Ethan Gage Collection # 1 (71 page)

“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.

“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.”

W
e 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 pre
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
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.

 

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
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
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
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
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.

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.