The Confusion

Off Malta
LATE AUGUST 1690

“SINCE BEFORE THE TIME of the Prophet my clan has bred and raised camels on the green foothills of the Mountains of Nuba, in Kordofan, up above the White Nile,” said Nyazi, as the galleot drifted langorously through the channel between Malta and Sicily. “When they are come of age, we drive them in great caravans down into Omdurman, where the White and the Blue Nile become one, and thence we follow tracks known only to us, sometimes close to the Nile and sometimes ranging far out into the Sahara, until we reach the Khan el-Khalili in Cairo. That is the greatest market of camels, and of many other things besides, in the world. Sometimes too we have been known to follow the Blue Nile upstream and cross over the mountains of Gonder into Addis Ababa and points beyond, even ranging as far as sea-ports where ivory-boats set their sails for Mocha.

“Unlike my comrade Jeronimo I am not one to tell flowery stories, and so I will merely relate that on one such journey, many of the men in my caravan fell ill and died. Now we are great fighters all. But we were so weakened that, in a mountain pass, we fell prey to a tribe of savages who have never heard the word of the Prophet; or if they have, they have disregarded it, which is worse. At any rate, it was their custom that a young man could not come of age and take a wife until he had castrated an enemy and brought his orchids of maleness to the chief shaman. And so every man of my clan who had not died of the disease was emasculated, except for me. For I had been riding behind the caravan to warn of ambushes from the rear. I was on an excellent stallion. When I heard the fighting, I galloped forward, praying that Allah would let me perish in battle. But by the time I drew near, all I heard was screaming. Some of it was the cries of the men being castrated, but, too, I heard my own brother-who had already suffered-shouting my name. ‘Nyazi!’ he cried, ‘Fly away, and meet us at the Caravanserai of Abu Hashim! For henceforth you must be the husband of our wives, and the father of our children; the Ibrahim of our race.’ ”

This engendered a respectful silence from each of the Ten, save one. Jack held his cupped hands in front of him like scale-pans, bobbled them, and let one drop. “Beats having your nuts cut off by wild men,” he said.

At this Nyazi flew into a rage (which was something Nyazi did very well) and launched himself on Jack more or less like a leopard. Jack fell on his arse, then rolled onto his back-which hurt, because his back was still one large scab. He managed to get his knees up in Nyazi’s ribs, then used the strength of his legs to shove him off. Nyazi sprawled flat on his back, screamed just as Jack had done, and there was pinned to the deck by Gabriel Goto and Yevgeny. It was several minutes before he could be calmed down.

“I offer you my apologies,” he said, with extreme gravity. “I forgot that you have suffered an even worse mutilation.”

“Worse? How do you reckon?” asked Jack, still lying flat trying to think of a way to stand up without doing any more damage to his back.

Nyazi copied Jack’s gesture of the bobbling scale-pans. “My clansmen could still perform the act-but they did not wish to. You wish to, but cannot.”

“Touche,” Jack muttered.

“Because of this, I see, now, that you were not accusing me of cowardice, and so I no longer feel obligated to kill you.”

“Truly you are a prince among camel-traders, Nyazi, and no man is better suited to be the Ibrahim of his race.”

“Alas,” Nyazi sighed, “I have not yet been able to impregnate even a single one of my forty wives.”

“Forty!” cried several of the Cabal at once.

“Counting the several I already had; ones we had acquired in trade during this trip and sent home via a different route; and those of the men who had been made eunuchs by the savages, the number should come to forty, give or take a few. All waiting for me in the foothills of the mountains of Nuba.” Nyazi got a faraway look in his eye, and an impressive swelling down below. “I have been saving myself,” he announced, “refusing to practice the sin of Onan, even when ifrits and succubi come to tempt me in the night-time. For to spill my seed is to diminish my ferocity, and weaken my resolve.”

“You never made it to the Caravanserai of Abu Hashim?”

“On the contrary, I rode there directly, and there waited for my poor clansmen to catch up with me. I understood it might be a long wait, as men who have suffered in this way naturally tend to avoid long camel rides. After I had been there for two nights, a caravan came down out of the upper White Nile laden with ivory. The Arabs of the caravan saw my skill with camels, and asked if I would help them as far as Omdurman, which was three days to the north. I agreed, and left word with Abu Hashim that I would be back to meet my brothers in less than a week.

“But on the first night out, the Arabs fell on me and put a collar around my neck and made me a slave. I believe they intended to keep me forever, as a camel-driver and a butt-boy. But when we got near Omdurman, the Arabs went to a certain oasis and drew up not far from a caravan headed by a Turk. And here the usual sort of negotiation took place: The Arabs took the goods they wished to trade (mostly elephant tusks) and piled them up halfway between the two camps, then withdrew. The Turks then came out and inspected the goods, then made a pile of the stuff they wished to trade (tobacco, cloth, ingots of iron) and withdrew. It went back and forth like this for a long time. Finally I was added to the Arabs’ pile. Then the Turks came out and took me away along with the Arabs’ other goods, and the cursed Arabs did likewise with the goods of the Turks, and we went our separate ways. Eventually the Turks took me as far as Cairo, and there I tried to escape-for I knew that my clansmen would be at the Khan el-Khalili during a certain time of year, which is late August. Alas, I was caught because of the treachery of a fellow-slave. Later I tore a leg from a stool and beat him to death with it. The Turks could see that I would be trouble as long as I remained in Cairo, and so I was traded to an Algerian corsair-captain who had just rowed into port with a cargo of blonde Carmelite nuns.”

Jack sighed. “I am never one to turn down a yarn. But I detect a certain repetitive quality in these galley-slave narrations, which forces me to agree with (speaking of blonde slave-girls) dear Eliza, who took such a dim view of the whole practice.”

“But as I recall from your narrations-which were not devoid of a certain repetitive quality, by the way-” Dappa said, “she objected on moral grounds-not because it led to monotonous storytelling.”

“I, too, could probably dream up some highfalutin grounds if all I had to pass the time was embroidery and bathing.”

“I did not realize that pulling on an oar posed such a challenge to your intellect,” Dappa returned.

“Until la suette anglaise delivered me from the French Pox, I had no intellect at all. When I’m rich and free, I’ll come up with a hundred and one reasons why slavery is bad.”

“A single good one would suffice,” Dappa said.

Feeling the need for a change of subject, Jack turned towards Vrej Esphahnian, who had been squatting on his haunches smoking a twist of Spanish tobacco and watching the exchange.

“Oh, mine is banal compared with everyone else’s,” he said. “As you may recall, my brother Artan sent out letters to diverse places, inquiring about the market for ostrich plumes. What came back convinced him that our family’s humble estate might be bettered if we established a trading-circuit to Northern Africa. I was dispatched to Marseille to make it so. From there, by buying passage on small coastal vessels, I tried to work my way down the Balearic coast of Spain towards Gibraltar, which I supposed would be a good jumping-off place. But I did not appreciate that the Spanish coast from Valencia downwards is infested with Moorish pirates, whose forefathers once were the lords of al-Andalus. These Corsairs knew the hidden coves and shallows of that coastline as well as-”

“All right, all right, you have said enough to convince me that it is, as you said, the usual galley-slave tale,” Jack said, strolling over to the rail and stretching-very carefully. He picked up a bulging skin and squirted a stream of stale water into his mouth, then stood up on the bench to contemplate the rock of Malta, which was drifting by them a few miles to starboard. He had just realized that it was a very small island and that he’d better look at it while he had the chance. “What I meant was: How did you end up on my oar?”

“The ineffable currents of the slave-market drove me to Algiers. My owner learned that I had some skills beyond oar-pulling, and put me to work as a bookkeeper in a market where Corsairs sell and trade their swag. The winter before last, I made the acquaintance of Moseh, who was asking many questions about the market in tutsaklar ransom futures. We had several conversations and I began to perceive the general shape of his Plan.”

“He told you about Jeronimo, and the Viceroy?”

“No, I learned of that on the same night as you.”

“Then what do you mean when you say you understood his plan?”

“I understood his basic principle: that a group of slaves who, taken one by one, were assigned a very low value by the market, might yet be worth much when grouped together cleverly…” Vrej rolled up to his feet and grimaced into the sun. “The wording does not come naturally in this bastard language of Sabir, but Moseh’s plan was to synergistically leverage the value-added of diverse core competencies into a virtual entity whose whole was more than the sum of its parts…”

Jack stared at him blankly.

“It sounds brilliant in Armenian.” Vrej sighed.

“How came you to be at the bottom of the slave-market?” Jack asked. “I know your family was not the wealthiest, but I should’ve thought they’d pay anything to ransom you from Algiers.”

Vrej’s face stopped moving, as if he had spied a Gorgon atop one of Malta’s cliffs. Jack gathered that the question was an impolite one, by Armenian standards.

“Never mind,” Jack said, “you are right, it makes no difference why your family would not, or could not, pay your ransom.” Then, after there’d been no word from Vrej in quite a while: “I’ll not ask again.”

“Thank you,” said Vrej, as if forcing the words past a clenched garrotte.

“Nonetheless, it is remarkable that we ended up on the same oar,” Jack continued.

“Algiers in wintertime is lousy with wretched slaves, trying to dream their way to freedom,” Vrej admitted, in a voice still tight and uneven. But as he continued talking, the anger, or sadness, that had possessed him for a few minutes slowly drained away. “I reckoned Moseh for another one of these at first. As one conversation led to the next, I perceived he was a man of intelligence, and began to think that I should throw in my lot with him. But when I learned that he had acquired a new bench-mate named Jack Shaftoe, I looked on it as a sign from God. For I owe you, Jack.”

“You owe me!?”

“And have, ever since the night you fled Paris. On that night my family and I incurred a debt to you, and if necessary we will travel to the end of the world, and sell our souls, to make good on it.”

“You can’t be thinking of those damned ostrich plumes?”

“You left them in our trust, Jack, and made us your commission-agents in the matter.”

“They were trash-the amount of money is trivial. Please do not consider yourself under any obligation…”

“It is a matter of principle,” Vrej said. “So I hatched a Plan of my own, every bit as complex as the Plan of Moseh, but not nearly so interesting. I’ll spare you the details, and tell you only the result: I was traded to your oar, Jack, and chained to you in fact-though chains of iron are nothing compared to the chains of debt and obligation that have fettered us since that night in Paris in 1685.”

“That is extremely civil of you,” Jack said. “But the only thing in all the world that makes me feel more ill at ease than being obliged, is some other man’s feeling obliged to me-so when we reach Cairo I’ll accept a few extra pounds of coffee, or something, to cover the proceeds from the sale of those ostrich-plumes, and then you and I can go our separate ways.”

AFTER RIDING THE front of a storm through the Strait of Gibraltar, they had spent a couple of days riding out the gale in the Alboran Sea, the anteroom of the Mediterranean. When the weather had settled down they had sailed southeast, steering toward the peaks of the Atlas Mountains, until they’d picked up the Barbary Coast not far from the Corsair-port of Mostaganem. They had not put in there-partly because they had no anchors, and partly because Nasr al-Ghurab seemed to be under strict instructions not to make contact with the world until they had reached their destination. But a few miles up the coast from Mostaganem, where a river came down off the north slopes of the Atlas and spilled into the sea, al-Ghurab had caused a certain flag to be run up the mast. Not much later a bergantine had come rowing out of a hidden cove and had drawn alongside them, carefully remaining a bow-shot away. There had been some shouting back and forth in Turkish, and the galleot’s skiff had been sent over, carrying two corsairs and Dappa, and collected kegs of fresh water and some other victuals. This bergantine had then shadowed them on the slow progress along the coast to the harbor of Algiers. Slow because they had almost never laid hands on the oars; no one wanted to, most were not fit to, and the rais had not asked them to.

At Algiers most of the regular oar-slaves had been transferred into the Penon, the squat Spanish fortress in the middle of the harbor, and locked up, for the time being, in places where they could not tell the tale of what they had seen. Empty wooden crates had come back, and the Cabal had busied itself packing the gold bars into them and stuffing straw in between so that they would not clank. Only after the crates had been nailed securely shut had fresh-and ignorant-oar-slaves been brought aboard.

They had also acquired a new drum. For on the day following their deliverance from Spaniard and storm, Jack Shaftoe had made a great ceremony of tossing the old one overboard. It had been a large wooden barrel-half with a cowhide stretched over the top, the hair still on it except where it had been worn away from being pounded. It was mottled white and brown like an unlabelled map, and it had bobbed stubbornly alongside them for a while, a little world loose in the sea, until Jack had stove it in with an oar. Meanwhile, Jeronimo had solemnized it in his own way: looking about at the gore that lined the hull, and the exhausted and half-flayed rowers, he had said, “We are all blood brothers now.” Which he had probably intended as some sort of sacrament-like benediction. For his part, Jack could see any number of grave drawbacks to being part of the same family as Jeronimo. But he had kept these misgivings to himself so as not to mar the occasion. Jeronimo had included, among his new brothers, all of the galley-slaves who were not members of the Cabal, and promised that he would use his share of the proceeds to ransom them. This had produced only eye-rolling from those slaves who could understand what he was saying. As days had gone by, his promises had flourished like mushrooms after an autumn rain, until he had laid out a scheme for constructing or buying an actual three-masted ship, manning it with freed slaves, and setting out to found a new country somewhere. But as they had inched across the map towards Algiers, a depression had settled over him, and he’d gone back to predictions of a bloodbath in Egypt-or possibly even Malta.

Accompanied by another, more heavily armed galleot, they had left Algiers behind-they hoped forever. They had rowed briskly eastwards, passing by one small Corsair-port after another until they had traversed the mouth of the Gulf of Tunis and reached the Ras el Tib, a rocky scimitar-tip pointed directly at Sicily, a hundred miles to the northeast. Here they had offloaded all but a dozen of their oar-slaves and then used their sails to take them out into deep water-the first time they’d lost sight of land since the night of their escape from Bonanza. The rais had immediately ordered the galleot’s Turkish colors struck, and had raised French ones in their stead.

THUS DISGUISED-if a new flag could be considered a disguise-they now sailed under the guns of various medieval-looking fortresses that had been built, by various occult sects of Papist knights, on crags and ridges looking north across the strait. No cannonballs were fired in their direction, and after a few hours, when they rounded a point and gazed into the Grand Harbor of Malta, they understood why: for a whole French fleet was riding at anchor there beneath the white terraces and flowered walls of Valletta. Not just merchant ships-though there were at least a dozen of those-but men-of-war, too. Three frigates to serve as gun-platforms, and a swarm of tactical galleys.

And-as van Hoek was first to notice-there was also Meteore. Evidently she had passed through the Strait of Gibraltar behind them and then made directly for Malta, to join up with the fleet, and await the galleot. Jack borrowed a spyglass to have a look at the jacht, and was rewarded by a view of a new flag that had been run up her mizzen-mast. It was a banner emblazoned with a coat of arms that he’d last seen carved in bas-relief on the onrushing lintel of a door in the Hotel Arcachon in Paris. “I would know that arrangement of fleurs-de-lis and Neeger-heads anywhere,” he announced. “The Investor is here in person.”

“He must have come down via Marseille,” van Hoek remarked.

“I thought I smelled a fish gone bad,” Jack said.

Likewise, their galleot was noticed and identified immediately. Within a few minutes a longboat had been sent out from Meteore, rowed by half a dozen seamen and carrying a French officer. This fellow clambered aboard the galleot and made a quick inspection-just enough to verify that the crew was orderly and the vessel seaworthy. He handed the rais a sealed letter and then departed.

“I wonder why he just doesn’t take us,” Yevgeny muttered, leaning on the rigging and gazing at all those warships.

“For the same reason that the Pasha did not do so when we were in the harbor of Algiers,” Moseh said.

“The Duke’s interests in that Corsair-city are deep,” Jack added. “He dares not queer his relations with the Pasha by violating the terms of the Plan.”

“I would have anticipated a more thorough inspection,” said Mr. Foot, arms crossed over his caftan as if he were feeling a chill, and glancing uneasily at a gold-crate.

“He knows we got something out of the Viceroy’s brig-and that it was valuable enough to make us risk our lives by tarrying in front of Sanlucar de Barrameda for several hours, transshipping it to the galleot. If we’d found nothing we’d have fled without delay,” Jack said. “And that is as good as an inspection.”

“But does he know what it is?” Mr. Foot asked. They were within earshot of their skeleton crew of oar-slaves and so he had to speak obliquely.

“There is no way he could,” said Jack. “The only communication he’s had from this boat is a bugle call, which was a pre-arranged signal, and I doubt that they had a signal meaning thirteen.” Thirteen was a sort of code meaning twelve or thirteen times as much money as we expected.

“Still, we know that the Pasha of Algiers sent out messages on faster boats than ours, to all the ports of the Levant, telling the masters of all harbors to deny us entry.”

“All except for one,” Yevgeny corrected him.

“Might he not have sent a message here to Malta, telling about the thirteen?”

Dappa now came strolling along. “You are forgetting to ask a very interesting question, namely: Does the Pasha know?”

Mr. Foot appeared to be scandalized; Yevgeny, profoundly impressed. “I should imagine so!” said Mr. Foot.

Dappa said, “But have you noticed that, on every occasion when the rais has parleyed with someone who does not know about the thirteen, he has been at pains to make sure I am present?”

“You, who are the only one of us who understands Turkish,” Yevgeny observed.

Jack: “You think al-Ghurab has kept the matter of the thirteen a secret?”

Yevgeny: “Or wishes us to think that he has.”

Dappa: “I would say-to know that he has.”

Mr. Foot: “What possible reason could he have for doing such a thing?”

Dappa: “When Jeronimo gave his ‘blood brothers’ speech, and all the rest of you were rolling your eyes, I chanced to look at Nasr al-Ghurab, and saw him blink back a tear.”

Mr. Foot: “I say! I say! Most fascinating.”

Jack: “For the Caballero, who is every inch the gentleman, it was no easy thing to admit what the rest of us have all known in our bones for so long: namely that we have found our natural and rightful place in the world here, among the broken and ruined scum of the earth. Perhaps the rais was merely touched by the brutally pathetic quality of the scene.”

Dappa: “The rais is a Corsair of Barbary. His sort enslave Spanish gentlefolk for sport. I believe he intends to make common cause with us.”

Mr. Foot: “Then why hasn’t he come out and said as much?”

Dappa: “Perhaps he has, and we have not been listening.”

Yevgeny: “If that is his plan, it depends entirely on what happens here in Malta. Perhaps he waits to announce himself.”

Jack: “Then it all pivots on that letter the Frenchman brought-and speaking of that, I believe we are delaying the ceremony.”

Nasr al-Ghurab had retreated to the shade of the quarterdeck with the other members of the Cabal, who were looking toward them impatiently. When Jack and the others had arrived, the rais passed the letter around so that all could inspect the splash of red wax that sealed it. Jack found it to be intact. He had half expected to find the arms of the Duc d’Arcachon mashed into it, but this was some sort of naval insignia. “I cannot read,” said Jack.

When the letter had made its way back to the rais he broke the seal and unfolded it. “It is in Roman characters,” he complained, and handed it to Moseh, who said, “This is in French.” It passed into the hands of Vrej Esphahnian, who said, “This is not French, but Latin,” and gave it to Gabriel Goto, who translated it-though Jeronimo hovered over his shoulder cocking his head this way and that, grimacing or nodding according to the quality of Gabriel’s work.

“It begins with a description of very great anguish in the houses of the Viceroy and the Hacklhebers on the day following our adventure,” said the Jesuit in his curiously accented Sabir; though he was nearly drowned out by Jeronimo, who was laughing raucously at whatever Gabriel had glossed over. Gabriel waited for Jeronimo to calm down, then continued: “He says that his friendship with us is strong, and not to worry that every port in Christendom is now alive with spies and assassins seeking to collect the huge price that has been put on our heads by Lothar von Hacklheber.”

Which caused several of them to glance nervously towards the Valletta waterfront, judging whether they might be within musket-, or even cannon-range.

“He is trying to scare us,” Yevgeny snorted.

“It is just a formality,” Jack put in, “a-what’s it called-?”

“Salutation,” said Moseh.

Gabriel continued, “He says he has received a message from the Pasha, carried on a faster boat, to the effect that everything has gone exactly as planned.”

“Exactly!?” said Moseh, a bit unsettled, and he searched al-Ghurab’s face. The rais gave a little shrug and stared back at him coolly.

“Accordingly, he sees no reason to depart from the Plan now. As agreed, he will lend us four dozen oar-slaves, so that we can keep pace with the fleet on its passage to Alexandria. Victuals will be brought out on a small craft in a few hours. Meanwhile the jacht will send out a longboat to collect the rais and the ranking Janissary-these will go to pick out the oar-slaves.”

Now all began talking at once. It was some time before their various conversations could be forged into one. Moseh did it by striking the new drum, which silenced them all; they’d been trained to heed it, and it reminded them once more that they were still enrolled as slaves on the books of the hoca el-pencik in the Treasury in Algiers.

Moseh: “If the Investor does not learn of the thirteen until Cairo, he’ll demand to know why we did not tell him immediately!” (shooting a reproachful look at the rais). “It will be obvious to him that we sought to play out a deception, and later lost our nerve.”

Van Hoek: “Why should we care what the bastard thinks of us? It’s not as if we intend to do business with him in the future.”

Vrej: “This is short-sighted. The power of France in Egypt-especially Alexandria-is very great. He can make it go badly for us there.”

Jack: “Who says he’s ever going to find out about the thirteen?”

Jeronimo laughed with sick delight. “It begins!”

Moseh: “Jack, he expects his payment in silver pigs. We don’t have any!”

Jack: “Why give the son of a bitch anything?”

Van Hoek, grimly amused: “By continuing to conceal what the rais has thus far concealed, we are already talking about screwing the investor out of twelve-thirteenths of what would otherwise come to him. So why make such scruples about the remaining one-thirteenth?”

Moseh: “I agree that we should either screw the Investor thoroughly, or not at all. But I would argue for completely open dealings. If we simply follow the Plan and give the Investor his due, we will all be free, with money in our purses.”

Jeronimo: “Unless he decides to screw us.”

Moseh: “But that is no more likely now than it was before!”

Jack: “I think it was always very likely.”

Yevgeny: “We cannot tell the Investor of the thirteen here, now. For then he will say that we tried to hide it earlier, as part of a plan to screw him, and use it as a pretext to seize the galleot.”

Van Hoek: “Yevgeny is an intelligent man.”

Jack: “Yevgeny has indeed read the Investor’s character shrewdly.”

Moseh clamped his head between the palms of his hands, massaging the bare places where forelocks had once grown. For his part, Vrej Esphahnian looked ill at ease to the point of nausea. Jeronimo had gone back to dire predictions, which none of them even heard any more. Finally Dappa said, “Nowhere in the world are we weaker than we are here and now. It is not the time to reveal great secrets.”

In this, it seemed, he spoke for the entire Cabal.

“Very well,” Moseh said, “we’ll tell him in Egypt, and we’ll hope he’ll be so pleased by unexpected fortune that he’ll overlook past deceptions.” He paused and heaved a sigh. “Now as for the other matter: Why does he want both the rais and the ranking Janissary to come out in the longboat to collect the slaves?”

“It is a routine formality,” said the rais. “For him to do otherwise would be very odd.”*

“Remember, we are speaking of a French Duke. He will hew to protocol no matter what,” Vrej agreed.

“Only one of us can pass for a Janissary. I will go,” Jack said. “Get me a turban and all the rest.”

“EVEN IF THAT DUKE STARED me full in the face, I doubt he would recognize me,” Jack said. “My face was covered most of the time that I was in his house-otherwise, he never would have mistaken me for Leroy. I only let the scarf fall at the very end-”

“But if there was any truth whatsoever in your narration,” said Dappa carefully, “it was a moment of high drama, exceeding anything ever staged in a theatre.”

“What is your point?”

“In those short moments you may have made a vivid impression in the Duke’s memory.”

“I should hope so!”

“No, Jack,” Moseh said gently, “you should hope not.”

Only Moseh, Dappa, and Vrej knew that the Investor had for some years been combing every last fen, wadi, and reef of the Mediterranean for the man identified, by Muslims, as Ali Zaybak. Moseh and Dappa had followed Jack to the dress-up sack to fret and wring their hands. Vrej was completely unconcerned, though: “In those days Jack had long hair, and a stubbled face, and was heavier. Now with his head and face shaved, and a turban, and with him so gaunt and weather-tanned, I think there is little chance of his being recognized-provided he keeps his trousers on.”

“What possible reason could there be to take them off?” Jack demanded hotly.

THE LONGBOAT CAME OUT. Jack and the rais climbed in. Dappa came, too, as interpreter-for they had agreed that it would be unwise for Jack to let it be known that he spoke Vagabond-French. The longboat took them not to Meteore after all, but to a part of the harbor where no fewer than half a dozen war galleys of the French Navy were tied up on either side of a long stone pier. The longboat was tied up at the pier’s end by a couple of barefoot French swabbies. The tide was quite low, so Jack, Nasr al-Ghurab, and Dappa took turns ascending a ladder to the pier’s sun-hammered top and there met the same young officer who had earlier brought them the letter. He was a slender fellow with a high nose and an overbite, who bowed slightly, and greeted them without really showing respect. Introductions were made by an aide. The officer was identified as one Pierre de Jonzac.

“Tell Monsieur de Jonzac that he has the smallest nostrils of any human who ever lived,” Jack said in the most vulgar Sabir he could muster, “which must serve him well in his dealings with his master.”

“The Agha of the Janissaries greets you as one warrior to another,” Dappa said vaguely.

“Tell him that I am grateful that he has personally taken responsibility for getting us and our cargo to Egypt,” the rais said.

French was exchanged. Pierre de Jonzac stiffened. His pupils widened and his nostrils shrank at the same time, as if they shared a common drawstring. “He understandeth little, and resenteth much,” Dappa said out of the side of his mouth.

“If we do not take our time, here, and pick out a good complement of slaves, why, we will fall behind the convoy, and Dutch or Calabrian pirates will end up with our cargo-” began the rais.

“-of whose nature we are ignorant,” added Jack.

“-but which the Duke appears to value highly,” finished Dappa, who could see for himself how this was going. When he said all of this in French, Pierre de Jonzac flinched, and looked as if he were about to order them flogged. Then he seemed to think better of it.

De Jonzac spun on his heel and led them down the pier. The hulls of the French galleys were low as slippers and narrow as knives and could not even be seen from here, but each one had-as well as a pair of masts-both a fore-and a stern-castle, meant to carry her pay-load of cannons and Marines as high above the foes’ as possible. These castles-which were all decorated, gilded, and painted in the finest Barock style-seemed to hover in the air on either side of the pier, bobbing gently in the swell. It was a strangely peaceful scene-until they followed de Jonzac to the edge of the pier and looked down into one of the galleys: a stinking wood-lined gouge in the water, packed with hundreds of naked men, chained by their waists and ankles in groups of five. Many were dozing. But as soon as faces appeared above them, a few began to shout abuse, and woke up all the rest. Then they were all screaming.

“Rag-head! Come down here and take my seat!”

“You have a pretty ass, nigger! Bend over so we can inspect!”

“Where do you want to row today?”

“Take me! My oar-mates snore!”

“Take him! He prays too much!”

And so forth; but they were all shouting as loud as they could, and shaking their chains, and stomping the deck-planks so that the hull boomed like a drum.

“Je vous en prie!” said Pierre de Jonzac, extending a hand.

It came clear that they were expected to take a few slaves from each galley. A rite soon took shape: They’d cross a gangplank from the pier to the sterncastle and parley with the captain, who would be expecting them, and who would have helpfully culled out a few slaves-always the most miserable tubercular specimens on his boat. Nasr al-Ghurab would prod them, inspect their teeth, feel their knees, and scoff. This was the signal to begin haggling. Using Dappa as his intermediary, al-Ghurab had to reject galeriens one by one, beginning always with the most pitiable, and these would be sent down into the ever-boiling riot of Vagabonds, smugglers, pickpockets, deserters, stranglers, prisoners of war, and Huguenots chained to the benches below. Then it would be necessary to pick out a replacement, which involved more haggling, as well as endless resentful glares, verbal abuse, bluffing, and stalling from the petty officers-called comites-who controlled the oar-deck, and tedious un-chaining and re-chaining. The longboat could only ferry ten or so slaves out to the galleot at a time, so five loads, and as many round trips, were needed.

Al-Ghurab’s strategy had been that he would wear the French down by taking his time and choosing carefully; but as the day went on it became obvious that time was on the side of the captains of the galleys, who relaxed in their cabins, and of Pierre de Jonzac, who sipped Champagne under a giant parasol on the pier, while Jack, Dappa, and al-Ghurab toiled up and down the gangplanks smelling the bodies and enduring the curses of the galeriens. They picked out perhaps two boat-loads of reasonably good slaves before they began to lose their concentration, and after that they were more concerned with getting to the end of the day with some vestiges of dignity. Jack led many a galerien down the aisle that day. Some of them had to be prodded down the entire length of a one-hundred-fifty-foot ship to be offloaded. Each of those who was staying behind felt bound to say something to the one who was being taken off:

“I hope the Mohametans bugger you as often as you’ve whined about your wife and kids in Toulouse!”

“Send us a letter from Algiers, we hear the weather is very nice there!”

“Farewell, Jean-Baptiste, may God go with you!”

“Please don’t let the Corsairs ram us, I have nothing against them!”

It was on the very last trip of the day that Jack-standing in the aisle of a galley while the rais argued with a comite-was dazzled, for a moment, by a bright light shone into his eye. He blinked and it was gone. Then it was back: bright as the sun, but coming from within this galley. The third time, he held up an arm to shield his eyes, and squinted at it sidelong, and perceived that it was coming from the middle of a bench near the bow, on the starboard side. He began walking towards it-creating a sensation among the galeriens, who had all noticed the light on his face and were screaming and pounding their benches with amusement.

By the time he’d reached the forward part of the oar-deck, Jack had lost track of the light’s source-but then one more flash nicked him again, then faded and shrank to a little polygon of grey glass, held in a man’s fingers. Jack had already guessed it would be a hand-mirror, because these were commonly found among the few miserable effects that galley-slaves were allowed to have with them. By thrusting it out of an oar-lock, or raising it high overhead, the owner could see much that would otherwise be out of his view. But it was cheeky for a galerien to flash sunlight into the eyes of a free man standing in the aisle, because this was most annoying, and might be punished by breakage or confiscation of the mirror.

Jack looked up into the eyes of the insolent wretch who had been playing tricks on him, and recognized him immediately as Monsieur Arlanc, the Huguenot, whom he had last seen buried in shit in a stable in France.

Jack parted his lips; Monsieur Arlanc raised a finger to his, and shook his head almost imperceptibly. Then he swiveled his eyes in their sockets, leading Jack’s gaze over the gunwale and across the choppy black water of the harbor, off in the general direction of Sicily. Jack’s attention rolled aimlessly about the harbor, like a loose cannonball on a pitching deck, until it fell into a hole, and stopped. For he could clearly see a sort of heathen half-galley riding the swells at the harbor’s entrance, but obliterated, every so often, by a flash of light just like the one that had come from the hand-mirror of Monsieur Arlanc.

The half-galley was none other than the Cabal’s galleot.

Jack’s first thought was that the new slaves must be staging a mutiny and that his comrades were signalling for help. But the flashes emanated not from the quarterdeck, where the Cabal would make their last stand in a mutiny, but from a point down low and amidships: one of the oar-locks. It must be one of the new galeriens, probably chained safely to his bench by now, but reaching out with a hand-mirror to flash signals to-whom, exactly?

Jack turned around to face the pier-side, which had fallen into deep shade as the sun had swung around over the high crags and castles of Malta. By blocking the sun’s glare with his hand he was able to see a vague spot of bluish light prowling around the pier’s shadows. The mirror was held in an unsteady hand on a rocking boat far away, and so the spot of light frequently careered off into the sky or plunged into the waves. But it would always come back, and work its way carefully down the pier, and then dart upwards at the same place. After this had occurred several times, Jack raised his sights to the top of the pier and saw Pierre de Jonzac sitting there at a folding table with a quill in one hand, staring out to sea. Each mirror-flash lit him up with a ghastly light, and after each one he glanced down (his wig moved) and made a mark (his quill wiggled).

“I suppose you think this was all predestined to happen, monsieur,” said Jack, “but I like to believe you had some say in the matter, and therefore deserve my thanks.”

“There is no time to talk,” Arlanc said. “But know that the men they have sent you are very dangerous: murderers, conspiracists, phanatiques, looters of bakeries, outragers of women, and locksmiths gone bad.”

“I would rather have a Huguenot or two,” Jack mused, scanning the other four members of Monsieur Arlanc’s team. The headman, who sat on the aisle, was a Turk.

“It is a noble conception, Jack, but not destined to happen. They will never agree to it-it is not part of their plan.”

“What about God? Doesn’t He have a plan?”

“I believe only that God preserved me until now so that I could show you what I have showed you,” said Monsieur Arlanc, glancing up towards de Jonzac frozen in another pallid flash, “and thereby repay you for your generosity in the stables. What on earth are you doing, by the way?”

“It is a long story,” Jack said, taking a step away-for al-Ghurab had finally picked out the last slave, and was calling to him. “I’ll explain it when we reach Egypt.”

Monsieur Arlanc smiled like a saint on the gridiron, and shook his head. “This galley will never reach Egypt,” he said, “and my mortal body is, as you can see, one with it.” He patted the chain locked round his waist.

“What, are you joking? Look at the size of this armada! We’ll be fine.”

Arlanc closed his eyes, still smiling. “If you see Dutch colors, or English, or-may God forbid it-both combined, make for Africa, and stop not until you have run aground.”

“And then what? Go on foot across the Sahara?”

“It would be easier than the journey we begin tomorrow. God bless you and your sons.”

“Likewise you and yours. See you at the Sphinx.” Jack stormed off down the aisle. For once, the galeriens did not hound him the whole way. They seemed sober and deflated instead, as if they had all guessed at the subject of Jack’s and Monsieur Arlanc’s conversation.

THE VOYAGE FROM MALTA to Alexandria was a rhumb-line a thousand miles long. The Dutch hit them halfway, five days into the passage, somewhere to the south of Crete. Jack supposed that if he were God watching the battle from Heaven it might make some kind of sense: the onslaughts of the Dutch capital ships, the stately maneuvers of the French ones, and the slashing zigzags of the galleys would form a coherent picture, and seem less like an interminable string of dreadful accidents. But Jack was just a mote on a galleot that was evidently considered too small to be worth attacking, or defending. Now they understood why the shrewd Investor had never insisted on having the loot taken off the galleot and loaded into a man-of-war: He must have suspected that half or more of his capital ships would end up on the bottom of the Mediterranean.

Every time a French frigate was struck by a Dutch broadside, a vast cloud of spinning planks, tumbling spars, and other important materials would come flying out the opposite side and tear up the water for a hundred yards or more. After this had happened several times the ship would stop moving and a galley would be brought in to tow it from the line of battle, somewhat like a servant scurrying into the middle of a lively dance-floor to drag away a fat count who had passed out from drink.

The galleot, for its part, wandered about aimlessly, like a lost lamb searching for its mother in a flock that was being torn apart by wolves. Van Hoek spent the day up on the maintop, cheering for the Dutch, and occasionally shouting explanations-so cryptic and technical as to be useless-of what was going on to the others. Very early the Cabal had met to discuss surrendering to the Dutch forthwith. But there was much that could go awry with that plan. At the very best it would mean surrendering all of the gold, and many in the Cabal did not share van Hoek’s natural affinity for the Dutch side of things anyway.

The galley to which Monsieur Arlanc was chained survived most of the battle without serious damage. Then (according to van Hoek) she was called in to ram a certain Dutch ship. Along the way she came under fire from others, and a bomb apparently went off in her sterncastle, starting a fire that, a few minutes later, detonated her powder magazine and essentially blew open her stern. Very quickly her bow began to point up in the air, her ram sweeping relentlessly upwards like the hand of a clock. The galeriens in the forward half of the ship-presumably including Monsieur Arlanc-let go their oars and hooked their arms over their benches, though some of them broke loose, so that skeins of slaves dangled and swung like strings of trout hanging before a fishmonger’s stall.

“Let us row in that direction,” Jack said, “because it is no more dangerous than what we are doing anyway, and because it is good form.”

There was profound apprehension on the faces of other members of the Cabal. Vrej Esphahnian opened his mouth as if to lodge an objection but then a large cannonball hummed past, a couple of yards over their heads, confirming Jack’s point and sparing them many tedious deliberations. So Nasr al-Ghurab brought the tiller around and they made for the sinking galley.

Meanwhile Jack went down among the oar-slaves-but not before asking Yevgeny to fetch a certain large hammer, and an anvil.

On the night before their departure from Malta, when most of the fleet’s ordinary seamen had been ashore carousing and/or receiving Holy Communion, and most of its officers attending formal dinners, the Cabal had armed themselves with blunderbusses and then worked their way down the aisle, unchaining one pair of slaves at a time and searching them. Turbans, head-rags, and loincloths had been shaken out and groped, jaws and butt-cheeks pried apart, hair combed through or cut off. Jeronimo had scoffed at this-more so after being told it was all because of a warning from a “heretic Frog slave.” But he went silent as soon as he saw a complete set of fine lock-picks being drawn out through the anal sphincter of a stocky middle-aged galerien named Gerard. And he remained silent as an increasingly astounding variety of hardware was produced, like conjurors’ tricks, from diverse orifices and bits of clothing. “If I see a granado coming from some man’s nostril I will be no more surprised than I am now,” he said. Finally a mirror was found, and then another-confirming Jack’s story. Nyazi was uncharacteristically pensive, and said: “Honor dictates that we send the Investor to Hell forthwith, along with as many of his clan as we can get our daggers into.” But El Desamparado flew into a rage that did not abate until he had ranted for the better part of an hour and made many trips up and down the length of the galleot flailing away with a nerf du boeuf.

Now these galeriens were no more impressed by Jeronimo’s prowess with the whip than they were by his Classical allusions.* At the height of his rage Jeronimo was no more or less prepossessing than any comite of the French Navy. It was, rather, the odd comments he made when he calmed down that convinced them all that El Desamparado was a madman, and scared them all into silence and submission.

In any event, the French padlocks that had secured the slaves when they’d been brought over had been tossed into the bilge, and their chains heated up in the galleot’s portable brazier and hammered shut, just in case any lock-picks had escaped the search.

Now, as the galleot rowed through the wreckage of the French flotilla with clouds of grapeshot and lengths of smoking chain flying overhead, Jack fished one of those padlocks out of the bilge. As Yevgeny parted the chain of Gerard with a few terrible hammer-blows, Jack worked his way through the giant key-ring that the French had handed over to them, and got that padlock open. Then Jack, Yevgeny, Gerard, and Gabriel Goto got into the skiff and rowed the last few yards to the slowly sinking galley.

Hundreds of chained men had already been pulled below the water, and perhaps two score remained above it. The bench to which Monsieur Arlanc and his four companions were joined by a common chain, and from which they’d all been dangling for the last quarter of an hour, was only a couple of yards above the water now, and their legs were washed by every wave. Jack clambered onto that bench holding one end of the chain that went around Gerard’s waist, then wrapped Gerard’s chain around Arlanc’s and padlocked them together. He threw away the key and, for good measure, smashed the body of the lock with a hammer to make it unpickable.

Gerard’s eyes went immediately to the chain that went round the waists of Monsieur Arlanc and his four comrades, and terminated at the end of the bench along the aisle, where it was padlocked to a stout loop of iron.

Jack jumped back into the skiff; handed Gerard his set of lock-picks; and threw him overboard, saying, “Go and redeem thyself.”

Of course there was much more to it than that, and when Jack told the tale afterwards he would give the full report, with all due embellishments: the hysterical blubbering of some galeriens, the pious praying of others, the many strong hands that shot up out of the water to grip the gunwales of their skiff and were cut away by Gabriel’s sword. The officers and French Marines still clinging to the galley’s forecastle, trying to buy passage on the galleot, or failing that, to fight their way aboard, only to be beaten back by Jeronimo and Nyazi and van Hoek and the others. The banks of powder-smoke drifting by overhead, and the bodies of the drowned galeriens below: pale blurred forms in strings of five, like pearls.

But at the time Jack took little notice of this ambience and concentrated on the matter of the lock and the chain almost as intently as Gerard. At the moment that the galley pulled Gerard under water he still had not got the lock open, and Jack began to think his plan had failed. The Turk who sat in the aisle was pulled under crying “Allahu Akbar!” and then the man who sat next to Monsieur Arlanc went down intoning “Father into your hands I commend my spirit.” Then it came to the point where Monsieur Arlanc’s face was only visible in the troughs of the waves. But then the head of Gerard re-appeared, followed by that of the Turk; they were clambering uphill, using the galley as a ladder even as it slid deeper. Gerard reached a temporarily secure place, turned around, hefted the opened padlock in one hand, and flung it at Jack’s head. Jack ducked it and laughed. “There is your redemption, English!” screamed Gerard, weeping with rage.

NOW THEY MADE direct for the Mouths of the Nile, sailing by day and rowing by night. Every few hours they sighted remnant ships of the French fleet, now scattered across fifty miles. Several times they saw Meteore, which had survived the battle with the amputation of her mizzenmast, and she signalled to them with mirror-flashes.

“A group of two, then a group of three,” said Nasr al-Ghurab.

“According to the Plan, this is a signal that we are to curtail the voyage, and put in at Alexandria instead of going on to Abu Qir,” Moseh said.

Al-Ghurab rolled his eyes. “That would be as good as going direct to Marseille. In El Iskandariya, the French are almost more powerful than the Turks.”

“There is no point in making it easy for the Investor to bugger us,” Jeronimo scoffed.

“Then we shall go to Cairo and make it slightly more difficult,” said the rais.

“Cairo I like better than Alexandria,” Jack said, “but I do not like Cairo much. It is a cul-de-sac-the end of the line.”

“Not so-we could row up the Nile to Ethiopia!” Dappa said.

Nyazi, viewing Dappa’s jest as a challenge to his hospitality, declared that he would gladly sleep naked in the dirt to the end of his days in order to provide the Cabal with comfortable beds-providing they could get as far as the foothills of the Mountains of Nuba.

“The entire point of choosing Cairo was that it is as far East as Mediterranean vessels can go,” Moseh reminded them, “and so our cargo should have the highest value there, at the reputedly stupendous bazaar of the Khan el-Khalili, in the very heart of that ancient city, called by some the Mother of the World. And this is as true now as it was before.”

“But once we go in we cannot come out-the Investor needs only to post ships before the two Mouths of the Nile, at Rosetta and Damietta, and we are bottled up,” van Hoek pointed out.

“Nonetheless, this half of the Mediterranean is yet Turkish. Turks control every harbor,” said the rais, “and word has gone out, on faster boats than ours, that if a galleot should appear, with a crew of mostly infidels, and such-and-such markings, it is to be impounded at once, and the crew put in irons. Going to Cairo and trading our cargo for a vast array of goods in the Khan el-Khalili is not such a miserable fate compared to the alternatives-”

“One, being buggered by the Investor in Alexandria,” said Jeronimo.

“Two, being thrown into a dungeon-pit in some flyblown port in the Levant,” said Dappa.

“Three, running the ship aground in some uninhabited place and trudging off into the Sahara bent under the weight of our cargo,” said Vrej.

“Ethiopia sounds better every minute,” said Dappa.

“I shall distribute my wives equally among the nine of us who still have penises,” proclaimed Nyazi, “and Jack can have my finest camel!”

“Jack, fear not,” said Monsieur Arlanc, taking him aside. “I know one or two negociants in Grand Caire. Through them, I can help you sell your share of the goods, and get a bill of exchange, payable in Amsterdam.”

Jack sighed. “I do not predict any of us will sleep easy in Cairo.”

So they made no response to messages from the Investor’s jacht, and used their (now) superior speed to stay well clear of her. And yet they did not attempt to pull away and vanish during the night-times, as there was no advantage in throwing the Investor into a rage.

High sere country, veiled in dust, began to appear off to starboard. The water took on a brown tinge and then became polluted with mud, sticks, and straw, which Nasr al-Ghurab called sudd. He said it had been washed down out of Egypt by the Nile. The river, he said, would be at its fullest now, as it was the month of August.

Then one midday they spied a hill with a single Roman column rising out of its top, and a city jumbled about its base. “It looks as if a movement of the earth has shaken the whole city down into rubble,” Jack said, but the rais said that Alexandria always looked that way, and pointed to the fortifications as proof. Indeed a square-sided stone castle rose from the middle of the harbor, at the end of a broad causeway; it seemed orderly and showed no signs of damage. One or two of the faster French ships had already dropped anchor under the shelter of its guns. Gazing for a few moments through a borrowed spyglass, Jack could see men in periwigs going to and fro in longboats, parleying with the customs officials, who here as in Algiers were all black-clad Jews.

“The French pay three percent-merchants of other nations pay twenty,” Monsieur Arlanc commented, “probably thanks to the machinations of your Investor, and of other great Frenchmen.” Since his being rescued from the galley, he had been accepted as a sort of advisor to the Cabal.

“Once the Turks see how the French fleet was mangled by the Dutch, perhaps they’ll change their policy,” van Hoek said.

“Not if the Duc d’Arcachon bribes them with a galleot-load of gold bars,” Jack put in.

Most of the French fleet, including Meteore, set their courses direct for the harbor of Alexandria proper. Nasr al-Ghurab, however, pointed them straight up the coast; raised all the sail he could; and put the galeriens to work, driving them at a blazing speed of nine knots for two hours. This brought them to a cusp of land called Abu Qir. From here Alexandria was still plainly visible through dust and heat-waves, and presumably the reverse was true; no doubt some French officer had watched every oar-stroke through a spyglass.

There was no city at Abu Qir, other than a few huts of Arab fishermen surrounded by spindly racks where they put fish out to dry in the sun. But there was a solid Turkish fort with many guns, and a customs house below it, having its own pier. Moseh and Dappa went in using the skiff while the rais and the others managed the ticklish job of bringing the galleot alongside the pier. Out of the customs house came the Jew who was in charge of the place, followed by Moseh, Dappa, and a couple of younger Jews-his sons-who carried sticks of red wax, bottles of ink, and other necessaries. The Jew was speaking a queer kind of Spanish to Moseh. He spent a couple of hours going through the hold, putting a customs-seal on each of the wooden crates without actually inspecting them, and without exacting any duties-this, of course, had all been pre-arranged on the Turkish side, by the Pasha working through his contacts in Egypt. This customs house at Abu Qir was the only one in the Ottoman Empire, or the world for that matter, where they could have done it.

The inspector made it clear to everyone within earshot that he was not happy with any part of the arrangement, but he did his part and departed without creating any obstructions or demanding any baksheesh above and beyond what he was getting anyway: a purse of pieces of eight, handed to him by Nasr al-Ghurab after the “inspection” was complete.

This inspector turned out to be a hospitable soul, who importuned Moseh to come in and share an evening meal-making the reasonable assumption that the galleot would remain tied up to his pier all night. And indeed this would have been easiest. But a French sloop-of-war had been dispatched from Alexandria and was halfway to them now, her triangular sail apricot-colored in the late afternoon sun, and no one liked the looks of that. Furthermore, according to this Jew, a fine high-road called the Canopic Way joined Alexandria to Abu Qir, and riders on good horses could easily make the trip in a couple of hours. Having no particular desire to be trapped between the French sloop and a hypothetical squadron of French night-riders, Nasr al-Ghurab ordered the galleot to put to sea about an hour before sunset. Under other conditions this would have been most unwise. But the current of the Nile would tend to push them away from the land, and according to the weather-glass that van Hoek had improvised from a glass tube and a flask of quicksilver, the skies would be clear for at least another day. So they abandoned themselves to the waves, and spent an uneasy night throwing the sounding-lead over the side and hauling it in again, over and over and over, lest they run aground in the Nile’s shifting sands.

When the sun rose upon one tired and irritable Cabal, they found themselves in the center of a vast half-moon-shaped bay, contained between the headland of Abu Qir to the southwest, and a huge sand-spit to the northeast, some twenty miles farther along the coast from Abu Qir. This bay had no distinct shore, but rather smeared away into mud-flats that extended for many miles inland before they became worthy of supporting trees, crops, and buildings. It soon became plain that the galleot had been drifting in a lazy orbit, a vast whorl of current driven by the Nile. For according to the rais, the sand-spit to the northeast had been constructed, one grain of silt at a time, by the Rosetta Mouth, which was bedded in it somewhere. And when the sun bubbled up from the horizon and shone as a red disk through the haze of floury dust sighing down from the Sahara, it silhouetted a skyline of mosque-domes and minarets, deep among those mud-flats, which was the city of Rosetta itself.

The morning’s peace was then broken by wailing and sobbing from the head of the galleot. Jack went forward to find Vrej Esphahnian kneeling on the heavy timber that had once supported the ram. The Armenian was now doing some ramming of his own, repeatedly butting his forehead against the timber and clawing at his scalp until blood showed. He did not appear to hear anything Jack said to him. So Jack lingered until he was certain that Vrej did not intend to hurl himself into the bay, and then returned to the quarterdeck, where tactics were being discussed.

As soon as it had grown light enough to see, they had turned the galley northwards and begun rowing out of this bay. Rosetta (or Rashid, as al-Ghurab called it) had been close enough that they’d heard the city’s muezzins wailing at the break of dawn. But the rais explained that to reach the city they would have to go several miles north to the tip of the bar, and find their way in at the river-mouth, then work upriver for an hour or two.

It was not long before the French sloop came into view; she had sailed out into deeper waters for the night and was now patrolling off the Rosetta Mouth. Fortunately a wind came up from the southwest, and by raising some canvas the galleot was able to run before it, overshooting the river-mouth and making excellent speed towards the east-as if she intended to go in at the Damietta Mouth, a hundred miles away, or to break loose altogether and make a run for some other port. The sloop’s skipper had no choice but to bite down hard on that bait, and to chase them downwind. When she had drawn abeam of the galleot, and begun to converge toward them, al-Ghurab struck the canvas, wheeled about, and set the oar-slaves to work rowing upwind. The sloop came about in response. But lacking oars, she could only work upwind by tacking, and so she had no hope of keeping pace with the galleot. The gap between the two vessels was about half a mile to begin with, and grew steadily as they rowed towards the snarl of interlocking and ingrown sand-bars that guarded the Nile’s Rosetta Mouth.

These maneuvers took up half the day, which gave Vrej Esphahnian time to calm down. When he seemed capable of speech again, Jack brought him a cup and a wineskin, and sat with him in the bow-now the least foul-smelling part of the ship, as they were working into the wind.

“Forgive my weakness,” said Vrej in a hoarse voice. “When I saw Rosetta, I could think only of the tales my father told me, of how he passed through that place with his boat-load of coffee. He had nursed that boat through countless narrow seas and straits, canals and river-courses, and when he passed through customs at Rosetta and sailed down to the river’s mouth, suddenly the vast Mediterranean opened up before him: to some, an emblem of terror and harbinger of wild storms, but to him a vista of freedom of opportunity. From there he sailed direct to Marseille and-”

“Yes, I know, introduced coffee to France,” said Jack, who knew the rest of the tale at least as well as Vrej himself. “Now excuse me for tacking upwind, as it were, against the general direction of your narration. But according to your brother’s version of this story, your father acquired that boat-load of coffee in Mocha.”

Vrej, taken aback: “Yes-Mocha is where coffee from Ethiopia, silver from Spain, and spices from India all come together.”

“I have seen maps,” said Jack impressively, “maps of the whole world, in a library in Hanover. And I seem to recollect that Mocha lies on the Red Sea.”

“Yes-as Nyazi can tell you, it lies in Arabia Felix, across the Red Sea from Ethiopia.”

“And furthermore I am under the impression that the Red Sea empties into the ocean that extends to Hindoostan.”

Vrej said nothing.

“If it is true that Cairo is the end of the line-that no vessel can go farther east than that-then how did your father manage to get his ship from Mocha, on the Red Sea, to here?”

Vrej was now sitting with his eyes tightly shut, cursing under his breath.

“There must be a way through!” Jack said, then stood up to shout the news to the others. As he did, he noticed, in the corner of his eye, a movement of Vrej’s hand. It was subtle. Yet any man in the world would notice it, and many would step away in response, or even reach across toward his sword-hilt, because Vrej was unmistakably reaching towards the handle of the dagger that was bound in his waist-sash. His hand moved no more than a finger’s breadth before he mastered the impulse and moved it back. But Jack noticed it, and faltered, and looked into the eyes of Vrej Esphahnian, red and swollen from weeping. He saw sadness there (of course), but he did not see murderous passions; only a kind of surrender. “That’s the spirit, Vrej!” he said, giving him a hearty shoulder-slap, and then Jack stepped away and called the Cabal to council.

THAT NIGHT THE PEACE of the Street of the Wigmakers in the souk of Rosetta was wrecked by the sound of a pistol-butt being hammered against an old wooden door. The head of an angry man was thrust out between shutters above, and became much less angry when he saw that two of the three visitors were Turks (or at least dressed that way), and one of those a Janissary. Pieces of eight jangled in a purse improved his mood even more. Door-bolts were removed, the visitors admitted.

The dwelling was clean and well-tended, but it smelt as if the floor-sweepings of every barbershop in the Ottoman Empire had been stuffed into its back room and left to ripen. Tea was brewed and tobacco proffered. After some half an hour of preliminaries, the visitors made a business proposal. Once the owner got over his astonishment, he accepted it. A boy was sent off to the Street of the Barbers at a dead run. While they waited, the wigmaker lit some lamps and displayed his wares. The finished products were big wigs mounted on wooden block-heads, destined for export to Europe; but they looked almost as strange to the European visitors as they did to any Arab, for during the years that they had spent pulling oars, fashions had been changing: wigs were now tall and narrow, no longer flat and broad.

Deeper in the shop were the raw materials, and here choices had to be made. Even the finest Barbary horse-hair was too coarse for tonight’s project. At the other end, hanks of fine, lustrous human hair from China were available-but these were the wrong color and it would take too long to dye them.

A bleary-eyed Turkish barber came in and began heating water and stropping razors. The customers settled on some sandy brown goat hair, intermediate in price.

The Janissary’s head and face were now shaved clean by the barber, and the fine fuzz on the upper cheeks burned away, dramatically but painlessly, using spirits of wine soaked into wads of Turcoman cotton. The barber was paid off and sent home. The wigmaker then went to work, painting the naked skin with pine gum one tiny patch at a time and stabbing tufts of goat hair into the goo. After two hours, the Janissary smelled overpoweringly of goats and pine-trees, and looked like he hadn’t had a shave or haircut in years. And when he was stripped to the waist, revealing a back ridged with whip-scars, anyone would have identified him not as a Janissary but as a wretched oar-slave.

PIERRE DE JONZAC RETURNED to the bank of the Nile an hour after dawn, just as he had promised or threatened to, and he brought with him his entire squadron of dragoons. Yesterday they’d galloped headlong to the very edge of the quay and pulled up just short of charging across the gangplanks, all panting and sweaty and dust-caked from having galloped up and down the Canopic Way for a night and a day trying to follow the maneuvers of the galleot.

Using Monsieur Arlanc as interpreter, Nasr al-Ghurab complimented de Jonzac on the splendid appearance of his self and his troops this morning-for it was obvious that the menials at the French Consulate had been up all night grooming, scrubbing, starching, and polishing. The rais went on to apologize for the contrastingly dismal state of his ship and crew. Some of them were “enjoying the shade of the vines,” which was a poetic way of saying they were in the bazaar (which had a leafy roof of grapevines) buying provisions. Others were “sipping mocha in the Pasha’s house.” De Jonzac looked on this (as he was meant to) as a crashingly unsubtle way of claiming that members of the Cabal were inside the stone fort built by the Turks to control the river, showering baksheesh upon officialdom. The fort was nearby enough to literally overshadow them, and scores of resplendent Janissaries were peering down from its battlements, casting a cold professional eye on the French dragoons. The point being that Rosetta was very different from Alexandria; here the French might have a consulate, and some troops, but (as the saying went) that and a few reales would buy them a cup of Mocha.

This point was entirely sound, but al-Ghurab had spoken only lies so far. The real reason that only a few Cabal members were visible on the galleot’s quarterdeck was that four of them (Dappa, Jeronimo, Nyazi, and Vrej) had been riding south, post-haste, all through the night, hoping to cover the hundred and fifty miles to Cairo in two days. And another of them was chained to an oar.

“It was uncommonly humane of you to set free a third of your oar-slaves last night,” de Jonzac commented, “but since my master owns part interest in them, we have made arrangements, among our numerous and highly placed Turkish friends in yonder Fort, to have them all rounded up and sent back to Alexandria.”

“I hope that your Navy will be able to find benches for them to sit on,” shouted van Hoek.

De Jonzac’s face grew red and stormy-looking, but he ignored the cruel words of the Dutchman and continued: “Some of them were eager to talk to us, even before we put thumbscrews on them. So we know that you have been hiding certain metallurgical information from us.”

The night before-needing some ready cash to pay wigmakers and horse-traders-they’d broken open a crate, and pulled out a gold bar, in full view of certain oar-slaves who’d later been set free. This had been done in the hope and expectation that they’d later divulge it to de Jonzac.

The rais shrugged. “What of it?”

De Jonzac said, “I’ve sent a message to Alexandria informing my master that certain numbers mentioned in the Plan must now be multiplied by thirteen.”

“Alas! If only the calculation were that simple, your master could relax in the splendor of his Alexandrian villa while you went to Cairo to balance the books. In fact it is much more complicated than that. Our friend in Bonanza turns out to have diversified his portfolio far beyond the usual metal goods. The hoard will require a tedious appraisal before we can reckon its value.”

“That is a routine matter-you forget my master is well acquainted with the workings of the Corsair trade,” de Jonzac sniffed. “He has trusted appraisers who can be dispatched hither-”

“Dispatch them instead to Cairo,” said the rais, “for that is where our trusted appraisers dwell. And send for your master, too. For there is one treasure here whose value only he can weigh.”

De Jonzac smiled thinly. “My master is a man of acumen-I assure you he leaves appraisals to experts, save, sometimes, when it comes to Barbary stallions.”

“How about English geldings?” the rais asked, and nodded to Yevgeny and Gabriel Goto.

Down on the oar-deck, Jack began to rattle his chains and to scream in English: “You bloody bastards! Sell me out to the Frog, will you? Motherless wog scum! May God’s curse be on your heads!”

Calmly ignoring this and further curses, Yevgeny came up behind Jack, pinioned his elbows together behind his back, and lifted him up off the bench so that de Jonzac could get a good look at him. Gabriel Goto then grabbed Jack’s drawers and yanked them down so they hung around the knees.

De Jonzac observed a long moment of silence as a frisson ran through his dragoons.

“Perhaps it is Ali Zaybak-perhaps some other English wretch who stood too close to a fire,” the rais said drily. “Can you recognize Jack Shaftoe?”

“No,” de Jonzac admitted.

“Having recognized him, could you place a value on his head?”

“Only my master could do that.”

“Then we will see you, and your master, in Cairo, in three days,” said Nasr al-Ghurab.

“That is not enough time!”

“We have been slaves for years,” said Moseh, who had been standing quietly, arms folded, the whole time, “and we say that three more days is too long.”

LATER THAT DAY they set off upriver, mostly under sail-power. The main channel was a few fathoms deep and perhaps a quarter-mile wide-which meant that they were never more than an eighth of a mile from French dragoons. For de Jonzac had sent out two pairs of riders to shadow them, one pair on each riverbank.

As soon as the galleot got clear of Rosetta-which was a sprawl of mostly humble dwellings with no wall to mark its boundary-Jack was dragged away from his bench and draped about in diverse neck-collars, manacles, and leg-irons, then taken back to the concealment of the quarterdeck where Yevgeny devoted a quarter of an hour to smiting an anvil, rattling chains, and producing other noises meant to convince anyone listening that Jack was being securely fettered. Meanwhile Jack-never one to stint on dramaturgy-screamed and cursed as if Yevgeny were bending red-hot irons directly around his wrists. In fact, the reason for his cries of agony was that he was ripping handfuls of goat-hair from his scalp and head. The skin was left covered with a scaly crust of hardened pine-gum. Various scrubbings with turpentine and lamp-oil got that off, taking several layers of skin and leaving him raw from the collarbones upwards. He wrapped his burning head in a turban, got dressed, belted on his sword, and strolled out into view looking every inch a Janissary; then paused, turned around, and shouted some abuse in Sabir at an imaginary chained wretch behind him.

He dared not look directly at his audience during this performance, but van Hoek was spying on the dragoons through an oar-lock, and reported that they’d witnessed most of it. They did not have much leisure for spying, though. The river was at its highest now, filling its channel and frequently spilling out into surrounding countryside, and so the galleot did not have to work her way around shallows as she would have in other seasons. Yet the current was gentle and she could easily make seven miles an hour upstream. Jack had been expecting a desert, and he could tell one was out there somewhere from the way everything collected a film of yellow dust. But Egypt, seen from here, was as moist and fertile as Holland. And as crowded. Even in the most remote stretches they were never out of sight of several dwellings. They passed villages a few times an hour, and large towns several times a day. For as far as they could see to both sides of the river, the flat countryside was covered with golden fields of corn and rice, and veined with wandering lines of darker green: the countless water-courses of the Delta, lined, and frequently choked, with reeds and rushes as high as a man’s head. Palm trees grew in picket-lines along waterways, and towns were belted with orchards of figs, citrus, and cassia.

All of it was scenery to the Cabal, and an obstacle course to the French riders. They fell behind the galleot when they had to swing wide around river-bends and flooded fields, then caught up when they found a way to cut across one of the river’s vast meanders. Fortunately for them they had left Rosetta trailing strings of fresh horses; and Egypt, like most of the Turks’ empire, was a settled and orderly country. Traveling along her high-roads was not as easy as in England, but it was easier than in France, and so they were able to keep pace during the day. This gave Moseh, Jack, and the others confidence that the four who’d gone ahead-Nyazi’s group-had reached Cairo without difficulty.

At night the wind fell. Rather than attempting to row through the dark, and perhaps run aground or stray into some backwater, the rais simply tied the galleot to a palm tree along the riverbank and then organized the Cabal into watches. The dragoons actually served as an outlying guard-post, as they were not keen to see the galleot’s cargo fall into the hands of some local Ali Baba and his forty thieves.

In the middle of the second day, the wind failed and the rais sent a dozen slaves ashore to pull the galleot by ropes-which was why they had not released all of the slaves in Rosetta. In this way they came, late in the afternoon, to the place where the Nile diverged into its two great branches: the one that they had just navigated, and another that ran to Damietta. Here, as night fell on the second day, they tied the galleot up again, and bided during the hours of darkness. Jack stood an early morning watch, then climbed into a hammock on the quarterdeck and fell asleep in the open air.

When he awoke, the sun was rising, the ship was under way, and he could see a strange terrain of angular mountains off to the west. Sitting up for a better look, he recognized them as Pyramids. When he had got his fill of gawking at those-which took a good long while-he turned around to face the rising sun and gazed across the Nile into the Mother of the World.

Now this was like trying to comprehend all the activity of an anthill, and read all the words in a book, and feel all the splendor of a cathedral, in one glance. Jack’s mind was not equal to the demands that Cairo placed on it, and so for a long while he fixed his attention on small and near matters, as if he were a boy peering through a hollow reed. Fortunately there were many such matters to occupy him: the Nile here was at least as big as the Danube at Vienna, and its course was crowded with boats laden with grain that had been brought down out of Upper Egypt. The captains of those boats had been shooting cataracts and beating back crocodiles for weeks, and were in no particular mood to make way for the unwieldy galleot. Many enemies were made as they worked their way in to the east bank of the river and made the galleot fast to a quay.

Almost immediately they were engulfed in camels, which is never pleasant, and rarely desirable-especially when they are being ridden and led by fierce-looking armed men. Jack thought they were under assault by wild nomads until he began noticing that all of them looked like Nyazi, and many were smiling. Then he heard Jeronimo bellowing in Spanish, “If I had a copper for every fly that swarms on you, beast, I’d buy the Spanish Empire! You smell worse than Vera Cruz in the springtime, and there is more filth clinging to your body than most animals shit in a year. Truly you must have sprung fully formed from a heap of manure, as flies and Popes do-may God have mercy on my soul for saying that! Jack Shaftoe is there smiling at me, thinking that you, camel, and I are well matched for each other-later I’ll make him your wife perhaps and you can take him out into the desert and do with him what you will.”

Dappa and Vrej were off seeing to other matters, but shortly Jack caught sight of Nyazi. He had had a joyous reunion with his clan-members. Jack was glad he had not been there to endure it.

Nasr al-Ghurab now unchained all of the galley-slaves at once-some two score of them-and told them that they could go now into Cairo, and never come back; or they could join in with the Cabal, and never leave it; but these were their only two choices. Within moments, all but four of them had vanished. Those who remained were a Nubian eunuch, a Hindoo, the Turk who had been at the head of Monsieur Arlanc’s oar, and an Irishman named Padraig Tallow. The first three had somehow made the calculation that their chances were better with the Cabal, while Padraig (Jack suspected) just wanted to see how it would all come out. Monsieur Arlanc was offered the same choice as the others, and to Jack’s delight he elected to throw his lot in with the Cabal.

They all got busy pulling the gold-crates out of the galleot and loading them onto the camels, which took no more than half an hour. The rais, accompanied by van Hoek, Jeronimo (who’d had enough of camels), the Turk, the Nubian, and several of Nyazi’s clansmen (who wanted to see what it was like to ride on a boat), cast off the galleot’s lines and took her downriver, heading for an isle in midstream a few miles distant where boats were bought and sold. The camel-caravan meanwhile formed up and prepared to move out.

SOME OF THOSE GALLEY-SLAVES, as they had considered the choice that they’d been given, had asked searching questions about the Plan. The most frequently heard was: “Why do you not simply ride out of town with your treasure? Why bother waiting for this Investor-who has made obvious his intention to cheat you?” Jack was not unsympathetic to this line of questioning. But in the end he had to agree with Moseh and Nasr al-Ghurab, who answered by pointing with their chins across the Nile, toward the city that the Turks had built up there, called El Giza. It had mosque-domes, leafy gardens, baths, and houses of pleasure. But, too, it had dungeons, and high walls with iron hooks on them, and a Champs de Mars where thousands of Janissaries drilled with muskets and lances. There would be judges in there, too, and some of them would probably be sympathetic to a French Duke who complained that he was being robbed by a rabble of slaves.

The Turkish authorities had already been alerted by a couple of exhausted French dragoons who had galloped up on half-dead horses as the camels were being loaded. So as the caravan left the Nile behind and began winding through the 2,400 wards and quarters of Cairo, it was carefully followed by Janissaries, not to mention hundreds of beggars, Vagabonds, pedlars, courtesans, and curious boys.

Now Cairo was a sort of accomplice in everything that happened there. It was large enough to engulf any army, and wise enough to comprehend any Plan, and old enough to’ve outlived whole races, nations, and religions. So nothing could really happen there without the city’s consent. Nyazi’s caravan, three dozen horses and camels strong, armed to the teeth, laden with tons of gold, was nothing here. The train of men and animals was frequently chopped into halves, thirds, and smaller bits by yet stranger processions that burst out from narrow ways and cut across it: gangs of masked women running and ululating, columns of Dervishes in high conical hats pounding on drums, wrapped corpses being paraded around atop stilts, squadrons of Janissaries in green and red. Every so often they would stumble upon a shavush in his emerald-green, ankle-length robe, red boots, white leather cap, and stupendous moustache. Then every camel in the procession had to be made to kneel, every man had to dismount, until he had wandered past; and as long as they had stopped, Vagabonds would run up and spray rose-water at them and demand money for it.

Even if Jack had not known, when he’d disembarked from the galleot, that Egypt was the world’s oldest country, he’d have figured it out after an hour’s slow progress through Cairo’s streets. He could see it in the faces of the people, who were a mixture of every race Jack had ever heard about, and some he hadn’t. Every face told as many tales as a whole galley full of oar-slaves. Likewise their houses, which were made partly of stone, partly of timbers so old and gnarled they looked petrified, and mostly of bricks, hand-made and rudely baked, some looking as if they might bear the hand-prints of Moses himself. As many buildings were being torn down, as built up; which only stood to reason, as all the space had been claimed, and there was nothing to do but shift the available materials from one site to another, much as the Nile continually built and dissolved the sand-bars of the Delta by pushing grains of sand from place to place according to its whim. Even the Pyramids had had a gnawed look about their corners, as if people had been using them for quarries.

After hours of working deeper into the city they reached the Khan el-Khalili: a shambolic market, bigger in itself than all but a few European cities. Nyazi bade Jack take his shoes off and led him into an ancient mosque and up a steep spiral staircase that was dark and cool as a natural cave. Finally they stepped out on the roof and Jack looked out upon the city. The river was too far away to be seen from here and so what he saw was a million dusty flat rooves piled with bales, barrels, bundles, mounds, and household detritus. Each roof had its own peculiar height, and the lower ones seemed in danger of becoming buried.

Cairo was like the bottom of a vast pit whence the inhabitants had been madly trying to escape for thousands of years, and the only way out was to dig up clay, quarry limestone, and tear down empty houses and defenseless monuments, and pile the proceeds ever higher. Who had lately been winning the race could be judged by whose roof was highest. The losers could not keep pace with their neighbors, or even with the drifting dust that assiduously covered anything that failed to move, and so gradually sank from sight. Jack had the phant’sy that he could go into any house in Cairo, descend into the cellar, and find an entire house buried beneath, and yet another house beneath that one, and so on, miles down. Never had the preachers’ line “He will come to judge the quick and the dead” been so clear to Jack; for here in this Bible-land, Quick and Dead were the only two categories, and the distinction between them the only Judgment that mattered.

So he drew comfort from being in the Khan el-Khalili, which appeared to be the quickest part of the city. The caravan wound through market-streets devoted to every good imaginable, from slaves to butter to live cobras, and eventually reached a place that, Jack thought, must be the dead center of the entire metropolis. It was a yard, or perhaps an alley: a rectangle of dirt, a bow-shot in length, but not above five yards in width, hemmed in by four-and five-storey buildings. Above, a narrow aperture provided light, but something translucent had been thrown across between the parapets of the buildings: caravan-tents and tarpaulins, Jack suspected. These formed a continuous roof overhead, letting in dusty light but sealing the place off from eavesdroppers. The surrounding buildings were astonishingly quiet-the quietest place in Cairo-and they smelled of hay. Ships coming down the Nile had replenished the place with food for the horses and camels that were stabled here.

“This is where it began,” remarked Nyazi. “This was the seed.”

“What do you mean?” Jack asked.

“A hundred generations ago, some men like me camped here-” stomping the dirt with one sandal “-for the night with their camels, and in time the camp put down roots, and became a caravanserai. The market of Khan el-Khalili grew up around it, and Cairo around it. But you see the caravanserai remains, and still we come here to sell our camels.”

“It is a good place to meet the Duke,” Moseh said. “The Plan was sound all along. For, according to what Nyazi has said, not a single day has gone by in this place, since the very beginning of the world, when silver and gold have not passed from hand to hand here. Its presence was not dictated by any king, nor was it prophesied by any creed; it emerged of its own accord, and endures regardless of what the Sultan in Constantinople or the Sun King in Paris might prefer.”

Friendship is a Vertue oftener found among Thieves than other People, for when their Companions are in Danger, they venture hardest to relieve them.

–Memoirs of the Right Villanous John Hall

The ground floors of the caravanserai’s buildings had high ceilings so that without having to duck, or doff their turbans, men could ride camels into them, and that was just what the clan of Nyazi did. That night, Nasr al-Ghurab came back with his contingent, and with Dappa and Vrej, whom they hadn’t seen since Rosetta.

“Truly the forkings and wanderings of the Nile are as unknowable as the streets of Cairo,” said Dappa, blinking his eyes in amazement, “but Vrej found an Armenian coffee-trader, no more than five minutes’ walk from this place, who knew all about the way to Mocha. You go downstream to the great fork, and take the Damietta branch, and after a few miles there is a village on the right bank where a water-course strays off eastwards. In time that stream goes all the way to the Red Sea.”

“Then much traffic must pass through it!” Moseh exclaimed.

“It is jealously guarded by the head men of the villages that bestride it, and by the Turkish officials,” Dappa agreed.

“And for that very reason,” said Vrej, picking up the narrative, “other Egyptians, in neighboring precincts, have been at work with picks and shovels, scooping out short-cuts that bypass the larger villages and toll-stations. These look like nothing more than stagnant dead-ends, or reed-choked sewer-ditches, when they are visible at all; and you may be sure that they are guarded by the farmers who dug them, every bit as jealously as the main channel. So we shall not make it through to the Red Sea without crossing the palms of innumerable peasants with baksheesh-the total expense will be dumb-founding, I fear.”

“But we will have a boat-load of gold,” said Yevgeny.

“And we will be running for our lives,” added Jack, “which always makes spending money not quite so painful.”

“And those farmers will want to keep it all a secret from their Turkish overlords just as badly as we will,” predicted Jeronimo.

“Not quite as badly,” Moseh demurred, “but badly enough.”

“Very good then,” said Surendranath, the Hindoo galley slave who had chosen to throw in his lot with them. “You have shown extreme wisdom in establishing your batna.”

“Avast! We are all People of the Book here, and have no use for your idolatrous claptrap,” said Jeronimo.

“Steady there, Caballero,” said Jack, “I know from personal experience that Books of India contain much of interest. What else can you tell us about this batna, Surendranath?”

“I learnt it from English traders in Surat,” said the befuddled Surendranath, “It stands for Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement.”

A recess, now, as the phrase was translated into diverse languages.

Moseh said, “Be it English or Hindoo, there’s still wisdom in it. Our friend, born and raised a banyan, understands that escaping over the flooded fields and through the wadis to the Red Sea is an alternate plan-a contingency and nothing more.” As Moseh was saying these words, he gazed deliberately into the eyes of those members of the Cabal he deemed most impetuous. But he began and ended with his eyes locked on Jack’s. Moseh concluded, “To have a batna is good and wise, as Surendranath has pointed out. But the Negotiated Agreement is much better than this Best Alternative.”

“Moseh, you have sat next to me for years and heard all of my stories, and so you know that I only love one thing in the world, even in spite of this,” said Jack, pulling up the loose sleeve of his garment to display the track of the harpoon in his arm. “There should be no doubt in your mind that I would rather be on a ship bound for Christendom tomorrow, than fleeing for my life towards the Red Sea, like some miserable Hebrew of yore. But like those Hebrews I’ll not be a slave any longer.”

“We are all in accord there,” said Dappa.

“Then, as I have been chosen to represent the Cabal in our final negotiation with the Investor, I must ask you all to do one thing. I am a Vagabond, and was never one for swearing pompous oaths and prating about honor. But this undertaking is no longer a Vagabondish sort of enterprise-so every man among you must now swear, by whatever he considers holiest, that you are with me tomorrow. That, whatsoever happens in my dealings with the Duke-whether I show foolishness or wisdom-whether I remain collected, or lose my temper, or piss my breeches-whether or not the Imp of the Perverse comes to pay me a visit-you are with me, and will accept my decision, and live or die with me.”

Here Jack had been expecting a long, awkward pause, or even laughter. But the sword of Gabriel Goto was out of its sheath before Jack’s words had stopped echoing round the narrow yard. The newcomers flinched. In a simple swift movement Gabriel reversed his sword and presented its hilt to Jack, and in the light of the fire the blade shimmered like a swift stream of clear water beneath the rising sun. “I am samurai,” he said simply.

Padraig, the big Irishman, stepped forward and spat into the fire. “We’ve a saying,” he said to Jack in English. “Is this a private fight, or can anyone join in? Well, I’m in, which ought to suffice. But if you want me to swear by something, then I do swear on my mother’s grave above the sea in Kilmacthomas, and damn you if you think that’s not as good as being a samurai.”

Moseh took the scrap of Indian bead-work from around his neck, kissed it, and tossed it to Jack. “Throw that into the fire if I fail you,” he said, “and let it become part of the dust of the Khan el-Khalili.”

Vrej said, “I have followed you thus far, Jack, seeking to make good on the debt that my family owes you. I swear on my family that I will pay you back.”

Monsieur Arlanc said, “I do not believe in swearing oaths. But I do believe that I am destined to see the matter through to its proper end.”

Van Hoek said, “I swear by my right arm that I’ll never be taken by pirates again. And this Investor is a pirate in the eyes of God.”

“But cap’n, you are left-handed!” Jack said, trying to lighten the mood, which he was beginning to find oppressive.

“To make good on the oath, I must use my strong left hand to cut off the right,” said van Hoek, missing the humor altogether. Indeed, the jest had put him into a more emotional state than any of his fellow-slaves had ever seen. Suddenly he drew his cutlass out; lay his right fist on a bench with only the little finger extended; and brought the cutlass down on it. The last joint of the pinky flew off into the dust. Van Hoek thrust his weapon back into its scabbard, then went out and retrieved the severed digit and held it up in the fire-light. “There is your oath!” he growled, and flung it into the fire. Then he sagged to his knees, and passed out in the dirt.

Some uneasiness, now, as the others wondered whether they would be expected to cut off pieces of themselves. But Nyazi withdrew from the folds of his cloak a red Koran, and he and Nasr al-Ghurab and the Turk from Arlanc’s galley gathered around it and said holy words in Arabic, and for good measure, announced that they would make the haj if they survived. Likewise Yevgeny, Surendranath, and the Nubian swore fearsome oaths to their respective gods. Mr. Foot, who had been lurking round the edges of the fire-light looking vaguely indignant, announced that it would be super-fluous for him to swear loyalty since “the whole enterprise” had been his idea (apparently referring to the ill-starred cowrie shell voyage of many years back) and that in any case it “would never do” to show anything other than loyalty to his comrades and that it was “bizarre” and “shocking” and “unseemly” and “inconceivable” for Jack to even suggest that he, Mr. Foot, would do otherwise.

“I swear by my country-the country of free men,” said Dappa, “which at the moment has only sixteen or so citizens, and no territory. But it is the only country I have and so by it do I swear.”

Jeronimo stepped forward, piously wringing his hands, and began to mumble some words in Latin; but then his demon took over and he shouted, “Fuck! I do not even believe in God! I swear by all of you Vagabonds, Niggers, Heretics, Kikes, and Camel-Jockeys, for you are the only friends I have ever had.”

THE DUC D’ARCACHON had disembarked from his gilded river-barge, and was riding towards the Khan el-Khalili on a white horse, accompanied by several aides, a Turkish official or two, and a mixed company of rented Janissaries and crack French dragoons. Behind them rumbled several empty wagons of very heavy construction, such as were used to carry blocks of dressed stone through the streets. This much was known to the Cabal half an hour in advance-word had been brought by the messenger-boys who moved through the streets of Cairo like scirocco winds.

Every master jeweler in the city had been hired by the Duc d’Arcachon-or, failing that, had been bribed not to do any work for the Cabal-and were now converging on a certain gate of the Khan el-Khalili to await the Duke. This was common knowledge to every Jew in the city, including Moseh.

A flat-bottomed, shallow-draft river-boat waited at the terminus of a canal that wandered through the city and eventually communicated with the Nile. It was only half a mile from the caravanserai, down a certain street, and the people who dwelled along that street had carried their chairs and hookahs indoors and rounded up their chickens and were keeping their doors bolted and windows shuttered today, because of certain rumors that had begun to circulate the night before.

It was mid-afternoon before the clatter and rumble of the Investor’s entourage penetrated the still courtyard where Jack stood in the lambent glow of the stretched canvas above. He took a deep whiff of air into his nostrils. It smelt of hay, dust, and camel-dung. He ought to be scared, or at least excited. Instead he felt peace. For this alley was the womb at the center of the Mother of the World, the place where it had all started. The Messe of Linz and the House of the Golden Mercury in Leipzig and the Damplatz of Amsterdam were its young impetuous grandchildren. Like the eye of a hurricane, the alley was dead calm; but around it, he knew, revolved the global maelstrom of liquid silver. Here, there were no Dukes and no Vagabonds; every man was the same, as in the moment before he was born.

The challenges and salutations were barely audible through the stable’s haystacks; Jack could not even make out the language. Then he heard horseshoes pocking over the stone floor, coming closer.

Jack rested his hand on the pommel of his sword and recited a poem he’d been taught long ago, standing in the bend of a creek in Bohemia:

Watered steel-blade, the world perfection calls,

Drunk with the viper poison foes appals.

Cuts lively, burns the blood whene’er it falls;

And picks up gems from pave of marble halls.

“That is he!?” said a voice in French. Jack realized his eyes were closed, and opened them to see a man on a white, pink-eyed cheval de parade. His wig was perfect, an Admiral’s hat was perched atop it, and four little black patches were glued to his white face. He was staring in some alarm at Jack, and Jack almost reached for one of the pistols in his waist-sash, fearing he had already been recognized. But another chevalier, riding knee to knee with the Duke to his left side, leaned askew in his saddle and answered, “Yes, your grace, that is the Agha of the Janissaries.” Jack recognized this rider as Pierre de Jonzac.

“He must be a Balkan,” remarked the Duke, apparently because of Jack’s European coloration.

A third French chevalier rode on the Duke’s right. He cleared his throat significantly as Monsieur Arlanc emerged from the stables and fell in beside Jack, on his left hand. Evidently this was to warn the Duke that they were now in the presence of a man who could understand French. Moseh now emerged and stood on Jack’s right to even the count, three facing three.

The Frenchmen-wishing to command the field-rode forward all the way to the center of the alley. Likewise Jack strolled forward until he was drawing uncomfortably close to the Duke. Finally the Duke reined in his white horse and held up one hand in a signal for everyone to halt. De Jonzac and the other chevalier stopped immediately, their horses’ noses even with the Duke’s saddle. But Jack took another step forward, and then another, until de Jonzac reached down and drew a pistol halfway from a saddle-holster, and the other aide spurred his horse forward to cut Jack off.

Behind the Duke and his men, it was possible to hear a considerable number of French soldiers and Janissaries infiltrating the caravanserai, and before long Jack began to see musket-barrels gleaming in windows of the uppermost storeys. Likewise, men of Nyazi’s clan had taken up positions on both sides of the alley to Jack’s rear, and the burning punks of their matchlocks glowed in dark archways like demons’ eyes. Jack stopped where he was: perhaps eight feet from the glabrous muzzle of the Duke’s horse. But he chose a place where his sight-line to the Duke’s face was blocked by the aide who had ridden forward. The Duke said something sotto voce and this man backed his mount out of the way, returning to his former position guarding the Duke’s right flank.

“I comprehend your plan,” said the Duke, dispensing with formalities altogether-which was probably meant to be some kind of insult. “It is essentially suicidal.”

Jack pretended not to understand until Monsieur Arlanc had translated this into Sabir.

“We had to make it seem that way,” answered Jack, “or you would have been afraid to show up.”

The Duke smiled as if at some very dry dinner-table witticism. “Very well-it is like a dance, or a duel, beginning with formal steps: I try to frighten you, you try to impress me. We proceed now. Show me L’Emmerdeur!”

“He is very near by,” said Jack. “First we must settle larger matters-the gold.”

“I am a man of honor, not a slave, and so to me, the gold is nothing. But if you are so concerned about it, tell me what you propose.”

“First, send your jewelers away-there are no jewels, and no silver. Only gold.”

“It is done.”

“This caravanserai is vast, as you have seen, and full of hay at the moment. The gold bars have been buried in the haystacks. We know where they are. You do not. As soon as you have given us the documents declaring us free men, and set us on the road, or the river, with our share of the money in our pockets-in the form of pieces of eight-we will tell you where to find the gold.”

“That cannot be your entire plan,” said the Duke. “There is not so much hay here that we cannot simply arrest you, and then search it all at our leisure.”

“While we were going through the stables, hiding the gold, we spilled quite a bit of lamp-oil on the floor, and buried a few powder-kegs in haystacks for good measure,” Jack said.

Pierre de Jonzac shouted a command to a junior officer back in the stables.

“You threaten to burn the caravanserai, then,” said the Duke, as if everything Jack said had to be translated into childish language.

“The gold will melt and run into the drains. You will recover some of it, but you will lose more than you would by simply paying us our share and setting us free.”

An officer came out on foot and whispered something to de Jonzac, who relayed it to the Duke.

“Very well,” said the Duke.

“I beg your pardon?”

“My men have found the puddles of lamp-oil, your story seems to be correct, your proposal is accepted,” said the Duke. He turned and nodded to his other aide, who opened up his saddle-bags and began to take out a series of identical-looking documents, formally sealed and beribboned in the style of the Ottoman bureaucracy.

Jack turned and beckoned toward the doorway where Nasr al-Ghurab had been lurking. The rais came out, laid down his arms, and approached the Duke’s aide, who allowed him to inspect one of the documents. “It is a cancellation of a slave-deed,” he said. “It is inscribed with the name of Jeronimo, and it declares him to be a free man.”

“Read the others,” Jack said.

“Now for the important matter, mentioned earlier,” said the Duke, “which is the only reason I made the journey from Alexandria.”

“Dappa,” read al-Ghurab from another scroll. “Nyazi.”

A cart rattled out from behind the French lines, causing Jack to flinch; but it carried only a lock-box. “Your pieces of eight,” the Duke explained, amused by Jack’s nervousness.

“Yevgeny-and here is Gabriel Goto’s,” the rais continued.

“Assuming that the wretch you displayed in Alexandria really was L’Emmerdeur, how much do you want for him?” the Duke inquired.

“As we are all free men now, or so it appears, we will likewise do the honorable thing, and let you have him for free-or not at all,” said Jack.

“Here is that of van Hoek,” said the rais, “and here, a discharge for me.”

Another tolerant smile from the Duke. “I cannot recommend strongly enough that you give him to me. Without L’Emmerdeur there is no transaction.”

“Vrej Esphahnian-Padraig Tallow-Mr. Foot-”

“And despite your brave words,” the Duke continued, “the fact remains that you are surrounded by my dragoons, musketeers, and Janissaries. The gold is mine, as surely as if it were locked up in my vault in Paris.”

“This one has a blank space where the name should go,” said Nasr al-Ghurab, holding up the last document.

“That is only because we were not given this one’s name,” explained Pierre de Jonzac, pointing at Jack.

“Your vault in Paris,” Jack said, echoing the Duke’s words. He now spoke directly to the Duke, in the best French he could muster. “I amguessing that would be somewhere underneath the suite of bedchambers in the west wing, there, where you have that god-awful green marble statue of King Looie all tarted up as Neptune.”

A Silence, now, almost as long as the one Jack had experienced, once, in the grand ballroom of the Hotel Arcachon. But all things considered, the Duke recovered quickly-which meant either that he’d known all along, or that he was more adaptable than he looked. De Jonzac and the other aide were dumbfounded. The Duke moved his horse a couple of steps nearer, the better to peer down at Jack’s face. Jack stepped forward, close enough to feel the breath from the horse’s nostrils, and pulled the turban from his head.

“This need not alter the terms of the transaction, Jack,” said the Duke. “Your comrades can all be free and rich, with a single word from you.”

Jack stood there and considered it-genuinely-for a minute or two, as horses snorted and punks smoldered in the dark vaults of the caravanserai all around him. One small gesture of Christlike self-abnegation and he could give his comrades the wealth and freedom they deserved. At any earlier part of his life he would have scoffed at the idea. Now, it strangely tempted him.

For a few moments, anyway.

“Alas, you are a day too late,” he said at last, “for last night my comrades swore any number of mickle oaths to me, and I intend to hold them to account. ’Twere bad form, otherwise.”

And then in a single motion he drew out his Janissary-sword and plunged it all the way to the hilt into the neck of the Duke’s horse, aiming for the heart. When he hit it, the immense muscle clenched like a fist around the wide head of the blade, then went limp as the watered steel cleaved it in twain.

The blade came out driven on a jet of blood as thick as his wrist. The horse reared up, the Duke’s jeweled spurs flailing in the air. Jack stepped to one side, drawing a pistol from his waistband with his free hand, and fired a ball through the head of the aide who had brought the documents. The Duke just avoided falling off his horse, but managed to hold on as it bolted forward a couple of paces and then fell over sideways, pinning one of the Duke’s legs and (as Jack could hear) breaking it.

Jack looked up to see Pierre de Jonzac aiming a pistol at him from no more than two yards away. Moseh had meanwhile stuck his tongue out, and gone into motion. A flying hatchet lodged in de Jonzac’s shoulder, causing him to drop the weapon. A moment later his horse collapsed, shot through the head, and de Jonzac was thrown to the ground practically at Jack’s feet. Jack snatched the fallen pistol; aimed it at the head of de Jonzac; then moved the barrel slightly to one side and fired into the ground.

“My men think you are dead now, and won’t waste balls on you,” Jack said. “In fact I have let you live, but for one purpose only: so that you can make your way back to Paris and tell them the following: that the deed you are about to witness was done for a woman, whose name I will not say, for she knows who she is; and that it was done by ‘Half-Cocked’ Jack Shaftoe, L’Emmerdeur, the King of the Vagabonds, Ali Zaybak: Quicksilver!”

As he said these words he was stepping over to the Duc d’Arcachon, who had dragged himself out from under his horse and was lying there, hatless and wigless, propped up on one elbow, with the jagged ends of his leg-bones poking out through the bloody tissues of his silk stockings.

“Here I am supposed to give you a full account and explanation of your sins, and why you deserve this,” Jack announced, “but there is no time. Suffice it to say that I am thinking of a mother and daughter you once abducted, and disgraced, and sold into slavery.”

The Duke pondered this for a moment, looking bewildered, and then said: “Which ones?”

Then Jack brought the bright blade of the Janissary-sword down like a thunderbolt, and the head of Louis-Francois de Lavardac, duc d’Arcachon, bounced and spun in the dirt of Khan el-Khalili in the center of the Mother of the World, and the dust of the Sahara began to cloud the lenses of his eyes.

NOW JACK GOT THE IDEA that it was raining, because of the spurts of dust erupting from the ground all around him. Frenchmen, Janissaries, or both were firing at him from above-feeling free to do so now that Jack had apparently slain all three of the Frenchmen in the alley. Monsieur Arlanc and Nasr al-Ghurab had made themselves scarce. Jack ran into the stables, which had become the scene of a strange sort of indoor battle. Nyazi’s men, and the Cabal, were outnumbered. But they’d had plenty of time to ready positions among the haystacks and watering-troughs of the stable, and to string trip-wires between pillars. They could have held the French and Turks off all day, if not for the fact that the stables had been set on fire-possibly on purpose, but more likely by the muzzle-flash of a weapon. Jack vaulted into a trough, drenching himself and his clothes, and then scurried back through an apparently random hail of musket-balls to where Yevgeny, Padraig, Jeronimo, Gabriel Goto, the Nubian eunuch, and several of Nyazi’s clan were frantically rifling haystacks for gold bars and piling them into heavy wagons. These were drawn by nervous horses with grain-sacks over their heads to keep them from seeing the flames-a cheap subterfuge that was already wearing thin. At a glance Jack estimated that somewhat more than half of the gold had been recovered.

Moseh, Vrej, and Surendranath, with their merchants’ aptitude for figures, knew where every last bar was hid, and were making sure that none went missing. That was a job best done by calm men. As men were more intelligent than horses, one could not keep them calm by putting sacks over their heads; some kind of real security had to be provided, from fire, smoke, Janissaries, dragoons, and-what else had the Duke mentioned?

“Have you seen any French musketeers?” Jack inquired, when he had located Nyazi. As long as they remained in the stables, Nyazi was their general.

It was easier to talk now than it had been a few minutes ago. Smoke had rendered muskets useless, and flames the possession of gunpowder extremely dangerous. The thuds of musket-fire had died away and were being supplanted by the ring of blade against blade, and the shouting of men trying to shift their burdens of fear to their foes.

“What is a musketeer?”

“The Duke claimed he had some,” Jack said, which did not answer Nyazi’s question. But there was no time to explain the distinction between dragoons and musketeers now.

A horn had begun to blow from the back of the stables, giving the signal that the gold wagons were ready to depart. Nyazi began to holler orders to his clansmen, who were distributed around the smoke in some way that was clear only to him, and they began falling back toward the wagons. This was their attempt at an orderly retreat under fire, which as Jack knew was no easy thing to manage even with regular troops under good conditions. In fact it was almost as chaotic as the advance of the Janissaries, who had overrun at least part of Nyazi’s defensive line and were now stumbling forward, gasping and gagging, tripping over rakes and slamming into pillars, charging toward the sound of the trumpet call-not so much because the enemy and the gold were there, as because one could not blow a bugle without drawing breath, and so it proved that air was to be had ahead.

Jack got as far as a place where the smoke was diluted by a current of fresh air, then was nearly spitted by a bayonet-thrust coming in from his left rear, aimed at his kidney. Jack spun almost entirely around to the right, so the tip of the blade snagged in the muscle of his back but was deflected, cutting and tearing the flesh but not piercing his organs. At the same time he was delivering a backhanded cut to the head of the bayonet’s owner. So the fight was over before Jack knew it had started. But it led immediately to a real sword-fight with a Frenchman-an officer who had a small-sword, and knew how to use it. Jack, fighting with a heavier and slower weapon, knew he would have to end this on the first or second exchange of blows, or else his opponent could simply stand off at a distance and poke holes through him until he bled to death.

Jack’s first attack was abortive, though, and his second was nicely parried by the Frenchman-who backed into a pitchfork that was lying on the floor, and tripped over its handle, sprawling back onto his arse. Jack snatched up the pitchfork and flung it like a trident at his opponent just as he was scrambling to his feet. It did no damage, but in knocking it aside, the Frenchman left himself open for a moment and Jack leapt forward swinging. His opponent tried to block the blow with the middle of his small-sword, but this weapon-designed for twitchy finger-fighting and balletic lunges-was feeble shelter against Jack’s blade of watered steel. The Janissary-blade knocked the rapier clean out of the French officer’s hand and went on to cut his body nearly in half.

There was a clamor of voices and blades and whinnying horses off to his right. Jack desperately wanted to get over there, because he suspected he was alone and surrounded.

Then one of the powder-kegs exploded. At least that was the easiest way to explain the crushing sound, the horizontal storm of barrel-staves, pebbles, nails, horseshoes, and body parts that came and went through the smoke, and the sudden moaning and popping of timbers as sections of floor collapsed. Jack’s ears stopped working. But his skull ended up pressed against the stone floor, which conducted, directly into his brain, the sound of horseshoes flailing, iron-rimmed cartwheels grinding and screeching, and-sad to say-at least one cart-load of gold bars overturning as panicked horses took it round a corner too fast. Each bar radiated a blinding noise as it struck the pavement.

Lying flat on his back gave him the useful insight that there was a layer of clear air riding just above the floor. He pulled his soaked tunic off, tied it over his mouth and nose, and began crawling on his naked belly. The place was a maze of haystacks and corpses, but light was shining in through a huge stone arch-way. He dragged himself through it, and out into the open-and into battle.

Monsieur Arlanc got his attention by pelting him in the head with a small rock, and beckoned him to safety behind an overturned cart. Jack lay amid scattered gold bars for a while, just breathing. Meanwhile Monsieur Arlanc was crawling to and fro on his belly, gathering the bullion together and stacking it up to make a rampart. The occasional musket-ball whacked into it, but most of the fire was passing over their heads.

Rolling over onto his belly and peering out through a gun-slit that the Huguenot had prudently left between gold bars, Jack could see the large floppy hats characteristic of French musketeers. They had formed up in several parallel ranks, completely blocking the street that ran down to the canal where the Cabal’s means of escape was waiting. These ranks took turns kneeling, loading, standing, aiming, and firing, keeping up a steady barrage of musket-balls that made it impossible for the men of the Cabal to advance, or even to stand up. This human road-block was only about forty yards away, and was completely exposed. But it worked because the Cabal’s forces did not have enough muskets, powder, and balls left to return fire. And it would continue working for as long as those musketeers were supplied with ammunition.

Meanwhile the stable continued to burn, and occasionally explode, behind them. The situation could not possibly be as dire as it seemed or they would all be dead. Between volleys of musketeer-fire Jack heard the whinny of horses and the rattling bray of camels. He looked to the left and saw a stable-yard, surrounded by a low stone wall, where several of Nyazi’s men had gotten their camels to kneel and their horses to lie down on their sides. So they had a sort of reserve, anyway, that could be used to pull the carts down to the boat-but not as long as those carts were forty yards in front of a company of musketeers.

“We have to outflank those bastards,” Jack said. Which was obvious-so others must have thought of it already-which would explain the fact that only a few members of the Cabal were in evidence here. The left flank, once he looked beyond that embattled stable-yard, looked like a cul-de-sac; movement that way was blocked by a high stone wall that looked as if it might have been part of Cairo’s fortifications in some past ?on, and was now a jumbled stone-quarry.

So Jack crawled to the right, working his way along the line of gold-ramparts and immobilized carts, and spied a side-street leading off into the maze of the Khan el-Khalili. At the entrance of this street, a Janissary was pinned to a wooden door by an eight-foot-long spear, which Jack looked on as proving that Yevgeny had passed by there recently. A hookah jetted arcs of brown water from several musket wounds. Once he had entered the street, and gotten out of view of the musketeers, Jack got to his feet and threw his weight against a green wooden door. But it was solider than it looked, and well-barred from the inside. The same presumably went for every door and window that fronted on this street; there was no way to go but forward.

He rounded a tight curve and came to a wee square, the sort of thing that in Paris might have, planted in its center, a life-size statue of Leroy leading his regiments across the Rhine, or something. In place of which stood Yevgeny, feet planted wide, arms up in the air, manipulating a half-pike that he had evidently ripped from the hands of a foe. Yevgeny was holding it near its balance-point and whirling it round and round so fast that he, and the pike, taken together, seemed and sounded like a monstrous hummingbird. Three Janissaries stood round about him at a respectful distance; two, who’d ventured within the fatal radius, lay spreadeagled in the dust bleeding freely from giant lacerations of the head.

One dropped to his knees and tried to come in under Yevgeny’s pike, but the Russian, who was turning slowly round and round even as he spun the weapon, canted the plane of its movement in such a way that its sharpened end swept the fellow’s cap off, and might have scalped him had he been an inch closer. He collapsed to his belly and crept back away-which was not possible to do quickly.

All this presented itself to Jack’s eyes in the first moment that he came into this tiny plaza. His first thought was that Yevgeny would be defenseless against anyone who came upon the scene with a projectile weapon. Scarcely had this entered his mind when one of the two standing Janissaries backed into a door-nook, withdrew a discharged pistol from his waist-sash, and set about loading it. Jack picked up a fist-sized stone and flung it at this man. Yevgeny stopped his pike in mid-whirl, swung the butt high into the air, and drove the point into the body of the man who’d dropped to his stomach. The third, construing this as an opening, gathered his feet under him so as to spring at Yevgeny. Noting this, Jack let out a scream that astonished the man and made him have second thoughts and go all tangle-footed. He turned towards Jack and, distracted as he was by Yevgeny on his flank, parried an imagined attack from Jack, and mounted a weak one of his own. Yevgeny meanwhile chucked the pike at the pistol-loader, who had dropped his weapon into the dirt when Jack’s rock had caught him amidships (which was understandable) and gone down on both knees to retrieve it (a fatal mistake, as it had turned him into a stationary target).

The one who was fighting with Jack swooped his blade wildly from side to side. This was not a good technique, but its sheer recklessness set Jack back on his heels long enough for him to turn and run away. Yevgeny noted this, and pursued him hotly.

Three ways joined together in this little space. Jack had entered along one of them. That poor unnerved Janissary, and Yevgeny, had exited along the way that led off to Jack’s left. This was the way Jack needed to probe if there was to be any hope of outflanking the musketeers. It led imperceptibly downhill, away from the caravanserai and towards the canal. To Jack’s right, then, was a needle’s eye, which is to say a very narrow arch built to admit humans while preventing camels from passing out of the stables. Peering through that, he saw that beyond it the alley broadened and ran straight for about ten yards to a side entrance of the caravanserai, which was sucking in a palpable draft of air to feed the howling and cackling flames. A squad of some eight or ten French soldiers were just emerging from the smoke. They had prudently cast off their muskets and powder-horns, but otherwise looked none the worse for wear-they must have found some way to circumvent the fire.

But Jack’s view of these was suddenly blocked by a figure in a black ankle-length robe: Gabriel Goto, who stepped out from the shelter of a doorway and took up a position blocking the eye of the needle. At the moment he appeared to be unarmed; but he stopped the Frenchmen in their tracks anyway, by raising up his right hand and uttering some solemn words in Latin. Jack was no Papist, but he’d been in enough battles and poorhouses to recognize the rite of extreme unction, the last sacrament given to men who were about to die.

Hearing musket-fire from the opposite way out-the way Yevgeny had gone-Jack turned to look, and saw a somewhat wider street that wound off in the direction of where those musketeers had established their road-block. Ten or twelve yards away, just where it curved out of view, a corpse lay sprawled on its back.

Jack turned round again to look at Gabriel Goto, who had planted himself just on this side of the needle’s eye and was standing in a prayerful attitude as the Frenchmen came towards him. The samurai waited until they were no more than two yards away. Then he reached under his cloak and drew out his two-handed saber, gliding forward in the same movement, like a snake over grass, and tracing a compound diagram in the air with his sword-tip. Then he drew back, and Jack noticed that the head, neck, and right arm of one Frenchman were missing-removed by a single diagonal cut.

As Gabriel Goto seemed to have matters well in hand at the needle’s eye, Jack went the other way, slowing as he approached the corpse that lay in the street. It was the Turk from Monsieur Arlanc’s oar. He had been shot in the head with a musket, which was a polite way of saying that a lead ball three-quarters of an inch in diameter had hit him between the eyes traveling at several hundred miles an hour and turned much of his skull into a steaming crater. This gave Jack the idea of looking up, which was fortunate, as he saw a French musketeer kneeling on a rooftop above, aiming a musket directly at him. Smoke squirted from the pan. Jack darted sideways. A musket-ball slammed into a stone corner just above him, driving a shower of flakes into his face but not doing any real harm. Jack jumped back out and looked up to see Nasr al-Ghurab up on that rooftop, lunging at the musketeer with a dagger. The rais won that struggle in a few moments. But then he was struck in the leg by a musket-ball fired, from only a few yards’ distance, by a Janissary posted directly across the way. He fell, clutching his leg, and looking in astonishment and horror at the fellow who’d shot him, and shouted a few words in Turkish.

Jack meanwhile ran ahead, rounded a curve, and was confronted by a Y. The left fork led to a point in the main street, directly in front of the musketeers’ position; anyone who did so much as poke his head out of there would get it blown off in an instant. The right fork led to a point behind the musketeers, and so that was the one they wanted; but the French had had the good sense to throw up a barricade consisting of a wagon rolled over onto its side. Two muskets were immediately fired at Jack, who without thinking dove headlong into the deep gutter that ran down the center of the street. This had no more than a trickle of sewage in the bottom; it was lined with stone and (because of the slight curve in the street) protected him from musket-fire.

He rolled onto his back and looked straight up to see the sniper who had shot al-Ghurab having his throat cut by Nyazi, who had somehow gotten to the roof. But rather than advancing, Nyazi was obliged to throw himself down to avoid fire from a few other Janissaries who were on the adjoining rooftop. Though he could not understand much Turkish or Arabic, Jack could tell the two languages apart by their sounds, and he was certain that several other Arabic-speaking men-Nyazi’s clansmen-were up there, too. So it was going to be camel-traders versus Janissaries on the rooftops.

Levering himself up on his elbows and surveying the street, Jack could now see Yevgeny, Padraig, and the Nubian backed into doorways, safe for now, but unable to advance toward the musketeers’ barricade.

Jack retreated up the gutter, squirming like an eel, until he was out of the line of fire, then got to his feet and ran back to the front of the stables, where the wagon-train was pinned down. There he could see into the stable-yard, where Jeronimo was saddling an Arab horse, apparently getting ready to do something.

From one of their supply-wagons Jack secured a powder-keg and an earthenware jar of lamp-oil. Then he turned round and went back, at first crawling on his belly and pushing these items before him, later hugging the keg to his belly and running. A rightward glance at the T intersection told him that Gabriel Goto was still embroiled at the needle’s eye, French body parts continuing to thud down every few seconds. The sword whirling through the air tracing Barock figures, like the pen of a royal calligrapher.

Jack paused near the Turk’s body to pry the wax-sealed bung from the jar of lamp-oil. He poured about half the contents over the powder-keg, dribbling it on slowly so that it soaked into the dry wood rather than running off. Then he came round the curve into the Y intersection and dove once more into the gutter: a trough with vertical sides and a rounded bottom, like a U, wide enough that the keg, laid sideways, could fit into it, remaining mostly below street level. But the round ends of the keg, bound by iron hoops, rolled like cartwheels along the sloping sides of the U.

Pushing the reeking keg in front of him, he inched forward until he began to draw direct fire from the musketeers manning the barricade, no more than ten yards away. Then he gave the keg a panicky shove and backed away. His intention had been to pour the remainder of the lamp-oil into the gutter and use it as a sort of liquid fuse. But here events overtook him. For Yevgeny had come up with the idea of trying to set fire to the barricade, and had fashioned a sort of burning lance from a spear and an oily rag. As Jack watched from the gutter, Yevgeny fired a pistol alongside this contrivance, igniting it; then he stepped out into the street and immediately took a musket-ball in the ribs. He paused, stepped farther into the street, and took another in the thigh. But these wounds apparently did not even qualify as painful by Russian standards, and so with perfect aplomb he hefted the flaming harpoon, judged the distance, then hopped forward three times on his good leg and hurled it towards the powder-keg. Another musket-ball hit him in the left wrist and spun him around. He fell like a toppled oak towards the street. At the same moment Jack rolled up out of the gutter and found himself standing in the middle of the Y with his back to the barricade.

There was a sudden bright light. It cast a long shadow behind Gabriel Goto, who was walking down the street painting the ashlars with a long streak of blood that drizzled from the hem of his black robe. He appeared to be perfectly unharmed.

Jack turned around to see planks fluttering down all over the neighborhood, and stray wagon-wheels bounding along the street. The right fork of the Y, where the barricade had once stood, was just a smoky mess. Above it, on the rooftop, Nasr al-Ghurab had dragged himself into position despite a flayed and butchered thigh. He whipped out a cutlass, threw his good leg over the parapet, shouted “Allahu Akbar!” and fell into the inferno, landing on two musketeers, crushing one and cutting the other in half.

At the same moment, Jack saw movement down the left fork of the Y, which had not figured much into the battle as it led to a place directly in front of the musketeers. But all of a sudden a lone man on horseback was galloping across that space: It was Excellentissimo Domino Jeronimo Alejandro Penasco de Halcones Quinto, mounting a one-man cavalry charge on his Arab steed. He almost reached the enemy without suffering any injuries, for he had timed his charge carefully, and none of the musketeers were in position to fire. But as he galloped the last few yards, screaming “Estremaduras!” a shower of blood erupted from his back; some officer, perhaps, had shot him with a pistol. The horse was hit, too, and went down on its knees. This would have pitched any other man out of the saddle, but Jeronimo seemed to be ready for it. As he flew out of the saddle he shoved off with both feet, pitching his hindquarters upwards; tucked his head under; landed hard on one shoulder, and rolled completely over in a somersault. In the same continuous movement he sprang up to his feet, drew his rapier, and drove it all the way through the body of the officer who had shot him. “How do you like that, eh? El Torbellino made me practice that one until I pissed blood; and then he made me practice it some more until I got it right!” He pulled out the rapier and slashed its edge through the throat of another Frenchman who was coming up from one side. “Now you will learn that a man of Estremaduras can fight better when he is bleeding to death than a Frenchman in the pink of health! I judge that I have sixty seconds to live, which-” plunging his rapier into a a musketeer’s neck “-should give me more than enough time to-” cutting another musketeer’s throat “-kill a dozen of you-four so far-” he now revealed a dagger in the other hand, and stabbed a fleeing musketeer in the back “-make it five!”

But then several musketeers finally converged on El Desamparado, realizing that there was no escape from the man unless they killed him, and plunged their bayonets into his body.

“Yevgeny!” Jack shouted, for the Russian was only a few yards away from him, lying on his back in the street as if asleep. “We will be back with the heavy carts in a minute to get you.”

Then Jack, Padraig, the Nubian, and Gabriel Goto charged the barricade four abreast, and got through what was left of it with no difficulty. Padraig stayed behind to batter the surviving musketeers into submission with a quarter-staff, and to pick over their bodies for better weapons. Above them, several of Nyazi’s clansmen were charging across the rooftops, having overcome the Janissaries up there.

They came into the rear of the formation of musketeers that had been blocking the main street. At a glance Jack could not tell whether El Desamparado had slain his full quota of a dozen; but it was obvious that he would not slay any more. The rest were milling around, out of formation, and so Jack and his comrades simply discharged all of their remaining loaded firearms into their midst and then fell upon them with swords. The ones who survived all of this stumbled back over the bodies of El Desamparado and his victims and retreated into the side-street that had formed the left fork of the Y, where the men of Nyazi’s clan were able to rain stones and a few musket-balls on their heads.

Finally, now, the clansmen of Nyazi were able to bring the horses out of the stable-yard and hitch them to the gold-wagons, though various dragoons, musketeers, and Janissaries continued to harass them from all around; and now the thieves of Cairo were beginning to make their presence known, too. Flocks of them began to coalesce in doorways and corners, hidden by the greedy shadows of late afternoon, and made occasional sorties into the light in the hope of fetching some gold. In spite of this, within a quarter of an hour they were able to drive away from the stables-a cyclone of flame now-with four of the original six gold-carts.

Jack and Gabriel Goto were riding on the last of these, supposedly to act as a rear-guard. But both of them had another errand in mind as well. When they came abreast of the side-street where the barricade had been exploded, they reined in the cart-horse, jumped off, and ran up to recover Yevgeny.

Because of the smoldering debris that half-choked the street, they could not see the place where he had fallen until they were almost upon it. But then they found nothing except a wide smear of gore. Yevgeny’s blood had outlined the paving-stones in narrow red lines as it trickled between them, seeking the gutter. But Yevgeny himself was nowhere to be seen. The only other traces of him that remained were his left hand, which had been shot off, and a few rude characters drawn in blood on the pavement. An uneven line of bloody footsteps meandered up the street toward the stables, and disappeared into dust and smoke.

“Can you read it?” Jack asked Gabriel.

“It says, ‘Go the long way round,’ ” Gabriel answered.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Specifically? I do not know. Generally? It suggests that he will go some other way.”

“Spoken like a Jesuit.”

“He has gone that way,” said Gabriel, pointing toward the caravanserai, “and we must go this.” Pointing back towards the gold-carts.

“We are needed there anyway,” Jack said, breaking into a run. For their cart had already come under attack from a mixed mob of thieves, Vagabonds, Janissaries, and French soldiers. The appearance of Jack and Gabriel on their flank, bloody sabers held high, got rid of most of them. But looters better armed and more determined were close behind them, and so Jack and Gabriel and a few of Nyazi’s men rattled the half-mile down to the canal hotly pursued, though at a prudent distance, by a sort of wolf-pack.

At the foot of the street where it gave way to the canal, Mr. Foot, Vrej, Surendranath, and van Hoek were waiting-looking as if they had been through some adventures of their own this afternoon. They had thrown a heavy platform across the gap between the quay and the river-boat, and the other three gold-carts had already rumbled across it, spilling many of their contents on the deck.

Parked to one side of the street was a humble-looking hay-wain, harnessed to a camel. As the last cart, carrying Jack and Gabriel, jounced past it, a whip cracked and this vehicle bolted out into the middle of the street. By this point nothing could have prevented the gold-cart from reaching the platform, so Jack vaulted off of it, and turned round to face the hay-wain, anticipating some sort of attack. But by the time he had recovered his balance, the hay-wain had stopped in the middle of the street, directly in the path of the pursuing horde. The driver (Nyazi!) and another man (Moseh!) jumped off and chocked its wheels there, and at the same time the pile of hay on the cart’s back seemed to come alive; most of the load showered into the street. Revealed were a long tubular black object (a cannon!) and, clambering to his feet next to it, a black man (Dappa!).

Now in a way this was not surprising, for it was all a part of the plan-they’d spent all of yesterday buying the damned piece. In another way it was, for it was supposed to have been set up at dockside, loaded, aimed, and ready to be fired. Instead of which it had just gotten here-in the nick of time, Jack thought, if it had been loaded. But Dappa, rather than jamming a torch against its touch-hole, now began to rummage through a clanking assortment of implements strewn about his feet, while from time to time casting a glance up the length of the street to (at first) count, and (presently) estimate the number of heavily armed, screaming men sprinting their way.

“I have not done this before,” he announced, fishing out, and inspecting, a long, rusty pick, “but have had it all explained to me, by men who have.”

“Men who have lost sea-battles and been taken as galley-slaves,” Jack added.

Dappa brushed hay from the butt of the cannon and shoved the pick into the touch-hole.

“Help load the boat!” Jack screamed at Moseh and Nyazi. To Dappa he suggested, “For Christ’s sake, don’t worry about clearing the bloody touch-hole!”

Dappa returned, “If you’d be so good as to get the tampion out of my way?”

Jack scurried around to the muzzle-side of the wagon, turned his back to the on-rushing horde-which was not a thing that came naturally to him-reached up, and yanked out a round wooden bung that had been stuffed into the gun’s muzzle. It was shot out of his hand by a pistol-ball.

Dappa had an arrow through his sleeve, though not, apparently, through his arm. He was regarding a long-handled scoop. “As you are in such a hurry today,” he announced, “we shall dispense with the customary procedure of swabbing out the barrel.” As he spoke he shoved the scoop into some crunchy-sounding receptacle, which was hidden from Jack’s view by the side of the wagon, and raised it up heaped with coarse black powder. Balancing this in one hand he produced a copper-bladed spatula in the other, and leveled the powder-charge; then, moving with utmost deliberation so as not to spill any, he turned the scoop end-for-end and introduced it to the cannon’s muzzle, then, slowly at first, but quicker as he went along, hand-over-handed it until the entirety of its long handle had been swallowed by the barrel. He then gave it a half rotation to disgorge its load, and began gingerly to extract it.

Jack had until now been caught between a desire to make sure that Dappa didn’t do it wrong, and a natural concern for what was approaching. To describe the foremost of the attackers as irregulars would have been to give far too high an estimate of their discipline, motives, armaments, and appearance; they were thieves, avaricious bystanders, micro-ethnic-groups, and a few Janissaries who had broken ranks when they had caught sight of gold bars. Most of these had faltered when they had caught sight of the cannon. But awareness had now propagated up the street that it was still in the process of being loaded. Meanwhile the French platoons had re-formed and begun marching in good order down the hill, reaming the street clear in a manner very like what the gun-swab would have done to the barrel of the cannon, had Dappa not elected to omit that step. The emboldened rabble swarming out from their places of concealment mingled together with the not-so-emboldened ones being rammed down the street by this piston of French troops and all joined together into-

“An avalanche, or so ’tis claimed by certain Alpine galeriens I have rowed with, may be triggered by the sound of cannon-fire.” Dappa had torn off his shirt, wadded it up, and stuffed it down the barrel, and was now feeding in double handfuls of shot. He followed that with his turban, and finally took up his long rammer. “I wonder if we may halt an avalanche thus.” His long dreadlocks, freed from the imprisonment of the head-wrap, fell about his face as he bent forward to get the pad of the rammer into the muzzle.

“Don’t bother taking the rammer out-at this range ’twill serve as a javelin,” was Jack’s last advice to Dappa, as he turned his back and began to stalk up the hill towards the Mobb. For there were one or two fleet-footed scimitar-swingers, far ahead of the pack, who might arrive soon enough to interfere with the final steps of the rite.

“Where did that horn of priming-powder get to?” Dappa wondered.

Jack feinted left long enough to convince the hashishin on the right that he had a clear path to Dappa; then Jack lashed out with a foot and tripped him as he ran by. Moseh emerged from nearer to the quay. He had located another boarding axe, his tongue was coming out, he had an eye on the man who’d just planted his face in the street, and he was followed by Nyazi and Gabriel Goto, who had been watching all of these developments with interest and decided to leave off ship-loading work.

A scimitar slashed downward from the left; Jack angled it off the back of his blade. A tapping sound from behind suggested that Dappa had found his priming-powder and was getting it into the touch-hole.

“Has anyone got a light?” Dappa said.

Jack butt-stroked his opponent across the jaw with the guard of his sword and yanked a discharged pistol out of the fellow’s waist-band, then turned round and underhanded it across five or six yards of empty space to Dappa. Which might have got him killed, as it entailed turning his back on his opponent; but the latter knew what was good for him, and prudently flung himself down.

As did Jack; and (as he saw now, turning his head to look up the hill) as did nearly everyone else. A small number of utterly unhinged maniacs kept running toward them. Jack got to his feet, making sure he was well out of the way of the cannon’s muzzle, and backed up to the wagon. Nyazi, Moseh, and Gabriel Goto closed ranks around him.

There followed a bit of a standoff. Crazed hashishin aside, no one in the street could move as long as Dappa had them under his gun. But as soon as Dappa fired it, he’d be defenseless, and they’d be swarmed under. Pot-shots whistled their way from a few doorways up the street; Dappa squatted down, but held his ground at the cannon’s breech.

It bought them the time they needed, anyway. “All aboard!” called van Hoek-a bit late, as the boat had already cast off lines, and the gap between it and the quay was beginning to widen. “Now!” called Dappa. Jack, Nyazi, Gabriel Goto, and Moseh all turned and ran for it. Dappa stayed behind. The French regulars leapt to their feet and made for him double-time. Dappa cocked the pistol, held its pan above the small powder-filled depression that surrounded the orifice of the cannon’s touch-hole, and pulled the trigger. Sparks showered and, like stars going behind clouds, were swallowed in a plume of smoke. A spurt of flame two fathoms long shot from the cannon’s muzzle, driving the ram-rod, some pounds of buckshot, and half of Dappa’s clothing up the length of the street. The riot that came his way a moment later suggested that none of it had been very effective. But by the time the Mobb engulfed the cannon, Dappa was sprinting down the quay. He jumped for it, caromed off the gunwale, and fell into the Nile; but scarcely had time to get wet before oars had been thrust into the water for him to grab onto. They pulled him aboard. Everyone went flat on the decks as the French soldiers discharged their muskets, once, in their general direction. Then they passed out of sight and out of range.

“What went awry?” van Hoek asked.

“Our escape-route was blocked by a company of French musketeers,” Jack said.

“Fancy that,” van Hoek muttered.

“Jeronimo and both of our Turks are dead.”

“The rais?”

“You heard me-he is dead, and now you are our Captain,” Jack said.

“Yevgeny?”

“He dragged himself away to die. I suspect he did not want to be a burden on the rest of us,” Jack said.

“That is hard news,” van Hoek said, gripping his bandaged hand and squeezing it.

“It is noteworthy that both of the Turks were killed,” said Vrej Esphahnian, who had overheard most of this. “More than likely one of them betrayed us; the Pasha in Algiers probably planned the whole thing, from the beginning, as a way to screw the Investor out of his share.”

“The rais seemed very surprised when he was shot by a Janissary,” Jack allowed.

“It must have been part of the Turks’ plan,” said Vrej. “They would want to slay the traitor first of all, so that he would not tell the tale.”

Upstream, a Turkish war-galley had been dispatched from Giza to pursue them. But it had feeble hope of catching them, for the Nile was not a wide river even at this time of the year, and such width as it had was choked by a jam of slow-moving grain barges.

Night fell as they were approaching the great fork of the Nile. They took the Rosetta branch to throw off their landward pursuers, then cut east across the Delta, following small canals, and got across to the Damietta Fork by poling the boat over an expanse of flooded fields several miles wide. By the time the sun rose the following morning, they had struck their masts, and anything else that projected more than six feet above the waterline, and were surrounded by tall reeds in the marshy expanses to the east.

At the end of that day they made rendezvous with a small caravan of Nyazi’s people, and there a share of the gold was loaded onto their camels. Nyazi and the Nubian both said their farewells to the Cabal at this point and struck out for the south, Nyazi visibly excited at the thought of a reunion with his forty wives, and the Nubian trusting to fortune to get him back to the country from which he had been abducted.

Eastwards on the boat continued Jack, Mr. Foot, Dappa, Monsieur Arlanc, Padraig Tallow, Vrej Esphahnian, Surendranath, and Gabriel Goto, with van Hoek as their captain and Moseh as their designated Prophet. It was a role in which he seemed uncomfortable until one day, after many wanderings and lesser adventures, they came to a place where the reeds parted into something that could only be the Red Sea.

There Moseh stood in the bow of the boat, lit up by the rising sun, and spoke a few momentous words in half-remembered Hebrew-prompting Jack to say, “Before you part the waters, there, please keep in mind that we’re on a boat, and have nothing to gain from being left high and dry.”

Van Hoek ordered the masts stepped and the sails raised, and they set a course for Mocha and the Orient, free men all.