The Barbary Pirates

and whether marvelous things were once known and then forgotten after the fall of the Roman Empire. Some of my acquaintances have suggested that myths of the ancient gods actually refer to early beings who somehow taught mankind how to grow, build and write, and by doing so lifted us out of the mud. The Egyptian Rite thinks the knowledge of such ancestors, if relearned, could provide terrible power. I’ve seen some things to make me suspect they might be right.”

“What things?” Cuvier asked. He’d brought a red-leather notebook and pen to record our discoveries, a tin officer’s field kit with scissors, comb, and toothbrush, and a combination clock and compass in a copper case. He’d write down our remarks and mark our direction with every entry, as if no one had ever mapped the highway before.

“A book that caused nothing but trouble. And a tool, a hammer, that was even worse.”

“And now we’re off to find an ancient weapon,” said Fulton, “with Bonaparte, Fouche, and those lunatics in Madame Marguerite’s bordello curious about it, too. Why Napoleon is so anxious about forgotten weapons, when he won’t give a proper hearing to my modern ones, is beyond me.” He was amusing himself by taking apart his own pocket watch for the pleasure of putting it back together, but kept losing sprockets and springs when the coach went over bumps, making us have to look for them on the vehicle’s dusty floor. Cuvier took care to keep his own compass-clock out of the inventor’s reach.

“It’s human nature to see the flaws in what you have and perfection in what you don’t,” I said. “Besides, buying your submarine or steamboat means uncomfortable change, Robert. Sending us on a treasure hunt to conspire with a Greek patriot risks nothing.”

“Except us,” Smith said. “It’s the man on the lip of the canal who wants it dug deeper, not the man at the bottom.”

“The man at the lip will argue he can see farther, and better measure the necessary depth,” Cuvier said.

“And the one at the bottom should reply that he’s the one who can weigh the rock and soil, and count the blisters.”

At Venice we ferried across a limpid lagoon to that fabled, crumbling wedding cake of a city that was still buzzing from Bonaparte’s brief occupation in 1797. French troops had torn down the gates of the Jewish ghetto (many Jews had enlisted in Napoleon’s army as a result) and ended a thousand years of Venetian independence with a flurry of decrees declaring republican ideals. The revolution had been brief, since the Treaty of Campo Formio had given the city to Austria a few months later, but the ghetto hadn’t been reestablished and the population was still debating the merits of the frightening freedoms the French had promised. They discussed as well contrary warnings that French reform ultimately meant tyranny. Was Napoleon promise or peril? Was he liberator, or lord?

I was tempted to linger in the city by the decadent beauty of Venice: the mysterious twisting of its fetid canals, the iceberg majesty of its sinking, leaning houses, the rhythmic song of its lyrical gondoliers, its arched, weather-stained marble bridges, its baroque balconies pouring out cascades of flowers, and its dark-haired beauties weaving through the pillars at the periphery of Piazza San Marco like duchesses at a dance, their silks shimmering like butterfly wings. The queen city of the Adriatic rang with bell, song, lush opera, and echoing church choir, and smelled of perfume, spice, charcoal, urine, and water. Sunlight burned on the wavelets, and candles beckoned when it was dark.

But I’d reformed, I reminded myself, and thus resisted the temptation to peek at pleasure, indulgence, and wickedness. Instead, I begged my companions for just enough time to hunt down a fine Venetian rapier in an armory shop, given the reputation of Italian cutlery. A Venetian sword was renowned for its slim and supple balance and elegant curved guard, and yet it carried a shave more weight and sturdiness than its French counterpart.

“All the best duelists have one,” I justified.

A naval cutlass would be more practical for alley fighting, but the rapier was elegant to the feminine eye, giving me a certain swagger. I felt dashing when I buckled one on and studied myself in the store’s cracked antique mirror, deciding I looked quite the courtier. So I spent twice the money I should have, and learned when I tried to walk that the weapon banged so annoyingly on my thigh that I eventually took it off and tied it across my back like Magnus Bloodhammer’s old ax, lest I tangle my own legs. This was the new nineteenth century, I reasoned, and I assumed that in the unlikely event I actually needed a weapon as antique as a rapier, I’d have warning enough to unstrap, unsheathe, give it a whet and a polish, and get into some kind of proper stance. Besides, I still carried my habitual tomahawk and longrifle, the latter marred by an annoying crevice in the stock where Cecil Somerset had broken his sword in my last adventure. The gun was so banged about that it retained little of its original elegance when forged in Jerusalem. Still, it shot well, and I looked like a little arsenal with everything strapped on. Women eyed me with wary interest behind their splayed fans, wondering just what kind of rogue I might be, and men edged around me in narrow lanes as if I were balmy as a butcher. Venetians are used to all sorts of visitors, but whispers began about Ethan Gage, the frontier American. That secretly pleased me.

Given that we were adventuring into Ottoman territory, my companions tolerated my weapon shopping by doing their own. We enjoyed the excuse to acquire manly accoutrements.

Cuvier, after a period of perplexity, settled on a pair of brass-and-silver dueling pistols in a rosewood box. They’d be deadly enough within ten paces.

Bluff and hearty Smith went for something entirely more formidable, a wicked blunderbuss—Dutch for “thunder gun”—which fired a spray of balls from a barrel just fifteen inches long. The piece was short enough to be concealed under a coat or cloak. When Smith tried it out from the quay at the harbor, its stunning report sent up clouds of pigeons at San Marco two hundred yards away. “It kicks like a mule but bites like a bear,” he reported. “Just the thing to make a boarding party think twice.”

I expected Fulton to pick out a similar firearm, perhaps an even more complex and mechanical-minded one like a nine-barreled musketoon, designed for fighting from a foretop and rarely used because it had the alarming habit of kicking so powerfully that it could knock its user out of the rigging. That seemed the kind of design problem that would challenge the inventor, and I pictured him fixing braces and pulleys to hold his torso against the recoil. But no, Fulton became intrigued with the unlikeliest of instruments, a scuffed and dusty Scottish bagpipe he found in a market stall.

“That will make our enemies run,” I said good-naturedly. “I’ve heard the pipes, and it sets dogs howling. Invaders stayed out of Scotland for a thousand years because they couldn’t stand the noise.”

“That fire-eater in the Palais gave me an idea,” Fulton replied. “I can’t play this, but I can play with it. What if it could spit fire? Something to tinker with as we sail south.” He pressed the bag and got a wail. “Or entertain us.”

I’m rather tolerant of lunatics, which is why I know so many of them.

We paid for our purchases, the inventor blowing a wheeze or two on his Scottish pipes while we winced, and then the savants said we must press on.

“We hurry so science can find more time,” Cuvier explained. “Thira is a depository of time. We need time to explain the mysteries of our planet because nothing makes sense without it. Time, time, time.”

“Most people don’t sensibly fill the time they have already, Ben Franklin would say.”

“I said science. The human mind is imprisoned by our brief concept of history, Ethan. The globe becomes ever more complicated and all our explanations have to be crammed into a few thousand years, like a sprouting boy with shoes three sizes too young. But if the earth is older than we think, then all kinds of new ideas become possible.”

“What kind of ideas?”

“That if the world wasn’t always as it is, then it mustn’t always remain this way, either,” Smith put in. “Perhaps we’re only a chapter in a longer tale. That we men are not the reason for existence, but just players in a bigger drama we don’t understand.”

“People won’t like that, William. We like to think history begins and stops with us.”

“Then why did God leave us clues that it didn’t?” the Englishman said.

“Well, surely if the rocks are that old, we’ve time enough for supper on the piazza before getting to them, eh?”

“Fouche and Napoleon told us to hurry. The Venetians are looking at us oddly. Looking at you oddly.”

“Fouche and Napoleon don’t have blisters on their backsides from hurrying hundreds of miles to one of the