Swords From the Sea (75 page)

Gaining force as infantry pressed after the horsemen into the streets, the attack reached the main square of the city.

The fort and the battery both held out, but their garrisons were too weak to counter-attack. Around the mosque Selim had rallied a mixed group, without anything to support him.

From the terrace of the palace Paul heard the roar of the attack rising and nearing him. It had the terrifying force of an insensate thing. It swept across the square. Around him, he had a half-dozen muskets firing. Popguns against the rush of a thousand men already tasting victory.

Then something inexplicable happened. Heavy, measured reports sounded from the bay where the Argus had raised her anchor to drift close to the jetties. Her bow guns had come into action, trained over the housetops. After one reverberation from the bay, there was a flurry among the horsemen leading the attack.

An eighteen-pound cannonball had stripped a row of them from their saddles. Frightened horses plunged. Sudden panic seized the Tripolitans at the death that had struck from the sky. The mass of them dissolved into fugitives running away from the square.

As they ran, musketry from the roofs harassed them. Cannonballs followed them out of the fruit orchards up the bare hills, where Arab horsemen lashed them with savage pursuit. For once the Tripolitans did not contrive to carry off their dead.

Stripping a body beneath the steps of the mosque, Selim the janizary recognized it by its cloth-of-gold girdle and red morocco boots as that of the renegade officer Hadjali.

"Yah muslimin," he proclaimed to the inhabitants who had gathered around him, awestruck. "0 Moslems, it is written that for every man the place of his death is appointed. Verily, God appointed that the leaders of these dogs should taste death here. Your eyes have seen it. Who will give silver for these boots of a pasha?"

"Aiwah!" the listeners agreed. Beyond any doubt the Tripolitans had been driven away by an act of God. They knew nothing of the skill of a gun-layer on a ship.

"If you'd moved the Argus up the mountain," Isaac Hull observed to Eaton with satisfaction, "the vessel would have been carried by boarding; and where would you be now?"

Eaton said nothing more about guns for his fort. He kept on raising the walls of his fort, trying to forget that they had not a rial left in their pockets, that the Tripolitans still cut them off from the inland food supplies, and that no aid had reached him from the sea. Long since, he had sent the Hornet over to Syracuse, and now he dispatched the Nautilus with urgent appeal for stores, guns, and the reinforcement of a hundred Marines-which would make Derna secure.

Over there the port of Syracuse was packed with gunboats, bomb ketches, a squadron of frigates. A whole treasury of money, hospitals, and theaters where the sick could be treated with medicine, and officers amused. Politicians dined there, he knew, on silver plate!

No answer came to his appeals. The breath of the desert wind, scorching with midsummer heat, inflamed his crippled arm.

One morning Leitensdorfer emerged from the ditch of the Kalah Amrica spluttering. Hugging a broken clay jar crusted with earth, he bellowed: "By Salbal and Bathbal-the drachms of Selene! The gold of the ancients!"

The jar that the diggers had turned up was heavy with gold coins bearing the head of a king. Forty-six, they counted, and they found no more buried money, although Leitensdorfer heaved up the earth in his search. Eaton decided that the only fair thing was to divide the coins among the whole force, from diggers to commanders.

That gave one gold piece to each man. Farquhar flipped up his and laughed. "We hold the gorgeous East in fee. Doubles or quits, Eugene? Toss you for the five bob you owe me."

But Leitensdorfer turned away sullenly, pocketing his single coin. He seemed aggrieved that the expedition had come upon no more wealth than that. Paul followed him and offered to swap. "Trade you mine for that moonstone ring of Marie's?"

The ring could not have any value except to him, because Marie had once held it out to him as a betrothal ring. Now, as he anticipated, Eugene fished among the oddments in a pocket and handed over the ring with the flying bird carved on it. With a quick glance around, he pocketed the heavy coin. Somehow in spite of his brilliant play-acting, he could not change himself from a Tyrolese innkeeper. He had gone hungry for too long.

The stores of the Argus had been exhausted. The crew gleaned what they could by trading in the market of the town, fetching in rolls of silk and weapons, prize goods taken from the Tripolitan corsairs at sea. Marie helped them exchange their trophies for Spanish dollars, to buy eggs and milk and meat from the peasants. The Marines gave up the last of their brass buttons, and the trove of gold pieces.

Only once did a sail head in from the horizon of the sea. A polacca from Naples stopped for an hour to take on fresh water, and to part with fresh fish to the men of the New World who offered pocketknives and tin chests for it. The polacca also had news from the outer world.

Hearing it, Mendrici fell into a fever of excitement. Napoleon's army was leaving the English Channel. It was moving east, toward Italy or Austria-possibly against Russia. To the others at Derna the news had no meaning. An emperor was marching somewhere with his army. But Mendrici left on the polacca, which would take him to an Italian port.

The Argus could not leave. When Eaton talked stubbornly of a fleet to invade the port of Tripoli, and of a column to be started overland against their arch-enemy the Bey, Isaac Hull shook his head silently. Along the bare hills of the coast they could not go beyond the range of his guns.

In the marketplace, women from the farms offered food without payment to the Americans. They wanted to share with the hungry men.

When Paul went through the streets, families came out to stand in his way and beg him to settle disputes. They tried to leave dates and milk with him.

"I'm not my brother's keeper," he assured Marie. "Why do they follow me and what do they keep calling me? Judge?"

"No." She hesitated. "They think up names for people."

"Then what is mine?"

"I think you are your brother's keeper."

"You haven't told me."

"They call you A Maut, which is the Dead."

She looked up into his thin brown face. The fever had left him, after the infection of his wound. "When they saw you first at the gate, you were covered with blood and dying. You were crawling out under the horses of the Tripolitans toward the battery-"

"The safest place."

"They say no man could be so brave as to do that. It must have been appointed for you to do. Now that you are alive, they like to touch you and have you decide their troubles for them."

Paul opened his lips to laugh. Then he had the odd feeling that these people pressing about him and Marie herself saw something in him that did not exist. He had been afraid of death. Now he was glad to be well, and to have a pomegranate in his hand to share with Marie when they could get away from the people ... In two months he had got no nearer to Tripoli.

"I wish they could decide my troubles for me."

She shook her dark head quickly at that. "When I saw you, that first evening, I prayed to the Holy Mary of the Seas. For both of us." Then, without thinking of it, she took his hand. "Now we can come and sit by the well. We have some fruit, and we can pretend that the cactus thorns are the lilac trees of your home."

That morning he had been out with thirty men, beating off raiders who sneaked up in a dust-storm against the fort. Suddenly he realized that it would be something to sit by running water and chew the seeds of a pomegranate.

Chapter Twelve

When she first sighted the ship Marie did not believe her eyes. The sails showed above the island. She closed her eyes and waited. The ship was standing in, not heeling like the Argus in the light breeze. It moved steadily, over spurts of spray. Four courses of sails towered above the raking bowsprit of the frigate.

Unbelieving, the girl watched until the great ship turned, the sails flapped and came aback, and the anchor chain rumbled out. The frigate was anchoring beyond the slanting masts of the Argus.

Then the familiar rub-a-dub of Selim's drum sounded in staccato ex- citement-rrrub-aaa-dub. By it, Marie was convinced that the frigate had actually come, sending a launch smartly out to shore ...

Captain John Rodgers of the thirty-six-gun frigate Constellation had difficulty in making out the ranks and ratings of the wretchedly clad figures surrounding him on the shore under the stone rampart of a battery that had all its guns trained inward, not properly out to sea. The Marine officer with a beard over his unbuttoned ragged coat-the so-called colonel of engineers wrapped in a flaming Turkish robe-the equally grotesque captain of cannoneers, gripping a copper drum of outlandish shape under his bare arm.

And Captain Rodgers had equal difficulty in making them understand his instructions in regard to them. So he repeated his message carefully.

Peace had already been concluded with the Bey of Tripoli, terminating the action against the Barbary powers. That treaty of peace had been drawn up and signed by the Commissioner of the United States Government, and signed by Rodgers himself among others.

It terminated the payment of tribute by the United States to the Barbary States forever. Although the sum of sixty thousand dollars was to be paid the Bey in the exchange of prisoners, because there were more Americans than Tripolitans to be released-

"Sixty thousand dollars!" The flamboyant colonel thrust up his massive fists. "Sixty-with ten thousand dollars and one hundred men, certainly, we had marched to Tripoli! "

"The treaty," replied Rodgers, making allowance for the excitement of irregular officers obviously in a state of semi-exhaustion, "was the most favorable ever to be gained by the United States from Barbary."

The officers confronting him did not seem to realize that.

"Captain Bainbridge and all the personnel of the Philadelphia have been released from captivity already," he added.

Paul, hearing that repeated, told himself that his brother was free and out of Tripoli, on shipboard again. Isaac Hull glanced at him and stepped over to his side.

"Bainbridge," he said, "they tell me that while the-the Court of Inquiry must be held, upon the loss of the frigate, the officers of the vessel have all signed a declaration, approving your brother's action. It is irregular, but-"

Something tight within Paul dissolved. He looked at the prints in the sand. "Thanks for telling me that."

In his mind passed swiftly the vision of a heavy frigate grounding under full sail in pursuit of a swift corsair, in dangerous waters. Then the image of the ship went away.

Rodgers was facing Eaton, explaining that he had orders to evacuate all the latter's command on the Constellation. How many should he be prepared to receive on deck?

"They are all here, Captain."

Startled, the seaman swung to survey the ragged groups waiting by a brass nine-pounder on the beach. "I thought you had a regiment!"

"The regiment is here. All of us are here except Hamet, and the two Marines up at the fort. There!" With his good arm Eaton pointed up at a gray enclosure of stones mounting no guns, on the bare hillside. He repeated slowly, "The fort," and stopped.

Those two words held the friendship of Hamer and the Arabs, and a dream that had become his life.

"How much gear?" asked Rodgers. "Baggage?"

Eaton turned away from his fort and roused himself. "That gun," he said.

"I see." Curiously Rodgers glanced at the stooped tired man-a notional civilian, he had heard. Obviously Eaton's expedition had been the cause of the advantageous peace terms gained from the Bey.

Rodgers had expected to find much greater strength in the Derna detachment. He wanted to say something in appreciation of that, but it lay outside his instructions to do so. "We all understand, General Eaton-" he began, and hesitated. "I may say it is generally realized how the peace project postdated your achievement in capturing Derna, and the actual signing came after your repulse of-"

"The dragon," prompted an amused voice from the parapet.

"The dragon was frightened by the small boy in his cave."

Perplexed, Rodgers stared up at a dirty gentleman sprawled on the parapet.

"The evacuation had better be after dark," said Eaton, squaring his shoulders. "We are under observation by the enemy-"

Along the line of the hills the commander could discern no sign of an enemy, but he agreed readily. The operation would be simpler than anticipated. He wondered briefly if ever again an American expeditionary force would be landed upon the North African coast.

After Paul picked her up and stepped into the water to lower her carefully into the boat, Marie Anne felt again that she was dreaming, and that the great ship could not be waiting in the darkness.

Holding her bundle tight, she was lifted to a deck faintly white in the starlight, and as firm as the floor of a house under her feet. Above her the network of shrouds soared against the stars.

Lanterns moved around her and quiet voices sounded. The smell of steaming tea from a pot, the silence of the Arab officers by Hamet on a carpet, the brown faces of the Greeks over a lantern, the voice of Dave droning "Turoo-li-ay-ay," Farquhar begging O'Bannon to get him a commission as lieutenant in the Marines-all this closed around her as if in a dream.

Paul was helping her up on the boom where she could see. He had for gotten about the ring he said he had for her. They sat on the boom staring at the familiar shore beyond the glint of open water. On the shore the Bedouins had taken down all the tents and had taken the horses to start back to the desert whence they had come.

A bell chimed sharply, musically. Someone called down from the afterdeck, and voices answered promptly, dying away toward the bow, far off.

"Now Selim is really going home," she whispered.

"We're going home," said Paul. "Somehow. If you will come with It me.

She would go with him, anywhere. Even if the great ship had not come in- Suddenly she realized, with a sense of wonder, that she was going home.