Ethan Gage Collection # 1 (36 page)

Again, the walls were thick with carvings and traces of old paint. A woman I assumed was Isis dominated. I saw no sign of Min and his staff, or anything else. Was I on a wild goose chase? Always I felt like I was groping blind, with clues no reasonable man could understand. What was I supposed to see?

I noticed, finally, that this room was considerably smaller than the enclosed temple's perimeter. There had to be a second chamber. I stepped back on the stone porch and realized there was a second door and high room, even narrower than the first, and just as baffling. This one, however, had a stone table, like an altar. The pedestal was the size of a small writing desk, perched in the room's center. It was plain, unremarkable, and I might have passed it by except for a peculiar occurrence. As I bent over the altar the chain round my neck came loose and snagged the pedestal. The medallion broke free and struck the stone floor with an audible clink. This had never happened before. I swore, but when I bent to retrieve it, what I saw arrested me.

Carved onto a floor slab were two faint Vs, overlapping like compass and square. In the Egyptian style they were geometric, and yet the resemblance was clear.

“By the Great Architect,” I muttered. “Can it be?” I remembered Enoch's script:
The crypt will lead to heaven.

I refastened the medallion and stamped on the floor slab. It shifted. Something hollow was under there.

Kneeling in excitement now, my rifle set to one side, I pried with the blade of my tomahawk until I could grasp the slab. It lifted like a heavy trapdoor and released a rush of stale air, an announcement that it hadn't been opened in a long time. Holding my candle, I leaned over. The light glimmered on a floor below. Could there be treasure? Leaving my gun for a moment and sliding feet first, I dropped, falling ten feet and landing like a cat. My heart was hammering. I looked up. Easy enough for Silano to slide the lid back in place if he was watching me. Or was he waiting to see what I might find?

Passages led in two directions.

Again there was a riot of carving. The ceiling bore a field of the five-pointed stars. The walls were thick with gods, goddesses, hawks, vultures, and rearing snakes, a motif repeated again and again. The first passage dead-ended within twenty feet at a mound of clay amphoras—dull, dusty jars that seemed unlikely to hold anything of value. Just to be sure, however, I used my tomahawk to crack one open. When it split apart, I raised my candle.

And jumped. Looking back at me was the hideous face of a mummified baboon, flesh desiccated, eye sockets huge, jaws full of teeth. What the devil?

I broke another jar and found another baboon inside. Another symbol, I remembered, for the god Thoth. So this was a kind of catacomb, full of bizarre animal mummies. Were they offerings? I put my candle near the ceiling so the light would reach farther in the gloom. The clay jars were heaped as far back as the light would reach. Little things moved in the shadows—some kind of insect.

I turned and went the other way, down the other passage. I desperately wanted out of this crypt, yet if Enoch's clue made any sense there must be something down here. My candle stub was getting low. And then there was more movement, something slithering away on the floor.

I looked with my meager light. There were tracks on the sand and dust of a damned snake, and a crack into which it had probably crawled. I was sweating. Was Bin Sadr down here too? Why had I left my rifle?

And then something glittered.

The other tunnel ended too, but now there were no jars, but instead a relief carving of the now-familiar priapic figure of Min, probably a figure of some fascination to the sensual Cleopatra. He was stiff as a board, his member erect and startlingly bright.

Min was decorated not with paint, but with gold. His manhood was outlined with twin sticks of gold connected with a hinge at one end, half obscenity, half tool of life. Without knowing about the riddle of the medallion, one would assume the golden shafts were solely sacred decoration.

But I think Cleopatra had another idea. Maybe she left this piece in
Egypt if she really took the other medallion to Rome, to ensure its secret stayed in her native country. I pried the gold member loose until it popped into my hand, and worked the hinge. Now the golden shafts formed a V. I took out the medallion, splayed its arms, and laid this new V across them. When I formed the now-familiar Freemason symbol, a compass crossed with a square, the notches on the medallion's arms locked. The result was a diamond of overlapping arms, swinging below the medallion's inscribed disc but without, of course, the European letter
G,
which the Masons used to denote God or gnosis, knowledge.

Splendid. I had completed the medallion, and perhaps found a root symbol of my own fraternity.

And still had no clue what it meant.

“Ethan.”

The sound was faint, almost like a whisper of wind or trick of the ear, but it was Astiza's voice, I knew, coming faintly from somewhere outside. The call was as electrifying as a bolt of lightning. I dropped the newly complex medallion around my neck, rushed down the passageway, saw to my relief the slab was still askew, and swiftly wiggled my way up and out the crypt shaft. My gun lay where I had left it, untouched. I picked it up and crouched. All was silent. Had her call been my imagination? I moved quietly to the entrance, peering cautiously outside. I could see Cleopatra on the main temple wall opposite, her carved form picked out by moonlight.

“Ethan?” It was a near sob, coming from the open pillars adjacent to the enclosure I was in.

I stepped out on the temple's porch and advanced as silently as an Indian, rifle ready. On this half of the temple platform, the columns rose to horizontal beams that held up nothing, framing squares of sky. I could see the stars between them. A different face, this of the serene Isis, was carved into the pillars' design.

“Astiza?” My voice echoed among the columns.

“Do you have it?”

I stepped around a pillar and there she was. I stopped, confused.

She was stripped to my fantasy of a harem girl, her linen translucent, her legs visible through her gown, her jewelry heavy, and her eyes
lined. She'd been dressed for seduction. Her arms were lifted because her wrists were chained to shackles that led to a stone beam above. The posture lifted her breasts, twisting her waist and hips, and the effect was an erotic helplessness, a tableau of a princess in peril. I stopped, stupefied by this apparition from a fairy tale. Her own look was pained.

“Is it complete?” she asked in a small voice.

“Why are you dressed like that?” It was the most mundane of a hundred questions ricocheting like billiard balls in my mind, but I felt I was in a hallucinatory dream.

The answer was the press of a sword point in the small of my back. “Because she is distracting,” Count Silano murmured. “Drop your rifle, monsieur.” The sword pressed more painfully.

I tried to think. My weapon thumped to the stone.

“Now, the medallion.”

“It's yours,” I tried, “if you unchain her and let us flee.”

“Unchain her? But why, when she can simply lower her arms?”

And Astiza did so, her slim wrists slipping from loose shackles, her look apologetic. The chains swung gently, an empty prop. The gossamer veils draped her body like a classical statue, her undergarments only calling attention to the places they concealed. She looked embarrassed at her fraudulence.

Once more, I felt the fool.

“Haven't you realized that she's with me, now?” Silano said. “But then you're American, aren't you, too direct, too trusting, too idealistic, too naïve. Did you come all this way fantasizing about rescuing her? Not only did you never understand the medallion; you never understood her.”

“That's a lie.” I stared up at her as I said it, hoping for confirmation. She stood trembling, rubbing her wrists.

“Is it?” Silano said behind me. “Let's review the truth. Talma went to Alexandria to ask questions about her not just because he was your friend, but because he was an agent for Napoleon.”

“That's a lie too. He was a journalist.”

“Who cut a deal with the Corsican and his scientists, promising to keep an eye on you in return for access to the highest councils of the
expedition. Bonaparte wants the secret found, but doesn't trust anyone. So Talma could come if he spied on you. Meanwhile, the journalist suspected Astiza from the beginning. Who was she? Why did she come with you like an obedient dog, trudging with an army, acquiescing to a harem? Because of infatuation with your clumsy charm? Or because she's always been in alliance with me?”

He certainly enjoyed boasting. Astiza was looking up at the ruined beams.

“My dear Gage, have you understood a single thing that's happened to you? The journalist learned a disturbing thing about our Alexandrian witch: not that word of your coming was sent by gypsies, as she told you, but by
me
. Yes, we were in communication. Yet instead of helping kill you, as I recommended, she seemed to be using you to discover the secret. What was her game? When I landed in Alexandria, Talma thought he could spy on me as well, but Bin Sadr caught him. I told the fool he could join me against you and we could sell whatever treasure we found to the highest-bidding king or general—Bonaparte too!—but we couldn't reason with him. He threatened to go to Bonaparte and have the general interrogate us all. Nor was he a bargaining chip once you insisted on the fiction that the medallion was lost. His last chance was to steal it from whoever had it and deliver it to me, but he refused. In the end, the little hypochondriac was more loyal than you deserved, and a French patriot to boot.”

“And you are not.” My voice was cold.

“The Revolution cost my family everything it had. Do you think I consort with rabble because I care about liberty? Their liberty took everything from me, and now I'm going to use them to get it all back. I do not work for Bonaparte, Ethan Gage. Bonaparte, unwittingly, works for me.”

“So you sent Talma to me in a jar.” I was so rigid, fists clenched, that my knuckles were white. The sky seemed to be wheeling, the chains a pendulum like some trick of Mesmer. I had just one chance.

“A casualty of war,” Silano replied. “If he'd listened to me, he'd have been richer than Croesus.”

“But I don't understand. Why didn't your lantern bearer, Bin Sadr in disguise, just take the medallion that first evening in Paris, the moment I stepped into the street?”

“Because I thought you'd given it to the whore, and I didn't know where she lived. But she didn't confess to it even when the Arab gutted her. Nor did my men find it in your chambers. Frankly, I wasn't even sure of its importance, not until I asked more questions. I assumed I'd have the leisure to strip you of it in prison. But you ran, allied with Talma, and were on your way to Egypt as a savant—what amusement!—before I was even certain the trinket was what we'd all been looking for. I still don't know where you hid the medallion that first night.”

“In my chamber pot.”

He laughed. “Irony, irony! Key to the greatest treasure on earth, and you cover it with shit! Ah, what a clown. Yet what uncommon luck you've had, eluding an ambush on the Toulon highway and an Alexandrian street, dodging snakes, coming unscathed through major battles, and even finding your way here. You have the devil's luck! And yet in the end you come to me, bringing the medallion with you, all for a woman who won't let you touch her! The male mind! She told me that all we had to do was wait, provided Bin Sadr didn't get you first. Did he ever find you?”

“I shot him.”

“Really? Pity. You've been a most troublesome man, Ethan Gage.”

“He survived.”

“But of course. He always does. You will not want to meet him again.”

“Don't forget that I'm still in the company of savants, Silano. Do you want to answer to Monge and Berthollet for my murder? They have the ear of Bonaparte, and he has an army. You'll hang if you harm me.”

“I believe it is called self-defense.” He pushed slightly with his sword and I felt a faint sting through my robes, and a trickle of my own blood. “Or is it attempted capture of a fugitive from revolutionary justice? Or a man who lied about losing a magic medallion so he could keep it for himself? Any will suit. But I am a nobleman with my own code of honor, so let me offer you mercy. You're a hunted fugitive,
without friends or allies and no threat to anyone, if you ever were. So, for the medallion I give you back…your life.
If
you promise to tell me what Enoch learned.”

“What Enoch learned?” What was he talking about?

“Your enfeebled mentor threw himself on a bonfire to grasp a book before we could torture him. French troops were coming. So, what did the book contain?”

The villain was referring to the book of Arabic poetry that Enoch had clutched at. I was sweating. “I still want the woman, too.”

“But she doesn't want you, does she? Did she tell you we were once lovers?”

I looked. Astiza had put her hands to one of the swaying manacles as if to hold herself up, looking at both of us with sorrow. “Ethan, it was the only way,” she whispered.

I tasted the same ashes that Bonaparte must have bit when he learned of the betrayal of Josephine. I'd come so far—for this? To be held at sword point by an aristocratic braggart? To be humiliated by a woman? Robbed of all I'd struggled for? “All right.” My hands went to my neck and I lifted the talisman clear, holding it out in front of me where it rocked like a pendulum. Even at night it shone coldly. I could hear both of them gasp slightly at its new shape. They had led me, and I had found the part to complete it.

“So it
is
the key,” Silano breathed. “Now all we must do is understand the numbers. You will help me, priestess. Gage? Turn slowly now, and give it up.”