suette anglaise. ”
“Never heard of any such disease—and I’m English, mind you.”
Moseh de la Cruz shrugged, as best a man could when hacking at a cluster of barnacles with a pitted and rusted iron hoe. “It is a well-known disease, hereabouts—whole neighborhoods were laid low with it in the spring.”
“Perhaps they’d made the mistake of listening to too much musick—?”
Moseh shrugged again. “It is a real enough disease—perhaps not as fearsome as some of the others, such as Rising of the Lights, or Ring-Booger, or the Laughing Kidney, or Letters-from-Venice…”
“Avast!”
“In any event, you came down with it, Jack, and had such a fever that all the other tutsaklars in the banyolar were roasting kebabs over your brow for a fortnight. Finally one morning you were pronounced dead, and carried out of the banyolar and thrown into a wain. Our owner sent me round to the Treasury to notify the hoca el-pencik so that your title deed could be marked as ‘deceased,’ which is a necessary step in filing an insurance claim. But the hoca el-pencik knew that a new Pasha was on his way, and wanted to make sure that all the records were in order, lest some irregularity be discovered during an audit, which would cause him to fall under the bastinado at the very least.”
“May I infer, from this, that insurance fraud is a common failing of slave-owners?”
“Some of them are completely unethical, ” Moseh confided. “So I was ordered to lead the hoca el-pencik back to the banyolar and show him your body—but not before I was made to wait for hours and hours in his courtyard, as midday came and went, and the hoca el-pencik took a siesta under the lime-tree there. Finally we went to the banyolar —but in the meantime your wagon had been moved to the burial-ground of the Janissaries.”
“Why!? I’m no more a Janissary than you are.”
“Sssh! So I had gathered, Jack, from several years of being chained up next to you, and hearing your autobiographical ravings: stories that, at first, were simply too grotesque to believe—then, entertaining after a fashion—then, after the hundredth or thousandth repetition—”
“Stay. No doubt you have tedious and insufferable qualities of your own, Moseh de la Cruz, but you have me at a disadvantage, as I cannot remember them. What I want to know is, why did they think I was a Janissary?”
“The first clew was that you carried a Janissary-sword when you were captured.”
“Proceeds of routine military corpse-looting, nothing more.”
“The second: you fought with such valor that your want of skill was quite overlooked.”
“I was trying to get myself killed, or else would’ve shown less of the former, and more of the latter.”
“Third: the unnatural state of your penis was interpreted as a mark of strict chastity—”
“Correct, perforce!”
“—and assumed to’ve been self-administered.”
“Haw! That’s not how it happened at all—”
“Stay,” Moseh said, shielding his face behind both hands.
“I forgot, you’ve heard.”
“Fourth: the Arabic numeral seven branded on the back of your hand.”
“I’ll have you know that’s a letter V, for Vagabond.”
“But sideways it could be taken for a seven.”
“How does that make me a Janissary?”
“When a new recruit takes the oath and becomes yeni yoldash, which is the lowliest rank, his barrack number is tattooed onto the back of his hand, so it can be known which seffara he belongs to, and which bash yoldash is responsible for him.”
“All right—so ’twas assumed I’d come up from barracks number seven in some Ottoman garrison-town somewhere.”
“Just so. And yet you were clearly out of your mind, and not good for much besides pulling on an oar, so it was decided you’d remain tutsaklar until you died, or regained your senses. If the former, you’d receive a Janissary funeral.”
“What about the latter?”
“ That remains to be seen. As it was, we