The Rosetta Key (34 page)

Thirty seconds. The rifle ball was wrapped in its wadding and nervously fed into the muzzle opening with the short ramrod.

Najac’s French and Arabs were screaming and firing, but I felt nothing but wind. I could see the ripples in the smoky air as the bullets sped, the glint of frantic eyes, the white of bared teeth, the blood spraying from somewhere across a young officer’s face. The bar hit the ribs of a towering grenadier and he folded sideways.

Forty seconds. The stubborn ball was being rammed down.

I leapt across dead and dying men, using their bodies like rocks in a stream, my balance a spider’s. Round me in a circle my bar sung, men scrambling as they had from Jericho, Smith running a chasseur through with his saber, one Royal Marine dying and two more sticking their prey with bayonets. The sky continued to rain debris from the walls above, and I saw blossoms of explosions behind Najac as grenades and shells went off. Even as I pressed forward, Ottoman and English reinforcements were surging behind me, clotting the breech with their numbers and blood. A tricolor wavered and went down, then rose again, swaying back and forth.

Fifty seconds. Najac didn’t even take time to remove the ramrod but was fumbling to prime the pan with gunpowder and pull back the lock. There was fear in his eyes, fear and desperation, but hatred too. I was almost on him when one of his brigands rose before me, hands raised above his head with a scimitar, face distorted by howling, until my bar took him on the side of his skull and exploded it, bits of gore spraying in all directions. I could taste him in my teeth.

And now as I cocked my arm for a final swing, Najac’s eyes wide with terror, there was a flash in the pan and a roar, a blast of heat and smoke, and my own rifle, ramrod still in it, fired straight at my breast.

I sat down hard, knocked backward. But before I could die, I swung low and my bar hit the thief in his ankles, shattering them. He went down too, troops surging over us, and realizing I still wasn’t dead I crawled forward, wheezing, and seized him by the throat, cutting off his shrieks of pain. I squeezed so hard that the tendons in my own neck swelled with the effort.

His look was hopeless hatred. His arms thrashed, looking for a weapon. His tongue bulged out obscenely.

This is for Ned, and Mohammad, and Jericho, and all the other fine men you’ve cut down in your miserable, roach-scuttle of a life, I thought. And so I squeezed, as he turned purple, my blood dripping onto my squirming victim. I could see the ramrod sticking out from my chest. What was going on?

Then I felt his hands on my waist and a tug as he grabbed my tomahawk. Having failed to finish me with my own rifle, he wanted to stave in my temple with my own hatchet!

Hardly thinking, I leaned forward so the ramrod he’d fired was against his own chest and heart. Its tip was shattered and sharp as a knitting needle, and finally I realized what must have happened. When he’d fired, the arrow-like projectile had hit me all right, but exactly where the cylinder holding the Book of Thoth was tucked into my shirt. Its blunt head had stuck in the soft gold, knocking me backward but not breaking my skin. Now, as he worked my tomahawk free and cocked his arm to strike, I leaned into him so I was pushing the ramrod with the cylinder, straight against his chest. The effort hurt like hell but it cracked the devil’s breastbone and then slid easily as a fork into cake. Najac’s eyes widened as we embraced, and I pierced his heart.

Blood pumped up out of him as if from a well, a widening pool, and hissing like the viper he was, he died, my name a red bubble on his lips.

Cheering, but in English this time. I looked up. The French assault was breaking.

I jerked the ramrod out, swayed upward to my knees, and at long last reclaimed my custom rifle. This was the worst charnel yet, a ghastly tangle of limbs and torsos of men who’d died grappling with each other. There were hundreds of bodies in the breach, and scores more in the soggy moat in either direction, assault ladders shattered and the walls of Acre dented and cracked. But the French were retreating. The Turks were cheering too, their cannon barking to bid the French good-bye.

Smith’s and Djezzar’s men didn’t dare pursue. They crouched, stunned by their own success, and then hastily reloaded in case the enemy came again. Sergeants began ordering a crude barricade at the tower’s base.

Smith himself spied me and strode over, the bodies compressing slightly as he walked across them. “Gage! That was the nearest-run thing I ever did see! My God, the tower! Looks like she could come down in an instant!”

“Bonaparte must have thought the same, Sir Sidney,” I said. I was gasping, trembling at every muscle, more exhausted than I’d ever been. Emotion had wrung me dry. I hadn’t caught breath in a century. I hadn’t slept in a thousand years.

“He’ll see it rebuilt and braced stronger than ever by the next dawn, if British engineering has anything to do with it,” the naval captain said fiercely. “By God, we’ve bested him, Ethan, we’ve bested him! He’ll throw every cannonball he has at us now, but he won’t come again after this thrashing. His men won’t allow it. They’ll balk.”

How could he be so sure? And yet he was about to be proved right.

Smith nodded. “Where’s Phelipeaux? I saw him lead the charge right into them. By God, that’s royalist courage!”

I shook my head. “I’m afraid they’ve done for him, Sidney.”

We picked our way over. Two bodies lay across Phelipeaux’s so we dragged them aside. And miracle of miracles, the royalist was still breathing, even though I’d seen half a dozen bayonets pierce him like a haunch of beef. Smith pulled him up slightly, resting the dying man’s head in his lap. “Edmond, we’ve turned them back!” he said. “The Corsican is finished!”

“What… retreated?” Though his eyes were open, he was blind.

“He’s scowling at us right now from that high hill of his, the best of his troops gutted or sent running. Your name will know glory, man, because Boney won’t take Acre. The republican tyrant has been stopped, and political generals like him don’t last past a bad defeat.” He looked at me, eyes gleaming. “Mark my word, Gage. The world will hear little of Napoleon Bonaparte, ever, ever again.”

A
nd then Colonel Phelipeaux died. Did he really comprehend his victory as life leaked out his body? I don’t know. But maybe he had a glimmer that it hadn’t been in vain, and that in the violent insanity of this worst day of the siege, something fundamental had been won.

I went back to Najac’s body, stooped, and took my rifle, my tomahawk, and the ring. Then I walked back through the rubble of the half-ruined tower. Shouting engineers were already beginning to lever aside stones, ready beams, and mix mortar. The tower would be patched yet again.

I went in search of Jericho and Miriam.

Fortunately, I didn’t see the ironmonger’s body among the long rows of defenders being laid mournfully to temporary rest in the pasha’s gardens. I glanced up. The birds had disappeared in the cacophony, but I could see the veiled eyes of Djezzar’s harem women looking down from their grilled windows. Splinters had been knocked from some of the woodwork, leaving yellow gashes in the dark-stained design. The pasha himself was strutting up and down his wall like a rooster, clapping his exhausted men on the shoulder and shouting out at the French. “What, you do not like my hospitality? Then come back and get some more!”

I drank at the mosque fountain and then walked dully through the city, smeared with blood and powder smoke, huddled civilians looking at me warily. My eyes, I supposed, were bright in the blackness of my face, but my stare was a thousand miles away. I walked until I reached the jetty with its lighthouse, the Mediterranean clean after the squalor of battle. I looked back. Cannon were still rumbling, and smoke and dust had created a pall in that direction, backlit to stormy darkness by a declining sun.

How had so much time passed? We’d sprinted for the wall in the morning.

I took out the pharaoh’s ring that had meant grief for every person who’d touched it. Do curses really exist? Franklin the rationalist would doubt it. But I knew enough not to finger its ruby as I waded into the cool sea, to my knees, to my waist, the chill seizing my crotch, my chest. I bent and sank underwater, opening my eyes in the green gloom, letting the sea wash out some of the grit. I held my breath as long as I could, making sure I was finally ready to do what must be done. Then I surfaced, shaking the water from my wet, uncut hair, cocked my arm, and threw. It was a red meteor, heading for the cobalt that marked deep water. There was a plop and, simple as that, the ring was gone.

I shivered in relief.

I
found Miriam in the city hospital, its rooms jammed with the freshly wounded. Sheets were bright red, and pans of water pink. Basins held chunks of amputated flesh. Flies buzzed, feasting, and there were smells not just of blood but of gangrene and lye and the charcoal of braziers where surgical tools were heated before cutting. Periodically, the air would be pierced by screaming.

The building quaked from continuing artillery fire. As Smith had predicted, Napoleon seemed to be throwing everything he had at us in a last outpouring of frustration. Maybe he hoped to simply flatten what he couldn’t take. Saws rattled on tables. Dust sifted down from the tile roof into wounded men’s eyes.

Miriam was, I saw with relief, attending to a brother who was still alive. Jericho was pale, his hair greasy, his shirt gone, and the upper half of his torso wrapped in stained bandages. But he was alert and energetic enough to give me a skeptical glare as I came up to his pallet.

“Can’t anything kill you?”

“I got the man who shot you, Jericho.” My tone was dull from emotional overload. “We held the breach. You, me, Miriam, all of us. We held.”

“Where in Hades’ name did you go when you left the city?”

“It’s a long story. That thing we were looking for in Jerusalem? I found it.”

They both stared at me. “The treasure?”

“Of sorts.” I reached inside my shirt and pulled out the golden cylinder. Sure enough, it was dented and nearly punctured where the ramrod had hit. My chest had a bruise the size of a plate. But both the book’s metal sheath and my own body were intact. Their eyes widened at the gleam of metal, which I shielded from other hospital eyes. “It’s heavy, Jericho. Heavy enough to build twice the house, and twice the forge, you left in Jerusalem. When the war’s over, you’re a rich man.”

“Me?”

“I’m giving it to you. I have bad luck with treasures. The book inside, however, I intend to keep. Can’t read a word, but I’m getting sentimental.”

“You’re giving me all the gold?”

“You and Miriam.”

Now he scowled. “What, you think you can pay me?”

“Pay you?”

“For crashing into our lives and taking not just our home and livelihood but my sister’s virtue?”

“It’s not payment! My God, she didn’t…” Wisely, I didn’t finish. “Not payment, nor even thanks. Just simple justice. You’d be doing me a favor to take it.”

“You seduce her, you take her, you leave without a word, and now you bring this?” He was getting angrier, not calmer. “I spit on your gift!”

Clearly he didn’t understand. “Then you spit on the humble apology of your own future brother-in-law.”

“What?” they said together. Miriam was looking at me in disbelief.

“I’m ashamed I had to go without explanation and leave both of you wondering these past few weeks,” I said. “I know I seemed lower than a snake in a sewer. But I had a chance to finish our quest so I did, keeping this prize from the French who’d misuse it. They’ll never get the book now, because even if they break through I can send it out to sea on Smith’s ships. I finished what we started, and now I’m back to finish the rest. I want to marry your sister, Jericho. With your permission.”

His face was churning with disbelief. “Are you completely mad?”

“I’ve never been saner in my life.” The answer had been right before me, I’d realized. One god or another was showing me the sensible path by snatching Astiza away. We were poison for each other, fire and ice who ended up in peril whenever we got together, and the poor Egyptian woman was better off without me. Certainly my heart couldn’t take losing her again. Yet here was gentle Miriam, a good woman who’d learned to blow a man’s head off with a pistol but still set an example of a good, quiet life. That’s what I’d really found in the Holy Land, not this silly book! So now I’d marry a proper girl, settle down, forget my pain over Astiza, and be done with battles and Bonaparte forever. I nodded to myself.

“But what about Astiza?” Miriam asked in wonder.

“I’m not going to lie to you. I loved her. Still love her. But she’s gone, Miriam. I rescued her as I had before, and lost her again as I had before. I don’t know why, but it’s not meant to be. The last few hours of hell have opened my eyes to a thousand things. One is how much I love
you
, and how wonderful you’ll be for me, and how good, I hope, I can be for you. I want to make an honest couple of us, Jericho. I seek your blessing.”

He stared at me a long time, his expression inscrutable. Then his face twisted in a strange way.

“Jericho?”

It crinkled, and finally he burst into laughter. He howled, tears streaming down his face, and Miriam began laughing too, looking at me with something disturbingly close to pity.

What was going on?

“My blessing!” He roared. “As if I’d ever give it to
you
!” Then he winced, reminded by the pain of the hole in his shoulder.

“But I’ve reformed, you see…”

“Ethan.” Miriam reached out and touched my hand with hers. “Do you think the world stands still while you go on these adventures of yours?”

“Well, no, of course not.” I was more and more confused.

Jericho got himself under control, gasping and wheezing. “Gage, you have the timing of a broken chronometer.”

“What are you telling me?” I looked from one to the other. “Do I have to wait until the war’s over?”

“Ethan,” Miriam said with a sigh, “do you remember where you left me when you went to find Astiza?”