The Rosetta Key

hung above the main door of the mosque. As the mob surged through, I sighted through my rifle-mounted spyglass, put the rope and its hook on the ornate ceiling in my crosshairs, and fired.

My shot shredded the rope and the lamp came down like a guillotine, landing with a great crash as it buried the head of the mob and scattered the rest. Our pursuers momentarily recoiled, looking warily upward. It was enough to give our crew of filthy, bleeding troglo-dytes the precious seconds necessary to retreat toward the back of the mosque.

“They have the sacred relics of Muhammad!” I heard the mob cry.

And I suddenly wondered if the Prophet’s midnight journey to Jerusalem and his ascension to heaven was just a myth, or if he too had truly been here once, seeking and perhaps finding wisdom. Had he, 9 6

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

too, heard of the Book of Thoth? What had Jesus learned in Egypt, or Buddha in his wanderings? Were all the faiths, myths, and stories an endless interweaving and embroidery of ancient texts, wisdom built on wisdom, and mystery concealed by yet more mystery? Heresy—but here at the religious center of the world, I couldn’t help but wonder.

We raced over worn red carpets that covered the flagstones of the mosque and into the small anterooms beyond the great hall, dreading a dead-end that would trap us. But at the point where the El-Aqsa and the Temple Mount joined the city’s periphery wall there was another locked door. Big Ned ran at it full tilt and this time smashed it open, the torn splinters like fresh wounds in old wood. We looked out. The wall led off the southern end of the Temple Mount at a downward slope, to enclose Jerusalem. At a tower it turned westward, encompassing the city below.

“If we get into the maze of streets we can lose them,” Farhi gasped.

He, Miriam, and the injured Little Tom began trotting along the rampart toward the steps that led downward at the Dung Gate, staggering with exhaustion, while Tentwhistle and I reloaded on the rampart and Ned and Jericho stood ready with swords. When our first pursuers filled the doorway we’d just exited, we fired. Then our swordsmen charged into the smoke, swinging. There were howls, retreat, and Ned trotted back, speckled with blood.

“They’re thinking now,” he said with a toothy grin.

Jericho looked sickened, his blade wet. “This is evil you’ve brought,” he told the sailor.

“If I remember, blacksmith, it’s been you and your doxy sister leading the way.”

And we retreated yet again.

If the mob had been better armed, we would have been dead.

But we ran a gauntlet of only a few shots, bullets passing with that peculiar hot sizzle that paralyze if you stop to think about it. Then we were down the stairs of the wall and onto a Jerusalem street, the Dung Gate bolted shut by a squad of janissaries, scimitars ready so we couldn’t run outside. Above us, the battlements were crammed with screaming Muslims racing for the stairs.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

9 7

“Into the Jewish Quarter!” urged Farhi. “It’s our only chance!” Now there were calls of alarm from the minarets, and Christian bells were ringing. We’d roused the entire city. Shouting people streamed into the streets. Dogs were howling, sheep bleating. A terrified goat galloped past us, going the other way. Farhi, panting, led us uphill toward the Ramban Synagogue and Jaffa Gate, the Muslim mob behind lit by torches in a snake of fire. Even if I could find time to load again, my single shot would be no deterrent to the anger we’d aroused by trespassing under the Dome of the Rock. Unless we got help, we were doomed.

“They want to burn the Ramban and Yochanan ben Zakkai synagogues!” Farhi shouted to the anxious Jews as they poured into the streets. “Get Christian allies! The Muslims are rioting!”

“The synagogues! Save our holy temples!” And with that, we had a shield. Jews ran to block the mob surging into their quarter. Christians warned that their real goal was the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Mob collided with mob. In moments there was chaos.

With it, Farhi disappeared.

I grabbed the others. “We split up! Jericho and Miriam, you live here. Go home!”

“I heard Muslims call my name,” he said grimly. “We cannot stay in Jerusalem. I was recognized.” He glared at me. “They’ll sack and burn my house.”

I felt sick with guilt. “Then take what you can and flee to the coast.

Smith is organizing the defense of Acre. Seek protection with him there.”

“Come with us!” Miriam pleaded.

“No, alone you two can likely travel unmolested, because you’re native. The rest of us stand out like snowmen in July.” I pressed the seraphim into her hands. “Take these and secrete them until we meet again. We Europeans can run or hide, sneaking when it’s dark.

We’ll go the other way to give you time. Don’t worry. We’ll meet in Acre.”

“I’ve lost my home and reputation for an empty room,” Jericho said bitterly.

9 8

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“There was something there,” I insisted. “You know there was. The question is, where is it now? And when we find it, we’ll be rich.” He looked at me with a combination of anger, despair, and hope.

“Go, go, before it’s too late for your sister!” At the same time, Tentwhistle pulled at me. “Come, before it’s too late for us!”

So we parted. I looked back at brother and sister as we ran. “We’ll find it!”

I and the British sailors headed toward the Zion Gate. I looked back once, but Jericho and Miriam were lost in the mobs like flotsam in a tossing sea. We stumbled on, too slow and desperate. Little Tom, his arm sticky with blood, couldn’t hurry but kept manfully on. We entered the Armenian Quarter and came to the gate. Its soldiers had gone, probably to control the rioting or search for us: our first stroke of luck in this entire fiasco. We unbolted the great doors, pushed hard, and passed into open country. The sky was just pinking. Behind, flames, torchlight, and the coming dawn had turned the sky orange above the city’s walls. Ahead was sheltering shadow.

To our right was Mount Zion and the Tomb of David. To the left was the Valley of Hinnom, the Pool of Siloam somewhere in the darkness below. “We’ll circle the city wall to the north and take the Nablus Road,” I said. “If we travel at night we can make Acre in four days and get word to Sidney Smith.”

“What about the treasure?” Tentwhistle asked. “Is that it? Do we give up?”

“You saw it wasn’t there. We have to figure where next to look. I hope to God they didn’t catch Farhi. He’ll know where to try next.”

“No, I think he’s betraying us. Why’d he slip off like that?” I wondered that too.

“It’s our own skins first,” said Big Ned.

And with that his lieutenant jerked and the sound of a shot echoed up the hill. Then another and another, bullets whapping into the dust.

Tentwhistle sat down with a grunt. Then I heard the words in French:

“There they are! Spread out! Cut them off!” It was the group that had tried to brick us up in the tunnels, the t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

9 9

same Frenchmen who had accosted Miriam. They’d crawled back out of the Pool of Siloam, heard the chaos, and waited under the wall for someone to appear.

I crouched by Tentwhistle and aimed. My lens found one of our ambushers and I fired. He went down. Pretty rifle. I feverishly reloaded.

Ned had taken Tentwhistle’s pistol and he fired too, but our assail-ants were not within pistol range. “All you’ll do is draw their aim with your flash,” I told him. “Get Tom and the lieutenant back through the gate. I’ll hold them here a moment and then we can lose them in the Armenian Quarter.”

Another bullet whined overhead. Tentwhistle was coughing blood, his eyes glazed. He would not live long.

“Right, guv’nor, you buy us time.” Ned began dragging Tentwhistle back, Tom groggily following. “Potts dead, two more of us wounded.

Bloody inspiration, you are.”

It was getting lighter. Bullets pinged as the Frenchmen swarmed closer. I fired again, then glanced behind me. The sailors were back through the gate. No time to reload, time to go! In a crouch, I sidled backward toward it. Dark forms were closing like circling wolves.

Then I heard a creak. The gate was closing! I scuttled rapidly, and just made it to the city wall when the gate boomed shut, locking me out. I heard the thud of its bar being slid home.

“Ned! Open up!” There was a French command and I threw myself flat just before a volley went off. Bullets hammered against the iron like hail. I was like a condemned man at an execution wall. “Hurry, they’re coming!”

“I think we’ll be going our own way, guv’nor,” Ned called.

“Own way? For God’s sake . . .”

“I don’t think these frogs will care that much about a couple of poor British sailors. You’re the one with the treasure secrets, ain’t you?”

“What, you’re leaving me to them?”

“Maybe you can lead ’em on like you did us, eh?”

“Damn, Ned, let’s stand together, as the lieutenant said!”

“He’s done, and so are we. Doesn’t pay to cheat honest seamen at cards, guv’nor. Lose your friends, you do.” 1 0 0

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“But I didn’t cheat, I outsmarted you!”

“The same bloody thing.”

“Ned, open this gate!”

But there was no reply, just the mute slab.

“Ned!” Lying prone, I hammered on the unyielding iron. “Ned!

Let me in!”

But he didn’t, of course, as I strained to hear their retreat over the city’s tumult. I turned back. The French had crept to just yards away, and several muskets were trained on me. The tallest one smiled.

“We said good-bye beneath the Temple Mount and yet we meet again!” their leader cried. He doffed a tricorn hat and bowed. “You do have a talent of being everywhere, Monsieur Gage, but then so do I, do I not?” His was a torturer’s grin. “Surely you remember me, from the Toulon stage? Pierre Najac, at your service.”

“I remember you: The customs inspector who turned out to be a thief. So is Najac your real name?”

“Real enough. What happened to your friends, monsieur?” Slowly I stood. “Disappointed in a game of cards.”

c h a p t e r

1 0

Iknew I was in hell when Najac insisted on showing me his bullet wound. It was the one I’d given him the year before, red and scabby, on a torso that couldn’t have seen soap or a washcloth for a month. The little crater was a few inches below his left nipple and toward his left side, confirming that my aim had been off by degrees. Now I knew he smelled bad, too.

“It broke a rib,” he said. “Imagine my pleasure when I learned after my convalescence that you might be alive and that I could help my master track you down. First you were stupid enough to make inquiry in Egypt. Then, when we came here we caught a doddering old fool who squealed about meeting a Frank carrying Satan’s gold angels, once we’d roasted him enough. That’s when I knew you must be close.

Revenge is sweeter the longer it is delayed, don’t you think?”

“I’ll let you know when I finally kill you.” He laughed at my little joke, stood, and then kicked the side of my head so hard that the night dissolved into bright bits of light. I toppled over by the fire, bound hand and foot, and it was the smoldering of my clothes and resulting pain that finally jarred me enough to wriggle away. This greatly amused my captors, but then I always 1 0 2

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

did enjoy being the center of attention. Afterward the burn kept me feverish. It was the night after our departure from Jerusalem, and fear and pain were the only things keeping me conscious. I was exhausted, sore, and frightfully alone. Najac’s party of bullyboys had somehow swelled to ten, half of them French and the rest bedraggled Bedouin who looked like the kitchen grease of Arabia, ugly as toads.

Missing, besides half this complement’s teeth, was the Frenchman I’d stabbed in the fight over Miriam. I hoped I’d finished him, a sign I was getting better at dispatching my enemies. But maybe he was convalescing too, dreaming of the day he could capture and kick me as well.

Najac’s mood wasn’t improved by his discovery that I carried nothing of value but my rifle and tomahawk, which, being a thief, he appropriated. My seraphim I’d entrusted to Miriam, and in all the excitement I hadn’t noticed that someone—Big Ned or Little Tom, I assumed—had also relieved me of my purse. My insistence that we’d found nothing underground, that Jerusalem was as frustrating as Egypt, did not sit well.

What was I doing if nothing was to be found down there?

Seeing the root stone of the world from its other side, I answered.

They pounded on me but hesitated to kill me. The passageways under the Temple Mount were as stirred up as an ant nest, the Muslims probably puzzling over what we’d been looking for. The ruckus eliminated any chance of this French-Arab gang going back, so I was the only clue they had.

“I’d roast you right now if Bonaparte and the master didn’t want you alive,” Najac snarled. He let the Arabs amuse themselves by using their daggers to flick embers on my arms and legs, but not much more. Time enough later to make me scream.

So I finally lapsed into exhausted blackness until I was yanked painfully awake the next morning for a breakfast of chickpea paste and water. Then we continued down a trace from the Jerusalem hills to the coastal plain, the horizon marked by columns of smoke.

The French army was hard at work.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 0 3

¤

¤

¤

Despite my captivity, I had an odd sense of homecoming when we reached Napoleon’s camp. I’d marched with Bonaparte’s army and encountered Desaix’s division at Dendara. Now, pitching white tents before the walls of Jaffa, were men in European uniforms again. I smelled familiar food, and once more heard the lilting elegance of the French tongue. As we rode through the ranks, men looked curiously at Najac’s gang and a few pointed at me in surprised recognition. Not long before I’d been one of their savants. Now here I was again, a deserter and a prisoner.

Jaffa itself was familiar, but viewed this time from the vantage of the besieger. Canopies and hanging carpets had disappeared, its ramparts bearing the fresh bite of cannonballs. Similarly, many of the orange trees that sheltered Napoleon’s army showed raw wood where Ottoman fire had smashed their tops. Fresh earth and sand were being thrown up for siege works, and long lines of French cavalry horses shifted nervously where they were picketed in the shade, whinnying and shuffling as cannon popped. Their tails flicked at flies like met-ronomes, and their manure had that familiar sweet scent.

Najac went inside Napoleon’s broad canvas pavilion while I stood hatless in the Mediterranean sun, thirsty, dazed, and feeling fatalistic.

I’d fallen once on a cliff above the St. Lawrence River, pivoting endlessly, and felt this same vague sense of sickening regret that time—

only to bounce off a bush, over the rocks, and into the river.

And here, perhaps, came my savior bush. “Gaspard!” I called.

It was Monge, the famed French mathematician, the man who’d helped solve some of the puzzle of the Great Pyramid. He’d been a confidant of Napoleon since the general’s triumphs in Italy and had mentored me like a wayward nephew. Now he was accompanying the army into Palestine.

“Gage?” Monge squinted as he came closer, his civilian dress increasingly shopworn, his knees patched, coat ragged, and face rough 1 0 4

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

with stubble. The man was fifty-two, and tired. “What are you doing here? I thought I told you to go home to America!”

“I tried. Listen. Do you have word of Astiza?”

“The woman? But she went with you.”

“Yes, but we were separated.”

“Took a balloon, the two of you did—that’s what Conte told me.

Oh, how furious he was at that prank! Floated away, how the rest of us envied you . . . and now you’re back in this asylum? Good God, man, I knew you weren’t a true savant, but you seem to have no sense at all.”

“On that point we can agree, Doctor Monge.” Not only did he know nothing of Astiza’s fate, he clearly didn’t know of our entry into the pyramid, and I quickly decided it best not to tell him. If the French ever became aware there were things of value down there, they’d blow the edifice apart. Better to let Pharaoh rest in peace.

“Astiza fell into the Nile and the balloon eventually came down in the Mediterranean,” I explained. “Is Nicolas here too?” I was a little nervous at meeting Conte, the expedition’s aeronaut, having stolen his observation balloon.

“Fortunately for you he’s back in the south, organizing the shipment of our siege artillery. He had a rather brilliant plan to construct multiwheeled wagons to carry the guns across the desert, but Bonaparte has no time for new inventions. We’re risking bringing the train by sea.” He stopped, realizing he was relating secrets. “But what are you doing here, with your hands tied?” He looked puzzled. “You’re filthy, burned, friendless—my God, what’s happened to you?”

“He’s an English spy,” said Najac, emerging from the tent. “And you risk suspicion too, scientist, simply by talking to him.”

“English spy? Don’t be ridiculous. Gage is a dilettante, a hanger-on, a dabbler, a wanderer. No one could take him seriously as a spy.”

“No? Our general would.”

And with that Bonaparte himself appeared, the tent flap billowing grandly as if infused with his electricity. Like all of us he was browner than when we’d left Toulon nearly a year before, and while he was t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 0 5

still just thirty, success and responsibility had given new hardness to his face. Josephine was an adulteress, his plans to reform Egypt on French republican lines had been answered with his condemnation as an infidel, and he’d had to put down a bloody uprising in Cairo. His idealism was under siege, his romanticism breached. Now his gray eyes were icy, his dark hair shaggy, his countenance more hawklike, his stride impatient. He marched up to me and stopped. At five-foot-six he was shorter than me, and yet inflated with power. I couldn’t help flinching.

“So. It is you! I’d thought you dead.”

“He went to the British, mon général,” Najac said. The man was like a schoolroom tattletale, and I was beginning to wish I’d shot him in the tongue.

Bonaparte leaned into me. “Is this true, Gage? Did you desert me for the enemy? Did you reject republicanism, rationality, and reform for royalism, reactionaries, and the Turk?”

“Circumstances forced us apart, General. I’ve simply been trying to discover the fate of the woman I’d acquired in Egypt. You remember Astiza.”

“The one who shoots at people. My experience is that love does more harm than good, Gage. And you expected to find her in Jerusalem, where Najac caught you?”

“As a savant, I was trying to make some historical inquiry . . .” He erupted. “No! If there is one thing I’ve learned, you are not a savant! Don’t waste my time anymore with damned nonsense! You’re a turncoat, a liar, and a hypocrite who fought in the company of English sailors! You probably are a spy, as Najac said. If you weren’t so silly, as Monge also points out.”

“Sir, Najac there tried to rob me of my critical medallion in France when I was already committed to your expedition. He’s the traitor!”

“He shot me,” Najac said.

“He’s a henchman of Count Alessandro Silano and an adherent of the heretical Egyptian Rite, enemy of all true Freemasons. I’m certain of it!”

“Silence!” Bonaparte interrupted. “I’m well aware of your dislike 1 0 6

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

of Count Silano, Gage. I also know he has shown admirable loyalty and perseverance despite his tumble at the pyramids.” So, I thought: Silano is alive. The news was going from bad to worse in a hurry. Had the count pretended his fall from the balloon had been from the pyramids? And why did nobody say anything about Astiza?

“If you had Silano’s loyalty, you wouldn’t have condemned yourself now,” Bonaparte went on. “By the saints, Gage, you were accused of murder, I gave you every opportunity, and yet you switch sides like a pendulum!”

“Character tells, mon général,” Najac said smugly. I longed to strangle him.

“You were actually looking for treasure, weren’t you?” Napoleon demanded. “That’s what this is all about. American mercantilism and greed.”

“Knowledge,” I corrected, with some semblance of truth.

“And what knowledge have you found? Speak honestly, if you value your life.”

“Nothing, General, as you can see from my condition. That’s the truth. All I tell is the truth. I’m just an American investigator, caught up in a war not of my . . .”

“Napoleon, the man is clearly more fool than traitor,” the mathematician Monge interrupted. “His sin is incompetence, not betrayal.

Look at him. What does he know?”

I tried to grin stupidly—not easy for a man of my basic sense—but I figured the mathematician’s assessment was an improvement over Najac’s. “I can tell you the politics of Jerusalem are very confused,” I offered. “It is unclear where the loyalty of the Christians and the Jews and the Druze truly lie . . .”

“Enough!” Bonaparte looked sourly at all of us. “Gage, I don’t know whether to have you shot or let you take your chances with the Turk. I should send you into Jaffa and let you wait for my troops there. They are not patient men, my soldiers, not after the resistance at El-Arish and Gaza. Or perhaps I should send you to Djezzar, with a note saying you are a spy for me.”

I swallowed. “Perhaps I could aid Doctor Monge . . .” t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 0 7

And then came the sound of gunfire, horns, and cheering. We all looked toward the city. On the south side, a column of Ottoman infantry was boiling out of Jaffa while Turkish guns thudded. Flags thrashed, men skittering down the hill toward a half-finished French artillery emplacement.

French bugles began to sound in response.

“Damn,” Napoleon muttered. “Najac!”

“Oui, mon général !”

“I’ve a sally to attend to. Can you find out what he really knows?” The man grinned. “Oh yes.”

“Then report back to me. If he’s truly useless, I’ll have him shot.”

“General, let me talk to him . . .” Monge tried again.

“If you talk to him again, Doctor Monge, it will be only to hear his last words.” And then Bonaparte ran toward the sound of the guns, calling his aides.

¤

¤

¤

I’m no coward, but there’s something about being hung upside down above a sand pit in the Mediterranean dunes by a gang of hooting French-Arab cutthroats that made me want to tell them anything they want to hear. Just to stop the damned blood from welling in my head! The French had repulsed the Ottoman sally, but not before the plucky Turks overran the uncompleted battery and killed just enough Frenchmen to get the army’s fire up. When told I was an English spy, several soldiers enthusiastically offered to help Najac’s gang excavate the pit and construct the palm-log scaffold I was suspended from. Officially, the idea was to wring from me any secrets I hadn’t already shared. Unofficially, my torture was a reward to Najac’s particular assortment of sadists, perverts, lunatics, and thieves, who existed to do the invasion’s dirty work.

I’d already told the truth a dozen times. “There’s nothing down there!” And, “I failed!” And, “I didn’t even know exactly what I’m looking for!”

But then truth isn’t really the point of torture, given that the victim 1 0 8

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

will say anything to get the pain to stop. Torture is about the torturer.

So they roped my ankles and hung me upside down from the cross-beam over the sandy pit, my arms free to flap. They’d dug the hole a good ten feet deep before striking something hard, declaring it good enough for my grave. Now one of the Bedouin came forward with a wicker basket and emptied its contents. Half a dozen snakes fell to the bottom of the pit and writhed in indignation, hissing.

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

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

“What?”

“Apophis!” I said it louder.

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

Just how much did I really know—I, the mysterious electrician of Jerusalem? Najac, however, pretended to be oblivious to the name.

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

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

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

“Lower away!”

The rope began to unreel in jerky movements. My upside-down head descended to ground level, my body swaying above the pit, and all I could see was a line of boots and sandals, their owners jeering.

Then more rope. I pulled my head back up, curving my back to look straight down. Yes, the snakes were there, slithering as snakes do. It reminded me of poor Talma’s treacherous death, and all the rotten misdeeds Silano and his rabble had committed to get to the book.

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

The rope stopped again, and an argument broke out in Arabic.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 0 9

I couldn’t follow the furious flood of words but I heard fragments like “Apophis” and “Silano” and “sorcerer” and “electricity.” So I had acquired a reputation! They were nervous.

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

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

“The next man who argues with me shares the grave with the American!” Najac warned. The group had fallen silent. “Yes, you agree with me now? Lower him! Slowly, so he can beg!” Oh, I begged all right, begged like a man possessed. I’m not proud when it comes to avoiding snakebite. But it did no good, except to keep my descent incremental so I could provide entertainment. They must have thought me born for the stage. I called out anything I thought they might want to hear, pleading, twisting, and sweating, my eyes stinging as perspiration ran. Then, when my abject wailing began to bore, someone pushed so I swung back and forth. It was dizzying. Much more of this and I would black out. I saw serpent after serpent coiling in excitement but then noticed something else.

“There’s a shovel down here!”

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

“I told you, nothing!”

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

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

“Well, maybe something,” I amended.

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

“Wait, wait!” I was beginning to truly panic. “Haul me up and I’ll 1 1 0

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

tell you!” I’d think of something! A couple of the serpents were swaying upward, getting ready to strike at my head.

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

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

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

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

Down I went another inch, and another. Oh, the fun my captors were having!

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

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

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

“And what is this treasure?”

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

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

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

“What is it, Monsieur Gage? What is the treasure?” I could think of nothing else to do. I took the shovel in both hands, t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 1 1

bent myself as far upward as I painfully could, took careful aim, and then dropped back down, letting my weight drive the crude shovel’s wooden beak against the clay pipe. It shattered!

Liquid gushed into the pit.

No one was more surprised than I was.

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

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

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

“The Grail!” I roared. “It’s the Grail!” And with that Najac snapped an order and they began to hoist me.

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

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

“What did you say?” Najac demanded.

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

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

c h a p t e r

1 1

Atrocities cannot be justified, but sometimes they can be explained. Bonaparte’s troops had been struggling with disillusion since landing in Egypt last summer.

The heat, the poverty, and the enmity of the population had all come as shocks. The French had expected to be welcomed as republican saviors, bringing the gifts of the Enlightenment. Instead they’d been resisted, viewed as infidels and atheists, the remnants of the Mameluke armies raiding from the desert. Garrisons in villages lived under the constant threat of poisoning or a knife in the dark. Napoleon’s answer was to march on.

There had been unexpectedly fierce resistance at Gaza. Turkish prisoners had been paroled on the promise not to fight again, but officers with telescopes had spied the same units now manning the walls of Jaffa. This was a breach of a fundamental rule of European warfare! Yet even this might not have ignited the massacres to follow.

What caused the thunder roll of outrage was the decision by Ottoman commander Aga Abdalla to answer Napoleon’s offer of surrender terms by killing the two French emissaries and mounting their heads on poles.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 1 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 1 4

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

Bonaparte smiled grimly.

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

“I found an old conduit.”

“And the Holy Grail, I understand.”

I took a breath. “It is the same thing I was looking for in the pyra -

mids, General, and the same thing that Count Alessandro Silano and his corrupt Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry is pursuing to the possible harm of us all. Najac here is himself in league with scoundrels who . . .”

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

“But only because of Silano . . .”

“Do you have this Grail or not?”

“No.”

“Do you know where it is?”

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

“Do you know what it even is?”

“Not precisely, but . . .”

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

“But he said he did, in the pit!”

“Who wouldn’t say anything, with your damned snakes snapping at his head? Enough of this nonsense from you and him! I want an example made of this man: he is not only useless, he is boring! He will be paraded before the infantry and shot like the turncoat he is. I am tired of Masons, sorcerers, snakes, moldering gods, and every other t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 1 5

kind of imbecilic legend I have heard since starting this expedition. I am a member of the Institute! France is the embodiment of science!

The only ‘Grail’ is firepower!”

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

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

“Mon dieu!” Najac crossed himself, which I considered the height of hypocrisy, given that his piety had as much value as a Continental dollar. “It’s a sign! You should not speak as you did!” Napoleon momentarily went pale, but regained his composure. He frowned at the enemy swarming on the walls, looked at the sprawled colonel, and then picked up his hat. “It was Lambeau who took the bullet, not me.”

“But the power of the Grail!”

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

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

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

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

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

¤

¤

¤

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

Meanwhile, General Bon on the northern side of town had turned his diversionary attack into a full-fledged assault that broke in from that direction. With French troops swarming, the defenders’ morale collapsed and the Ottoman levies began to surrender. French fury at 1 1 6

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

the foolish emissary beheadings hadn’t been slaked, however, and killing and looting first went unchecked, then turned into mob frenzy.

Prisoners were shot and bayoneted. Homes were ransacked. As the bloody afternoon gave way to concealing night, whooping soldiers staggered through the streets heavy with plunder. They fired muskets into windows and waved sabers wet with blood. The looters refused to even stop to help their own wounded. Officers who tried to stop the massacre were threatened and shoved aside. Women’s veils were ripped from their faces, their clothes following. Any husband or brother who tried to defend them was shot down, the women raped in sight of the bodies. No mosque, church, or synagogue was respected, and Muslim, Christian, and Jew alike died in the flames.

Children lay screaming on the corpses of their parents. Daughters pleaded for mercy while being violated on top of dying mothers.

Prisoners were hurled from walls. Flames trapped the elderly, the sick, and the insane in the rooms where they hid. Blood ran down the gutters like rainwater. In one monstrous night, the fear and frustration of nearly a year’s bitter campaigning was taken out on a single helpless city. An army of the rational, from the capital of reason, had gone insane.

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

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

Napoleon did not shrink from hard decisions. For all his admiration of poets and artists, he was at heart an artilleryman and an engineer.

He was invading Syria and Palestine, a land with two and a half million people, with thirteen thousand French soldiers and two thousand Egyptian auxiliaries. Even as Jaffa fell, some of his men were displayt h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 1 7

ing symptoms of plague. His fantastic goal was to march to India like Alexander before him, heading an army of recruited Orientals, carving out an empire in the East. Yet Horatio Nelson had destroyed his fleet and cut him off from reinforcements, Sidney Smith was helping organize the defense of Acre, and Bonaparte needed to frighten the Butcher into capitulation. He dared not free his prisoners, and he couldn’t feed or guard them.

So he decided to execute them.

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

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

“Allah will protect us,” others promised.

“As he protected Jaffa?”

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

He pressed the point of his saber into my back.

“This is a crime, what you’re about to do!” I hissed. “The world will not forget!”

“Nonsense. There are no crimes in war.” I described the ensuing scene at the beginning of this story. One of the remarkable things about readying to be executed is how the senses 1 1 8

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

sharpen. I could sense the fabric layers of the air as if I had butterfly wings, I could pick out the scents of sea, blood, and oranges, I could feel every grain of sand under my now bootless feet and hear every click and creak of weapons being readied, harness being twitched by impatient horses, the hum of insects, the cries of birds. How unwilling I was to die! Men pleaded and sobbed in a dozen languages. Prayers were a hum.

“At least I drowned your damned snakes,” I remarked.

“You will feel the ball go into your body as I did,” Najac replied.

“Then another, and another. I hope it takes you time to bleed away, because the lead hurts very much. It flattens and tears. I would have preferred the snakes, but this is almost as good.” He strode away as the muskets leveled.

“Fire!”

¤

¤

¤

There was a crash, and the rank of prisoners reeled. Bullets thwacked home, flesh and droplets flying. So what saved me?

My Negro giant, arms lifted in supplication, ran after Najac as if the villain might grant reprieve, which put him between me and the muskets just as the volley went off. The bullets hurled him backward, but he formed a momentary shield. A line of prisoners collapsed, screaming, and I was spattered with so much blood that initially I feared some might be my own. Of those of us still standing, some fell to their knees, and some rushed at the ranks of the French. But most, including me, fled instinctively into the sea.

“Fire!” Another rank blasted and prisoners spun, toppled, tripped.

One next to me gave an awful, bloody cough; another lost the crown of his head in a spray of red mist. The water splashed upward in blinding sheets as hundreds of us ran into it, trying to escape a nightmare too horrific to seem real. Some stumbled, crawling and bawling in the shallows. Others clutched wounded arms and legs. Pleas to Allah rang out hopelessly.

“Fire!”

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 1 9

As bullets whined over me, I dove and struck out, realizing as I did so that most of the Turks around me didn’t know how to swim.

They were paralyzed, chest deep in water. I went several yards and looked back. The pace of firing had slackened as the soldiers rushed forward with bayonets. The wounded and those frozen by fear were being stuck like pigs. Other French soldiers were calmly reloading and aiming at those of us farther out in the water, calling to each other and pointing targets. The volleys had dissolved into a general maelstrom of shooting.

Drowning men clutched at me. I pushed them off and kept going.

About fifty yards offshore was a flat reef. Waves rolled over its top, leaving shallows one or two feet in depth. Scores of us reached this jagged table, pulling ourselves up on it and staggering toward the deeper blue on the seaward side. As we did so we drew fire; men jerked, spun, and fell into froth that was turning pink. Behind me the sea was thick with the bobbing heads and backs of Ottomans shot or drowned, as French waded in with sabers and axes.

This was madness! I still was as miraculously unhurt as Napoleon, watching from the dunes. The reef ended and I plunged into deeper water with a wild hopelessness. Where could I go? I drifted, paddling feebly, down the outer edge of the reef, watching as men huddled until bullets finally found them. Was that Najac running up and down the sand, furiously looking for my corpse? There was a higher out-cropping of reef that rose above the waves nearer Jaffa itself. Could I find some kind of hiding place?

Bonaparte, I saw, had disappeared, not caring to watch the massacre to its end.

I came to the rock where men clung, as pitifully exposed as flies on paper. The French were putting out in small boats to finish off survivors.

Not knowing what else to do, I put my head underwater and opened my eyes. I saw the thrashing legs of the prisoners clinging to our refuge, and the muted hues of blue as the edifice descended into the depths. And there, a hole, like a small underwater cave. If nothing else, it looked blessedly removed from the horrible clamor at the 1 2 0

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

surface. I dove, entered, and felt with my arm. The rock was sharp and slimy. And then at my farthest reach my hand thrashed in empty air.

I pulled myself forward and surfaced.

I could breathe! I was in an inner air pocket in an underwater cave, the only illumination a shaft of light from a narrow crack overhead.

I could hear the screams and shots again, but they were muffled. I dared not call out my discovery, lest the French find me. There was only room for one, anyway. So I waited, trembling, while wooden hulls ground against the rocks, shots rang out, and the last blubber-ing prisoners were put to the sword or bayonet. The soldiers were methodical; they wanted no witnesses.

“There! Get that one!”

“Look at the vermin squirm.”

“Here’s another to finish off!”

Finally, it was quiet.

I was the only survivor.

So I existed, shivering with growing cold, as the curses and pleas faded. The Mediterranean has almost no tide, so I was in little danger of drowning. It was morning when we were marched to the beach and nightfall by the time I dared emerge, my skin as corrupted as a cadaver’s from the long soaking. My clothes were in shreds, my teeth chattering.

Now what?

I numbly treaded water, bobbing out to sea. A corpse or two floated by. I could see that Jaffa was still burning, banked coals against the sky. The stars were bright enough to silhouette the line of vegetation along the beach. I spied the flicker of French campfires and heard the occasional shot, or shout, or ring of bitter laughter.

Something dark floated by that wasn’t a corpse and I grabbed it: an empty powder keg, discarded by one side or the other during the battle. Hour followed hour, the stars wheeling overhead, and Jaffa grew dimmer. My strength was being leached by the chill.

And then in the glimmer of predawn, almost twenty-four hours since the executions had begun, I spied a boat. It was a small Arab lighter of the kind that had taken me from HMS Dangerous into Jaffa.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 2 1

I croaked and waved, coughing, and the boat came near, wide eyes peering at me over the gunwale like a watchful animal.

“Help.” It was barely more than a mutter.

Strong arms seized me and hauled me aboard. I lay at the bottom, spineless as a jellyfish, exhausted, blinking at gray sky and not entirely certain if I was alive or dead.

“Effendi?”

I jerked. I knew that voice. “Mohammad?”

“What are you doing in the middle of the sea, when I deposited you in Jerusalem?”

“When did you become a sailor?”

“When the city fell. I stole this boat and sculled out of the harbor.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how to sail it. I’ve just drifted.” Painfully, I sat up. We were well offshore I saw with relief, out of range of any French. The lighter had a mast and lateen sail, and I’d sailed craft not too dissimilar to this one on the Nile. “You are bread upon the waters,” I croaked. “I can sail. We can go find a friendly ship.”

“But what is happening in Jaffa?”

“Everyone is dead.”

He looked stricken. No doubt he had friends or family that had been caught up in the siege. “Not everyone, of course.” But I was more honest the first time.

Years from now historians will labor to explain the strategic reasoning for Napoleon’s invasions of Egypt and Syria, for the slaughter at Jaffa and the marches with no clear goal. The scholars’ task is futile. War is nothing about reason and everything about emotion. If it has logic, it is the mad logic of hell. All of us have some evil: deep in most, indulged by a few, universally released by war. Men sign away everything for this release, uncapping a pot they scarcely know is boiling, and then are haunted ever after. The French—for all their muddle of republican ideals, alliances with distant pashas, scientific study, and dreams of reform—achieved above all else an awful catharsis, followed by the sure knowledge that what they’d released must eventually consume them too. War is poisoned glory.

1 2 2

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“But do you know a friendly ship?” Mohammad asked.

“The British, perhaps, and I have news I need to bring them.” And some scores to settle, too, I thought. “Do you have water?”

“And bread. Some dates.”

“Then we are shipmates, Mohammad.”

He beamed. “Allah has his ways, does he not? And did you find what you were looking for in Jerusalem?”

“No.”

“Later, I think.” He gave me some water and food, as restorative as a tingle of electricity. “You are meant to find it, or you would not have survived.”

How comforting it would be to have such faith! “Or I shouldn’t have looked, and I’ve been punished by seeing too much.” I turned away from the sad glow from shore. “Now then, help me set this sail.

We’ll set course for Acre and the English ships.”

“Yes, once more I am your guide, effendi, in my new and sturdy boat! I will take you to the English!”

I lay back against a thwart. “Thanks for your rescue, friend.” He nodded, “And for this I will charge only ten shillings!”

Part Two

c h a p t e r

1 2

I came to Acre a hero, but not for escaping the mass execution at Jaffa. Rather, I paid back the French with timely information.

Mohammad and I found the British squadron the second day of our sail. The ships were led by the battleships Tigre and Theseus, and when we coasted into the lee of the flagship I hailed none less than that friendly devil himself, Sir Sidney Smith.

“Gage, is that really you?” he called. “We thought you’d gone back over to the frogs! And now you’re back to us?”

“To the French by the treachery of your own British seamen, Captain!”

“Treachery? But they said you deserted!” How’s that for a cheeky lie by Big Ned and Little Tom? No doubt they thought me dead and unable to contradict them. It’s just the kind of truth-twisting I might have thought of, which made me all the more indignant. “Hardly! Locked out from brave retreat by your own bully seamen, I was! You owe us a medal. Don’t they, Mohammad?”

“The French tried to kill us,” my boat mate said. “He owes me ten shillings.”

1 2 6

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“And here you are in the middle of the Mediterranean?” Smith scratched his head. “Damnation. For a man who turns up everywhere, it’s hard to know where you belong. Well, come aboard and let’s sort this out.”

So up we climbed, the eighty-gun ship-of-the-line a behemoth compared to the feeble lighter we’d been sailing in, which was taken in tow. The British officers searched Mohammad as if he might produce a dagger at any moment, and gave sharp looks at me. But I’d already determined to act the wronged one, and had a trump besides.

So I launched into my version of events.

“. . . And then the iron gate slammed shut against me as the ring of French and Arab scoundrels closed in. . . .” Yet instead of the outrage and sympathy I deserved, Smith and his officers regarded me with skepticism.

“Admit it, Ethan. You do seem to go too easily from one side to the other,” Smith said. “And get out of the damndest fixes.”

“Aye, he’s an American rebel, he is,” a lieutenant put in.

“Wait. You think the French let me escape from Jaffa?”

“The reports are that no one else did. It’s rather remarkable, finding you.”

“And who’s this heathen, then?” another officer asked, pointing at Mohammad.

“He’s my friend and savior, and a better man than you, I’ll wager.” Now they bristled, and I was probably on the brink of being called out for a duel. Smith hurriedly intervened. “Now, there’s no need for that. We have the right to ask hard questions, and you have the right to answer them. Frankly, Gage, I hadn’t heard all that much useful from you in Jerusalem, despite the Crown’s investment. Then my sailors report you’d acquired a quite expensive, rather remarkable rifle?

Where’s that?”

“Stolen by a blasted French thief and torturer named Najac,” I said.

“If I’d joined the French, what the devil am I doing in rags, wounded, burned, bobbing in a boat with a Muslim camel driver and without a weapon?” I was angry. “If I’d gone to the French, why am I not sipping t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 2 7

claret in Napoleon’s tent right now? Aye, let’s sort the truth. Call those rascal seamen up right now. . . .”

“Little Tom lost his arm and has been sent home,” Smith said.

Despite my indignation, the news gave me pause. To lose a limb was a sentence of poverty. “Big Ned has been assigned ashore, with much of the Dangerous crew, to bolster Djezzar’s defenses in Acre.

Perhaps you can discuss it with him there. We’ve got a stew of stout men to hold off Bonaparte, a mix of Turks, Mamelukes, mercenaries, rascals, and English bulldogs. We’ve even got a French royalist artillery officer who’s joined our side, Louis-Edmond Phelipeaux. He’s strengthening the fortifications.”

“You’re allied with a Frenchman, and you’re questioning me?”

“He helped arrange my escape from Templar Prison in Paris and is as faithful a comrade as you could wish for. Curious how men choose up sides in a dangerous time, isn’t it?” He looked at me closely. “Potts and Tentwhistle dead, Tom crippled, nothing gained, yet here you are. Jericho says he thought you dead or deserted as well.”

“You’ve talked to Jericho, too?”

“He’s in Acre, with his sister.”

Well, there was glad news. I’d been distracted by my own problems, but I felt a flush of relief of hearing that Miriam was safe for the moment. I wondered if she still had my seraphim. I took a breath.

“Sir Sidney, I’m done with the French, I can assure you. Hung me upside down over a snake pit, they did.”

“By God, the barbarians! Didn’t tell them anything, did you?”

“Of course not,” I lied. “But they told me something, and I can prove my loyalty with it.” It was time to play my trump.

“Told you what?”

“That Bonaparte’s siege artillery is coming by water, and with luck we can capture it all before his troops reach Acre.”

“Really? Well, that would change things, wouldn’t it?” Smith beamed. “Find me those guns, Gage, and I will give you a medal. A fine Turkish one—they’re bigger than ours and nicely gaudy. They 1 2 8

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

hand them out by the basket load, and you can bet I’ll spare one if you’re telling the truth. For once.”

¤

¤

¤

Of course it rained, dampening our chances of spying the French flotilla, and then fog moved in, lowering visibility even more.

The murk soon had the English thinking I was a double agent again, as if I controlled the weather. But if we had difficulty finding the French, they had a worse time evading us. Fog was their enemy, too.

So the French stumbled upon us on the morning of March 18

when Captain Standelet tried to round Cape Carmel and enter the huge bay bounded by Haifa at the south and Acre at the north. Three boats, including that of Standelet, escaped. Six more did not, however, and siege guns, which fire a twenty-four-pound ball, were trussed in their holds. In a single blow, we’d captured Napoleon’s most potent weapon. With a morning’s work I was proclaimed bulwark of Acre, fox of Jaffa, and watchman of the deep. I got a jeweled medal, too, the Sultan’s Order of the Lion, which Smith then bought back to cover my payment to Mohammad, plus a few coins besides. “If you know how to spend less than you get, you have the philosopher’s stone,” he lectured. “I’ve been reading your Franklin.” And so I came to the old Crusader city. Our route by water was paralleled on land by columns of smoke marking the advance of Napoleon’s troops. Reports had come of a steady string of skirmishes between his regiments and the Muslims of the interior, but it was at Acre that the contest would be decided.

The city is on a peninsula that juts into the Mediterranean at the north end of the Bay of Carmel, and thus is two-thirds surrounded by sea. The peninsula extends southwest from the mainland, and its harbor is formed by a breakwater. Acre is smaller than Jerusalem, its sea and land walls less than a mile and a half in circumference, but is more prosperous and about as populous. By the time I arrived the French were already sealing off the city from the landward side, flapping tricolors marking the arc of their camps.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 2 9

Acre is a lovely city in normal times, its seawalls bounded by aqua-marine reefs and its land walls bordered by green fields. An ancient aqueduct, no longer in use, led from its moat to the French lines.

The great copper green dome of its central mosque, coupled with a needle-like minaret, punctuate a charming skyline of tile, towers, and awnings. Upper stories arch over twisting streets. Markets shaded by bright awnings fill the main thoroughfares. The port smells of salt, fresh fish, and spices. There are three major inn-and-warehouse complexes for maritime visitors, the Khan el-Omdan, the Khan el-Efranj, and the Khan a-Shawarda. Balancing this prettiness is the ruler’s palace on the northern wall, a grim Crusader block with a round tower at each corner, softened only because its harem windows look down on cool gardens between mosque and palace. The stout fort and rambling medieval town of tile roofs called to my mind a stern, forbidding headmaster overlooking a lively class of redheaded children.

The government and religious area occupies the northeastern quarter of the city, and the land walls face north and east, their corner joined at a massive tower. This would be so key to the ensuing siege that it would eventually be called by the French la tour maudite: the accursed tower. But could Acre be defended?

Clearly, many thought not. We took Mohammad’s little boat ashore, following the Tigre’s longboat, and when we reached the quay the waterfront was jammed with refugees anxious to flee the city.

Smith, Mohammad, and I pushed through a crowd close to panic.

Most were women and children, but not a few were rich merchants who’d paid Djezzar steep bribes to leave. In war, money can mean survival, and stories of slaughter had raced up the coast. People clutched the few belongings they could carry and bid for passage on the mer-chantmen offshore. A sweating woman cradled a silver coffee service, her toddlers clutching at her gown and howling. A cotton merchant had stuffed loaded pistols into a sash sewn with golden coins. A lovely dark-eyed girl of ten with trembling mouth held a squirming puppy.

A banker used a wedge of African slaves to push his way to the fore-front.

“Never mind this rabble,” Smith said. “We’re better without them.” 1 3 0

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“Don’t they trust their own garrison?”

“Their garrison doesn’t trust itself. Djezzar has spine, but the French have crushed every army they’ve met. Your cannon will help.

We’ll have bigger guns than Boney has, and we’ll put a battery of them right at the Land Gate, where the sea and land walls meet. But it will be the corner tower that’s the nut the devil cracks his tooth on.

It’s the farthest from the support of our naval artillery, yet the strongest point in the wall. It’s Acre’s bloody knuckle, and our real secret is a man who hates Boney even more than we do.”

“You mean Djezzar the Butcher.”

“No, I mean Napoleon’s classmate from the Ecole Royale Mili-taire in Paris. Our Louis-Edmond le Picard de Phelipeaux shared a desk with the Corsican rascal, believe it or not, and the aristocrat and provincial kicked each other’s legs blue when they were teens. It was Phelipeaux who always bested Bonaparte on tests, Phelipeaux who graduated with higher honors, and Phelipeaux who got the best military assignments. If the revolution hadn’t occurred, forcing our royalist friend out of France, he’d likely be Napoleon’s superior. He slipped into France as a clandestine agent last year and rescued me from Temple Prison, posing as a police commissioner who pretended he was transferring me to a different cell. He’s never lost to Napoleon, and won’t this time. Come and meet him.” Djezzar’s “palace” looked like a transplanted Bastille. The Crusader keep had been remodeled to include gunports, not charm, and two-thirds of the Butcher’s ordinance was aimed at his own people, not the French. Square and stolid, the citadel was as implacable as Djezzar’s iron-fisted rule.

“There’s an armory in the basement, barracks on the ground floor, administrative offices in the next, Djezzar’s palace above that, and the harem at the very top,” Smith said, pointing. I could see grilled harem windows, like the cage of pretty birds. As if in sympathy, swallows flitted between them and the palms below. Having broken into a harem in Egypt, I had no desire to explore this one. Those women had been scary.

We passed hulking Ottoman sentries and a massive wooden door t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 3 1

studded with iron, and entered the gloomy interior. After the dazzling light of the Levant, the inside had the air of a dungeon. I blinked as I looked about. This was the level that was quarters for Djezzar’s loyal-ist guards, and there was a military sparseness about it. The soldiers looked at us shyly from the shadows, where they were cleaning muskets and sharpening blades. They looked about as cheerful as recruits at Valley Forge. Then there were quick footsteps from the stairs and a lithe and more energetic Frenchman bounded down, in a rather stained and careworn white uniform of the Bourbons. This must be Phelipeaux.

He was taller than Napoleon, elegant in his movements, and with that languid self-confidence that comes with high birth. Phelipeaux gave a courtly bow, his wan smile and dark eyes seeming to measure everything with an artilleryman’s calculation. “Monsieur Gage, I am told you may have saved our city!”

“Hardly that.”

“Your captured French guns will be invaluable, I assure you. Ah, the irony of it. And an American! We are Lafayette and Washington!

What an international alliance we are forming here: British, French, American, Mameluke, Jew, Ottoman, Maronite . . . all against my former classmate!”

“Did you really school together?”

“He peeked at my answers.” He grinned. “Come, let’s peek at him now!”

I liked his dash already.

Phelipeaux led us up a winding stair until we came out on the roof of Djezzar’s castle. What a magnificent view! After the rain of recent days the air was dazzling, distant Mount Carmel a blue ridge far across the bay. Nearer, the assembling French were as sharp as lead soldiers.

Tents and awnings were blossoming like a spring carnival. From Jaffa, I knew what life would be like in their lines: plentiful food, imported drink to bolster the courage of assault groups, and cadres of prostitutes and servant women to cook, clean, and provide warmth at night, all at exorbitant prices cheerfully paid by men who felt there was a good chance they were about to die. About a mile inland was a hill 1 3 2

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

a hundred feet in height, and there I could see a cluster of men and horses amid flapping banners, out of range of any of our fire.

“I suspect that is where Buonaparte will set his headquarters,” Phelipeaux said, drawing out the Italian pronunciation with aristocratic disdain. “I know him, you see, and know how he thinks. We both would do the same. He’ll extend his trenches and try to mine our walls with sappers. So I know that he knows the tower is key.” I followed the sweep of his finger. Cannon were being swung up onto the walls, and there was a stone-lined dry moat just beyond, about twenty feet deep and fifty wide. “No water in the moat?”

“It hasn’t been designed for it—the bottom is above sea level—but our engineers have an idea. We’re building a reservoir on the Mediterranean near the city’s Land Gate that we’ll pump full of seawater.

It could be released into the moat at a time of crisis.”

“That plan, however, is still weeks from completion,” Smith said.

I nodded. “So in the meantime, you’ve got your tower.” It was massive, like a promontory at the edge of a sea. I imagined it looked even taller from the French side.

“It’s the strongest on the wall,” Phelipeaux said, “but it can also be fired upon and assaulted from two sides. If the republicans break it, they will be into the gardens and can fan out to seize our defenses from behind. If they cannot, their infantry will perish uselessly.” I tried to survey the scene with his engineer’s eye. The ruined aqueduct ran off from the walls toward the French. It broke just short of our wall near the tower, having once delivered water. I saw the French were digging trenches alongside it because it provided cover from harassing fire. To one side was what looked like a dried pond.

The French were setting survey stakes inside it.

“They’ve drained a reservoir to provide themselves a protective depression to site a battery,” Phelipeaux said as if reading my mind.

“Soon it will be filled with the lighter guns they brought overland.” I looked down. The garden was an oasis of shade amid the military preparation. The harem women were probably accustomed to visiting there. Now, with so many soldiers and sailors manning the ramparts above, they’d be locked away.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 3 3

“We’ve added nearly a hundred cannon to the city’s defenses,” Phelipeaux said. “Now that we’ve captured the heaviest French guns, we must keep them at a distance.”

“Which means not allowing Djezzar to give up,” Smith amended.

“And you, Gage, are the key to that.”

“Me?”

“You’ve seen Napoleon’s army. I want you to tell our ally it can be beaten, because it can be if he believes. But first you have to believe it yourself. Do you?”

I thought a moment. “Bonaparte buttons his breeches like the rest of us. He just hasn’t met anyone yet as pugnacious as himself.”

“Exactly. So come meet the Butcher.”

We did not have to wait for an audience. After Jaffa, Djezzar recognized his own survival depended on his new European allies.

We were ushered into his audience chambers, a finely decorated but nonetheless modest room with an ornately carved ceiling and a carpet of overlapping oriental rugs. Birds tweeted from golden cages, a small monkey hopped about on a leather leash, and some kind of large jungle cat, spotted, eyed us sleepily from a cushion, as if deciding whether we were worth the trouble of eating. I had much the same sense from the Butcher, who was sitting erect, his aging torso still conveying physical power. We sat cross-legged before him while his Sudanese bodyguards watched us carefully, as if we might be assassins instead of allies.

Djezzar was seventy-five and looked like a fiery prophet, not a kindly grandfather. His bushy beard was white, his eyes flint, and his mouth had a cruel set. A pistol was tucked in his sash, and a dagger lay near to hand. Yet his gaze also betrayed the self-doubt of a bully up against another tough: Napoleon.

“Pasha, this is the American I told you about,” Smith introduced.

He took me in at a glance—my borrowed seaman’s clothing, stained boots, skin leathered by too much sun and saltwater—and didn’t try to hide his skepticism. Yet he was curious, too. “You escaped Jaffa.”

“The French meant to kill me with the other prisoners,” I said. “I 1 3 4

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

swam out to sea and found a small cave in the rocks. The massacre was horrible.”

“Still, survival is the mark of remarkable men.” The Butcher himself was a wily survivor, of course. “And you helped capture the enemy’s artillery?”

“Some of it, at least.”

He studied me. “You are resourceful, I think.”

“As are you, Pasha. As resourceful as any Napoleon.” He smiled. “More so, I think. I have killed more men and fucked more women. So now it is a test of wills. A siege. And Allah has forced me to use infidels to fight infidels. I don’t trust Christians.

They are always conspiring.”

This seemed ungrateful. “Right now we’re conspiring to save your neck.”

He shrugged. “So tell me about this Bonaparte. Is he a patient man?”

“Not in the least.”

“But he’s energetic at pushing for what he wants,” Phelipeaux amended.

“He’ll come at your city hard, early, even without the guns,” I said. “He believes in a quick strike of overpowering force to break an enemy’s will. His soldiers are good at what they do, and their fire is accurate.”

Djezzar took a date from a cup and examined it as if he’d never seen one before, then popped it in his mouth, chewing it to one side as he talked. “So perhaps I should surrender. Or flee. He outnumbers my garrison two to one.”

“With the British ships you outgun him. He’s hundreds of miles from his Egyptian base and two thousand miles from France.”

“So we can beat him before he gets more cannon.”

“He has almost no troops to garrison anything he captures. His soldiers are homesick and tired.”

“Sick in another way, too,” Djezzar said. “There have been rumors of plague.”

“A few cases appeared even in Egypt,” I confirmed. “I heard there t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 3 5

were more at Jaffa.” The Butcher was a shrewd one, I saw, not some Ottoman weakling imposed by the Sublime Porte in Constantinople.

He gathered information about his enemies like a scholar. “Napoleon’s weakness is time, Pasha. Every day he stays in front of Acre, the sultan in Constantinople can order more forces to surround him.

He gets no reinforcements, and no resupply, while the British navy can bring both to us. He tries to accomplish in a day what other men require a year to complete, and that’s his weakness. He’s trying to conquer Asia with ten thousand men, and no one knows better than he that it’s all bluff. The moment his enemies stop fearing him, he’s finished. If you can hold . . .”

“He goes away,” Djezzar finished. “This little man no one has beaten.”

“We will beat him here,” Smith vowed.

“Unless he finds something more powerful than artillery,” another said from the shadows.

I started. I knew that voice! And indeed, emerging from the gloom behind Djezzar’s cushioned perch was the hideous countenance of Haim Farhi! Smith and Phelipeaux blinked at this mutilation but did not recoil. They’d seen it before, too.

“Farhi! What are you doing in Acre?”

“Serving his master,” Djezzar said.

“We left Jerusalem an uncomfortable place, Monsieur Gage. And with no book, there was no reason to stay there.”

“You went with us for the pasha?”

“But of course. You know who modified my appearance.”

“It was a favor to him,” the Butcher rumbled. “Good looks allow vanity, and pride is the greatest sin. His scars let him concentrate on his numbers. And get into heaven.”

Farhi bowed. “As always, you are generous, master.”

“So you escaped Jerusalem!”

“Narrowly. I left you because my face draws too much attention, and because I knew further research was required. What do the French know of our secrets?”

1 3 6

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“That Muslim outrage bars them from further exploration of the tunnels. They know nothing, and threatened me with snakes to try to learn what I knew. We’ve all come away empty-handed, I think.”

“Empty-handed of what?” Smith asked.

Farhi turned to the British officer. “Your ally here did not go to Jerusalem merely to serve you, Captain.”

“No, there was a woman he inquired about, if I recall.”

“And a treasure desperate men are seeking.”

“Treasure?”

“Not money,” I said, annoyed at Farhi’s casual sharing of my secret.

“A book.”

“A book of magic,” the banker amended. “It’s been rumored for thousands of years, and sought by the Knights Templar. When we asked for your sailor allies, we weren’t looking for a siege door into Jerusalem. We were looking for this book.”

“As were the French,” I added.

“And me,” said Djezzar. “Farhi was my ear.” It was appropriate he used the singular, since the scoundrel had cut off his minister’s other one.

Smith was looking from one to the other of us.

“But it wasn’t there,” I said. “Most likely, it doesn’t exist.”

“And yet agents are making inquiries up and down the province of Syria,” Farhi said. “Arabs, mostly, in the employ of some mysterious figure back in Egypt.”

My skin prickled. “I was told Count Silano is still alive.”

“Alive. Resurrected. Immortal.” Farhi shrugged.

“What’s your point, Haim?” Djezzar said, with the tone of a master long impatient with the meanderings of his subordinates.

“That, as Gage said, what all men seek might not exist. Yet if it does, we have no way to look for it, locked up as we are by Napoleon’s army. Time is his enemy, yes. But it’s our challenge too. If we are besieged too long, it may be too late to find first what Count Alessandro Silano is still seeking.” He pointed at me. “This one must find a way to look for the secret again, before it is too late.” t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 3 7

¤

¤

¤

I followed the smell of charcoal to find Jericho. He was in the bowels of the armory in the basement of Djezzar’s palace, his muscles illuminated by the glow of a smithy furnace, hammering like Thor on the tools of war: swords, pikes, forked poles to push off scaling ladders, bayonets, ramrods. Lead cooled in bullet molds like black pearls, and scrap was piled for conversion into grapeshot and shrapnel. Miriam was working the bellows, her hair curled on her cheeks in sweaty tendrils, her shift damp and disturbingly clingy, perspiration glistening in that vale of temptation between neck and breasts. I didn’t know what my reception would be, given that they’d lost their Jerusalem house in the tumult I’d caused, but when she saw me her eyes flashed bright greeting and she flew to me in the hellish glow, hugging. How good she felt! It was all I could do to keep my hand from slipping onto her round bottom, but of course her brother was there. Yet even taciturn Jericho allowed a reluctant smile.

“We thought you dead!”

She kissed my cheek, setting it on fire. I held her a safe distance away lest my own enthusiasm at our reunion be too physically obvious.

“And I feared the same for the two of you,” I said. “I’m sorry our adventure has left you trapped here, but I really thought we’d find treasure. I escaped from Jaffa with my friend Mohammad in a boat.” I looked at Miriam, realizing how much I’d missed her, and how angel-ically beautiful she really was. “The news of your survival was like nectar to a man dying of thirst.”

I thought I saw a blush beyond the soot, and certainly I’d erased her brother’s smile. No matter. I wouldn’t release her waist, and she wouldn’t release my shoulders.

“And now here we all are, alive,” Jericho said. “All three of us.” I finally let her go and nodded. “With a man called the Butcher, a half-mad English sea captain, a mutilated Jew, a disgruntled school-1 3 8

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

mate of Bonaparte, and a Muslim guide. Not to mention a burly blacksmith, his scholarly sister, and a ne’r-do-well American gambler.

Quite the merry men, we are.”

“And women,” Miriam said. “Ethan, we heard what happened at Jaffa. What happens if the French break in here?”

“They won’t,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “We don’t have to beat them—we just have to hold them off until they’re compelled to retreat. And I have an idea for that. Jericho, is there any spare heavy chain in the city?”

“I’ve seen some about, used by ships, and to chain off the harbor mouth. Why?”

“I want to drape it from out towers to welcome the French.” He shook his head, convinced I was daft as ever. “To give them a hand up?”

“Yes. And then charge it with electricity.”

“Electricity!” He crossed himself.

“It’s an idea I had while in the boat with Mohammad. If we store enough spark in a battery of Leyden jars, we could transfer them with a wire to a suspended chain. It would give the same jolt I demon-strated in Jerusalem, but this time it would knock them into the moat where we could kill them.” I’d become quite the sanguinary warrior.

“You mean they wouldn’t be able to hold onto the chain?” Miriam asked.

“No more than if it were red hot. It would be like a barrier of fire.” Jericho was intrigued. “Could that really work?”

“If it doesn’t, the Butcher will use the links to hang us.”

c h a p t e r

1 3

Ineeded to generate an electric charge on a scale even Ben Franklin had not dreamed of, so while Jericho set to work collecting and linking chain, Miriam and I set out to assemble glass, lead, copper, and jars in sufficient quantity to make a giant battery. I’ve seldom enjoyed a project so much. Miriam and I didn’t just work together, we were partners, in a way which recaptured the alliance I’d had with Astiza. The demure shyness I’d first encountered had been lost somewhere in the tunnels beneath Jerusalem, and now she exhibited a brisk confidence that stiffened the courage of anyone she worked with. No man wants to be a coward around a woman. She and I worked shoulder to shoulder, brushing more than necessary, while I remembered exactly the spot on my cheek where her kiss had burned. There’s nothing more desirable than a woman you haven’t had.

While we labored we could hear the echo of the French guns, seeking the range as their first trenches advanced toward the walls.

Even the bowels of Djezzar’s palace would tremble when an iron ball crashed into the outer walls.

Franklin gave the name “battery” to lines of Leyden jars because 1 4 0

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

they reminded him of a battery of guns, set hub to hub to give concentrated fire. In our case, each additional jar could be connected to the last to add to the potential shock of French soldiers that I intended.

We soon had so many that the task of energizing them all with friction—by turning a crank—looked Sisyphean, like rolling a boulder endlessly uphill.

“Ethan, how are we going to turn your glass disks long enough to power this huge contraption?” Miriam asked. “We need an army of grinders.”

“Not an army, but a broader back and a dimmer mind.” I meant Big Ned.

Ever since I had stepped ashore in Acre I’d been contemplating my reunion with the hulking, cranky sailor. He had to be paid back for his treachery at the Jerusalem gate, and yet he remained a dangerous giant still resentful about his gambling losses. The key was not to blunder into him when I was at a disadvantage, so I carefully planned my lesson. I learned he’d heard of my miraculous reappearance and boasted he still owed me a tussle, once I left the protection of my woman’s skirts. When I was informed he’d been assigned to help hurriedly patch the moat masonry at the base on Acre’s key tower, I appeared to give a hand from the sallyport above.

A wall is strongest without cracks for cannonballs to pry at, so that’s why Smith and Phelipeaux wanted repairs made. It was a bold job, British marksmen traded sniper fire with French sharpshooters in their trenches while a few volunteers, including Ned, labored outside the walls below in the dark. Despite my problems with Ned and Tom, I’d come to admire the flinty determination of the English crew, a working man’s porridge of the poor and illiterate who had little of the idealism of the French volunteers but a dogged loyalty to crown and country. Ned had that same starch. As muskets flashed and banged in the dark—how I missed my rifle!—baskets of stone, mortar, and water were lowered to the repair crew while they chipped, scraped, and fitted. Near dawn they finally scrambled back up a rope ladder like scurrying monkeys, bullets pinging, my arm giving each a hand inside. Finally there was only Ned below. He gave the ladder a good tug.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 4 1

The look on his face when his escape route came loose and rattled down to make a heap at his feet was priceless. There’s something to be said for revenge.

I leaned out. “Not fun to be locked out, is it, Ned?” His head flamed like a red onion when he recognized me fifty feet above. “So you’ve dared come out of the pasha’s palace, Yankee tinkerer! I thought you wouldn’t come within a hundred miles of honest British seamen after the lesson I taught you at Jerusalem! And now you plan to leave me in this moat and let the French do your work for you?” He cupped his hands and shouted. “He’s a coward, he is!”

“Oh, no,” I countered. “I just want you to get a taste of your own base treachery, and see if you’re man enough to face me honestly, instead of slamming gates in my face or hiding in a ship’s bilge.” His eyes bulged as if pumped full of steam. “Face you honestly! By God, I’ll rip you limb from limb, you cheat, if you ever have the pluck to stand toe to toe like a man!”

“It’s a bully’s way to rely on size, Big Ned,” I called down. “Fight me fairly, sword to sword like gentlemen do, and I’ll teach you a real lesson.”

“Bloody thunder, indeed I will! I’ll fight you with pistols, marlin-spikes, cudgels, daggers, or cannon fire!”

“I said swords.”

“Let me up then! If I can’t strangle you, I’ll cleave you in two!” So with our duel set to my satisfaction I lowered a rope, hoisted the ladder back up, and got Ned back into Acre just before the dawn light would make him a target.

“I just showed you more mercy than you showed me,” I lectured as he glowered, dusting mortar from his clothes.

“And I’m about to return the mercy you showed at cards. Let’s cross blades and be done with our business once and for all! I wouldn’t let you buy your way out now if you had money to pay me back ten times!”

“I’ll meet you in the palace gardens. Do you want rapier, saber, or cutlass?”

“Cutlass, by God! Something to cut through bone! And I’ll bring 1 4 2

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

my bullyboys to watch you bleed!” He glared at the other men who were enjoying our exchange. “Nobody crosses Big Ned.”

¤

¤

¤

My willingness to duel such an animal came from thinking a few cards ahead. Franklin was always an inspiration, and while working at Jericho’s new forge I mused how the sage of Philadelphia might use ingenuity instead of brawn. Then I set to work.

Ned’s sabotage was simple. I disassembled the cloth-and-wood handle from his cutlass, bolted on a copper replacement, roughened the handle to let my opponent take firm hold, and polished the entire assembly. Metal is conductive.

Mine was more complicated. I hollowed its haft, lined it with lead, doubled its wrapping for my own added insulation, and—just before my opponent arrived—held its butt end against a stout wire leading from the cranking machine I had built to generate a frictional charge.

I was spinning away, storing electricity in the steel of my weapon, when my opponent appeared in the courtyard.

Ned squinted. “What’s that then, you bloody Yankee tinkerer?”

“Magic,” I said.

“Hey, I wants a fair fight now!”

“And you shall get it, blade to blade. Your muscle to my brain.

Nothing fairer than that, eh?”

“Ethan, he’ll split you like a bolt of wood,” Jericho warned, as I’d coached. “This is madness. You stand no chance against Big Ned.”

“Honor requires that we cross blades,” I recited with equally rehearsed resignation, “no matter what his skill and size.” I suppose it’s not sporting to lead on a bull, but what matador doesn’t wave a cape?

I gave some minutes for a crowd of assembled sailors to bet against me—I covered them all, with a loan from the metallurgist, figuring I might as well make a profit from all this bother—and then took a fencing stance on the garden path where we’d duel. I liked to think the harem girls were watching from above, and I knew Djezzar was.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 4 3

“On guard, you big bully!” I cried. “If I lose I’ll give you every shilling, but if you lose, then you’re beholden to me!”

“If you lose, I’ll take what I’m owed from the steaks and chops I’ll have turned you into!” The crowd roared at this wit and Ned preened.

Then he charged and swung.

I parried.

I wish I could report there was some gallant and expert swordplay as I deftly countered his brute force with athletic skill. Instead, as steel touched steel, there was simply a blaze of sparks and a sharp report like a gunshot that made the spectators cry and jump. Our blades merely touched, yet Ned flew backward as if he’d been kicked by a mule. His cutlass went flying, narrowly missing one of his shipmates, and he crashed down like Goliath and lay there, eyes rolled back in his head. The sword stung in my own hand, but I’d been insulated from the worst of the jolt. The air had a burning smell.

Was he dead?

I touched him with my sword tip. He jerked like one of Galvani’s frogs.

The crowd was utterly silent, in awe.

Finally Ned shuddered, blinked, and cringed. “Don’t touch me!”

“You shouldn’t test your betters, Ned.”

“Blimey, what did you do?”

“Magic,” I said again. I pointed my sword at the others. “I won at cards fairly, and won this duel. Now. Who else wants to challenge me?” They backed off as if I had leprosy. A boatswain hurriedly tossed me the purse of bets he’d held. God bless the foolish gambling instincts of British sailors.

Ned woozily sat up. “No one’s ever bested me before. Not even my pappy, not once I got to be eight or nine and could thrash him.”

“Will you respect me finally?”

He waggled his head to clear it. “I’m beholden, you said. You’ve got strange powers, guv’nor. I see that now. You always survive, no matter what side you’re on.”

“I just use my brain, Ned. If you’d ally with me, I’d teach you to do the same.”

1 4 4

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“Aye. I wants to serve with you, not fight.” Clumsily, he struggled to his feet and swayed. I could imagine the unearthly tingling he still felt. Electricity hurts. “You others, you listen to me,” he croaked.

“Don’t cross the American. And if you do, you have to deal with me.

We’s partners, we is.” He gave me a hug, like a giant ape.

“Don’t touch the sword, man!”

“Oh yes.” He stepped hastily away.

“Now, I need your help making more magic, but this time against the French. I need a fellow who can crank my apparatus like the devil himself. Can you do that, Ned?”

“If you don’t touch me.”

“No, we’re even,” I confirmed. “Now we can be friends.”

¤

¤

¤

There was an odd lull as the French burrowed like ants toward the walls of Acre, putting their remaining cannon in place. They dug and we waited, with that sluggish fatalism that wears down the besieged. It was Holy Week, so in the spirit of the holidays, Smith and Bonaparte agreed to a prisoner exchange, trading back the men taken in raids and skirmishing. Djezzar paced his walls like a restless cat, muttering about the damnation of Christians and all infidels, and then sat in a great chair on the corner tower to motivate his soldiers by glaring with his fierce eye. I labored on my electrical scheme, but it was difficult to get Jericho’s help because the Butcher, Smith, and Phelipeaux kept sending down a steady stream of armory requests. In close combat on the ramparts, with little time to reload, steel would be as important as gunpowder.

The strain was showing. The metallurgist’s somewhat cherubic face had grown tauter, his eyes shadowed. The French guns banged around the clock, he seldom saw daylight, and he was uneasy about my growing closeness to Miriam. And yet he was the kind of man who couldn’t refuse anyone, nor allow a lapse in quality. He worked even when Miriam and I collapsed in opposite corners of the armory, in fitful, exhausted sleep.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 4 5

Thus the ironmonger awakened us in the predawn darkness of March 28 when the tattoo of the French guns accelerated, signaling an impending attack. Even deep in Djezzar’s cellar, the beams overhead trembled from the bombardment. Dust filtered down. The quaking made sparks fly up from the forge.

“The French are testing our defenses,” I guessed groggily. “Keep your sister down here. You’re both more valuable as metallurgists than targets.”

“And you?”

“It’s not ready yet, but I’m going to see how my chain might be used!”

It was four in the morning, the stairs and ramps lit by torches. I was swept up in a tide of Turkish soldiers and British sailors mounting the walls, everyone cursing in their own language. At the parapet the bombardment was a rolling thunder, punctuated by the occasional crash as a cannonball hit the wall, or a shriek as one sailed overhead.

There were stabs of light on the French line, marking where their cannons were.

Smith was there, a weird smile on his lips, pacing behind a contingent of Royal Marines. Phelipeaux was racing madly up and down the walls, using a garbled mixture of French, English, Arabic, and anxious hand gestures to direct the city’s cannon. At the same time signal lanterns were being hoisted on the corner tower to elicit naval support.

I looked into the gloom but couldn’t see the enemy troops. I borrowed a musket and fired to where I guessed they might be, in hopes of drawing answering pinpricks of light, but the French were too disciplined. So I followed Phelipeaux to the tower. It was trembling like a tree being chopped at.

Now our own cannon were beginning to bark back, their flashes interrupting the steady drum of French fire, but also giving the enemy artillerists a reference for aiming. Shot began flying higher, and then there was a bang as a cannonball clipped the wall’s crenellation and rock fragments spewed like the pieces of a grenade. A Turkish cannon was dismounted and flopped over, blinded men screaming.

“What can I do?” I asked Phelipeaux, trying to contain the natu-1 4 6

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

ral shake in my voice. The whole business hurt my ears. The walls and moat tended to echo and amplify the crashes, and there was that acrid, intoxicating stench of burnt powder.

“Get Djezzar. He’s the only man his men are more frightened of than Napoleon.”

I was grateful for an excuse to run back to the palace, and almost collided with Haim Farhi in the pasha’s chambers.

“We need your master to help stiffen his soldiers!”

“He can’t be disturbed. He’s in the harem.” By Casanova’s trousers, the ruler could rut at a time like this? But then a door opened on a stairway leading upward and the Butcher appeared, shirtless, bearded, his eyes bright, a cross between a satyr and the prophet Elijah. Two pistols had been stuffed into his sash and he held an old Prussian saber. A slave brought a rusty coat of medieval mail and a felt undershirt. Before he closed the door behind, I could hear the excited chattering and weeping of the women.

“Phelipeaux needs you,” I said unnecessarily.

“Now the Franks will come close enough that I can kill them,” he promised.

The first pale light was silhouetting Napoleon’s observatory hill when we returned to the tower. British ships had moved close inshore in Acre Bay, I saw, but their fire couldn’t reach the assault column.

Now I could make out a mass of men in shallow trenches below, like a great dark centipede. Many were carrying ladders.

“They’ve made a breach in the tower just above the moat,” Phelipeaux reported. “It’s not big, but if they get inside the Turks will bolt.

There’ve been too many rumors about what happened at Jaffa. Our Ottomans are too nervous to fight and too frightened to surrender.” I leaned over the edge to look at the black pit of the dry moat far below. The French could get into it easily enough, but could they get out? “Use a barrel of gunpowder,” I suggested. “Or half a barrel, and the rest nails and ball. Drop it on them when they try the breach.” The royalist colonel grinned. “Ah, my bloodthirsty Américain. You have a warrior’s instincts! We will light the way for the Corsican!” t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 4 7

“Napoleon!” Djezzar roared, climbing to stand on his observatory chair so that he was visible as a flag. “Try this Mameluke now! I will fuck you like I just fucked my wives!” Bullets whizzed by, miraculously not hitting him. “Yes, fan me like my women!” We dragged him down. “If you’re killed, all is lost,” Phelipeaux lectured.

The Butcher spat. “That is what I think of their marksmanship.” His mail shirt swung at the hem as he strutted from side to side of the tower, making sure his soldiers stood fast. “Don’t think my eye isn’t upon you!”

As the landscape turned pale gray with the coming sun, I saw how hasty Bonaparte had been. His trenches were still too shallow and a score of his men had already been hit. Several French guns had been disabled in his reservoir battery because their earthworks were inadequate, and the old aqueduct was chewed by our fire, spraying his huddled troops with masonry. Their ladders looked absurdly short.

Nonetheless, there was a great shout, a waving of the tricolor, and the French charged. Always, they had élan.

This was the first time I’d seen their reckless courage from the other side, and it was a frightening sight. The centipede charged and swallowed the ground between trenches and moat with alarming swiftness. The Turks and British marines tried to slow them with gunfire, but the expert French covering fire forced our heads down.

We picked off only a few. They spilled down the lip of the moat to its bottom. Their ladders were too short to reach—their scouting had been hasty—but the bravest jumped down, braced the stunted ladders, and allowed comrades to follow. Others fired across the moat into the breach they’d made, killing some of our defenders. The Ottoman troops began to moan.

“Silence! You sound like my women!” Djezzar roared. “Do you want to learn what I will do to you if you run?” Now the French infantry propped their scaling ladders on the other side of the moat. The tops were several feet short of the breach, an inexcusable miscalculation. This was the moment, when pull-1 4 8

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

ing themselves up, that they might grasp a suspended chain. Left uncharged, it would allow them to flood inside the city and Acre would suffer the fate of Jaffa. But if electrified . . .

The bravest Turks leaned over to fire or hurl down stones, but as soon as they did they were hit by Frenchmen aiming across the moat.

One man gave a great cry and fell all the way to the bottom. I fired a musket myself, cursing its inaccuracy.

A few Ottomans began to desert their guns. The British sailors tried to stop them, but they were panicked. Then Djezzar descended from the top of the tower to block their exit, waving his Prussian saber and roaring. “What are you afraid of?” he shouted. “Look at them! Their ladders are too short! They can’t get in!” He leaned out, discharged both pistols, and handed them to a Turk. “Do something, old woman! Reload these!”

His men, chastened, started firing again. As frightened as they were of the formidable French, they were terrified of Djezzar.

Then a flaming meteor fell from the tower.

It was the keg of gunpowder I’d suggested. It hit, bounced, and exploded.

There was a thunderous roar and a radiating cloud of wood splinters and metal bits. The clustered grenadiers reeled, the closest blown to bits, others severely wounded, and still more stunned by the blast.

Djezzar’s men whooped and began firing into the milling French in earnest, adding to the havoc below.

The assault thus ended before it could properly begin. With their own cannon unable to fire too close to their charge, their ladders too short, the breach too small, and the resistance newly stiffened, the French had lost momentum. Napoleon had gambled on speed over tedious siege preparation, and lost. The attackers turned and began scrambling back the way they’d come.

“See how they run?” Djezzar shouted to his men.

And indeed, the Turkish troops began to shout in amazement and new confidence. The ruthless Franks were retreating! They were not invincible after all! And from that moment a new confidence seized the garrison, a confidence that would sustain them in the long dark t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 4 9

weeks to come. The tower would become the rallying point not just for Acre but for the entire Ottoman Empire.

When the sun finally crested the eastern hills and fully lit the scene, the havoc was apparent. Nearly two hundred of Napoleon’s troops lay dead or wounded, and Djezzar refused to slacken fire to let the French recover their injured. Many died, screaming, before the survivors could finally be carried to safety the next night.

“We have taught the Franks Acre’s hospitality!” the Butcher crowed.

Phelipeaux was less satisfied. “I know the Corsican. That was just a probe. Next time he will come stronger.” He turned to me. “Your little experiment had better work.”

¤

¤

¤

The failure of Napoleon’s first assault had a curious effect on the garrison. The Ottoman soldiers were heartened by their successful repulse, and for the first time attended to their duties with proud determination instead of fatalistic resignation. The Franks could be beaten! Djezzar was invincible! Allah had answered their prayers!

The British sailors, in contrast, sobered. A long succession of naval victories had made them cocky about “facing the frogs.” The courage of the French soldiers, however, was noted. Bonaparte had not retreated. Instead his trenches were being dug forward more vigorously than ever. The seamen felt trapped on land. The French used scarecrows to draw our fire and dug out our cannonballs to fire back at us.

It didn’t help that Djezzar was convinced the Christians in Acre must be plotting against him, even though the attacking French were from a revolution that had abandoned Christianity. He had several dozen, plus two French prisoners, sewn into sacks and cast into the sea. Smith and Phelipeaux could no more stop the pasha than Napoleon could have stopped his troops at the sack of Jaffa, but many English concluded their ally was a madman who could not be controlled.

Djezzar’s restless enmity was not limited to followers of the cross.

1 5 0

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

Salih Bey, a Cairo Mameluke and old archenemy, had fled Egypt after Napoleon’s victory there and came to make common cause with Djezzar against the French. The pasha greeted him warmly, gave him a cup of poisoned coffee, and threw his corpse into the sea within half an hour of his arrival.

Big Ned told his fellows to put their trust in “the magician”—me.

The same trickery that had allowed me to defeat him, a man twice my size, would help us prevail against Napoleon, he promised. So at our direction, the sailors built two crude wooden capstans on either side of the tower. The chain would be hung like a garland across its face, the elevation controlled by these hoists. Next I moved my Leyden jars and cranking apparatus to a floor halfway up the tower, which contained the sally door from which I’d challenged Big Ned. A smaller chain with a hook would link with the larger one, and that chain in turn would be touched by a copper rod connected to my jars.

“When they come, Ned, you must crank like the very devil.”

“I’ll light the frogs up like a fire at All Hallows, guv’nor.” Miriam helped set the apparatus up, her quick fingers ideal for linking the jars. Had the ancient Egyptians known such sorcery, too?

“I wish old Ben was here to see me,” I remarked when we rested in the tower one evening, our metal sorcery gleaming in the dim light from the tower’s arrow slits.

“Who’s old Ben?” she murmured, leaning against my shoulder as we sat on the floor. Such physical closeness no longer seemed remarkable, though I dreamt of more.

“An American wiseman who helped start our country. He was a Freemason who knew about the Templars, and some think he had their ideas in mind when he made the United States.”

“What ideas?”

“Well, I don’t know, exactly. That a country is supposed to stand for something, I guess. Believe in something.”

“And what do you believe, Ethan Gage?”

“That’s what Astiza used to ask me! Do all women ask that? I ended up believing in her, and as soon as I did, I lost her.” She looked at me sadly. “You miss her, don’t you?” t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 5 1

“As you must miss your betrothed who died in the war. As Jericho misses his wife, Big Ned his Little Tom, and Phelipeaux the mon-archy.”

“So here we are, our circle of mourning.” She was quiet a moment.

Then, “Do you know what I believe in, Ethan?”

“The church?”

“I believe in the Otherness the church stands for.”

“You mean God?”

“I mean there’s more to life’s madness than just madness. I believe that in every life there are rare moments when we sense that Otherness that is all around us. Most of the time we are sealed up, lonely and blind, like a chick in its egg, but occasionally we get to crack the shell for a peek. The blessed have many such moments, and the wicked not one. But when you do—when you’ve sensed what is truly real, far realer than the nightmare we live in—everything is bearable.

And I believe that if you can ever find someone who believes like you do, who strains against the egg that constrains us—well, then the two of you together can smash the shell entirely. And that’s the most we can hope for in this world.”

I shivered inwardly. Was the monstrous war I’d been trapped in the past year some false dream, some enclosing shell? Did the ancients know how to crack open the egg? “I don’t know if I’ve ever had even a single moment. Does that make me wicked?”

“The wicked would never admit it, not even to themselves.” Her hand felt my stubbled jaw, her blue eyes like the abyss off the reef at Jaffa. “But when the moment comes you must seize it, to let in the light.”

And so she kissed me, fully this time, her breath hot, her body straining against mine, her breasts flattened against me, and her torso trembling.

I fell in love then, not just with Miriam, but with everyone. Does that sound insane? For the briefest of breaths I felt linked to all the other troubled souls of our mad world, a weird sense of community that filled me with heartbreak and love. So I kissed her back, clinging.

Finally, I was forgetting the pain of long-lost Astiza.

1 5 2

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“I kept your golden angels, Ethan,” she murmured, pulling a velvet pouch that she had hung between her breasts. “You can have them back now.”

“Keep them, as a present.” What use did I have for them?

And then there was a roar, a spit of mortar, and our entire tower quaked as if a giant hand was shaking it to spill us out. For a moment I feared it would go over, but it slowly stopped swaying and just settled slightly, its floor at a slight tilt. Bugles sounded.

“They set off a mine! They’re coming!”

It was time to try the chain.

c h a p t e r

1 4

Ipeered out the sally port into a fog of smoke and dust. “Stay here,” I told Miriam. “I’m going to try to see what’s happening.” Then I galloped for the top of the tower.

Phelipeaux was already there, hatless, leaning over the edge of the parapet and heedless of French bullets pattering about.

“The sappers dug a tunnel under the tower and packed it with gunpowder,” he told me. “They misjudged, I think. The moat is rubble, but we only breached. I don’t see cracks all the way up.” He pulled himself back and grasped my arm. “Is your devilry ready?” He pointed. “Bonaparte is determined.”

As before a column of troops trotted beside the ancient aqueduct, but this time it looked like a full brigade. Their ladders were longer than last time, bobbing as they jogged. I leaned out myself. There was a large gap at the base of the tower and a new causeway of rubble in the moat.

“Rally your best men at the breach,” I told Phelipeaux. “I’ll hold them with my chain. When they bunch, hit them with everything we have from down there and up here.” I turned to Smith, who’d come up breathless. “Sir Sidney, ready your bombs!” 1 5 4

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

He gulped air. “I’ll drop the fire of Zeus on them.”

“Don’t hesitate. At some point, I’ll lose power and they’ll break my contraption.”

“We’ll finish them by then.”

Down Phelipeaux and I dashed, he to the breach and I to my new companion. “Now, Ned, now! Come to our room and crank for all you’re worth! They’re coming, and our battery of jars must be fully charged!”

“You lower the chain, guv’nor, and I’ll give it a spark.” I put a few sailors at each of the capstans, telling them to crouch until it was time to lower. A full-scale artillery duel had broken out since the mine explosion, and the scale and fury of the battle was breathtaking. Cannon were firing everywhere, making us shout against their thunder. As balls smashed into the city, bits of debris would fly into the air. Sometimes the shadowy stream of the missiles could be spied sailing overhead, and when they struck there was a great crash and puff of dust. Our own balls were throwing up great gouts of sand where they fell amid the French positions, occasionally flipping or destroying a field piece or powder wagon. The leading French grenadiers were breaking into a run, ladders like lances, making for the moat.

“Now, now!” I shouted. “Lower the chain!” At both ends, my sailors began letting the capstan cables out. The suspended chain, like a holiday garland, began scraping and sliding down the side of the tower toward the breach at its base.

When it reached the gap I had them tie it off, the chain hanging across the hole in the tower like an improbable entry bar. The French must have thought we’d gone mad. Whole companies of them were firing volleys at our heads atop the wall, while we returned the compliment with grapeshot. Metal whined and buzzed. Men screamed or gasped in shock as they were hit, and the ramparts were becoming slick with blood.

Djezzar appeared, still in his old mail like a crazed Saracen, striding up and down past the sprawled or crouched bodies of his soldiers, heedless of enemy fire. “Shoot, shoot! They’ll break when they t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 5 5

realize we won’t run! Their mine didn’t work! See, the tower still stands!”

I dashed down the tower stairs to the room where my companions were. Ned was cranking furiously, his shirt off, his great torso gleaming with sweat. The glass disk spun like a galloping wheel, the frictional pads buzzing like a hive. “Ready, guv’nor!”

“We’ll wait for them to get to the chain.”

“They’re coming,” Miriam said, peering out an arrow slit.

Running madly despite the withering fire decimating their ranks, the lead grenadiers charged across the causeway of rubble that half filled the moat and began clambering toward the hole their mine had made, one of them holding a tricolor banner. I heard Phelipeaux shout a command and there was a rippling bang as a volley from our men inside the base of the tower went off. The lead attackers pitched backward and the standard fell. New attackers scrambled over their bodies, shooting back into the breach, and the flag was raised again.

There was that familiar thud of lead hitting flesh, and the grunts and shouts of wounded men.

“Almost there, Ned.”

“All my muscle is in those jars,” he panted.

The leading attackers reached my iron garland and clung. Far from a barrier, it was more like a climbing aid as they reached back to hoist up comrades behind them. In no time the chain was thick with soldiers, like wasps on a line of treacle.

“Do it!” Miriam cried.

“Give a prayer to Franklin,” I muttered. I pushed a wooden lever that rammed a copper rod from the batteries against the small chain connected to the big one. There was a flash and crackle.

The effect was instantaneous. There was a shout, sparks, and the grenadiers flew off the chain as if kicked. A few could not detach themselves, screaming as they burned, and then hanging on the chain shuddering, their muscles putty. It was ghastly. I could smell their meat. Instantly, confusion reigned.

“Fire!” Phelipeaux shouted from below. More shots from our tower, and more attackers fell.

1 5 6

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“There is strange heat in that chain!” the grenadiers were shouting.

Men touched it with their bayonets and recoiled. Soldiers tried to lift or tug it and dropped like stunned oxen.

The contraption was working, but how long would the charge hold? Ned was wheezing. At some point the attackers would notice how the chain was suspended and break it down, but now they were milling uncertainly, even as more troops poured into the moat behind them. As they bunched, more of them were shot down.

Suddenly I realized an absence and looked wildly about. “Where’s Miriam?”

“She went to carry powder to Phelipeaux below,” Ned grunted.

“No! I need her here!” The breach would be a butcher’s shop. I ran for the door. “Keep cranking!”

He winced. “Aye.”

Two floors below, I stepped into the full fury of battle. Phelipeaux and his band of Turks and English marines, with fixed bayonets, were jammed in the tower’s base, firing and fencing through the ragged breach with French grenadiers trying to get under or over the chain.

Both sides had hurled grenades, and at least half our number were down. On the French side, the dead lay like shingles. From here the breach looked like a yawning cave open to the entire French army, a hideous hole of light and smoke. I spied Miriam at the very front, trying to drag one of the wounded back from French bayonets.

“Miriam, I need you above!”

She nodded, her dress torn and bloody, her hair a wild tangle, her hands red with gore. Fresh troops rushed, touched the chain and screamed, and hurled backward. Crank, Ned, crank, I prayed under my breath. I knew the charge would become exhausted.

Phelipeaux was slashing with his sword. He took a lieutenant through the chest, then slashed at another’s head. “Damned republicans!”

A pistol went off, narrowly missing his face.

Then there was a female scream and Miriam was being dragged from us. A soldier had crawled under and caught her legs. He began t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 5 7

hauling her back with him as if to throw her on my device. She’d be cooked!

“Ned, stop cranking! Pull back the copper rod!” I shouted. But there was no chance he could hear me. I plunged after her.

It was a charge into a wedge of Frenchmen who had crawled under. I grabbed a dropped musket and swung wildly, knocking men aside like tenpins, until it broke at the stock’s wrist. Finally I grabbed Miriam’s kidnapper and the three of us began to writhe, she clawing at his eyes.

We stumbled in the debris, hands clutching at us from both sides, and then I received a blow and she was pulled from me and hurled against the chain.

I braced, waiting for my witchcraft to kill what I now loved.

Nothing happened.

The metal had gone dead.

There was a great cheer, and the French surged forward. They hacked at the chain ends and it fell. A dozen men dragged it away, inspecting it for the source of its mysterious powers.

Miriam had fallen with the chain. I tried to crawl under the surging grenadiers to reach her, but was simply trampled. I grasped the hem of her dress, even as booted soldiers charged and stumbled over the top of us. I could hear shots and cries in at least three languages, men snorting and going down.

And then there was another roar, this one even louder than the mine because it was not confined underground. A massive bomb made from gunpowder kegs had finally been hurled from the tower top by Sidney Smith. It fell into the mass of Frenchmen who had bunched before the chain and now it exploded, its force redoubled by the moat and tower that bounded it. I hugged the rubble as the world dissolved into fire and smoke. Limbs and heads flew like chaff. The men who had been trampling us turned into a bloody shield, their bodies falling on us like beams. I went briefly deaf.

And then hands were digging at us to drag us backward. Phelipeaux was mouthing something I couldn’t hear, and pointing.

1 5 8

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

Once more, the French were retreating, their casualties far heavier than before.

I turned back, shouting a shout I couldn’t hear myself. “Miriam!

Are you alive?”

She was limp and silent.

¤

¤

¤

I carried her from the wreckage and out of the tower to the pasha’s gardens, my ears ringing but beginning to clear. Behind, Phelipeaux was shouting orders for engineers and laborers to begin repairing the breach. The garden air was smoky. Ash sifted down.

I lay my helpmate on a bench beside a fountain and put my ear to her lips. Yes! A whisper of tremulous breath. She was unconscious, not dead. I dipped a handkerchief in the water, pink from blood, and wiped her face. So soft, so smooth, under the grime! Finally the coolness brought her back. She blinked, shivering a little, and then abruptly jerked up. “What happened?” She was shaking.

“It worked. They retreated.”

She put her arms around my neck and clung. “Ethan, it’s so hor -

rible.”

“Maybe they won’t come back.”

She shook her head. “You told me Bonaparte is implacable.” I knew it would take more than an electric chain to defeat Napoleon.

Miriam looked down at herself. “I look like a butcher.”

“You look beautiful. Beautiful and bloody.” It was true. “Let’s get you inside.” I boosted her up and she leaned against me, one arm around my shoulders for support. I wasn’t quite sure where to take her, but I wanted to get away from Jericho’s foundry and the combat wall. I began to walk us toward the mosque.

Then Jericho appeared, led by an anxious Ned.

“My God, what happened?” the ironmonger asked.

“She got caught up in the fighting in the breach. She performed like an Amazon.”

“I’m all right, brother.”

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 5 9

His voice was accusatory. “You said she’d simply help with your sorcery.”

She interceded. “The men needed ammunition, Jericho.”

“I could have lost you.”

Then there was silence, and the strain of two men wanting a woman for different reasons. Ned stood mutely to one side, looking guilty as if it was his fault.

“Well, come back down to the foundry, then,” Jericho said tightly.

“No cannonballs will reach us there.”

“I’m going with Ethan.”

“Going? Where?”

They both looked at me, as if I knew. “Going,” I said, “where she can get some rest. It’s noisy as a factory at your forge, Jericho. Hot and dirty.”

“I don’t want you with her.” His voice was flat.

“I’m with Ethan, brother.” Her voice was soft but insistent.

And so we went, she leaning on me, the metallurgist left standing in the garden in frustration, his hands closing on nothing. Behind us, artillery rumbled like distant drums.

My friend Mohammad had taken quarters at Khan el-Omdan, the Pillars Inn, rather than sail away and leave us to Napoleon. In the excitement of working on the chain I’d forgotten about him, but I sought him out now. I’d wrapped a cloak around Miriam, but when we appeared at his apartment we both looked like refugees: smoke-stained, filthy, and torn.

“Mohammad, we need to find a place to rest.”

“Effendi, all the rooms are taken!”

“Surely . . .”

“Yet something can always be found for a price.” I smiled wryly. “Could we share your room?” He shook his head. “The walls are thin and water scarce. It’s no place for a lady. You don’t deserve better, but she does. Give me the rest of the money Sir Sidney gave you for your medal and your winnings at the duel.” He held out his hand.

I hesitated.

1 6 0

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“Come, you know I won’t cheat you. What good is money, unless you use it?”

So I handed it over and he disappeared. In half an hour he was back, my purse empty. “Come. A merchant has fled the city and a young physician has been using his home to sleep, but rarely gets to.

He rented me the keys.”

The house was dark, its shutters drawn, its furnishing draped and pushed against the wall. Its desertion by its owner had left a desolate air, and the doctor who had taken his place was only camped there. He was a Christian Levantine from Tyre named Zawani. He shook my hand and looked curiously at Miriam. “I’ll use the money for herbs and bandages.” We were far enough from the walls that the guns were muted. “There’s a bath above. Rest. I won’t be back until tomorrow.” He was handsome, his eyes kind, but already hollowed from exhaustion.

“The lady needs to recover . . .”

“There’s no need to explain. I’m a doctor.” We were left alone. The top floor had a bathing alcove with a white masonry dome above its pool that was pierced by thick panes of colored glass. Light came through in shafts of multiple colors like a dismantled rainbow. There was wood to heat the water, so I set to work while Miriam dozed. The room was full of steam when I woke her. “I’ve prepared a bath.” I made to leave but she stopped me, and undressed us both. Her breasts were small but perfect, firm, her nipples pink, her belly descending to a thatch of pale hair. She was a virginal Madonna, scrubbing both of us of the dirt of battle until she was once more alabaster.

The merchant’s mattress was elevated as high as my waist on an ornately carved bed, with drawers underneath and a canopy overhead.

She crawled up first and lay back, so I could see her in the pale light.

There’s no sight lovelier than a welcoming woman. The sweetness of her swallows you, like the embrace of a warm sea. The topography of her body was a snowy mountain range, mysterious and unexplored.

Did I even remember what to do? It felt like a thousand years. An odd, sudden memory of Astiza intruded—a knife to the heart—but then Miriam spoke.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 6 1

“This is one of those moments I told you about, Ethan.” So I took her, slowly and gently. She wept the first time, and then clung fiercely, crying out, the second. I clung too, shaking and gasping at the end, my eyes wetting when I thought first of Astiza, then of Napoleon, then of Miriam, and how long it would be before the French came again, as furious now as they’d been at Jaffa. If they got inside, they’d kill us all.

I turned my head so she couldn’t see any tear or worry, and we slept.

Near midnight, I was jostled awake. I clutched a pistol, but then saw it was Mohammad.

“What the devil?” I hissed. “Can’t we have some privacy?” He put his finger to his lips and beckoned with his head. Come.

“Now?”

He nodded emphatically. Sighing, I climbed out, the floor cold, and followed him out to the main room.

“What are you doing here?” I grumbled, holding a blanket around myself like a toga. The city seemed quiet, the guns taking a rest.

“I’m sorry, effendi, but Sir Sidney and Phelipeaux said this shouldn’t wait. The French used an arrow to fire this over the wall. It has your name on it.”

“An arrow? By Isaac Newton, what century are we in?” A small piece of burlap was tied to the arrow. Sure enough, a tag, with fine pen, read, “Ethan Gage.” Franklin would have admired the postal efficiency.

“How do they know I’m here?”

“Your electric chain is like a banner announcing your presence.

The whole province is talking about it, I would guess.” True enough. So what could our enemies be sending me that was so small?

I unwrapped the burlap and rolled its content onto the palm of my hand.

It was a ruby ring, its jewel the size of a cherry, with a tag attached that read, simply, “She needs the angels. Monge.” My world reeled.

The last time I’d seen the jewel, it had been on Astiza’s finger.

c h a p t e r

1 5

Mohammad was watching me closely. “This ring means something to you, my friend?”

“This is it? No other message?” Monge undoubtedly was Gaspard Monge, the French mathematician I’d seen at Jaffa.

“And it is not just the size of the jewel, is it?” Mohammad pressed.

I sat down heavily. “I knew the woman who wore it.” Astiza was alive!

“And the French army would catapult her ring for what reason, exactly?”

What reason indeed? I turned the ring over, remembering its origin. I’d insisted Astiza take it from the subterranean treasure trove we’d found under the Great Pyramid, despite her protestations that such loot was cursed. Then we’d briefly forgotten it until she was trying to climb the tether of Conte’s runaway balloon into my wicker basket, a desperate Count Silano clinging to her ankles. She remembered the curse and pleaded with me to get the ring off, but I couldn’t.

So, rather than drag me down within range of French soldiers, she cut the tether and fell with Silano, screaming, into the Nile. The balloon shot up so tumultuously that I didn’t see their landing, there t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 6 3

was a volley from the French troops, and by the time I peered into the sun-dazzled waters . . . nothing. It was as if she’d vanished from the earth. Until now.

And the angels? The seraphim we’d found. I’d have to take them back from Miriam. “They want me to come looking.”

“So it is a trap!” my companion said. “They fear you and your electrical magic.”

“No, not a trap, I think.” I didn’t flatter myself that they considered me such a formidable enemy that they had to lure me outside the walls simply to shoot me. What I did suspect is that they hadn’t given up our mutual quest for the Book of Thoth. If there was one way to enlist me again, it was the promise of Astiza. “They simply know I’m alive, because of the electricity, and they’ve learned something I can add to. It’s about what I was searching for in Jerusalem, I’m guessing.

And they know that the one thing that would make me come back to them is news of this woman.”

“Effendi, you cannot mean to leave these walls!” I glanced back to where Miriam was sleeping. “I have to.” He was baffled. “Because of a woman? You have one, right here.”

“Because there’s something out there waiting for rediscovery, and its use or misuse will affect the fate of the world.” I thought. “I want to help the French find it, but then steal it from them. For that I need help, Mohammad. I’ll have to escape through Palestine once I have Astiza and the prize. Someone with local knowledge.” He blanched. “I barely escaped Jaffa, effendi! To go amid the Frankish devils . . .”

“Might give you a share of the greatest treasure on earth,” I said blandly.

“Greatest treasure?”

“Not guaranteed, of course.”

He considered the matter. “What share?”

“Well, five percent seems reasonable, don’t you think?”

“For getting you through the Palestinian wilderness? A fifth, at least!”

“I intend to ask other help. Seven percent is the absolute maximum I can afford.”

1 6 4

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

He bowed. “A tenth, then, is utterly reasonable. Plus a small token if we get the help of my cousins and brothers and uncles. And expenses for horses and camels. Guns, food. Hardly a pittance, if it’s really from the greatest treasure.”

I sighed. “Let’s just see if we can get to Monge without being shot, all right?”

There was, of course, a nagging matter as we began our brisk planning. I’d just slept with the sweetest woman I’d ever met, Miriam, and was planning to take back my seraphim and sneak off to learn the truth about Astiza without leaving the poor woman so much as a word. I felt like a cad, and hadn’t the faintest idea how to explain myself without sounding caddish. It wasn’t that I was disloyal to Miriam, I was simply also loyal to the memory of the first woman, and loved them both in different ways. Astiza had become to me the essence of Egypt, of ancient mystery, a beauty whose quest for ancient knowledge had become my own. We’d met when she helped try to assassinate me, Napoleon himself leading the little charge that captured her. Then she’d saved my life, more than once, and filled my empty character with purpose. We’d not just been lovers, we’d become partners in a quest, and nearly died in the Great Pyramid.

It was perfectly reasonable to go looking for Astiza—the ring had ignited memories like a match to a trail of gunpowder—but a trifle awkward to explain to Miriam. Women can be grumpy about this kind of thing. So I’d go find the meaning of Astiza’s ring, rescue her, put the two of them together, and then . . .

What? Well, as Sidney Smith had promised, it’s splendid how these things work out. “So convenient it is to be a reasonable creature,” Ben Franklin had said, “since it enables one to do everything one has a mind to do anyway.” Old Ben had entertained the ladies himself, while his wife stewed back in Philadelphia.

“Should we wake your woman?” Mohammad asked.

“Oh no.”

¤

¤

¤

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 6 5

When I asked Big Ned to come along, he was as hard to convince as a dog called for a walk by its master. He was one of those men who do nothing by halves; he was either my most implacable enemy or my most faithful servant. He’d become convinced I was a sorcerer of rare power, and was merely biding my time before distributing the wealth of Solomon.

Jericho, in contrast, had long since given up all talk of treasure.

He was intrigued when I woke him to explain that the ruby ring had belonged to Astiza, but only because the distraction might keep me away from his sister.

“So you must take care of Miriam while I’m gone,” I told him, trying to salve my conscience by leaving him in charge. He looked so pleased that for a moment I considered whether he’d somehow sent me the ring himself.

But then he blinked and shook his head. “I can’t let you go alone.”

“I won’t be alone. I have Mohammad and Ned.”

“A heathen and a lunkhead? It will be a contest to see which of the three leads you into disaster first. No, you need someone with a level head.”

“Who is Astiza, if she’s alive. Smith and Phelipeaux and the rest of the garrison need you more than I do, Jericho. Defend the city and Miriam. I’ll still cut you in when we’ve found the treasure.” You can’t dangle wealth in a man’s mind and not have him think nostalgically about the prospect, however slim.

He looked at me with new respect. “It’s risky, crossing French lines.

Maybe there’s something to you after all, Ethan Gage.”

“Your sister thinks so too.” And before we could quarrel about that issue, I set off with Mohammad and Ned. We’d be caught in cross fire if we simply strolled outside the walls, so we took the boat Mohammad had fled Jaffa in. The city was a dark silhouette against the stars, to give the French as few aiming points as possible, while the glow of enemy campfires produced an aurora behind the trenches. Phospho-rescence was silver in our wake. We landed on the sandy beach behind the semicircle of French lines and crept to their camp the back way, crossing the ruts and trampled crops of war.

1 6 6

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

It’s easier than you might guess to walk into an army from its rear, which is the province of the wagon masters, sutlers, camp followers, and malingerers who aren’t used to reaching for a gun. I told my compatriots to wait in a thicket by a tepid stream and marched in with that superior air of a savant, a man who has an opinion on everything and accomplishment in none. “I have a message for Gaspard Monge from his academic colleagues in Cairo,” I told a sentry.

“He’s helping at the hospital.” He pointed. “Visit at your own peril.”

Had we already wounded that many? The eastern sky was beginning to lighten when I found the hospital tents, stitched together like a vast circus canvas. Monge was sleeping on a cot and looked sick himself, a middle-aged scientist-adventurer whom the expedition was turning old. He was pale, despite the sun, and thinner, hollowed out by sickness. I hesitated to wake him.

I glanced about. Soldiers, quietly moaning, lay in parallel rows that receded into the gloom. It seemed too many for the casualties we’d inflicted. I bent to inspect one, who was twitching fitfully, and recoiled at what I saw. There were pustules on his face and, when I lifted the sheet, an ominous swelling at his groin.

Plague.

I stepped back hastily, sweating. There had been rumors it was getting worse, but confirmation brought back historic dread. Disease was the shadow of armies, plague the handmaiden of sieges, and only rarely confined to one side. What if it crossed the walls?

On the other hand, the disease gave Napoleon a tight deadline.

He had to win before plague decimated his army. No wonder he had attacked impetuously.

“Ethan, is that you?”

I turned. Monge was sitting up, tousled and weary, blinking awake.

Again, his face reminded me of a wise old dog. “Once more I’ve come for your counsel, Gaspard.”

He smiled. “First we thought you dead, then we guessed you were the mad electrician somehow inside the walls of Acre, and now you materialize at my summons. You may indeed be a wizard. Or the t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 6 7

most baffled man in either army, never knowing to which side you belong.”

“I was perfectly happy on the other side, Gaspard.”

“Bah. With a despotic pasha, a lunatic Englishman, and a jealous French royalist? I don’t believe it. You’re more rational than you pretend.”

“Phelipeaux said it was Bonaparte who was the jealous one at school, not he.”

“Phelipeaux is on the wrong side of history, as is every man behind those walls. The revolution is remaking man from centuries of superstition and tyranny. Rationalism will always triumph over superstition. Our army promises liberty.”

“With the guillotine, massacre, and plague.” He frowned at me, disappointed at my intransigence, and then the corners of his mouth twitched. Finally he laughed. “What philosophers we are, at the end of the earth!”

“The center, the Jews would say.”

“Yes. Every army eventually tramps through Palestine, the crossroads of three continents.”

“Gaspard, where did you get this ring?” I held it out, the stone like a bubble of blood in the paleness. “Astiza was wearing it when I last saw her, falling into the Nile.”

“Bonaparte ordered the arrow missive.”

“But why?”

“Well, she’s alive, for one thing.”

My heart took off at full gallop. “And her condition?”

“I haven’t seen her, but I’ve had word. She was in a coma, and under the care of Count Silano for a month. But I’m told she’s recovered better than he has. He entered the water first, I suspect, she on top of him, so he broke the surface. His hip was shattered, and he’ll limp for the rest of his life.”

The beat of my pulse was like drums in my ears. To know, to know . . .

“Now she cares for him,” Monge went on.

It was like a slap. “You must be joking.” 1 6 8

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“Takes care, I mean. She hasn’t given up the peculiar quest you all seem to be on. They were furious to hear you’d been condemned at Jaffa—that was the work of that buffoon Najac; I don’t know why Napoleon wouldn’t listen to me— and horrified that you’d been executed. You know something they need. Then there were rumors you were alive, and she sent the ring. We saw your electrical trick. My instructions were to inquire about angels. Do you know what she means?”

Once more I could feel them pressing my skin. “Perhaps. I must see her.”

“She’s not here. She and Silano have gone to Mount Nebo.”

“Mount what?”

“East of Jerusalem, across the Jordan River. There Moses finally spied the Promised Land, and died before he could enter it. Now why are they so interested in Moses, Ethan Gage?” He was watching me carefully.

So Monge, and probably Bonaparte, didn’t know everything. What kind of game were Silano and Astiza playing? “I have no idea,” I lied.

“And what do you know about these angels of yours that makes them as anxious to find you as you are to find them?”

“I have even less idea of that,” I said truthfully.

“You’ve come alone?”

“I have some friends, waiting in a safe place.”

“No place is safe in Palestine. This is a pestilential country. Our friend Conte has devised elaborate wagons to transport more siege artillery from Egypt, since the perfidious British captured our guns at sea, but it’s been a running skirmish to get them here. These people don’t know when they are beaten.”

If Napoleon was expecting big guns, time was short. “What happens at Mount Nebo?”

Monge shrugged. “If you’d confide in your fellow savants, Gage, perhaps we could illuminate your future with more precision. As it is, you keep your own counsel, and end up in trouble. It’s like your goose chase over the Pascal’s triangle that was inscribed on your medallion—say, did you finally get rid of that old toy?” t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 6 9

“Oh yes.” Monge had become convinced my medallion in Egypt had been a modern fraud. Astiza, out of his hearing, had called him a fool. He was not a fool, but burdened by the certainty that comes with too much education. The correlation between schooling and common sense is limited in the extreme. “There’s nothing to confide. I was simply conducting electrical experiments when you sent this ring over our walls.”

“Experiments that killed my men.”

The voice made me jump. It was Bonaparte, moving out of the shadows! He seemed to be everywhere, always. Did he sleep? He looked sallow, restless, and his gray eyes cast their cold hold, as they did toward so many men—like a master to his steed. Again I marveled at his knack of seeming bigger than he is, and how he exuded a sense of seductive energy. “Monge is right, Gage, your proper place is on the side of science and reason—the revolution’s side.” We were enemies, I had to remind myself. “So are you going to try to shoot me again?”

“That is what my army was trying to do yesterday, was it not?” he said mildly. “And you and your electrical sorcery helped best us.”

“After you tried to shoot or drown me at Jaffa at the advice of that madman Najac. There I was, facing eternity, and when I look up you are reading cheap novels!”

“My novels are not cheap, and I have an interest in literature as I do in science. Did you know I wrote fiction as a youth? I had dreams of being published.”

Despite myself, I was curious. “Love or war?”

“War, of course, and passion. One of my favorites was called The Masked Prophet. It was about a Muslim fanatic in the eighth century, fancying himself the Mahdi, who goes to war with the caliph. Prophetic in its setting, no?”

“What happens?

“The hero’s dreams are doomed when he’s blinded in battle, but to keep his affliction secret he covers his face with a mask of brilliant silver. He tells his men he had to cover his face so the Mahdi’s radi-ance wouldn’t blind those who look upon him. They believe him. But 1 7 0

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

he cannot win, and pride will not allow surrender, so he orders his men to dig a gigantic trench to swallow the enemy charge. Then he invites his followers to a feast and poisons them all. He drags the bodies into the trench, sets fire to the corpses, and runs into the flames himself.

Melodramatic, I admit. Adolescent morbidness.” This was the imagination at work in the Holy Land? “If you don’t mind me asking, what was your point?”

“‘The extremes to which the mania for fame can push a man’ was my closing line.” He smiled.

“Prophetic as well.”

“You think my story was autobiographical? I’m not blind, Ethan Gage. If anything, I’m cursed by seeing too well. And one thing I see is that now you are at your proper place, on the side of science you never should have left. You think yourself different than Count Silano, and yet you both want to know—in that way, you are exactly alike. So is the woman you’re both drawn to, all of you curious as cats.

I could order you shot, but it’s more delicious to let the three of you solve your mystery, don’t you think?”

I sighed. “At least you seem more genial than when we last met, General.”

“I have a clearer sense of my own direction, which always settles one’s mood. I haven’t given up seducing you, American. I still hope we can remake the world for the better.”

“Better like the slaughter at Jaffa?”

“Moments of ruthlessness can save millions, Gage. I made clear to the Ottomans the risk of resistance so this war can end quickly. If not for fanatics like Smith and Phelipeaux, traitor to his own nation, they would have surrendered and no blood would be shed. Don’t let yourself be trapped in Acre by their folly. Go, learn what you can with Silano and Astiza, and then make a scholar’s decision of what to do with it. I’m a member of the Institute myself, remember. I will abide with science. Won’t I, Gaspard?”

The mathematician gave a thin smile. “No one has done more to marry science, politics, and military technology, General.”

“And no one has worked harder for France that Doctor Monge t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 7 1

here, who I have nursed myself as ailments assail him. He is stead-fast! Learn from him, Gage! Now, given your strange history, you will understand that I must assign you an escort. You have an interest in keeping an eye out for each other, I believe?” And out the shadows stepped Pierre Najac, looking as disheveled and murderous as when I’d left him.

“You must be joking.”

“On the contrary, guarding you is his punishment for not dealing more intelligently with you before,” Bonaparte said. “Isn’t it, Pierre?”

“I will get him to Silano,” the man growled.

I’d not forgotten the burns and beatings. “This torturer is nothing more than a thief. I don’t need his escort.”

“But I do,” Napoleon said. “I’m tired of you wandering off in all directions. You’ll go with Najac or not at all. He’s your ticket to the woman, Gage.”

Najac spat. “Don’t worry. After we find whatever it is we’re looking for, you’ll have your chance to kill me. As I’ll have a chance to kill you.”

I looked at what he was carrying. “Not with my rifle, you won’t.” Napoleon was puzzled. “Your rifle?”

“I helped make it in Jerusalem. Then this bandit stole it.”

“I disarmed you. You were a captive!”

“And now an ally once again, whether I want to be or not. Give it back.”

“I’ll be damned if I will!”

“I won’t help if you won’t return it.”

Bonaparte looked amused. “Yes, you will, Gage. You’ll do it for the woman, and you’ll do it because you could no more give up this mystery than pass a promising game of cards. Najac captured you, and he’s right. Your gun is a prize of war.”

“It’s not even that good,” the scoundrel added. “It shoots like a blunderbuss.”

“A weapon’s accuracy depends on the man who wields it,” I replied.

I knew the piece shot like the very devil. “What do you think of its telescope?”

1 7 2

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“A stupid experiment. I took it off.”

“It was a gift. If we’re searching for treasure, I need a spyglass.”

“That’s fair,” Napoleon adjudicated. “Give that to him.” Grudgingly, Najac did so. “And my tomahawk.” I knew he must have it.

“It’s dangerous to let the American be armed,” Najac warned.

“It isn’t a weapon, it’s a tool.”

“Give it to him, Najac. If you can’t control the American with a dozen men when all he has is a hatchet, perhaps I should send you back to the constabulary.”

The man grimaced, but gave it up. “This is an instrument for savages, not savants. You look like a rustic, carrying it about.” I hefted its pleasing weight. “And you look like a thief, brandishing my rifle.”

“Once we find your damned secret, Gage, you and I will settle once and for all.”

“Indeed.” My rifle was already nicked and marked—Najac was as much an oaf with firearms as he was unkempt in clothing—but it still looked as slim and smooth as a maiden’s limb. I longed for it. “Do me a favor, Najac. Escort me from a distance where I won’t have to smell you.”

“But within rifle shot, I promise.”

“Alliances are never easy,” Bonaparte quipped. “But now, Najac has the rifle and Gage the glass. You can aim together!” The annoying joke made me want to discomfit the general. “And I suppose you want me to hurry?” I gestured at the sick.

“Hurry?”

“The plague. It must be panicking your troops.” But I could never get him off-balance. “It gives them urgency. So yes, make haste. But do not concern yourself too deeply with my campaign timing. Greater things than you know are afoot. Your quest is not just about Syria, but Europe. France herself waits for me.”

c h a p t e r

1 6

I’d assumed we’d travel directly to Mount Nebo with Najac’s band of cutthroats, but he laughed when I suggested it. “We’d have to cut our way through half the Ottoman army!” Ever since Napoleon had invaded Palestine, the Sublime Porte of Constantinople had been gathering soldiers to stop the French. Galilee, Najac informed me, was swarming with Turkish and Mameluke cavalry. Gallic liberation was not being embraced in the Holy Land with any more enthusiasm than it had been in Egypt.

Now General Jean-Baptiste Kléber, who had landed with Bonaparte on the beach in Alexandria nearly a year ago, would take his division to brush these Muslims away. My companions and I would accompany his troops eastward to the Jordan River, which flows southward from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea. Then we’d strike south on our own, following the fabled Jordan until it passed by the foot of Mount Nebo.

Mohammad and Ned were not happy at having to march with the French. Kléber was a popular commander, but he could also be an impetuous hothead. Yet we had no choice. The Ottomans were directly in our path and in no mood to differentiate between one 1 7 4

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

group of Europeans and another. We’d rely on Kléber to bludgeon a path through.

“Mount Nebo!” Mohammad exclaimed. “It’s for ghosts and goats!”

“Treasure, I’d guess,” Ned said shrewdly. “Why else would our magician here be signing on again with the frogs? The hoard of Moses, eh, guv’nor?”

For a lummox, he guessed entirely too much. “It’s a meeting of antiquity scholars,” I said. “A woman I knew in Egypt is alive and waiting. She’ll help solve the mystery we tried to answer in the tunnels beneath Jerusalem.”

“Aye, and I hear you already have a pretty bauble.” I shot a look at Mohammad, who shrugged. “The sailor wanted to know what prompted our expedition, effendi.”

“Then know this is bad luck.” I took the ring from my pocket.

“It’s from the grave of a dead Pharaoh, and such plunder is always cursed.”

“Cursed? That’s a life’s wages right there,” Ned said in wonder.

“But you don’t notice me wearing it, do you?”

“Wouldn’t match your color,” Ned agreed. “Too gaudy, that is.”

“So we march with the French until we can break free. There’s likely to be a scrape or two. Are you willing?”

“A scrape without a scrap of steel between us, except that sausage chopper of yours,” Ned said. “And you do have a poor choice of escorts, guv’nor. That Najac character looks like he’d boil his children, if he could get a shilling for the broth. Still, I likes being outside the walls. Felt boxed, I did.”

“And now you will see the real Palestine,” Mohammad promised.

“The whole world wishes to possess her.” Which was exactly the problem, as near as I could tell.

Were we French allies—or prisoners? We were weaponless except for my tomahawk, with no freedom of movement, guarded by both escorting chasseurs and Najac’s gang. Yet Kléber sent a bottle of wine and his compliments, we were given good mounts and treated as guests of the march, riding ahead of the main column to escape the worst of the dust. We were prized dogs on a leash.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 7 5

Ned and Najac took an immediate disliking to each other, the sailor remembering the fracas that had killed Tentwhistle and Najac jealous of the giant’s strength. If the villain came near us he’d swing his coat wide to display the two pistols crammed in his sash, remind-ing us he was not to be trifled with. In turn, Ned announced loudly that he hadn’t seen a frog so ugly since a mutant croaker in the privy pond behind Portsmouth’s sleaziest brothel.

“If your brain was even half the size of your bicep I might be interested in what you have to say,” Najac said.

“And if your pudding was even half the size of your flapping tongue, you wouldn’t have to look so hard for it every time you drop your breeches,” Ned replied.

Despite the quarreling, I relished our release from Acre. The Holy Land arouses uncommon passion, well watered in the north and bright spring green. Wheat and barley grew like wild grass, and broad paint strokes of color came from red poppies and yellow mustard.

There was purple flax, golden chrysanthemum in natural bouquets of twisted stems, and tall Easter lilies. Was this God’s garden? Away from the sea the sky was the blue of the Virgin’s scarf, and light picked out the mica and quartz like tiny jewels.

“Look, a yellow bunting,” Mohammad said. “The bird means summer is coming.”

Our division was a blue snake slithering through Eden, the French tricolor heralding our improbable penetration of the Ottoman Empire.

Drifts of sheep divided like the sea for our passage. Light field guns bounced in the sun, their bronze winking like a signal. White covered wagons swayed. Somewhere to the northeast was Damascus, and to the south, Jerusalem. The soldiers were in a good mood, happy to get away from tedious siege duty, and the division had money enough—

captured at Jaffa—to eat well, instead of stealing. At the end of the second day we climbed a final ridge and I had a glimpse of the Sea of Galilee, blue soup in a vast green and brown bowl, far, far below. It is a huge lake sunken below sea level, hazy and holy. We didn’t descend but instead followed ridges south to famous Nazareth.

The home of the Savior is a gritty, desultory place, its main road a 1 7 6

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

dirt cart track and its traffic mainly goats. A mosque and a Franciscan monastery stand brow to brow, as if keeping an eye on each other. We drew water from Mary’s Well and visited the Church of the Annun-ciation, an Orthodox grotto with the kind of gewgaws that give Prot-estants indigestion. Then we marched down again to the rich, lazy vale of the Jezreel Valley, the breadbasket of ancient Israel and a thoroughfare for armies for three thousand years. Cattle grazed on grassy mounds that once were great fortresses. Carts clattered on roads that Roman legions had traversed. My companions were impatient at this military meandering, but I knew I was experiencing what few Americans can ever hope to see. The Holy Land! Here, by all accounts, men come closer to God. Some of the soldiers crossed themselves or muttered prayers at sacred places, despite the revolution’s official atheism.

But when evening fell they sharpened their bayonets, the rasping as familiar as crickets as we fell asleep.

As anxious as I was to see Astiza, I also felt uneasy. I had not, after all, managed to save her. She was once more somehow entangled with the occult investigator Silano. My political alliances were more confused than ever, and Miriam was waiting in Acre. I practiced first lines for all of them, but they seemed trite.

Mohammad meanwhile warned that our three thousand companions were not enough. “At every village there are rumors the Turks are massing against us,” he warned. “More men than stars in the sky.

There are troops from Damascus and Constantinople, Ibrahim Bey’s surviving Mamelukes from Egypt, and hill fighters from Samaria.

Shi’a and Sunni are joining together. Their mercenaries range from Morocco to Armenia. It’s madness to stay with these French. They are doomed.”

I gestured to Najac’s scoundrels. “We have no choice.” General Kléber, of course, was trying to find this Turkish host instead of evade it, hoping to flank it by coming down from the Nazarene highlands. “Passion governs,” old Ben liked to say, “and never governs wisely.” And indeed Kléber, competent as generals go, had chafed as a subordinate to Napoleon for a full year. He was older, taller, stronger, and more experienced, and yet the glory of the Egyptian campaign t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 7 7

had been won by the Corsican. It was Bonaparte who was featured in the bulletins sent home on the Egyptian campaign, Bonaparte who was growing rich on spoils, Bonaparte who was making possible great new archeological discoveries, and Bonaparte who ruled the mood of the army. Even worse, at the Battle of El-Arish at the beginning of the Palestinian campaign, Kléber’s division had performed indifferently, while his rival, Reynier, had won Napoleon’s praise. It didn’t matter that Kléber had the stature, bearing, and shaggy locks of the military hero that Bonaparte lacked, and that he was a better shot and a better rider. His colleagues deferred to the upstart. None would admit it, but for all his faults, Bonaparte was their intellectual superior, the sun around which they instinctively revolved. So this independent foray to destroy Ottoman reinforcements was Kléber’s chance to shine. Just as Bonaparte had broken camp in the middle of the night to strike the Mameluke at the pyramids before they were fully ready, so Kléber decided to set out in the dark to surprise the Turkish camp.

“Madness!” said Mohammad. “We’re too far away to surprise them.

We’ll find the Turks just as the sun is coming up in our eyes.” Indeed, the path around Mount Tabor was far longer than Kléber had anticipated. Instead of attacking at 2:00 a.m., as planned, the French encountered the first Turkish pickets at dawn. By the time we had drawn up ranks for an assault, our prey had time for breakfast.

Soon there were swarms of Ottoman cavalry dashing hither and yon, and Kléber’s ambition began to be tempered by common sense. The rising sun revealed that he had led three thousand troops to assault twenty-five thousand. I do have an instinct for the wrong side.

“So the ring is bad luck,” Mohammad muttered. “Is it possible Bonaparte is still trying to execute you, effendi, but merely in a more complicated way?”

The three of us gaped at the huge herd of menacing cavalry, horses half swallowed by the tall spring wheat as their riders pointlessly fired guns in the air. The only thing that prevented us from being overrun immediately was the enemy’s confusion; no one seemed to be in charge. Their army was stitched from too many corners of the empire.

We could see the rainbow colors of the various Ottoman regiments, 1 7 8

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

great trains of wagons behind them, and tents pitched bright as a carnival. If you want a pretty sight, go see war before the fighting starts.

“It’s like the Battle of the Pyramids all over again,” I tried to reassure. “Look at their disarray. They have so many soldiers they can’t get organized.”

“They don’t need organization,” Big Ned muttered. “All they need is stampede. By barnacle, I wish I were back on a frigate. It’s cleaner, too.”

If Kléber had proved rash in underestimating his opponents, he was a skilled tactician. He backed us up a hill called Djebel-el-Dahy, giving us the high ground. There was a ruined Crusader castle called Le-Faba near the top that overlooked the broad valley, and the French general put one hundred of his men on its ruined ramparts.

The remainder formed two squares of infantry, one commanded by Kléber and the other by General Jean-Andoche Junot. These squares were like forts made of men, each man facing outward and the ranks pointing in all four directions so that it was impossible to turn their flank. The veterans and sergeants stood behind the newest troops to prevent them from backing and collapsing the formation. This tactic had baffled the Mamelukes in Egypt, and it was about to do the same to the Ottomans. No matter which way they charged, they would meet a firm hedge of musket barrels and bayonets. Our supply train and our trio, with Najac’s men, were in the center.

The Turks foolishly gave Kléber time to dress his ranks and then made probing charges, galloping up near our men while whooping and swinging swords. The French were perfectly silent until the command rang out to “Fire!” and then there was a flash and rippling bang, a great gout of white smoke, and the closest enemy cavalry toppled from their horses. The others steered away.

“Blimey, they have more pluck than sense,” Ned said, squinting.

The sun kept climbing. More and more enemy cavalry poured into the gentle vale below us, shaking lances and warbling cries. Periodically a few hundred would wheel and charge toward our squares.

Another volley, and the results would be the same. Soon there was a semicircle of dead around us, their silks like cut flowers.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 7 9

“What the devil are they doing?” Ned muttered. “Why don’t they really charge?”

“Waiting for us to run out of water and ammunition, perhaps,” Mohammad said.

“By swallowing all of our lead?”

I think they were waiting for us to break and run—their other enemies must be less resolute—but the French didn’t waver. We bristled like a hedgehog, and they couldn’t get their horses to close.

Kléber stayed mounted, ignoring the whining bullets, slowly riding up and down the ranks to encourage his men. “Hold firm,” he coached.

“Hold firm. Help will come.”

Help? Bonaparte at Acre was far away. Was this some kind of Ottoman game, to let us sweat and worry until they finally made the penultimate charge?

Yet as I sighted through the scope that Sir Sidney had given me, I began to doubt such an attack would come. Many Turks were holding back, inviting others to break us first. Some were sprawled on the grass to eat, and others asleep. At the height of a battle!

As the day advanced, however, our endurance sapped and their confidence grew. Powder was growing short. We began to hold our volleys until the last second, to give precious bullets the surest target.

They sensed our doubt. A great shout would go up, spurs would be applied to horses, and waves of cavalry would come at us like break-ers on a beach. “Hold . . . hold . . . let them come . . . fire! Now, now, second rank, fire!” Horses screamed and tumbled. Brilliantly cos-tumed janissaries tumbled amid clods of earth. The bravest would spur onward, weaving between their toppling fellows, but when they reached the hedge of bayonets their horses would rear. Pistols and muskets pocked our ranks, but the carnage was far worse on their side. So many horse carcasses littered the fields that it was becoming difficult for the Turks to hurtle past to get at us. Ned, Mohammad, and I helped drag French wounded into the center of the squares.

Now it was noon. The French injured were moaning for water and the rest of us longed for it. Our hill seemed dry as an Egyptian tomb.

The sun had halted its arc across the sky, promising to beat down 1 8 0

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

on us forever, and the Turks were taunting each other on. A hundred French had fallen, and Kléber gave orders for the two squares to join into one, thickening the ranks and giving the men badly needed reassurance. It looked like all the Muslims in the world were massed against us. The fields had been trampled into soil and dust rose in great pillars. The Turks tried sweeping over the crest of Djebel-el-Dahy and coming down on us from above, but chasseurs and cara-biniers in the old Crusader castle forced them to diverge and they spilled uselessly down both sides of our formation, letting us thin them by firing into their flanks.

“Now!” A volley would roar out, smoke acrid and blinding, bits of wadding fluttering like snow. Horses, screaming and riderless, would go galloping away. Then teeth would tear at cartridges, pouring in precious powder. The ground was white with paper.

By midafternoon my mouth was cotton. Flies buzzed over the dead.

Some soldiers fainted from standing in place too long. The Ottomans seemed impotent, and yet we could go nowhere. It would end, I supposed, when we all died of thirst.

“Mohammad, when they overrun us pretend you’re dead until it’s over. You can emerge as a Muslim. No need to share the fate of addled Europeans.”

“Allah does not tell a man to desert his friends,” he replied grimly.

Then a fresh cry rose up. Men claimed they’d spied the glimmer of bayonets in the valley to the west. “Here comes le petit caporal !” Kléber was disbelieving. “How could Bonaparte get here so soon?” He gestured to me. “Come. Bring your naval spyglass.” My English telescope had proven sharper than standard French army issue.

I followed him out of the comfort of the square and onto the exposed slope of our hill. We passed a ring of bodies of fallen Muslims, some groaning in the grass, their blood a scarlet smear on the green wheat.

The Crusader ruins gave a panoramic view. If anything, the Turks looked even more numerous now that I could see farther over their ranks. Thousands trotted this way and that, gesturing as they argued what to do. Hundreds of their comrades already carpeted the hill t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 8 1

below us. In the distance their tents, supplies, and thousands of servants and camp followers were visible. We were like a blue rock in a sea of red, white, and green. One determined charge and surely they would crack our formation open! Then men would run, and it would be the end.

Except they hadn’t yet. “There.” Kléber pointed. “Do you see French bayonets?”

I peered until my eye ached. The high grass billowed in the west, but whether from the passage of infantry or wind I didn’t know. The lush earth had swallowed the antlike maneuvering of armies. “It could be a French column, because the high grass is moving. But as you say, how could it come so quickly?”

“We’ll die of thirst if we stay here,” Kléber said. “Or men will desert and have their throats cut. I don’t know if there are reinforcements that way or not, but we are going to find out.” He trotted back down, with me following.

“Junot, start forming columns. We’re going to meet our relievers!” The men cheered, hoping against hope that they were not simply opening themselves to being overrun. As the square dissolved into two columns, the Turkish cavalry became more animated. Here was a chance to swoop down on our flanks and rear! We could hear them shouting, horns blaring.

“Forward!” We began marching downhill.

Turkish lances waved and danced.

Then there was a cannon shot in the distance. The businesslike crack was as French as a shouted order in a Parisian restaurant, so dis-tinct are calibers of ordnance. We looked and saw a plume of smoke drift off. Men began crying with relief. Help was indeed coming! The French began to cheer, even sing.

The enemy cavalry hesitated, peering west.

The tricolors rippled as we tramped down Djebel-el-Dahy, as if on parade.

Then smoke began rising from the enemy camp. There were shots, faint screams, and the triumphant wail of French bugles. Napoleon’s cavalry had broken into the Turkish rear and was sowing panic. Pre-1 8 2

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

cious supplies began to go up in flames. With a roar, stored ammunition exploded.

“Steady!” Kléber reminded. “Keep ranks!”

“When they come at us, crouch and fire on command!” Junot added.

We saw a small lake by the village of Fula. Our excitement grew.

There was an Ottoman regiment in front of it, looking irresolute.

Now the officers galloped up and down the columns, giving orders to ready a charge.

“Strike!” With a cheer, the bloodied French swept the rest of the way down the hill and toward the Samaritan infantry that garrisoned the village. There were shots, a plunge of bayonets and clubbed muskets, and then the enemy was running. Meanwhile Turks were fleeing from whatever had appeared in the west as well. Miraculously, in minutes an army of twenty-five thousand was collapsing into panic, fleeing east before a few thousand Frenchmen. Bonaparte’s cavalry galloped past us, giving chase toward the valley of the Jordan. Ottomans were hunted and slain all the way to the river.

We plunged into the Fula pond, slaking our thirst, and then stood wet and dripping like drunken men, our cartridge pouches empty.

Napoleon galloped up, beaming like the savior he was, his breeches gray from dust.

“I suspected you’d get yourself into trouble, Kléber!” he shouted. “I set out yesterday after reading the reports!” He smiled. “They ran at the crack of a cannon!”

c h a p t e r

1 7

With his instinct for the political, Bonaparte immediately named our near-disaster the Battle of Mount Tabor—a much more imposing and pronounceable peak than modestly sloping Djebel-el-Dahy, though several miles distant—and proclaimed it “one of the most lopsided victories in military history. I want the full details dispatched to Paris as soon as we can.”

I was certain he hadn’t been as prompt in relaying news of the massacre at Jaffa.

“A few more divisions and we could march to Damascus,” Kléber said, intoxicated by his improbable victory. Instead of being jealous, he now seemed dazzled by his commander’s timely rescue. Bonaparte could work miracles.

“A few more divisions, General, and we could march to Bagh-dad and Constantinople,” Napoleon amended. “Damn Nelson! If he hadn’t destroyed my fleet, I would be master of Asia!” Kléber nodded. “And if Alexander hadn’t died in Babylon, or Caesar been stabbed, or Roland been too far behind . . .” 1 8 4

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“For want of a nail the battle was lost,” I piped up.

“What?”

“Just something my mentor Ben Franklin used to say. It’s the little things that trip us up. He believed in attention to detail.”

“Franklin was a wise man,” Napoleon said. “Scrupulous attention to detail is essential to a soldier. And your mentor was a true savant.

He’d be anxious to solve ancient mysteries, not for his own sake but for science. Which is why you’ll now go on to meet Silano, correct, Monsieur Gage?”

“You seem to have brushed the opposition out of the way, General,” I said amiably. Bonaparte sundered armies the way Moses parted the sea. “Yet we’re still at the lip of Asia, thousands of miles from India and your ally there, Tippoo Sahib. You’ve not even taken Acre. How, with so few men, can you emulate Alexander?” Bonaparte frowned. He did not like doubt. “The Macedonians were not much more numerous. And Alexander had his own siege, at Tyre.” He looked pensive. “But our world is bigger than theirs, and events progress in France. I have many calls on my attention, and your discoveries may be more important in Paris than here.”

“France?” Kléber asked. “You think of home when we’re still fighting in this dung hole?”

“I try to think of everything, always, which is why I thought to bring relief to your expedition before you needed it, Kléber,” Bonaparte said crisply. He clapped the shoulder of the general that loomed over him, great hair like a lion’s mane. “Just be assured there’s a purpose to what we’re doing. Stand your duty and we’ll rise together!” Kléber looked at him suspiciously. “Our duty is here, not France.

Isn’t it?”

“And this American’s duty is to finish, finally, what we brought him here for—to solve the mystery of the pyramids and the ancients with Count Alessandro Silano! Ride hard, Gage, because time weighs on all of us.”

“I’m more anxious to get home than anyone,” I said.

“Then find your book.” He turned and stalked off with his staff t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 8 5

of officers, finger jabbing as he fired off orders. I, meanwhile, was chilled. It was the first I’d heard him mention any book. Clearly, the French knew more than I hoped.

And Astiza had told them more than I wished.

So we were in it now, tools of Silano and his discredited Egyptian Rite of Freemasons. The Templars had found something and been burned at the stake by tormentors hoping to get it. I hoped my own fate would be kinder. I hoped I wasn’t leading my comrades to destruction.

We dined on captured Turkish meats and pastries, trying to ignore the stench already rising from the dark battlefield. “Well that’s it, then,” Big Ned remarked gloomily. “If a horde like that can’t stand against a few frogs, what chance do me mates have in Acre? It will be another bloody massacre, like Jaffa.”

“Except that Acre has the Butcher,” I said. “He won’t let anyone run or surrender.”

“And cannon and Phelipeaux and Sidney Smith,” said Mohammad. “Don’t worry, sailor. The city will stand until we get back.”

“Just in time for the final sacking.” He looked at me slyly.

I knew what the sailor was thinking. Find the treasure and run. I can’t say I entirely disagreed.

¤

¤

¤

French cavalry were still pursuing the remnants of the shattered Ottoman army when we followed their trampled trail and dropped into the valley of the Jordan River. We were past the fields now, in dry goat country except for the groves and meadows along the river. Any number of holy men had followed this stream, John the Baptist holding court somewhere along its fabled banks, but we rode like a company of outlaws. Najac’s dozen French and Arabs bristled with rifles, muskets, pistols, and swords. There were real outlaws as well, and we saw two different bands slink off like disappointed wolves after spying our ordinance. We also passed drowned and shot 1 8 6

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

bodies of Ottoman soldiers, bloated like balloons of cloth. We gave them wide berth to avoid the stink and took care to draw water only from springs.

As we rode south, the valley became increasingly arid and the British ships Ned called home seemed ten thousand miles away. One night, he crawled over to whisper.

“Let’s ditch these brigands and strike out on our own, guv’nor,” he urged. “That Najac keeps eyeing you like a crow waiting for a corpse’s eyeball. You could dress these rascals like choirboys and they’d still frighten Westminster.”

“Aye, they have the morality of a legislature and the hygiene of galley slaves, but we need them to lead us to the woman who wore the ruby ring, remember?” He groaned, so I had to settle him. “Don’t think I haven’t retained my electrical powers. We’ll get what we’re coming for, and pay this lot back too.”

“I longs for the day to mash them. I hate frogs. A-rabs too, Mohammad excepted.”

“It’s coming, Ned. It’s coming.”

We trotted past a track Najac said led to the village of Jericho. I saw nothing of it, and the country was so brown it was hard to believe a city with mighty walls had ever been built here. I thought of the ironmonger and again was guilty for my desertion of Miriam. She deserved better.

The Dead Sea was as its name implies: a salt-encrusted shore and brackish, bright blue water that extended to the horizon. No birds thronged its shallows and no fish broke its surface. The desert air was thick, hazy and muggy, as if we’d advanced in season by two months in two days. I shared Ned’s disquiet. This was an odd, dreamlike land, spawning too many prophets and madmen.

“Jerusalem is that way,” Mohammad said, pointing west. Then, swinging his arm in the opposite direction, he said, “Mount Nebo.” Mountains rose precipitously from the Dead Sea shore as if in a hurry to get away from the brine. The tallest was as much a ridge as a peak, speckled with scrub pine. In rocky ravines, which would run with water only in a rain, pink oleander bloomed.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 8 7

Najac, who’d said little in our journey, took out a signal mirror and flashed it in the morning sun. We waited, but nothing happened.

“The damn thief has gotten us lost,” Ned muttered.

“Be patient, thickhead,” the Frenchman snapped back. He signaled again.

Then a column of signaling smoke rose from Nebo. “There!” our escort exclaimed. “The seat of Moses!”

We kicked our horses and began to climb.

It was a relief to get out of the Jordan Valley and into less cloying air. We cooled, and the slope began to smell of scrub pine. Bedouin tents were pitched on the mountain’s benches, and I could spy black-robed Arab boys tending wandering herds of scrubby goats. We followed a caravan track upward, hooves plopping in the soft dirt, horses snorting when they passed camel dung.

It took four hours, but finally we breasted the top. We could indeed see the Promised Land back west across the Jordan, brown and hazy from here, looking nothing like milk and honey. The Dead Sea was a blue mirror. Ahead, I saw no cave promising to hold treasure. Instead there was a French tent in a hollow, green grass next to it indicating a spring. The low ruins of something, an old church maybe, were nearby. Several men waited for us by a wisp of campfire smoke, the remains of the signal fire. Was Silano among them? But before I could tell I spied a person sitting on a rocky outcrop below the ruined church, away from the men, and guided my horse out of our file and dismounted.

It was a woman, dressed in white, who’d been watching our approach.

¤

¤

¤

She stood as I approached on foot, her tresses long and black as I remembered, falling from a white scarf to keep off the sun. Fabric and hair blew slightly in the mountain breeze. Her beauty was more tangible than I was prepared for, vivid in the mountaintop light. I’d turned her into a ghost and yet here she was, made flesh. I’d braced for disappointment, having polished her in my memory, but no, what I’d 1 8 8

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

imagined was still here, the poised litheness, the lips and cheekbones worthy of a Cleopatra, the lustrous dark eyes. Women are flowers, giving grace to the world, and Astiza was a lotus.

She’d aged, however. Not poorly—it’s a mistake to think age an insult to women, because her beauty simply had more character—but her eyes had deepened, as if she’d seen or felt things she would prefer she hadn’t. I wondered if I’d changed the same way: how long since I’d looked in a glass? I touched my hand to stubble and was conscious, suddenly, of my travel-stained clothes. Her own gown was dust-dyed, and divided for riding. She wore cavalry boots, small enough that perhaps they’d been borrowed from some drummer. She was slim, a dancer’s body, but again, we’d all narrowed. Her waist was cinched by a silk rope, holding a small curved dagger and a leather pouch. A water skin was on the rock.

I hesitated, my rehearsals forgotten. It was as if she’d risen from the dead. Finally, “I sent men asking.” It sounded like an apology, awkward and without eloquence—but I was embarrassed, having floated away in the balloon when she hadn’t. “They told me you’d disappeared.”

“Do you have my ring?”

It was a cool way to begin. I took it out, the ruby bright. She plucked like a bird and slipped it quickly into the pouch at her side, as if it were hot. She still thinks it cursed, I thought.

“I’ll use it as an offering,” she said.

“To Isis?”

“To all of Them, including Thoth.”

“I feared you dead. It’s like a miracle. You look like a spirit or an angel.”

“Do you have the seraphim?”

Her distance was disconcerting. “I find you through hell and high water and all you want is jewelry?”

“We need them.” She was straining not to show emotion, I realized.

“We?”

“Ethan, I was saved by Alessandro.”

Well, there was a sharp little knife in the ribs. She’d been cling-t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 8 9

ing to the balloon’s trailing tether, Silano locked around her so she couldn’t climb, and finally she had cut the rope with my tomahawk so the airship could float out of musket range. I’d failed to haul her into the basket, or get rid of the nobleman-sorcerer who’d once been her lover. So were they a couple again? If so, I was damned if I could understand why they’d sent for me. If all they wanted were gold trin-kets, I could have mailed the things. “You were almost killed by that bastard. The only reason you didn’t get away is because he wouldn’t let go.”

She looked away over the valley, her tone hollow. “I don’t remember our landing, just the fall. The last thing I remember is your face, looking down from the lip of the basket. It was the most awful thing I’ve had to do in my life. As I cut the tether I saw a hundred emotions in your eyes.”

“Horror, if I recall.”

“Fear, shame, regret, anger, longing, sorrow . . . and relief.” I was going to protest but instead I flushed, because it was true.

“When I swung that tomahawk I freed you, Ethan, from the burden thrust upon you: safeguarding the Book of Thoth. I freed you of me. Yet you didn’t go to America.”

“You can’t cut the rope that binds us with a hatchet, Astiza.” So she turned back and looked at me again, her gaze fierce, her body trembling, and I knew it was all she could do to keep from flying into my arms. Why was she hesitating? Once again I understood nothing. And I couldn’t reach out either, because there was an invisible wall of duty and regret we had to break down first. We couldn’t properly begin because we had too much to say.

“When I woke, a month had passed and I was with Silano, nursed in secret. The savants had given him research quarters in Cairo. As he mended his broken hip he continued to read every scrap of ancient writing that could be scoured for him. He’s assembled trunks and trunks of books. I even saw him picking through blackened manu-scripts that must have come from Enoch’s burned library. He hadn’t given up, not for an instant. He knew we hadn’t emerged from the pyramid with anything useful, and he suspected the book had been 1 9 0

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

carried elsewhere. So once again I became his ally so I could use him to get back to you. I hoped you might still be in Egypt, or someplace near.”

“You said you expected me to go to America.”

“I doubted, I admit. I knew you might run. Then we heard rumors about inquiries being made, and my heart quickened. Silano had Bonaparte jail the real messenger and sent his own man in his place to Jerusalem to discourage you. Yet it didn’t work. And as the count began to piece together a new plan, and Najac left to spy on you, I realized that fate was conspiring to bring us all together again. We’re going to solve this mystery, Ethan, and find the book.”

“Why? Don’t you just want to bury it again?”

“It can also be used for good. Ancient Egypt was once a paradise of peace and learning. The world could be that way again.”

“Astiza, you’ve seen our world. Or has the fall knocked all sense out of you?”

“There’s a church on the rise just above us, ruins now. It marks where Moses may once have sat, gazing at his Promised Land, knowing that for all his sacrifice he himself could never enter it. Your culture’s old god was a cruel one. The building itself dates to Byzantine times. We’ve found a tomb of a Templar knight, as Silano’s studies led him to expect, and in that tomb bones. Hidden in one femur was a medieval map.”

“You broke apart a dead man’s bones?”

“Silano found mention of the possibility while studying in Constantinople. Fleeing Templars came this way, Ethan, after their destruction in Europe. They hid something they’d found in Jerusalem in a strange city this map describes. Silano has discovered something else as well, something that may involve electricity and your Benjamin Franklin. Then we heard you’d been executed at Jaffa, but your body was missing. In desperation, I gave Monge the ring, wondering if he’d come across you. And now . . .”

“Were you ever in love with Alessandro Silano?” She hesitated only a moment before answering. “No.” t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 9 1

I stood there, hoping for more before I dared ask the next, most logical question.

“I’m not proud of that fact,” she said. “He loved me. He still does.

Men fall in love easily, but women must be careful. We were lovers, but it would be hard for me to love him.”

“Astiza, you didn’t need me here to carry two golden angels.”

“Do you still love me, Ethan, as you said along the Nile?” Of course I loved her. But I feared her, too. What had poor Talma called her, a witch? A sorceress? I feared the power she’d once more have over me when I admitted my attraction. And what of poor Miriam, still besieged in the walls of Acre?

Yet none of that mattered. All the old emotions were flooding back.

“I’ve loved you from the moment I pulled the wreckage off you in Alexandria,” I finally confirmed in a rush. “I loved you when we were riding in the chebek up the Nile, and I loved you in Enoch’s house, and I loved you even when I thought for a moment you’d betrayed me at Dendara Temple. And I loved you when I thought we were doomed in the Great Pyramid. I loved you enough to throw in with the damned British just in hopes of getting you back, and I loved you to throw in again, it seems, with the damned French. I loved even the hope of seeing you when I was in the valley down there, and all the long ride up the mountain, even when I had no idea what I’d say to you or what you’d look like or how you’d feel.” I was losing all discipline, wasn’t I?

Women can rob a man of sense faster than Appalachian jug whiskey.

And now, out of breath and hanging for hope, I waited for her to cut me dead with a word. I’d opened my chest to the muskets. I’d bent beneath the executioner’s blade.

She gave a sad smile. “It would be hard to love Alessandro, but it was not hard for me to fall in love with you.” I actually swayed slightly, dizzy with joy. “Then let’s leave now.

Tonight.”

She shook her head, her eyes wet. “No, Ethan. Silano knows too much. We can’t leave him to this quest. We have to see it through, and seize the book when the time is right. We have to work with him, 1 9 2

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

and then betray him. It’s been my destiny since I met him in Cairo, and yours since you won the medallion in Paris. Everything has been leading up to this mountaintop, and the mountains beyond. We’ll find it and then we will leave.”

“What mountains beyond?”

“The City of Ghosts.”

“What?”

“It’s a sacred place, a mythical place. No European has been there, I think, since the Templars. Our journey isn’t done.” I groaned. “By the greed of Benedict Arnold.”

“So you and I must now be estranged, Ethan, to mislead him.

You’re angry I’ve partnered again with Alessandro, and we journey on as bitter ex-lovers. They must think us enemies until the very end.”

“Enemies?”

And then she swung and slapped me, as hard as she could.

It sounded like a rifle shot. I glanced back. The others were looking down the slope at us. Alessandro Silano, tall, his bearing aristocratic, was watching most intently.

¤

¤

¤

Silano was not the lithe swordsman I remembered. He walked with a limp, and pain had hardened his handsomeness, turning Pan-like charm into a darker satyr of frustrated ambition. He was more rigid from the injury he’d suffered in the balloon fall, and his gaze had no seduction this time, only purpose. There was darkness in his eye, and a hard set to his mouth. He winced as he came down a goat path from the ruined Byzantine chapel to meet us, and didn’t offer a hand or greeting. What would be the point? We were rivals, and my face still stung from Astiza’s slap. I suspected Monge or other physicians had given him drugs for the pain.

“Well?” Silano asked. “Does he have them?”

“He wouldn’t say,” she reported. “He’s not convinced he should help us.”

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 9 3

“So you persuade by slapping him?”

She shrugged. “We have some history.”

Silano turned to me. “We don’t seem able to escape each other, do we, Gage?”

“I was doing just fine until you sent for me with Astiza’s ring.”

“And you came for her, as you did before. I hope she learns to appreciate it before you learn to tire of it. She’s not an easy woman to love, American.” He glanced at her, no more sure than me how much to trust her. She’d put him off, I could tell. They were allies, not lovers.

It’s not easy to live with something you can’t have, and Silano was not a man to tolerate frustration. We would all have to watch each other.

“She told me you’d bring two small metal angels you found in the Great Pyramid. Did you?”

I hesitated, just to make him squirm. Then, “I brought them. That doesn’t mean I’ll use them to help you.” I wanted to test how hostile he was. He could, of course, have me killed. “They’re in a safe place until we’ve talked. Given our history, you’ll forgive me if I don’t entirely trust you.”

He bowed. “Nor I you, of course. And yet partners need not be friends. In fact, sometimes it is better they are not: there is more honesty that way, don’t you think? Come, I’m sure you’re hungry after your journey. Let’s eat, and I’ll tell you a story. Then you can decide if you wish to help.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then you can go back to Acre. And Astiza can follow or stay as she wishes.” He began limping back up the path, then turned. “But I know what both of you will decide.”

I glanced at Astiza, looking for reassurance that she despised this man, this diplomat, duelist, conjurer, scholar, and schemer. But her gaze was not of contempt but of sadness. She understood how captive we are to desire and frustration. We were dreamers in a nightmare of our own making.

We hiked to the roofless church, light picking out its rubble.

There were heaps and hollows from excavation. Astiza showed me 1 9 4

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

the opened stone sarcophagus where the Knight Templar’s bones had apparently been found, concealed beneath the floor.

“Silano found references to this grave in the Vatican and the libraries of Constantinople,” she said. “This knight was Michel de Troyes, who fled the arrests of the Templars in Paris and sailed for the Holy Land.”

“There was a letter that said he laid his bones with Moses,” Silano said, “and buried the secret within him. It took some time before we realized the reference meant the location must be Mount Nebo, even though the grave of Moses has never been found. I hoped to simply find the document in the knight’s grave, but didn’t.”

“You hit the bones in impatience,” Astiza said.

“Yes.” The admission of emotion was reluctant. “And a crack in his femur showed a hint of gold. A slim tube had been inserted—his leg must have been butchered and its bone hollowed after his death—and within the tube was a medieval map, the names in Latin. It points to the next step. It was then that we sent for you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re a Franklin man. An electrician.”

“Electricity?”

“Is the key. I’ll explain after supper.” By now there were twenty of us—Najac’s men, my own trio, and Silano, Astiza, and several bodyguards that Silano traveled with.