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he searched the market for his own men. Armitage had been buying sweets, his fingers sticky with rose-flavored jelly, his sullen eyes all the darker when Alfie called him to heel. Alfie didn’t know if he should be furious or relieved to find the youth had disappeared again. Hopefully he would have the sense to lie low and avoid whatever trouble this looked like becoming.
    Mr. Hall, the purser—trying to buy enough green-stuff to stave off scurvy for eighty hungry men—had also mysteriously melted from view. But Kelly, one of the tars he had brought with him to carry burdens, stood in the sharp shadow of the awning, with a peach in one hand, a plum in the other, plum juice down his chin and fingers, and a sudden worried look that must, Alfie thought, be the mirror of his own.
“You will come with us.”
    The soldiers closed in, not comical at all any more, their hands on their long, curving scimitars, their faces grim.
“My captain will gladly talk to the Dey or his representative,” Alfie tried again, keeping his voice from rising into a squeak of panic with some effort. If half of what everyone “knew” about the Turks was true, then placidly going with them was the last thing he wanted to do. “He said as much a fortnight ago and you’ve done nothing but fob him off since. I do not have the authority to negotiate for him, and I am under orders to report back at once if the situation should change.”
His answer was the nudge of a rifle in his back. “I also am under orders,” said the officer, with a gleam of cold humor, “and your captain must be taught that the Dey has better things to do than to jump at the command of every British Lieutenant with nothing but a gunboat and his arrogance to his name. We can make this point peacefully, or with bloodshed. It is your choice.”
Alfie licked his lips—his mouth suddenly dry as the desert sand on which he stood. Not for the first time he damned John’s Admiral; the one who expected miracles and provided a pittance to achieve them with. This Janissary officer was right, Admiral fucking Saunders should have sent more than one little ketch to do this job. From the Dey’s point of view it must look like an insult, and from his own it looked like suicide. “I’ll come then,” he said, even as two of the janissaries got him by the arms and made the agreement moot. “But you’re making a mistake. You don’t insult the British Navy and get away with it. If you don’t treat with
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the captain of the Meteor , next time it’ll be fourteen ships of the line and there won’t be anything left of your city.”
    “We too are a proud maritime nation.” Beneath the extravagant mustache the officer’s smile twisted with anger. “We were a proud maritime nation when you British were painting yourselves blue and hunting heads like savages. Enough!” He gestured, and the guards’ grips on Alfie’s arms shifted to press tendon to bone. He swayed, knees almost buckling with the pain, and struggled long enough to lock gazes with the able seaman, who had dropped both fruit and stood with fists clenched.
    “Kelly! Tell the captain!”
“Aye sir!”
As he fled, one of the janissaries raised his rifle and sighted. “No, Abdy.” The officer pressed the barrel down. “Let the
infidel be our messenger. He can spare us the unpleasantness of further dealings with these dogs.”
    That told me, Alfie thought, filled with ridiculous, terrified laughter as they dragged him away. You don’t reason with dogs. But what do you do with them? What are they going to do with me?
God, he hoped Cavendish would think of something, before he had to find out!
     
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C
HAPTER 4
    The Algerian ship—a long, sleek galley, her great banks of oars beating like a fish’s fins—turned to cut across the Meteor’s course. She maneuvered like a fish, John thought, nimble and fleet. Or more like a shark. Barely a hundred feet of sea separated