Our alliance was a refuge from anxiety and burden. Two had become one, ambiguity had been replaced with commitment, and aimlessness had found purpose. As Enoch had suggested, I’d found something to believe in. Not empires, not medallions, not magic, and not electricity, but partnership with the woman beside me. Everything else could start from that.
The trio of pyramids that were our goal finally rose from the rim of the desert like islands from the sea. We’d ridden hard to arrive on October 21 ^ st, the date I’d guessed had some mysterious significance. The weather had cooled, the sky a perfect blue dome, the sun a dependable god’s chariot drawing its daily transect of heaven. The high Nile was just visible through its belt of trees. For hours the monuments seemed to get no closer. Then, as the afternoon’s shadows began to lengthen, they appeared to inflate like one of Conte’s balloons, huge, beckoning, and forbidding. They reared out of the earth, as if their apex had erupted from the underworld.
That image gave me a thought.
‘Let me see the medallion,’ I suddenly asked Astiza.
She took it off, the yellow metal on fire in the sun. I looked at the overlapping Vs of its arms, one pointed up, the other pointed down. ‘This looks like two pyramids, doesn’t it? Their bases joined, and their summits pointed in opposite directions?’
‘Or the reflection of a single one in a mirror or water.’
‘As if there was as much below the surface as above, like the roots of a tree.’
‘You think there’s something under the pyramid?’
‘There was under that temple of Isis. What if the medallion represents not the outside, but the inside? When we explored the interior with Bonaparte, the shafts inside sloped like the pyramid’s sides. The angles were different, but an echo of them. Suppose this is not a symbol of the pyramids, but a map of pyramid shafts?’
‘You mean the ascending and descending corridors?’
‘Yes. There was a tablet on the ship I came to Egypt on.’ I’d suddenly remembered the silver-and-black tablet of Cardinal Bembo that Monge had showed me in L’Orient ’s treasure hold. ‘It was filled with levels and figures as if it might be a map or diagram of some underground place with different levels.’
‘There are stories that the ancients had books to instruct the dead how to negotiate the perils and monsters of the underworld,’ she said. ‘Thoth would weigh their heart, and their book would guide them past cobras and crocodiles. If their book was correct they would emerge on the other side into paradise. What if there is some truth to this? What if somehow bodies interred in the pyramid actually took a physical journey through some cavernous gauntlet?’
‘That could explain the absence of any mummies,’ I mused. ‘But when we explored the pyramid we confirmed that its descending corridor dead-ends. It doesn’t rise again in the opposite direction like this medallion. There is no descending V.’
‘That is true of the corridors we know,’ Astiza said, suddenly excited. ‘But what side of the pyramid is the entrance on?’
‘The north.’
‘And what constellation does the medallion display?’
‘Alpha Draconis, the polestar when the pyramids were built. So?’
‘Hold the medallion out as if the constellation were in the sky.’
I did so. The circular disc was held against the northern sky, light shining through the tiny perforations and making the pattern of Draconis, the dragon. When I did so, the medallion’s arms were perpendicular to north.
‘If that medallion were a map, which sides of the pyramid would the shafts be on?’ Astiza asked.
‘East and west!’
‘Meaning perhaps there are entrances not yet discovered on the east or west flanks of the pyramids,’ she reasoned.
‘But why haven’t they been found? People have climbed all over the pyramids.’
Astiza frowned. ‘I don’t know.’
‘And why the connections to Aquarius, the rising Nile, and this time of year?
‘I don’t know that, either.’
And then we saw a scrap of white, like snow, in the desert.
It was a curious tableau. French officers, aides, savants, and servants were arranged in a semicircle for a picnic in the desert, their horses and donkeys picketed behind. The party faced the pyramids. Camp field tables had been put end to end and covered with white linen. Felucca sails had been rigged as canopies, with captured Mameluke lances as tent poles and French cavalry sabres thrust into the sand as pegs. French crystal and golden Egyptian goblets had been laid out with heavy European silver and china. Bottles of wine were open and half-empty. There were lavish heaps of fruit, bread, cheese and meat. Candles were ready for lighting. Seated on folding stools were Bonaparte and several of his generals and scientists, all of them chatting amiably. I also spotted my mathematician friend, Monge.
Dressed as we were in Arab robes, an aide-de-camp came to shoo us away like any other curious Bedouins. Then he noticed my complexion and Astiza’s beauty, only partly covered under the tattered cloak that she’d drawn around her as best she could. He gaped more at her than me, of course, and while he was doing so I addressed him in French.
‘I’m Ethan Gage, the American savant. I’m here to report that my investigations are nearing completion.’
‘Investigations?’
‘Of the secrets of the pyramid.’
He went to murmur my message and Bonaparte stood, peering like a leopard. ‘It’s Gage, popping up like the very devil,’ he muttered to the others. ‘And his woman.’
He beckoned us forward and the soldiers looked greedily at Astiza, who kept her gaze over their heads and walked with as much decorum as our costumes would allow. The men restrained from rude comment because there was something different about us, I think, some subtle signs of partnership and propriety that signalled we were a couple, and that she was to be respected and left alone. So their gaze reluctantly turned from her to me.
‘What are you doing in that dress-up?’ Bonaparte demanded. ‘And didn’t you desert my command?’ He turned to Kleber. ‘I thought he deserted.’
‘Damned rascal broke out of jail and eluded a pursuing patrol, if I recall,’ the general said. ‘Disappeared into the desert.’
Thankfully, word did not appear to have reached them of the events at Dendara. ‘To the contrary, I’ve been much at risk in your service,’ I said blithely. ‘My companion here was held for ransom by Silano and the Arab, Achmed bin Sadr: her life for the medallion we’ve discussed. It was her courage and my own determination that got us free to resume our studies. I’ve come looking for Doctor Monge to consult on a mathematical question that I hope will shed light on the pyramids.’
Bonaparte looked at me with disbelief. ‘Do you think me an idiot? You said the medallion was lost.’
‘I said so only to keep it from Count Silano, who does not have your interests, or those of France, at heart.’
‘So you lied.’
‘I dissembled to protect the truth from those who would misuse it. Please listen, General. I’m not jailed, not captured, and not fleeing. I came looking for you because I think I’m near a major discovery. All I need now is the help of the other savants.’
He looked from me to Astiza, half-angry and half-amused. Her presence gave me a curious immunity. ‘I don’t know whether to reward you or shoot you, Ethan Gage. There’s something baffling about you, something that goes beyond your crude American habits and rustic education.’
‘I just try the best I can, sir.’
‘The best you can!’ He looked to the others, because I’d given him a subject to pontificate on. ‘It is never enough to do your best, you must be the best. Is this not true? I do what’s necessary to exert my will!’
I bowed. ‘And I am a gambler, General. My will is irrelevant if the cards don’t go my way. Whose fortune doesn’t vary? Isn’t it true you were a hero at Toulon, then imprisoned briefly after the fall of Robespierre, and then a hero again when your cannon saved the Directory?’
He scowled a moment, then shrugged as if to concede the point, and finally smiled. If Napoleon didn’t suffer
