“A hundred philips!” cried Ali derisively. “A hundred philips for that skinful of bones! Ma’sh’Allah! Five philips is my price, O dalal.”
Again laughter crackled through the mob. But the dalal stiffened with increasing dignity. Some of that laughter seemed to touch himself, and he was not a person to be made the butt of mirth.
“ ’Tis a jest, my master,” said he, with a forgiving yet contemptuous wave. “Behold how sound he is.” He signed to one of the corsairs, and Lionel’s doublet was slit from neck to girdle and wrenched away from his body, leaving him naked to the waist, and displaying better proportions than might have been expected. In a passion at that indignity Lionel writhed in the grip of his guards, until one of the corsairs struck him a light blow with a whip in earnest of what to expect if he continued to be troublesome. “Consider him now,” said the dalal, pointing to that white torso. “And behold how sound he is. See how excellent are his teeth.” He seized Lionel’s head and forced the jaws apart.
“Ay,” said Ali, “but consider me those lean shanks and that woman’s arm.”
“ ’Tis a fault the oar will mend,” the dalal insisted.
“You filthy blackamoors!” burst from Lionel in a sob of rage.
“He is muttering curses in his infidel tongue,” said Ali. “His temper is none too good, you see. I have said five philips. I’ll say no more.”
With a shrug the dalal began his circuit of the well, the corsairs thrusting Lionel after him. Here one rose to handle him, there another, but none seemed disposed to purchase.
“Five philips is the foolish price offered me for this fine young Frank,” cried the dalal. “Will no true believer pay ten for such a slave? Wilt not thou, O Ayoub? Thou, Hamet—ten philips?”
But one after another those to whom he was offered shook their heads. The haggardness of Lionel’s face was too unprepossessing. They had seen slaves with that look before, and experience told them that no good was ever to be done with such fellows. Moreover, though shapely, his muscles were too slight, his flesh looked too soft and tender. Of what use a slave who must be hardened and nourished into strength, and who might very well die in the process? Even at five philips he would be dear. So the disgusted dalal came back to Ali.
“He is thine, then, for five philips—Allah pardon thy avarice.”
Ali grinned, and his men seized upon Lionel and bore him off into the background to join the two negroes previously purchased.
And then, before Ali could bid for another of the slaves he desired to acquire, a tall, elderly Jew, dressed in black doublet and hose like a Castilian gentleman, with a ruffle at his neck, a plumed bonnet on his grey locks, and a serviceable dagger hanging from his girdle of hammered gold, had claimed the attention of the dalal.
In the pen that held the captives of the lesser raids conducted by Biskaine sat an Andalusian girl of perhaps some twenty years, of a beauty entirely Spanish. Her face was of the warm pallor of ivory, her massed hair of an ebony black, her eyebrows were finely pencilled, and her eyes of deepest and softest brown. She was dressed in the becoming garb of the Castilian peasant, the folded kerchief of red and yellow above her bodice leaving bare the glories of her neck. She was very pale, and her eyes were wild in their look, but this detracted nothing from her beauty.
She had attracted the Jew’s notice, and it is not impossible that there may have stirred in him a desire to avenge upon her some of the cruel wrongs, some of the rackings, burning, confiscations, and banishment suffered by the men of his race at the hands of the men of hers. He may have bethought him of invaded ghettos, of Jewish maidens ravished, and Jewish children butchered in the name of the God those Spanish Christians worshipped, for there was something almost of contemptuous fierceness in his dark eyes and in the hand he flung out to indicate her.
“Yonder is a Castilian wench for whom I will give fifty philips, O dalal,” he announced. The datal made a sign, whereupon the corsairs dragged her struggling forth.
“So much loveliness may not be bought for fifty philips, O Ibrahim,” said he. “Yusuf here will pay sixty at least.” And he stood expectantly before a resplendent Moor.
The Moor, however, shook his head.
“Allah knows I have three wives who would destroy her loveliness within the hour and so leave me the loser.”
The dalal moved on, the girl following him but contesting every step of the way with those who impelled her forward, and reviling them too in hot Castilian. She drove her nails into the arms of one and spat fiercely into the face of another of her corsair guards. Rosamund’s weary eyes quickened to horror as she watched her—a horror prompted as much by the fate awaiting that poor child as by the undignified fury of the futile battle she waged against it. But it happened that her behaviour impressed a Levantine Turk quite differently. He rose, a short squat figure, from his seat on the steps of the well.
“Sixty philips will I pay for the joy of taming that wild cat,” said he.
But Ibrahim was not to be outbidden. He offered seventy, the Turk countered with a bid of eighty, and Ibrahim again raised the price to ninety, and there fell a pause.
The dalal spurred on the Turk. “Wilt thou be beaten then, and by an Israelite? Shall this lovely maid be given to a perverter of the Scriptures, to an inheritor of the fire, to one of a race that would not bestow on their fellow-men so much as the speck out of a
