English admiral Norborough had burned Tripoli’s fleet as a warning. Weaker nations, however, find it more cost- effective to pay tribute than to try to catch the swift corsairs or assault their heavily fortified African cities. That tribute is not just money, but ships, cannon, and powder that turn North African ports into bristling hedgehogs of defiance. Cuvier might hope for ransom from the French government that had elevated him, but Smith, Fulton, and I had neither rich families nor high rank. That meant we were almost certain to die manacled: overworked, underfed, and rotten with disease.
I explained all this as gently as I could.
“What if we defy them?” Fulton sought to clarify.
“Their favorite discipline is the bastinado, where they tie the ankles, hoist up the feet, and flail them with two hundred strokes. Some slaves are crippled for life. If the beating is severe enough to render a man useless, he’s suspended from hooks on the city walls to die of exposure. Then the pirates sail out to capture more.”
“There’s no mercy?”
“Sometimes you can gain better treatment by conversion to Islam, a cultural surrender called ‘taking the turban.’”
“Then give me a Koran to swear to!”
“Unfortunately, you have to prove your submission through circumcision.”
Fulton studied me to see if I was joking, which I was not. “Every time I think you can’t make things any worse, your leadership becomes even more incompetent,” he finally said.
“All is not entirely lost.” I was, I suppose, our morale officer.
“What do you mean?”
“We have the American navy on our side.”
I crawled to the grating and stood as upright as I could in our cramped chamber, my face checkered by the light shining down. “Hamidou, I must give you warning!” I called.
The captain came over to stand on the grate, casting a shadow. “Silence, slave, before I cut off your tongue and more besides!” He was not at all the jolly skipper who’d sailed us down the Adriatic, and once again I remembered that I needed to modify my habitually optimistic appraisal of people. I noticed he’d tucked Cuvier’s dueling pistols in his belt, and no doubt was polishing Smith’s blunderbuss as well.
“The United States has sent a naval squadron in response to Yussef Karamanli’s declaration of war!” I warned. “Robert and I are American citizens. If you’re caught with us aboard, it could mean the gallows or worse. I’m only trying to warn you!”
He laughed. “So you think I should let you go?”
“It might be best for you as well as us. We could put in a good word.”
He pretended to consider. “No. If an American frigate could catch me, which it can’t, I will throw you Americans to the sharks, cut out the tongues of the two other infidels, and swear that Yankees were never aboard. This is more satisfying, I think.”
“Hamidou, we put our trust in you!”
“Yes. Better to trust in
Why the prospect of my torture arouses such amusement I’ve never understood, but it seems a universal reaction among my enemies. I am, as I’ve said, affable—except when I have to shoot particularly horrid people— and don’t, in my opinion, deserve the rejoicing that always seems to accompany my capture.
“That didn’t seem to work,” I reported to the others unnecessarily, since they’d heard every word.
“We weren’t exactly counting on you,” assured Smith.
I took out the parchment I’d kept after Aurora threw it back. “This book of prayer hasn’t reformed these Muhammadans in the slightest.” I held it under the grating to look at its Latin script again, still puzzled why anyone would conceal it in the wall of buried ruins a hundred feet underground. Had I missed some kind of code, of the kind we’d deciphered amid the Dakota Indians in distant North America?
The dimness of the hold and pocks of light forced me to peer even more intently at what seemed a worthless old scrap of animal skin. It was then that I detected the faintest of curved lines like a whisper beneath the Latin script. Moving the parchment beneath the grating, I began to notice other tracings, almost invisible if you blinked.
“Cuvier, could you take a look at this? I think there’s something more to this parchment.”
The French savant sighed, heaved himself up from where he had slumped between the barrels, and crouch- walked to join me under the grating. Following my finger, he squinted at the script, bored at first, but then more intent. He took the scrap in his own hands and held it this way and that under the light.
Finally he pulled me away and whispered in the shadows. “I think it’s a palimpsest.”
“Thank God for that. A what?”
“In the Middle Ages, writing material was in short supply and parchment durable. To reuse it, they’d scrape off the old writing and copy some new text over it. Perhaps what the Knights meant to leave was not this list of prayers, but whatever was first under them.”
I began to have a glimmer of hope. Knowledge is power, and we’d need all the power we could muster against Aurora and her pirates. I scratched with my nail at the parchment, smearing some ink. “Then how can we get the new writing off?”
Cuvier stayed my hand. “Let me think for a moment.” He exhibited that look of pursed concentration that made him look so smart. Then he turned to the others. “Gentlemen, biology teaches that we must breach a water cask so we can drink all we can hold.”
“Why?” asked Smith.
“Because we have to do our very best to urinate on Ethan’s discovery.”
“Catch it with what?” I asked.
“I suggest our boots,” said Smith. “I had to bail a leaky canal boat once and found my footwear quite adequate for the purpose.”
“I can hardly bear to put my feet in my shoes, let alone drink from them.”
“Then we can forgo the experiment and spend the rest of our short lives in slavery and torture.”
“You have a point. Bottoms up.”
We balanced on the barrel, pressed down, forced a leak, collected the overflow in each of our boots—we weren’t friends enough to share, trust me—and drank as much as we could. It was satisfying to steal from Dragut, even if it was only water. We drank until we were bloated and could make our own water, a time-consuming task in the heat.
“Whose shoe should catch the piss?” Fulton asked.
“Ethan’s, of course,” Smith replied.
“Wait,” I objected, “why not yours?”
“Because I didn’t concoct this expedition. Besides, you’re the one who found a palimpsest.”
I did persuade them to take a vote but it went unanimously against me, so our production of urine was collected in my footwear, my companions taking great satisfaction in draining their bladders there. Then we began to scrub the parchment with urine, slowly sloughing the medieval ink away to reveal whatever was underneath.
It was a map, I saw, with a cross-hatching of lines and symbols atop a chart that looked like the outline of a coast. A bay with a narrow neck was shown, and an arcing line like a fence or boundary crossed the interior. The