The Barbary Pirates (20 page)

We clanked by a market. There were ranks of silvery fish, mounds of bright spices, carpets, cloaks, leather, silks, figs, raisins, olives, grain, and oil. There was brass and iron cookware, finely tooled saddles, sweetly curving daggers, oranges, pomegranates, grapes, onions, anchovies, and dates. Everything was for sale, including me.

“How much am I worth, exactly?” I asked. “As a slave, that is.”

He considered. “Half the price of a pretty woman.”

“But you can’t just mean to auction us off like common sailors,” I reasoned. “We’re learned men.”

“You’re Christian dogs, until you convert.”

The slave market of Tripoli was a stone platform under the wall of
Yussef’s central citadel, and perhaps his entertainment was the lamentation that rose from the hopeless. We queued next to its steps while a mob of bidders inspected us, since we represented a potentially shrewd investment. Our sale price would go to our pirate captors, but there was a chance a buyer might turn a profit not just from our labor but from ransoming us to higher-bidding relatives in Christendom. The bashaw’s own representatives were resplendent in jeweled turbans and upturned slippers. They were there to take the prettiest for the harem and the most able for whatever household duties needed filling after the last purchase had finally expired of overwork and disease. Other buyers included swarthy Berber chieftains from the hinterlands, military overseers needing brute labor to complete battery work, galley masters looking to replenish their banks of oars, carpet makers who needed quick fingers and fresh eyes, and dyers, water carriers, wheat growers, tanners, drovers, and masons, all with whips and manacles of their own. The system was built entirely on coercion instead of free enterprise and I’d announce in a second that it couldn’t work, except that the Barbary kingdoms had been defying the navies of Europe for three hundred years. My own United States depended on slavery in its south, and by all reports its most enthusiastic practitioners were quite wealthy.

The captives ahead were auctioned like cattle. Muscles were ordered tightened to judge strength, mouths forced open with wedges of stick, bellies prodded, feet lifted, and clothes rudely ripped to hunt for boils, rashes, or other signs of disease. We were all forced to prove, by prancing, that we didn’t suffer from gout. In some cases trousers were tugged down to judge the size of the genitals, as if the poor captive was to be put to stud.

One Sardinian sailor reacted to this indignity with such shock that he shoved an auctioneer and kicked out at a soldier, his chains clanking. At this outburst, the crowd roiled and churned like an ant nest poked with a stick. I braced for the beating, and indeed guards leaped forward to rain blows on the poor man until he was curled like a baby on the auction platform, sobbing in Italian for mercy. The savagery seemed disproportionate and wildly unrestrained, and yet this was but a preview of his real punishment.

There was a stir behind us and I turned. A man had appeared on a snow-white horse, surrounded by a troop of janissaries. He was in his thirties, I judged, handsome and fit, and dusty from some pleasure hunt that morning. Retainers had raptors hooded and tied to poles. When he halted, Negro slaves ran up to fan him with long-handled plumes.

Behind on another horse, her auburn ringlets cascading nakedly down in a display some Muslims would consider obscene, was Aurora Somerset, her lips slightly parted in excitement. She was watching the beating, quietly thrilled.

“It’s Karamanli,” Cuvier whispered. “Look at that emerald on his turban.”

“Big enough to pick him out in a crowd,” I admitted. “And give him a headache.”

“He likes order in his markets,” Dragut said. “This Sardinian will be made an example.”

The bashaw said something sharp to one of his officers and the message was relayed to the auction overseer. This man winced at the thought of lost profit, but then issued orders of his own. In an instant the groaning, bloody sailor was unlocked from his chains, hauled semiconscious to the edge of the platform, and then held by both arms while a huge iron hook swung down from the shadows above. Fortunately, the victim was too dazed to know what was about to happen to him.

We gasped, jerking the victim to attention, and then the implement was jammed through his back and shoved out through his belly like a gigantic fishhook, its point obscenely dripping blood.

He howled then—screeched as if in the very grip of demons.

And then he was hoisted, flapping frantically, blood sluicing down his nakedness while his eyes rolled back in their sockets from the unbelievable pain.

“For the love of God!” My companions were sobbing.

Twenty feet above the auction platform his ascent stopped. The sailor thrashed and squirmed, eyes bulging as he regarded the hook jutting from his guts, bloody droplets spattering the stones. Finally the convulsions slowed and he fainted, and then I noticed that he was not alone in hanging in the shadows above. Other cadavers, half rotted and dried, hung from similar hooks to warn what would happen if we resisted.

Certainly my own will collapsed. Escape? I could barely breathe.

I turned to look back at Aurora and Yussef. The woman licked her lips. The ruler of Tripoli nodded with grim satisfaction and then kicked his steed toward his castle gate, the pirate queen and his retinue following. “Now catch his eye,” I croaked desperately.

But my companions were in no mood to court this monster’s notice, and in any event we were too ragged and anonymous to gain his appreciation anyway. He passed into the shadows of his fortress without a glance, Aurora ignoring us as well. Then we were left, helpless and humiliated.

And yet our shame at being exhibited like animals was nothing compared with the infamy visited on the women. If old and shapeless they were bustled off to the laundries or bakeries with cursory bidding and swift transaction, but if young and at all lovely they were stripped naked to a roar of approval from the throng of sweating men. Then they were turned like a piece of glassware, propriety forgotten. If bidding lagged the auctioneer would lift a breast or bring a cane up between the thighs while the assembly roared and the shouted numbers went higher. It made no difference how much the damsels wept or shuddered, one even wetting herself in fear and mortification: they were lasciviously inspected before being bundled off to the buyer’s harem to be cleaned for his rape and enjoyment. We burned to avenge them, but what chance did we have? And if some of the women wailed at their fate, some of the captive men wept at an even worse future, knowing their existence would not be the dull luxury of the harem, but a monotony of dry bread, senseless beating, and crushing labor until death became sweet release.

We were dizzy from heat and angry excitement, swaying from thirst and hopelessness, and blinking against flies that swarmed to drink our last sweat. Finally our quartet of savants was shoved and whipped up the steps and onto the platform, the remaining buyers groaning and hooting at our lack of fitness. We did not appear to have half the endurance of a normal seaman. Who wants a scientist as a slave? The auctioneer began with a sigh of determination, barking and singsonging to the assembly. They shouted insults and mockery, hoping to drive our price down. The betting was that we’d go to the quarries and expire in weeks.

“We’re finally in hell,” Cuvier said, eyes closed against the mob. “Not Thira, but here.”

“No,” said Fulton. “Hell is coming.”

I looked where he was staring. The crowd’s noise abruptly hushed as a giant breasted the bidders with the heavy, swaying gait of an elephant. His shoulders were wide as a door, his bald head gleamed, and his torso was a crosshatch of tattoos and scar tissue. There was an odd paleness to him, like a cave being who rarely sees the sun. His eyes were tiny in his brutal and rumpled face, but they had the look of dull cunning the vicious sometimes muster. His hands and wrists looked capable of bending steel, his nose mashed, his lips heavy like a grouper’s, and his muscles swollen as if pumped full of bile. There was a muttering of fear as the crowd hastily parted, and then it was quiet enough to hear the creak of chain as the impaled sailor, still dripping blood, made his last instinctual twitching above this ghastly scene.

“It’s Omar,” I heard the pirates breathe. “The Dungeon Master.”

“Too ugly for a mother to love,” I whispered.

“Too ugly to have been born at all,” Cuvier amended. “He emerged, I’m guessing, like maggots from the dung.”

The giant pointed at us with a finger thick as a small pistol, and we realized we’d been noticed after all.

“Yussef Karamanli says the little ones are for me.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

If the hold of Dragut’s ship had been claustrophobic, and the slave
market of Tripoli wretched, Omar’s dungeon was infinitely worse. Its tunnels had been hewn by Carthaginians, Romans, Visigothic barbarians, Arab jihadists, and Turkish overlords over a score of centuries: a labyrinth of sorrow gnawed by generations of jailers and prisoners like termites into wood. Each tyranny had added a descending level, so each sin and cruelty could be hidden farther from the light. We were not marched but dragged to this hive in the bowels beneath Yussef’s palace, and were not thrust into a cell but pitched into a pit, a rock well slimed with dripping spring water that made its sides too slippery to climb. The bottom was ankle-deep in mud and sewage. We mostly felt this instead of saw it, because there was no light except the reflection of torches somewhere far overhead. The pit’s smell was peculiar, an odor of carrion and reptile, stale and prehistoric, so perhaps animals were sometimes kept there. No creature was in the pit now, which is just as well because we probably would have eaten it, killing the beast bare-handed and chewing it raw. The sweat from the rock was our only drinking water—we had to lap it like dogs—and our first food did not come for two days. We finally heard the shuffle of a troglodyte guard above and saw something tumble down in the dimness. We had the wit to catch what was a stale, weevil-infested loaf of bread, enough for two or three mouthfuls for each of us. The worms represented more nourishment than the rancid flour they’d fed on.

We wolfed down our share without tasting.

Our quartet barely said a word in our despair, so the primary sound was the screaming and begging of Yussef’s enemies being tortured somewhere above. Omar himself had been immensely strong and immensely silent, flinging us into our misery without a word of explanation. He’d seemed not so much cruel as indifferent, as if the suffering he oversaw never registered on the animal lobe of his brain.

All of us were sick. Humans cannot live long in a wet, stinking pit without inhaling from its vapors all kinds of pestilence, as any doctor will tell you. Our occasional shouts to summon help or explanation were ignored, and we wondered at times if we’d been entirely forgotten. When the future is uncertain, the present is misery, and time creeps like a slug. Even had we wanted to betray our navies, there was no opportunity to do so. In any event, the four of us pledged again not to betray the secret of the mirror as a way of fortifying our spirits.

“Better this pit than dishonor,” Cuvier said heavily.

“No Englishman would imperil his navy,” Smith added.

“Nor an American betray his nation’s cause,” said Fulton.

“Well said,” I confirmed. “Though a little negotiation wouldn’t hurt, if we could get out of this slime hole and properly pay them back.” They didn’t respond to this, given that they hadn’t much use for my ideas anymore.

We did try standing on each other’s shoulders to reach the lip, but even with a precarious pyramid that had Cuvier, the lightest of us, reaching for the top, we were still too short. There was no shovel to pile sand, and no sand to pile in any event. There was, in short, no possibility of escape, and no communication. Didn’t they want ransom? Had they given up trying to corrupt us to betray the secret of Archimedes?

And then they did break my will, but in an entirely unexpected way.

Time had disappeared, and existence in the hole had become synonymous
with eternity. Then, without warning, a chain rattled down, rusty and thick. Omar shouted in a deep voice, “Gage, alone!”

“What’s this?” Cuvier asked, with just a hint of suspicion.

“Perhaps I’m the first to be shot.” I could think of worse things, like staying where I was.

“I read they decapitate,” Smith said.

“Oh.”

“It’s very quick.”

“Ah.”

“Maybe they want to torture you,” Cuvier speculated.

“Remember our pledge, Ethan,” Fulton warned. “We dare not help them.”

“You remember it, too, when you hear my screams.” And with that I grasped the chain, wrapped my legs around its links, and shouted. Omar hauled me up the slimy walls of our well, with me rotating so I was thoroughly smeared with filth. I was weak by now from lack of proper food and water, and had a hard time even holding on. My companions feared for me but also followed my ascent with envy, as if I’d been given leave to levitate to someplace that wasn’t just an endless, hopeless
now
.

I knew better.

The Dungeon Master seemed to fill the pit’s tight chamber, his teeth yellow, his breath stinking, and the skin of his palms thick and hard as boot leather. He clamped his paws on the back of my neck as if it were the scruff of a kitten, half lifting and paralyzing me, and I’d no doubt that should I not go where he pushed, my head would be snapped from its stalk. He began shoving me up a rock passageway.

“Torture doesn’t work with me,” I tried in Arabic.

He used his other hand to cuff me with the power of a bear, the blow leaving my ears ringing. “Silence, pretty one. Time enough for noise.”

I saw no advantage in following his advice. “I have powerful friends, Omar, with money to buy not only the escape of us savants but a life for you, too, if you go with us.”

Now he stopped, holding me at arm’s length, and regarding me with squinted disbelief. “Look at me. Where else could I possibly be?” And then he slammed me back against the tunnel wall, my poor head bouncing, and dragged me even more roughly than before. “I told you not to talk. It makes it worse.”