Ethan Gage Collection # 1

by William Dietrich

  He pressed the point of his saber into my back.

  “This is a crime, what you’re about to do!” I hissed. “The world will not forget!”

  “Nonsense. There are no crimes in war.”

  I described the ensuing scene at the beginning of this story. One of the remarkable things about readying to be executed is how the senses sharpen. I could sense the fabric layers of the air as if I had butterfly wings, I could pick out the scents of sea, blood, and oranges, I could feel every grain of sand under my now bootless feet and hear every click and creak of weapons being readied, harness being twitched by impatient horses, the hum of insects, the cries of birds. How unwilling I was to die! Men pleaded and sobbed in a dozen languages. Prayers were a hum.

  “At least I drowned your damned snakes,” I remarked.

  “You will feel the ball go into your body as I did,” Najac replied.

  “Then another, and another. I hope it takes you time to bleed away, because the lead hurts very much. It flattens and tears. I would have preferred the snakes, but this is almost as good.” He strode away as the muskets leveled.

  “Fire!”

  There was a crash, and the rank of prisoners reeled. Bullets thwacked home, flesh and droplets flying. So what saved me? My Negro giant, arms lifted in supplication, ran after Najac as if the villain might grant reprieve, which put him between me and the muskets just as the volley went off. The bullets hurled him backward, but he formed a momentary shield. A line of prisoners collapsed, screaming, and I was spattered with so much blood that initially I feared some might be my own. Of those of us still standing, some fell to their knees, and some rushed at the ranks of the French. But most, including me, fled instinctively into the sea.

  “Fire!” Another rank blasted and prisoners spun, toppled, tripped. One next to me gave an awful, bloody cough; another lost the crown of his head in a spray of red mist. The water splashed upward in blinding sheets as hundreds of us ran into it, trying to escape a nightmare too horrific to seem real. Some stumbled, crawling and bawling in the shallows. Others clutched wounded arms and legs. Pleas to Allah rang out hopelessly.

  “Fire!”

  As bullets whined over me, I dove and struck out, realizing as I did so that most of the Turks around me didn’t know how to swim. They were paralyzed, chest deep in water. I went several yards and looked back. The pace of firing had slackened as the soldiers rushed forward with bayonets. The wounded and those frozen by fear were being stuck like pigs. Other French soldiers were calmly reloading and aiming at those of us farther out in the water, calling to each other and pointing targets. The volleys had dissolved into a general maelstrom of shooting.

  Drowning men clutched at me. I pushed them off and kept going.

  About fifty yards offshore was a flat reef. Waves rolled over its top, leaving shallows one or two feet in depth. Scores of us reached this jagged table, pulling ourselves up on it and staggering toward the deeper blue on the seaward side. As we did so we drew fire; men jerked, spun, and fell into froth that was turning pink. Behind me the sea was thick with the bobbing heads and backs of Ottomans shot or drowned, as French waded in with sabers and axes.

  This was madness! I still was as miraculously unhurt as Napoleon, watching from the dunes. The reef ended and I plunged into deeper water with a wild hopelessness. Where could I go? I drifted, paddling feebly, down the outer edge of the reef, watching as men huddled until bullets finally found them. Was that Najac running up and down the sand, furiously looking for my corpse? There was a higher out-cropping of reef that rose above the waves nearer Jaffa itself. Could I find some kind of hiding place?

  Bonaparte, I saw, had disappeared, not caring to watch the massacre to its end.

  I came to the rock where men clung, as pitifully exposed as flies on paper. The French were putting out in small boats to finish off survivors.

  Not knowing what else to do, I put my head underwater and opened my eyes. I saw the thrashing legs of the prisoners clinging to our refuge, and the muted hues of blue as the edifice descended into the depths. And there, a hole, like a small underwater cave. If nothing else, it looked blessedly removed from the horrible clamor at the surface. I dove, entered, and felt with my arm. The rock was sharp and slimy. And then at my farthest reach my hand thrashed in empty air. I pulled myself forward and surfaced.

  I could breathe! I was in an inner air pocket in an underwater cave, the only illumination a shaft of light from a narrow crack overhead. I could hear the screams and shots again, but they were muffled. I dared not call out my discovery, lest the French find me. There was only room for one, anyway. So I waited, trembling, while wooden hulls ground against the rocks, shots rang out, and the last blubbering prisoners were put to the sword or bayonet. The soldiers were methodical; they wanted no witnesses.

  “There! Get that one!”

  “Look at the vermin squirm.”

  “Here’s another to finish off!”

  Finally, it was quiet.

  I was the only survivor.

  So I existed, shivering with growing cold, as the curses and pleas faded. The Mediterranean has almost no tide, so I was in little danger of drowning. It was morning when we were marched to the beach and nightfall by the time I dared emerge, my skin as corrupted as a cadaver’s from the long soaking. My clothes were in shreds, my teeth chattering.

  Now what?

  I numbly treaded water, bobbing out to sea. A corpse or two floated by. I could see that Jaffa was still burning, banked coals against the sky. The stars were bright enough to silhouette the line of vegetation along the beach. I spied the flicker of French campfires and heard the occasional shot, or shout, or ring of bitter laughter.

  Something dark floated by that wasn’t a corpse and I grabbed it: an empty powder keg, discarded by one side or the other during the battle. Hour followed hour, the stars wheeling overhead, and Jaffa grew dimmer. My strength was being leached by the chill.

  And then in the glimmer of predawn, almost twenty-four hours since the executions had begun, I spied a boat. It was a small Arab lighter of the kind that had taken me from HMS Dangerous into Jaffa. I croaked and waved, coughing, and the boat came near, wide eyes peering at me over the gunwale like a watchful animal.

  “Help.” It was barely more than a mutter.

  Strong arms seized me and hauled me aboard. I lay at the bottom, spineless as a jellyfish, exhausted, blinking at gray sky and not entirely certain if I was alive or dead.

  “Effendi?”

  I jerked. I knew that voice. “Mohammad?”

  “What are you doing in the middle of the sea, when I deposited you in Jerusalem?”

  “When did you become a sailor?”

  “When the city fell. I stole this boat and sculled out of the harbor. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to sail it. I’ve just drifted.”

  Painfully, I sat up. We were well offshore I saw with relief, out of range of any French. The lighter had a mast and lateen sail, and I’d sailed craft not too dissimilar to this one on the Nile. “You are bread upon the waters,” I croaked. “I can sail. We can go find a friendly ship.”

  “But what is happening in Jaffa?”

  “Everyone is dead.”

  He looked stricken. No doubt he had friends or family that had been caught up in the siege. “Not everyone, of course.” But I was more honest the first time.

  Years from now historians will labor to explain the strategic reasoning for Napoleon’s invasions of Egypt and Syria, for the slaughter at Jaffa and the marches with no clear goal. The scholars’ task is futile. War is nothing about reason and everything about emotion. If it has logic, it is the mad logic of hell. All of us have some evil: deep in most, indulged by a few, universally released by war. Men sign away everything for this release, uncapping a pot they scarcely know is boiling, and then are haunted ever after. The French—for all their muddle of republican ideals, alliances with distant pashas, scientific study, and dreams of reform—achieved above all else an awful
catharsis, followed by the sure knowledge that what they’d released must eventually consume them too. War is poisoned glory.

  “But do you know a friendly ship?” Mohammad asked.

  “The British, perhaps, and I have news I need to bring them.” And some scores to settle, too, I thought. “Do you have water?”

  “And bread. Some dates.”

  “Then we are shipmates, Mohammad.”

  He beamed. “Allah has his ways, does he not? And did you find what you were looking for in Jerusalem?”

  “No.”

  “Later, I think.” He gave me some water and food, as restorative as a tingle of electricity. “You are meant to find it, or you would not have survived.”

  How comforting it would be to have such faith! “Or I shouldn’t have looked, and I’ve been punished by seeing too much.” I turned away from the sad glow from shore. “Now then, help me set this sail. We’ll set course for Acre and the English ships.”

  “Yes, once more I am your guide, effendi, in my new and sturdy boat! I will take you to the English!”

  I lay back against a thwart. “Thanks for your rescue, friend.”

  He nodded, “And for this I will charge only ten shillings!”

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 12

  I came to Acre a hero, but not for escaping the mass execution at Jaffa. Rather, I paid back the French with timely information.

  Mohammad and I found the British squadron the second day of our sail. The ships were led by the battleships Tigre and Theseus, and when we coasted into the lee of the flagship I hailed none less than that friendly devil himself, Sir Sidney Smith.

  “Gage, is that really you?” he called. “We thought you’d gone back over to the frogs! And now you’re back to us?”

  “To the French by the treachery of your own British seamen, Captain!”

  “Treachery? But they said you deserted!”

  How’s that for a cheeky lie by Big Ned and Little Tom? No doubt they thought me dead and unable to contradict them. It’s just the kind of truth-twisting I might have thought of, which made me all the more indignant. “Hardly! Locked out from brave retreat by your own bully seamen, I was! You owe us a medal. Don’t they, Mohammad?”

  “The French tried to kill us,” my boat mate said. “He owes me ten shillings.”

  “And here you are in the middle of the Mediterranean?” Smith scratched his head. “Damnation. For a man who turns up everywhere, it’s hard to know where you belong. Well, come aboard and let’s sort this out.”

  So up we climbed, the eighty-gun ship-of-the-line a behemoth compared to the feeble lighter we’d been sailing in, which was taken in tow. The British officers searched Mohammad as if he might produce a dagger at any moment, and gave sharp looks at me. But I’d already determined to act the wronged one, and had a trump besides. So I launched into my version of events.

  “…And then the iron gate slammed shut against me as the ring of French and Arab scoundrels closed in….”

  Yet instead of the outrage and sympathy I deserved, Smith and his officers regarded me with skepticism.

  “Admit it, Ethan. You do seem to go too easily from one side to the other,” Smith said. “And get out of the damndest fixes.”

  “Aye, he’s an American rebel, he is,” a lieutenant put in.

  “Wait. You think the French let me escape from Jaffa?”

  “The reports are that no one else did. It’s rather remarkable, finding you.”

  “And who’s this heathen, then?” another officer asked, pointing at Mohammad.

  “He’s my friend and savior, and a better man than you, I’ll wager.”

  Now they bristled, and I was probably on the brink of being called out for a duel. Smith hurriedly intervened. “Now, there’s no need for that. We have the right to ask hard questions, and you have the right to answer them. Frankly, Gage, I hadn’t heard all that much useful from you in Jerusalem, despite the Crown’s investment. Then my sailors report you’d acquired a quite expensive, rather remarkable rifle? Where’s that?”

  “Stolen by a blasted French thief and torturer named Najac,” I said.

  “If I’d joined the French, what the devil am I doing in rags, wounded, burned, bobbing in a boat with a Muslim camel driver and without a weapon?” I was angry. “If I’d gone to the French, why am I not sipping claret in Napoleon’s tent right now? Aye, let’s sort the truth. Call those rascal seamen up right now….”

  “Little Tom lost his arm and has been sent home,” Smith said. Despite my indignation, the news gave me pause. To lose a limb was a sentence of poverty. “Big Ned has been assigned ashore, with much of the Dangerous crew, to bolster Djezzar’s defenses in Acre. Perhaps you can discuss it with him there. We’ve got a stew of stout men to hold off Bonaparte, a mix of Turks, Mamelukes, mercenaries, rascals, and English bulldogs. We’ve even got a French royalist artillery officer who’s joined our side, Louis-Edmond Phelipeaux. He’s strengthening the fortifications.”

  “You’re allied with a Frenchman, and you’re questioning me?”

  “He helped arrange my escape from Templar Prison in Paris and is as faithful a comrade as you could wish for. Curious how men choose up sides in a dangerous time, isn’t it?” He looked at me closely. “Potts and Tentwhistle dead, Tom crippled, nothing gained, yet here you are. Jericho says he thought you dead or deserted as well.”

  “You’ve talked to Jericho, too?”

  “He’s in Acre, with his sister.”

  Well, there was glad news. I’d been distracted by my own problems, but I felt a flush of relief of hearing that Miriam was safe for the moment. I wondered if she still had my seraphim. I took a breath.

  “Sir Sidney, I’m done with the French, I can assure you. Hung me upside down over a snake pit, they did.”

  “By God, the barbarians! Didn’t tell them anything, did you?”

  “Of course not,” I lied. “But they told me something, and I can prove my loyalty with it.” It was time to play my trump.

  “Told you what?”

  “That Bonaparte’s siege artillery is coming by water, and with luck we can capture it all before his troops reach Acre.”

  “Really? Well, that would change things, wouldn’t it?” Smith beamed. “Find me those guns, Gage, and I will give you a medal. A fine Turkish one—they’re bigger than ours and nicely gaudy. They hand them out by the basket load, and you can bet I’ll spare one if you’re telling the truth. For once.”

  Of course it rained, dampening our chances of spying the French flotilla, and then fog moved in, lowering visibility even more. The murk soon had the English thinking I was a double agent again, as if I controlled the weather. But if we had difficulty finding the French, they had a worse time evading us. Fog was their enemy, too.

  So the French stumbled upon us on the morning of March 18 when Captain Standelet tried to round Cape Carmel and enter the huge bay bounded by Haifa at the south and Acre at the north. Three boats, including that of Standelet, escaped. Six more did not, however, and siege guns, which fire a twenty-four-pound ball, were trussed in their holds. In a single blow, we’d captured Napoleon’s most potent weapon. With a morning’s work I was proclaimed bulwark of Acre, fox of Jaffa, and watchman of the deep. I got a jeweled medal, too, the Sultan’s Order of the Lion, which Smith then bought back to cover my payment to Mohammad, plus a few coins besides. “If you know how to spend less than you get, you have the philosopher’s stone,” he lectured. “I’ve been reading your Franklin.”

  And so I came to the old Crusader city. Our route by water was paralleled on land by columns of smoke marking the advance of Napoleon’s troops. Reports had come of a steady string of skirmishes between his regiments and the Muslims of the interior, but it was at Acre that the contest would be decided.

  The city is on a peninsula that juts into the Mediterranean at the north end of the Bay of Carmel, and thus is two-thirds surrounded by sea. The peninsula extends southwest from the mainland, and its harb
or is formed by a breakwater. Acre is smaller than Jerusalem, its sea and land walls less than a mile and a half in circumference, but is more prosperous and about as populous. By the time I arrived the French were already sealing off the city from the landward side, flapping tricolors marking the arc of their camps.

  Acre is a lovely city in normal times, its seawalls bounded by aquamarine reefs and its land walls bordered by green fields. An ancient aqueduct, no longer in use, led from its moat to the French lines. The great copper green dome of its central mosque, coupled with a needle-like minaret, punctuate a charming skyline of tile, towers, and awnings. Upper stories arch over twisting streets. Markets shaded by bright awnings fill the main thoroughfares. The port smells of salt, fresh fish, and spices. There are three major inn-and-warehouse complexes for maritime visitors, the Khan el-Omdan, the Khan el-Efranj, and the Khan a-Shawarda. Balancing this prettiness is the ruler’s palace on the northern wall, a grim Crusader block with a round tower at each corner, softened only because its harem windows look down on cool gardens between mosque and palace. The stout fort and rambling medieval town of tile roofs called to my mind a stern, forbidding headmaster overlooking a lively class of redheaded children.

  The government and religious area occupies the northeastern quarter of the city, and the land walls face north and east, their corner joined at a massive tower. This would be so key to the ensuing siege that it would eventually be called by the French la tour maudite: the accursed tower. But could Acre be defended?

  Clearly, many thought not. We took Mohammad’s little boat ashore, following the Tigre’s longboat, and when we reached the quay the waterfront was jammed with refugees anxious to flee the city. Smith, Mohammad, and I pushed through a crowd close to panic. Most were women and children, but not a few were rich merchants who’d paid Djezzar steep bribes to leave. In war, money can mean survival, and stories of slaughter had raced up the coast. People clutched the few belongings they could carry and bid for passage on the merchantmen offshore. A sweating woman cradled a silver coffee service, her toddlers clutching at her gown and howling. A cotton merchant had stuffed loaded pistols into a sash sewn with golden coins. A lovely dark-eyed girl of ten with trembling mouth held a squirming puppy. A banker used a wedge of African slaves to push his way to the fore-front.