it by except for a peculiar occurrence. As I bent over the altar the chain round my neck came loose and snagged the pedestal. The medallion broke free and struck the stone floor with an audible clink. This had never happened before. I swore, but when I bent to retrieve it, what I saw arrested me.
Carved onto a floor slab were two faint Vs, overlapping like compass and square. In the Egyptian style they were geometric, and yet the resemblance was clear.
‘By the Great Architect,’ I muttered. ‘Can it be?’ I remembered Enoch’s script: The crypt will lead to heaven.
I refastened the medallion and stamped on the floor slab. It shifted. Something hollow was under there.
Kneeling in excitement now, my rifle set to one side, I pried with the blade of my tomahawk until I could grasp the slab. It lifted like a heavy trapdoor and released a rush of stale air, an announcement that it hadn’t been opened in a long time. Holding my candle, I leant over. The light glimmered on a floor below. Could there be treasure? Leaving my gun for a moment and sliding feet first, I dropped, falling ten feet and landing like a cat. My heart was hammering. I looked up. Easy enough for Silano to slide the lid back in place if he was watching me. Or was he waiting to see what I might find?
Passages led in two directions.
Again there was a riot of carving. The ceiling bore a field of the five-pointed stars. The walls were thick with gods, goddesses, hawks, vultures, and rearing snakes, a motif repeated again and again. The first passage dead- ended within twenty feet at a mound of clay amphoras – dull, dusty jars that seemed unlikely to hold anything of value. Just to be sure, however, I used my tomahawk to crack one open. When it split apart, I raised my candle.
And jumped. Looking back at me was the hideous face of a mummified baboon, flesh desiccated, eye sockets huge, jaws full of teeth. What the devil?
I broke another jar and found another baboon inside. Another symbol, I remembered, for the god Thoth. So this was a kind of catacomb, full of bizarre animal mummies. Were they offerings? I put my candle near the ceiling so the light would reach farther in the gloom. The clay jars were heaped as far back as the light would reach. Little things moved in the shadows – some kind of insect.
I turned and went the other way, down the other passage. I desperately wanted out of this crypt, yet if Enoch’s clue made any sense there must be something down here. My candle stub was getting low. And then there was more movement, something slithering away on the floor.
I looked with my meagre light. There were tracks on the sand and dust of a damned snake, and a crack into which it had probably crawled. I was sweating. Was Bin Sadr down here too? Why had I left my rifle?
And then something glittered.
The other tunnel ended too, but now there were no jars, but instead a relief carving of the now-familiar priapic figure of Min, probably a figure of some fascination to the sensual Cleopatra. He was stiff as a board, his member erect and startlingly bright.
Min was decorated not with paint, but with gold. His manhood was outlined with twin sticks of gold connected with a hinge at one end, half obscenity, half tool of life. Without knowing about the riddle of the medallion, one would assume the golden shafts were solely sacred decoration.
But I think Cleopatra had another idea. Maybe she left this piece in Egypt if she really took the other medallion to Rome, to ensure its secret stayed in her native country. I pried the gold member loose until it popped into my hand, and worked the hinge. Now the golden shafts formed a V. I took out the medallion, splayed its arms, and laid this new V across them. When I formed the now-familiar Freemason symbol, a compass crossed with a square, the notches on the medallion’s arms locked. The result was a diamond of overlapping arms, swinging below the medallion’s inscribed disc but without, of course, the European letter G, which the Masons used to denote God or gnosis, knowledge.
Splendid. I had completed the medallion, and perhaps found a root symbol of my own fraternity.
And still had no clue what it meant.
‘Ethan.’
The sound was faint, almost like a whisper of wind or trick of the ear, but it was Astiza’s voice, I knew, coming faintly from somewhere outside. The call was as electrifying as a bolt of lightning. I dropped the newly complex medallion around my neck, rushed down the passageway, saw to my relief the slab was still askew, and swiftly wiggled my way up and out the crypt shaft. My gun lay where I had left it, untouched. I picked it up and crouched. All was silent. Had her call been my imagination? I moved quietly to the entrance, peering cautiously outside. I could see Cleopatra on the main temple wall opposite, her carved form picked out by moonlight.
‘Ethan?’ It was a near sob, coming from the open pillars adjacent to the enclosure I was in.
I stepped out on the temple’s porch and advanced as silently as an Indian, rifle ready. On this half of the temple platform, the columns rose to horizontal beams that held up nothing, framing squares of sky. I could see the stars between them. A different face, this of the serene Isis, was carved into the pillars’ design.
‘Astiza?’ My voice echoed among the columns.
‘Do you have it?’
I stepped around a pillar and there she was. I stopped, confused.
She was stripped to my fantasy of a harem girl, her linen translucent, her legs visible through her gown, her jewellery heavy, and her eyes lined. She’d been dressed for seduction. Her arms were lifted because her wrists were chained to shackles that led to a stone beam above. The posture lifted her breasts, twisting her waist and hips, and the effect was an erotic helplessness, a tableau of a princess in peril. I stopped, stupefied by this apparition from a fairy tale. Her own look was pained.
‘Is it complete?’ she asked in a small voice.
‘Why are you dressed like that?’ It was the most mundane of a hundred questions ricocheting like billiard balls in my mind, but I felt I was in a hallucinatory dream.
The answer was the press of a sword point in the small of my back. ‘Because she is distracting,’ Count Silano murmured. ‘Drop your rifle, monsieur.’ The sword pressed more painfully.
I tried to think. My weapon thumped to the stone.
‘Now, the medallion.’
‘It’s yours,’ I tried, ‘if you unchain her and let us flee.’
‘Unchain her? But why, when she can simply lower her arms?’
And Astiza did so, her slim wrists slipping from loose shackles, her look apologetic. The chains swung gently, an empty prop. The gossamer veils draped her body like a classical statue, her undergarments only calling attention to the places they concealed. She looked embarrassed at her fraudulence.
Once more, I felt the fool.
‘Haven’t you realised that she’s with me, now?’ Silano said. ‘But then you’re American, aren’t you, too direct, too trusting, too idealistic, too naive. Did you come all this way fantasising about rescuing her? Not only did you never understand the medallion; you never understood her.’
‘That’s a lie.’ I stared up at her as I said it, hoping for confirmation. She stood trembling, rubbing her wrists.
‘Is it?’ Silano said behind me. ‘Let’s review the truth. Talma went to Alexandria to ask questions about her not just because he was your friend, but because he was an agent for Napoleon.’
‘That’s a lie too. He was a journalist.’
‘Who cut a deal with the Corsican and his scientists, promising to keep an eye on you in return for access to the highest councils of the expedition. Bonaparte wants the secret found, but doesn’t trust anyone. So Talma could come if he spied on you. Meanwhile, the journalist suspected Astiza from the beginning. Who was she? Why did she come with you like an obedient dog, trudging with an army, acquiescing to a harem? Because of infatuation with your clumsy charm? Or because she’s always been in alliance with me?’
He certainly enjoyed boasting. Astiza was looking up at the ruined beams.
‘My dear Gage, have you understood a single thing that’s happened to you? The journalist learnt a disturbing thing about our Alexandrian witch: not that word of your coming was sent by gypsies, as she told you, but by me. Yes, we were in communication. Yet instead of helping kill you, as I recommended, she seemed to be using you to discover the secret. What was her game? When I landed in Alexandria, Talma thought he could spy on me as well, but Bin Sadr caught him. I told the fool he could join me against you and we could sell whatever treasure we found to the highest-bidding king or general – Bonaparte too! – but we couldn’t reason with him. He threatened to go to
