‘There will be no duels!’ Napoleon ordered once more. ‘Enough! Everyone is acting like children! Gage, you have permission to leave my table.’
I stood and bowed. ‘Perhaps that would be best.’ I backed through the door.
‘You are about to see just how serious a scholar I am!’ Silano called after me. And I heard him speaking to Napoleon, ‘That American, you should not trust him. He’s a man who could make all our plans come to naught.’
It was past noon the next day that Ash, Enoch, Astiza, and I were resting by Enoch’s fountain, discussing the dinner and Silano’s purpose. Enoch had armed his servants with cudgels. For no obvious reason, we felt under siege. Why had Silano come all this way? What was Bonaparte’s interest? Did the general desire occult powers as well? Or were we magnifying into a threat what was only idle curiosity?
Our answer came when there was a brief pounding at Enoch’s door and Mustafa went to answer it. He came back not with a visitor, but with a jar. ‘Someone left this.’
The clay-coloured container was fat, two feet high, and heavy enough that I could see the biceps flex in the servant’s arms as he carried it to a low table and put it down. ‘There was no one there and the street was empty.’
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘It’s a jar for oil,’ Enoch said. ‘It’s not the custom to deliver a gift this way.’ He looked wary, but stood to open it.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘What if it’s a bomb?’
‘A bomb?’
‘Or a Trojan horse,’ said Astiza, who knew her Greek legends as well as her Egyptian ones. ‘An enemy leaves this, we carry it inside
…’
‘And out jump midget soldiers?’ asked Ashraf, somewhat amused.
‘No. Snakes.’ She remembered the incident in Alexandria.
Now Enoch hesitated.
Ash stood. ‘Stand back and let me open it.’
‘Use a stick,’ his brother said.
‘I’ll use a sword, and be quick.’
We stood a few steps back. Using the point of a scimitar, Ashraf broke a wax seal on the rim and loosened the lid. No sound came from inside. So, using the tip of his weapon, Ash slowly raised and flipped the covering off. Again, nothing. He leant forward cautiously, probing with his sword… and jumped back. ‘Snake!’ he confirmed.
Damn. I’d had enough of reptiles.
‘But it can’t be,’ the Mameluke said. ‘The jar is full of oil. I can smell it.’ He cautiously came back again, probing. ‘No… wait. The snake is dead.’ His face looked troubled. ‘May the gods have mercy.’
‘What the devil?’
Grimacing, the Mameluke plunged his hand into the jar and lifted. Out came a snakelike fistful of oily hair entangled with the scales of a reptile. As he hoisted his arm, we saw a round object wrapped in the coils of a dead serpent. Oil sluiced off a human head.
I groaned. It was Talma, eyes wide and sightless.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
‘They killed him as a message to me,’ I said.
‘But why would they kill your friend for something you said you didn’t have? Why didn’t they kill you? ’ Ashraf asked.
I was wondering the same thing. Poor Talma’s head had been temporarily dipped back into the jar, his hair like river weed. I didn’t want to guess where the body might be.
‘Because they don’t believe him,’ Astiza reasoned. ‘Only Ethan knows for sure if the medallion still exists and what it might mean. They want to coerce him, not kill him.’
‘This is a damned poor way to do it,’ I said grimly.
‘And who is they?’ Enoch asked.
‘The Bedouin, Achmed bin Sadr.’
‘He’s a tool, not a master.’
‘Then it must be Silano. He warned me to take him seriously. He arrives, and Antoine dies. All this is my fault. I asked Talma to investigate Bin Sadr in Alexandria. Talma was kidnapped, or followed Silano to spy on him. He was caught and wouldn’t talk. What did he even know? And his death is supposed to frighten me.’
Ash clapped my shoulder. ‘Except that he doesn’t know what a warrior you are!’
Actually, I was human enough to have nightmares for a month, but that’s not what one confesses at times like this. Besides, if there was one thing I was certain of, Silano would never, ever get my medallion.
‘It’s my fault,’ Astiza said. ‘You said he went to Alexandria to investigate me.’
‘That was his idea, not mine or yours. Don’t blame yourself.’
‘Why didn’t he just ask me his questions directly?’
Because you never fully answer them, I thought. Because you enjoy being an enigma. But I said nothing. We sat in gloomy silence for a while, wrestling with self-recrimination. Sometimes the more innocent we are, the more we blame ourselves.
‘Your friend will not be the last to perish if Silano gets his way,’ Enoch finally said heavily.
It sounded as if the old man knew more than he’d let on. ‘What do you mean?’
‘There is more at stake here than you may realise, or have been told. The more I study, the more I fear, and the more I am convinced.’
‘Of what?’
‘Your medallion may be some kind of clue or key to open a sacred door to a long-hidden vault. The pendant has been sought and fought over for millennia, and then, its purpose undeciphered, probably lay forgotten on Malta until Cagliostro learnt of it in his studies here and sought it out. It curses the unworthy and drives them mad. It taunts the brilliant. It has become a riddle. It is a key with no lock, a map to no destination. None remember what it relates to. It has baffled even me.’
‘So perhaps it is useless,’ I said with a mixture of hope and regret.
‘Or, its time has at last come. Silano wouldn’t have followed you here after his own studies if he didn’t have real expectation.’
‘To find treasure?’
‘If only it were that. There is treasure, and then there is power. I don’t know which truly motivates this mysterious European and his so-called Egyptian Rite, but were Silano to ever find what so many have sought, he would have not only immortal life and wealth unimaginable, but access to secrets that could undo the very warp and weave of the world. The right man might build with them. The wrong…’
‘ What secrets? What the devil are all you people really after?’
Enoch sighed, considering what to say. Finally he spoke. ‘The Book of Thoth.’
‘The book of what?’
‘Thoth is the Egyptian god of wisdom and knowledge,’ Astiza said. ‘Your English word ‘thought’ comes from his name. He is the thrice great, the one the Greeks called Hermes. When Egypt began, Thoth was there.’
‘The origins of our nation are mysterious,’ Enoch said. ‘No history exists. But Egypt came before all. Instead of legends of a gradual awakening, our civilisation seems to have sprung from the sand wholly formed. There is no precedent, and then suddenly kingdoms emerge with all the necessary arts. Where did knowledge come from? We attribute this sudden birth to the wisdom of Thoth.’
‘It was he who invented writing, drawing, surveying, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine,’ Astiza explained. ‘From whence he came we don’t know, but he started all that has come since. To us he is like Prometheus, who brought fire, or Adam and Eve, who ate from the apple of knowledge. Yes, your Bible story
