Napoleon's Pyramids

by William Dietrich

  ‘My God, who is he?’ I said.

  She gripped to turn his hand, looking at his rings, and stopped. ‘A son of Horus,’ she murmured. On his finger was the same symbol she wore as an amulet. It was not an Islamic sign.

  He jerked his hand away. ‘That’s not for you,’ he suddenly growled in English.

  ‘You speak our language?’ I asked, once more startled.

  ‘I’ve had dealings with European merchants. And I’ve heard of you, the British in a green coat. What is a British doing with the Franks?’

  ‘I’m American. Antoine is French, Astiza Egyptian and Greek.’

  He absorbed this. ‘And I a Mameluke.’ He was on his back, looking up at the sky. ‘So does war and destiny bring us together.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘I am Ashraf el-Din, a lieutenant of Murad Bey.’

  ‘And what’s a son of Horus?’ I asked Astiza.

  ‘A follower of the ancients. This man is not the typical Mameluke from the Caucasus. He’s of the old families here, aren’t you?’

  ‘The Nile runs in my veins. I’m a descendant of the Ptolomies. But I was sworn into Mameluke ranks by Murad Bey himself.’

  ‘The Ptolomies? You mean Cleopatra’s clan?’ I asked.

  ‘And the generals of Alexander and Caesar,’ he said proudly.

  ‘The Mamelukes despise the Egyptians they rule,’ Astiza explained, ‘but occasionally they’ve recruited from the great old families.’

  All this seemed a curious coincidence. I’m attacked by the rare Mameluke who swears by a pagan god and speaks English? ‘Can I trust you if we let you up?’

  ‘I am your prisoner, taken in battle,’ Ashraf said. ‘I submit to your mercy.’

  I let him stand. He swayed a moment.

  ‘Your name is a mouthful,’ I said. ‘I think I shall call you Ash.’

  ‘I will answer.’

  And all this good fortune would evaporate if I couldn’t satisfy my colleagues by making sense of the medallion. Astiza with her Horus pendant had made a useful guess about it, and maybe this devil could too. With the division cheering and everyone’s eyes on the battle, I took the medallion from my shirt and dangled it before him. Talma’s eyes widened.

  ‘I’m more than a warrior, son of Horus,’ I said. ‘I’ve come to Egypt to understand this. Do you recognise it?’

  He blinked in wonder. ‘No. But another might.’

  ‘Who in Cairo knows what this means? Who knows the old Egyptian gods and your nation’s history?’

  He glanced at Astiza. She nodded at him and they jabbered together in Arabic. Finally she turned to me.

  ‘More gods than you know are walking your shadow, Ethan Gage. You have captured a warrior who claims to know a man I’ve only heard of as rumour, who takes as his name that of one long lost.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Enoch the wise, also known as Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes the trice-great, scribe of the gods, master of arts and sciences.’

  ‘My, my.’ Enoch was also the name of the Old Testament father of Methuselah. A long-lived bunch. My Masonic memories also recalled a supposed Book of Enoch, source of ancient wisdom. It had been lost several millennia ago. I peered at my bloody captive. ‘He knows this sage?’

  She nodded as our prisoner blinked at my medallion in wonder. ‘Enoch,’ she said, ‘is his brother.’

  Suddenly we were advancing. The square reformed into columns and we marched toward the Egyptian fortifications at Imbaba, literally climbing up and over a windrow of the dead. I tied Ash’s hands behind his back with a golden cord taken from his waist and left him bareheaded. His head was shaven except for the standard small tuft at the crown by which it was said that the Prophet Muhammad would, at their last breath, come and seize Mamelukes to raise them to paradise. His skullcap of coins was tucked into my own belt, and Astiza carried his fabulous sword. If I felt guilty about exposing my defeated enemy to the hot sky, the feeling was assuaged by the fact that the atmosphere was becoming more and more obscured by dust. While it was only about 4 p.m., the midsummer day was becoming dark.

  As we moved across the wreckage of the battlefield, I got a better view of what had happened. While our square and that of Jean-Louis Raynier had borne the brunt of the Mameluke cavalry attacks, other divisions had moved forward. One broke through enemy lines near the shore of the Nile and began raking the rear of the Egyptian infantry with cannon fire. Two more assaulted Imbaba directly to put an end to Egyptian batteries there. The surviving Mameluke cavalry had been split, some seeking refuge in the fortified town and others pushed westward into the desert with Murad Bey. This latter group was now scattering. The battle was turning into a rout, and the rout to slaughter.

  The French had carried the breastworks of Imbaba in their first emotional charge, the Albanian infantry disintegrating. Turning to flee, the Ottoman soldiers were shot down or forced into the Nile. Whenever there was any pause on the part of the French, they were ordered to keep firing by the commander-in-chief himself. Here was Napoleon’s grim fury. At least a thousand Mamelukes were caught up in this panic and were pushed with their infantry into the river, swiftly sinking under the weight of their personal fortunes. Those who tried to stand their ground were killed. This was war at its most primeval. I saw some of the French emerge from the carnage so stained with blood that it looked as if they’d wallowed in a wine vat.

  Our general galloped by, eyes shining. ‘Now! Crush them now, or we will pay more dearly later!’

  We bypassed Imbaba and marched rapidly the last miles until we were between the pyramids and Cairo, the city a fairyland of minarets and domes on the far side of the Nile. The half of the Mameluke army still safe there followed us on the opposite shore, screaming at our formations as if words would accomplish what bullets had not. We were out of range of each other. Then, when they came abreast of the fleet of feluccas moored at the quays of Cairo, the bravest of the Mamelukes embarked to set off across the river to try to attack us.

  It was too late. Imbaba had become a charnel house. Murad Bey was already fleeing for the desert. The makeshift Mameluke armada of boats sailed toward a shore lined with French infantry, a watery charge even more hopeless than that of the Muslim cavalry. They sculled into a storm of bullets. Even worse, the entire battlefield was being swallowed by an oncoming wall of sand and dust, as if God, Allah, or Horus had decided on a final intervention. The boats were reaching into the teeth of the wind.

  The storm was like a wall, blotting out the west. The light was growing dim as if from an eclipse of the sun. The western sky had grown black from the oncoming sandstorm, and the mighty pyramids, stupefying in their size and simplicity, were enveloped in brown fog. Toward this tempest rowed Ibrahim Bey and his bravest followers, their overloaded boats leaning farther and farther in the rising wind, the Nile frothy with whitecaps, and long lines of dusty French infantry drawn up on the bank with a storm of sand hammering their backs. The French fired again and again, in steady, disciplined volleys. Egyptians screamed, grunted, and toppled out of the boats.

  The dust storm drew higher and higher, an infinite cliff, blotting out of the sky. Now I could see nothing of the fleeing Arabs on the western bank, or of the pyramids, or even of Napoleon and his staff. It was like the end of the world.

  ‘Get down!’ Ashraf cried. He, Astiza, Talma, and I crouched together, drawing up clothing to cover our mouths and noses.

  The full power of the wind hit like a punch, shrieking, and then came sand like stinging bees. It was bad enough for the French, who crouched with their backs to the tempest, but the oncoming Mamelukes were face to it and caught on small, unstable boats. The arena went dark. The wind consumed all other noise. The battle stopped. The four of us held each other, trembling and praying to an assortment of gods, reminded at last that there are powers higher than our own. For several long minutes the sandstorm beat at us, seeming to rob our chests of air. Then, almost as quickly as it had come, it snuffed itself out and the
noise died. Dust sifted down from the air above.

  Slowly, shakily, thousands of French soldiers rose back up from their shallow graves of sand, seemingly resurrected but entirely brown. To a man they were speechless, overwhelmed, horrified. Overhead, the sky cleared. To the west, the sun was red as a ripped heart.

  We looked out at Cairo and the river. The water was swept clean of boats. All the Mamelukes who had tried to attack us by water were drowned or shipwrecked on the eastern bank. Every boat had capsized. We could hear the wails of the survivors, and Astiza translated. ‘Now we are slaves of the French!’ They fled into the city and through it, gathered wives and valuables, and disappeared into the growing dusk. The strange storm, supernatural in nature, had seemed to erase one group of conquerors and install another. The wind had extinguished the past and introduced a strange European future.

  Flames flickered along the waterfront of the city as the few feluccas still moored there began to burn. Someone was hoping to delay the French crossing by firing the boats, a futile hope given the other craft available up and down the Nile. The feluccas flamed into the night, illuminating the city we were about to occupy like the lamps of a theatre, the fantastic Moorish architecture flickering and dancing with the light of conflagration.

  The French soldiers, having survived both battle and storm, were triumphant, exhausted, and filthy. They crowded into the Nile to wash and then sat in melon fields to eat and clean their muskets. Clumps of naked Arab dead were everywhere, stripped for booty. The French had suffered a few score dead and two hundred wounded; the Arabs countless thousands. Ordinary French soldiers were newly rich with loot. Napoleon’s victory was complete, his hold on the army confirmed, his gamble rewarded.

  He rode among his troops like a triumphant lion, receiving their accolades and bestowing congratulations in turn. All the disgruntlement and acrimony of the past weeks had disappeared in the joy of victory. Napoleon’s intense fury appeared to have been sated by the day’s intensity, and his wounded pride over his wife’s betrayal had been assuaged by slaughter. It was as merciless a battle as I could imagine, and it had spent all emotion. Josephine would never know the carnage her games had unleashed.

  The general found me sometime that evening. I don’t know when – the shock of such a huge fight and storm had blurred my sense of time – or how. His aides had come looking specifically for me, however, and I knew with certain dread what it was he wanted. Bonaparte never gave himself leave to brood; he always thought ahead to the next step.

  ‘So, Monsieur Gage,’ he said to me in the dark, ‘I understand you have captured yourself a Mameluke.’

  How did he know so much so quickly? ‘It seems so, General, by accident as much as intention.’

  ‘You have a knack for contributing to the action, it seems.’

  I shrugged with modesty. ‘Still, I remain a savant, not a soldier.’

  ‘Which is precisely why I’ve sought you out. I’ve liberated Egypt, Gage, and tomorrow I will occupy Cairo. The first step in my conquest of the East is completed. The second hinges on you.’

  ‘On me, General?’

  ‘Now you will unravel the clues and discover whatever secrets these pyramids and temples hold. If there are mysteries, you will learn them. If there are powers, you will give them to me. And as a result, our armies will become invincible. We will march to unite with Tippoo, drive the British out of India, and seal the destruction of England. Our two revolutions, American and French, will remake the world.’

  It is difficult to exaggerate what the emotional effect of such a call can have on an ordinary human being. It’s not that I cared a whit about England, France, Egypt, India, or making a new world. Rather that this short, charismatic man of emotional fire and blazing vision had enlisted me in partnership with something bigger than myself. I’d been waiting for the future to start, and here it was. In the day’s carnage and supernatural augury of weather I’d seen proof, I thought, of future greatness: of a man who changed everything about him for better and worse, like a little god himself. Without thinking through the consequences, I was flattered. I bowed slightly, in salute.

  Then, with my heart in my throat, I watched Bonaparte stalk away, remembering Sydney Smith’s dark description of the French Revolution. I thought of the heaps of dead on the battlefield, the wailing of Egyptians, and the disgruntlement of homesick troops joking about their six acres of sand. I thought about the earnest investigations of the scholars, the European plans for reform, and Bonaparte’s hope for an endless march to the borders of India, as Alexander had marched before him.

  I thought of the medallion around my neck and how desire always seems to defeat simple happiness.

  It was after Bonaparte had disappeared that Astiza leant close.

  ‘Now you will have to decide what you truly believe,’ she whispered.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The home of Ashraf’s oddly named brother was in one of Cairo’s more reputable sections, which is to say it was in a neighbourhood marginally less dusty, disease-ridden, rat-infested, stinking, and crowded than the city’s norm. Just as in Alexandria, the glories of the East seemed to have eluded Egypt’s capital, which had little provision for sanitation, garbage removal, street lighting, traffic management, or corralling the marauding dog packs that roamed its lanes. Of course I’ve said much the same of Paris. Still, if the Egyptians had marshalled their dogs instead of their cavalry, our conquest might not have been so easy. Scores of the mutts were shot or bayoneted each day by annoyed soldiers. The executions had no more impact on the canine population than swatting had on the incessant flies.

  And yet, as in Alexandria or Paris, there was opulence amid the squalor. The Mamelukes were masters at squeezing taxes from the oppressed peasantry and spending it on monuments to themselves, their palaces exhibiting an Arabic grace missing from the heavier structures of Europe or America. While plain on the outside, the finer houses inside had shady courtyards of orange, palm, pomegranate, and fig, gracefully pointed Moorish arches, tiled fountains, and cool rooms rich with carpets, cushions, carved bookshelves, domed ceilings, and brass and copper tables. Some had intricate balconies and mashrabiyya screened windows that looked over the street, as carefully carved as a Swiss chalet and as concealing as a veil. Bonaparte claimed for himself the recently constructed marble-and-granite home of Mohammed Bey el-Elfi, which boasted baths on every floor, a sauna, and glass windows. Napoleon’s academics were housed in the palace of another bey named Quassim who had fled to Upper Egypt. His harem became the invention workshop for the industrious Conte, and his gardens the seminar room for the savants. The Muslim mosques were even more elegant, their Moorish minarets and soaring domes matching in grace and grandeur the finest Gothic churches in Europe. In the markets the awnings were bright as rainbows, and the oriental carpets draped on balustrades like a garden of flowers. The contrasts of Egypt – heat and shade, wealth and poverty, dung and incense, clay and colour, mud brick and gleaming limestone – were almost overwhelming.

  The common soldiers found themselves in surroundings considerably less luxurious than the officers: dark, medieval homes with no conveniences. Many of them promptly proclaimed the city disappointing, its people hideous, the heat enervating, and the food gut-wrenching. France had conquered a country, they wailed, that had no wine, no proper bread, and no available women. Such opinion would moderate as the summer cooled and some females began to form liaisons with the new rulers. In time the troops even grumpily admitted that the aish, or baked flat bread, was actually an agreeable substitute for their own. The dysentery that had plagued the army since landing increased, however, and the French army was beginning to suffer more casualties from disease than bullets. The absence of alcohol had already caused so much grumbling that Bonaparte ordered stills to make a libation from dates, the most plentiful fruit. And while officers were planning the planting of vineyards, their troops quickly discovered the Muslim drug called hashish, sometimes rolled into honeyed balls and spice
d with opium. Drinking its brew or smoking its seeds became commonplace, and throughout its occupation of Egypt, the army was never able to get the drug under control.

  The general entered his prize city through a main gate at the head of a regiment, bands playing and flags flying. At Ashraf’s direction Astiza, Talma, and I entered a smaller gate and threaded through twisting lanes past bazaars that, two days after the great battle, were half-deserted, their flaws lit by the harsh sun of noon. Boys threw water to hold down the dust. Donkeys with baskets slung on either side forced us into entryways as they squeezed down alleys. Even in the heart of Cairo there were village sounds of barking dogs, snorting camels, crowing roosters, and the call of the muezzins to prayer, which to my ears sounded like cats mating. The shops looked like stables and the poorer houses like unlit caves, their men squatting impassively in their faded blue galabiyyas and smoking from sheesha water pipes. Their children, jaundiced and covered with sores, stared at us with saucer eyes. Their women hid. It was obvious that the majority of the nation lived in abject poverty.

  ‘Maybe the finer neighborhoods are elsewhere,’ Talma said worriedly.

  ‘No, this is what you have responsibility for,’ Ashraf said.

  The notion of responsibility had been preying on my mind, and I told Ash that if his brother would receive us I’d grant the Mameluke his freedom. I really didn’t want to support another dependent besides Astiza, and in fact the entire idea of servants and slaves had always made me uncomfortable. Franklin had a pair of Negroes once and was so discomfited by their presence that he’d set them free. Slaves were a poor investment, he’d concluded: costly to buy, expensive to maintain, and with no incentive to do good work.

  Ashraf seemed less than pleased at my mercy. ‘How am I to eat if you cast me out like a foundling?’

  ‘Ash, I am not a rich man. I have no means to pay you.’