bare for the pot, is that he’s got no arms. Yussuf burned them off, just after he took the pashaship of Tripoli from his brother, Hamet Caramanli.”
Fletcher made a retching sound in his throat and Sinan grinned, casting him a sly glance. “Empty belly gets sick easily, doesn’t it? Yavuz was a good man, devoted to Hamet. Wouldn’t take the vow to Allah to support Yussuf, though. Always claimed Hamet was the pasha. Yussuf had him thrown to the torturers. They cooked his arms and made him eat a little of the flesh. To save his life, Yussuf sent for an Arab physician from Cairo. He cut ’em both off, clear up to the shoulders.”
Sinan spat. “Would have been a kindness to let him die. He’s half mad. Can’t even feed himself. But the pasha likes to have him around. Reminds him Hamet is still alive, planning vengeance or a return to power or whatever it is that deposed pasha’s plan.”
“Poor devil!”
“A poor fool! No man should be so loyal. What’s it got him? Ah, here we are! Smell that food, man?”
The kitchen was an immense room fitted with a dozen open hearths. Refectory tables groaned under silver platters loaded with oranges and plums, melons from Algiers and Tunisian figs. Two women in striped barracans were ladling out a thick stew filled with chunks of lamb and bits of yellow bread and vegetables.
Sinan swaggered forward, topknot swinging.
“Stir your fat legs, sofradji! My nasrany friend, the man who killed Kefas in fair fight, this afternoon on the Street of Arcades, has an empty belly. The pasha has said he must be strong, to guard the bash-kedin and her women.”
The women glanced at Fletcher from under heavily lashed eyes. They giggled, and while one came forward with a bowl of stew the other brought a long twist of barley bread.
“Don’t throw your bodies at him, daughters of sin,” Sinan growled. “He’s almost as hungry for a woman as he is for that stew.”
The two women were fat and greasy. One of them was old enough to be a grandmother. They squealed at the Turk’s words, and scurried back to their hearths. Sinan straddled a stool and watched the American dip a spoon into the thick soup.
When he was done, Sinan called another woman to the table. “Didn’t I tell you the nasrany was hungry, Rephia? Give him more!”
Fletcher ate five bowls of the stew and finished three lengths of the hard-crusted bread. He ate fig paste and a slice of sweetmeat before he admitted, as he swallowed the last few drops of the palm wine Sinan had poured for him, that he was hungry no longer.
Sinan looked at him with shining black eyes, nodding his head. “You ate well, for a Christian. By Allah! If you guard Marlani Chamiprak the way you wolf your food, Yussuf will make you a free man in a week. He values good service, does the pasha. Treat him well and his generosity will overwhelm you.”
Fletcher put that thought away inside him as he got to his feet. “Come along, then. I’m anxious to discover how generous this Yussuf Caramanli can be.”
With a grin on his lips and a roll to his walk, Sinan brought Fletcher up a flight of stone steps and out into the dying sunlight on the second courtyard. His thumb jerked upward at the grilled stonework of the harem windows.
“That’s where you’ll be quartered, up there behind that latticework. You’ll be surrounded with women. Pretty girls, not like those fat cooks down in the kitchen! Hotblooded Tauregs and pallid Spanish slaves. Turks. Greeks. Women of every nation you can name, and you not able to put a finger on any one of them.”
Sinan paused and cocked a speculative eye at the big American. “Watch yourself, nasrany. They may be slaves and concubines, but they all belong to Yussuf Caramanli. If you’re caught playing games with them, your death won’t be a pleasant thing!”
“I’ll be as indifferent to them as if I were a eunuch,” Fletcher promised glibly.
Sinan chuckled. “They won’t make it easy for you. Some of those little kalfas have been a long time without a man. They’ll risk death by suffocation for a few hours of manly comfort. I tell you this because I’ve taken a liking to you. Guard your virtue better than you guard your life. It amounts to the same thing, in the harem.”
As he walked at the heels of the Turk, Fletcher found himself thinking of his plantation home in Virginia, and of its pillared elegance. In the years of his rebellious youth, when he had been obliged to sit at a Monroe desk and add up columns of figures in the workhouse beside the stable portico, or journey to the ironworks near Baltimore in which his father owned a controlling interest, he had dreamed of something other than fields of tobacco and ledgers filled with monotonous numerals. Checking the slaves as they painted the washhouse or put fresh straw on the floor of the coachhouse, or riding Big Dan across hundreds of acres rolling fat with green tobacco, had been infinitely boring.
The ocean stretched wide and green from the mouth of Accokeek Creek, a day’s ride from the manse. He would spend long afternoons staring at it, with Big Dan browsing contentedly on bunch grass twenty feet away. When the chance came to go aboard a training ship as a midshipman, he snatched at it. As a midshipman, he would see distant lands that were only names in books to him at the time. There would be no dusty ledgers, no tobacco fields or roaring blast furnaces to occupy his time. Later, he had been transferred to the marine corps, at his own request.
Fletcher smiled grimly. Instead of his dreams of adventure, he faced the reality of slavery. He wondered for a moment what his aristocratic father, gentleman planter that he was, might do in his place. Would he choose death to acting the slave for an unbaptised infidel? Or would he plan, as he himself planned, to play his part in such a manner that he would win over the confidence of his captors and perhaps, eventually, his freedom? Fletcher realized that a man made his own destiny, by his own acts. It was not his father who walked toward the harem quarters behind Sinan ibn Ajaj, but himself.
The food in his veins and the months of slave labor in the stone quarries of Ali ben Sidi began to work their spell. Strength came flooding into his body. He stretched a little, feeling confidence and sureness blossom in him.
The pasha of Tripoli sat on one of the hundred cushions thrown across a quarter of the tiled floor of his audience chamber. His legs in loose silk trousers were crossed under him. His brocaded kaftan jacket was covered by strings of seed pearls. His black beard had been freshly trimmed and scented.
He spoke swiftly with Sinan in a Turkish dialect that Fletcher could not follow. Whatever it was the bald Sinan told him, he grunted in approval. He lifted his hands and clapped.
A palace guard entered, carrying a lacquered swordcase in his hands. He knelt and set it before Yussuf Caramanli, who was regarding Fletcher all this while with a curious smile on his full lips. Reaching out with a slippered toe, he kicked the long teakwood case.
“Open it,” he told Sinan. “Show the nasrany the sword that will be his only friend for the rest of his life.”
It was a magnificent weapon, of blue Damascus steel, its curved blade inset with thin kufic scrollwork. The hilt was of silver on steel, and the haft was wrapped about with durable cording. Sinan brought it out into the lights of a hundred lamps and held it out to the Virginian.
“A good blade, Stefan. See for yourself.”
Fletcher grasped the braided hilt, lifting the sword into his hand. It was light, but its steel was so finely made that he knew instinctively he had never before held such a weapon in his fist. Its blue,
