“Absolutely not,” Cuvier countered. “Are you going to help turn a terrible weapon over to pirate fanatics?”
“Not turn it over. Just use what we know to get out of this fix, somehow.”
“I’d rather be enslaved than give the barbarians a clue that might result in the destruction of the French navy,” my friend vowed.
“Aye, and the British navy, too,” said Smith. “Come, Ethan, your own nation is at war with these devils. We can’t tell them where this death ray is.”
“Where is it?” I peered at the map.
“We don’t know exactly, but sooner or later they would figure that out. Just pinpointing the city makes discovery far easier. Your frigates would become infernos, and your countrymen would fry. We can’t trade that for freedom. Death before dishonor, eh?”
“Of course.” I swallowed. “Still, a little hint might not hurt.”
Fulton shook his head. “Any modern inventor could probably improve on the Greek design. We dare not even tempt them.”
By the whiskers of Zeus, I’d fallen in with honorable men! That’s always a risky thing—not to mention novel. “But they’ll take the palimpsest from us and maybe come to the same conclusion,” I tried. I’m not craven, just practical.
“The only thing to do,” Cuvier said, “is memorize this scrap to the closest detail and then destroy it. Then the key will be in our brains, not an underground tunnel or a piece of animal skin.”
“Destroy it how? We can’t throw it into the sea from down here.”
“No, and we can’t bring the obscuring prayers back, either. The only thing I can think of, my friends, is to eat it.”
“After we’ve washed it in piss to see the design?”
“Nothing wrong with a little urine, Ethan,” the scientist assured. “Less toxic than bad well water. Maidens used it to wash their hair. Besides, the palimpsest is long dried now. Seasoned, you might say.”
“Eat a palimpsest?” I looked with dismay. “How?”
“A little at a time, I suspect. It’s not like we have salt and pepper.”
And so we did, and by the end I had a sore jaw from chewing and a knotted gut from too much parchment and not enough vegetables. Why can’t I find normal treasure, like gold doubloons or a queen’s tiara?
Our morose chewing of this cud did put us in a philosophical mood, and when men ponder the mysteries of the universe the first thing that comes to mind is women.
I’d explained my unsuccessful audience with Aurora Somerset and given hints of our unhappy history, which seemed to surprise no one. Females, we agreed, were more bewitching than a treasure map and explosive as a keg of gunpowder.
“It’s odd how dangerous they are, given that men are so clearly superior,” Smith said with honest puzzlement. “In strength, in courage, and in intelligence, the evidence of our gender’s advantage is indisputable.”
“Not entirely,” Fulton cautioned. “I know many a man who’d quail at the prospect of childbirth.”
“Certainly women have strengths of their own,” the Englishman allowed. “Beauty, to cite the most obvious. My point is that despite our own male brilliance, the hens seem to get the upper hand over the peacock. Quite baffling, really.”
“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
So here I was on a stone quay at the edge of Africa in the hot midday sun, dragging an anchor’s worth of iron, appalled at the idea of trying to rekindle passion with Aurora Somerset, and facing the fate they whisper about in Mediterranean taverns. Our captivity was Muslim payback for their expulsion from Spain, the blood of the Crusades, and their whipping at Lepanto and Vienna a couple of centuries back. Every war breeds the next one. The four of us might be the despair of any parish prelate, given our rather liberal views on religion and Scripture, but to the pirates we were Christian dogs, about to get a preview of the hell we’d earned by not converting to Islam.
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?”