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

The palace of the pasha of Tripoli lay southeast of the town, its high white walls brooding out across the blue waters of the road-stead. For uncounted years this palace had stood against the hot winds of the African gibleh and the lashing rains that came sweeping southward across the Mediterranean from Sicily. Dragut reis had anchored his galleys in these waters. In the twelfth century, Roger Guiscard had taken Tripoli from the Arabs with his Norman knights. In Roman times, the palace had been a fortress. The years between the days when Roman biremes swung to the swell of the tides until now, when a sunset gun sounded from the walls, had only whitened the building stone to sepulchral pallor.

Fletcher found himself thinking of little but food walked between two surly brown guards into the palace, is stomach was a vast hollow between his loins and rib case. For food, he would guard the person of the seductive brown Marlaní with any weapon Yussuf Caramanli chose. But deep down inside him, possibly at the hope this new life was opening to him, a tiny flame of rebellion stirred.

The harem quarters layoff the inner courtyard. Fletcher was taken to the harem guards' rooms, where he stripped the rag from his middle and bathed in warm water thick with suds. Soft towels were given him to dry his flesh. Clean for the first time in months, he donned loose muslin trousers and a linen camyss, with low slippers of yellow Moroccan leather on his feet. Around his lean middle went a girdle of copper discs, from which would be hung a curved scimitar on thin iron chains. Then he was taken before the keeper of the house.

Sihan ibn Ajaj was a big man, with a shaven head from which hung a black topknot wrapped with golden threads, His red vest, trimmed with gold brocade, enclosed a massive chest and paunch. Fletcher had the feeling that his bulk was deceiving. There was muscle under all that laid, his thick arms were proof enough of that. His fleshy face was creased now in a disapproving scowl, as he let his small black eyes run over Fletcher. He walked around him, his frown deepening.

The bald Turk grumbled at him. “You look well enough for a nasrany. Big, and thick in the shoulders. Plenty of room for solid muscle, once we put some meat and rice in your belly.” His hand slapped hard at the muscles ridging the American's torso. He grinned, “That cus-cus will help you fight off any true believers who come slipping into the harem quarters at night. And don't believe they won't come, some time. Not to make love to the little kalfas, but to slip cold steel into Yussuf himself.”

Fletcher looked interested. “Do they hate him so. m. in the city, then?”

Sinan ibn Ajaj grinned coldly. “Not most of them. But there are always a few hotheads willing to risk their necks to save another man's food from the fire. Remember, Yussuf drove out his brother Hamet, and became pasha in his, place. Hamet is no holy man, to ignore that affront. If he could, he'd cook Yussuf for a month over a bed of red coals. A month? Ten years! But Yussuf has the power and Hamet is a broken man.”

He gloomed at Fletcher from under shaggy black eyebrows. “There are plots and counter-plots cooking from the Grand Bazaar to the Land Port Gate, right now. Reason they haven't struck before is that Yussuf Caramanli keeps himself too well protected. Never lets down his guard, not once. But sometime he will and—inshallah! When that time comes, you'll have your bellyful of fighting, believe me!"

That was a prospect he would look forward to, Fletcher assured himself silently. Not alone for the sake of the action, which would serve to release some of the angers and frustrations that had been building up in him these past eighteen months, but because it would give him a chance to strike back at these Barbary sea-dogs He was no scholar of history, but he knew the corsairs for a medieval anachronism, a throw-back to the time of the feudal robber barons. They roamed the Mediterranean as the White Company and others like them used to rove the land. They preyed on the helpless and the slow of keel. They robbed, taking what they would. And because it would cost their governments too much money to outfit a fleet against them, the European nations preferred to pay them tribute.

It may have been because their own liberty was so new that the young United States bridled at the conduct of these pirates. To them, the liberty of the sea was a dear and precious thing. Almost, Fletcher thought wryly, as precious as his own personal liberty.

Because his own liberty was so precious, he would die to save it. Now he was making the first step upward from the slave conditions of the stone quarries. As a bodyguard to the pasha's wife, he would gain a certain amount of bodily freedom. It was up to him to hoard and nourish that tiny Seedling of liberty, until he could make it blossom, full grown.

To aid that growth, he must make friends here. To that end, he grinned in a friendly way and jabbed a thumb into the Turk's ribs. “For a brave man, you talk a lot, Sinan. My belly is as empty as the purse of a wandering beggar.

Is there no food at all in this hulk of stone you call a palace?”

Sinan moved to the arched doorway, beckoning Fletcher to follow. They went down a corridor tiled with marble chips in red and yellow. Fletcher had visited the Alhambra in Spain, during the cruise of the Adams in 1802. He found the interior of this palace, with its wall mosaics and gilt decorations, to be the equal of the delicate stone tracery and blue faience work of that citadel. His eye was caught by the glazed earthenware urns that lined the pillared gallery, and the silver-gilt plating of a great chest of blued wood that rested, close beside a wall fountain.

It was then that he saw an inordinately thin man, with a red turban set awry on his head, scurry from the shadows across the tiled floor and into the shelter of a horseshoe arch. The man seemed a human scarecrow, with his striped barracan flapping loosely about his grotesque figure as he ran. One he turned his head and looked at the American, and Fletcher felt a cold shock pass over him at sight of those wild, reddened eyes.

Sinan growled. “Yon thing is called Yuvaz the Armless. The reason he looks so scrawny, like a fowl plucked bare for the pot, is that he's got no arms. Yussuf burned them off, just after he took the pasha ship of Tripoli from his brother, Hamet Caramanli.”

Fletcher made a retching sound in his throat and Sinan grinned, casting him a sly glance. “Empty belly gets sick easily, doesn't it? Yuvaz was a good man, devoted to Hamet: Wouldn't take the vow to Allah to support Yussuf, though. Always claimed Hamet was the pasha. Yussuf had him thrown to the torturers. They cooked his arms and made him eat a little of the flesh. To save his life, Yussuf sent for an Arab physician from Cairo. He cut 'em both off, clear up to the shoulders.”

Sinan spat. “Would have been a kindness to let him die. He's half mad. Can't even feed himself. But the pasha likes to have him around. Reminds him Hamet is still alive, planning vengeance or a return to power or whatever it is that deposed pasha's plan.”

“Poor devil!”

“A poor fool! No man should be so loyal. What's it got him? Ah, here we are! Smell that food, man?”

The kitchen was an immense room fitted with a dozen open hearths. Refectory tables groaned under silver platters loaded with oranges and plums, melons from Algiers and Tunisian figs. Two women in striped barracans were ladling out a thick stew filled with chunks of lamb and bits of yellow bread and vegetables.

Sinan swaggered forward, topknot swinging.

“Stir your fat legs, sofradji! My nasrany friend, the man who killed Kefas in fair fight this afternoon on the Street of Arcades, has an empty belly. The pasha has said he must be strong, to guard the bash-kedin and her women.”

The women glanced at Fletcher from under heavily lashed eyes. They giggled, and while one came forward with a bowl of stew the other brought a long twist of barley bread. “Don’t throw your bodies at him, daughters of sin,” Sinan growled. “He’s almost as hungry for a woman as he is for that stew.”

The two women were fat and greasy. One of them was old enough to be a grandmother. They squealed at the Turk's words, and scurried back to their hearths. Sinan straddled a stool and watched the American dip a spoon into the thick soup.

When he was done, Sinan called another woman to the table. “Didn't I tell you the nasrany was hungry, Rephia? Give him more!”

Fletcher ate five bowls of the stew and finished three lengths of the hard-crusted bread. He ate fig paste and a slice of sweetmeat before he admitted, as he swallowed the last few drops of the palm wine Sinan had poured for him, that he was hungry no longer.

Sinan looked at him with shining black eyes, nodding his head. “You ate well, for a Christian. By Allah! If you guard Marlani Chamiprak the way you wolf your food, Yussuf will make you a free man in a week. He values good service, does the pasha. Treat him well and his generosity will overwhelm you.”

Fletcher put that thought away inside him as he got to his feet. “Come along, then. I'm anxious to discover how generous this Yussuf Caramanli can be.”

With a grin on his lips and a roll to his walk, Sinan brought Fletcher up a flight of stone steps and out into the dying sunlight on the second courtyard. His thumb jerked upward at the grilled stonework of the harem windows.

“That's where you'll be quartered, up there behind that latticework. You'll be surrounded with women. Pretty girls, not like those fat cooks down in the kitchen! Hotblooded Tauregs and pallid Spanish slaves. Turks. Greeks. Women of every nation you can name, and you not able to put a finger on any one of them.”

Sinan paused and cocked a speculative eye at the big American. “Watch yourself, nasrany. They may be slaves and concubines, but they all belong to Yussuf Caramanli. If you're caught playing games with them, your death won't be a pleasant thing!”

“I’ll be as indifferent to them as if I were a eunuch,” Fletcher promised glibly.

Sinan chuckled. “They won't make it easy for you. Some of those little kalfas have been a long time without a man. They’ll risk death by suffocation for a few hours of manly comfort. I tell you this because I've taken a liking to you. Guard your virtue better than you guard your life. It amounts to the same thing, in the harem.”

As he walked at the heels of the Turk, Fletcher found himself thinking of his plantation home in Virginia, and of its pillared elegance. In the years of his rebellious youth, when he had been obliged to sit at a Monroe desk and add up columns of figures in the workhouse beside the stable portico, or journey to the iron works near Baltimore in which his father owned a controlling interest, he had dreamed of something other, than fields of tobacco and ledgers filled with monotonous numerals. Checking the slaves as they painted the wash house or put fresh straw on the floor of the coach house, or riding Big Dan across hundreds of acres rolling fat with green tobacco, had been infinitely boring.

The ocean stretched wide and green from the mouth of Accokeek Creek, a day's ride from the manse. He would spend long afternoons staring at it, with Big Dan browsing contentedly on bunch grass twenty feet away. When the chance came to go aboard a training ship as a midshipman, he snatched at it. As a midshipman, he would see distant lands that were only names in books to him at the time. There would be no dusty ledgers, no tobacco fields or roaring blast furnaces to occupy his time. Later, he had been transferred to the marine corps, at his own request.

Fletcher smiled grimly. Instead of his dreams of adventure, he faced the reality of slavery. He wondered for a moment what his aristocratic father, gentleman planter that he was, might do in his place. Would he choose death to acting the slave for an unbaptized infidel? Or would he plan, as he himself planned, to play his part in such a manner that he would win over the confidence of his captors and perhaps, eventually, his freedom? Fletcher realized that a man made his own destiny, by his own acts. It was not his father who walked toward the harem quarters behind Sinan ibn Ajaj, but himself.

The food in his veins and the months of slave labor in the stone quarries of Ali ben Sidi began to work their spell. Strength came flooding into his body. He stretched a little, feeling confidence and sureness blossom in him.

The pasha of Tripoli sat on one of the hundred cushions thrown across a quarter of the tiled floor of his audience chamber. His legs in loose silk trousers were crossed under him. His brocaded kaftan jacket was covered by strings of seed pearls. His black beard had been freshly trimmed and scented.

He spoke swiftly with Sinan in a Turkish dialect that Fletcher could not follow. Whatever, it was the bald Sinan told him, he grunted in approval. He lifted his hands and clapped.

A palace guard entered, carrying a lacquered sword-case in his hands. He knelt and set it before Yussuf Caramanli, who was regarding Fletcher all this while with a curious smile on his full lips. Reaching out with a slippered toe, he kicked the long teak-wood case.

“Open it,” he told Sinan. “Show the nasrany the sword that will be his only friend for the rest of his life.”

It was a magnificent weapon, of blue Damascus steel, its curved blade inset with thin kufic scroll work. The hilt was of silver on steel, and the haft was wrapped about with durable cording. Sinan brought it out into the lights of a hundred lamps and held it out to the Virginian.

“A good blade, Stefan. See for yourself.”

Fletcher grasped the braided hilt, lifting the sword into his hand. It was light, but its steel was so finely made that he knew instinctively he had never before held such a weapon in his fist. Its blue, watered sheen was so bright that it seemed to glow in the lamplight.

Sinan saw that he was staring at the scroll work, and leaned forward. “Its name is written there forever, infidel. Dushman kash! The slayer of his enemies. Have you any enemies, Stefan?”

Fletcher brought his gaze up sharply, aware that there was mockery in the voice of the bald Turk. From Sinan, his eyes went to Yussuf Caramanli, who sat forward of his throne cushions, eyeing him with amusement.

“He does not know Mustafa reis, Sinan,” chided the pasha with a smile.

“I know him,” Fletcher growled. “He sold me to Ali ben Sidi.”

The pasha laughed. "Ah, yes. You were one of the Americanos that went to my best sea captain as his share of the loot. Most of my other captains were glad to waive their rights for gold. Not Mustafa reis. He hates you Americans with a fine hate. Tell Stefan why, some time, Sinan.”

Yussuf Caramanli stared thoughtfully at Stephen. “I did not know this afternoon that you, were one of the men chosen by Mustafa reis. Otherwise I would have bastinadoed you and brought you back to the stone quarries for Ali ben Sidi to kill in any manner he desired, to teach his slaves of the consequences of killing a royal guard. However Allah saw fit to make me act without such knowledge. New, of course, I am committed. It would never do to give you back, once I bought you. It would be a sign of weakness, and a pasha must never, be weak. So you will take your post in the harem, to guard Marlani Chamiprak.”

Losing interest, the pasha leaned forward to a silver platter filled with purple grapes. Idly, he drew a bunch into his hand and sat there cross-legged, nibbling at them, as Sinan took Fletcher down the length of the audience room.

As the big bronze doors clanged shut behind them, Sinan sighed and shook his head. “A lucky star, watches over you, nasrany. Mustafa reis will not like what Yussuf has done. He will give anything to put you back in chains, or torture you to death in a public square. But Yussuf will not let him do that; it has become a matter of pride to him. But walk as if you walked on eggshells! One false slip, and even the pasha of Tripoli will not be able to protect you from him.”

“I’ll be careful, Fletcher promised, but Sinan only eyed him curiously and grunted.

“You aren't, the careful kind” the bald Turk growled, and clapped his heavy, meaty hands.”

In the distance the patter of bare feet sounded along the tiled floors of the palace hall.

Sinan sighed, "I won't see much of you, once you go behind the seraglio doors. You'll live in a different world from me. There will be jealous women, and lusting women, and scheming women. Only a eunuch is able to live there without trouble settling around his ears. Make believe you are a eunuch, American!”

A slim Tuareg girl, with hair like blackened copper hanging to her brown shoulders, came walking toward them. Silver hoops swung from her tiny ears. Her glowing eyes, their lids darkened with kohl, studied his big bulk. Beneath the thin khalak, that was a sheer mist of green silk, her body was naked. Her full breasts moved faintly to her breathing. Her legs were slim and brown, long and shapely, under the floating silk.

Sinan said, “Her name's Shellah. A Tuareg girl, a slave. She sometimes acts as guide or messenger in the palace. She'll take you to the harem quarters.”

The girl was smiling boldly, letting her dark eyes drift over Fletcher with calculating slyness. There was impudence in her smile and in her lazy stance. When Sinan shouted at her in Turki, she shouted back at him, baring tiny white teeth.

“Desert harlot!” grumbled Sinan. “Remember what I told you, Stefan. Don't let these little kalfas get their claws into you, or you'll wind up blind in chains, hung upside down over a rat pit! Remember! Now, go with Shellah.”

It was not a difficult command to obey. The Tuareg girl carried something of the wildness of the desert in the spicy smell of her thick hair and in the warm glow of the eyes. She glanced slyly at this big, yellow-haired man as she padded beside him, and she let the misty kalak slide a little, baring her supple brown back.

Her giggle came into the silence between them as they mounted the wide stairway to the harem rooms. Now the Tuareg girl grew coquettish. Her arm brushed against him as they walked.

Once she said something in the Bedouin tongue that Fletcher did not understand. When she realized that he could not comprehend her desert jargon, she laughed softly. She spoke again, and though the words were strange, something in their inflection made Fletcher flush.

His hands closed on her wrist and he brought a halt, swinging her in against him. With one hand he caught the thick black hair, twisting his fingers in it, and held her face motionless.

"I don't know your game, little one,” he told her, staring down into the bold eyes that never flickered, though his grip on her hair stung her scalp. "Maybe. Sinan told you to act up, to test me. Or maybe it was the pasha, or even that favorite wife of his. I've been a slave a long time. Too long. I've almost forgotten that I'm a man, too.”

He paused and grinned down at her soft red mouth. The palace was silent all about them. From where they stood, at the top of the tiled stair, Fletcher could see the length of the empty corridor before him. His pulse was beating faster now that her soft hips and legs were wedged so closely against him. Suddenly rebellion leaped in him—revolt against the subservience he must observe, against the irony of his position. Here he was, a strong man with a noble weapon at his side; but instead of fighting lustily for his country, he must waste his manhood protecting a group of pampered harem women.

"If you want to run to Sinan or the pasha or his wife,” he went on conversationally “and tell them what I'm going to do to you, go ahead. I have a sword at my hip again. This time they won't take me alive, to hang over any rat pit.” He kissed her roughly, hungrily, holding her head hard between hands, while his savagely seeking lips bruised her mouth. The Tuareg girl took his kisses in a soft, sweet surrender. She melted against him with a supple twist of her slender body that told Fletcher she was enjoying this moment, whether or not she betrayed him later.

As he let her go, Shellah whispered something in her Tuareg dialect, her eyes hot on his face. With fingertips tinted a bright red by henna paste, she drew her thin, revealing shawl about her body, and moved on. Her bosom was leaping with her hurried breathing, but the only sound was the musical tinkle of the silver chains about her slim ankles.

When they came to a door inscribed with geometric inlays and set with two round gold hoops for handles, Shellah put her fingers on one of the grips and lifted her dark eyes. “Enter, Stefan. And do not worry, Shellah is no mewling spy, to go running when a man kisses her.”

She saw his amazement at her knowledge of the English language, and paused, still holding the door-pull “I was captured when I was very young, at the oasis of Kufra. They found me intelligent, and taught me many things. Your language was one of the things I learned. Now go in, and say no more of what happened between us.”

The Tuareg girl tugged and the door swung outward. Fletcher stepped into a domed room, its walls ornate with delicate plaster friezes in bold reds and blues and golds. Tall archways led back into gloomy recesses, and the last red rays of the dying sun came thrusting through the iron fretwork of the windows. He saw low sofas, heaped heavily with pillows and silk cushions, an occasional table and coffer of inlaid teak-wood, a few upholstered benches and Ottomans.

Lying at full length on one of the low sofas, her right hand draped lazily from the cushions so that her fingers could scratch and fondle the head of a white kitten, was Marlani Chamiprak. Her gaze was fastened on the silken veils that floated from the ceiling overhead. As Fletcher stepped across the sill, she arched her slim body, revealing that her only article of clothing was a pair of loose, silken trousers of royal green.

Marlani said sweetly, “Did the nasrany give you any difficulty, Shellah?"

“No difficulty, highness,” replied the girl, entering behind Fletcher and closing the door.

Apparently still entranced by the dangling lengths of red, blue and yellow silk floating in the eddies of air above her, the kedin laughed softly. “He is a disappointment. I was hoping that hot red blood ran in his veins. It seems I made a mistake.”

Her hand came away from the kitten and gestured lazily. “Come stand before me, nasrany. I want to see what my new guard looks like.”

Fletcher went to the foot of the divan and let her stare at him. Admiration shone in her yellow cat eyes as she examined his deep chest and bared midriff. He was a big man, Fletcher, towering tall and muscular among the scented cushions and silks. His height made Marlani look up at him, and now the American could read the wanton hunger in her eyes, the hidden desires and emotions that must be veiled everywhere but in the privacy of her harem boudoir.

The woman writhed, stretching. Laughter gurgled deep. in her throat as she saw his eyes drawn instinctively to the hard brown breasts thrusting up at him. She whispered throatily, “You are mine now, Americano. You belong to me. Here in the selamlik my word is law. Even Yussuf does not interfere with what I do.”

She came off the low, cushioned sofa with a flash of shapely brown legs and walked toward him, hips rolling easily, a smile twisting the corners of her red mouth. Lightly, she scratched her fingernails, sharply pointed and coated with silver dust, across his chest. Her yellow eyes brightened, glowing.

“He does not interfere at all! Whatever I do here, is my own business!”

Fletcher thought numbly that the pasha of Tripoli would make it his business if Fletcher dared to do what the bold yellow eyes invited him to do. For the first time since the Philadelphia went down, there was good food in his belly and clean clothes on his body. If this wanton with the kohl darkened eyes and the musk-scented hair were to have her way with him—and the pasha learned of it—he would be strung up by his heels over a slow fire.

Marlani Chamiprak read something of this in his stony face. The yellow eyes narrowed. The red lips drew back a little, to show even white teeth. “You are a coward! You are afraid of Yussuf. And I thought all you Americanos were brave men!”

Marlani let the tide of her desire run wild in her, making no attempt to check it. Never before this moment had she felt like this. Never, before had a big blond American stood in her boudoir, fighting for control, forcing his eyes away from the body she exhibited so shamelessly.

Before she had been wed to Yussuf Caramanli, Marlani had been a dancer at the court of Sultan Selim III of Turkey. Long ago she had learned the ways of pleasing men, and with her lessons had come an avid addiction to the art. She had been faithful to Yussuf, but since he had begun this stupid war with the United States, he had become more and more neglectful of her.

She laughed softly, throwing her head back. Then she swirled, arms spread wide, and went dancing about the room, her thin silken trousers billowing outward. She danced nearer to Fletcher, tripped across a cushion and fell against him. Her upturned face was an inch below his chin, her honeyed breath fanning his lips as her cat eyes mocked him. “Coward!” she whispered fiercely. “What are you afraid of? Put your arms around me! Make love to me, nasrany!” He held himself as rigid as if he were at attention on the spar deck of the Constellation, his training ship. For one instant he stared down into her flushed, lovely face with its kohled eyes and long lashes, seeing the moist red lips waiting, parted. Then his gaze lifted until he was staring blankly above her brown hair at the Moorish windows of the haremlik.

He said heavily, “The pasha said I was to guard his wife against all harm. He said my life depended on it.”

She whispered, “In the harem, my word is the law. Kiss me!”

She writhed against him, but he was as unmoving as a statue. Then Marlani Chamiprak drew back and snarled, like a savage cat. Her hand came up and her palm cracked hard against his cheek. Three times she hit him, until his cheek was an angry scarlet.

“You Americano fool! You shouldn't have made an enemy of me. It would have been better for you to have Yussuf angry with you, than me!" She paused for breath and slowly the rage gave way to a quiet slyness, brightening her eyes and curving her lips. “If you want it like this, with open war between us, very well. But remember, I fight as a woman fights!”

She turned on a heel and walked away. Just before she disappeared behind the archway curtains, she looked back over a bare shoulder. "I'll make you forget yourself yet, nasrany. When I do, I'll tell Yussuf you raped me! Pray to your gods that it will take a long time.”

The curtain fell behind her, limply, and Stephen Fletcher was aware that sweat was standing out like jeweled beads on his forehead.