“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 thought it was the former. So we went to the high ground outside the city-walls, to the burial-ground of the ocak-”

“Come again?”

“Ocak: a Turkish order of Janissaries, modeled after the Knights of Rhodes. They rule over Algiers, and are a law and society unto themselves here.”

“Is that man coming over to hit us with the bull’s penis a part of this ocak?”

“No. He works for the corsair-captain who owns the galley. The corsairs are yet another completely different society unto themselves.”

After the Turk had finished giving Jack and Moseh several bracing strokes of the bull’s penis, and had wandered away to go beat up on some other barnacle-scrapers, Jack invited Moseh to continue the story.

“The hoca el-pencik and several of his aides and I went to that place. And a bleak place it was, Jack, with its countless tombs, mostly shaped like half-eggshells, meant to evoke a village of yurts on the Transoxianan Steppe-the ancestral homeland for which Turks are forever homesick-though, if it bears the slightest resemblance to that burying-ground, I cannot imagine why. At any rate, we roamed up and down among these stone yurts for an hour, searching for your corpse, and were about to give up, for the sun was going down, when we heard a muffled, echoing voice repeating some strange incantation, or prophecy, in an outlandish tongue. Now the hoca el-pencik was on edge to begin with, as this interminable stroll through the graveyard had put him in mind of daimons and ifrits and other horrors.