Napoleon’s Pyramids

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Egyptian desert west of the Nile is a trackless ocean of sand and rock, interrupted by only a few oasis islands. The desert east of the Nile and south of Cairo – a sterile plateau separated from the Red Sea by moonlike mountains – is emptier yet, a roasting pan seemingly unchanged from the birth of the world. The blue sky bleaches to a dull haze on the shimmering horizon, and dryness threatens to mummify an intruder each pitiless afternoon. There is no water, no shade, no birdcall, no plant, no insect, and seemingly no end. For millennia, monks and magi retreated here to find God. When I fled I felt I’d left him far behind, in the waters of the Nile and the great green forests of home.

Ashraf and I rode in that direction because no sane man would. We passed first through Cairo’s City of the Dead, the Muslim beehive tombs as white as ghosts in the night. Then we trotted quickly through a ribbon of green farmland that followed the Nile, dogs barking as we passed. Long before sunrise we were dots on an arid plain. The sun rose, blinding as we angled east, and arced so slowly that it became a pitiless clock. The saddles of our captured mounts had canteens that we made last until noon, and then thirst became the central fact of existence. It was so hot that it hurt to breathe, and my eyes squinted against desert whiteness bright as snow. Powdery dust caked lips, ears, clothes, and horses, and the sky was a weight we carried on our shoulders and the crowns of our heads. The chain of the medallion burnt into my neck. A mirage of a lake, the cruel illusion all too familiar by now, wavered just out of reach.

So this is Hades, I thought. So this is what happens to men without proper direction, who drink, fornicate, and gamble for their daily bread. I longed to find a scrap of shade to crawl into and sleep forever.

‘We must go faster,’ Ashraf said. ‘The French are pursuing.’

I looked back. A long plume of white dust had been caught by the wind and spun into a lazy funnel. Somewhere under it was a platoon of hussars, following our hoof prints.

‘How can we? Our horses have no water.’

‘Then we must find them some.’ He gestured ahead at undulating humps of hills that looked like cracked loaves.

‘In a bed of coals?’

‘Even in a bed of coals a diamond can hide. We’ll lose the French in the canyons and wadis. Then we’ll find a place to drink.’

Kicking our tired horses and tightening our cloaks against the dust, we pressed on. We entered the uplands, following a maze of sandy wadis like a snarl of string. The only vegetation was dry camel thorn. Ashraf was looking for something, however, and soon found it: a shelf of bare, sun-blasted rock to our left that led to a choice of three canyons. ‘Here we can break our tracks.’ We turned off, hooves clacking, and picked our way across the stone table. We took the middle limestone canyon because it looked narrowest and least hospitable: perhaps the French would think we went another way. It was so hot that it was like riding into an oven. Soon we could hear the frustrated shouts of our pursuers in the dry desert air, arguing about which way we’d gone.

I lost all sense of direction and docilely followed the Mameluke. Higher and higher the crests reached, and I could begin to see the jagged lines of real mountains, the rock black and red against the sky. Here was the range that separated the valley of the Nile from the Red Sea. Nowhere was there a spot of green or glisten of water. The silence was unnerving, broken only by our own clop and creak of leather. Was this desert – the fact that ancient Egyptians could walk from the fertile Nile to absolute nothingness – the reason they seemed so preoccupied with death? Was the contrast between their fields and the ever-encroaching sand the origin of the idea of an expulsion from Eden? Was the waste a reminder of the brevity of life and a spur to dreams of immortality? Certainly the dry heat would mummify corpses naturally, long before the Egyptians did it as religious practice. I imagined someone finding my husk centuries from now, my frozen expression one of vast regret.

Finally the shadows seemed to be growing longer, the sounds of pursuit fainter. The French must be as thirsty as we were. I was dizzy, my body sore, my tongue thick.

We stopped at what looked like a rock trap. High cliffs rose all around us, the only exit being the narrow canyon we’d just ridden through. The towering walls were finally so high, and the sun so advanced, that they cast welcome shadow.

‘Now what?’

Ashraf stiffly got down. ‘Now you must help me dig.’ He knelt on the sand at the base of a cliff, at a cleft where a waterfall might have pooled if such an absurdity could exist here. But perhaps it did: the rock above was stained dark as if water occasionally flowed down. He began burrowing into the sand with his hands.

‘Dig?’ Had the sun driven him mad?

‘Come, if you don’t want to die! It rains a torrent once a year, or perhaps once a decade. Like that diamond in coals, some water remains.’

I joined in. At first the exercise seemed pointless, the hot grit burning my hands. Yet gradually the sand grew gratefully cool and then, astonishingly, damp. Smelling water, I began throwing sand away like a terrier. At last we reached true moisture. Water oozed, so thick with sediment it was like coagulating blood.

‘I can’t drink mud!’ I reached to dig again.

Ashraf grabbed my arm and rocked us back on our heels. ‘The desert asks patience. This water may have come from a century ago. We can wait moments more.’

As I watched impatiently, sweet liquid began to pool in the depression we’d dug. The horses snorted and whinnied.

‘Not yet, my companions, not yet,’ Ash soothed.

It was the shallowest bowl I’d ever seen, and as welcome as a river. After an eternity we bent to kiss our puddle, like Muslims bowing to Mecca. As I lapped and swallowed the dirty leakage it gave me a shiver and a glow. What bags of water we are, so helpless if not constantly replenished! We slurped until we’d drained it back to mud, sat back, regarded each other, and laughed. Our drinking had made a circle of clean wetness around our lips, while the rest of our face was painted with dust. We looked like clowns. There was an impatient wait for our meagre well to refill and then we cupped some for the horses, guarding that they didn’t drink too much too soon. As dusk settled this became our job, carrying water in a saddlebag to the thirsty mounts, sipping ourselves, and slowly mopping the rest of the grit from our heads and hands. I began to feel faintly human again. The first stars popped out, and I realised I hadn’t heard any sounds of French pursuit for some time. Then the full panoply of the heavens blossomed, and the rocks glowed silver.

‘Welcome to the desert,’ Ashraf said.

‘I’m hungry.’

He grinned. ‘That means you’re alive.’

It grew cold but even if we’d had wood, we dared not light a fire. Instead we huddled and talked, giving each other small comfort by sharing our grief about Talma and Enoch, and small hope as we talked about vague futures: with Astiza for me, and with Egypt as a whole for Ash.

‘The Mamelukes are exploitive, it is true,’ he admitted. ‘We could learn things from your French savants, just as they learn from us. But Egypt must be ruled by the people who live here, Ethan, not pink-skinned Franks.’

‘Can’t there be a collaboration of both?’

‘I don’t think so. Would Paris want an Arab on its town council, even if the imam had the wisdom of Thoth? No. This is not human nature. Suppose a god came down from the sky with answers to all questions. Would we listen, or nail him to a cross?’

‘We all know the answer to that one. So each man to his place, Ash?’

‘And wisdom to its place. I think this is what Enoch was trying to do, to keep Egypt’s wisdom locked away where it belongs, as the ancients decided.’

‘Even if they could levitate rocks or make people live forever?’

‘Things lose value if they’re done too easily. If any nation or man could make a pyramid with magic, then it becomes no more remarkable than a hill. And live forever? Anyone with eyes can see that this goes against all nature. Imagine a world full of the old, a world with few children, a world in which there was no hope of advancement because every office was filled with patriarchs who had got there centuries ahead of you. This would not be a paradise, it would be a hell of caution and conservatism, of stale ideas and shopworn sayings, of old grudges and remembered slights. Do we fear death? Of course. But it is death that makes room for birth, and the cycle of life is as natural as the rise and fall of the Nile. Death is our last and greatest duty.’

We waited a day to make sure the French weren’t waiting for us. Then, assuming a lack of water had driven them back to Cairo, we started south, travelling at night to avoid the worst of the heat. We paralleled the Nile but stayed many miles to the east to avoid detection, even though it was a struggle to negotiate the serpentine hills. Our plan was to catch up with Desaix’s main column of troops, where Silano and Astiza rode. I would pursue the count as the French pursued the Mameluke insurgents up the river. Eventually I would rescue Astiza, and Ashraf would have revenge on whoever had killed poor Enoch. We would find the staff of Min, unscramble the way into the Great Pyramid, and find the long-lost Book of Thoth, protecting it from the occult Egyptian Rite. And then… would we secrete it, destroy it, or keep it for ourselves? I would cross that bridge when I came to it, as old Ben would say.

Along our way, we found nests of life in the desert after all. A Coptic monastery of brown domed buildings sprouted like mushrooms in a forest of rock, a garden of palms promising the presence of a well. The Mameluke habit of carrying their wealth into battle now displayed a practical purpose: Ashraf had retrieved the purse he’d thrown at me and had enough coins to purchase food. We drank our fill, bought larger water bags, and found more wells as we continued south, spaced like inns on an invisible highway. The dried fruit and unleavened bread was simple but sustaining, and my companion showed how to coat my cracked lips with mutton fat to keep them from blistering. I was beginning to become more comfortable in the desert. The sand became a bed, and my loose robes – washed of donkey stink – caught every cooling breeze. Where before I had seen desolation, now I began to see beauty: there were a thousand subtle colours in the sinuous rocks, a play of light and shadow against crumbled white limestone, and a magnificent emptiness that seemed to fill the soul. The simplicity and serenity reminded me of the pyramids.

Occasionally we would zigzag closer to the Nile, and Ashraf would descend to a village at night to barter as a Mameluke for food and water. I’d stay up in the barren hills, overlooking the serene green belt of farmland and blue river. Sometimes the wind would bring the sound of camel or donkey bray, the laughter of children, or the call to prayer. I would sit on the edge, an alien peeking in. Toward dawn he would rejoin me, we’d make a few miles, and then as the sun rose over the cliffs we’d shovel away sand at places he knew and creep into old caves cut into the bluffs.

‘These are tombs of the ancients,’ Ash would explain, as we risked a small fire to cook whatever he had bartered for, using purchased charcoal and washing our meal down with tea. ‘These caves were hollowed out thousands of years ago.’ They were half-filled with drifting sand, but still magnificent. Columns carved like bundles of papyrus held up the stone roof. Bright murals decorated the walls. Unlike the barren granite of the Great Pyramid, here was a representation of life in a place of death, painted in a hundred colours. Boys wrestled. Girls danced and played. Nets drew in swarms of fish. Old kings were enveloped in trees of life, each leaf representing a year. Animals roamed in imagined forests. Boats floated on painted rivers where hippos reared and crocodiles swam. Birds filled the air. There were no skulls or morbid ravens as in Europe or America, but instead paintings that evoked a lush, wild, happier Egypt than the one I was traversing now.

‘It looks like a paradise in those days,’ I said. ‘Green, uncrowded, rich, and predictable. You don’t sense a fear of invasion, or a dread of tyrants. It’s as Astiza said, better then than at any time afterward.’

‘In the best times the whole land was united upriver as far as the third or fourth cataract,’ Ashraf agreed. ‘Egyptian ships sailed from the Mediterranean to Aswan, and caravans brought riches from Nubia and lands like Punt and Sheba. Mountains yielded gold and gems. Black monarchs brought ivory and spices. Kings hunted lion in the desert fringe. And each year the Nile would rise to water and renew the valley with silt, just as it is doing now. It will peak about the time you said your calendar indicated, on October 21 ^ st. Each year the priests watched the stars and zodiac to keep track of the optimal times for sowing and reaping and measured the level of the Nile.’ He pointed to some of the pictures. ‘Here the people, even the noblest, bring offerings to the temple to ensure the cycle continues. There were beautiful temples up and down the Nile.’

‘And the priests took those offerings.’

‘Yes.’

‘For a flooding that occurred every year anyway.’

He smiled. ‘Yes.’

‘That’s the profession for me. Predict that the seasons will turn, the sun will come up, and rake in the common people’s gratitude.’

‘Except it was not predictable. Some years there was no flood, and famine followed. You probably didn’t want to be a priest then.’

‘I’m betting they had some good excuse for the drought and asked people to double the tribute.’ I have an eye for easy work and could just imagine their tidy system. I looked around. ‘And what’s this writing?’ I asked of graffiti atop some pictures. ‘I don’t recognise the language. Is it Greek?’

‘Coptic,’ Ashraf said. ‘Legend has it that early Christians hid in these caves from the persecution of the Romans. We are the latest in a long chain of fugitives.’

Another wall took my eye. It seemed to be a tally of something, a series of hash marks in the old language none of us could read. Some seemed plain enough: one mark to designate 1, three for 3, and so on. There was something familiar about those marks and I mused about it as we lay on sand that had sifted through the entrance, half filling the cave. Then it came to me. I took out the medallion.

‘Ash, look at this. This little triangle of notches on my medallion – they look like the marks on that wall!’

He glanced from one to the other. ‘Indeed. What of it?’

What of it? This might change everything. If I was right, the bottom of the medallion was not meant to represent a pyramid, it represented numbers! I was carrying something that bore some kind of sum! The savants might be lunatics for mathematics, but my weeks enduring them was paying off – I’d seen a pattern I otherwise might have missed. True, I couldn’t make much sense of the numbers – they seemed a random grouping of 1s, 2s, and 3s.

But I was getting closer to the mystery.

After many days and miles, we came to the crest of a steep limestone bluff near Nag Hammadi, the Nile curling around its edge and green fields on the far shore. There, across the river, we saw our quarry. Desaix’s division of French soldiers, three thousand men and two guns, formed a column more than a mile long, marching slowly beside the Nile. From our vantage point they were insects on a timeless canvas, crawling blind on a sheen of oils. It was at this moment that I realised the impossibility of the task the French had set for themselves. I grasped finally the vast sprawl not just of Egypt, but of Africa beyond, an endless rolling vista that made the French division seem as insignificant as a flea on an elephant. How could this little puddle of men truly subdue this empire of desert, studded with ruins and swarming with horse-mounted tribesmen? It was as audacious as Cortez in Mexico, but Cortez had the heart of an empire to aim for, while poor Desaix had already captured the heart, and now was pursuing the thrashing but defiant arms, in a wilderness of sand. His difficulty was not conquering the enemy, but finding him.

My problem was not finding my enemy, who must be somewhere in that column of soldiers, but coming to grips with him now that I was a French outlaw. Astiza was down there too, I hoped, but how could I get a message to her? My only ally was a Mameluke; my only clothes my Arab robes. I didn’t even know where to start, now that we had the division in view. Should I swim the river and gallop in, demanding justice? Or try to assassinate Silano from behind a rock? And what proof did I have that he was really my enemy at all? If I succeeded, I’d be hanged.

‘Ash, it occurs to me that I’m like a dog after an ox cart, not at all certain how to handle my prize should I catch it.’

‘So don’t be a dog,’ the Mameluke said. ‘What is it you’re really after?’

‘The solution to my puzzle, a woman, revenge. Yet I have no proof yet that Silano is responsible for anything. Nor do I know exactly what to do with him. I’m not afraid to face the count. I’m just uncertain what he deserves. It’s been simpler riding through the desert. It’s empty. Uncomplicated.’

‘And yet in the end a man can no more be one with the desert than a boat can be of the sea – both pass on its surface. The desert is a passage, not a destination, friend.’

‘And now we near the end of the voyage. Will Silano have the army’s protection? Will I be regarded as a fugitive? And where will Achmed bin Sadr be lurking?’

‘Yes, Bin Sadr. I do not see his band down there with the soldiers.’

As if in answer, there was a ping off a nearby rock and the delayed echo of a gun’s report. A chip of rock flew up in the air and then plopped into the dirt.

‘See how the gods answer all?’ Ashraf pointed.

I twisted in my saddle. To the north behind us, from the hills where we’d come, were a dozen men. They were in Arab dress, riding camels, rocking as they trotted fast, their image wavering in the heat. Their leader was carrying something too long to be a musket – a wooden staff, I surmised.

‘Bin Sadr, the devil himself,’ I muttered. ‘He keeps raiders off the back of the French. Now he’s spotted us.’

Ashraf grinned. ‘He comes to me so easily, having killed my brother?’

‘The cavalry must have asked him to track us.’

‘His misfortune, then.’ The Mameluke looked ready to charge.

‘Ash, stop! Think! We can’t attack a dozen at once!’

He looked at me with scorn. ‘Are you afraid of a few bullets?’

More smoke puffed from the oncoming Arabs, and more spouts of dust twanged up around us. ‘Yes!’

My companion slowly raised a sleeve of his robe, displaying fabric neatly holed in a near-miss. He grinned. ‘I felt the wind of that one. Then I suggest we flee.’

We kicked and sped off, angling down the back side of the ridge and away from the Nile in a desperate effort to get distance and cover. Our horses could outrun a camel in a sprint, but the dromedaries had more endurance. They could go a week without water, and then drink a volume that would kill any other animal. The French cavalry we’d lost easily. These desert warriors might be more persistent.

We skidded into a side valley, our horses fighting to maintain balance as pebbles flew, and then on flatter ground leant into a dead run, trying to ignore the excited warble and random gunshots of our pursuers behind. They came after us hard, a trail of their dust hanging in their wake, frozen by the still and heavy air.

For an hour we kept them at a healthy distance, but with the heat and lack of water our mounts began to tire. We’d been days with no grazing and little to drink, and our animals were wearing out. We’d skitter up one sun-baked ridge and then drop down its other side, hoping somehow to confuse the chase, but our own dust marked us like a beacon.

‘Can you slow them down?’ Ash finally asked.

‘I certainly outrange them. But at the speed they’re coming I only have one good shot. It takes almost a minute to reload.’ We stopped at a high point and I took off the longrifle I carried across my back. Its strap had bit into my shoulder for three hundred miles, but I was never tempted to leave its reassuring weight behind. It was uncomplaining and deadly. So now I sighted across my saddle, aiming for Bin Sadr, knowing that to kill him might end the pursuit. He was a good four hundred paces off. There was no wind, dry air, a target charging head-on… and enough heat to ripple his image like a flapping flag. Damn, where exactly was he? I aimed high, allowing for the bullet drop, squeezed, and fired, my horse starting at the report.

There was a long moment for the bullet to arrive. Then his camel tumbled.

Had I got him? The pursuing Bedouins had all reined in an anxious circle, shouting in consternation and loosing a few shots even though we were far out of musket range. I leapt on my horse and we galloped on as best we could, hoping we’d at least bought ourselves time. Ash looked back.

‘Your friend has shoved one of his companions off his camel and is mounting it himself. The other warrior is doubling with another. They’ll come more cautiously now.’

‘But he survived.’ We stopped and I reloaded, but that lost us most of the little ground we’d gained. I didn’t want to be pinned down in a firefight because they’d overrun us while we loaded. ‘And they are still coming.’

‘It would seem so.’

‘Ash, we cannot fight them all.’

‘It would seem not.’

‘What will they do if they catch us?’

‘Before, just rape and kill us. But now that you have shot his camel, I suspect they will rape us, strip us, stake us to the desert, and use scorpions to torment us while we die of thirst and sun. If we’re lucky, a cobra will find us first.’

‘You didn’t tell me that before I fired.’

‘You didn’t tell me you were going to hit the camel, not the man.’

We rode into a twisting canyon, hoping it wouldn’t dead-end like the one where we’d dug for water. A dry wash or wadi gave it a sandy floor, and it twisted like a snake. Yet our trail was obvious, and our horse flanks were streaked with foam. They’d give out soon.

‘I’m not going to give him the medallion, you know. Not after Talma and Enoch. I’ll bury it, eat it, or throw it down a hole.’

‘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 burnt 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 spoilt 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 learnt 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 ways.

It was my first time on a camel, a noisy, grumpy, and somewhat ugly beast with its own community of fleas and midges. Yet it was well-trained and reasonably docile, dressed in rich and colourful 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 gods’ 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 fulfil 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.