The Rosetta Key

by William Dietrich

  We kicked our horses and began to climb.

  It was a relief to get out of the Jordan Valley and into less cloying air. We cooled, and the slope began to smell of scrub pine. Bedouin tents were pitched on the mountain’s benches, and I could spy black-robed Arab boys tending wandering herds of scrubby goats. We followed a caravan track upward, hooves plopping in the soft dirt, horses snorting when they passed camel dung.

  It took four hours, but finally we breasted the top. We could indeed see the Promised Land back west across the Jordan, brown and hazy from here, looking nothing like milk and honey. The Dead Sea was a blue mirror. Ahead, I saw no cave promising to hold treasure. Instead there was a French tent in a hollow, green grass next to it indicating a spring. The low ruins of something, an old church maybe, were nearby. Several men waited for us by a wisp of campfire smoke, the remains of the signal fire. Was Silano among them? But before I could tell I spied a person sitting on a rocky outcrop below the ruined church, away from the men, and guided my horse out of our file and dismounted.

  It was a woman, dressed in white, who’d been watching our approach.

  She stood as I approached on foot, her tresses long and black as I remembered, falling from a white scarf to keep off the sun. Fabric and hair blew slightly in the mountain breeze. Her beauty was more tangible than I was prepared for, vivid in the mountaintop light. I’d turned her into a ghost and yet here she was, made flesh. I’d braced for disappointment, having polished her in my memory, but no, what I’d imagined was still here, the poised litheness, the lips and cheekbones worthy of a Cleopatra, the lustrous dark eyes. Women are flowers, giving grace to the world, and Astiza was a lotus.

  She’d aged, however. Not poorly—it’s a mistake to think age an insult to women, because her beauty simply had more character—but her eyes had deepened, as if she’d seen or felt things she would prefer she hadn’t. I wondered if I’d changed the same way: how long since I’d looked in a glass? I touched my hand to stubble and was conscious, suddenly, of my travel-stained clothes. Her own gown was dust-dyed, and divided for riding. She wore cavalry boots, small enough that perhaps they’d been borrowed from some drummer. She was slim, a dancer’s body, but again, we’d all narrowed. Her waist was cinched by a silk rope, holding a small curved dagger and a leather pouch. A water skin was on the rock.

  I hesitated, my rehearsals forgotten. It was as if she’d risen from the dead. Finally, “I sent men asking.” It sounded like an apology, awkward and without eloquence—but I was embarrassed, having floated away in the balloon when she hadn’t. “They told me you’d disappeared.”

  “Do you have my ring?”

  It was a cool way to begin. I took it out, the ruby bright. She plucked like a bird and slipped it quickly into the pouch at her side, as if it were hot. She still thinks it cursed, I thought.

  “I’ll use it as an offering,” she said.

  “To Isis?”

  “To all of Them, including Thoth.”

  “I feared you dead. It’s like a miracle. You look like a spirit or an angel.”

  “Do you have the seraphim?”

  Her distance was disconcerting. “I find you through hell and high water and all you want is jewelry?”

  “We need them.” She was straining not to show emotion, I realized.

  “We?”

  “Ethan, I was saved by Alessandro.”

  Well, there was a sharp little knife in the ribs. She’d been clinging to the balloon’s trailing tether, Silano locked around her so she couldn’t climb, and finally she had cut the rope with my tomahawk so the airship could float out of musket range. I’d failed to haul her into the basket, or get rid of the nobleman-sorcerer who’d once been her lover. So were they a couple again? If so, I was damned if I could understand why they’d sent for me. If all they wanted were gold trin-kets, I could have mailed the things. “You were almost killed by that bastard. The only reason you didn’t get away is because he wouldn’t let go.”

  She looked away over the valley, her tone hollow. “I don’t remember our landing, just the fall. The last thing I remember is your face, looking down from the lip of the basket. It was the most awful thing I’ve had to do in my life. As I cut the tether I saw a hundred emotions in your eyes.”

  “Horror, if I recall.”

  “Fear, shame, regret, anger, longing, sorrow … and relief.”

  I was going to protest but instead I flushed, because it was true.

  “When I swung that tomahawk I freed you, Ethan, from the burden thrust upon you: safeguarding the Book of Thoth. I freed you of me. Yet you didn’t go to America.”

  “You can’t cut the rope that binds us with a hatchet, Astiza.”

  So she turned back and looked at me again, her gaze fierce, her body trembling, and I knew it was all she could do to keep from flying into my arms. Why was she hesitating? Once again I understood nothing. And I couldn’t reach out either, because there was an invisible wall of duty and regret we had to break down first. We couldn’t properly begin because we had too much to say.

  “When I woke, a month had passed and I was with Silano, nursed in secret. The savants had given him research quarters in Cairo. As he mended his broken hip he continued to read every scrap of ancient writing that could be scoured for him. He’s assembled trunks and trunks of books. I even saw him picking through blackened manu-scripts that must have come from Enoch’s burned library. He hadn’t given up, not for an instant. He knew we hadn’t emerged from the pyramid with anything useful, and he suspected the book had been carried elsewhere. So once again I became his ally so I could use him to get back to you. I hoped you might still be in Egypt, or someplace near.”

  “You said you expected me to go to America.”

  “I doubted, I admit. I knew you might run. Then we heard rumors about inquiries being made, and my heart quickened. Silano had Bonaparte jail the real messenger and sent his own man in his place to Jerusalem to discourage you. Yet it didn’t work. And as the count began to piece together a new plan, and Najac left to spy on you, I realized that fate was conspiring to bring us all together again. We’re going to solve this mystery, Ethan, and find the book.”

  “Why? Don’t you just want to bury it again?”

  “It can also be used for good. Ancient Egypt was once a paradise of peace and learning. The world could be that way again.”

  “Astiza, you’ve seen our world. Or has the fall knocked all sense out of you?”

  “There’s a church on the rise just above us, ruins now. It marks where Moses may once have sat, gazing at his Promised Land, knowing that for all his sacrifice he himself could never enter it. Your culture’s old god was a cruel one. The building itself dates to Byzantine times. We’ve found a tomb of a Templar knight, as Silano’s studies led him to expect, and in that tomb bones. Hidden in one femur was a medieval map.”

  “You broke apart a dead man’s bones?”

  “Silano found mention of the possibility while studying in Constantinople. Fleeing Templars came this way, Ethan, after their destruction in Europe. They hid something they’d found in Jerusalem in a strange city this map describes. Silano has discovered something else as well, something that may involve electricity and your Benjamin Franklin. Then we heard you’d been executed at Jaffa, but your body was missing. In desperation, I gave Monge the ring, wondering if he’d come across you. And now …”

  “Were you ever in love with Alessandro Silano?”

  She hesitated only a moment before answering. “No.”

  I stood there, hoping for more before I dared ask the next, most logical question.

  “I’m not proud of that fact,” she said. “He loved me. He still does.

  Men fall in love easily, but women must be careful. We were lovers, but it would be hard for me to love him.”

  “Astiza, you didn’t need me here to carry two golden angels.”

  “Do you still love me, Ethan, as you said along the Nile?”

  Of course I loved h
er. But I feared her, too. What had poor Talma called her, a witch? A sorceress? I feared the power she’d once more have over me when I admitted my attraction. And what of poor Miriam, still besieged in the walls of Acre?

  Yet none of that mattered. All the old emotions were flooding back.

  “I’ve loved you from the moment I pulled the wreckage off you in Alexandria,” I finally confirmed in a rush. “I loved you when we were riding in the chebek up the Nile, and I loved you in Enoch’s house, and I loved you even when I thought for a moment you’d betrayed me at Dendara Temple. And I loved you when I thought we were doomed in the Great Pyramid. I loved you enough to throw in with the damned British just in hopes of getting you back, and I loved you to throw in again, it seems, with the damned French. I loved even the hope of seeing you when I was in the valley down there, and all the long ride up the mountain, even when I had no idea what I’d say to you or what you’d look like or how you’d feel.” I was losing all discipline, wasn’t I?

  Women can rob a man of sense faster than Appalachian jug whiskey.

  And now, out of breath and hanging for hope, I waited for her to cut me dead with a word. I’d opened my chest to the muskets. I’d bent beneath the executioner’s blade.

  She gave a sad smile. “It would be hard to love Alessandro, but it was not hard for me to fall in love with you.”

  I actually swayed slightly, dizzy with joy. “Then let’s leave now. Tonight.”

  She shook her head, her eyes wet. “No, Ethan. Silano knows too much. We can’t leave him to this quest. We have to see it through, and seize the book when the time is right. We have to work with him, and then betray him. It’s been my destiny since I met him in Cairo, and yours since you won the medallion in Paris. Everything has been leading up to this mountaintop, and the mountains beyond. We’ll find it and then we will leave.”

  “What mountains beyond?”

  “The City of Ghosts.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a sacred place, a mythical place. No European has been there, I think, since the Templars. Our journey isn’t done.”

  I groaned. “By the greed of Benedict Arnold.”

  “So you and I must now be estranged, Ethan, to mislead him. You’re angry I’ve partnered again with Alessandro, and we journey on as bitter ex-lovers. They must think us enemies until the very end.”

  “Enemies?”

  And then she swung and slapped me, as hard as she could.

  It sounded like a rifle shot. I glanced back. The others were looking down the slope at us. Alessandro Silano, tall, his bearing aristocratic, was watching most intently.

  Silano was not the lithe swordsman I remembered. He walked with a limp, and pain had hardened his handsomeness, turning Pan-like charm into a darker satyr of frustrated ambition. He was more rigid from the injury he’d suffered in the balloon fall, and his gaze had no seduction this time, only purpose. There was darkness in his eye, and a hard set to his mouth. He winced as he came down a goat path from the ruined Byzantine chapel to meet us, and didn’t offer a hand or greeting. What would be the point? We were rivals, and my face still stung from Astiza’s slap. I suspected Monge or other physicians had given him drugs for the pain.

  “Well?” Silano asked. “Does he have them?”

  “He wouldn’t say,” she reported. “He’s not convinced he should help us.”

  “So you persuade by slapping him?”

  She shrugged. “We have some history.”

  Silano turned to me. “We don’t seem able to escape each other, do we, Gage?”

  “I was doing just fine until you sent for me with Astiza’s ring.”

  “And you came for her, as you did before. I hope she learns to appreciate it before you learn to tire of it. She’s not an easy woman to love, American.” He glanced at her, no more sure than me how much to trust her. She’d put him off, I could tell. They were allies, not lovers.

  It’s not easy to live with something you can’t have, and Silano was not a man to tolerate frustration. We would all have to watch each other.

  “She told me you’d bring two small metal angels you found in the Great Pyramid. Did you?”

  I hesitated, just to make him squirm. Then, “I brought them. That doesn’t mean I’ll use them to help you.” I wanted to test how hostile he was. He could, of course, have me killed. “They’re in a safe place until we’ve talked. Given our history, you’ll forgive me if I don’t entirely trust you.”

  He bowed. “Nor I you, of course. And yet partners need not be friends. In fact, sometimes it is better they are not: there is more honesty that way, don’t you think? Come, I’m sure you’re hungry after your journey. Let’s eat, and I’ll tell you a story. Then you can decide if you wish to help.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Then you can go back to Acre. And Astiza can follow or stay as she wishes.” He began limping back up the path, then turned. “But I know what both of you will decide.”

  I glanced at Astiza, looking for reassurance that she despised this man, this diplomat, duelist, conjurer, scholar, and schemer. But her gaze was not of contempt but of sadness. She understood how captive we are to desire and frustration. We were dreamers in a nightmare of our own making.

  We hiked to the roofless church, light picking out its rubble.

  There were heaps and hollows from excavation. Astiza showed me the opened stone sarcophagus where the Knight Templar’s bones had apparently been found, concealed beneath the floor.

  “Silano found references to this grave in the Vatican and the libraries of Constantinople,” she said. “This knight was Michel de Troyes, who fled the arrests of the Templars in Paris and sailed for the Holy Land.”

  “There was a letter that said he laid his bones with Moses,” Silano said, “and buried the secret within him. It took some time before we realized the reference meant the location must be Mount Nebo, even though the grave of Moses has never been found. I hoped to simply find the document in the knight’s grave, but didn’t.”

  “You hit the bones in impatience,” Astiza said.

  “Yes.” The admission of emotion was reluctant. “And a crack in his femur showed a hint of gold. A slim tube had been inserted—his leg must have been butchered and its bone hollowed after his death—and within the tube was a medieval map, the names in Latin. It points to the next step. It was then that we sent for you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re a Franklin man. An electrician.”

  “Electricity?”

  “Is the key. I’ll explain after supper.”

  By now there were twenty of us—Najac’s men, my own trio, and Silano, Astiza, and several bodyguards that Silano traveled with.

  Evening had come on. These servants built a fire in a corner of the church’s ruined walls and then left key members of the expedition alone. Najac sat with us, to my distaste, so I insisted Ned and Mohammad eat with us as well. Astiza knelt demurely, not at all her character, and Silano commanded the center position. We sat on sand drifting across old mosaics of Roman hunting scenes, animals rearing before spears thrust by noblemen in a forest.

  “So, we are all together at last,” Silano began, the warmth of the fire making a cocoon from the cold desert sky. Sparks flew up to mingle with the stars. “Is it possible Thoth meant unions like this, to solve the riddles he left for us? Have we unwittingly been following the gods all along?”

  “I believe in one true God,” Mohammad muttered.

  “Aye,” said Ned, “though you’ve got the wrong one, mate. No offense.”

  “As I believe in One,” Silano said, “and all things, and all beings, and all beliefs, are manifestations of his mystery. I’ve followed a thousand roads in the libraries, monasteries, and tombs of the world, and all lead toward the same center. That center is what we seek, my reluctant allies.”

  “What center, master?” Najac prompted, like the trained dog he was.

  Silano picked up a grain of sand. “What if I
said this was the universe?”

  “I’d say take it, and leave us the rest,” Ned suggested.

  The count smiled thinly, threw up the grain, and caught it. “And what if I said the world around us is gossamer, as insubstantial as the spaces between a spider’s web, and all that sustains the illusion are mysterious energies we don’t understand—that this energy may be nothing more than thought itself? Or … electricity?”

  “I would say that the Nile you crashed into was no spiderweb, but instead substantial enough to break your hip,” I replied.

  “Illusion upon illusion. That is what some of the sacred writings maintain, all inspired by Thoth.”

  “Gold is mere spider’s silk? Power grasps nothing but air?”

  “Oh no. While we are but a dream, the dream is our reality. But here, then, is the secret. Let us suppose the most solid things, the stones of this church, are matrices of almost nothing. That the tumble of a boulder or the fall of a star is a simple mathematical rule. That a building can encompass the divine, a shape can be sacred, and a mind can sense unseen energies. What becomes of beings who realize this?

  If mountains are mere web, might not they be moved? If seas are the thinnest vapor, might not they be parted? Could the Nile become blood, or a plague of frogs spawned? How hard to tumble the walls of Jericho, when they are but a latticework? How hard to turn lead into gold when both, essentially, are dust?”

  “You’re mad,” said Mohammad. “This is Satan’s talk.”

  “No. I am a scholar!” And now he pushed to his feet, Najac giving him a hand that he shook off as soon as he was able. “You denied me that title once, at a banquet before Napoleon, Ethan Gage. You insulted my reputation to make me seem petty.” I reddened despite myself. The man forgot nothing. “Yet I’ve probed these mysteries for twenty years. I came to Cairo when it was still in the thrall of the Mamelukes, and explored old mysteries while you were frittering your life away. I followed the trail of the ancients while you hooked your opportunism to the French. I’ve tried to understand the enigmatic hints left behind for us, while the rest of you wrestled in the mud.” He hadn’t lost his high opinion of himself, either. “And now I understand what we’re seeking, and what we must harness to find it. We have to catch the lightning!”