The Barbary Pirates

CHAPTER TWENTY

From the sea, Tripoli looked inviting as a lion’s mouth. Dragut brought us up to the deck to watch our approach so that we could fully understand the futility of rescue. The heat of North Africa clawed as we neared land, the sky yellow above the desert and milk blue over the gardens and date palms that surrounded the city’s walls. The forts and towers of the strongest pirate lair in the Mediterranean wavered in the heat like a bad dream. The lion’s jaws were the reefs that girded the city as we approached, emerald and gold amid the darker blue of the Mediterranean, and the teeth were the cannon that jutted from embrasures in the ramparts: hundreds and hundreds of cannon, it seemed. Beneath their protection, the corsairs, xebecs, and feluccas of the Barbary pirates bobbed placidly, huddled like cubs.

I’d hoped to see the proud black frigates of my own navy by now, given that I’d sailed back to Europe with the powerful American squadron. But any blockade was nowhere to be seen, and Dragut’s taunt that the United States flotilla was hiding at Malta seemed dismayingly true. If Tripoli was truly at war with my own infant nation, it was hard to see any sign of it.

“See,” said Dragut, as if reading my mind. “Your ships draw too much water to even come close.”

Midday heat and sun were dazzling, adding to the hallucinatory effect of what Napoleon’s savants had labeled “mirage.” The land scent was of sand and spices, excrement and oranges, the wool of piled carpets and stink of drying fish. Tripoli is on a green plain that gives way to desert waste, and in the shimmering light its flat-roofed houses are whitewashed ice blocks that gleam like snow. This glacier is crevassed with winding streets so narrow and confused that they seem more like natural channels than planned thoroughfares. The city’s flatness is punctuated by the bulbous domes of mosques and upright stalks of minarets, topped by conical green roofs like witches’ hats. At the city’s southeastern edge, near the harbor, is the squat, massive, crenellated castle of the bashaw, Yussef Karamanli. Beyond is a rocky outcrop with a fort that commands both city and sea: a fine place for a mirror.

Karamanli, Dragut told us with pride, was as ruthless a prince as Attila the Hun. “He came to power seven years ago when he drove out the pirate Ali Bourghal. Before that he murdered his brother Hassan in the palace harem, shooting off his mother’s fingers when she raised her arm to try to protect her eldest son. Yussef dragged Hassan’s pregnant wife off the dying body of her husband by her hair. Then he cut off Hassan’s privates and threw them to his dogs.”

“No wonder you joined up with him.”

“And yet he is also a pious man—he wears scripture from the Koran, written in strips, wound into his turban.”

“Now there’s a commitment.”

“When Yussef took the city from the pirate Bourghal, his other brother Hamet agreed to exile in Alexandria. However, Hamet’s wife and children remain as hostages. Yussef views Hamet with contempt, and controls him by terrorizing his family. Yussef himself has two wives, a fair-skinned Turk and an ebony black.”

The white Madonna and the black, I thought, remembering my adventures beneath Jerusalem with Miriam and my teachings from Astiza.

“Plus a harem of concubines. Yussef is a stallion. He also has a pet leopard, an Italian band to serenade him with music, and jewels the size of robin’s eggs.”

“I still can’t see him winning an election.”

“He doesn’t have to. He is loved and feared because his rule is Allah’s will. We Muslims are content with our lot because, as the Prophet said, ‘It is written.’ Christians are tormented because they don’t really believe in fate and are always trying to change things. We faithful are happy with oppression if it is God’s will. Tripoli is tranquil in tyranny.”

“So you put up with a lunatic who murders his brother, wounds his mother, and drags his pregnant sister-in-law by the hair?”

“All the world pays tribute to Yussef Karamanli.”

“By God, England and France don’t,” Smith put in.

“This is as it should be. The English and French keep other navies weak. Did not Nelson just destroy the Danish fleet at Copenhagen? We cannot fight their battleships, nor can they close in with our shallow coast. So we leave their flag alone and they leave ours alone, while allowing us to prey on the merchant ships of their commercial rivals. Shippers learn there is safety paying extra to sail under the English or French flag. Here again we see the wisdom of God, with each nation assigned to its rightful place. The only people who do not see reason are the Americans, but look—do you see their frigates? They bluster but hide.”

“It was Yussef who declared war on us.”

“Because your baby nation doesn’t understand the way of the world and pay rightful tribute! The United States should give us what we demand. It will be far cheaper than senseless defiance. You’ll see.”

“I can’t say we have faith in your advice, Dragut, given that you’ve lied, betrayed, and enslaved us.”

“Ah! You are lucky that Hamidou Dragut is the one who captured you, and not a truly hard man like Murad Reis!”

“The traitor Scot?” Smith asked.

“He took the turban, but is dour and gloomy like his homeland. I will put in a word for you but he is not merciful like me, Hamidou. Murad chose valor under the Crescent over slavery under the Cross. Now he is captain of all our corsairs, renowned for his courage, cleverness, and cruelty. Every slave has that opportunity! In your backward nations, slavery is a life’s torment, the work of Negroes you despise. In our enlightened nation it is but a step to wealth and even freedom for those who convert to Islam! Our Christian slaves live the life of the damned, but Muslim slaves can rise as high as their masters. Such is the wisdom of Allah.”

“Not one of us will ever become a Mussulman,” Cuvier vowed, “even we savants who question Scripture.”

“Then you must be ransomed to bankrupt your families, or sentenced to the quarries, or given over to Omar the Dungeon Master. Are you savants not men of reason? Listen to me well: Only reason can save you now.”

Cannon fired salutes as we neared the city. Aurora’s flotilla answered in turn, each puff of smoke from the forts followed a second or two later by one from us, the bangs echoing across the lovely turquoise water. Swarms of dockworkers, slavers, soldiers, and veiled wives assembled on the quay as we glided between the reefs. Horns blew from the city walls and drums beat out a tattoo. Our ship tied up and great rattling chains, each set as heavy as two pails of water, were dragged aboard by starved-looking slaves and manacled around our ankles and wrists, the weight holding our arms down and our hands cupped as if we were trying to cover our privates. This forced pose was not entirely inappropriate because our clothes were ragged after the caves of Thira. Dirty, unshaven, and thin, we looked like the wretched slaves we’d become. My scientist companions gloomily surveyed the churning mob waiting to escort us to the slave markets. Reason! We had one card left, but didn’t dare play it. We thought we knew the place to which the palimpsest map referred.

It was Smith, with his love for geography, who’d figured it out. He told me when I’d been returned to the hold of Dragut’s ship after meeting Aurora. “We had it backward, Ethan,” he explained in a whisper as we made for the African coast. “This inlet here isn’t a bay, it’s a peninsula, as if the map is drawn in a mirror. And once I realized that, everything else became plain. I know of one harbor in this part of the world with that shaped protrusion, and it is Syracuse on Sicily, where Archimedes did his calculations and wielded his mirror. This curved line here is not drawn on land, but on the sea. Fulton suggested what that detail might represent.”

“I think that’s the limit of the mirror’s effectiveness,” the inventor said. “Within that line, the mirror’s rays were strong enough to set attacking Roman galleys on fire.”

“The symbols may refer to places on land the makers of this map wanted to record,” Smith went on. “The hiding place, perhaps, of the mirror of Archimedes. Caves, forts, a church.”

I looked. There was a cross on the peninsula, and a castlelike symbol a good distance from town. A line was drawn from cross to castle, but it angled at a horseshoe-shaped mark. Where the line bent, there was a wavy line like a symbol for a river. Nearby was an oval, little humps that could mark huts or caves, and arrows with odd symbols and meaningless numbers.

“I think the Templars drew this after they rediscovered the mirror,” Smith whispered, “and hid it on Thira in a place only they knew: some underground catacombs, perhaps.”

“So we have something to bargain with!” I exclaimed.

“Absolutely not,” Cuvier countered. “Are you going to help turn a terrible weapon over to pirate fanatics?”

“Not turn it over. Just use what we know to get out of this fix, somehow.”

“I’d rather be enslaved than give the barbarians a clue that might result in the destruction of the French navy,” my friend vowed.

“Aye, and the British navy, too,” said Smith. “Come, Ethan, your own nation is at war with these devils. We can’t tell them where this death ray is.”

“Where is it?” I peered at the map.

“We don’t know exactly, but sooner or later they would figure that out. Just pinpointing the city makes discovery far easier. Your frigates would become infernos, and your countrymen would fry. We can’t trade that for freedom. Death before dishonor, eh?”

“Of course.” I swallowed. “Still, a little hint might not hurt.”

Fulton shook his head. “Any modern inventor could probably improve on the Greek design. We dare not even tempt them.”

By the whiskers of Zeus, I’d fallen in with honorable men! That’s always a risky thing—not to mention novel. “But they’ll take the palimpsest from us and maybe come to the same conclusion,” I tried. I’m not craven, just practical.

“The only thing to do,” Cuvier said, “is memorize this scrap to the closest detail and then destroy it. Then the key will be in our brains, not an underground tunnel or a piece of animal skin.”

“Destroy it how? We can’t throw it into the sea from down here.”

“No, and we can’t bring the obscuring prayers back, either. The only thing I can think of, my friends, is to eat it.”

“After we’ve washed it in piss to see the design?”

“Nothing wrong with a little urine, Ethan,” the scientist assured. “Less toxic than bad well water. Maidens used it to wash their hair. Besides, the palimpsest is long dried now. Seasoned, you might say.”

“Eat a palimpsest?” I looked with dismay. “How?”

“A little at a time, I suspect. It’s not like we have salt and pepper.”

And so we did, and by the end I had a sore jaw from chewing and a knotted gut from too much parchment and not enough vegetables. Why can’t I find normal treasure, like gold doubloons or a queen’s tiara?

Our morose chewing of this cud did put us in a philosophical mood, and when men ponder the mysteries of the universe the first thing that comes to mind is women.

I’d explained my unsuccessful audience with Aurora Somerset and given hints of our unhappy history, which seemed to surprise no one. Females, we agreed, were more bewitching than a treasure map and explosive as a keg of gunpowder.

“It’s odd how dangerous they are, given that men are so clearly superior,” Smith said with honest puzzlement. “In strength, in courage, and in intelligence, the evidence of our gender’s advantage is indisputable.”

“Not entirely,” Fulton cautioned. “I know many a man who’d quail at the prospect of childbirth.”

“Certainly women have strengths of their own,” the Englishman allowed. “Beauty, to cite the most obvious. My point is that despite our own male brilliance, the hens seem to get the upper hand over the peacock. Quite baffling, really.”

“Upper wing,” I corrected. “If the metaphor is peacock.”

“It’s really a product of natural history,” Cuvier opined. “Now the male, it is true, has the instinct to be unfaithful. While monogamy is advantageous for the survival of children, in terms of procreation it’s in a buck’s best interest to mount as many damsels as possible.”

“Here, here,” I said.

“So that should keep men in a position of superiority,” Smith said. “If his heart is broken by one mate, he simply transfers his energies to the next. Look at Gage there, a perfect example of serial infatuation, faithlessness, and poor judgment.”

I opened my mouth to clarify but Fulton cut me off.

“Fighting stags risk dying in combat, but the winner gains a harem,” the inventor agreed. “The bull rules the pasture, and the ram his ewes. Male superiority, gentlemen, is the rule of the barnyard, and it should be the rule of the salon.”

“And yet it is not,” Cuvier cautioned. “Ethan, for example, is the kind of man who has endless problems with women, given his flea-like frenzy, inability to plan for the future, rank opportunism, and hapless disloyalty. In his case, the advantage is to the fair sex. When does one hunt a stag? In the rutting season, when the animal’s brain is positively addled by lust and he can’t get anything right.”

“Ethan again,” Fulton agreed.

“The woman, in contrast, has a far weightier task than simple copulation,” Cuvier went on. “While a loose bull like Gage might charge around the pasture, wearing out over this skirt and that, the female has but one chance to get it right. Just a single man will impregnate her, and so her choice of the stud is crucial to her own well-being and that of her child. As a result, she approaches relationships with the acumen of an Alexander and the strategy of Frederick the Great. Her brilliance at this dance is honed from earliest childhood, and faced with her ruthless strategy and judicious selection, we men are but helpless pawns. It is she who controls our success or failure, she who maneuvers to bring the right mate to her boudoir, she who calculates not just physical attractiveness but money, intelligence, and power, and sets in place a bewildering set of flanking maneuvers and ambushes that turn the hapless male to befuddled acquiescence. At the same time, she must convince the male that the entire affair is his idea.”

“We are no match,” Smith agreed with a sigh. “We are rabbits to their fox.”

“Or at least hapless romantics like Ethan are,” said Cuvier.

“They weigh our inheritance, our reputation, our prospects, and our hygiene,” Fulton confirmed. “It’s little wonder Gage here has such trouble with his Astiza and this Somerset, to just begin the list. It’s a hopeless mismatch.”

“I am hardly a victim, gentlemen.” My pride was being stung.

“Perhaps not,” said Cuvier, “but the farther you stay from women, Ethan Gage, the safer all of us will be.”