The Barbary Pirates

my son.”

“You will marry me, this midnight, or I will give your son to Dragut’s Moors this very night to begin to use as they will! You will marry me or hear his screams, and then you’ll explain what you’ve done to your Egyptian slut of a harem whore before Yussef sells her away to the worst kind of degradation!”

“This wasn’t our bargain!”

“You never asked what the full terms of the bargain were. And I couldn’t tell you, because you’re too stupid to grasp the chance to be a king. So I’ll force it on you, and force you into my bed, and in time you’ll worship me as I deserve.”

She certainly had a high opinion of herself, which is a problem with lovely women. Admittedly, I’m sometimes guilty of the same vice. I stared out at the sea, thinking furiously. No union consecrated by this rabble would be recognized anywhere as either holy or legal. Should I go along with this sham until I could finally get Astiza and Harry away from this treacherous bitch? She wanted to marry me to torment me, to keep me close enough to make every day a misery of regret for what I’d done to her brother. Climb into a bridal bed with a woman who’d slain my friends? I couldn’t even pretend to function. And yet what choice did I have with little Harry still a hostage? I was surrounded by a hundred hostile fanatics and fantasists, and my former friends probably believed I’d betrayed my own country.

“I will make it as hateful for you as it will be for me.”

“I don’t think so, Ethan. No, I don’t think there is any chance of that.” And she turned to Osiris. “The ritual, at midnight! Bring the boy so he can see!” She smiled back at me. “I’m ever so certain I can corrupt you both.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The moon rose orange over the desolate island, as big as the captured mirror itself, and then as it climbed and brightened, the sea and ship turned silver. The Egyptian Rite contingent had commandeered the hold below the main deck, and its hatch glowed orange as well. The pirates drew uneasily toward the bow and muttered to each other about serving under the shadow of Satan, pagans, and Christian blasphemers. Cutthroats they might be, but Aurora and the Egyptian Rite unnerved them. These self-styled exalted ones seemed more ruthless than any buccaneers, and the Moors were nervous.

I wasn’t about to reassure. “These men and women are the disciples of hell, Dragut,” I told my captor. “You’re dooming your own souls to consort with them.”

“Silence, American. No man is more confused about good and evil than you.”

“Do you think they’ll use their mirror solely on Christian enemies? Aurora wants to control the world, and the Ottoman Turks are closer than Europe. You’re equipping a diabolical monster who will prey on your own people.”

“I have no people. I, Hamidou Dragut, rely on myself.”

“Nonsense. You’ve sold your manhood to power-mad pagans.”

“As you are about to sell yours!”

“I have no choice. My God, to use my son to blackmail me into marrying her? So she can play harridan the rest of my life? Where’s the sense in that?”

“Those people obey a different law. There’s nothing we can do when we’re in their world, and down that hatch is their world. Like all of us, you made the bargain you must. Aurora promises she can give Tripoli victory. Perhaps, as they said, it is written.”

“I don’t think it’s written for a bundle of blasphemers to turn the planet on its head. Tripoli is going to infuriate England and France into a war against it, Dragut. This woman you’ve allied yourself to is going to pull all of you down with her.”

“No, she promises we’ll be rich. You can’t see a future even when it’s a temptress!”

“I see the future, and it’s all on fire.”

And then Osiris appeared, stumping across the deck with that limp that continued to give me some satisfaction. Maybe I could chop away at other body parts, too. He looked at me with distaste. “It’s time, American. I’m to take you on a trip through the underworld to judge you worthy, as dictated by the Egyptian Book of the Dead.”

“Underworld?”

“When the British cornered Blackbeard in the Carolinas, he forced his crew into the hold and lit matches so the smoke and stink would give them a preview of hell. He wanted his sailors to fear the afterlife so much that they’d never surrender to the gallows. The inferno caused them to fight like demons, out of terror. We of the Rite have a different kind of journey, to purify and inform. It will prepare you for Aurora.”

“What, I’m to be a vestal virgin now?”

He gestured toward the hatch with its lurid light. “Virginity, I presume, is out of reach. What we weigh is your courage and your soul.”

“Weigh my soul! Your own is a lump of coal!”

“This is about you and Aurora.”

Sometimes the only thing to do is play along and look for the odd chance. So I went over to the opening, considered the haze of incense and smoke drifting from the hatch, and decided to take a stroll in Hades after all. With Osiris behind me, I descended to the deck below, hot and smoky from a hundred flickering candles.

What I encountered was a dreamworld, populated by creatures from a pharaoh’s nightmare. The Rite’s members—I assumed that’s what they were—had donned the heads of a witch’s bestiary. Their robes were white, black, and scarlet, and their heads were of jackals, hawks, serpents, dogs, and lions. The eye sockets were blank cutouts, utterly unrevealing, and their cloaks so shapeless as to leave me uncertain if the wearer was man or woman. Beaks and white teeth gleamed in the haze of this hell, and fingers decorated with long, artificial talons clacked and tapped as they reached out for me, pulling me down and in. I coughed, eyes streaming, while they turned me in dizzying circles. Odd music, pagan and primitive, came from their pipes and drums. Some potion was pushed upon me and I drank, increasing my disorientation.

Finally I was pushed to stumble deeper into their gathering, the man-beasts pulling at my sleeves. A gypsy crone loomed, and whether a noble lady in costume or some witch from the Carpathians, I know not. She held a tiny brass scale. “Shall we weigh your sins on one pan, and a feather on the other, pilgrim?” she asked with a glassy gleam to her eyes. She laid a fluff of down. “The crocodile consumes those whose good deeds don’t tip the scale in their favor.”

“I did my best.”

She laughed, shrill and disbelieving.

And then a dragon lurched out of the throng and grunted, brought up short by a bright yellow leash.

Not a dragon, exactly, but the biggest and ugliest lizard I’d ever seen. It was some kind of primeval monster a good eight feet long, with darting forked tongue and bright pink mouth lined with bloody teeth. He was terrifying as a crocodile! The beast lunged at my crotch, nostrils flared, and as I fell backward the assembly shrieked with delight. This was a real animal, its feet armed with wicked claws, but nothing like I’d ever seen or imagined. Its skin was made up of glittery scales as dry and hard as chain armor, and the monster smelled of rotted meat. The beast was medieval nightmare come to life, its tail swishing on the deck.

“The dark forests of the world have all kinds of creatures that men have half dreamed of,” Osiris whispered in my ear. “We brought this one from the jungles of the Spice Islands, where the boundary between world and underworld is not as firm as we think. Nor is the barrier to heaven as absolute as established religions would have us believe. Strange beings watch us, and sometimes can be summoned. Demons can give power.”

I thought of Napoleon’s Little Red Man and shivered, despite myself. The animal-headed denizens of this hazy hold were murmuring at my hesitation, and I was determined not to give them the satisfaction of seeing me retreat.

“It’s just a damned lizard.”

“Give your soul to us, Ethan, and we’ll erase the boundary between hell and heaven. You’ll live in an eternal