The Rosetta Key

Evening had come on. These servants built a fire in a corner of the church’s ruined walls and then left key members of the expedition alone. Najac sat with us, to my distaste, so I insisted Ned and Mohammad eat with us as well. Astiza knelt demurely, not at all her character, and Silano commanded the center position. We sat on sand drifting across old mosaics of Roman hunting scenes, animals rearing before spears thrust by noblemen in a forest.

“So, we are all together at last,” Silano began, the warmth of the fire making a cocoon from the cold desert sky. Sparks flew up to mingle with the stars. “Is it possible Thoth meant unions like this, to solve the riddles he left for us? Have we unwittingly been following the gods all along?”

“I believe in one true God,” Mohammad muttered.

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“Aye,” said Ned, “though you’ve got the wrong one, mate. No offense.”

“As I believe in One,” Silano said, “and all things, and all beings, and all beliefs, are manifestations of his mystery. I’ve followed a thousand roads in the libraries, monasteries, and tombs of the world, and all lead toward the same center. That center is what we seek, my reluctant allies.”

“What center, master?” Najac prompted, like the trained dog he was.

Silano picked up a grain of sand. “What if I said this was the universe?”

“I’d say take it, and leave us the rest,” Ned suggested.

The count smiled thinly, threw up the grain, and caught it. “And what if I said the world around us is gossamer, as insubstantial as the spaces between a spider’s web, and all that sustains the illusion are mysterious energies we don’t understand—that this energy may be nothing more than thought itself? Or . . . electricity?”

“I would say that the Nile you crashed into was no spiderweb, but instead substantial enough to break your hip,” I replied.

“Illusion upon illusion. That is what some of the sacred writings maintain, all inspired by Thoth.”

“Gold is mere spider’s silk? Power grasps nothing but air?”

“Oh no. While we are but a dream, the dream is our reality. But here, then, is the secret. Let us suppose the most solid things, the stones of this church, are matrices of almost nothing. That the tumble of a boulder or the fall of a star is a simple mathematical rule. That a building can encompass the divine, a shape can be sacred, and a mind can sense unseen energies. What becomes of beings who realize this?

If mountains are mere web, might not they be moved? If seas are the thinnest vapor, might not they be parted? Could the Nile become blood, or a plague of frogs spawned? How hard to tumble the walls of Jericho, when they are but a latticework? How hard to turn lead into gold when both, essentially, are dust?”

“You’re mad,” said Mohammad. “This is Satan’s talk.”

“No. I am a scholar!” And now he pushed to his feet, Najac giving him a hand that he shook off as soon as he was able. “You denied 1 9 6

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me that title once, at a banquet before Napoleon, Ethan Gage. You insulted my reputation to make me seem petty.” I reddened despite myself. The man forgot nothing. “Yet I’ve probed these mysteries for twenty years. I came to Cairo when it was still in the thrall of the Mamelukes, and explored old mysteries while you were frittering your life away. I followed the trail of the ancients while you hooked your opportunism to the French. I’ve tried to understand the enigmatic hints left behind for us, while the rest of you wrestled in the mud.” He hadn’t lost his high opinion of himself, either. “And now I understand what we’re seeking, and what we must harness to find it. We have to catch the lightning!”

“Catch what?” Ned asked dubiously.

“Gage, I understand you have succeeded in using electricity as a weapon against Bonaparte’s troops.”

“As a necessity of war.”

“I think we’re going to need Franklin’s expertise when we near the Book of Thoth. Are you electrician enough?”

“I’m a man of science, but I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”

“It’s why we need the seraphim, Ethan,” Astiza broke in, more softly. “We think that somehow they’re going to point to a final hiding point the Knights Templar used after destruction of their order. They brought what they’d found beneath Jerusalem to the desert and concealed it in the City of Ghosts. The documents are enigmatic, but Alessandro and I believe that Thoth, too, knew of electricity, and that the Templars set that as a test to find the book. We need to draw down the lightning like Franklin did.”

“So I agree with Mohammad. You’re both mad.”

“In the vaults beneath Jerusalem,” Silano said, “you found a curious floor, with a lightning design. And a strange door. Did you not?”

“How do you know that?” Najac, I was certain, had never penetrated to the rooms we’d explored, and had not seen Miriam’s oddly decorated door.

“I’ve been studying, as you said. And upon this Templar door you saw a Jewish pattern, did you not? The ten sefiroth of the kabbalah?” t h e

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“What has that to do with lightning?”

“Watch.” Bending to the dust on the floor by our fire, he drew two circles, their edges joined.

“All things are dual,” Astiza murmured.

“And yet united,” the count said. He drew another circle, as big as the first two, overlapping both. Then circles upon those circles, more upon more, the pattern becoming ever more intricate. “The prophets knew this,” he said. “Perhaps Jesus did as well. The Templars relearned it.” Then where circles intersected he began drawing lines, forming patterns: both a five-sided and a six-sided star. “The one is Egyptian and the other Jewish,” he said. “Both are equally sacred. The Egyptian star you use for your nation’s new flag. Do you not think this was the intent of the Freemasons who helped found your country?” And finally, at the interstices, he jabbed out ten points, which made the same peculiar pattern we’d seen in the Templar Hall under the Temple Mount. The sefiroth, Haim Farhi had called them.

Once again, everyone seemed to be speaking ancient tongues I wasn’t privy too, and finding import in what I would have assumed was mere decoration.

“Recognize it?” Silano asked.

“What of it?” I said guardedly.

“The Templars drew another pattern from this design,” he said.

From dot to dot he drew a zigzagging, overlapping line. “There. A lightning bolt. Eerie, is it not?”

“Maybe.”

“Not maybe. Their clues tell us to harness the sky if we wish to find where the book is. The lightning symbol is in the map we found here, and then there is the poem.”

“Poem?”

“Couplets. They’re quite eloquent.” He recited: Aether cum radiis solis fulgore relucet Angelus et pinnis indicat ore Dei,

Cum region deserta bibens ex murice torto Siccatis labris arida sorbet aquas

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Tum demum partem quandam lux clara revelat Quae prius ignota est nec repute tibi Opperiens cunctatur eum dea candida Veri Floribus insanum qui furit atque fide

“That’s Greek to me, Silano.”

“Latin. Do they not teach the classics on the frontier, Monsieur Gage?”

“On the frontier, the classics make good fire starter.”

“The translation of this document, which I found in my travels, explains why I was anxious to make your reacquaintance:” When heaven blazes with the lightning of the sun’s rays And with his feathers the angel points out at God ’s command When the desert, drinking from the twisted snail shell Thirstily sucks up water with dried-out lips Then at last the clear light reveals a certain part Which formerly was both unknown, nor was it cognized in your estimation

Lingering, divine bright Truth awaits him The fool crazy for flowers, who also trusts with faith What the devil did that mean? The world could avoid a great deal of confusion if everyone just said things straight out, but that doesn’t seem to be our habit, does it? And yet there was something about this phrasing that jarred a memory, a memory I’d never shared with either Astiza or Silano. I felt a chill of recognition.

“We must go to a special place within the City of Ghosts,” Silano said, “and call down the flames of the storm, the lightning, just as your mentor Franklin did in Philadelphia. Call it to the seraphim, and see which part they point to.”

“The part of what?”

“A building or cave, I’m guessing. It will become apparent if this works.”

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“From the thunderstorm’s rain. A reference to a sacred drinking vessel, I suspect.”

Or something else, I thought to myself. “And the flowers and faith?”

“My theory is that is a reference to the Templars themselves and the Order of the Rose and Cross, or Rosicrucians. Theories of the origin of the Rosy Cross vary, but one is that the Alexandrian sage Ormus was converted to Christianity by the disciple Mark in 46 a .d.

and fused its teachings with that of ancient Egypt, creating a Gnostic creed, or belief in knowledge.” He looked hard at me to make sure I’d make the connection with the Book of Thoth. “Movements fade in and out of history, but the symbol of the cross and the rose is a very old one, symbolizing death and life, or despair and hope. The Resurrection, if you will.”

“And male and female,” Astiza added, “the phallic cross and the yonic flower.”

“Flower and faith symbolize the character required of those who would find the secret,” Silano said.

“A woman?”

“Perhaps, which is one reason we have a woman along.” I decided to keep my own suspicions to myself. “So you want to draw lightning down to my seraphim and see what happens?”

“In the place prescribed by the documents we’ve found, yes.” I considered. “What you’re talking about is a lightning rod, or rather two, since we have two seraphim. We need metal to bring the energy down to the ground, I think.”

“Which is why our tent poles are metal, to mount your angels on.

I’ve been planning this for months. You need our help to find the city, and we need your help to find the hiding place within it.”

“And then what? We cut the book in half?”

“No,” Silano said. “We don’t need Solomon to resolve our rivalry.

We use it together, for mankind’s good, just as the ancients did.”

“Together!”

“Why not, when we have the power to do unlimited good? If the world’s true form is gossamer, it can be spun and shifted. That’s what 2 0 0

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this book apparently tells us how to do. And when all things are possible, stones can be shifted, lives lengthened, enemies reconciled, and wounds healed.” His eyes gleamed.

I looked at his hip. “Made young again.”

“Exactly, and in charge of a world finally run on reason.”

“Bonaparte’s reason?”

Silano glanced at Najac. “I am loyal to the government that commissioned me. And yet politicians and generals only understand so much. It is scholars who will rule the future, Ethan. The old world was the plaything of princes and priests. The new will be the responsibility of scientists. When reason and the occult are joined, a golden age will begin. Priests played that role in Egypt. We will be the priests of the future.”

“But we’re on opposite sides!”

“No, we’re not. All things are dual. And we are linked by Astiza.” His smile was meant to be seductive.

What an unholy trinity. Yet how could I accomplish anything without playing along? I looked at her. She was sitting at Silano’s side, not mine.

“She hasn’t even forgiven me,” I lied.

“I will if you help us, Ethan,” she replied. “We need you to call down fire from the sky. We need you to harness heaven, like your Benjamin Franklin.”

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The entrance to the City of Ghosts was a slit of sandstone canyon, tight and pink as a virgin.

The sinuous passageway was no wider than a room at its base, the sky a distant blue line above. The walls rose as high as six hundred feet, at times leaning in like a roof, as if closing like a crack in an earthquake. The embrace was disquieting as we walked with packs down its shadowed floor. Yet if rock can be voluptuous, this rose and blue barbican was a seraglio of rolling flesh, carved by water into a thousand sensuous forms as pleasing to the eye as a sultan’s favorite.

Much of it was banded into layers of coral, gray, white, and laven-der. Here rock dripped down like frozen syrup, there it puffed like frosting, and in yet another place it was a lace curtain. The sand and rock wadi formed a crude road that dipped downward toward our destination, like a causeway to some underworld in a satyr’s dream.

And nature wasn’t the only sculptor here, I saw when I looked closely.

This had been a caravan gate, and a channel had been carved into the canyon wall, its dark stain making clear that it had once been an aqueduct for the ancient city. We passed beneath a worn Roman arch that marked the canyon’s upper entrance and strode silently, in 2 0 2

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awe, past niches in its walls that held gods and geometric carvings.

Sandstone camels, twice life-size, sauntered with us as bas-relief on the sandstone walls. It was as if the dead had been turned to stone, and when we turned the canyon’s final corner this ghostly effect was redoubled. We gasped.

“Behold,” intoned Silano. “This is what is possible when men dream!”

Yes, here the book must reside.

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We’d been traveling to this place several days from Nebo. Our party had followed the Jordanian highlands, skirting green pastures on the high plateau and passing by the brooding ruins of Crusader castles, as forsaken as the Templars. Occasionally we dipped down into deep and hot mountain canyons that opened to sandy yellow desert to the west. Tiny streams were swallowed by the dry-ness. Then we’d climb up the other side and continue south, hawks wheeling in the dry thermals and Bedouins shooing their goats into side wadis, watching silently from a safe distance until we passed. The siege at Acre seemed a planet away.

As we rode I had plenty of time to think about Silano’s Latin clue. The part about the angels pointing seemed somewhat plausible, though what forces were at play was beyond me. What had jarred my memory, however, were the words “snail shell” and “flower.” The same imagery had been used by the French savant, and my friend, Edme François Jomard when we climbed the Great Pyramid. He’d said the pyramid’s dimensions encoded a “golden number” or ratio—1.618, if I recalled—that was in turn a geometric representation of a progression of numbers called the Fibonacci sequence. This mathematical progression could be represented by an interconnected series of ever-growing squares, and an arc through the squares produced the kind of spiral seen in a nautilus shell, or, Jomard said, in the arrangement of flower petals. My comrade Talma had thought the young scientist half addled, but I was intrigued. Did the pyramid really stand for t h e

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some fundamental truth about nature? And what, if anything, did that have to do with where we were going now?

I tried to think like Monge and Jomard, the mathematicians. “Then at last the clear light reveals a certain part which formerly was both unknown, nor was it cognized in your estimation,” the Templars had written. This seemed like nonsense, and yet it gave me a wild idea.

Did I have a clue that would allow me to snatch the Book of Thoth out from under Silano’s nose?

We camped in the most defensible places we could find, and one evening we climbed a hillock to spend the night in the limestone remains of a Crusader castle, its broken towers orbited by swallows.

The ruin was yellow in the low sun, weeds growing from the crevices between stones. We rode up through a meadow of wildflowers that waved in the spring wind. It was as if they were nodding at my sup-position. Fibonacci, they whispered.

As we bunched at the half-fallen gate to lead our horses into the abandoned courtyard, I managed a whisper to Astiza. “Meet me under the moon, on the battlements as far from where we sleep as possible,” I murmured.

Her nod was almost imperceptible and then, acting as if irritated, urged her horse ahead of mine to cut mine off. Yes, to the others we were bitter ex-lovers.

Our own trio had made a habit of sleeping a little apart from Najac’s gang of cutthroats, and when Ned was deep into his lusty snores I crept away and waited in the shadows. She came like a ghost, wrapped in white and luminous in the night. I rose and pulled her into a sentry post out of sight of any others, milky moonlight falling through the arrow slit. I kissed her for the first time since our reunion, her lips cold from the chill, her fingers knotting in mine to control my hands.

“We don’t have time,” she whispered. “Najac is awake and thinks I’ve gone to relieve myself. He’ll be counting the minutes.”

“Let the bastard count.” I tried to embrace her.

“Ethan, if we go too far it will spoil everything!”

“If we don’t I’ll burst.”

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“No.” She thrust me away. “Patience! We’re close!” Damnation, it had been hard to stay on keel since leaving Paris.

Too much exercise and too few women. I took a breath. “All right, listen. If this lightning trick really works, you need to help me separate from Silano. I need time to try something on my own, and then we must rendezvous later.”

“You know something you haven’t told us, don’t you?’

“Perhaps. It’s a gamble.”

“And you’re a gambler.” She thought. “After we harness the lightning, tell him you’ll trade your share in the book for me. Then I’ll pretend to betray you, and go with him. We’ll abandon you. Act frustrated.”

“That won’t be hard. Can I trust you?”

She smiled. “Trust has to come from within.” And with that she slipped away. We took care that the rest of the time we were as prickly as porcupines. I hoped it was truly a ruse.

We followed the old caravan tracks and I feared Ottoman patrols, but it was as if the clash at Mount Tabor had temporarily made Turkish forces disappear. The world seemed empty, primeval. We were trailed once by native tribesmen, tough little men on camels, but our party looked tough too, and poor to boot, hardly worth robbing. Najac rode to talk with them with his toughs, and they disappeared.

By the time we reached the city of the Templar maps, no one followed us at all.

We turned west and dropped from the edge of the central plateau toward the distant desert. Between us and that waste, however, was the strangest geologic formation I’d ever seen. There was a range of moonlike mountains, jagged and stark, and in front of them a boil of brown sandstone, lumpy and rounded. It looked like a frozen brew of brown bubbles, or wildly risen bread. There seemed no way in or around this odd formation, but when we came near we saw caves on it like a pox, a hundred-eyed monster. The sandstone, I realized, was dotted with them. Carvings of pillars and steps began to appear in the outcrops. We camped in a dry wadi, the stars brilliant and cold.

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Silano said the paths we would tread the next morning were too narrow and precipitous for horses, so when the sky lightened we left them picketed at the canyon’s entrance with some of Najac’s Arabs as guard. I noted the horses were oddly nervous, neighing and stamping, and they shied from a wagon that had appeared at the edge of our camp sometime in the night. It was boxy but covered with tarpaulins, and Silano said its supplies included meat that made the animals skittish. I wanted to investigate, but then the morning sun lit the escarpment and picked out its cracklike canyon and welcoming Roman arch. We entered on foot and within yards could see nothing of the world behind. All sound disappeared, except the scuffle of our own feet as we descended the wadi.

“Storms have washed cobbles over what was once an ancient road,” Silano said. “The flash floods boil most frequently this time of year, records say, after thunder and lightning. The Templars knew this, and used it. So will we.”

And then, as I have described, we came after a mile to the canyon’s other end, and gaped. Before us was a new canyon, perpendicular to the first and just as imposing, but this is not what amazed us. Instead, on the wall opposite was the most unexpected monument I’d ever seen, the first thing to be on a par in glory with the immensity of the pyramids. It was a temple carved from living rock.

Imagine a sheer cliff hundreds of feet high, pink as a maiden’s cheeks, and not on it but in it, carved into its face, an ornate pagan edifice of pillars and pediment and cupolas rearing higher than a Philadelphia church steeple. Sculpted eagles the size of buffalo crouched on its upper cornices, and the alcoves between its pillars held stone figures with angel wings. What drew my eye weren’t these cherubim or demons, however, but the central figure high above the temple’s dark door. It was a woman, breasts bare and eroded, her hips draped with Roman folds of stony cloth, and her head high and alert. I’d seen this form before in the sacred precincts of ancient Egypt. Cupped in her arm was a cornucopia, and on her head the remains of a crown made of a solar disc between bull’s horns. I felt a shiver at this weird recurrence of a goddess who’d haunted me since Paris, where the 2 0 6

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Romans had built a temple to this same goddess on what is now the site of Notre Dame.

“Isis!” Astiza cried. “She’s a star, guiding us to the book!” Silano smiled. “The Arabs call this the Khazne, the Treasury, because their legends claim this is where Pharaoh hid his wealth.”

“You mean the book is in there?” I asked.

“No. The rooms are shallow and bare. It’s somewhere nearby.” We rode to the Khazne’s entrance, splashing across a small stream that ran down the center of this new chasm. The canyon twisted away to our right. A broad staircase led to the dark pillared entry. We stood a moment in the cool of the temple’s portico, looking out at the red rock, and then stepped into the room beyond.

As Silano said, it was disappointingly empty, as featureless as the room that had held the empty sarcophagus in the Great Pyramid.

The cliff had been hollowed into straight, sheer, boxlike inner chambers. A few minutes of inspection confirmed there were no hidden doors. It was plain as an empty warehouse.

“Unless there’s a trick to this place, like its mathematical dimensions, there’s nothing here,” I said. “What’s it for?” It seemed too large to live in and yet not big and luminous enough for a temple.

Silano shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. We are to find the Place of High Sacrifice. If there’s one thing we can confirm about this, it isn’t high.”

“Glorious, however,” Astiza murmured.

“Illusion, like all else,” Silano said. “Only the mind is real. That’s why cruelty is no sin.”

We came back outside, the canyon half in sunlight, half in shadow.

The day was hazing. “We’re lucky,” Silano said. “The air is heavy and smells like storm. We won’t need to wait, but must act before the tempest breaks.”

This new canyon slowly broadened as we followed it, allowing us ever better glimpses of the maze of mountains we’d entered. Rock shot skyward like layer cakes, rounded loaves, and doughy castles.

Oleander bloomed to reflect the strange rock. Everywhere the cliff walls were pierced with caves, but not natural ones. They had the t h e

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rectangular shape of human doors, indicating people had once carved them. It was a city not built on the earth, but of it. We passed a grand semicircular Roman theater, its tiers of seats again carved from the cliff itself, and finally passed out to a broad bowl enclosed by steep mountains, like a vast courtyard surrounded by walls. It was a perfect hiding place for a city, accessible only by narrow and easily defended canyons. Yet it had room enough for a Boston. Pillars, no longer holding anything up, reared from the dirt. Roofless temples rose from rubble.

“By the grace of Isis,” Astiza murmured. “Who dreamed here?” One cliff wall was a spectacle to rival the earlier Khazne. It had been carved into the façade of a fabulous city, a riot of staircases, pillars, pediments, platforms, windows, and doors, leading to a bee-hive of chambers within. I began counting the entrances and gave up.

There were hundreds. No, thousands.

“This place is huge,” I said. “We’re to find a book in this? It makes the pyramids look like a postbox.”

“You’re to find it. You and your seraphim.” Silano had pulled out his Templar map and was studying it. Then he pointed. “From up there.”

A mountain behind us that rose above the ancient theater was carved into battlements but appeared flat on top. Goat tracks led upward. “Up there? Where?”

“To the High Place of Sacrifice.”

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Anarrow footpath had been built from crude steps chiseled out of sandstone. It was muggy and we sweated, but as we climbed our view broadened, and more and more cliffs came into view that were pockmarked with doorways and windows. Nowhere did we see people. The abandoned city was silent, without the keening of ghosts.

The light was purpling.

At the top we came out to a flat plateau of sandstone with a magnificent view. Far below was the dusty bowl of ruined walls and toppled pillars, enclosed by cliffs. Beyond were more jagged mountains 2 0 8

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without a scrap of green, as stripped as a skeleton. The sun was sink-ing toward looming thunderheads that scudded toward us like black men-o’-war. There was a hot, humid breeze that picked up funnels of dust and spun them like tops. The rock shelf itself had been precisely flattened by ancient chisels. At the center was an incised rectangle the size of a ballroom, like a very shallow and dry pool. Silano consulted a compass. “It’s oriented north and south, all right,” he pronounced, as if expecting this. To the west, where the storm was coming from, four steps led to a raised platform that appeared to be some kind of altar.

On it was a round basin with a channel.

“For blood,” the count told us. His cloak flapped in the wind.

“I don’t see anyplace to hide a book,” I said.

Silano gestured to the city far below, ten thousand holes pock-ing the sandstone like a lunatic hive. “And I see infinity. It’s time to use your seraphim, Ethan Gage. They are made of holier metal than gold.”

“What metal?”

“The Egyptians called it Ra-ezhri. Tears of the Sun. The finger of God is going to touch it, and then point to where we must go. What do we need to draw down the finger of Thoth? How can the essence of the universe give us a sign?”

He was crazy as a loon, but so was old Ben, I suppose, when he proposed to go kite-flying in a tempest. Savants are a balmy lot.

“Wait. What happens when we retrieve the book?”

“We study,” Silano said shortly.

“We don’t know if we can even read it,” Astiza added.

“I mean who gets it,” I insisted. “Someone needs to become the caretaker. It seems my seraphim are the critical tool, and my skill at setting them the key. And I’m not really on the French or the British side. I’m neutral. You should entrust it to me.”

“You couldn’t have found this place by yourself in a thousand years,” growled Najac, “or care for a grocery list.”

“And you couldn’t find your right ear if you had a cord tied from it to your cockles,” I replied with irritation.

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impatiently. “You join me, join the Egyptian Rite, and win a share of power.”

“Join a man who in Egypt sent me my friend’s head in a jar?” He sighed. “Or, you can leave with nothing.”

“And what claim of ownership do you have?” I had to play my part.

He looked around, amused. “Why, all the guns, most of the provi-sions, and the only hope of deciphering what we’re about to find.” Najac’s men raised the muzzles of their weapons. It especially annoyed me to have to look down the barrel of my own rifle, in Najac’s greasy hands. “I really don’t know what Franklin saw in you, Ethan. You have such a slow grasp of the obvious.”

I pointed to the building clouds. “It won’t work without me, Silano.”

“Don’t be a fool. If you don’t help, then no one gets the book and you have nothing. Besides, you’re as curious as I am.” I looked at Astiza. “This is the deal, then. I help you set the seraphim. If it works, you do get the book. Take it, and be done with it.”

“Guv’nor!” Ned cried.

“But I want Astiza in its place.”

“She is not mine to give, monsieur.”

“I want you to let us go, without harm or interference.” He glanced at her. She was avoiding both our eyes. “And you’ll help if I agree?”

I nodded. “We’d better hurry.”

“But it’s her choice, not mine,” he cautioned. Astiza’s face was a mask.

“Her choice,” I confirmed confidently. “Not yours. That’s all I’m asking.”

“Agreed.” He smiled, the grin as cold as a beaver trap in a Canadian creek. “Then help us prepare.”

I took a breath. Could I trust her? Would this work at all? I was gambling all on a Latin riddle. I fished my pyramid souvenirs out from my clothing and watched the sorcerer’s eyes gleam as he seized them. “Use the clasps that attached them to Moses’ staff to mount them on the top of your metal poles,” I directed. “We’re going to make a Franklin lightning rod.” I’d noticed two holes drilled in the 2 1 0

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top of the leveled plateau, and Silano confirmed they were mentioned in the Templar documents, so we inserted them. But there was no connection between them.

I studied the flat plane. There were grooves in the sandstone rock, I saw, forming a six-pointed star. The poles were at opposite points.

“We need a connection between the poles,” I said. “Metal strips, to conduct electricity. Do you have any?”

Of course not. So much for Silano’s research! It was growing darker, thunder rumbling as the cloudworks swelled and mounted. Funnels of dust skittered on the valley floor far below, weaving and bending like drunks.

“I don’t see what the rods will do, if isolated,” I warned.

“The Templars said this will work. My studies are infallible.” The man had an ego to match Aaron Burr. So I thought of what could replace the metal strips, because my enemies were right: I was as curious as anyone. “Najac, do something beside scowl,” I finally suggested. “Use your water bag to fill these grooves with water, and add some salt.”

“Water?”

“Ben said it can help conduct electricity.” The water filled the little runnels until the star gleamed in the thick, green-purple light. The sun was swallowed and the temperature dropped. My skin prickled. More thunder, and I could see first tendrils of rain curling downward like feathers, evaporating before they touched the ground. Lightning stabbed to the west. I backed to the edge of the plateau. Ned and Mohammad followed me, but no one else seemed frightened. Even Astiza was waiting expectantly, hair swirling, her eyes on the sky and not me.

The storm swept down on us like a cavalry charge. There was a gusting wall of wind, hurling grit, and the clouds overran us, great bags of rain and thunder that glowed silver as they billowed and ballooned. Lightning flashed and struck the peaks around us, nearer and nearer, the thunder like artillery. Fat drops of rain hit, hot and heavy, more like molten lead than water. Our clothing shuddered, and the wind rose to a shriek. And then there was a blinding flash, an instant h e

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taneous roar, and the mountain quaked. One of the rods had been hit! My knees went weak. Sparks blazed, and bright blue light flashed from rod to rod along the wet star grooves, and then arced across space from angel to angel. The seraphim turned glowing white. They swung, the iron rods turning, and their wings pointed northeast, tilt-ing toward each other so that lines drawn from each would meet about twenty yards away. The lightning bolt had passed, but the rods held power, everything bathed in a purple glow not too different than the one we’d seen in the chamber below the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

And then beams of light flowed from the wings of the seraphim, met in midair, and a single beam streaked like a rifle bullet, as if pulled, to strike a grand pillared doorway of another cliffside temple, two miles from where we stood. Sparks flew in a fountain.

“Yes!” Silano’s henchmen cried.

The ray held a moment, like a momentary peek of sun into a dark cave, and then faded. The mountaintop went dark. Dazzled, I looked at our metal poles. The seraphim had melted, the tops of the poles flattened like mushrooms. Silano had his arms up in the air in triumph. Astiza was rigid, her gown soaked, water dripping from the tendrils of dark hair plastered on her cheek. The storm was moving on toward the east, but behind its flashing prow came more rain, cooler this time, a hiss to cleanse the air of ozone. It poured down. We could all feel the electricity in the air, our hair still dancing to it. Water was sluicing everywhere off the cliff tops.

“Did everyone mark that?” Silano asked.

“I could find it with my eyes closed,” Najac promised, a note of greed in his tone.

“Satan’s work,” Big Ned muttered.

“No, Moses’!” Silano answered. “And that of the Knights Templar and all those who quest for truth. We are at God’s work, gentlemen, and whether the god is Thoth or Jehovah or Allah, his guise is the same: knowledge.” His eyes were alight with energy, as if some of the lightning had entered him.

I’ve nothing against knowledge—I sailed with savants, after all—

and yet his words and look disturbed me. I remembered childhood 2 1 2

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sermons of Satan as serpent, promising knowledge to Adam and Eve in the Garden. What fire were we playing with here? Yet how could we allow so tempting an apple to go unpicked?

I looked at Astiza, my moral compass. But she had to avoid my gaze, didn’t she? She looked awed—that something had really happened—and worried.

“Gentlemen, I believe we are about to make history,” Silano said.

“Down we go before nightfall. We’ll camp in front of the temple that was illuminated and search it at first light tomorrow.”

“Or with torches tonight,” the eager Najac said.

“I appreciate your impatience, Pierre, but after a thousand years I don’t think our goal is going anywhere. Monsieur Gage, as always your company has been intriguing. But I daresay neither of us will entirely regret our parting. You have made your bargain, so now I can say it. Adieu, frontiersman.” He bowed.

“Astiza,” I said. “Now you can come with me.” She was silent a long time. Then, “But I can’t, Ethan.”

“What?”

“I’m going with Alessandro.”

“But I came for you! I left Acre for you!” I displayed more bluster than a barrister facing damning evidence for a guilty client.

“I can’t let Alessandro have the book by himself, Ethan. I can’t walk away from it after all this suffering. Isis has brought me to this place to finish what I started.”

“But he’s mad! Look at his companions. They’re the devil’s spawn!

Come away with us. Come with me to America.” She shook her head. “Good-bye, Ethan.”

Silano was smiling. He’d expected this.

“No!”

“She has made her choice, monsieur.”

“I only helped with the lightning to get you!”

“I’m sorry, Ethan. The book is more important than you. More important than us. Go back to the English. I’m going with Alessandro.”

“You used me!”

“We used you to find the book: for good, I hope.” t h e

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In mock frustration I jerked out one of the iron poles to use as a weapon, but Najac’s gang raised their muskets. Astiza wouldn’t look at me as Silano shepherded her off the plateau, wrapping her head with her scarf.

“Someday soon you will realize what you just threw away, Gage,” Silano called. “What the Egyptian Rite could have given you! You will rue your bargain!”

“Aye,” Najac growled, his pistol steady. “So go back to Acre and die.” I let the pole drop with a clang. Our acting had succeeded. If, indeed, Astiza was acting. “Then get off my mountain,” I ordered, my voice shaking.

Smirking, they filed back down the trail, taking the melted seraphim and the rods with them, Astiza glancing back just once as she made her way down.

It was when they were out of earshot that Big Ned finally erupted.

“By the saints, guv’nor, we’re going to let that papist scoundrel steal our rightful treasure? I thought you had more grit!”

“Not grit, Ned, wit. Remember how I bested you at swords?” He looked chastened. “Aye.”

“That was by brain, not muscle. Silano doesn’t know as much as he thinks. Which means we have our own chance. We’re going to find a trail off the back side of this mountain and do our own exploring, well away from that tribe of cutthroats.”

“Away? But they know where this book of yours is!”

“They know where the lightning strike threw its light. But I don’t think the Templars would be that obvious. I’m hoping they were students of the Great Pyramid.”

He was baffled. “What do you mean, guv’nor?”

“I’m betting we’ve just witnessed a little misdirection. I am a gambling man, Ned. And the Great Pyramid incorporates a series of numbers known as the Fibonacci sequence. Surely you’ve heard of it.”

“Blimey, no.”

“The French in Egypt taught me about it. And this sequence, in turn, is a representation of some basic processes of nature. It’s holy, if you will. Just the kind of thing Templars would be interested in.” 2 1 4

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“I’m sorry, guv’nor, but I thought this was all about ancient treasure and secret powers, not numbers and Templars.”

“It’s all those things. Now, there’s a ratio that comes up in any geographic representation of the sequence, a pleasing proportion of a longer line to a shorter one that happens to be 1.61 and some-odd.

It’s called the “golden number” and was known to the Greeks and the builders of the Gothic cathedrals and to Renaissance painters. And it’s encoded in the dimensions of the Great Pyramid.”

“Gold?” Ned was looking at me as if I were daft, which perhaps I was.

I found a patch of dirt and drew. “Which means the book may really be at an angle to what we’ve just seen. That’s what I’m betting, anyway. Now, let’s suppose that the base of a pyramid is represented by the line we saw shooting across the valley here.” I sketched a line pointing at the ruins where Silano and his team were headed. “Draw a line perpendicular to it, and it runs off more or less west.” I pointed toward the rugged range where the storm had come from. “Somewhere along that new line is a point that would be represented if we completed a right triangle by drawing from where Silano is going to my other line going west.”

“A point where?”

“Exactly. You have to know how long the third line, the sloping line, should be. Let’s suppose it is 1.61 times, roughly, that of the line to Silano’s Temple—the golden ratio, the physical embodiment of Fibonacci and nature, and the slope of the Great Pyramid itself. A pyramid built to incorporate fundamental numbers, the kind that go into snail shells or flowers. It’s hard to gauge distance, yes, but if we assume the temple is two miles away, then our adjoining line is a little over three . . .”

He squinted, following my arm now as I left the temple where the lightning beam had struck and swung it from north to west. “I’m guessing it would strike my imaginary western line just about where that imposing ruin is.”

We stared. On the floor of the valley was a wreck of an ancient building that looked like it had been battered by artillery for a hunt h e

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dred years. The dilapidation was actually just time and decay, yet it still stood higher than all the rubble around it. A line of old pillars, holding nothing, jutted up along what appeared to be an ancient causeway.

“You saw this angle where, effendi?” Mohammad tried to clarify.

“In the slope of the Great Pyramid. My friend Jomard explained it to me.”

“You mean that Count Devil is going to the wrong temple?”

“It’s just a guess, but the only chance I’ve got. Lads, are you willing to take a look and hope that the Templars cared for this number game as much as the ancient Egyptians did?”

“I’ve learned to have faith in you, effendi.”

“And my, what a joke it would be to find the bloody book first,” Ned laughed. “And some gold, too, I’m betting.” And he gave me that wide, menacing smile.

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We pretended to descend as if we were making for the entry canyon to leave the City of Ghosts. But after picking our way around some rocks, out of sight of Silano, we found a tricky descent down a wet, beautiful ravine on the west side of the mountain. We passed more caves and ruined tombs, next to spraying falls spawned by the rain—the desert was drinking its fill indeed, as the Templars had prophesized—until we were on the city’s floor. It was dusk, the rain over. Using low hills as cover to keep out of sight of the others, we reached the large temple we’d seen just as it was getting dark. It was cool after the storm, stars beginning to stud the sky.

This structure was in worse repair than the Temple of Dendara I’d explored in Egypt, and much less impressive. Its roof was gone, and what was left was a windowless pen of rubble with minimal decoration. It was big—the walls seemed a hundred feet high, with an arch tall enough to sail a frigate through—but plain.

A tunnel leading downward was not hard to find. In one corner on the inside of the temple there was a crater in the rubble, as if someone had dug in search of treasure, and at the bottom were rough boards t h e

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weighted down with rocks. “Here it is then!” Ned quietly exulted. We threw the boards aside and found a set of sandstone stairs leading downward. Using dry brush to make crude torches, we lit one with steel and flint and descended. Yet we were soon disappointed. After thirty steps the staircase ended abruptly at what appeared to be a well, its sides of smooth sandstone. I took a rock and dropped it. Long seconds passed, and then there was a splash. I could hear water running below.

“An old well,” I said. “The Bedouin closed it up so their goats and children wouldn’t fall in.”

Disappointed, we went back outside to explore the perimeter but found nothing of interest. Out in front, old pillars holding nothing up lined an abandoned causeway. More heaps of broken masonry marked ancient buildings, long collapsed. All looked picked over, pottery fragments everywhere. I’ll tell you what history is: broken shards and forgotten bones; a million inhabitants thinking their moment is the most important, all turned to dust. From the cliffs around, caves were mute mouths. Weary, we sat.

“Looks like your theory didn’t work, guv’nor,” Ned said, dispirited.

“Not yet, Ned. Not yet.”

“Where’s the ghosts, then?” He peered about.

“Keeping their own counsel, I hope. Do you believe in them?’

“Aye, I’ve seen ’em. Lost shipmates stalk the deck on the darkest watches. Other wraiths, from wrecks unknown, call from passing swells. It gives a sailor a chill, it does. There was a baby that died in a rooming house I rented in Portsmouth, and we used to hear the cries when . . .”

“This is Satan’s talk,” Mohammad interrupted. “It’s wrong to dwell on the dead.”

“Yes, let’s think of our purpose, lads. We need a way down. If there’s one thing that goes with treasure hunting, it’s grubbing in the earth.”

“We should get miner’s wages, we should,” Ned agreed.

“In the morning, Silano is going to enter a temple where that lightning beam struck and either find something or not. I’ve bet not. But we need to find it ourselves and be well on our way before then.” 2 1 8

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“And what of the woman?” Ned asked. “Are you givin’ her up, guv’nor?”

“She’s supposed to steal away and meet us.”

“Ah, you gambled on her, too? Now, women are bad bets.” I shrugged. “Life is nothing but gambles.”

“I like the sound of the river,” Mohammad remarked, to change the subject. He viewed gambling as Satan’s device too, I knew. “You seldom hear it in the desert.”

We listened. Indeed, there was a stream running down a channel next to the causeway, chuckling as it splashed.

“It’s that storm. This place is parched like a bone most days, I figure,” Ned said.

“I wonder where the water goes,” Mohammad added. “We’re in a bowl.”

I stood. Where indeed? The desert drinks its fill. Suddenly excited, I clambered down the temple’s broken stairs to the causeway and crossed it to the temporary stream, sparkling now in the starlight. It ran west toward the mountains and . . . there! Disappeared.

An old pillar lay like a chopped tree trunk across the river course, and under it the river abruptly ended. On one side a babbling brook, on the other dry sand and cobbles. I slid into the cool water, feeling it rush against my calves, and peered under the column. There was a horizontal crack in the earth like a sleepy giant’s eyelid, and into this the water poured. I could hear the echo. Not a giant’s eye, but its mouth. Drinks its fill.

“I think I’ve found our hole!” I shouted up to the others.

Ned jumped down beside me. “Slip into that crack, guv’nor, and you might be flushed to hell.”

Indeed. Yet what if by some miracle I’d guessed right, and this was a clue to where the Templars had really hidden their Jerusalem secret?

It felt right. I backed out from under the pillar and looked about.

This was the only pillar that had fallen into the stream course. What were the chances it would have rolled precisely to where a cavern led downward? A cavern, moreover, that made its presence known only after a big thunderstorm?

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I followed the column’s trunklike length up the slope opposite from the temple. It had sheered off its base as if in an earthquake, its lower remnant jutting like a broken tooth. Intriguingly, the foundation platform seemed freer of debris than the surrounding landscape.

Someone—centuries ago, now?—had cleared this: perhaps after setting aside their coat of medieval chain mail and a white tunic with a red cross.

“Ned, help me dig. Mohammad, get more brush for torches.” He groaned. “Again, guv’nor?”

“Treasure, remember?”

Soon we’d revealed a platform of worn marble under the column base. For just a moment I could visualize what this city must have been like in its heyday, the columns forming a shady arcade on either side of the central causeway, crammed with colorful shops and tav-erns, clean water gushing down to blue fountains, and tasseled camels from Arabia, humps laden with trade goods, swaying in stately march.

There would be banners, trumpets, and gardens of fruit trees . . .

There! A pattern on the marble. Carved triangles jutted from the pillar’s square base. There were actually two layers of paving, I realized, one an inch higher and overlapping the other. It made this pattern: 2 2 0

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“Look for a symbol on this stonework,” I told my companions.

“Like a Masonic sign of compass and square.” We hunted. “Clean as a virgin’s breast,” Ned declared.

Well, the Templars were warrior-monks, not stonemasons. “No cross? No sword? No sefiroth?”

“Effendi, it’s just a broken pillar.”

“No, there’s something here. Some way down to flower and faith, like the poem said. It’s a locked door, and the key is . . . it’s a square with a square. Four corners and four corners? That’s eight. A sacred number? It’s in the Fibonacci sequence.” The other two looked at me, blank.

“But two triangles too, three and three. Six. That isn’t. Together they make fourteen, and that isn’t either. Damn! Am I entirely off course?” I felt I was trying too hard. I needed Monge, or Astiza.

“If you could overlap the triangles, effendi, it would make the Jewish star.”

Of course. Was it as simple as that? “Ned, help pull this column base. Let’s see if the triangles on this floor slide over each other.”

“What?” Once more he looked at if I were a lunatic.

“Pull! Like you did on the altar beneath Jerusalem!” Looking as if he was confirming his own damnation, the sailor joined me. By myself I don’t think I would have budged the frozen stonework, but Ned’s muscles bulged until they cracked. Mohammad helped too. Grudgingly, the base of the fallen pillar indeed began to move, the marble beginning to overlap. As the triangles crossed, they increasingly began to form the pattern of the Star of David.

“Pull, Ned, pull!”

“You’re going to bring another lightning bolt, guv’nor.” But we didn’t. The more the triangles overlapped, the smoother they slid. When they formed the star there was a click and the pillar base suddenly swung free, rotating out of the way on a single pin at its corner. The whole assembly had become weightless. As the base did so the six-sided star began to sink into the earth.

We gaped.

“Jump, jump, before it gets away from us!” I sprang and landed t h e

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on the descending paving. After a moment’s hesitation Ned and Mohammad did too, the Arab holding crude torches. We could hear the creak of ancient gears as we settled into the earth.

“We’re going to hell,” Mohammad moaned.

“No, men. The book and treasure!”

The sound of water was louder now, echoing into whatever subterranean chamber we were descending. We sank down a star-shaped shaft, our platform the six-sided star, and then it jerked and settled on the bottom. I looked up. We were in a well, far too high to climb out of. I could see only a few stars.

“How do we get back up?” Ned asked reasonably.

“Hmmm. I wonder if we should have left one of us on top? Well, too late now, lads. The book will tell us how to get out.” I said it with more confidence than I felt.

A low horizontal passage led off from our peculiar shaft toward the sound of water. We crouched and followed it. In roughly the length of the fallen pillar above, we came to a cavern. There was a roar of water.

“Let’s light a torch,” I said. “Just one—we may need the others.” Yellow light flared. I gasped. The stream from the thunderstorm was spilling down from the slit I’d observed above, the desert drinking its fill. But that wasn’t what caught my eye. The cavern we’d come to was man-made and shaped like a horn, or funnel, narrowing as it went down. Around its periphery a ledge wound, just wide enough for a man. We were clustered at its top. The ledge spiraled as it descended, and its pattern reminded me of the nautilus shell Jomard had shown me at the Great Pyramid, the one inspired by the Fibonacci sequence.

For the flower and faith. At the funnel’s bottom, the water was a swirling, turbulent pool.

“Whirlpool,” Ned muttered. “Not the kind of thing you get back out of.”

“No, it’s another symbol, Ned. The universe is made of numbers somehow, and the Templars, or the people who built this city, were trying to memorialize it in stone. Just like the Egyptians. This is what the book is about, I’m guessing.”

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“Underground places built by madmen?”

“What’s behind the everyday world we see.” He shook his head. “It’s a sewer, guv’nor.”

“No. A portal.” And faith.

“Blimey, how did I get mixed up with you!”

“Indeed, we are in an evil place, effendi.”

“No, this is a holy place. You two can wait here. I’m betting they wouldn’t build all this if there wasn’t something down there. Would they?”

They looked at me as if I belonged in an asylum, which wasn’t far wrong. We were all crazy as loons, looking for a shortcut to happiness.

But I knew I’d figured out the puzzle, that the mad Templars and their lightning had put their secret here, not where Silano was, and that if Astiza met us as promised I’d finally have it all—knowledge, treasure, and a woman. Well, two women, but that would be sorted out in due course. Again, I was gripped with guilt about Miriam, combined with sweet memory of her body and no little apprehension about her hurt.

It’s odd what one thinks about in tight times.

I lit another torch and descended, creeping down the spiral track like a careful snail. My compatriots stayed above, looking down on me. When I got to where the fall of water hit the pitch-black pool, my torch sputtered in the mist. How deep was this well? Too deep to retrieve whatever the Templars threw down here? For I’d no doubt they’d dropped their Jerusalem treasure down this funnel, trusting that surviving members would someday come back and reconstitute their order.

I gathered my courage. The water, as I said, was utterly dark, swirling like a drain, with green scum floating on its surface like curds.

Its smell was musty as a coffin. But we couldn’t get out the way we’d come, could we? So, setting my torch to one side where it promptly went out—my only light now was the dim torch of Ned and Mohammad above—I took a breath, prayed to all the gods I could think of, and plunged.

The water was chilly, but not shocking. I fell through ink. Soft, fibrous mats of algae brushed me as I fell, the slime of centuries.

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There may have been swimming things as well, white and pulpy in the dark—I imagined them, whether or not they were there—but I just kicked straight down, groping. I had two minutes to find what we sought, or drown.

The current started to hurry me. I began to panic, because it was increasingly apparent that fighting back upward would cost more time and breath than I had. I could not retreat, and I was being swept down and forward.

I noticed a peculiar glow. It came from ahead, not bright, but welcome enough after long seconds of utter blackness. I saw a bottom and it was reassuringly white, like a bottom of clean sand. Then I saw the true source of the paleness and almost swallowed water. The bottom was not sand, but bone.

I’d seen the frieze of skulls at the Templar chamber under Jerusalem, but this was a hundred times worse, an ossuary of the damned.

Real skulls this time, pale and dim but recognizable enough, in grue-some tangle with arms, legs, and ribs. It was a reef of bone, bleached white, teeth as long as forefingers, sockets as blank as a grave. The whole was wrapped in fuzzed chain and chunks of stone.

This had been a sacrificial well or execution chamber.

The current swept me over this boneyard, pulling me toward a growing light. Was I hallucinating as my brain starved of air? No, it was real light, and I passed out of a short tunnel and saw it even brighter above me. While the current wanted to pull me on to wherever the river went, I kicked furiously upward.

I burst out of water with my last shrieking breath. Those bones!

I spied and thrashed for a shelf of sandstone, grabbed, kicked, and flopped up out of the water like a played-out fish. For a while I just lay, gasping. Finally I got breath enough to sit up and look about. I was at the bottom of a sandstone shaft or well. High above, far out of reach, was the source of dim light. The underground stream I’d escaped ran past the shelf of rock and poured into another underwater tunnel. I shuddered. Might there be still more bones downstream, to be joined by mine?

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couldn’t see the sky so I surmised something was reflecting the night sky downward. The illumination was very dim, but it was light enough to see that the walls of the shaft were smooth, without crevice or foothold and too far apart to span with my body. There was no chance of climbing out. And what else?

Men watching.

Dripping, I rose slowly to my feet and turned about in this dim chamber. I was surrounded by men, I realized, huge brooding ones in medieval armor. They were helmeted, bearded, and had kite-shaped shields grounded at their armored feet. Except they weren’t real men but sandstone statues, carved from the shaft walls to form a circle of eternal sentries: Templars. Perhaps they were representations of past grand masters. They were more than life-size, a good nine feet, and their gaze was grim. Yet there was something comforting about these companions as well, who would never let down their guard and yet stood back against the walls of the rock chamber as if they expected what they guarded was someday to be found.

And what was that? A stone sarcophagus, I saw, but not a lidless one like I’d seen in the king’s chamber of the Great Pyramid. This was in the style of European churches, its lid the sculpted figure of a European knight. The sarcophagus was of limestone, and the Templar, I guessed, was perhaps that first one: Montbard, uncle of Saint Bernard. A guardian for all eternity.

The lid was heavy, and at first seemed firmly set it place. But when I gave it a hard enough shove it shifted slightly, with a scraping sound.

Dust sifted from its edges. Straining, I pushed and pushed, until I had it ajar and could lower an edge onto the ground. Then I peered inside.

A box inside a box.

The coffin was made of acacia wood, remarkably preserved. While opening it gave me pause, I’d come too far. I jerked open the lid. Inside was a skeleton of a man, not terrifying but instead looking small and naked in this ultimate exposure. His flesh had long since decayed away to bone and his clothes were wisps. His warrior’s sword was a narrow, rusty tendril of its former might. But one skeletal hand gripped a marvel not corroded at all, but as bright and intricately decorated as t h e

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the day it was forged. It was a golden cylinder, fat as an arrow quiver and long as a scroll. Its exterior was a riot of mythic figures, of bulls, hawks, fish, scarabs, and creatures so strange and unworldly that I’m at a loss to describe them, so different were they from anything I’d seen before. There were grooves and arabesque scrollwork, stars and geometric shapes, and the gold was so smooth and intricate that my fingertips stroked its sensuousness. The metal seemed warm. It was a life’s fortune in weight, and priceless in design.

The Book of Thoth must be inside. But when I pulled to lift it away, the skeleton pulled back!

I was so startled I let go and the cylinder shifted slightly, settling deeper into the bones. Then I realized I’d simply been surprised by the object’s weight. I lifted again and the cylinder came free like an anchor stone, supple, slick, and heavy. No lightning flashed. No thunder pealed. Without having realized I’d held it, I let loose pent-up breath. It was simply me in the gloom, holding what men had reportedly sought, fought, and died for over five thousand years. Was this, too, cursed? Of would it be my guidebook to a better world?

And how to open it?

As I studied the cylinder more carefully, recognition dawned. I’d seen some of these symbols before. Not all, but some had been on the ceiling at the Temple of Dendara, and others on the calendar device I’d studied in the hold of L’Orient before the French flagship blew up in the Battle of the Nile. There was a circle atop a line, just as on the calendar, and all the others: animals, stars, a pyramid, and Taurus the bull, the zodiacal age in which the Great Pyramid had been built. And not just a pyramid, but a small representation of a pillared temple. The cylinder, I saw, was jointed so that one could twist and align symbols, not unlike the circles of the calendar. So once more I tried what I knew: bull, five-sided star, and the symbol of the summer solstice, just as I’d done on the ship. But that was not enough, so I added pyramid and temple.

Perhaps I was smart. Perhaps I was lucky. Perhaps there were a hundred combinations that would open the cylinder. All I know is there was a click and it divided between pyramid and temple, like a 2 2 6

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sausage cut in two. And when I pulled the golden halves apart, what I expected was inside: a scroll, the ancient form of the book.

I unrolled it, my fingers trembling in my excitement. The papy-rus, if that’s what it was, was unlike any I’d seen or felt before. It was slicker, stronger, more tensile, and oddly shimmering, but of a material that seemed neither hide, paper, or metal. What was it? The writing was even stranger. Instead of the pictorial script or hieroglyphics I’d seen in Egypt, this was more abstract. It was angular and faintly geometric, but odder than script I’d ever seen, a riot of shapes, slashes, squiggles, loops, and intricate characters. I had discovered the secret of life, the universe, or immortality, if the lunatics chasing this thing were to be believed. And I couldn’t read a word!

Somewhere, Thoth was laughing.

Well, I’d puzzled things out before. And even if the scroll proved indecipherable, its container was enough to pension a king of Prussia.

Once more, I was rich.

If I could get out of this mouse hole.

I considered. A swim back against the current would be impossible, and even if I could do it I’d only climb back up to a shaft we had no means of ascending. Yet going downstream would suck me into an underground pipe with no guarantee of air. I’d barely survived such a sluice under the Great Pyramid, and didn’t have the nerve to try it again. I’d seen no sign of this temporary river emerging anywhere.

What would Ben Franklin do?

I’d heartily tired of his aphorisms when I had to hear them everyday, but now I missed him. “Wise men don’t need advice, fools don’t take it.” Clever, but hardly a help. “Energy and persistence conquer all things.” Persistence how? Tunneling out like a miner? I inspected the chamber more closely. The Templar statues were rigid and unmoving, unlike the turning Madonnas under the Temple Mount. There were no designs on the cave walls, and no cracks, doors, or holes in which to insert the golden cylinder, in hopes it might serve as some kind of key. I tapped the shaft, but heard no hollows. I shouted, but the echo was useless. I beat the walls, just to see if something might give, but nothing did. How the devil did the Templars get in here? The tunnel t h e

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would be dry between storms. Should I wait? No, more thunder had been growling and a stream like this could run for days. I kicked, wrenched, and howled, but nothing budged. “Never confuse motion with action,” Ben had advised.

What else had he said? “Well done is better than well said.” Yes, but not exactly useful in my present predicament, as near as I could tell. “All would live long, but none would be old.” At the moment, even being old seemed preferable to dying. “In rivers and bad government, the lightest things swim to the top.” Well, at least that had river in it. . . .

Swim to the top.

I looked up. If light was filtering down, there had to be a way out.

Impossible to climb without rope, ladder, or footholds. If only I had one of Conte’s balloons . . . swim to the top.

What Ben did, different than almost all of us, was think first, and then act. Why is that so difficult? Yet finally I had an idea, a desperate one, and—just as important—no plausible alternative. I seized the lid of the sarcophagus that was leaning against the stone box and dragged it, screeching, to the edge of the water. Heaving, I got it upright like a door, balancing on one corner, to teeter above the underground river.

As well as I could, I aimed at the dark hole into which the river disappeared downstream. And, with a grunt, shoved the lid out into the water! The force of the current rammed the lid against the mouth of the tunnel, sealing the water’s outlet.

Instantly, the water began to rise.

It spilled across the sandstone platform, running over the boots of the Templar statues. This had better work! “Sorry, Montbard, or whoever you are.” I heaved the acacia wood coffin up to the lip of the stone sarcophagus and tipped out its bones. They rattled into the limestone sarcophagus in a sacrilegious jumble, the skull looking up at me with what I swear was reproach. Well, I was cursed now.

I balanced the wood box across the top of the sarcophagus, tucked the golden cylinder in my shirt, and climbed in as if it were a bath-tub. The water was rising fast, almost a foot a minute. It crept past the Templar knees, topped the edge of the sarcophagus, and poured 2 2 8

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inside—and then floated me. I prayed to gods Christian, Jewish, and Egyptian. Glory, hallelujah!

My ark rose. As the well filled and the water deepened, I knew the increasing pressure might blow out the lid I’d jammed below, so I could only hope it would hold long enough. “He that lives upon hope will die fasting.” My own advice is to pick and choose your aphorisms as convenient, so I hoped like the very devil. Up we bobbed, foot after precious foot. I realized my action would also back water into the spiral in the chamber behind, toward Ned and Mohammad.

I hoped they could swim.

The dim light grew as we climbed, and stars reflected in the black water. I found a rib or two that hadn’t spilled out of my vessel and unceremoniously pitched them overboard, reasoning I wouldn’t really care what happened to my bones once I didn’t have need of them anymore. Up and up until I indeed saw a silvered disk, reflecting light from a slanted shaft. And on that shaft were sandstone stairs! I stood in my wobbling coffin, stretched for the first step, and boosted. Solid rock! Behind me, the water was still rising.

Then there was a thump, the water burped, and with a sucking roar it began falling, my coffin boat spiraling down with it. The lid that plugged the stream had cracked under the pressure and given way. Back out of sight the water swirled, pouring again out its drain, but I’d no time to watch it. I mounted the stairs, realizing this was the same well shaft we’d found in the ruined temple. We hadn’t noticed the reflection from our angle, and if we hadn’t cast aside the boards I would have had no light down there at all. I emerged between the stone walls, clambered over rubble, and raced back across the causeway to the base of the pillar where we’d first descended. “Ned! Mohammad! Are you alive!”

“By the skin of our teeth, guv’nor! That whole funnel filled with water and we was about to drown like rats! Then the water went down again!”

“How did you get up there, effendi? What’s going on?”

“I just wanted to give you boys a bath is all.”

“But how did you get out?”

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“Ferry boat.” I could see their upturned faces like little moons.“Wait.

I’ve got an idea to try to get you up.” The base of the fallen column, you will recall, had pivoted out of the way of the star-shaped paving to start the platform descending. Now I pushed it back, there was a click, and sure enough, the platform below began to rise up its star-shaped shaft, Ned and Mohammad hooting in joy like madmen.

Once they were up I got their help to shove the base back onto its rightful place, sealing the entry again. Then Ned hugged me as if I were his mother. “By Davy Jones, you is a wizard, guv’nor! Always you jump clear like a cat! And did you get the treasure?”

“There’s no treasure, I’m afraid.” Their faces fell. “Believe me, I looked. Just a Templar grave, my friends. Oh, and this.” Like a magician, I pulled out the golden cylinder. They gasped.

“Here, feel its weight.” I let them hold it. “There’s enough gold here to set all three of us up in decent style.”

“But effendi,” Mohammad said, “what of your book? Is it here? Is it full of magical secrets?”

“It’s in there, all right, and it’s the most peculiar thing I’ve ever seen. I’m sure we’ll do the world a favor to keep it away from Silano.

Maybe a scholar can make sense of it someday.”

“A scholar?”

“I’ve finally got it, by the labors of Hercules, and I can’t read a word.” They looked at me with consternation.

“Let’s go get Astiza.”

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The level exit from the City of Ghosts would take us past Silano’s camp, which I dared not do. Instead, as the stars faded and the sky blushed, we first put the well’s board back in place in the temple—I didn’t want a falling child on my conscience—and then retraced our laborious route up and over the High Place of Sacrifice, pausing only at Ned’s insistence to let him uproot a small, wizened pine tree. “At least it’s a club,” he explained. “A nunnery has more firepower than we has.” While we hiked he peeled off branches with his meaty paws like a Samson to shape it. Up, over, and down we went, winded and weary by the time we reached the canyon floor at the ruined Roman theater. A mile or more behind us, I could see a campfire glow where Silano was camped. If Astiza had crept away, how long before her absence was noticed? To the east the sky was glowing. The higher peaks were already lit.

We hurried back up the city’s main canyon toward the sinuous entry slit and came again to the façade of the first great temple we had seen, the Khazne. As the others knelt at the small brook to drink, I bounded up its stairs and into its dark interior.

“Astiza?”

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Silence. Wasn’t this to be our rendezvous?

“Astiza!” It echoed as if mocking me.

Damnation. Had I misread the woman again? Had Silano tumbled to our plan and held her captive? Or was she simply late or lost?

I ran back outside. The sky was brightening from gray to blue, and the tops of the cliffs were beginning to glow. We had to leave before the count realized I’d directed him to an empty hole! But I wasn’t going to trade the woman I loved for a scroll I couldn’t read. If we left without her, I’d be tortured with regret again. If we stayed too long, my friends might be killed.

“She’s not here,” I reported worriedly.

“Then we must go,” Mohammad said. “Every mile we put between ourselves and those Frankish infidels doubles our chance of escape.”

“I feel she’s coming.”

“We can’t wait, guv’nor.”

Ned was right. I could hear faint calls echoing down the canyon from Silano’s group, though whether of excitement or outrage yet I couldn’t tell. “A few minutes more,” I insisted.

“Has she bewitched you? She’s going to get us all caught, and your book!”

“We can trade away the book if we have to.”

“Then what in Lucifer’s privy did we come here for?” Suddenly she appeared from around the bend, hugging the rock to minimize her chance of being seen, face pale, ringlets of dark hair in her eyes, breathless from having run. I rushed back to her.

“What took you so long?”

“They were so excited they couldn’t sleep. I was the first to go to bed, and it was agony, waiting all night for them to quiet. Then I had to crawl in the canyon wadi past a sleepy guard, for a hundred yards or more.” Her dress was filthy. “I think they’ve already noticed me gone.”

“Can you run?”

“If you don’t have it, I don’t want to.” Her eyes were bright, asking.

“I found it.”

She gripped my arms, her grin like a child’s waiting for a present.

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She’d dreamed of the book far longer than I had. I pulled the cylinder out. She sucked in her breath.

“Feel its weight.”

Her fingers explored it like a blind man’s. “Is it really in here?”

“Yes. But I can’t read it.”

“For Allah’s sake, effendi, we must go,” Mohammad called.

I ignored him, twisted the cylinder open, and unrolled part of the scroll. Once again I was struck by how alien the characters appeared.

She held the book with both hands, bewildered, but reluctant to give it back. “Where was it?”

“Deep in a Templar tomb. I gambled there was a twist to their clues, and they required seekers to use pyramid mathematics to prove their knowledge.”

“This will change the world, Ethan.”

“For good, I hope. Things can’t get much worse, from my perspective.”

“Guv’nor!” Ned’s shout broke us from our mutual trance. He had his hand to his ear, pointing. It was the echo of a gunshot.

I grabbed the book from her, twisted the cylinder shut, thrust it back in my shirt, and ran to where the sailor was looking. Sunlight was beginning to flood down the face of the temple, turning the cliff and carvings a brilliant rose. But Ned was pointing back the way we had come, toward Silano’s camp. A mirror was winking as it tilted.

“They’re signaling somebody.” He pointed to the sandstone plateau the entry canyon cut in two. “Some devil on top there, ready to roll a rock.”

“Silano’s men are coming, effendi!”

“So we have to get those tethered horses away from the Arabs at the entrance. Are you up to it, hearties?” It seemed the sort of rallying cry Nelson or Smith might use.

“Home to England!” Ned shouted.

So we ran, swallowed in an instant by the tight entry canyon and absolutely blinded by its many curves. Our footsteps echoed as we charged uphill. Ned’s arms pumped with his club. Astiza’s hair flew out behind her.

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There were shouts far above, and then bangs. We glanced up. A rock the size of a powder keg was ricocheting between the narrow walls as it came down, pieces flying off like grapeshot.

“Faster!” We sprinted, getting beyond the missile before it hit the canyon floor with a crash. Arabic was being shouted on the rim above.

On we jogged. Now there was a roar, and a flash of light. The bastards had rigged the whole canyon! Silano must have guessed we might outfox him and that he’d want to block our escape. An avalanche or rock blasted out by gunpowder sluiced down, and this time I pulled my companions back, all of us ducking under an overhang.

The avalanche thundered down, shaking the canyon floor, and then we were running again through its concealing cloud of dust, clambering over the rubble.

Bullets whined, to no effect since we were invisible.

“Hurry! Before they set off another charge!” There was another explosion, and another deluge of rock, but this time it came down behind us where it would slow the pursuing Silano. We were more than halfway through this snake hole, I judged, and if all the Arabs were on top setting off gunpowder, there wouldn’t be any left to guard the horses. Once mounted, we’d stampede the remainder and . . .

Panting, we rounded another bend in the canyon and saw our way blocked by a wagon. It was a caged contraption of the type I’d seen to transport slaves, and I guessed it was the one we’d seen shrouded near camp that the horses had shied from. There was a lone Arab by it, sighting at us with a musket.

“I’ll handle this,” Ned growled, hefting his club.

“Ned, don’t give him an easy shot!”

Yet even as the sailor charged, there was a whistle in the air and a stone flicked by our ears with nearly the speed of a bullet, striking the Arab in the forehead just as he fired. The musket went off but the ball went wide. I looked back. Mohammad had removed his turban and used its cloth as a makeshift sling. “As a boy, I had to keep the dogs and jackals from the sheep,” he explained.

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the lead, Astiza next. Yet as the man groggily slid down, he released a lever and the back of the cage dropped with a bang. Something shadowy and huge rose and bunched.

“Ned!” I shouted.

The thing sprang as if launched by a catapult instead of its own hind haunches. I had a terrifying glimpse of brown mane, white teeth, and the intimate pink of its mouth. Astiza screamed. Ned and the lion roared in unison and collided, the club whacking down even as the predator’s jaws crunched on his left forearm.

The sailor howled in agony and rage, but I could also hear the crack of the lion’s ribs as the pine club smashed into its side, again and again, the velocity so powerful that it shoved the animal onto its side, taking Ned’s arm, and him, with it. The two rolled, the human shouting and the cat snarling, a blur of fur and dust. The sailor reared up and the club struck again and again even as he was raked by the claws. His clothes were being shredded, his flesh opened up. I was sickened.

I had out my tomahawk, puny as a teaspoon, but before I could think things through and turn tail like a sensible man, I charged too.

“Ethan!” I heard Astiza only dimly.

Another stone from Mohammad sung by me and struck the cat, making its head whip, and the distraction was timed so exquisitely that I was able to dash into the melee and take a swipe at the lion’s head. I connected with the brow of one eye and the cat let go Ned’s arm and roared with pain and fury, its tail lashing and its hindquarters churning in the dirt. Now Astiza was charging too, a heavy rock held high over her head, and she heaved like an athlete so it came right down into the beast’s bloody vision, crashing against its snout.

Our wild assault bewildered it. Against all expectation, the lion broke and ran, vaulting past the wagon cage that had brought it here.

It raced up the canyon and then charged, I now saw, more of Najac’s Arabs coming up to contest our way. Screaming at this reversal of their secret weapon, they turned and fled. The bloodied lion took one of them down, pausing to snap the man’s neck, and then set off after the others and the freedom of the hills beyond.

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The horses were screaming in terror.

We were in shock, hearts racing. My tomahawk’s edge was stuck with blood and fur. Astiza was bent over, chest heaving. Astonishingly, all but Ned were unscathed. I could still smell the cat stink, that rank odor of piss, meat, and blood, and my voice was quavering as I knelt beside the giant sailor. His charge into the lion’s jaws was the bravest thing I’d ever seen.

“Ned, Ned! We’ve got to keep going!” I was wheezing. “Silano’s still coming, but I think the lion cleared the canyon for us.”

“Afraid not, guv’nor.” He spoke with difficulty, his jaw clenched.

He was bleeding like a man flogged. He glowed with vivid blood.

Mohammad was wrapping his turban cloth around the giant’s man-gled forearm, but it was pointless. It looked like it had been shredded by a machine. “You’ll have to go on without me.”

“We’ll carry you!”

He laughed, or rather gasped, a sneezelike chortle between clenched lips, his eyes wide at the knowledge of his own fate. “Bloody likely.” We reached to lift him anyway, but he shrieked with pain and shoved us aside. “Leave me, we all know I’m not making it back to England!” He groaned, tears staining his cheeks. “He scraped me ribs raw, the leg feels like it’s sprained or broken, and I weigh more than King George and his tub. Run, run like the wind, so it’s worthwhile.” His knuckles were white where he grasped the club.

“Ned, I’ll be damned if I leave you! Not after all this!”

“And you’ll be dead if you don’t, and your treasure book in the hands of that mad count and his lunatic bullyboy. By Lucifer, make my life mean something by living! I can crawl back to that rubble heap and catch ’em when they’re coming across.”

“They’ll shoot you down!”

“It will be a mercy, guv’nor. It will be a mercy.” He grimaced.

“Had a feeling I wouldn’t see England if I went with you. But you’re a damned interesting companion, Ethan Gage. More than just a Yankee card sharp, you are.”

Why do our worst enemies sometimes become our best friends?

“Ned . . .”

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“Run, damn your eyes! Run, and if you find me mums, give her a bit of that gold.” And, shaking us off, he rose doggedly, first to his knees and then his feet, weaving, and began staggering back the way we came, his side a sheet of blood. “Christ, I’m thirsty.” I was transfixed, but Mohammad hauled at me. “Effendi, we must go. Now!”

So we ran. I’m not proud of it, but if we stayed to fight Silano’s armed Frenchmen we’d lose for sure, and for what? So we hurtled past the Arab slumped at the wagon, leapt the one chewed by the lion, and on and on up the sloping canyon, our chests heaving, half expecting the maddened cat to leap out at us at every turn. But the lion was gone. As we came to the mouth of the canyon we heard the echo of shouts and then shots behind. There was screaming, a roaring scream a big man might make when subjected to unbearable pain. Ned was still buying us time, but with agony.

The horses were tethered where we’d left them the day before, but they were stamping with shrill neighs, eyes rolling. We saddled the three best, seized the line rope of the others, and began galloping back the way we’d come. There was more gunfire, but we were well out of range.

As we climbed to the highland plateau we looked back. Silano’s group had emerged from the canyon and were following in dogged pursuit, but they were on foot. The gap was growing. We couldn’t handle the extra horses, so except for three remounts we let the other horses go. It would take our pursuers time to recapture them.

Then, weeping and utterly drained, we set off north for Acre.

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¤

At sunset we reached the Crusader castle where we’d camped before. I suppose we should have ridden farther, but after losing a night’s sleep retrieving the book and fleeing through the canyons, Mohammad and I were reeling in our saddles. Astiza was little better.

I’m a gambler, and I gambled Silano and Najac wouldn’t retrieve their horses anytime soon. So we stopped, the castle stones briefly orange t h e

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as the sun sank, and ate meager rations of bread and dates we found in the saddlebags. We dared not light a fire.

“You two sleep first,” Mohammad said. “I’ll keep watch. Even if the French and Arabs are stranded on foot, there are still bandits around here.”

“You’re as exhausted as us, Mohammad.”

“Which is why you must relieve me in a few hours. That corner has grass for a bed and the stone will still be warm from the sun. I’ll be up in the broken tower.”

He disappeared, still my guide and guardian.

“He’s leaving us alone on purpose,” Astiza said.

“Yes.”

“Come. I’m shivering.”

The grass was still green and soft this time of year. A lizard skit -

tered away into its hole when evening pulled down its shadow. We lay together in the wedge of warm stone, our first opportunity to be truly close since she’d slapped me in front of Silano. Astiza snuggled for warmth and comfort. She was shaking, her cheeks wet.

“Always it is so hard.”

“Ned wasn’t a bad sort. I led him to disaster.”

“It was Najac who put the lion there, not you.” And I who took Ned along, and Astiza who carried the ring. I suddenly remembered it and brought it out from her little purse. “You kept this even after saying it was cursed.”

“It was all I had of you, Ethan. I meant to offer it back.”

“Did the gods have a purpose, letting us find it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” She clung even tighter.

“Maybe it’s good luck. After all, we have the book. We’re together again.”

She looked at me in amazement. “Hunted, unable to read it, a companion dead.” She held out her hand. “Give it.” When I did she sat up and hurled it to the far corner of the ruined courtyard. I could hear it clink. A ruby, big enough to set a man for life, was gone. “The book is enough. No more, no more.” And then she bent back down, eyes fierce, and kissed me, with electric fire.

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Someday, perhaps, we’ll have a proper bed, but just as in Egypt we had to seize the time and place given. It was an urgent, fumbling, half-clothed affair, our desire not so much for each other’s bodies as for reassuring union against a cold, treacherous, relentless world. We gasped as we coupled, straining like animals, Astiza giving out a small cry, and then we slumped together in almost immediate unconsciousness, our tangle of linen drawn like a shell. I dimly pledged to relieve Mohammad as promised.

He woke us at dawn.

“Mohammad, I’m sorry!” We were struggling with as much deco-rum as possible to get dressed.

“It’s all right, effendi. I fell asleep too, probably minutes after I left you. I checked the horizon. Nobody has come. But we must move again, soon. Who knows when the enemy will recover his horses?”

“Yes, and with the French in control of Palestine, there’s only one place we can safely go: Acre. And they know it.”

“How will we get through Bonaparte’s army?” Astiza asked with spirit, not worry. She looked rejuvenated in the growing light, glowing, her eyes brighter, her hair a glorious tangle. I felt resurrected too.

It was good to shed the pharaoh’s ring.

“We’ll cut toward the coast, find a boat, and sail in,” I said, suddenly confident. I had the book, I had Astiza . . . of course I also had Miriam, a detail I’d neglected to tell Astiza about. Well, first things first.

We mounted, and galloped down the castle hill.

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We dared not pause a second night. We rode as hard as we could push the horses, retracing our route to Mount Nebo and then descending to the Dead Sea and the Jordan, a plume of dust floating off our hooves as we hurried. The Jerusalem highlands, we assumed, were still swarming with Samaritan guerrillas who might or might not regard us as allies, so we pushed north along the Jordan and back into the Jezreel Valley, giving Kléber’s battlefield there a t h e

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wide berth. Vultures orbited the hill where we’d made our stand. My party was still weaponless, except for my tomahawk. Once we saw a French cavalry patrol and dismounted to hide in an olive grove while they passed by a mile distant. Twice we saw Ottoman horsemen, and hid from them too.

“We’ll strike for the coast near Haifa,” I told my companions. “It’s only lightly garrisoned by the French. If we can steal a boat and reach the British, we’ll be safe.”

So we rode, parting the high wheat like Moses, the City of Ghosts as unreal as a dream and Ned’s bizarre death an incomprehensible nightmare. Astiza and I had regained that easy companionship that comes to couples, and Mohammad was our faithful chaperone and partner. Since our escape, not once had he mentioned money.

We’d all been changed.

So escape seemed near, but as we rode northeast toward the coast hills and Mount Carmel that embraced Haifa, we saw a line of waiting horsemen ahead.

I scaled a pine to peer with my telescope, dread dawning as I focused first on one figure, then another. How could this be?

It was Silano and Najac. They’d not only caught up, they’d somehow ridden around and put out this picket line to ensnare us.

Maybe we could creep by them.

But no, there were unavoidable open fields as we sprinted north, and with a cry they spotted us. The chase was on! They took care to keep between us and the coast.

“Why aren’t they closing?” Astiza asked.

“They’re herding us toward Napoleon.”

We tried veering toward the Mediterranean that night, but a volley of shots sent us skittering back. Najac’s Arabs, I suspected, were expert trackers and they’d guessed where we must go. Now we couldn’t shake them. We rode hard, enough to keep them at a distance, but we were helpless without weapons. They didn’t press, knowing they had us.

“We can go inland again, effendi, toward Nazareth or the Sea of Galilee,” Mohammad said. “We could even seek refuge with the Turkish army at Damascus.”

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“And lose all we’ve gained,” I said grimly. “We both know the Ottomans would take the cylinder in an instant.” I looked back. “Here’s our plan, then. We race them to the French lines, as if we’re going to surrender to Napoleon. Then we keep going, right through their encampment, and run for the walls of Acre. If Silano or the French follow, they’ll come under the guns of the English and Djezzar.”

“And then, effendi?”

“We hope our friends don’t shoot at us too.” And we kicked for the final miles.

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We were on the coastal plain as the sun rose, the Mediterranean an enticing silver platter blocked by our enemies. When we galloped, our pursuers, who’d been conserving their own steeds, did too. I’d been looking at them through the glass and recognized some of the horses they’d recaptured. They had new ones as well. Silano must have pushed them brutally. Our rest at the Crusader castle had cost us dearly.

Our only hope was surprise. “Astiza! When we near the camp, hold your white scarf aloft like a truce flag! We have to confuse them!” She nodded, leaning intently over the neck of her sprinting horse.

Behind us, we heard shots. I looked back. Our pursuers were well out of range, but trying to alert the French sentries that we were to be arrested. I was betting on confusion, helped by the fact that we had a woman.

The last mile passed in a dead run, our horses’ foam-flecked, flanks heaving, our heads down as shots continued to pop behind us. The sentries were out, muskets raised, bayonets fixed, but uncertain.

“Now, now! Wave it now!”

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and straightening enough to give a look at her female torso, the wind flattening her gown against her breasts. The guards lowered their guns.

We thundered past. “Bandits and guerrillas!” I shouted. Najac’s bunch looked like ruffians. Now the pickets were tentatively aiming at our pursuers.

“Don’t slow!” I shouted to the others. We flashed by the hospital tents and jumped the tongues of wagons. There, was that Monge and the chemist, Berthollet? And was Bonaparte running out of his tent?

We crashed through a campfire circle, men scattering and embers flying, and everywhere soldiers were standing from their morning breakfast and exclaiming and pointing. Their muskets were stacked in neat little pyramids, bayonets gleaming. Down the avenue-like corridor between a regiment’s tents we pounded, dust swirling. Behind I could hear cries and argument as Silano’s party reined up at the lines, pointing furiously.

We just might make it.

A sergeant aimed a pistol, but I swerved and the man was butted aside by the shoulder of my horse, the gun going off harmlessly. A quick-witted Mohammad snatched a tricolor and carried it, as if we were leading a charge on Acre all by ourselves. But no, now a hedge of infantry was forming between us and the city walls, still a mile distant, so we wove along the lines, leaping a dike of sand. Shots began to be fired. They buzzed past like insistent hornets.

Up on Acre’s walls, horns were blowing. What would Smith think, when I’d deserted him without a word?

There, a kitchen unit, the men weaponless and preoccupied with cooking. I turned my horse and thundered through it, scattering them.

Their numbers gave us cover from other fire. Then across a trench, galloping alongside the old aqueduct toward the city . . .

Then I was flying.

For a moment I didn’t understand what had happened, and thought perhaps my horse had been shot or had suddenly burst its heart. I hit soft dirt and skidded, half blinded with dust. But as I rolled I realized Mohammad and Astiza had been thrown too, their horses screaming t h e

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as the equine legs snapped, and I saw the rope that had been hastily staked to trip us. It snapped through the air, a cook hooting in triumph. Down, with our goal in view!

I got up, hands scraped raw, and ran back to the other two. More shots, balls humming past.

“The aqueduct, effendi! We can use it for cover!” I nodded, pulling Astiza ruthlessly to keep up. She was wincing, her ankle twisted, but determined.

There was a stack of scaling ladders assembled for the next assault, and Mohammad and I seized one and threw it up against the old Roman engineering work. I pushed Astiza up from behind, rolling her over the top so we could collapse in the channel where water had run. It was a scrap of protection. Bullets pinged off the stone. “Stay low and follow this until we’re under the British guns,” I said. “Astiza, you go first with the scarf to signal them.” The plucky woman had held onto the thing even when her horse went down.

She shoved it at me. “No, it’s you they’ll recognize. Run and get help. I’ll follow as fast as I can.”

“I’ll stay with her,” Mohammad promised.

I looked over the edge of the aqueduct. The entire French camp was boiling. Silano had talked his way in and was pointing. Najac appeared to be loading my rifle.

No time to tarry.

I ran, the channel less than three feet deep, shots whining and pinging. Astiza and Mohammad followed at a pained crouch. Thank Thoth a musket can barely hit the side of a barn! Ahead, more French soldiers in advance trenches were turning to the commotion and raising their own guns.

Then an English cannon boomed from Acre, throwing up a gout of earth, and the French instinctively ducked back into their own trenches. Then another gun, and another. No doubt the defenders had no idea yet who they were shooting to benefit, but had decided that any French enemy must be their friend.

Then there was another bark, a scream, and a ball struck the pillars of the aqueduct. French cannon! The entire structure quaked.

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“Hurry,” I yelled back at other two. I ran at a duck, waving the scarf like a madman and hoping for a miracle.

More puffs of smoke from a French battery, and more sizzles as balls sailed past, some bouncing over their own trenches. One hit, and the aqueduct shook again, and then again. A ball crashed through the upper rim, spraying me with rock splinters. I blinked and looked back. Astiza was hobbling grimly, Mohammad right behind. Another hundred yards! Cannon banged away on both sides, an entire battle swirling around our little trio.

Then Astiza cried out. I turned. Mohammad has jerked upright, stiff, his mouth round with surprise. His chest bloomed red, and he toppled over. I looked back. Najac was just lowering my rifle.

It was all I could do not to run back and kill the bastard.

“Leave him!” I shouted to Astiza instead. I’d wait for her.

But then the aqueduct between us exploded.

It was a perfect shot from big cannon. The French must have brought up new siege guns to replace the ones we’d captured at sea.

The aqueduct heaved, ancient stone exploded in all directions, dust flew, and then there was a yawning gap between piers. Astiza and I were suddenly on opposite sides of a chasm.

“Jump down and I’ll pull you up!”

“No, go, go,” she shouted. “He won’t kill me! I’ll buy you time!” She ripped off part of her gown and began limping back, waving it frantically in surrender. The French fire slackened.

I cursed, but I had no means of stopping her. Heartsick, I turned and sprinted for Acre, fully upright now, gambling that speed would make me an elusive target.

If a longrifle were quicker to reload, Najac might have picked me off even then. But it would take him a full minute to get off another shot, and other bullets flew blind. I was beyond the forward French trenches now, to the point where the aqueduct’s end crumbled into rubble before reaching the walls of Acre, and even as cannon fire rippled on both sides I swung over its broken lip and dropped to the sand. Dust puffed from my boots.

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I heard the thunder of hooves and turned. Najac’s Arabs were riding down the length of the aqueduct for me, I saw, bent over their steeds and heedless of English fire.

I sprinted for the moat. It was fifty yards away, the strategic tower looming like a monolith, soldiers on Acre’s ramparts pointing at me.

It would be a near-run thing. Legs pumping, I ran as I’d never run before, hearing the pursuing horsemen closing the distance. Now men up and down the Acre wall were firing over my head, and I heard horses neighing and crashing as some went down.

At the moat’s end I slid over its edge like a Maine otter on a snow bank, tumbling to the dry bottom. The stench was nauseating. There were rotting bodies, broken ladders, and the abandoned weapons that make up the detritus of war. The breach in the tower had been sealed and there was no way up the wall. Men were peering down at me, but none seemed to realize yet who I was. No rope was offered. Not knowing what else to do, I ran down the moat’s dusty course toward where it joined the Mediterranean. I could see the masts of British ships, and guns continued to go off above my head. Hadn’t Smith said they were building a reservoir of seawater at the moat’s head?

New shouts! I looked back. The damned Arab daredevils had spurred some of their horses down into the moat with me and now they were galloping along, heedless of the soldiers overhead trying to shoot them, determined to take me. Silano clearly knew I had the book! Ahead was the ramp over the moat by the Land Gate, and a black, moist seawall of the new reservoir beyond it. Trapped!

And then there was another explosion, straight ahead. A roar, pieces flying, and the black wall dissolved in front of me. The blast knocked me backward, and I stared stupefied as a wall of green seawater turned to foam and began rushing down the moat at me and my pursuers. I got to my knees just as the flood hit. It knocked me back the way I’d come, carrying me like a leaf in a gutter.

I was in a tumble of foam, unable to get proper breath, unsure what was up and down. I tumbled. The water swept me into a tangle with my pursuers and something big struck me, a horse I guessed, 2 4 6

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fortuitously knocking me toward air. We were being washed down the moat back toward the central tower, all of us tangled with half-decayed corpses and the flotsam of siege debris. I thrashed, coughing.

And then I saw my chain! Or a chain, at any extent, drooping down the tower wall like a garland, and when we swept by I grabbed it.

It plucked me out of the water like a well bucket and began dragging me up the rough tower walls, scraping like sandpaper.

“Hang on, Gage. You’re almost home!”

It was Jericho.

Now bullets began banging off the wall around me and I realized I was a hanging target for the entire French army. One lucky shot and I’d fall off.

I tucked into a ball. If I could have shriveled any smaller I’d have disappeared.

Cannon boomed, and a ball that seemed big as a house crashed into the masonry a few yards from me, dissolving to shrapnel. The entire tower shuddered and I swung like a bead on a string. Grimly, I held on. Then another ball, and another. Each time the entire tower shook and the chain swayed, me dangling. Was this ever going to end?

I looked down. The flow of water was slowing but the Arab horsemen were gone, washed to who knows where. Wreckage dotted the water’s surface. A man floated belly up, like a fish.

“Heave!” Jericho cried.

And then strong hands were grabbing me and I was dragged, wheezing, over the crenellation and onto the Acre battlements, half drowned, scraped, burned, cut, bruised, heartsick at the love and companions I had lost, and yet miraculously unpunctured. I had the lives, and bedraggled look, of an alley cat.

I sprawled, chest heaving, unable to stand. People clustered around: Jericho, Djezzar, Smith, Phelipeaux.

“Bloody hell, Ethan,” Smith said in greeting. “Whose side are you on now?”

But I looked beyond them to the one who had instinctively caught my eye, hair golden, eyes wide and stunned, dress smeared with smoke and powder.

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“Hello, Miriam,” I croaked.

And then the French guns really started up.

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In my experience, it’s when you need to collect thoughts most carefully that there are the greatest distractions. In this case it was a hundred French artillery pieces, venting frustration at my survival. I stood and looked out shakily. There was a lot of activity in Napoleon’s encampments, units forming and moving to the trenches. I had, it seemed, something Bonaparte wanted back. Badly.

The wall was trembling under our feet.

Miriam was looking at me with an expression that was a cross between shock and relief, with a rising tide of indignation, a tributary of confusion, a reservoir of compassion, and more than a pitcher of suspicion. “You left with no word?” she finally managed.

It sounded worse the way she put it. “It was difficult to explain why.”

“What was the Christian running from?” Djezzar wanted to know.

“It appears to be the entire French army,” Phelipeaux observed mildly. “Monsieur Gage, they do not appear to like you very much.

And we were thinking of shooting you as well, for desertion and treachery. Do you have any friends at all?”

“It’s that woman, isn’t it?” Miriam had developed a way of getting to the point. “She’s alive, and you went to her.” I looked back. Was Astiza alive? I’d just seen my Muslim friend killed by my own gun, and Astiza turn back toward that villain Silano.

“I had to get something before Napoleon did,” I told them.

“And did you?” Smith asked.

I pointed at the massing troops. “He thinks so, and he’s coming to get it.” Realizing an attack might be imminent, our garrison’s leaders began shouting orders, bugles sounding over the din of cannon.

I addressed Miriam. “The French sent me a sign that she might be alive. I had to find out, but I didn’t know what to say to you—not after our night together. And she was alive. We were coming here together, to explain, but she’s been recaptured, I think.” 2 4 8

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“Did I mean anything to you? At all?”

“Of course! I fell in love with you! It’s just . . .”

“Just what?”

“I never fell out of love with her.”

“Damn you.”

It was the first profanity I’d ever heard Miriam use, and it shocked me more than a tirade of abuse from someone like Djezzar. I was searching for a way to explain, making clear that higher causes were at stake, but each time I started a sentence it sounded hollow and self-serving, even to me. Emotion had carried us away that night after the defense of the tower, but then fate and a ruby ring had drawn me off in a way I didn’t anticipate. Where was the wrong? Moreover, I had a golden cylinder of incalculable value tucked in my shirt. But none of this was easy to put when the French army was coming.

“Miriam, it was always about more than just us. You know that.”

“No. Decisions hurt people. It’s as simple as that.”

“Well, I’ve lost Astiza again.”

“And me too.”

But I could win her back, couldn’t I? Yes, men are dogs, but women take a certain feline satisfaction in flogging us with words and tears.

There is love and cruelty on both sides, is there not? So I’d take her scorn and fight the battle and then, if we survived, plot a strategy to paper over the past and get her back.

“They’re coming!”

Grateful to have to face only Napoleon’s divisions instead of Miriam’s hurt, I climbed with the others to the top of the great tower. The plain had come alive. Every trench was a caterpillar of hurrying men, their advance fogged by the gun smoke of the furious cannonade.

Other troops were dragging lighter field pieces forward to engage if a breach was effected. Ladders rocked as grenadiers crossed the uneven ground, and galloping teams hauled fresh cannonballs and powder to the batteries. A group of men in Arab robes had clustered near the half-destroyed aqueduct.

I snapped open my glass. They were the survivors of Najac’s gang, by the look of it. I didn’t see Silano or Astiza.

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Smith hauled on my shoulder and pointed. “What the devil is that?” I swung my glass. A horizontal log was trundling toward us, a massive cedar jutting from a carriage bed with six sets of wheels. Soldiers pushed from the sides and behind. Its tip was swollen, like a gigantic phallus, and coated, I guessed, with some kind of armor. What the devil indeed? It looked like a medieval battering ram. Surely Bonaparte didn’t think he could start knocking against our ramparts with weapons centuries out of date. Yet the device’s pushers were trotting forward confidently.

Had Napoleon gone mad?

It reminded me of the kind of makeshift contraption that might have delighted Ben Franklin, or my American colleague Robert Fulton, who prowled Paris with dotty ideas for things he called steamboats and submarines. And who else did I know who was an inveterate tinkerer? Nicolas-Jacques Conte, of course, the man whose balloon Astiza and I had stolen in Cairo. Monge had said he’d invented some kind of sturdy wagon to get heavy guns to Acre. This trundling log had all the markings of his makeshift ingenuity. But a battering ram?

It seemed so backward for a modernist like Conte. Unless . . .

“It’s a bomb!” I suddenly cried. “Shoot at its head, shoot at the head!” The land torpedo had reached a slight downward incline leading to the moat and was beginning to accelerate.

“What?” Phelipeaux asked.

“There are explosives at the end of the log! We’ve got to set them off!” I grabbed a musket and fired, but if I hit the contraption at all my bullet bounced harmlessly off the metal sheathing at its tip.

Other shots were fired, but our soldiers and sailors were still aiming for the men pushing alongside the wheels. One or two were hit, but the monster simply ran over them as they fell, the torpedo gathering speed.

“Hit it with a cannon!”

“It’s too late, Gage,” Smith said calmly. “We can’t depress the guns far enough.”

So I grabbed Miriam, brushing by her astonished brother, and pulled her to the rear of the tower before she could protest.

“Get back in case it works!”

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Smith, too, was backing away, and Djezzar had already left to strut along the walls and cow his men. But Phelipeaux lingered, gamely trying to slow the rush of Conte’s contraption with a well-aimed pistol shot. It was madness.

Then the rolling ram reached the lip of the moat and flew straight across, its snout crashing against the base of the tower.

The soldiers who’d been pushing ran, one pausing long enough to yank a lanyard. A fuse flared.

A few seconds, and then the device exploded with a roar so cacophonous that it blotted out my hearing. The air erupted with smoke and flame, and chunks of stone flew higher than the top of our tower, rolling lazily.

The edifice had shuddered under previous attacks, but this time it swayed like a drunk on Drury Lane. Miriam and I fell, me grabbing her in my arms. Sir Sidney held on to the tower’s rear crenellations.

And the front of the edifice dissolved before my eyes, sheering off and slipping into a hellish abyss. Phelipeaux and Jericho fell with it.

“Brother!” Miriam screamed, or at least that’s the sound I interpreted her mouth making. All I could hear was ringing.

She ran for the lip until I tackled her.

Crawling over her squirming body, on a platform that was now half gone and dangerously leaning, I looked down into wreckage that was boiling smoke like the throat of a volcano. The front third of this strongest tower had simply peeled away, the rest of it exposed like a hollow tree and stitched together by half-destroyed floors. It was as if our clothes had been ripped away, leaving us naked. Bodies were entwined with stone in the rubble below, the moat filled to the brim with wreckage. A new sound impinged on my abused ears, and I realized that thousands of men were cheering, their roar just detectable in my addled state. The French were charging for the breach they had made.

Najac, I bet, would be with them, looking for me.

Smith had recovered his balance and had his saber out. He was shouting something the ringing in my ears made inaudible, but I surmised he was calling men to the breach below. I wriggled back-t h e

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ward and hauled Miriam with me. “The rest of it may come down!” I shouted.

“What?”

“We have to get off this tower!”

She couldn’t hear either. She nodded, turned toward the attacking French, and before I could stop her leaped off the edge I’d just crawled back from. I lunged, trying to grab her, and slid once more to the brink. She’d dropped like a cat to beams jutting from the tower floor below, and was climbing down the edges of the collapse toward Jericho. Swearing soundlessly to myself, I started to follow, certain the entire edifice would go over at any moment and bury us in a rock grave. Meanwhile bullets were bouncing like fleas in a jar, cannonballs were screaming in both directions, and ladders were reaching up like claws.

Smith and a contingent of British marines had half galloped, half bounded down the partially wrecked stairs behind us, and got to the breach when we did. They collided with French troops surging across the rubble in the plugged moat, and there was a blast of musket fire from both sides, men screaming. Then they were on each other with bayonet, cutlass, and musket butt. The French division commander Louis Bon went down, fatally shot. The aide-de-camp Croisier, humiliated by Napoleon when he failed to catch some skirmishers the year before, hurled himself into the fray. Miriam dropped into this hell shouting frantically for Jericho. So there I dropped too, dazed, nearly weaponless, black from powder smoke, face-to-face with the entire French army.

They looked ten feet tall in their high hats and crossed belts, throwing themselves at us with the fury and frustration that comes from weeks of fruitless siege work. Here was the chance to finish things, as they had at Jaffa! They were roaring like surf in a storm, stumbling forward over carnage, the end of the shattered cedar log splayed outward like an opened flower. Yet even as they pressed they came under a deluge of iron, rock, and bomblets hurled by Djezzar’s Ottomans above, which dropped them like wheat. If the French were determined, we were desperate. If they punched through the tower 2 5 2

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Acre was lost and all of us would certainly be dead. Royal Marines ran at them screaming, shooting, and chopping, the red and blue a mosaic of struggling color.

It was the most ferocious fight I’d been in, as hand-to-hand as Greek and Trojan, no quarter asked or given. Men grunted and swore as they stabbed, choked, gouged, and kicked. They surged and struggled like bulls. Croisier sank in the melee, shot and stabbed in a dozen places. We could see nothing of the wider fight, just this scrim on a hillock of rubble with the tower about to come down on top of us. I saw Phelipeaux, half buried, his back likely broken, somehow drag out a pistol from beneath himself and fire into his revolutionary enemies.

A half-dozen bayonets entered him in reply.

Jericho had not just survived the fall, but dragged himself clear of the wreckage. His clothes were half burnt and blown off and his skin was gray with stone dust, but he’d found an iron bar, slightly bent, and strode into the oncoming French like Samson. Men backed from his maniacal energy as he whirled the staff. A fusilier came up behind with aimed musket, but Miriam had somewhere found an officer’s pistol which she held with two hands and fired point-blank. Half the fusilier’s head was blown away. A grenadier was coming from the other direction. I remembered my tomahawk and threw it, watching it spin before burying in the attacker’s neck. He dropped like a cut tree and I pulled it back out. Then both Miriam and I managed to get hold of Jericho’s arms and drag him backward a pace or two, out of the reach of the bayonets he seemed desperate to impale himself on. As we did so, fresh troops from Djezzar surged past to engage the French. A hedgerow of bodies was building. Smith, hatless, head bloodied, was slashing with his saber like a man possessed. Bullets whined, pinged, or hit with a thunk when they found flesh, and someone new would grunt and go down.

My hearing was back, dimly, and I shouted to Jericho and Miriam,

“We have to get back behind our lines! We can help more from on high!”

But then something hummed past my ear, as close as a warning hornet, and Jericho took a bullet in his shoulder and spun like a top.

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I turned and saw my nemesis. Najac was cursing, my own rifle planted butt first on the rubble as he began to reload, his bullyboys hanging back from the real fight but popping away over the heads of the struggling grenadiers. That shot was meant for me! They’d come for my corpse, all right—because they knew what was likely tucked in my shirt. And so I was seized with my own combat madness, an anger and awful thirst for vengeance that made me feel like my muscles were swelling, my veins engorged, and my eyes suddenly capable of supernatural detail. I’d seen the flash of red on the bastard’s finger. He was wearing Astiza’s ruby ring!

I knew in an instant what had happened. Mohammad had been unable to resist the temptation of the cursed jewel Astiza had flung away in the Crusader court. When we were sleeping he had pocketed it, ending his periodic demands for money. And so it had been he, not I, who’d been slain by Najac’s longrifle shot as we fled along the aqueduct. The French brigand had checked to make sure the Muslim was dead and then seized the stone for his own, not knowing its history.

It was a confession of murder. So I picked up Jericho’s iron bar and started for him, counting the seconds. It would take him a full minute to load the American long rifle, and ten seconds had already passed. I had to fight through a thicket of French to be on him.

The bar sang as I wielded it in a great arc, as possessed as a Templar for Christ. This was for Mohammad and Ned! I felt invulnerable to bullets, ignorant of fear. Time slowed, noise paled, vision narrowed.

All I saw was Najac, hands trembling as he shook out a measure of powder into the rifle barrel.

Twenty seconds.

My bar swung into that thorn field of bayonets like a sickle clear-ing a trail. Metal rang as I batted it aside. Infantrymen sheered away from my madness.

Thirty seconds. The rifle ball was wrapped in its wadding and nervously fed into the muzzle opening with the short ramrod.

Najac’s French and Arabs were screaming and firing, but I felt nothing but wind. I could see the ripples in the smoky air as the bullets sped, the glint of frantic eyes, the white of bared teeth, the blood 2 5 4

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spraying from somewhere across a young officer’s face. The bar hit the ribs of a towering grenadier and he folded sideways.

Forty seconds. The stubborn ball was being rammed down.

I leapt across dead and dying men, using their bodies like rocks in a stream, my balance a spider’s. Round me in a circle my bar sung, men scrambling as they had from Jericho, Smith running a chasseur through with his saber, one Royal Marine dying and two more sticking their prey with bayonets. The sky continued to rain debris from the walls above, and I saw blossoms of explosions behind Najac as grenades and shells went off. Even as I pressed forward, Ottoman and English reinforcements were surging behind me, clotting the breech with their numbers and blood. A tricolor wavered and went down, then rose again, swaying back and forth.

Fifty seconds. Najac didn’t even take time to remove the ramrod but was fumbling to prime the pan with gunpowder and pull back the lock. There was fear in his eyes, fear and desperation, but hatred too.

I was almost on him when one of his brigands rose before me, hands raised above his head with a scimitar, face distorted by howling, until my bar took him on the side of his skull and exploded it, bits of gore spraying in all directions. I could taste him in my teeth.

And now as I cocked my arm for a final swing, Najac’s eyes wide with terror, there was a flash in the pan and a roar, a blast of heat and smoke, and my own rifle, ramrod still in it, fired straight at my breast.

I sat down hard, knocked backward. But before I could die, I swung low and my bar hit the thief in his ankles, shattering them. He went down too, troops surging over us, and realizing I still wasn’t dead I crawled forward, wheezing, and seized him by the throat, cutting off his shrieks of pain. I squeezed so hard that the tendons in my own neck swelled with the effort.

His look was hopeless hatred. His arms thrashed, looking for a weapon. His tongue bulged out obscenely.

This is for Ned, and Mohammad, and Jericho, and all the other fine men you’ve cut down in your miserable, roach-scuttle of a life, I thought. And so I squeezed, as he turned purple, my blood dripping t h e

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onto my squirming victim. I could see the ramrod sticking out from my chest. What was going on?

Then I felt his hands on my waist and a tug as he grabbed my tomahawk. Having failed to finish me with my own rifle, he wanted to stave in my temple with my own hatchet!

Hardly thinking, I leaned forward so the ramrod he’d fired was against his own chest and heart. Its tip was shattered and sharp as a knitting needle, and finally I realized what must have happened.

When he’d fired, the arrow-like projectile had hit me all right, but exactly where the cylinder holding the Book of Thoth was tucked into my shirt. Its blunt head had stuck in the soft gold, knocking me backward but not breaking my skin. Now, as he worked my tomahawk free and cocked his arm to strike, I leaned into him so I was pushing the ramrod with the cylinder, straight against his chest. The effort hurt like hell but it cracked the devil’s breastbone and then slid easily as a fork into cake. Najac’s eyes widened as we embraced, and I pierced his heart.

Blood pumped up out of him as if from a well, a widening pool, and hissing like the viper he was, he died, my name a red bubble on his lips.

Cheering, but in English this time. I looked up. The French assault was breaking.

I jerked the ramrod out, swayed upward to my knees, and at long last reclaimed my custom rifle. This was the worst charnel yet, a ghastly tangle of limbs and torsos of men who’d died grappling with each other. There were hundreds of bodies in the breach, and scores more in the soggy moat in either direction, assault ladders shattered and the walls of Acre dented and cracked. But the French were retreating.

The Turks were cheering too, their cannon barking to bid the French good-bye.

Smith’s and Djezzar’s men didn’t dare pursue. They crouched, stunned by their own success, and then hastily reloaded in case the enemy came again. Sergeants began ordering a crude barricade at the tower’s base.

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slightly as he walked across them. “Gage! That was the nearest-run thing I ever did see! My God, the tower! Looks like she could come down in an instant!”

“Bonaparte must have thought the same, Sir Sidney,” I said. I was gasping, trembling at every muscle, more exhausted than I’d ever been. Emotion had wrung me dry. I hadn’t caught breath in a century.

I hadn’t slept in a thousand years.

“He’ll see it rebuilt and braced stronger than ever by the next dawn, if British engineering has anything to do with it,” the naval captain said fiercely. “By God, we’ve bested him, Ethan, we’ve bested him!

He’ll throw every cannonball he has at us now, but he won’t come again after this thrashing. His men won’t allow it. They’ll balk.” How could he be so sure? And yet he was about to be proved right.

Smith nodded. “Where’s Phelipeaux? I saw him lead the charge right into them. By God, that’s royalist courage!” I shook my head. “I’m afraid they’ve done for him, Sidney.” We picked our way over. Two bodies lay across Phelipeaux’s so we dragged them aside. And miracle of miracles, the royalist was still breathing, even though I’d seen half a dozen bayonets pierce him like a haunch of beef. Smith pulled him up slightly, resting the dying man’s head in his lap. “Edmond, we’ve turned them back!” he said.

“The Corsican is finished!”

“What . . . retreated?” Though his eyes were open, he was blind.

“He’s scowling at us right now from that high hill of his, the best of his troops gutted or sent running. Your name will know glory, man, because Boney won’t take Acre. The republican tyrant has been stopped, and political generals like him don’t last past a bad defeat.” He looked at me, eyes gleaming. “Mark my word, Gage. The world will hear little of Napoleon Bonaparte, ever, ever again.”

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And then Colonel Phelipeaux died. Did he really comprehend his victory as life leaked out his body? I don’t know. But maybe he had a glimmer that it hadn’t been in vain, and that in the violent insanity of this worst day of the siege, something fundamental had been won.

I went back to Najac’s body, stooped, and took my rifle, my tomahawk, and the ring. Then I walked back through the rubble of the half-ruined tower. Shouting engineers were already beginning to lever aside stones, ready beams, and mix mortar. The tower would be patched yet again.

I went in search of Jericho and Miriam.

Fortunately, I didn’t see the ironmonger’s body among the long rows of defenders being laid mournfully to temporary rest in the pasha’s gardens. I glanced up. The birds had disappeared in the cacophony, but I could see the veiled eyes of Djezzar’s harem women looking down from their grilled windows. Splinters had been knocked from some of the woodwork, leaving yellow gashes in the dark-stained design. The pasha himself was strutting up and down his wall like a rooster, clapping his exhausted men on the shoulder and shouting 2 5 8

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out at the French. “What, you do not like my hospitality? Then come back and get some more!”

I drank at the mosque fountain and then walked dully through the city, smeared with blood and powder smoke, huddled civilians looking at me warily. My eyes, I supposed, were bright in the blackness of my face, but my stare was a thousand miles away. I walked until I reached the jetty with its lighthouse, the Mediterranean clean after the squalor of battle. I looked back. Cannon were still rumbling, and smoke and dust had created a pall in that direction, backlit to stormy darkness by a declining sun.

How had so much time passed? We’d sprinted for the wall in the morning.

I took out the pharaoh’s ring that had meant grief for every person who’d touched it. Do curses really exist? Franklin the rationalist would doubt it. But I knew enough not to finger its ruby as I waded into the cool sea, to my knees, to my waist, the chill seizing my crotch, my chest. I bent and sank underwater, opening my eyes in the green gloom, letting the sea wash out some of the grit. I held my breath as long as I could, making sure I was finally ready to do what must be done. Then I surfaced, shaking the water from my wet, uncut hair, cocked my arm, and threw. It was a red meteor, heading for the cobalt that marked deep water. There was a plop and, simple as that, the ring was gone.

I shivered in relief.

¤

¤

¤

I found Miriam in the city hospital, its rooms jammed with the freshly wounded. Sheets were bright red, and pans of water pink.

Basins held chunks of amputated flesh. Flies buzzed, feasting, and there were smells not just of blood but of gangrene and lye and the charcoal of braziers where surgical tools were heated before cutting.

Periodically, the air would be pierced by screaming.

The building quaked from continuing artillery fire. As Smith had predicted, Napoleon seemed to be throwing everything he had at us t h e

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in a last outpouring of frustration. Maybe he hoped to simply flatten what he couldn’t take. Saws rattled on tables. Dust sifted down from the tile roof into wounded men’s eyes.

Miriam was, I saw with relief, attending to a brother who was still alive. Jericho was pale, his hair greasy, his shirt gone, and the upper half of his torso wrapped in stained bandages. But he was alert and energetic enough to give me a skeptical glare as I came up to his pallet.

“Can’t anything kill you?”

“I got the man who shot you, Jericho.” My tone was dull from emotional overload. “We held the breach. You, me, Miriam, all of us.

We held.”

“Where in Hades’ name did you go when you left the city?”

“It’s a long story. That thing we were looking for in Jerusalem? I found it.”

They both stared at me. “The treasure?”

“Of sorts.” I reached inside my shirt and pulled out the golden cylinder. Sure enough, it was dented and nearly punctured where the ramrod had hit. My chest had a bruise the size of a plate. But both the book’s metal sheath and my own body were intact. Their eyes widened at the gleam of metal, which I shielded from other hospital eyes. “It’s heavy, Jericho. Heavy enough to build twice the house, and twice the forge, you left in Jerusalem. When the war’s over, you’re a rich man.”

“Me?”

“I’m giving it to you. I have bad luck with treasures. The book inside, however, I intend to keep. Can’t read a word, but I’m getting sentimental.”

“You’re giving me all the gold?”

“You and Miriam.”

Now he scowled. “What, you think you can pay me?”

“Pay you?”

“For crashing into our lives and taking not just our home and live -

lihood but my sister’s virtue?”

“It’s not payment! My God, she didn’t . . .” Wisely, I didn’t finish.

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“Not payment, nor even thanks. Just simple justice. You’d be doing me a favor to take it.”

“You seduce her, you take her, you leave without a word, and now you bring this?” He was getting angrier, not calmer. “I spit on your gift!” Clearly he didn’t understand. “Then you spit on the humble apology of your own future brother-in-law.”

“What?” they said together. Miriam was looking at me in disbelief.

“I’m ashamed I had to go without explanation and leave both of you wondering these past few weeks,” I said. “I know I seemed lower than a snake in a sewer. But I had a chance to finish our quest so I did, keeping this prize from the French who’d misuse it. They’ll never get the book now, because even if they break through I can send it out to sea on Smith’s ships. I finished what we started, and now I’m back to finish the rest. I want to marry your sister, Jericho. With your permission.”

His face was churning with disbelief. “Are you completely mad?”

“I’ve never been saner in my life.” The answer had been right before me, I’d realized. One god or another was showing me the sensible path by snatching Astiza away. We were poison for each other, fire and ice who ended up in peril whenever we got together, and the poor Egyptian woman was better off without me. Certainly my heart couldn’t take losing her again. Yet here was gentle Miriam, a good woman who’d learned to blow a man’s head off with a pistol but still set an example of a good, quiet life. That’s what I’d really found in the Holy Land, not this silly book! So now I’d marry a proper girl, settle down, forget my pain over Astiza, and be done with battles and Bonaparte forever. I nodded to myself.

“But what about Astiza?” Miriam asked in wonder.

“I’m not going to lie to you. I loved her. Still love her. But she’s gone, Miriam. I rescued her as I had before, and lost her again as I had before. I don’t know why, but it’s not meant to be. The last few hours of hell have opened my eyes to a thousand things. One is how much I love you, and how wonderful you’ll be for me, and how good, I hope, I can be for you. I want to make an honest couple of us, Jericho.

I seek your blessing.”

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He stared at me a long time, his expression inscrutable. Then his face twisted in a strange way.

“Jericho?”

It crinkled, and finally he burst into laughter. He howled, tears streaming down his face, and Miriam began laughing too, looking at me with something disturbingly close to pity.

What was going on?

“My blessing!” He roared. “As if I’d ever give it to you!” Then he winced, reminded by the pain of the hole in his shoulder.

“But I’ve reformed, you see . . .”

“Ethan.” Miriam reached out and touched my hand with hers. “Do you think the world stands still while you go on these adventures of yours?”

“Well, no, of course not.” I was more and more confused.

Jericho got himself under control, gasping and wheezing. “Gage, you have the timing of a broken chronometer.”

“What are you telling me?” I looked from one to the other. “Do I have to wait until the war’s over?”

“Ethan,” Miriam said with a sigh, “do you remember where you left me when you went to find Astiza?”

“In a house here in Acre.”

“In a doctor’s house. A physician in this hospital.” She opened her eyes, looking past me. “A man who found me in tears, confused and self-hating when he came home to finally snatch a few hours of sleep.”

Slowly, I turned. Behind me was the Levantine surgeon, dark, young, handsome, and altogether more reputable-looking, despite his bloodstained hands, than a gambler and wastrel like me. By John Adams, I’d been played the fool once again! When the gypsy Sarylla had given me the Fool tarot card, she’d known what she was about.

“Ethan, meet my new fiancé.”

“Doctor Hiram Zawani at your service, Mr. Gage,” the man said with that kind of educated accent I’ve always envied. It makes them sound three times as smart as you, even if they don’t have the sense of a dobbin. “Haim Farhi said you’re not quite the rascal you seem.” 2 6 2

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“Doctor Zawani made an honest woman of me, Ethan. I was lying to myself about what I wanted and needed.”

“He’s the kind of man my sister needs,” Jericho said. “No one should know that better than you. And you brought them together!

You’re a confused, shallow human being, Ethan Gage, but for once you did something right.”

They smiled, as I tried to figure out if I’d been complimented or insulted.

“But . . .” I wanted to say she was in love with me, that surely she must have waited, that I had two women vying for my attention and my problem was sorting between them . . .

In half a day, I’d gone from two to none. The ruby and the gold were gone, too.

Well, hang.

And yet it was liberating. I hadn’t been to a good brothel since fleeing Paris, and yet here it was, the chance to be a free bachelor again. Humiliating? Yes. But a relief? I was surprised how much so.

“It’s splendid how these things work out,” Smith had said. Lonely?

Sometimes. But less responsibility, too.

I’d take ship home, give the book to the Philadelphia Library to scratch their heads over, and get on with my life. Maybe Astor had need of help in the fur trade. And there was a new capital being built in the swamps of Virginia, out of sight of any honest Americans. It sounded like just the kind of future den of opportunism, fraud, and skullduggery for a man of my talents.

“Congratulations,” I squeaked.

“I should still break you in two,” Jericho said. “But given what’s happened, I think I’ll just let you help us hock this.” And he gave Zawani a peek at the gold.

¤

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¤

One day later the French, having used up much of their ammunition in a final furious bombardment that left their strategic plight unchanged, began to retreat. Bonaparte depended on moment h e

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tum. If he couldn’t surge forward and keep his enemies off-balance, he was hopelessly outnumbered. Acre had stopped him. His only alternative was to return to Egypt and claim victory, citing battles he’d won and ignoring those he’d lost.

I watched them skulk off with my glass. Hundreds of men, the sick and wounded who were unable to walk, were on wagons or slumped on horseback. If left behind they were doomed, so I spotted even Bonaparte walking, leading a horse that carried a bandaged soldier.

They set fire to the supplies they couldn’t take, great columns of smoke rising into the May air, and blew up the Na’aman and Kishon bridges.

The French were so short of adequate animal transport and fodder that two dozen cannon were abandoned. So were crowds of Jews, Christians, and Matuwelli who had sided with the French in hopes of liberation from the Muslims. They were wailing like lost children, because now they could expect only cruel revenge from Djezzar.

The French vindictively began burning farms and villages along the path of their coastal retreat, to slow a pursuit that never came.

Our dazed garrison was in no shape to follow. The siege had lasted sixty-two days, from March 19 to May 21. Casualties had been heavy on both sides. The plague that had riddled Napoleon’s army had come inside the walls, and the immediate concern was to clear out the dead.

It was hot, and Acre reeked.

I moved with dazed weariness. Astiza was gone again, captive or dead. I put the book in a leather satchel and hid it in the quarters I took at the Merchant’s Inn, Khan a-Shawarda, but I bet I could have left it in the main market and not had it taken, so useless did its strange writing appear. Slowly, reports filtered back of Napoleon’s retreat. He abandoned Jaffa, won at such terrible cost, a week after leaving Acre. The worst French plague cases were given opium and poison to hasten their deaths so they wouldn’t fall into the hands of pursuing Samaritans from Nablus. The defeated soldiers staggered into El-Arish in Egypt on June 2, reinforcing its garrison, and then the bulk of the army went on toward Cairo. A thermometer put on the desert sands recorded a temperature of 133 degrees. When they reached the Nile the march stopped, men resting and refitting: Napo-2 6 4

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leon couldn’t afford to present a defeated army. He reentered Cairo on June 14 with captured banners, claiming victory, but the claims were bitter. I learned that the one-legged artillery general Caffarelli had an arm shattered by a Turkish cannonball and died of infection outside Acre, that the physicist Etienne Louis Malus had sickened with plague in Jaffa and had to be evacuated, and that both Monge and his chemist friend Berthollet contracted dysentery and were among the sick evacuated by wagon. Napoleon’s adventure was turning into a disaster for everyone I knew.

Smith, meanwhile, was anxious to finish his archenemy off. Turkish reinforcements from Constantinople had not arrived quickly enough to help Acre, but early in July a fleet arrived with nearly twelve thousand Ottoman troops, ready to sail on to Abukir Bay and regain Egypt. The English captain had pledged his own squadron in support of the attack. I had no interest in joining this expedition, which I doubted could defeat the main French army. I still had plans for America. But on July 7 a trade boat delivered to me a missive from Egypt. It was closed with red sealing wax with an image of the beaked god Thoth, and was addressed to me in a feminine hand. My heart beat faster.

When I opened it, however, the script was not by Astiza but in a strong male scrawl. Its message was simple.

I can read it, and she’s waiting.

The key is at Rosetta.

Silano.

Part Three

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Iarrived back in Egypt on July 14, 1799, one year and two weeks after I’d first landed with Napoleon.This time I was with a Turkish army, not a French one. Smith was enthusiastic about this counteroffensive, proclaiming it might finish Boney off. I couldn’t help but notice, however, that he stayed offshore with his squadron. And it is difficult to say who had less confidence in this invasion’s ultimate success: me or its aging, white-bearded commander, Mustafa Pasha, who limited his advance to occupying the tiny peninsula that formed one side of Abukir Bay. His troops landed, seized a French redoubt east of the village of Abukir, massacred its three hundred defenders, compelled the surrender of another French outpost at the end of the peninsula, and halted. Where the peninsula’s neck joined the mainland Mustafa began erecting three lines of fortifications in anticipation of the inevitable French counterattack.

Despite the successful defense of Acre, the Ottomans were still wary of meeting Napoleon in open field. After Bonaparte’s ludicrously lopsided victory at the Battle of Mount Tabor, the pashas viewed every initiative on their part as disaster in the making. So they invaded and dug furiously, hoping the French would cooperatively expire in front 2 6 8

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of their trenches. We could see the first French scouts of Bonaparte’s rapidly assembling blocking force peering at us from the dunes beyond the peninsula.

Without being invited, I politely suggested to Mustafa that he strike south and try to link up with the Mameluke resistance my friend Ashraf had joined, a mobile cavalry under Murad Bey. The rumor was that Murad had dared come to the Great Pyramid itself, climbing to the top and using a mirror to signal his wife kept captive in Cairo. It was the gesture of a dashing commander, and I expected these Turks would fare better under Murad’s wily command than under cautious Mustafa. But the pasha didn’t trust the arrogant Mamelukes, didn’t want to share command, and was terrified of leaving the protection of his earthworks and gunboats. As Bonaparte had been impatient at Acre, the Ottomans had landed too quickly, with too little force, in Egypt.

Yet things were in strategic flux. Yes, Napoleon’s original grand strategic scheme had unraveled. His fleet had been destroyed by Admiral Nelson the year before, his advance in Asia been halted at Acre, and Smith has received a dispatch that the Indian sultan whom Bonaparte hoped ultimately to link up with, Tippoo Sahib, had been killed at the siege of Seringapatam in India by the English general Wellesley. Yet even as Mustafa landed, a combined French-Spanish fleet had sailed into the Mediterranean to contest British naval superiority. The odds were getting complex.

I decided my own best gamble was to do my business with Silano in Rosetta, a port on the mouth of the Nile, as quickly as possible.

Then I’d scuttle back to the Turkish enclave before their beachhead dissolved and take a boat going anywhere but here. If I succeeded, Astiza might come with me. And the book?

Bonaparte and Silano were right. I felt ownership, and was as curious as ever to hear what its mysterious writing actually said. Could old Ben himself have resisted? “What makes resisting temptation so difficult for people,” he had written, “is that they don’t want to discourage it completely.” Somehow I had to get Silano’s “key,” once more rescue Astiza, and then decide for myself what to do with the t h e

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secret. The only thing I was certain of is that if the text promised immortality, I wanted nothing to do with it in this world. Life is hard enough without bearing it forever.

While the Turks entrenched in the summer’s oppressive heat, their tents a carnival of color, I hired a felucca to take me to the western mouth of the Nile and Rosetta. We’d sailed by the place during my first entry to Egypt the year before, but I didn’t recall the town merit-ing particular attention. Its location gave it some strategic value, but why Silano wanted to meet there was a mystery; its convenience for me would be the last thing on the sorcerer’s mind. The likeliest explanation was that his message was a lie and a trap, but there was just enough bait—the woman and a translation—to make me stick my head in the snare.

Accordingly, I had my new captain, Abdul, heave to midway in order to make an important modification to the sail, a thing he accepted as ample evidence of the balminess of all foreigners. I swore him to secrecy with the aid of a few coins. Then we once more passed from the blue sea to the brown tongue of the great African river.

We were soon intercepted by a French patrol boat, but Silano had sent a pass to give me entry. The lieutenant on the chebek recognized my name—my adventures and crisscrossing of sides had given me a certain notoriety, apparently—and invited me on board. I said I preferred to stay in my own craft and follow.

He consulted his paper. “I am then ordered, monsieur, to confiscate your baggage until such time as you meet with Count Alessandro Silano. It says this is necessary for the security of the state.”

“My baggage is what you see on me, given that my exploits have left me penniless and without allies. Surely you don’t wish me to dis-embark naked?”

“Yet there is a satchel you carry over your shoulder.”

“Indeed. And it is heavy, because it is weighted with a large stone.” I held it over the side of the boat. “Should you try to take this meager belonging, Lieutenant, I will drop it into the Nile. Should that happen I can assure that Count Silano will have you court-martialed at best, or put under a particularly uncomfortable ancient spell at worst. So let 2 7 0

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us proceed. I’m here of my own volition, a lone American in a French colony.”

“You have a rifle as well,” he objected.

“Which I have no plan to discharge unless somebody tries to take it away. The last man who attempted to do so is dead. Trust me, Silano will approve.”

He grumbled and looked at his paper a few times more, but since I was poised at the rail with rifle in one hand and the other propped over the river, confiscation was impractical. So we sailed on, the chebek herding us like a mother hen, and docked in Rosetta. It’s a palm-shaded, well-watered farming town in the Nile Delta, made of brown mud brick except for the limestone mosque and its single minaret.

I left instructions with my felucca captain and set off through the winding lanes toward a still unfinished French fort called Julian, the tricolor flapping above its mud walls and a crowd of curious street urchins following in my wake. These were halted at the gate by sentries with black bicorne hats and enormous mustaches. My notoriety was confirmed when these soldiers recognized me with a clear expression of dislike. The harmless electrician had become something between a nuisance and a threat, and they eyed me like a sorcerer.

Tales from Acre must have filtered back here.

“You can’t bring that rifle in here.”

“Then I won’t come. I’m here by invitation, not command.”

“We’ll hold it for you.”

“Alas, you French have a habit of borrowing and not giving back.”

“The count will not object,” interrupted a feminine voice. And stepping from an alcove was Astiza, dressed modestly in a full-length gown, a scarf pulled over her head and wrapped around her neck so that her lovely but worried face was like a moon. “He’s come to consult as a savant instead of as a spy.”

Apparently she carried some of Silano’s authority. Reluctantly, the soldiers let me through to the courtyard, and the main gate clicked shut behind me. Brick-and-board buildings lined the inner walls of the square, simple fort.

“I told him you’d come,” she said quietly. The fierce sun beat down t h e

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on the parade ground and it, and the scent of her—of flowers and spices—made me dizzy.

“And go, with you.”

“Make no mistake, we are both prisoners, Ethan, rifle or not. Once more, we must forge a partnership of convenience with Alessandro.” She gave a nod of her head to the walls and I saw more sentries watching us. “We need to learn if there’s anything to this legend at all, and then make a plan what to do.”

“Did Silano tell you to say that?”

She looked disappointed. “Why can’t you believe I love you? I rode with you all the way to Acre, and it was a cannon shot that separated us, not choice. It was fate that brought us both together again. Just have faith a little longer.”

“You sound like Napoleon. ‘I have made all the calculations. Fate will do the rest.’”

“Bonaparte has his own wisdom.”

And with that we came to the headquarters building, a one-story stucco structure with a shed roof of tile and a porch thatched with palm. It was cool and dim inside. As my eyes adjusted from the glare, I saw Silano waiting at a plain table with two officers. The older one I’d known since the French landing at Alexandria. General Jacques de Menou had fought bravely and later, by report, had converted to Islam.

He was fascinated with Egyptian culture, but he was not a particularly commanding officer with his pencil moustache, round accountant’s face, and balding pate. The other, a handsome captain, I didn’t know.

On either side of the room were closed doors, with locks.

Silano stood. “Always you are trying to escape me, Monsieur Gage, and always our paths entwine!” He gave a slight, courtly bow. “Surely you recognize destiny by now. Perhaps we’re meant to be friends, not enemies?”

“I’d be more persuaded of that if your other friends didn’t keep shooting at me.”

“Even the best friends quarrel.” He gestured. “General de Menou you know?”

“Yes.”

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“I didn’t expect to see you again, Américain. How poor Nicolas was angry about his stolen balloon!”

“That came from the shooting part,” I told the general.

“And this is Captain Pierre-Francois Bouchard,” Silano went on.

“He was in charge of construction at the fort here when his men dug up a piece of rubble. Fortunately, Captain Bouchard was quick to recognize its significance. This Rosetta Stone may change the world, I think.”

“A stone?”

“Come. Let me show you.”

Silano led us to the room on the left, unlocked its door, and ushered us inside. It was dim; the slit window looking out onto the courtyard draped for privacy. The first thing that caught my eye was the wooden coffin of a mummy. Brightly painted and remarkably preserved, it bore paintings that looked like a depiction of a soul’s journey through the land of the dead.

“Is there a body inside?”

“Of Omar, our sentry,” Menou joked. “He is tireless.”

“Sentry?”

“I brought this downriver and told the soldiers we found it at this fort site,” Silano said. “Fear surrounds these mummies, and this one is now reputed to haunt Rosetta. It’s better than a cobra for keeping the curious out of this room.”

I touched the lid. “Amazing how bright the colors are.”

“Magic too, perhaps. We can’t do the same now, just as we’ve lost the formula for the leaded glass in the medieval cathedrals. We can’t match either beauty.” He pointed to some paint pots in one corner of the room. “I’m experimenting. Maybe Omar in there will give me a hint one night.”

“And you don’t believe in curses?”

“I believe I’m about to control them. With this.” Beside the wooden sarcophagus, something bulky, about five feet high and a little less than three feet wide, was shrouded with a tarpaulin. With a dramatic gesture, Silano whisked the cover off. I bent, peering in the dim light.

There was writing in different languages. I’m not a linguist, but one t h e

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block of words looked Greek, and another like writing I’d seen in Egyptian temples. A third script I couldn’t identify but the fourth, at the top, just above the temple writing, made my heart beat faster. It was the same curious symbols I’d read on the scroll I’d found in the City of Ghosts. I realized what Silano had meant with his cryptic message. He could compare the Greek words to the secret ones of Thoth and possibly unravel the language!

“What’s this text here?” I pointed to the one I didn’t recognize.

“Demotic, the Egyptian language that followed the ancient hieroglyphs,” Silano said. “My guess is that these are in order of time—the oldest language, that of Thoth, at the top, and the newest, Greek, at the bottom.”

“When Alessandro brought me here I recognized what we’d seen on the scroll, Ethan,” Astiza said. “See? I was meant to be captured again.”

“And now you want me to help you decipher it,” I summarized.

“We want you to give us the book so we can help you decipher it,” Silano corrected.

“And I get?”

“The same that I offered before.” He sighed, as if I were a particularly dim child. “Partnership, power, and immortality if you want it.

The secrets of the universe, perhaps. The reason for existence, the face of God, and the world in your palm. Or, nothing, if you prefer not to cooperate.”

“But if I don’t cooperate, you don’t have the book, right?” I saw Menou make a small gesture. Captain Bouchard maneuvered behind me, and I noticed he had a pistol in his belt.

“On the contrary, monsieur,” Silano said. He nodded and my satchel was yanked from my shoulder and roughly opened.

“Merde,” Bouchard said. He turned my leather bag upside down and a wooden rolling pin fell out, making a dent in the building’s packed-earth floor. The general and the captain looked puzzled and Astiza stifled a laugh. Silano’s look grew dark.

“You didn’t really think I’d deliver it like Franklin’s post, did you?”

“Search him!”

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But there was no scroll. They even peered in my rifle barrel, as if I could have somehow stuffed it down there. They pried open the soles of my boots, checked the bottom of my feet, and grabbed at places that left me indignant.

“Are you going to look in my ears, too?”

“Where is it?” Silano’s frustration was plain.

“Hidden, until we form a true partnership. If we Americans and French represent liberty and reason, then the translation is for all mankind, not the Egyptian Rite of renegade Freemasons. Or ambitious generals like Napoleon Bonaparte. I want it given to the institute of savants in Cairo for dissemination to the world. The British Academy, as well. And I want Astiza once and for all. I want you to give her up, Silano, to trade her for the book, no matter how much power you have over us. And I want her to promise to go with me, wherever I choose to go. Now and forever. I want Bonaparte to know we’re all here, working together for him, so that none of us conveniently disappear. And I want the bloodshed to end. We’ve both lost friends. Promise me all that, and I’ll fetch your book. We’ll both have our dreams.”

“Fetch it from where? Acre?”

“You can have it within the hour.”

He bit his lip. “I’ve already had your felucca and wretched captain searched. They even hauled the boat to check its keel. Nothing!” Again, some of that impatient frustration I’d glimpsed the year before in Egypt broke through his urbane mask.

I smiled. “Such trust, Count Silano.”

He turned to Astiza. “Do you agree with his condition for you?” It was the second proposal I’d made in a month, I realized. Neither of them had been terribly romantic, but still . . . I must be getting old to want commitment from a woman, which meant commitment from me. “Yes,” she said. She was looking at me with hope. I felt happy and panicked at the same time.

“Then damn it, Gage, where is it?”

“Do you agree to my conditions?”

“Yes, yes.” He waved his hand.

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“On your honor as a nobleman and a savant? These soldiers are your witness.”

“On my word, to an American with more treacheries than I can count. The important thing is to break the linguistic code and translate the book. We’ll enlighten the entire world! But not if you don’t have it.”

“It’s on the boat.”

“Impossible,” Bouchard said. “My men searched every inch.”

“But they didn’t raise sail.”

I led them out of the fort and down to the Nile. The sun was drawing low, warm light spilling through date palms that waved in the hot breeze. The green water looked soupy, egrets standing in its shallows.

My boat captain had crawled into one corner of his beached craft, looking as if he expected execution any second. I couldn’t blame him.

I have a way of bringing bad luck to companions.

I snapped an order and the sail, bordered top and bottom by wooden booms, was cranked up the mast until it filled and turned in the wind.

“There. Do you see it?”

They looked close. Faint, in the horizontal light, was a strip from the bottom to the highest point of the sail with faint, odd characters.

“He sewed the thing into the cotton,” Menou said with a certain admiration.

“It was on display all the way upriver,” I announced. “Not one person noticed.”

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We had two tasks. One was to use the Rosetta Stone to translate the symbols of Thoth’s scroll into French. The second, even more time-consuming job, was to then actually translate the book and make sense of it.

Now that he had his hands on a scroll he’d been seeking for years, Silano exhibited some of that genteel charm with which he’d seduced the ladies in Paris. Lines disappeared from his face, his limp became less pained, and he was eagerly animated as he began charting symbols and trying to find connections. He had charm, and I began to understand what Astiza had seen in him. There was a courtly intellectual energy that was seductive. Even better, he seemed content to concede Astiza to me, even though I caught him looking at her longingly at times. She too seemed accepting of our treaty. What an odd triumvirate of researchers we’d become! I didn’t forget the death of my friends at Silano’s hands, but I admired his diligence. The count had brought trunks of musty books, and each educated guess would send one of us to another volume to check the plausibility of whether this grammar might work or that reference made sense. The dim pret h e

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history when this book was supposedly written was slowly being illuminated.

Laboriously, we puzzled out chapter titles on the scroll.

“On the diaphanous nature of reality and bending it to one’s will,” read one. The disturbing promise excited me, despite myself.

“On Freedom and Fate,” read another. Well, there was a question.

“On Teaming Mind, Body, and Soul.”

“On Summoning Manna from Heaven.” Had Moses read that? I didn’t see any sections on parting the sea.

“On Life Everlasting, in Its Various Forms.” Why hadn’t that worked for him?

“On Underworld and Overworld.” Hell and heaven?

“On Bending Men’s Minds to One’s Will.” Oh, Bonaparte would like that one.

“On Eliminating Ills and Curing Pain.”

“On Winning the Heart of a Lover.” Now that could be sold faster than Ben’s Almanac.

“On the Forty-Two Sacred Scrolls.”

That last was enough to make me groan. This book, apparently, was just the first of forty-one other volumes, which my Egyptian mentor Enoch had claimed were but a sampling of 36,535 scrolls—one hundred for each day of the year—scattered around the earth. They were to be found only by the worthy when the time was right. Thank the saints that I wasn’t particularly worthy! Just getting this first one had nearly killed me. Silano, however, was dreaming of new quests.

“This is astonishing! This book I’m guessing is a summary, a list of topics and first principles, with knowledge and mystery deepening with each volume. Can you imagine having them all?”

“The pharaohs thought even this one needed to be sealed away,” I reminded.

“The pharaohs were primitive men who didn’t have modern science or alchemy. All human progress comes from knowledge, Gage. From fire and the wheel, our world is a culmination of a million ideas, shared and recorded. What we have here is a thousand years of scientific 2 7 8

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advancement, left by someone, a god or wizard or some exalted being from who knows where—Atlantis, or the moon—who started civilization and now can restore it. For five millennia the greatest library was lost, and now it’s found again. This scroll will lead us to others. And then the wisest men, like me, can rule and put things in order. Unlike kings and tyrants, I will decree with perfect knowledge!” No one was going to accuse Silano of humility. Stripped of his fortune by the revolution, forced to crawl back into favor by courting democrats who’d been mere lawyers and pamphleteers, the count was a man driven by frustration. Sorcery and the occult would win back what republicanism had taken away.

While we had some chapter headings, the actual text was proving tedious to piece together. Its construction was utterly foreign, and simply identifying words did not make the meaning clear.

“This is the work of whole universities,” I told the count. “We’ll spend the rest of our lives trying to puzzle this out here in Rosetta.

Let’s give it to the National Institute or the British Academy.”

“Are you a complete fool, Gage? Letting a common savant have at this is like storing gunpowder in a candle shop. I thought you were the one who feared its misuse? I’ve studied the traditions around these words for decades. Astiza and I have labored long and hard to be worthy.”

“And me?”

“You were necessary, oddly, to finding the scroll. Only Thoth knows why.”

“A gypsy told me once I was a fool. The fool who sought the fool.”

“That’s the first time I’ve heard those charlatans be right.” And as if to prove the point, that night he had me poisoned.

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I ’m not the most gentle and contemplative of men, and generally don’t give much thought to God’s creatures unless I want to hunt or trap or ride them. But there are hounds I’ve warmed to, cats I’ve t h e

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appreciated for their mousing, and birds with feathers to take one’s breath away. That’s why I fed the mouse.

I stayed up later with the book than Silano and Astiza, puzzling whether this word fit that one, and if oddities such as “in your world, random chance is the foundation of fatalistic predetermination” made any sense at all. I finally took a brief break on our porch, the stars thick in the moist close darkness of the summer sky, and asked an orderly for some food to be brought. It took too long, but finally I was given a plate and went back inside to sit at our table and nibble at fuul, boiled beans mashed with tomatoes and onions. I spotted in a corner a periodic visitor that had amused me before, an Egyptian spiny mouse: so named because its hairs prick the mouth of any predator. Feeling companionable in the quiet night, I idly threw it some mash, even though the presence of such rodents was one reason we encased the book in a strongbox.

Then I bent back to work. So many choices! I marveled at the symbols, noticing suddenly how they seemed to shift and slide, rotate and tumble. I blinked, the words blurry. I was more tired than I realized! But if I could decipher where the sentence ended, or whether Thoth used sentences in the modern sense at all . . .

Now the scroll was wavering. What was going on? I looked over to the corner. The mouse, as big as a small rat at home, had flopped onto its side and was quivering, its eyes wide with terror. Foam was at its mouth.

I shoved my plate away and stood.

“Astiza!” I tried to cry, but it was a throttled mumble from a thick tongue, heard by no one but myself. I took a tottering step. That bastard Silano! He figured he didn’t need me anymore! I remembered his threat of poisoned pig in Cairo, the year before. Then I was falling, not even sure what had happened to my legs, and hit the floor so hard that lights danced before my eyes. Through a haze I could see the mouse dying.

Men stole in the room to scoop me up. Yet how was he going to explain this murder to Astiza? Or did he plan to assassinate her 2 8 0

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too? No, he still wanted her. They hoisted, grunting, and carried me between them like a sack of flour. I was dizzy, but conscious—probably because I’d barely tasted the dish. They assumed I was dead.

We went out a side gate and down to the river and garrison privy, watered by a canal. Beyond it was a small lagoon off the main river, redolent of lotus and shit. With a swing back and forth they pitched my body, helpless as a baby.

With a splash, I went under. Did they mean to make it look like a drowning?

Yet the shock of the water revived me a little, and panic gave my limbs some motion. I managed to flop back to the surface and take a breath, treading water. The shallow dose was wearing off. My two would-be executioners watched me, curiously not very alarmed by my resilience. Didn’t they realize I hadn’t eaten enough poison? They were making no move to shoot me, or wade in after to finish me off with sword or ax.

Maybe I could paddle and find help.

It was then that I heard a big splash behind me.

I turned. There was a low dock in the lagoon, and with a rattle a chain was unreeling, its links snaking toward me. What the devil?

My escorts laughed.

Coming toward me in the dark were the protruding nostrils and reptilian eyes of that most loathsome and hideous of all beasts, the Nile crocodile. This prehistoric nightmare, armored in scales, thick as a log, a torpedo of muscle, can be astonishingly quick in and out of the water. It is old as dragons, as unfeeling as a machine.

Even in my fuddled state their plot came to me. Silano’s scoundrels had chained the predator in this lagoon to dispose of me by eating me. I could hear the count’s story. The American had used the privy, walked to the Nile to wash or gaze out at the night, the croc came out of the water—it had happened in Egypt a thousand times before—and snick, snack, I was gone. Silano would have stone, scroll, and woman. Checkmate!

I’d just processed this disagreeable scenario, acknowledging its ingenious perfidy with dull admiration, when the animal struck. It t h e

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snatched me under, clamping my leg but not yet chewing it, and rolled us, in its time-honored habit of drowning its prey. The perfect horror of that vise, its long mouth of overlapping teeth, its mossy scales, the dim blankness of its expression, all somehow registered in my mind and shocked me into action despite the pain and poison. I freed my tomahawk from my belt as we whirled and struck the beast on his snout, no doubt surprising him with my little sting as much as he’d surprised me. His jaws snapped open, as if on a spring, releasing my leg, and I chopped again, hitting the roof of his mouth where the tomahawk lodged. The lagoon erupted as the crocodile writhed, and as it twisted I felt its chain slithering by me. Instinctively I grabbed.

The animal and its chain carried me upward, my head broke water, and I seized breath. Then we dove again, the croc trying to turn to bite me, even as each snapping of its jaws must have driven the tomahawk painfully deeper. I dared not let his mouth get close. I pulled myself frantically forward on his chain until I got to where it made a necklace around the monster’s neck, just before its forelegs. I hung on.

Twist as it might, it couldn’t bite me.

We dove, so I jabbed at its eyes. Now it thrashed like a bucking horse as I barely held on. We’d break surface and then submerge, wallow in the mud of the shallow bottom, and then surge upward again. I could hear the dock cracking and squealing behind as the beast yanked furiously on its chain. The laughter of my captors had stopped. My leg was bleeding, the blood making the crocodile’s thrashing even more frantic as he smelled. I had no way to kill the beast.

So when our writhing brought us near the dock I let go and swam for it. No man has ever left the water that fast. I flew to get up on the wood.

The croc turned, wrapped in its own chain, and came after me, its snout crashing into the splintery dock. It bit, grunting at the pain of my tomahawk as it did so, snapping boards in two. The dock began to sink toward its snout as I scrabbled up its slope. I heard confused shouts from the men who’d thrown me in. Then I spied the post where the chain was wrapped and when a surging charge slacked the 2 8 2

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tension, I lifted its loop to release the animal, hoping it would swim away up the Nile.

Instead the crocodile exploded half out of the water, the loose chain singing like a whip. I ducked as it whickered by. The animal fell back into the lagoon, realized it was free, and suddenly was charging full tilt, but not toward me. His agonized eyes had spied the men on shore watching our struggle. The crocodile came out of the water after them, great feet splayed out as it charged, spray flying. Screaming, they ran.

A crocodile can gallop short distances as fast as a horse. He took one of my tormentors and broke him nearly in two with a furious snap of its jaws, then dropped that one and chased the next, straight toward the fort. The man was shouting a warning.

I didn’t have much time.

I was damned if I’d leave it all to Silano. I’d kill him if I could, and if not I’d torment him with what he’d lost. I’d take the scroll and throw it into the deepest hole in the Mediterranean. Wounded by the animal’s teeth, dripping blood, I limped up the path, following the trail of swept sand where the crocodile’s mighty tail had thrashed. Cautiously, I paused at the small sally gate we’d come out of. The crocodile had smashed right through and was in the courtyard, men beginning to shoot. A cannon went off in alarm. I went inside myself but kept to the shadows, creeping around the perimeter to my quarters. There I grabbed my longrifle and peeked out the door. The crocodile was down, a hundred men blazing at it, chunks of another human trapped in its colossal jaws. Then I aimed, but not at the beast. Instead I put the sights on a lantern in the stables across the courtyard, which in turn weren’t far from the magazine.

I was going to set the fort on fire.

It was one of the prettiest shots I ever made, breath held, finger squeezing. I had to fire the length of the parade ground, through an open window, and pluck down the lantern without extinguishing its wick. It fell, broke, and flames began to dance in the hay. A weird light began to illuminate the scales and saber-like teeth of the monster, even as men began shouting, “Fire, fire!” Horses were screaming.

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No eyes were on me.

So I limped again and got back to the room where I’d been poisoned. Along the way, I seized one of the picks used for construction of the fort.

The scroll, damn him, was gone.

I glanced out. Flames were shooting higher and neighing horses were stampeding from the stable, adding to the chaos. I could hear officers shouting. “The magazine! Wet down the magazine!” I loaded and fired again, hitting someone trying to organize a chain of buckets from the fort’s well. When he fell the bucket brigade scattered in confusion, not knowing what was going on. Shots went off as sentries fired in all directions.

Astiza burst in dressed in her nightclothes, her hair undone, eyes wide with confusion. She took in my bloody leg, soaked clothing, and the empty table where I’d had the scroll.

“Ethan! What have you done?”

“You mean, what has your ex-lover Silano done! He poisoned me and tried to feed me to that reptile out there! Don’t think you wouldn’t have been next, once he’d had you and tired of you. He wants that book all for himself. Not for science, not for Bonaparte, and certainly not for us. It’s driven him mad!”

“I saw him running for the lookout tower with Bouchard. They slammed the door and locked themselves in.”

“He’s going to wait and let the garrison finish me. Maybe you, too.” More shouting, and now bullets began pattering the headquarters building where we huddled.

“We can’t let him disappear with that book!” she said.

“Then why did we find it in the first place?”

“Why do people learn anything? It’s our nature!”

“Not my nature.” I grabbed her. “Are you with me?”

“Of course.”

“Then if we can’t have the scroll, we’ll break the key that translates it and give him a worthless book. Is there a way out of this rat hole?”

“There’s an officer’s armory behind that other door, and some powder inside.”

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“You think we can fight the whole garrison?”

“We can blow a hole through the back wall.” I smiled. “Lord, you are beautiful under pressure.” It was a heavy locked door but I fired once and then swung the pick. It gave way. This was not the main magazine, just the officers’

arms, but by Thoth there were two kegs of powder. I uncorked one and set a trail of powder to the main room, then put both kegs against the outer wall. “Now we take the stone for ourselves.”

“You can’t take that! It weighs too much!” I hefted the rolling pin I’d put in my satchel as a decoy and grinned.

“Ben Franklin says I can.”

Publishing always seemed a messy trade to me, but Franklin claimed it was like printing money. I slung my rifle over my shoulder and limped back to the room with the Rosetta Stone, lurid firelight outside throwing shadows. Soldiers in the courtyard had formed a long chain all the way down to the river, buckets passed over the tail of the dead crocodile. The shooting had slackened.

I took Silano’s experimental paints from his pots and smeared some on my rolling pin. Then I ran it over the top part of the Rosetta Stone, coating the surface with paint but leaving the incised symbols paint-free. I did the same to the Greek.

“Strip to the waist, please.”

“Ethan!”

“I need your skin.”

“By the grace of Isis, men! Is that all you can think about at a time like . . .”

So I took her nightgown by the shoulders and tore, ripping it down her back as she shrieked. “Sorry. You’re smoother than me.” Then I kissed her, her rags held against her breasts, and backed her against the stone.

She twitched. “What are you doing?”

“Making you a library.” I pulled her off and looked. Not perfect, some symbols lost at the indent of her spine, but still, a mirror image had been painted there. I pressed her again against the Greek, some carrying down onto the top of her buttocks. It was oddly erotic, but t h e

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then women have quite lovely backs, and I did like the swell of the fabric draped on her hips. . . .

Back to work! While she stood there, too shocked to be angry yet, I attacked the monument, not to deface it but to truncate it. I had to aim for the middle of the hieroglyphics, hoping some savant wouldn’t curse me years later. One blow, two, three, and then the granite began to crack! I took final aim and swung with all my might, and the top quarter of the Rosetta Stone broke free, taking all of Thoth’s script and a portion of the hieroglyphics with it. The fragment crashed to the floor.

“Help me drag it.”

“Are you completely mad?”

“We have the key script on you. We’re going to destroy this piece.

We can’t move the whole stone, but we can get this into the armory.”

“And then?”

“Blow it up when we blow the wall. It will make the book worthless until we steal it back!”

The stone was heavy, but we managed to tug, shove, and scrape it across the entry room and into the armory on the far side. I wedged it against the gunpowder kegs, figuring it would help direct their blast against the wall.

Then I retreated, took a candle, and lit the train of powder. I glanced back. Astiza was crouched by the window, looking out. Men were shouting and running. The flames were growing brighter.

“Ethan!” she warned. Then the whole world erupted.

Fort Julian’s magazine went first, a thunderous explosion that shot flaming debris hundreds of feet into the sky. Even sheltered as we were inside, the concussion knocked us sprawling. A moment later there was a second boom from the armory and debris rained out from it, too. Bits of the Rosetta Stone flew like shrapnel. Astiza’s lovely torso would be the only record of Thoth. I touched her.

“The paint is already dry.” I smiled. “You’re a book, Astiza, the secret of life!”

“You’d better get this book a cover. I’m not running around Egypt naked.”

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I fetched an officer’s cloak. My tomahawk I had to leave in the dead crocodile. With my rifle we pushed through the wreckage of the armory. The mud fort wall had breached, and we climbed over its rubble to the streets of Rosetta. Down at the end of the lane some laundry hung by a donkey cart, not far from a corralled and very frightened donkey.

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Fleeing at the pace of a donkey cart is not the swiftest way to avoid one’s enemies, but it has the advantage of being so ridiculous as to be overlooked. Liberation of laundry allowed us to be more or less in Egyptian dress, my leg wound throbbing but tightly bound. My hope was that in the confusion caused by a rampaging crocodile, stampeding horses, and an exploding magazine, we might slip away. With any luck, the faith-less Silano might assume I was in the belly of his gigantic reptile, at least until someone thought to slit open its stomach. If not that, he’d assume we were trying to slip by the patrol boats on the Nile. My vague plan was to slip by the French into the Ottoman camp, go to Smith’s squadron offshore, and bargain from somewhere safe. If we’d lost the book, Silano had lost the ability to continue deciphering it.

The success of this scheme began to diminish as the sun rose and the day grew hotter. As we left the green flood plain of the Nile for the red desert toward Abukir, a grumble like thunder began to be heard, but in such a clear sky it was the thud of guns. A battle was underway, which meant unless the Turks won and the French broke, the entire Frankish army was in our way. It was July 25, 1799.

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“We can’t turn back,” Astiza said. “Silano would spot us.”

“And battles are confusing. Maybe a way will present itself.” We parked the donkey in the lee of a high sand dune and ascended to look out at the bay beyond. The panorama was heartbreaking.

Once more, the atrophy of Ottoman arms was apparent. There was nothing wrong with the courage of Mustafa’s men. What was lacking was firepower and tactical sense. The Turks waited like a paralyzed hare; the French bombarded and then attacked with their cavalry. We were spectators to a disaster, watching a headlong charge by Joachim Murat’s troopers not merely breach the first Ottoman line, but knife through the second and third as well. The cavalry stampeded the entire length of the Abukir peninsula, spilling the defenders in a panic from their trenches, tents deflating as guy ropes were cut. We learned later that Murat himself captured the Turkish commander-in-chief in furious hand-to-hand combat, receiving a grazing wound on his jaw from Mustafa’s pistol but chopping off a couple of the pasha’s fingers with his sword in return. Bonaparte used his own handkerchief to bind the man’s hand. In 1799, there was still chivalry.

The rest was slaughter, once the lines cracked. More than two thousand of the Muslim warriors were cut down on land and twice that many drowned as they plunged into the sea to try to reach their ships.

A garrison in the fort at the end of the peninsula stubbornly held out, but was bombarded and starved into submission. For the price of a thousand casualties, three-quarters of them wounded, Bonaparte had destroyed another Ottoman army. It was exactly the triumph he needed to retrieve his reputation after the debacle at Acre. To a colleague he wrote it was “one of the most beautiful battles I ever saw,” and to the Directory in Paris he described it as “one of the most terrible.” Both were true. He had been resuscitated by blood.

So Astiza and I had a camp of boiling mad Frenchmen back at Rosetta and a victorious French army looting the remains of our allies in front. I’d fled from the jaws of a crocodile to military encircle-ment.

“Ethan, what do you think we should do?” I suppose it’s flattering when women ask men things like that in the midst of military peril, t h e

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but I wouldn’t mind if they came up with their own ideas once in a while.

“Keep running, I think. I just don’t know where.” So she did make a suggestion, plucky girl. “Remember the Oasis of Siwah, where Alexander the Great was declared a son of Zeus and Amon? Napoleon doesn’t control it. Let’s make for that.” I swallowed. “Isn’t that a hundred miles across empty desert?”

“So we’d better get started.”

We’d both end up mummified by heat and thirst, but where else could we go? Silano would kill us for sure, now. Napoleon too. “I wish our donkey didn’t look so half-starved and addled-eyed,” I said. “If we’d had time, I’d have looked for a better one.” No matter. A French patrol was waiting when we descended from the dune.

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Predictably, Napoleon was in a good mood that night. There’s nothing like victory to settle him. Bulletins would be sent to France describing Bonaparte’s victory in vivid detail. Captured standards were being readied for shipment for display in Paris. And I, his annoying mosquito, was safely bound, one leg chewed by a ravenous crocodile, my love trussed, my gun confiscated, and my donkey on its way back to its rightful owner.

“I’ve been trying to save you from witchcraft, General,” I tried, without much spirit.

He’d uncorked a bottle of Bordeaux, part of the personal horde his brother had brought from France. “Have you now? With your beautiful viper by your side?”

“Silano is seeking dark powers that will lead you astray.”

“Then thank God you blew up half my fort, Gage.” He took a swallow.

It did sound bad when he put it that way. “That was simply a diversion.” It would have been braver to be surly and defiant, I know, but I was trying to save our lives.

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Count Silano had arrived gaping as if I’d walked from the tomb after three days. Now he said, “I am tired of trying to kill you, monsieur.”

I smiled at them both. “I’m tired of it too.”

“This piece of stone you destroyed,” Bonaparte said. “It was a key to translate an ancient book?” Fortunately, there was enough dignity that no one thought to strip Astiza.

“Yes, General.”

“And that book would tell us what, exactly?”

“Magic,” Silano said.

“Does magic still exist?”

“We can make it exist. Magic is just advanced science. Magic and immortality.”

“Immortality!” Bonaparte laughed. “Escape from the ultimate fate!

But I’ve seen too many dead, so my immortality is not to be forgotten.

Recollection is what we leave.”

“We believe this book will help you achieve immortality in more literal ways,” the count said. “You, and those who rise with you.”

“Such as yourself?” He passed the bottle. “So you have incentive, my friend!” Napoleon turned to me. “It’s annoying you broke the stone, Gage, but Silano has already deciphered some of the symbols.

Perhaps he’ll puzzle out the rest. And the stone remaining will allow the savants to focus on hieroglyphics. Depending on who ultimately wins here in Egypt, the piece will probably wind up someday in either Paris or London. Crowds will flock to it, never knowing a fourth text is gone.”

“I could stay around to tell them.”

“I’m afraid not.” Napoleon reached into a leather binder and brought out a bundle of dated newspapers. “Smith sent me these as a gift when I let the Turks take off their wounded. It seems that while we’ve achieved glory in Egypt, events in Europe have been rapidly unraveling. France is once more in peril.” It was then I confirmed that Bonaparte had clearly abandoned one goal, conquest of Asia, and adopted another, a return to Paris. He’d t h e

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won what he could, and we’d found what he most wanted to find.

Power, one way or another.

“France and Austria have been at war since March, and we’ve been driven from Germany and Italy. Tippoo Sahib died in India the same time we were repulsed at Acre. The Directory is in shambles, and my brother Lucien is in Paris trying to reform the imbecilic assembly. The British fleet will have to loosen its blockade soon to resupply at Cyprus. That’s when I can return to put things right. Duty requires it.”

That seemed shameless. “Duty? To leave your men?”

“To prepare the way. Kléber has dreamed of command since we landed here. Now he’ll get it: I’ll surprise him with a letter. Meanwhile I take the risk of evading the British fleet.” Risk! The risk was to be left with a marooned army in Egypt. The bastard was abandoning his men for the politics of Paris! Yet the truth was, I had a grudging admiration for the sly dog. We were two of a kind in some ways: opportunists, gamblers, and survivors. We were fatalists, always after the main chance. We both liked pretty women.

And high adventure, if it was an escape from tedium.

It was as if he’d read my mind. “War and politics makes necessity,” he said. “It is too bad we have to kill you, but there it is.”

“There what is?”

“I feel as if I’m being driven toward an unknown goal, Ethan Gage, and that you represent as much of a dangerous obstacle now as you did assistance when I brought you to Egypt. Neither of us planned you’d end with the damned English, but there you were at Acre with your electricity. And now you’ve attacked Rosetta.”

“Only because of Silano. He was the one with the crocodile . . .” Bonaparte stuck out his hand. “Au revoir, Monsieur Gage. Under different circumstances we might have become firm partners. As it is, you’ve betrayed France for the last time. You’ve proven yourself entirely too much of a nuisance, and too able an enemy. Yet even cats have only nine lives. Surely you’ve used yours up by now?”

“Not unless you put it to the test,” I replied morosely.

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“I will leave it to Silano to be creative with you and your woman.

The one who shot at me so long ago, in Alexandria.”

“She shot at me, general.”

“Yes. Why are the bad ones so beautiful? Well. Destiny awaits.” And having disposed of us, off he marched, his mind on his next project.

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Adecent man would simply shoot us, but Silano was a scientist. Astiza and I had crossed him enough that he thought we deserved some pain, and he was curious to use our environment. “Do you know sand alone can mummify a carcass?”

“How erudite.”

So we were buried after midnight, but only to our necks.

“What I like about this is that you can watch each other burn and weep,” he said as his henchmen finished packing sand around our bodies. Our hands had been tied behind our backs, and our feet bound. We had no hats, and were already thirsty. “There will be a slow increase in torment as the sun rises. Your skin will fry, and eventually crack. The reflected light and dust will slowly induce blindness, and as you watch each other you will gradually go mad. The hot sand will leach out any liquid you retain, and your tongues will swell so much that you will have difficulty breathing. You will pray for snakes or scorpions to make it faster.” He stooped and patted me on the head, like a child or dog. “The scorpions like to go for the eyes, and the ants crawl up the nostrils to feed. The vultures will hope to get to you before you’re completely eaten. But it is the snakes that hurt the most.”

“You seem to know a lot about it.”

“I’m a naturalist. I have studied torture for many years. It’s an exquisite science, and quite a pleasure if you understand its refine-ments. It’s not easy to keep a man in excruciating pain and yet coher-ent enough to tell you something useful. What’s interesting about this exercise is that the body below the neck should be baked dry and t h e

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preserved. It is from this natural process, I’m guessing, that ancient Egyptians got the idea of mummification. Do you know that the Persian king Cambyses lost an entire army in a sandstorm?”

“Can’t say that I care.”

“I study history so as not to repeat it.” He turned to Astiza, her dark hair a fan on the earth. “I did love you, you know.”

“You’ve never loved anyone but yourself.”

“Ben Franklin said the man who loves himself will have no rival,” I chimed in.

“Ah, the amusing Monsieur Franklin. Certainly I’m more faithful to myself than either of you have been to me! How many chances for partnership did I give you, Gage? How many warnings? Yet you betrayed me, again and again and again.”

“Can’t imagine why.”

“I’d like to watch you beg before the end.” And I would have, if I thought it would do a lick of good.

“But I’m afraid that destiny tugs at me, too. I’m accompanying Bonaparte back to France, where I can study the book more deeply, and he’s not a man to sit still. Nor is it safe to stray from the main army. I’m afraid we will not meet again, Monsieur Gage.”

“Do you believe in ghosts, Silano?”

“I’m afraid my interest in the supernatural does not extend to superstition.”

“You will, when I come after you.”

He laughed. “And after you give me a good fright, perhaps we’ll play a game of cards! In the meantime I’ll let you turn into one. Or a mummy. Maybe I’ll have someone dig you out in a few weeks so I can prop you in a corner like Omar.”

“Alessandro, we do not deserve this!” Astiza cried.

There was a long silence. We could not see his face. Then, quietly,

“Yes you do. You broke my heart.”

And with that, we were left alone to fry.

Astiza and I faced each other, me south and she north, so that our cheeks could be equally roasted between dawn and sunset. It’s cold in the desert at night and for the first few minutes after the sun broke 2 9 4

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

the horizon, the warmth was not unpleasant. Then, as pink left the sky and it turned to summer’s milk, the temperature began to rise, accentuated by the reflecting sand. My ear began to burn. I heard the first rustlings of insects.

“Ethan, I’m afraid,” whispered Astiza, who was six feet from me.

“We’ll black out,” I promised, without conviction.

“Isis, call to me our friends! Give us help!” Isis didn’t reply. “It won’t hurt after a while,” I said.

Instead, the pain increased. I soon had a headache, and my tongue thickened. Astiza was quietly moaning. Even in the best of circumstances the summer sun in Egypt hammers one’s head. Now I felt like Jericho’s anvil. I was reminded all too sharply of the flight that Ashraf and I made into the desert a year before. That time, at least, we’d been mounted and my Mameluke friend had known how to find water.