garlic, mother’s milk, hog’s tooth, tortoise brain, and snake venom.
‘Talma, all you’re getting is a case of the runs,’ I lectured.
‘It’s purging my system. My druggist told me of Egyptian priests a thousand years old. He looks venerable himself.’
‘I asked and he’s forty. The heat and his poisons have wrinkled him like a raisin.’
‘I’m sure he was joking. He told me that when the cramps go away, I’ll have the vigour of a sixteen-year- old.’
‘And the sense, apparently.’
Talma was newly flush with money. Though a civilian, his role as journalist made him essentially an adjunct of the army, and he’d written an account of our assault so flattering that I scarcely recognised it. Bonaparte’s chief of staff, Berthier, had accordingly quietly slipped him some extra pay as reward. But I saw little in Alexandria’s markets worth buying. The souk was hot, shadowy, swarming with flies, and poorly stocked after our capture of the city. Even so, through shrewd bargaining, the wily merchants fleeced our bored soldiers more thoroughly than their own city had been pillaged. They learnt clumsy French with astonishing rapidity. ‘Come, look my stall, monsieur! Here is what you want! Not you want? Then I know you need!’
Astiza was a happy exception to our disillusion. Picked out of the rubble and given a chance to clean herself, she wrought a wondrous transformation. Neither as fair as the fierce Mamelukes nor as dark as common Egyptians, her features, bearing, and complexion were simply Mediterranean: skin of sun-polished olive, hair jet but streaked with strands of copper, lavish in its thickness, eyes almond shaped and liquid, her gaze demure, her hands and ankles fine, her breasts high, waist thin, hips transfixing. An enchantress, in other words, a Cleopatra, and I relished my luck until she made clear she viewed her rescue as dubious, and me with distrust.
‘You’re a plague of barbarians,’ she announced. ‘You’re the kind of men who belong nowhere, and thus go everywhere, disrupting the lives of sensible people.’
‘We’re here to help you.’
‘Did I ask for your help, at the point of a gun? Did Egypt ask to be invaded, to be investigated, to be saved?’
‘It’s oppressed,’ I argued. ‘It invited rescue by being backward.’
‘Backward to whom? My people were in palaces when yours were in huts. What about your own home?’
‘I have no home, really.’
‘No parents?’
‘Deceased.’
‘No wife?’
‘Unattached.’ I grinned, fetchingly.
‘I shouldn’t wonder. No country?’
‘I’ve always liked travel and had a chance to visit France when I was still a youth. I finished growing up there with a famous man named Benjamin Franklin. I like America, my native land, but I have wanderlust. Besides, wives want to nest.’
She looked at me with pity. ‘It’s not natural, how you spend your life.’
‘It is if you like adventure.’ I decided to change the subject. ‘What’s that interesting necklace you wear?’
‘An eye of Horus, homeless one.’
‘Eye of who?’
‘Horus is the hawk god who lost his eye battling the evil Seth.’ Now I remembered! Something to do with resurrection, brother-and-sister sex, and this Horus as the incestuous result. Scandalous stuff. ‘As Egypt battles your Napoleon, so did Horus battle darkness. The amulet is good luck.’
I smiled. ‘Does that mean it’s lucky you now belong to me?’
‘Or lucky that I live long enough to see you all go away.’
She cooked us dishes I couldn’t name – lamb with chickpeas and lentils, it tasted like – serving it with such grim duty that I was tempted to adopt one of the stray dogs to test each meal for poison. Yet the food was surprisingly good and she refused to take any pay. ‘If I’m caught with your coins I’ll be beheaded, once the Mamelukes kill you all.’
Nor did her services extend into the evenings, even though coastal Egyptian nights can be as cool as the days are hot.
‘In New England we bundle together to ward off the chill,’ I informed her that first evening. ‘You’re welcome to come closer if you’d like.’
‘If not for the invasion of our house by all your officers, we wouldn’t even be in the same room.’
‘Because of the teachings of the Prophet?’
‘My teachings come from an Egyptian goddess, not the Mameluke women-haters who rule my country. And you’re not my husband, you’re my captor. Besides, all of you smell of pig.’
I sniffed, somewhat discouraged. ‘So you’re not Muslim?’
‘No.’
‘Nor Jewish or Coptic Christian or Greek Catholic?’
‘No.’
‘And who is this goddess?’
‘One you’ve never heard of.’
‘Tell me. I’m here to learn.’
‘Then understand what a blind man could see. Egyptians have lived on this land for ten thousand years, not asking, or needing, anything new. We’ve had a dozen conquerors, and not one has brought us as much contentment as we originally had. Hundreds of generations of restless men like you have only made things worse, not better.’ She’d say little more, since she considered me too ignorant to comprehend her faith and too kind to beat anything out of her. Instead she complied with my orders while carrying herself like a duchess. ‘Egypt is the only ancient land in which women had rights equal to men,’ she claimed, meanwhile remaining impervious to wit and charm.
It baffled me, frankly.
Bonaparte was having equal trouble winning over the population. He issued a proclamation of some length. I can give a sense of its tone, and his political instincts, by quoting its start:
In the name of God, the clement and the merciful. There is no divinity save Allah, He has no son and shares His power with no one.
In the name of the French Republic, founded on liberty and equality, the commander-in-chief Bonaparte lets it be known that the beys who govern Egypt have insulted the French nation and oppressed French merchants long enough: the hour of their punishment has come.
For too many years the Mameluke gang of slaves, purchased in Georgia and the Caucasus, has tyrannised the most beautiful region of the world. But Almighty God, who rules the Universe, has decreed that their reign shall come to an end.
People of Egypt, you will be told that I have come to destroy your religion. Do not believe it! Answer back to those imposters that I have come to restore to you your rights and to punish the usurpers; that I worship God more than the Mamelukes do and that I respect His Prophet Muhammad and the admirable Koran…
‘Quite a religious beginning,’ I remarked as Dolomieu read this with mocking drama.
‘Especially for a man who believes completely in the utility of religion and not at all about the reality of God,’ the geologist replied. ‘If the Egyptians swallow this load of stable dung, they deserve to be conquered.’
A later clause in the proclamation got more to the point:
All villages that take up arms against the army will be burnt to the ground.
Napoleon’s religious entreaties soon came to naught. Word reached Alexandria that the mullahs of Cairo had declared all of us to be infidels. So much for revolutionary liberalism and the unity of religion! A contract for three hundred horses and five hundred camels that had been negotiated with local sheikhs immediately evaporated, and sniping and harassment increased. The seduction of Egypt was going to prove more difficult than Bonaparte had hoped. Most of his cavalry would march the early stages of his advance on Cairo carrying their saddles on their heads, and he would learn much in this campaign about the importance of logistics and supply.
Meanwhile, the people of Alexandria were disarmed and ordered to wear the tricolour cockade. The few who complied looked ridiculous. Talma, however, wrote that the population was joyful at their liberation from their Mameluke masters.
