The Barbary Pirates

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

If the hold of Dragut’s ship had been claustrophobic, and the slave market of Tripoli wretched, Omar’s dungeon was infinitely worse. Its tunnels had been hewn by Carthaginians, Romans, Visigothic barbarians, Arab jihadists, and Turkish overlords over a score of centuries: a labyrinth of sorrow gnawed by generations of jailers and prisoners like termites into wood. Each tyranny had added a descending level, so each sin and cruelty could be hidden farther from the light. We were not marched but dragged to this hive in the bowels beneath Yussef’s palace, and were not thrust into a cell but pitched into a pit, a rock well slimed with dripping spring water that made its sides too slippery to climb. The bottom was ankle-deep in mud and sewage. We mostly felt this instead of saw it, because there was no light except the reflection of torches somewhere far overhead. The pit’s smell was peculiar, an odor of carrion and reptile, stale and prehistoric, so perhaps animals were sometimes kept there. No creature was in the pit now, which is just as well because we probably would have eaten it, killing the beast bare-handed and chewing it raw. The sweat from the rock was our only drinking water—we had to lap it like dogs—and our first food did not come for two days. We finally heard the shuffle of a troglodyte guard above and saw something tumble down in the dimness. We had the wit to catch what was a stale, weevil-infested loaf of bread, enough for two or three mouthfuls for each of us. The worms represented more nourishment than the rancid flour they’d fed on.

We wolfed down our share without tasting.

Our quartet barely said a word in our despair, so the primary sound was the screaming and begging of Yussef’s enemies being tortured somewhere above. Omar himself had been immensely strong and immensely silent, flinging us into our misery without a word of explanation. He’d seemed not so much cruel as indifferent, as if the suffering he oversaw never registered on the animal lobe of his brain.

All of us were sick. Humans cannot live long in a wet, stinking pit without inhaling from its vapors all kinds of pestilence, as any doctor will tell you. Our occasional shouts to summon help or explanation were ignored, and we wondered at times if we’d been entirely forgotten. When the future is uncertain, the present is misery, and time creeps like a slug. Even had we wanted to betray our navies, there was no opportunity to do so. In any event, the four of us pledged again not to betray the secret of the mirror as a way of fortifying our spirits.

“Better this pit than dishonor,” Cuvier said heavily.

“No Englishman would imperil his navy,” Smith added.

“Nor an American betray his nation’s cause,” said Fulton.

“Well said,” I confirmed. “Though a little negotiation wouldn’t hurt, if we could get out of this slime hole and properly pay them back.” They didn’t respond to this, given that they hadn’t much use for my ideas anymore.

We did try standing on each other’s shoulders to reach the lip, but even with a precarious pyramid that had Cuvier, the lightest of us, reaching for the top, we were still too short. There was no shovel to pile sand, and no sand to pile in any event. There was, in short, no possibility of escape, and no communication. Didn’t they want ransom? Had they given up trying to corrupt us to betray the secret of Archimedes?

And then they did break my will, but in an entirely unexpected way.

Time had disappeared, and existence in the hole had become synonymous with eternity. Then, without warning, a chain rattled down, rusty and thick. Omar shouted in a deep voice, “Gage, alone!”

“What’s this?” Cuvier asked, with just a hint of suspicion.

“Perhaps I’m the first to be shot.” I could think of worse things, like staying where I was.

“I read they decapitate,” Smith said.

“Oh.”

“It’s very quick.”

“Ah.”

“Maybe they want to torture you,” Cuvier speculated.

“Remember our pledge, Ethan,” Fulton warned. “We dare not help them.”

“You remember it, too, when you hear my screams.” And with that I grasped the chain, wrapped my legs around its links, and shouted. Omar hauled me up the slimy walls of our well, with me rotating so I was thoroughly smeared with filth. I was weak by now from lack of proper food and water, and had a hard time even holding on. My companions feared for me but also followed my ascent with envy, as if I’d been given leave to levitate to someplace that wasn’t just an endless, hopeless now.

I knew better.

The Dungeon Master seemed to fill the pit’s tight chamber, his teeth yellow, his breath stinking, and the skin of his palms thick and hard as boot leather. He clamped his paws on the back of my neck as if it were the scruff of a kitten, half lifting and paralyzing me, and I’d no doubt that should I not go where he pushed, my head would be snapped from its stalk. He began shoving me up a rock passageway.

“Torture doesn’t work with me,” I tried in Arabic.

He used his other hand to cuff me with the power of a bear, the blow leaving my ears ringing. “Silence, pretty one. Time enough for noise.”

I saw no advantage in following his advice. “I have powerful friends, Omar, with money to buy not only the escape of us savants but a life for you, too, if you go with us.”

Now he stopped, holding me at arm’s length, and regarding me with squinted disbelief. “Look at me. Where else could I possibly be?” And then he slammed me back against the tunnel wall, my poor head bouncing, and dragged me even more roughly than before. “I told you not to talk. It makes it worse.”

I was taken past horrid iron machines stained dark with blood, and heavy doors with small barred windows from which insane gibbering escaped. How can people invent such places, let alone administer them? Then we turned into a side rat hole and he pushed me ahead down a tight spiral to a new chamber lit by a tiny slit far, far above. The single ray of light just emphasized the grotto’s darkness, its vaulted ceiling stained black by the smoke of two millennia of torches. There was a rude wooden table in the chamber’s center, with manacles at each of its corners. To one side was the glow of a forge on which sat a bubbling pot, giving off noxious fumes. Iron implements were thrust into the coals. My courage, never all that vast to begin with, was starting to shrivel.

I was slammed down on the table and chained helplessly in place, my throat and belly and privates exposed to whatever deviltry this dim monster could invent. Never had I felt so helpless! The tiny window made things worse, reminding me there was a different world beyond. From a beam overhead swung metal implements designed to pierce, pinch, and cut. I wanted to scream already, and nothing had yet been done.

“Soon you will talk more than you believed possible.” Omar, clinical as a doctor, pumped air into the coals with a bellows, sparks dancing. He slipped on a heavy leather glove and lifted out an iron bar like a fireplace poker and brought it over to where I helplessly waited.

He held it above my eyes, letting me see its glow. “Each time I do this, I learn ways to prolong the pain. Victims can live for days. Yes, Omar is not as clumsy as he once was!” The hulking brute nodded. “By the time I’ve had the last of your friends, I will make it last a very long time indeed; so long that I will become bored before they finally die.”

“We wouldn’t want that,” I managed. My throat was dry as dust, my muscles cracking from tension. “Finish us quickly, is my advice.”

“You are lucky you are first, while I am still learning. We will experiment with pain. And a handsome man like you needs a mirror, so I will bring one after my branding so that you can weep at the ruin I make of your face. My goal is to make you even more hideous than me. You will blister and infect, but I keep maggots to eat the corruption. It makes you last longer.”

“Thank goodness for maggots.” It was a wheeze.

“I am told you pride yourself with women, so I have tools to mutilate those parts as well. The groin is a locus of agony, and always elicits the greatest screaming.”

I was near to fainting. “Can’t you just kill me? Beheading, Smith read.”

There was a hiss and I jumped, the poker thrust into a pail of water and then reinserted in the coals. “Why would they need the skill of a Dungeon Master to do that? Anyone can hack off a head with a sword. It is torture