Ethan Gage Collection # 1 (9 page)

“So?”

“This could be where he discovered the medallion, deep in the treasures of the Knights of Malta! Don't you see, Ethan? It's as if we're following in its footsteps. Destiny is at work.”

Again I was reminded of Stefan's tales of Caesar and Cleopatra, of crusaders and kings, and a quest that had consumed men through time. “Do any of these Knights remember the piece or know what it means?”

“No. But we're on the right path. Can I see it again?”

“I've hidden it for safekeeping because it causes trouble when it's
out.” I trusted Talma, and yet had become reluctant to show the medallion after Stefan's dire tales of what happened to men through history who grasped it. The savants knew it existed, but I'd deflected requests to share it for examination.

“But how are we to solve the secret when you keep it hidden?”

“Let's just get it to Egypt first.”

He looked disappointed.

After a little more than a week our armada set sail again, lumbering eastward toward Alexandria. Rumors flew that the British were still hunting us, but we saw no sign of them. Later we would learn that Nelson's squadron had passed our armada in the dark, neither side spying the other.

It was on one of these evenings, the soldiers gambling for each other's shoes to relieve the tedium of the passage, that Berthollet invited me to follow him to
L'Orient
's deepest decks. “It is time, Monsieur Gage, for us scholars to start earning our keep.”

We descended into murk, lanterns giving feeble light, men in hammocks swaying hip to hip like moths in cocoons, coughing and snoring and, in the case of the youngest and most homesick, weeping the night away. The ship's timbers creaked. The sea hissed as it rushed past, water dripping from caulked hull seams as slowly as syrup. Marines guarded the magazine and treasure room with bayonets that gleamed like shards of ice. We stooped and entered Aladdin's Cave, the treasure hold. The mathematician Monge was waiting for us, seated on a brass-bound chest. Also present was another handsome officer who had listened to most of the philosophical discussions in silence, a young geographer and mapmaker named Edme François Jomard. It was Jomard who would become my guide to the mysteries of the pyramids. His dark eyes shone with a bright intelligence, and he had brought on board a trunk full of books by ancient authors.

My curiosity at his presence was distracted by what the cabin contained. Here was the treasure of Malta and much of the payroll of the French army. Boxes brimmed with coin like combs of honey. Sacks held centuries of jeweled religious relics. Bullion was stacked like logwood. A fistful could remake a man's life.

“Don't even think about it,” the chemist said.

“
Mon dieu!
If I were Bonaparte, I'd retire today.”

“He doesn't want money, he wants power,” Monge said.

“Well, he wants money, too,” Berthollet amended. “He's become one of the richest officers in the army. His wife and relatives spend it faster than he can steal it. He and his brothers make quite the Corsican clan.”

“And what does he want of us?” I asked.

“Knowledge. Understanding. Decipherment. Right, Jomard?”

“The general is particularly interested in mathematics,” the young officer said.

“Mathematics?”

“Mathematics is the key to war,” Jomard said. “Given proper training, courage does not vary much from nation to nation. What wins is superior numbers and firepower at the point of attack. That requires not just men, but supply, roads, transport animals, fodder, and gunpowder. You need precise amounts, moving in precise miles, to precise places. Napoleon has said that above all, he wants officers who can count.”

“And in more ways than one,” Monge added. “Jomard here is a student of the classics and Napoleon wants him to count in new ways. Ancient authors such as Diodorus of Sicily suggested that the Great Pyramid is a mathematical puzzle, right, Edme?”

“Diodorus proposed that in its dimensions the Great Pyramid is somehow a map of the earth,” Jomard explained. “After we liberate the country, we will measure the structure for proof of that contention. The Greeks and Romans were as puzzled by the purpose of the pyramids as we moderns, which is why Diodorus proposed his idea. Would men really slave so long on a mere tomb, particularly when no bodies or treasures have ever been found in it? Herodotus claims the pharaoh was actually entombed on an island in an underground river, far beneath the monument itself.”

“So the pyramid is just a tombstone, a marker?”

“Or a warning. Or, because of its dimensions and tunnels, a kind of machine.” Jomard shrugged. “Who knows, when its builders left no records?”

“Yet the Egyptians
did
scatter the world with clues that none of us can yet read,” Monge said. “And this is where we come in. Look at this. Our troops captured it in Italy and Bonaparte has brought it along.”

The chemist whisked away an embroidered cloth, revealing a tablet of bronze the size of a large dinner platter, its surface coated with black enamel etched by silver. Incised were intricately beautiful depictions of Egyptian figures in the ancient style, spaced in a series of rooms atop one another. The gods, goddesses, and hieroglyphs were bound by a border of fantastic animals, flowers, and trees. “It's the Tablet of Isis, once owned by Cardinal Bembo.”

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“That's what the general wants us to answer. For centuries, scholars have suspected there is some message in this tablet. Legend has it that Plato was initiated into the greater mysteries in some kind of chamber under Egypt's biggest pyramid. Perhaps this is a plan, or map, of such chambers. Yet there is no report of such rooms. Could your medallion be a key to understanding?”

I doubted it. The markings on my neckpiece seemed crude compared to this work of art. The figures were stiff but graceful as angels. There were towering headdresses, seated baboons, and striding cattle. Women had wings on their arms like hawks. Men had the heads of dogs and birds. Thrones were supported by lions and crocodiles. “Mine is cruder.”

“You're to study this for clues before we reach the ruins outside Cairo. Many of the characters hold staffs, for example. Are they rods of power? Is there any connection to electricity? Could this advance the Revolution?”

The men asking these questions were eminent figures of science. I'd won my trinket in a card game. Yet solving such a puzzle might lead me to any number of commercial rewards, not to mention a pardon. As I counted the figures, I was struck that some seemed to have grander headdresses. “Here's something,” I offered. “The number of primary characters here, twenty-one, coincides with those of the Tarot that the gypsies showed me.”

“Interesting,” Monge said. “A tablet to forecast the future perhaps?”

I shrugged. “Or just a pretty platter.”

“We've made an etching of it that you can take back to your cabin.” He reached into another chest. “Another peculiarity is this, which our troops found in the same fortress where Cagliostro was imprisoned. I sent for it when Berthollet told me of you.” It was a round disc the size of a dinner plate, its center empty and its edge made by three rings, each fitting inside the other. The rings had symbols of suns, moons, stars, and signs of the zodiac. They rotated, so that symbols could be realigned with one another. Why, I had no idea.

“We think it's a calendar,” Monge said. “The fact that you can align the symbols suggests it might show the future or indicate a certain date. But what date, and why? Some of us think it may refer to the precession of the equinoxes.”

“The procession of what?”

“Precession. Ancient religion was based on study of the sky,” Jomard said. “The stars formed patterns, moved across the heavens in predictable ways, and were believed alive, in control of the fate of men. The Egyptians divided the vault of the sky into the twelve signs of the zodiac, extending each downward to twelve zones on the horizon. At the same time each year—say, March 21, the spring equinox, when the length of day and night are equal—the sun rises under the same zodiacal sign.”

I decided not to point out that the officer had chosen to use the traditional Gregorian date, not the new revolutionary ones.

“Yet not
precisely
where it started. Each year the zodiac falls just slightly short of making the full circuit, because the earth wobbles on its axis like a spinning top, the axis making a circle in the sky over a period of twenty-six thousand years. Over long periods of time the position of the constellations seems to shift. At March 21 of this year, the sun rose in Pisces, as it has since Christ was born. Perhaps this is why early Christians chose the fish as their symbol. But before Jesus, the March 21 sunrise was in the constellation of the ram, an age which lasted 2,160 years. Before the ram was the bull, when the pyra
mids may have been built. Next to come, after the 2,160 years of Pisces, is the age of Aquarius.”

“Aquarius had special meaning for the Egyptians,” Monge added. “Many people think these signs were Greek, but they are really far older, some dating from Babylon and others from Egypt. The poured pitchers of water of Aquarius symbolized the annual rising of the Nile, vital for fertilizing and watering Egypt's annual crops. Man's first civilization rose in the strangest environment on earth: a Garden of Eden, a strip of green amid inhospitable desert, a place of constant sun and rare rain, watered by a river that rises from sources still unknown to this day. Isolated from enemies by the Sahara and Arabian Deserts, fed by a mysterious annual cycle, roofed with a cloudless canopy of stars, it was a stable land of extreme contrasts, an ideal place for religion to evolve.”

“So this is a tool for calculating the cycle of the Nile?”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps it suggests a propitious time for different actions. That's what we hope you will help decipher.”

“Who made it?”

“We don't know,” Monge said. “Its symbols are different from anything we have seen, and the Knights of Malta have no record of where it even came from. Is it Hebrew? Egyptian? Greek? Babylonian? Or something entirely different?”

“Surely this is a puzzle for your mind, not mine, Dr. Monge. You're a mathematician. I struggle to make change.”

“Everyone struggles to make change. Listen, we don't know what all this means yet, Gage. But the interest in your medallion suggests to me that your pendant is a piece of some momentous puzzle. As an American, you are privileged to be on a French expedition. Berthollet here has extended legal protection to you. But this is not an act of charity—it is a hire of your expertise. There are a dozen reasons Bonaparte wants to go to Egypt, but one of them is that there may be ancient secrets to be learned: mystic secrets, technological secrets, electrical secrets. Then you, Franklin's man, appear with this mysterious medallion. Is it a clue? Keep these artifacts in mind as we advance into the unknown. Bonaparte is seeking to conquer a country. All you must conquer is a riddle.”

“But a riddle to what?”

“To where we came from, perhaps. Or how we fell from grace.”

I
returned to the cabin I shared with Talma and a lieutenant named Malraux, my mind both dazzled by treasure and stupefied by the mysteries I was to wrestle with. I could see no connection between the medallion and these new objects, and nobody seemed to have any idea what the puzzle was I was supposed to solve. For decades, charmers and charlatans like Cagliostro had toured the courts of Europe claiming to know great Egyptian secrets, without ever explaining precisely what those secrets were. They had started a craze for the occult. Skeptics had scoffed, but the idea that there must be
something
in the land of the pharaohs had taken root. Now I found myself in the middle of that mania. The more science advanced, the more people longed for magic.

At sea I'd adopted the sailor practice of going barefoot, given the summer's heat. As I prepared to lie in my bunk, my mind swirling, I noticed that my boots were missing. This was disturbing, given how I'd used them as a hiding place.

I poked anxiously around. Malraux, already in bed, muttered something in his sleep and swore. I shook Talma.

“Antoine, I can't find my shoes!”

He came awake blearily. “Why do you need them?”

“I just want to know where they are.”

He rolled over. “Maybe some bosun gambled them away.”

A quick search of late-night card and dice circles did not locate my boots. Had someone discovered the hollow compartment in my heel? Who would dare violate the possessions of the savants? Who could even have guessed my hiding place? Talma? He must have wondered about my calm when asked the whereabouts of the medallion, and probably speculated where I might be hiding it.

I came back to the cabin and looked across at my companion. Once more he slept like an innocent, which made me all the more suspicious. The more the medallion grew in importance, the less I trusted anyone. It was poisoning my faith in my friend.

I retreated to my hammock, depressed and uncertain. What had seemed a prize in the card salon was feeling like a burden. A good thing I hadn't kept the medallion in my shoe! I put my hand on the touch-hole of the twelve-pounder next to my hammock. Since Bonaparte had forbidden target practice to conserve powder and keep our passage quiet, I'd wrapped my prize in an empty powder bag and used tar to stick it to the inside of the muzzle plug. The plug would be removed before combat, and my plan had been to retrieve the medallion before any sea battle, but meanwhile not risk having it stolen from my neck or boot. Now, with my shoes gone, my distance from the prize made me nervous. Come the morrow, when the others were on deck, I'd fish it from its hiding place and wear the thing. Curse or charm, I wanted it round my neck.