The Stanhope Challenge - Regency Quartet - Four Regency Romances (41 page)

The man before him startled, shocked at Mark’s skills with the language. His expression of contempt fell to one more civil and, to Mark’s relief, one definitely more respectful. “How do you know our leader?”

None of your business. “That is his flagship. I am the captain of this ship, and I demand to meet my equal.”

The pirate sneered. “His is not your equal.”

How true. “Al Hassan will wish to speak with me.”

“Why?”

“Because I bring him news from my country. News he will wish to hear, especially if you dare to lay hands on us—any of us—and hurt us.”

The pirate’s black eyes narrowed. “You may tell me.”

“I tell you nothing.”

The Barber motioned to his own guard. “Take them! Take them all!”

Mark jerked up at the touch of rough hands to his shoulders. Hauled to his feet, he fought to stand tall though he had not been permitted to do anything but lie on the floor of Al Hassan’s flagship for two days. Or he thought it was two days. With little light permeating to the lowest, coldest hold of the galleon, Mark could only measure the drift of scant rays across the dank walls of his cell.

“Stand!” ordered one of his guards in the bastardized Arabic Mark knew well. “Walk! We will not carry you.”

Mark thrust out his hands toward the guard, clanking the chains on his wrists to encourage their removal.

The man’s wide nostrils flared in disgust at Mark’s audacity, muttering something that Mark bet was a florid curse.

“A blight on your family, as well,” he murmured, as the guard dragged him forward by the chains.

“Quiet!” seethed the guard behind him. This one spoke English.

Ah. How much?

“Where is the woman?” Mark demanded and swiveled his body to get a glimpse of the burly man a pace behind him. “My woman, what did you do with her?”

The guard snarled a few words to the one in front. If he understood what Mark asked, he was not inclined to jeopardize his own health by talking to the new captive.

Still Mark had to try for more news. “If you idiots have hurt her,” he poured out his worst thoughts, “or raped her, I will kill you. Someday, somehow.”

“Quiet!” bellowed the one behind him as he pushed Mark under a beam and up the ladder to the deck above and another above that, where he swayed in the blinding sun. Callous to his condition, his two guards hoisted him by the armpits and pushed him toward the side. He stumbled, his feet and legs still mush from days of inactivity, but he caught himself upright, fearing to lose face if he fell like a sack of wheat.

“Over! You go down,” barked his guard.

Mark slit open his eyes and saw they wanted him to climb over the rim and down the rope ladder to the slip boat. Just in front of this galleon, the three others in this flotilla navigated the close inlet toward a whitewashed city whose luster assaulted Mark’s sight. Grimacing, he scanned the decks of the other vessels. His crew of twelve clustered on one deck, hands chained like his. But among them, he detected no sign of Sirena. Heart dropping, he spun to examine this deck once more. What had they done with her?

From the moment Morris had told him the pirates were upon them, Mark knew these brigands would want her. For themselves, yes. But for their master, most definitely. To be certain, this meant they must not touch her, but treat her as if she were, quite literally, gold. The corsairs of the Bou Regreg had murdered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of men in their endless raids upon Iberian towns. They had done that to more easily plunder gold, silver, jewels, anything they fancied. But in those towns, these fiends had carried off any able-bodied young men who would surrender or children who appeared fit to work. Women, especially youthful, comely ones, these robbers saved for their leaders. Choosing among the female captives, the corsairs would take those they liked themselves to serve as houris. The most beautiful of them these bastards, who were a mix of Spanish, French and Turkish, would sell to Ottoman viziers.

Sirena Maxwell was one the pirates would save for a rich Ottoman lord or for their own self-proclaimed pasha of the Bou Regreg. If they have not taken her for themselves and thrown her overboard to hide their perfidy.

The possibility enraged him, churning his empty stomach and forcing him to crane his neck about in an attempt to find her.

But here among these men attired in the berber blues and blood red robes of the mercenaries of the Bou Regreg, Mark found no sign of her. He blamed himself that he had not ordered Morris to turn the ship about, back to Dover, the moment he recognized the identity of the beautiful stowaway on his ship. Instead he had done the dastardly but most natural thing. He had made love to her, so absorbed in her that he ignored his duty, his men and his honor. He sat on makeshift bench in the middle of the row boat and castigated himself for his failure to save them all. His hope remained to find a means to bargain with these heathens by negotiating with Al Hassan. If there was one thing the berber leader feared, it was war. War declared by a country larger and better equipped than this lawless breed. Al Hassan knew his power prevailed only in a vacuum. The preoccupation of France and Britain with each other these past few decades had opened a hole in the Atlantic. Mark knew Al Hassan wished it to continue. And the threat that the Americans might come and subdue the pirates was a horror to these men who had survived by hook and crook.

Aboard the skiff, ten men rowed him to shore. The tide came in so that their landing was swift and easy. Two guards lifted him once more under his armpits, and nigh unto dragged his tired feet through the sucking sand. As they reached the top step to the quays, Mark saw the teaming populace of the pirates’ city. Black men in brown African kaftans, Moors in jewel toned brocaded shirts and trousers and Greeks in belted knee-length white robes mixed with the Arabs in their multicolored jebellas. Like bees crammed into a small hive, the populace swarmed through the town eating, arguing or selling their wares. Mark’s guard poked him onward through the chattering crowds in the souk, the smoky air so ripe with the fog and fragrance of ambergris and patchouli his eyes watered. So hungry from lack of food these past days of captivity, his stomach clenched at the rich aromas of roasting lamb, mint and garlic. He gagged.

Faster, they pushed him through the winding medina until they passed through an iron gate three stories high. Tugging at his chains, they hastened him up a wide pebbled road curling up the cliff toward the fortress of their leader. At every pace stood sentries, their eyes cast straight ahead, no notice given of the captive’s arrival.

Remembering the same reception years ago, Mark knew less fear than satisfaction. Predictable, these lawless men had not changed the way they treated their ferenghi prisoners whom they wished to use to their own ends. That they valued him so much as to present him to their pirate pasha meant he had a card or two to play to free himself, his men and Sirena.

Inside the massive pink stone walls of their leader’s palace, Mark easily donned the only demeanor that might thwart the will of Al Hassan and set free Sirena. He strode the length of the ornate courtyard, the countless azure fountains spraying water to the sky. His thirst for revenge fresh in his mouth, Mark straightened and forced himself to become more sure-footed. Strength was the first element these outlaws understood. Courage closely followed.

They passed through a domed alabaster room, all of them breathing deeply of the cooler air. Swiftly, they entered another room, awash in mosaics in a spectrum of palest pinks to swarthy reds. From the delicate arches high above their heads, the harsh sunlight of North Africa diffused through pink stained windows to cast the room in the rosy glow that gave the palace its name among the English and the French. The Rouge, all in all two hundred or more rooms, was said to have been built over a century ago for the first corsair who rebelled against the local Ottoman vizier and took that man’s daughter to wife. The girl, it was claimed, had lush lips the passionate color of pomegranate seeds. The Rouge celebrated her mouth and her labia, both reputed to have been so talented at amusing her lord husband that he brought her to him nightly, his houris hating her for her skills.

Each succeeding corsair of Bou Regreb sought to find a similar woman who could excite him beyond all others. Al Hassan himself claimed more than a hundred wives. His seraglio housed three times that. If Al Hassan ventured one look at Sirena, clothed, the pirate would keep her. If Al Hassan stripped her naked, Mark feared the man would never let her go.

A filigreed golden door opened inward. Mark steadied himself for the audience. Play this right, he might be out of here today. His men and Sirena with him.

Twenty or more men in multicolored robes stood to either side of a massive white throne upon a dais. And there, atop red and pink silken pillows, sat the leader of this pack of thieves. Al Hassan had aged considerably since Mark had last stood before him six years ago. Once muscular, the self-styled pasha had a belly that hung over his embroidered belt, chubby legs both swathed in white bandages, one foot to the floor clad in a golden slipper, the other naked, oozing pus from the toes and propped upon a mound of cushions. His beard was long, pointed and gray. His fleshy jowls wiggling against his bull-like neck. His onyx eyes, large and ponderous, now rimmed by dark circles that gave evidence to some gluttonous disease.

Mark’s guards lifted him under the armpits once more.

“No!” he growled and shook them off. “I walk by myself.”

A chorus of many men’s voices permeated the throne room. It was a sound of surprise and approval. They might not understand his words, but they knew the tone of them. Certainly, praise was what he wanted, but admiration was what he needed more. He marched forward, each step a mighty declaration of his rage.

At the edge of the first step to the dais, he stopped. His gaze had never parted from Al Hassan’s. He would not show him deference. The man was a criminal, ignoring the rules of the sea and of men.

“Stan. Hope.” Al Hassan said with halting pronunciation, then tried more English only to shake his head and crook a finger at a tall man in a red fez. Mark saw the servant raise his dark head, and Mark blinked, shocked when he recognized him.

Ramon Catalon was a Spaniard, a capitan of a Spanish man of war taken by Al Hassan a month before Mark had been captured last time. He had suffered horribly at the hands of Al Hassan’s torturer. Everyone then in the corsair’s prison had watched him return from a daily bout with the pasha’s sadistic master of the whip. Each day they had watched him bleed, unable to walk for the lashes on the soles of his feet. Each day they assumed would be Ramon’s last. One day, he did not return to the dungeons. All concluded he was dead. His crew along with him. Yet here he stood. Regal, self-possessed and commanding as he ever was, he obviously had earned a new role in Al Hassan’s retinue. And though Ramon gave no sign of the friendship that had sprung up between him and Mark in their youth plying Caribbean waters, Catalon had a glint in his eyes that sparked in Mark new hope. Whether hope for escape or hope to live one more day, Mark would have been a fool to wager.

“Why did you come to the waters of the English and French?” Ramon asked him in better English than his master’s.

“I return to America, but went off course in a storm,” he told him, then shot a look at Hassan to determine if he understood.

Evidently no clarification was necessary. Al Hassan bent forward to peer into Mark’s eyes more deeply. “You have only tea and spices on your ships. Why?”

“I was taken prisoner by the British. My men, too.”

Al Hassan looked at Ramon, who interpreted.

“You are American. The British keep you rebel sailors for their slaves. How are you free?” came Hassan’s next query, this time through Ramon.

Mark summarized his father’s ransom of his ship, his men and him.

Al Hassan’s long gray brows darted about as he listened. Then he smiled salaciously as he waved a finger and asked another question.

The Spaniard met Mark’s gaze with a smile that held a hint of a sneer for the words he uttered. “Your father must be rich to free so many.”

“No,” Mark lied. He would not burden his father pay for him again. He would get out of here by his own actions. “He paid all he had to buy our freedom. There is nothing left.”

He waited while ruler and servant exchanged words. Finally, the Ramon faced him and with blank expression told him Hassan’s words. “We took your cargo. Your men, too.”

“And the woman with me?” Mark broached the subject Hassan did not. “Where is she?”

Ramon’s blue gaze turned sympathetic for a chilling moment. “Al Hassan has given her to his maids.”

Mark became paralyzed. She lives. But in the hands of Hassan’s female servants, she was being prepared for only one thing. Service to Hassan. As his slave.

Mark stepped forward. “She is mine.”

Two guards blocked him with scimitars to his throat.

Hassan needed no interpretation for his words. He threw out a question to Mark.

When Hassan had fallen back to his chair, Ramon uttered the question Mark had expected. “Is she?”

Mark would have spoken, but Ramon cautioned him with stern blue eyes, then he interpreted the flood of words from Hassan. “She wears sailors’ rags. The Koran decrees it is haraam for women to wear men’s clothes. Is she corrupt? Does she prefer women to men?”

“No. She is mine.”

“Yet she wears no jewelry, no gold, nothing to show she is a valued female in your custom. Is she your concubine?”

If Mark said yes, Hassan could take her if he wished and do anything with her. If he thought Sirena was his whore, Hassan would use her without regard for her person, her health or her life. If on the other hand Mark said no, Hassan would ask if she were his wife.

Hassan’s string of invective intruded upon Mark’s thoughts.

“Al Hassan wishes to know if she is pure?” Ramon inquired.

Is she a virgin? Here was the way to save her. “I have taken her to my bed. To touch her is forbidden. In my culture, you may not have her. By your law, you should not even look upon her face.”