The Rosetta Key (6 page)

So I learned what I could in their hookah culture. It was a small town, and word inevitably spread of the infidel in Arab clothes who worked at the forge of a Christian, but there were any number of people with foggy pasts seeking any number of things. I was just one more, who did what life chiefly consists of: waiting.

T
o pass the winter, I did my best to tease Miriam. I’d found a piece of amber in the market, an insect preserved inside. It was being sold as a slick and shiny good-luck charm, but I saw it as an artifact of science. I stole up behind her once when she was cleaning a chicken, rubbed the amber briskly on my robes, and then lifted my hand above the downy feathers. Some floated up to my down-turned palm.

She whirled. “How are you doing that?”

“I bring mysterious powers from France and America,” I intoned.

She crossed herself. “It’s evil to bring magic into this house.”

“It’s not magic, it’s an electrical trick I learned from my mentor Franklin.” I turned my palm so she could see the amber I held. “Even the ancient Greeks did this. If you rub amber, it will attract things. We call the magic electricity. I am an electrician.”

“What a foolish idea,” she said uncertainly.

“Here, try it.” I took her hand, despite her hesitation, and put the amber in her fingers, enjoying the excuse to touch her. Her fingers were strong, red from work. Then I rubbed it on her sleeve and held it over the feathers. Sure enough, a few levitated to stick.

“Now you’re an electrician, too.”

She sniffed and gave it back to me. “How do you find time for useless games?”

“But perhaps they’re not useless.”

“If you’re so clever, use your amber to pluck the next chicken!”

I laughed, and ran the amber past her cheek, pulling with it strands of her lovely hair. “It can serve as a comb, perhaps.” I had created a blond veil, her eyes suspicious above it.

“You are an impudent man.”

“Simply a curious one.”

“Curious about what?” She blushed when she said it.

“Ah. Now you’re beginning to understand me.” I winked.

But she wouldn’t allow things to go any further. I’d hoped to while away spare time by finding a card game or two, but I was in the worst city in the world for that. Jerusalem had fewer amusements than a Quaker picnic. Nor did there turn out to be much sexual temptation in a town where women were wrapped as tightly as a toddler in a Maine blizzard: my celibacy in Jaffa was involuntarily extended. Oh, women would give me a fetching eye now and again — I’ve got a bit of dash — but their allure was poisoned by lurid stories one heard in the coffeehouses of genital mutilation by angry fathers or brothers. It does give one pause.

In time I was so frustrated and bored that I took inspiration from my amber play and decided to tinker with electricity as Franklin had taught me. What had seemed a clever Parisian hobby to charm salons with an electric kiss — I could make a spark pass between a couple’s lips, once I’d given a woman a charge with my machines — had taken on more seriousness after my sojourn in Egypt. Was it possible ancient people had turned such mysteries into powerful magic? Was that the secret of their civilizations? Science was also a way to give myself status during my winter of discontent in Jerusalem. Electricity was novel here.

With Jericho’s reluctant tolerance, I built a frictional hand crank, with a glass disk to make a generator. When I rotated it against pads connected to a wire, the static charge was passed to glass jugs I lined with lead: my makeshift Leyden jars. I used strands of copper to wire these spark batteries in sequence and sent enough electricity to a chain to make customers jump if they touched it, numbing their limbs for hours. Students of human nature won’t be surprised that men lined up to be jolted, shaking their tingling extremities in awe. I gained even more of a reputation as a sorcerer when I electrified my own arms and used my fingers to attract flakes of brass. I’d become a Count Silano, I realized, a conjurer. Men began to whisper about my powers, and I admit I enjoyed the notoriety. For Christmas I evacuated the air from a glass globe, spun it with my crank, and laid my palm on it. The ensuing purple glow lit the shed and entranced neighborhood children, though two old women fainted, a rabbi stormed from the room, and a Catholic priest held up a cross in my direction.

“It’s just a parlor trick,” I reassured them. “We did it all the time in France.”

“And what are the French but infidels and atheists?” the priest rejoined. “No good will come from electricity.”

“On the contrary, learned doctors in France and Germany believe electric shocks may be able to cure illness or madness.” But since everyone knows physicians kill more than they cure, Jericho’s neighbors were hardly impressed by this promise.

Miriam also remained dubious. “It seems like a lot of trouble just to sting someone.”

“But why does it sting? That’s what Ben Franklin wanted to understand.”

“It comes from your cranking, does it not?”

“But why? If you churn milk or hoist a well bucket, do you get electricity? No, there is something special here, which Franklin thought might be the force that animates the universe. Perhaps electricity animates our souls.”

“That is blasphemous!”

“Electricity is in our bodies. Electricians have tried to animate dead criminals with electricity.”

“Ugh!”

“And their muscles actually moved, though their spirits had departed. Is electricity what gives us life? What if we could harness that force the way we harness fire, or the muscles of a horse? What if the ancient Egyptians did? The person who knew how might have unimaginable power.”

“And is that what you seek, Ethan Gage? Unimaginable power?”

“When you’ve seen the pyramids, you wonder if men didn’t have such power in the past. Why can’t we relearn it today?”

“Perhaps because it caused more harm than good.”

Meanwhile, Jerusalem worked its own spell. I don’t know if human history can soak into soil like winter rain, but the places I visited had a palpable, haunting sense of time. Every wall held a memory, every lane a story. Here Jesus fell, there Solomon welcomed Sheba, into this square the Crusaders charged, and across that wall Saladin took the city back. Most extraordinary was the southeastern corner of the city, consisting of a vast artificial plateau built atop the mount where Abraham offered to sacrifice Isaac: the Temple Mount. Built by Herod the Great, it’s a paved platform a quarter mile long and three hundred yards wide that covers, I was told, thirty-five acres. To hold a mere temple? Why did it have to be so big? Was it covering something —
hiding
something — more critical? I was reminded of our endless speculation about the true purpose of the pyramids.

Solomon’s Temple was on this mount until first the Babylonians and then the Romans destroyed it. And then the Muslims built their golden mosque on the same spot. On the south end was another mosque, El-Aqsa, its form distorted by Crusader additions. Each faith had tried to leave its stamp, but the overall result was a serene emptiness, elevated above the commercial city like heaven itself. Children played and sheep grazed. I’d stride up sometimes through the Chain Gate and stroll its perimeter, viewing the surrounding hills with my little spyglass. The Muslims left me alone, whispering that I was a genie who tapped dark powers.

Despite my reputation, or perhaps because of it, I’d occasionally be allowed to enter the blue-tiled Dome of the Rock itself, taking off my boots before stepping on its red and green carpet. Perhaps they hoped I’d convert to Islam. The dome was held up by four massive piers and twelve columns, its interior decorated with mosaics and Islamic script. Beneath it was the sacred rock, Kubbet es-Sakhra, root stone of the world, where Abraham had offered to sacrifice his son, and where Muhammad had ascended for a tour of heaven. There was a well on one side of the rock, and reportedly a small cave underneath it. Was anything hidden
there
? If this was where Solomon’s Temple once stood, wouldn’t any Hebrew treasures have been secreted in the same place? But none were allowed to descend to the cave, and when I lingered too long, a Muslim caretaker would shoo me away.

So I speculated, and labored with Jericho to beat out horseshoes, sickles, fire tongs, hinges, and all the sundry hardware of everyday life. I had ample opportunity to interrogate my host.

“Are there any underground places in this city where something valuable might be hidden for a long time?”

Jericho barked a laugh. “Underground places in Jerusalem? Every cellar leads to a maze of abandoned tunnels and forgotten streets. Don’t forget that this city has been sacked by half the world’s nations, including your own Crusaders. So many throats have been cut that the groundwater should be blood. It is ruin built atop ruin atop ruin, not to mention a honeycomb of caves and quarries. Underground? There may be more Jerusalem down there than up here!”

“This thing I’m looking for was brought by the ancient Israelites.”

He groaned. “Don’t tell me you’re looking for the Ark of the Covenant! That’s a lunatic’s myth. It may have been in Solomon’s Temple once, but there’s been no mention of it since Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and carried the Jews into exile in 586 b.c.”

“No, no, I don’t mean
that.
” But I did mean it, or at least hope that the ark could lead me to the Book, or that they were one and the same.

“Ark” means “box,” and the Ark of the Covenant was supposedly the gold-plated acacia wood box where the Hebrews who escaped from Egypt kept the Ten Commandments. By reputation it had mysterious powers and was a help in defeating their enemies. Naturally I wondered if the Book of Thoth was in the container as well, since Astiza believed Moses had taken it. But I said none of this, yet.

“Good. It would take you all of eternity to dig up Jerusalem, and I suspect in the end you’d have no more than when you started. Crawl down holes if you will, but all you’ll find are pot shards and rat bones.”

M
iriam was a quiet woman, but gradually I realized that this quiet was a veil over a keen intelligence, with intense curiosity about the past. As different as she and Astiza were in personality, in intellect they were twins. In the early days of my stay she cooked and served our meals but ate apart. It wasn’t until I’d worked awhile with Jericho at his forge, winning some small measure of trust, that I was able to cajole the two of them into letting her join us at the table. We weren’t Muslims bound to segregate the sexes, after all, and their reluctance was curious. At first she spoke only when spoken to — she was again the opposite of Astiza in that way — and seemed to have little in need of saying. As I’d suspected, she was truly lovely — a beauty that always put me in mind of fruit and cream — but only with reluctance did she shed her scarf at table. When she did, her hair was a golden waterfall, as light as Astiza’s was dark, her neck high, her cheeks lovely. I continued to pride myself on my chastity (since trying to find an adventuress in Jerusalem was like trying to find a virgin in the card cozies of Paris, I might as well take satisfaction in my enforced virtue) but I was astonished that this beauty hadn’t already been swept off by some persistent swain. At night I could hear the sounds of her splashing as she carefully bathed while standing in a wooden tub, and I couldn’t help but wonder about her breasts and belly, the roundness of her rump, and the slim strong legs that my all-too-frustrated brain imagined, runnels of soapy water cascading down the perfect topography of her thighs and calves and ankles. And then I’d groan, try to think about electricity, and finally resort to my fist.

At supper Miriam enjoyed our talk, her eyes quick and lively. Brother and sister were people who’d seen some of the world, and so they enjoyed my own stories of life in Paris, growing up in America, my early fur-trading forays on the Great Lakes, and my journeys down the Mississippi to New Orleans and to the Caribbean Sugar Isles. They were curious about Egypt as well. I didn’t tell them about the secrets of the Great Pyramid, but I described the Nile, the great land and sea battles of the year before, and the Temple of Dendara that I’d visited far to the south. Jericho told me more of Palestine, of Galilee where Jesus walked, and of the Christian sites I might visit on the Mount of Olives. After some hesitation, Miriam began to make shy suggestions as well, hinting that she knew a great deal more about historic Jerusalem than I would have guessed — more, in fact, than her brother. Not only could she read — rare enough for a woman in Muslim lands — but she did read, avidly, and spent much of her quiet days, shielded from men and free from children, in study of books she bought in the market or borrowed from the nunneries.

“What are you reading?” I’d ask her.

“The past.”

Jerusalem was a place pregnant with the past. I roamed the hills outside the walls in chilly winter, when the light cast long shadows across anonymous ruins. Once the bitter wind brought light snow, the white coverlet followed by pale blue skies, and a sun as heatless as a kite. It lit the landscape into sugar.

Meanwhile work on the rifle proceeded, and I could tell Jericho was enjoying the craftsmanship required. When the barrel was completely forged we drilled it out to the correct diameter, I turned the hand crank while he fed the clamped barrel toward me. It’s hard work. When that was done he stretched a line through its bore, drawing it tight with a bent bow, and then sighted down its middle for shadows and ridges that would signal imperfections. Adept heating and hammering made the tube even straighter.

The grooved rifling that would spin the bullet was painstaking. There were seven grooves, each cut by a bit rotated through the barrel. Since it could not cut deeply, the bit had to be hand-twisted through the gun two hundred times per groove.

That was only the beginning. There was polishing, the bluing of the metal, and then the myriad metal parts for the flintlock, trigger, patch box, ramrod, and so on. My hands helped, but the skill was pure Jericho, his meaty paws able to produce results worthy of a maiden with a needle. He was happiest when silently working.