Ethan Gage Collection # 1

by William Dietrich

  “So the pyramid is just a tombstone, a marker?”

  “Or a warning. Or, because of its dimensions and tunnels, a kind of machine.” Jomard shrugged. “Who knows, when its builders left no records?”

  “Yet the Egyptians did scatter the world with clues that none of us can yet read,” Monge said. “And this is where we come in. Look at this. Our troops captured it in Italy and Bonaparte has brought it along.”

  The chemist whisked away an embroidered cloth, revealing a tablet of bronze the size of a large dinner platter, its surface coated with black enamel etched by silver. Incised were intricately beautiful depictions of Egyptian figures in the ancient style, spaced in a series of rooms atop one another. The gods, goddesses, and hieroglyphs were bound by a border of fantastic animals, flowers, and trees. “It’s the Tablet of Isis, once owned by Cardinal Bembo.”

  “What does it mean?” I asked.

  “That’s what the general wants us to answer. For centuries, scholars have suspected there is some message in this tablet. Legend has it that Plato was initiated into the greater mysteries in some kind of chamber under Egypt’s biggest pyramid. Perhaps this is a plan, or map, of such chambers. Yet there is no report of such rooms. Could your medallion be a key to understanding?”

  I doubted it. The markings on my neckpiece seemed crude compared to this work of art. The figures were stiff but graceful as angels. There were towering headdresses, seated baboons, and striding cattle. Women had wings on their arms like hawks. Men had the heads of dogs and birds. Thrones were supported by lions and crocodiles. “Mine is cruder.”

  “You’re to study this for clues before we reach the ruins outside Cairo. Many of the characters hold staffs, for example. Are they rods of power? Is there any connection to electricity? Could this advance the Revolution?”

  The men asking these questions were eminent figures of science. I’d won my trinket in a card game. Yet solving such a puzzle might lead me to any number of commercial rewards, not to mention a pardon. As I counted the figures, I was struck that some seemed to have grander headdresses. “Here’s something,” I offered. “The number of primary characters here, twenty-one, coincides with those of the Tarot that the gypsies showed me.”

  “Interesting,” Monge said. “A tablet to forecast the future perhaps?”

  I shrugged. “Or just a pretty platter.”

  “We’ve made an etching of it that you can take back to your cabin.” He reached into another chest. “Another peculiarity is this, which our troops found in the same fortress where Cagliostro was imprisoned. I sent for it when Berthollet told me of you.” It was a round disc the size of a dinner plate, its center empty and its edge made by three rings, each fitting inside the other. The rings had symbols of suns, moons, stars, and signs of the zodiac. They rotated, so that symbols could be realigned with one another. Why, I had no idea.

  “We think it’s a calendar,” Monge said. “The fact that you can align the symbols suggests it might show the future or indicate a certain date. But what date, and why? Some of us think it may refer to the precession of the equinoxes.”

  “The procession of what?”

  “Precession. Ancient religion was based on study of the sky,” Jomard said. “The stars formed patterns, moved across the heavens in predictable ways, and were believed alive, in control of the fate of men. The Egyptians divided the vault of the sky into the twelve signs of the zodiac, extending each downward to twelve zones on the horizon. At the same time each year—say, March 21, the spring equinox, when the length of day and night are equal—the sun rises under the same zodiacal sign.”

  I decided not to point out that the officer had chosen to use the traditional Gregorian date, not the new revolutionary ones.

  “Yet not precisely where it started. Each year the zodiac falls just slightly short of making the full circuit, because the earth wobbles on its axis like a spinning top, the axis making a circle in the sky over a period of twenty-six thousand years. Over long periods of time the position of the constellations seems to shift. At March 21 of this year, the sun rose in Pisces, as it has since Christ was born. Perhaps this is why early Christians chose the fish as their symbol. But before Jesus, the March 21 sunrise was in the constellation of the ram, an age which lasted 2,160 years. Before the ram was the bull, when the pyramids may have been built. Next to come, after the 2,160 years of Pisces, is the age of Aquarius.”

  “Aquarius had special meaning for the Egyptians,” Monge added. “Many people think these signs were Greek, but they are really far older, some dating from Babylon and others from Egypt. The poured pitchers of water of Aquarius symbolized the annual rising of the Nile, vital for fertilizing and watering Egypt’s annual crops. Man’s first civilization rose in the strangest environment on earth: a Garden of Eden, a strip of green amid inhospitable desert, a place of constant sun and rare rain, watered by a river that rises from sources still unknown to this day. Isolated from enemies by the Sahara and Arabian Deserts, fed by a mysterious annual cycle, roofed with a cloudless canopy of stars, it was a stable land of extreme contrasts, an ideal place for religion to evolve.”

  “So this is a tool for calculating the cycle of the Nile?”

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps it suggests a propitious time for different actions. That’s what we hope you will help decipher.”

  “Who made it?”

  “We don’t know,” Monge said. “Its symbols are different from anything we have seen, and the Knights of Malta have no record of where it even came from. Is it Hebrew? Egyptian? Greek? Babylonian? Or something entirely different?”

  “Surely this is a puzzle for your mind, not mine, Dr. Monge. You’re a mathematician. I struggle to make change.”

  “Everyone struggles to make change. Listen, we don’t know what all this means yet, Gage. But the interest in your medallion suggests to me that your pendant is a piece of some momentous puzzle. As an American, you are privileged to be on a French expedition. Berthollet here has extended legal protection to you. But this is not an act of charity—it is a hire of your expertise. There are a dozen reasons Bonaparte wants to go to Egypt, but one of them is that there may be ancient secrets to be learned: mystic secrets, technological secrets, electrical secrets. Then you, Franklin’s man, appear with this mysterious medallion. Is it a clue? Keep these artifacts in mind as we advance into the unknown. Bonaparte is seeking to conquer a country. All you must conquer is a riddle.”

  “But a riddle to what?”

  “To where we came from, perhaps. Or how we fell from grace.”

  I returned to the cabin I shared with Talma and a lieutenant named Malraux, my mind both dazzled by treasure and stupefied by the mysteries I was to wrestle with. I could see no connection between the medallion and these new objects, and nobody seemed to have any idea what the puzzle was I was supposed to solve. For decades, charmers and charlatans like Cagliostro had toured the courts of Europe claiming to know great Egyptian secrets, without ever explaining precisely what those secrets were. They had started a craze for the occult. Skeptics had scoffed, but the idea that there must be something in the land of the pharaohs had taken root. Now I found myself in the middle of that mania. The more science advanced, the more people longed for magic.

  At sea I’d adopted the sailor practice of going barefoot, given the summer’s heat. As I prepared to lie in my bunk, my mind swirling, I noticed that my boots were missing. This was disturbing, given how I’d used them as a hiding place.

  I poked anxiously around. Malraux, already in bed, muttered something in his sleep and swore. I shook Talma.

  “Antoine, I can’t find my shoes!”

  He came awake blearily. “Why do you need them?”

  “I just want to know where they are.”

  He rolled over. “Maybe some bosun gambled them away.”

  A quick search of late-night card and dice circles did not locate my boots. Had someone discovered the hollow compartment in my heel? Who would dare violate the possessions
of the savants? Who could even have guessed my hiding place? Talma? He must have wondered about my calm when asked the whereabouts of the medallion, and probably speculated where I might be hiding it.

  I came back to the cabin and looked across at my companion. Once more he slept like an innocent, which made me all the more suspicious. The more the medallion grew in importance, the less I trusted anyone. It was poisoning my faith in my friend.

  I retreated to my hammock, depressed and uncertain. What had seemed a prize in the card salon was feeling like a burden. A good thing I hadn’t kept the medallion in my shoe! I put my hand on the touch-hole of the twelve-pounder next to my hammock. Since Bonaparte had forbidden target practice to conserve powder and keep our passage quiet, I’d wrapped my prize in an empty powder bag and used tar to stick it to the inside of the muzzle plug. The plug would be removed before combat, and my plan had been to retrieve the medallion before any sea battle, but meanwhile not risk having it stolen from my neck or boot. Now, with my shoes gone, my distance from the prize made me nervous. Come the morrow, when the others were on deck, I’d fish it from its hiding place and wear the thing. Curse or charm, I wanted it round my neck.

  The next morning, my boots were back where I had left them. When I inspected them, I saw the sole and heel had been pried at.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I almost drowned in the surf of Alexandria because of Bonaparte’s fear of Admiral Nelson. The English fleet prowled like a wolf somewhere over the horizon, and Napoleon was in such a hurry to get ashore that he ordered an amphibious landing. It wasn’t the last time I’d be wet in the driest country I’d ever seen.

  We arrived off the Egyptian city on July 1, 1798, staring in wonder at minarets like reeds and mosque domes like snowy hillocks, all shimmering under the brutal summer sun. There were five hundred of us crowded on the main deck of the flagship, soldiers, sailors, and scientists, and for long minutes it was so quiet you could hear every creak of rigging and every hiss of wave. Egypt! It wavered in distortion like a reflection in a curved mirror. The city was dust brown, dirty white, and looked anything but opulent, almost as if we’d arrived at the wrong address. The French ships slowly wallowed in a rising wind from the north, each Mediterranean swell a topaz jewel. From the land we could hear blowing horns, the boom of signal cannon, and the wails of panic. What must it have been like to behold our armada of four hundred European ships which seemed to fill the entire sea? Households were stuffed onto donkey wagons. Market awnings deflated as the valuables they shaded were secreted in wells. Arab soldiers strapped on medieval armor and mounted cracked parapets with pikes and ancient muskets. Our expedition artist, the Baron Dominique Vivant Denon, began drawing furiously: the walls, the ships, the epic emptiness of North Africa. “I’m trying to capture the form of the solid buildings against the desert’s peculiar volume of light,” he told me.

  The frigate Junon came alongside to make a report. It had arrived at the city a day earlier and conferred with the French consul, and the news it brought jolted Napoleon’s staff into a frenzy of activity. Nelson’s fleet had already been at Alexandria, hunting for us, and had left just two days before! It was pure luck they hadn’t caught us unloading. How long before the English returned? Rather than risk running the gauntlet of the forts at the entrance to the city’s harbor, Bonaparte ordered an immediate amphibious landing with longboats at the beach of Marabut, eight miles to the west. From there, French troops could march along the beach to seize the port.

  Admiral Brueys vehemently protested, complaining the coast was uncharted and the wind was rising toward a gale. Napoleon overruled him.

  “Admiral, we’ve no time to waste. Fortune grants us three days, no more. If I don’t take advantage of them, we’re lost.” Once ashore, his army was beyond the reach of the British warships. Embarked, it could be sunk.

  Yet ordering a landing is easier than accomplishing it. By the time our ships began anchoring in the heavy swells off the sand beach, it was late afternoon, meaning the landing would continue through the night. We savants were given a choice of remaining on board or accompanying Napoleon to watch the assault on the city. I, with more adventure than sense, decided to get off L’Orient. Its heavy roll was making me sick again.

  Talma, despite his own queasy misery, looked at me as if I were mad. “I thought you didn’t want to be a soldier!”

  “I’m simply curious. Don’t you want to watch the war?”

  “The war I can observe from this deck. It’s the bloody details you need to be on the beach to see. I’ll meet you in the city, Ethan.”

  “I’ll have picked us out a palace by then!”

  He smiled wanly, looking at the swells. “Perhaps I should hold the medallion for safekeeping?”

  “No.” I shook his hand. Then, to remind him of ownership: “If I drown, I won’t need it.”

  It was dusk by the time I was called to take my place in a boat. Bands had assembled on the larger ships and were playing the “La Marseillaise,” the strains shredded by the rising wind. Toward land, the horizon had turned brown with sand blowing from the desert. I could see a few Arab horsemen dashing this way and that on the beach. Clinging to a rope, I took the ladder down the warship’s side, its tumble-home shape swollen like a bicep and its guns bristling like black stubble. The longrifle I carried across my back, its hammer and pan wrapped in oil skin. My powder horn and shot pouch bounced against my waist.

  The boat was heaving like a bucking saddle. “Jump!” a boatswain commanded, so I did, striving for grace but sprawling anyway. I quickly clambered to a thwart as told, clinging with both hands. More and more men dropped aboard until I was certain we could hold no more without swamping, and then a few more piled in as well. We finally pushed away, water sloshing over the gunwale.

  “Bail, damn you!”

  Our longboats looked like a swarm of water beetles, crawling slowly toward shore. Soon nothing could be heard above the thunder of the approaching surf. When we dipped into the wave troughs, all I could see of the invasion fleet were the mast tops.

  Our helmsman, in normal life a French coastal fisherman, at first steered us expertly as the waves mounded toward the beach. But the boat was overloaded, as hard to maneuver as a wine wagon, and it barely had freeboard. We began to skid in the rising surf, the stern slewing as the helmsman shouted at the rowers. Then a breaker turned us sideways and we broached and flipped.

  I didn’t have time to take breath. The water came down like a wall, driving me under. The roar of the gale was cut to a dim rumble as I skipped along the bottom, tumbling on the sand. My rifle was like an anchor, but I refused to let it go. The submersion seemed like a black eternity, my lungs near to bursting, and then at a lull in the surge I sank enough to crouch on the bottom and push off. My head broke the surface just before I was ready to swallow, and I gasped with desperation before another wave broke over me. Bodies bumped in the dark. Flailing, I fastened onto a loose oar. Now the water was shallow, and the next wave carried me in on my belly. Sputtering, choking on seawater, nose draining, eyes stinging, I staggered onto Egypt.

  It was flat and featureless, not a tree in sight. Sand had impregnated every crevice of my body and clothes, and the wind pushed so hard that I staggered.

  Other half-drowned men were lurching out of the waves. Our overturned longboat grounded and the sailors rallied us to flip it upright, emptying out the water. Once they found enough oars the seamen pushed out again, to get more troops. The moon had risen, and I saw a hundred similar scenes playing out along the beach. Some boats managed to glide in as intended, grounding neatly, while others foundered and tumbled like driftwood. It was chaotic, men tying themselves to each other with line to wade back out and rescue comrades. Several drowned bodies had washed to the sea’s edge, half buried in the sand. Small artillery pieces were sunk to their hubs. Equipment floated like flotsam. A French tricolor, raised as a rallying point, snapped and rattled in the wind.

  “Henri, remember the farms
the general promised us?” one sodden soldier said to another, gesturing at the barren dunes ahead. “There’s your six acres.”

  Since I had no military unit, I began asking where General Bonaparte was. Officers shrugged and cursed. “Probably in his great cabin, watching us drown,” growled one. There had been resentment at the spaciousness he had appropriated for himself.

  And yet, far down the beach, a knot of order had begun to form. Men were assembling around a familiarly short and furiously gesticulating figure, and as if by gravity other troops were drawn to their mass. I could hear Bonaparte’s voice giving sharp commands, and ranks began to be drawn up. When I neared I found him bareheaded and soaked to the waist, his hat having cartwheeled away in the wind. His scabbard dragged on the beach, cutting a little line behind him. He acted as if nothing was amiss, and his confidence reinforced others.

  “I want a skirmish line in the dunes! Kleber, get some men up there if you don’t want to be picked off by Bedouin! Captain? Use your company to free that cannon, we’ll need it at dawn. General Menou, where are you? There! Get your standard planted to form up your men. You infantry there, stop standing like drowned rats and help those others right that boat! Has a little water knocked the sense out of you? You are soldiers of France!”

  The expectation of obedience worked wonders, and I began to recognize Bonaparte’s talent for command. A mob gradually became an army, soldiers forming columns, organizing equipment, and dragging away the drowned for quick, unceremonious burial. I heard the occasional pop of skirmish fire to keep roving tribesmen at bay. Boatload after boatload made it ashore and thousands of men assembled in moon and starlight, the trampled sand shining silver where water pooled in our boot prints. Equipment lost in the surf was retrieved and redistributed. Some men found themselves wearing hats too small that perched on their crowns like chimneys, and others with headgear that came down around their ears. Laughing, they traded back and forth. The night wind was warm, drying us rapidly.