Barbary Slave by Gardner Fox - Chapter 10

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 10

An ominous silence lay over the Caramanli palace. From the entrance passageway to the smallest vase-niche in the haremlik, no man spoke above a whisper. Bare feet padded about on necessary duties, and guards stood frozen at their posts before doors and gateways, hands on their long scimitars. But outside of this, there seemed no life at all behind the thick white walls. Yussuf pasha was in the selamlik, mad with rage, ordering whippings and the bastinado to any who went near him. The bash-kedin sobbed in helpless terror on the cushions of her seraglio divan.

In one of the damp, small rooms of the dungeons that lay beneath the castello, Stephen Fletcher was stretched on his back, hands behind his head. Three hours before, he had been thrust through the great iron door that was the entryway to these cold, wet cellars, and the iron bolts slammed home behind him. Then he had been brought along a narrow corridor between empty, dark vaults fitted with iron bars or solid iron gates, and hurled savagely into a tiny square of stone and metal whose only furniture was a long, wide bench of rotting wood that served as bed and table, chair and couch.

He was felt dead inside, filled with a heavy despair that weighed him down as grimly as any manacles. Disgust ate in him, too: disgust at his own susceptibility to a little exposed flesh. Hindsight told him that he should have lifted Marlani Chamiprak and put her outside his door and locked it. He had known the pasha was suspicious of them, yet he had let the woman kiss and stir him until reason flew away before the fever of desire.

His fist hit the edge of the wide bench.

“Fool, fool, fool! With everything to gain, by prudence, I was like a sailor after a half-year voyage!”

He reviled himself, trying not to think of the tortures that Yussuf Caramanli would be dreaming up in his selamlik. It would not be an easy death. There would be no merciful quickness, no volley of shots or headsman's falling ax Stephen Fletcher would suffer, and for a long time.

The palace was so quiet above him that he wondered if he was losing his hearing. When the faint pad of feet on stone sounded from the dark corridor, he swung himself from the bench and came to a stand, heart pounding madly. So soon? Was Yussuf so eager to begin his cruel play that he would begin now, in the middle of the night? Surely he would wait for dawn, if only to give Fletcher more strength to survive prolonged torture.

But these weren't the footfalls of armed guards, there was no arc of light from a gaoler's lantern, no jingle of keys—only bare feet padding, then the sibilant sound of short, quick breathing.

Fletcher walked catlike to the barred door and stared out into the gloom. A woman was standing there, in loose silk trousers and vest, looking fearfully behind her.

“Shellah,” he whispered, and the woman jumped. She came closer, and Fletcher could see the big iron key in her hand.

“Yuvaz got the key,” she panted, clinging to the cell bars. “He’s stolen dozens of them in the years he's been here, waiting for the moment to strike at Yussuf. He says we have to free you, so you can get word to the Americans about the secret fleet.”

She bent, thrusting her key in the lock, praying that no click of falling tumbler would betray her presence to the guard in the outer corridor. The lock turned smoothly, the door opened silently and Fletcher was in the corridor beside her, taking the key from her trembling hand.

He closed and locked the cell door, noting that in the gloom of the corridor no casual eye would notice whether there was anyone inside or not.

“Eve? What of Eve?"

“She's safe enough in the haremlik. I left her crying her pretty eyes out for you.”

“I was an idiot!” Shellah Smiled wisely. “Say instead that Marlani is a determined cat, who likes her loving heavily spiced with peril.”

Her soft, fragrant fingers over his lips held him silent for a moment, and he could read the warning in her eyes. There were guards patrolling these corridors. Mostly they slept or played chess in one of the anterooms. But there were times when Yussuf Caramanli took it into his head to come visiting a prisoner; and then it would not be good to be caught with an ivory chess-piece in hand, or slumped sideways in dreams about the slave girl one was saving up his zequins to buy. This night was a time to be alert.

“Do not speak, until I tell you, Stefan,” she whispered. “Just follow me!”

He crept after her like her shadow. They slipped through. an unoccupied cell by way of a loose stone slab and soon found themselves in another part of the cellar entirely, amid cells equipped with manacles that had imprisoned Greeks and Carthaginians in the days of the Scipios. Now, Shellah: went more surely, for there were no guards in this old, closed section of the castello.

A little side door with a carefully broken bolt opened onto a paved walk winding under a rose arbor and coming to a stop before a low wooden door in the garden gate. There were no guards here: the prisoners were inside the palace walls, so what chance had they of reaching the gardens? A latch clicked, then Shellah was draping the hem of her garment across her face so that only her dark eyes and brows could be seen.

Side by side, they hurried along the cobbled street, under the lighted eyes of windows in the stucco walls. Then the moonlight was flooding the shore, the clumps of esparto grass, throwing black shadows across the white sands. Their sandaled feet kicked up little puffs of sand as they moved along, almost in the shadow of the high, thick sea walls, toward a narrow jut of beach that ran outward at low tide like an elongated finger into the sea. An overturned catboat lay by the tiny promontory.

“A fisherman brought it here at dusk,” whispered Shellah, bending to help Fletcher turn it over. “There is food in oilskin wrappings in the gear locker, and fishing tackle, and a woolen barracan against the cold.”

“You’ve thought of everything.”

She looked at Fletcher and now he could see the tears glinting crystal in her eyes. Fletcher remembered Mark Avison and his solicitude for this desert girl.

“I wish it were you and Mark getting into this,” he said.

Her smile was tremulous. “Yuvaz says you have the better chance to make it. He could not get in touch with Mark Avison at the Olive Tree Tavern. Besides, he is not certain that Mark trusts him fully. And by freeing you, Yuvaz is able to strike at Yussuf. The pasha will be mad with rage when he learns you have escaped.”

“And you? Will any harm come to you?” Shellah shrugged. “Most likely not. Who would accuse me of risking my neck to save a nasrany?”

Something about her hesitant speech made Fletcher scan her face more closely. He guessed her thoughts. “You think Eve will suffer? Is that it?”

"He'll probably put her in a dungeon, in a fit of temper. But she's well guarded tonight. He'll know she could not have helped you get away. Yussuf will be angry, but he'll be cunning. I don't think he'll hurt her—not until he recaptures you, at any rate.”

Fletcher groaned. If there were any chance at all to stay and fight, to win freedom with the woman he loved, he would have kicked the boat away from him. His head ached from the pound of blood in his veins and the constriction that gripped his heart. Eve, Eve he thought. I'll come back for you. On my life, I promise it. Then he was bending and putting strong hands to the small boat. Wood scraped on sand as the narrow keel slid forward into the water.

Fletcher turned to the girl. “Will you be safe on the way back?”

She laughed softly. “If a guard sees me, I'll tell him I was visiting a friend on the beach, to make love a little. On a warm night like this, there'll be a hundred men and women in the dunes, trying to forget the boredom of their lives.”

The American nodded and said goodbye. He swung into the skiff and it went sliding out into the harbor waters. A mast was tilted upward from the stern, tied across the forward thwart. A triangular sail and rigging lay neatly wrapped on the floor slats.

It took a few moments to unwrap the ropes and seat the mast. He ran up the sail and the wind shook it, then filled it slowly, until the canvas strained and the boom swung outward to the full length of its main-sheet The skiff was cat-rigged, without shrouds or bowsprit, but it took the water easily and there was speed in its lean hull. Fletcher felt a small glow of animal pleasure as the wind whipped him and the boat surged forward like a living thing. He was remembering for an instant the years of his youth, when he sailed catboats in Accokeek Creek, and the smell of the salt tides and marshes and the clear, high calling of the gulls. Then, there had been high-adventure in every clump marsh grass. Now there was death behind and death and the sense of adventure was gone in the grim necessity staying alive.

Moonlight tipped the little wave crests with white fire the skiff slid past the black, wet rocks of the mole. Fletcher squatted on the aft thwart, gripping the long wooden handle of the tiller and telling himself what a miracle it was that he was here, a free man, while less than an hour ago he had been sunk in bitter gloom in the castello dungeon.

And yet, when he considered it, it didn't seem so strange. The pashas and beys of this Barbary Coast were served by men with the fatalism of the East in their hearts. Most Arabs or Turks would never think in terms of escape from a palace prison. They accepted death and punishment as they accepted everything else: with a belief in foreordained design that would be comic, were it not so tragic. There was little need for wide-awake guards when the prisoners viewed their imprisonment as the will of Allah.

If he and Shellah had been seen leaving the castello gardens, they had been looked on as lovers slipping to a bed on the warm Mediterranean sands. Now all that remained was to elude a possible onlooker from the anchored boats in the road stead. Fletcher knew that the hour was an early one, but he could pass for an ambitious fisherman, anxious to lower his nets before the dawn."

No challenging voice came across the waters. No yellow lantern was lifted high to illuminate the little cock-boat It slipped between the rocks, and through the shallow waters until the jutting mole was behind it, and only the vast stretch of heaving Mediterranean before it.

The silence of the sea was all around him as the shoreline and its flickering lights faded astern. The restless waves lifted and carried the tiny skiff forward like a leaf, as the wind in the sails and his hand on the tiller kept her prow pointing north. She ran before the wind and following sea with her sail fat and her free boards slicing water.

All that night Fletcher sailed, until dawn was a red haze in the east and the seas seemed turned to blood. Now hunger ate in him and he blessed Yuvaz and Shellah with every mouthful of the meat and bread he chewed.

The sun came up and made a pleasant heat on his back and shoulders. Soon he took off his shirt and sat naked to the middle, his feet bare. He had no way of knowing how long he sailed, but after a time he trimmed in the main-sheet and let the boom swing over as he jibed, and now he sailed with the wind abeam, eastward toward Derna.

Somewhere out on these lifting blue waters, he should sight an American warship. If that fortune failed him, he would find William Eaton in his captured citadel along the Cyrenaica sands.

Night came swirling in with a thick, wet fog that blotted out the sky and everything about him but the heaving sea. Without a compass he was afraid he would lose his way. He made a crude sea anchor and tossed it over-side Then he wrapped himself in the thick woolen barracan and stretched out on the floor slats. As his heavy eyelids closed wearily, he remembered that he had not slept now for more than twenty hours.

The fog lasted all the next day, hanging low to the water and coming in thick white puffs where the wind caught it. Fletcher cursed the fog and the lack of a compass that held him here immobile. He dared not move without knowing his direction, for the entire coastline was a network of Tripoline spies and allies, and in the fog he could not tell east from west or north from south.

During his second night at anchor the fog lifted. Fletcher woke to the sun on his face and a fair wind coming down from Italy. Just in time, too, he thought, wolfing the last crust of bread tinted yellow by sulfur. The water cask was more than half full, but his food was gone. He stood and stretched, then bent to unreef the sail where he had tied it along the boom.

He paused like that, his fingers on the gaskets. A sail was just visible, a tiny white triangle where greenish water met blue sky. Fletcher needed no second look to know it was no American sail. A ship like the Constitution or the Constellation would be higher in the sky with its towering top-gallants This was a Barbary brig or felucca heading toward him.

He worked swiftly, hoping that he had not been seen. He unseated his mast and placed it in the bottom of the boat, Sails beside it. Then he stretched himself out on the keel-boards and waited. He had made his hull as low as possible and there was nothing else he could do. With only his eyes and the top of his head showing above the gunwale-capping, he waited.

The ship did not veer, but ran straight on with the wind abeam. Within half an hour, Fletcher knew her lookout had sighted him.

He chuckled bitterly, and came to his feet. “I could up sail and try to run, but she'd catch me in less than an hour. As well wait and take what she has to give.”

But Fletcher was not a man who could sit and wait for his doom. He whirled and dove for the mast, cursing between his teeth. His heart thudding wildly, he set it up and ran up the sail and watched the wind fill it. As his left hand took the tiller, his right fist came down hard on the gunwale-capping

“She's got to travel fast to catch you, Stephen Fletcher!” he shouted. “Maybe it won't be as easy as you thought!”

The skiff was small and fast, and Fletcher fled with the wind running. As the strange ship came on, he put the tiller to windward at right angles to his former course. It took the felucca longer to come about, and he gained a few precious cable lengths.

He ran for half the day, until the superior speed of the corsair ship brought it within shooting distance. From the shrouds, three musketeers hung with their legs in the shrouds and peppered shot at him.

Sooner or later one of those balls would cripple him. With a sigh, Fletcher put his rudder hard down and watched the sails slat above him. He sat unmoving as the boat checked its headway and swung lazily upward in the heave of a wave.

“I’m cursed,” he said, and bitterness filled his throat. Half naked men swirled over-side from the felucca into a long tender and came for him, rowing smoothly. An aga stood in the prow, a cocked pistol in either hand, the wind stretching his topknot out behind him.

“Come aboard, nasrany dog!” he shouted. As the cock-boat scraped against the skiff, Fletcher vaulted into the smaller boat. Black eyes stared ferociously, and one or two of the men grinned, running their eyes over his big body. The aga laughed cruelly.

“They're wondering how long you'll take the torture Yussuf has dreamed up,” he informed him. “Or perhaps how well you'll take the kiss of the cat on board the Aydah.”

“The cat?”

“Our captain must have some pleasure from the chase, nasrany.”

A cold chill started up Fletcher's spine. As the mocking eyes of the aga moved past him toward the corsair ship, the American swung around. A man leaned against the starboard rail, grinning down at him. Fletcher would know that sardonic brown face anywhere.

Mustafa reis! The corsair captain's bright eyes never moved from the American as he scaled the rope ladder, vaulted onto the deck-boards and came to stand before him. The wind aft stirred the folds of Mustafa's barracan, and sent his loose, baggy trousers rippling about his legs. His fingers worked spasmodically on the braided haft of his curved dagger.

“Your luck has turned, nasrany," he said at last, and the passion in him slurred his voice. “Allah has rewarded me at last for the many gifts I've put in his mosques. Now you're in my hands.”

Fletcher shrugged. He had done what he could to run from these pirates, but it was not enough. No words would change whatever fate Mustafa reis prepared for him.

The corsair captain smiled almost affably. “Shortly now, you’ll be back at the castello of the Caramanlis. There are people eager to see you there—Yussuf pasha, his unfaithful wife, Marlani, who claims you were raping her when Yussuf interrupted, Eve Doremus–”

Fletcher started forward, then felt the cold round muzzle of a pistol shoved into the small of his back. Mustafa reis laughed in delight.

“That stirs you, eh, nasrany? Let me tell you this, then: Yussuf has thrown your precious Christian woman into a dungeon cell! Down into the dampness with the castello rats! He'll keep her there a month; if you aren't back in his power by that time, he'll torture her to death in the great square! That is, if I can't talk him into giving her to me. I'd like to enjoy her charms for a while, before I give her to my slaves . . .”

The pistol was not enough to hold him now. Like a cat he moved, knowing that a pistol ball would be a blessing compared to what waited for him in Tripoli. His hands went out and his long, powerful fingers closed around the throat of Mustafa reis. Unbalanced by the attack, the corsair captain rode back on his heels and fell to the deck.

Twisting and turning, they rolled from the scuppers to the main hatch. Voices were yelling all around them, but Fletcher didn't hear. His only concern was choking the life from this devil before him. It didn't matter what they did to him, if only Mustafa reis died here and now.

His fingers dug deeper. The bright eyes below him bulged. Mustafa reis heaved up, but Fletcher was too big, and too strong for him to dislodge. They rolled against the naked legs that hemmed them in.

Around them, men cursed and swore by Allah and his prophet. Mustafa reis had given orders that this man was not to be killed under any circumstances. Yussuf pasha had promised to torture him to death in the great market square, over a period of thirty days. It would be a fine sight to see a nasrany take thirty days to die, with each hour of those days an eternity of pain and screaming suffering! And the manor men who killed him would take his place: this was Mustafa reis' own solemn promise.

But by the beard of Allah! If they did not free their captain's throat from those fingers, he would die!

One man braver than the rest shifted his grip on the curved handle of his long-barreled pistol. He brought it up and sideways, so that the barrel slammed against Fletcher's temple.

The big Americano did not go down. The pistol lifted and fell again. The man who used it tempered his blows, for fear of killing the mad Americano. Five times Fletcher was hit before he stiffened and rolled free of the choking, sobbing Mustafa reis, to lie face upward on the deck planks.

Mustafa reis was bent double, a hand to his red and swollen throat, sucking air painfully into his lungs. Eager hands reached out to him, lifting him to his feet. His face was black with congested blood, and twisted with hatred.

"Lash his wrists to the shrouds!” The corsair lifted himself erect, trying to fight the nausea that thickened his throat. He watched the half, naked Fletcher lifted and dragged toward the starboard shrouds. Men scrambled into the netting, wrapping bits of hemp about the American's wrists and heaving upward until he was stretched in the shrouds like a man crucified.

Mustafa reis whispered hoarsely, “Leave him like that, for the rest of the day and all night long. Tomorrow, a little after dawn, we'll flog him!”