The Barbary Pirates

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

I’ve been terrified many times in my life. I’ve been trapped in the Great Pyramid, hung upside down over a snake pit at Jaffa, tied to a stake in a fireworks display, and forced to run an Indian gauntlet on the edge of Lake Superior. Few experiences, however, have unnerved me as much as setting sail as guardian of a two-year-old son I didn’t know I had.

Quite unintentionally, I had fathered responsibility! While I was aware that conception was theoretically possible when I dove for the bed, somehow the eventual likelihood always slipped my mind in the heat of the moment. I hadn’t the faintest idea what one does with a child. Worse, I had fathered a bastard, and unless I somehow rectified the mess I’d made, he’d live his life with the stain of illegitimacy—that is, if he managed to escape slavery and rape. Indeed, thanks to me, the boy was in the clutches of a clan of half-mad Barbary pirates out to trump my own navy with a devil’s device that dated back more than two thousand years. The only good news is that I’d watched as Cuvier, Smith, and Fulton had indeed been set free, no doubt wondering what odious deal I’d struck to get them hauled out of the pit. They sailed the same night I’d met with Astiza. Then Dragut, Aurora, young Horus, and I set to sea the next morning, while his mother wept and the boy wailed.

I’d hoped to get some time alone with my Egyptian love, but once I’d made my devil’s bargain our audience was over. It occurred to me after we were separated that I might have said something more eloquent than dazed questions, but I’d been too discombobulated by Astiza’s reappearance with a son to do much more than stutter. Even a simple, “I love you!” would have been gallant, but how often do we waste our lives saying things of no importance at all, only to neglect the eloquence that life’s surprises demand? I knew Astiza was unenthusiastic about our bargain, given that I had no training as a father, but she knew the alternative was worse. At least I didn’t mean to harm the boy.

That couldn’t be said of everyone and everything. When we boarded Aurora’s ship, the Isis, some of the crew muttered my tyke was bad luck. And then there was the hulking black mass of Sokar, Aurora’s mastiff, who rumbled a growl as if inspecting us for dinner and then—as my son shrank against my leg—giving a loud, annoying bark. Horus jumped and cried.

“Damnation, do we have to take your dog? It will give him nightmares!”

“Sokar only kills when I tell him to. Your whelp will be all right.”

Oh yes, Aurora Somerset had quite the mothering instincts. I realized then that she was above all a bully, who used growling mastiffs, pirate goons, or her own rapacious sexuality to intimidate and torment. Like all bullies she looked for the weak or helpless, like an innocent two-year-old or—yes, I had to admit it—his occasionally hapless father. I’d played victim to her sexual charms, giving her a taste of dominance that I’d been paying for ever since. She wanted to rule me again. Coming from a perverse aristocratic father and an utterly corrupt brother, Aurora had lost at an early age any capacity to love or even to enjoy a normal relationship, and assuaged her own wounds by picking at the vulnerabilities of others. That didn’t make me feel any more charitable about it.

“I’ve also brought Horus a guardian for when we’re busy,” she added in her best airy manner, as if we were conversing from saddle-back in Hyde Park.

There was a clump on the deck and at first I thought the man who peg-legged out from her cabin was simply another Mediterranean pirate: strapping, shaved bald, with a scar that cut across cheek and mouth and the usual murderous look I get from landlords, creditors, or jilted mistresses. But there was something familiar about the set of those broad shoulders and the penetrating glint of those dark eyes. What unholy reunion was this?

I finally groaned in recognition. “Osiris?”

Yes, it was my riddle master from Madame Marguerite’s Palais Royal brothel, looking considerably more tanned now that he was in the Mediterranean, but none the happier for it. I glanced down to his foot, which was missing. The thump of his peg was coming from the leg I’d run over with the fire wagon. His facial scar, I realized, was where I’d slashed him with that medallion of pyramid and snake. I thought it gave him character, but doubted he’d agree.

“I told you we’d go on this journey together, Gage. But you hurried off.”

“I thought it was that you couldn’t keep up—say, did you have an accident with a fire wagon?”

“Accidents happen to us all,” he prophesied. Just to add to his demented ugliness, it appeared he’d filed his front teeth into something resembling points. I should have checked the passenger registry.

“Not that I’d ever discourage partnership, but I don’t know if our relationship is entirely working, Osiris. Just to look at your face and leg and all.”

“And no man has the devil’s luck forever, Ethan Gage. You’re one of us now, to do with what we will. So is your boy.”

“Unwilling hostages, you mean.”

“I suspect you’re susceptible to surrendering to the ecstatic revelations of my order.”

“The Egyptian Rite? Don’t you mean its corruption and degeneracy?”

“We could have killed you many times over, but mercy stayed our hand. Now your life is about to change profoundly. And should you refuse this opportunity? Well.” He smiled with all the charm of a blood-sucking bat. “There’s always the boy to initiate, if the father fails to accept rebirth.”

“I’m having trouble enough with this first life, actually. I don’t know if I’m up for being born into another. It’s all a lot of bother, don’t you think?”

“Don’t disappoint us again. When the saw took off my mangled foot I had all kinds of visions of what I might do to you. Best not to tempt me.”

“And you stay away from Horus, or you’re going to be sawing the other ankle.”

“Bold words for a man with no weapons and no friends.”

“Maybe my friends are closer than you think.” That was hogwash, given that my three companions were halfway to France by now and the American navy might as well be in China, but my instinctual reaction to arrogant people is to be cocky. It’s usually a mistake.

“I don’t see them. And someday, when you aren’t necessary anymore, we’ll discuss our business once again.” And he sneered and limped off, which did little to reinforce his menace. I did wish for my rapier or longrifle, however, and wondered if they were locked in Aurora’s cabin.

Not surprisingly, Horus spoke Arabic, with a smattering of English words that Astiza had taught him. While I worked to expand the tyke’s vocabulary, I wondered if his mother had said anything much about distant Dad. Had she simply pretended I never existed?

“Where Mama?” he asked as we worked our way out of Tripoli’s reefs and set sail for Syracuse, on the island of Sicily.

“Well, Harry, she said I could take you on a boat trip. We’ll get to know each other and then all go back to Egypt together.”

“I want Mama!”

“We’ll see her soon enough. It might be fun to be a pirate, you know.”

“Mama!”

And thus began our relationship. When he began wailing Dragut threatened to throw us in the hold if I didn’t shut my bastard up, so I took him to the bow and managed to calm him down by pointing out light ropes he could play with. He was soon absorbed wrapping loops around my arms and legs, and in a short time had me pretty well trussed, being perfectly content with this mischief. As we played, the ship pitching in the waves, I noticed Aurora silently watching us from the door of her stern cabin and felt a familiar chill. Even if this ancient weapon still existed, or had ever existed—and I doubted both—I had a feeling the agreement I made would not be as simple as Dragut had promised. She had yet to add her own amendments. The more I tried to escape these Egyptian Rite rascals, the more deeply entwined with them I seemed to get. The more I dreaded Aurora Somerset, the more determined she seemed to make me her partner. We had become—as I’d concluded in America, after I wounded her brother—married in hate.

As baffled as I was at the prospect of taking care of a child, I found that Harry had practicality I admired. He was, in predictable order, hungry, sleepy, or bored. Addressing these issues came to be my primary responsibility. He was in the habit of one nap per day, but also subject to awakening in the night and crawling into my hammock for comfort. At first I found this startling and then, after a while, oddly natural and even reassuring. Certainly he slept better than I did, accepting his immediate environment with a child’s equanimity, even though he did keep asking about his mother. On food, he stated his likes and dislikes plainly. The bread, dates, and fruit I fetched him were fine, but he had no use for olives, chickpeas, or pickled fish. Fortunately he was both weaned and trained to the toilet, though it took some persuasion to accustom him to the ship’s bucket we used as his boy-sized head. With cheerful curiosity, he’d follow pirates to the vessel’s real head under the bowsprit, watching them do their business above the pitching waves with a scientist’s concentration. Bodily functions had unending fascination for him, and I gave long and learned lectures about the relative merits of privies, latrines, necessary houses, heads, buckets, bushes, and the tavern wall. He took enormous pride in mastering his own bucket, and I daresay it’s a more useful skill than most of what we give medals for.

Keeping him entertained and out of mischief was my biggest challenge, since I had to warn him off the gunwales, ratlines, and guns, and away from swinging booms and finger-pinching halyards.

The dog he avoided on his own.

Fortunately, some of the pirates, after their initial apprehension, adopted him as a kind of pet. They amused themselves by teaching him quick games. I found he could be kept occupied for an hour or two with a few musket balls and a belaying pin to knock them about. I created a simple dice game he took a liking to—the point was to jump the joints in the ship’s decking to the count of the dice, and I always let him win. I was oddly proud, and worried, that he’d inherited my gaming instincts.

“Where you live?” he asked.

“A lot of places, actually.”

“Where Mama?” It was his favorite subject.

“I met your mother in Egypt,” I told him. “She was helping a man take a shot at me, but then I claimed her as a slave of sorts and it all worked out in the end. She’s very clever.”

“Mama say you brave.”

“Did she now?” I couldn’t have been more flattered if I’d been inducted in Napoleon’s new Legion of Honor, even if Harry wasn’t entirely certain what “brave” even meant. “I think I’d say resourceful, and occasionally determined. The real grit is in being a mama, Harry. It’s a real commitment, being a mama.”

“And papa!”

“Well, yes. I suppose I should have been here, or there, had I known about you. But my original home is across the ocean in America, so I visited there. I was looking for woolly elephants, I was. Have you ever seen an elephant?” I mimicked the beast, using my arm for a trunk.

“From castle! It hurt a man.”

“My goodness! Was it an accident?”

“Mama wouldn’t let me see.”

“Well, that shows we have to be careful, don’t we? If we get in a scrape I’ll take you down to the hold and tuck you among the spare sails. You absolutely must stay there, you hear? When it’s safe again, I’ll come get you.”

“What’s a scrape?”

“Oh, just some unpleasantness. I don’t think we’ll have any.”

“Am I pirate?”

“I think you are, Harry. A boy pirate, anyway, if you’re on a pirate ship.”

“Who pretty lady?” He pointed to Aurora.

“Why she’s a pirate, too, and not one you want to get close to. She’s not a nice lady like your mama.”

“She gave me sugar.”

“Did she now?” That little bit of favoritism annoyed me. I didn’t want Aurora making friends with my son. “If you get hungry, you come to your papa.”

“Dog bad. And bad man walks funny.”

“Remember—find a hiding place in the sails.”