The Dakota Cipher

CHAPTER FIVE

So off I went, on a confiscated Italian horse (that’s a fancy word for ‘stolen’ that invaders use) and nervous as a virgin that I might stumble into the Austrian army. When you read about campaigns it’s all arrows and rectangles on a map, as choreographed as a ballet. In reality, war is a half-blind, sprawling affair, great masses of men halfheartedly groping for each other across yawning countryside while looting anything that can be carried. It’s all too easy for the observer to become disoriented. Gunshots echo alarmingly: fired accidentally, or from boredom, or sudden quarrel. Frightened, homesick eighteen-year-olds poke about with thirteen-pound muskets topped by wicked, two-foot bayonets. Passed-over colonels dream of suicidal charges that might restore their reputation. Sergeants stiffen a line in hopes for a sleeve of braid. It’s no place for a sensible man.

Within an hour after setting out on June 9^th, I heard the ominous thunder of combat. Lieutenant General Jean Lannes had crashed into the Austrian advance force at the villages of Casteggio and Montebello, and by day’s end I was riding past long columns of Austrian prisoners, white uniforms spattered with blood and powder, expressions weary and sour. French wounded called insults to the prisoners plodding by. Wrecked wagons, dead horses and cows, and burning barns added to my disquiet. Gangs of pressed peasants were commandeered to tip heaps of battlefield dead into mass graves, while survivors matter-of-factly cleaned the muskets they called ‘clarinets’ with beef marrow and whitened crossbelts with pipe clay. Some soldiers hoped filth might make them less tempting a target, but others thought fastidiousness brought luck. They used a slit piece of wood called a patience to hold their buttons out from their uniform cloth, shining them with mutton fat until they gleamed.

‘Bones were cracking in my division like a shower of hail falling on a skylight,’ Lannes reported to Napoleon. The battle had produced four thousand casualties between the two sides – a mere dress rehearsal – and it was through this carnage that I reluctantly passed to skulk in the wake of the retreating Austrians into that netherworld between two armies.

What Napoleon didn’t realise is that, look as I might, I couldn’t really see. The Po Valley is flat, its fields bordered by tall poplar and cypress, and rain that June came down in buckets. Every rivulet was swollen, the landscape as different from Egypt and Syria as sponge from sandpaper. I could have plodded by the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan and not spotted it, should they happen to take this muddy lane instead of that one, down a cut and behind a hedge. So I wandered, asking directions of Italian refugees in sign language, sleeping in hayricks, and squinting for the missing sun. If Renato was lying, I was unlikely to catch him at it.

Instead, he told me himself.

At an abandoned farmhouse near Tortona I spied a red sash draped on a loose shutter, the agreed signal that our spy was waiting with information. Families had scurried out of the path of the armies like mice darting between the hooves of cattle, and rummaging soldiers had torn off the home’s door, eaten the barn’s animals, and burnt the furniture. What was left, walls and a tile roof, offered shelter from another spring downpour. I was nervous, but the Austrians seemed to be falling back. The enemy had reportedly destroyed the bridge leading to lightly defended Alessandria, and more Austrians were running southwest towards Acqui. Accordingly, Bonaparte had split his forces, with Lapoype’s division racing north and Desaix’s division south. In the confusion, we spies were surely safe. I tied my horse, checked the load on my longrifle, and warily entered the dark home.

‘Renato?’ I almost tripped. He was seated on the stone floor, muddy boots outstretched and bottles at his side. I heard the click of his pistol hammer. ‘It’s Gage, from Napoleon.’

‘You’ll forgive my caution.’ A softer tap as the hammer was eased back to rest near the pan. As my eyes adjusted I saw the muzzle lower, but he didn’t put his pistol away. He was watchful as a cat.

‘My orders are to meet you.’

‘How convenient for us both. And your reward, American?’

Why not the truth? ‘I go back to Paris.’

He saluted me with his pistol muzzle and laughed. ‘Better than this cold farmhouse, no? You have the loyalty of a mosquito. Some blood, and you’re off.’

I seated myself across from him, rifle by my side, only slightly reassured by our candour. ‘I’m no warrior. I’ve been riding around in the rain for four days, no good to anyone.’

‘Then you need this.’ He tossed me a bottle sitting next to him. ‘I found the trap to the cellar’s sparkling wine, just the thing for a party. To a fellow spy! And of course I could believe you really are a mosquito, irritating and aimless. On the other hand, I’ve heard you have a reputation for pluck and persistence as well. No, don’t deny it, Ethan Gage! So perhaps you’re here to fetch my latest missive. Or perhaps to spy on me.’

‘Why would I spy on you?’

‘Because the French don’t trust me! Yes, we men of intrigue see things clearly.’ He nodded to himself. ‘I don’t blame you for trying to get back to France. Can you imagine being a soldier in regimental line, shoulder to shoulder with a rank of similar idiots just fifty paces distant, everyone blazing away?’ He shuddered. ‘It’s amazing what armies get conscripts to do. If the morons survive, it will be the highlight of their lives.’

I took a drink, thinking. His bottle was two-thirds empty, the champagne loosening his tongue. ‘People better than me say they believe in something, Renato.’

He drank again too, and wiped his mouth. ‘Believe in Bonaparte? Or that old ass, Melas? What are they fighting about, really? Ask any of those soldiers to explain a war of a hundred years ago and they’ll go blank. Yet they’ll march to their death for this one. They’re all fools, every one. Fools universal, except for me.’

‘You serve the French, too, don’t you?’

‘Alas.’ He winked. ‘The cabbages pay better than the vain Corsican.’

‘Napoleon would find that hard to believe, at your price.’

‘I’m a double agent, my naïve friend. If you are really that naïve.’ He belched, and drank again. ‘While I report, I spy, and then cross the lines to report and spy again. Why not keep everyone informed? Now Bonaparte is going to get a surprise.’

‘What do you mean?’ I took a more vigorous swallow and lightly reinserted the cork, eyeing the pistol he kept in his lap.

‘The Austrians are not running. They’re concentrating. Napoleon has split his forces to catch an army massing against him.’

‘But you told him the opposite!’

He shrugged. ‘If he wanted the truth, he should have paid more than Melas.’

‘Men will die!’

‘You think they won’t die otherwise? Bonaparte believed what he wanted to believe. He remembers the clumsy Austrians of four years ago and gives Melas no credit. That old man is a fox, let me tell you. Fox enough to outbid Bonaparte for me. So I tell the French what they want, and the Austrians what I’ve told the French. Now the little despot will get his comeuppance.’

He massaged the butt of his pistol, making me feel safe as a goose at Christmas. Why was he telling me this? I rocked my bottle, considering.

‘Yes, American, Napoleon is about to get his nose bloodied. When he loses, I’ll sell him still more advice – he’ll be desperate enough to pay double – and then I’ll go back and sell what I sold him to the Austrians for triple. This is how to make money in our business.’

‘Our business?’

‘Bringing people together.’ He laughed.

‘You’re very candid.’

He shrugged. ‘Just half-drunk. And confident of your discretion.’

‘Because I’m a spy, too?’

Now he looked at me seriously. ‘Of course not! You’re a man like me, American, able to see the value in what you’ve been told. You’d betray me in an instant just as I’ve betrayed Bonaparte, and count your thirty pieces of silver as I swing from a tree. No, no, don’t deny it … I’d do the same if our positions were reversed. This is the way of the world.’ Lazily he raised his pistol. ‘So you’ll go to your grave with a secret! Ah, don’t touch your rifle!’ He smiled. ‘You must realise by now that I was sent to find you, not Bonaparte. My true employers remember your crimes.’

‘True employers?’

He pulled the hammer back. ‘Do you think the Rite forgets?’ He aimed for my heart.

So I shot him with my cork.

He was a little too confiding and too confident, see. I’d seen reptiles like him before, so I got up some pressure in my bottle of bubbly and popped the cork just as he pulled to fire. The bottle gushed, cork and spray flying in his face, and it was enough of a surprise that the pistol jerked as I rolled. The ball whined past and thudded into the wall behind, raising a little puff of dust. He heaved up, pulling out a second pistol, but I beat him with a sidearm throw of my tomahawk. There was a crack as it struck between chin and teeth, enamel flying, and then I brought up my rifle. We fired at the same time, but it’s even harder to aim with a hatchet in your face. He missed, and I didn’t.

The bullet slammed him backward and he jerked as he died. I reloaded as I watched, ready to club him, then yanked my tomahawk out of his face and cleaned its steel on his coat. His split lips were fixed in a snarl. It was a nasty business, but after the events of the past two years the extermination of his kind of vermin didn’t bother me overmuch.

The Rite? Now I understood my own apprehension. I dragged him through his own blood to the doorway for better light and ripped open his coat and shirt. Burnt into his chest was a small tattoo of a pyramid wrapped with a snake. Apophis, the snake god! I shivered. Was this spy in the same confederacy as my old nemesis Silano, another branch of the perfidious Egyptian Rite that had pursued me in Egypt? And now, thanks to this serpent, Napoleon was dividing his forces as the Austrians were massing. Even if I hurried back to Napoleon this instant, it would be too late to pull in Desaix and Lapoype. The French centre would be overwhelmed.

Damn Renato!

No, there’d be no quick exit to Paris. I’m not exactly steadfast, but I’m no traitor either, even if it wasn’t my country. The only thing to do was to gallop after Desaix, who I faintly knew from Egypt, and get him hurrying back to the battle about to erupt in his rear. It would be a near-run thing, but if I rushed there might just be time enough!

I glanced down at the lifeless body. As I said, don’t boast. And me? Not only was I occasionally useful, I might be developing integrity as well. By the saints, how had Napoleon guessed I might be worth betting on?

The spy stared upward with the surprised gaze of the dead, his body in a widening pool of gore. I buttoned his bloody shirt to hide his mark and wearily mounted my horse to go off and save the battle. And did I see the flicker of someone else, sinking back into a hedgerow, from the corner of my eye?