the other piece of metal I’d saved in my long sluiceway tumble. It was starting to look hard-used.
‘Now!’
We charged. If anyone had bothered to look in our direction, we would have looked like two half-naked lunatics: wet, sand-plastered, wild-eyed, and desperate. But the fighting gave us the moment we needed to cross the verge and interrupt Conte just as his gasbag reached full inflation. An artilleryman was climbing into the wicker basket.
Astiza distracted the famed scientist by bounding up into his view like a dishevelled harlot, more of her charms on display than either of us would have preferred. Conte was a savant, but he was also a man, and he gaped in stupefaction as if Venus herself had popped from the half-shell. Meanwhile, I darted by and collared the artilleryman, somersaulting him backward out of the rising basket. ‘Sorry! Change of assignment!’
He reared up to argue the point, obviously confused by my remnants of Egyptian clothing. To settle the issue, I clouted him on the forehead with the butt of my tomahawk and climbed into the basket in his place. Several French soldiers had disembarked from their boat and were lining up to give me a volley, but their aim was blocked by a charging Silano.
‘I’m sorry, Nicolas, we must borrow your airship,’ Astiza said to Conte as she jerked the peg holding its anchor rope out of the ground. ‘Bonaparte’s orders.’
‘ What orders?’
‘To save the world!’ The balloon was rising, the rope skidding along the ground, and I was already too high to reach her. So she jumped and grabbed the tether, hanging below the basket as we rose off the earth. Conte, running after us with arms waving, was butted aside by the sprinting Silano. Just as the writhing rope kicked up a last tendril of dust and climbed into the air, the count leapt and grabbed too. The sudden weight sent us sagging, the basket only fifty feet off the ground. Silano began climbing the tether with sheer arm strength, tenacious as a bulldog.
‘Astiza! Hurry!’
The ground was slipping beneath us at an alarming speed.
Her ascent was painfully slow, given her weariness. Silano gained on her, teeth gritted, eyes slit with hatred. I reached down. Just as Astiza’s hand neared mine, he grabbed her ankle. ‘He’s got me!’ She kicked, he cursed and swayed, holding the tether, and then clutched her leg once again. ‘He’s like a leech!’
I leant over the basket rim to haul. ‘I’ll get you in and cut the rope!’
‘Now his other arm is on me! He’s hanging on me as much as the tether!’
‘Kick, Astiza! Fight!’
‘I can’t,’ she cried. ‘His arms are locked around me.’
I looked down. The demon was squeezing her legs like a constricting snake, his face bitter with determination. I pulled, but couldn’t lift both of them. Combined, they weighed three hundred pounds.
‘Tell me what you learnt, Gage!’ he shouted. ‘Let me in, or we all go down!’
The balloon continued to lumber along less than a hundred feet off the surface. We passed over the edge of the riverbank and drifted along the shallows of the Nile. Conte was running along the river after us. Ahead I saw a company of French infantry turn and look at this scene in amazement. We’d pass so close that they could kill us all with a volley if they chose.
‘It’s the ring!’ Astiza cried. ‘The ring you made me wear! I forgot to take it off! It’s the curse, Ethan, the curse!’
‘There is no curse!’
‘Take it off me!’
But her hands were grasped like iron on the rope and out of my reach, and I could no more slip the silly ring off than I could chop off her hand. Meanwhile Silano, clutching her legs, was even farther from me.
That gave me an idea.
‘Take my tomahawk!’ I said. ‘Crack his head like a nut!’
Desperately she released her right hand, the one without the ring, caught my weapon as I dropped it, and chopped down at Silano. But he’d heard us and as she swung he dropped until his arms were clamped like a vise around her ankles, his head out of range. The blade whistled by his hair. With just one arm holding on she slid down the rope a few feet, palm burning, out of my grasp. I hauled on the tether, but couldn’t lift it.
‘Astiza!’ Silano shouted. ‘Don’t! You know I still love you!’
It was as if the words paralysed her for a moment, and they shocked me as well. Her eyes flickered with memory and a thousand questions roared in my head. He loved her? She’d said she didn’t love him, but…
‘Don’t believe him!’ I cried.
She thrashed the tomahawk at air, her look frantic. ‘Ethan! I can’t hold on! Pull up the rope!’
‘You’re too heavy! Shake him off! The soldiers are aiming! They’re going to shoot us all unless we can climb!’ If I somehow climbed down over her to get to Silano, we’d probably all tumble off.
She jerked but the count was like a barnacle. She slid down another foot.
‘Astiza, they’re about to fire!’
She looked up at me in desperation. ‘I don’t know what to do.’ It was a sob. We lumbered along, too heavy to rise, the Nile glittering below.
‘Astiza, please,’ the count pleaded. ‘It’s not too late…’
‘Kick! Kick! They’re going to shoot us all!’
‘I can’t.’ She was gasping.
‘Kick!’
Astiza looked at me with tears in her eyes. ‘Find it,’ she whispered.
Then, swinging viciously, she swung the tomahawk against the tether. The line snapped with a crack.
And in an instant, she and Silano were gone.
With their weight released the balloon popped up like a champagne cork, soaring so quickly that I lost my footing and toppled into the bottom of the basket. ‘Astiza!’
But there was no reply, just screams as the pair fell.
I scrambled up just in time to see a titanic splash in the river. Their fall had distracted the soldiers for a moment, but now the muskets swung in unison back to me. I was soaring away. There was a sharp command, a flash of muzzles, and a huge plume of smoke blew out.
I heard the hum of bullets, but none arced high enough to hit.
In despair, I studied the surface of the receding river. The rising sun was in my eyes and the Nile was a dazzling platter of light, every wavelet a mirror. There, was that a head, maybe two? Had one or both of them survived the fall? Or was it all a trick of the light?
The harder I strained, the less certain I was of what I saw. The soldiers were shouting excitedly and milling on the riverbank. Then all became impossibly blurred, my hope gone, my ambitions dust, my heart profoundly alone.
For the first time in many years, I was crying.
The Nile was molten silver, and I was blind.
I kept rising. There was Conte far below, staring in stupefaction at his lost prize. I was high as a minaret, with a panorama of Cairo’s smoking rooftops. The world was shrinking to toys, the sound of battle receding. The wind was taking me north, downriver.
The balloon climbed higher than the pyramids, and then as high as a mountain. I began to wonder if it would ever stop and if I, like Icarus, would be burnt by the sun. Through morning haze I saw Egypt in all its serpentine glory. A snake of green stretched south until lost in the distance, like a ship’s wake in an ocean of brown desert. To the north, the direction we were drifting, the green opened like a fan to the Nile Delta, the brown flood waters creating a vast lake that was thronged with birds and dotted with date palms. Beyond was the sea glimmer of the Mediterranean. There was a hushed silence, as if everything we’d just experienced was some dark and noisy dream. The wicker creaked. I heard a bird cry. Otherwise, I was alone.
Why had I made her wear the ring? Now I had no treasure, and no Astiza either.
Why hadn’t I listened?
