of the harbor of Tripoli.
The United States and the Barbary state of Tripoli had been at war in that mid-autumn of 1803, a war begun when Yussuf Pasha used an axe on the flagpole of the American consulate at Tripoli when that young nation across the Atlantic refused to join its European fellows in paying tribute to the corsairs.
A fleet under the command of Commodore Edward Preble had gathered at Gibraltar to blockade the North African coast. Under Captain Bainbridge, the Philadelphia ran the shoals and reefs of those treacherous waters, hunting corsair ships. On the last day of October, while chasing a small vessel standing in for the protection of the Tripolitan roadstead, the Philadelphia scraped across a reef.
Stephen Fletcher had been taken from the helpless frigate to the slave mart, and then to the stone quarries. When he showed stubbornness and fight, Ali ben Sidi had summoned his big slave master. Fletcher had been strung up by the wrists and lashed until his bare back was a bloody pulp.
The cuts of that whip had gone deeper than the flesh they marred. They taught him caution and prudence, and a seeming humility. He learned how to behave like a slave under the lash that night. Ali ben Sidi had no more trouble with him. He worked days in the stone quarries, and the nights he spent sleeping fitfully, dreaming of the Virginia plantation that had been his home, and of the fields of tobacco and cotton shifting in the breeze off the Shenandoahs.
The year and a half since the grounding of the Philadelphia added to the strength of his long thighs and lean middle, putting power in his chest and arms, ridging his back with swollen muscles. He was half starved all the time, and was never really free of the bite of hunger, and so in those hours when he was excused from the quarries, he took to scavenging in the streets.
Now, for the first time in many months, the starving man saw a chance to unleash his pride. He seemed to lift himself. His chin thrust forward.
“I am Stephen Fletcher,” he said, “Lieutenant Stephen Fletcher, United States Marines.”
The palace of the pasha of Tripoli lay southeast of the town, its high white walls brooding out across the blue waters of the roadstead. For uncounted years this palace had stood against the hot winds of the African gibleh and the lashing rains that came sweeping southward across the Mediterranean from Sicily. Dragut reis had anchored his galleys in these waters. In the twelfth century, Roger Guis-card had taken Tripoli from the Arabs with his Norman knights. In Roman times, the palace had been a fortress. The years between the days when Roman biremes swung to the swell of the tides until now, when a sunset gun sounded from the walls, had only whitened the building stone to a sepulchral pallor.
Fletcher found himself thinking of little but food as he walked betwen two surly brown guards into the palace. His stomach was a vast hollow between his loins and his rib-case. For food, he would guard the person of the seductive brown Marlani with any weapon Yussuf Caramanli chose. But deep down inside him, possibly at the hope this new life was opening to him, a tiny flame of rebellion stirred.
The harem quarters lay off the inner courtyard. Fletcher was taken to the harem guards’ rooms, where he stripped the rag from his middle and bathed in warm water thick with suds. Soft towels were given him to dry his flesh. Clean for the first time in months, he donned loose muslin trousers and a linen camyss, with low slippers of yellow Moroccan leather on his feet. Around his lean middle went a girdle of copper discs, from which would be hung a curved scimitar on thin iron chains. Then he was taken before the keeper of the house.
Sinan ibn Ajaj was a big man, with a shaven head from which hung a black topknot wrapped with golden threads. His red vest, trimmed with gold brocade, enclosed a massive chest and paunch. Fletcher had the feeling that his bulk was deceiving. There was muscle under all that lard, his thick arms were proof enough of that. His fleshy face was creased now in a disapproving scowl, as he let his small black eyes run over Fletcher. He walked around him, his frown deepening.
The bald Turk grumbled at him. “You look well enough for a nasrany. Big, and thick in the shoulders. Plenty of room for solid muscle, once we put some meat and rice in your belly.” His hand slapped hard at the muscles ridging the American’s torso. He grinned, “That cus-cus will help you fight off any true believers who come slipping into the harem quarters at night. And don’t believe they won’t come, some time. Not to make love to the little kalfas, but to slip cold steel into Yussuf himself.”
Fletcher looked interested. “Do they hate him so much in the city, then?”
Sinan ibn Ajaj grinned coldly. “Not most of them. But there are always a few hotheads willing to risk their necks to save another man’s food from the fire. Remember, Yussuf drove out his brother Hamet, and became pasha in his place. Hamet is no holy man, to ignore that affront. If he could, he’d cook Yussuf for a month over a bed of red coals. A month? Ten years! But Yussuf has the power and Hamet is a broken man.”
He gloomed at Fletcher from under shaggy black eyebrows. “There are plots and counterplots cooking from the Grand Bazaar to the Land Port Gate, right now. Reason they haven’t struck before is that Yussuf Caramanli keeps himself too well protected. Never lets down his guard, not once. But sometime he will and—inshallah! When that time comes, you’ll have your bellyful of fighting, believe me!”
That was a prospect he would look forward to, Fletcher assured himself silently. Not alone for the sake of the action, which would serve to release some of the angers and frustrations that had been building up in him these past eighteen months, but because it would give him a chance to strike back at these Barbary seadogs. He was no scholar of history, but he knew the corsairs for a medieval anachronism, a throw-back to the time of the feudal robber barons. They roamed the Mediterranean as the White Company and others like them used to rove the land. They preyed on the helpless and the slow of keel. They robbed, taking what they would. And because it would cost their governments too much money to outfit a fleet against them, the European nations preferred to pay them tribute.
It may have been because their own liberty was so new that the young United States bridled at the conduct of these pirates. To them, the liberty of the sea was a dear and precious thing. Almost, Fletcher thought wryly, as precious as his own personal liberty.
Because his own liberty was so precious, he would die to save it. Now he was making the first step upward from the slave conditions of the stone quarries. As a bodyguard to the pasha’s wife, he would gain a certain amount of bodily freedom. It was up to him to hoard and nourish that tiny seedling of liberty, until he could make it blossom, full grown.
To aid that growth, he must make friends here. To that end, he grinned in a friendly way and jabbed a thumb into the Turk’s ribs. “For a brave man, you talk a lot, Sinan. My belly is as empty as the purse of a wandering beggar. Is there no food at all in this hulk of stone you call a palace?”
Sinan moved to the arched doorway, beckoning Fletcher to follow. They went down a corridor tiled with marble chips in red and yellow. Fletcher had visited the Alhambra in Spain, during the cruise of the Adams in 1802. He found the interior of this palace, with its wall mosaics and gilt decorations, to be the equal of the delicate stone tracery and blue faience work of that citadel. His eye was caught by the glazed earthenware urns that lined the pillared gallery, and the silver-gilt plating of a great chest of blued wood that rested close beside a wall fountain.
It was then that he saw an inordinately thin man, with a red turban set awry on his head, scurry from the shadows across the tiled floor and into the shelter of a horseshoe arch. The man seemed a human scarecrow, with his striped barracan flapping loosely about his grotesque figure as he ran. One he turned his head and looked at the American, and Fletcher felt a cold shock pass over him at sight of those wild, reddened eyes.
Sinan
