What you heard

Aaron rowed the boat across the ithsmus. He’d caught wind of a feast planned this evening at the palace in Athens, and if he was going to meet Sultan Karpathy at the port, he’d better hurry. But the Turks didn’t make it easy, fighting their little war with each other like a Muslim version of the Spanish armada.

He had a pretty good idea of when he’d landed this time, about three hundred years before his last stop in the councils of the de Medicis. Most times he conjured up the right place, but he backfired occasionally just as he’d done this time. He’d wanted to dine with the Pilgrims in Plymouth for turkey dinner – but instead, he’d landed in a Turkish prison bath in Constantinople. Byzantium didn’t please Aaron Aardvark, too grimy.

But he certainly got more nookie in those three hours in the prison bath than he would’ve gotten with the Pilgrims. The men and the women just crawled all over him (and under him and in him). “Hey you,” he said to the concubine on the other end of the boat, the Amazon beauty he’d grabbed before heading to the port, “what’s your name?” But she didn’t speak English or Hebrew (Aaron’s only other language), so she just grunted and spread her legs open for him.

He’d plug the horny concubine here in the boat and then be on his own when he landed in Greece. She could take the boat back to Constantinople. He traveled fastest alone, and he needed to hurry to make it to the sultan’s feast by evening.