The Confusion

“How came you to be at the bottom of the slave-market?” Jack asked. “I know your family was not the wealthiest, but I should’ve thought they’d pay anything to ransom you from Algiers.”

Vrej’s face stopped moving, as if he had spied a Gorgon atop one of Malta’s cliffs. Jack gathered that the question was an impolite one, by Armenian standards.

“Never mind,” Jack said, “you are right, it makes no difference why your family would not, or could not, pay your ransom.” Then, after there’d been no word from Vrej in quite a while: “I’ll not ask again.”

“Thank you,” said Vrej, as if forcing the words past a clenched garrotte.

“Nonetheless, it is remarkable that we ended up on the same oar,” Jack continued.

“Algiers in wintertime is lousy with wretched slaves, trying to dream their way to freedom,” Vrej admitted, in a voice still tight and uneven. But as he continued talking, the anger, or sadness, that had possessed him for a few minutes slowly drained away. “I reckoned Moseh for another one of these at first. As one conversation led to the next, I perceived he was a man of intelligence, and began to think that I should throw in my lot with him. But when I learned that he had acquired a new bench-mate named Jack Shaftoe, I looked on it as a sign from God. For I owe you, Jack.”

“You owe me!?”

“And have, ever since the night you fled Paris. On that night my family and I incurred a debt to you, and if necessary we will travel to the end of the world, and sell our souls, to make good on it.”

“You can’t be thinking of those damned ostrich plumes?”

“You left them in our trust, Jack, and made us your commission-agents in the matter.”

“They were trash-the amount of money is trivial. Please do not consider yourself under any obligation…”

“It is a matter of principle,” Vrej said. “So I hatched a Plan of my own, every bit as complex as the Plan of Moseh, but not nearly so interesting. I’ll spare you the details, and tell you only the result: I was traded to your oar, Jack, and chained to you in fact-though chains of iron are nothing compared to the chains of debt and obligation that have fettered us since that night in Paris in 1685.”

“That is extremely civil of you,” Jack said. “But the only thing in all the world that makes me feel more ill at ease than being obliged, is some other man’s feeling obliged to me-so when we reach Cairo I’ll accept a few extra pounds of coffee, or something, to cover the proceeds from the sale of those ostrich-plumes, and then you and I can go our separate ways.”

AFTER RIDING THE front of a storm through the Strait of Gibraltar, they had spent a couple of days riding out the gale in the Alboran Sea, the anteroom of the Mediterranean. When the weather had settled down they had sailed southeast, steering toward the peaks of the Atlas Mountains, until they’d picked up the Barbary Coast not far from the Corsair-port of Mostaganem. They had not put in there-partly because they had no anchors, and partly because Nasr al-Ghurab seemed to be under strict instructions not to make contact with the world until they had reached their destination. But a few miles up the coast from Mostaganem, where a river came down off the north slopes of the Atlas and spilled into the sea, al-Ghurab had caused a certain flag to be run up the mast. Not much later a bergantine had come rowing out of a hidden cove and had drawn alongside them, carefully remaining a bow-shot away. There had been some shouting back and forth in Turkish, and the galleot’s skiff had been sent over, carrying two corsairs and Dappa, and collected kegs of fresh water and some other victuals. This bergantine had then shadowed them on the slow progress along the coast to the harbor of Algiers. Slow because they had almost never laid hands on the oars; no one wanted to, most were not fit to, and the rais had not asked them to.

At Algiers most of the regular oar-slaves had been transferred into the Penon, the squat Spanish fortress in the middle of the harbor, and locked up, for the time being, in places where they could not tell the tale of what they had seen. Empty wooden crates had come back, and the Cabal had busied itself packing the gold bars into them and stuffing straw in between so that they would not clank. Only after the crates had been nailed securely shut had fresh-and ignorant-oar-slaves been brought aboard.