The Rosetta Key

The Rosetta Key

Wi l l i a m D i e t r i c h

To my daughter, Heidi

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery.

There is always more mystery.

—Anaïs Nin

Contents

Epigraph iii

Map viii

Part One 1

Chapter 1

Eyeing a thousand musket barrels aimed at one’s chest does…

3

Chapter 2

I started with brelan, which is not a bad game…

11

Chapter 3

Jaffa rises like a loaf from the Mediterranean shore, empty…

19

Chapter 4

Jerusalem was half ruin, I saw when I rode down…

29

Chapter 5

To pass the winter, I did my best to tease…

39

Chapter 6

My first reaction was to depart Jerusalem, and the cursed…

49

Chapter 7

I expected Haim Farhi would have some of the Aristotle-like…

63

Chapter 8

“You should be honored, guv’nor,” Big Ned said.

75

Chapter 9

We ran back upstairs to the statue as if to…

91

Chapter 10

I knew I was in hell when Najac insisted on…

101

Chapter 11

Atrocities cannot be justified, but sometimes they can be explained. 112

Part Two 123

Chapter 12

I came to Acre a hero, but not for escaping…

125

Chapter 13

I needed to generate an electric charge on a scale…

139

Chapter 14

I peered out the sally port into a fog of…

153

Chapter 15

Mohammad was watching me closely. “This ring means something

to…

162

Chapter 16

I’d assumed we’d travel directly to Mount Nebo with Najac’s…

173

Chapter 17

With his instinct for the political, Bonaparte immediately named

our…

183

Chapter 18

The entrance to the City of Ghosts was a slit…

201

Chapter 19

We pretended to descend as if we were making for…

216

Chapter 20

The level exit from the City of Ghosts would take…

230

Chapter 21

We were on the coastal plain as the sun rose,…

241

Chapter 22

And then Colonel Phelipeaux died. Did he really comprehend his… 257

Part Three 265

Chapter 23

I arrived back in Egypt on July 14, 1799, one…

267

Chapter 24

We had two tasks. One was to use the Rosetta…

276

Chapter 25

Fleeing at the pace of a donkey cart is not…

287

Chapter 26

Astiza and I landed on the southern coast of France…

298

Chapter 27

There was irony in being imprisoned in a “temple” first…

312

Chapter 28

Astiza and I were both weaponless. The woman, for lack…

326

Historical Note 337

Acknowledgments 341

About the Author

Other Books by William Dietrich

Credits

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

Map

Part One

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Eyeing a thousand musket barrels aimed at one’s chest does tend to force consideration of whether the wrong path has been taken. So I did consider it, each muzzle bore looking as wide as the bite of a mongrel stray in a Cairo alley. But no, while I’m modest to a fault, I have my self-righteous side as well—and by my light it wasn’t me but the French army that had gone astray. Which I could have explained to my former friend, Napoleon Bonaparte, if he hadn’t been up on the dunes out of hail-ing distance, aloof and annoyingly distracted, his buttons and medals gleaming in the Mediterranean sun.

The first time I’d been on a beach with Bonaparte, when he landed his army in Egypt in 1798, he told me the drowned would be immor-talized by history. Now, nine months later outside the Palestinian port of Jaffa, history was to be made of me. French grenadiers were getting ready to shoot me and the hapless Muslim captives I’d been thrown in with, and once more I, Ethan Gage, was trying to figure out a way to sidestep destiny. It was a mass execution, you see, and I’d run afoul of the general I once attempted to befriend.

How far we’d both come in nine brief months!

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I edged behind the biggest of the wretched Ottoman prisoners I could find, a Negro giant from the Upper Nile who I calculated might be just thick enough to stop a musket ball. All of us had been herded like bewildered cattle onto a lovely beach, eyes white and round in the darkest faces, the Turkish uniforms of scarlet, cream, emerald, and sapphire smeared with the smoke and blood of a savage sacking.

There were lithe Moroccans, tall and dour Sudanese, truculent pale Albanians, Circassian cavalry, Greek gunners, Turkish sergeants—the scrambled levies of a vast empire, all humbled by the French. And me, the lone American. Not only was I baffled by their babble; they often couldn’t understand each other. The mob milled, their officers already dead, and their disorder a defeated contrast to the crisp lines of our executioners, drawn up as if on parade. Ottoman defiance had enraged Napoleon—you should never put the heads of emissaries on a pike—and their hungry numbers as prisoners threatened to be a crippling drag on his invasion. So we’d been marched through the orange groves to a crescent of sand just south of the captured port, the sparkling sea a lovely green and gold in the shallows, the hilltop city smoldering. I could see some green fruit still clinging to the shot-blown trees. My former benefactor and recent enemy, sitting on his horse like a young Alexander, was (through desperation or dire calculation) about to display a ruthlessness that his own marshals would whisper about for many campaigns to come. Yet he didn’t even have the courtesy to pay attention! He was reading another of his moody novels, his habit to devour a book’s page, tear it out, and pass it back to his officers. I was barefoot, bloody, and only forty miles as the crow flies from where Jesus Christ had died to save the world. The past several days of persecution, torment, and warfare hadn’t persuaded me that our Savior’s efforts had entirely succeeded in improving human nature.

“Ready!” A thousand musket hammers were pulled back.

Napoleon’s henchmen had accused me of being a spy and a traitor, which was why I’d been marched with the other prisoners to the beach. And yes, circumstance had given a grain of truth to that characterization. But I hadn’t set out with that intent, by any means.

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I’d simply been an American in Paris, whose tentative knowledge of electricity—and the need to escape an utterly unjust accusation of murder—resulted in my being included in the company of Napoleon’s scientists, or savants, during his dazzling conquest of Egypt the year before. I’d also developed a knack for being on the wrong side at the wrong time. I’d taken fire from Mameluke cavalry, the woman I loved, Arab cutthroats, British broadsides, Muslim fanatics, French platoons—and I’m a likable man!

My latest French nemesis was a nasty scoundrel named Pierre Najac, an assassin and thief who couldn’t get over the fact that I’d once shot him from beneath the Toulon stage when he tried to rob me of a sacred medallion. It’s a long story, as an earlier volume will attest.

Najac had come back into my life like a bad debt, and had kept me marching in the prisoner rank with a cavalry saber at my back. He was anticipating my imminent demise with the same feeling of triumph and loathing that one has when crushing a particularly obnoxious spider. I was regretting that I hadn’t aimed a shave higher and two inches to the left.

As I’ve remarked before, it all seems to start with gambling. Back in Paris, it had been a card game that won me the mysterious medallion and started the trouble. This time, what had seemed a simple way to get a new start—taking the bewildered seamen of HMS Dangerous for every shilling they had before the British put me ashore in the Holy Land—had solved nothing and, it could be argued, had actually led to my present predicament. Let me repeat: gambling is a vice, and it is foolish to rely on chance.

“Aim!”

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I, Ethan Gage, have spent most of my thirty-four years trying to keep out of too much trouble and away from too much work. As my mentor and onetime employer, the late, great Benjamin Franklin, would no doubt observe, these two ambitions are as at odds as positive and negative electricity. The pursuit of the latter, no work, is almost sure to defeat the former, no trouble. But that’s a lesson, like the headache that follows alcohol or the treachery of beautiful 6

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women, forgotten as many times as learned. It was my dislike of hard labor that reinforced my fondness for gambling, gambling that got me the medallion, the medallion that got me to Egypt with half the planet’s villains at my heels, and Egypt that got me my lovely lost Astiza. She in turn had convinced me that we had to save the world from Najac’s master, the French-Italian count and sorcerer Alessandro Silano. All this, without my quite expecting it to, put me on the wrong side of Bonaparte. In the course of things I fell in love, found a secret way into the Great Pyramid, and made the damndest discoveries ever, only to lose everything I held dear when forced to escape by balloon.

I told you it was a long story.

Anyway, the gorgeous and maddening Astiza—my would-be assassin, then servant, then priestess of Egypt—had fallen from the balloon into the Nile along with my enemy, Silano. I’ve been desperately trying to learn their fate ever since, my anxiety redoubled by the fact that my enemy’s last words to Astiza were, “You know I still love you!” How’s that for prying at the corners of your mind at night? Just what was their relationship? Which is why I’d agreed to allow the English madman Sir Sidney Smith to put me ashore in Palestine just ahead of Bonaparte’s invading army, to make inquiries. Then one thing led to another and here I stood, facing a thousand gun muzzles.

“Fire!”

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But before I tell you what happened when the muskets blazed, perhaps I should go back to where my earlier tale left off, in late October of 1798, when I was trapped on the deck of the British frigate Dangerous, making for the Holy Land with her sails bellied and a bone in her teeth, cutting the frothy deep. How hearty it all was, English banners flapping, burly seamen pulling at their stout lines of hemp with lusty chants, stiff-necked officers in bicorne hats pacing the quarterdeck, and bristling cannon dewed by the spray of the Mediterranean, droplets drying into stars of salt. In other words, it was just the kind of militant, masculine foray I’ve learned to detest, t h e

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having narrowly survived the hurtling charge of a Mameluke warrior at the Battle of the Pyramids, the explosion of L’Orient at the Battle of the Nile, and any numbers of treacheries by an Arab snake worshipper named Achmed bin Sadr, who I finally sent to his own appropriate hell. I was a little winded from brisk adventure and more than ready to scuttle back home to New York for a nice job as a bookkeeper or a dry goods clerk, or perhaps as a solicitor attending to dreary wills clutched by black-clad widows and callow, undeserving offspring. Yes, a desk and dusty ledgers—that’s the life for me! But Sir Sidney would hear none of it. Worse, I’d finally figured out what I cared about in this world: Astiza. I couldn’t very well take passage home without finding out if she’d survived her fall with that villain Silano and could, somehow, be rescued.

Life was simpler when I had no principles.

Smith was gussied up like a Turkish admiral, plans building in his brain like an approaching squall. He’d been given the job of helping the Turks and their Ottoman Empire thwart the further encroach-ment of Bonaparte’s armies from Egypt into Syria, since young Napoleon’s hope was to carve an eastern empire out for himself. Sir Sidney needed allies and intelligence, and, after fishing me out of the Mediterranean, he’d told me it would work to both our advantage if I joined his cause. It was foolhardy for me to try to return to Egypt and face the angry French alone, he pointed out. I could make inquiries about Astiza from Palestine, while simultaneously assessing the various sects that might be lined up to fight Napoleon. “Jerusalem!” he’d cried. Was he mad? That half-forgotten city, an Ottoman backwater encrusted by dirt, history, religious lunatics, and disease, had—by all reports—survived only by foisting obligatory tourism on the credible and easily cheated pilgrims of three faiths. But if you’re an English schemer and warrior like Smith, Jerusalem had the advantage of being a crossroad of the complicated culture of Syria, a polyglot den of Muslim, Jew, Greek Orthodox, Catholic, Druze, Maronite, Matuwelli, Turk, Bedouin, Kurd, and Palestinian, all of them remembering slights from each other going back several thousand years.

Frankly, I’d never have ventured within a hundred miles of the 8

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place, except that Astiza was convinced that Moses had stolen a sacred book of ancient wisdom from the bowels of the Great Pyramid and that his descendants had carried it to Israel. That meant Jerusalem was the likeliest place to look. So far this Book of Thoth, or the rumors of it, had been nothing but trouble. Yet if it did hold keys to immortality and mastery of the universe, I couldn’t quite forget about it, could I? Jerusalem did make a perverse kind of sense.

Smith imagined me a trusted accomplice, and in truth we did have an alliance of sorts. I’d met him in a gypsy camp after I’d shot Najac.

The signet ring he gave had saved me from a yardarm noose when I was hauled before Admiral Nelson after the fracas at the Nile. And Smith was a genuine hero who’d burned French ships and escaped from a Paris prison by signaling one of his former bedmates from a barred window. After I’d picked up a pharaoh’s treasure under the Great Pyramid, lost it again to keep from drowning, and stolen a balloon from my friend and fellow savant Nicolas-Jacques Conte, I’d crash-landed into the sea and found myself wet and penniless on the quarterdeck of the Dangerous, fate putting me face-to-face with Sir Sidney once more, and as much at the mercy of the British as I’d been the French. My own feelings—that I’d had quite enough of war and treasure and was ready to go home to America—were blithely ignored.

“So while you make inquiries from Syrian Palestine about this woman you took a fancy to, Gage, you can also feel out the Christians and Jews for possible resistance to Bonaparte,” Smith was telling me. “They might side with the frogs, and if he’s taking an army that way, our Turkish allies need all the help they can get.” He put his arm around my shoulder. “You’re just the man for this kind of work, I judge: clever, affable, rootless, and without any scruples or belief.

People tell you things, Gage, because they figure it doesn’t matter.”

“It’s just that I’m American, not British or French . . .”

“Exactly. Perfect for our uses. Djezzar will be impressed that even a man as shallow as you has enlisted.”

Djezzar, whose name meant “the Butcher,” was the notoriously cruel and despotic pasha in Acre whom the British were depending on to fight Napoleon. Charmed, I’m sure.

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“But my Arabic is crude and I know nothing of Palestine,” I pointed out reasonably.

“Not a problem for an agent with wit and pluck like you, Ethan.

The Crown has a confederate in Jerusalem by the code name of Jericho, an ironmonger by trade who once served in our own navy. He can help you search for this Astiza and work for us. He has contacts in Egypt! A few days of your artful diplomacy, a chance to walk in the footsteps of Jesus Christ hisself, and you’re back with nothing more than dust on your boots and a holy relic in your pocket, your other problems solved. It’s really quite splendid how these things work out.

Meanwhile I’ll be helping Djezzar organize the defense of Acre in case Boney marches north, as you’ve warned. In no time we’ll both be bloody heroes, feted in the chambers of London!” Whenever people start complimenting you and using words like

“splendid,” it’s time to check your purse. But, by Bunker Hill, I was curious about the Book of Thoth and tortured by the memory of Astiza. Her sacrifice to save me was the worst moment of my life—

worse, honestly, than when my beloved Pennsylvania long rifle blew up—and the hole in my heart was so big you could fire a cannonball through it and not hit a thing. Which is a good line to use on a woman, I figured, and I wanted to try it out on her. So of course I said yes, the most dangerous word in the English language.

“I am lacking clothes, weapons, and money,” I pointed out. The only things I’d managed to retain from the Great Pyramid were two small gold seraphim, or kneeling angels, which Astiza contended came from the staff of Moses and which I’d stuffed rather ingloriously into my drawers. My initial thought had been to pawn them, but they’d acquired sentimental value despite their tendency to make me scratch. At the very least they were a reserve of precious metal I preferred not to reveal. Let Smith give an allowance, if he was so anxious to enlist me.

“Your taste for Arab rags is perfect,” the British captain said.

“That’s quite the swarthy tan you’ve developed, Gage. Add a cloak and turban in Jaffa and you’ll blend like a native. As for an English weapon, that might get you clapped in a Turkish prison if they suspect 1 0

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you of spying. It’s your wits that will keep you safe. I can lend you a small spyglass. It’s splendidly sharp and just the thing to sort out troop movements.”

“You didn’t mention money.”

“The Crown’s allowance will be more than adequate.” He gave me a purse with a scattering of silver, brass, and copper: Spanish reales, Ottoman piastres, a Russian kopek, and two Dutch rix-dollars. Government budgeting.

“This will hardly buy breakfast!”

“Can’t give you pound sterling, Gage, or it will give you away in an instant. You’re a man of resources, eh? Stretch the odd penny! Lord knows the Admiralty does!”

Well, resourcefulness can start right now, I said to myself, and I wondered if I and the off-duty crewmen might while away the hours with a friendly game of cards. When I was still in good standing as a savant on Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition, I’d enjoyed discussing the laws of probability with famed mathematicians such as Gaspard Monge and the geographer Edmé François Jomard. They’d encouraged me to think in a more systematic way about odds and the house advantage, sharpening my gambling skills.

“Perhaps I can interest your men in a game of chance?”

“Haw! Be careful they don’t take your breakfast, too!”

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I started with brelan, which is not a bad game to play with simple sailors, contingent as it is on bluff. I had some practice at this in the salons of Paris—the Palais Royale alone had one hundred gambling chambers on a mere six acres—and the honest British seamen were no match for the man they soon called a Frankish dissembler. So after taking them for as much as they’d tolerate by pretending I had better cards—or letting slip my vulnerability when the hand actually left me better armed than the weapon-stuffed sash of a Mameluke bey—I offered games that seemed to be more straightforward luck. Ensigns and gunner mates who’d lost half a month’s pay at a card game of skill eagerly came forward with a full month’s wager on a game of sheer chance.

Except that it wasn’t, of course. In simple lansquenet, the banker—

me—places a bet that other players must match. Two cards are turned, the one to the left my card, the one to my right the player’s. I then start revealing cards until there’s a match with one of the first two.

If the right card is matched first, the player wins; if the left card is matched first, the dealer wins. Even odds, right?

But if the first two cards are the same, the banker wins immedi-1 2

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ately, a slight mathematical advantage that gave me a margin after several hours, and finally had them pleading for a different game.

“Let’s try pharaon,” I offered. “It’s all the rage in Paris, and I’m sure your luck will turn. You are my rescuers, after all, and I am in your debt.”

“Yes, we’ll have our money back, Yankee sharp!” But pharaon is even more advantageous to the banker, because the dealer automatically wins the first card. The last card in the deck of fifty-two, a player’s card, is not counted. Moreover, the dealer wins all matching cards. Despite the obviousness of my advantage they thought they’d wear me down through time, playing all night, when exactly the opposite was true—the longer the game went on, the greater my pile of coins. The more they thought my loss of luck to be inevitable, the more my advantage became inexorable. Pickings are slim on a frigate that has yet to take a prize, yet so many wanted to best me that by the time the shores of Palestine hove into view at dawn, my poverty was mended. My old friend Monge would simply have said that mathematics is king.

It’s important when taking a man’s money to reassure him of the brilliance of his play and the caprice of ill fortune, and I daresay I distributed so much sympathy that I made fast friends of the men I most deeply robbed. They thanked me for making four high-interest loans back to the most abject losers, while tucking away enough surplus to put me up in Jerusalem in style. When I gave back a sweetheart’s locket that one of the fools had pawned, they were ready to elect me president.

Two of my opponents remained stubbornly uncharmed, however.

“You have the devil’s luck,” a huge, red-faced marine who went by the descriptive name of Big Ned observed with a glower, as he counted and recounted the two pennies he had left.

“Or the angels,” I suggested. “Your play has been masterful, mate, but providence, it seems, has smiled on me this long night.” I grinned, trying to look as affable as Smith had described me, and then tried to stifle a yawn.

“No man is that lucky, that long.”

I shrugged. “Just bright.”

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“I want you to play with me dice,” the lobsterback said, his look as narrow and twisted as an Alexandrian lane. “Then we’ll see how lucky you are.”

“One of the marks of an intelligent man, my maritime friend, is reluctance to trust another man’s ivory. Dice are the devil’s bones.”

“You afraid to give me a chance of winning back?”

“I’m simply content to play my game and let you play yours.”

“Well, now, I think the American is a bit the poltroon,” the marine’s companion, a squatter and uglier man called Little Tom, taunted.

“Scared to give two honest marines a fighting chance, he is.” If Ned had the bulk of a small horse, Tom carried himself with the compact meanness of a bulldog.

I began to feel uneasy. Other sailors were watching this exchange with growing interest, since they weren’t going to get their money back any other way. “To the contrary, gentlemen, we’ve been at arms over cards all night. I’m sorry you lost, I’m sure you did your best, I admire your perseverance, but perhaps you ought to study the mathematics of chance. A man makes his own luck.”

“Study the what?” Big Ned asked.

“I think he said he cheated,” Little Tom interpreted.

“Now, there’s no need to talk of dishonesty.”

“And yet the marines are challenging your honor, Gage,” said a lieutenant whom I’d taken for five shillings, putting in with more enthusiasm than I liked to hear. “The word is that you’re quite the marksman and fought well enough with the frogs. Surely you won’t let these redcoats impugn your reputation?”

“Of course not, but we all know it was a fair . . .” Big Ned’s fist slammed down on the deck, a pair of dice jumping from his grip like fleas. “Gives us back our money, play these, or meet me on the waist deck at noon.” It was a growl with just enough smirk to annoy. Clearly he was of a size not accustomed to losing.

“We’ll be in Jaffa by then,” I stalled.

“All the more leisure to discuss this between the eighteen-pounders.” Well. It was clear enough what I must do. I stood. “Aye, you need to be taught a lesson. Noon it is.”

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The gathering roared approval. It took just slightly longer for the news of a fight to reach from stem to stern of Dangerous than it takes a rumor of a romantic tryst to fly from one end of revolutionary Paris to the other. The sailors assumed a wrestling match in which I’d writhe painfully in the grip of Big Ned for every penny I’d won. When I’d been sufficiently kneaded, I’d then plead for the chance to give all my winnings back. To distract my all-too-fervent imagination from this disagreeable future, I went up to the quarterdeck to watch our approach to Jaffa, trying my new spyglass.

It was a crisp little telescope, and the principal port of Palestine, months before Napoleon was to take it, was a beacon on an otherwise flat and hazy shore. It crowned a hill with forts, towers, and minarets, its dome-topped buildings terracing downward in all directions like a stack of blocks. All was surrounded by a wall that meets the harbor quay on the seaward side. There were orange groves and palms landward, and golden fields and brown pastures beyond that. Black guns jutted from embrasures, and even from two miles out we could hear the wails of the faithful being called to prayer.

I’d had Jaffa oranges in Paris, famed because their thick skin makes them transportable to Europe. There were so many fruit trees that the prosperous city looked like a castle in a forest. Ottoman banners flapped in the warm autumn breeze, carpets hung from railings, and the smell of charcoal fires carried on the water. There were some nasty-looking reefs just offshore, marked by ringlets of white, and the little harbor was jammed with small dhows and feluccas. Like the other large ships, we anchored in open water. A small flotilla of Arab lighters set out to see what business they could solicit, and I readied to leave.

After I’d dealt with the unhappy marine, of course.

“I hear your famous luck got you into a tangle with Big Ned, Ethan,” Sir Sidney said, handing me a bag of hard biscuit that was supposed to get me to Jerusalem. The English aren’t known for their cooking. “Regular bull of a man with a head like a ram, and just as thick, I wager. Do you have a plan to fox him?”

“I’d try his dice, Sir Sidney, but I suspect that if they were weighted any more, they’d list this frigate.”

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He laughed. “Aye, he’s cheated more than one pressed wretch, and has the muscle to shut complaints about it. He’s not used to losing.

There’s more than a few here pleased you’ve taken him. Too bad your skull has to pay for it.”

“You could forbid the match.”

“The men are randy as roosters and won’t get ashore until Acre.

A good tussle helps settle them. You look quick enough, man! Lead him a dance!”

Indeed. I went below to seek out Big Ned and found him near the galley hearth, using lard to slick his imposing muscles so he’d slide out of my grip. He gleamed like a Christmas goose.

“Might we have a word in private?”

“Trying to back from it, eh?” He grinned. His teeth seemed as big as the keys of a newfangled piano.

“I’ve just given the whole matter some thought and realized our enemy is Bonaparte, not each other. But I do have my pride. Come, let’s settle out of sight of the others.”

“No. You’ll pay not just me back, but every jack-tar of this crew!”

“That’s impossible. I don’t know who is owed what. But if you follow right now, and promise to leave me alone, I’ll pay you back double.”

Now the gleam of greed came to his eyes. “Damn your eyes, it will be triple!”

“Just come to the orlop where I can show my purse without caus-ing a riot.”

He shambled after me like a dim but eager circus bear.We descended to the lowest part of the frigate, where the stores are kept.

“I hid the money down here so no one could thieve it,” I said, lift-ing a hatch to the bilge. “My mentor Ben Franklin said riches increase cares, and I daresay he had a point. You should remember it.”

“Damn the rebel Franklin! He should have hanged!” I reached down. “Oh dear, it shifted. Fell, I think.” I peered about and looked up at the looming Goliath, using the same art of feigned helplessness that any number of wenches had used on me. “Your losses were what, three shillings?”

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“Four, by God!”

“So triple that . . .”

“Aye, you owe me ten!”

“Your arm is longer than mine. Can you help?”

“Reach it yourself!”

“I can just brush it with my fingertips. Maybe we could find a gaff?” I stood, looking hapless.

“Yankee swine . . .” He got down and poked his head in. “Can’t see a bloody thing.”

“There, to the right, don’t you see that gleam of silver? Reach as far as you can.”

He grunted, torso through the hatch, stretching and groping.

So with a good hearty heave I tipped him the rest of the way. He was heavy as a flour sack, but once I got him going that was an advantage. He fell, there was a clunk and a splash, and before he could get off a good howl about greasy bilgewater, I had the hatch shut and bolted. Gracious, the language coming from below! I rolled some water casks over the hatch to muffle it.

Then I took the purse from where it was really hidden between two biscuit barrels, tucked it in my trousers, and bounded up to the waist deck, sleeves rolled. “It’s noon by the ship’s bells!” I cried. “In the name of King George, where is he?”

A chorus of shouts for Big Ned went up, but no answer came.

“Is he hiding? Can’t blame him for not wanting to face me.” I boxed the air for show.

Little Tom was glowering. “By Lucifer, I’ll thrash you.”

“You will not. I’m not matching every man on this ship.”

“Ned, give this American what he deserves!” Tom cried.

But there was no answer.

“I wonder if he’s napping in the topgallants?” I looked up at the rigging, and then had the amusement of watching Little Tom clamber skyward, shouting and sweating.

I spent some minutes below behaving like an impatient rooster, and then as soon as I dared I turned to Smith. “How long do we have to wait for this coward? We both know I’ve business ashore.” t h e

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The crew was clearly frustrated, and deeply suspicious. If I didn’t get off Dangerous soon, Smith knew he’d likely lose his newest, and only, American agent. Tom dropped back down to the deck, panting and frustrated. Smith checked the hourglass. “Yes, it’s a quarter past noon and Ned had his chance. Be gone, Gage, and accomplish your task for love and freedom.”

There was a roar of disappointment.

“Don’t play cards if you can’t afford to lose!” Smith shouted.

They jeered, but let me pass to the ship’s ladder. Tom had disappeared below. I’d not much time, so I dropped onto the dirty fishing nets of an Arab lighter like an anxious cat. “To shore now, and an extra coin if you make it fast,” I whispered to the boatman.

I pushed us off myself, and the Muslim captain began sculling for Jaffa’s harbor with twice his usual energy, meaning half what I preferred.

I turned to wave back to Smith. “Can’t wait until we meet again!” Blatant lie, of course. Once I learned Astiza’s fate and satisfied myself about this Book of Thoth, I had no intention of going near either the English or the French, who’d been at each other’s throats for a millen-nium. I’d sail for China first.

Especially when there was a boil of men at the gun deck and Big Ned’s head popped up like a gopher, red from rage and exertion. I gave him a look from the new glass and saw he was wearing a baptism of slime.

“Come back here, yellow dog! I’ll rip you limb from limb!”

“I think the yellow is yours, Ned! You didn’t keep our appointed time!”

“You tricked me, Yankee sharp!”

“I educated you!” But it was getting hard to hear as we bobbed away. Sir Sidney lifted his hat in wry salute. The English marines scrambled to lower a longboat.

“Can you go a little faster, Sinbad?”

“For another coin, effendi.”

It was a sharp little race, given that the beefy marines churned the waves like a waterwheel, Big Ned howling at the bow. Still, Smith 1 8

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had told me about Jaffa. It has just one land gate in, and you needed a guide to find your way back out. Given a head start, I’d hide well enough.

So I took one of my ferryman’s fishing nets and, before he could object, heaved it in the path of the closing longboat, snarling their starboard oars so they began turning in circles, roaring insults in language that would make a drill sergeant blush.

My ferryman protested, but I had coins enough to pay double for his sorry net and keep him rowing. I leapt onto the stone quay a good minute ahead of my complainants, determined to find Astiza and get back out—and vowing never to see Big Ned or Little Tom again.

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Jaffa rises like a loaf from the Mediterranean shore, empty beaches curving north and south into haze. Its importance as a trading port had been superseded by Acre to the north, where Djezzar the Butcher has his headquarters, but it is still a prosperous agricultural town. There is a steady stream of Jerusalem-bound pilgrims in and oranges, cotton, and soap back out.

Its streets are a labyrinth leading to the towers, mosques, synagogues, and churches that form its peak. House additions arch illegally over dim lanes. Donkeys clatter up and down stone steps.

Questionably gotten though my gambling gains might be, they quickly proved invaluable when a street urchin invited me to the upstairs inn of his disappointingly homely sister. The money bought me pita bread, falafel, an orange, and a screened balcony to hide behind while the gang of British marines rushed up one alley and down another, in futile search of my vile carcass. Blown and hot, they finally settled in a Christian quayside inn to discuss my perfidy over bad Palestinian wine. Meanwhile, I snuck about to spend more winnings. I bought a sleeved Bedouin robe of maroon and white stripes, new boots, bloused trousers (so much more comfortable in the heat 2 0

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than tight European breeches!) sash, vest, two cotton shirts, and cloth for a turban. As Smith had predicted, the result made me look like one more exotic member of a polyglot empire, so long as I took care to stay away from the arrogant, questioning Ottoman janissaries in their red and yellow boots.

I learned there was no coach to the holy city, or even a decent highway. I was too financially prudent—Ben, again—to buy or feed a horse. So I purchased a docile donkey sufficient to get me there, and not much farther. For a meager weapon, I economized with a curbed Arab knife with a handle of camel horn. I have little skill with swords, and I couldn’t bear to purchase one of the Muslims’ long, clumsy, elaborately decorated muskets. Their inlaid mother-of-pearl is lovely, but I’d seen how indifferently they performed against the French musket during Napoleon’s battles in Egypt. And any musket is far inferior to the lovely Pennsylvania rifle I’d sacrificed at Dendara in order to escape with Astiza. If this Jericho was a metallurgist, maybe he could make a replacement!

For guide and bodyguard to Jerusalem I chose a bearded, sharp-bargaining entrepreneur named Mohammad, a moniker seemingly given to half the Muslim men in this town. Between my elementary Arabic and Mohammad’s primitive French, learned because Frankish merchants dominated the cotton trade, we could communicate.

Still conscious of money, I figured that if we left early enough I could shave a day off his fee. I’d also slip out of town unseen, in case any Royal Marines were still lurking about.

“Now then, Mohammad, I would prefer to depart about midnight.

Steal a march on the traffic and enjoy the brisk night air, you see.

Early to rise, Ben Franklin said.”

“As you wish, effendi. You are fleeing enemies, perhaps?”

“Of course not. I’m told I’m affable.”

“It must be creditors then.”

“Mohammad, you know I’ve paid half your extortionate fee in advance. I’ve money enough.”

“Ah, so it is a woman. A bad wife? I have seen the Christian wives.” He shook his head and shuddered. “Satan couldn’t placate them.” t h e

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“Just be ready at midnight, will you?”

Despite my sorrow at losing Astiza and my anxiety to learn her fate, I’ll confess it crossed my mind to seek an hour or two of female companionship in Jaffa. All varieties of sex from the dullest to the most perverse were advertised with distracting persistence by Arab boys, despite condemnation from any number of religions. I’m a man, not a monk, and it had been some days. But Smith’s ship remained anchored offshore, and if Big Ned had any persistence it would be just my luck that he’d find me entwined with a trollop, too single-minded to outwit him. So I thought better of it, congratulated myself for my piety, and decided I would wait for relief in Jerusalem, even though copulating in the Holy Land was the kind of deed that would choke my old pastor. The truth is, abstinence and loyalty to Astiza made me feel good. My trials in Egypt had made me determined to work on self-discipline, and here I was, past the first test. “A good conscience is a continual Christmas,” my mentor Franklin liked to say.

Mohammad was an hour late, but finally led me through the dark maze of alleys to the landward gate, its paving stained with dung. A bribe was required to get it opened at night, and I passed through its archway with that curious exhilaration that comes from starting a new adventure. I had, after all, survived eight kinds of hell in Egypt, restored myself to temporary solvency with gambling skills, and was off on a mission that bore no resemblance to real work, despite my fantasies of becoming a ledger clerk. The Book of Thoth, which believers contended could confer anything from scientific wisdom to life everlasting, probably no longer existed . . . and yet it might just be found somewhere, giving my trip the optimism of a treasure hunt.

And despite my lustful instincts, I truly longed for Astiza. The opportunity to somehow learn her fate through Smith’s confederate in Jerusalem made me impatient.

So off we strode through the gate—and stopped.

“What are you doing?” I asked the suddenly recumbent Mohammad, wondering if he’d had a fainting spell. But no, he lay down with the deliberation of a dog circling a fireplace rug. No one can relax like an Ottoman, their very bones melting.

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“Bedouin gangs infest the road to Jerusalem and will rob any unarmed pilgrim, effendi,” my guide said blithely in the dark. “It’s not just risky to proceed alone, it is insane. My cousin Abdul is leading a camel caravan there later today, and we will join him for safety. Thus do I and Allah look after our American guest.”

“But what about our early start?”

“You have paid, and we have started.” And with that he went back to sleep.

Well, tarnation. It was the middle of the night, we were fifty yards outside the walls, I had little notion which way to go, and it was entirely possible he was right. Palestine was notorious for being overrun by brigands, feuding warlords, desert raiders, and thieving Bedouins. So I stewed and steamed for three hours, worried the marines might somehow wander this way, until at last Abdul and his snorting camels did indeed congregate at the gate, well before the sun rose.

Introductions were made, I was loaned a Turkish pistol, charged five more English shillings both for it and my added escort, and then another shilling for feed for my donkey. I’d been in Palestine less than twenty-four hours and already my purse was growing thin.

Next we brewed some tea.

At last there was a glimmer of light as the stars faded, and we were off through the orange groves. After a mile we passed into fields of cotton and wheat, the road lined with date palms. The thatched farmhouses were dark in early morning, barking dogs signaling their location. Camel bells and creaking saddles marked our own passage.

The sky lightened, bird call and rooster crow started up, and as the dawn pinked I could see the rugged hills ahead where so much biblical history had taken place. Israel’s trees had been depleted for charcoal and ashes to make soap, yet after the waterless Egyptian desert this coastal plain seemed as fat and pleasant as Pennsylvania Dutch country. Promised Land, indeed.

The Holy Land, I learned from my guide, was nominally a part of Syria, a province of the Ottoman Empire, and its provincial capital of Damascus was under the control of the Sublime Porte in Constantinople. But just as Egypt had really been under the control of t h e

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the independent Mamelukes until Bonaparte threw them out, Palestine was really under the control of the Bosnian-born Djezzar, an ex-Mameluke himself who’d ruled from Acre with notorious cruelty for a quarter century, ever since putting down a revolt of his own merce-nary troops. Djezzar had strangled several of his wives rather than put up with rumors of infidelity, maimed his closest advisers to remind them who was boss, and drowned generals or captains who displeased him. This ruthlessness, Mohammad opined, was necessary. The province was splintered among too many religious and ethnic groups, each about as comfortable with the other as a Calvinist at a Vatican picnic.

The invasion of Egypt had hurled even more refugees into the Holy Land, with Ibrahim Bey’s fugitive Mamelukes seeking a toehold.

Fresh Ottoman levies were pouring in to anticipate a French invasion, while British gold and promises of naval aid were stirring the pot even thicker. Half the population was spying on the other half, and every clan, sect, and cult was weighing its best chances between Djezzar and the so-far-invincible French. Word of the astonishing Napoleonic victories in Egypt, the latest of which had been suppres-sion of a revolt in Cairo, had shaken the Ottoman Empire.

I knew, too, that Napoleon still hoped to eventually link up with Tippoo Sahib, the Francophile sultan fighting Wellesley and the British in India. The fervently ambitious Bonaparte was organizing a camel corps he hoped could eventually cross the eastern deserts more efficiently than Alexander had done. The thirty-year-old Corsican wanted to do the Greek one better by galloping all the way to southern India to link with Citizen Tippoo and deprive Britain of its richest colony.

According to Smith, I was to make sense of this porridge.

“Palestine sounds like a regular rat’s nest of righteousness,” I remarked to Mohammad as we rode along, me three sizes too big for my donkey, which had a spine like a hickory rail. “As many factions here as a New Hampshire town council.”

“All men are holy here,” Mohammad said, “and there is nothing more irritating than a neighbor, equally holy, of a different faith.” Amen to that. For another man to be convinced he is right is to sug-2 4

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gest you may be wrong, and there is the root of half the world’s bloodshed. The French and British are perfect examples, firing broadsides at each other over who is the most democratic, the French republicans with their bloody guillotine, or the British parliamentarians with their debtor prisons. Back in my Paris days, when all I had to care about was cards, women, and the occasional shipping contract, I can’t recall being very upset with anybody, or they with me. Then along came the medallion, the Egyptian campaign, Astiza, Napoleon, Sidney Smith, and here I was, urging my diminutive steed toward the world capital of obstinate disagreement. I wondered for the thousandth time how I’d gotten to such a point.

Because of our delay and the caravan’s stately pace, we were three long days getting to Jerusalem, arriving at dusk on the third. It’s a tiresome, winding route on roads that would be snubbed by any self-respecting goat—there obviously hadn’t been a repair since Pontius Pilate—and in little time the brown, scrub-cloaked hills had acquired the steepness of the Appalachians. We climbed up the valley of the Bab al-Wad into pine and juniper, the grass brown this fall season.

The air got noticeably cooler and drier. Up and down and round-about we went, past braying donkeys, farting, foam-flecked camels, and cart drovers whose oxen butted head-to-head while the two drivers argued. We passed brown-robed friars, cassocked Armenian mis-sionaries, Orthodox Jews with beards and long sidelocks, Syrian merchants, one or two French expatriate cotton traders, and Muslim sects beyond number, turbaned and carrying staffs. Bedouin drove flocks of sheep and goats down hillsides like a spill of water, and village girls swayed interestingly by on the road’s fringe, clay jars balanced carefully on their heads. Bright sashes swung to the rock of their hips, and their dark eyes were bright as black stones on the bottom of a river.

What passed for hostels, called khans, were considerably less appealing: little more than walled courts that served chiefly as corrals for fleas. We also encountered bands of tough-looking horsemen who on four different occasions demanded a toll for passing. Each time I was expected by my companions to contribute more than what seemed my fair share. These parasites looked like simple robbers to t h e

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me, but Mohammad insisted they were local village toughs who kept even worse bandits away, and each village had a right to a portion of this toll, called a ghafar. He was probably telling the truth, since being taxed for protection against robbers is something all governments do, isn’t it? These armed louts were a cross between private extortionists and the police.

When I wasn’t grumbling about the unceasing drain upon my purse, however, Israel had its charm. If Palestine didn’t quite carry the atmosphere of antiquity that Egypt had, it still seemed well-trodden, as if we could hear the echoes of long-past Hebrew heroes, Christian saints, and Muslim conquerors. Olive trees had the girth of a wine cask, the wood twisted by countless centuries. Odd bits of historic rubble jutted from the prow of every hill. When we paused for water, the ledges leading down to spring or well were concave and smooth from all the sandals and boots that had gone before us. As in Egypt, there was a clarity to the light, very different from foggy Europe.

The air had a dusty taste as well, as if it had been breathed too many times.

It was at one of these khans that I was reminded that I hadn’t left the world of the medallion entirely behind. A geezer of indeterminate faith and age was given meager sustenance by the innkeeper for doing the odd chore about the place, and he was so meek and unassuming that none of us paid him much mind except to ask for a cup of water or an extra sheepskin to sprawl on. I would have had eyes for a serving wench, but a raggedy man pushing a twig broom did not capture my attention, so when I was undressing in the wee hours and had my golden seraphim momentarily exposed, I backed into him and jumped before I knew he was there. He was staring goggle-eyed at my little angels, wings outstretched, and at first I thought the old beggar had spied something he longed to steal. But instead he stepped back in consternation and fear.

I flipped my linen over the seraphim, the brightness vanishing as if light had gone out.

“The compass,” he whispered in Arabic.

“What?”

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“Satan’s fingers. Allah’s mercy be upon you.” He was clearly as addled as a loon. Still, his look of dismay made me uneasy. “They’re personal relics. Not a word of this, now.”

“My imam whispered of these. From the den.”

“The den?” They’d come from under the Great Pyramid.

“Apophis.” And with that, he turned and fled.

Well, I hadn’t been so flabbergasted since the danged medallion had actually worked. Apophis! That was the name of a snake god, or demon, that Astiza had claimed was down in the bowels of Egypt.

I didn’t take her seriously—I am a Franklin man, after all, a man of reason, of the West—but something had been down in a smoky pit I’d had no desire to get closer to, and I thought I’d left it and its name long behind in Egypt. . . . Yet here it had been spoken again!

By the snout of Anubis, I’d had quite enough of stray gods and goddesses, mucking up my life like unwanted relatives tracking the floor with mud on their boots. Now a senescent handyman had brought the name up again. Surely it made no sense, but the coincidence was unnerving.

I hurriedly redressed, secreting the seraphim again in my clothing, and hurried outside my cubicle to seek the old man out and ask him what the name meant.

But he was nowhere to be found. The next morning, the innkeeper said the servant had apparently packed his meager belongings and fled.

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And then at last we came to fabled Jerusalem. I’ll admit it was a striking sight. The city is perched on a hill set amid hills, and on three sides the ground falls steeply to narrow valleys. It is on the fourth side, the north, from which invaders always come. Olives, vineyards, and orchards clothe the hillsides, and gardens provide clusters of green within. Formidable walls two miles long, built by a Muslim sultan called Suleiman the Magnificent, entirely enclose the city’s inhabitants. Fewer than nine thousand people lived there when t h e

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I arrived, subsisting economically on pilgrims and a desultory pottery and soap industry. I’d learn soon enough that about four thousand were Muslims, three thousand Christians, and two thousand Jews.

What picked the place out were its buildings. The primary Muslim mosque, the Dome of the Rock, has a golden cupola that glows like a lighthouse in the setting sun. Closer to where we stood, the Jaffa Gate was the old military citadel, its crenellated ramparts topped by a round tower like a lighthouse. Stones as colossal as the ones I’d seen in Egypt made up the citadel’s base. I’d find similar rocks at the Temple Mount, the old Jewish temple plateau that now served as the base of the city’s great mosque. Apparently, Jerusalem’s foundations had been laid by Titans.

The skyline was punctuated everywhere by domes, minarets, and church towers bequeathed by this crusader or that conqueror, each trying to leave a holy building to make up for his own national brand of slaughter. The effect was as competitive as rival vegetable stalls at a Saturday market, Christian bells tolling as muzzeins wailed and Jews chanted their prayers. Vines, flowers, and shrubs erupted from the ill-maintained wall, and palms marked squares and gardens. Outside, ranks of olive trees marched down to twisting, rocky valleys that were smoky from burning garbage. From this terrestrial hell-dump one lifted the eye to heaven, birds wheeling in front of celestial cloud palaces, everything sharp and detailed. Jerusalem, like Jaffa, was the color of honey in the low sun, its limestone fermenting in the yellow rays.

“Most men come here looking for something,” Mohammad remarked as we gazed across the Citadel Valley toward the ancient capital. “What do you seek, my friend?”

“Wisdom,” I said, which was true enough. That’s what the Book of Thoth was supposed to contain, and by Franklin’s spectacles I could use some. “And news of one I love, I hope.”

“Ah. Many men search their entire lives without finding wisdom or love, so it is well you come here, where prayers for both might be answered.”

“Let’s hope so.” I knew that Jerusalem, precisely because it was 2 8

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reputed to be so holy, had been attacked, burned, sacked, and pillaged more times than any place on earth. “I’ll pay you now and seek out the man I’m to stay with.” I tried not to jingle my purse too much as I counted out the rest of his fee.

He took his pay eagerly and then reacted with practiced shock.

“Not a gift for sharing my expertise about the Holy Land? No rec-ompense for the safety or your arrival? No affirmation of this glorious view?”

“I suppose you want credit for the weather, as well.” He looked hurt. “I have tried to be your servant, effendi.” So, twisting in my saddle so he couldn’t see how little was left, I gave him a tip I could ill afford. He bowed and gave effusive thanks.

“Allah smiles on your generosity!”

I wasn’t able to keep the grumpiness from my “Godspeed.”

“And peace be upon you!”

A blessing that had no power, it turned out.

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Jerusalem was half ruin, I saw when I rode down the dirt track and crossed a wooden bridge to the black iron of the Jaffa Gate, and through it to a market beyond.

A subashi, or police officer, checked me for weapons—they were not allowed in Ottoman cities—but allowed me to keep my poor dagger.

“I thought Franks carried something better,” he muttered, taking me for European despite my clothing.

“I’m a simple pilgrim,” I told him.

His look was skeptical. “See that you remain one.” Then I sold my donkey for what I’d paid for it—a few coins back, at least!—and got my bearings.

The gate had a steady stream of traffic. Merchants met caravans, and pilgrims of a dozen sects shouted thanksgiving as they entered the sacred precincts. But Ottoman authority had been in decline for two centuries, and powerless governors, raiding Bedouin, extortionate tax collection, and religious rivalry had left the town’s prosperity as stunted as cornstalks on a causeway. Market stalls lined major streets, but their faded awnings and half-empty shelves only emphasized the 3 0

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historical gloom. Jerusalem was somnolent, birds having occupied its towers.

My guide Mohammad had explained the city was divided into quarters for Muslims, Christians, Armenians, and Jews. I followed twisting lanes as best I could for the northwest quadrant, built around the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and Franciscan headquarters. The route was depopulated enough that chickens skittered out of my way.

Half the houses appeared abandoned. The inhabited homes, built of ancient stone with haphazard wooden sheds and terraces jutting like boils, sagged liked the skin of grandmothers. As in Egypt, any fantasies of an opulent East were disappointed.

Smith’s vague directions and my own inquiries took me to a two-story limestone house with a solid wooden wagon gate topped by a horseshoe, its façade otherwise featureless in the Arab fashion. There was a smaller wooden door to one side, and I could smell the charcoal from Jericho’s smithy. I pounded on the small entry door, waited, and pounded again, until a small peephole opened. I was surprised when a feminine eye looked out: I’d become accustomed in Cairo to bulky Muslim doormen and sequestered wives. Moreover, her pupils were pale gray, of a translucence unusual in the East.

On Smith’s instruction, I started in English. “I’m Ethan Gage, with a letter of introduction from a British captain to a man they call Jericho. I’m here . . .”

The eyehole shut. I stood, wondering after some minutes whether I even had the right house, when finally the door swung open as if of its own accord and I stepped cautiously through. I was in the work yard of an ironmonger, all right, its pavers stained gray with soot. Ahead I could see the glow of a forge, in a ground-story shed with walls hung with tools. The left of the courtyard was a sales shop stocked with finished implements, and to the right was storage for metal and charcoal. Slightly overhanging these three wings were the living apart-ments above, reached by an unpainted wooden stair and fronted by a balcony, faded roses cascading from iron pots. A few petals had fallen to the ashes below.

The gate closed behind me, and I realized the woman had been t h e

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hidden by it. She ghosted by without speaking, her eyes inspecting me with a sidewise glance and an intense curiosity that surprised me.

It’s true I’m a handsome rogue, but was I really that interesting? Her dress fell from neck to ankles, her head was covered by a scarf in the custom of all faiths here in Palestine, and she modestly averted her face, but I saw enough to make a key judgment. She was pretty.

Her face had the rounded beauty of a Renaissance painting, her complexion pale for this part of the world, with an eggshell smooth-ness. Her lips were full, and when I caught her gaze she looked down demurely. Her nose had that slight Mediterranean arch, that subtle curve of the south that I find seductive. Her hair was hidden except for a few escaping strands that hinted at a surprisingly fair coloring.

Her figure was trim enough, but it was hard to tell more than that.

Then she disappeared through a doorway.

And with that instinctive scouting done, I turned around to see a bearded, hard-muscled man striding from the smithy in a leather apron. He had the forearms of a smith, thick as hams and marked with the inevitable burns of the forge. The smudge from his work didn’t hide his sandy hair and startling blue eyes that looked at me with some skepticism. Had Vikings washed ashore in Syria? Yet his build was softened somewhat by a fullness to his lips and ruddiness behind his bearded cheeks (a cherubic youthfulness he shared with the woman), which suggested the earnest gentleness I’ve always imagined of Joseph the Carpenter. He shed a leather glove and held out a cal-lused hand. “Gage.”

“Ethan Gage,” I confirmed as I shook a palm hard as wood.

“Jericho.” The man might have a woman’s mouth, but he had a grip like a vise.

“As your wife might have explained . . .”

“Sister.”

“Really?” Well, that was a step in the right direction. Not that I was forgetting about Astiza for a moment—it’s just that female beauty arouses a natural curiosity in any healthy male, and it’s safest to know where one stands.

“She is shy of strangers, so do not make her uncomfortable.” 3 2

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That was clear enough, from a man sturdy as an oak stump. “Of course. Yet it is commendable that she apparently understands English.”

“It would be more remarkable if she didn’t, since she lived in England. With me. She has nothing to do with our business.”

“Charming yet unavailable. The very best ladies are.” He reacted to my wit with as much animation as a stone idol.

“Smith sent word of your mission, so I can offer temporary lodging and time-tested advice: any foreigner who pretends to understand the politics of Jerusalem is a fool.”

I remained my affable self. “So my job might be brief. I ask, don’t understand the answer, and go home. Like any pilgrim.” He looked me up and down. “You prefer Arab dress?”

“It’s comfortable, anonymous, and I thought it might help in the souk and the coffee shop. I speak a little Arabic.” I was determined to keep trying. “As for you, Jericho, I don’t see you falling down anytime soon.”

I’d merely puzzled him.

“The biblical story, about the walls of Jericho coming down? Solid as a rock, you seem to be. Good man to have on one’s side, I hope?”

“My home village. There are no walls now.”

“And I didn’t expect to find blue eyes in Palestine,” I stumbled on.

“Crusader blood. The roots of my family go far back. We should be a paintbox mix, but in our generation the paleness came out. Every race comes through Jerusalem: Crusaders, Persians, Mongols, Ethio-pians. Every creed, opinion, and nation. And you?”

“American, ancestry brief and best forgotten, which is one of the advantages of the United States. I understand you learned your English through their navy?”

“Miriam and I were orphaned by the plague. The Catholic fathers who took us in told us something of the world, and at Tyre I signed onto an English frigate and learned ironwork repairs. The sailors gave me my nickname, I apprenticed to a smith in Portsmouth, and sent for her. I felt obligated.”

“But didn’t stay, obviously.”

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“We missed the sun; the British are white as worms. I’d met Smith while in the navy. For passage back and some pay, I agreed to keep my ears open here. I host his friends. They do his bidding. Little useful is ever learned. My neighbors think I’m simply capitalizing on my English to take in the occasional lodger, and they’re not far wrong.”

Bright and blunt, this blacksmith. “Sidney Smith thinks he and I can help each other. I got caught up with Bonaparte in Egypt. Now the French are planning to come this way.”

“And Smith wants to know what the Christians and the Jews and the Druze and the Matuwelli might do.”

“Exactly. He’s trying to help Djezzar mount resistance to the French.”

“With people who hate Djezzar, a tyrant who keeps his slipper on their neck. More than a few will regard the French as liberators.”

“If that’s the message, I’ll take it back. But I also need help for my own cause. I met a woman in Egypt who disappeared. Fell into the Nile, actually. I want to learn if she’s dead or alive and, if alive, how to rescue her. I’m told you may have contacts in Egypt.”

“A woman? Close to you?” He seemed reassured by my interest in someone other than his sister. “That kind of inquiry is more costly than listening to political gossip in Jerusalem.”

“How much more costly?”

He looked me up and down. “More, I suspect, than you can afford to pay.”

“So you won’t help me?”

“It’s my contacts in Egypt who won’t help you, not without coin.” I judged he wasn’t trying to cheat me, just tell me the truth. I needed a partner if I was going to get anywhere in my quest, and who better than this blue-eyed blacksmith? So I gave him a hint of what else I was after. “Maybe you can contribute. What if I promised, in return, a share of the greatest treasure on earth?” He finally laughed. “Greatest treasure? Which is?”

“A secret. But it could make a man a king.”

“Ah. And where might this treasure be?” 3 4

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“Right under our noses in Jerusalem, I hope.”

“Do you know how many fools have hoped to find treasure in Jerusalem?”

“It’s not the fools who will find it.”

“You want me to spend my money looking for your woman?”

“I want you to invest in your future.”

He licked his lips. “Smith found a bold, impudent, rascal, didn’t he?”

“And you are a judge of character!” He might be skeptical, but he was also curious. Paying for word of Astiza would not really cost him much, I bet. And he had the same avarice as all of us: Everyone dreams of buried treasure.

“I could see if it’s affordable.”

I’d hooked him. “There’s another thing I need as well. A good rifle.”

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Jericho lived simply, despite some prosperity from his ironmonger trade. Because he was a Christian his house had more furnishings than a Muslim abode: Muhammadans rely on cushions that can be moved so the women can be sequestered when a male guest arrives.

The habit of the Bedouin tent has never been left behind. We Christians, in contrast, are accustomed to having our heads closer to the warm ceiling than the cooler floor, and so sit high and formal, in stationary clutter. Jericho had a table, chairs, and armoires instead of Islamic cushions and chests. The carpentry was plain, however, with a Puritan simplicity. The plank floors were bare of carpets, and any decoration on the plaster walls was limited to the odd crucifix or pic-ture of a saint: clean as a convent, and just as disconcerting. Miriam, the sister, kept it spotless. Food was plentiful, but basic: bread, olives, wine, and what greens the woman could buy each day in the market stalls. Occasionally she’d bring meat for her muscled, hungry brother, but it was relatively rare and expensive. Winter was coming, but there was no provision for heat except that given off by the charcoal of the cooking hearth and the forge below. There was no glass in the screened windows, so the coldest were blocked up by bags of sawdust t h e

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for the season, adding to the autumn gloom. The basin water was cold, winds penetrating, candles and oil precious, and we slept and rose at farmer hours. For a Parisian layabout like me, Palestine was a shock.

It was the forging of my new rifle that first bonded us. Jericho was steady, skilled, quiet, diligent (all things I should emulate, I suppose) and had earned the town’s respect. You could see it in the eyes of the men who came into the sooty courtyard to buy iron implements: Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike. I thought I might have to tutor him in the design of a good gun, but he was ahead of me. “You mean like the German jaegar, the hunting rifle?” he said when I described the piece I’d lost. “I’ve worked on some. Show me on the sand how long you want the piece to be.”

I sketched out a forty-two-inch barrel.

“Won’t that be clumsy?”

“The length gives it accuracy and killing power. Just forty-five caliber is enough; the rifle velocity makes up for bullets smaller than a musket’s. I can carry more ammunition for a given weight of shot and powder. Soft iron, deep grooving, a drop to the stock to bring the sights up to my eye for aiming but keep my brow out of the pan flash.

The best I’ve seen can drive a tack three times out of five at fifty yards.

It takes a full minute to load and ram, but the first shot will actually hit something.”

“Smoothbores are the rule here. Quick to load and you can shoot with anything—pebbles, if need be. For this gun, we’ll need precise bullets.”

“Precision means accuracy.”

“In a close fight, sometimes speed wins.” He had the prejudice of the sailors he had served with, who fought in sharp brawls when boarding.

“And the right shot can keep them from getting close at all. To my mind, trying to fight with an ordinary musket is like going to a brothel blindfolded—you might get the result you want, but you can miss by a mile, too.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.” Damned if I could get him to joke.

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He looked at the pattern in the sand. “Four hundred hours of work.

For which you’ll pay me out of this treasure of yours?”

“Double. I’m going to be searching hard while you craft the rifle.”

“No.” He shook his head. “Easy to promise money you don’t have.

You’ll help, and not just with this but other projects. It will be a new experience for you, doing real work. On slow days you can hunt for buried treasure or learn enough gossip to satisfy Sidney Smith. You can bill him to satisfy your debt to me.” Honest work? The idea was intriguing—truth be told, I’m sometimes envious of solid men like Jericho—but daunting, too. “I’ll help at your forge,” I bargained, “but you have to guarantee me enough hours to peck about. Get me the rifle by the end of winter, when Napoleon comes, and by that time I’ll find the treasure and get Smith’s money, too.” Squeezing anything out of the Admiralty is like getting gravy from a shoelace, but spring was far off. Things could happen.

“Then bellow that fire.” And when I leaped to obey, and shoveled charcoal, and shifted enough metal to make my shoulders ache, he grudgingly nodded. “Miriam thinks you’re a good man.” And with her endorsement, I knew I had some trust.

Jericho first fetched a round metal rod, or mandrel, slightly smaller than the intended bore of my future rifle. He heated a bar of carbon-ized Damascus steel, called a skelp, the same length as my gun barrel.

This he would wrap around the mandrel. I held the rod and handed tools while he placed these on a groove in a barrel anvil and began to beat to fuse the barrel’s cylinder. He’d do an inch at a time, removing the rod while the metals were still slightly pliable, then plunging the result into sizzling water. Then it was reheat, wrap another inch of the steel, hammer, and reweld: inch by inch. It was tedious, painstaking work, but curiously enthralling too. This lengthening tube would become my new companion. The duty kept me warm, and hard physical work was its own satisfaction. I ate simply, slept well, and even came to feel comfortable in the pious simplicity of my lodging. My muscles, already toughened by Egypt, became harder still.

I tried to draw him out. “You’re not married, Jericho?”

“Have you seen a wife?”

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“A handsome, prosperous man like you?”

“I have no one I wish to marry.”

“Me neither. Never met the right girl. Then this woman in Egypt . . .”

“We’ll get word of her.”

“So it’s just you and your sister,” I persisted.

He stopped his hammering, annoyed. “I was married once. She died carrying my child. Other things happened. I went to the British ship. And Miriam . . .”

Now I saw it. “Takes care of you, the grieving brother.” His gaze held mine. “As I take care of her.”

“So if a suitor would appear?”

“She has no wish for suitors.”

“But she’s such a lovely girl. Sweet. Demure. Obedient.”

“And you have your woman in Egypt.”

“You need a wife,” I advised. “And some children to make you laugh. Maybe I can scout about for you.”

“I don’t need a foreigner’s eye. Or a wastrel’s.”

“Yet I might as well offer it, since I’m here!” And I grinned, he grumped, and we went back to pounding metal.

When work was light I explored Jerusalem. I’d vary my dress slightly depending on which quarter I was in, trying to glean useful information through my Arabic, English, and French. Jerusalem was used to pilgrims, and my accents were unremarkable. The city’s crossroads were its markets, where rich and poor mingled and janissary warriors casually shared meals with common artisans. The khaskiyya, or soup kitchens, provided welfare for the destitute, while the coffeehouses attracted men of all faiths to sip, smoke water pipes, and argue.

The air, heady with the dark beans, rich Turkish tobacco, and hash-ish, was intoxicating. Occasionally I’d coax Jericho to come along.

He needed a cup of wine or two to get going, but once started, his reluctant explanations of his homeland were invaluable.

“Everyone in Jerusalem thinks they’re three steps closer to heaven,” he summarized, “which means that together they create their own little hell.”

“It is a weaponless city of peace and piety, is it not?” 3 8

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“Until someone steps on someone else’s piety.” If anyone questioned my own presence I’d explain I was a trade representative for the United States, which had been true in Paris.

I was waiting to make deals with the winner, I said. I wanted to be friends with everyone.

The city was so filled with rumor of Napoleon’s coming that it buzzed like a hive, but there was no consensus about which side was likely to prevail. Djezzar had been in ruthless control for a quarter century. Bonaparte had yet to be beaten. The English controlled the sea, and Palestine was but an islet in a vast Ottoman lake. While the Shiite and Sunni sects of the Muslim communities were at bitter odds with each other, and both Christians and Jews were restless minorities and mutually suspicious, it was not at all clear who might take arms against who. Would-be religious despots from half a dozen faiths dreamed of carving out their own puritanical utopias. While Smith hoped I might recruit for the British cause, I’d no real intention of doing so. I still liked French republican ideals and the men I’d served with, and I didn’t necessarily disagree with Napoleon’s dreams of reforming the Near East. Why should I take the side of the arrogant British, who had so bitterly fought my own nation’s independence?

All I really wanted was to hear of Astiza and find out if there was any chance this fabled Book of Thoth might improbably have survived over three thousand years. And then flee this madhouse.

So I learned what I could in their hookah culture. It was a small town, and word inevitably spread of the infidel in Arab clothes who worked at the forge of a Christian, but there were any number of people with foggy pasts seeking any number of things. I was just one more, who did what life chiefly consists of: waiting.

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To pass the winter, I did my best to tease Miriam. I’d found a piece of amber in the market, an insect preserved inside. It was being sold as a slick and shiny good-luck charm, but I saw it as an artifact of science. I stole up behind her once when she was cleaning a chicken, rubbed the amber briskly on my robes, and then lifted my hand above the downy feathers. Some floated up to my down-turned palm.

She whirled. “How are you doing that?”

“I bring mysterious powers from France and America,” I intoned.

She crossed herself. “It’s evil to bring magic into this house.”

“It’s not magic, it’s an electrical trick I learned from my mentor Franklin.” I turned my palm so she could see the amber I held. “Even the ancient Greeks did this. If you rub amber, it will attract things.

We call the magic electricity. I am an electrician.”

“What a foolish idea,” she said uncertainly.

“Here, try it.” I took her hand, despite her hesitation, and put the amber in her fingers, enjoying the excuse to touch her. Her fingers were strong, red from work. Then I rubbed it on her sleeve and held it over the feathers. Sure enough, a few levitated to stick.

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“Now you’re an electrician, too.”

She sniffed and gave it back to me. “How do you find time for useless games?”

“But perhaps they’re not useless.”

“If you’re so clever, use your amber to pluck the next chicken!” I laughed, and ran the amber past her cheek, pulling with it strands of her lovely hair. “It can serve as a comb, perhaps.” I had created a blond veil, her eyes suspicious above it.

“You are an impudent man.”

“Simply a curious one.”

“Curious about what?” She blushed when she said it.

“Ah. Now you’re beginning to understand me.” I winked.

But she wouldn’t allow things to go any further. I’d hoped to while away spare time by finding a card game or two, but I was in the worst city in the world for that. Jerusalem had fewer amusements than a Quaker picnic. Nor did there turn out to be much sexual temptation in a town where women were wrapped as tightly as a toddler in a Maine blizzard: my celibacy in Jaffa was involuntarily extended. Oh, women would give me a fetching eye now and again—I’ve got a bit of dash—but their allure was poisoned by lurid stories one heard in the coffeehouses of genital mutilation by angry fathers or brothers. It does give one pause.

In time I was so frustrated and bored that I took inspiration from my amber play and decided to tinker with electricity as Franklin had taught me. What had seemed a clever Parisian hobby to charm salons with an electric kiss—I could make a spark pass between a couple’s lips, once I’d given a woman a charge with my machines—had taken on more seriousness after my sojourn in Egypt. Was it possible ancient people had turned such mysteries into powerful magic? Was that the secret of their civilizations? Science was also a way to give myself status during my winter of discontent in Jerusalem. Electricity was novel here.

With Jericho’s reluctant tolerance, I built a frictional hand crank, with a glass disk to make a generator. When I rotated it against pads connected to a wire, the static charge was passed to glass jugs I lined t h e

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with lead: my makeshift Leyden jars. I used strands of copper to wire these spark batteries in sequence and sent enough electricity to a chain to make customers jump if they touched it, numbing their limbs for hours. Students of human nature won’t be surprised that men lined up to be jolted, shaking their tingling extremities in awe. I gained even more of a reputation as a sorcerer when I electrified my own arms and used my fingers to attract flakes of brass. I’d become a Count Silano, I realized, a conjurer. Men began to whisper about my powers, and I admit I enjoyed the notoriety. For Christmas I evacuated the air from a glass globe, spun it with my crank, and laid my palm on it. The ensuing purple glow lit the shed and entranced neighborhood children, though two old women fainted, a rabbi stormed from the room, and a Catholic priest held up a cross in my direction.

“It’s just a parlor trick,” I reassured them. “We did it all the time in France.”

“And what are the French but infidels and atheists?” the priest rejoined. “No good will come from electricity.”

“On the contrary, learned doctors in France and Germany believe electric shocks may be able to cure illness or madness.” But since everyone knows physicians kill more than they cure, Jericho’s neighbors were hardly impressed by this promise.

Miriam also remained dubious. “It seems like a lot of trouble just to sting someone.”

“But why does it sting? That’s what Ben Franklin wanted to understand.”

“It comes from your cranking, does it not?”

“But why? If you churn milk or hoist a well bucket, do you get electricity? No, there is something special here, which Franklin thought might be the force that animates the universe. Perhaps electricity animates our souls.”

“That is blasphemous!”

“Electricity is in our bodies. Electricians have tried to animate dead criminals with electricity.”

“Ugh!”

“And their muscles actually moved, though their spirits had 4 2

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departed. Is electricity what gives us life? What if we could harness that force the way we harness fire, or the muscles of a horse? What if the ancient Egyptians did? The person who knew how might have unimaginable power.”

“And is that what you seek, Ethan Gage? Unimaginable power?”

“When you’ve seen the pyramids, you wonder if men didn’t have such power in the past. Why can’t we relearn it today?”

“Perhaps because it caused more harm than good.” Meanwhile, Jerusalem worked its own spell. I don’t know if human history can soak into soil like winter rain, but the places I visited had a palpable, haunting sense of time. Every wall held a memory, every lane a story. Here Jesus fell, there Solomon welcomed Sheba, into this square the Crusaders charged, and across that wall Saladin took the city back. Most extraordinary was the southeastern corner of the city, consisting of a vast artificial plateau built atop the mount where Abraham offered to sacrifice Isaac: the Temple Mount. Built by Herod the Great, it’s a paved platform a quarter mile long and three hundred yards wide that covers, I was told, thirty-five acres. To hold a mere temple? Why did it have to be so big? Was it covering something— hiding something—more critical? I was reminded of our endless speculation about the true purpose of the pyramids.

Solomon’s Temple was on this mount until first the Babylonians and then the Romans destroyed it. And then the Muslims built their golden mosque on the same spot. On the south end was another mosque, El-Aqsa, its form distorted by Crusader additions. Each faith had tried to leave its stamp, but the overall result was a serene empti-ness, elevated above the commercial city like heaven itself. Children played and sheep grazed. I’d stride up sometimes through the Chain Gate and stroll its perimeter, viewing the surrounding hills with my little spyglass. The Muslims left me alone, whispering that I was a genie who tapped dark powers.

Despite my reputation, or perhaps because of it, I’d occasionally be allowed to enter the blue-tiled Dome of the Rock itself, taking off my boots before stepping on its red and green carpet. Perhaps they hoped I’d convert to Islam. The dome was held up by four massive piers t h e

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and twelve columns, its interior decorated with mosaics and Islamic script. Beneath it was the sacred rock, Kubbet es-Sakhra, root stone of the world, where Abraham had offered to sacrifice his son, and where Muhammad had ascended for a tour of heaven. There was a well on one side of the rock, and reportedly a small cave underneath it. Was anything hidden there? If this was where Solomon’s Temple once stood, wouldn’t any Hebrew treasures have been secreted in the same place? But none were allowed to descend to the cave, and when I lingered too long, a Muslim caretaker would shoo me away.

So I speculated, and labored with Jericho to beat out horseshoes, sickles, fire tongs, hinges, and all the sundry hardware of everyday life.

I had ample opportunity to interrogate my host.

“Are there any underground places in this city where something valuable might be hidden for a long time?” Jericho barked a laugh. “Underground places in Jerusalem? Every cellar leads to a maze of abandoned tunnels and forgotten streets.

Don’t forget that this city has been sacked by half the world’s nations, including your own Crusaders. So many throats have been cut that the groundwater should be blood. It is ruin built atop ruin atop ruin, not to mention a honeycomb of caves and quarries. Underground?

There may be more Jerusalem down there than up here!”

“This thing I’m looking for was brought by the ancient Israelites.” He groaned. “Don’t tell me you’re looking for the Ark of the Covenant! That’s a lunatic’s myth. It may have been in Solomon’s Temple once, but there’s been no mention of it since Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and carried the Jews into exile in 586 b.c .”

“No, no, I don’t mean that. ” But I did mean it, or at least hope that the ark could lead me to the Book, or that they were one and the same.

“Ark” means “box,” and the Ark of the Covenant was supposedly the gold-plated acacia wood box where the Hebrews who escaped from Egypt kept the Ten Commandments. By reputation it had mysterious powers and was a help in defeating their enemies. Naturally I wondered if the Book of Thoth was in the container as well, since Astiza believed Moses had taken it. But I said none of this, yet.

“Good. It would take you all of eternity to dig up Jerusalem, and 4 4

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I suspect in the end you’d have no more than when you started.

Crawl down holes if you will, but all you’ll find are pot shards and rat bones.”

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Miriam was a quiet woman, but gradually I realized that this quiet was a veil over a keen intelligence, with intense curiosity about the past. As different as she and Astiza were in personality, in intellect they were twins. In the early days of my stay she cooked and served our meals but ate apart. It wasn’t until I’d worked awhile with Jericho at his forge, winning some small measure of trust, that I was able to cajole the two of them into letting her join us at the table. We weren’t Muslims bound to segregate the sexes, after all, and their reluctance was curious. At first she spoke only when spoken to—she was again the opposite of Astiza in that way—and seemed to have little in need of saying. As I’d suspected, she was truly lovely—a beauty that always put me in mind of fruit and cream—but only with reluctance did she shed her scarf at table. When she did, her hair was a golden waterfall, as light as Astiza’s was dark, her neck high, her cheeks lovely. I continued to pride myself on my chastity (since trying to find an adventuress in Jerusalem was like trying to find a virgin in the card cozies of Paris, I might as well take satisfaction in my enforced virtue) but I was astonished that this beauty hadn’t already been swept off by some persistent swain. At night I could hear the sounds of her splashing as she carefully bathed while standing in a wooden tub, and I couldn’t help but wonder about her breasts and belly, the roundness of her rump, and the slim strong legs that my all-too-frustrated brain imagined, runnels of soapy water cascading down the perfect topography of her thighs and calves and ankles. And then I’d groan, try to think about electricity, and finally resort to my fist.

At supper Miriam enjoyed our talk, her eyes quick and lively.

Brother and sister were people who’d seen some of the world, and so they enjoyed my own stories of life in Paris, growing up in America, my early fur-trading forays on the Great Lakes, and my journeys t h e

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down the Mississippi to New Orleans and to the Caribbean Sugar Isles. They were curious about Egypt as well. I didn’t tell them about the secrets of the Great Pyramid, but I described the Nile, the great land and sea battles of the year before, and the Temple of Dendara that I’d visited far to the south. Jericho told me more of Palestine, of Galilee where Jesus walked, and of the Christian sites I might visit on the Mount of Olives. After some hesitation, Miriam began to make shy suggestions as well, hinting that she knew a great deal more about historic Jerusalem than I would have guessed—more, in fact, than her brother. Not only could she read—rare enough for a woman in Muslim lands—but she did read, avidly, and spent much of her quiet days, shielded from men and free from children, in study of books she bought in the market or borrowed from the nunneries.

“What are you reading?” I’d ask her.

“The past.”

Jerusalem was a place pregnant with the past. I roamed the hills outside the walls in chilly winter, when the light cast long shadows across anonymous ruins. Once the bitter wind brought light snow, the white coverlet followed by pale blue skies, and a sun as heatless as a kite. It lit the landscape into sugar.

Meanwhile work on the rifle proceeded, and I could tell Jericho was enjoying the craftsmanship required. When the barrel was completely forged we drilled it out to the correct diameter, I turned the hand crank while he fed the clamped barrel toward me. It’s hard work.

When that was done he stretched a line through its bore, drawing it tight with a bent bow, and then sighted down its middle for shadows and ridges that would signal imperfections. Adept heating and hammering made the tube even straighter.

The grooved rifling that would spin the bullet was painstaking.

There were seven grooves, each cut by a bit rotated through the barrel.

Since it could not cut deeply, the bit had to be hand-twisted through the gun two hundred times per groove.

That was only the beginning. There was polishing, the bluing of the metal, and then the myriad metal parts for the flintlock, trigger, patch box, ramrod, and so on. My hands helped, but the skill was pure 4 6

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Jericho, his meaty paws able to produce results worthy of a maiden with a needle. He was happiest when silently working.

Maid Miriam surprised me one day by asking to measure my arm and shoulder. She, it turned out, would shape the rifle’s stock, which has to be fitted to the rifleman’s size like a coat. She’d volunteered for the job. “She has an artist’s eye,” Jericho explained. “Show her the drop and offset you want in the stock.” There was no maple in Palestine, so she used desert acacia, the same wood used in the ark: heavier than I preferred, but hard and tight-grained. After I’d roughly sketched how I wanted the wood to differ from the design of Arab firearms, she translated my suggestion into graceful curves, reminis-cent of Pennsylvania. When she measured my size to get the dimensions of the butt right, I trembled like a schoolboy at the touch of her fingers.

That’s how chaste I’d become.

So I existed, sending vague political and military assessments to Smith that would have confused any strategist foolish enough to pay attention to them, until finally one evening our supper was interrupted by a hammering at Jericho’s door. The blacksmith went to check, and came back with a dusty, bearded traveler from the day’s market caravan. “I bring the American word from Egypt,” the visitor announced.

My heart hammered in my breast.

We sat him at the plain wood trestle table, gave him some water—

he was Muslim, and refused any wine—and some olives and bread.

While he gave uneasy thanks for our hospitality and ate like a wolf, I waited apprehensively, surprised at the flood of emotion rushing through my veins. Astiza had shrunken in memory during these weeks with Miriam. Now feelings buried for months pounded in my head as if I were still holding Astiza, or watching her desperately dangle on a rope below. I flushed impatiently, feeling the prickle of sweat. Miriam watched me.

There were the obligatory greetings, wishes for prosperity, thanks to the divine, a report on health—“How are you?” is one of the most profound queries of my age, given the prevalence of gout, ague, t h e

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dropsy, chilblains, ophthalmia, aches, and faints—and recitation of the hardships of the journey.

Finally, “What news of this man’s woman friend?” The messenger swallowed, flicking bread crumbs from his beard.

“There are reports of a French balloon lost during the October revolt in Cairo,” he began. “Nothing about the American aboard; he is said to have simply disappeared, or deserted from the French army. There are a number of stories placing him at this location or that, but no agreement about what happened to him.” He glanced at me, then down at the table. “No one confirms his story.”

“But surely there are reports of the fate of Count Silano,” I said.

“Count Alessandro Silano has similarly disappeared. He was reported investigating the Great Pyramid, and then vanished. Some suspect he may have been killed in the pyramid. Others think that he returned to Europe. The credulous think he disappeared by magic.”

“No, no!” I objected. “He fell from the balloon!”

“There is no report of that, effendi. I am only telling you what is being said.”

“And Astiza?”

“We could find no trace of her at all.” My heart sank. “No trace?”

“The house of Qelab Almani, the man you call Enoch, where you claimed to have stayed, was empty after his murder and has since been requisitioned as a French barracks. Yusuf al-Beni, who you said hosted this woman in his harem, denies that she ever stayed there. There was rumor of a beautiful woman accompanying General Desaix’s expe-ditionary force to Upper Egypt, but if so, she too vanished. Of the wounded Mameluke Ashraf that you mentioned, we heard no word.

No one remembers Astiza’s presence in either Cairo or Alexandria.

There is soldier talk of an attractive woman, yes, but no one claims to have seen her, or known her. It is almost as if she never existed.”

“But she fell into the Nile too! An entire platoon saw it!”

“If so, my friend, she must never have emerged. Her memory is like a mirage.”

I was stunned. Her death, the burial of her drowned body, I had 4 8

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braced for. Her survival, even if she was imprisoned, I had hoped for.

But her complete disappearance? Had the river carried her away, never to be seen again or decently buried? What kind of answer was that?

Silano gone too? That was even more suspicious. Had she somehow survived and gone with him? That was even greater agony!

“You must know something more than that! My God, the entire army knew her! Napoleon remarked on her! Key savants took her on their boat! Now there’s no word at all?” He looked at me with sympathy. “I am sorry, effendi. Sometimes God leaves more questions than answers, does he not?” Humans can adapt to anything but uncertainty. The worst monsters are the ones we haven’t yet encountered. Yet here I was, hearing her last words that rang in my head, “Find it!” and then her cutting the rope, falling away with Silano, the screams, the blinding sun as the balloon soared away . . . was it all just a nightmare? No! It had been as real as this table.

Jericho was looking at me gloomily. Sympathy, yes, but also the knowledge that the Egyptian woman had kept me at a distance from his sister. Miriam’s gaze was more direct than it ever had been before, and in her eyes I read sorrowful understanding. In that instant I realized she’d lost someone too. This was why no suitors were encouraged, and why her brother remained her closest companion. We were all bonded by grief.

“I just wanted a clear answer,” I whispered.

“Your answer is, what is past is past.” Our visitor stood. “I am sorry that I could not bring better news, but I am only the messenger. Jericho’s friends will keep their ears open, of course. But do not hope.

She is gone.”

And with that, he, too, left.

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My first reaction was to depart Jerusalem, and the cursed East, immediately and forever.

The bizarre odyssey with Bonaparte—escaping Paris, sailing from Toulon, the assault on Alexandria, meeting Astiza, and on and on through horrific battles, the loss of my friend Antoine Talma, and the bitter secret of the Great Pyramid—was like a mouthful of ashes.

Nothing had come of it—no riches, no pardon for a crime in Paris I’d never committed, no permanent membership with the esteemed savants who had accompanied Napoleon’s expedition, and no lasting love with the woman who’d entranced and bewitched me. I’d even lost my rifle! My only real reason for coming to Palestine was to learn Astiza’s fate, and now that word was that there was no word (could any message be crueler?) my mission seemed futile. I didn’t care about the coming invasion of Syria, the fate of Djezzar the Butcher, the career of Sir Sidney Smith, or the political calculations of Druze, Matuwelli, Jew, and all the rest trapped in their endless cycles of revenge and envy. How had I found myself in such a crazy necropolis of hatred? It was time to go home to America and start a normal life.

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by the very fact of not knowing. If Astiza seemed not alive, neither was she definitely dead. There was no body. If I sailed away I’d be haunted the rest of my life. I had too many memories of her—of her showing me the star Sirius as we sailed up the Nile, her help in wrestling down Ashraf during the fury of the Battle of the Pyramids, her beauty when seated in Enoch’s courtyard, or her vulnerability and eroticism when chained at the Temple of Dendara. And then possessing her body by the banks of the Nile! With a century or two to spare you might get over memories like that—but you wouldn’t forget them. She haunted me.

As for the Book of Thoth, it might well be a myth—all we’d found in the pyramid, after all, was an empty repository for it, and perhaps Moses’ taunting staff—and yet what if it wasn’t, and really rested somewhere under my feet? Jericho was nearing completion on a rifle that I’d had a hand in building, and which seemed likely to be superior to the one I’d lost. And then there was Miriam, who I guessed had suffered a tragic loss before mine, and who was a partner in sorrow.

With Astiza vanished, the woman whose house I shared, whose food I ate, and whose hands were shaping the wood of my own weapon, suddenly seemed more wondrous. Who did I have to return to in America? No one. So despite my frustration I found myself deciding to stay a little longer, at least until the gun was completed. I was a gambler, who waited for a turn of the cards. Maybe a new card would come now.

And I was curious who Miriam had lost.

She treated me with proper reserve as she had before, and yet our eye contact lingered longer now. When she set my plate she stood perceptibly closer, and the tone of her voice—was it my imagination?—was softer, more sympathetic. Jericho was watching both of us more closely, and would sometimes interrupt our conversations with gruff interjections. How could I blame him? She was a beautiful helpmate, loyal as a hound, and I was a shiftless foreigner, a treasure hunter with an uncertain future. I couldn’t help but dream of having her, and Jericho was a man too: he knew what any man would wish.

Worse, I might take her away to America. I noticed that he began t h e

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devoting more hours to my rifle. He wanted to get it finished, and me gone.

We endured the late winter rains, Jerusalem gray and quiet. Reports came that Bonaparte’s best general, Desaix, had reported fresh triumphs and seen spectacular new ruins far up the Nile. Smith was roving at sea between Acre, the blockade off Alexandria, and Constantinople, all to prepare for Napoleon’s spring assault. French troops were assembling at El-Arish, near the border with Palestine. The strengthening sun slowly warmed the city stone, war drew nearer, and then one dusky evening when Miriam set out to the city’s markets to fetch a missing spice for our evening’s supper, I impulsively decided to follow. I wanted an opportunity to speak with her away from Jericho’s protective presence. It was unseemly for a man to trail a single woman in Jerusalem, but perhaps some opportunity for conversation would present itself. I was lonely. What did I intend to say to Miriam? I didn’t know.

I followed at a distance, trying to think of some plausible reason to approach, or a way to circle ahead so our meeting would seem to be coincidence. How odd that we humans have to think so deviously about ways to express our heart. She walked too quickly, however.

She skirted the Pools of Hezekiah, descended to the long souk that divided the city, bought food once, passed up goods at two other stalls, and then took the lanes toward the markets of the Muslim Bezetha District, beyond the pasha’s residence.

And then Miriam disappeared.

One moment she was descending the Via Dolorosa, toward the Temple Mount’s Gate of Darkness and the El-Ghawanima Tower, and the next she was gone. I blinked, confused. Had she noticed me following, and was she trying to avoid me? I accelerated my pace, hurrying past locked doorways, until finally realizing I must have gone too far. I retraced my steps and then, from the courtyard adjacent to an ancient Roman arch that bridged the street, I heard talking, rough and urgent. It’s odd how a sound or smell can jar memory, and I could swear there was something familiar about the male voice.

“Where does he go? Where is he looking?” The tone was threatening.

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“I don’t know!” She sounded terrified.

I stepped past iron grillwork into a dark, rubble-strewn courtyard, the ruins sometimes used as a goat pen. Four brutes, in French cloaks and European boots, surrounded the frightened young woman. I was, as I have said, weaponless, except for the Arab dagger I carried in my sash. But they hadn’t seen me yet, so I had the advantage of surprise.

These didn’t look like the kind of men to bluff, so I glanced around for a better weapon. “To be thrown upon one’s own resources is to be cast into the very lap of fortune,” Ben Franklin used to say. But then he had more resources than most.

I finally spied a discarded stone Cupid, long since defaced and castrated by either Muslims or Christians trying to obey edicts about false idols and pagan penises. It lay on its side in the debris like a forgotten doll.

The sculpture was a third my height—heavy enough—and fortunately not held down by anything but its own weight. I could just barely lift it over my head. So I did, said a prayer to love, and heaved.

It struck the huddled rascals in their back like pins in a bowl and they went down in a heap, cursing.

“Run for home!” I cried to gentle Miriam. They’d already ripped her clothing.

So she gave me a fearful nod, took a step to leave, and then swung back as one villain grabbed at her again. I thought maybe he’d pull her down, but even as he clawed she kicked him hard in his cockles as neatly as dancing a jig. I could hear the thump of the impact, and it froze him like a flamingo in a Quebec snowstorm. Then she broke free and sprang past out the gate. Brave girl! She had more pluck, and better knowledge of male anatomy, than I’d imagined.

Now the pack of ruffians rose against me, but meanwhile I’d hauled Cupid up again and had taken the cherub by his head. I swung him in a circle and let go. Two of the devils crashed down again and the statuary shattered. Meanwhile neighbors had heard the ruckus and were raising a hue and cry. A third villain began to draw a hidden sword—obviously sneaked past the police of Jerusalem—so I charged him with my Arab knife before he could clear his scabbard, ram-t h e

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ming the blade home. For all my scuffles, I’d never stabbed anyone before, and I was surprised how readily it plunged in, and how eerily it scraped a rib when it did so. He hissed and twisted away so violently that I lost my grip. I staggered. Now I had no weapon at all.

Meanwhile the one who’d been interrogating Miriam had dragged out a pistol. Surely he wouldn’t risk a shot in the sacred city, violating all laws, voices rising!

But the piece went off with a roar, its flash like a flicker of lightning, and something seared the side of my head. I lurched away, half-blinded. It was time to retreat! I tottered out to the street but now the bastard was coming after me, dark, his cape flying like wings, his own sword drawn. Who the devil was this? The blow of the pistol ball had left me so woozy I was wading in syrup.

And then, as I turned in the lane to meet him as best I could, a blunt staff thrust past me and struck the bastard smack where throat meets chest. He gave an awful cough and his feet slid out ahead of him, landing him on his backside. He looked up in amazement, gulp-ing. It was Miriam, who’d taken a pole from a market awning and hefted it like a lance! I do have a knack for finding useful women.

“You!” he gagged, his eyes on me, not her. “Why aren’t you dead?” Neither are you, I thought, my own shock as great as his. For in the dusky light of the cobbled lane, I recognized first the emblem that Miriam’s thrust had knocked out of his shirt—a Masonic compass and square, with the letter G inside—and then the swarthy face of the “customs inspector” who had accosted me on the stage to Toulon during my flight from Paris last year. He’d tried to take my medallion and I’d ended up shooting him with my rifle, while Sidney Smith had shot another bandit in unseen support. I’d left this one howling, wondering if the wound had been mortal. Obviously not. What the devil was he doing in Jerusalem, armed to the teeth?

But I knew, of course, knew with dread that he had the same purpose as me, to search for ancient secrets. This was a confederate of Silano, and the French hadn’t given up. He was here to look for the Book of Thoth. And, apparently, for me.

Before I had any chance to confirm this, however, he scrambled 5 4

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upward, listened to the shrieks of the neighbors and the cries of the watchmen, and fled, wheezing.

We ran the other way.

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¤

Miriam was shaking as we made our way back to Jericho’s house, my arm around her shoulder. We’d never been physically close, but now we clung instinctively. I took some of the less obvious back alleys I’d learned in my wanderings of Jerusalem, rats skittering away as I looked over my shoulder for pursuit. It was a climb back to Jericho’s—none of the city is level, and the Christian quarter is higher than the Muslim—so after a while we paused for a moment in an alcove, to catch our breath and make sure that with my throbbing head I was taking the right direction. “I’m sorry about that,” I told her.

“It isn’t you they are after, it’s me.”

“Who are those men?”

“The one who shot at me is French. I’ve seen him before.”

“Seen him where?”

“In France. I shot him, actually.”

“Ethan!”

“He was trying to rob me. Shame I didn’t kill him then.” She looked as if seeing me for the first time.

“It wasn’t about money, it was something more important. I haven’t told you and your brother the whole story.” Her mouth was half open.

“I think it’s time to.”

“And this woman Astiza was part of it?” Her voice was soft.

“Yes.”

“Who was she?”

“A student of ancient times. A priestess, actually, but of an old, old Egyptian goddess. Isis, if you’ve heard of her.”

“The Black Madonna.” It was a whisper.

“Who?”

“There has long been a cult of worshippers around the statues of the Virgin carved in black stone. Some simply saw it as a variation of t h e

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Christian artwork, but others said it was really a continuation of the cult of Isis. The White Madonna and the Black.” Interesting. Isis had turned up repeatedly during my search in Egypt. And now this quiet woman, by all appearances a pious Christian, knew something of her as well. I’d never heard of a pagan goddess who got around so well.

“But why white and black?” I was reminded of the checkerboard pattern of the Paris Masonic lodges where I’d done my best at grasp-ing Freemasonry. And the twin pillars, one black and one white, which flanked the lodge altar.

“Like night and day,” Miriam said. “All things are dual, and this is a teaching from the oldest times, long before Jerusalem and Jesus. Man and woman. Good and evil. High and low. Sleep and wakefulness.

Our secret mind and our conscious mind. The universe is in constant tension, and yet opposites must come together to make a whole.”

“I heard the same from Astiza.”

She nodded. “That man who shot at you had a medal expressing this, did he not?”

“You mean the Masonic symbol of overlapping square and compass?”

“I’ve seen that in England. The compass draws a circle, while the carpenter’s angle makes a square. Again, the dual. And the G stands for God, in English, or gnosis, knowledge, in Greek.”

“The heretic Egyptian Rite began in England,” I said.

“So what do those men want?”

“The same thing I seek. That Astiza and I sought. They might have held you for ransom to get to me.” She was still trembling. “His fingers were like talons.” I felt guilty at what I’d inadvertently dragged her into. What had been a treasure-hunting lark was now a perilous quest. “We’re in a race to learn the truth before they do. I’m going to need Jericho’s help.” She took my arm. “Let’s go get it, then.”

“Wait.” I pulled her back into the darkness. I felt our scrape had given us some measure of emotional intimacy, and thus permission to ask a more personal question. “You lost someone too, didn’t you?” 5 6

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She was impatient. “Please, we must hurry.”

“I could see it in your eyes when the messenger told me there’s no trace of Astiza. I’ve wondered why you’re not married, or betrothed: You’re too pretty. But there was someone, wasn’t there?” She hesitated, but the peril had breached her reserve as well. “I’d met a man through Jericho, an apprentice smith in Nazareth. We were engaged in secret because my brother became jealous. Jericho and I were close as orphans, and suitors pain him. He found out and there was a row, but I was determined to marry. Before we could do so, my fiancé was pressed into Ottoman service. He was eventually sent to Egypt and never came back. He died at the Battle of the Pyramids.”

I, of course, had been on the opposite side in that battle, watching the efficient slaughter the European troops carried out. What a waste.

“I’m sorry,” I said inadequately.

“That is war. War and fate. And now Bonaparte may come this way.” She shuddered. “Is this secret you seek, will it help?”

“Help what?”

“Stop all the killing and violence. Make this city holy again.” Well, that was the question, wasn’t it? Astiza and her allies had never been certain whether they could use this mysterious Book of Thoth for good or must simply ensure it didn’t fall into the wrong hands for evil.

“I only know it will hurt if that bastard who shot at us gets it first.” And with that, I decided to kiss her.

It was a stolen kiss that took advantage of our emotional turmoil, and yet she didn’t immediately pull away, even though I was hard against her thigh. I couldn’t help my arousal, the action and intimacy had excited me, and the way she kissed back I knew it was recip-rocated, at least a little. When she did pull away it was with a little gasp.

To keep me from pressing against her again, she looked from my eyes to my temple. “You’re bleeding.” It was a way to not talk of what we’d just done.

Indeed, the side of my head was wet and warm, and I had the t h e

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damndest headache. “It’s a scratch,” I said, more bravely than I felt.

“Let’s go talk to your brother.”

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We’d better finish this rifle of yours,” Jericho said when I told him our story.

“Capital idea. I might get you to forge me a tomahawk, too. Ouch! ” Miriam was dressing my wound. It stung a little, but her strong fingers were wonderfully gentle as she wrapped my head. The pistol ball had only grazed me, but it shakes a man to come that close. Truth to tell, I also enjoyed being nursed. The woman and I had touched more in the last hour than the previous four months. “There’s nothing more useful than those hatchets, and I lost mine. We’re going to need every advantage we can get.”

“We’ll need to stand watch in case these ruffians come around.

Miriam, you’re not to leave this house.” She opened her mouth, then closed it.

Jericho was pacing. “I have an idea to improve the gun, if the rifle is as accurate as you claim. You said it is difficult to focus on targets at its farthest range, correct?”

“Once I aimed at an enemy and hit his camel.”

“I’ve noticed you peer around the city with your spyglass. What if we used it to help you aim?”

“But how?”

“By attaching it to the barrel.”

Well, that was a perfectly ridiculous idea. It would add to the weight, make the gun clumsier, and get in the way of loading. It must be a bad idea because no one had done it before. And yet what if it would really help to see distant targets up close? “Could that work?” Franklin, I knew, would have been intrigued by this kind of tinkering.

The unknown, which frightens most men, lured him like a siren.

“We can try. And we need allies if that gang of men is still in the city. You think you killed one?”

“Stabbed him. Who knows? I shot their leader in France, and here 5 8

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he is, big as life. I seem to have a hard time finishing people off.” I thought of Silano and Achmed bin Sadr in Egypt, who both kept coming at me after various wounds. I not only needed that rifle, I needed practice with it.

“I’m going to send word to Sir Sidney,” Jericho said. “The French agents here may be important enough for the British to send help.

And Miriam said all this has something to do with that treasure you keep promising. What’s really going on?” It was past time to bring them into my confidence. “There may be something buried here in Jerusalem that could affect the course of the entire war. We hunted for it in Egypt, but decided in the end that it must have come to Israel. Yet every time I find a stair or a ladder leading downward, I come to a dead end. The city is a rubble heap.

My quest may be impossible. Now the French are here, undoubtedly after the same thing.”

“They asked about you,” Miriam reminded.

“Yes, and did they just discover my presence or hear of it from afar?

Jericho, could the people who asked about Astiza in Egypt have let slip my own existence?”

“They weren’t supposed to . . . but wait. Find what, exactly? What is this treasure you seek?”

I took a breath. “The Book of Thoth.”

“A book?” He was disappointed. “I thought you said it was treasure.

I’ve spent the winter making a rifle for a book?”

“Books have power, Jericho. Look at the Bible or the Koran. And this book is different, it’s a book of wisdom, power and . . . magic.”

“Magic.” His expression was flat.

“You don’t have to believe me. All I know is that people have shot at me, thrown snakes in my bed, and chased me on camels and boats to get this book—or rather a medallion I had that was a clue to where the book was kept. It turned out the medallion was a key to a secret door in the Great Pyramid, which Astiza and I entered. We found an underground lake heaped with treasure, a marble pavilion, and a golden repository for this book.”

“So you already have the treasure?”

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“No. The only way to escape the pyramid was to swim through a tunnel. The weight of the gold and jewels threatened to drown me.

I lost it all. The Jews might have hidden a different treasure here in Jerusalem.”

He had the same skeptical look I used to get from Madame Durrell in Paris when I explained the lateness of my rent. “And the book?”

“The repository was empty. All that was left was a shepherd’s crook lying next to it. Astiza convinced me that the crook had been carried by the man who stole the book, and that that man must have been . . .” I hesitated, knowing what this all must sound like.

“Who?”

“Moses.”

For a moment he simply blinked, in consternation. Then he laughed, a scornful bark. “So! I have been hosting a madman! Does Sidney Smith know you are insane?”

“I haven’t told him all this, and wouldn’t tell you if we hadn’t seen that Frenchman. I know it sounds odd, but that villain was allied with my greatest enemy, Count Silano. Which means time is short. We have to find the book before he does.”

“A book Moses stole.”

“Is it that impossible? An Egyptian prince kills an overseer in a fit of rage, flees the country, and then comes back after conversations with a burning bush to free the Hebrew slaves. All this you believe, correct? Yet suddenly Moses has the power to call down plagues, part the waters, and keep the Israelites fed in the wilderness of Sinai. Most men call it a simple miracle, a gift from God, but what if he discovered instructions to tell him how to do so? This is what Astiza believed.

As a prince, he knew how to get in and out of the pyramid, which was but a decoy and a marker to protect the book from the unworthy. Moses takes it, and when Pharaoh discovers it gone, he pursues Moses and the Hebrew slaves with six hundred chariots, only to be swallowed by the Red Sea. Later, this tribe of ex-slaves enters the Promised Land and proceeds to conquer it from its civilized, estab-lished inhabitants. How? By an ark with mysterious powers or a book of ancient wisdom? I know it sounds improbable, and yet the French 6 0

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believe it too. Otherwise, these men wouldn’t have seized your sister.

This is a crisis as real as the bruises on her arms and shoulders.” The blacksmith looked at me, drumming his fingers. “You are mad.” I shook my head in frustration. “Then why do I have these?” And I reached in my robe to bring out the two golden seraphim, each four inches long. Miriam gasped and Jericho’s eyes went wide. It wasn’t just the brilliance of the gold, I knew, still vivid after thousands of years.

It was the fact that these kneeling angels, their wings outstretched toward each other, were a tiny model of the ones that had once decorated the top of the Ark of the Covenant. This wasn’t a cheap trick I could have had made up in an artisan’s shop. The workmanship was too good, and the gold too heavy.

“One old man I met called these a compass,” I went on. “I don’t know what he meant. I don’t know how much any of this is true. I’ve been operating on science, faith, and speculation since I fled Paris a year ago. But the pyramids seem to encode sophisticated mathematics that no primitive people would know. And where did civilization come from? In Egypt, it seemed to spring wholly formed. The legend is that human knowledge of architecture, writing, medicine, and astronomy came from a being called Thoth, who became an Egyptian god, predecessor of the Greek god Hermes. Thoth supposedly wrote a book of wisdom, a book so powerful that it could be used for evil as well as good. The Egyptian pharaohs, realizing its potency, safeguarded it under the Great Pyramid. But if Moses stole it, the book may have—must have—been brought here by the Jews.”

“Moses didn’t even get to the Promised Land,” objected Miriam.

“He died on Mount Nebo, looking across the river Jordan. He was not allowed by God to enter.”

“But his successors came, with the ark. What if this book was part of the ark, or supplemented it? What if it was secreted under Solomon’s Temple? And what if it survived the destruction of the First Temple by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians and the Second Temple by Titus and the Romans? What if it’s still here, waiting to be rediscovered? And what if it is found first by Bonaparte, who dreams of being another Alexander? Or by the followers of Count Alessandro t h e

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Silano, who dream of enriching themselves and their corrupt Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry? What if Silano survived his fall from my balloon, even if Astiza did not? This book could tip the balance of power. It must be found and safeguarded or, if worse comes to worst, destroyed. All I’m saying is we have to look in every likely place before those French do.”

“You live in my house, and work at my forge, and not until now do you tell me this?” Jericho was annoyed, and yet was looking curiously at my seraphim.

“I’ve tried to leave you and Miriam out of all this. It’s a nightmare, not a privilege. But now, if you know of underground tunnels you must help me find them. The French will not give up. We’re in a race.”

“I’m a smith, not an explorer.”

“And I’m a mere trade representative caught up in distant wars, not a soldier. Sometimes we’re called to things, Jericho. You’ve been called to help me with this.”

“To find Moses’ magic book.”

“Not Moses. Thoth.”

“Ah. To find a book written by a mythical god, a false idol.”

“No! To prevent the wrong people—the renegade Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry—from harnessing its power for evil.” My frustration was rising because I knew how insane I sounded.

“The Egyptian Rite?”

“You remember the rumors of them in England, brother,” Miriam said. “A secret society, said to have dark practices. Other Masons abhorred them.”

“Yes, that’s right,” I encouraged. “I suspect the man who attacked your sister is one of them.”

“But I work with hard iron and hot fire,” Jericho protested. “Tangible things. I know nothing of ancient Jerusalem or hidden tunnels or lost books or renegade Masons.”

I grimaced. How could I enlist him?

“Yet we know there is a scholar in this city who has researched the ancient pathways,” Miriam allowed.

“You don’t mean the usurer!”

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“He’s a student of the past, brother.”

“A historian?” I interrupted. It sounded like Enoch, who had helped me in Egypt.

“More like a mutilated tax collector, but no one knows more about the history of Jerusalem,” Jericho conceded. “Miriam has befriended him. We need lanterns, picks, help from Sidney Smith . . . and the counsel of Haim Farhi.”

“And who is he?” I said cheerfully, relieved the blacksmith was helping.

“A man who knows more than anyone about the treasure hunters who came before you—the Christian knights who may have beaten you to your quest.”

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I expected Haim Farhi would have some of the Aristotle-like gravity and dignity of Enoch, the mentor and antiquarian in Egypt who was murdered by my enemies.

Instead, I was struggling not to gape. It wasn’t just that this short, slight, middle-aged Jew with corkscrew sidelocks and dour, dark clothing lacked Enoch’s majesty. It was that he had been mutilated into one of the most hideous men I’d ever seen. Part of his nose was carved away, leaving a piglike snout. His right ear was missing. And his right eye had been gouged, leaving a socket closed by a scar.

“My God, what happened to him?” I whispered to Jericho as Miriam took the man’s cloak at the door.

“He incurred the ire of Djezzar the Butcher,” the smith replied quietly. “Do not express pity. He carries his survival like a badge of honor. He’s one of the most powerful bankers in Palestine and has Djezzar’s trust, having remained loyal after torture.”

“People use him for their savings and loans?”

“It was his face that was damaged, not his mind.”

“Rabbi Farhi is one of the province’s foremost historians,” Miriam said more loudly as they came toward us, both guessing the reason for 6 4

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our whispers. “He’s also a student of Jewish mysteries. Anyone delv-ing into the past is wise to seek his counsel.”

“So I appreciate his help,” I said diplomatically, trying not to stare.

“As I appreciate your tolerance of my misfortune,” Farhi replied in a serene voice. “I know my effect on people. I see my disfigure-ment mirrored in the look of every frightened child. But mutilation’s isolation gives me time for this city’s legends. Jericho tells me you’re searching for lost secrets of strategic significance, yes?”

“Possibly.”

“Possibly? Come, if we’re to make progress we must trust each other, must we not?”

I was learning not to trust much of anyone, but didn’t say that, or anything else.

“And these items may have some connection with the Ark of the Covenant,” Farhi persisted. “Is this not so as well?”

“It is.” Obviously he knew what I’d told Jericho.

“I can understand why you’ve journeyed so far, with such excitement. Yet it is my sad responsibility to warn that you may be seven hundred years too late. Men have come to Jerusalem before, seeking the same powers you have.”

“And you’re going to tell me they tried their best and didn’t find them.”

“On the contrary, I am going to tell you they possibly found exactly what you are looking for. Or, that if they didn’t, it’s unlikely you could succeed either. They searched for years. Jericho tells me you have days, at most.”

What did this mutilated man know? “Found what, exactly?”

“Curiously, scholars still argue about that. A group of Christian knights came away from Jerusalem with inexplicable powers, and yet they proved powerless when they were betrayed. So did they find something? Or not?”

“A fairy story,” Jericho scoffed.

“But one grounded in history, brother,” Miriam said quietly.

“Those stories of tunnels are musty legends,” Jericho insisted to Miriam.

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“And what is legend but an echo of truth?” his sister answered.

I looked among the three of them. They’d argued this before.

“What legends?”

“Of our ancestors, the Knights Templar,” Miriam said. “Their full name was the Poor Knights of Christ on the Temple of Solomon.

Not all the warrior monks were celibate, and tradition holds that our blood descends from theirs. They sought what you seek, and some think they found it.”

“Do they now?”

“It’s a curious story,” Farhi said. “I understand you have lived in Paris, Mr. Gage? Are you familiar with the Champagne region of France, southeast of Paris and north of Troyes?”

“I’ve passed through, and enjoyed its products.”

“More than thirteen hundred years ago, one of the most terrible battles in all history was fought there. The last of the Romans defeated Attila, the great Hun.”

“The Battle of Chalons,” I said, grateful that Franklin had mentioned this ancient scrape once or twice. He was a fount of oddball information, and read history books thick enough for three doorstops, written by some Englishman named Gibbon.

“At this battle Attila had a mysterious ancient sword with mystical powers, dating far, far back in time. Legends of such enchantments, and the idea that there are greater powers in this world than mere muscle and steel, carried down to the generations of Franks who came to inhabit Champagne. These were people who thought there might be more to the world than what we easily see and touch. The great saint and teacher Saint Bernard of Clairvaux was one who heard these stories.”

That name struck a bell too. I remembered the French savant Jomard evoking him when we first climbed the Great Pyramid.

“Wait, I’ve heard of him. He said something about God being height and breadth—being dimensions. That you could incorporate divine dimensions into holy buildings.”

“Yes. ‘What is God? He is length, width, height and depth,’ the saint said. And the powerful knight André de Montbard, Bernard’s 6 6

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uncle, shared the idea that ancients who knew such things might have buried powerful secrets in the East. Buried, perhaps, beneath Solomon’s Temple, which occupied the Temple Mount a short distance from where we sit.”

“Freemasons believe that to this day,” I said, remembering my dead journalist friend, Antoine Talma, and his enthusiastic theories.

“In 1119,” Farhi went on, “Bernard’s uncle, Montbard, was one of nine knights who journeyed to the Holy Land on a special mission.

Jerusalem had already been captured by the Crusaders, and these nine arrived in the city and asked to form a new military order of warrior-monks called the Templars. Yet from the very beginning their purpose seemed mysterious. They proposed to protect Christian pilgrims, but these men from Champagne initially recruited no followers and did little patrolling of the Jaffa road. Instead, they got extraordinary permission from the ruler of Jerusalem, King Baldwin II, to set up their headquarters in the El-Aqsa Mosque, on the southern end of the Temple Mount.”

“Nine newcomers get to camp on the Temple Mount?” Farhi nodded, fixing me with his one good eye. “Curious, isn’t it?”

“And what do these Templars have to do with Moses and the ark?” I asked.

“Here we come to speculation,” Farhi said. “The rumors are that they tunneled into the roots of what had been Solomon’s Temple and found . . . something. After their sojourn here, they returned to Europe, were given special status by the pope, and became the continent’s first bankers and most powerful military order. Recruits flocked to them.

They were rich beyond imagination, and kings trembled before the Templar Order. And then on one, single, terrible night—on Friday, October 13, 1309—the Templar leaders were arrested in a massive purge by the king of France. Hundreds were tortured and burned.

With them died the secrets of what they’d found in Jerusalem. So legends began: how did an obscure order of knights grow so rich and powerful so quickly?”

“You think they found the Ark?”

“No trace of it has ever been seen.”

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“Soon after,” Miriam added, “stories began to be sung of knights in search of a Holy Grail.”

“The cup of the Last Supper,” I said.

“That’s one story,” Farhi said. “But the Grail has also been described in various accounts as a cauldron, a platter, a stone, a sword, a spear, a fish, a table . . . and even a secret book.” He was watching me carefully.

“The Book of Thoth!”

“I haven’t heard it called that, until now. And yet the story you’ve told Jericho and Miriam is intriguing. The god Thoth was the precur-sor of the Greek god Hermes. Did you know that?”

“Yes, I learned that in Egypt.”

“In the legend of Parzival, finished in 1210, the hero seeks counsel from a wise old hermit named Treurizent. Do you recognize that name?”

I shook my head.

“Some scholars believe it comes from the French treble escient.” Now I felt a warm surge of excitement. “Thrice knowing! Which is what the Greek name Hermes Trismegistus means, Hermes the thrice knowing, master of all crafts, who in turn is the Egyptian god Thoth!”

“Yes. Three Times Greatest, the First Intelligence, the originator of civilization. He was the first great author, the one we Jews know as Enoch.”

“Enoch was the name my mentor in Egypt took.”

“I’m not surprised. Now, when the Templars were arrested they were accused of heresy. They were charged with obscene rituals, sex with other men, and worshipping a mysterious figure named Baphomet.

Have you ever heard of him?”

“No.”

“He’s been portrayed as a goat-headed demon, or devil. Yet there is a curiosity about that name. If it came from Jerusalem, it could be a corruption of the Arabic word abufihamat, pronounced “bufihimat.” It means “father of wisdom.” And who could that be, to men who called themselves Knights of the Temple?” 6 8

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I thought a moment. “King Solomon.”

“Yes! The connections continue. The ancient Jews also had the habit, during foreign occupation, of sometimes writing secret codes using substitution ciphers. In the Atbash cipher, each letter of the Hebrew alphabet actually represents another letter. The first letter becomes the last in the alphabet, the second letter the second-to-the-last, and so on. If you spell Baphomet in Hebrew, and then translate it using this Atbash cipher, it comes out reading sophia, the Greek word for wisdom.”

“Baphomet. Solomon. Sophia. So the knights were pledging themselves to wisdom, not to a demon?”

“That is my theory,” Farhi said modestly.

“Then why were they persecuted?”

“Because the king of France feared them and wanted their wealth.

What better way to discredit your enemies than to accuse them of blasphemy?”

“The knights may have pledged themselves to something more tangible,” Miriam said. “Did you not tell us, Ethan, that thoth is alleg-edly the origin of the English word for ‘thought’?”

“Yes.”

“And so the chain is even longer. Baphomet is the Father of Wisdom, is Solomon, is Sophia . . . but could he also not be thought, Thoth, your original god of all learning?” I was stunned. Had the Knights Templar, the reputed ancestors of my own fraternal Masonic lodges, know of this ancient Egyptian deity? Had they even worshipped it? Was all this nonsense connected, in ways that stretched from Masons to Templars, and from Templars back through Greeks, Romans, Jews, to ancient Egypt? Was there a secret history that wound through all the world’s time, paralleling the commonly known one?

“And how did Solomon become so wise?” Jericho said slowly. “If this book were real, and the king had it in his possession. . . .”

“There were dark rumors Solomon had the power to summon demons,” Miriam said. “And so the stories loop on themselves—that pious men sought only knowledge, or that the knowledge itself was t h e

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corrupting, leading to riches and evil. Is knowledge good or bad?

Look at the story of the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Back and forth the legends and arguments go.” I was dazed with the possibilities. “You think the Knights Templar already found this book?”

“If they did they may have lost it in the purge that followed,” Farhi said. “Your particular Grail may be nothing but ashes, or in other hands. Yet no power followed the Templars. No group of knights ever equaled them, and no fraternity ever again became so widespread over Europe. And when Jacques de Molay, the last grand master, was burned at the stake for refusing to betray Templar secrets, he levied a terrible curse by promising that the king of France and the pope would follow him to the grave within a year. Both did so. So was the book found to begin with? Was it lost? Or was it . . .”

“Re-hidden,” Miriam said.

“In the Temple Mount!” I cried.

“Possibly, but in places so deep it cannot be easily found again.

Moreover, when Saladin recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders, the possibility of penetrating the mount seemed lost. Even now, the Muslims guard it zealously. No doubt they’ve heard some of the stories we have. Yet they allow no exploration. These secrets could shake all religions to their foundations, and Islam is an enemy of witchcraft.”

“You mean we can’t get in there?”

“If we tried and were found, we’d be executed. It is sacred ground.

Excavations in the past have caused riots. It would be as if we tried to excavate St. Peter’s.”

“Then why are we talking?”

They glanced at each other in mutual understanding.

“Ah. So we must not be found.”

“Exactly,” Jericho said. “Farhi has suggested a possible path.”

“Why hasn’t he taken this path himself?”

“Because it is wet, filthy, dangerous, confined, and probably futile,” Farhi said cheerfully. “We were, after all, dealing only with vague historical legend until you come with claims that something 7 0

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extraordinary really existed in ancient Egypt, and was perhaps carried here. Do I believe it? No. You may be an entertaining liar, or a credulous fool. But do I disbelieve, when its existence may have represented great power to my people? I can’t afford to.”

“So you will lead us?”

“As well as a disfigured bookkeeper can.”

“For a share of the treasure, I presume.”

“For truth and knowledge, as Thoth would be content with.”

“Which Miriam said could be used for good or evil.”

“The same could be said about money, my friend.” Well, anytime a stranger announces altruism, and calls me friend, I wonder what pocket he’s reaching into. But in my own months of searching I hadn’t found a clue, had I? Maybe he and I could use each other. “Where do we start?”

“Between the Dome of the Rock and the El-Aqsa Mosque is the Fountain of El-Kas,” Farhi said crisply. “It draws its water from ancient rain cisterns deep within the Temple Mount. Those cisterns are connected by tunnels, to feed each other. Some writers have speculated they are part of a vein of passages that may extend even under the holy rock Kubbet es-Sakhra itself, where Abraham offered his sacrifice to God: the foundation stone of the world. Moreover, these cisterns must also be connected to springs, not just rainwater. Accordingly, a decade ago I was asked by Djezzar to search the ancient records for underground passageways into Temple Mount. I told him I found none.”