The Dakota Cipher (4 page)

T
HE WHOLE WORLD KNOWS WHAT HAPPENED NEXT.
I
T DAWNED
bright, the air scrubbed by recent rain, and by afternoon we had a high, hot Italian sun, the kind of weather that allows cavalry to actually charge, cannons to actually deploy, and dry muskets to actually fire. If you want to kill each other, there’s nothing like a sunny day.

As Renato had predicted, the Austrians attacked in force at Marengo, long lines of white pushing through fields and cow pens in irresistible numbers. They took terrible casualties as they plunged across the moatlike Fantanone River, but they were drilled to obedience and didn’t falter. There were a hundred heroic charges on each side, men dying for a vineyard or goat paddock, the battlefield a fog, and by the time Napoleon realized he’d stumbled into the full Austrian army and was desperately outnumbered, his troops were in reluctant, bloody retreat. Bonaparte had twenty-two thousand men and forty guns against thirty thousand men and one hundred cannons, and the Austrians sprayed grapeshot at every French rally. Hannibal
had allowed himself to be outwitted, and Napoleon’s career as leader of France was about to end before it had properly began.

I arrived by midday with the bad news that Renato had been a double agent, and the better news that Desaix was coming. Then I watched the battle, its discipline filling me with appalled wonder. I’d seen war in Egypt and the Holy Land, but nothing like this drilled European slugging. Regimental formations marched shoulder to shoulder like automatons, stopped, and blasted each other in ferocious, unflinching determination. How gloriously gaudy they looked, infantry shakos topped with plumes, flags a beacon in gun smoke! The front rank kneeled, the second fired over their head, and the third passed up freshly loaded muskets, soldiers leaning into opposing volleys as if weathering sleet. Men coughed, yelped, went down, and new ones stepped smartly up like puppets. Dead and wounded sprawled everywhere, the green grass stained with red, but the living gave ground only grudgingly. Entire companies disintegrated rather than yield. Why did they endure? The individual soldier had little idea how his sacrifice was affecting the whole, but was acutely aware how his courage helped the small universe of friends and comrades. Men fought for their standing among men. The ranks would actually ripple as the bullets tore into them, sagging, and then stiffen until a charge with bayonet would push them back another fifty yards. Back and back the French fell, Napoleon finally committing his Consular Guard in hopes of a final, decisive blow. His elite folded under withering musket and cannon fire like paper curled by heat, pride and power ground down in a few hot minutes. An Austrian cavalry charge scooped up four hundred prisoners.

The battle was lost.

And then I saved the day.

I got no official credit in the campaign histories, of course; I was an agent of no official standing. I was simply one of the “couriers”
sent to fetch Desaix. But I got to the little general a full eight hours before any messengers Napoleon sent, and Desaix finally came in time. He reined up near Napoleon late afternoon, his division filing into line, and listened patiently to his commander’s glum recitation of the day’s reverses.

“The battle is certainly lost,” the divisional commander agreed. “But there is still time to win another.” And then Desaix counterattacked.

After eight hours of brutal fighting, the Austrians thought victory was theirs. The aged Melas, badly bruised after being thrown from his horse two times, had left the mopping-up to his subordinates and retired from the field. Napoleon’s columns were wrecked, and his exhausted opponents assumed they’d sleep in San Guiliano.

But Desaix’s fresh division hit them like a shock, an Austrian ammunition wagon blew up, and then General François Etienne de Kellermann saw an opening and led four hundred French dragoons into the side of the enemy. It was a brilliant charge of the kind they put into paintings, a rumble like an earthquake, green clods flying from the pounding hooves, sabers bright, plumes waving above the dragoons’ towering bearskin hats—an equine avalanche that took the Austrians when they were weariest. The enemy, victorious one minute, were in headlong retreat the next, hundreds captured by the hurtling horsemen. I hadn’t seen anything so astounding since Napoleon’s own timely arrival at Mount Tabor in the Holy Land, converting a certain Turkish victory into a Turkish rout with a cannon shot.

Bonaparte was less surprised. “The fate of a battle is a single moment,” he remarked.

Brave little Desaix was shot dead at Marengo at the moment of his greatest triumph, and there has been as much romantic nonsense over this tragedy as Napoleon’s crossing of the Alps. “Why am I not allowed to weep?” the conqueror was later recorded as saying, suggesting a tenderness I never saw him display toward any man, or any
woman, either. Napoleon weep? To him, life was war and people were soldiers to be used. He was sad, yes—Desaix was as valuable as a good horse—but hardly morose about one more corpse in a square mile of carnage. The truth is that the bullet entered through Desaix’s back, either from Austrian fire as he swung around to exhort his men or, just as likely, from an errant bullet from his own side. The number of men accidentally killed or wounded by their excited, confused, and frightened comrades is one of the dirty secrets of war.

We’d learn later that General Kleber, whom I’d soldiered with on the beaches of Alexandria and the battlefield of Mount Tabor—and who Napoleon had left in command in Egypt—was assassinated by a Muslim fanatic at almost the same moment Desaix fell. So go the people who have been chapters in our lives. Generals are spent like coins.

By day’s end there were twelve thousand Austrian and French dead or wounded, dead and dying horses, shattered caissons, and dismounted artillery. The Austrians had lost another six thousand prisoners and forty cannon.

“I have just put the crown on your head,” Kellermann remarked, an impolitic truth he wouldn’t be forgiven for. Let honor be bestowed; don’t grasp for it.

I made no such boast, but could have. At 4:00 p.m. at Marengo, Napoleon’s rule was finished; by 7:00 p.m. it had been confirmed. Instead, wisely keeping my mouth shut for once, I wangled my way onto Bonaparte’s swift carriage back to Paris after the Austrians agreed to armistice.

On our journey Napoleon confided that his ambition had merely been whetted. “Yes, I have done enough, it’s true,” he told me. “In less than two years I have won Cairo, Paris, and Milan, but for all that, were I to die tomorrow I should not at the end of ten centuries occupy half a page of general history!”

Who else counted their history pages a thousand years hence?

Back in Paris, I was put to work helping negotiations with the newly arrived American commissioners. The confidence I’d won from Bonaparte eased the way for the Franco-American treaty. And so I concluded my tale of derring-do at Mortefontaine where we’d gathered to celebrate peace. We toasted, Pauline Bonaparte’s eyes sparkling at my tale, and even grim Magnus Bloodhammer looking at me with grudging respect.

I downed another glass and smiled modestly. It’s good to be the hero.

“Monsieur Gage,” Pauline invited, “would you like to see my brother’s cellar?”

O
NE OF THE PROMISES OF OUR NEW NINETEENTH CENTURY IS
the practical simplicity of women’s clothing. In the old days, getting past the skirts, corsets, and garters of a noblewoman was as complicated as reefing a barkentine in a gale. A man might be so wearied by ribbons, stays, laces, and layers that by the time he got to squeezable flesh he’d forgotten what all the effort was for. The new revolutionary fashions, I’m happy to report, are less complicated, and getting at Pauline, nestled between two wine kegs, was not much more complicated than lowering the gallant at top and hoisting the mainsail at bottom, noting she had dispensed with chemise and bunching what little there was at her waist while she sang like a choir. Lord, the girl had enthusiasm! Her breasts were even better than what portraiture has recorded, and her thighs nimble as scissors. We bucked and plunged like a Sicilian stagecoach, Pauline as hot as a Franklin stove, and I could happily have had her in a few more cellar nooks and crannies, sampling the vintages this way and that, if rough hands had not suddenly seized me and jerked me back like a cork popping out of a bottle.

The indignity!

It’s hard to fight back with your trousers about your ankles, and I was too surprised in any event to react. Damnation! Had General Leclerc come back from his cantonment after all? I could try to explain we were merely dusting the bottles, but I didn’t think he’d believe me, given that both Pauline and I were both more exposed than a Maine lighthouse in a howling nor’easter.

“He assaulted me!” she shrieked, which was no more likely to be believed, given her amorous reputation.

“You shouldn’t thrust yourself in where you do not belong,” one of my assailants said with an accent I couldn’t place, just before a clout to the head blurred my vision and buckled my knees. My manhood was wilting and my longrifle and tomahawk had been checked with my greatcoat in the anteroom upstairs. I have an all too fervent imagination of what various enemies might do to me and woozily tried to cross my legs.

“I know what this looks like…,” I began.

A gag went into my mouth.

Instead of having my throat or something even more valuable cut, they seemed determined to truss me like a sausage. Ropes were thrown around me as they pummeled and kicked, and in my daze I had the wit to do only one thing: fetch a handful of the chocolates I’d filched from my waistcoat pocket and slip them into my shirtsleeve just as my wrists were being bound. Having been tied before, I’d spent time giving the problem some thought.

I dimly saw Pauline was allowed to flee, pulling up and pushing down her filmy garment. One does not tie up Napoleon’s sister! Then, my own pants hauled up as well, I was dragged down a dark corridor to a cellar door that led to the gardens beyond. Given the situation, I didn’t expect her to call for my rescue.

So I tried to reason my way out. Unfortunately, my gag reduced my logic to muffled mumphs and growls.

“Save your breath, American. You don’t even understand what you’re involved in.”

Hadn’t I been in the first consul’s sister? Or was this about something else entirely? I’d assumed I was being manhandled by the vengeful minions of Pauline’s husband or brothers, but perhaps some other retribution was going on. I tried to review who else might want me dead. Had someone really seen me leave that ruined Italian farmhouse, and was Renato just the first attempt at Egyptian Rite retribution, given that I’d incinerated Count Alessandro Silano? Had the Apophis snake cult from Egypt somehow trailed me to Paris? The British might be annoyed that I was once more with the French, like a shuttlecock in the wind. Then there were a few young ladies less than satisfied with the circumstances of our parting, a gambling victim or two, the occasional creditor, the entire Austrian army, the English sailors from HMS
Dangerous
whose pay I had taken in cards, the angry Muslims from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem….

For someone as likeable as me, I’d acquired an astonishing list of potential enemies. I suppose it doesn’t much matter
who
kills you, given that you will be dead anyway. Still, one likes to know.

I was dragged down a garden path like a log, thrown in a small, saucer-shaped coracle about as seaworthy as a leaf, and towed by rowboat across the château lake. I half expected to be weighted and tossed in the water, but, no, they beached our craft on the island where the fireworks were to ignite and bundled me past the shrubbery to where the combustibles were mounted. As near as I could tell, Despeaux had stockpiled enough incendiaries to light the Second Coming.

“You always want to be at the center of things. Now you will end that way, too,” my assailants said. I was lashed to a stake in the middle of the display of rockets and mortars as if I, too, were a rocket set to shoot skyward. I realized that at the climax of the celebration of the Convention of Mortefontaine I would go up in flames like a roman candle. If anyone could identify my remains, they’d conclude
poking around fireworks was just the thing the bold, foolish electrician Ethan Gage would try.

“When the gag burns through you can scream, because by that time it will be impossible to hear you over the explosions,” a captor said, not altogether helpfully. “Each shout will suck burning air into your lungs.” And then they lit a slow fuse and departed without so much as an
adieu
, their oars quietly dipping as they made for shore.

I was doomed, unless my chocolate melted.

Having been tied before, upon return to Paris I’d made some study of the matter. It seems that the knack of getting out of knots is to have some slack, and that expanding the chest and bulging the muscles is a trick escape artists use to get them started on their bonds. In the case of my wrists, the chocolate in my sleeves had made their circumference bigger. Now, as the hard candy turned liquid, I squeezed my wrists together and the confection squirted out, loosening my ropes. Thank goodness for culinary invention! Being able to twist and move my hands, however, was not the same thing as being free. I saw with growing panic that the crowd from the party had come outside the château to watch the fireworks, their gaiety backlit by the glowing windows. Flirtatious laughter floated across the water and paper lanterns were set afloat on the lake. I could smell the burning fuse.

Sweating, unable to call out, I worked my wrists raw, thumbs pulling at strands, the mess of chocolate both lubricating the ropes and making them sticky. Finally, a key cord came loose.

Then there was a flash at the corner of my vision, and a sizzle. The pyrotechnics were about to ignite!

Thrashing my lower arms, I got the last bonds off my aching hands, freeing my arms to my elbows. By reaching up I managed to snag my gag and haul it to one side. “Help!”

The bloody orchestra, however, had broken into a rousing version of “Yankee Doodle,” as cacophonous as a flight of geese. The crowd
whooped as the fuse flamed toward the arsenal, its spark bright as a tiger’s eye.

So I clawed at the ropes holding my torso to the pole. My upper arms were still tied to my chest, but I had enough freedom below my elbows to get one end of the bond free and begin to awkwardly fling it to unwind myself, moaning at my own slowness. There was a whistle of powder and the first cluster of skyrockets soared up, smoke blinding anyone to my presence on the island. They exploded in a galaxy of stars, bright bits raining down. Some of the mortars coughed and burped, shells soaring. It was getting damnably hot damnably fast, and I was sweating. On and on the loose rope flew, growing longer and beginning to burn, even as the vile choir of exploding fireworks increased. If the climax was reached and the ground display turned the island into a fountain of flame, I was cooked, and dead.

“Help!” I called again.

Now they were playing the “Marseillaise”!

Finally I unwound myself free of the pole, went to run, and fell. My feet were still bound! Something was still strapped to my back! I didn’t have time for this! Skyrockets were screaming up in every direction, hot sparks were raining on my hair and clothes, and I was dazed and half-blinded by the excruciating light. I began hopping toward the water, clawing at the bonds at my chest.

Then the island seemed to erupt.

To the shrieking delight of the crowd, the ground display went off like a sun’s corona. Huge sheets of sparks shot up in pulsing arcs, the air a hell of sulfur, smoke, and stinging ash. The cords around my ankles caught fire, and if I hadn’t still had my boots on (Pauline and I had been in a hurry) I would have been badly burned. On I hopped like a panicked rabbit, until I spied the saucer-shaped coracle I’d been towed out in. I collapsed on it, my momentum pushing it into the lake and dragging my own feet into the water. The flames extinguished with a hiss. Now I had my arms mostly free, but some
rope still around my chest and biceps. My hair was smoking, and I threw water on that and got the now-burnt-through ropes off my feet. Finally I kneeled, barely balancing in the wobbly craft, and hand-paddled toward the crowd, Hades in tumult behind me.

“Look, what’s that! Something’s coming from the island!”

The damned idiots began to applaud, drowning my complaints once again. They thought I was part of the show! And just when I finally got near enough to shout about brigands and kidnappers, my hair nearly ignited again!

Or, rather, a molten fountain my torturers had cruelly stuck to my back, held by cords still around my chest, went off with a whoosh. The wooden tail was tucked in the back waist of my trousers, and apparently its fuse had ignited as I was fleeing the island. Now it—I—was a flaming torch. I reached behind and yanked the missile out of my bonds before it could finish roasting me and desperately held the spouting tube away from me by its hot nose, sparks shooting great, pulsing gouts of flame out the tail. The exhaust illuminated my figure, and actually giving me slight propulsion as I drifted toward the onlookers. Now everyone was cheering.

“It’s Gage! What a character! Look, he’s holding up a torch to celebrate our convention!”

“They say he’s a sorcerer! Lucifer means ‘light-giver,’ you know!”

“Did he plan the entire show?”

“He’s a genius!”

“Or a prima donna!”

Not knowing what else to do, I held my rocket upside down as flames spewed skyward and tried to muster singed dignity, my smile gritted against the pain of the burns. There! Were hooded onlookers melting into the trees? The final sparks were cascading past my figure to hiss into the water as I grounded and finally stepped ashore, like Columbus.

“Bravo! What a scene stealer!”

I bowed, more than a little shaken. I was half-blind, coughing from the acrid fumes, and wincing from my burns and abrasions. My watering eyes cut rivulets down my blackened cheeks.

The American commissioners pushed their way to the front of the throng. “By heavens, Gage, what the devil are you trying to symbolize?” Ellsworth asked.

I dazedly tried to think fast. “Liberty, I think.”

“That was quite the performance,” Davie said. “You might have been hurt.”

“He’s a plucky daredevil,” said Vans Murray. “It’s an addiction, is it not?”

Then Bonaparte was there, too. “I might have known,” he said. “I’m grateful you are not in politics, Monsieur Gage, or your instinct would be to upstage me.”

“I’m afraid that would be impossible, First Consul.”

He looked skeptically from me to the island. “You were planning this stunt all along?”

“It was a last-minute inspiration, I assure you.”

“Well.” He looked at the others. “Holding that torch aloft was a nice touch. This will be an evening for us all to remember. The friendship of France and the United States! Gage, you obviously have flair. It will stand you in good stead as you carry my messages to your president.”

“America?” I glanced around for Pauline’s husband, Egyptian snake worshippers, Muslim fanatics, or British agents. Perhaps it
was
time to go home.

An arm went around my shoulder. “And now you have new friends to keep you safe!” said Magnus Bloodhammer, squeezing me like a bear. He smiled at Napoleon. “Gage and I have been looking for each other, and now
I
will go to America, too!”