“I wouldn’t ride with you if I thought you would.”
The canyon ended in a steep rubble slope that led to its rim. We dismounted and dragged at the reins, pulling our exhausted horses upward. Unwillingly they advanced a few yards, heads thrashing, and then in frustration reared and kicked. We were as tired and unbalanced as they were. We slid on the slope, the reins jerking in our hands. No matter how hard we hauled, they were dragging us backward.
“We have to go another way!” I shouted.
“It’s too late. If we turn back we ride into Bin Sadr. Let them go.” The reins flew out of our hands and our mounts skittered back down into the canyon, fleeing in the direction of the oncoming Arabs.
To be dismounted in the desert was tantamount to death.
“We’re doomed, Ashraf.”
“Didn’t the gods give you two legs and the wits to use them? Come, fate hasn’t brought us this far to be done with us now.” He began climbing the slope on foot, even as the Arabs came round a bend to spot us, warbled in triumph, and began firing more shots. Bits of rock exploded behind us where each bullet hit, giving me energy I didn’t know I had. Fortunately, our pursuers had to pause to reload as we scrambled upward, and the steep slope would be challenging for camels as well. We climbed over the lip of the latest hill, panting, and looked about. It was a landscape of desolation, not a living thing in sight. I trotted to the rim of the next ravine…
And stopped short in amazement.
There, in a shallow depression, was a huddled mass of people.
Hunched, the whites of their eyes like a field of agates, were at least fifty blacks—or they would have been black if they were not covered by the same powdery Egyptian dust that coated us. They were naked, dotted with sores and flies, and laced together with chains, men and women alike. Their wide eyes stared at me as if from masks of stage makeup, as shocked to see us as we to see them. With them were half a dozen Arabs with guns and whips. Slavers!
The slave drivers were crouched with their victims, no doubt puzzled by the echoing gunfire. Ashraf shouted something in Arabic and they answered back, an excited chatter. After a moment, he nodded.
“They were coming down the Nile and saw the French. Bonaparte has been confiscating the caravans and freeing slaves. So they came up here to wait until Desaix and his army passes. Then they heard shots. They are confused.”
“What should we do?”
In reply, Ash brought up his musket and calmly fired, hitting the slave caravan’s leader full in the chest. The slaver pitched backward without a word, eyes wide with shock, and before he’d even hit the ground the Mameluke had two pistols out and fired both, hitting one drover in the face and another in the shoulder.
“Fight!” my companion cried.
A fourth slaver was pulling his own pistol when I killed him before I could think. Meanwhile Ash had drawn his sword and was charging. In seconds the wounded man and a fifth were dead and the sixth was running for his life back the way he’d come.
The suddenness of my friend’s ferocity left me stunned.
The Mameluke strode to the leader, wiped his sword on the dead man’s robes, and searched his body. He straightened with a ring of keys. “These slavers are vermin,” he said. “They don’t capture their slaves in battle, they buy them with trinkets and grow rich off misery. They deserved to die. Reload our guns while I unshackle these others.”
The blacks cried and jostled with so much excitement that they tangled their own chains. Ash found a couple who spoke Arabic and gave sharp orders. They nodded and shouted to their fellows in their own language. The group stilled enough to let us free them, and then at Ash’s direction they obediently picked up the Arab weapons, which I reloaded, and rocks.
Ashraf smiled at me. “Now we have our own little army. I told you the gods have their ways.” Gesturing, he led our new allies back up to the crest of the ridge. Our posse of pursuing Arabs must have paused at the sounds of the fighting on the other side of the hill, but now they were coming up after us, pulling at their reluctant camels. Ash and I stepped up within view and Bin Sadr’s henchmen shouted as triumphantly as if they’d spotted a wounded stag. We must have looked lonely on the pale blue skyline.
“Surrender the medallion and I promise you no harm!” Bin Sadr called in French.
“Now there’s a promise I’d believe,” I muttered.
“Ask for mercy yourself or I will burn you like you burned my brother!” Ashraf shouted back.
And then fifty newly freed blacks emerged on the ridge crest to form a line to either side of us. The Arabs halted, stunned, not understanding that they had walked into a trap. Ash called out a sharp command and the blacks gave a great cry. The air filled with stones and pieces of hurled chain. Meanwhile, the two of us fired, and Bin Sadr and another man went down. The blacks passed us the dead slavers’ arms to shoot as well. Bedouin and camels, pelted with rocks and metal, went sprawling, screaming, and bawling in outrage and terror. Our pursuers tumbled down the steep slope in a small avalanche of rubble, their own aim spoiled by their precarious position. Hurled stones followed them, a meteor shower of released frustration. We killed or injured several in their pell-mell retreat, and when the survivors gathered in a little cluster at the base of the canyon, they peered up at us like chastened dogs.
Bin Sadr was holding one arm.
“The snake has Satan’s luck,” I growled. “I only wounded him.”
“We can only pray it will fester,” Ashraf said.
“Gage!” Bin Sadr yelled in French. “Give me the medallion! You don’t even know what it’s for!”
“Tell Silano to go to hell!” I shouted back. Our words echoed in the canyon.
“We’ll give you the woman!”
“Tell Silano I’m coming to take her!”
The echoes faded away. The Arabs still had more guns than we did, and I was leery of leading the freed slaves down into a pitched battle. Bin Sadr was no doubt weighing the odds as well. He considered, then painfully mounted. His followers did so too.
He started to ride slowly away, then turned his camel and looked up at me. “I want you to know,” he called, “that your friend Talma screamed before he died!” The word died reverberated in the wilderness, bouncing again and again and again.
He was out of range now, but not out of sight. I fired in frustration, the bullet kicking up dust a hundred paces short of him. He laughed, the sound amplified in the canyon, and then with the companions who were left, turned and trotted back the way he’d come.
“So will you,” I muttered. “So will you.”
Our horses gone, we took two of the slavers’ camels and gave the four others to the freed blacks. There were enough provisions to get the party started on the long trek back to their homeland, and we gave them the captured guns to hunt for game and fend off slavers who would no doubt try to recapture them. We showed them how to load and fire, a task they learned with alacrity. Then they clutched at our knees to give thanks so fervently that we finally had to pry them off. We’d rescued them, it was true, but they’d also rescued us. Ashraf sketched a path for them through the desert hills that would keep them away from the Nile until they were above the first cataract. Then we went our separate way.
It was my first time on a camel, a noisy, grumpy, and somewhat ugly beast with its own community of fleas and midges. Yet is was well-trained and reasonably docile, dressed in rich and colorful harness. At Ash’s direction I took my perch as it sat, then held on as it lurched upward. A few cries of “Hut, hut!” and it began moving, following the lead of Ash’s beast. There was a rocking rhythm it took some time to get used to, but it was not altogether unpleasant. It felt like a boat in a seaway. Certainly it would do until I found a horse again, and I needed to reach the French expeditionary force before Bin Sadr did. We followed the ridge crest to a point above a Nile ferry and then descended to cross to Desaix’s side of the river.
On the far bank we crossed the trampled wake of the army,
rode through a banana grove, and at length struck desert again to the west and aimed for low hills, circling around to the army’s flank. It was late afternoon when we spied the column again, camping along the dark course of the Nile. Shadows of date palms combed the ground.
“If we go on now we can enter their lines before sunset,” I said.
“A good plan. I leave you to it, friend.”
“What?” I was startled.
“I have done what I needed to, freeing you from jail and getting you here, yes?”
“More than you needed to. I am in your debt.”
“As I am in yours giving me my freedom, trust, and companionship. It was wrong to blame you for the death of my brother. Evil comes, and who knows why? There are dual forces in the world, forever in tension. Good must fight bad, it is a constant. And so we will, but each in our own way, for now I must go to my people.”
“Your people?”
“Bin Sadr has too many men to take on alone. I am still Mameluke, Ethan Gage, and somewhere in the desert is the fugitive army of Murad Bey. My brother Enoch was alive until the French came, and I fear many more will die until this foreign presence is driven from my country.”
“But Ashraf, I’m part of that army!”
“No. You’re no more a Frank than a Mameluke. You are something strange and out of place, American, sent here for the gods’ purpose. I’m not certain what role you’ve been chosen to play, but I do feel that I’m to leave you to play it, and that Egypt’s future relies on your courage. So go to your woman and do what her gods ask you to do.”
“No! We aren’t just allies, we’ve become friends! Haven’t we? And I’ve lost too many friends already! I need your help, Ashraf. Avenge Enoch with me!”
“Revenge will come at the god’s chosen time. If not, Bin Sadr would have died today, because you seldom miss. I suspect he has a different fate, perhaps more terrible. Meanwhile, what you need is to get what this Count Silano has come here to find, and fulfill your destiny. Whatever happens on future battlefields can’t alter the bond we’ve made over these many days. Peace be upon you, friend, until you find what it is you’re looking for.”
And with that he and his camel disappeared toward the setting sun and I started, more alone than ever, to find Astiza.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I knew that the notion of galloping into Desaix’s division of French soldiers, shouting for Silano, was unlikely to produce anything other than my own arrest. But what I lacked in power I made up for in possession: I had the medallion, and my rival did not. It would be far easier, I realized, to have Silano come to me.
It was near dusk when I approached a squad of camped sentries, my arms raised. Several ran out with muskets, having learned to view any approaching Egyptian with suspicion. Too many unwary Frenchmen had died in a war that was becoming crueler.
I gambled that news of my escape from Cairo had not reached these pickets. “Don’t shoot! I’m an American recruited to Berthollet’s company of scholars! I’ve been sent by Bonaparte to continue my investigation of the ancients!”
They looked at me suspiciously. “Why are you dressed like a native?”
“Without escort, do you think I’d still be alive if I were not?”
“You came alone from Cairo? Are you mad?”
“The boat I was riding hit a rock and has to be repaired. I was impatient to come ahead. I hope there are ruins here.”
“I recognize him,” one said. “The Franklin man.” He spat.
“Surely you appreciate the opportunity to study the magnificent past,” I said lightly.
“While Murad Bey taunts us, always a few miles ahead. We beat him. And then we beat him again. And then again. Each time he runs, and each time he comes back. And each time a few more of us will never return to France And now we wait at ruins while he escapes deeper into this cursed country, as out of reach as a mirage.”
“If you can even see the mirage,” joined another. “A thousand troops have sore eyes in this dust and sun, and a hundred are hobbling blind. It’s like a jest out of a play. Ready to fight? Yes, here is our rank of blind musketeers!”
“Blindness! That’s the least of it,” added a third. “We’ve shit twice our weight between here and Cairo. Sores don’t heal. Blisters become boils. There are even cases of plague. Who hasn’t lost half a dozen kilos of flesh on this march alone?”
“Or been so horny they’re ready to mate with rats and donkeys?”
All soldiers like to grumble, but clearly, disillusionment with Egypt was growing. “Perhaps Murad is on the brink of defeat,” I said.
“Then let’s defeat him.”
I patted my rifle. “My muzzle has been as warm as yours at times, friends.”
Now their interest brightened. “Is that the American longrifle? I hear it can kill a Red Indian at a thousand paces.”
“Not quite, but if you only have one shot, this is the gun you want. I recently hit a camel at four hundred.” No need to tell them what I’d been aiming at.
They crowded around. Men find unity in admiring good tools and it was, as I’ve said, a beautiful piece, a jewel amid the dross of their regulation muskets.
“Today my gun stays cold because I have a different task, no less important. I’m to confer with Count Alessandro Silano. Do you know where I could find him?”
“The temple, I suppose,” a sergeant said. “I think he wants to live there.”
“Temple?”
“Away from the river, beyond a village called Dendara. We’ve stopped so Denon can scribble more pictures, Malraux can measure more stone, and Silano can mutter more spells. What a circus of lunatics. At least he brought a woman.”
“A woman?” I tried not to betray any particular interest.
“Ah, that one,” a private agreed. “I sleep with her in my dreams.” He jerked his fist up and down and grinned.
I restrained the inclination to club him with my rifle. “Which way to this temple?”
“You intend to go dressed like a bandit?”
I straightened. “I look, I believe, like a sheikh.”
That drew a laugh. They pointed and offered escort, but I declined. “I need to confer with the count alone. If he’s not already at the ruins and you see him, give him this message. Tell him he can find what he’s looking for at midnight.”
Silano wouldn’t arrest me, I gambled. He’d want me to first find what we both were looking for, and then surrender it for Astiza.
The temple glowed under stars and moon, an immense pillared sanctuary with a flat stone roof. It and its subsidiary temples were enclosed by a mud-brick wall a square kilometer in circumference, eroded and half buried. The wall’s primary gateway jutted out of the sand as if half drowned, with clearance just high enough to walk under. It was carved with Egyptian gods, hieroglyphs, and a winged sun flanked by cobras. Beyond, the courtyard was filled with dunes like ocean swells. A waning moon gave pale illumination to sand as smooth as the skin of an Egyptian woman, sensuous and sculpted. Yes, there was a thigh, beyond it a hip, and then a buried obelisk like a nipple on a breast…
I’d been away from Astiza too long, hadn’t I?
The main building had a flat façade, with six immense pillars rearing from the sand to hold up the stone roof. Each column was topped by the eroded visage of a broad-faced goddess. Or rather four faces: on each pillar she looked in the four cardinal directions, her Egyptian headdress coming down behind cowlike ears. With her wide-lipped smile and huge, friendly eyes, Hathor had a bovine serenity. The headdress was colored with faded paint, I noted, evidence that the structure had once been brilliantly colored. The temple’s long abandonment was apparent from the dunes that rolled inside. Its front looked like a dock being consumed by a rising tide.
I looked about, but saw no one. I had my rifle, my tomahawk, and no certain plan except that this might be the temple that would house the staff of Min, that Silano might meet me here, and that I might spot him before he spied me.
/> I slogged up the dune and passed through the central entry. Because of the heaping sand, I wasn’t far from the ceiling as I passed inside. When I lit a candle I had taken from the soldiers, it revealed a roof painted blue and covered with yellow five-pointed stars. They looked like starfish or, I thought, the head, arms, and legs of men who had taken their place in the night sky. There was also a rank of vultures and winged suns decorated in reds, gold, and blues. We seldom look up and yet the entire ceiling was as intricately decorated as the Sistine Chapel. As I went deeper into the temple’s first and grandest hall the sand receded and I descended from the ceiling, beginning to get a sense of just how high the pillars really were. The interior felt like a grove of massive trees, painstakingly carved and painted with symbols. I wandered amid the eighteen gigantic columns in awe, each crowned with the placid faces of the goddess. The pillars banded as they rose. Here was a row of ankhs, the sacred key of life. Then stiff Egyptian figures, giving offerings to the gods. There were the indecipherable hieroglyphs, many enclosed in ovals the French had dubbed cartouches, or cartridges. There were carvings of birds, cobras, fronds, and striding animals.
At either end of this room the ceiling was even more elaborate, decorated with the signs of the zodiac. A huge nude woman, stretched like rubber, curled around them: a sky goddess, I guessed. Yet the sum was bewildering and overwhelming, a crust of gods and signs so thick that it was like walking inside an ancient newspaper. I was a deaf man at an opera.
I studied the sand for tracks. No sign of Silano.
At the rear of this great hall there was an entry to a second, smaller hall, equally high but more intimate. Rooms opened off it, each decorated on walls and ceiling but empty of furniture for millennia, their purpose unclear. Then a step up to another entry, and beyond it another, each room lower and smaller than the one before. Unlike a Christian cathedral, which broadened as one advanced, Egyptian temples seemed to shrink the farther one penetrated. The holier the enclosure, the more it was lightless and exclusive, rays of light reaching it only on rare days of the year.
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