The Rosetta Key

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

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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.

The sand grew hotter. Every inch of skin could feel the rising heat, and yet I couldn’t wiggle. There were sharp pricks, like bites, but I couldn’t tell if something was already eating me or it was merely the heat gnawing into my sensations. The brain has a way of amplifying pain with dread.

Did I mention that gambling is a vice?

Sweat had half blinded me, stinging, but soon was leached out, leaving salt. My entire head felt like it was swelling. My vision blurred from the glare, and Astiza’s own head seemed as much a blob as someone recognizable.

Was it even noon yet? I didn’t think so. I heard a faint rumble.

Was the fighting starting again? Maybe it would rain, as at the City of Ghosts.

No, the heat rose, in great shimmering waves. Astiza sobbed for a while, but then fell silent. I prayed she’d passed out. I was waiting for the same, that slow slide into unconsciousness and death, but the desert wanted to punish me. On and on the temperature climbed. My chin was burning. My teeth were frying in their sockets. My eyes were swelling shut.

Then I saw something scuttle by.

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It was black, and I groaned inwardly. Soldiers had told me that scorpion stings were particularly painful. “Like a hundred bees at once,” one had said. “No, no, like holding a hot coal to the skin!” chimed in another. “More closely like acid in the eye!” offered another.

“A hammer to the thumb!”

More scuttling. Another one. The scorpions were approaching us, then backing off. I couldn’t hear any signaling, but they seemed to pile into packs like wolves.

I hoped their assault would not wake Astiza up. I pledged to try as hard as I could not to scream. The rumbling was getting louder.

Now one arthropod came near, a monster in my ruined vision, as huge as the crocodile from this perspective. It seemed to be contemplating me with the dull, cold instinctive calculation of its tiny brain.

Its cocked tail twitched, as if aiming. And then . . .

Slam! I jerked as much as my entrapment would let me. A dusty boot had come down, obliterating the creature. It twisted, grinding the scorpion into the dust, and then I heard a familiar voice.

“By the beard of the Prophet, can you never look after yourself, Ethan?”

“Ashraf?” It was a bewildered mumble.

“I’ve been waiting for your tormentors to go far enough away.

It is hot, sitting in the desert! And here the two of you are, in even worse shape than when I left you last fall. Do you learn nothing, American?”

Could it be? The Mameluke Ashraf had been first my prisoner and then my companion as we fled Cairo and rode to rescue Astiza. He’d saved us again in a skirmish on a riverbank, given us a horse, and then bid good-bye, joining the resistance forces of Murad Bey. And now he was here again? Thoth was at work.

“I’ve been tracking you for days, first to Rosetta, and then back again. I did not understand why you were disguised like a fellahin in a donkey cart. Then your Franks bury you alive? You need better friends, Ethan.”

“Amen to that,” I managed.

And I heard the blessed scrape of a spade, digging me out.

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I only dimly remember what came next. Crowding by a company of well-armed Mamelukes, explaining the rumble I’d heard.

Water, painfully wet as we sucked it into our swollen throats. A camel knelt and we were tied onto it. Then a ride into the setting sun. We slept under a scrap of tent at an oasis, regaining our senses. Our heads were red and blistered, our lips cracked, our eyes like slits. We were helpless.

So at length we were tied on again and led even deeper into the waste, south and west and then east to a secret camp of Murad’s.

Women salved our burnt skin, and nourishment slowly restored us.

Time was still a blur. If I climbed to the top of a nearby dune, I could just see the tips of the pyramids. Cairo was invisible, beyond.

“How did you know to find us?” I asked Ashraf. He’d already related his raids and battles that were wearing down the French.

“First we heard an ironmonger was inquiring about Astiza from distant Jerusalem,” he said. “It was a curious report, but I knew you’d disappeared and suspected. Then Ibrahim Bey reported that Count Silano had ridden north and disappeared somewhere in Syria. What was going on? Napoleon was repulsed at Acre, but you did not come back to Cairo with him. So I believed you’d joined the English, and I determined to watch for you in the Ottoman invasion force. And yes, we saw flames in Rosetta, and I spied the two of you in your donkey cart, but French cavalry were too near. So I waited, until they buried you and the French finally drew off. Always I am having to save you, my American friend.”

“Always I am in your debt.”

“Not if you do what I suspect you must do.”

“What is that?

“Word just came that Napoleon has sailed and taken Count Silano with him. You’re going to have to stop them in France, Ethan. The servant women have told me of the mysterious signs on your companion’s back. What are they?”

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“Ancient writing to read what Silano has stolen.”

“The paint is sloughing off, but there is a way to extend them longer. I’ve told the women to mix their pots of henna.” Henna was a plant used to decorate the Arab women with intricate traceries of brown patterns, like an impermanent tattoo.

When they finished, Astiza’s back looked oddly beautiful.

“Should this book be read at all?” Ashraf asked as we prepared to leave.

“If not, then its secret will die with me,” she said. “I am the Rosetta key.”

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Astiza and I landed on the southern coast of France on October 11, 1799, two days after Napoleon Bonaparte and Alessandro Silano did the same. For both parties it had been a long voyage. Bonaparte, after patting mistress Pauline Foures on her fanny and leaving a note to Kléber informing him that he was now in command (he preferred not to face the general in person), had taken Monge, Berthollet, and a few other savants like Silano and hugged the frequently windless African coast to avoid the British navy. The route turned a routine sea voyage into a tedious forty-two days. Even as he crept homeward, French politics became more chaotic as plot and counterplot simmered in Paris. It was the perfect atmosphere for an ambitious general, and the bulletin announcing Napoleon’s smashing victory at Abukir arrived in Paris three days before the general did. His way north was marked by cheering crowds.

Our voyage was also slow, but for a different reason. With Smith’s encouragement, we boarded a British frigate a week after Bonaparte had left Egypt and sailed directly for France to intercept. His slow-ness saved him. We were off Corsica and Toulon two weeks before t h e

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Napoleon arrived and, learning there was no word of him, darted back the way we’d come. Even from a masthead, however, a lookout surveys only a few square miles of sea, and the Mediterranean is big.

How close we came I don’t know. Finally a picket boat brought word that he’d landed first in his native Corsica and then France, and by the time we followed he was well ahead of us.

If Silano hadn’t been along, I’d have been content to let him go. It’s not my duty to dog ambitious generals. But we had a score to settle with the count, and the book was dangerous in his hands and potentially useful in ours. How much did he already know? How much could we read, with Astiza’s key?

If our hunt at sea was anxious and discouraging, the time it took was not. Astiza and I had rarely had time to take a breath together.

It had always been campaigns, treasure hunts, and perilous escapes.

Now we shared a lieutenant’s cabin—our intimacy an issue of some jealousy among the lonely officers and crew—and had time to know each other at leisure, like a man and wife. Time enough, in other words, to scare any man wary of intimacy.

Except I liked it. We had certainly been partners in adventure, and lovers. Now we were friends. Her body ripened with rest and food, her skin recovered its blossom, and her hair its sheen. I loved to simply look at her, reading in our cabin or watching the bright sea by the rail, and loved how clothes draped her, how her hair floated in the breeze. Even better, of course, was slowly taking those clothes off.

But our ordeals had saddened her, and her beauty seemed bittersweet.

And when we came together in our cramped quarters, sometimes urgently and at other times with gentle care, trying to be quiet in the thin-walled ship, I was transported. I marveled that I, the wayward American opportunist, and she, the Egyptian mystic, got on at all.

And yet it turned out we did complement and complete each other, anticipating each other. I began thinking of a normal life ahead.

I wished we could sail forever, and not find Napoleon at all.

But sometimes she was lost to me with a troubled look, seeing dark things in the past or future. That’s when I feared I would lose her again. Destiny claimed her as much as I did.

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“Think about it, Ethan. Bonaparte with the power of Moses?

France, with the secret knowledge of the Knight Templars? Silano, living forever, every year mastering more arcane formulae, gathering more followers? Our task isn’t done until we get that book back.” So we landed in France. Of course we couldn’t dock in Toulon.

Astiza conferred with our English captain, studied the charts, and insistently directed us to an obscure cove surrounded by steep hillsides, uninhabited except by a goatherd or two. How did she know the coast of France? We were rowed ashore at night to a pebble beach and left alone in the moonless dark. Finally there was a whistle and Astiza lit a candle, shielded by her cape.

“So the fool has returned,” a familiar voice said from the brush.

“He who found the Fool, father of all thought, originator of civilization, blessing and curse of kings.” Men materialized, swarthy and in boots and broad hats, bright sashes at their waists that held silver knives. Their leader bowed.

“Welcome back to the Rom,” said Stefan the gypsy.

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I was pleasantly astounded by this reunion. I’d met these gypsies, or “gyptians,” as some in Europe called them—wanderers supposedly descended from the ancients—the year before when my friend Talma and I had fled Paris to join Napoleon’s expedition. After Najac and his gutter scoundrels had ambushed us on the Toulon stage, I’d escaped into the woods and found refuge with Stefan’s band. There I had first met Sidney Smith and, more agreeably, the beautiful Sarylla who had told my fortune, told me I was the fool to seek the Fool (another name for Thoth) and instructed me in lovemaking tech-niques of the ancients. It had been a pleasant way to complete my journey to Toulon, encapsulated in a gypsy wagon and safe from those pursuing my sacred medallion. Now, like a rabbit popping from a hole, my gypsy saviors were here again.

“What in the tarot are you doing here?” I asked.

“But waiting for you, of course.”

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“I sent word ahead to them on an English cutter,” Astiza said.

Ah. Hadn’t these same gypsies sent word ahead to her, of the medallion and my coming? Which almost led to my head being blown off by Astiza’s former master, not the easiest of introductions.

“Bonaparte is ahead of you, and word of his latest victories just ahead of him,” Stefan said.“His journey to Paris has become a triumph.

Men hope the conqueror of Egypt may be the savior of France. With only a little help from Alessandro Silano, he may achieve everything he desires, and desire is dangerous. You must separate Bonaparte from the book, and safekeep it. The Templar hiding place lasted nearly five centuries. Yours, hopefully, will last five millennia, or more.”

“We have to catch him first.”

“Yes, we must hurry. Great things are about to happen.”

“Stefan, I’m delighted and amazed to see you, but hurrying is the last thing I thought gypsies capable of. We ambled to Toulon about as fast as a grazing cow, if I remember, and your little ponies can’t pull your wagons much faster.”

“True. But the Rom have a knack for borrowing things. We’re going to find a coach and a fast team, my friend, and drive you—a member of the Council of Five Hundred, let us pretend—at break-neck pace to Paris. I shall be a captain of police, say, and André here your driver. Carlo as your footman, the lady as your lady . . .”

“The first thing we’re going to do back in France is steal a coach and four?”

“If you act as if you deserve it, it doesn’t look like stealing.”

“We’re not even legally in France. And I’m still charged with murdering a prostitute. My enemies could use it against me.”

“Won’t they kill you regardless?”

“Well, yes.”

“Then what is your worry? But come. We’ll ask Sarylla what to do.” The gypsy fortune-teller who taught me more than my fortune—

lord, I fondly remembered the yelps she made—was as beautiful as I remembered, dark and mysterious, rings glittering on her fingers and hoop earrings catching the firelight. I was not entirely glad to bump into a former paramour with Astiza in tow, and the two women 3 0 2

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bristled silently in that way they have, like wary cats. Yet Astiza sat quietly at my shoulder while the gypsy woman plied the cards of the tarot.

“Fortune speeds you on your way,” Sarylla intoned, as her turn of cards revealed the chariot. “We will have no problem liberating a carriage for our purposes.”

“See?” Stefan said with satisfaction.

I like the tarot. It can tell you anything you want to hear.

Sarylla turned more cards. “But you will meet a woman in hurried circumstances. Your route will become circuitous.” Another woman? “But will we be successful?” She turned more cards. I saw the tower, the magician, the fool, and the emperor. “It will be a near-fought thing.” Another card. The lovers. She looked at us. “You must work together.”

Astiza took my hand and smiled.

And she turned again. Death.

“I do not know who this is for. The magician, the fool, the emperor, or the lover? Your way is perilous.”

“But possible?” Death for Silano, certainly. And perhaps I should assassinate Bonaparte too.

Another card. The wheel of fortune. “You are a gambler, no?”

“When I have to be.”

Another card. The world. “You have no choice.” She looked at us with her great, dark eyes. “You will have strange allies and strange enemies.”

I grimaced. “Everything’s normal then.” She shook her head, mystified. “Wait to see which is which.” She looked hard at the cards and then at Astiza. “There is danger for your new woman, Ethan Gage. Great danger, and something even deeper than that, I think. Sorrow.”

Here it was, that rivalry. “What do you mean?”

“What the cards say. Nothing more.”

I was disturbed. If Sarylla’s original fortune hadn’t come true, I’d have brushed this off. I am, after all, a Franklin man, a savant. But t h e

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however I might mock the tarot, there was something eerie about its power. I was frightened for the woman beside me.

“There may be fighting,” I said to Astiza. “You can wait for me on the English ship. It’s not too late to signal them.” Astiza considered the cards and the gypsy for some time, and then shook her head. “I have my own magic and we’ve come this far,” she said, pulling her cloak around her against the unaccustomed European chill of October, already reaching south. “Our real danger is time. We must hurry.”

Sarylla looked sympathetic and gave her the tarot card for the star.

“Keep this. It is for meditation and enlightenment. May faith be with you, lady.”

Astiza looked surprised, and touched. “And you.” So we crept to a magistrate’s house, “borrowed” his coach and team, and were on our way to Paris. I was awed by the lush green-gold of the countryside after Egypt and Syria. The last grapes hung round and fat. The fields were pregnant with yellow haystacks. Lingering fruit gave the air a ripe, fermented scent. Wagons groaning with autumn produce pulled aside as Stefan’s men cried commands and cracked the whip as if we were really republican deputies of importance. Even the farm girls looked succulent, seeming half-dressed after the robes of the desert, their breasts like melons, their hips a merry bushel, their calves stained with wine juice. Their lips were red and full from sucking on plums.

“Isn’t it beautiful, Astiza?”

She was more troubled by the cloudy skies, the turning leaves, and trees that formed unruly arbors over the highways.

“I can’t see,” she replied.

Several times we passed through towns with sagging decorations of tricolor bunting, dried flower petals on the roads, and wine bottles discarded in ditches. Each was evidence of Napoleon’s passing.

“The little general?” an innkeeper remembered. “A rooster of a man!”

“Handsome as the devil,” his wife added. “Black lock of hair, fierce gray eyes. They say he conquered half of Asia!” 3 0 4

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“The treasure of the ancients is coming right after him, they say!”

“And his brave men!”

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We drove well into the night and rose before dawn, but Paris is a multiday journey. As we went north; the sky grew grayer and the season advanced. Our coach blew the highway’s carpet of leaves into a rooster tail. Our horses steamed when we stopped for water. And so we were clattering onward in the dusk of the fourth day, Paris just hours ahead, when suddenly another fine team and coach burst out of a lane to our left and swerved right in front of us.

Horses screamed and crashed, the teams dragging each other down.

Our own coach tilted, balanced on two wheels, and then slid into a ditch and slowly went over. Astiza and I tumbled to one side in the coach. The gypsies leapt clear.

“Imbeciles!” a woman shouted. “My husband could have you shot!” We shakily climbed out of the wreck. Our coach’s front axel was broken, as were the legs of two of our screaming horses. Cavalry who were escorting whomever we’d collided with had dismounted and were moving forward with pistols to dispatch the injured horses and disentangle the others. Shouting at us from the window of her own coach was an impressively fashionable woman—her clothes would beggar a banker—with a frantic look. She had the hauteur of a Parisian, but I didn’t immediately recognize her. I was an American, illegally back in France, still wanted for murder as far as I knew, who had not even obeyed the forty-day quarantine imposed on those traveling from the East. (Neither had Bonaparte.) Now there were soldiers and questions, even though her coach was in the wrong. I had a feeling being in the right wouldn’t matter much here.

“My business is of paramount importance for the state!” the woman shouted in panic. “Get your animals away from mine!”

“You pulled out in front of us!” Astiza replied, her accent plain.

“You are as rude as you are incompetent!”

“Wait,” I cautioned. “She has soldiers.” t h e

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Too late. “And you are as impertinent as you are clumsy!” the woman shrieked. “Do you know who I am? I could have you arrested!” I went forward to head off a cat fight by making a bogus offer of later payment, just to get the harridan on her way. Our gypsies had wisely melted into the trees. Two pistol shots rang out, silencing the worst screams of the horses, and then the cavalrymen turned to us, hands on the hilts of their swords.

“Please, madame, it was just a simple accident,” I said, smiling with my usual affable charm. “A moment more and you’ll be on your way.

And you’re heading to?”

“My husband, if I can find him! Oh, this is disaster! We took the wrong turn and I missed him on the highway, and now his brothers will get to him first and tell their lies about me. If you’ve delayed me too much, you’ll answer for it!”

I thought the guillotine had thinned out this kind of arrogance, but apparently it hadn’t gotten them all. “But Paris is that way,” I pointed.

“I wanted to meet him! But he’s got past us and we were taking this lane to swing back. Now he’ll already be home, and I not being there will confirm the worst!”

“What worst?”

“That I’m unfaithful!” And she burst into tears.

It was then that I recognized her features, somewhat famous in the Parisian social circles at whose fringes I’d moved. This was none other than Josephine, Napoleon’s wife! What the devil was she doing on a dark road with night falling? And of course tears brought sympathy. I am nothing if not gallant, and weeping will disarm any gentleman.

“It’s Bonaparte’s wife,” I whispered to Astiza. “When he heard she was an adulteress, on the eve of the Battle of the Pyramids, he nearly went insane.”

“Is that why she’s frightened?”

“We know how mercurial he is. He might put her in front of a firing squad.”

Astiza considered, then moved swiftly to the coach door. “Lady, we know your husband.”

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“What?” She was a small woman, I now assessed, slim and finely dressed, neither homely nor particularly beautiful, her skin warm, her nose straight, her lips full, her eyes attractively wide and dark and, even in their desperation, intelligent. She had dark hair and finely sculpted ears, but her complexion was blotchy from crying. “How could you know him?”

“We served with Bonaparte in Egypt. We’re hurrying ourselves, to warn him of terrible danger.”

“You do know him! What danger? An assassination?”

“That a companion, Alessandro Silano, plans to betray him.”

“Count Silano? He’s coming with my husband, I heard. He’s supposed to be a confidant and adviser.”

“He’s bewitched Napoleon, and has tried to turn him against you.

But we can help. You’re attempting to reconcile?” She bowed her head, eyes wet. “It’s been such a surprise. We had no warning he was coming. I rushed from my dearest friend to meet him. But these idiots took a wrong turn.” She leaned out the carriage window and gripped Astiza’s arms. “You must tell him that despite everything, I still love him! If he divorces me, I lose everything! My children will be penniless! Is it my fault he goes away for months and years?”

“Then the gods have arranged this accident, don’t you think?” Astiza said.

“The gods?”

I drew my companion back. “What are you doing?” I hissed.

“Here is our key to Bonaparte!” Astiza whispered. “He’ll be surrounded by soldiers. How else are we going to get to him save through his wife? She’s not faithful to him or anything else, which means she’ll ally with anyone who suits her purpose. That means we have to enlist Josephine on our side. She can find out where the scroll is when she beds him, when men lose what little wits they have. Then we steal it back!”

“What are you whispering about?” Josephine called.

Astiza smiled. “Please, lady, our own carriage is ruined but it’s t h e

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imperative we reach your husband. I think we can help each other. If you’d let us ride with you we can help you reconcile.”

“How?”

“My companion is a wise Freemason. We know the key to a sacred book that could give Napoleon great power.”

“Freemason?” She squinted at me. “Abbot Barruel in his famed book said they were behind the revolution. The Jacobins were all a Masonic plot. But the Journal of Free Men says the Masons are actually Royalists, plotting to bring back the king. Which are you?”

“I see the future in your husband, lady,” I lied.

Josephine looked intrigued, and calculating. “Sacred book?”

“From Egypt,” Astiza said. “If we ride we can be in Paris by dawn.” Somewhat surprisingly, she assented. She was so rattled by Napoleon’s reappearance and his undoubted fury at her adulterous ways that she was eager for any help, no matter how improbable. So we left our own stolen coach a wreck, half its horses shot, our gypsies hiding, and took hers to Paris.

“Now. You must tell me what you know or I will throw you out,” she warned.

We had to gamble. “I found a book that conveys great powers,” I began.

“What kind of powers?”

“The power to persuade. To enchant. To live unnaturally long, perhaps forever. To manipulate objects.”

Her eyes were wide and greedy.

“Count Silano has stolen this book and fastened onto Bonaparte like a leech, draining his mind. But the book hasn’t been translated.

Only we can do so. If his wife was to offer the key, on the understanding that Silano must be displaced, then you’d get your marriage back. I’m proposing an alliance. With our secret, you can get into your husband’s bedchamber. With your influence, we can get back our book, dispose of Silano, and help Napoleon.” She was wary. “What key?”

“To a strange, ancient language, long lost.” Astiza turned on Jose-3 0 8

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phine’s coach seat and I gently unlaced the back of her dress. The fabric parted, revealing the intricate alphabet in henna.

The Frenchwoman gasped. “It looks like Satan’s writing!”

“Or God’s.”

Josephine considered. “Who cares whose it is, if we win?” Was Thoth finally smiling on us? We raced toward Bonaparte’s house on the newly renamed Rue de la Victoire, a tribute to his victories in Italy. And, with no plan, no confederates, and no weapons, we drew this ambitious social climber into our confidence.

What did I know about Josephine? The kind of gossip Paris thrived on. She grew up on the island of Martinique, was half a dozen years older than Napoleon, two inches shorter, and a tenacious survivor.

She’d married a rich young army officer, Alexandre de Beauharnais, but he was so embarrassed by her provincial manners that he refused to present her to the court of Marie Antoinette. She separated from him, returned to the Caribbean, fled a slave revolt there to return to Paris at the height of the revolution, lost her husband to the guillotine in 1794, and then was imprisoned herself. Only the coup that ended the Terror saved her head. When a young army officer named Bonaparte called to compliment her on the conduct of her son Eugene, who had asked for help in retrieving the sword of his executed father, she seduced him. In desperation she gambled on this rising Corsican and married him, but then slept with everyone in sight while he was in Italy and Egypt. Some whispered she was a nymphomaniac.

She’d been living with a former officer named Hippolyte Charles, now a businessman, when the alarming news arrived of her husband’s return. With the revolution having allowed divorce, she was now in danger of losing everything at the very moment Bonaparte was seeking ultimate power. At thirty-six, with discoloring teeth, she might not have another chance.

Her eyes widened at Astiza’s explanation of supernatural powers.

A child of the Sugar Isles, tales of magic weren’t alien to her.

“This book can destroy men who possess it,” Astiza said, “and wreck nations in which it is unleashed. The ancients knew this and hid it away, but Count Silano has tempted fate by stealing it. He’s t h e

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bewitched your husband with dreams of unlimited power. It could drive Napoleon mad. You must help us get it back.”

“But how?”

“We’ll safeguard the book if you give it to us. Your knowledge of it will give you tremendous influence over him.”

“But who are you?”

“My name is Astiza and this is Ethan Gage, an American.”

“Gage? The electrician? Franklin’s man?”

“Madame, I am honored to make your acquaintance and flattered that you have heard of me.” I took her hand. “I hope we can be allies.” She snatched it away. “But you are a murderer!” She looked at me doubtfully. “Of a cheap adventuress! Aren’t you?”

“A perfect example of Silano’s lies, the kind that can entrap your husband and ruin his dreams. I was the victim of an unjust accusation.

Let us help get this kind of poison away from your husband, and your married bliss will return to normal.”

“Yes. It is Silano’s fault, not mine. This book contains terrible power, you say?”

“The kind that can enslave souls.”

She thought carefully. Finally she sat back and smiled. “You’re right. God is looking out for me.”

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The Bonaparte house, bought by Josephine before they were married, was in the fashionable part of Paris known as Chaussée d’Antin, a once-marshy area where the rich had built charming homes called “follies” over the past century. It was a modest two-story abode with a rose garden at the end of its bloom and a terrace that Josephine had covered with a wooden roof and hung with flags and tapestries: a respectable home for striving, midlevel functionaries. Her carriage pulled into a gravel drive under linden trees and she got out, nervous and flustered, plucking at her cheeks. “How do I look?”

“Like a woman with a secret,” Astiza assured her. “In control.” Josephine smiled wanly and took a breath. Then we entered.

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The rooms were a curious mix of feminine and masculine, with rich wallpaper and lacy curtains but hung with maps and plans of cities. There were the mistress’s flowers, and the master’s books, heaps of them, some just unpacked from Egypt. Her neatness was apparent, even as his boots were discarded in the dining room and his greatcoat thrown over one chair. A staircase led upward.

“He is in his bedchamber,” she whispered.

“Go to him.”

“His brothers will have told him everything. He will hate me! I am a wicked, unfaithful woman. I can’t help it. I love love so. I thought he would be killed!”

“You are human, as is he,” I soothed. “He’s not a saint either, trust me. Go, ask forgiveness, and tell him you’ve been busy recruiting allies. Explain how you’ve persuaded us to help him, that his future depends on the three of us.”

I didn’t trust Josephine, but what other weapon did we have? I was worried that Silano might be lurking about. Summoning her courage, she mounted the twenty steps to the floor above, tapping on his door.

“My sweet general?”

It was quiet for a while, and then we heard pounding, and then weeping, and then sob-wracked pleas for forgiveness. Bonaparte, it seemed, had locked the door. He was determined for divorce. We could hear his wife pleading through the wood. Then the shouting quieted and there was quieter talk, and once I thought I heard the click of a lock being turned. Then, silence. I took the stairs down to the basement kitchen and a maid found us some cheese and bread to eat. The staff clustered like mice, awaiting the outcome of the storm above. We dozed, in our weariness.

Near dawn, a maid roused us. “My mistress wants to see you,” she whispered.

We were led upstairs. The maid tapped and Josephine’s voice replied “Come in” with a lightness I hadn’t heard before.

We entered, and there the victor of Abukir and his newly faithful wife lay side by side in bed, covers to their chin, both looking as satisfied as cats with cream.

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“Good God, Gage,” Napoleon greeted. “You’re still not dead? If my soldiers could survive like you, I could conquer the world.”

“We’re only trying to save it, General.”

“Silano said he left you buried! And my wife has been telling your stories.”

“We only want to do what is best for you and France, General.”

“You want the book. Everyone does. Yet no one can read it.”

“We can.”

“So she says, with a record of what you helped destroy. I admire your cleverness. Well, rest assured one thing good has come from your long night. You’ve helped reconcile me to Josephine, and for that I am in a generous mood.”

I brightened. Maybe this would work. I began glancing around for the book.

Then there were heavy steps behind and I turned. A troop of gen-darmes was mounting the stairs. When I looked back, Napoleon was holding a pistol.

“She’s convinced me that instead of simply shooting you, I should lock you in Temple Prison. Your execution can wait until you stand trial for that whore’s murder.” He smiled. “I must say, my Josephine has been tireless on your behalf.” He pointed to Astiza. “As for you, you will disrobe in my wife’s dressing room with her and my maids watching. I’ve summoned secretaries to copy your secret.”

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There was irony in being imprisoned in a

“temple” first built as headquarters for the Knight Templars, then used as a dungeon to hold King Louis and Marie Antoinette before they were beheaded, and finally serving as an unsuccessful jail for Sidney Smith. The English captain had escaped in part by signaling a lady he’d bedded through the prison windows, which was resourcefulness after my own heart. Now, eighteen months later, Astiza and I got to experience the accommodations ourselves, our lodgekeeper the portly, greasy, obsequious, officious, dim, but curious jailer Jacques Boniface, who’d entertained Sir Sidney with legends of the Knights.

We were driven there in the jail’s iron wagon, watching Paris through iron bars. The city seemed drab in November, the people apprehensive, the skies gray. We were watched in turn, like animals, and it was a depressing way to introduce Astiza to a great city. All was foreign to her: the great cathedral steeples, the clamor of the leather and linen and fruit markets, the cacophony of neighing horse traffic and sidewalk merchants, and the boldness of women wrapped in fur and velvet strategically opened to give a glimpse of breast and ankle.

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Astiza had been humiliated by her stripping to copy the key, and didn’t speak. When we alighted alongside the outer keep, in a cold and treeless courtyard, something caught my eye at the compound gate. There were people staring through the grillwork, always glad to see wretches even less fortunate than they, and I was startled to spy one head of bright red, wiry hair, as familiar as a bill of rent and as pesky as an unwanted memory. Could it be? No, of course not.

Temple Prison, which dated from the thirteenth century, was a narrow, ugly castle that rose two hundred feet to the peak of its pyramidal roof, its tower cells lit by narrow barred windows. They opened on the inside to galleries around a central atrium, climbed by a spiral staircase. It says something for the efficiency of the Terror that the prison was largely empty. Its royalist inmates had all been guillotined.

As prisons go, I’ve seen worse. Astiza and I were allowed to stroll the parapet around the roof—it was much too high to try to jump or climb from—and the food was better than in some of the khans I’d experienced near Jerusalem. We were in France, after all. If it wasn’t for the fact that we were shut up tight, and that Bonaparte and Silano seemed intent on mastery of the world, I might have welcomed the rest. There’s nothing like treasure hunting, ancient legends, and battles to make one appreciate a good nap.

But the Book of Thoth pulled on us, and Boniface was a gossip who enjoyed relating the machinations of a city at war and under strain.

Plots and conspiracies were fried quick as a crêpe, each cabal looking for “a sword” to provide the necessary military muscle to take over the government. The Directory of five leading politicians was constantly reshuffled by the two legislative chambers. And the Council of the Ancients and the Council of Five Hundred were raucous, pompous assemblies who wore Roman mantles, indulged in shameless graft, and kept an orchestra on hand to punctuate legislation with patriotic songs. The economy was a wreck, the army was beggared for supplies, half of western France was in a revolt fueled by British gold, and most generals had one eye on the battlefield and the other on Paris.

“We need a leader,” our jailer said. “Everyone is sick of democracy.

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You’re lucky to be here, Gage, away from the turmoil. When I go into the city I never feel safe.”

“Pity.”

“Yet people don’t want a dictator. Few seek the return of the king.

We must preserve the republic, but how can anyone take the reins of our fractious assembly? It’s like controlling the cats of Paris. We need the wisdom of Solomon.”

“Do you now?” We were sharing supper in the confines of my cell.

Boniface had done the same with Smith because the jailer was bored and had no friends. I suppose his company was supposed to be part of our torture, but I’d taken an odd liking to him. He showed more tolerance of his prisoners than some hosts show guests, and paid better attention. It didn’t hurt that Astiza remained quite fine to look at and that I, of course, was uncommonly good company.

Now he nodded. “Bonaparte wants to be a George Washington, reluctantly accepting stewardship of his country, but he hasn’t the gravity and reserve. Yes, I’ve studied Washington, and his stoic mod-esty is a credit to your young nation. The Corsican arrived thinking he might be swept into the Directory by popular acclaim, but his superiors received him with coldness. What is he doing back from Egypt without orders? Have you two seen Le Messenger?”

“If you will recall, Monsieur Boniface, we are confined to this tower,” Astiza said gently.

“Yes, yes, of course. Oh, that brave periodical denounced the Egyptian campaign! Made a mockery of it! An army abandoned! Soldiers thrown uselessly at the ramparts of Acre! Bonaparte humiliated by the man once imprisoned here, Sir Sidney Smith! The newspapers are a voice for the assembly, you know. It’s all over for Napoleon.” Talma had told me that Bonaparte feared hostile newspapers more than bayonets. But what no one knew was that Napoleon had the book, and that Silano once again had the full code to read it. So much for bargaining with Josephine, the scheming slut. That woman could seduce the pope, and reduce him to beggary in the process.

When I asked Boniface about the Knight Templars who’d built this place, it was like turning the handle on a pump. Facts and theo-t h e

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ries gushed out. “Jacques de Molay himself was grand master here and then tortured! There are ghosts here, young people, ghosts I’ve heard shrieking in winter storms. The Templars were burned and beaten until they admitted to the worst kinds of abominations and devil worship, and then they were sent to the stake. Yet where was their treasure? The rooms you’re confined in were supposed to be stuffed, yet when the French king arrived to pillage them, they were empty. And where was the rumored source of Templar power? De Molay would say nothing, except when he went to the stake. Then he prophesized king and pope would be dead within the year. Oh, the shiver in the crowd when he prophesized that! And it was true!

These Templars were not just warrior-monks, my friend, they were magicians. They’d found something in Jerusalem that gave them strange powers.”

“Imagine if such power could be rediscovered,” Astiza murmured.

“A man like Bonaparte would seize the state in an instant. Then we’ll see things change, let me tell you, for better and worse.”

“Is that when our trial will be?”

“No. That’s when you’ll be guillotined.” He gave a Gallic shrug.

Our jailer was eager to hear our adventures, which we cautiously edited. Had we been inside the Great Pyramid? Oh yes. Nothing to see.

And Jerusalem’s Temple Mount?

A Muslim holy site now, with Christian access prohibited.

What about rumors of lost cities in the desert?

If they are lost, how could we find them?

The ancients could not raise their great monuments without colossal secrets, Boniface insisted. Magic had been lost with the priests of yore. Ours was a pale modern age, stripped of wonder, mechanical and cynical. Science was subduing mystery, and rationalism was trampling wonder. Nothing like Egypt!

“Yet what if it were found again?” I hinted.

“You know something, don’t you, American? No, don’t shake your head! You know something, and I, Boniface, am going to get it out of you!”

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On October 26, our jailer brought electrifying news. Lucien Bonaparte, age twenty-four, had just been elected president of the Council of Five Hundred!

I knew Lucien had been working on his brother’s behalf in Paris long before Napoleon left Egypt. He was a gifted politician. But president of France’s most powerful chamber? “I thought you had to be thirty years old to hold that post?”

“That’s why Paris is buzzing! He lied of course—had to, in order to comply with the Constitution—but everyone knows the lie. Yet they elected him anyway! This is Napoleon’s doing, somehow. The deputies are frightened, or bewitched.”

More intriguing news followed. Napoleon Bonaparte, who’d been snubbed by the Directory, now was to have a banquet in his honor.

Was public opinion turning? Had the general been wooing the city’s politicians to his side?

On November 9, 1799—18 Brumaire on the new revolutionary calendar—Boniface came to us goggle-eyed. The man was a walking newspaper. “I don’t believe it!” he exclaimed. “It’s as if our legislators are under the spell of Mesmer! At half past four this morning, the Council of Ancients was roused out of bed and sleepily assembled in the horse ring of the Tuileries, where they voted to remove themselves outside the city to the estate of Saint-Cloud to deliberate there. The decision is insane: it separates them from support of the mob. They did this willingly, and the Five Hundred will follow them! All is confusion and speculation. But more than that has Paris holding its breath.”

“What?”

“Napoleon has been given command of the city’s garrison, with General Moreau removed! Now troops are moving to Saint-Cloud.

Others are manning barricades. Bayonets are everywhere.”

“Command of the garrison? That’s ten thousand men. The army of Paris was what kept everyone, including Bonaparte, in check.”

“Exactly. Why would the chambers allow this? Something odd is t h e

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going on, something that leads them to vote the opposite of what they asserted just hours or days before. What could it be?” I knew what, of course. Silano had made progress translating the Book of Thoth. Spells were being said and woven, and minds were being clouded. Bewitched indeed! The entire city was being entranced.

Astiza and I looked at each other. There was no time to waste. “Mysteries of the East,” I said suddenly.

“What?”

“Jailer, have you ever heard of the Book of Thoth?” Astiza asked.

Boniface looked surprised. “But of course. All students of the past have heard of the Thrice Great, ancestor of Solomon, originator of all knowledge, the Way and the Word.” His voice had shrunk to a whisper. “Some say Thoth created an earthly paradise we’ve forgotten how to maintain, but others say that he’s the dark archangel himself, in a thousand guises: Baal, Beelzebub, Bahomet!”

“The book has been lost for thousands of years, has it not?” Now he looked sly. “Perhaps. There are rumors the Templars . . .”

“Jacques Boniface, the rumors are true,” I said, standing from the rude table where we shared a jug of cheap wine, my voice deepening.

“What charges are filed against Astiza and me?”

“Charges? Why none. We don’t need charges to hold you in Temple Prison.”

“Yet don’t you wonder why Bonaparte has confined us here? You can see for yourself we’re friendless and helpless. Confined us but not yet killed us, in case we may be useful yet. What is an odd pair like us doing in Paris at all, and what do we know that is so dangerous to the state?”

He looked at us warily. “I have wondered these things, yes.”

“Perhaps—allow the possibility, Boniface—we know of treasure.

The greatest on earth.” I leaned forward across the table.

“Treasure?” It was a squeak.

“Of the Knights Templar, hidden since that Friday the thirteenth, 1309, when they were arrested and tortured by the mad king of France.

Keeper of this keep, you are as trapped as us. How long do you want to be here?”

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“As long as my masters . . .”

“Because you could be master yourself, Boniface. Master of Thoth.

You and we, who are the true students of the past. We wouldn’t give sacred secrets to ambitious tyrants like Bonaparte, as Count Alessandro Silano is doing. We’d reserve them for all mankind, would we not?” He scratched his head. “I suppose so.”

“But to do so we must move, and quickly. Tonight is Napoleon’s coup, I think. And it depends on who holds a book that was once lost, now recovered. The Templars hid their wealth all right, in a place they reasoned no man would ever dare look,” I lied.

“Where?” He was holding his breath.

“Under the Temple of Reason, built on the Isle de la Cité exactly where the ancient Romans built their temple to Isis, goddess of Egypt.

But only the book will tell us exactly where it is.” His eyes goggled. “Notre Dame?” Poverty will make you believe anything, and a jailer’s wage is criminal.

“You’ll need a pick and courage, Monsieur Boniface. The courage to become the richest, most powerful man in the world! But only if you are willing to dig! And only one man can lead us to the precise spot! Silano lives only for his own greed, and we must capture him and do what’s right, for Freemasonry, Templar lore, and the mysteries of the ancients! Are you with me?”

“Will it be dangerous?”

“Just get us to Silano’s chambers and then you can hide in the crypts of Notre Dame while we decipher the secret. Then together we’ll change history!”

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In calmer times I might not have persuaded him. But with Paris on the edge of a coup, troops erecting barricades, legislative assemblies panicking, generals crowding in glittering array into Napoleon’s house, and the city dark and apprehensive, anything could happen.

More importantly, the Catholic priesthood had been shut down by the revolution and Notre Dame had become a grand ghost, used only t h e

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by devout old women and swept out by the poor for welfare. Our jailer could get into its crypts easily enough. While Bonaparte was addressing thousands of men in the garden of the Tuileries, Boniface was assembling trenching tools.

To let us out was a blatant violation of the responsibilities of his office, of course. Yet I warned him he’d never find the book, or read it, without us. That he’d spend the rest of his days as jailer of Temple Prison, gossiping with the condemned instead of inheriting the wealth and power of the Knight Templars. That evening Boniface reported that Bonaparte had stormed into the Council of the Ancients when they balked at his demands to disband the Directory and appoint him first consul. His speech had been volcanic and nonsensical, by all accounts, so much so that his own aides pulled him away. He was shouting gibberish! All seemed lost. And yet the deputies did not order his arrest or refuse to meet. They instead seemed inclined to meet his demands. Why? That evening, after Napoleon’s mesmerized troops had cleared Saint-Cloud’s Orangerie of the Council of Five Hundred, some of the deputies leaping from windows to get away, the Ancients passed a new decree dictating that a “temporary executive committee” led by Bonaparte had replaced the nation’s Directory.

“All seemed lost to his plotters a dozen times, and yet men wilted before his will,” our jailer said. “Now some deputies from the Five Hundred are being rounded up to do the same. The conspirators will take the oath of office after midnight!” Later, men said it was all bluff, bayonet, and panic. But I wondered if that gibberish included words of power that hadn’t been spoken for nearly five thousand years, words from an ancient book that had been buried in a City of Ghosts with a Knight Templar. I wondered if the Book of Thoth was already in motion. If its spells still had power, then Napoleon, new master of the most powerful nation on earth, would soon master the planet—and with him Silano’s Egyptian Rite.

A new rule of occult megalomaniacs would commence, and instead of a new dawn, a long darkness would fall upon human history.

We had to act.

“Have you discovered where Alessandro Silano is?” 3 2 0

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“He’s conducting experiments in the Tuileries, under Bonaparte’s protection. But word is that he is away tonight, aiding the conspirators in their takeover of the government. Fortunately, most of the troops have marched to Saint-Cloud. There are a few guards at the Tuileries, but the old palace is largely empty. You can go to Silano’s chambers and get your book.” He looked at us. “You are certain he has the secret? If we fail, it could mean the guillotine!”

“Once you have the book and treasure, Boniface, you will control the guillotine—and everything else.”

He nodded uncertainly, the stains from his last half-dozen suppers a mottled scramble on his shirt. “It’s just that this is risky. I’m not sure it’s the right thing.”

“All great things are difficult, or they would not be great!” It sounded like something Bonaparte would say, and Frenchmen love that kind of talk. “Get us to Silano’s chambers and we’ll take the risk while you go ahead to Notre Dame.”

“But I am your jailer! I can’t leave you by yourself!”

“You think sharing the world’s greatest treasure won’t bind us more tightly than the strongest chain? Trust me, Boniface—you won’t be able to get away from us.”

Our route through Paris was a mile and a half, and we went on foot instead of coach so that we could skirt the military checkpoints erected in the city. Paris seemed to be holding its breath. There were few lights, and those people on the streets were clustered, trading rumors of the attempted coup. Bonaparte was king. Bonaparte had been arrested. Bonaparte was at Saint-Cloud, or the Luxembourg Palace, or even Versailles. The deputies would rally the mob. The deputies had rallied to Bonaparte. The deputies had fled. It was a paralyzed chatter.

We passed city hall to the north bank of the Seine, and theaters dark instead of lively. I had fond memories of their lobbies crowded with courtesans, courting business. Then we followed the river westward past the Louvre. The great spires and buttresses of the cathedrals on the Isle de la Cité rose against a gray sky, illuminated by a shrouded moon. “That is where you must prepare the way for us,” I t h e

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said, pointing toward Notre Dame. “We’ll come with the book and a captured Silano.”

He nodded. We ducked into a doorway while a company of cavalry clattered by.

Once I thought I sensed a figure following us and whirled, but it was only to catch a skirt disappearing into a doorway. Again, a flash of red hair. Had I imagined her? I wished I had my rifle, or any weapon, but if we were stopped with a gun we might be jailed. Firearms were prohibited in the city. “Did you see a strange woman?” I asked Astiza.

“Everyone in Paris looks strange to me.” We passed by the Louvre, the river dark and molten, and at the Tuileries Gardens turned and followed the great façade of the Tuileries Palace, ordered by Catherine de Medici two centuries before.

Like many European palaces it was a great pile of a place, eight times too large for any sensible need, and moreover had been largely abandoned after the construction of Versailles. Poor King Louis and Marie Antoinette had been forced to move back to it during the revolution, and then the edifice had been stormed by the mob and left a wreck ever since. It still had the air of ghostly abandon. Boniface had a police pass to get us by one bored, sleepy sentry at a side door, explaining we had urgent business. Who didn’t these fretful days?

“I wouldn’t take the woman up there,” the soldier advised, giving Astiza a gander. “No one does anymore. It’s guarded by a spirit.”

“A spirit?” Boniface asked, paling.

“Men have heard things in the night.”

“You mean the count?”

“Something moves up there when he’s gone.” He grinned, his teeth yellow. “You can leave the lady with me.”

“I like ghosts,” Astiza replied.

We climbed the stairs to the first floor. The architectural opulence of the Tuileries was still there: vast halls opening one to another in a long chain, intricately carved barrel ceilings, mosaic-like hardwood floors, and fireplace mantles with enough gewgaws to decorate half of Philadelphia. Our footsteps echoed. But the paint was dirty, the 3 2 2

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paper was peeling, and the floor had been cracked and ruined by a cannon the mob dragged through here to confront Louis XVI back in 1792. Some of the grand windows were still boarded up from being broken. Most of the art had disappeared.

On we went, room after room, like a place seen endlessly through mirrors reflecting each other. At last our jailer stopped before a door.

“These are Silano’s chambers,” Boniface said. “He doesn’t allow the sentries to come near. We must hurry, because he could return at any time.” He looked around. “Where is this ghost?”

“In your imagination,” I replied.

“But something keeps the curious away.”

“Yes. Credulity for silly stories.”

The door lock was easily picked: our jailer had had plenty of time to learn how from the criminals he housed.

“Fine work,” I told him. “You’re just the man to penetrate the crypts. We’ll meet you there.”

“You think me a fool? I’m not leaving you until I’m sure this count really has anything worth finding. So long as we hurry.” He looked over his shoulder.

So we passed together through an anteroom and into a larger, shadowy chamber and then stopped, uncertain. Silano had been busy.

Catching the eye first was a central table. A dead dog lay on it, lips curled in a snarl of frozen pain, its fur daubed with paint or shorn bare.

Pins tied together with filaments of metal jutted from the carcass.

“Mon dieu, what is that?” Boniface whispered.

“An experiment, I think,” replied Astiza. “Silano is toying with resurrection.”

Our jailer crossed himself.

The shelves were jammed with books and scrolls Silano must have shipped from Egypt. There were also scores of preservative jars, their liquid yellow like bile, filled with organisms: saucer-eyed fish, ropey eels, birds with beaks tucked in their wet plumage, floating mammals, and parts of things I couldn’t entirely identify. There were baby limbs and adult organs, brains and tongues, and in one—like marbles or olives—a container of eyes that looked disturbingly human. There t h e

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was a shelf of human skulls, and an assembled skeleton of some large creature I couldn’t even name. Stuffed and mummified rodents and birds watched us from the shadows with eyes of glass.

Near the door a pentagram had been painted on the floor, inscribed with odd symbols from the book. Parchment and plaques with odd symbols hung on the walls, along with old maps and diagrams of the pyramids. I spied the kabbalah pattern we’d seen beneath Jerusalem, and other jumbles of numbers, lines, and symbols from arcane sources, like a backward, twisted cross. All was illuminated by low-burning candles: Silano had been gone for some time, but obviously expected to be back. On a second table was an ocean of paper, covered with the characters from the Book of Thoth and Silano’s attempts at French translation. Half was crossed out and spattered with dots of ink. Additional vials held noxious liquids, and there were tin boxes with heaps of chemical powder. The room had a weird smell of ink, preservative, powdered metal, and some underlying rot.

“This is an evil place,” Boniface muttered. He looked as if he’d made a pact with the devil.

“That is why we must get the book from Silano,” Astiza said.

“Leave now if you’re afraid,” I urged.

“No. I want to see this book.”

The floor was mostly covered with a grand wool carpet, stained and torn but no doubt left by the Bourbons. It ended at a balcony that overlooked a dark space. Below was a ground floor, paved with stone, that had large double doors leading outside like a barn. A coach and three carts were jammed into it, the carts heaped with boxes. So Silano was still unpacking. A wooden stair led to where we were, explaining why this particular apartment had been chosen. It was convenient for shipping things in and out.

Like a wooden sarcophagus.

The coffin from Rosetta had been lost in the shadows but I saw it now, leaning upright against the wall. The tracery of ancient decoration was gray in the dim light, but familiar. Yet there was something oddly forbidding about the case.

“It’s the mummy,” I said. “I’ll bet the count has spread word. This 3 2 4

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is the spirit the sentry was talking about, the thing that keeps men from snooping in this room.”

“A dead man is in there?”

“Thousands of years dead, Boniface. Take a look. We’ll all be like that, someday.”

“Open it? No! The guard said it comes alive!”

“Not without the book, I’ll guess, and we don’t have that yet. The key to the fortune under Notre Dame might be in that sarcophagus.

You’ve sent men to execution, jailer. You’re afraid of a wood box?”

“A casket.”

“Which Silano brought all the way from Egypt without trouble.” So the goaded jailer screwed up his courage, marched over, and swung the lid open. And Omar, guardian mummy, face almost black, sockets eyeless and closed, teeth grimacing, slowly leaned out and fell into his arms.

Boniface shrieked. Linen wrappings flapped by his face and musty dust puffed into his eyes. He dropped Omar as if the mummy was on fire. “It’s alive!”

The trouble with miserly pay for public servants is that you don’t get the best.

“Calm yourself, Boniface,” I said. “He’s dead as a sausage, and he’s been dead for several thousand years. See? We call him Omar.” The jailer crossed himself again, despite the Jacobin animosity to religion. “This is a mistake, what we’re doing. We’ll be damned for it.”

“Only if we lose our courage. Listen, the hour grows late. How much risk can you tolerate? Go to the church, pick its locks, and hide our tools. Hide, and wait for us.”

“But when will you come?”

“As soon as we get the book and answers from the count. Start tapping on the crypt floors. There has to be a hollow somewhere.” He nodded, regaining some of his greed. “And you promise to come?”

“I won’t be rich unless I do, will I?”

That satisfied him and, to our relief, he fled. I hoped it was the last I’d ever see of him, since to my knowledge there wasn’t a scrap t h e

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of treasure under Notre Dame and I had no intention of going there.

Omar the mummy had done us a favor.

I looked at the corpse warily. It would stay still, wouldn’t it?

“We have to find the book fast,” I told Astiza. The trick was to finish before the count came back. “You take that side’s shelves, I’ll take this one.”

We flew along the books, spilling them out, searching for the book somewhere behind. Here were volumes on alchemy, witchcraft, Zoro-aster, Mithras, Atlantis, and Ultima Thule. There were albums of Masonic imagery, sketches of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the hierarchy of the Knights Templar, and theories about Rosicrucians and the mystery of the Grail. Silano had treatises on electricity, longevity, aphro-disiacs, herbal cures, the origin of disease, and the age of the earth.

His speculation was boundless, and yet we didn’t find what we were looking for.

“Perhaps he takes it with him,” I guessed.

“He wouldn’t dare do that, not on the streets of Paris. He’s hidden it where we wouldn’t think—or dare—to look.” Dare to look? At Rosetta, Omar had served as sentry. I considered the poor tumbled mummy, its eroded nose to the floor. Could it be?

I rolled him over. There was a slit in its wrappings and his torso, I realized, was hollow, vital organs removed. Grimacing, I reached inside.

And felt the slick, tightly wrapped scroll. Clever.

“So the mouse has found the cheese,” said a voice from the doorway.

I turned, dismayed we weren’t ready. It was Alessandro Silano, striding toward us erect and young, years flushed away, a drawn rapier flicking back and forth as he strode. His limp was gone and his look was murderous. “You’re a hard man to kill, Ethan Gage, so I’m not going to repeat the indulgent mistake I made in Egypt. While I wanted to dig up your mummified corpse and toast it in my future palace, I was also hoping I’d someday have this chance—to run both of you through, as I will right now.”

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Astiza and I were both weaponless. The woman, for lack of something better, picked up a skull.

For little more reason than to hold what we’d come for, I scooped up Omar and his eternal grin, the Book of Thoth still inside. He was light and fragile. The bandages were like old paper, rough and crumbly.

“It’s fitting that we’re back here in Paris where it all began, isn’t it?” the count said. His rapier was a lethal wand, twitching like the tongue of a snake. With his free hand he undid the cord at his neck to let his street cloak fall. “Have you ever wondered, Gage, how different your life would be if you’d simply sold the medallion to me that first night in Paris?”

“Of course. I wouldn’t have met Astiza and taken her away from you.” He gave her a quick glance, her arm cocked to throw the skull. “I’ll have her back to do with as I wish, soon enough.” So she hurled the bone. He knocked it away with the hilt of his rapier, his lips in a sneer, the skull making a loud clack as it fell. And he kept coming past the tables toward me.

He looked younger, yes—the book had done something for him—

but it was an odd youthfulness, I realized, as if he’d been stretched.

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His skin was tight and sallow, his eyes bright and yet shadowed by fatigue. He looked like a man who hadn’t slept for weeks. Who might never sleep again. And because of that, his eyes had a hint of madness.

There was something terribly wrong with this scroll we’d found.

“Your study smells like hell, Alessandro,” I said. “Which god are you apprentice to?”

“It’s simply a preview of where you’re going, Gage. Right now!” And he thrust.

So I held up my macabre shield. Omar was penetrated, but the mummy trapped the point. I felt guilty about putting the old boy through all this, but then he was past caring, wasn’t he? I shoved the mummy at Silano, twisting his wrist, but then his sword slipped entirely through the carcass and along my own side. Damn, that hurt!

The rapier was like a razor.

Silano cursed and swung with his free arm—he’d regained his old litheness—and struck me a blow, knocking me back and wrestling the Egyptian cadaver away from me. He staggered to one side, his sword still entangled, but he groped inside the body’s cavity and triumphantly pulled out the scroll. Now I had no shield at all. He held the book above his head, daring me to lunge so he could skewer me.

Astiza had crouched, waiting for a chance.

I looked around wildly. The wooden sarcophagus! It was already leaning upright, so I grabbed it and wrestled the unwieldy box around to protect me. Silano had his sword free now, poor Omar almost broken in two, and he thrust the scroll into his shirt and came at me once again. I parried with the casket, letting the sword stab through the old wood but twisting, now knocking him backward and snapping the rapier in two. He kicked at the coffin angrily, smashing the decrepit wood, and when it fell apart something wedged inside broke free.

My rifle!

I dove for it, but when I reached out the broken sword slashed across my knuckles like the bite of a snake, so painful I couldn’t get a grip on my gun. I rolled clear as Silano was kicking shattered wood 3 2 8

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aside to get at me. Now he’d produced a pistol, his face twisted with rage and loathing. I threw myself back against the shelves just as the gun went off, feeling the wind of the bullet as it sped past. It hit one of his noxious glass jars at the end of the room and the vessel shattered. Liquid splashed onto the floor by the balcony and something hideous and pale went skittering. A poisonous smell arose, a stench of combustible fumes, to mix with the smell of gunpowder.

“Damn you!” He fumbled to reload.

And then old Ben came to my aid. “Energy and persistence conquer all,” I remembered again. Energy!

Astiza was under the table, creeping toward Silano. I took off my coat and threw it at him for distraction, and then tore off my shirt.

The count looked at me as if I were a lunatic, but I needed bare, dry skin. There’s nothing better for creating friction. I took two steps and dove forward toward the jar that had broken, hitting the wood carpet like a swimmer and skidding on my torso, gritting my teeth against the burn. Electricity, you see, is generated by friction, and the salt in our blood turns us into temporary batteries. As I slid to the end of the room, I had a charge.

The broken jar had a metal base. As I slid I thrust out my arm and extended my finger like Michelangelo’s God reaching toward Adam.

And when I came near, the energy I’d stored leapt, with a jolt, toward the metal.

There was a spark, and the room exploded.

The fumes of Silano’s witch’s brew became a fireball, shooting over my cringing body and ballooning toward the count, Astiza, and down toward the carts, coaches, and boxes below where the preservative had dripped. The puff of the blast threw the table’s papers up in a whirlwind, singeing some, while below me the storage area caught fire. I struggled up, my hair singed and both sides burning—one from the scrape of the sword and the other from my slide on the carpet—and eyed my rifle. There was preservative on my remaining clothes, and I swatted out a puff of flame on my breeches. A dim, smoky haze filled the room. Silano, I saw, had fallen, but now he too was struggling upward, looking dazed but groping again for his t h e

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pistol. Then Astiza rose behind him and wrapped something around his neck.

It was the linen wrapping from Omar!

I crawled toward my gun.

Silano, writhing, lifted her off her feet but she hung grimly on his back. As they clumsily danced the hideous mummy bounced with them, a bizarre ménage à trois. I got to my gun and snapped a shot, but there was just a dry click.

“Ethan, hurry!”

The powder horn and shot bag were there, so I began to load, cursing a rifle’s laborious ramming for the first time.

Measure, pour, wadding, ball. My hand was trembling. Astiza and Silano spun by me. The count was turning red from her choking but he had her hair and was twisting to get at her. Starter ram, now the hammering with the longer one . . . damn! The pair had crashed against the balcony railing, breaking part of it free. Fire rose below.

The attached mummy continued its dance. The count twisted Astiza to his front, shielding himself as he eyed my rifle and struggled to lift his pistol clear. Smoke thickened against the ceiling. My one shot had to be perfect! He’d pulled the wrappings off his own throat and was tightening them on hers. He lifted his gun.

I threw out the ramrod, put a pinch of powder in the pan, my barrel coming up, Silano firing but his aim spoiled by Astiza, whom he twisted to hurl into the flames, just enough to expose his neck as they strained . . .

“He’s going to burn me!”

I fired.

The ball hit his throat.

His scream was a bloody gargle. His eyes went wide in shock and pain.

And then he smashed through the balcony railing and down into the flames below, taking my woman with him.

“Astiza!”

It was the plunge from the balloon all over again. She gave a cry and was gone.

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I ran to the end of the study and peered down, expecting to see her in flames. But no, the mummy had snagged on one of the broken balustrades, its rib cage and dried muscles still tight after millennia.

Astiza was hanging by its linen wrappings, her feet kicking above the hot fire.

Count Silano had disappeared into the holocaust, writhing on the makeshift pyre. The book was at his breast.

To hell with the cursed book!

I grasped the bandages, hauled, got her arm, and pulled her up. I wasn’t going to let her drop with Silano again! As I dragged her across the lip of the balcony Omar broke free and fell, turning into a torch as his linens caught the flames. He banged down to burn with his master. I looked. His broken limbs were moving, as in agony! Was he somehow still alive? Or was it a trick of the heat?

He’d not been a curse but a savior. Thoth had smiled on us after all.

And the book? As Silano’s clothes burned away, I could see the scroll curling on his dissolving chest. The flames were growing hotter as the count’s flesh bubbled, and I backed away.

Astiza and I clung. There were church bells, shouts, a clatter of heavy wagons. The Paris fire brigade would be here soon. By the time they arrived, the secrets men had coveted for thousands of years would have turned to ash.

“Can you walk?” I asked her. “We don’t have much time. We have to flee.”

“The book!”

“It’s gone with Silano.”

She was weeping. For what, I wasn’t sure.

Below, I heard the carriage doors being opened and water pumped.

We slowly limped to the door we’d entered by, bloody and singed, stepping over a mess of glass, fluid, bone, books, and ruined papers.

The hall was smoky. For a moment I hoped the fire would push any pursuers away until we could make our escape.

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But no, a platoon of sentries was pounding down the hall.

“That’s him! That’s the one!” It was an annoyingly familiar voice I hadn’t heard for a year and a half. “He owes me rent!” Madame Durrell! My former landlady in Paris, who I fled in unseemly circumstances, had been the red-haired mystery woman who’d haunted the periphery of my vision since I’d returned to Paris.

She’d never been a believer in my character and at our parting had accused me of attempted rape. I’d deny it, but really, all you had to do is look at her. The pyramids are younger than Madame Durrell, and in better shape, too.

“Am I never to be free of you?” I groaned.

“You will when you pay what you owe me!”

“Creditors have better memories than debtors,” Ben liked to say.

From experience, I knew he was right. “And you’ve been following me like one of Fouché’s secret policemen?”

“I spied you in the prison wagon, where you belonged, but I knew you’d be out somehow, and up to no good! Oui, I kept an eye on Temple Prison, let me assure you! When I saw you enter the palace with that corrupt jailer I ran for help. Count Silano himself said he would confront you! Yet by the time I get back here the whole place is in flames!” She turned to the soldiers. “This is typical of the American. He lives like a wilderness savage. Try getting him to pay you!” I sighed. “Madame Durrell, I’m afraid I’ve lost everything once again. I cannot pay you, no matter how many policemen you have.” She squinted. “What about that gun there? Isn’t that the one you stole from my apartment, the one you tried to shoot me with?”

“I did not steal it, it was mine, and I shot the lock, not at you. It’s not even the same . . .” But Astiza put her hand on my arm and I looked past my old landlady. Bonaparte was coming down the corridor with a cluster of generals and aides. His gray eyes were ice, his features stormy. The last time I’d seen him that angry was when he’d heard of Josephine’s infidelities and annihilated the Mamelukes at the Battle of the Pyramids.

I braced for the worst. Bonaparte’s command of the language of the drill field was legendary. But, after glowering, he shook his head 3 3 2

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in grudging wonder. “I should have guessed. Have you indeed discovered the secret of immortality, Monsieur Gage?”

“I’m just persistent.”

“So you follow me for two thousand miles, set fire to a royal palace, and leave my firemen to find two bodies in the ashes?”

“We were preventing worse things from happening, I assure you.”

“General, he owes me rent!” Madame Durrell piped up.

“I would prefer you refer to me as first consul, madame, a post to which I was elected at two o’clock this morning. And how much does he owe you?”

We could see her calculating, wondering how far she dared inflate the true total. “One hundred livres,” she finally tried. When no one erupted at this absurdity, she added, “With fifty, for interest.”

“Madame,” Napoleon said, “Were you the one who sounded the alarm?”

Durrell puffed herself up. “I was.”

“Then another fifty livres as a reward for that, as a gift from the government.” He turned. “Berthier, count out two hundred for this gallant woman.”

“Yes, General. I mean Consul.”

Madame Durrell beamed.

“But you must never breathe a word of this to anyone,” Bonaparte lectured her. “What has gone on here tonight involves the security of France, and our nation’s fortunes rely on your discretion and courage.

Can you handle such a burden, madame?”

“For two hundred livres I can.”

“Excellent. You are a true patriot.” His aide pulled her away to count out some money, and the new ruler of France turned back to me. “The bodies were burned beyond recognition. Can you identify them to me, Monsieur Gage?”

“One is Count Silano. It seems we could not renew our partnership.”

“I see.” He tapped his foot. “And the second?”

“An old Egyptian friend named Omar. He saved our lives, I think.” Bonaparte sighed. “And the book?”

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“A victim of the same conflagration, I’m afraid.”

“Was it? Search them.” And we were searched, roughly, but there was nothing to be found. A soldier confiscated my rifle yet again.

“So you betrayed me to the end.” He peered up at the smoke beginning to dissipate, frowning like a landlord at a leak. “Well, I have no need of the book any longer, given that I have France. You should watch what I do with her.”

“I’m sure you’ll not sit still.”

“Unfortunately, you are long overdue to be shot, and France will be safer when that happens. Having left it to others before this night, without success, I think I’ll tend to it myself. The Tuileries Gardens are as good a place as any.”

“Napoleon!” Astiza pleaded.

“You will not miss him, madame. I am going to shoot you too. And your jailer, if I can find him.”

“I think he’s looking for treasure in the crypts of Notre Dame,” I said. “Don’t blame him. He’s a simple man with imagination, the only jailer I ever liked.”

“That idiot lost Sidney Smith from Temple Prison too,” Napoleon grumbled. “Whom I then had to face at Acre.”

“Yes, General. But his tales encouraged all of us to keep looking for your book.”

“Then I’ll shoot you twice, to make up for him.” We were marched outside. Wisps of smoke were rising into a predawn gray sky. Once more I was much the worse for wear—exhausted, slashed by a rapier, scraped raw to make friction, and sleepless. If I truly have the devil’s luck, I pity the devil.

Bonaparte stood us up against a decorative wall, the season having taken most of the flowers. It is there in an ominous November dawn that my story should end: Napoleon master, the book gone, my love doomed. We were too exhausted to even beg. Muskets were raised and hammers drawn back.

Here we go again, I thought.

And then came a sharp command. “Wait.”

I’d closed my eyes—I’d had quite enough of staring down musket 3 3 4

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barrels at Jaffa—and heard the crunch of boots on pea gravel as Napoleon came over. What now? I opened them warily.

“You’re telling the truth about the book, aren’t you Gage?”

“It’s gone, General. I mean, First Consul. Burned.”

“It did work, you know. Parts of it. You can put men under a spell and get them to agree to extraordinary things. It’s a criminal waste what you’ve done, American.”

“No man should be able to enchant another.”

“I despise you, Gage, but I’m impressed by you as well. You’re a survivor, like me. An opportunist, like me. And even an intellectual like me, in your own odd way. I don’t need magic when I have the state. So what would you do if I let you go?”

“Let me go? You’ll excuse that I wasn’t thinking that far ahead.”

“My position has changed. I am France. I can’t indulge in petty revenge, I must think for millions. There will be an election next year in your United States, and I need help improving relations. You’re aware our two nations have been dueling at sea?”

“Most unfortunate.”

“Gage, I need an envoy in the Americas who can think on his feet. France has interests in the Caribbean and Louisiana, and we’ve not given up hope of recovering Canada. There are strange reports of artifacts in the west that might interest a frontiersman like you. Our nations can be enemies, or we can help each other as we did during your revolution. You know me as well as anyone. I want you to go to your new capital, the one they call Washington, or Columbia, and explore some ideas for me.”

I looked beyond him at the line of executioners. “An envoy?”

“Like Franklin, explaining each nation to the other.” The soldiers grounded their arms. “Delighted, I’m sure.” I coughed.

“We’ll waive the charge of murder against you and overlook this fiasco with Silano. Fascinating man, but I never trusted him. Never.” That’s not what I remembered, but there was a limit to argument with Napoleon. I felt life returning to my extremities. “And?” I nodded toward Astiza.

“Yes, yes, you’re as bewitched by her as I am with Josephine. Any t h e

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man can see that, and God pity us both! Go with Astiza, see what you can learn, and remember—you owe me two hundred livres!” I smiled as affably as possible. “If I can get my rifle back.”

“Done. But we’ll confiscate your ammunition, I think, until I’m well out of range.” As they handed back my empty long rifle, he turned and contemplated the palace. “My government will begin in the Luxembourg, of course. But I’ve a mind this could be my home.

Your fire is an excuse to start remodeling: This very morning!”

“How fortunate I could be of assistance.”

“You realize that it’s because your character is so empty that it’s not worth the bullets to kill you?”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

“And that France and America share the same interests against perfidious Britain?”

“England does have a way of being overbearing at times.”

“I don’t trust you either, Gage. You’re a rascal. But work with me and maybe something will come of it. You’ve yet to make your fortune, you know.”

“I’m well aware of that, First Consul. After nearly two years of adventure, I don’t have a penny to my name.”

“I can be generous to friends. So. My aides will find you a hotel, well away from that horrid landlady of yours. What a Medusa! I’ll start you on a small allowance and count on you not to risk it at cards.

We’ll dock some until I get my livres back, of course.” I sighed. “Of course.”

“And you, lady?” he addressed Astiza. “Are you ready to see America?”

She’d looked troubled as we talked. Now, she hesitated and then slowly, sadly, shook her head. “No, Consul.”

“No?”

“I’ve been searching my heart these long dark days, and I’ve realized I belong in Egypt as much as Ethan does not. Your country is beautiful but cold, and its forest shadows the soul. The American wilderness would be worse. This isn’t my place. Nor do I think we’ve found the last trace of Thoth or the Templars. Send Ethan on your 3 3 6

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mission, but understand why I must return to Cairo and your institute of savants.”

“Madame, I cannot guarantee your safety in Egypt. I don’t know if I’ll be able to rescue my army.”

“Isis has a role for me, and it’s not across the ocean.” She turned.

“I’m sorry, Ethan. I love you, as you’ve loved me. But my quest is not entirely over. The time hasn’t come for us to settle down together. It will, perhaps. It will.”

By the swamps of Georgia, could I never succeed with women? I go through Dante’s inferno, finally dispose of her former lover, get a respectable job from the new government of France—and now she wants to leave? It was insane!

Or was it? I was in no mood to nest just yet, and really had no idea where this next adventure might take me. Nor was Astiza the type of woman to trail docilely in my wake. I, too, was intrigued to learn more about ancient Egypt, so maybe she could start that path while I ran Bonaparte’s errands in America. A few diplomatic dinners, a quick look at a sugar isle or two, and I’d be free of the man and ready to plan our future.

“Won’t you miss me?” I risked.

She smiled sadly. “Oh, yes. Life is sorrow. But life is also destiny, Ethan, and this stay of execution is a sign that the next door must be opened, the next path taken.”

“How do I know we’ll see each other again?” She smiled sadly, regretfully, and yet sweetly, and kissed me on the cheek. Then she whispered. “Bet on it, Ethan Gage. Play the cards.”

H i s t o r i c a l

N o t e

If we learn more from our mistakes than our successes, then Napoleon’s 1799 campaign in the Holy Land was education in the extreme. His attacks were impatient and ill-prepared at Acre. He alienated most of the indigenous population. The massacre and subsequent execution of prisoners at Jaffa were to plague his reputation the rest of his life. Scarcely better were reports that he was guilty of mercy-killing his own troops by distributing opium and poison to dying plague victims. He would not experience such an embarrassing military and political setback until his invasion of Russia in 1812.

And yet, by the close of 1799, Bonaparte had not just survived a military debacle; the Corsican had so adroitly manipulated public opinion back in France that he found himself first consul of his adopted nation, on his way to becoming emperor. Modern politicians who seem coated with Teflon (meaning that nothing critical sticks to them) cannot compare to the slickness of Napoleon Bonaparte. How could he achieve such turnaround from such disaster? That’s the mis-chievous mystery at the center of this book.

For fiction readers curious about such things, much of this novel 3 3 8

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is true. The tragedy of Jaffa, the Battle of Mount Tabor, and the siege of Acre went much as described, although I have taken liberties with details. Ethan Gage and his electrified chain are an invention, and so is Napoleon’s battering-ram torpedo. But Sir Sidney Smith, Phelipeaux, Haim Farhi, and Djezzar were real. (In reality, Phelipeaux died of exhaustion or sunstroke in the siege, not bayonets.) Acre and Jaffa—the latter now a suburb of Tel Aviv—retain some of the architectural flavor of 1799, and it’s not hard to imagine Gage’s sojourn in the Holy Land. While the strategic tower and walls of the siege of Acre are gone—they were replaced after the battle with new ones by Djezzar because of the extensive damage—there’s abundant romance in walking the ramparts of this lovely Mediterranean town. To the east, a highway to Galilee cuts by the foot of the hill where Napoleon had his headquarters.

For readers interested in the history of Bonaparte’s Syrian campaign, I recommend Napoleon in the Holy Land by Nathan Schur and Bonaparte in Egypt by J. Christopher Herold. Evocative documentary watercolors made by the English artist David Roberts in 1839 are collected in a number of art books.

While I’ve imagined some of my subterranean vaults under Jerusalem’s Temple Mount—a necessity since even long-visited chambers such as Solomon’s Stables have been closed to visitors by Muslim authorities—Jerusalem is riddled with caves and tunnels.They include a dark, thigh-deep subterranean waterway from the lower Pool of Siloam that this author dutifully waded through to get a feel for the underground adventure I describe. Underground gates to long-secret tunnels under the Temple Mount exist: You can see at least one as a tourist. The Temple Mount is kept off-limits to archeologists because of fear that discovery could ignite religious strife. Explorers have been chased off by angry mobs in the past, but doesn’t that lend credence to the idea that there might still be revelations there? Just don’t show up with a shovel. You might ignite a holy war.

Some readers will recognize that the “City of Ghosts” is in fact the breathtaking Jordanian ruin of Petra, built by the Nabataean Arabs shortly before Christ and ultimately administered by the Romans.

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At the time Gage visits, it was indeed a lost city that would stun the first nineteenth-century Europeans to see it. While I’ve taken some obvious liberties, much is as I’ve described it. There is a High Place of Sacrifice.

The Tuileries Palace in Paris was begun in 1564 and burned down in 1871. It served as the palace of Napoleon and Josephine beginning in February of 1800, three months after he seized power. Temple Prison was also real, but has since been demolished. And yes, Notre Dame is built on the site of a Roman temple to Isis.

The lore of the Knights Templar, kabbalah symbolism, and the idea of a Book of Thoth are all real. More on Thoth can be found in the prequel to this novel, Napoleon’s Pyramids. My suggestion that Thoth’s book was found by the Templars is made up—but then what was the source of their astonishingly quick and overwhelming rise to power after they excavated under the Temple Mount? Just what did they find? Where is the biblical Ark of the Covenant? What secrets did ancient societies acquire? There is always more mystery.

I should wryly note that it may come as a surprise to the British Museum that the Rosetta Stone, proudly displayed after British troops confiscated it from the French in 1801, is in fact missing its topmost and most important piece. After reading this novel, the curators may want to put a small index card on the stone’s glass case apologizing for the omission and assuring that strenuous efforts are being made to find the fragments blown to pieces by a renegade American in Rosetta in 1799. But that is only a suggestion—as is the idea that archeologists keep an eye out for the remaining 36,534

Books of Thoth.

If, that is, they are worthy.

A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

T his author relied on the careful scholarship of a host of historians to craft this tale, plus the evocative archaeological preservation work that makes Israel and Jordan such rewarding places to visit. I thank in particular guides Paule Rakower and Professor Dan Bahat in Israel, and Mohammed Helalat in Jordan. Diane Johnson of Western Washington University provided the Templar Latin epigram, and Nancy Pearl brought to my attention the anecdote of Napoleon ripping out the pages of novels and passing them on to his officers. At HarperCollins, special thanks to my editor, Rakesh Satyal, copyeditor Martha Cameron, produc-tion editor David Koral, editorial assistant Rob Crawford, publicist Heather Drucker for her hard work getting the word out, and the many others who make publication of a book possible. Kudos of course to Andrew Stuart, the agent who keeps me in business. And, as always, thanks to my first reader, Holly.

About the Author

WILLIAM DIETRICH is the author of Napoleon’s Pyramids, Scourge of God, and Hadrian’s Wall. A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, historian, and naturalist, he is a staff writer at the Seattle Times and a professor at Western Washington University. He lives in Washington State.

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A l s o b y Wi l l i a m D i e t r i c h

Fiction

Napoleon’s Pyramids

The Scourge of God

Hadrian’s Wall

Dark Winter

Getting Back

Ice Reich

Nonfiction

On Puget Sound

Natural Grace

Northwest Passage

The Final Forest

Credits

Designed by Kara Strubel

Map by Nick Springer, Springer Cartographics LLC

Copyright

THE ROSETTA KEY. Copyright © 2008 by William Dietrich. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader February 2008

ISBN 978-0-06-164631-7

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Document Outline

Title Page

Dedication Page

Epigraph Page

Contents

Map

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Part Two

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Part Three

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Historical Note

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by William Dietrich

Credits

Copyright Notice

About the Publisher