Where the Light Falls
Page 33
Jean-Luc rubbed his two clammy palms together, still unsure of the old man’s motivations but certain of his madness. “For God’s sake, Lazare, why must you do this? The poor man’s father was beheaded by you and your friends, his brother was chased, I believe murdered, by the man who wants to kill him, and his fiancée has been hunted for no reason other than returning his love. When will it all end? The Terror is over. Can we not attempt to rebuild our lives and our city?”
Lazare took out his snuffbox, sprinkled a pinch onto his gloved hand, and snorted the powder. He lowered his eyes and stamped the ground with his feet. After an uncomfortable pause he looked back up at Jean-Luc. “André de Valière has managed to elude the justice of our Republic. The justice that our fallen martyrs died to bring us. Their work will continue posthumously, through me, until all of our enemies are hunted down and destroyed. That is a vow I will keep.”
Now Jean-Luc couldn’t help but let out a short, bitter laugh, a gesture of disgust. Of contempt. He looked directly into the old man’s pale eyes as he answered, his tone biting: “You do not seek justice, citizen. You’re no better than any of those monsters—Robespierre, Saint-Just, Hébert. They were murderers who ultimately received the same justice that they so ruthlessly meted out. Perhaps you have been fated to join them.”
“You’ll make me irritated, saying things like that,” Lazare sneered, his voice as taut as a bowstring.
Now Jean-Luc broiled with a feeling of rising indignation. For his friend André. For Sophie, imprisoned. For the nation that had been gripped by the madness of this old man and his murderous friends. “I don’t give a damn about your anger, Lazare. But take it out on me—not Sophie. You can’t imprison a woman just because she loves a good man and looks at you like a plague-ridden corpse. And how can you blame her? You’re barely better.”
“And here I was trying to forgive you.”
Jean-Luc spit on the ground close to the old man’s shoes. “Piss on your forgiveness.”
Lazare sighed, rubbing his gloved hands together, his voice staying calm. “So this is the gratitude I receive? For pulling you up out of the gutter, making you something greater than you were. Bringing you into the company of important men. You’ve thrown away my friendship over a woman and her pitiful lover?”
Jean-Luc gasped out a guttural exhale. “This is madness, and I’ve had quite enough.” He stepped up onto the curb, shoving past the old man. But Lazare had not finished.
“I still want André de Valière’s head. And I’ll have it.”
Jean-Luc paused, hovering outside the tavern door. He turned around, wrestling with the urge to rush toward the man and throttle him. But Lazare’s words cut him short. “I will have it. And then, once I’ve done away with him, I shall begin to tighten the noose.”
Lazare looked Jean-Luc squarely in the eyes now, his steady gaze impervious to the giving or receiving of emotion. His eyes spoke of one thing only: his raw, unwavering determination.
“You see, Citizen St. Clair, I will offer you one last lesson. And then I think I am quite done teaching you. Here it is, so listen closely: Murat sought simply to kill his enemies. He wanted to settle some old grievance, a feud he had with Old Man de Valière, by punishing the subsequent generation.” Lazare waved a hand dismissively. “But I, I told him that that was much too easy. Death ends pain, you see? You do not merely kill your enemies; you must first make them suffer. You must take from them everything they hold dear. So, with that said, I have a question for you, Jean-Luc St. Clair: should I begin with Marie or Mathieu?”
July 1798
André had never truly known thirst before the march through Egypt.
Alexandria had fallen quickly, its sentries caught unaware and ill-equipped to fend off the French cannons and rifles that bombarded the walls of the city.
Their principal objective would be Cairo, which lay almost two hundred kilometers inland, on the southern side of a punishing stretch of barren desert. This desert was Bedouin-controlled territory, inhabited by fierce and dreaded tribes of nomadic warriors who neither acknowledged nor feared these strangely uniformed foreigners. But the most lethal enemy on that march, André suspected, would be the relentless sun. The daytime heat of the first few days was unlike anything André or any of his comrades had ever experienced.
André found Ashar on the beach the day before they were to set out from Alexandria. The Egyptian’s face was blank, an inscrutable mask, as he looked out over the horizon. “Why do you side with us, the French, against your own people, Ashar?” André asked.
Ashar’s dark eyes were steady, without expression, as he turned to face André. After a long pause, he answered André’s question with an evasive statement: “Your general, Napoleon Bonaparte, intends to make war with the Mamelukes.”
“Yes?”
“Tribal warriors, horsemen, who rule the interior of my country.”
“And so I ask you again: why would you fight with the French?” Implicit in André’s question, though he did not say it outright, was: how can we trust you?
“Because the Mamelukes are not Egyptian,” Ashar answered, matter-of-factly. “They are Ottoman, or at least they come from somewhere ruled by them. They are foreign invaders, just as you are. But they rule my country as a wolf would rule a flock of sheep, taking and devouring whatever they wish. From what I have seen of them and of your people, I believe the French would show more mercy to my people than those barbarians have done.”
“You must have never been to Paris,” André replied with a half smile, though it quickly faded as he thought of home and all those who had perished over the previous years.
“Captain Valière!” A horseman approached, offering André a brisk salute. “Sir, you are to report to the command tent of General Dumas immediately. Your promotion orders are complete and the general would like to issue them to you personally.”
“My promotion?” André stared at the man for a moment, wondering whether this was some sort of ruse.
“Yes, sir.” The soldier saluted André, then remounted his saddle.
Ashar looked at him with his typically sly smile. “Perhaps your fortunes have finally begun to turn.”
André ran a hand through his hair and exhaled a long, deep breath. “Major Valière.”
“Yes, sir,” the messenger said. “You’re to be assigned to the cavalry, under Generals Dumas and Murat.”
As the sun descended beyond the dunes on the third evening of July, André rode out of the city of Alexandria among a force of some fifteen thousand soldiers. They rode or marched through the night, with the sounds of howling winds and far-off cries echoing as unseen reminders that they were foreigners in this wild desert realm. As the gray light of dawn turned to day and the sun rose in the sky, the heat hovered over and around them like an unwelcome and unmoving presence, extinguishing their high morale and sapping the energy they needed to cover the miles of desert.
“Conserve your water, lads!” André ordered as they halted and made camp for their afternoon rest. He noted, with dismay, that few took heed of this command; in temperatures soaring well above anything they had ever known, this order ran counter to their every human instinct.
On the third day of their march, the first animals began to die, and this cruel omen of the desert’s lethality caused some of the men to grumble and ask questions. “How much farther until the water source?” became a common query, posed nearly every hour.
André didn’t know the answer. He did not know, any more than his men did, what lay ahead; all he knew was that turning back was not an option. Their only hope was to keep going forward—eventually, they had to reach the Nile. With the tricolor standard leading the way like a distant, shimmering apparition, André and his men covered mile after mile across open sand that burned under centuries of unforgiving sunlight. The men felt their cheeks scorch and blister, their lips grow puffy from sun poisoning. More animals dropped, their carcasses left in the sand to feed the intrepid buzzards that w
ould fly this far from any oasis. And still, no sign of the lifesaving Nile.
As horrible as the days were, the nights were no better. Their evening serenades were the high-pitched trills of the nearby Bedouin warriors, encamped just out of sight, a constant companion to the French march. The presence of this heard but unseen foe was made all the more eerie by the distant glow of their camps, the scent of their fires drifting over the horizons of moonlit sand.
“War cries,” Ashar explained. He had ridden up silently and now unfurled his sleeping pad beside André’s.
“Do they wish to fight us?” André asked, mesmerized by the never-ending glow of the distant fires.
“Perhaps,” was all the cryptic reply that Ashar offered.
André shivered involuntarily in the dark, bitter desert night.
But of all the trials André faced on that march, his dreams were the worst, for they assailed his mind and his very soul. He could not say whether it was the exhaustion. Or the thirst. Or the strange sounds that seemed to float across the endless expanse of desert. But his dreams were so vivid that he woke each morning feeling as if his grasp of reality, even of his mind, was slowly slipping away from him, grains of sand sliding through his blistered fingertips.
He dreamed of many things, but without fail his dreams would end with visions of Sophie. In one of the more vivid ones, she invited him to attend her wedding—a wedding between herself and another man, aged and ghostly pale. But the worst was when she came to him, crying, telling him that Remy was dead and that she had been listed for the scaffold the following day. André would wake with a lurch, his neck clammy and his body sweating under a makeshift cover made from his saddle and saddle blanket.
On the tenth day, it seemed as if the men could go no farther. André, exhausted and defeated, did not know whether he had it in him to force them on. It was on this morning that a small group of scouts appeared, riding back from the front of the train with a fervor that none of them had felt since leaving Alexandria. “Water! Water up ahead! We’ve reached the Nile!”
André watched the track of the riders as they galloped past him and disappeared along the horizon in a cloud of dust. He fixed his eyes forward and shielded them, hoping to see a shimmer up ahead that promised to be their salvation.
Turning to the nearest noncommissioned officer, André said, “I want to know how far the river is. Stay here, I’m coming straight back. Keep formation, no matter what any of the other companies do. For God’s sake, keep formation.”
André spurred his horse forward and galloped past the miserable infantry companies. After cresting a small dune, André squinted and gazed ahead, and then he saw it: a vast field spotted with intermittent groves of fertile vegetation. At the far end of the expanse, a brilliant track of shiny blue-green. It was a glistening surface, lined by a wall of shade-giving palm trees. Glorious sight! Perhaps a half league ahead of him, the first companies were reaching it, splashing into it with the joy and reckless abandon of a prisoner unexpectedly set free. It was no mirage; they had in fact reached the Nile.
André snapped the reins of his exhausted horse and cantered back to rejoin his squadron, eager to tell them that they were indeed saved.
—
“They will drink themselves to death.” Ashar reined in his horse beside André’s.
André laughed. “I think some of them might welcome that.”
“No, it is the truth,” the Egyptian answered, his tone as humorless as his facial expression. “Their bodies are not meant, after ten days, to guzzle this much. They must sip this water in moderation, slowly, or they will poison themselves. I have seen it before.”
The warning, and Ashar’s certainty, settled on André, and he turned with a new, horrified concern to see thousands of Frenchmen glutting themselves in the water, gulping uninterrupted mouthfuls.
“Stop drinking, damn you!” The order was issued from over André’s shoulder. André turned and saw the outline of a familiar figure. Nicolai Murat. André’s entire body stiffened, but the general cantered past him and rode directly toward the bank. “Stop drinking, that’s an order!”
André had a feeling that this would end badly, so he rounded up his men, some of them only footsteps from reaching the river. “Squadron, back into column!”
His men, stunned and incredulous at being ordered not to drink the water their bodies so badly needed, nevertheless assented, muttering unhappily under their breath as they stepped away from the river and gathered around André.
But some of the other squadrons and infantry companies already appeared as an unruly mob, abandoning their discipline to the intoxicating relief the river provided.
“Stop drinking, that’s an order!” Murat, atop his horse, yelled louder at the hundreds of troops bathing in the river. Most of the men either did not hear the general or chose to ignore his orders, too feverish were they drinking and splashing in the water.
“To file now, lads, we’ll drink our fill in a moment, but we must be patient.” André kept his men close, even as he kept his eyes fixed uncomfortably on Murat and the chaos unfolding in the nearby river.
With a decisive movement Murat reached for the pistol holstered at his waist. He raised it and took aim. A loud crack was followed by a plume of smoke and the familiar scent of burnt gunpowder as the bullet hit a man who was stooped over the river, greedily gulping mouthfuls of the Nile. The man did not see it coming. His body fell into the water with a splash, a flow of red seeping across his back. It was as instantaneous as it was inglorious, this man’s death on the Egyptian riverbank.
All around now the other men ceased their drinking and turned in the direction of the gunfire. “The next man to drink without his commander’s permission shall face a firing squad,” Murat shouted, his mustache quivering as he spoke. “You are soldiers in the French army, not beasts without control over your instincts. You will show moderation, or you will bring about your own death.”
The men began to inch back away from the river, huddling in small groups with looks of disbelief, fear, and anger. André was as stunned as the rest of them, but he kept his men close, an organized cluster removed from the melee of the riverbank.
“Officers, control your men as they refill their skins and canteens.” Murat turned his horse, not glancing again in the direction of his lifeless victim. “And someone bury that damned fool.”
Ashar remained beside André at the bank of the river, his voice sage as he watched the flowing waters before them. “I’ve seen it before.”
Later, once the column had re-formed and recommenced its seemingly unending march, they hugged the snakelike shape of the Nile on a southeasterly course. Much of the panic had dissipated, washed clean by the fact that their thirst had been sated and the water source would henceforth remain in sight, bordering the army’s eastern flank for the remainder of the march. Morale rose as they continued on, bound for Cairo.
As they marched farther inland and south, André and the men got their first glimpses of villages and local Egyptians. The people were dressed simply, in lightweight cotton that hung loosely on their frames and sandaled shoes much more suitable for the terrain than the heavy leather of the French boots. Their eyes, dark and inquisitive, watched as the soldiers lumbered past. Some of the little children ran up to the moving columns, jabbering in incomprehensible Arabic as their bare feet scudded along to keep pace with the strangely dressed French.
One morning they encountered a train of Egyptians marching in the opposite direction from their lines. Several camps had begun to pop up along the banks of the Nile. Establishments that appeared temporary, as if the people were on the move.
“Where are they going?” André asked, looking at one such camp, where a group of children had broken off stalks of papyrus reed and were using them to duel one another outside a cluster of tents.
“They are fleeing,” Ashar answered.
“Why?”
“They fear the Mamelukes more than the French.”
“What are they like?” André asked. “The Mamelukes.”
“They are like the desert,” Ashar answered after a thoughtful pause. “Fierce. Unforgiving. Unrelenting.”
“But…how do they survive out here?”
“The desert is their home. It is what they know.”
“They have no permanent homes?”
“Some of the Mameluke chieftains have great houses in the cities, palaces adorned with women more beautiful than you could possibly imagine.” Ashar sighed wistfully, then looked back to the endless sand dunes stretched out before them. “But they are nomadic warriors. Horsemen. Their women and children move with them as they go.”
André picked at a reed, tying a bow with its stalk. “Are there many of them?”
Ashar nodded. “Beyond count.”
André whistled. Austrians and Prussians were a formidable enemy, to be sure, but a familiar one at least, their tactics and weapons like those of the French. These desert horsemen seemed to come from a place and time that none in their army had ever known. André eyed Ashar again, with that recurring sense that although he was familiar with his friend, he did not truly know him.
“The Mamelukes are a proud order,” Ashar continued. “And why should they not be? They were brought to this country by Egyptians to be our slaves. Within a few decades they went from slaves to becoming the masters of Egypt. Now they simply have a new enemy to slaughter.”