The Barbary Pirates by William Dietrich Read Free Book Online Page B

where?”
    “I’ve ordered research into just that question. Gog and Magog, it seems, are referred to in the Bible, and are sometimes interpreted as lands at the ends of the earth. Og itself is a Celtic reference to a distant, powerful kingdom. I wonder if there was some common, root language.”
    Magnus had believed in long-ago civilizations and forgotten powers.
    “This machine had something to do with Og, I was told. The Little Red Man said he’d warned French leaders at critical times before, and that I must remember that word because I would hear it again someday. I remembered the sound of it—Og—because it was so odd, but I hadn’t heard it spoken again until now.” He stared. “By you.”
    Despite myself, I felt a shiver. “I don’t know any Little Red Man.”
    “But you do find ancient things, and fate keeps bringing us together. You’re an agent of destiny, Ethan Gage, which is why I’ve remained intrigued by you. I’ve told no one of Og, and very few of the Little Red Man, and yet you bear that word. You, the wayward American.”
    “It was simply written down. I’d no time to make sense of it.”
    “Sense! Sometimes I think I’m as lunatic as my brothers.” Napoleon’s odd family was, of course, the source of endless gossip in Paris. The more he tried to elevate his relatives to positions of responsibility, the sharper the public witticisms in cataloging their faults.
    “My elder brother Joseph only wants to be rich, and he’s loyal enough,” Bonaparte confided. “But Lucien is venal and jealous, and Jerome is reportedly smitten by some ship-owner’s daughter in Baltimore. Baltimore!” He said it as if it were a barbarian fiefdom. “I forced Louis to marry Josephine’s daughter, Hortense, this last January, but Louis doesn’t really like women and Hortense loves one of my aides. She spent the night before her wedding weeping.”
    Why he confessed all this to me I don’t know, but men sometimes tell me things because they figure me inconsequential. Of course the actual Paris gossip was more malicious than that . Napoleon’s brother Lucien had started a rumor that Napoleon forced the marriage of Hortense and Louis because Napoleon, her stepfather, had impregnated her himself in his desperation to father an heir. Hortense’s marriage, so the gossip went, would legitimize a potential successor. Certainly Hortense was heavy with child, but who made it, and when, was open to speculation. I was wise enough not to ask.
    “You’re not a lunatic,” I said sympathetically, to ingratiate myself. I can be a shameless courtier. “You just bear the weight of rule.”
    “Yes, yes. Ah, Gage. You cannot imagine how carefree you are, floating free of responsibility!”
    “But I’m trying to influence the future of Louisiana.”
    “Forget Louisiana. Nothing is going to happen with Louisiana until the situation in Haiti is resolved. The blacks fight on and on.” He scowled. “And now you bring back memory of the gnome! He came into my tent past all my guards. His cloak dragged on the sand, making a track like a snake’s.” His voice was hollow, his eyes distant.
    “But we don’t know where Og was.”
    “Yes we do. Og is a word scholars associate with Atlantis.”
    “Atlantis?” Hadn’t the gold foil borne that word as well? “And where is that , exactly?” I’d heard of it, of course—Magnus Bloodhammer had talked of it in America, savants had debated its geography, and we’d even speculated it was the source of mysterious copper mines in the wilderness—but I wasn’t sure of the details.
    “Atlantis is Plato’s story—a fabulous kingdom named for Atlas that was destroyed in some upheaval. Legend has that it was advanced and sought to assert its influence over the entire world. The common belief is that it was distant, like Og, perhaps. Beyond Gibraltar, what the Greeks called the Pillars of Hercules.”
    “So what has Og to do with Thira?”
    “Perhaps because they are not