Beasts of prey look for easy victims. So do bullies. But scratch the lion and he’ll back off looking for easier meat. Let’s crouch beneath the bulwark, wait until they draw near, and then give a broadside with your light guns and our arms. It will throw them into confusion. If we can cut up their rigging, maybe we can escape.”
“You’re willing to risk your life?” Dragut asked.
“I’d rather sell it here than in a slave market.”
“You are mad, Christians. But very brave, too. All right.” He snapped orders to his crewmen. “You Europeans take your place just by the bulwark there, where the protection is best. We will ready behind you, with matches for the cannon. I’ll watch for the precise moment and we will rise as one and fire! Every shot must hit to throw them into disorder. Then you must help us with the lines to draw off and escape.”
Ever notice how organizers put followers in the front rank, and them behind? But it didn’t seem the time to argue choreography. The pirate corsairs were coming on fast, lateen-sailed vessels larger than the xebec but just as swiftly built, and crammed with men. As we crouched I could peek through a hawser hole at the mob of them, stripped to the waist except for earrings and armlets of gold. Some were bearded and turbaned. Others were shaved bald, muscles bulging, painted with tattoos or decorated with great mustaches. All of them were roaring and clashing steel for our maximum demoralization. Were these the ships I’d seen at Thira? The animal smell of them came across the water, plus oil and spices, the smell of Africa.
“Hold your fire until the last moment,” Dragut counseled. “Remember, we get only one volley! We must wait until they are close as possible!”
“Damnation,” Smith muttered. “I felt less confined in a canal ditch.”
“Your blunderbuss will give them pause,” I encouraged. “Georges, fire both your pistols at once. Fulton, you’ve lost your pipes. Do you need a gun?”
“I’ve got an ax to cut their boarding lines,” he said. “And maybe we can swing the boom to knock some of them back. A pendulum can accumulate tremendous power.”
“Just what Archimedes would advise.” I turned back to Hamidou. “Ready when you are!”
He nodded encouragingly and laid his cutlass on the flat of his hand.
The nearest corsair loomed to fill all my view, its sails almost black, its crew balanced on the railing, twitchy as colts.
“Steady,” I murmured. I’d already picked a target for my longrifle, a big brute of a pirate who looked to be their captain. Then, because of the time it took to reload, I’d slash at any boarders with my rapier. We’d sting like a scorpion. “When you give the word, Dragut.” I tensed, ready to rise and fire.
It was then that I felt the annoyingly familiar press of a gun barrel at the nape of my neck. “And the word is ‘surrender,’ Ethan Gage,” he said cheerfully. I realized I’d never told him my whole name and yet he knew it, the devious bastard. “Take your finger from your trigger, please, and lower your longrifle to the deck, so that I do not have to shatter your spine.”
I glanced sideways. My companions also had guns to their heads, held by our own crewmen. We’d been betrayed, from beginning to end! Had the Venetian gondoliers simply been herding us to this treacherous vessel from the start? Our arms thumped on the deck.
Then there was a crash of wood as the two ships mated, and a shout as a rank of half-naked, unwashed pirates poured across, their bare feet lighting like cats. In seconds we were yanked backward, our arms wrenched and our feet bound.
Dragut looked at me with amazement. “You didn’t get off even a single shot. I expected more from the hero of Acre and Mortefontaine.”
“When I finally do, I’ll aim at you.”
“Alas, I think the time for that is past.”
“What base treachery is this?” cried Smith.
“I believe, gentlemen, that we have once more been led into a trap by our esteemed guide, Ethan Gage,” said Cuvier.
“But why not just seize us yourselves back at Thira?” I asked our captain.
“It was you who had the rapier to my eye, not vice versa. We didn’t really expect you to escape from the island.”
“And because I wanted the pleasure of seizing you myself!” cried a new voice. A lithe new pirate swung on a line from the enemy poop and lightly landed on ours, this one beardless and dressed in sea boots, greatcoat, and bloused trousers that were a century back in style, as braided and gaudy as a Caribbean buccaneer’s. The newcomer wore a magnificent broad-brimmed plumed hat and held a jeweled sword in a fine-fingered hand. A broken, ominously broken second sword was tucked in a wide leather belt, along with twin pistols. As the buccaneer hopped down to the xebec’s main deck, some of the other scoundrels flinched as they made room, and we soon saw why. With a leap a black hound cleared the gap between the two vessels and followed his master onto our deck, landing with a heavy thump with feet skittering for new purchase. This muscular beast was a short- haired, thick-snouted mastiff, ugly with slobber and hanging jowls, a dog that bristled at the sight of us and growled with the purr of Hell’s Cerberus. Its eyes were yellow, its flanks scarred, its tail chewed, and the whole package was uglier than the fleas that inhabited it.
The owner plucked off the feathered headgear and gave a sweeping bow.
A torrent of auburn ringlets cascaded down around our captor’s shoulders—a woman!—and she gave a seductive smile I remembered all too well, even as my heart fell like a barometer in a hurricane. “I told you we weren’t through, Ethan.”
I gaped in shock, revulsion, and fear, frozen by that still-beautiful face, that athletically graceful figure, those long, white fingers holding a blade that sparkled silver. How vividly did I now remember the broken sword tucked in her belt, which her brother had shattered on my longrifle. She was as bewitching as I remembered, too: the high cheekbones, the feline gaze, the wicked dance of her eyes. It was Aurora Somerset, the English aristocrat who had tupped and tormented me on the North American frontier.
“Aurora?” was all I could manage, stupidly.
My companions looked at us curiously.
“I’ve joined the Barbary pirates,” she said, as if that weren’t obvious enough. “I thought it would bring us together.”
PART TWO
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
As threatened, here she was, fully recovered from her trauma and apparently in charge of an ill-tempered dog and several shiploads of feral pirates, most of them pledged to a religion that dictated women stay subservient and out of sight. Well, nobody is consistent.
My companions were merely dumbfounded. I knew enough to be terrified.
I’d met Aurora on my journey west to seek Norse artifacts with the late Magnus Bloodhammer. I was predictably blinded by her beauty and made a fool of myself, as men are wont to do. The upshot was my capture, near torture, escape into the wild, and final showdown in which I killed the man who was both Aurora’s half brother
