The Barbary Pirates

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I’d half hoped we might run into an American frigate on our way to Syracuse, given that Malta was on the way, but I didn’t see our flag anywhere. If Morris was fighting a war he had an odd way of doing it. We breezed past the British outpost as if in a regatta and pointed for Syracuse, that ancient city on Sicily’s eastern shore that had been fought over by the Athenians, Romans, Vandals, Goths, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Germans, Spanish, and just about anyone else who happened by. It was founded more than seven centuries before Christ, about the same time as Rome, and was presently ruled from Naples by the Bourbon king Ferdinand under the protection of the British navy. Syracuse, in short, was a place so thoroughly besieged, shelled, occupied, surrendered, and liberated that I had a hard time believing there was anything left to find there but recycled rubble. With luck we’d poke about, realize the whole thing was a myth, and Aurora would good-naturedly grant us all our freedom.

I knew better, of course.

The old city of Syracuse is on an oblong island that is connected by bridges to the mainland. There’s a fort called Castello Maniace at the city’s outer tip, its guns commanding any ship trying to enter or leave the harbors. This island, called Ortygia, is what we’d initially mistaken for a narrow bay on the palimpsest map. There’s a large harbor on the southern side and a smaller one to the north, and then the new town and villas run uphill on the mainland, occupying a pie-shaped wedge of land that culminates at the Epipoli plateau. It’s a perfect, centrally located place for a city, and the ancient Greeks had built eighteen miles of walls (long since dismantled and stolen by farmers and contractors) to enclose all its suburbs and estates.

Now, in 1802, the buildings of Ortygia are three-and four-story houses of honey-colored limestone with red tile roofs, the old town dominated by the spires and domes of its primary cathedral, the duomo. There is more gay color in Syracuse than in Muslim Tripoli, more whimsy and more charm. Bright blue fishing boats bob at its quays, painted stucco has hues of yellow and pink, and the homes have wooden shutters of ivory, green, blue, and lavender. Wrought-iron balconies allow the city’s damsels to step out to water fringes of flowers and pose above the chaos of cart, donkey, prancing cavalier, farm wagon, and fancy coach.

I saw all this playing the English tourist, Sir Ethan Gage, in the company of my cousin, the Lady Aurora Somerset, both of us kept in European costume from clothes the pirates had pillaged and stored in Barbary. That this brought back memories of Aurora’s incestuous relationship with Cecil Somerset is an understatement, and the charade made me queasy. Aurora treated it as a grand joke. We pretended this pairing because our pirate corsair couldn’t very well tie to the town quay, so instead we were rowed ashore at a bay down the coast. Dragut took pirates to do some preliminary scouting at an old Greek fort called Euryalus, and came back reporting he found no mirror but that it was a ruin perfect for “the necessary rendezvous.”

“What rendezvous?” I asked.

“If we find the mirror we need help getting it and reassembling it,” the captain said. “But first we have to find it, somewhere in or around this city. Correct?”

“As best as I could tell.”

“For your son’s sake, I hope you’re right.”

“Assuming we find it, how are we going to take it without having half of Sicily at our heels? Castello Maniace will blow your corsair out of the water if it comes to fetch the mirror.”

“An interesting problem you should apply your mind to, if you want to save your son’s life. Remember, Ethan, our fate is your own.”

Aurora hired a carriage that took us to Syracuse in style, all of us pretending to be on holiday during the European peace. Harry came along as my son, with me widowed should anyone ask. Osiris was our “servant,” a limping ogre vowing quietly to hurt Horus should I voice a wrong opinion or fail to endorse their latest skulduggery. Dragut was Aurora’s manservant and bodyguard, lest I be tempted to try to strangle the girl. Fortunately, our tight little contingent of domestic bliss was able to leave her slobbering mastiff behind. I hoped Sokar choked on a sailor’s femur by the time we got back.

We were to search the city for clues and then rendezvous with more of the pirates in that ruined ancient fort of Euryalus, Greek for “nail head.” This castle, reputedly designed by Archimedes himself, had nonetheless fallen to the Romans in record time, which made me wonder again if the mirror was simple myth. But how to explain the peculiar mural at Akrotiri, on Thira?

The new Italian city of Syracuse had long since buried the ancient Greek one, and there was little sign on Ortygia that Archimedes had ever walked there. One clue of continuity, however, was built into the city’s cathedral on the central piazza. The duomo had a baroque façade, erected after one of the periodic earthquakes that ravaged Sicily, but its sidewalls incorporated the pillars of an ancient Greek temple to Athena. It was a pragmatic recycling of faith and architecture that reminded me how new beliefs entwine with old.

“It’s said that the gold of her statue would catch the morning sun and serve as a beacon to sailors when they were miles out to sea,” a waiter told us on the piazza as I kept trying to keep Horus in his chair instead of crawling around on the pavement. I don’t know how mothers keep track of their scamps. “While our duomo is closed in, the Greek temple was open to the air.”

“Maybe that’s where Archimedes got his idea for his mirrors,” I theorized.

“What mirror, Papa?”

“The brightest mirror in the world. That’s what we’re looking for!”

His little face beamed with delight. Aurora looked bored, her halfhearted attempts at acting matronly reminding me of a folktale witch who’d just as soon pop a child into the oven.

To be playing the English squire with Aurora, Dragut, and Osiris was more than a little bizarre. I supped with a woman I loathed. She was absolutely imperturbable to my hostility and gloom, acting as if ours was the most natural reunion in the world. She knew this annoyed me, and enjoyed the annoyance. Hamidou searched me periodically to ensure I carried no weapon, and made certain I was aware of Cuvier’s dueling weapons in his own belt lest I try something rash. Osiris loomed over Harry. Cain and Abel had a cheerier partnership.

At least propriety required that Aurora and I have separate rooms, given that we didn’t pretend to be married. Otherwise I was forced to fake fond union; there was no question of escape. “Your son’s fate rests with our success or failure,” Aurora said quietly over glasses of port in the evening, after little Harry had been packed off to bed in my room, Osiris standing guard like a golem in a nightmare. “Find the mirror, or condemn your family.”

“All we had is an old map showing the city. It proves nothing.”

“Then think! Where would the Greeks or Romans hide it? Where would the Templars find it? How has it been hidden for two thousand years?”

I sighed. “Well, Archimedes got the idea from the Atlanteans, perhaps, or whoever it was that lived behind the mirror’s protection on Thira. Maybe the Greeks even found a mirror already ancient, ten thousand years old, and brought it to Syracuse. Who knows? But the Romans adopted every military idea they could find, and would have taken that one if it had worked—unless Archimedes hid it away.”

“The Roman commander claimed the scholar’s death was an accident,” Dragut said, “an impulse by a common soldier who didn’t recognize the famous Greek. But maybe the mathematician really died for not telling them where the mirror was.”

“It could have been melted down. Or thrown into the sea.”

“Not destroyed,” Aurora insisted, “or the Templars would never have been interested. Think like Archimedes, Ethan! You know more than you’re telling us. The Romans had an army to find it. What did they miss?”

“How the devil should I know?”

“Because your son’s life depends on it.”

“You think it helps when you keep threatening my innocent child?”

“You’re the obstinate one, not me. I’ve asked for partnership since our beginning.”

I sighed. “And now you have your wish.”

She smiled, cold as an iceberg. “Exactly.”

I actually had an idea. Above the city were the old Greek theater and the Roman arena, half buried now. I remembered a horseshoe shape on the map; could that refer to the old amphitheater? And then there was that angled line from the old Greek fort to a cross on the island of Ortygia. This meant something to the men who’d drawn it.

There were also stone quarries from which the ancient city had been built. We hired a schoolteacher for information and were told that invading Athenians had been imprisoned there, many dying a ghastly death from hunger, exposure, and thirst. These limestone cliffs above the city were also riddled with caves. It was no place for a two-year-old, so I reluctantly agreed that Osiris could keep my lad occupied playing with the ducks at the Fountain of Arethusa, a freshwater spring that emerged near the edge of the sea in Ortygia. The ancient pool had been abandoned as a watering hole and recolonized by birds that Harry squealed at every time we passed. The ducks made up for his instinctual distrust of Osiris.

The rest of us purchased lanterns and explored the quarries as if enthralled by ancient atrocities: there’s something ghoulish about tourism. The grottoes were pleasant escape from the heat of summer, the quarry pits shady from orange groves and musical from the trilling of birds. I kept my eye out for obvious burial places or hiding spots, but it seemed to me this was the first place any invader would look. We separated to make the task go faster, Dragut satisfied by now that I intended to cooperate to safeguard Harry. I explored one quarry cave after another, each as empty as those rooms on Thira. There were no murals, either.

By midday I’d wearied of the task and took a break. I was trying an orange in the high grass under the cliff walls, wondering where the mirror might really be, when a sound crept into my depressed consciousness. Music like songbirds, I realized, but this was human, an ethereal melody that seemed to be floating off the cliffs. A woman was singing with a voice of angels, and the sweetness shook me out of my lethargy. Here was grace embodied by sound, sweet deliverance from my depressing captivity and this ancient quarry prison. I had to discover who the source of such loveliness was!

I made my way toward a towering cave in white cliffs shaped like a gigantic pointed ear, its opening a good hundred feet high. This was the entrance to a deep cavern with a flat, sandy floor, and it was from there that the haunting aria came from. The sound was amplified by the walls, giving it a depth like a heavenly choir. The song was Italian, a strain from an opera.

I walked in, my eyes adjusting to the dimness. What magic in a woman’s voice, given the right place! Yes, there she was in the rear of this excavation, lost in reverie, her voice lifted like an offering. Who could it be? And so I stealthily advanced, she turned, and…

It was Aurora.

I stopped, confused. The idea such music could come from my archenemy had somehow never occurred to me, nor the notion that she’d ever sung in her entire twisted life. Yet there she was, a little flushed, lips parted, eyes alight, and I was suddenly jolted with memory of my initial attraction to her on the Canadian frontier. She had an overpowering, bewitching beauty, a sexual power that swamped the senses and blinded the mind. I still hated and feared her, but I still wanted her, too—and silently cursed myself for it.

There was a moment of silence. Then:

“I don’t often sing, but the acoustics were irresistible.”

“You surprise me again, Aurora.”

“We don’t know each other, Ethan, not really. Everything went badly too quickly in America. But we could.”

“You killed my lover, Namida.”

“You killed my brother. People die, Ethan, for all kinds of causes. But the quest for knowledge is eternal. That’s what we have in common.”

“Why do you want to pretend that?”

“Why do you resist it? It’s no different from your attraction to Astiza. When you wanted me, on Lake Superior, you couldn’t have me. Now that you can, you repudiate me. Which of us is confused?”

How lovely she was, and how dangerous! I shivered, and hoped she didn’t see it. I did want her, but I also wanted to kill her, and would do so in an instant if Horus and Astiza weren’t at risk. Why hadn’t I insisted on staying with Astiza in the first place, three years before? Then none of this would have happened.

Aurora stepped close, her scent a mix of perfume and sweat from the day’s exertions. “I could learn to be a mother, too. Do you think I’ve never wanted children? Do you think I don’t have feelings, like you?” She grasped my arm. “I could be like other women, Ethan. I could!” And for just a moment I glimpsed the desperation beneath her steel.

I shook free. “Aurora, the last thing you’re like is other women. Harry has the good sense and instinct to be afraid of you.”

“He’ll feel different when I make him a prince.” The stubborn yearning was pathetic, the determination unnerving. “You both don’t know me. Not all of me.”

I knew enough, and looked away. “We should find Hamidou and decide what to do next,” I said, for lack of anything better to say.

“The mirror is here somewhere, I can feel it,” she said. “Some great bronze thing, as bright as the sun, bringing fire like Prometheus and remaking the world.”

“Somewhere.”

“We’re going to find it, Ethan, and possess it together.”