Ethan Gage Collection # 1 (57 page)

I followed the sweep of his finger. Cannon were being swung up onto the walls, and there was a stone-lined dry moat just beyond, about twenty feet deep and fifty wide. “No water in the moat?”

“It hasn't been designed for it—the bottom is above sea level—but our engineers have an idea. We're building a reservoir on the Mediterranean near the city's Land Gate that we'll pump full of seawater. It could be released into the moat at a time of crisis.”

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

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

“It's the strongest on the wall,” Phelipeaux said, “but it can also be fired upon and assaulted from two sides. If the republicans break it, they will be into the gardens and can fan out to seize our defenses from behind. If they cannot, their infantry will perish uselessly.”

I tried to survey the scene with his engineer's eye. The ruined aqueduct ran off from the walls toward the French. It broke just short of our wall near the tower, having once delivered water. I saw the French were digging trenches alongside it because it provided cover from harassing fire. To one side was what looked like a dried pond. The French were setting survey stakes inside it.

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

“Soon it will be filled with the lighter guns they brought overland.”

I looked down. The garden was an oasis of shade amid the military preparation. The harem women were probably accustomed to visiting there. Now, with so many soldiers and sailors manning the ramparts above, they'd be locked away.

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

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

“And you, Gage, are the key to that.”

“Me?”

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

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

“Exactly. So come meet the Butcher.”

We did not have to wait for an audience. After Jaffa, Djezzar recognized his own survival depended on his new European allies. We were ushered into his audience chambers, a finely decorated but nonetheless modest room with an ornately carved ceiling and a carpet of overlapping oriental rugs. Birds tweeted from golden cages, a small monkey hopped about on a leather leash, and some kind of large jungle cat, spotted, eyed us sleepily from a cushion, as if deciding whether we were worth the trouble of eating. I had much the same sense from the Butcher, who was sitting erect, his aging torso still conveying physical power. We sat cross-legged before him while his Sudanese bodyguards watched us carefully, as if we might be assassins instead of allies.

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

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

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

“The French meant to kill me with the other prisoners,” I said. “I
swam out to sea and found a small cave in the rocks. The massacre was horrible.”

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

“Some of it, at least.”

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

“As are you, Pasha. As resourceful as any Napoleon.”

He smiled. “More so, I think. I have killed more men and fucked more women. So now it is a test of wills. A siege. And Allah has forced me to use infidels to fight infidels. I don't trust Christians. They are always conspiring.”

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

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

“Not in the least.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A few cases appeared even in Egypt,” I confirmed. “I heard there
were more at Jaffa.” The Butcher was a shrewd one, I saw, not some Ottoman weakling imposed by the Sublime Porte in Constantinople. He gathered information about his enemies like a scholar. “Napoleon's weakness is time, Pasha. Every day he stays in front of Acre, the sultan in Constantinople can order more forces to surround him. He gets no reinforcements, and no resupply, while the British navy can bring both to us. He tries to accomplish in a day what other men require a year to complete, and that's his weakness. He's trying to conquer Asia with ten thousand men, and no one knows better than he that it's all bluff. The moment his enemies stop fearing him, he's finished. If you can hold…”

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

“We will beat him here,” Smith vowed.

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

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

“Farhi! What are you doing in Acre?”

“Serving his master,” Djezzar said.

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

“You went with us for the pasha?”

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

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

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

“So you escaped Jerusalem!”

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

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

“Empty-handed of what?” Smith asked.

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

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

“And a treasure desperate men are seeking.”

“Treasure?”

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

“A book.”

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

“As were the French,” I added.

“And me,” said Djezzar. “Farhi was my ear.”

It was appropriate he used the singular, since the scoundrel had cut off his minister's other one.

Smith was looking from one to the other of us.

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

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

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

“Alive. Resurrected. Immortal.” Farhi shrugged.

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

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

 

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

“We thought you dead!”

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

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

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

“And now here we all are, alive,” Jericho said. “All three of us.”

I finally let her go and nodded. “With a man called the Butcher, a half-mad English sea captain, a mutilated Jew, a disgruntled school
mate of Bonaparte, and a Muslim guide. Not to mention a burly blacksmith, his scholarly sister, and a ne'r-do-well American gambler. Quite the merry men, we are.”

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

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

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

“I want to drape it from out towers to welcome the French.”

He shook his head, convinced I was daft as ever. “To give them a hand up?”

“Yes. And then charge it with electricity.”

“Electricity!” He crossed himself.

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

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

“No more than if it were red hot. It would be like a barrier of fire.”

Jericho was intrigued. “Could that really work?”

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

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

While we labored we could hear the echo of the French guns, seeking the range as their first trenches advanced toward the walls. Even the bowels of Djezzar's palace would tremble when an iron ball crashed into the outer walls.

Franklin gave the name “battery” to lines of Leyden jars because
they reminded him of a battery of guns, set hub to hub to give concentrated fire. In our case, each additional jar could be connected to the last to add to the potential shock of French soldiers that I intended. We soon had so many that the task of energizing them all with friction—by turning a crank—looked Sisyphean, like rolling a boulder endlessly uphill.

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

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

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

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

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

I leaned out. “Not fun to be locked out, is it, Ned?”

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

“Oh, no,” I countered. “I just want you to get a taste of your own base treachery, and see if you're man enough to face me honestly, instead of slamming gates in my face or hiding in a ship's bilge.”

His eyes bulged as if pumped full of steam. “Face you honestly! By God, I'll rip you limb from limb, you cheat, if you ever have the pluck to stand toe to toe like a man!”

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

“Bloody thunder, indeed I will! I'll fight you with pistols, marlinspikes, cudgels, daggers, or cannon fire!”

“I said swords.”

“Let me up then! If I can't strangle you, I'll cleave you in two!”

So with our duel set to my satisfaction I lowered a rope, hoisted the ladder back up, and got Ned back into Acre just before the dawn light would make him a target.

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

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

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

“Cutlass, by God! Something to cut through bone! And I'll bring
my bullyboys to watch you bleed!” He glared at the other men who were enjoying our exchange. “Nobody crosses Big Ned.”

 

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

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

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

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

“Magic,” I said.

“Hey, I wants a fair fight now!”

“And you shall get it, blade to blade. Your muscle to my brain. Nothing fairer than that, eh?”

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

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

I gave some minutes for a crowd of assembled sailors to bet against me—I covered them all, with a loan from the metallurgist, figuring I might as well make a profit from all this bother—and then took a fencing stance on the garden path where we'd duel. I liked to think the harem girls were watching from above, and I knew Djezzar was.
“On guard, you big bully!” I cried. “If I lose I'll give you every shilling, but if you lose, then you're beholden to me!”

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

I parried.

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

Was he dead?

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

The crowd was utterly silent, in awe.

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

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

“Blimey, what did you do?”

“Magic,” I said again. I pointed my sword at the others. “I won at cards fairly, and won this duel. Now. Who else wants to challenge me?”

They backed off as if I had leprosy. A boatswain hurriedly tossed me the purse of bets he'd held. God bless the foolish gambling instincts of British sailors.

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

“Will you respect me finally?”

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

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

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

“Don't cross the American. And if you do, you have to deal with me. We's partners, we is.” He gave me a hug, like a giant ape.

“Don't touch the sword, man!”

“Oh yes.” He stepped hastily away.

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

“If you don't touch me.”

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

 

T
here was an odd lull as the French burrowed like ants toward the walls of Acre, putting their remaining cannon in place. They dug and we waited, with that sluggish fatalism that wears down the besieged. It was Holy Week, so in the spirit of the holidays, Smith and Bonaparte agreed to a prisoner exchange, trading back the men taken in raids and skirmishing. Djezzar paced his walls like a restless cat, muttering about the damnation of Christians and all infidels, and then sat in a great chair on the corner tower to motivate his soldiers by glaring with his fierce eye. I labored on my electrical scheme, but it was difficult to get Jericho's help because the Butcher, Smith, and Phelipeaux kept sending down a steady stream of armory requests. In close combat on the ramparts, with little time to reload, steel would be as important as gunpowder.

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

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

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

“And you?”

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

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

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

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

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

“What can I do?” I asked Phelipeaux, trying to contain the natu
ral shake in my voice. The whole business hurt my ears. The walls and moat tended to echo and amplify the crashes, and there was that acrid, intoxicating stench of burnt powder.

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

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

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

“He can't be disturbed. He's in the harem.”

By Casanova's trousers, the ruler could rut at a time like this? But then a door opened on a stairway leading upward and the Butcher appeared, shirtless, bearded, his eyes bright, a cross between a satyr and the prophet Elijah. Two pistols had been stuffed into his sash and he held an old Prussian saber. A slave brought a rusty coat of medieval mail and a felt undershirt. Before he closed the door behind, I could hear the excited chattering and weeping of the women.