‘It was Arabs, not French, who did this.’
‘It was France, not Egypt, which upset the order of things.’
There was no answer to that, and no denying that I’d become a part of it. We choose for the most expedient of reasons, and upend the world.
I took a laboured breath. ‘I have to find Astiza. Help me, Ash. Not as prisoner, not as master and slave, not as employee. As a friend. As a fellow warrior. Astiza has the medallion. They’ll kill her for it as brutally as they killed Talma, and I don’t trust asking the army for help. Napoleon wants the secret too. He’ll take the medallion for himself.’
‘And be cursed like everyone who touches it.’
‘Or discover the power to enslave the world.’
Ashraf’s reply was silence, letting me realise what I’d just blurted about the general I’d been following. Was Bonaparte a Republican saviour? Or a potential tyrant? I’d seen hints of both in his character. How did one tell the difference between the two? Both required charm. Both required ambition. And maybe a feather on the scales of Thoth would tip a leader’s heart one way or the other. But of course it didn’t matter, did it? I had to decide for myself what I believed. Now Enoch had given me an anchor: believe in her.
‘My brother gave you help and look where it got him,’ Ashraf said bitterly. ‘You are no friend. I was wrong to have led you into Cairo. I should have died at Imbaba.’
I was desperate. ‘Then if you won’t help as a friend, I order you to help me as my captive and servant. I paid you!’
‘You dare lay claim to me after this?’ He took out a purse and hurled it at me. Coins exploded, rolling away on the stone floor. ‘I spit on your money! Go! Find your woman yourself! I must prepare the funeral of my brother!’
So I was alone. At least I had the integrity to leave his money where it had scattered, despite knowing how few coins I had of my own. I took what I had cached in an empty coffin: my longrifle and my Algonquin tomahawk. Then I stepped again over Mustafa’s body and went back into Cairo’s streets.
I wouldn’t be coming back.
The house of Yusuf al-Beni, where Astiza had been secreted in a harem, was more imposing than Enoch’s, a turreted fortress that shadowed its narrow street with brooding overhangs. Its windows were high on its face, where sun shone and swallows glided, but its door was shadowed by a heavy arch as thick as the entrance to a medieval castle. I stood before it in disguise. I’d wrapped my weapons in a cheap, hastily purchased carpet and dressed myself in Egyptian clothes in case the French might be looking to return me to Jomard at the pyramid. The loose-fitting riding trousers and galabiyya were infinitely lighter, more anonymous, and more sensible than European garb, and the head scarf provided welcome shelter from the sun.
Was I once more too late?
I pounded on Yusuf’s door and a doorman the size of Mustafa confronted me. Shaved, huge, and as pale as Enoch’s servant had been dark, he filled the entry like a bale of Egyptian cotton. Did every rich house have a human troll?
‘What do you want, rug merchant?’ I could understand the Arabic by now.
‘I’m no merchant. I need to see your master,’ I replied in French.
‘You’re a Frank?’ he asked in the same tongue.
‘American.’
He grunted. ‘Not here.’ He began to close the door.
I tried to bluff. ‘The sultan Bonaparte is looking for him.’ Now cotton bale paused. It was enough to make me believe Yusuf was somewhere in the house. ‘The general has business with the woman who is a guest here, the lady called Astiza.’
‘The general wants a slave?’ The tone was disbelief.
‘She’s no slave, she’s a savant. The sultan needs her expertise. If Yusuf is gone, then you must fetch the woman for the general.’
‘She is gone too.’
It was an answer I didn’t want to believe. ‘Do I have to bring a platoon of soldiers? The sultan Bonaparte is not a man who wants to be left waiting.’
The doorman shook his head in dismissal. ‘Go away, American. She is sold.’
‘Sold!’
‘To a Bedouin slave trader.’ He went to slam the door in my face, so I jammed the end of the carpet in it to stop him.
‘You can’t sell her, she’s mine!’
He grasped the end of my carpet with a hand that had the span of a frying pan. ‘Take your rug from my door or you will leave it here,’ he warned. ‘You have no business with us anymore.’
I rotated the carpet to aim at his midriff and slipped my hand up the other end of the roll, grasping my rifle. The click of its hammer being pulled back was clearly audible, and that checked his arrogance. ‘I want to know who bought her.’
We studied each other, wondering if either was quick enough to overcome the other. Finally he grunted. ‘Wait.’
He disappeared, leaving me feeling like a fool or a penitent. How dare the Egyptian sell Astiza? ‘Yusuf, come out here, you bastard!’ My cry echoed in the house. I stood for long minutes, wondering if they would simply ignore me. If they did, I’d go in shooting.
Finally I heard the heavy tread of the doorman returning. He filled the doorway. ‘It’s a message from the woman’s buyer, and is simple to relate. He says you know what is needed to buy her back.’ Then the door slammed shut.
That meant Silano and Bin Sadr had her. And it meant they didn’t have the medallion, and must not know I didn’t either.
Yet wouldn’t they keep her alive in hopes I’d bring it? She was a hostage, a kidnap victim.
I stepped back from the entryway, trying to think what to do. Where was the medallion? And with that something tiny fell past my ear, landing with a soft splat in the dust. I looked up. A grilled opening in an ornate screen far above was being closed by a feminine hand. I picked up what had been dropped.
It was a packet of paper. When I unrolled it I found Astiza’s golden eye of Horus and a message, this time in English in Astiza’s writing. My heart soared:
‘The south wall at midnight. Bring a rope.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
There was no wider gulf between the invading French army and the Egyptians than the subject of women. To the Muslims, the arrogant Franks were dominated by crass European females who combined vulgar display with imperious demands to make a fool of every man who came into contact with them. The French, in turn, thought that Islam locked its greatest source of pleasure away in opulent but shadowy prisons, foregoing the titillating wit of female company. If the Muslims thought the French slaves to their women, the French thought the Muslims frightened of theirs. The situation was made even tenser by the decision of some Egyptian females to form liaisons with the conquerors and to be displayed, without veil, arms and necks bare, in officers’ carriages. These new mistresses, giddy at the freedoms the French had granted them, would call up gaily to the screened windows their carriages trotted past, shouting, ‘Look at our freedom!’ The imams thought we were corrupting, the savants thought the Egyptians medieval, and the soldiers simply wanted the pleasures of the bed. While under strict orders not to molest Muslim women, there was no such prohibition against paying for them, and some were more than willing to be bought. Other Egyptian damsels defended their virtue like vestal virgins, withholding favours unless an officer promised marriage and life in Europe. The result was a great deal of friction and misunderstanding.
The grain-sack draping of Muslim women, designed to control male lust, instead made every passing female, her age and form unknown, a subject of intense speculation among the French soldiers. I was not immune to such
