Barbary Slave by Gardner Fox - Chapter 12

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 12

It was market day in Tripoli. From the surrounding countryside, swaying camels laden down with bales of Persian carpets and muslins paraded leisurely past the desert gate. Tiny wooden carts drawn by tireless donkeys creaked endlessly over the cobbled streets. Dealers in henna leaves and snuff went on foot, hawking their wares from wicker baskets in singsong voices. A group of Bedouin riders cantered through the crowd, the red silk tassels of their horses' headstalls shaking rhythmically, their long burnooses rippling about them. Women walked like strange ghosts, completely swathed in black silk haiks.

Where the Street of Smiths gave off the clanging ring of hammers on anvils and the leathery sound of bellows blowing at the forge-fires, a man reined in a little desert horse. He was dressed like a desert dweller, but beneath the sheltering folds of the cloak were tight white breeches and knee-boots The rider paused, indecisive,

Stephen Fletcher had crawled ashore on a sandy beach thirty miles from Tripoli, a little after midnight. Within forty minutes of wading ashore, he had come upon a little fire, where a Bedouin family lay encamped. Tall dark piles showed the produce of a season awaiting the morning packing of the camel panniers. A few scrawny horses, native animals to judge from their boniness, cropped at the esparto grass.

A handful of his silver coins purchased a horse—worst-looking one of the lot, Fletcher knew, but it was a horse—and a burnoose. The Bedouin, who knew that Fletcher was an infidel but that his silver was blessed by Allah, gave him directions on how to reach Tripoli by early afternoon. He rode all night and most of the following morning, through the red dawn and early coolness into a blazing noon sun.

Now he turned the little barb and toed it forward, walking it slowly between the blacksmith shops. His eyes studied each face, each body in the red reflections of the forge-fires A hammer bouncing with metallic clangor on a horseshoe filled his ears, then was replaced by the heavier thud of a chain kepi fastened to a pointed corsair helmet. Sudanese worked most of the smithies, big black men from the east African coast along the Red Sea; but here and there a man with lighter skin stood out. These paler men were the slaves bought in the great square by the owners of the blacksmith shops.

Somewhere among these open shops was Mark Avison, the blond New Englander. Fletcher knew he must find Mark first, before he dared move another step toward the Caramanli palace. As he pulled the barb aside to let three desert Tauregs trot their ponies past him, their black litham veils hiding all but their eyes, Fletcher saw the American.

Avison was stripped to the waist, the muscles in his torso bulging as he hefted a big sledge. Fletcher toed his pony forward, leaning down as if staring toward a bad leg. Then he swung to the ground and brought the barb forward by the rein.

“Can you fix the fore off hoof?” he asked. He added in a whisper, “Don't appear to know me, Mark!”

The New Englander squatted down and looked carefully at the hoof. “I think we can have it good as new in a little while.” He went on, “Steve! We'd about given you up! We heard you were captured, but rumor had it you'd gotten away.”

In hoarse whispers, with their heads together over the little barb's hoof, Fletcher told him of the escape. Shellah had engineered, of his flight in the little cock-boat, his capture by Mustafa reis and his lashing. When he spoke of the Constitution and his rescue, Avison chuckled hoarsely.

“I know the Constitution. Whoever built her must have put iron in her sides. Those corsair cannon will never harm her !”

When he heard of the destruction of the secret Tripoline fleet and of the sea fight off the Jerban coast, Avison scarcely breathed. “By the Lord Harry,” he whispered, “I’d have given a year of my life to be there!”

“Rodgers would have kept you idle, watching what went on. He'd think you too valuable to risk in a fight.”

They were drawing curious eyes, so Fletcher hissed, “Gather the men for a break tonight. At the Cyrenaica Gate, at midnight. Bring what weapons you've managed to hide with Yuvaz' help. I’m headed for the castello, to get Eve and Shellah, and the horses Yuvaz promised.”

Avison nodded. Noticing the slave master staring hard, he growled in surly fashion, “I hear you, I hear you, son of the desert wind I'll have the horse ready when you get back! Shaitan, what a tongue on the man!”

Fletcher smothered a grin and moved out into the street, losing himself amid the men and women hurrying by on their errands. An over full water-skin in the hands of a passing water-boy almost splattered his burnoose, but he snatched his cloak aside and howled a flurry of Islamic curses at the cowering boy. With his cloak wrapped about his lower face and only his eyes showing, he was as much the Bedouin as any who traveled the great ridges of the Sahara dunes.

It was growing dusk when Fletcher came to the garden gate of the Caramanli palace. Soon now, unless the palace routine had been changed in his absence, Shellah would be coming through the early evening darkness, a ring of keys jingling in her hand, to fetch the sellers of sweetmeats in the outer court. The wooden door was unlatched. It opened and closed behind him, and he hid himself behind a growth of large cactus, only thick enough to shelter him from the most casual glances.

Shellah came at last, as the lanterns were being lit in the selamlik.

She froze to a standstill at his whisper. “Shellah, on your life and mine! No sound! It's Stefan, come back to take you and Eve out of this place."

The desert girl had quick wits. She knelt on one knee and fumbled at her slipper. “How? How?” she breathed.

"You're on your way to fetch the sweetmeats sellers? Bring them back along this same path. I'll slip in among them as they go. Undo the dungeon key from your key-ring now. Drop it on the soft dirt to one side of the path. Then meet me back here at the street gate within the hour."

“Allah steals my wits I almost think it may work!"

“Quickly, Shellah. Quickly! We'll meet Mark at midnight.”

Her dark eyes opened wide at that, and her breathing quickened. Then her slim brown fingers fumbled at the key-ring and detached a large iron key. In an instant she was on her feet and moving away.

Fletcher waited a long time, until he was positive he would not be seen. Then he slipped from the shrubbery and snatched up the key. He hid it in the pocket of his breeches, then went back behind the spiked branches of the cactus plant until Shellah should bring the sweetmeats sellers through the gardens. They came before he was well settled, babbling among themselves, their plaited baskets covered with snowy cloths, heaped high with powdered figs and dates. As they were moving past his hiding place, Fletcher slipped out and walked behind them.

No one noticed him, or the fact that he carried no basket. Each man was intent on his own business, and had no time to spare for the tall, cloaked figure that followed so closely. When they were under the arched portico, Fletcher slid aside into the black shadows and watched them file after Shellah toward the entry door of the haremlik stairs.

Fletcher waited a long time, until he was positive he the iron latch of a grilled door and then he was in a narrow corridor, moving with sure strides toward the stair at the far end leading into the damp cellars of the palace. It was quiet here in the late spring night. He could hear only faintly the strumming of a stringed instrument and the soft voice of a singing slave girl.

When the cellar stones were under his feet, he saw the guards.

There were two of them—big brown Libyans from the oasis country, clad in loose trousers and helmets and chain-mail shirts. They carried long scimitars; Fletcher was unarmed.

They lounged on a wooden bench to one side of the large, iron-reinforced oak door that gave entrance to the dungeon cells. There was no way of coming on them unexpectedly. It was fight and kill now, or die.

Fletcher kicked off his boots.

He came on bare feet out of the shadows, silent and swift. The guards saw him loom up in the light from the iron wall cresset; then he was on them. He came in a flying leap, that caught them half rising from the bench and knocked them to the ground in a rolling jumble of flailing bodies. Fletcher had to work fast. One or two loud outcries, and his surprise would be gone, the entire castello alerted.

He drove a fist in a short arc to the side of the nearest jaw. The man stiffened under him. Fletcher dropped him and rolled free, turning as his feet hit the ground to launch himself at the second man.

Panther-fast, he hit the second guard just as the man opened his mouth for the yell that would bring his fellows down on this mad nasrany. The shock of that flying impact drove the guard over onto his back and then Fletcher was astride him, his big hands closing around the guard's throat. Bracing his feet on either side of the guard's hips, he lifted him by the neck and drove his head down against the stone floor of the corridor. There was a sharp thwack and the guard went limp.

It took only a moment to gag and bind them with their belts and strips of linen torn from their loose trousers. Fletcher carried them one at a time into the dungeon where he dropped them in separate cells. Snatching up a discarded scimitar he thrust it into a scabbard and buckled its belt about his waist. Then he locked the big oaken door and moved off through the damp, dark cellars.

“Eve, Eve!” His low call echoed through the cells, but there was no answer. His heart thudding heavily with an unnamed fear, Fletcher walked on. Am I too late? he asked himself. Has Yussuf Caramanli killed her already, before the month is finished?

He was deep in the dungeons now. Only the faint radiance from a distant oil lamp on the stone wall brightened the blackness. Was she down here at all, even if she were alive? Perhaps the pasha had her a prisoner up above, in some secret room of the haremlik! If that were so, how could he ever get her out of this huge pile of stone and stucco?

“Eve, where are you? Eve? Eve!” He fought down his fear, walking steadily along the narrow corridors between the cells. A strange sound came to his ears after a while and he listened, standing unmoving, silent. A woman was sobbing, somewhere near here.

“Eve!”

His cry reverberated between the cells. After a moment he heard a whimpered, “Stephen? Stephen, is that your voice? Or have I gone mad, down here all this time?”

He found her crouched on one hip before the bars of a cell. Her hands clung to the thick iron bars as she raised her tear-streaked face. “Is it you? Or am I seeing visions?” His master key unlocked the cell and then she was in his arms, straining against him, shuddering and crying wildly. He let her sob herself out, kissing her silky, fragrant hair, enjoying the soft pressure of her body against his.

“Shellah will be waiting at the gate for us, dearest, he told her. “We're late now. We've no time to waste.”

As they ran along the dungeon corridors, he told her bits of his adventures since the night of his arrest. Besides. Shellah, he explained, Mark Avison and the others off the Philadelphia—those of them who were slaves and not being held for ransom—were gathering this night. Swords and horses would be waiting for them, close by the Cyrenaica Gate.

In exchange, she told him the only news in the castello. Marlani Chamiprak had been returned to the good graces of the pasha. Her story—that she had gone to Stephen Fletcher's little room to ask Eve Doremus to go the haremlik and stitch on cushions, and that while Eve had gone on ahead, Stephen Fletcher had pulled Marlani back and tried to make love to her —won over Yussuf. Fletcher wondered idly what inducements the coppery desert woman had added to her arguments to convince her lord and master of her innocence. He chuckled wryly, but this was no time for guessing games. Shellah would be at the gate, and at the other end of the city, Mark Avison and the American slaves were waiting.

The night was dark and moonless. They came out of the haremlik portico to find Shellah crouched in the shadow of a pillar, trembling. “Mashallah!” she breathed, running to Eve and clasping her in her brown arms. “I'd given you both up for dead!”

Side by side, they ran for the garden gate. Just as Fletcher was stretching out his hand for the latch-pull, the oaken door opened. Two men stood there, blocking their way. One was Yuvaz the Armless, crouched forward, shaking wildly in terror, his mouth dripping blood where he had been struck, again and again. The other man was Mustafa reis. Shellah cried out in dismay. Eve gasped and whirled as if to plead with Fletcher. Only the big marine kept his head. He lunged forward, hitting the corsair sea captain, sending him reeling backward, out into the street. Fletcher was after him in a moment, dragging the scimitar from his belt.

Mustafa reis bellowed his triumph. “Nasrany dog, son of a dog and brother of dogs! You've played into my hands! No man in Tripoli is my match with cold steel. I'll carve your face and put out your eyes, but won't kill you. I'll let Yussuf pasha have that pleasure!” His steel came flashing down, a faint white blur in the dark night. Fletcher met it with his own, felt the shock of the contact run up into his arm and shoulder. The corsair feinted and slashed sideways at Fletcher's hip. The American went backward, barely turning the stroke.

The clash of steel blades would bring the castello guards on the double. They would flood the streets with men and block every exit. Burdened with two women, Fletcher would never make the Cyrenaica Gate before his capture. Everything he planned had gone wrong! Everything for which he had sacrificed his standing as a marine officer, for which he had taken the lead-tipped cat on board the Aydah, was gone up in smoke!

Suspecting the American's despair, Mustafa reis began to gloat at him. “Infidel pig! Did you think to fool the children of Allah? I found this armless thing visiting with his friends tonight. I followed him like his own shadow. I know now what sort of traitor he is. When my tongue makes a present of you to my pasha, it will also offer him Yuvaz. Hai! The birds will have good eating shortly! The two of you, perched on the torture scaffold, with your women beside you!”

Sweat ran down Fletcher's face, blinding him. Never before had he faced a sword like this, that seemed to be everywhere at once. It cut down from overhead and sliced at him sideways and came thrusting up less than a foot from the street stones. He skipped and danced, flailing this way and that with his blade, knowing inside him that it would be only a matter of seconds before that keen edge at his cheek.

“Yuvaz,” he gasped. “Take the women—Shellah and run for the Cyrenaica Gate. I'll hold Mustafa reis you're safely away!”

The corsair captain shouted now as he wove in with his scimitar, stamping heavily to the attack. "Ho, the castaello! Ho, the guards! To me! To me!” His blade sliced sideways suddenly out of an overhead molinello, and Fletcher felt the sharp, hot bite of steel along his forearm.

Feet were pounding along the garden paths, behind the high palace wall.

“Run man!” he shouted at the trembling Yuvaz. “If you hope to save your own neck, get the women out of here!”

Yuvaz uttered a wet, choking cry. Then he was running soundlessly, with Eve Doremus and Shellah at his heels. As Fletcher thrust into a savage attack at the corsair captain, their pounding feet faded into silence.

Mustafa reis laughed harshly. “You stupid fool! Do you think you can get out of Tripoli? When his guards tell Yussuf Caramanli what's been going on tonight, he'll have every man in the palace after you!”

As if he had hoped to distract Fletcher with his words, the corsair captain swept in with whirling blade. Fletcher was blinded for a moment, so that he fought purely by instinct, guarding himself in tierce and prime. The steel blades grated, fell away to meet again, clanging savagely. Too late, Fletcher realized that Mustafa reis was making him turn as he fought, to swing about so that his back was to the closed gate in the garden wall. When the castello guards swarmed out, they would have him at their mercy.

Desperately, he fought to free himself from that intolerable position. His arm swept his curving blade this way and that, but Mustafa reis held like a rock, fighting only on the defensive. Behind him, Fletcher heard hoarse voices raised in excited query, heard the latch grate as it lifted.

For one moment, the corsair captain took his eyes from the American to look past him at the opening door.

In that instant, Fletcher hurled himself forward, his blade held straight before his lunging body. Like that, the scimitar went into Mustafa's belly, the point protruding out his back by a foot of bloody steel.

Fletcher did not wait for him to fall. In one bound he was past him, wrenching the dying man's sword from his nerveless fingers. On bare feet he was running faster than he had ever run, down the dark street, leaving the guards bending over the sea captain whose body was even now jerking convulsively in his death agonies.

“Yussuf himself will ride out tonight to find us! He'll search the palace and find the two guards I left tied in the dungeons. He'll learn Eve and Shellah are gone, together with Yuvaz, and will smell out the rest by instinct!”

Five of the guards were coming after him. Fletcher tried to lose them. He ran easily, turning down an alley where its mouth loomed black and inviting. He went up a garden wall, ran across the flaggings and took the far wall in a single leap. He found parrow little pathways between the steep sides of buildings. As he ran, he went as nearly as he could in an easterly direction, toward the escape gate where the American slaves would be waiting for him.

He had no way of knowing whether Yuvaz and the girls would win free. More than once he paused to listen for their footfalls, but only an occasional drunken voice or the soft splashing of fountain waters answered his listening ears. Faintly in the distance, he heard the shouts of the castello guards as they hunted him.

Now, as he ran, he angled his course more directly toward the Cyrenaica Gate. If anyone knew the shortcuts that would take Eve Doremus and Shellah to the waiting American, Yuvaz would know them. He put worry from his mind, and stretched his legs for speed.

He saw the horses first, saddled and bridled, in little clusters close by the shop awnings, where the sellers of water-skins and camel saddles gathered in the daytime to hawk their wares. The wooden gate was closed, but a man leaned in its shadows, a naked scimitar in his hand. As Fletcher came pounding up, the solitary guard moved forward. In the dim light Fletcher recognized Caleb Framingham.

“Steve?”

“Yussuf himself is hunting us in the streets. I just killed Mustafa reis. What about Eve? Did she—?”

A soft cry was his answer. Fletcher whirled to take Eve Doremus against him as she hurtled out of the black shadows of a saddle-maker's awning.

“If you'd been killed back there—oh, I didn't want to run and leave you! I would die! Darling, darling! Oh, Steve—sweetheart—“

He folded her in his arms and kissed her. The embrace lasted only a brief moment before Mark Avison, Ned Brunner and the others were around them, whispering fiercely.

“Steve, come on!"

“No time for that, man!" They could hear the outcries of the palace soldiers as they came running up the Street of the Wine-sellers, which lead at right angles into the gate Square. In a moment it would be touch and go. By the time Caleb Framingham and the two men working with him on the huge crossbar of the wooden gate could open those ponderous doors, the palace guards would be on them. Their pounding feet echoed louder every passing moment.

Fletcher gripped Mark Avison by a wrist. “Get into the shadows, Mark. All of you but Yuvaz, Eve and Shellah! We'll let them see us at the gate.”

“What about us, Steve?”

“Hide in the awning shadows! They'll be so busy looking at us, they won't see you, until you hit them.”

Avison chuckled. His curly yellow hair was like a halo on his head in the faint radiance of the house-lamp as he swung it, crying out softly, “You men, into the shadows. Steve's going to bait a trap for them.”

Chuckles and mutterings of approval sounded a moment as the men disappeared under the awnings and into the deeply recessed doorways of the adjacent houses. For nineteen months, they had been slaves to the Tripolines. They had eaten rotten food and drunk stale water. The backs of some of them bore livid red scars where a lash had failed them. All were gaunt and lean and vengeful. It hurt their spirit to run from Tripoli without a chance to hit back at their former masters. Now that chance was being given them.

In the shadows, hands worked convulsively on the grips of Moslem scimitars or tightened angrily around the curving butts of long barreled Turkish pistols. Bright eyes watched Fletcher and the armless man with the two girls as they ran for the big wooden gate, saw them struggle frantically with the crossbar. The horses were out of sight, hidden by a garden wall.

The trap was set, the bait was ready. The guards came in a shouting, running mass of waving swords and clanking mail shirts. They filled the streets from building wall to building wall. And towering high above them all was Yussuf Caramanli, on an Egyptian stallion. At sight of Fletcher, who whirled and stood with his back to the oaken doors, he howled in triumph.

“Take them alive. All four of them. The man who harms them dies in their place!”

The janissaries were blind to everything but the two girls and the man. Yuvaz they discounted: what harm could a man without arms do to a castello guard? The girls they ignored with the inborn arrogance of the Oriental male. They came for Fletcher, round shields up and scimitars poised to ward off his blows.

The foremost of them was within a dozen feet of the Americans out of the awning shadows. On the opposite side of the cobbled street, from the recessed doorways of shops and private buildings, Caleb Framingham and Ned Brunner led their fellows. From left and right the Americans hit the palace guards.

The street was filled with dead and dying Tripolines at that first exchange of sword-cuts The Americans struck with speed and savagery. This was their chance to pay for starved bellies and whipped backs, manacle-scarred wrists and ankles, and all the scorn and contempt they had been forced to swallow for months. The guards could not stand to them. Scimitars were beaten aside; unprotected necks were slashed where helmets and chain-mail could not protect them; clawing hands seized shields and yanked them down.

Yussuf Caramanli bellowed like a wounded bull. He ripped out his own blade, but the bodies that pressed around him terrified his horse and almost, unseated him. His eyes bulged from his head, for wherever he looked he saw Americans: angry, vengeful, fighting like the arch-demons of Shaitan. Their faces were dark and angry and very terrifying, like remembered nightmares come to life.

“Tumar, Tumar!” he cried. “To me, to me! These infidel pigs will kill me! Surround me!”

But the captain of his guard was too busy with Stephen Fletcher to hear him. With his breath rasping in his throat, with blood running from his arm and thigh where the Americano's scimitar had cut—Bi'llah! how the man wield that thing! He was in no condition to worry about anyone's safety but his own. Slowly, Tumar fell back he was pressed into another guard who fought for his very life on the gate-square cobblestones. Tumar saw the scimitar coming at his head and lifted his blade. Too late, he realized the molinello was but a feint, and that Fletcher's real targe was his unprotected right side. The next moment the cold steel was biting deep into his flesh and he was stumbling, dying as he crumpled.

Although Tumar did not hear the pasha's cry, Yuvaz, the Armless did. He sidled away from the gate, running in his lurching way, grinning wolfishly. He skirted the rim of the struggling men, dancing a little in his intentness. If only he had an arm with a sword in it!

Fletcher leaped over the body of the dying captain, his scimitar blade a flail before him, slicing a path for himself through the packed castello guards. The sight of Yussuf Caramanli put a ferment in his blood. Suddenly Stephen Fletcher had plans for the pasha of Tripoli. Savagely, he fought to reach him.

A twisted knot of struggling men lurched into Fletcher and sent him spinning sideways. Fighting to recover balance, he fell to his knee. An open space cleared around him, as if by magic. Looking up, he saw Yussuf Caramani spurring his stallion forward. High over his head the royal scimitar moved, for a moment. Then it was coming down, straight at Fletcher's unprotected head. Yuvaz the Armless came out of nowhere, lifting himself with all his strength in a wild leap, hitting hard against Yussuf.

The pasha screamed as he felt himself falling. His feet slid out of the ivory stirrups and the cobbles came rushing up to meet him. He landed heavily and lay there, paralyzed for a moment.

Yuvaz threw himself at him, mouth gaping open. Like a starving animal he buried his teeth in Yussuf Caramanli's throat, and bit down hard.

The pasha screamed thickly, his fingers sink in Yuvaz' shoulders. The thick body convulsed in age whipping the lighter man sideways. But Yuvaz kept jaws tightly clenched on that fat throat as the two rolled across the square, struggling silently.

When his throat seemed about to explode, Yussuf remembered the curving dagger in his sash. His fingers fumbled for it, closed around the haft. An instant later the slim length of the dagger was buried in the armless man's chest.

Yuvaz fell free, lungs heaving wildly. Fletcher caught the pasha's hand, twisting it at the wrist. The curved dagger went flying. Then Fletcher was turning the pasha face down on the cobbles, whipping his sash loose, kneeling on the small of his back and bringing both wrists up behind him. He tied the sash tightly about those wrists, tied and knotted it, and then stood up.

Death was blurring Yuvaz' eyes as Fletcher knelt beside him.

“I die happy, nasrany,” the armless man said. “You will take Yussuf as your prisoner to your American ships. They will hang him from a yardarm, and Hamet will be pasha once again in Tripoli.”

“Yussuf is my prisoner. I will take him to the American ships. It will be as you say.”

Yuvaz jerked heavily. His breath grew labored and hoarse. Slowly, his head shook from side to side. “Allah is waiting for me. Allah and the gardens of delight. I will have arms in paradise, nasrany. Arms and a whole body, and there will be houris to delight my every waking hour. . . .”

His eyes open wide, Yuvaz laughed. And then he died. Fletcher stood up. The castello guards were fleeing down the side streets. Only the Americans and the fallen pasha were left in the square. Fletcher pushed his scimitar back into its scabbard and bending over Yussuf, lifted him to his feet.

The sailors and marines crowded around, exclaiming in their delight. One or two wanted to butcher him instantly and leave his blood staining the stones that their own blood had stained, but Fletcher was adamant about his prisoner's disposal.

“Capturing Yussuf changes everything,” he told them. “We don't need to go horseback riding for seven hundred miles. We'll borrow the fishing smacks on the beach and go out to find the Constitution and the rest of the squadron. Having the pasha of Tripoli as our prisoner means the Barbary war is over!”

They howled their approval, and eager hands went to work on the crossbar of the Cyrenaica Gate.

As Fletcher followed them, walking hand in hand with Eve, a little behind the silent Yussuf Caramanli, he remembered suddenly that he was a deserter.

When he set foot on the deck planks of the Constitution, Commodore John Rodgers would hang him from the bowsprit.