‘How can you mail such rubbish back to France?’ I said. ‘Half the population has fled, the city is pockmarked with cannonball holes, and its economy has collapsed.’
‘I’m talking about the spirit, not the body. Their hearts are uplifted.’
‘Who says so?’
‘Bonaparte. Our benefactor, and our only source of orders to get back home.’
It was on my third night in Alexandria that I realised I hadn’t left my pursuers behind at the Toulon coach.
It had been hard enough to get to sleep. Word was starting to filter back of atrocities committed by the Bedouin on any soldier caught alone from his unit. These desert tribesmen roamed the Arabian and Libyan Deserts like pirates roam the sea, preying indiscriminately on merchants, pilgrims, and army stragglers. Mounted on camels and able to retreat back into the waste, they were beyond the reach of our army. They would kill or capture the unwary. Men were raped, burnt, castrated, or staked out to die in the desert. I’ve always been cursed with a vivid imagination for such things and I could envision all too clearly how throats might be cut while troops slept. Scorpions were slipped into boots and backpacks. Snakes were concealed between jars of food. Carcasses were thrown into tempting wells. Supply was a tangle, the scientists were restless and grumpy, and Astiza remained as reserved as a nun in a barracks. Moving in the heat was like dragging a heavy sled. What madness had I enlisted in? I’d made no progress in deciphering what the medallion might mean, seeing nothing like it in Alexandria. So I brooded, troubled and dissatisfied, until I was finally exhausted enough to drift off.
I came awake with a jolt. Someone or something had landed on top of me! I was groping for a weapon when I recognised the scent of cloves and jasmine. Astiza? Had she changed her mind? She was straddling me, a silken thigh locked on either side of my chest, and even in my sleepy stupor my first thought was, Ah, this is more like it. The warm squeeze of her legs began to awaken all parts of me, and her tumble of hair and enchanting torso were delectably silhouetted in the dark. Then the moon moved from a cloud and enough light sifted in our grilled window to see that her arms were high over her head, holding something bright and sharp.
It was my tomahawk.
She swung.
I twisted in terror but she had me pinned. The blade whistled by my ear and there was a sharp thunk as it bit the wooden floor, joined by a hiss. Something warm and alive slapped the top of my head. She freed the tomahawk and chopped again, and again, the blade thunking next to my ear. I stayed paralysed as something leathery kept writhing against my crown. Finally it was still.
‘Serpent,’ she whispered. She glanced at the window. ‘Bedouin.’
She climbed off and I shakily stood. Some kind of viper had been chopped into several portions, I saw, its blood spattered on my pillow. It was as thick as a child’s arm, fangs jutting from its mouth. ‘Someone put this here?’
‘Dropped through the window. I heard the villain scuttling like a roach, too cowardly to face us. You should give me a gun so I can properly protect you.’
‘Protect me from what?’
‘You know nothing, American. Why is Achmed bin Sadr asking about you?’
‘Bin Sadr!’ He was the one who delivered severed hands and ears, and whose voice had sounded like the lantern bearer in Paris, as nonsensical as that seemed. ‘I didn’t know he was.’
‘Every person in Alexandria knows you have made him your enemy. He’s not an enemy you want to have. He roams the world, has a gang of assassins, and is a follower of Apophis.’
‘Who the devil is Apophis?’
‘The serpent god of the underworld who each night must be defeated by Ra, the sun god, before dawn can return. He has legions of minions, like the demon god Ras al-Ghul.’
By Washington’s dentures, here was more pagan nonsense. Had I acquired a lunatic? ‘Sounds like a lot of trouble for your sun god,’ I quipped shakily. ‘Why doesn’t he just chop him up like you did and be done with it?’
‘Because while Apophis can be defeated, he can never be destroyed. This is how the world works. All things are eternally dual, water and land, earth and sky, good and evil, life and death.’
I kicked aside the serpent. ‘So this is the work of some kind of snake cult?’
She shook her head. ‘How could you get in so much trouble so quickly?’
‘But I’ve done nothing to Bin Sadr. He’s our ally!’
‘He’s no one’s ally but his own. You have something he wants.’
I looked at the chunks of reptile. ‘What?’ But of course I knew, feeling the medallion’s weight on its chain. Bin Sadr was the lantern bearer with his snake-headed staff who somehow had a dual identity as a desert pirate. He must have been working for Count Silano the night I’d won the medallion. How had he got from Paris to Alexandria? Why was he some kind of henchman for Napoleon? Why did he care about the medallion? Wasn’t he on our side? I was half tempted to give the thing to the next assailant who came along and be done with it. But what annoyed me is that no one ever asked politely. They shoved pistols in my face, stole boots, and threw snakes at my bed.
‘Let me sleep in your corner, away from the window,’ I asked my protectress. ‘I’m going to load my rifle.’
To my surprise she assented. But instead of lying with me, she squatted at the brazier, fanning its coals and sifting some leaves into it. A pungent smoke arose. She was making a small human figure out of wax, I saw. I watched her push a sliver of wood into the figure’s cheek. I had seen the same thing in the Sugar Isles. Had the magic originated in Egypt? She began to make curious marks on a sheet of papyrus.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Go to sleep. I’m casting a spell.’
Since I was anxious to get out of Alexandria before another serpent landed on my head, I was more than happy when the scientists gave me an early opportunity to move on toward Cairo without having to cross the hot delta of land. Monge and Berthollet were going to make the journey by boat. The savants would sail east to the mouth of the Nile and then ascend the river to the capital.
‘Come along, Gage,’ Monge offered. ‘Better to ride than walk. Bring the scribe Talma, too. Your girl can help cook for all of us.’
We would use a chebek, a shallow-draft sailing craft named Le Cerf, armed with four eight-pounders and skippered by Captain Jacques Perree of the French navy. It would be the flagship of a little flotilla of gunboats and supply craft that would follow the army upriver.
By first light we were underway, and by midday we were skirting Abukir Bay, a day’s march east of Alexandria. There the French fleet had anchored in line of battle, in defence against any reappearance of Nelson’s ships. It was an awesome sight, a dozen ships of the line and four frigates moored in an unbroken wall, five hundred guns pointed at the sea. We could hear the bosun whistles and cries of the sailors float over the water as we passed. Then on we went toward the great river, sailing into the brown plume that curled into the Mediterranean and bouncing over the standing waves at the river bar.
As the day’s heat rose I learnt more about the genesis of the expedition. Egypt, Berthollet informed me, had been the object of French fascination for decades. Sealed from the outside world by the Arab conquest of A.D. 640, its ancient glories were unseen by most Europeans, its fabled pyramids known more by fantastic story than fact. A nation the size of France was largely unknown.
‘No country in the world has history as deep as Egypt,’ the chemist told me. ‘When the Greek historian Herodotus came to record its glories, the pyramids were already older to him than Jesus is to us. The Egyptians themselves built a great empire, and then a dozen conquerors made their mark here: Greeks, Romans, Assyrians, Libyans, Nubians, Persians. This country’s beginning is so old no one remembers it. No one can read hieroglyphics, so we don’t know what any of the inscriptions say. Today’s Egyptians say the ruins were built by giants or wizards.’
So Egypt slumbered, he related, until in recent years the handful of French merchants in Alexandria and Cairo had come under harassment from the arrogant Mamelukes. The Ottoman overseers in Constantinople who had governed Egypt since 1517 had shown little desire to intervene. Nor did France wish to offend the Ottomans, its useful ally against Russia. So the situation simmered until Bonaparte, with his youthful dreams of Oriental glory, encountered Talleyrand, with his grasp of global geopolitics. Between them the pair had seized upon the scheme of
