The mighty sea wolf Abdul-Basir Hakim stood at the port rail of his anchored schooner and studied the curving Mexican coastline a hundred miles north of the city of Mazatlan and the Tropic of Cancer. Protected by the Baja Peninsula to the west and the Sierra Madre to the east, the Gulf of California was dead calm, the cobalt sea shimmering in hard winter sunlight. His skin was tanned almost black by the sun and his great beak of a nose and hazel eyes gave him the look of a piratical hawk. He took the telescope from his eye and said, “They return.”
A dory rowed by two men crossed the sparkling sea at a fast clip toward the Nawfal and its waiting commander.
Hakim put the glass to his eye again and studied the village on the shore. Yes, he decided, there was some kind of fiesta going on. The plaza was full of people, their clothes a riot of color against the drab stucco buildings. Faintly, almost lost in distance, he heard a band play with more enthusiasm than skill.
He nodded. Where there was a fiesta there would be women, and at least a few of them would surely be pretty and shapely of body enough to command a good price. The sheik turned to his second-in-command, a scar-faced rogue he’d saved from a French gallows. “A fiesta, Najid.”
The man smiled, showing few teeth and all of those black. “Good news, lord.” Hassan Najid had no need to say more. He, like his master, knew the implications of such a celebration.
Unlike his men, who were dressed in the striped shirts and black bell-bottom pants of English seamen, Hakim wore the blue robes of a Bedouin. At his left side hung a gold-hilted saif, the terrible curved scimitar of the Middle East. The sheik was proud to say that two score men had fallen to his sword in many battles.
The dory bumped alongside the schooner then a seaman scrambled over the rail. The man bowed and Hakim said, “Well?”
“A wedding, lord,” the seaman said.
“And the bride?”
“Very lovely, lord. And there are other pretty young women there.” The seaman smiled. “And some hags.”
“And the men? What about the men?”
“No more than thirty of fighting age.”
“Are they armed?”
“They are sheep, lord.”
Hakim gave that some thought. Like many successful warriors, he was a cautious man and carefully weighed the odds before entering battle.
Finally he turned to Najid and said, “Lower the longboat. You and eleven others will go with me. The men will use their swords and pistols this day.”
Najid gave a deep salaam, then turned away, shouting orders. Within minutes, the longboat was lowered and a dozen heavily armed seamen scrambled on board. Hakim, his naked blade across his knees, took his usual place at the bow.
That he was outnumbered did not enter the sheik’s thinking. His men were the elite of his corsairs, tough desert warriors born and bred for war. They would make short work of a rabble of Mexican peasants.
The longboat followed the surf and ground to a halt on a narrow stretch of shingle beach between half a dozen upturned fishing boats. The village, a rambling collection of adobe buildings built around a central plaza, lay fifty yards from shore.
Hakim stood on the beach and studied the village through his telescope.
The plaza was crowded with people dancing to music the sheik did not understand or appreciate, a far cry from the sweet flute airs of his homeland.
One girl stood out above the rest. Dressed in white, she was obviously the bride, and her hair, as black and glossy as a raven’s wing, hung unbound to her waist, swaying like a thick sable curtain as she danced.
Sheik Hakim nodded and smiled. Such a bride would bring a fine price at the Zanzibar slave market. He turned and addressed his men. “I want the girl in white and all the other women present. I will make my selection in the plaza.”
“And the men, lord?” Najid asked.
“Kill them all. Spare the hags and the atfal. We do not make war on children this day.” Hakim raised his sword. “Forward!”
The corsairs hit the village like a ripsaw through soft pine.
Women screamed in terror as their men were cut down one by one.
The groom, a slender, handsome young man, tried his best to protect his bride and got a sword in the guts for his attempts. He died hard, using the last of his strength trying, and failing, to come to grips with his attacker.
Shrieking, the bride kneeled beside her fallen husband and took him in her arms and soon her dress looked like blood on snow.
Hakim, huge and powerful, cut down three cowering peons one after the other, laughing, enjoying the slaughter. His sword was not a silent weapon. The steel blade announced its coming deathblow with a thin whisper, and for a dozen Mexicans it was the last sound they heard on this earth.
The village blacksmith, taller and more muscular than the others, made a stand at his forge and dashed out the brains of two of Hakim’s men with a hammer.
Enraged, the sheik ordered him taken alive and lost a third man when the smith rammed a corsair’s head into the anvil, splitting the man’s skull so his brains spilled onto the floor. But finally the giant was wrestled to the ground where, bloody but defiant, he was bound hand and foot with ropes.
When the slaughter was over, the sand of the plaza was scarlet with blood from the sprawled, butchered bodies. The fountain in the middle of the square ran red, the legs of a headless corpse sticking out of the basin. Above the village the sky was blue, the sun bright, but the air was tainted with the metallic smell of blood, and the birds shunned the place.
Hakim’s corsairs herded the bride and a dozen other girls to the beach. The women were terrified, some crying uncontrollably while others stood, stone-faced, in shocked silence.
The sheik ordered the women to be pushed into a line, then strolled past them, pausing at each one to study her face and figure. In the end he settled on the bride, a beautiful girl named Consuelo Spinoza, and three others.
“Take them to the ship, then return,” he ordered Najid, whose sword hand was crimson to the wrist. “See no harm comes to them or you’ll pay with your head.”
The longboat pulled away with the hysterical women on board, grieving for lost fathers, husbands, or lovers.
Sheik Abdul-Basir Hakim watched them leave and was well satisfied. If that infidel dog Zebulon Moss had agreed to provide more, his trip would be profitable indeed.
He turned away from the shore. He had a score to settle.
He ordered the blacksmith brought before him and his corsairs forced the man to his knees. The Mexican was defiant; no fear in him. That was good. Hakim would not defile his blade with the blood of a coward.
One swift stroke of the sheik’s sword and the blacksmith’s head jumped from his body and rolled in the sand. Hakim’s men cheered and Hakim acknowledged them by smiling and holding his bloody sword aloft.
By the beards of his forefathers, it had been a fine morning’s work.