or two to make some progress.’
‘What I am supposed to do in the meantime?’
‘Start asking questions of your own savants. Why would the constellation Draco be on this piece? A solution will come faster if we all work together.’
‘Ethan, it’s too big a risk,’ Talma said, looking at Astiza with distrust.
Indeed, who was this woman who’d been called priestess? Yet my heart told me Talma’s fears were exaggerated, that I’d been lonely in this quest and that now, unbidden, I had some allies to help unravel the mystery. The goddess’s will indeed. ‘No, she’s right,’ I said. ‘We need help or we’re not going to make any progress. But if Enoch runs with my medallion, he’ll have the entire French army after him.’
‘Run? He has invited us to stay in his house with him.’
My bed chamber was the finest I’d enjoyed in years. It was cool and shadowy, the bed high off the floor and surrounded by gauze curtains. The tile was layered with carpets, and the washbasin and ewer were silver and brass. What a contrast to the grime and heat of campaigning! Yet I felt myself being seduced into a story I didn’t understand, and found myself going back over events. Wasn’t it fortuitous that I’d met a Greek-Egyptian woman who spoke English? That the brother of this strange Enoch had charged straight at me after breaking into the middle of the square at the Battle of the Pyramids? That Bonaparte had not just permitted, but approved, this addition to my retinue? It was almost as if the medallion was working magic as a strange attractant, drawing people in.
Certainly it was time to put more questions to my supposed servant. After we’d bathed and rested I found Astiza in the main courtyard, now shadowy and cool. She was sitting by the fountain in expectation of my interrogation. Washed, changed, and combed, her hair shone like obsidian. Her breasts were cupped in folds of linen, their nubs distractingly draped, and her feet were slim and sandalled, her ankles crossed demurely. She wore bracelets, anklets, and an ankh at her throat, and was so breathtaking it was hard to think clearly. Nonetheless, I must.
‘Why did he call you priestess?’ I said without preamble, sitting next to her.
‘Surely you didn’t think my interests are limited to cooking and washing for you,’ she said quietly.
‘I knew you were more than a serving girl. But priestess of what?’
Her eyes were wide, her gaze solemn. ‘Of faith that has run through every religion for ten thousand years: that there are worlds beyond the ones we see, Ethan, and mysteries beyond what we think we understand. Isis is a gate to those worlds.’
‘You’re a bloody pagan.’
‘And what is a pagan? If you look at the origin of the word, it means country dweller, a person of nature who lives to the rhythm of seasons and the sun. If that is paganism, then I am a fervent believer.’
‘And a believer in what else, exactly?’
‘That lives have purpose, that some knowledge is best left guarded, and some power sheathed and unused. Or, if released, that it be used for good.’
‘Did I lead you to this house or did you lead me?’
She smiled gently. ‘Do you think we met by accident?’
I snorted. ‘My recollection is by cannon fire.’
‘You took the shortest route to the harbour of Alexandria. We were told to watch for a civilian in a green coat coming that way, possibly accompanying Bonaparte.’
‘We?’
‘My master and I. The one you killed.’
‘And your house just happened to be on our route?’
‘No, but a house of a Mameluke who’d fled was. My master and I commandeered it and our acolytes brought us guns.’
‘You almost killed Napoleon!’
‘Not really. The Guardian was aiming at you, not him.’
‘What!’
‘My priesthood thought it best to simply kill you before you learnt too much. But the gods apparently had other plans. The Guardian hit almost everyone but you. Then the room exploded and when I came to, there you were. I knew then that you had purpose, however blind you might be.’
‘What purpose?’
‘I agree it’s hard to imagine. But you are supposed to help, somehow, guard what should be guarded or use what should be used.’
‘Guard what? Use what?’
She shook her head. ‘We don’t know.’
By Franklin’s lightning, this was the damnedest thing I’d ever heard. I was supposed to believe my captive had found me instead of the other way around? ‘What do you mean, the Guardian?’
‘Simply one who keeps the old ways that made this land the world’s richest and most beautiful, five thousand years ago. We too had heard rumours of the necklace – Cagliostro couldn’t keep silent in his excitement at finding it – and of unscrupulous men on their way to dig and rob. But you! So ignorant! Why would Isis put it in your hands? Yet first they lead you to me. Then us to Ashraf, and from Ashraf to Enoch. Secrets that have slumbered for millennia are being awakened by the march of the French. The pyramids tremble. The gods are restless, and directing our hand.’
I didn’t know if she was daft as a lunatic or smart as a seer. ‘Toward what?’
‘I don’t know. All of us are half-blind, seeing some things but missing others. These French savants you boast of, they are wise men, are they not? Magi?’
‘Magi?’
‘Or as we in Egypt called them, magicians.’
‘I think men of science would draw a distinction between themselves and magicians, Astiza.’
‘In ancient Egypt, no such distinction existed. The wise knew magic, and performed many spells. Now, you and I must be a bridge between your savants and men like Enoch, and solve this puzzle before unscrupulous men do. We’re in a race with the cult of the snake, the serpent god Apophis, and its Egyptian Rite. They want to learn the secret first and use it for their own dark designs.’
‘What designs?’
‘We don’t know, because none of us are entirely sure what it is we seek.’ She hesitated. ‘There are legends of great treasures and, more importantly, great powers, the kind of power that shakes empires. What, exactly, it is too early to say. Let Enoch study some more. Just be aware that many men have heard these stories throughout history and have wondered at the truth behind them.’
‘You mean Napoleon?’
‘I suspect that he understands least of all, but hopes someone will find it so he can seize it for himself. Why, he isn’t sure, but he’s heard the legends of Alexander. All of us are in a fog of myth and legend, except perhaps Bin Sadr – and whoever Bin Sadr’s true master is.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I began with one of the expedition’s astronomers, Nicholas-Antoine Nouet. While most of the French had cursed the desert for its enervating heat and scuttling vermin, Nouet had been delighted, saying the dry air made it unusually easy to chart the heavens. ‘It’s an astronomer’s paradise, Gage! A country without clouds!’ I found him crouched at the new institute, coat off and sleeves rolled up, sorting through a stack of calibrated rods used to measure the position of the stars against the horizon.
‘Nouet,’ I addressed, ‘is the sky constant?’
He looked up with irritation since I’d broken his chain of thought. ‘Constant?’
‘I mean, do the stars move?’
‘Well.’ He straightened, looking outside to the shaded garden that the scientists had expropriated. ‘The earth rotates, which is why the stars seem to rise and set like the sun. They make a wheel around our northern axis, the
