The Mer- Lion

In Scotland he was a noble... but in the bloody desert coleseum.. he was a slave battling for the hand of a woman he hated

James Mackenzie

intrigued royalty
...

The Queen of France

gave him his soubriquet de Wynter, for at 23 he already wore his family's mark—a shock of silver-pewter hair.

The King of Scotland

gave him his mission. So well known was de Wynter's way with a lady that the king thought him a proper envoy to bring back Margaret Douglas from England to Scotland where she belonged

The King of England

wanted de Wynter out of England so that he could no longer court the Boleyn and Henry sent him to the Tower. The only way de Wynter could free himself and his life-long friejids, The Companions, was to enter the Order of the Knights Hospitaller and be sent to Malta...

The Amira Aisha off Tunis

found him a shackled slave, a victim of high seas piracy, an ideal subject for her own schemes.

But

James Mackenzie was man of destiny, a Scot whose fortune was guarded by

THE MER-LION

WARNER BOOKS EDITION

Copyright © 1982 by Lee Arthur All rights reserved.

Warner Books, Inc., 75 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, N.Y. 10019

A Warner Communications Company

Printed in the United States of America First Printing: July, 1982
10987654321

Chronology of
The Mer-Liom

1503 James IV of Scotland marries Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VJJtt of England;
Seamus MacDonal arrives in Scotland from Ireland.

The earl of Seaforth marries Islean, bastard daughter of James IV.

Henry VII dies, Henry VIII ascends throne of England, marries his brother's widow, Catherine of Aragon;
Islean, Countess of Seaforth, gives birth to a son, James Mackenzie.

James V of Scotland born.

England and Scotland meet in the Battle of Flodden, James IV killed; Berbers revolt in Tunisia, crown Hassan the Moulay
and marry him to a Berber princess.

Margaret Tudor forfeits her regency, marries Douglas, earl of Angus;
heir born to the throne of Tunisia.

The Scots duke of Albany named regent of Scotland.

The corsair chieftain, Barbarossa, murders his airy, the Sultan Selim of Algiers.

1518        Barbarossa confirmed as Beglerbey of Algiers by Suleiman. 1520        Henry VIII and Francis I of France meet at the Field of Cloth of Gold.

1524 Albany ousted as regent by Hamilton, Margaret Tudor and Douglas, returns to France; James V crowned king and imprisoned by Douglas.

Siege of Naples lifted when Louise of France ransoms the French survivors; Henry VIII seeks a divorce from Catherine.

James V escapes; Douglas exiled and divorced; Margaret Tudor marries Methven.

The earl of Seaforth assassinated in Edinburgh;
the Knights Hospitaler lay claim to Henry VIII's new palace, the late Cardinal Wolsey's Hampton Court; Anne Boleyn named Marquis of Pembroke, accompanies Henry VIII to the second Field of Cloth of Gold;
Barbarossa demands Aisha, princess of Tunisia, as his wife.

The Great Games of the Amira Aisha held at el Djem in Tunisia from January 19 to 25; the sixth day a champion is named
and Henry VIII marries Anne Boleyn.

* Events italicized are fictional, occurring only in
The Mer-Lion.

Characters

 
SCOTLAND

James Mackenzie, 4th Earl of Seaforth, son of the "Old Earl," husband to

Islean Stewart, Countess of Seaforth, bastard daughter of James IV, mother to

James Mackenzie, 5th Earl of Seaforth, reinvested by Claude, Queen of France, as 11th Lord de Wynter and 1st Baron Alais, father to

Jamie Mackenzie, disputed heir to the Scots titles of Seaforth, Alva and Rangely as well as Alais in France.

Seamus MacDonal, an Irishman, captain of the Seaforth guard, father to Dugan of Alva Deny of Rangely

Fionn and his sister, Devorguila, of Seaforth, both by Nelly.

Father Cariolinus, chaplain to the Seaforths James IV of Scotland, King 1488-1513, husband of Margaret Tudor of England, sister to Henry VIII, mother of James V of Scotland, reigning monarch at this time.
Archibald Douglas,
the "Marrying Douglas," stepfather to James V and father, by Margaret Tudor, of

Margaret Douglas,
named and renounced heir to England.

John Stewart,
Scots Duke of Albany, first cousin to James
IV, regent to James V, heir in his own right to the Scottish throne.

Lady Ann Campbell,
chatelaine of the Castle Dolour, near
Alva,
and third wife to

Lord Campbell,
head of the southern Campbell clan

David Angus             

Companion to James Mackenzie when he was Master of Seaforth and later the 5th Earl.

George Cameron      / Andrew Boorde,
Englishman, visiting physician, law-breaker, and lecturer at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

ENGLAND

Henry VIII,
King, brother to Margaret Tudor and Mary Tudor, unwilling husband to

Catherine
of
Aragon.

Anne Boleyn,
Lady, daughter of the Earl of Wiltshire, sister
to

George Rochford,
husband to

Jane Rochford,
Lady.

Mary Tudor,
Queen Dowager of France, Duchess of Suffolk, wife
to

Charles Brandon,
friend to the king.

Thomas Cromwell,
Master of the King's Jewels, rival of

Thomas Cranmer,
Archbishop of Canterbury, successor to Wolsey, Cardinal.

John Skelton,
Orator Regius and Poet Laureate to Henry VIII

John Carlby,
Lord, Turcopilier in the Order of Knights of St. John of Jerusalem,, Rhodes, and Malta         

Thomas Notte,
Captain of the King's Yeoman Guard, brother to

Walter Notte,
Yeoman Gaoler, under command of
John Elstow,
Gentlemen Gaoler, Tower of London

THE MAGHRIB (NORTHWESTERN AFRICA)

Don Federico,
Captain
Eiuj Ali,
slave oarsman

John the Rob,
an Englishman and unwilling passenger, chief of the the beggars.

Uroj Barbarossa,
Beglerbey of Algiers, Corsair Chieftain,, husband to

Marimah,
first among four wives, mother of Eulj Ali.

Sinan the Jew,
"Drub-Devil," of Smyrna, one of his lieutenants

Monlay Hassan,
king of Tunis, father of

Aisha Kahina,
daughter also of

Ramlah,
Princess of the Berbers, half-sister to

Ali ben Zaid,
son of the aged chief of the Berbers.

Hassan ben Khairim,
slave dealer

Zainab,
slave, and favorite handmaiden of Aisha

Artemidorius of Tralles,
of Greece
Pietro Strabo,
of Italy
Hamad Attia,
of Gafsa, Tunisia
Al-wazier Yahiba,
of Marrakesh,

Judges at the "Games'

Sheykh Beteyen ibn Kader,
of

Arred, Arabia

Ibn al-Hudaij,
al wazier to Moulay

Hassan, chief judge

Table of Cont
ents

PROLOGUE

5
Shawwal,
A.H
. 939 / May
AD
1538

The Maghrib (Northwestern Africa)

Fear loosed his bowels and unhinged his knees.

Cowering, the messenger crumpled to the floor, face hidden in his hands. He had tried to surrender his packet in an anteroom, but as its contents were unknown, none would accept it. All knew full well that rewards were great for welcome words, but bad news often meant a short life for the bearer. A vicious kick propelled the man forward a scant body-length. Again. And again, as his blackamoor escort forcefully and frequently applied his leather-booted foot to the messenger's buttocks.

At the far end of the throne room, a gray-streaked, full-bearded man sat cross-legged on a divan, silken cushions piled about him, a naked scimitar spanning his knees. His hands—one living, one dead—were poised, statue-like, palm-down upon its gleaming blade. The single glimpse of those hands that the messenger stole unmanned him even more. The left hand was frozen forever in polished silver, the other hid its living flesh under a pelt of curly hair, the hue of which had earned the man his name—Barbarossa—the Red Beard. The very whisper of that name stilled noisy young children and made experienced merchantmen tremble. For three decades, this corsair chief had claimed the shipping lanes of the Mediterranean as his personal fiefdom, but that had not contented him. Like so many low-bred men, this son of a washerwoman (by a janissary-turned-potter) had royal dynastic ambitions. To achieve them, he would make alliances, break alliances, take partners, betray partners. He was even willing to wait until a certain girl-child grew to marriage

able age. As a necessary step toward his goal, he had strangled his friend, the king of Algiers, in his bath. Barbarossa then bought his confirmation as the new Beglerbey of Algiers from the Ottoman sultan. It had cost him thousands of dinars, which he didn't begrudge. As the ruler of Algiers he could now demand that his trading partner, the Moulay Hassan of Tunisia, give him the bride of his choice: Aisha, heiress to the Moulay's throne. For eighteen years, since the day of her birth, Barbarossa had wanted to wed her. He could wait those few moments longer as her messenger amusingly humped the length of the room to hand over her answer setting the wedding date.

Eventually, even the longest stretch of marble floor must end, and the servile man came to the divan that blocked further progress. Blindly, the messenger held up the small leather packet in the general direction of the Beglerbey. One of those fearsome hands— the man dared not look to see which—plucked the message from his trembling grasp. But when the messenger tried to back away, the blackamoor's foot in the small of his back pinned him to the cold floor. In rapid succession, came a faint crackling sound as of a new-laid fire, the clash of metal fingers forming" a fist, and the anguished howl of a wounded animal. Instinctively the messenger looked up
...
in time to see the scimitar descend.

Ignoring the blood and the body cleft near in two from crown to navel, Barbarossa stalked furiously through the sea of prostrate courtiers, each silently praying that he not be next. Only the blackamoor remained upright, following close on his master's heels, as Barbarossa growled his commands: "Prepare my ship. Summon Sinan the Jew; he will command in my absence. Tell my sons to follow me. Tell their mothers I go. Remind Sinan to heed the advice of Marimah. This mother of six of my sons is a woman of great wisdom. Would that I had listened to her words about the foolhardiness of proud princesses." This last he had not meant to say aloud, and he glanced around to check if the blackamoor had heard.

The black's face was bland. Not by the quiver of a muscle did he reveal the acuity of his hearing. He was a wise one, also. He changed the subject. "And the messenger?" he prompted. "Do you wish to send the body back?"

"Yes. No," Barbarossa corrected himself. "The message was never delivered. Do you understand?"

"If the master says day is night, or night day, even the sun must obey. The messenger never arrived, his message was not delivered."

Later, when the blackamoor returned with slaves to remove the body, one of them found, wadded up in a tiny ball, the piece of parchment that had already claimed one man's life and would eventually cost hundreds more theirs. He might have thrown the missive over the parapet to lie until the high tide, smashing against the rocks below, beat it into pulp and washed it out to sea, its message forever lost. But this the blackamoor could not permit. Marimah would pay well for such information. Confiscating the parchment, he examined it cursorily, then casually crushed it back into a ball and apparently tossed it into the sea; but his casting arm released nothing—the message lay tucked -expertly in his palm.

What he had read—
"From Aisha, Amira of Ifriqiya and Tunisia, heir to the throne of the Hafsids, twenty-third in a line descended from Dido, Queen of Carthage
...to
Barbarossa, self-proclaimed admiral of the seas and self-made occupant of the throne of Algiers, son of Jacob the potter and Sara the laundress"
—raised the hackles on his own neck. He must dispose of this potentially perilous parchment quickly, but not, of course, without reading it first and committing it to memory. Marimah was not the only one who paid well for information about Barbarossa.

Eager to be about his own affairs, the black made short work of having the body hurled over the wall, to fall, twisting and turning, and then bounce and break upon the craggy escarpment. Even before the blood cm the throne room floor had been mopped up, the crabs, the carrion-eaters of the sea, had begun to emerge from their water-washed crevices and fissures to feast upon still another in their diet of delectables cast with such frequency from the dizzying heights of the Beglerbey's palace above them. By the next low tide the carcass would have been picked clean, the bones washed away, banishing all evidence that a messenger had come from the princess of Tunisia.

That her messenger did not immediately return came as no surprise to Aisha. The bearer of such a challenge as she had penned must be considered a likely loss. She had, however, expected some sort of a reply. The dramatic return, for example, of the mutilated corpse of her envoy would have demonstrated the corsair's contempt for the message. That was what she would have done. Of course, she reminded herself, Barbarossa was a commoner and couldn't be expected to observe proper royal protocol. That, at least, was how she attempted to explain the strange silence from Algiers. What troubled her sleep was the nagging thought that the challenge might never have been delivered. A cowardly messenger, fearful of his possible fate, might have shirked his duty and fled in the opposite direction. Until she received corroboration of delivery from her informant at the court of the Beglerbey, she feared she would suffer more than one restless night.

She took comfort in the knowledge that her beauty had not been marred by her sleepless nights. Her face was clear and unlined. Even innocent of kohl and rouge, it was exquisite, dominated by large, wide-spaced, darkly fringed eyes whose color changed with her mood, like a cat's, from green to gold. So captivating were they that the casual observer, caught up in their gaze, might overlook the tell-tale signs of pride, petulance and passion in her "full lower lip and firm, pointed chin.

Aisha stretched luxuriously between the silken sheets of her couch, then sat up in one fluid movement, her silken mane of golden hair tumbling down about her slim shoulders like a living veil. She stretched again and stifled a yawn with the back of a small, long-nailed elegant hand. She slept in the nude. As her maids and her glass told her, her body was as beautiful as her face. Not an ounce of extra flesh blurred its grace. The breasts, although small and girlish, were high and rose-tipped, the waist uncommonly trim. Her hips and haunches were more boyish than she liked, a reflection of her youth, yet she detected a hint of curves that promised more abundance when she matured. One would have expected that, with her fair hair and chrysoberyl eyes, her skin would be pale; it wasn't. Not swarthy like her Arab father yet darker and more golden than her mother's Berber fairness. Indeed, long ago she had decided that the protected pallor of the seraglio was not possible for her. She courted the sun's paint brush by exposing her entire body to it until now she was from head to toe one golden glow.

She slid one long, slim leg out from under the covers, then heard from outside her chamber the clash of her bodyguards' crossed spears, their voices raised in a perfunctory challenge. Aisha settled back. Ramlah must be here. Only she would be about at mis hour of the morning. After nineteen years of the sedentary life of a harem woman, Aisha's mother still followed her Berber training and rose before the sun.

Even before she kissed her daughter good morning, Ramlah blurted out part of her news: "Word's come."

"What word?" Aisha interrupted fearfully. No need to pretend unconcern with her mother. But Ramlah wasn't to be hurried. Settling down, cross-legged, upon her daughter's couch, she clapped her hands for service, complaining all the while at the dearth of good slaves these days. Only when Aisha's handmaiden had poured her a cup of sweet mint tea was Ramlah ready to satisfy her only child's curiosity. "My agent heard that your father's agents received word from ah informer in Algeria that the messenger did deliver the packet to Barbarossa in person. And, my dear, the old man could not wait to read it in private; he must open the packet and break the seal right men and there."

⁴
"Then what happened?''

"What would you expect? He killed the poor bearer with one blow of his sword, practically split him in half. The old pirate seems very strong for his age; are you sure you won't change your mind?"

The look Aisha gave her mother spoke words, but Ramlah ignored it. As her daughter rose to dress, she ordered the slave to pour another cup of tea and watched critically. Only the best clothes, the best jewels, the best of everything—including a husband—were good enough for Ramlah's beloved daughter.

"You haven't heard the rest. A ship captain returned to port last night, and he claims he was stopped by a corsair ship. He was boarded and searched and all papers and correspondence on board were confiscated."

Aisha's eyes narrowed in thought, then widened as a possible explanation occurred to her. "Clever man! Barbarossa, you old schemer, I could almost like you. Almost, by your daring and resourcefulness, are you worthy of me." Ramlah's astonishment brought a laugh to Aisha's lips. Then, quickly, remorsefully, she brought her merriment under control. "He received my challenge all right, Mother. Can't you just imagine that old man reading it aloud?" She deepened her naturally low voice to the best approximation of a male's that she could, then aped the airs and manner of a pompous, vainglorious, mock-heroic pretender to a throne as she recited the words she had written to Barbarossa.

'
 
                         

You assume me chattel, not equal, but I am neither. I am regal, descended from Dido through my patrimony
..
. Kahina the prophetess/warrior-woman maternally. I choose my husband, not he me. Even if I were not princess, I would not consent. Even the Messenger of Allah (on whom be praise) was forbidden to take in marriage a non-consenting woman. The man I choose must be a prince among men. Are you he? Then, I set you a challenge. If you would have me, come win me. Prove yourself a king in combat against armed warriors, not unarmed rulers at their bath. Win against men who are your betters, and you shall claim the Princess and the throne of Tunisia as your own. Lose, and I claim your life—"

"Yes, yes," Ramlah interrupted, "I know all that. I helped you write it, remember? What does that have to do with sea searches?" "Ahh, but imagine his reaction—"

Again Ramlah interrupted. Sometimes it seemed to her that her brilliant daughter gave her no credit for intelligence. "I need not
imagine
his reaction. He killed the messenger. What does—"

It was Aisha's turn to break in. "You forget, Mother. The message then went on to say that his opponents would be worthy of him for, and I quote,
'this competition shall be proclaimed in every mosque and every bazaar on this side of the Mediterranean and on the other and will be open to all who by blood and bearing of arms name themselves noble.'"

"Aisha, you are being difficult. What is the connection?"

"As I see it, instead of acting as an ordinary man would, rejecting or accepting my challenge out of hand, he set upon another course. I think if we checked, we'd discover his men patrolling not just the sea but every trade route out of Tunisia. Why? To forestall the competition, of course. If the challenge were not proclaimed, none would know of it. If none knew of the competition, none would come. Except Barbarossa. He could then claim his prize and enlarge his kingdom without risking his life or lifting a sword. I should be his by default."

"But,.you had already sent word abroad even before the messenger left for Algiers."

"I know and you know that, but our corsair chieftain didn't. Do you mink such a man would credit a mere woman with forethought and intelligence? Not he? But I wager he has discovered his mistake by now. The question is,"—Aisha's eyes glittered as if facing a wily chess master—"what will be his next move."

She sprang to her feet and paced the floor, scattering her handmaidens to either side. If Barbarossa could have seen her striding about the silk-draped, fur-strewn room in all her naked, barbaric glory, he might well have changed his mind and attended the competition, thus changing the course of history. But he could not
...
and did not. He had discounted the descriptions of her charms as exaggerations.