“Upper wing,” I corrected. “If the metaphor is peacock.”
“It’s really a product of natural history,” Cuvier opined. “Now the male, it is true, has the instinct to be unfaithful. While monogamy is advantageous for the survival of children, in terms of procreation it’s in a buck’s best interest to mount as many damsels as possible.”
“Here, here,” I said.
“So that should keep men in a position of superiority,” Smith said. “If his heart is broken by one mate, he simply transfers his energies to the next. Look at Gage there, a perfect example of serial infatuation, faithlessness, and poor judgment.”
I opened my mouth to clarify but Fulton cut me off.
“Fighting stags risk dying in combat, but the winner gains a harem,” the inventor agreed. “The bull rules the pasture, and the ram his ewes. Male superiority, gentlemen, is the rule of the barnyard, and it should be the rule of the salon.”
“And yet it is not,” Cuvier cautioned. “Ethan, for example, is the kind of man who has endless problems with women, given his flea-like frenzy, inability to plan for the future, rank opportunism, and hapless disloyalty. In his case, the advantage is to the fair sex. When does one hunt a stag? In the rutting season, when the animal’s brain is positively addled by lust and he can’t get anything right.”
“Ethan again,” Fulton agreed.
“The woman, in contrast, has a far weightier task than simple copulation,” Cuvier went on. “While a loose bull like Gage might charge around the pasture, wearing out over this skirt and that, the female has but one chance to get it right. Just a single man will impregnate her, and so her choice of the stud is crucial to her own well-being and that of her child. As a result, she approaches relationships with the acumen of an Alexander and the strategy of Frederick the Great. Her brilliance at this dance is honed from earliest childhood, and faced with her ruthless strategy and judicious selection, we men are but helpless pawns. It is she who controls our success or failure, she who maneuvers to bring the right mate to her boudoir, she who calculates not just physical attractiveness but money, intelligence, and power, and sets in place a bewildering set of flanking maneuvers and ambushes that turn the hapless male to befuddled acquiescence. At the same time, she must convince the male that the entire affair is his idea.”
“We are no match,” Smith agreed with a sigh. “We are rabbits to their fox.”
“Or at least hapless romantics like Ethan are,” said Cuvier.
“They weigh our inheritance, our reputation, our prospects, and our hygiene,” Fulton confirmed. “It’s little wonder Gage here has such trouble with his Astiza and this Somerset, to just begin the list. It’s a hopeless mismatch.”
“I am hardly a victim, gentlemen.” My pride was being stung.
“Perhaps not,” said Cuvier, “but the farther you stay from women, Ethan Gage, the safer all of us will be.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Someday I was going to learn not to go on errands for Napoleon Bonaparte.
“What is our plan again?” whispered Fulton.
“Well, I was going to ransom us with what we know, but an outbreak of moral rectitude among the four of us put an end to that scheme. I see only two ways out. One is to run like the very devil when we have the chance.”
Fulton looked down at his manacles. “I think they’ve anticipated that.”
“The other is to appeal to reason. I don’t trust our pirate queen for a moment, lads, and so we need to see the king of this place, one Yussef Karamanli, and convince him just how important we really are.”
“Isn’t he the one who shot one brother and exiled another on his way to the throne? The one who’s declared war on our own United States? The one whose grandfather had his janissary guards strangled, one by one, as they came in the door of a thank-you banquet?”
“He’s no George Washington,” I allowed. “In the end, however, pirates are always businessmen. You savants represent the brightest minds in Europe. We’ll figure out some harmless task to impress him, earn his gratitude, put him in our debt, and then be sent on our way. With presents, perhaps.”
“Your optimism is ludicrous,” Smith said.
“If we prove truly useful, he’ll never let us go,” Cuvier added.
“Maybe Napoleon will rescue us then.”
“Napoleon has no idea where we are.”
“Then look for any chance of escape, gentlemen.”
“Punishable by excruciating death, I’ve read,” Smith warned. “We really don’t have a chance, if I recall.”
“Well,” I said doggedly, “I’ll think of something.”
They sighed.
With that and the crack of whips we shuffled forward, bunched with a second group of captives pushed off another ship. Some of these were sobbing women. Our vine of chain was locked together and we were pushed, stumbling, past hogsheads of sugar, pipes of wine, and casks of nails into the city proper, passing from blinding sunlight to the canyonlike shadows of a street of Africa, awnings casting them in shade. We were lashed through crowds of jostling soldiers, shouting merchants, shrouded women, braying donkeys, and snorting camels. We shuffled with bare feet on the manure-spotted sand of the street to the blare of horns and beat of drums. High overhead the red, green, and white banners of Tripoli floated to taunt anyone dreaming of freedom. From the alcoves, the poorest Muslim beggars made sure to strike and spit to ensure that our mood was even worse than theirs. We were jeered until we shrank into ourselves like the intimidated spirits we were. Our weapons were gone, our boots stolen—I made sure Dragut himself took my urine-soaked shoe—and half our buttons plucked off. We were thirsty, starved, sunburned, and whipped, and as pitiable a lot as you’ll see this side of a cannibal campfire. I kept looking for opportunity, and finding none.
Tripoli did bring back memories of Alexandria and Cairo. Here were the coffee shops, the old men squatting at the entrance to puff at six-foot hookah pipes as we stumbled by, the air heavy with hashish and incense. There were taverns, too, run by freed Christians and patronized by Muslims who sat in dark shadows to imbibe forbidden alcohol.
The Turkish and Arab women we passed were veiled, their robes shapeless, so that only the beauty of their almond eyes hinted at the charms within.
Tripoli also had a large colony of Jews who’d been expelled from Spain in Columbus’s day. By decree the Jews were dressed in black, and forced to go barefoot if they crossed in front of a mosque. Most of the beggars were missing hands or arms, their extremities having been chopped off and the stumps dipped in pitch after conviction of some crime. Street urchins ran with us, too, yelling taunts and laughing at our shackled misery. High above, the eyes of more women peered down at us from the grilled windows of harems and apartments.
I preferred Philadelphia.
“There’s a hierarchy in Tripoli you would do well to memorize,” said Hamidou as his sailors jabbed us forward. “The rulers and janissary soldiers are Turks, answerable to the Sublime Porte in Istanbul. They are the ones allowed to wear the red fez wrapped with muslin. Below them are Arab merchants, the descendants of the desert warriors who conquered North Africa more than a thousand years ago. Beneath the Arabs are the Moors, the Muslims driven from Spain by the Christian knights. Then the Levantines, the Greeks and Lebanese who do menial
