Napoleon’s Pyramids

CHAPTER TEN

The home of Ashraf’s oddly named brother was in one of Cairo’s more reputable sections, which is to say it was in a neighbourhood marginally less dusty, disease-ridden, rat-infested, stinking, and crowded than the city’s norm. Just as in Alexandria, the glories of the East seemed to have eluded Egypt’s capital, which had little provision for sanitation, garbage removal, street lighting, traffic management, or corralling the marauding dog packs that roamed its lanes. Of course I’ve said much the same of Paris. Still, if the Egyptians had marshalled their dogs instead of their cavalry, our conquest might not have been so easy. Scores of the mutts were shot or bayoneted each day by annoyed soldiers. The executions had no more impact on the canine population than swatting had on the incessant flies.

And yet, as in Alexandria or Paris, there was opulence amid the squalor. The Mamelukes were masters at squeezing taxes from the oppressed peasantry and spending it on monuments to themselves, their palaces exhibiting an Arabic grace missing from the heavier structures of Europe or America. While plain on the outside, the finer houses inside had shady courtyards of orange, palm, pomegranate, and fig, gracefully pointed Moorish arches, tiled fountains, and cool rooms rich with carpets, cushions, carved bookshelves, domed ceilings, and brass and copper tables. Some had intricate balconies and mashrabiyya screened windows that looked over the street, as carefully carved as a Swiss chalet and as concealing as a veil. Bonaparte claimed for himself the recently constructed marble-and-granite home of Mohammed Bey el-Elfi, which boasted baths on every floor, a sauna, and glass windows. Napoleon’s academics were housed in the palace of another bey named Quassim who had fled to Upper Egypt. His harem became the invention workshop for the industrious Conte, and his gardens the seminar room for the savants. The Muslim mosques were even more elegant, their Moorish minarets and soaring domes matching in grace and grandeur the finest Gothic churches in Europe. In the markets the awnings were bright as rainbows, and the oriental carpets draped on balustrades like a garden of flowers. The contrasts of Egypt – heat and shade, wealth and poverty, dung and incense, clay and colour, mud brick and gleaming limestone – were almost overwhelming.

The common soldiers found themselves in surroundings considerably less luxurious than the officers: dark, medieval homes with no conveniences. Many of them promptly proclaimed the city disappointing, its people hideous, the heat enervating, and the food gut-wrenching. France had conquered a country, they wailed, that had no wine, no proper bread, and no available women. Such opinion would moderate as the summer cooled and some females began to form liaisons with the new rulers. In time the troops even grumpily admitted that the aish, or baked flat bread, was actually an agreeable substitute for their own. The dysentery that had plagued the army since landing increased, however, and the French army was beginning to suffer more casualties from disease than bullets. The absence of alcohol had already caused so much grumbling that Bonaparte ordered stills to make a libation from dates, the most plentiful fruit. And while officers were planning the planting of vineyards, their troops quickly discovered the Muslim drug called hashish, sometimes rolled into honeyed balls and spiced with opium. Drinking its brew or smoking its seeds became commonplace, and throughout its occupation of Egypt, the army was never able to get the drug under control.

The general entered his prize city through a main gate at the head of a regiment, bands playing and flags flying. At Ashraf’s direction Astiza, Talma, and I entered a smaller gate and threaded through twisting lanes past bazaars that, two days after the great battle, were half-deserted, their flaws lit by the harsh sun of noon. Boys threw water to hold down the dust. Donkeys with baskets slung on either side forced us into entryways as they squeezed down alleys. Even in the heart of Cairo there were village sounds of barking dogs, snorting camels, crowing roosters, and the call of the muezzins to prayer, which to my ears sounded like cats mating. The shops looked like stables and the poorer houses like unlit caves, their men squatting impassively in their faded blue galabiyyas and smoking from sheesha water pipes. Their children, jaundiced and covered with sores, stared at us with saucer eyes. Their women hid. It was obvious that the majority of the nation lived in abject poverty.

‘Maybe the finer neighborhoods are elsewhere,’ Talma said worriedly.

‘No, this is what you have responsibility for,’ Ashraf said.

The notion of responsibility had been preying on my mind, and I told Ash that if his brother would receive us I’d grant the Mameluke his freedom. I really didn’t want to support another dependent besides Astiza, and in fact the entire idea of servants and slaves had always made me uncomfortable. Franklin had a pair of Negroes once and was so discomfited by their presence that he’d set them free. Slaves were a poor investment, he’d concluded: costly to buy, expensive to maintain, and with no incentive to do good work.

Ashraf seemed less than pleased at my mercy. ‘How am I to eat if you cast me out like a foundling?’

‘Ash, I am not a rich man. I have no means to pay you.’

‘But you do, from the gold you just captured from me!’

‘I’m supposed to pay back what I just won in battle?’

‘Is that not just? Here is what we will do. I will become your guide, Citizen Ash. I know all of Egypt. For this, you will pay me back what you stole. At the end, we will each have what we started with.’

‘That’s a fortune that no guide or servant would ever earn!’

He considered. ‘This is true. So you will hire my brother as well with the money, to investigate your mystery. And pay to stay in his household, a thousand times better than the sties that we are passing. Yes, your victory and your generosity will buy you many friends in Cairo. The gods have smiled on all of us this day, my friend.’

That would teach me to be generous. I tried to take solace in Franklin, who counselled that ‘he who multiplies riches multiplies cares.’ That certainly seemed true of my game winnings. Yet Ben was as obsessed with a dollar as any of us, and drove hard bargains, too. I never could get a raise out of him.

‘No,’ I told Ash. ‘I will pay you a living wage, and your brother too. But only when we’ve discovered what the medallion means will I give you back the remainder.’

‘This is fair,’ said Astiza.

‘And it shows you have the wisdom of the ancients!’ Ashraf said. ‘Agreed! Allah, Jesus, and Horus be with you!’

I was pretty sure such inclusion was blasphemy in at least three religions, but never mind: he might do well as a Freemason. ‘Tell me about your brother.’

‘He is a very strange man, like you; you will like him. Enoch cares nothing for politics but everything for knowledge. He and I are nothing alike, because I am of this world and he is of another. But I love and respect him. He knows eight languages, including yours. He has more books than the sultan in Constantinople has wives.’

‘Is that a lot?’

‘Oh yes.’

And so we came to Enoch’s house. Like all Cairo habitations the outside was plain, a three-story edifice with tiny, slitlike windows and a massive wooden door with a small iron grill. At first Ashraf’s hammering brought no answer. Had Enoch fled with the Mameluke beys? But finally a peephole behind the grill was opened, Ash shouted imprecations in Arabic, and the door cracked open. A gigantic black butler named Mustafa ushered us inside.

The relief from the heat was immediate. We passed through a small open atrium to a courtyard with murmuring fountain and shading orange trees. The home’s architecture seemed to create a gentle breeze. An ornate wooden stair climbed one side of the court to screened rooms above. Beyond was the main living room, floored in intricate Moorish tile and covered at one end with oriental carpets and cushions, where guests could lounge. At the opposite end was a screened balcony where women could listen to the conversation of the men below. The beamed ceiling was ornate, the arches pleasingly peaked, and the sculpted bookcases crammed with volumes. Draperies billowed in puffs of desert air. Talma mopped his face. ‘It’s what I dreamt.’

We didn’t stop here, however. Mustafa led us through a smaller courtyard beyond, bare except for an alabaster pedestal carved with mysterious signs. Above was a square of brilliantly blue sky at the top of towering white walls. The sun illuminated one side like snow and cast the opposite into shadow.

‘It’s a light well,’ Astiza murmured.

‘A what?’

‘Such wells at the pyramids were used for measuring time. At the summer solstice, the sun would be directly overhead, casting no shadow. That is how the priests could pinpoint the longest day of the year.’

‘Yes, that is right!’ Ashraf confirmed. ‘It told the seasons and predicted the rising of the Nile.’

‘Why did they need to know that?’

‘When the Nile rose, the farms flooded and labour was freed for other projects, like building pyramids,’ Astiza said. ‘The Nile’s cycle was the cycle of Egypt. The measurement of time was the beginning of civilisation. People had to be assigned to keep track of it, and became priests, and thought of all kinds of other useful things for people to do.’

Beyond was a large room as dim as the courtyard was bright. It was crowded with dusty statuary, broken stone vessels, and chunks of wall with colourful Egyptian painting. Red-skinned men and yellow-skinned women posed in the stiff yet graceful poses I’d seen on the tablet in the hold of L’Orient. There were jackal-headed gods, the cat goddess Bastet, stiffly serene pharaohs, black-polished falcons, and blocky wooden cases with life-sized paintings of humans on the outside. Talma had already described these elaborate coffins to me. They held mummies.

The scribe stopped before one in excitement. ‘Are these real?’ he exclaimed. ‘A source like this could cure all my illnesses…’

I pulled. ‘Come on before you choke to death.’

‘These are cases from which the mummies have been removed,’ Ashraf told him. ‘Thieves would discard the coffins, but Enoch has let it be known he will pay to collect them. He thinks their decoration is another key to the past.’

I saw that some were covered with hieroglyphics as well as drawings. ‘Why write on something that would be buried?’ I asked.

‘It may be to instruct the dead through the perils of the underworld, my brother says. For us the living, they are useful to store things in because most people are too superstitious to look inside. They fear a curse.’

A narrow stone staircase at the rear of the room led down to a large vaulted cellar lit by lamps. At Ashraf’s invitation, we descended to a large library. It was roofed with barrel vaults and floored with stone, dry and cool. Its wooden shelves were crammed floor to ceiling with books, journals, scrolls, and sheaves of parchment. Some bindings were sturdy leather, light glinting on gold lettering. Other tomes, often in strange languages, seemed held together by tendrils of old fabric, their smell as musty as the grave. At a central table, half the size of a barn door, sat the bent figure of a man.

‘Greetings, my brother,’ Ashraf said in English.

Enoch looked up from his writing. He was older than Ashraf, bald, with a fringe of long grey locks and a heavy beard, looking as if Newton’s gravity had tugged all his hair toward his sandals. Dressed in grey robes, he was hawk-nosed and bright-eyed and his skin was the colour of the parchment he’d been bent over. He carried an air of serenity few people achieve, his eyes betraying a hint of mischief.

‘So the French are occupying even my library?’ The tone was wry.

‘No, they come as friends, and the tall one is an American. His friend is a French scribe…’

‘Who is interested in my dehydrated companion,’ Enoch said with amusement. Talma was staring, transfixed, at a mummy posed upright in an open coffin in one corner. This casket, too, was covered with fine, indecipherable writing. The mummy was stripped of bandages, some of the old linen in a tangle at its feet, and incisions had been made in its chest cavity. There was nothing reassuring about the body, a dark brownish-grey looking starved from the drying, the eyes closed, the nose a snub, the mouth open in a rictus that showed small, white teeth. I found it disturbing.

Talma, however, was happy as sheep in clover. ‘Is this truly ancient?’ he breathed. ‘An attempt at everlasting life?’

‘Antoine, I think they failed,’ I observed dryly.

‘Not necessarily,’ Enoch said. ‘To the Egyptians, the preservation of the dead physical body was a requirement for everlasting life. According to accounts that have come down to us, the ancients believed the individual consisted of three parts: his physical body, his ba – which we might call character – and his ka, or life force. These last two combined are equivalent to our modern soul. Ba and ka had to find each other and unite in a perilous underworld as the sun, Ra, journeyed each night through it, in order to form an immortal akh that would live amid the gods. The mummy was their daytime home until this task was completed. Instead of separating the material and the spiritual, Egyptian religion combined them.’

‘ Ba, ka, and Ra? Sounds like a firm of solicitors.’ I was always uncomfortable with the spiritual.

Enoch ignored me. ‘I have decided the journey of this one should be completed by now. I’ve unwrapped and cut him to investigate ancient embalming techniques.’

‘There is talk these tissues could have medicinal qualities,’ Talma said.

‘Which distorts what Egyptians believed,’ Enoch replied. ‘The body was a home to be animated, not the essence of life itself. Just as you are more than your ailments, scribe. You know, your trade as scribe was that of the wise Thoth.’

‘I’m actually a journalist, come to record Egypt’s liberation,’ Talma said.

‘How artfully you put that.’ Enoch looked at Astiza. ‘And we have another guest, as well?’

‘She is a…’ Ashraf began.

‘Servant,’ Enoch finished. He looked at her curiously. ‘So you have come back.’

Blimey, did these two know each other as well?

‘The gods appear to have willed it.’ She cast her eyes down. ‘My master is dead, killed by Napoleon himself, and my new master is the American.’

‘An intriguing twist of fate.’

Ashraf moved forward to embrace his brother. ‘It is also by the grace of all the gods and the mercy of these three that I’ve seen you again, brother! I’d made my peace and prepared for paradise, but then I was captured!’

‘You’re now their slave?’

‘The American has already set me free. He’s hired me as his bodyguard and guide with the money he took from me. He wants to hire you as well. Soon I will have back all that I lost. Is this not fate as well?’

‘Hire me for what?’

‘He’s come to Egypt with an ancient artifact. I told him you might recognise it.’

‘Ashraf is the bravest warrior I’ve ever seen,’ I spoke up. ‘He hurtled a French infantry square and it took all of us to bring him down.’

‘Bah. I was captured by a woman pushing a wagon wheel.’

‘He has always been brave,’ said Enoch. ‘Too much so. And vulnerable to women, as well.’

‘I am a man of this world, not the next, my brother. But these people seek your knowledge. They have an ancient medallion and want to know its purpose. When I saw it I knew I must bring them to you. Who knows more of the past than wise Enoch?’

‘A medallion?’

‘The American obtained it in Paris but thinks it Egyptian,’ Astiza said. ‘Men have tried to kill him to obtain it. The bandit Bin Sadr desires it. French savants are curious about it. Bonaparte favours him because of it.’

‘Bin Sadr the Snake? We’d heard he rides with the invaders.’

‘He rides with whoever pays him enough,’ Ashraf scoffed.

‘And who truly pays him?’ Enoch asked Astiza.

Again, she looked down. ‘Another scholar.’ Did she know more than she’d told me?

‘He’s a spy for this Bonaparte,’ Ashraf theorised, ‘and an agent, perhaps, for whoever wants this medallion most.’

‘Then the American should be most careful.’

‘Indeed.’

‘And the American threatens the peace of whatever home he comes into.’

‘As usual, you are quick with the truth, my brother.’

‘And yet you bring him to me.’

‘Because he may have what has long been rumoured!’

I didn’t like this talk at all. I’d just survived a major battle and yet was still in peril? ‘Just who is this Bin Sadr?’ I asked.

‘He was such a relentless grave robber that he became an outcast,’ Enoch said. ‘He had no sense of propriety or respect. Men of learning despised him, so he joined with Europeans investigating the dark arts. He became a mercenary and, by rumour, an assassin and began roaming the world in the company of powerful men. He disappeared for a time. Now he appears again, apparently working for Bonaparte.’

Or for Count Alessandro Silano, I thought.

‘Sounds like a splendidly interesting newspaper story,’ said Talma.

‘He would kill you if you wrote it.’

‘But perhaps too complicated for my readers,’ the journalist amended.

Maybe I should just give the medallion to this Enoch, I thought. After all, like the booty I had seized from Ash, it had cost me nothing. Let him deal with snakes and highwaymen. But no, what if it led to real treasure? Berthollet might think the best things in life are free, but in my experience the people who say that are ones who already have money.

‘So you’re seeking answers?’ Enoch asked.

‘I’m seeking someone to trust. Someone to study it but not steal it.’

‘If your neckpiece is the kind of guidepost I think it is, I don’t want it for myself. It is a burden, not a gift. But perhaps I can help understand it. Can I see it?’

I took it off and let it swing from its chain, everyone looking curiously. Then Enoch gave it the same inspection everyone else had, turning it, splaying the arms, and using a lamp to shine light through its perforations. ‘How did you get this?’

‘I won it at cards from a soldier who claimed it once belonged to Cleopatra. He said it was carried by an alchemist named Cagliostro.’

‘Cagliostro!’

‘You’ve heard of him?’

‘He was in Egypt once.’ Enoch shook his head. ‘He sought secrets no man should learn, entered places no man should enter, and uttered names no man should say.’

‘Why shouldn’t he say a name?’

‘To learn a god’s real name is to know how to call him to do your bidding,’ Ashraf said. ‘To say the name of the dead is to summon them. The old ones believed words, especially written words, were magic.’

The old man looked from me to Astiza. ‘What is your role here, priestess?’

She bowed slightly. ‘I serve the goddess. She brought me to the American just as you have been brought, for her own purposes.’

Priestess? What the devil did that mean?

‘Which maybe is to hurl this necklace into the Nile,’ Enoch said.

‘Indeed. And yet the ancients forged it so that it might be found, did they not, wise Hermes? And it has come to us in this unlikely way. Why? How much is chance, and how much is destiny?’

‘A question I haven’t answered in a life of learning.’ Enoch sighed, perplexed. ‘Now then.’ He studied the medallion anew, pointing to the perforations in the disc. ‘Do you recognise the pattern?’

‘Stars,’ Astiza offered.

‘Yes, but which ones?’

We all shook our heads.

‘But it is easy! It is Draconis, or Draco. The dragon.’ He traced a line along the stars that looked like a writhing snake or a skinny dragon. ‘It is a star constellation, meant to guide the owner of this medallion, I suspect.’

‘Guide him how?’ I asked.

‘Who knows? The stars revolve in the night sky and shift position with the seasons. A constellation means little unless correlated with a calendar. So what good is this?’

We waited for an answer to what we hoped was a rhetorical question.

‘I don’t know,’ Enoch admitted. ‘Still, the ancients were obsessed with time. Some temples were built only to be illuminated on the winter solstice or the autumn equinox. The journey of the sun was like the journey of life. Did this come with no time piece?’

‘No,’ I said. But I was reminded of the calendar that Monge had shown me in the hold of L’Orient, the one captured in the same fortress that had imprisoned Cagliostro. Maybe the old conjurer had carried the pair together. Could it be a clue?

‘Without knowing when it should be used, this medallion may be worthless. Now, this line that bisects the circle, what does that mean?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘These zigzag lines here are almost certainly the ancient symbol for water.’ I was surprised. I thought maybe they were mountains, but Enoch insisted they were the Egyptian symbol for waves. ‘But this little pyramid of scratches, it baffles me. And these arms… ah, but look here.’ He pointed and we bent closer. There was a notch or indentation halfway down each arm that I’d never really noticed, as if part of the arm had been filed away.

‘Is it a ruler?’ I tried. ‘That notch could mark a measurement.’

‘A possibility,’ Enoch said. ‘But it could also be a place to fit another piece onto this one. Perhaps the reason this medallion is so mysterious, American, is because it’s not yet complete.’

It was Astiza who suggested that I leave the medallion with the old man for study so that he could look for similar ornaments in his books. At first I was dubious. I’d got used to its weight and the security of knowing where it was at all times. Now I was going to give it up to a near-stranger?

‘It’s no good to any of us until we know what it is and what it’s for,’ she reasoned. ‘Wear it and it can be taken from you in the streets of Cairo. Leave it in the cellar of a reclusive scholar and you’ve left it in a vault.’

‘Can I trust him?’

‘What choice do you have? How many answers have you got in your weeks of possession? Give Enoch a day or two to make some progress.’

‘What I am supposed to do in the meantime?’

‘Start asking questions of your own savants. Why would the constellation Draco be on this piece? A solution will come faster if we all work together.’

‘Ethan, it’s too big a risk,’ Talma said, looking at Astiza with distrust.

Indeed, who was this woman who’d been called priestess? Yet my heart told me Talma’s fears were exaggerated, that I’d been lonely in this quest and that now, unbidden, I had some allies to help unravel the mystery. The goddess’s will indeed. ‘No, she’s right,’ I said. ‘We need help or we’re not going to make any progress. But if Enoch runs with my medallion, he’ll have the entire French army after him.’

‘Run? He has invited us to stay in his house with him.’

My bed chamber was the finest I’d enjoyed in years. It was cool and shadowy, the bed high off the floor and surrounded by gauze curtains. The tile was layered with carpets, and the washbasin and ewer were silver and brass. What a contrast to the grime and heat of campaigning! Yet I felt myself being seduced into a story I didn’t understand, and found myself going back over events. Wasn’t it fortuitous that I’d met a Greek-Egyptian woman who spoke English? That the brother of this strange Enoch had charged straight at me after breaking into the middle of the square at the Battle of the Pyramids? That Bonaparte had not just permitted, but approved, this addition to my retinue? It was almost as if the medallion was working magic as a strange attractant, drawing people in.

Certainly it was time to put more questions to my supposed servant. After we’d bathed and rested I found Astiza in the main courtyard, now shadowy and cool. She was sitting by the fountain in expectation of my interrogation. Washed, changed, and combed, her hair shone like obsidian. Her breasts were cupped in folds of linen, their nubs distractingly draped, and her feet were slim and sandalled, her ankles crossed demurely. She wore bracelets, anklets, and an ankh at her throat, and was so breathtaking it was hard to think clearly. Nonetheless, I must.

‘Why did he call you priestess?’ I said without preamble, sitting next to her.

‘Surely you didn’t think my interests are limited to cooking and washing for you,’ she said quietly.

‘I knew you were more than a serving girl. But priestess of what?’

Her eyes were wide, her gaze solemn. ‘Of faith that has run through every religion for ten thousand years: that there are worlds beyond the ones we see, Ethan, and mysteries beyond what we think we understand. Isis is a gate to those worlds.’

‘You’re a bloody pagan.’

‘And what is a pagan? If you look at the origin of the word, it means country dweller, a person of nature who lives to the rhythm of seasons and the sun. If that is paganism, then I am a fervent believer.’

‘And a believer in what else, exactly?’

‘That lives have purpose, that some knowledge is best left guarded, and some power sheathed and unused. Or, if released, that it be used for good.’

‘Did I lead you to this house or did you lead me?’

She smiled gently. ‘Do you think we met by accident?’

I snorted. ‘My recollection is by cannon fire.’

‘You took the shortest route to the harbour of Alexandria. We were told to watch for a civilian in a green coat coming that way, possibly accompanying Bonaparte.’

‘We?’

‘My master and I. The one you killed.’

‘And your house just happened to be on our route?’

‘No, but a house of a Mameluke who’d fled was. My master and I commandeered it and our acolytes brought us guns.’

‘You almost killed Napoleon!’

‘Not really. The Guardian was aiming at you, not him.’

‘What!’

‘My priesthood thought it best to simply kill you before you learnt too much. But the gods apparently had other plans. The Guardian hit almost everyone but you. Then the room exploded and when I came to, there you were. I knew then that you had purpose, however blind you might be.’

‘What purpose?’

‘I agree it’s hard to imagine. But you are supposed to help, somehow, guard what should be guarded or use what should be used.’

‘Guard what? Use what?’

She shook her head. ‘We don’t know.’

By Franklin’s lightning, this was the damnedest thing I’d ever heard. I was supposed to believe my captive had found me instead of the other way around? ‘What do you mean, the Guardian?’

‘Simply one who keeps the old ways that made this land the world’s richest and most beautiful, five thousand years ago. We too had heard rumours of the necklace – Cagliostro couldn’t keep silent in his excitement at finding it – and of unscrupulous men on their way to dig and rob. But you! So ignorant! Why would Isis put it in your hands? Yet first they lead you to me. Then us to Ashraf, and from Ashraf to Enoch. Secrets that have slumbered for millennia are being awakened by the march of the French. The pyramids tremble. The gods are restless, and directing our hand.’

I didn’t know if she was daft as a lunatic or smart as a seer. ‘Toward what?’

‘I don’t know. All of us are half-blind, seeing some things but missing others. These French savants you boast of, they are wise men, are they not? Magi?’

‘Magi?’

‘Or as we in Egypt called them, magicians.’

‘I think men of science would draw a distinction between themselves and magicians, Astiza.’

‘In ancient Egypt, no such distinction existed. The wise knew magic, and performed many spells. Now, you and I must be a bridge between your savants and men like Enoch, and solve this puzzle before unscrupulous men do. We’re in a race with the cult of the snake, the serpent god Apophis, and its Egyptian Rite. They want to learn the secret first and use it for their own dark designs.’

‘What designs?’

‘We don’t know, because none of us are entirely sure what it is we seek.’ She hesitated. ‘There are legends of great treasures and, more importantly, great powers, the kind of power that shakes empires. What, exactly, it is too early to say. Let Enoch study some more. Just be aware that many men have heard these stories throughout history and have wondered at the truth behind them.’

‘You mean Napoleon?’

‘I suspect that he understands least of all, but hopes someone will find it so he can seize it for himself. Why, he isn’t sure, but he’s heard the legends of Alexander. All of us are in a fog of myth and legend, except perhaps Bin Sadr – and whoever Bin Sadr’s true master is.’