Lord Abdul Harun

London calls him a corsair-lord and says he receives in a manner no London merchant could afford. His trade is men: taken in narrow water, priced, and sold back through brokers every packet room can name.

Lord Abdul Harun raids the belt of the Inner Sea that neither Archon Demetrios Kallisar nor Prince-Governor Rashid al-Qadisi wholly commands, and he has raided it, by the packet rooms’ count, for the better part of thirty years. He is no sea-rover of the old romance. He keeps a house on the western crescent with a garden court and a counting room, receives envoys in silk, and is spoken of in London as a lord because there is no other word for a man whom two governments treat with rather than hang.

His method is the taking of men, not ships. A hull that falls behind its convoy in a narrow place is boarded at first light by men who do nothing else, and boarded so cleanly that its master has seldom time to strike his colours. The cargo is a courtesy. The crew are the prize. They are carried inland to the cistern prisons behind his harbour, where each man is entered in a ledger with his house, his parish and his worth, and a letter goes north. In the taking of the brig Margaret Ansell in 4614 eleven men came home on the first payment, four on the second, and the cook, whose house would not pay, was sold on to the inland caravans and never heard of again. The mate came home with the letter that told London so, and without the two fingers that proved it was his hand.

None of this is concealed, and that is the scandal of it. The ransoms pass through brokers who are respectable men and do ordinary business for the rest of the week; the rates are steady and printed in the Basin houses’ private tables; and a British house with southern trade carries the possibility as a line in its accounts, because the line is smaller than the premium it would pay to insure against it. On the days when the fear is raiding the packet rooms call him a devil. On quiet days they call him a fact of trade.

A company will meet Harun’s name long before it meets him, and most never do: in a ransom letter, a widow’s petition, a broker’s draft that must be carried south under seal. The rule the packet rooms give is a hard one. Do not go after a man he holds. Go to the broker, pay what is asked, and count the men when they come off the boat.

In person

A man of about fifty, dark-bearded and grey at the chin, heavy-lidded and composed rather than savage. He wears layered silk robes over a fitted dark coat, rings, and a jewelled dagger carried for show, and receives at a carved table with a ransom ledger, broker’s letters and a brass sea-chronometer set with a blue engine-stone; behind him a white harbour and his anchored raiding craft.