“What? I’ve done exactly what you asked.”
“I’ve decided that we’re going to be married, Ethan.”
“Married!” I was as dumbfounded as when presented with my son. I thought she would break into laughter at her joke, but she looked quite businesslike.
“Marriage will give Horus a proper mother and legitimacy. I will raise him as an acolyte of the Rite, and when he comes of age he’ll be a prince ready to inherit the world.”
“But we hate each other!”
“That’s a crude, simplistic way of explaining our relationship.” She fingered the edge of the mirror. “We repel, and yet we attract. We extinguish, and yet we ignite. We loathe, and yet I will make you a little king yourself because I know how much you’d dread such responsibility, even as you long for me. Don’t deny your longing! I saw it in that cave of echoes in Syracuse. I saw it in my cabin on the Isis. We’re bound, Ethan, and the success of this quest only proves it. We’re chained by destiny. I’m going to marry you and weld you to me forever, and if you’re unhappy with that, as you watch me indoctrinate your son—well, so much the better!” Her eyes flashed. “You will marry me so you must serve me!” All good humor had disappeared. “You will marry me so you can never escape again!”
No wonder I’ve never galloped to the altar. “I’m a poor bet as a husband.”
“If you don’t marry me tonight, on this ship, Horus and Astiza will be sold into the worst kind of slavery you can imagine, and you’ll be given back to Omar the Dungeon Master to break. But if you do marry me, and help us erect and operate the mirror, you’ll rule by my side and your son will inherit powers that not even Bonaparte has ever dreamed of. King George and Jefferson will be his minions, and the emperors of Austria and Russia will prostrate themselves.”
“That makes no sense. From one weapon?”
“This is but the beginning of the ancient secrets we are working to relearn, and just the first mirror of a million—if we need them! We will set nations on fire like your Norwegian’s Ragnarok, his end of the world. And you and I, Ethan, will be freed of all law, all hypocritical rules, all morals, all restraint. We’ll do anything we want with anyone we want to, because we will have acquired the magic of gods who once walked this earth. We will be perfect beings, because it will be us who define perfection.”
I knew she was balmy, but not to the extent of this megalomaniac ranting. She was a cult courtesan on a merchant tub of pagans and cutthroats, and yet boasted like she was Queen of Sheba. I wasn’t on a pirate ship, I was in a house of the addled. I closed my eyes in frustration. “I won’t marry you, Aurora. You’re not the mother of 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!”