I leaped over his toppling form with my bloody rapier and rushed Aurora. “Just give me my son!”
The cabin door burst open and Dragut was there with what I realized was Smith’s blunderbuss. I lurched backward and fell flat on the carpets as the big gun went off with a roar, kicking the pirate backward. A ball or more hit my blade and yanked the hilt from my hands, while more bullets shattered the stern windows, glass spraying out over the water. I was stunned by the wind of the shot blowing over me, the bloody heap of Osiris beneath. Now I was weaponless.
Aurora lifted a naval pistol and cocked.
She wanted me alive. She aimed for my head at first, and then shifted to my splayed middle, aiming at that tender spot men prefer to protect at all costs. Then, thinking better of it—well, the girl had experienced me in bed—shifted yet lower to blow off one of my knees and merely leave me shankless, her mouth a cruel curl.
And then she shrieked and danced.
Little Harry had stuck her foot with her own silver knife!
The pistol went off, its ball embedding itself in a bulkhead, and even as she snatched my son by the hair in howling rage, ready to do who knows what, I leaped up with Osiris’s cutlass in hand. I’d run the harridan through!
Then there was a black blur, a snarl and leap, and Sokar the dog from hell was crashing against me to bite, even while a cannon ball blasted through the sidelights and screamed between Aurora and me, crashing into the opposite wall in a spray of splinters. The dog was spun away from the wind of its passage, and I was kicked by the concussion out the shattered stern windows to fall, end over end. Before I understood what had happened, I plunged into the sea.
“Harry!” It was a thought, because I was underwater and couldn’t scream.
I came thrashing up, desperate to get back aboard to learn the fate of my son, but the Zephyr was already going, sails full, gathering momentum, the savage dog up there barking madly at me from the broken stern windows. The American bow chasers were throwing up spouts where the ship had just been. My son, if he was still alive, was sailing away from me. I’d lost the mirror, lost my family, and probably lost what little reputation I had by consorting with a witches’ brew of Barbary pirates and cultists.
And then there was a crunch I could hear from five hundred yards off. I turned, sickened, to watch the pursuing schooner lurch as it slammed into the reef where Dragut had led it. The collision was so hard that men pitched out of the rigging. The foremast snapped at the top and came down in a tangle. There were shouts, curses, and howls of frustration.
The Americans had grounded and Aurora and her acolytes were drawing off into the night, headed for Tripoli.
I hadn’t stopped them from getting the mirror, and I hadn’t saved my own son.
I treaded water, ashamed by my own impotence, and then with no other choice began slowly swimming for the grounded schooner. It took me a full hour to work my way there but it hardly mattered, since the ship wasn’t going anywhere until it worked off in the morning. The wind had died, and the flag that so excited me hung limply, as if in defeat.
I came close enough to shout. The ship had already lowered long-boats to sound the reef, so men hauled me aboard a cutter.
“You a pirate?”
“I escaped them.”
They let me clamber up the ship’s ladder to the deck.
There I came face-to-face with Lieutenant Andrew Sterett, whom I’d heard about on the Atlantic crossing. As commander of this ship Enterprise, he had scored the only unambiguous victory of the war the year before by capturing the corsair Tripoli, killing or wounding sixty of its crew. The Enterprise had returned to Baltimore last winter so the exploit could be trumpeted. Now here he was, back in the Mediterranean.
“Lieutenant Sterett,” I gasped. “I trust you remember me: we met in America and I sailed for Europe with Commodore Morris. Ethan Gage, the American envoy?”
He looked me up and down in amazement and distaste. I dripped water like a dunked cat and my skin was spotted with cuts and splinters. “Where the devil did you come from?”
“I was blown off the pirate ship. It’s imperative we catch them.”
“And how am I to do that, caught on a bloody rock?”
I looked over the side. “Wait for tide and wind, of which there is very little.”
Another voice suddenly came from the dark that I recognized with a start. “That’s the one!” it shouted. “He’s the one I told you about!”
And Robert Fulton, inventor and fellow adventurer, rushed up to see me.
“Robert, you’ve saved me!”
“He’s the one! Ethan Gage, the traitor who needs to hang!”
PART THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
My admiration for the military discipline of my nation’s small navy was dampened by the crew’s efficiency in rigging a hemp noose. The sailors, frustrated by their grounding on the reef, seized with enthusiasm the idea of throttling at least one passenger of the escaping pirate ship. Sterett, I remembered, had become famous for running one of his own crewmen through with a saber as a response to cowardice, during a 1799 battle between the Constellation he served on and the frigate L’Insurgente. This was an episode in the undeclared naval war with France that I’d helped put a stop to. Republican newspapers had clamored for Sterett’s punishment, but he’d coolly replied, “We put men to death for even looking pale on this ship.” Of course the Navy liked that so much, they gave him a promotion. Now he was to be my nemesis as well.
“Fulton, explain to them who I am!”
“I already have. He’s a scoundrel American who threw in with the Barbary rogues like another Benedict Arnold. I don’t care how badly Omar tortured you, Ethan—how could you go back on your pledge to keep the mirror secret? Are you coward, or traitor?”
“Likely both,” Sterett said, sizing me up.
“Dammit, man, who do you think got you sprung free from that Tripoli hellhole?”
“By a devil’s bargain! Didn’t you just aid yonder pirates in stealing an infernal machine from Syracuse, when we expressly promised each other not to?”
“I did it to save your life!”
“Death before dishonor, Ethan. That was our pledge. It’s your bad luck I volunteered to help these brave Americans intercept your mission, and my bad luck we were a few hours late.” He turned to Sterett. “Hanging may be too good for him. He has very few principles at all.”
“Then the devil will finish the job for us.”
I struggled against the sailors holding me. “I’m stuffed full of principle! I just fall in with the wrong kind of women! And spend a little too much time looking for treasure, since I don’t have what you’d call a proper career. I drink, I gamble, I scheme, but I do know something of electricity and firearms. And I mean well.” It seemed a feeble defense even to me.
“Do you deny you’re a turncoat to the United States of America and every man on this ship?” Sterett had his sword out and looked like a farmer who has cornered vermin in a larder. Excitable people should never be armed.