The Barbary Pirates

stand in a shaft of dazzling sunlight, like the apparition of an angel.

All sense left me then, and I heard a roaring in my ears. My knees went weak.

It was Astiza, my lost love from Egypt, as beautiful as ever.

With her, dressed like a little sultan, was a boy of just over two years. He looked at me with bright, cautious curiosity.

“Hello, Ethan,” Astiza said. “This is your son, Horus.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Astiza was as striking as I remembered. She’s a Mediterranean beauty, Greek and Egyptian, her hair silk and piled for this reunion, held in place with a golden pin. She has eyes to drown in, dark and deep, and they shone with a bright intelligence that might frighten some men but captivated me. She was not as conventionally beautiful as Aurora Somerset but had a thousand times more character, the set of her lip or the waiting question of her eyes hinting at a depth of emotion the English noblewoman had no knowledge of. There was bright steel in Astiza, but vulnerability, too, and while she always seemed ready to slip away (that independence!) she once had need of me as well, as baffled by her attraction to me as I was by my longing for her. We had electricity. We understood each other’s hopes in an unspoken way I’d never shared with another woman. Slim, poised, draped in Arabian finery, her sandals silver and her jewelry braided gold, she seemed a dream after the ghastliness of Omar and the horror of his dungeons.

Yet my appraisal was done hurriedly because my stunned stare necessarily went to the wee creature beside her. This was a lad not much beyond the nursery, shorter, I guessed, than Napoleon’s Little Red Man, with a shock of unruly hair that mimicked my own in a way both enchanting and disturbing. My son! I wasn’t aware I had one. He had Astiza’s hypnotic eyes and upright stance, and my own cheekiness. He didn’t shy behind my old lover’s skirts but looked at me with that optimistic wariness children use with strange but promising adults. I might have a present—or, I might be of no use whatsoever. And damn if the tyke’s face didn’t look a bit like mine, too, a point I registered with both apprehension and pride.

“My son?” It came out as a croak.

“I suspected pregnancy when we were in Temple Prison in Paris.”

“You didn’t share this rather momentous information?”

“I didn’t want it to dissuade you from bringing me to help stop Alessandro Silano and his Egyptian Rite treachery. And later, when Napoleon spared us…you’re a man who’s destined to go his own way, Ethan. I knew we’d have a reunion. I just didn’t expect it to be like this.”

“What are you doing in Tripoli?” My questions were thick, my mind reeling, my purpose confused. I was a father? By Thor’s thunder, was I supposed to marry the girl? And was I supposed to be pleased, or disturbed? I couldn’t remember old Ben Franklin having anything to say about this.

“I was captured, like you.”

“What kind of a name is Horus?” She hadn’t conferred on that, either.

“A quite noble name of an Egyptian god. You know that.”

“I just always imagined having a Jack or a Tom or something.” I was rambling, while I tried to take it all in.

“You weren’t around to consult.” Her tone was cool, and tarnation if I didn’t feel guilty about the entire situation. But I hadn’t planned this or wanted it! I just wanted her, and I still did, didn’t I? Of course I did, I wanted to leap the gap between us, but a child gave new gravity to the situation. New purpose to every glance and word. What was my duty here?

Dragut and Karamanli were looking at me with amusement.

“How were you captured?”

“Kidnapped in Egypt. I’d returned to Dendara for my studies of the past when Bedouin raiders took us. Ethan, all this from the beginning—with Silano and the medallion, the Book of Thoth, your mission in North America—has been an attempt by our enemies to reconstruct the power discovered in the Middle Ages by the Knights Templar. They are reassembling the lost powers of a very ancient world, a world that preceded the one we know and that started our own civilization. Secrets lost for millennia are being bent toward evil.”

“That’s not true,” Dragut said.

“The more I studied in Egypt the more I understood the vastness of their design, and I hoped the hieroglyphs of Dendara would reveal how all this secret history came about. But before I could work, Horus and I were kidnapped. We were ridden into the desert by Bedouin and I thought we’d be ransomed from there, but instead we were sold in a slave market to men who wore medallions of a pyramid entwined with a snake. It was Apophis all over again. They took us to the coast, threatening to harm Horus if I tried any witchcraft. Then we were chained to a corsair and sailed here, where I was brought to Karamanli’s harem.”

“My God. Are you a concubine?”

She shook her head. “I wasn’t captured for him. I was captured for you.”

“For me?” I was more confused than ever.

“To persuade you, if you failed to cooperate. All this has been planned for many months, Ethan, by some pirate captain who has some scheme I don’t understand. A devil in league with Hamidou Dragut here.”

“A devil-ess,” I corrected heavily. “The pirate is a woman.”

“A woman!”

“We have some history.”

Her look was less than happy. “I see.” In an instant many things had become clear to her, such as why she was in this predicament at all.

I swallowed. “Perfectly horrid, I assure you. The plague, Inquisition, and Reign of Terror were holidays compared with Aurora Somerset. I was asking about you in Paris, Astiza, really I was—I wrote Ashraf about you, too—which is how my friends and I got into this mess. I came to find you. And now, to meet you here, with… Horus.” I blinked at the boy. “I’m more than a little astounded.”

“Who that?” the boy piped up.

“It’s your papa, I told you.”

“He come stay?” His voice lifted at the end of each question, and he seemed quite the proficient talker for his age, which I was swiftly calculating must be just over two. I couldn’t help but have some satisfaction at the precocious little prodigy I’d spawned, as well as new alarm at the question he raised. I loved Astiza, yes, but a family and domesticity? Everything was happening too fast.

“No, my sweet. He’s going to save us by going away.”

“Go where?”

“Where other people tell him to go.”

“Now what are you talking about?” I interrupted.

“As we’ve explained, we need your help and partnership, Ethan Gage,” Dragut said. “We could let Omar the Dungeon Master explore what you know, but one is never certain if the information elicited through torture is entirely honest. Much better for all, we think, is your voluntary help in achieving our mutual ends.”

“Mutual ends!”

“Ethan, this was not my idea,” Astiza said. “I’m as helpless as you. But these cultists, these fanatics, are as ruthless as the pirates they employ.”

“You have two choices, Monsieur Gage,” Dragut explained. “You can return to the dungeon and let Omar have his way. He, at least, will enjoy it. Perhaps we’ll learn something useful, and while by the end you’ll be broken and insane, Aurora and I can investigate whatever clues he has wrung out of you. Should you make this choice to end your life in hideous pain, Astiza will become a concubine to the highest bidder, and your son will be sold into a harem of a different sort. There are beys who run to that taste, and are always looking for young boys to initiate. We will put Horus there.”

“Where, Mama?”

“Hush, baby.”