The Rosetta Key (39 page)

More scuttling. Another one. The scorpions were approaching us, then backing off. I couldn’t hear any signaling, but they seemed to pile into packs like wolves.

I hoped their assault would not wake Astiza up. I pledged to try as hard as I could not to scream. The rumbling was getting louder.

Now one arthropod came near, a monster in my ruined vision, as huge as the crocodile from this perspective. It seemed to be contemplating me with the dull, cold instinctive calculation of its tiny brain. Its cocked tail twitched, as if aiming. And then…

Slam! I jerked as much as my entrapment would let me. A dusty boot had come down, obliterating the creature. It twisted, grinding the scorpion into the dust, and then I heard a familiar voice.

“By the beard of the Prophet, can you never look after yourself, Ethan?”

“Ashraf?” It was a bewildered mumble.

“I’ve been waiting for your tormentors to go far enough away. It is hot, sitting in the desert! And here the two of you are, in even worse shape than when I left you last fall. Do you learn nothing, American?”

Could it be? The Mameluke Ashraf had been first my prisoner and then my companion as we fled Cairo and rode to rescue Astiza. He’d saved us again in a skirmish on a riverbank, given us a horse, and then bid good-bye, joining the resistance forces of Murad Bey. And now he was here again? Thoth was at work.

“I’ve been tracking you for days, first to Rosetta, and then back again. I did not understand why you were disguised like a fellahin in a donkey cart. Then your Franks bury you alive? You need better friends, Ethan.”

“Amen to that,” I managed.

And I heard the blessed scrape of a spade, digging me out.

I
only dimly remember what came next. Crowding by a company of well-armed Mamelukes, explaining the rumble I’d heard. Water, painfully wet as we sucked it into our swollen throats. A camel knelt and we were tied onto it. Then a ride into the setting sun. We slept under a scrap of tent at an oasis, regaining our senses. Our heads were red and blistered, our lips cracked, our eyes like slits. We were helpless.

So at length we were tied on again and led even deeper into the waste, south and west and then east to a secret camp of Murad’s. Women salved our burnt skin, and nourishment slowly restored us. Time was still a blur. If I climbed to the top of a nearby dune, I could just see the tips of the pyramids. Cairo was invisible, beyond.

“How did you know to find us?” I asked Ashraf. He’d already related his raids and battles that were wearing down the French.

“First we heard an ironmonger was inquiring about Astiza from distant Jerusalem,” he said. “It was a curious report, but I knew you’d disappeared and suspected. Then Ibrahim Bey reported that Count Silano had ridden north and disappeared somewhere in Syria. What was going on? Napoleon was repulsed at Acre, but you did not come back to Cairo with him. So I believed you’d joined the English, and I determined to watch for you in the Ottoman invasion force. And yes, we saw flames in Rosetta, and I spied the two of you in your donkey cart, but French cavalry were too near. So I waited, until they buried you and the French finally drew off. Always I am having to save you, my American friend.”

“Always I am in your debt.”

“Not if you do what I suspect you must do.”

“What is that?

“Word just came that Napoleon has sailed and taken Count Silano with him. You’re going to have to stop them in France, Ethan. The servant women have told me of the mysterious signs on your companion’s back. What are they?”

“Ancient writing to read what Silano has stolen.”

“The paint is sloughing off, but there is a way to extend them longer. I’ve told the women to mix their pots of henna.” Henna was a plant used to decorate the Arab women with intricate traceries of brown patterns, like an impermanent tattoo.

When they finished, Astiza’s back looked oddly beautiful.

“Should this book be read at all?” Ashraf asked as we prepared to leave.

“If not, then its secret will die with me,” she said. “I am the Rosetta key.”

A
stiza and I landed on the southern coast of France on October 11, 1799, two days after Napoleon Bonaparte and Alessandro Silano did the same. For both parties it had been a long voyage. Bonaparte, after patting mistress Pauline Foures on her fanny and leaving a note to Kléber informing him that he was now in command (he preferred not to face the general in person), had taken Monge, Berthollet, and a few other savants like Silano and hugged the frequently windless African coast to avoid the British navy. The route turned a routine sea voyage into a tedious forty-two days. Even as he crept homeward, French politics became more chaotic as plot and counterplot simmered in Paris. It was the perfect atmosphere for an ambitious general, and the bulletin announcing Napoleon’s smashing victory at Abukir arrived in Paris three days before the general did. His way north was marked by cheering crowds.

Our voyage was also slow, but for a different reason. With Smith’s encouragement, we boarded a British frigate a week after Bonaparte had left Egypt and sailed directly for France to intercept. His slowness saved him. We were off Corsica and Toulon two weeks before Napoleon arrived and, learning there was no word of him, darted back the way we’d come. Even from a masthead, however, a lookout surveys only a few square miles of sea, and the Mediterranean is big. How close we came I don’t know. Finally a picket boat brought word that he’d landed first in his native Corsica and then France, and by the time we followed he was well ahead of us.

If Silano hadn’t been along, I’d have been content to let him go. It’s not my duty to dog ambitious generals. But we had a score to settle with the count, and the book was dangerous in his hands and potentially useful in ours. How much did he already know? How much could
we
read, with Astiza’s key?

If our hunt at sea was anxious and discouraging, the time it took was not. Astiza and I had rarely had time to take a breath together. It had always been campaigns, treasure hunts, and perilous escapes. Now we shared a lieutenant’s cabin — our intimacy an issue of some jealousy among the lonely officers and crew — and had time to know each other at leisure, like a man and wife. Time enough, in other words, to scare any man wary of intimacy.

Except I liked it. We had certainly been partners in adventure, and lovers. Now we were friends. Her body ripened with rest and food, her skin recovered its blossom, and her hair its sheen. I loved to simply look at her, reading in our cabin or watching the bright sea by the rail, and loved how clothes draped her, how her hair floated in the breeze. Even better, of course, was slowly taking those clothes off. But our ordeals had saddened her, and her beauty seemed bittersweet. And when we came together in our cramped quarters, sometimes urgently and at other times with gentle care, trying to be quiet in the thin-walled ship, I was transported. I marveled that I, the wayward American opportunist, and she, the Egyptian mystic, got on at all. And yet it turned out we
did
complement and complete each other, anticipating each other. I began thinking of a normal life ahead.

I wished we could sail forever, and not find Napoleon at all.

But sometimes she was lost to me with a troubled look, seeing dark things in the past or future. That’s when I feared I would lose her again. Destiny claimed her as much as I did.

“Think about it, Ethan. Bonaparte with the power of Moses? France, with the secret knowledge of the Knight Templars? Silano, living forever, every year mastering more arcane formulae, gathering more followers? Our task isn’t done until we get that book back.”

So we landed in France. Of course we couldn’t dock in Toulon. Astiza conferred with our English captain, studied the charts, and insistently directed us to an obscure cove surrounded by steep hillsides, uninhabited except by a goatherd or two. How did she know the coast of France? We were rowed ashore at night to a pebble beach and left alone in the moonless dark. Finally there was a whistle and Astiza lit a candle, shielded by her cape.

“So the fool has returned,” a familiar voice said from the brush.

“He who found the Fool, father of all thought, originator of civilization, blessing and curse of kings.” Men materialized, swarthy and in boots and broad hats, bright sashes at their waists that held silver knives. Their leader bowed.

“Welcome back to the Rom,” said Stefan the gypsy.

I
was pleasantly astounded by this reunion. I’d met these gypsies, or “gyptians,” as some in Europe called them — wanderers supposedly descended from the ancients — the year before when my friend Talma and I had fled Paris to join Napoleon’s expedition. After Najac and his gutter scoundrels had ambushed us on the Toulon stage, I’d escaped into the woods and found refuge with Stefan’s band. There I had first met Sidney Smith and, more agreeably, the beautiful Sarylla who had told my fortune, told me I was the fool to seek the Fool (another name for Thoth) and instructed me in lovemaking techniques of the ancients. It had been a pleasant way to complete my journey to Toulon, encapsulated in a gypsy wagon and safe from those pursuing my sacred medallion. Now, like a rabbit popping from a hole, my gypsy saviors were here again.

“What in the tarot are you doing here?” I asked.

“But waiting for you, of course.”

“I sent word ahead to them on an English cutter,” Astiza said.

Ah. Hadn’t these same gypsies sent word ahead to
her
, of the medallion and my coming? Which almost led to my head being blown off by Astiza’s former master, not the easiest of introductions.

“Bonaparte is ahead of you, and word of his latest victories just ahead of him,” Stefan said. “His journey to Paris has become a triumph. Men hope the conqueror of Egypt may be the savior of France. With only a little help from Alessandro Silano, he may achieve everything he desires, and desire is dangerous. You must separate Bonaparte from the book, and safekeep it. The Templar hiding place lasted nearly five centuries. Yours, hopefully, will last five millennia, or more.”

“We have to catch him first.”

“Yes, we must hurry. Great things are about to happen.”

“Stefan, I’m delighted and amazed to see you, but hurrying is the last thing I thought gypsies capable of. We ambled to Toulon about as fast as a grazing cow, if I remember, and your little ponies can’t pull your wagons much faster.”

“True. But the Rom have a knack for borrowing things. We’re going to find a coach and a fast team, my friend, and drive you — a member of the Council of Five Hundred, let us pretend — at breakneck pace to Paris. I shall be a captain of police, say, and André here your driver. Carlo as your footman, the lady as your lady…”

“The first thing we’re going to do back in France is steal a coach and four?”

“If you act as if you deserve it, it doesn’t look like stealing.”

“We’re not even legally in France. And I’m still charged with murdering a prostitute. My enemies could use it against me.”

“Won’t they kill you regardless?”

“Well, yes.”

“Then what is your worry? But come. We’ll ask Sarylla what to do.”

The gypsy fortune-teller who taught me more than my fortune — lord, I fondly remembered the yelps she made — was as beautiful as I remembered, dark and mysterious, rings glittering on her fingers and hoop earrings catching the firelight. I was not entirely glad to bump into a former paramour with Astiza in tow, and the two women bristled silently in that way they have, like wary cats. Yet Astiza sat quietly at my shoulder while the gypsy woman plied the cards of the tarot.

“Fortune speeds you on your way,” Sarylla intoned, as her turn of cards revealed the chariot. “We will have no problem liberating a carriage for our purposes.”

“See?” Stefan said with satisfaction.

I like the tarot. It can tell you anything you want to hear.

Sarylla turned more cards. “But you will meet a woman in hurried circumstances. Your route will become circuitous.”

Another woman? “But will we be successful?”

She turned more cards. I saw the tower, the magician, the fool, and the emperor. “It will be a near-fought thing.”

Another card. The lovers. She looked at us. “You must work together.”

Astiza took my hand and smiled.

And she turned again. Death.

“I do not know who this is for. The magician, the fool, the emperor, or the lover? Your way is perilous.”

“But possible?” Death for Silano, certainly. And perhaps I should assassinate Bonaparte too.

Another card. The wheel of fortune. “You are a gambler, no?”

“When I have to be.”

Another card. The world. “You have no choice.” She looked at us with her great, dark eyes. “You will have strange allies and strange enemies.”

I grimaced. “Everything’s normal then.”

She shook her head, mystified. “Wait to see which is which.” She looked hard at the cards and then at Astiza. “There is danger for your new woman, Ethan Gage. Great danger, and something even deeper than that, I think. Sorrow.”

Here it was, that rivalry. “What do you mean?”

“What the cards say. Nothing more.”

I was disturbed. If Sarylla’s original fortune hadn’t come true, I’d have brushed this off. I am, after all, a Franklin man, a savant. But however I might mock the tarot, there was something eerie about its power. I was frightened for the woman beside me.

“There may be fighting,” I said to Astiza. “You can wait for me on the English ship. It’s not too late to signal them.”

Astiza considered the cards and the gypsy for some time, and then shook her head. “I have my own magic and we’ve come this far,” she said, pulling her cloak around her against the unaccustomed European chill of October, already reaching south. “Our real danger is time. We must hurry.”

Sarylla looked sympathetic and gave her the tarot card for the star. “Keep this. It is for meditation and enlightenment. May faith be with you, lady.”

Astiza looked surprised, and touched. “And you.”