Fletcher ate five bowls of the stew and finished three lengths of the hard-crusted bread. He ate fig paste and a slice of sweetmeat before he admitted, as he swallowed the last few drops of the palm wine Sinan had poured for him, that he was hungry no longer.
Sinan looked at him with shining black eyes, nodding his head. “You ate well, for a Christian. By Allah! If you guard Marlani Chamiprak the way you wolf your food, Yussuf will make you a free man in a week. He values good service, does the pasha. Treat him well and his generosity will overwhelm you.”
Fletcher put that thought away inside him as he got to his feet. “Come along, then. I’m anxious to discover how generous this Yussuf Caramanli can be.”
With a grin on his lips and a roll to his walk, Sinan brought Fletcher up a flight of stone steps and out into the dying sunlight on the second courtyard. His thumb jerked upward at the grilled stonework of the harem windows.
“That’s where you’ll be quartered, up there behind that latticework. You’ll be surrounded with women. Pretty girls, not like those fat cooks down in the kitchen! Hotblooded Tauregs and pallid Spanish slaves. Turks. Greeks. Women of every nation you can name, and you not able to put a finger on any one of them.”
Sinan paused and cocked a speculative eye at the big American. “Watch yourself, nasrany. They may be slaves and concubines, but they all belong to Yussuf Caramanli. If you’re caught playing games with them, your death won’t be a pleasant thing!”
“I’ll be as indifferent to them as if I were a eunuch,” Fletcher promised glibly.
Sinan chuckled. “They won’t make it easy for you. Some of those little kalfas have been a long time without a man. They’ll risk death by suffocation for a few hours of manly comfort. I tell you this because I’ve taken a liking to you. Guard your virtue better than you guard your life. It amounts to the same thing, in the harem.”
As he walked at the heels of the Turk, Fletcher found himself thinking of his plantation home in Virginia, and of its pillared elegance. In the years of his rebellious youth, when he had been obliged to sit at a Monroe desk and add up columns of figures in the workhouse beside the stable portico, or journey to the ironworks near Baltimore in which his father owned a controlling interest, he had dreamed of something other than fields of tobacco and ledgers filled with monotonous numerals. Checking the slaves as they painted the washhouse or put fresh straw on the floor of the coachhouse, or riding Big Dan across hundreds of acres rolling fat with green tobacco, had been infinitely boring.
The ocean stretched wide and green from the mouth of Accokeek Creek, a day’s ride from the manse. He would spend long afternoons staring at it, with Big Dan browsing contentedly on bunch grass twenty feet away. When the chance came to go aboard a training ship as a midshipman, he snatched at it. As a midshipman, he would see distant lands that were only names in books to him at the time. There would be no dusty ledgers, no tobacco fields or roaring blast furnaces to occupy his time. Later, he had been transferred to the marine corps, at his own request.
Fletcher smiled grimly. Instead of his dreams of adventure, he faced the reality of slavery. He wondered for a moment what his aristocratic father, gentleman planter that he was, might do in his place. Would he choose death to acting the slave for an unbaptised infidel? Or would he plan, as he himself planned, to play his part in such a manner that he would win over the confidence of his captors and perhaps, eventually, his freedom? Fletcher realized that a man made his own destiny, by his own acts. It was not his father who walked toward the harem quarters behind Sinan ibn Ajaj, but himself.
The food in his veins and the months of slave labor in the stone quarries of Ali ben Sidi began to work their spell. Strength came flooding into his body. He stretched a little, feeling confidence and sureness blossom in him.
The pasha of Tripoli sat on one of the hundred cushions thrown across a quarter of the tiled floor of his audience chamber. His legs in loose silk trousers were crossed under him. His brocaded kaftan jacket was covered by strings of seed pearls. His black beard had been freshly trimmed and scented.
He spoke swiftly with Sinan in a Turkish dialect that Fletcher could not follow. Whatever it was the bald Sinan told him, he grunted in approval. He lifted his hands and clapped.
A palace guard entered, carrying a lacquered swordcase in his hands. He knelt and set it before Yussuf Caramanli, who was regarding Fletcher all this while with a curious smile on his full lips. Reaching out with a slippered toe, he kicked the long teakwood case.
“Open it,” he told Sinan. “Show the nasrany the sword that will be his only friend for the rest of his life.”
It was a magnificent weapon, of blue Damascus steel, its curved blade inset with thin kufic scrollwork. The hilt was of silver on steel, and the haft was wrapped about with durable cording. Sinan brought it out into the lights of a hundred lamps and held it out to the Virginian.
“A good blade, Stefan. See for yourself.”
Fletcher grasped the braided hilt, lifting the sword into his hand. It was light, but its steel was so finely made that he knew instinctively he had never before held such a weapon in his fist. Its blue, watered sheen was so bright that it seemed to glow in the lamplight.
Sinan saw that he was staring at the scrollwork, and leaned forward. “Its name is written there forever, infidel. Dushman kush! The slayer of his enemies. Have you any enemies, Stefan?”
Fletcher brought his gaze up sharply, aware that there was mockery in the voice of the bald Turk. From Sinan, his eyes went to Yussuf Caramanli, who sat forward on his throne cushions, eying him with amusement.
“He does not know Mustafa reis, Sinan,” chided the pasha with a smile.
“I know him,” Fletcher growled. “He sold me to Ali ben Sidi.”
The pasha laughed. “Ah, yes. You were one of the Americanos that went to my best sea captain as his share of the loot. Most of my other captains were glad to waive their rights for gold. Not Mustafa reis. He hates you Americans with a fine hate. Tell Stefan why, some time, Sinan.”
Yussuf Caramanli stared thoughtfully at Stephen. “I did not know this afternoon that you were one of the men chosen by Mustafa reis. Otherwise I would have bastinadoed you and brought you back to the stone quarries for Ali ben Sidi to kill in any manner he desired, to teach his slaves the consequences of killing a royal guard. However, Allah saw fit to make me act without such knowledge. Now, of course, I am committed. It would never do to give you back, once I bought you. It would be a sign of weakness, and a pasha must never be weak. So you will take your post in the harem, to guard Marlani Chamiprak.”
Losing interest, the pasha leaned forward to a silver platter filled with purple grapes. Idly, he drew a bunch into his hand and sat there cross-legged, nibbling at them, as Sinan took Fletcher down the length of the audience room.
As the big bronze doors clanged shut behind them, Sinan sighed and shook his head. “A lucky star watches over you, nasrany. Mustafa reis will not like what Yusuf has done. He will give anything to put you back in chains, or torture you to death in a public square. But Yussuf will not let him do that; it has become a matter of pride to him. But walk as if you walked on eggshells! One false slip, and even the pasha of Tripoli will not be able to protect you from him.”
“I’ll be careful,” Fletcher promised, but Sinan only eyed him curiously and grunted.
“You aren’t the careful kind!” the bald Turk growled, and clapped his heavy, meaty hands.
In the distance the patter of bare feet sounded along the tiled floors of the palace hall.
Sinan sighed, “I won’t see much of you, once you go behind the seraglio doors. You’ll live in a different world from me. There will be jealous women, and lusting women, and scheming women. Only a eunuch is able to live there without trouble settling around his ears. Make believe you are a eunuch, American!”
A slim Taureg girl, with hair like blackened copper hanging to her brown shoulders, came