Ethan Gage Collection # 1

by William Dietrich

  Could that be the meaning of my October date?

  So wondrous were the decorations that for a brief time I forgot my mission. I had flickering glimpses of snakes and lotus flowers, boats that floated in the sky, and fierce and terrible lions. There were baboons and hippos, crocodiles and long-necked birds. Men marched in gloriously decorated processions, carrying offerings. Women offered their breasts like life itself. Deities as regal and patient as emperors stood in sideways poses. It seemed crude and idolatrous, this mix of animals and animal-headed gods, and yet for the first time I recognized how much closer the Egyptians were to their gods than we are to ours. Ours are sky gods, distant, unworldly, while the Egyptians could see Thoth each time an ibis stepped across a pond. They could sense Horus with each flight of a falcon. They could report having talked to a burning bush, and their neighbors would accept the story calmly.

  There was still no sign of Silano or Astiza. Had the soldiers led me astray—or was I walking into a trap? Once I thought I heard a footstep, but when I listened there was nothing. I found some stairs and mounted them, ascending in a twisting pattern like the climb of a hawk. Carved on the walls was an upward procession of men carrying offerings. There must have been ceremonies up here. I emerged on the temple’s roof, surrounded by a low parapet. Still not sure what I was looking for, I wandered amid small sanctuaries set on its terrace. In one, small pillars topped by Hathor made a gazebo-like enclosure reminiscent of a Paris park. In the northwest corner was a door leading to a small, two-roomed sanctum. The inner chamber had bas reliefs showing a pharaoh or god rising from the dead in more ways than one: his phallus was erect and triumphant. It reminded me of the tumescent god Min. Was this the legend of Isis and Osiris I’d been told when we sailed toward Egypt? A falcon floated above the being about to be resurrected. Again, my poor brain could detect no useful clue.

  The outer room, however, gave me a tingle of excitement. On the ceiling, two nude women flanked a spectacular circular relief crammed with figures. After studying it for a while, I decided the carving must be a representation of the sacred sky. Upheld by four goddesses and eight representations of the hawk-headed Horus—did they represent the twelve months?—was a circular disc of the symbolic heavens, painted with faded colors of blue and yellow. I spied signs of the zodiac again, not too dissimilar from what had come down to us in modern times: the bull, the lion, the crab, the twin fish. At the circumference was a procession of thirty-six figures, both human and animal. Could these represent the Egyptian and French ten-day weeks?

  I craned my neck, trying to make sense of it. At the northern axis of the temple was a figure of Horus, the hawk, who seemed to anchor all the rest. Toward the east was Taurus, the bull, signifying the age in which the pyramids had been built. To the south was a half-fish, half-goat creature, and near it a man pouring water from two jars—Aquarius! This was the sign of the future age, centuries hence, and the symbol for the vital rising of the Nile. Aquarius, like the water symbol on the medallion around my neck, and Aquarius, like the sign on the lost calendar of L’Orient that I’d guessed pointed to October 21.

  The ceiling’s circle reminded me of a compass. Aquarius was oriented to the southwest.

  I stepped outside, trying to get my bearings. A stone stairway led up to the parapet at the rear edge of the temple, so I climbed to look. To the southwest was another smaller temple, more decayed than the one I was in. Enoch had said there would be a small temple of Isis, and within it, perhaps, the mysterious staff of Min. Beyond it the dunes swept over the compound’s periphery wall, and distant hills glowed silver under cold stars.

  I felt the medallion against my chest. Could I find its completion?

  A second flight of stairs took me back to the ground floor. Its straightness was like the dive of a hawk that had spiraled upward on the other side. Now men with offerings were marching downward. Once again I was in the main temple, but a door to one side led again to the sands of the compound. I looked up. The main temple wall loomed above me, lion heads jutting like gargoyles.

  My rifle ready, I walked to the rear, toward the smaller temple I’d seen. To my right, palms grew from the ruins of the sacred lake. I tried to imagine this place in ancient times, the dunes at bay, the causeways paved and shining, the gardens tended, and the lake shimmering as priests bathed. What an oasis it must have been! Now, ruins. At the temple’s rear I turned the corner and stopped short. Gigantic figures were carved on the wall, thirty feet high. A king and queen, I guessed from their headdress, were offering goods to a full-breasted goddess, perhaps Hathor or Isis. The queen was a slim and stylish woman with a towering crown, her arms bare, her legs long and slim. Her wig was braided, and a cobra like a golden tiara was poised above her forehead.

  “Cleopatra,” I breathed. It had to be her, if Enoch was right! She was opposite her little temple of Isis, which sat about twenty meters to the south of the main building.

  I glanced about. Still the compound seemed lifeless, except for me. I had the sense that it was poised, waiting. For what?

  The Isis temple was built on a raised terrace, a drift of sand between it and the Cleopatra carving on the main building. Half the small temple was a walled sanctuary like the larger temple I’d just come from. The other half was open and ruined, a shadowy mass of pillars and beams, open to the sky. I climbed up broken blocks to the door of the walled section. “Silano?” My query echoed back at me.

  Hesitantly, I stepped inside. It was very dark, the only light coming from the door and two high openings barely big enough to fit pigeons. The room was taller than it was long or wide, and claustrophobic, its smell acrid. I took another step.

  Suddenly there was a whir of wings and I instinctively ducked. Warm wind thrashed at me, extinguishing my light. Bats flew by, squeaking, scraping my scalp with leathery wings. Then they funneled outside. I relit my candle with shaking hand.

  Again, the walls were thick with carvings and traces of old paint. A woman I assumed was Isis dominated. I saw no sign of Min and his staff, or anything else. Was I on a wild goose chase? Always I felt like I was groping blind, with clues no reasonable man could understand. What was I supposed to see?

  I noticed, finally, that this room was considerably smaller than the enclosed temple’s perimeter. There had to be a second chamber. I stepped back on the stone porch and realized there was a second door and high room, even narrower than the first, and just as baffling. This one, however, had a stone table, like an altar. The pedestal was the size of a small writing desk, perched in the room’s center. It was plain, unremarkable, and I might have passed it by except for a peculiar occurrence. As I bent over the altar the chain round my neck came loose and snagged the pedestal. The medallion broke free and struck the stone floor with an audible clink. This had never happened before. I swore, but when I bent to retrieve it, what I saw arrested me.

  Carved onto a floor slab were two faint Vs, overlapping like compass and square. In the Egyptian style they were geometric, and yet the resemblance was clear.

  “By the Great Architect,” I muttered. “Can it be?” I remembered Enoch’s script: The crypt will lead to heaven.

  I refastened the medallion and stamped on the floor slab. It shifted. Something hollow was under there.

  Kneeling in excitement now, my rifle set to one side, I pried with the blade of my tomahawk until I could grasp the slab. It lifted like a heavy trapdoor and released a rush of stale air, an announcement that it hadn’t been opened in a long time. Holding my candle, I leaned over. The light glimmered on a floor below. Could there be treasure? Leaving my gun for a moment and sliding feet first, I dropped, falling ten feet and landing like a cat. My heart was hammering. I looked up. Easy enough for Silano to slide the lid back in place if he was watching me. Or was he waiting to see what I might find?

  Passages led in two directions.

  Again there was a riot of carving. The ceiling bore a field of the five-pointed stars. The walls were thick with gods, goddesses,
hawks, vultures, and rearing snakes, a motif repeated again and again. The first passage dead-ended within twenty feet at a mound of clay amphoras—dull, dusty jars that seemed unlikely to hold anything of value. Just to be sure, however, I used my tomahawk to crack one open. When it split apart, I raised my candle.

  And jumped. Looking back at me was the hideous face of a mummified baboon, flesh desiccated, eye sockets huge, jaws full of teeth. What the devil?

  I broke another jar and found another baboon inside. Another symbol, I remembered, for the god Thoth. So this was a kind of catacomb, full of bizarre animal mummies. Were they offerings? I put my candle near the ceiling so the light would reach farther in the gloom. The clay jars were heaped as far back as the light would reach. Little things moved in the shadows—some kind of insect.

  I turned and went the other way, down the other passage. I desperately wanted out of this crypt, yet if Enoch’s clue made any sense there must be something down here. My candle stub was getting low. And then there was more movement, something slithering away on the floor.

  I looked with my meager light. There were tracks on the sand and dust of a damned snake, and a crack into which it had probably crawled. I was sweating. Was Bin Sadr down here too? Why had I left my rifle?

  And then something glittered.

  The other tunnel ended too, but now there were no jars, but instead a relief carving of the now-familiar priapic figure of Min, probably a figure of some fascination to the sensual Cleopatra. He was stiff as a board, his member erect and startlingly bright.

  Min was decorated not with paint, but with gold. His manhood was outlined with twin sticks of gold connected with a hinge at one end, half obscenity, half tool of life. Without knowing about the riddle of the medallion, one would assume the golden shafts were solely sacred decoration.

  But I think Cleopatra had another idea. Maybe she left this piece in Egypt if she really took the other medallion to Rome, to ensure its secret stayed in her native country. I pried the gold member loose until it popped into my hand, and worked the hinge. Now the golden shafts formed a V. I took out the medallion, splayed its arms, and laid this new V across them. When I formed the now-familiar Freemason symbol, a compass crossed with a square, the notches on the medallion’s arms locked. The result was a diamond of overlapping arms, swinging below the medallion’s inscribed disc but without, of course, the European letter G, which the Masons used to denote God or gnosis, knowledge.

  Splendid. I had completed the medallion, and perhaps found a root symbol of my own fraternity.

  And still had no clue what it meant.

  “Ethan.”

  The sound was faint, almost like a whisper of wind or trick of the ear, but it was Astiza’s voice, I knew, coming faintly from somewhere outside. The call was as electrifying as a bolt of lightning. I dropped the newly complex medallion around my neck, rushed down the passageway, saw to my relief the slab was still askew, and swiftly wiggled my way up and out the crypt shaft. My gun lay where I had left it, untouched. I picked it up and crouched. All was silent. Had her call been my imagination? I moved quietly to the entrance, peering cautiously outside. I could see Cleopatra on the main temple wall opposite, her carved form picked out by moonlight.

  “Ethan?” It was a near sob, coming from the open pillars adjacent to the enclosure I was in.

  I stepped out on the temple’s porch and advanced as silently as an Indian, rifle ready. On this half of the temple platform, the columns rose to horizontal beams that held up nothing, framing squares of sky. I could see the stars between them. A different face, this of the serene Isis, was carved into the pillars’ design.

  “Astiza?” My voice echoed among the columns.

  “Do you have it?”

  I stepped around a pillar and there she was. I stopped, confused.

  She was stripped to my fantasy of a harem girl, her linen translucent, her legs visible through her gown, her jewelry heavy, and her eyes lined. She’d been dressed for seduction. Her arms were lifted because her wrists were chained to shackles that led to a stone beam above. The posture lifted her breasts, twisting her waist and hips, and the effect was an erotic helplessness, a tableau of a princess in peril. I stopped, stupefied by this apparition from a fairy tale. Her own look was pained.

  “Is it complete?” she asked in a small voice.

  “Why are you dressed like that?” It was the most mundane of a hundred questions ricocheting like billiard balls in my mind, but I felt I was in a hallucinatory dream.

  The answer was the press of a sword point in the small of my back. “Because she is distracting,” Count Silano murmured. “Drop your rifle, monsieur.” The sword pressed more painfully.

  I tried to think. My weapon thumped to the stone.

  “Now, the medallion.”

  “It’s yours,” I tried, “if you unchain her and let us flee.”

  “Unchain her? But why, when she can simply lower her arms?”

  And Astiza did so, her slim wrists slipping from loose shackles, her look apologetic. The chains swung gently, an empty prop. The gossamer veils draped her body like a classical statue, her undergarments only calling attention to the places they concealed. She looked embarrassed at her fraudulence.

  Once more, I felt the fool.

  “Haven’t you realized that she’s with me, now?” Silano said. “But then you’re American, aren’t you, too direct, too trusting, too idealistic, too naïve. Did you come all this way fantasizing about rescuing her? Not only did you never understand the medallion; you never understood her.”

  “That’s a lie.” I stared up at her as I said it, hoping for confirmation. She stood trembling, rubbing her wrists.

  “Is it?” Silano said behind me. “Let’s review the truth. Talma went to Alexandria to ask questions about her not just because he was your friend, but because he was an agent for Napoleon.”

  “That’s a lie too. He was a journalist.”

  “Who cut a deal with the Corsican and his scientists, promising to keep an eye on you in return for access to the highest councils of the expedition. Bonaparte wants the secret found, but doesn’t trust anyone. So Talma could come if he spied on you. Meanwhile, the journalist suspected Astiza from the beginning. Who was she? Why did she come with you like an obedient dog, trudging with an army, acquiescing to a harem? Because of infatuation with your clumsy charm? Or because she’s always been in alliance with me?”

  He certainly enjoyed boasting. Astiza was looking up at the ruined beams.

  “My dear Gage, have you understood a single thing that’s happened to you? The journalist learned a disturbing thing about our Alexandrian witch: not that word of your coming was sent by gypsies, as she told you, but by me. Yes, we were in communication. Yet instead of helping kill you, as I recommended, she seemed to be using you to discover the secret. What was her game? When I landed in Alexandria, Talma thought he could spy on me as well, but Bin Sadr caught him. I told the fool he could join me against you and we could sell whatever treasure we found to the highest-bidding king or general—Bonaparte too!—but we couldn’t reason with him. He threatened to go to Bonaparte and have the general interrogate us all. Nor was he a bargaining chip once you insisted on the fiction that the medallion was lost. His last chance was to steal it from whoever had it and deliver it to me, but he refused. In the end, the little hypochondriac was more loyal than you deserved, and a French patriot to boot.”

  “And you are not.” My voice was cold.

  “The Revolution cost my family everything it had. Do you think I consort with rabble because I care about liberty? Their liberty took everything from me, and now I’m going to use them to get it all back. I do not work for Bonaparte, Ethan Gage. Bonaparte, unwittingly, works for me.”

  “So you sent Talma to me in a jar.” I was so rigid, fists clenched, that my knuckles were white. The sky seemed to be wheeling, the chains a pendulum like some trick of Mesmer. I had just one chance.

  “A casualty of war,” Silan
o replied. “If he’d listened to me, he’d have been richer than Croesus.”

  “But I don’t understand. Why didn’t your lantern bearer, Bin Sadr in disguise, just take the medallion that first evening in Paris, the moment I stepped into the street?”

  “Because I thought you’d given it to the whore, and I didn’t know where she lived. But she didn’t confess to it even when the Arab gutted her. Nor did my men find it in your chambers. Frankly, I wasn’t even sure of its importance, not until I asked more questions. I assumed I’d have the leisure to strip you of it in prison. But you ran, allied with Talma, and were on your way to Egypt as a savant—what amusement!—before I was even certain the trinket was what we’d all been looking for. I still don’t know where you hid the medallion that first night.”

  “In my chamber pot.”

  He laughed. “Irony, irony! Key to the greatest treasure on earth, and you cover it with shit! Ah, what a clown. Yet what uncommon luck you’ve had, eluding an ambush on the Toulon highway and an Alexandrian street, dodging snakes, coming unscathed through major battles, and even finding your way here. You have the devil’s luck! And yet in the end you come to me, bringing the medallion with you, all for a woman who won’t let you touch her! The male mind! She told me that all we had to do was wait, provided Bin Sadr didn’t get you first. Did he ever find you?”

  “I shot him.”

  “Really? Pity. You’ve been a most troublesome man, Ethan Gage.”

  “He survived.”

  “But of course. He always does. You will not want to meet him again.”

  “Don’t forget that I’m still in the company of savants, Silano. Do you want to answer to Monge and Berthollet for my murder? They have the ear of Bonaparte, and he has an army. You’ll hang if you harm me.”

  “I believe it is called self-defense.” He pushed slightly with his sword and I felt a faint sting through my robes, and a trickle of my own blood. “Or is it attempted capture of a fugitive from revolutionary justice? Or a man who lied about losing a magic medallion so he could keep it for himself? Any will suit. But I am a nobleman with my own code of honor, so let me offer you mercy. You’re a hunted fugitive, without friends or allies and no threat to anyone, if you ever were. So, for the medallion I give you back…your life. If you promise to tell me what Enoch learned.”