sword out. Now we had only to escape the city…
‘There they are!’
It was a French military patrol. We cursed, wheeled, and fled back the way we had come. I heard the French commands to aim and fire, so I grabbed Ash to pitch both of us down to the dirt of the street. There was a roar, and several bullets sizzled overhead. Then cries and screams ahead. They’d hit Yusuf’s men.
We crawled into a side street, using the smoke as cover. Now we could hear shouts of alarm and wild shots in all directions.
‘What was that excrescence I fell into?’ I panted to Ash.
‘Donkey dung. You have fallen into what the Franks call merde, my friend.’
Another bullet wanged off a stone post. ‘I can’t disagree.’
At length we rose to a crouch and rounded a corner. Then we trotted until we entered a wider avenue leading more or less to the southern gate. We seemed to have lost immediate pursuit.
‘We’ve also lost my provisions. Damn that old woman!’
‘Moses found manna in the desert.’
‘And King George will find crumpets at his tea table, but I’m not him, am I?’
‘You’re becoming surly.’
‘It’s about time.’
We were almost to Cairo’s wall when a squadron of French cavalry turned onto our street. They were on routine patrol, not yet spotting us, but they blocked our path.
‘Let’s hide in that alcove,’ Ashraf suggested.
‘No. Don’t we need horses? Tie our rope to that pillar, as high as the shoulder of a mounted officer.’ I took the other end and did the same on the opposite side of the street. ‘When I shoot, get ready to steal a horse.’
I strode to the middle of the street, facing the approaching cavalry, and casually waved my rifle to let them see me in the dark.
‘Who goes there?’ an officer called. ‘Identify yourself!’
I fired, plucking off his cap.
They charged.
I darted toward a pool of shadow, slung my rifle, jumped to catch a pole, and swung myself up to an awning and sill. The cavalry patrol hit the rope at a dead run. The lead troopers were plucked from their saddles like puppets, colliding with the rank just behind. Horses reared, men toppled. I leapt, knocking a rider loose from his plunging mount. Ashraf had wrestled his way onto another horse. Pistols went off in the dark but the bullets whined harmlessly. We lashed our way out of the tangle.
‘The French are going to begin wondering whose side you’re on,’ Ash gasped as we began our gallop, looking back at the shouting troopers.
‘So am I.’
We rode for the wall and the gate. ‘Open wide! Couriers for Bonaparte!’ I cried in French. They saw the cavalry horses and tack before they spied us, lying low in our Arab robes. By then it was too late. We burst through the sentries toward the desert beyond, shots buzzing overhead as we galloped into the night.
I was out, the medallion mine, free to rescue Astiza, find the Book of Thoth, and become master of the world – or at least its saviour!
And I was now prey for every Bedouin, Mameluke, and French cavalryman in Egypt.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Egyptian desert west of the Nile is a trackless ocean of sand and rock, interrupted by only a few oasis islands. The desert east of the Nile and south of Cairo – a sterile plateau separated from the Red Sea by moonlike mountains – is emptier yet, a roasting pan seemingly unchanged from the birth of the world. The blue sky bleaches to a dull haze on the shimmering horizon, and dryness threatens to mummify an intruder each pitiless afternoon. There is no water, no shade, no birdcall, no plant, no insect, and seemingly no end. For millennia, monks and magi retreated here to find God. When I fled I felt I’d left him far behind, in the waters of the Nile and the great green forests of home.
Ashraf and I rode in that direction because no sane man would. We passed first through Cairo’s City of the Dead, the Muslim beehive tombs as white as ghosts in the night. Then we trotted quickly through a ribbon of green farmland that followed the Nile, dogs barking as we passed. Long before sunrise we were dots on an arid plain. The sun rose, blinding as we angled east, and arced so slowly that it became a pitiless clock. The saddles of our captured mounts had canteens that we made last until noon, and then thirst became the central fact of existence. It was so hot that it hurt to breathe, and my eyes squinted against desert whiteness bright as snow. Powdery dust caked lips, ears, clothes, and horses, and the sky was a weight we carried on our shoulders and the crowns of our heads. The chain of the medallion burnt into my neck. A mirage of a lake, the cruel illusion all too familiar by now, wavered just out of reach.
So this is Hades, I thought. So this is what happens to men without proper direction, who drink, fornicate, and gamble for their daily bread. I longed to find a scrap of shade to crawl into and sleep forever.
‘We must go faster,’ Ashraf said. ‘The French are pursuing.’
I looked back. A long plume of white dust had been caught by the wind and spun into a lazy funnel. Somewhere under it was a platoon of hussars, following our hoof prints.
‘How can we? Our horses have no water.’
‘Then we must find them some.’ He gestured ahead at undulating humps of hills that looked like cracked loaves.
‘In a bed of coals?’
‘Even in a bed of coals a diamond can hide. We’ll lose the French in the canyons and wadis. Then we’ll find a place to drink.’
Kicking our tired horses and tightening our cloaks against the dust, we pressed on. We entered the uplands, following a maze of sandy wadis like a snarl of string. The only vegetation was dry camel thorn. Ashraf was looking for something, however, and soon found it: a shelf of bare, sun-blasted rock to our left that led to a choice of three canyons. ‘Here we can break our tracks.’ We turned off, hooves clacking, and picked our way across the stone table. We took the middle limestone canyon because it looked narrowest and least hospitable: perhaps the French would think we went another way. It was so hot that it was like riding into an oven. Soon we could hear the frustrated shouts of our pursuers in the dry desert air, arguing about which way we’d gone.
I lost all sense of direction and docilely followed the Mameluke. Higher and higher the crests reached, and I could begin to see the jagged lines of real mountains, the rock black and red against the sky. Here was the range that separated the valley of the Nile from the Red Sea. Nowhere was there a spot of green or glisten of water. The silence was unnerving, broken only by our own clop and creak of leather. Was this desert – the fact that ancient Egyptians could walk from the fertile Nile to absolute nothingness – the reason they seemed so preoccupied with death? Was the contrast between their fields and the ever-encroaching sand the origin of the idea of an expulsion from Eden? Was the waste a reminder of the brevity of life and a spur to dreams of immortality? Certainly the dry heat would mummify corpses naturally, long before the Egyptians did it as religious practice. I imagined someone finding my husk centuries from now, my frozen expression one of vast regret.
Finally the shadows seemed to be growing longer, the sounds of pursuit fainter. The French must be as thirsty as we were. I was dizzy, my body sore, my tongue thick.
We stopped at what looked like a rock trap. High cliffs rose all around us, the only exit being the narrow canyon we’d just ridden through. The towering walls were finally so high, and the sun so advanced, that they cast welcome shadow.
‘Now what?’
Ashraf stiffly got down. ‘Now you must help me dig.’ He knelt on the sand at the base of a cliff, at a cleft where a waterfall might have pooled if such an absurdity could exist here. But perhaps it did: the rock above was stained dark as if water occasionally flowed down. He began burrowing into the sand with his hands.
‘Dig?’ Had the sun driven him mad?
