Ethan Gage Collection # 1

by William Dietrich

  At the same time, Bonaparte began to remake Egypt. Despite the jealousies of his fellow generals, it was clear to us savants that he was brighter than any of them. I for one judge intelligence not so much by what you know as by how much you want to know, and Napoleon wanted to know about everything. He devoured information the way a glutton devours food, and he had broader interests than any officer in the army, even Jomard. At the same time, he could lock his curiosity away, as if in a cabinet to be taken out later, while he concentrated furiously on the military task at hand. This combination is rare. Bonaparte dreamed of remaking Egypt as Alexander had remade the Persian Empire, and fired off memorandums to France requesting everything from seeds to surgeons. If the Macedonian had founded Alexandria, Napoleon was determined to found the richest French colony in history. Local beys were mustered into a divan council to help with administration and taxation, while the scientists and engineers were bombarded with queries about well digging, windmill construction, road improvements, and mineral prospecting. Cairo would be reformed. Superstition was to be succeeded by science. The Revolution had come to the Middle East!

  So when I approached him for leave to return to the flagship, it was with an affable tone that he asked, “This ancient calendar will tell you what, exactly?”

  “It may help make sense of my medallion and mission by telling us a key year or date. Just how is uncertain, but the calendar does no good in the hold of a ship.”

  “The hold does prevent it from being stolen.”

  “I intend to examine it, not sell it, General.”

  “Of course. And you’ll not uncover secrets without sharing them with me, the man who shielded you from murder charges in France, will you, Monsieur Gage?”

  “I am working in concert with your own savants right now.”

  “Good. You may be getting more help soon.”

  “Help?”

  “You’ll see. Meanwhile, I certainly hope you’re not considering leaving our expedition by trying to take ship to America. You understand that if I give you leave to go back to L’Orient for this calendar device, your slave girl and Mameluke captive will stay here in Cairo, under my protection.” His look was narrow.

  “But of course.” I recognized that he’d assigned an emotional importance to Astiza I’d yet to admit to myself. Did I care that she was hostage to my loyal conduct? Was she truly a guarantee that I’d return? I hadn’t thought about her in those terms, and yet I was intrigued by her and I admired Napoleon’s perception of my intrigue. He seemed to miss nothing. “I will hurry back to them. I do wish, however, to take my friend, the journalist Talma.”

  “The scribbler? I need him here, to record my administration.”

  But Talma was restless. He had asked to come along so he could visit Alexandria, and I enjoyed his wry company. “He’s anxious to file his dispatches on the fastest ship. He also wants to see more of Egypt and interest France in the future of this country.”

  Napoleon considered. “Get him back here in a week.”

  “It will be ten days, at most.”

  “I’ll give you dispatches to deliver to Admiral Brueys, and Monsieur Talma can carry some to Alexandria. You’ll both give me your impressions upon your return.”

  Despite Talma’s misgivings, I decided after careful consideration to leave the medallion with Enoch. I agreed with Astiza’s reasoning that it was safer in the cellar of an old scholar than bandied about Egypt. It was a relief not to have the pendant around my own vulnerable neck and have it safe from robbery when I went back down the Nile. While leaving the pendant was clearly a risk after carrying it so carefully from Paris to Cairo, its possession was pointless if we didn’t know what it was for, and I still had little clue. Enoch seemed my best bet for an answer—and I am, after all, a gambler. Given my admittedly soft spot for women, I gambled that Astiza felt some loyalty to my quest, and that Enoch was more interested in solving the puzzle than hawking the bauble for money. Let him keep thumbing through his books. Meanwhile, I would examine the calendar in the hold of L’Orient in hopes it could supply a hint to the medallion’s purpose, and together perhaps we’d crack the mystery. I urged Astiza to stay safely inside, and told Ashraf to keep both of them guarded.

  “Should I not guide you to the coast?”

  “Bonaparte says your presence here ensures I’ll want to return. And it will.” I clapped him on the shoulder. “We are a partnership, all of us in this house, Citizen Ash. You will not betray me, will you?”

  He drew himself straight. “Ashraf will guard this house with his life.”

  I didn’t want to carry my heavy rifle for a brief trip in a conquered country, but neither did I want it toyed with. After reflection, I remembered Ash’s remark about superstition and fear of curses and stored it and my tomahawk in one of Enoch’s mummy sarcophagi. It should be safe there.

  Uncharacteristically, Talma made no comment on my decision to entrust the medallion to the Egyptians, instead mildly asking Astiza if she had any message she wanted him to bring to Alexandria. She said no.

  We hired a native felucca to take us back down the Nile. These able sailing craft, skimming up and down the broad and slow Nile under their triangular sails, were the taxis of the river in the way donkeys filled that role in the streets of Cairo. It took several minutes of tiresome bargaining, but at length we were aboard and headed for Abukir, steered by a helmsman who spoke no French or English. Sign language seemed sufficient and we enjoyed the ride. As we once more entered the fertile delta downriver from Cairo, I was struck again by the serene timelessness of the villages along the river’s banks, as if the French had never passed this way. Trundling donkeys carried monumental heaps of straw. Small boys jumped and played in the shallows, indifferent to the crocodiles that lay like logs in quiet side channels. Clouds of white egrets rose flapping from islands of green reed. Silver fish darted between papyrus stalks. Clumps of vegetation bearing lilies and lotus flowers drifted down the Nile from the high reaches of Africa. Young girls in bright dresses sat on the flat roofs of houses, sorting red dates in the sun.

  “I had no idea that conquering a country was so easy,” Talma remarked as the current carried us downriver. “A few hundred dead and we’re masters of the place where civilization started. How did Bonaparte know?”

  “Easier to seize a country than to run it,” I said.

  “Exactly.” He lay against a gunwale, lazily looking at the passing landscape. “Here we are, lords of heat, flies, dung, rabid dogs, and illiterate peasants. Rulers of straw, sand, and green water. I tell you, it’s the stuff that legends are made of.”

  “Which is your specialty, as our journalist.”

  “Under my pen, Napoleon becomes a visionary. He let me come with you because I’ve agreed to write his biography. I have no objection. He told me hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets, but that I can rise with him. This is not exactly news to me. The more heroic I make him seem, the sooner he fulfills his ambitions and we can all go home.”

  I smiled at the world-weary way that the French view life after so many centuries of wars, kings, and terrors. We Americans are more innocent, more earnest, more honest, and more easily disappointed.

  “Yet it is a beautiful county, is it not?” I asked. “I’m surprised how rich the greens are. The Nile flood plain is a lush garden, and then you change to desert so abruptly that you could trace the boundary with a sword blade. Astiza told me the Egyptians call the fertile part the black land, for its soil, and the desert the red land, for its sand.”

  “And I call all of it the brown land, for mud brick, cantankerous camels, and noisy donkeys. Ashraf told me a story of a shipwrecked Egyptian who returns to his village years after being given up for dead. He’s been absent as long as Odysseus. His faithful wife and children rush out to meet him. And his first words? ‘Ah, there’s my donkey!’”

  I smiled. “How will you spend your hours in Alexandria?”

  “We both remember wha
t a paradise it is. I want to make some notes and ask some questions. There are books to be written here, more interesting ones than a simple hagiography of Bonaparte.”

  “I wonder if you could ask about Achmed bin Sadr.”

  “Are you sure it was him you saw in Paris?”

  “I’m not sure. It was dark but the voice is the same. My guide had a staff, or lantern handle, carved like a snake. And then Astiza saved me from a snake in Alexandria. And he showed too much interest in me.”

  “Napoleon seems to rely on him.”

  “Yet what if this Bin Sadr truly works not for Bonaparte, but for the Egyptian Rite? What if he’s a tool of Count Alessandro Silano, who wanted the medallion so badly? What if he had something to do with poor Minette’s murder? Every time he’s looked at me I’ve felt he’s looking for the medallion. So who is he, really?”

  “You want me to be your investigator?”

  “A discreet inquiry. I’m tired of surprises.”

  “I go where truth leads. From top to bottom, and head to…”—he looked pointedly at my boots—“to feet.”

  His confession was instantly obvious. “It was you who took my shoes on L’Orient!”

  “I didn’t take them, Ethan, I borrowed them, for inspection.”

  “And pretended you hadn’t.”

  “I kept a secret from you as you kept the medallion from me. I was worried you’d lost it during the attack on our coach but were too embarrassed to admit it. I sold your presence on this expedition to Berthollet partly on the strength of that medallion, but when we were reunited in Toulon you declined to show it to me. What was I to think? It was my responsibility to the savants to try to find out what game you were playing.”

  “There was no game. It was simply that every time I showed the medallion or talked about it, I seemed to find myself in trouble.”

  “Which I got you out of in Paris. You could have confided in me a little.” He had risked his own life to help get me here, and I’d treated him as less than a full partner. No wonder he was jealous.

  “You could have left my boots alone,” I nonetheless rejoined.

  “Keeping it hidden didn’t protect you from having a snake dropped in your bed, did it? What’s this business with snakes anyway? I hate snakes.”

  “Astiza said there’s some serpent god,” I said, agreeing to change the subject. “Its followers have a modern cult, I think, and perhaps our enemies are a part of it. You know, Bin Sadr’s curious snake-headed staff reminds me of a Bible story. Moses threw his staff down before Pharaoh and it turned into a serpent.”

  “Now we’re onto Moses?”

  “I’m as confused as you, Antoine.”

  “Considerably more so. At least Moses had the sense to lead his people out of this crazy country.”

  “It’s an odd story, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “The ten plagues that Moses has to bring. Each time one of the disasters occurs, Pharaoh relents, and says he will let the Hebrews go. Then he changes his mind until Moses brings on the next plague. He must have really needed those slaves.”

  “Until the final plague, when the eldest sons died. Then Pharaoh did let them go.”

  “And yet even then he changed his mind and pursued Moses with his army. If he hadn’t done that, he and his host would never have drowned in the closing of the Red Sea. Why didn’t he give up? Why not let Moses just walk away?”

  “Pharaoh was stubborn, like our own little general. Perhaps that’s the lesson of the Bible, that sometimes you have to let things go. In any event, I’ll ask about your snake friend, but I’m surprised you’ve not requested that I ask about another.”

  “Who?”

  “Astiza, of course.”

  “She seems guarded. As gentlemen, we must respect a woman’s privacy.”

  Talma snorted. “And now she has the medallion—the same medallion I wasn’t allowed to see, and which the dreaded Bin Sadr has been unable to get his hands on!”

  “You still don’t trust her?”

  “Trust a slave, a sniper, a beauty, a witch? No. And I even like her.”

  “She’s no witch.”

  “She’s a priestess who casts spells, you told me. Who is obviously casting a spell over you, and who has usurped what we came here with.”

  “She’s a partner. An ally.”

  “I wish you’d bed her, as a master has every right to do, so you could clear your brain and see her for what she is.”

  “If I make her sleep with me it doesn’t count.”

  He shook his head in pity. “Well, I’m going to ask about Astiza even if you’re not, because I’ve already learned one thing you don’t know.”

  “What?”

  “That when she formerly lived in Cairo, she had some kind of relationship with a European scholar allegedly studying ancient secrets.”

  “What scholar?”

  “An Italian-French nobleman named Alessandro Silano.”

  At Abukir Bay, the power of the French was manifest. Admiral François-Paul Brueys d’Aigalliers, who had viewed the disembarkation of Napoleon and his troops from his warships with the relief of a headmaster dismissing an unruly classroom, had created a defensive wall of wood and iron. His battleships were still moored in a long line, gunports open and five hundred muzzles pointed stoutly at the sea. A brisk northwesterly breeze was pushing swells against the ships, rocking them like majestic cradles.

  Only when we sailed onto the leeward side behind the vessels did I realize that these were ships only half at war. The French had anchored a long mile and a half from the beach in the shallow bay, and the landward half of the hulls were under repair. Sailors had rigged scaffolding to paint. Longboats were tied to ferry supplies or sailors. Laundry and bedding dried in the sun. Cannon was moved aside for carpentry. Awnings had been rigged above the hot decks. Hundreds of sailors had gone ashore to dig wells and manage trains of camels and donkeys bringing provisions from Alexandria. A fortress on one side was a market on the other.

  Still, L’Orient was one of the largest warships in the world. It rose like a castle, and climbing its ladder was like climbing a giant. I called up to announce myself, and as the felucca pushed off to carry Talma to Alexandria, I was piped aboard. It was noon on the fourteenth day of Thermidor, Year Six, the sun blazing, the shore golden, the sea an empty, brilliant blue. In other words, August 1, 1798.

  I was ushered to the admiral’s great cabin, which he had reclaimed from Napoleon. Brueys was in a white cotton shirt, open at the neck, confronting a table of paperwork. He was still sweating despite the sea breeze, and looked unusually pale. Physically, he was the general’s opposite: middle-aged at forty-five, with long, pale hair, a wide, generous mouth, friendly eyes, and a tall build. If Bonaparte’s appearance was energizing, Brueys was calming, a man more at ease with himself and his station. He took the dispatches from our general with a slight grimace, politely remarked on the past friendship between our two countries, and asked my purpose.

  “The savants have begun their investigation of the ancient ruins. I suspect that a calendar device with ties to Cagliostro might prove useful in understanding the mind of the Egyptians. Bonaparte has given me permission to examine it.” I handed over an order.

  “The mind of the Egyptians? What use is that?”

  “The pyramids are so remarkable that we don’t understand how they were built. This instrument is one of many clues.”

  He looked skeptical. “A clue if we wanted to build pyramids.”

  “My visit to your ship will be brief, Admiral. I have papers giving me permission to take the antiquity to Cairo.”

  He nodded wearily. “I apologize I am not more gracious, Monsieur Gage. It is not easy working with Bonaparte, and I’ve been plagued with dysentery since we came to this godforsaken country. My belly aches, my ships are beggared for supplies, and my undermanned crews are made up chiefly of those too invalid for the army.”

  The sickness explained his pallor. “T
hen I’ll not be more of a burden than I must. If you could give me escort to the hold…”

  “But of course.” He sighed. “I’d have you to dinner if I could eat. What interruption are you when we sit here at anchor, waiting for Nelson to find us? It’s madness to keep the fleet in Egypt, yet Napoleon clings to my ships like an infant to a blanket.”

  “Your ships are critical to all his plans.”

  “So he has flattered me. Well, let me give you the captain’s son, he’s a bright lad of promise. If you can keep up with him, you’re fitter than I.”

  The midshipman Giocante, a boy of ten, was the son of ship’s captain Luce Casabianca. A bright, dark-haired lad who had explored every cranny of L’Orient, he led me down to the treasury with the agility of a monkey. Our descent was brighter than the last time I’d gone this way with Monge, sunlight flooding through open gunports. There was a strong smell of turpentine and sawdust. I saw paint cans and oak lumber.

  It didn’t get dim until we descended to the orlop deck below the waterline. Now I could smell bilge water and the cheesy odor of stores going rancid in the climate. It was cooler down here, dark and secretive.

  Giocante turned and gave a wink. “You’ll not fill your pockets with gold pieces, now?” the boy teased me with the cheek of a captain’s son.

  “I wouldn’t get away with you watching me, would I?” I lowered my voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Unless you want to go in double, boy, and we’ll both sneak ashore, rich as princes!”

  “No need of that. My father says we’ll capture a fat English prize one day.”