Ethan Gage Collection # 1

by William Dietrich

  “An interesting way to die, is it not?” Najac asked rhetorically.

  “Apophis,” I replied, my voice thickened by being where my feet should be.

  “What?”

  “Apophis!” I said it louder.

  He pretended not to understand, but the Arabs did. They recoiled at the name, given that it was the moniker of that old Egyptian snake god revered by the renegade murderer Achmed bin Sadr. Yes, I’d encountered the same scaly bunch all right, and they twitched at my knowledge as if shedding their own skin. It put doubt in their heads. Just how much did I really know—I, the mysterious electrician of Jerusalem? Najac, however, pretended to be oblivious to the name.

  “A snake bite is horribly painful and agonizingly slow. We’ll kill you quicker, Monsieur Gage, if you tell us what you’re really after, and what you really found.”

  “I’ve had more agreeable offers. Go to hell.”

  “You first, monsieur.” He turned to the men holding my ropes.

  “Lower away!”

  The rope began to unreel in jerky movements. My upside-down head descended to ground level, my body swaying above the pit, and all I could see was a line of boots and sandals, their owners jeering. Then more rope. I pulled my head back up, curving my back to look straight down. Yes, the snakes were there, slithering as snakes do. It reminded me of poor Talma’s treacherous death, and all the rotten misdeeds Silano and his rabble had committed to get to the book.

  “I’ll curse you with the name of Thoth!” I shouted.

  The rope stopped again, and an argument broke out in Arabic. I couldn’t follow the furious flood of words but I heard fragments like “Apophis” and “Silano” and “sorcerer” and “electricity.” So I had acquired a reputation! They were nervous.

  Najac’s own voice rose over that of his henchmen, angry and insistent. The rope was let down again another foot and stopped again, the arguing continuing. Suddenly there was the crack of a pistol shot, a jerk as I fell two more feet, and then a halt again. All of me was now in the pit, the snakes four feet below.

  I looked up. A Bedouin who’d argued too long with Najac lay dead, one sandaled foot draped over the edge of my pit.

  “The next man who argues with me shares the grave with the American!” Najac warned. The group had fallen silent. “Yes, you agree with me now? Lower him! Slowly, so he can beg!”

  Oh, I begged all right, begged like a man possessed. I’m not proud when it comes to avoiding snakebite. But it did no good, except to keep my descent incremental so I could provide entertainment. They must have thought me born for the stage. I called out anything I thought they might want to hear, pleading, twisting, and sweating, my eyes stinging as perspiration ran. Then, when my abject wailing began to bore, someone pushed so I swung back and forth. It was dizzying. Much more of this and I would black out. I saw serpent after serpent coiling in excitement but then noticed something else.

  “There’s a shovel down here!”

  “To fill your own grave, once you have been bitten, Monsieur Gage,” Najac called. “Or would it be easier to explain what you saw under the Temple Mount?”

  “I told you, nothing!”

  So they lowered it a foot again. That’s what telling the truth will get you.

  The blasted snakes were hissing. It was unfair how angry the reptiles were, since it wasn’t me who had put them down there.

  “Well, maybe something,” I amended.

  “I am not a patient man, Monsieur Gage.” The rope went down again.

  “Wait, wait!” I was beginning to truly panic. “Haul me up and I’ll tell you!” I’d think of something! A couple of the serpents were swaying upward, getting ready to strike at my head.

  The sun had climbed, its illumination crawling across my grave. I saw the shovel again, snakes curling across it, and the scraped rock my grave excavators had stopped at. Except now I didn’t think it was a rock at all because it had the red clay color of a jar or a roof tile. It was also regular in shape I saw, cylindrical if the hump of covering sand was any indication. It looked almost like a pipe. No—it was a pipe.

  A pipe, now that I thought about it, which extended toward the sea.

  “I think you can tell me from down there,” Najac said, peering over the lip.

  I extended my dangling arms downward as far as I could. I was still a foot too short to reach the abandoned shovel. My tormentors saw what I was trying to do and lowered me inches further. But then a snake struck toward my palm and I jerked my arms upward, half curling, a move that brought peals of laughter. Now they began betting on my ability to grab the shovel before I was bitten by crawling reptiles. Down I went another inch, and another. Oh, the fun my captors were having!

  “If you kill me, you’ll lose the greatest treasure on earth!” I warned.

  “So tell me where it is.” Down a few more inches.

  “I can only lead you to it if you spare my life!” I was eyeing the shovel and the snakes, swinging myself by twisting my torso so I would pass over its wooden handle.

  “And what is this treasure?”

  Another snake struck toward me, I yelped, and there was another chorus of laughter. If only I could be so amusing to Paris courtesans.

  “It’s…” The rope dropped more, I reached, fingers straining, the snakes rose in readiness, and then as they jerked I seized the shovel and swung desperately. It caught two of the reptiles and threw them against the sand walls, starting a small cascade. They thrashed in fury as they fell back into the pit.

  “Up, up, please, by the grace of God, get me up!”

  “What is it, Monsieur Gage? What is the treasure?”

  I could think of nothing else to do. I took the shovel in both hands, bent myself as far upward as I painfully could, took careful aim, and then dropped back down, letting my weight drive the crude shovel’s wooden beak against the clay pipe. It shattered!

  Liquid gushed into the pit.

  No one was more surprised than I was.

  The rope fell another foot as the men above cried out in surprise, and my hair was in effluent stinking of sewage and seawater. Was this some wretched outfall from Jaffa? I squeezed my eyes tight, ready for the bite of fangs on my nose or ears or eyelids. Instead, the angry hissing was receding.

  I blinked open. The snakes had crawled to the sides of the pit to get away from the gushing stink. They were desert serpents, as unhappy about all this as I was.

  My head dropped again, and now my forehead dragged in the greasy cesspool. By Hamilton’s dollar, was I to escape the venom only to drown head down?

  “The Grail!” I roared. “It’s the Grail!”

  And with that Najac snapped an order and they began to hoist me.

  The Arabs were in an uproar, declaring I was a sorcerer who’d performed some electric miracle by bringing water out of sand. Najac was looking at the shovel in my hands with disbelief. Below, the pit kept filling, the snakes trying to climb away and dropping back down.

  And then my head was above ground level, my ankles still bound, my torso swaying like a hooked side of beef.

  “What did you say?” Najac demanded.

  “The Grail,” I grasped weakly. “The Holy Grail. Now, will you please just shoot me?”

  And of course he’d like to. But what if my claim proved important to Bonaparte? And then an angry mutter, growing to an indignant roar, began to rise from the entire besieging army.

  CHAPTER 11

  Atrocities cannot be justified, but sometimes they can be explained. Bonaparte’s troops had been struggling with disillusion since landing in Egypt last summer. The heat, the poverty, and the enmity of the population had all come as shocks. The French had expected to be welcomed as republican saviors, bringing the gifts of the Enlightenment. Instead they’d been resisted, viewed as infidels and atheists, the remnants of the Mameluke armies raiding from the desert. Garrisons in villages lived under the constant threat of poisoning or a knife in the dark. Napoleon’s answer was to march on.
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  There had been unexpectedly fierce resistance at Gaza. Turkish prisoners had been paroled on the promise not to fight again, but officers with telescopes had spied the same units now manning the walls of Jaffa. This was a breach of a fundamental rule of European warfare! Yet even this might not have ignited the massacres to follow. What caused the thunder roll of outrage was the decision by Ottoman commander Aga Abdalla to answer Napoleon’s offer of surrender terms by killing the two French emissaries and mounting their heads on poles.

  It was rashness by a proud Muslim outnumbered three to one. The French army roared in protest, like a provoked lion.

  Now there could be no mercy. Within minutes, the bombardment began. There would be a bark, a sizzle as a cannonball cut through the air, and then an eruption of dust and flying fragments as it struck the town’s masonry. With each hit the troops cheered, until the pounding extended hour into hour and became monotonous in its steady erosion of Jaffa’s defenses. On the east and north sides, each gun fired every six minutes. On the south, where cannon pointed across a thickly vegetated ravine that would give good cover to attacking troops, the guns roared every three minutes, slowly smashing a breech. Ottoman artillery replied, but with old ordnance and rusty aim.

  Najac took the time to watch his snakes drown and then chained me to an orange tree while he watched the bombardment and considered what I’d said. The battle was mayhem he preferred not to miss, but I assume he found a minute to inform Bonaparte of my babbling about the Holy Grail. Night came, fires pulsing in Jaffa, but I got no food or water, just the monotonous thud of artillery. I fell asleep to its drums.

  Dawn revealed a large breach in the city’s southern wall. The wedding-cake stack of white houses was pockmarked by dark new holes, and smoke shrouded Jaffa. The French aimed their guns like surgeons, and steadily the breach widened. I could see dozens of spent shot lying in the rubble at the base of the wall, raisins in rumpled dough. Then two companies of grenadiers, accompanied by assault engineers carrying explosives, began assembling in the ravine. More troops readied behind them.

  Najac unchained me. “Bonaparte. Prove your usefulness or die.”

  Napoleon was in a cluster of officers, shortest in stature, biggest in personality, and the one who gestured most vigorously. The grenadiers were filing past into the ravine, saluting as they approached the breach in Jaffa’s wall. Ottoman cannonballs were crashing, thrashing the foliage like a prowling bear. The soldiers ignored the inaccurate fire and its rain of cut leaves.

  “We’ll see whose head ends on a pole!” one sergeant called as they tramped past, bayonets fixed.

  Bonaparte smiled grimly.

  The officers ignored us for a time, but as the advance troops began their assault, Napoleon abruptly swung his attention to me, as if to fill the anxious time waiting for success or failure. There was a rattle of musket fire as the grenadiers emerged from the grove and charged into the breach, but he didn’t even look. “So, Monsieur Gage, I understand that now you are performing miracles, wringing water from stones and smothering serpents?”

  “I found an old conduit.”

  “And the Holy Grail, I understand.”

  I took a breath. “It is the same thing I was looking for in the pyramids, General, and the same thing that Count Alessandro Silano and his corrupt Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry is pursuing to the possible harm of us all. Najac here is himself in league with scoundrels who…”

  “Mr. Gage, I’ve endured your rambling over many months, and don’t recall benefiting whatsoever. If you remember I offered you partnership, a chance to remake the world through the ideals of our two revolutions, French and American. Instead you deserted by balloon, is this not correct?”

  “But only because of Silano…”

  “Do you have this Grail or not?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know where it is?”

  “No, but we were looking when Najac here…”

  “Do you know what it even is?”

  “Not precisely, but…”

  He turned to Najac. “He obviously knows nothing. Why did you pull him out?”

  “But he said he did, in the pit!”

  “Who wouldn’t say anything, with your damned snakes snapping at his head? Enough of this nonsense from you and him! I want an example made of this man: he is not only useless, he is boring! He will be paraded before the infantry and shot like the turncoat he is. I am tired of Masons, sorcerers, snakes, moldering gods, and every other kind of imbecilic legend I have heard since starting this expedition. I am a member of the Institute! France is the embodiment of science! The only ‘Grail’ is firepower!”

  And with that, a bullet plucked off the general’s hat and slammed into the chest of a colonel behind, killing the man.

  The general jumped, staring in shock as the officer toppled over.

  “Mon dieu!” Najac crossed himself, which I considered the height of hypocrisy, given that his piety had as much value as a Continental dollar. “It’s a sign! You should not speak as you did!”

  Napoleon momentarily went pale, but regained his composure. He frowned at the enemy swarming on the walls, looked at the sprawled colonel, and then picked up his hat. “It was Lambeau who took the bullet, not me.”

  “But the power of the Grail!”

  “This is the second time my stature has saved my life. If I had the height of our General Kléber, I would be dead twice over. There’s your miracle, Najac.”

  My captor was transfixed by the hole in the general’s hat.

  “Perhaps it’s a sign we can all still help each other,” I tried.

  “And I want the American gagged as well as bound. Another word, and I will have to shoot him myself.”

  And with that he stalked away, my plight unimproved. “All right, they have a foothold! Lannes, get a three-pounder into that breach!”

  I missed much of what happened next and am grateful for it. The Ottoman troops fought ferociously, so much so that a captain of engineers named Ayme had to find his way through Jaffa’s cellars to take the enemy from behind with the bayonet. With that, angry French soldiers began fanning into Jaffa’s alleys.

  Meanwhile, General Bon on the northern side of town had turned his diversionary attack into a full-fledged assault that broke in from that direction. With French troops swarming, the defenders’ morale collapsed and the Ottoman levies began to surrender. French fury at the foolish emissary beheadings hadn’t been slaked, however, and killing and looting first went unchecked, then turned into mob frenzy. Prisoners were shot and bayoneted. Homes were ransacked. As the bloody afternoon gave way to concealing night, whooping soldiers staggered through the streets heavy with plunder. They fired muskets into windows and waved sabers wet with blood. The looters refused to even stop to help their own wounded. Officers who tried to stop the massacre were threatened and shoved aside. Women’s veils were ripped from their faces, their clothes following. Any husband or brother who tried to defend them was shot down, the women raped in sight of the bodies. No mosque, church, or synagogue was respected, and Muslim, Christian, and Jew alike died in the flames. Children lay screaming on the corpses of their parents. Daughters pleaded for mercy while being violated on top of dying mothers. Prisoners were hurled from walls. Flames trapped the elderly, the sick, and the insane in the rooms where they hid. Blood ran down the gutters like rainwater. In one monstrous night, the fear and frustration of nearly a year’s bitter campaigning was taken out on a single helpless city. An army of the rational, from the capital of reason, had gone insane.

  Bonaparte knew better than to try to stem this release; the same anarchy had reigned in a thousand sackings before, from Troy to the Crusader pillages of Constantinople and Jerusalem. “One should never forbid what one lacks the power to prevent,” he remarked. By dawn the men’s emotion had been spent and the exhausted soldiers sprawled like their victims, stunned by what they’d done, but satiated as well, like satyrs after a debauch. A hungry, demonic anger had been fed.


  In the aftermath, Bonaparte was left with more than three thousand sullen, hungry, terrified Ottoman prisoners.

  Napoleon did not shrink from hard decisions. For all his admiration of poets and artists, he was at heart an artilleryman and an engineer. He was invading Syria and Palestine, a land with two and a half million people, with thirteen thousand French soldiers and two thousand Egyptian auxiliaries. Even as Jaffa fell, some of his men were displaying symptoms of plague. His fantastic goal was to march to India like Alexander before him, heading an army of recruited Orientals, carving out an empire in the East. Yet Horatio Nelson had destroyed his fleet and cut him off from reinforcements, Sidney Smith was helping organize the defense of Acre, and Bonaparte needed to frighten the Butcher into capitulation. He dared not free his prisoners, and he couldn’t feed or guard them.

  So he decided to execute them.

  It was a monstrous decision in a controversial career, made more so by the fact that I was one of the prisoners he decided to execute. I wasn’t even to have the dignity and fame of being paraded before assembled regiments as a noteworthy spy; instead I was herded by Najac into the mass of milling Moroccans and Sudanese and Albanians as if I were one more Ottoman levy. The poor men were still uncertain of what was happening, since they’d surrendered on the assumption their lives would be spared. Was Bonaparte marching them to boats bound for Constantinople? Were they being sent as slave labor to Egypt? Were they merely to be camped outside the city’s smoking walls until the French moved on? But no, it was none of these, and the grim ranks of grenadiers and fusiliers, muskets at parade rest, soon began to ignite rumor and panic. French cavalry were stationed at either end of the beach to prevent escape. Against the orange groves were the infantry, and at our back was the sea.

  “They are going to kill us!” some began to cry.

  “Allah will protect us,” others promised.

  “As he protected Jaffa?”

  “Look, I haven’t found the Grail yet,” I whispered to Najac, “but it exists—it’s a book—and if you’ll kill me, you’ll never find it either. It’s not too late for partnership…”