The five took tea and bread and hummus and olives and skewers of meat which Falconer hoped was lamb. The innkeeper came and went, setting down more small dishes and asking elaborate questions to which Nebo responded in tight monosyllables. Wadi ate standing. When he was full, the Arab moved to the awning’s outer edge. He studied the brilliant day in utter stillness for a time, then vanished.
Nebo glanced at Falconer and gave a tiny shrug. If he had no idea where his mate had gone, he clearly was not concerned.
Soap sniffed the air. “I still smell a storm. Right over the horizon, it is.” As though able to smell beyond the city and the dust.
Falconer felt an idea begin to take form. “Perhaps. But all we will see here is wind.”
Nebo slipped the burnoose down around his neck. His head was a misshapen bullet, smooth and hard and pocked with old scars. His eyes watched Falconer unblinkingly as he said, “You trust me with your gold.”
“That and much more.”
The African grunted his acknowledgment and waited while the innkeeper set down a plate of chopped mint and coriander in olive oil. “To know of such wealth puts your life in my hands.” He straightened in his chair and said formally, “I thank you for this gift of trust, Falconer.”
“I thank you for your good right arm, Nebo.”
“It is good to have allies in dark places.” He returned his attention to the meal. “Does this God of yours teach trust?”
“Among many other things. Trust is easier when you seek to value eternity.”
“You are a hunter, yes? A man of many battles. I think you hunted a very long time to find this God of yours.”
Falconer smiled for the first time since landfall. “It took me years to understand that my God was hunting for me.”
Nebo ate in the Arab fashion, using only the first three fingers of his right hand. He took a bit of bread, scooped up grilled meat and coriander, and ate in silence. It was the desert manner, to show respect through such pauses. There was no rush to speech, no question immediately piled upon the next. Several bites later, he continued, “This power of yours.”
“My faith.”
“I wish to know what this word means.”
Bernard demanded, “Is now truly the time for such talk?”
Soap dipped his bread into the hummus. For a small man of advancing years, he showed a remarkable ability to store food away. “The hour before a storm and the hour before battle. The two longest hours on earth. Makes a man know just how alone he can be. Good time to be asking such questions and answering them, methinks.”
Nebo examined the sailor. “You share this power?”
“I have been a believer for almost twenty years. And I tell you the truth. The day of my turning is the day my life changed.”
Nebo mulled this over, then asked the banker, “And you?”
Bernard stared at the scarred tabletop and was long in answering. “I seek as well.”
“It is good to know question, and to have trust in man who knows answers.” Nebo looked at Falconer. “Speak to me of this.”
Falconer chose his words carefully. “You feel a hunger, one all the food in the world cannot fill. It is so?”
“Yes.” To everyone’s surprise, it was not the African who murmured the word. It was Bernard. “Oh yes.”
Nebo glanced at the banker, then returned his burning gaze to Falconer, who said, “Knowing the glory of Jesus for one’s self is to satisfy this hunger forever.”
“How do I know this thing?”
The market and the road and the noise all faded into the distance. “I can tell you of His gift. When you feel you are ready, we can pray together, and you give Him your life. Everything.”
Nebo’s voice was soft, yet cut through the surrounding din. “More words I do not understand.”
Falconer pondered on how best to explain. Finally he said, “When you travel desert ways, you will sometimes search out rock buried in the sand.”
Nebo nodded. “It is so.”
“You jam your knife blade down in the sand until it touches the rock. Then you place your temple upon the knife handle.”
Nebo rocked his upper body back and forth. “It is as you say.”
“You do this because you have trained yourself to listen beyond the edge of hearing.”
Nebo’s words were soft drumbeats. “Sounds pass through the blade and into my brain. Sounds the ears do not hear. Suddenly the empty reaches are empty no longer.”
“When I pray,” Falconer said, “I search for the eternal voice that is beyond the reach of man.”
Nebo was still mulling those words when Wadi returned. The Arab remained in the daylight and gestured to Falconer with one finger. Come.
Falconer rose from the table. He said to the others, “Stay where you are.”
Falconer followed Wadi down a series of teeming market lanes. Everywhere they went, his presence drew stares. Falconer was now dressed in what had once been his standard slavers’ garb. He wore a buccaneer’s black trousers, fitted loose enough to hide any manner of items in the deep pockets. Added to them were black smugglers’ boots, so called because the tops were rolled down, masking pouches in which money and knives and even a small pistol could be hidden away. Though Falconer’s sword belt held a long curved dagger and two pistols, he would hold to his vow and not take another man’s life—not even if it meant the loss of his own. His shirt was black also, and unlaced at the neck.
But his menace came neither from his clothing nor the arms he bore. He towered a full head and shoulders above most of those they passed. His hands were the size of mallets. His shoulders were twice the breadth of the Arab who led him onward. His features were hewn from stone and storm and rage and battle. The scar on his face was not his worst, only the most visible. No wonder the locals stared.
As they entered a broad plaza, Falconer reflected upon the shame he carried from all that had shaped him into the man he had been. Yet this character of his was also why Nebo spoke with him. Warrior to warrior. About the God stronger than even his loss.
Wadi drew Falconer’s attention back to the present by halting and stepping into a shadowed alcove. Falconer had seen such recesses before. Ancient tradition held that a wealthy local merchant would buy such a niche, but not for a market stall. Instead, a small fountain would be set in place and water offered free to all who passed. In this case, however, the fountain was dry and the mosaics in the rear wall, which once had spelled out words in Arabic, were chipped and frayed. A pair of beggars with outstretched hands whined once, then upon catching sight of Falconer, withdrew their hands and went silent.
Wadi was armed as a desert soldier, with a cutlass and brace of pistols slung from his cloth belt and a longer curved scimitar hung from his back. Its two-handed pommel was bound in snakeskin and rose menacingly above his right shoulder. He jerked his chin at what lay directly across the square.
When Falconer saw what had drawn Wadi’s attention, he felt a sudden clenching in his gut. The sensation was not so much fear as knowing that by stepping into the sunlight he was crossing a line from safety into battle. Falconer offered a prayer, terse and concise.
Then he stepped forward, into the light and danger.
Wadi followed a pace behind, in keeping with a bodyguard and servant. The corral had a symbolic boundary of crumbling stone. But there was no chance that any of its human captives would escape, for they were well fettered. The road’s dust so cloaked them it was hard for an untrained eye to name them as either male or female. But none of those who stood at the periphery were untrained. Falconer was not the only buyer dressed in western attire. Two uniformed officers, possibly German, discussed a slave held up by a beast of a guard who gripped the neck chain and kept the youth on his toes. A dandy in immaculate riding boots held a perfumed handkerchief to his nose as he discussed the array of human wares with an Arab in a multicolored robe.
Falconer knew the routine with heart-wrenching familiarity. These were newly arrived charges. The market would be up ahead, probably the place Amelia Henning had described. Slave markets were often by the harbor, as most buyers and sellers would arrive in small lateen-sailed ships disguised as coastal fishing vessels. But these poor wretches had made the overland journey. They were corralled here no doubt because this was close to the slaver’s personal compound. They were to be fed and bathed and perhaps oiled before they were moved on to the market. The merchants gathered here sought to pierce the road’s dust and the slaves’ exhaustion to find an early deal.
But this was not why Wadi had brought Falconer over.
Two of the owner’s personal servants moved about the cluster of perhaps eighty captives. They permitted the slaves to drink only once they had been washed. Dippers of water were poured over their heads and then they were rubbed down with rough burlap. But three men Falconer observed refused such treatment. They were lashed by their neck to a central pole, a standard yet brutal punishment for slaves. The servants approached them nervously. When they came within range, the nearest man stretched as far as the neck brace permitted and kicked the bucket from the servant’s hand. The two servants squawked and flapped their hands, clearly telling the three men they would receive nothing to drink. The man tried to kick them again. The bargain hunters laughed at the sport.
Falconer turned to Wadi and asked, “Will you speak for me?”
The Arab’s voice sounded rusty with disuse. “If I must.”
“You could fetch Nebo.”
Wadi shook his head. “Let us do this thing.”
Falconer nodded his thanks. “Approach the trader.”
Wadi approached the man in the multicolored robe and plucked at his sleeve. The slaver bowed himself away from the dandy, then added his own invective to the trio lashed to the central pole as he walked by them. Falconer’s fierce glare bothered him not one bit. Slavers were not known for their great store of human kindness. Clearly the man saw in Falconer’s burning rage just another member of his own clan. He salaamed a greeting and spoke to Falconer in French.
Falconer’s voice was deepened to a growl by his rage. “I am American.”
The trader switched effortlessly to the other language. “Forgive me, effendi. We see so few of you these days.”
Falconer recognized the subtle threat. American slavers had never worked along the North African coast. And recently the American Congress had outlawed the importation of more slaves, as an appeasement to the nation’s growing opposition to the entire slave issue. Falconer made no attempt to mask his fury as he replied, “I work for others these days. My oaths of duty are no longer to my homeland.”
“Of course, effendi. I completely understand. Your curious American codes have made outlaws of many.”
Falconer took a deep breath. “I am interested in the three you have bound to the pillar.”
“They are a troublesome lot,” the trader warned. “You have seen that for yourself.”
Falconer released a trace of the internal cauldron. “I have broken men before.”
The trader bowed low. “You are welcome to inspect my wares.”
As Falconer stepped over the low wall, he snapped at Wadi as any slaver would his personal servant, “Bring water.”
Wadi’s bow went far to easing the trader’s natural suspicions. “Effendi.”
In an attempt to buy space and secrecy, Falconer said to the trader, “Make sure my man is given a bucket and show him the nearest well.”
Falconer stepped over the men and women and children separating him from the trio lashed to the central post. They were all so coated by dust their skin color was impossible to tell. But the men had full beards, which was extremely rare among Arabs and almost never seen on Africans. Closer still, Falconer saw the two men facing his direction both had light-colored eyes.
They drew their legs in tight, readying for another strike. Falconer took this as a very good sign. They were emaciated and wore nothing but rags. Their feet were bare, their ankles festering from the leg chains. Yet they still had fight in them.
Falconer crouched down, a half pace out of reach. He took out his dagger and rammed it into the earth between them. It was a common warning between slaver and newly acquired charge who did not speak any known tongue. He felt the trader’s gaze upon him from across the corral. Which was enough to keep his voice battle rough. “Do you speak English?”
The two men who faced him licked their lips and said nothing. But the third man, lashed so that he faced away from Falconer, tried in vain to swivel about.
That was all the response Falconer could want. “Listen to me carefully.” He now dropped his voice and spoke quickly. “I am a former slaver, brought to my knees and to new ways by my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. I ask that you trust me. We have a few seconds only. Who are you?”
One of the men tried to speak but could not. His eyes turned to watch as Wadi approached with a bucket. Falconer lifted the knife from the sand, as though readying for opposition. This time, however, the man allowed the ladle to be lifted to his mouth. He sucked greedily, then rasped, “Sailors.”
“One more question only. If I free you, will you give me your allegiance?”
The man sucked more water, then managed, “You give your word you’re not a slaver?”
The man’s accent suggested a hint of French, which could mean Canadian. Which meant a whaler. “By my eternal soul, I give you my word,” Falconer assured him.
“We’re your men.”
Falconer rose and slipped the dagger back into his belt. “Tell my man all you can.”
He walked back over to the waiting trader. Each footstep was a burden, a battle. He dared not glance at those he passed. Their misery and his own helplessness left him clamped so tight in grief and rage he could scarcely form the words. He stopped before the trader. “They are a risk. But I am thinking they might bring a profit for the one who can force them to submit.”
The trader bowed lower still, so that when he straightened, his greed and his relief over getting rid of these impossible charges was well hidden. “Naturally such as these would draw great interest in the harbor market.”
Falconer gripped his dagger’s haft with one hand, the pistol with the other. Anything to control his fury. “Name your price.”