But I wasn’t done figuring out the medallion, was I? Maybe I could get a fist of treasure, or a share of mysterious power. Or keep it from the lunatics of the Egyptian Rite and the Apophis snake cult. And a woman was waiting, wasn’t she?
‘I’m no strategist, admiral, but perhaps this battle changes everything,’ I said. ‘We won’t know how Bonaparte will react until news reaches him. Which I, perhaps, could bear. The French know nothing of my connection to Smith.’ Go back? Well, the battle and the dying boy had shaken me to the core. I had a duty too, and it was to get back to Astiza and the medallion. It was to finish, finally, something I’d started. ‘I’ll explain the situation to Bonaparte and, if that doesn’t move him, then learn what I can in coming months and report back to you.’ A plan had formulated in my mind. ‘A rendezvous off the coast near the end of October, perhaps. Just after the twenty-first.’
‘Smith is scheduled to be in the region then,’ Nelson noted.
‘And your own self-interest in doing this?’ Hardy asked me.
‘I have scores of my own to settle in Cairo. Then I’d like passage to a neutral port. After L’Orient, I’ve had enough of war.’
‘Three months before you report back?’ Nelson objected.
‘It may take that long for Bonaparte to react and form the new French plans.’
‘By God,’ objected Hardy, ‘this man served on the enemy flagship and now he wants to be put ashore? I don’t trust a word he says, ring or no ring.’
‘Not served. Observed. I didn’t fire a shot.’
Nelson thought, fingering my ring. Then he held it out. ‘Done. We’ve smashed enough ships that you hardly make a difference. Tell Boney exactly what you observed: I want him to know he’s doomed. However, it will take months for us to assemble an army to get the Corsican out of Egypt. In the meantime, I want you to make a count of his strength and gauge the mood. If there is any chance of surrender, I want to hear about it immediately.’
Napoleon is about as likely to give up as you are, Admiral, I thought, but I didn’t say that. ‘If you can get me ashore …’
‘We’ll get an Egyptian to put you on the beach tomorrow to erase any suspicion you’ve been talking to us.’
‘Tomorrow? But if you want me to notify Bonaparte …’
‘Sleep and eat first. No need to hurry, Gage, because I suspect the preliminary news has gone ahead of you. We chased a corvette that slipped into Alexandria just ahead of the battle, and I’m sure the diplomat on board had a rooftop view of our victory. He’s the kind of man to already be on his way. What was his name, Hardy?’
‘Silano, the reports said.’
‘Yes, that’s it,’ Nelson said. ‘Some tool of Talleyrand named Alessandro Silano.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
My first task, upon hearing this disturbing news, was to reunite with Talma, who likely assumed me dead once word of the explosion of L’Orient reached Alexandria. Silano here? Was that the ‘help’ that Bonaparte had hinted at?
The battered British fleet did not attempt to force the repaired forts at Alexandria’s harbour. Instead they began patrolling in blockade. As for me, an Arab lighter deposited me on the beach at Abukir Bay. No one took particular note of my landing, as dhows and feluccas were sweeping the water to salvage debris and rob the dead. French and British longboats were also retrieving bodies in a makeshift truce, and on shore, wounded men lay groaning under crude canvas shelters. I splashed up the beach looking as ragged as the rest, helped carry some wounded to the shade of a shell-pocked sail, and then joined a desultory procession of French sailors straggling toward Alexandria. They were sullen in defeat, quietly vowing revenge on the English, but also had the hopeless look of the stranded. It was a long, hot hike in a pillar of dust, and when I paused and looked back, I could see columns of smoke where some of the beached French ships were still burning. As we marched we passed the rubble of long-vanished civilisations. A sculpted head was toppled on its side. A royal foot as big as a table, with toes the size of pumpkins, peeked from debris. We were a ruin trudging past ruins. I didn’t reach the city until midnight.
Alexandria buzzed like a disturbed hive. It was by going from lodging to lodging, asking for news of a short, bespectacled Frenchman with an interest in miracle cures that I finally discovered that Talma had lodged in a dead Mameluke’s mansion that had been turned into an inn by an opportunistic merchant.
‘The sickly one?’ the proprietor responded. ‘He’s disappeared without taking his bag or his medicine.’
This didn’t sound good at all. ‘He left no word for me, Ethan Gage?’
‘You’re a friend of his?’
‘Yes.’
‘He owes me one hundred francs.’
I paid his debt and claimed Talma’s luggage as my own, hoping the journalist had rushed back to Cairo. Just to be sure he hadn’t sailed away, I checked the docks. ‘It’s not like my friend Talma to go off by himself,’ I told a French port supervisor worriedly. ‘He’s really not very adventurous.’
‘Then what is he doing in Egypt?’
‘Seeking cures for his ailments.’
‘Fool. He should have taken the waters in Germany.’
This supervisor confirmed that Count Silano had indeed arrived in Egypt, but not from France. Instead, he’d sailed from the Syrian coastline. He reportedly had disembarked with two enormous trunks of belongings, a monkey on a golden chain, a blonde mistress, a cobra in a basket, a pig in a cage, and a gigantic Negro bodyguard. If that were not conspicuous enough, he had adopted an Arab’s flowing robes and added a yellow sash, Austrian cavalry boots, and French rapier. ‘I am here to decipher the mysteries of Egypt!’ he’d proclaimed. With lingering gunfire still grumbling as the sun rose over the ruins of the French fleet, Silano had commissioned a caravan of camels and set off for Cairo. Could Talma have gone with him? It seemed unlikely. Or had Antoine trailed the count to spy?
I joined a cavalry patrol to Rosetta and then took a boat to Cairo. From a distance the capital seemed curiously unchanged after the apocalypse at Abukir, but I soon learnt that news of the disaster had indeed preceded me.
‘It’s like we’re clinging to a rope,’ said a sergeant who escorted me to Napoleon’s headquarters. ‘There’s the Nile, and this narrow band of green that follows it, and nothing but empty desert on either side. Fall into the sands and they kill you for your buttons. Garrison a village, and you might wake to a knife sawing your windpipe. Bed a woman, and you might find your drink poisoned or your balls gone. Pet a dog, and you risk rabies. We can march in only two dimensions, not three. Is the rope to hang us?’
‘The French have advanced to the guillotine,’ I quipped inanely.
‘And Nelson has already cut off our head. Here’s the body, flopping in Cairo.’
I didn’t think Bonaparte would like that analogy, preferring that the British admiral had cut off our feet while he, the brains, remained defiant. When I reported back to him at headquarters, he alternated between casting all blame on Brueys – ‘Why didn’t he sail for Corfu?’ – to insisting the essential strategic situation was unchanged. France was still the master of Egypt and within striking distance of the Levant. If India now seemed more remote, Syria remained a tempting target. Soon Egypt’s wealth and labour would be harnessed. Christian Copts and renegade Mamelukes were being recruited into French forces. A camel corps would turn the desert into a navigable sea. Conquest would continue, with Napoleon as the new Alexander.
Yet after repeating all this as if to convince himself, Bonaparte’s dark brooding couldn’t be hidden. ‘Did Brueys show courage?’ he asked me.
‘A cannonball took the admiral’s leg off but he insisted on remaining at his post. He died a hero.’
‘Well. There’s that, at least.’
‘So did Captain Casabianca and his young son. The deck was aflame and they refused to abandon ship. They died for France and for duty, general. The fight could have gone either way. But when L’Orient blew up …�
�
‘The entire Maltese treasure was lost. Damn! And Admiral Villeneuve fled?’
‘There was no way his ships could get into the fight. The wind was against them.’
‘And you lived, too.’ The observation seemed a bit sour.
‘I’m a good swimmer.’
‘So it seems. So it seems. You’re quite the survivor, aren’t you, Gage?’ He toyed with calipers and looked at me sideways. ‘I’ve a new arrival inquiring about you. A Count Silano, who says he knows you from Paris. He shares your interest in antiquities and has been doing his own research. I told him you were fetching something from the ship and he expressed interest in examining it as well.’
I wasn’t about to share information with Silano. ‘The calendar was lost in the battle, I’m afraid.’
‘Mon dieu. Has nothing good come of this?’
‘I’ve also lost track of Antoine Talma, who disappeared in Alexandria. Have you seen him, General?’
‘The journalist?’
‘He’s worked hard to emphasize your victories, you know.’
‘As I’ve worked hard to win them. I’m depending on him to write my biography for distribution in France. The people need to know what’s really happening here. But no, I don’t take personal roll of thirty-five thousand men. Your friend will turn up if he hasn’t run.’ The idea that some of us would try to sneak away from the Egyptian expedition seemed to gnaw at Bonaparte. ‘Are you any closer to understanding the pyramids and this necklace of yours?’
‘I examined the calendar. It may suggest auspicious dates.’
‘For what?’
‘I don’t know.’
He snapped the calipers shut. ‘I’m beginning to wonder about your usefulness, American. And yet Silano tells me there could be significant lessons, military lessons, in what you’re researching.’
‘Military lessons?’
‘Ancient powers. Egypt remained preeminent for thousands of years, building masterworks while the rest of the world was in huts. How? Why?’
‘That’s just the question that we savants are beginning to address,’ I said. ‘I’m curious to find if there are any ancient references to the phenomena of electricity. Jomard has speculated they could have used it to move their mammoth building blocks. But we can’t read their hieroglyphics, everything is half-buried in sand, and we’ve simply not had enough time at the pyramids yet.’
‘Which we’re about to remedy. I’m going to investigate them myself. But first, you will come to my banquet tonight. It’s time you conferred with Alessandro Silano.’
I was surprised at the depth of my relief at seeing Astiza. Perhaps it was having survived another terrible battle, or my worry about Talma, or the French sergeant’s gloomy assessment of our position in Egypt, or Silano’s appearance in Cairo, or Bonaparte’s impatience with my progress: in any event, I felt lonely. Who was I but an American exile, cast up with a foreign army in an even more foreign land? What I did have was this woman who – while withholding intimacies – had become my companion and, in a secret estimation I wouldn’t risk sharing with her, a friend. Yet her past was so vague that I was forced to ask myself whether I knew her at all. I looked carefully for some sign of hidden feelings when she greeted me, but she simply seemed happy that I’d returned unscathed. She and Enoch were eager to hear my firsthand account, since Cairo was a hotbed of rumour. If I’d any doubts about her quickness, they were dispelt when I heard how rapidly her French had improved.
Enoch and Ashraf had no word from Talma, but plenty of stories about Silano. He’d arrived in Cairo with his retinue, made contact with some Freemasons in the French officer corps, and conferred with Egyptian mystics and magicians. Bonaparte had granted him fine quarters in the home of another Mameluke bey, and any number of characters had been seen slipping in and out during all hours of the day and night. He’d reportedly asked General Desaix about impending plans to send French troops up the Nile.
‘He directs men greedy for the secrets of the past,’ Astiza added. ‘He has assembled his own bodyguard of Bedouin cutthroats, been visited by Bin Sadr, and parades his yellow-haired trollop in a fine carriage.’
‘And there is word he asked about you,’ Enoch added. ‘Everyone has wondered if you were trapped at Abukir. Did you bring the calendar?’
‘I lost it, but not before I had a chance to examine it. I’m guessing, but when I aligned the rings in a way that reminded me of the medallion and the pyramids, I sensed it was pointing to a date one month after the fall equinox, or October 21st. Is that day significant here in Egypt?’
Enoch thought. ‘Not really. The solstice, the equinox, or the New Year when the Nile begins to rise all have meaning, but I know of nothing to do with that date. Perhaps it was an ancient holy day, but if so the meaning has been lost. I will consult my books, however, and mention the date to some of the wiser imams.’
‘And what of the medallion?’ I asked. I’d felt uneasy being so separated from it, yet at the same time was thankful I hadn’t risked it at Abukir Bay.
Enoch brought it out, its gold gleam familiar and reassuring. ‘The more I study it, the older I think it is – older, I think, than most of Egypt. The symbols may date to the deep time when the pyramids were built. It is so old, no books survive from that period, but your mention of Cleopatra intrigued me. She was a Ptolemy who lived three thousand years after the pyramids, and Greek by blood as much as Egyptian. When she consorted with Caesar and Antony, she was the last great link between the Roman world and ancient Egypt. By legend there is a temple, its location lost, dedicated to Hathor and Isis, the goddesses of nurture, love, and wisdom. Cleopatra worshipped there.’
He showed me pictures of the goddesses. Isis looked like a conventionally beautiful woman with high headdress, but Hathor was odd, her face elongated and her ears jutting out like those of a cow. Homely, but in a pleasant way.
‘The temple was probably rebuilt in Ptolemaic times,’ Enoch said, ‘but its origin is far older than that, perhaps as old as the pyramids. Legend contends it was oriented to the star Draco when that star marked the north. If so, secrets might have been shared between the two sites. I’ve been looking for something that refers to a puzzle, or a sanctuary, or a door – something this medallion might point to – so I’ve been combing the Ptolemaic texts.’
‘And?’ I could see he enjoyed working this puzzle.
‘And I have an ancient Greek reference to a small temple of Isis favoured by Cleopatra that reads, “The staff of Min is the key to life.”’
‘Staff of Min? Bin Sadr has a staff, a snake-headed one. Who’s Min?’
Astiza smiled. ‘Min is a god who became the root word of “man”, just as the goddess Ma’at or Mut became the root word for “mother”. His staff is not like Bin Sadr’s.’
‘Here’s another picture.’ Enoch slid it across. On it was a drawing of a stiff-postured bald fellow with one particularly arresting feature: a rigid, upright male member of prodigious length.
‘By the souls of Saratoga. They put this in their churches?’
‘It’s just nature,’ Astiza said.
‘Well-endowed nature, I’d say.’ I was unable to keep envy from my voice.
Ashraf had a wicked grin. ‘Typical for Egyptians, my American friend.’
I looked at him sharply and he laughed.
‘You’re all having fun with me,’ I grumbled.
‘No, no, Min is a real god and this is a real representation,’ Enoch assured me, ‘though my brother is exaggerating our countrymen’s anatomy. Ordinarily I would read ‘The staff of Min is the key to life’ as a mere sexual and mythical reference. In our creation stories, our first god swallows his own seed and spits and shits out the first children.’
‘The devil you say!’
‘And it is the ankh, the predecessor to your Christian cross, which is usually referred to as a key to eternal life. But why Min in a temple of Isis? Frequented by Cleopatra? Why “key” as opposed to “essence” or some
other word? And why this after it: “The crypt will lead to heaven”?’
‘Why, indeed?’
‘We don’t know. But your medallion may be an uncompleted key. The pyramids point to heaven. What is in that crypt? We do know, as I said, that Silano has been making enquiries about going south, up the Nile, with Desaix.’
‘Into enemy territory?’
‘Somewhere south is where the temple of Hathor and Isis lies.’
I pondered. ‘Silano has been doing some studying of his own in ancient capitals. Perhaps he has the same clues you’ve found. But he still needs the medallion, I’m gambling. Keep it here, hidden. I’m going to see the sorcerer at a banquet tonight, and if the subject comes up I’ll tell him I lost it at Abukir Bay. It might be our only advantage if we’re in a race to this key of life.’
‘Don’t go to the banquet,’ Astiza said. ‘The goddess tells me we must stay away from this man.’
‘And my little god, Bonaparte, tells me I must sup with him.’
She looked uncomfortable. ‘Then tell him nothing.’
‘Of my investigations?’ Here was the issue the journalist had raised. ‘Or you?’
A blush rose in her cheeks. ‘He has no interest in your servants.’
‘Doesn’t he? Talma told me he’d heard that you knew Silano in Cairo. The reason Antoine went to Alexandria was to ask not about Bin Sadr, but about you. Just how much do you know about Alessandro Silano?’
She was quiet too long. Then, ‘I knew of him. He came to study the ancients, as I did. But he wanted to exploit the past, not protect it.’
‘Knew of him?’ By Hades, I knew of Chinamen, but I’d never had a thing to do with them. That’s not what Talma had implied. ‘Or knew him in ways you don’t want to admit, and which you’ve kept from me all these days?’
‘The problem with modern men,’ Enoch interrupted, ‘is that they ask too much. They respect no mystery. It causes endless trouble.’
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