Barbary Slave by Gardner Fox - Chapter 11
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 11
The night was an endless thing to the man who hung spread-eagled on the shrouds. An offshore wind had come out of the Sahara, its fading warmth touching him at chest and face in an effervescent searching. The sea lifted and dipped below him, the ropes sawing at his tied wrists and ankles at each movement of the brig. After a while the pain at his wrists was so intense it seemed the rope was slicing through them, and blood ran down his arms in rivulets. Dawn found him only half conscious, his head lolling limply. When Mustafa reis saw him like that, he roared in anger. “Cut his thongs, you sons of Shaitan! Am I to whip a dead man? I want to hear him scream!”
Steel flashed in the growing sunlight, and hands cradled Fletcher to the deck planks. Wine from a leather jack was poured down his throat, and brown hands fed him spiced meats and hot bread. When the strength began to flow back into him, he could see that his wrists had been cleaned and bandaged.
Mustafa reis stood before him, legs spread wide, white teeth bared in a wolfish grin. “Allah would have me keep you sound of limb, nasrany, until Yussuf gives you to his torturers. Besides, if I let you grow too weak, you'll be no fun under the cat." The black eyes searched him carefully, seeing that the food and drink was putting new life into the American. Then Mustafa laughed harshly and gestured with a hand. “Tie him to the mainmast."
Four men lifted Fletcher to the thick cedar mast. His arms were tied around the mainmast in grotesque embrace, his cheek tight against the wood. He felt the shirt torn from his back, and his tanned skin bared to the sea breeze. From somewhere behind him, he heard Mustafa reis say, “Begin!” Leather swished in the air, and his back exploded with pain.
The plaits of leather, sewn with tiny pellets of lead, were like tongues of fire biting through his skin. Fletcher hit the mast with his whole body, convulsing, his mouth opening in an involuntary groan.
The thongs came down again, but Fletcher stood rigid, soundless, though his muscles cramped in protest. Then a violent shudder ran the length of his body, shaking the stout mast that held him.
Again the leaden pellets drove into him, exposing rib bones and red flesh.
Fletcher threw back his head, wanting to scream as he had wanted nothing before in all his life. Silently, he ground his teeth into his lip, until there was warm blood in his mouth, and swung his head from side to side.
Then he saw the ship: a big frigate, with an immense spread of snowy sail and brass cannon gleaming brightly in the sun. A curving gilded beak rose above the sharp prow that came slicing through the green waves. She was fast and graceful, this American frigate, and her forty-four guns showed her power. Only seven years old—she had slid off her chocks at Hartt's shipyard in Boston in the fall of '98—the Constitution was already building a reputation. She was hull up and coming fast, sails tight and full with wind.
Fletcher did not believe his eyes. Through tight-clamped teeth he groaned, “I’m going mad with the pain. I'm beginning to see visions!”
A puff of white smoke appeared at one of the frigate's forward cannon. An instant later his ears caught the dull thud.
The whiplash about to strip his back of more flesh paused in mid-stroke. A man cried out harshly from the port rail. Then other voices broke in, and feet went running back and forth on the deck. Mustafa reis was bellowing orders. Powder kegs were broken out, and men came to carry them to their battle stations.
Fletcher hung on the mast, forgotten. His eyes were wide, his twisted grin triumphant. “Hell! It's the Constitution herself! I'd know her lines anywhere! Cave in her timbers, you American swabs! Fill her full of holes, then ride your keel over her settling hull!”
His voice rose to a screech. “Mustafa reis, you damned pirate You hear me? Take a good look at her. She's the Constitution herself that's found you! You can't outrun her and you can't outfight her! Maybe now you'll learn what it means to start a war with the United States!”
He was shouting and laughing and crying all at the same time. A passing corsair heard him babbling and backhanded him as he went by, but Fletcher only laughed the louder. Now the Constitution was swinging broadside on and her starboard cannon were like little round mouths pointing at the Tripoline. For a few moments she rode like this, beautiful and tall and sleek, her white sails bulging, slicing easily through the Mediterranean. Then the cannon mouths were spitting red flame and white smoke, and as the roar of those brass voices came to Fletcher, the deck rocked under him. It was as if a giant hand caught the brig and shook her. A mast came down and hit the deck with a screech of splitting wood. Sheered-off ropes whipped in the wind. Men were screaming below decks, helpless in that hailstorm of crushing lead.
Almost leisurely, the U. S. S. Constitution veered off. She ran with the wind ahead of the Barbary ship, and swung about five hundred yards away. As she returned, almost impudent in her swift strength, her port cannon menaced the pirate vessel.
Mustafa reis screamed with rage on the quarter-deck. “Starboard helm! Starboard helm! Clear the decks below.” Men ran to obey those commands, but the American frigate was coming fast. When she was directly to larboard, her cannon-twenty-two to each side-belched their lead and flame and Smoke again.
The Aydah shuddered wildly, trembling like a living thing in agony under that smashing broadside. Wood splintered; timbers caved. Powder kegs went up in red geysers. A sail flapped uselessly where the mizzenmast had been shot away. The quarter-deck guns were firing high as the gun-deck cannon were firing low, drowning out the screams of Mustafa reis from the starboard rail.
Fletcher was laughing, helplessly, inanely. “Again, again, again!” he howled. “Fill her up with lead and let the damned ship go down to Davy Jones's locker! Come up on her starboard planks this time!"
The corsair brig was listing badly, exposing her belly timbers. Her starboard cannon were pointing skyward as the ship tilted. She could not have harmed the big American frigate from any angle, now. As if realizing that, the Constitution tacked lazily and swept up aft. Her cannon roared, and the Aydah was pushed sideways as her keel timbers gave way to that leaden onslaught.
Fletcher felt the ship dying under his bare feet. She was settling fast, filling with water. The deck tilted sharply as the waves dragged her downward. Men pinned by broken bulkheads or fallen cannon were screaming in agony and fright, for the rest of the crew were leaving them behind in their haste to float the cock-boats and man their thwarts. As the waves washed in over them, those men would gurgle and drown, held helpless.
It came to Fletcher that he would drown, too. The corsairs were riddled with panic. They could think only of their places in the tenders that were being dropped overboard in such haste. Even Mustafa reis forgot his vengeance in his hurry to save his skin. Fletcher expected to feel a pistol ball in his back at any moment, but it never came. One minute the Aydah was all-confusion and rushing, yelling men; the next, it was silent as the sea into which it was being sucked so swiftly.
He fought the rope that held his arms around the mast. He flailed his body this way and that, but was anchored firmly. When the Aydah went down, he would go with it.
He did not see the lookout in the crow's nest of the Constitution take the spyglass from his eye, and shout down at Captain Stephen Decatur where he stood calm and relaxed in his blue uniform jacket and white breeches, his knee high boots polished until they glittered. He could not hear the captain's orders as a small boat was swung outward and lowered swiftly to the waves. A dozen seamen scampered down the rope ladder and into the tender.
Then the cock-boat was shooting across the green waves toward him. A lieutenant in the bow was kicking his feet free of his half-boots, preparatory to swinging up onto the partly submerged deck of the sinking corsair.
Salt water was swirling about the lieutenant's left ankle as his knife bit into the rope that held Fletcher. Gentle hands caught and lifted him; then he was being lowered between the thwarts, and the oars flashed as the small boat shot away from the dying Aydah like a frightened thing.
Fletcher stared up into the wind-reddened face of an officer whose eyes were warm with sympathy. “American?” the lieutenant asked.
Fletcher nodded. “Lieutenant, United States Marines imprisoned at Tripoli. Escaped. Can tell your commander about fort's defenses. I—“
It was then that Fletcher fainted.
Fletcher opened his eyes in a berth deck cabin. He lay in a narrow bunk, face down, his left cheek cradled on a mattress. All around him he could hear the sounds of a warship at sea: the faint voices of singing men working at the deck planks with mops and pails, the peculiar metallic rasp of a cannon being cleaned, the steady chant of seamen heaving the log.
A seaman in striped jersey and wide white trousers came to his feet when he saw Fletcher staring at him. His grin was infectious.
“You be a lucky man, sir! Fortunate it was that one of the boys was sweepin’ the pirate's deck with his glass.”
Fletcher croaked, “Fortunate it was, seaman.” The sailor knuckled his brow. “I got orders to alert the captain when you come to, sir. If you’ll be excusing me, I'll go above decks.”
It seemed to Fletcher that he just had time to roll over on his side—even the weight of the thin sheets was intolerable on his lacerated back—when the door opened and the red faced lieutenant whose knife had freed him from the mainmast of the Aydah pushed his head into the cabin.
"He looks fit and fine, Captain,” he grinned, and stood aside.
Captain Stephen Decatur came into the room with brisk steps. He was a young man, only in his middle twenties in this spring of 1805. Like his fellow officers, Isaac Hull and Charles Stewart, he was building the foundations of naval greatness on the decks of the young American navy that was on blockade duty in the Mediterranean. Already he had distinguished himself by slipping into the harbor of Tripoli and burning the Philadelphia where her corsair captors had moored her, in February, 1804. While commanding the twelve-gun schooner Enterprise, he had served also as aide to Commodore Edward Preble before Barron replaced him.
Of middle height, he had dark curly hair and piercing eyes. The resolute energy that burned in his strong body revealed itself by his quick, catlike movements. His dark blue jacket was set with silver buttons and lace, and the epaulets at his shoulders were thick with gold. He dragged a chair toward him and sat down.
“Can you talk, lieutenant?”
"I think so, sir. Luckily, they'd just begun with the cat when your fore-deck cannon spoke.”
“The ship's doctor says you'll be on your feet in a day or thereabouts. Lieutenant Marley tells me you know the defenses of the Tripoline fort.”
“I do, sir. But more important than that, there's the matter of a secret fleet Yussuf Caramanli is building. . ."
Fletcher talked for almost an hour as Decatur sat tight lipped, listening. When he was done, weakness washed across him in surging waves. His eyelids felt weighted with leaden sinkers. He scarcely felt the touch of the captain's fingers at his shoulder, nor heard the voice with which he ordered him back to sleep. He was snoring as the door closed behind the two officers.
In the companionway, Decatur said crisply, “Order on all sail, Lieutenant. We'll stand full and by, south by east for the Tripoline coast, to rendezvous with the fleet off Benghazi. After that, we'll go looking for these ships Yussuf Caramanli is building. When we find them—well, I think our little war will be a long way over.”
“Yes, sir!” agreed the smiling lieutenant, and saluted briskly.
Fletcher was in uniform three days later, off Farawa Island. Once again the tight blue marine jacket, with its turn back skirts and rows of silver buttons, fitted his chest snugly. He stood at the rail with Lieutenant Marley as the Constitution skirted the low African coastline.
Some days before, Commodore John Rodgers had arrived from the United States in the Congress to replace Commodore Samuel Barron as commander of the Mediterranean fleet. Captain Stephen Decatur, commanding the U.S.S. Constitution, was given command of the Congress while the Constitution was made flagship of the squadron. In this late May of 1805, the United States Mediterranean fleet was at its peak of strength. The frigates Constitution and Constellation, Congress and Essex, the sixteen-gun brigs. Argus and Siren, and the two twelve-gun schooners, built with shallow drafts for inshore work, the Nautilus and the Vixen, made it a formidable fighting force.
Now, with the Constitution showing the way, the other frigates came fast abeam, all sails flying, sunlight glinting on their cannon and copper rigging. Behind them, strung out astern, came the brigs and schooners. It was a fine spring morning, with the sun warming and the blue skies empty of clouds.
They had come up in the night, moving without lights. In the distance, the glimmer of lanterns and bonfires showed them where men worked feverishly against time to ready brigantines and feluccas for sea duty. All that night, from the dog watch to the graveyard watch, men had slept at their battle stations, ready at the first blast of the boatswain's pipe to leap to action. Now they waited with the early morning sun on their backs, crouched near their gleaming cannon, ready and eager for the signal to touch matches to vents.
The pirates had seen them. Desperate men were running on the sands, striving with sweat and muscle to turn the twenty-four pounders, seeking to roll the cannons around to face the sea and the big ships that had materialized so miraculously out of the early dawn mists.
A voice roared on the Constitution's gun-deck An instant later, the cannons spat their flame and iron. In this first attack, chain shot—twin cannonballs linked with chains—was poured along the stretch of beach. Usually used against the rigging of an enemy ship, this screaming weight of linked iron cut a bloody swathe along those clean white sands. Men were ripped in half, or sheared of hands and legs by that rush of whirling metal. Gun crews went down as if beneath a giant flail.
The Constitution moved on, and now the Constellation poured its weight of shot across the beaches. Then it was the turn of the other ships, their crews eager and grim, their master gunners sighting and shouting out their orders. One after another, a dozen broadsides raked the blood soaked Sands.
Now the Constitution was coming back, its port cannon ready.
Five swift brigantines, all the ships that the corsairs had outfitted for sea, came to meet the big frigate. The American ship slowed its advance, giving the Congress and the Essex time to join her. They closed on the five Tripolines together, outnumbered but confident.
Chain shot had been exchanged for solid iron. As the vessels closed, the starboard cannon of the Constitution exploded in a deafening outpouring of flame and metal. One of the brigantines reeled back under that solid onslaught, her timbers ripped and splintered. On the main deck, where the twenty-four pounders were powder monkeys ran with round kegs. Half naked men worked at the cannons, grabbing them on the starboard side, and reloading the breeches on the port side. Officers moved back and forth, calling out orders calmly, as if they were doing no more than testing their marksmanship.
From the rigging, selected marines and sailors were pouring rifle fire into the open decks of the nearest brigantine, dropping corsair after corsair at his battle station. Two hundred yards away, the Argus was slipping between two brigantines, both broadside batteries erupting simultaneously.
The Constitution moved on through the water. Now its port batteries were aiming at the fourth corsair ship. Now they were exploding.
Behind them, the Congress was closing with the last pirate vessel. Sailors and marines with bayonets fixed to their rifles, were shooting and running forward as the grapnels swung overhead. As the two ships bumped free-boards, the Americans brought their bayonets into play.
Lieutenant Marley was pointing aft, where the Nautilus and Vixen were swinging in line past the beaches, discharging chain shot in successive broadsides. "No man can live in that,' he said grimly. “Inside an hour, there will be only dead men and smashed cannons left on those sands."
It was hard to talk and harder to listen in the crashing roar of the spar deck cannons. Fletcher merely nodded and caught hold of the starboard rail as the Constitutions gave to another broadside. The smell of burned gunpowder and sweating men came to him in the wind. This was not his first action at sea, but the old excitement was still there, making his heart jump under his tightly buttoned service jacket. His hand itched to be around a pistol butt or a sword-hilt, but his orders were to remain with Lieutenant Marley and observe the Tripoline fleet.
Two wounded brigantines were closing with the Constitution. If they could board and capture her, and turn her weight of cannon against her sister ships, they yet might salvage victory from this debacle. Fletcher watched their advance, saw the half naked fighting men crouched behind the gunwales, pistols and scimitars in their brown hands, saw grapnels being swung from the netted shrouds.
The Constitution bided its time until the corsairs were within twenty yards. Then their gun deck and spar deck cannon exploded. The brigantines were wreathed in white smoke, only their towering masts and slating sails showing. Men screamed and moaned from the shelter of that smoke. Timbers splintered. Masts cracked and fell.
The American ship slid on, away from the broken corsairs.
As the wind caught the gun smoke and blew it toward the shoreline, they could see the sinking Tripolines wallowing in the surging sea. Without masts and sails-one of the corsairs had lost its rudder in that iron hail—they floated helplessly. More than half their crews lay dead. Most of the others were wounded near to dying.
Commodore Rodgers, now commanding the Constitution, turned his attention to the Essex, where she was locked gunwale to gunwale with two pirate ships. The Congress was hurling broadside after broadside at the fifth and last pirate ship, which was settling rapidly by the stern.
The men on the Essex were fighting savagely. Their gun crews had abandoned their cannon, after one final broadside, for pistols and muskets. The pirates came to them in surging, screaming waves, maddened by battle lust. Their naked chests invited the thrust of steel, and the marines and seamen decimated their ranks with bayonet play.
The Constitution could not fire on the pirate ships for fear of hitting the Essex, but it could send a fresh wave of marines aboard one of the Tripolines. Under the stabbing impact of those bayonets, the pirates went down like tenpins on a village green. Freed of the necessity of meeting two foes, the crew of the Essex swung around to their port side, where the corsair crew was striving to come aboard.
But the fight was over, after that. The single Tripoline brigantine that was still floating when the Essex cut loose her grapnels, was set afire and allowed to drift inshore with the tide. Those of the pirates still alive were taken in a tender to Farawa Island and put ashore. Then a landing party went in to spike what remained of the Tripoline cannons.
It may have been the fact that fighting had gone on around him all day without his playing a part in it made Fletcher so restless that night. Commodore Roder kept him away from the other men, ordering Lieutenant Marley to walk beside him whenever he took a stroll of the deck (as if he were a spy, he thought to himself). He grew morose as the Constitution lifted its anchor and put out to sea with the bloody beach a thin strip fast disappearing behind its aft rail.
Then he thought of Eve Doremus.
So much had happened to him since Shellah had come to his little dungeon cell that he had not thought of Eve, except when he was falling asleep, or in the dreams that had come to him while he lay in the little bunk as his back mended. Now she was with him again. He relived that night in his tiny palace room, when they had first been together. In memory, he tasted her lips once more, and felt the warm smoothness of her skin against his own. Those days on the Burak, while Yussuf Caramanli lay between life and death with Marlani Chamiprak at his side lest he wake to find her gone, he and Eve had leaned together on the rail, facing into the wind and holding hands, or strained against each other for a kiss during a snatched moment, sheltered by the striped deck tent."
He wanted nothing so much as to see her again, and hold her in his arms. They had had little time for the whispered secrets and confidences that are so much a part of romance. Their kisses and caresses had to be hidden things, exchanged only when Marlani Chamiprak and the corsair crew were nowhere near them. Those starry nights when they had sat with their backs propped to the main-deck scuppers came back to him. In little murmurs they had talked of the house he would build, close by the family plantation in Virginia, where they would raise their children and entertain the neighbors.
Fletcher clenched his fists against the yearning inside him. He tried to force his thoughts away from the future, back to the present and to the fact that Eve Doremus was a prisoner of Yussuf pasha.
When the Americans attacked, she would be killed. Even if the Constitution and her companion ships did not sail past the Caramanli castello with broadsides blazing, she would still be killed in the market square. Mustafa reis had promised as much, before he strung Stephen Fletcher, up to the shrouds. She would be tortured to death in the great square, the corsair captain had said, if Fletcher was not recaptured within the month.
Fletcher paled. “Damnation,” he whispered. “How long have I been gone from Tripoli?”
He found Lieutenant Marley below deck, in the wardroom. From his sea bag the lieutenant drew a battered, torn calendar. He said thoughtfully, scratching his jaw, “Let's see, now. We picked you up about three weeks ago. . . .”
“I was two days and two nights at sea by that time.”
“Took a full week for you to recover from that lashing, and another week and a half to find the hidden fleet. I'd guess you’ve been aboard now almost a month!”
Almost a month. Then how long was left Eve Doremus to stay alive?
Fletcher went white. “Must see the commodore! No time to waste. Girl in Tripoli—“
Commodore Rodgers was polite, but adamant. He listened to the story Fletcher poured into his ears, sitting grim and rigid in his cabin, but he only smiled sympathetically and shook his head. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant. I can't give you permission to leave ship at this moment. We're sailing straight for Tripoli. You know its innermost defenses. You—“
“But, sir! I've drawn you a dozen maps of the castello and the walls, and what lies behind them!”
Rodgers smiled. “True enough, and I’m grateful. But I want you at my elbow as we begin our attack, Lieutenant. I'm sorry. I’ve only one course to follow. Permission must be refused.”
The commodore turned to the papers littering the top of his desktop under the hanging glass lamp. He looked old and worried, with the lamplight painting black shadows around his eyes. Fletcher stared at him a moment longer, then came to his feet.
“Thank you anyhow, sir.” As Fletcher opened the door, the commodore lifted his head. “A moment, Lieutenant. A word of advice. The penalty for departing ship in the face of attack on an enemy post is death.”
“I know, sir,” replied Fletcher heavily, and closed the door behind him.
The U.S.S. Constitution and the Constellation, followed in single line by the Congress and Essex and the other ship of the fleet, swept past the low African shoreline midway between Jerba and Tripoli. Overhead the stars glittered like faint blue fires far away. The night was warm with approaching summer, and from somewhere forward there was the sound of sailors singing.
Fletcher eyed the low coastline eagerly. He stood by the rail in complete uniform, the riding lanterns catching the polished leather of his tall service hat. If he could only swing over side and down into that water gurgling past the bulwarks! It wouldn't be a long swim. A little more than a mile perhaps, at this distance. Once he was ashore, it shouldn't be too hard to find a little coastal inn where a horse could be bought, or a Bedouin, encampment-desert nomads on their way to Tripoli to trade where fleet Arab barbs would be exchanged for a few of the silver that Fletcher had received for back pay.
Fletcher grimaced and turned from that intriguing shore. Death was the penalty for doing what he thought about, here in the May night. They shot you for desertion. If he went over-side, and if by some miracle of fate, he could save Eve, he would die himself. If he stayed where he was like an obedient officer, Yussuf pasha would torture to death the woman he loved.
His fist clenched hard as the sweat came out on his face. For three hours, Fletcher stood by the rail. He went back over his life, step by step, from the days when he played Captain Kidd in the Fletcher plantation manse, through his trips to the iron-works in Baltimore with his father, to his training days and his life as a marine officer on the Adams and the Constellation and the Philadelphia. Against all that and his hope for the future, he balanced a pretty Boston girl with black hair and very soft, white skin, named Eve Idoremus.
The scales tilted sharply.
His eyes ran the length of the fighting deck of the big frigate. He studied the spar deck cannons thrust through the gun deck ports and the neat, trim look of their breaching tackle. The Constitution did not need him, not nearly as much as Eve Doremus needed him at this moment. There were sailors and marines aboard to do the fighting. The maps he had drawn for Commodore Rodgers were secure in his cabin locker. Stephen Fletcher would be as useful on the gun-deck of this fighting ship as he had been when she and her sister ships had smashed Yussuf Caramanli's secret fleet at Jerba. All he had done then was watch; all he would do when the Constitution stood in against Tripoli was stand beside Lieutenant Marley and marvel at the gunnery magic of her cannon crews.
Stephen Fletcher smiled grimly. “It's simply a matter of my offering my life to save hers!”
He waited until he was certain that no one watched him. Then he slipped out of his service jacket and put it on the deck beside his hat. With one hand gripping the rail capping, he went over-side and down toward the cold waters swirling below.