The Barbary Pirates

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I’ve been known to positively scamper to the side of an inviting woman, but I left our dank hold in dread at the thought of conversing with Lady Somerset. Beauty she might be, but I still bore the calf scar where she’d stabbed me with an Indian spear. Her new pet looked ready to chew on my other shank, and I was in no mood for witty repartee about our past. Nonetheless, her flagship was tacking to pick me up, and apparently I was expected to leap aboard with lusty panache. But Dragut took one whiff of me and yanked me back to wash. “By Allah, did you miss the bucket, or piss yourself in fear?”

“I just smell like a pirate, Hamidou.”

I was stripped and doused with bracing seawater. Then I pulled my tired clothing back on, combed my hair with fingers as best I could, balanced on the rail while the two ships drew abreast of each other, and seized a line swung from a boom on Aurora’s vessel. I did feel some pirate dash, and saw how the trade had its attractions. But then I looked about the flagship.

Aurora’s vessel, Isis, was bigger than Dragut’s, with heavier artillery and a larger crew, but exhibited the housekeeping of an Ohio flatboat. Lines were uncoiled, brass had curdled green, canvas and crates were lashed haphazardly, and bits of food and empty bottles rolled in the corners. Off-duty pirates snored next to gun tackle. Chickens pecked at grain scattered under a lashed longboat.

An American frigate would turn this to matchwood in minutes, I decided. Too bad there wasn’t one about.

“I know it’s not your habit to eat pork, but have you thought of keeping pigs?” I addressed my captors. “You’ve already built a marvelous sty.”

“Silence, slave!” I got lashed across the shoulders for my wit, and then a pock-faced bosun shoved me to the door of the stern cabin, guarded by flanking blacks with the muscled bulk of buffaloes. The sentries were haughty as Mamelukes, and regarded me with disdain bordering on disbelief. They must have thought their mistress could attract better.

“Didn’t have time to dress.”

They wrinkled their noses, checked me for weapons, and shoved me through.

“I’ll tell you what she’s like,” I called back to her goblins.

The corsair’s cabin, high enough to stand upright in, was pleasantly cool. The stern window glass was open and a breeze filtered through grilled wooden shutters. A Persian carpet covered the deck, and more carpets and pillows were piled in the peripheries to provide some Oriental opulence. Aurora herself lay like Cleopatra in a hammock that swung to the rhythm of the waves. She’d shed her fighting clothes for a linen shift that did little to conceal the voluptuousness of her figure. An emerald necklace of Spanish design draped her fine neck, and the matching earrings picked up the color of her eyes. Her fingers were bright with rings, and enough bracelets, armbands, and anklets hung on her limbs to make her a candidate for an anchor, should we have an emergency. Despite my knowledge that she was a hateful harridan, her seductive allure persisted, her lips pursed as she sipped from a golden goblet. Damnation, I felt aroused. But Aurora also held a pistol, and was as different from Astiza as a cobra from a nightingale.

It didn’t help that her mastiff watched me suspiciously from one corner, its growl distant thunder.

“Sokar, be quiet,” Aurora ordered. Sokar, if I recalled, was another Egyptian god of the underworld. This waist-high monster fit the part of nether demon.

“The hold I threw you into is a preview of one way our new relationship can continue,” she began without preamble, always the brisk dominatrix when the veil slipped. “I can assure you the dungeons of Tripoli are far worse, and the life expectancy of a Karamanli slave is shorter than that of a fleet sailor during a yellow jack plague. You never have enough food or water as a slave, it’s impossible to keep clean, and your weakened body breaks out into hideous boils and pustules. Whips and canes raise welts that grow red and leak pus, and your hair falls out in clumps. Your joints ache, your teeth rot, your tongue swells, and your vision goes milky.”

“Sounds like the clap after a night in bed with you.”

Her goblet jerked, hand whitening, and I could tell she wasn’t accustomed to candor. Any pirates who challenged her were probably at the bottom of the Mediterranean, and I suppose I risked that, too. Yet in some strange way I fascinated her. I had no idea why.

“Or, we can rule the world,” she finally managed.

“Aurora, you’ve done well for yourself since our last meeting—I believed you entirely mad and likely to die in the North American wilderness and yet here you are, a regular admiral—but I don’t think you’re on the brink of ruling the world. Capturing me is not on the same level as outdueling Nelson or Napoleon.”

“But capturing you is a step toward finding the mirror of Archimedes.”

“That’s what this is all about? The mythical toy of an eccentric old Greek?”

“That toymaker invented an early form of calculus almost two thousand years before Newton! Calculated the value of pi closer than the pharaohs! He was so excited when he discovered the principle of displacement in his bath that he cried ‘Eureka!’ and ran naked through the streets.”

“Most famous people have a flair for publicity. I’m too modest to ever succeed.”

“His mirror, if harnessed again, could incinerate any battle fleet sent against it. It would beam its death ray endlessly, never needing to be reloaded. We could pillage the merchant fleets of any nation and they’d be helpless to retaliate against us. In time we could mount the devices on ships and burn any port or fort we went against. Batteries of guns would explode. Ammunition wagons would be torn apart. Sailors and soldiers could be flung, screaming and burning, into the sea.”

“Such imagination, Aurora. But all that was two millennia ago. Ancient history, eh?”

“Unless the mirror was saved and eventually stored by someone like the Templars, in a place like Thira.”

“It wasn’t. I checked.”

“Maybe you didn’t look long enough. Or maybe you know more than you admit. Come, lie beside me, Ethan.” She wiggled. “It’s a broad hammock.”

“Actually, I’ve sworn off women. I think you’ll understand why better than anyone.”

“You begged for it once!”

“That was before you killed all my friends. And I did shoot your cousin, I believe. I mean brother. Or half brother…by the end, I wasn’t quite sure what to believe about Cecil. All in all, we haven’t had an easy time of it.”

“Those people would be alive if you’d shared your mission as I asked at the beginning! We’d be partners, making the world a better place with the wisdom of the Egyptian Rite. Have you noticed, Ethan, that every time you try to do the right thing, it accomplishes the wrong thing? You have no love, no money, no home. Yet I can offer all that, and more! Tell us what you know and join a cause bigger than yourself! Make something of your life!”

Sokar rumbled again, just to remind me what the choice really was. Then he went back to gnawing and cracking a bone, probably from the last sailor who turned Aurora down. I walked to a small sea desk, piled with books and scrolls about ancient history, alchemy, and magic. Say what you will about the Egyptian Rite, they were certainly readers. “Aurora, I’m as useless as I always was. You saw what we discovered on Thira: a medieval prayer guide. We found old ruins as vacant as Versailles, and managed to cave in the ceiling. You’re entirely right, I’m a complete failure, and you’d save yourself time and trouble by chasing someone more successful for once.”

“Yet you’re the one always one step ahead of us—in the pyramid, in Jerusalem, in the American frontier, and now on Thira. You want to know as fiercely as we do, Ethan!”

“And just who is this ‘we’? How do you get membership in such a cabal of lunatics and scoundrels anyway? Do you have to apply? Is it a question of genealogy?”

“We are serious seekers of the past who by possession of ancient wisdom deserve to rule. We choose to defy convention, and elect to follow occult knowledge anywhere it might lead. We trade ordinary conformity for wisdom. Perfect harmony will be achieved by having everyone in the world answer to us. To you and me, Ethan!”

There was something odd here. Why would Aurora Somerset, English aristocrat and renegade explorer, want anything more than to pick up on the tortures where she’d left off? If I honestly possessed some useful knowledge I could see her pretending temporary interest, until she got whatever she needed and could safely slit my throat. But why suggest we had a chance of partnership? I couldn’t stand the girl, and certainly she had no warmer feelings for me. She’d already seen my parchment of prayers, and didn’t know yet that it might contain something of value. No, there was something else going on, some wickedness afoot I couldn’t even guess at. “If there’s one thing I’m poor at, it’s harmony.”

She was becoming impatient, her recline in the hammock no longer languorous, her eyes eclipsing from the seductive to the dangerous. “You’d rather rot as a slave?”

“Let my friends go. Then maybe I’ll try to help with this mirror of yours.”

“My crew has to be paid, Ethan. Your friends are a type to ransom. But you can save yourself. Think of yourself. Escape by yourself.”

It was annoying she thought so little of my character that she assumed such a course would appeal to me—and even more annoying that she was half right. Here I was, single, rootless, an expatriate from my own country in the employ of another, caught up in the web of my old lover, and peeing on grubby sheepskin in hopes the latest sojourn underground wasn’t entirely worthless. What did I ever do but think of myself? And yet it sounded hollow and ashen to hear it come from Aurora Somerset: the kind of craven self-preservation that came from men not yet grown up. The rare times I’d shown character and backbone I felt better for it, so maybe it was time to make it a habit. Not just to reform outwardly, but to start a construction project on my soul! Lord knows I’m good at resolutions, if not always quite as fine in carrying them out.

“But I’m not by myself, am I? I’ve got three good friends captive on Dragut’s ship, and they’re imperiled solely because of my unfortunate history with you. No, Aurora, I think I’ll choose their company in that stifling hold over yours in the hammock, and enjoy it better, too. The fact is, you’ve captured impoverished savants, not merchant captains, and we aren’t worth the trouble of a ransom note.”

“Then you’ll die as slaves!” She’d rolled out of her horizontal throne now and stood, trembling with frustration, her eyes green fire, and by Venus the form she cast in her linen shift would tempt a pope. I don’t know how those who vow celibacy do it, frankly. The translucent gauze seemed to make her even more naked than if she wore nothing at all, and I wanted that flesh despite myself. Yet she was a devil’s temptress, a fire I dared not touch.

“You’ll never get Archimedes’ mirror. It would be like giving a keg of gunpowder to a pyromaniac. You won’t get your weapon, you won’t get me, and you won’t get whatever twisted goal you’re after. You’ll get this cabin, a crew of Muslim cutthroats, biscuit, bilge-water, and a lonely life seeking the peace you threw away.”

“You know nothing!” Her dog jumped up and barked, making me jump again, and I longed for my tomahawk to play fetch with the mastiff.

“Exactly,” I managed. “So sell me, drown me, or jail me, but please just let me be.”

A wish that neither of us could keep, as it turned out.