“He’s no George Washington,” I allowed. “In the end, however, pirates are always businessmen. You savants represent the brightest minds in Europe. We’ll figure out some harmless task to impress him, earn his gratitude, put him in our debt, and then be sent on our way. With presents, perhaps.”
“Your optimism is ludicrous,” Smith said.
“If we prove truly useful, he’ll never let us go,” Cuvier added.
“Maybe Napoleon will rescue us then.”
“Napoleon has no idea where we are.”
“Then look for any chance of escape, gentlemen.”
“Punishable by excruciating death, I’ve read,” Smith warned. “We really don’t have a chance, if I recall.”
“Well,” I said doggedly, “I’ll think of something.”
They sighed.
With that and the crack of whips we shuffled forward, bunched with a second group of captives pushed off another ship. Some of these were sobbing women. Our vine of chain was locked together and we were pushed, stumbling, past hogsheads of sugar, pipes of wine, and casks of nails into the city proper, passing from blinding sunlight to the canyonlike shadows of a street of Africa, awnings casting them in shade. We were lashed through crowds of jostling soldiers, shouting merchants, shrouded women, braying donkeys, and snorting camels. We shuffled with bare feet on the manure-spotted sand of the street to the blare of horns and beat of drums. High overhead the red, green, and white banners of Tripoli floated to taunt anyone dreaming of freedom. From the alcoves, the poorest Muslim beggars made sure to strike and spit to ensure that our mood was even worse than theirs. We were jeered until we shrank into ourselves like the intimidated spirits we were. Our weapons were gone, our boots stolen—I made sure Dragut himself took my urine-soaked shoe—and half our buttons plucked off. We were thirsty, starved, sunburned, and whipped, and as pitiable a lot as you’ll see this side of a cannibal campfire. I kept looking for opportunity, and finding none.
Tripoli did bring back memories of Alexandria and Cairo. Here were the coffee shops, the old men squatting at the entrance to puff at six-foot hookah pipes as we stumbled by, the air heavy with hashish and incense. There were taverns, too, run by freed Christians and patronized by Muslims who sat in dark shadows to imbibe forbidden alcohol.
The Turkish and Arab women we passed were veiled, their robes shapeless, so that only the beauty of their almond eyes hinted at the charms within.
Tripoli also had a large colony of Jews who’d been expelled from Spain in Columbus’s day. By decree the Jews were dressed in black, and forced to go barefoot if they crossed in front of a mosque. Most of the beggars were missing hands or arms, their extremities having been chopped off and the stumps dipped in pitch after conviction of some crime. Street urchins ran with us, too, yelling taunts and laughing at our shackled misery. High above, the eyes of more women peered down at us from the grilled windows of harems and apartments.
I preferred Philadelphia.
“There’s a hierarchy in Tripoli you would do well to memorize,” said Hamidou as his sailors jabbed us forward. “The rulers and janissary soldiers are Turks, answerable to the Sublime Porte in Istanbul. They are the ones allowed to wear the red fez wrapped with muslin. Below them are Arab merchants, the descendants of the desert warriors who conquered North Africa more than a thousand years ago. Beneath the Arabs are the Moors, the Muslims driven from Spain by the Christian knights. Then the Levantines, the Greeks and Lebanese who do menial jobs. The Jews are also refugees from Spanish intolerance, and they are our lenders. And finally, at the bottom, you slaves make up a fifth of our population. The government language is Turkish and Arabic, and the street talk is the Lingua Franca of the Mediterranean, a mix of all the dialects from around that sea.”
We clanked by a market. There were ranks of silvery fish, mounds of bright spices, carpets, cloaks, leather, silks, figs, raisins, olives, grain, and oil. There was brass and iron cookware, finely tooled saddles, sweetly curving daggers, oranges, pomegranates, grapes, onions, anchovies, and dates. Everything was for sale, including me.
“How much am I worth, exactly?” I asked. “As a slave, that is.”
He considered. “Half the price of a pretty woman.”
“But you can’t just mean to auction us off like common sailors,” I reasoned. “We’re learned men.”
“You’re Christian dogs, until you convert.”
The slave market of Tripoli was a stone platform under the wall of Yussef’s central citadel, and perhaps his entertainment was the lamentation that rose from the hopeless. We queued next to its steps while a mob of bidders inspected us, since we represented a potentially shrewd investment. Our sale price would go to our pirate captors, but there was a chance a buyer might turn a profit not just from our labor but from ransoming us to higher-bidding relatives in Christendom. The bashaw’s own representatives were resplendent in jeweled turbans and upturned slippers. They were there to take the prettiest for the harem and the most able for whatever household duties needed filling after the last purchase had finally expired of overwork and disease. Other buyers included swarthy Berber chieftains from the hinterlands, military overseers needing brute labor to complete battery work, galley masters looking to replenish their banks of oars, carpet makers who needed quick fingers and fresh eyes, and dyers, water carriers, wheat growers, tanners, drovers, and masons, all with whips and manacles of their own. The system was built entirely on coercion instead of free enterprise and I’d announce in a second that it couldn’t work, except that the Barbary kingdoms had been defying the navies of Europe for three hundred years. My own United States depended on slavery in its south, and by all reports its most enthusiastic practitioners were quite wealthy.
The captives ahead were auctioned like cattle. Muscles were ordered tightened to judge strength, mouths forced open with wedges of stick, bellies prodded, feet lifted, and clothes rudely ripped to hunt for boils, rashes, or other signs of disease. We were all forced to prove, by prancing, that we didn’t suffer from gout. In some cases trousers were tugged down to judge the size of the genitals, as if the poor captive was to be put to stud.
One Sardinian sailor reacted to this indignity with such shock that he shoved an auctioneer and kicked out at a soldier, his chains clanking. At this outburst, the crowd roiled and churned like an ant nest poked with a stick. I braced for the beating, and indeed guards leaped forward to rain blows on the poor man until he was curled like a baby on the auction platform, sobbing in Italian for mercy. The savagery seemed disproportionate and wildly unrestrained, and yet this was but a preview of his real punishment.
There was a stir behind us and I turned. A man had appeared on a snow-white horse, surrounded by a troop of janissaries. He was in his thirties, I judged, handsome and fit, and dusty from some pleasure hunt that morning. Retainers had raptors hooded and tied to poles. When he halted, Negro slaves ran up to fan him with long-handled plumes.
Behind on another horse, her auburn ringlets cascading nakedly down in a display some Muslims would consider obscene, was Aurora Somerset, her lips slightly parted in excitement. She was watching the beating, quietly thrilled.
“It’s Karamanli,” Cuvier whispered. “Look at that emerald on his turban.”
“Big enough to pick him out in a crowd,” I admitted. “And give him a headache.”
“He likes order in his markets,” Dragut said. “This Sardinian will be made an example.”
The bashaw said something sharp to one of his officers and the message was relayed to the auction overseer. This man winced at the thought of lost profit, but then issued orders of his own. In an instant the groaning, bloody sailor was unlocked from his chains, hauled semiconscious to the edge of the platform, and then held by both arms while a huge iron hook swung down from the shadows above. Fortunately, the victim was too dazed to know what was about to happen to him.