The Barbary Pirates

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Dragut’s appearance saved me from having to continue that disturbing conversation. We gave up on the echoing cave, its walls too smooth and featureless to hide anything. Outside we climbed through tall grass and the hum of insects to the crest of the white quarries and looked back at the city below. The Mediterranean was dotted with sails, and I tried to imagine some mirror harnessing the sun’s power to set them all afire.

“If this ancient invention worked, why did Syracuse lose?” I asked.

“All weapons have vulnerabilities,” Dragut said. “Perhaps the Romans came at night, when there was no sun. Perhaps it didn’t work in the rain.”

“And perhaps there was treachery,” Aurora said. “There is always someone willing to bargain away a city to save his own life.” She gave a glance as she said it, which annoyed me.

“Or bargain for the life of his innocent family,” I replied. Did even my captors hold me in contempt for helping them?

“But for medieval knights to be interested, the mirror must have somehow survived,” Aurora went on. “Somehow Archimedes knew the city must fall and he hid his machine. There is no record of the Romans capturing it. He secreted the mirror and either the Templars never found it, or they did so and hid it again. You saw the map, Ethan. You’re the key.” She smiled again, as if that might forestall any mutiny.

But the map didn’t show anything obvious, not even a picture of the mirror itself. These pirates were chasing a pipe dream of opiates and legend. I tried to remember the parchment we ate, its taste all too vivid. “Well, there’s the cathedral.” I pointed downhill toward Ortygia and the towers and domes of the duomo. “There was a cross on the map at that point.”

“I believe we could have found that landmark without your help,” Dragut said drily.

“There was also a castle or fort on the map, probably this Euryalus: the one that Archimedes supposedly designed. Where is that?”

“This way.” Dragut led us up a ridgeline past a tall, blocky mill to a plateau above the quarries. He pointed to a ridge in the distance. “It’s up there.” I saw a ramble of broken stone, with farms on the hill below. There were also the ruins of an old aqueduct that appeared to lead toward the mountains.

I considered a moment, and then held my arms out with my thumbs pointed skyward. One was aimed at the fort, the other at the cathedral several miles away. That line from one to the other should be the roughly angled line I’d seen drawn on the old map. I walked to the lip of a low cliff and looked down. Below were the ruins of a Greek theater, built into the limestone hillside. This was the horseshoe on the map, I figured. The nearby caves might be the humps drawn on the old parchment. Numbers might be measurements. But where was the squiggle that was the river? This was dry country.

“What is it you’re seeing?” Aurora asked. “What are you looking for?”

I ignored her. “Listen,” I said to Dragut. “Do you hear water?”

“It sounds almost under our feet.”

We climbed back down to an earthen platform that formed the top rim of the Greek amphitheater. At its rear was a limestone cliff about forty feet high, again pocked with caves. The largest of these was directly behind the center of the theater, a half-moon with a stream issuing from a dark tunnel in the back. The water fell into a pool contained by a stone wall. The rock behind the little waterfall was bright green with slime.

“Explain this, Hamidou.”

“A spring,” he guessed. “Perhaps that’s why they built the theater here. The citizens would make their hot climb for a performance and at the top have fresh water to drink.”

“They didn’t bring the theater to the spring,” Aurora said. “They brought the spring to the theater. This is below that aqueduct we saw. It feeds a tunnel that leads to this pool.” She pointed. “The water probably goes on to power that mill there, and then flows downhill to the city’s fountains. Clever.”

“Water power is just the kind of thing that would have fascinated Archimedes.”

“Yes,” Dragut said. “He invented a screw to lift water into irrigation canals.”

“So perhaps he engineered this. Which means he might have known this aqueduct and tunnel intimately.” I studied the cave mouth the water was pouring out of. “Not big enough to hide a ship-burning mirror, however.”

The other two watched me ponder, not sure if I was onto something or deliberately misleading them. I wasn’t sure myself, but I enjoyed that they were forced to trust me as much as I distrusted them. “Well. There was a line on the map that angled at this stream. I don’t have the slightest idea what it meant, but I think it might be worthwhile to take a look inside. The very fact that Roman soldiers would most likely not look inside a giant water pipe intrigues me.”

“You’re going to climb in that hole?”

“Yes. Hand me a lantern when I get up to the entrance.”

“How do we know you aren’t going to try to run away through the tunnel?” Aurora asked.

“Because your henchman holds my son, my dear. Your perfidy, your greed, your cruelty, and your ruthlessness are all keeping me perfectly in place.” I smiled sweetly and hopped over the low wall to splash across the thigh-deep pool to the little waterfall. As I expected, it was slippery, but by working up one side I was able to pull myself the ten feet up to the tunnel mouth, black as a nun’s habit. I squatted, water running past my boots, and called back to the others. “Now, a lantern!” I don’t like underground places, but I do have a certain expertise. There’s pride in having a skill besides cards, women, and wine.

Dragut handed me up a lamp and I began duckwalking into a passageway four feet high. Water splashed to my knees. The tunnel seemed wholly unremarkable, carved for the sole purpose of delivering what I was wading through. I was exploring because I didn’t know what else to do.

I left daylight behind. The others shouted but I ignored them, squatting and thinking in the dark. It was good to be by myself for a moment. But this cave crawl seemed pointless—until I saw a sign in the lantern light and my heart jumped.

A fat Templar cross, etched into the stone. No Archimedes did that, two and a half centuries before Christ was even born. Some medieval knight had crawled in here, too.

For what?

Now I went more slowly, looking carefully. The limestone was slick, cool, and featureless. Finally I saw a glow ahead. Was the aqueduct ending already? No, there was a shaft of light from above. I awkwardly made my way to it, thighs aching, and looked up. There was a carved crevice in the rock about one foot wide, extending across the ceiling of the tunnel. It rose, a vertical pocket like the sheath of a sword, toward the surface of the plateau we’d stood on earlier. At the top, stones had been placed to close most of this shaft so that the opening to the sky was only a foot square, too small for people to fall into or climb out of. So why make the pocket so big? There was nothing in it.

I crawled on and in a hundred feet there was another slit, same as the first, carved upward in the ceiling. And another, and another. I counted six before finally stopping. The shafts served, I assumed, to equalize air pressure and encourage water flow in a channel that barely sloped. They also let in light for maintenance. Yet each one had been hollowed to enormous size and then closed back up at the top. It made no sense.

Unless it did, to Archimedes.

I reversed course and crawled back out the tunnel, skidding down the waterfall and landing in its pool with a splash. I climbed out, soaking, dirty, and puzzled.

“You took a long time.”

“It’s a long tunnel.” I poured water out of my boots. “There are man-made crevices in there that might have hidden something.” I drew a circle in the sand, and lines across it. “Suppose you divided the mirror into sections, like a pie. Perhaps you even cut each section into two or three lengths.”

“Not cut,” said Aurora. “They were hinged, to catch and focus the sun.”

“The result would be narrow slices. There are air shafts in the tunnel in which the pieces of a dismantled mirror might have been hidden.”

“Might?” Dragut asked.

“There’s nothing there now. I did see a Templar Cross chiseled into rock. This medieval order you want to emulate got here ahead of us, I think. We may be too late.”

“No,” Aurora said. “Then why hide a map in such a secret place on Thira, and make a signet ring marking it? The knights found the mirror but had to conceal it again, until their investigations were completed. Perhaps they didn’t know yet how to reassemble it, or were waiting for a military base to deploy it from.”

“Perhaps they decided it was such a terrible invention it ought never be deployed.”

She ignored me. “If the mirror had been reassembled and used, there would be a medieval record of it. If it was destroyed, there is no need to draw a hidden map. If it was shipped away to another city, they would not have drawn Syracuse. It’s here. I can feel it here.”

“Not at Euryalus, the abandoned Greek fort: we searched there,” said Dragut.

“No, some place more accessible than that, from which the mirror might be more easily shipped. Yet somewhere it would never be disturbed. Somewhere sacred, somewhere sacrosanct, somewhere unsuspected.” She walked to the edge of the ancient theater and looked at the city below. “Somewhere like a temple to Athena, the Greek version of Egypt’s Isis, built in 480 B.C. after the Greek victory over the Carthaginians at Himera. The continuity of temple into cathedral would appeal to the Templars. Why else mark its location with a cross on the map?” She turned to me. “Ethan, I think our weapon is hidden in the city’s cathedral, its duomo.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“How will you ever get it? Or get it out of town?”

“I told you to ponder how we might slip by Castello Maniace,” Dragut said. “How can our ship get safely away?”

I shrugged. “Any lateen-rigged corsair is going to be a primary target. You need a decoy. No—you need a second ship, a Sicilian ship, with your own as a false target. You’ve got to allow the Sicilians to sink the Isis, so you can escape with the other.”

He considered and nodded. “Sly. See? We are becoming partners, Ethan Gage.”