledge of such ancestors, if relearned, could provide terrible power. I’ve seen some things to make me suspect they might be right.”

“What things?” Cuvier asked. He’d brought a red-leather notebook and pen to record our discoveries, a tin officer’s field kit with scissors, comb, and toothbrush, and a combination clock and compass in a copper case. He’d write down our remarks and mark our direction with every entry, as if no one had ever mapped the highway before.

“A book that caused nothing but trouble. And a tool, a hammer, that was even worse.”

“And now we’re off to find an ancient weapon,” said Fulton, “with Bonaparte, Fouché, and those lunatics in Madame Marguerite’s bordello curious about it, too. Why Napoleon is so anxious about forgotten weapons, when he won’t give a proper hearing to my modern ones, is beyond me.” He was amusing himself by taking apart his own pocket watch for the pleasure of putting it back together, but kept losing sprockets and springs when the coach went over bumps, making us have to look for them on the vehicle’s dusty floor. Cuvier took care to keep his own compass-clock out of the inventor’s reach.

“It’s human nature to see the flaws in what you have and perfection in what you don’t,” I said. “Besides, buying your submarine or steamboat means uncomfortable change, Robert. Sending us on a treasure hunt to conspire with a Greek patriot risks nothing.”

“Except us,” Smith said. “It’s the man on the lip of the canal who wants it dug deeper, not the man at the bottom.”

“The man at the lip will argue he can see farther, and better measure the necessary depth,” Cuvier said.

“And the one at the bottom should reply that he’s the one who can weigh the rock and soil, and count the blisters.”

At Venice we ferried across a limpid lagoon to that fabled, crumbling wedding cake of a city that was still buzzing from Bonaparte’s brief occupation in 1797. French troops had torn down the gates of the Jewish ghetto (many Jews had enlisted in Napoleon’s army as a result) and ended a thousand years of Venetian independence with a flurry of decrees declaring republican ideals. The revolution had been brief, since the Treaty of Campo Formio had given the city to Austria a few months later, but the ghetto hadn’t been reestablished and the population was still debating the merits of the frightening freedoms the French had promised. They discussed as well contrary warnings that French reform ultimately meant tyranny. Was Napoleon promise or peril? Was he liberator, or lord?

I was tempted to linger in the city by the decadent beauty of Venice: the mysterious twisting of its fetid canals, the iceberg majesty of its sinking, leaning houses, the rhythmic song of its lyrical gondoliers, its arched, weather-stained marble bridges, its baroque balconies pouring out cascades of flowers, and its dark-haired beauties weaving through the pillars at the periphery of Piazza San Marco like duchesses at a dance, their silks shimmering like butterfly wings. The queen city of the Adriatic rang with bell, song, lush opera, and echoing church choir, and smelled of perfume, spice, charcoal, urine, and water. Sunlight burned on the wavelets, and candles beckoned when it was dark.

But I’d reformed, I reminded myself, and thus resisted the temptation to peek at pleasure, indulgence, and wickedness. Instead, I begged my companions for just enough time to hunt down a fine Venetian rapier in an armory shop, given the reputation of Italian cutlery. A Venetian sword was renowned for its slim and supple balance and elegant curved guard, and yet it carried a shave more weight and sturdiness than its French counterpart.

“All the best duelists have one,” I justified.

A naval cutlass would be more practical for alley fighting, but the rapier was elegant to the feminine eye, giving me a certain swagger. I felt dashing when I buckled one on and studied myself in the store’s cracked antique mirror, deciding I looked quite the courtier. So I spent twice the money I should have, and learned when I tried to walk that the weapon banged so annoyingly on my thigh that I eventually took it off and tied it across my back like Magnus Bloodhammer’s old ax, lest I tangle my own legs. This was the new nineteenth century, I reasoned, and I assumed that in the unlikely event I actually needed a weapon as antique as a rapier, I’d have warning enough to unstrap, unsheathe, give it a whet and a polish, and get into some kind of proper stance. Besides, I still carried my habitual tomahawk and longrifle, the latter marred by an annoying crevice in the stock where Cecil Somerset had broken his sword in my last adventure. The gun was so banged about that it retained little of its original elegance when forged in Jerusalem. Still, it shot well, and I looked like a little arsenal with everything strapped on. Women eyed me with wary interest behind their splayed fans, wondering just what kind of rogue I might be, and men edged around me in narrow lanes as if I were balmy as a butcher. Venetians are used to all sorts of visitors, but whispers began about Ethan Gage, the frontier American. That secretly pleased me.

Given that we were adventuring into Ottoman territory, my companions tolerated my weapon shopping by doing their own. We enjoyed the excuse to acquire manly accoutrements.

Cuvier, after a period of perplexity, settled on a pair of brass-and-silver dueling pistols in a rosewood box. They’d be deadly enough within ten paces.

Bluff and hearty Smith went for something entirely more formidable, a wicked blunderbuss—Dutch for “thunder gun”—which fired a spray of balls from a barrel just fifteen inches long. The piece was short enough to be concealed under a coat or cloak. When Smith tried it out from the quay at the harbor, its stunning report sent up clouds of pigeons at San Marco two hundred yards away. “It kicks like a mule but bites like a bear,” he reported. “Just the thing to make a boarding party think twice.”

I expected Fulton to pick out a similar firearm, perhaps an even more complex and mechanical-minded one like a nine-barreled musketoon, designed for fighting from a foretop and rarely used because it had the alarming habit of kicking so powerfully that it could knock its user out of the rigging. That seemed the kind of design problem that would challenge the inventor, and I pictured him fixing braces and pulleys to hold his torso against the recoil. But no, Fulton became intrigued with the unlikeliest of instruments, a scuffed and dusty Scottish bagpipe he found in a market stall.

“That will make our enemies run,” I said good-naturedly. “I’ve heard the pipes, and it sets dogs howling. Invaders stayed out of Scotland for a thousand years because they couldn’t stand the noise.”

“That fire-eater in the Palais gave me an idea,” Fulton replied. “I can’t play this, but I can play with it. What if it could spit fire? Something to tinker with as we sail south.” He pressed the bag and got a wail. “Or entertain us.”

I’m rather tolerant of lunatics, which is why I know so many of them.

We paid for our purchases, the inventor blowing a wheeze or two on his Scottish pipes while we winced, and then the savants said we must press on.

“We hurry so science can find more time,” Cuvier explained. “Thira is a depository of time. We need time to explain the mysteries of our planet because nothing makes sense without it. Time, time, time.”

“Most people don’t sensibly fill the time they have already, Ben Franklin would say.”

“I said science. The human mind is imprisoned by our brief concept of history, Ethan. The globe becomes ever more complicated and all our explanations have to be crammed into a few thousand years, like a sprouting boy with shoes three sizes too young. But if the earth is older than we think, then all kinds of new ideas become possible.”

“What kind of ideas?”

“That if the world wasn’t always as it is, then it mustn’t always remain this way, either,” Smith put in. “Perhaps we’re only a chapter in a longer tale. That we men are not the reason for existence, but just players in a bigger drama we don’t understand.”

“People won’t like that, William. We like to think history begins and stops with us.”

“Then why did God leave us clues that it didn’t?” the Englishman said.

“Well, surely if the rocks are that old, we’ve time enough for supper on the piazza before getting to them, eh?”

“Fouché and Napoleon told us to hurry. The Venetians are looking at us oddly. Looking at you oddly.”

“Fouché and Napoleon don’t have blisters on their backsides from hurrying hundreds of miles to one of the loveliest spots on earth. The thing to do when people look at you, gentlemen, is to look back, particularly at the pretty girls!”

It was also necessary to relax, I continued, because we hadn’t yet found a Venetian captain to take us where we needed to go. Venice had been at odds with the Turks for the better part of three hundred years, and Ottoman waters swarmed with pirates. The Greeks were under the thumb of Muslim masters who referred to their peasant subjects as rayah, or cattle. No Venetians were anxious to go to such an unpromising dot on the sea as Thira. The captains we’d talked to kept quoting fares more suitable for sailing to the moon. So we’d prowl the docks tomorrow, I promised, meanwhile finding a table in Campo di San Polo. My companions, as seduced by Venice as I was, finally assented. Stars came out, and piazza musicians, and jugs of wine. As we toasted our progress so far, my companions began to tipsily eye the parade of Italian lovelies in the same hungry way I was. Like Odysseus, we’d been sidetracked by sirens—and my own miscalculation that any enemies must be behind or ahead.

We were well in our cups when who should sashay by but one particularly delectable and tawny beauty, hair high as a tower, dress cut to the outermost precipice of her bosom, and skin as flawless as a flower petal. I hoped for a wink or even a word of invitation, but instead she reached tantalizingly to the hem of her dress, gave us a glimpse of ankle, and impishly plucked something from her skirts. Was it an apple? She held the thing to our tavern torch for a moment and it sparkled like a pixie’s wand, and then she rolled it in our direction with the sweetest of smiles.

“Is this Italian custom?” Smith said, belching from drink, as the object stopped between our chairs.

“If so, she bowls with the grace of Aphrodite,” Cuvier slurred.

“What is it, Ethan?” Fulton asked, looking in curiosity at smoke drifting up from the smoldering sphere. “A festival invitation?”

I bent to look under the table. “That, my friends, is a grenade.”