The Barbary Pirates

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Once more I was breaking into a church in the middle of the night, committing so many sins on this quest that I feared I’d find the mouth of Hades in the most literal and unpleasant way. In addition to common sacrilege, I was assisting pirates and fanatics, I had dragged my son into the worst kind of danger, I was betraying the interests of my country, and I had gone back on my pledge to my three friends to keep our map secret. And this was my record when trying to do the right thing. If I ever consciously turn to infamy, my soul will be so threadbare that it won’t fill in a gale.

We used a bar to break in through a side door of the duomo from the Via Minerva, Aurora’s monstrous dog coming with us this time on an iron chain. Other Rite members passed through the city’s dark streets like a procession of pilgrims and then hid in the shadows of the duomo’s vestibule, crouching to wait by its twisted pillars entwined with carved grapevines.

Inside, the church nave seemed even higher and plainer in the midnight gloom, while the silver altar of Saint Lucia glowed like ice in starlight. Every footstep seemed like a transgression, every foot-step a heresy. The dog’s huffing wheeze was like an invasion of older beasts from demon times. We crossed to the chapel and the door that had led us upward. Its lock was still shattered, but a wooden bar had been nailed to close it.

Dragut took out a pry bar and pulled, the nails a shriek in the night.

Suddenly there was a shout. “By the grace of God, stop!”

An elderly priest was hurrying toward us from the shadows of the main altar, half dressed and agitated. One arm was lifted either in supplication or anger, and his shouts echoed in the vast space.

“What are you doing, blasphemers?”

Aurora froze for only a moment. Then: “Sokar, strike!”

The dog’s chain was dropped and the animal whipped away, running silently at the frantic holy man dashing toward us, its metal tether skipping on the floor. I tried to cry warning but Dragut’s hand clamped over my mouth. The dog leaped, a blur in the dark, and then the priest yelled and went down, sliding backward on the stone floor as the animal’s momentum carried them toward the sacristy. There was a savage snarling, muffled screams, and the sounds of bones snapping under powerful jaws. The priest thrashed wildly, his agony muffled by the animal’s gnawing of his head, and then the poor man was still. The dog trotted back with a self-satisfied growl, its jaws bloody.

Little Harry clung, terrified.

“That’s not a dog, it’s a monster.” My voice was shaking. “You’re damned for all eternity, all of you.”

“Sokar protects an older, finer religion. It is men like that who will be labeled sacrilegious and eliminated.”

“That’s it.” Sokar was snuffling as Osiris patted his head. “I quit. I’ll have nothing to do with this. I resign, before we all go to hell.”

“You can’t resign, or I’ll sic my dog on your son. You know you can’t quit, not now and not ever. You’re one of us, and the sooner you help us the sooner we can leave Syracuse so nobody else has to die.”

“Aurora, please!” I groaned.

“Someday you’ll see the beauty of our desecration.”

There was a click as Dragut held one of Cuvier’s pistols to my head, to reinforce the point, and a growl as Sokar shook his massive head, blood and spittle flying.

“We’re all partners, now,” the pirate reiterated.

For a band of sybarites, perverts, addled mystics, and amateur magicians, the Egyptian Rite proved frighteningly efficient at rigging the demolition of a sacred chapel. With the priest dead, Dragut opened a main door and Aurora’s confederates swept in like a silent tide, pulling ropes, gunpowder, and wrecking tools from under their robes. Directly beneath the dome was a small shelf running around its circumference, high above the chapel. The heretic monks daringly crawled out on this, oblivious to the thirty-foot drop, to string ropes and place charges of gunpowder. A web of stout line was tied horizontally to form a net to catch whatever was blown free. This was no attempt at delicate surgery; it was a quick snatch and run before the good citizens of Syracuse realized we were sabotaging their principal place of worship. Banks of votive candles were lit to provide lurid illumination. The work was done in choreographed silence. There was a last scramble up, fuses were unreeled to the chapel floor, and the hooded men waited for her order, each holding a candle.

Aurora walked to the middle of the chapel, looked upward at the placed gunpowder, and pirouetted beneath the dome and its dark angels, arms outstretched as if to catch the mirror herself.

“Now!”

The fuses were lit, sparking and smoking, and the Rite members backed into the main nave. Aurora was the last to come. Points of fire danced upward toward the chapel dome and a low hum rose up from those assembled, a hivelike chant.

“What if you destroy the mirror as well?”

“Our readings say it’s sturdy as a shield. Besides, there’s no other way. We don’t have the men to seize and hold this city while we chip it out.”

“This won’t just wake the town, it will wake the dead.”

“Then they can wave good-bye to a relic they didn’t even know they possessed.”

The light from the fuses disappeared, and there was a moment of suspense while we waited. Then a staccato roar as the circle of charges went off. Even Sokar jumped. Plaster and stone erupted downward, destroying the grimy angels in the ceiling, and a stinking cloud of smoke and dust rolled out from the chapel into the main church. Then, with a screech, something clanged and fell.

We ran through the choking fog and peered upward. Through the haze a disk vast and round was lying on the net of ropes that had been strung across the chapel. It was bronze, twenty feet in diameter, and bright where its metal had scraped as the mirror came loose.

My heart hammered. Two thousand years after Archimedes was slain by a Roman sword, his most terrifying invention—or was it a copy of an even earlier invention—had suddenly been rediscovered.

“Hurry, lower it!” Aurora shouted. “Every moment counts!” Bells began ringing in the city. Some of the Rite’s monks pulled pistols and muskets from their robes and crouched by the main cathedral entry, looking out at the dark piazza beyond. Others clambered up to the mirror. Ropes were cut and slowly the makeshift hammock and its burden were lowered to a marble floor covered with debris. High above, the joists of the domed ceiling jutted like broken branches.

The prize was about half an inch thick and shaped like a shallow upside-down bowl. Nestled inside this bowl were more bronze panels, hinged inward from the rim so that the mirror looked like an upside-down folded flower. The Rite’s henchmen lashed a hawser cable around the rim to make a crude tire. Then more ropes to pull the mirror upright onto its edge. Some of the monks were dancing with excitement, and their chants rose in volume. The brass weighed a ton, at least. It trembled, a giant wheel, men on both sides helping balance it. Like a wobbly plate, it was rolled out the duomo doors—just fitting!—and down the steps to the piazza. A dozen of the Rite’s hooded monks had to corral the mirror just to keep it from careening away.

While attention was fixed on the rolling mirror, I crouched in the ruined chapel and hastily scratched a word on the dusty floor.

Tripoli.

I straightened before Osiris noticed, picked up Harry, and followed the crowd outside.

Torches appeared where the Via Santo Landolina debouched into the square, and we heard shouts to stop. The city’s constabulary guard was coming, and no wonder: We might as well have brought an orchestra for all the noise we were making. We’d desecrated the city’s duomo, had a dog eat one of the local priests, and were trying to steal something too big to fit on a hay wagon. Shutters were banging open all over Syracuse. The Rite’s monks halted for a moment, hesitant, guns half raised, looking to Aurora for an order.

Then there was thunder. Grapeshot rattled down the length of the piazza and into the advancing Italians. A number fell, torches winking out.

Dragut had hauled a cannon from one of the ships and fired it down the length of the Landolina. “Come, do you think you’re a frozen sculpture!” he shouted to the robed pilgrims. “Roll the mirror, roll it!” He was waving Smith’s blunderbuss, the muzzle of which was smoking as well.

“Give me a weapon,” I told Aurora. “I need my rifle back.”

“You’ll get it when you prove yourself.”

We retreated as the monks did, the Rite’s members pushing the giant disk so that it began to wheel downhill toward the eastern end of the piazza. That street led to the Fountain of Arethusa, the natural spring where Horus had played with his ducks. There was a quay adjacent, two ships waiting there.

Dragut turned to me. “Now we’ll see if your plan works, Gage.”

There were more shouts behind and gunfire began to chase us, bullets pinging and passing by with that peculiar hot buzz. The breath of their passage makes survival exhilarating. One Rite member yelped and went down, others pausing to help him.

“Leave him!” Aurora shouted. “The mirror! The mirror!”

“It’s Anthony!”

She pointed a pistol at her wounded follower and fired, the man jerking and then lying still. “None can be left alive to betray our plans.”

The others began pushing the mirror even faster.

I sprinted ahead, holding young Harry. Sokar’s baying had started dogs barking all over the city and the child clung to me in confusion, bewildered by the excitement but intrigued, too. Yes, there the new ship was, just as I’d suggested and Dragut had promised! I bounded aboard a square-rigged brig the Barbary ruffians had captured, its crew set adrift in its boats. Zephyr, its name was. And, as I’d proposed, Aurora’s Isis was in tow behind for sacrifice. I looked back and heard the pirate cannon go off again, keeping pursuers at bay. Like some vast coin, the great bronze mirror came rolling down the street, chased by the monks as if it were a child’s hoop. Its weight and bulk made a grinding noise as it turned.

Just beyond us at the Castello Maniace fort at the tip of Syracuse, torches were flaring as that garrison came awake. It would be their guns we’d have to slip past to clear the harbor. If I wanted to keep my son from drowning, my trick had to succeed.

I stood by the stern rail as the mirror was wheeled across a wooden gangplank and maneuvered between main and mizzen. A dozen men gently lowered it to lie on the deck, the platter so big that its rim extended over the gunwales on either side. Once the Rite members and their pirate allies piled on board, Dragut had the gangplank rotated and lashed to make a bridge between main deck and poop so sailors could get across the top of the mirror. Lines were cast off, sails blossomed, and oars crabbed the merchant vessel away from the dock. Fortunately, there was a night breeze and the canvas bellied, even as carabinieri, soldiers, and outraged priests charged the quay where we’d been moored. Two cannons went off from the corsair being towed, scattering our pursuers again. Our ship broke out the flag of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, while the pirate craft unfurled the banner of the Tripolitan pirates. It was a ruse I prayed would work long enough in the dark to keep my boy from harm.

“Harry, remember when I told you to go hide in the sails in a scrape. Now is the time!”

“No! Watch!” He was spellbound.

“Too dangerous! More sugar if you’re a good boy and go below!”

It was a few hundred paces down the seawall of Syracuse to the fortress we must get past, and I could see more and more torches flaring there. Men ran back and forth on the ramparts as the great land guns were run out. They were 24-pounders, capable of ripping the bowels out of our tubby ship and its ancient cargo. As we gathered speed, sliding past the shallows at a brisk walking pace, I turned to Dragut.

“Now, if you hope to fool them.”

He waved.

Behind us Aurora’s corsair, connected by a towrope that was invisible in the dark, unfurled its own sail. A bow gun loaded with nothing more lethal than old rags gave a sharp report as if shooting at us, and we fired with equal pretense from light stern guns, both of us banging away as if the pirate corsair were chasing the Zephyr. Bits of burning rag flew in the air. The monks and pirates who’d jammed aboard the merchant vessel sank behind the gunwales to make us look lightly manned, while behind us the scarecrows I’d suggested for the corsair were propped up by the handful of brave pirates left aboard the Isis. In the dark, the impression was of a preying craft crammed with eager buccaneers.

The scheme was to make our ship look like a desperate, fleeing merchantman and to concentrate the Sicilian fire on the nearly empty corsair.

I looked anxiously at the fort. The excited shouts within the Castello died down as officers applied discipline. Door after door of the fortress gun ports banged opened. We heard the groan of tackle as each behemoth cannon was hauled out, its muzzle pointing at our vulnerable hull. We tensed, waiting for a barrage of fire that would gut us, but none came.

Now the corsair was coming abreast of the fort’s guns.

Its tiny crew slipped into a cutter on the side of the ship and pushed off with oars in the dark.

Finally there was a cry of command and a ripple of cannon fire thundered from the fortress. Metal screamed and punched through the towed pirate vessel as though it were paper, heeling the decoy.

Aurora swung her cutlass and chopped the towrope away, even as Dragut winced at the pummeling of the graceful flagship. Its rudder had been lashed, and it began ghosting on a course of its own.

“Fuoco! Sparare!” The excited commands to fire and shoot could be heard from the fort.

More cannon balls crashed into the pirate craft’s hull, sending up showers of wood splinters. The sail was slashed to ribbons, ending the ship’s motive power, and then the entire rigging cracked and crashed down, spilling tackle and shredded canvas over the side. The corsair began to drift and wallow. Cheers began in the fort.

Not a shot had come our way.

Another command, and another roar of fortress artillery. Pieces of Aurora’s old ship erupted, a barrel of gunpowder went off, and the vessel began to burn. The flames made it an even easier target, and more shot struck it solidly amidships. A mob had formed on the city’s shoreline and a fusillade of musket shots came from there, too, the crowd peppering the empty vessel and its scarecrows with bullets. The corsair’s stern began to settle.

We’d slipped by the tip of the fort and were gaining speed, on our way to safety.

Aurora looked from the Isis to the mirror. “A fair trade,” she murmured. “You destroyed my vessel, Ethan, and I salute you for it. That’s the kind of ruthless wisdom we’ll bring to all affairs.”

Perhaps they expected our merchant vessel to stop fleeing and turn around upon our apparent rescue from the destructive pirates. Perhaps they expected us to slow, or dip our flag in acknowledgment, or light a lantern, or give a cheer to our saviors.

Instead a score of pirates and monks clambered silently up our rigging to unfurl yet more sail. Faster and faster we slid into the dark, the mirror of Archimedes rocking where it balanced. The brightest light was the burning corsair, and it drew the eyes of fort and town ever more hypnotically as we faded into the night.

By the time the Sicilians put out in small boats and realized they’d battered an empty target, the skeleton pirate crew that had abandoned the corsair had hoisted their own cutter sail to race to catch up with us. We hoisted them aboard and were out the harbor mouth, reaching down the coast of Sicily without so much as a bullet in our hull. The island’s greatest prize was ours, to be resurrected in Tripoli.

“If the gods didn’t want this, why would it be so easy?” Aurora told her followers.

They laughed.

Now the Barbary pirates could set the world’s navies on fire.