‘No.’ She pushed my paws aside. ‘That will be your reward on the other side. Believe in me, Ethan.’ And with that, she vaulted herself over the low wall, dropped with a splash into the water, pointed her feet downstream, and let go. In a flash she was where the ceiling touched the water. She took a last breath, dipped her head, and was gone.
By the spurs of Paul Revere, the woman had pluck! And damned if I was going to stay in this tomb alone. So before I could philosophise about it further I plunged in myself – but instead of floating like a cork I sank to the bottom of the trough like a lead sinker.
It was the treasure, you see.
I was helpless as a rat in a pipe, or a bullet in a barrel. My hand reached up to scrape a wet ceiling, looking for air, and couldn’t touch it. I was bouncing along the bottom as if I’d tied on an anchor. Cursing my luck, or stupidity, I began clawing at golden pendants, emptying my pocket of precious gems, and shedding my arms of bracelets. Off came a belt worth a king’s ransom, an anklet I could buy a country estate with. Rings I dropped like bread crumbs. As I tugged each one off it was lost forever, or at least lost to the mud of the Nile or the belly of some crocodile. Yet with each frantic discard I became more buoyant. Soon I was off the bottom and slithering near the top of this insidious culvert, hands scraped raw, hoping against hope for a pocket of air as my lungs began to squeeze and burn. Don’t breathe! I silently screamed at myself. Just one moment more. And one moment more…
And more.
And still more as I thrashed to rid myself of wealth.
The last treasure came off.
My lungs burnt, my ears felt close to bursting, and I was sightless in the dark.
One thing I especially feared was colliding with the lifeless body of Astiza, which would have caused such despair that I’d suck the Nile into my lungs. Conversely, it was the thought of her waiting ahead that kept me determined to stick it out. Believe!
I put my arm up one last desperate time, expecting to feel wet rock, and encountered…
Nothing!
My head burst the surface just as my breath burst from my mouth. Air! It was still pitch black but I gasped for a lungful. Then I collided with the ceiling again with a painful bang and was sucked further down the seemingly endless, relentless, underground pipe. Air, air, just one more lungful, lord, how I ached, I couldn’t take much more… and then I was weightless, pitched into nothing, the water falling away beneath me. I gasped in surprise and terror, tumbling as I fell, my stomach gone, before crashing into a dark pool. I came up sputtering, eyes blinking, seeing I was again in a limestone cavern. I could breathe! Even more amazing, I could faintly see. But how? Yes! There was light coming from the water at the far end of the cave, a glimmer of outside! I dove and kicked to swim with all my might.
And surfaced at the edge of the Nile.
There was Astiza, floating on her back, her dark hair in a fan, her wet clothes translucent, her body pale, in a shallow of papyrus reeds and lotus blossoms. Was she dead, drowned?
She rolled and treaded water, looking at me with a smile.
‘You shed your greed, and the gods gave you air,’ she teased.
Trading breath for the wealth of Croesus. Thoth does have a sense of humour.
We paddled into a shallow by some reeds, resting on the muddy bottom with just our heads above water, considering what to do next. Somehow the entire night had passed and it was just after dawn, the warming sun on our faces and a haze of smoke over Cairo. We heard the pops and bangs of skirmishing. The city was still in open revolt and Bonaparte was still determined to suppress it.
‘I think I’ve overstayed my welcome in Egypt, Astiza,’ I wheezed.
‘The pyramid is locked and the Book of Thoth is gone. We can do no more here. But what was lost remains a potent weapon. I think we still need to learn its fate.’
‘Wasn’t it last seen with a fugitive Jew named Moses three thousand years ago? With no mention of it since?’
‘No mention? And yet Moses raised his arm to part the sea, healed the sick with a bronze snake, found food from the sky, and talked with God. Everyone knew he was a magician. How did he learn such powers? And was it solely the Ten Commandments the Hebrews carried in the Ark of the Covenant that won them their victories, or did they have another aid as well? Why did they spend forty years in the desert before invading their promised land? Perhaps they were mastering something.’
‘Or perhaps they had no magic at all and had to do things the old-fashioned way, by building an army.’
‘No. What is the book but another source of the same knowledge you and the other scientists are seeking to uncover right now? That book could give the savants of any nation the knowledge to dominate the world. Do you think Silano and Bonaparte haven’t guessed that? Do you think they don’t dream of a sorcerer’s powers or an angel’s immortality?’
‘So you want us to spend forty years in the desert looking for it?’
‘Not the desert. You know where the book must be, just as the Romans and the Arabs and the Crusaders and the Templars and the Turks knew, and always looked: Jerusalem. That’s where Solomon built his temple, and where the Ark was kept.’
‘And we’re supposed to find what they could not? The temple was destroyed by the Babylonians and Romans three or four times over. This Ark, if not destroyed, high-tailed it into the wilderness. It’s as mythic as the Holy Grail.’
‘Yet we know what we are looking for. Not a grail, not a treasure, not an ark.’
You know how women are. They grab an idea like a terrier and won’t let go unless you can figure a way to distract them. They don’t understand the difficulties, or they figure that you’ll do the heavy lifting if you run into a snag. ‘Capital idea. Let’s look for it, right after we settle my affairs in America.’
Our philosophic discussion ended when the crack of a musket shot sent up a little geyser of water just feet from our heads. Then another, and another.
I looked up the riverbank. On the crest of a dune was a patrol of French soldiers and, lively as a stag in heat, Count Alessandro Silano. While his henchmen had run down into the pyramid of death, he’d prudently decided to stay outside.
‘The magicians!’ he shouted. ‘Get them!’
Well, hell. The bastard seemed indestructible – but then he was probably thinking the same thing about us. And of course he had no idea what we had, or rather hadn’t. Astiza still had the medallion’s disk, and I realised I still had the cherubim from Moses’ staff, if that’s what it was, tucked uncomfortably in my loincloth. Maybe I’d make a dollar out of this after all. We launched ourselves into the river and began swimming hard for the Cairo bank, letting the current widen the distance. By the time the soldiers had run down to the edge of the riverbank to take better aim, we were out of effective range.
We could hear Silano ranting. ‘To the boats, you fools!’
The Nile is half a mile wide at the pyramids, but it seemed like half an ocean in the condition we were in. The same current giving us some distance from Silano was carrying us closer to the fighting in downtown Cairo. As we thrashed the last weary feet across the river’s breadth I could see a battery of artillery deploying outside the city’s walls, and one of Conte’s balloons hovering a few feet off the ground. It was being inflated to be used again as an observation post. It was a pretty thing, a patriotic red, white, and blue, with stones hung from bags on the side for ballast. The balloon gave me an idea, and since I was as winded as a Virginia congressman invited to give a few remarks, it might be our only chance.
‘Have you ever wanted to fly away from your troubles?’
‘Never more than now.’ She looked like a half-drowned kitten.
‘Then we’re going to take that balloon.’
She blinked water from her eyes. ‘You know how to operate it?’
‘The first French aeronauts were a rooster, a duck, and a sheep.’
We dragged ourselves from the Nile and crept along its bank, working downstream toward Conte. I looked back. Silano’s soldiers were pushing hard on the sweeps of their boats. The count was shouting and pointing to call attention to us, but all eyes were focused on fighting in the city. It would be a close thing. I took out my tomahawk,
