Barbary Slave by Gardner Fox - Chapter 01 (Part 1 of 2)

1955 Genre: Historical Fiction / Swashbuckling Pirates

SOLD INTO SLAVERY! It was unthinkable that innocent Eve Doremus of Boston would be forced to parade her naked beauty in a Barbary Coast slave mart. Or that the blond giant who guarded the Sultan's female chattels would be a U.S. Marine lieutenant. Yet anything was possible in exotic, violent, 19th Century Tripoli.

Amid the love-making, intrigues and tortures of the Pasha's pagan court, Eve and her marine—Stephen Fletcher—fell in love. But their romance was destined to face every temptation and peril as they loved and battled their way to freedom.

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CHAPTER 1 (Part 1 of 2)

The late afternoon sun made a white splendor of the city that lay sprawled across the low, sloping sands of the African coast. From the towering castle walls to the hook of the mole-head that held the blue waters of its harbor, Tripoli brooded in sullen apathy at the lone frigate ship that slid through the Mediterranean like a hungry wolf pacing at the outskirts of a camp. Sunlight tipped the muzzles of its starboard cannon and put a glaze on its freshly painted deck-boards. A wind whipped at the striped flag taut from its mainmast, occasionally showing the fifteen stars on its blue field.

Inside the city, men stared at the ship with venom in their eyes. Guards paced the thick white walls of the palace nestling at the northern corner of the Street of Arcades, their faces dark and gloomy. Along the stretch of sand before these walls, men in linen loincloths paused from their tasks of twisting strips of hemp to mutter oaths to Allah, as a glance showed them the big frigate prowling just outside gunnery range.

Men hated and men starved inside the city of Tripoli in this year 1805, that the Moslems called 1221. The high white walls of the Caramanli castello, that joined the sea walls to run in a height of stone as far as the Maltese castle near the mole, had been built to keep enemies out. Now these walls kept the true believers in, and those upstart Americans, who flew their stars and stripes with such unbelievable defiance, added their weight of sail and metal to act the part of jailers.

Where the Street of Arcades made a bend before the stalls of the rug sellers, a white man with only a piece of rag at his middle stirred restlessly. His eyes were feverishly bright in the dark bronze of his face as they scanned the passersby. Hunger was an ache in this man. It hurt, deep inside him, and the hurt was strong enough so that he was on the point of madness.

The man moved suddenly, scurrying out of the archway as a frightened rat scurries, his eyes intent on the orange peel tossed so carelessly aside by a passing dowedee with his fishnets dangling over a shoulder. There was street dirt on that bit of rind, and dry dust. But to the starving man whose bony hand clawed out at it, it seemed a rare, exotic fruit.

He caught it up and slithered sideways into the shelter of a canopy overhanging the street from the doorway of a glassware stall. Nervously his fingertips went over the skin, knowing it to be big and still juicy: possibly torn off an orange from Jefren. When he was partially hidden by the striped overhang, he hunkered down and licked at the peel, his eyes closing almost in ecstasy at the bittersweet taste.

He took a bite, carefully, muscles tensed against the need to wolf down this food. He chewed slowly, gently.

The starving man knew that the passersby were regarding him with amused scorn, but he was past pride. An empty belly screamed up to him that pride is an expensive luxury, and for a man who was now only a slave to the stone merchant, Ali ben Sidi of Tripoli, it ill behooved him to be spending something he did not have. And so he crouched and mouthed at is orange peel, ignoring the eyes of a slave seller whose lips were twisted in disgust, not seeing the scornful glance that a haughty corsair captain flung him as he picked his way between the street hawkers.

Voices touched his ears, but he did not hear the words. “The nasrany is worse than an alley cur. A dog would turn up his nose at such fare.”

“May Allah be blessed that I am not in his place!”

“Inshallah! He reminds me of the pigs I keep to eat my garbage!"

When the peeling was gone, and even as his stomach rumbled gratefully, the man stood up into the late sunlight that came over the rooftops of Tripoli to bathe his broad shoulders and deep chest in crimson light. Soon now, it would be the hour of prayer, when the muezzins would step onto the circular platforms of the mosques and call on all true believers to face toward Mecca and kneel atop their prayer mats. He was tall, this man, lean to emaciation, and there was pride in his fleshless face, from which the gray eyes blazed like crystals. The dirty rag at his hips was in danger of sliding from his narrow loins. A tousle of pale yellow hair, like a mop upended and thrust upon his poll, gathered the sunbeams with a reddish glint.

He moved onto the cobblestones, his eyes darting toward the gutters and beyond them into the dark mysteries of the stall shops, hoping against hope that some Turk or Arab fool had thrown away another precious bit of orange skin. The man went on more slowly. There was other food here. There had to be! He was late now, at the stone quarries. There would be lashes on his back from the black bull-hide whip that fat sheriff wielded so efficiently, but he would take those lashes in exchange for one more peeling from a Tunisian orange. Stubbornly, he told himself he would not return to the quarry where they made him lug gray stones from sunrise to sunset, until he did find it.

He saw the fruit lying close by the white wall of a goldsmith shop.

It was an overripe melon, squishy and half rotten.

The man whimpered deep in his throat and ran for it. His hand was stretching downward for the big fruit when a fat man moved out of the doorway of the goldsmith shop and came forward with a quick stride. His booted foot lifted in a kick. The kick caught the starving man at the side of his face and toppled him back into the dust of the cobbled Street.

He lay there on an elbow and a thigh, staring wildly up at the man who had kicked him. He saw the fleshy brown chest and black spade beard, the scimitar dangling from the belt that banded his middle, the loose green trousers that, except for the yellow boots on his feet, was his sole garment.

The starving man had been in Tripoli long enough to know this blubbery monster for a Caramanli palace guard. A member of the pasha's family was in the stall shop, buying precious ornaments. The guard threw back his head and roared vicious laughter into the warm African sunlight.

“No,” said the starving man through cracked lips. “By God No.”

He saw that Moroccan leather boot lift and poise itself above the overripe melon. Then that foot was coming down on the fruit, mashing it, making its skin burst wide apart and shower juice and pulp across half the street.

The guard laughed louder than before.

“American filth! There goes your meal! Come! Lick your food off my slipper! Eh? Here!”

The guard lifted his yellow boot with the fruit still clinging to the leather and extended it toward the man in the street.

That was when the starving man went mad.

He came off thigh and elbow in a fluid twist. His right foot took its purchase from a rounded cobblestone, and launched him in an arching leap at the hilarious guard. His big hands, like bony claws, wrapped about that taunting foot and twisted.

The guard roared his pain and his surprise. His fat body went backward, off balance. He fell heavily, directly in the arched doorway of the goldsmith shop.

The starving man went after him. The sight of that scimitar hanging in its belt chains had put a frenzy in his blood. His hand came down about its braided hilt. With an oath on his parched lips, he tugged it free. The blue steel came out into the sunlight and went yellow as the sunbeams caught it. "Now, you Tripolitan pig, get on your feet!"

The guard lay back on both elbows and shouted. “Sa'ad! Jibran! To me! Out here in front of the shop!“

The crowd in the street paused to stare. There was a stirring among them. This naked wild-man with a bared blade in his hand was a sight that struck to their hearts. A voice or two called for someone to break the neck of this crazed infidel.

The blue blade moved, and the voices fell still.

Stephen Fletcher felt the pride stir in him, driving out the anger and the madness. Not in a year and a half had he felt like this, with a weapon in his hand and his enemies ringing him in. That long ago, the U.S. frigate Philadelphia had run aground on the rocks east of Tripoli. He had been wearing the uniform of a marine lieutenant on that October day.

The Philadelphia had hit the rocks while chasing a Tripolitan corsair. Fletcher could still feel the grating crunch underfoot. Remembering what had happened then made the sweat come out on his face. They had worked hard to free it, with Captain William Bainbridge shouting orders, with the creak of davit ropes lowering a stern boat interrupting his voice, with sailors overhead loosing the top-gallant sails. They were caught fast, and the Barbary pirates knew it. They came flocking in their little feluccas and barquentines, pounding the big frigate while American axes chipped away at the foremast. The foremast fell, taking the main top-gallant mast with it. Guns were thrown overboard to lighten the ship forward.

As if sensing the helplessness of the big frigate, the Tripolitan gunboats swarmed in with their sakers blasting. They shot away the masts, but spared the hull. This was a prize that the corsairs would not duplicate soon again. Besides, by sparing the hull, they spared the lives of the crew, and healthy Americans would ring good prices in the slave market.

Stephen Fletcher grinned mirthlessly, remembering those hectic moments when the pirates had come aboard, fighting and wrestling with the Americans. There had been steel bared, and fists flashed here and there, as proud men sought out: a hawk face, as brown as old leather, twisted into a mask of berserk rage and hate, with a small black beard below sullen, full lips and a straight, thin nose. A topknot hung like a horsetail from that shaven head, making the face seem even more sinister. Dark eyes, lighted with inner fires, bright with triumph, fastened on him and on the other marines who fought at his side. Fletcher knew the man for a reis, a sea captain, as he came swinging down on a rope hastily flung above a yardarm, his curving scimitar in a brown fist.

Fletcher had gone to meet his steel with his own service sword. Their blades had clanged twice in thrust and parry before the corsairs had swept into them and whirled them apart. But even now, all these months later, he could still see that face, in a contorted spasm of hate, and the over bright eyes glittering with triumph.

The fight had been a short one. To save his men, Captain William Bainbridge surrendered his sword to the dark man with the feverish eyes. Mustafa reis, his own men called him, with something of fright in their voices.

Most of the prisoners were to be taken before the pasha. They would be housed in the castle dungeons and held for ransom or for a prisoner exchange. There were some chosen for a different fate. Mustafa reis did the choosing. He went striding across the deck, planks of the big frigate, his eyes touching the faces of the sullen prisoners. Some he pointed at, and as he pointed, corsairs came and harried these men away.

When Mustafa reis came to Stephen Fletcher, he barked something in the coast dialect and let his eyes rest on the big marine. Fletcher saw death for him in those eyes and in the hard brown contours of that face. Whatever it was the corsair captain had barked to the half-naked inn at his back, the American knew, it would not be a pleasant thing. Within two hours he was at the slave market. Next morning he had been sold to Ali ben Sigi, the stone merchant. For a year and a half, he had been working in the quarries, breathing stone dust and eating rotten garbage that cost his master nothing.

Now he had a chance to fight his enemies like a man. There was no broken deck under his feet, no officer roaring a command at him to lay down his arms.

He moved the curving blue blade again, and his laughter was hard, and cold.

“Take it away from me! Take it—if you can!”

The crowd fell back a little, and now Fletcher saw that men were coming from the goldsmith's doorway, guards who wore the same royal-green colors of the man who lay at his feet, still shouting.

A big man followed the guards out into the street. He wore a gold brocade barracan trimmed in black fur, and pointed slippers of red Cordovan leather. There was arrogance in the tilt of his chin, and in the glowing eyes that stared at the naked infidel. The brown hairs of his tiny beard quivered as he felt the defiant mockery of the American slave.

Yussuf Caramanli was the pasha of Tripoli. His thin, lightly sneering lips and bright eyes betrayed the pride that had fed on a century of power here in this coastal city. In 1714 his ancestor Mamet had come into power by murdering the Turkish soldiers who served Ahmed III. The Caramanlis had held tight to their power, using murder and treachery as their allies. When Hamet, Yussuf's brother, had come to power some years before, it was Yussuf who deposed him and assumed the throne.

Now all Europe paid him tribute. Even Napoleon Bonaparte, at whose frown the Continent shook in fear, sent him gold. London gold and Italian silver, Greek jewels and German monies, all came flowing into his great, brass-bound coffers. The world acknowledged the sea might of Yussuf Caramanli and paid him gold and silver and jewels for his personal enrichment, to keep his slim corsair ships from their coastal waters and his gun-deck cannon from their heavily laden merchant ships.

All the world paid tribute, except for a young nation on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. A nation of revolutionists, who had won their freedom from England only a quarter of a century ago. One of those Americans stood here before him now, with a naked sword in his hand.

Yussuf Caramanli smiled thinly. His dark hand twisted on the gold braid of the dagger-hilt whose scabbard he wore, like all Moslems, in the brocaded silk sash at his middle. He spoke quickly to the man crumpled at his feet.

“What happened, Kefas? Why do you grovel like a dog before this nasrany?”

“He assaulted me, highness. Knocked me down and stole my steel!”

The starving man had never seen Yussuf Caramanli. He said boldly, “I was reaching for that melon. He kicked me and put his foot on it.”

The pasha grimaced in disgust. By the black stone! These unbelievers had no pride at all! He said harshly, “Get up, Kefas! Sa'ad, give him your blade. I want this man cut in little pieces. Slowly, Kefas!”

The heavyset guard grinned and took the blade his fellow handed him. On feet that were astonishingly light for a man of his bulk, he moved toward the infidel. The starving man did not wait for him. His scimitar went high and came curving down in a molinello for the head that altered swiftly into a slanting cut at the ribs. Only for the fact that the attacking man's bare foot slipped on the pulp of the ruined melon, Kefas the Fat would have lost half his side. As it was, he got his own blade up just in time. The keen edge of the scimitar scratched his arm into red wetness, then fell away.

Steel clashed as those blued blades fell and lifted. The naked man slid and crouched, and the madness in him gave his starved muscles strength. He used the molinelli in prime and tierce until the steel seemed to blur. The bright eyes of Yussuf Caramanli followed every play of that scimitar with understanding and a little envy.

The fight did not last long. To the slice at the fat arm, the starved man added a gash at the blubbery flesh of his naked side, and a gaping cut in the hairy thigh. As those wounds dripped red blood on the cobbles, the naked at lunged, the curved blue steel held out straight before him. Its point went into the guard's belly an inch above the deep-set navel and protruded out his back.

The guard screamed and dropped his blade. His hands clawed at the pain in his middle as he lunged forward, face down.

The pasha of Tripoli stared at his fallen gladiator. He still watching the death throes when a soft hand touched his arm.

The woman had come forward from the goldsmith's stall at the first clang of the curving blades. Above the gold rim of her black silk veil, her yellow cat eyes-glowed brightly, moving from the scimitars to the big, almost naked body of the American, then sliding sideways to the bronzed-features of the pasha. Slyly, she had noted the faint touch of envy in his glance. Now she put a soft finger on his arm, so that he would turn and look at her.

Mariani Chamiprak was aware that she made a stirring figure, with the late-afternoon sunlight on her thin, black silk trousers and long yelek of black satin threaded with gold that hugged her lissome body from throat to knees. Her veil was attached by silver pins to her glossy black hair. She was the favorite wife of Yussuf Caramanli, his bask-eedin, and her slightest whim was a command to him.

She said softly, “The infidels killed my personal bodyguard, Yussuf.”

“He shall be tortured with the bastinado on his naked feet, and the screws on his limbs, my love.”

She pouted. “Oh, no! I would not want that.” She added slyly, “He is a good fighter, is he not?”

The pasha sighed. "By the beard of the prophet! As good a man as I have seen since the days of my youth, when I fought beside Murad reis himself.”

Marlani looked on the big Frank with over-bright eyes. Mashallah! He was a handsome one, even in his stayed state. There was pride in him, and a kind of inner wildness that sent little trickles of excitement down her slim brown legs. He was a different man from fat, bloated Kefas. It might be enjoyable, having him around the harem as her personal bodyguard. Yussuf paid little enough attention to her any more, being too concerned with this war he had managed to get himself into with the United States.

She let her warm little hand come to rest on Yussuf's wrist. “Make him my guard, pasha effendi. Let the unbeliever take the place of Kefas!”

Yussuf Caramanli lifted his hard brown face to study the woman at his elbow. Marlani let her eyes smile up at this man who had deposed his brother Hamet for the pashaship of Tripoli less than a dozen years ago. She read the fierce pride in him, the ruthlessness and the cruelty. She knew also of the frustration that ate in him, because of the big American frigates like the Constitution that prowled the outer waters of the city and harbor he ruled. He was very angry now with the big blond American who had killed Kefas. “You want me protected from all danger,” she pouted, caressing his arm with slim fingertips. “And you said yourself this man can fight as well as Murad reis of blessed memory. Give him to me, Yussuf. Let him guard me, for you.”

His nostrils flared. Yussuf Caramanli was confused, as he often was when this sly desert wife of his set her wits to obtain favors from him. Only in the most important matters did he ever seek to cross her, and then only sparingly. Now, as a gesture, he protested.

“But he is an infidel!”

“A hungry infidel,” she reminded him, smiling beneath her veil. “If he will eat a rotten melon off the street, he would be grateful to whoever gives him better fare. He will be like a dog in his devotion.”

The pasha glanced at the nearly naked American. He grumbled, “He should be made a eunuch.”

“That would destroy his fighting abilities. You saw how easily he beat down poor, fat Kefas! If you really want to protect me, give me someone like that!”

The pasha grunted. What his bash-kedin said was true enough. To make a eunuch of this man would be to deprive him of a sword-arm that might serve the Caramanlis with fanatical devotion. Still, he was an American, and Tripoli was at war with the Americans.

Marlani Chamiprak pressed closer. “Your enemies are not all Americans, remember! Your brother Hamet is not dead. He has many friends in Tripoli. Some night he may send someone to kill me, knowing how dear I am to you, nasrany would be a very tiger against such an attack!”

The pasha of Tripoli studied the bone structure of the slave. He had a big, strong body, a body that could defend him as well as his kedin, is the need arose. It would not matter to the American whether he killed one Tripolitan or another. Yussuf Rather thought that this yellow-haired slave might enjoy killing some of Hamet's friends, if they ever did attack him. Yussuf shivered with anticipatory fear, and looked closer at the big slave. That tall body would fill out with hard muscle when he ate something other than street refuse.

Yussuf Caramanli prided himself on his judgment. He said harshly, “Who owns you, nasrany?”

“Ali ben Sidi, the stone merchant.”

"I will buy you from him. I will make you personal guard to Marlani. Do well, and you shall be rewarded well, fail and—“ The pasha shrugged. He said softly, “Have you ever seen what a lead-tipped knot can do to a man?”

The man in the dirty rag shivered. His bared back bore the scars of former whippings. The pasha smiled cruelly, — “What is your name, infidel dog?”

The arrogance of Yussuf Caramanli, before whose corsair fleets all the world appeared to tremble, brought a spate of fury into the starving man. He let the anger run along his veins, enjoying its feel after so many months of subservience. It was good to be half blind with clean rage again. Not the craze of almost madness that had been in him short moments ago—that was rash, and only brought destruction to a man. This anger was different; it was cool and it let a man think, and it was all the more deadly because of that.

Not since Ali ben Sidi had strung him up by his wrists and ordered his bare back lashed to a bloody froth, had he been this way. That had been three days after the U.S. Philadelphia had run aground on the shoals of the harbor of Tripoli.

The United States and the Barbary state of Tripoli had been at war in that mid-autumn of 1803, a war begun when Yussuf pasha used an ax on the flagpole of the American consulate at Tripoli when that young nation across the Atlantic refused to join its European fellows in paying tribute to the corsairs.

A fleet under the command of Commodore Edward Preble had gathered at Gibraltar to blockade the North African coast. Under Captain Bainbridge, the Philadelphia ran the shoals and reefs of those treacherous waters, hunting corsair ships. On the last day of October, while chasing a small vessel standing in for the protection of the Tripolitan road-stead, the Philadelphia scraped across a reef.

Stephen Fletcher had been taken from the helpless frigate to the slave mart, and then to the stone quarries. When he showed stubbornness and fight, Ali ben Sidi had summoned his big slave master. Fletcher had been strung up by the wrists and lashed until his bare back was a bloody pulp.

The cuts of that whip had gone deeper than the flesh they marred. They taught him caution and prudence, and a seeming humility. He learned how to behave like a slave under the lash that night. Ali ben Sidi had no more trouble with him. He worked days in the stone quarries, and the nights he spent sleeping fitfully, dreaming of the Virginia plantation that had been his home, and of the fields of tobacco and cotton shifting in the breeze off the Shenandoahs.

The year and a half since the grounding of the Philadelphia added to the strength of his long thighs and lean middle, putting power in his chest and arms, ridging his back with swollen muscles. He was half starved all the time, and was never really free of the bite of hunger, and so in those hours when he was excused from the quarries, he took to scavenging in the streets.

Now, for the first time in many months, the starving man saw a chance to unleash his pride. He seemed to lift himself. His chin thrust forward.

“I am Stephen Fletcher," he said, “Lieutenant Stephen Fletcher, United States Marines.”