“I don’t feel good, mind you, but I don’t feel feverish.”
“But a few weeks ago, you and several others came down with violent cases of la suette anglaise.”
“Never heard of any such disease-and I’m English, mind you.”
Moseh de la Cruz shrugged, as best a man could when hacking at a cluster of barnacles with a pitted and rusted iron hoe. “It is a well-known disease, hereabouts-whole neighborhoods were laid low with it in the spring.”
“Perhaps they’d made the mistake of listening to too much musick-?”
Moseh shrugged again. “It is a real enough disease-perhaps not as fearsome as some of the others, such as Rising of the Lights, or Ring-Booger, or the Laughing Kidney, or Letters-from-Venice…”
“Avast!”
“In any event, you came down with it, Jack, and had such a fever that all the other tutsaklars in the banyolar were roasting kebabs over your brow for a fortnight. Finally one morning you were pronounced dead, and carried out of the banyolar and thrown into a wain. Our owner sent me round to the Treasury to notify the hoca el-pencik so that your title deed could be marked as ‘deceased,’ which is a necessary step in filing an insurance claim. But the hoca el-pencik knew that a new Pasha was on his way, and wanted to make sure that all the records were in order, lest some irregularity be discovered during an audit, which would cause him to fall under the bastinado at the very least.”
“May I infer, from this, that insurance fraud is a common failing of slave-owners?”
“Some of them are completely unethical,” Moseh confided. “So I was ordered to lead the hoca el-pencik back to the banyolar and show him your body-but not before I was made to wait for hours and hours in his courtyard, as midday came and went, and the hoca el-pencik took a siesta under the lime-tree there. Finally we went to the banyolar-but in the meantime your wagon had been moved to the burial-ground of the Janissaries.”
“Why!? I’m no more a Janissary than you are.”
“Sssh! So I had gathered, Jack, from several years of being chained up next to you, and hearing your autobiographical ravings: stories that, at first, were simply too grotesque to believe-then, entertaining after a fashion-then, after the hundredth or thousandth repetition-”
“Stay. No doubt you have tedious and insufferable qualities of your own, Moseh de la Cruz, but you have me at a disadvantage, as I cannot remember them. What I want to know is, why did they think I was a Janissary?”
“The first clew was that you carried a Janissary-sword when you were captured.”
“Proceeds of routine military corpse-looting, nothing more.”
“The second: you fought with such valor that your want of skill was quite overlooked.”
“I was trying to get myself killed, or else would’ve shown less of the former, and more of the latter.”
“Third: the unnatural state of your penis was interpreted as a mark of strict chastity-”
“Correct, perforce!”
“-and assumed to’ve been self-administered.”
“Haw! That’s not how it happened at all-”
“Stay,” Moseh said, shielding his face behind both hands.
“I forgot, you’ve heard.”
“Fourth: the Arabic numeral seven branded on the back of your hand.”
“I’ll have you know that’s a letter V, for Vagabond.”
“But sideways it could be taken for a seven.”
“How does that make me a Janissary?”
“When a new recruit takes the oath and becomes yeni yoldash, which is the lowliest rank, his barrack number is tattooed onto the back of his hand, so it can be known which seffara he belongs to, and which bash yoldash is responsible for him.”
“All right-so ’twas assumed I’d come up from barracks number seven in some Ottoman garrison-town somewhere.”
“Just so. And yet you were clearly out of your mind, and not good for much besides pulling on an oar, so it was decided you’d remain tutsaklar until you died, or regained your senses. If the former, you’d receive a Janissary funeral.”
“What about the latter?”
“That remains to be seen. As it was, we thought it was the former. So we went to the high ground outside the city-walls, to the burial-ground of the ocak-”
“Come again?”
“Ocak: a Turkish order of Janissaries, modeled after the Knights of Rhodes. They rule over Algiers, and are a law and society unto themselves here.”
“Is that man coming over to hit us with the bull’s penis a part of this ocak?”
“No. He works for the corsair-captain who owns the galley. The corsairs are yet another completely different society unto themselves.”
After the Turk had finished giving Jack and Moseh several bracing strokes of the bull’s penis, and had wandered away to go beat up on some other barnacle-scrapers, Jack invited Moseh to continue the story.
“The hoca el-pencik and several of his aides and I went to that place. And a bleak place it was, Jack, with its countless tombs, mostly shaped like half-eggshells, meant to evoke a village of yurts on the Transoxianan Steppe-the ancestral homeland for which Turks are forever homesick-though, if it bears the slightest resemblance to that burying-ground, I cannot imagine why. At any rate, we roamed up and down among these stone yurts for an hour, searching for your corpse, and were about to give up, for the sun was going down, when we heard a muffled, echoing voice repeating some strange incantation, or prophecy, in an outlandish tongue. Now the hoca el-pencik was on edge to begin with, as this interminable stroll through the graveyard had put him in mind of daimons and ifrits and other horrors. When he heard this voice, coming (as we soon realized) from a great mausoleum where a murdered agha had been entombed, he was about to bolt for the city gates. So were his aides. But as they had with them one who was not only a slave, but a Jew to boot, they sent me into that tomb to see what would happen.”
“And what did happen?”
“I found you, Jack, standing upright in that ghastly, but delightfully cool space, pounding on the lid of the agha’s sarcophagus and repeating certain English words. I knew not what they meant, but they went something like this: ‘Be a good fellow there, sirrah, and bring me a pint of your best bitter!’ ”
“I must have been out of my head,” Jack muttered, “for the light lagers of Pilsen are much better suited to this climate.”
“You were still daft, but there was a certain spark about you that I had not seen in a year or two-certainly not since we were traded to Algiers. I suspected that the heat of your fever, compounded with the broiling radiance of the midday sun, under which you’d lain for many hours, had driven the French Pox out of your body. And indeed you have been a little more lucid every day since.”
“What did the hoca el-pencik think of this?”
“When you walked out, you were naked, and sunburnt as red as a boiled crab, and there was speculation that you might be some species of ifrit. I have to tell you that the Turks have superstitions about everything, and most especially about Jews-they believe we have occult powers, and of late the Cabbalists have done much to foster such phant’sies. In any event, matters were soon enough sorted out. Our owner received one hundred strokes, with a cane the size of my thumb, on the soles of his feet, and vinegar was poured over the resulting wounds.”
“Eeyeh, give me the bull’s penis any day!”
“It’s expected he may be able to stand up again in a month or two. In the meanwhile, as we wait out the equinoctial storms, we are careening and refitting our galley, as is obvious enough.”
DURING THIS NARRATION Jack had been looking sidelong at the other galley-slaves, and had found them to be an uncommonly diverse and multi-cultural lot: there were black Africans, Europeans, Jews, Indians, Asiatics, and many others he could not clearly sort out. But he did not see anyone he recognized from the complement of God’s Wounds.
“What of Yevgeny, and Mr. Foot? To speak poetically: have insurance claims been paid on them?”