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SOLD INTO SLAVERY
It was unthinkable that innocent Eve Doremus of Boston would be forced to parade her naked beauty in a Barbary Coast slave mart. Or that the blond giant who guarded the Sultan’s female chattels would be a U.S. Marine lieutenant. Yet anything was possible in exotic, violent, 19th Century Tripoli.
Amid the love-making, intrigues and tortures of the Pasha’s pagan court, Eve and her marine—Stephen Fletcher—fell in love. But their romance was destined to face every temptation and peril as they loved and battled their way to freedom.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kevin Matthews is a pseudonym for Gardner F. Fox who was born in Brooklyn and attended St. John’s Prep, College and Law School. He lived most of his life on Long Island but after he married he moved to Westchester and is now living in Yonkers with his wife and two children.
He likes sports of all kinds and among his hobbies are the study of history, archaeology and the writing of amateur theatricals. His previous books include: BORGIA BLADE and MADAME BUCCANEER.
AN HISTORICAL NOVEL
BARBARY SLAVE
GARDNER FOX WRITING AS
KEVIN MATTHEWS
Copyright, 1955, by Kevin Matthews
CHAPTER 1
The late afternoon sun made a white splendor of the city that lay sprawled across the low, sloping sands of the African coast. From the towering castle walls to the hook of the molehead that held the blue waters of its harbor, Tripoli brooded in sullen apathy at the lone frigate ship that slid through the Mediterranean like a hungry wolf pacing at the outskirts of a camp. Sunlight tipped the muzzles of its starboard cannon and put a glaze on its freshly painted deckboards. A wind whipped at the striped flag taut from its mainmast, occasionally showing the fifteen stars on its blue field.
Inside the city, men stared at the ship with venom in their eyes. Guards paced the thick white walls of the palace nestling at the northern corner of the Street of Arcades, their faces dark and gloomy. Along the stretch of sand before these walls, men in linen loincloths paused from their tasks of twisting strips of hemp to mutter oaths to Allah, as a glance showed them the big frigate prowling just outside gunnery range.
Men hated and men starved inside the city of Tripoli in this year 1805, that the Moslems called 1221. The high white walls of the Caramanli castello, that joined the sea walls to run in a height of stone as far as the Maltese castle near the mole, had been built to keep enemies out. Now these walls kept the true believers in, and those upstart Americans, who flew their stars and stripes with such unbelievable defiance, added their weight of sail and metal to act the part of jailers.
Where the Street of Arcades made a bend before the stalls of the rug sellers, a white man with only a piece of rag at his middle stirred restlessly. His eyes were feverishly bright in the dark bronze of his face as they scanned the passersby. Hunger was an ache in this man. It hurt, deep inside him, and the hurt was strong enough so that he was on the point of madness.
The man moved suddenly, scurrying out of the archway as a frightened rat scurries, his eyes intent on the orange peel tossed so carelessly aside by a passing dowedee with his fishnets dangling over a shoulder. There was street dirt on that bit of rind, and dry dust. But to the starving man whose bony hand clawed out at it, it seemed a rare, exotic fruit.
He caught it up and slithered sideways into the shelter of a canopy overhanging the street from the doorway of a glassware stall. Nervously his fingertips went over the skin, knowing it to be big and still juicy: possibly torn off an orange from Jefren. When he was partially hidden by the striped overhang, he hunkered down and licked at the peel, his eyes closing almost in ecstasy at the bittersweet taste. He took a bite, carefully, muscles tensed against the need to wolf down this food. He chewed slowly, gently.
The starving man knew that the passersby were regarding him with amused scorn, but he was past pride. An empty belly screamed up to him that pride is an expensive luxury, and for a man who was now only a slave to the stone merchant, Ali ben Sidi of Tripoli, it ill behoved him to be spending something he did not have. And so he crouched and mouthed at his orange peel, ignoring the eyes of a slave seller whose lips were twisted in disgust, not seeing the scornful glance that a haughty corsair captain flung him as he picked his way between the street hawkers.
Voices touched his ears, but he did not hear the words.
“The nasrany is worse than an alley cur. A dog would turn up his nose at such fare.”
“May Allah be blessed that I am not in his place!”
“Inshallah! He reminds me of the pigs I keep to eat my garbage!”
When the peeling was gone, and even as his stomach rumbled gratefully, the man stood up into the late sunlight that came over the rooftops of Tripoli to bathe his broad shoulders and deep chest in crimson light. Soon now, it would be the hour of prayer, when the muezzins would step onto the circular platforms of the mosques and call on all true believers to face toward Mecca and kneel atop their prayer mats. He was tall, this man, lean to emaciation, and there was pride in his fleshless face from which the gray eyes blazed like crystals. The dirty rag at his hips was in danger of sliding from his narrow loins. A tousle of pale yellow hair, like a mop upended and thrust upon his poll, gathered the sunbeams with a reddish glint.
He moved onto the cobblestones, his eyes darting toward the gutters and beyond them into the dark mysteries of the stall shops, hoping against hope that some Turk or Arab fool had thrown away another precious bit of orange skin. The man went on more slowly. There was other food here. There had to be! He was late now, at the stone quarries. There would be lashes on his back from the black bullhide whip that fat sheriff wielded so efficiently, but he would take those lashes in exchange for one more peeling from a Tunisian orange. Stubbornly, he told himself he would not return to the quarry where they made him lug gray stones from sunrise to sunset, until he did find it.
He saw the fruit lying close by the white wall of a goldsmith shop.
It was an overripe melon, squishy and half rotten.
The man whimpered deep in his throat and ran for it. His hand was stretching downward for the big fruit when a fat man moved out of the doorway of the goldsmith shop and came forward with a quick stride. His booted foot lifted in a kick. The kick caught the starving man at the side of his face and toppled him back into the dust of the cobbled street.
He lay there on an elbow and a thigh, staring wildly up at the man who had kicked him. He saw the fleshy brown chest and black spade beard, the scimitar dangling from the belt that banded his middle, the loose green trousers that, except for the yellow boots on his feet, was his sole garment.
The starving man had been in Tripoli long enough to know this blubbery monster for a Caramanli palace guard. A member of the pasha’s family was in the stall shop, buying precious ornaments. The guard threw back his head and roared vicious laughter into the warm African sunlight.
“No,” said the starving man through cracked lips. “By God! No!”
He saw that Moroccan leather boot
