Swords From the Sea (68 page)

Lieutenant Presley O'Bannon of the Marines, observing them, parted with frugal words: "These savages have not read the Articles of War."

When he was free of his guests, Eaton came to throw himself down by Paul. Wiping his face with his sleeve, he said bluntly as was his manner: "When my pockets are empty, I wonder how many followers I shall have. I meant to tell you, Mr. Davies-my adjutant doubts if you will stand this journey. Frankly, he argues that our inexperience may cause us difficulty." He hesitated. "Some of the escort will be turning back tomorrow; and you could accompany them safely, I think, to Alexandria. If you-"

"I can help with stowing the loads, sir. I can handle ropes and tackle." The other's doubt quickened the boy's pulse. "I mean to go all the way with you."

After a glance at him, Eaton nodded. "I see you do. Although I'm eternally blessed if I know why a civilian wishes to make a camel driver of himself."

In rising, he added casually: "It would be better for you to comply with the discipline of the force you accompany. Colonel Leitensdorfer has served under varied flags in rather strange capacities, but-he gets things done."

Lying on his borrowed blanket, Paul reflected that Eugene plainly meant to get rid of him, while he could not count on Eaton backing him.

For forty hours he had not slept. Against his aching shoulders pressed the stones of the hard earth; against his tired eyes stood the wraiths of thorn-bush. He breathed in the smoke of smoldering dung fires, thinking how weary Marie would be, who had helped him to start this journey.

Chapter Five

Across the arid wasteland the stubbornness of Eaton drove his vestige of an army. Due west he led them as Paul saw by the bearing of Orion's square rising at night. By day the lash of his tongue drove them, until they had advanced most of the twenty-five miles that he set for a stage-then at the evening halts he blarneyed them, and sang over his wineglass. His eagerness was like a fever that in turn affected the others.

By the end of the second march, Farquhar had observed Marie and reported to the commander: "We have a beauty stowed away among the native allies."

Yet Eaton, recognizing her, accepted her presence almost eagerly.

"Child, your courage will be an example to us."

Marie curtsied to him quietly, saying she would be careful not to trouble the General. "By your kindness then, I will go with you to the American ships."

"Such as they are." He laughed, pleased by her demure respect. "A brig, a schooner, and a sloop will await our coming at Bomba Bay."

He spoke as if he had no doubt of reaching the rendezvous with the vessels. And Paul thought that then the Americans would have no alternative to embarking Marie on one of the ships.

Stared at curiously by the men, Marie kept herself among the native women. To Paul she spoke only with cool politeness, refusing to ride his sorrel, managing to get a donkey for herself from the Arabs. She had a ready smile for Farquhar, even when she refused his urging to sup with the officers.

"Why should I?" she asked. "The women are kind here, sir, it is the fashion for the ladies to dine apart from the gentlemen!"

She could jest easily with the Englishman, who was of her caste. She picked blossoms of wild jasmine to set in her hair. It seemed as if she played upon Eaton's good nature, and Farquhar's open admiration, while she greeted Paul only with silence. Although she plied the silent O'Bannon with questions about America, and even rode beside the Pasha-the shy Hamet Pasha, leader of what Eaton called his cavalry, who wore a jeweled headband with a woman's grace.

"The poor Hamet," she assured O'Bannon, "has cause to be heartsick. His wife and children are held captive in Tripoli."

Alone in the expedition, Hamet had not been hired to fight for Eaton. He was, Farquhar explained, of the princely Karamanli family, with a claim to the rule of the Barbary ports-to which Eaton had sworn to restore him.

Yet Hamet in the last days had wanted to turn back to the Delta of Egypt, complaining that Eaton's force was not capable of crossing the desert. His fear was shared by the remaining European, the Italian physician Mendrici, who had made a fortune in Cairo and had lent much of it to Eaton, who had used up all of his own funds with the four thousand dollars advanced him by Hull of the Argus. "Our worthy physician," Farquhar summed him up, "is a coward. He flinches at sight of a knife in Selim's hand. Yet he left a hotel suite on the Nile for this. Now, why on earth?"

Silently Paul wondered why the Englishman had come, and Eugene. The Tyrolese had his head together with Mendrici often, over the Italian's wine. Once Paul noticed the physician examining a coin under a candle with a magnifying glass. When he turned the gold piece in his thin fingers, Paul recognized it as Eugene's specimen from the tomb of Cleopatra Selene-the tomb that Eugene insisted he had sighted on the mountain height beyond Egypt.

Toward those mountains the expedition was making its way. In the column itself Selim's cannoneers and the band of Greeks held the balance of force-with Eugene, if he should ever decide to part from Eaton. The loot of a royal tomb would be a prize Paul could not imagine Eugene passing by. It might draw even the timid Mendrici into the desert.

But of Mendrici their commander had as little doubt as of Eugene.

"He accompanies us in spite of the danger," Eaton declared, "aware that we lacked a physician."

By degrees Paul realized that Eaton was shutting his eyes deliberately to the weakness of the members of his force. And he began to wonder how Eaton had obtained the rank of general, and whether in a clash he could stand up to the adroit Leitensdorfer.

The older man was driven by a craving for action. "After eight years," he would say, "we are opening our gun ports instead of our purses to them."

They were always the Barbary beys. "I'll do no more groveling to them." No more haggling over terms to keep a peace. He would succeed in striking his blow against them by land. No more bargaining as consul for the release of American slaves. "We paid them timber and tar for ships, with small arms and cannon-the worth of forty thousand dollars a year and more demanded, because we paid so much. Always the threat of war, and the Barbary cruisers loosed against our commerce, and Congress fearful of any act of war."

His ruddy face darkened with the anger that was like a fever. "We paid. The English lion showed his teeth, and the Barbary beys spoke softly. But we sent them jewels of the finest, bought in London. They asked for a frigate of thirty-six guns. I answered that the timber for such a frigate had not grown along our rivers. Paul, there are no trees in Barbary."

Eaton glowered at the boy, his mind miles away.

"When the Philadelphia arrived at last in pursuit of a xebec like the one that dogs us, Paul, I felt as if the dirt of the Barbary ports had been cleansed. Then the Bey of Tripoli was given his frigate-with forty-four guns, and her crew for slaves. Bainbridge surrendered her."

Familiar fear gripped Paul. "She listed on the reef," he said evenly. "Sir, those guns could not be served."

"She had muskets. In forty hours, when the wind changed, she floated free."

Paul was silent, knowing that William Eaton had sent the fullest report of the loss of the frigate from Tunis. His report had been barely fair to the captain, and outspoken in its regret for the loss of the vessel.

"The matter of seamanship," Eaton mused, "I cannot judge. But because of the tribute paid so many years by Congress, under threat, Bainbridge should have fought his ship. Because reports of American slaves had been made out too long, he should never have hauled down his flag. Now, with officers and crew captive, the Bey raised his demand to a halfmillion dollars."

Eaton had been drinking late that night. In his cups, he had a way of dwelling on the last war. "Time was-" he would say, and tell of happenings before Paul's time. When much excited, he would read an ode he had written upon the death of the Patriarch. Although he apologized for his lack of learning he loved to repeat the lines: "On the fields of fair Elysium, ranged in open order, with arms presented, stood the host of heaven."

Paul thought the words about Washington reviewing the host of heaven were puzzling. But William Eaton said them like a hymn.

The desert took their strength from them gently as the days crept into the first weeks. Because they lacked a map, they had to keep the sea within sight, climbing down into the wadis that channeled the coast ridge. When they made camp in one of the dry ravines, a storm broke over the heights. Before this march was over, not only Eaton but all his men would deserve the name of Drub-Devil.

The surge of muddy water that swept down the wadi carried away much of their hoarded stores, with the tents and cattle of the natives. Eaton swore that at the desert's end, at Bomba, the ships would be waiting with food, money, arms, and men.

"Aye," nodded O'Bannon, "and water."

They had parted with the last money they carried, the officers and Paul, to pay the insatiable camel drivers, who deserted notwithstanding after the storm. Eaton persuaded a Bedouin tribe that had joined them to load the remaining sacks of rice on their camels.

Because the animals of the tribe had to graze wherever green growth showed, the marchers must needs wait for the beasts. Because the stages grew shorter, in this fashion, the sacks of rice, biscuit, and flour hoarded by the Americans dwindled alarmingly each day.

Daily they sighted the orange sail of the xebec that followed them by sea.

And as if to tantalize them, a dark ridge appeared above the line of the plain far ahead of them at sunset.

"Salalum!" cried the Arabs, pointing at it. Eugene identified the black hump as the mountains, rising from the Libyan plain they had been crossing. There the desert ended, and the plateau of Cyrenaica began. On that plateau, where the Romans had raised wheat and built palaces, there should be grazing and water and perhaps game to be killed, and ripe dates to be gathered. So Eugene prophesied.

But by the next halt the mountains, standing bare as stone walls, still lay far off. Not so much as a pool of stagnant water was to be found.

It was not hunger and thirst that broke down the march. The Europeans had strength enough to keep on to the heights. The nomad tribes hung back complaining that their animals were beginning to die. Moreover, since their camels and sheep could not graze, milk was failing in the animals.

And the nomads had grown daily in numbers, since half-starved tribes, sighting the column, had hurried in to beg for food. Unruly as a mob, they pressed around the marchers, their children scurrying underfoot to snatch up out of the dirt the hard ends of biscuits thrown away by the soldiers.

Then, rounding the point of a cape, they sighted the columns and tawny shapes of buildings. In the furnace heat of mid-afternoon they stumbled into a city of ruins, where marble porticos reared drunkenly over a rubble of broken stone. The huge cistern, half caved in, held yellow water. It stank of sulphur, and the horses would not drink of it. Eugene shrugged his heavy shoulders. "Dead for a thousand years."

Eaton was for rushing on, but the Tyrolese advised a halt in this skeleton of a Roman seaport. Immediately the column broke up, the nomads searching the hollows for water that might lie under wet sand, Hamet's Arabs quartering themselves in a withered palm grove, the Greeks stretching out in the shade of the ruins, scraping the sand away to gaze curiously at the mosaic paving beneath, while the striped jerseys of the few Marines paired off, to quest around in their never-ending search for old coins. Eugene shook his head. "It is not good." Wiping his eyes, he stared out to sea. "The Tripolitan's sail, where is it?"

"Hauling to nor'west," muttered Paul, without thinking. He had kept close watch on the triangular orange sail of the xebec that escorted them along the coast as an albatross follows a ship.

Eugene scowled at him, in a bad temper. "So a seaman speaks. Be so kind, Monsieur Davies, to explain to me in English-where is it?"

Pointing out a speck in the haze to the westward, Paul said: "There." The vessel had hauled to windward fast after they halted, as if to hurry ahead of them. He had an impulse to explain as much to the truculent Eugene, but anger kept him silent.

Apparently the Tyrolese drew his own conclusions from the xebec's departure because he lifted his gaze to the shoulder of the mountain now overhanging them. The lines deepened about his eyes, and he rumbled, dissatisfied, "Herr Gott und-General Eaton, will you allow your ranks to lie in the sand and kill flies? This is no place to kill flies. Give them duties. Where is firewood? Where is food?"

Out of his explosive complaining, Paul gathered that Eugene wanted a feast prepared for all the Europeans, as a distraction. They had no water to cook rice. When Eugene demanded that the Yankee buy sheep from the Arabs, Eaton grimaced and pulled a slim sack from his pocket. Out of it he shook three Venetian sequins-all that remained of his money.

He seemed to act upon the advice of the Tyrolese as if it were Bible writ.

"But the nomads will not slaughter their animals for food," he objected. "Now that they are near starvation themselves, will they sell a sheep for three sequins?"

Marie's soft voice broke into the tense argument of the men. "I think their women will sell some sheep, General, for no money at all."

Her donkey had drawn close to the fetid water of the cistern. The women, she explained, had been fascinated by the ornamented brass buttons on the blue coats of the Marines. The buttons would add splendor to their bracelets and throat chains. For a handful they might give up a sheep.

Marie proved to be right. Eaton fed his command that evening with portions of roast mutton and a cup of sour wine, around fires made from driftwood and dead palm branches. But the tribal folk gathered beyond the firelight, patiently watching the strange Christians who gorged themselves on meat and smoked fuming tobacco afterward.

Paul noticed that Eugene made an excuse to go off afterward with Mendrici to the Italian's tent. The physician had some good wine left in the casks that were his private property. Yet Paul had overheard Eugene and Percival Farquhar discussing whether the tombs hidden away in the heights before them might be intact, with their riches. Farquhar must have need of more money than the small pay he had drawn from Eaton-