“I’m afraid not.” Napoleon reached into a leather binder and brought out a bundle of dated newspapers. “Smith sent me these as a gift when I let the Turks take off their wounded. It seems that while we’ve achieved glory in Egypt, events in Europe have been rapidly unraveling. France is once more in peril.” It was then I confirmed that Bonaparte had clearly abandoned one goal, conquest of Asia, and adopted another, a return to Paris. He’d t h e
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won what he could, and we’d found what he most wanted to find.
Power, one way or another.
“France and Austria have been at war since March, and we’ve been driven from Germany and Italy. Tippoo Sahib died in India the same time we were repulsed at Acre. The Directory is in shambles, and my brother Lucien is in Paris trying to reform the imbecilic assembly. The British fleet will have to loosen its blockade soon to resupply at Cyprus. That’s when I can return to put things right. Duty requires it.”
That seemed shameless. “Duty? To leave your men?”
“To prepare the way. Kleber has dreamed of command since we landed here. Now he’ll get it: I’ll surprise him with a letter. Meanwhile I take the risk of evading the British fleet.” Risk! The risk was to be left with a marooned army in Egypt. The bastard was abandoning his men for the politics of Paris! Yet the truth was, I had a grudging admiration for the sly dog. We were two of a kind in some ways: opportunists, gamblers, and survivors. We were fatalists, always after the main chance. We both liked pretty women.
And high adventure, if it was an escape from tedium.
It was as if he’d read my mind. “War and politics makes necessity,” he said. “It is too bad we have to kill you, but there it is.”
“There
“I feel as if I’m being driven toward an unknown goal, Ethan Gage, and that you represent as much of a dangerous obstacle now as you did assistance when I brought you to Egypt. Neither of us planned you’d end with the damned English, but there you were at Acre with your electricity. And now you’ve attacked Rosetta.”
“Only because of Silano. He was the one with the crocodile . . .” Bonaparte stuck out his hand. “Au revoir, Monsieur Gage. Under different circumstances we might have become firm partners. As it is, you’ve betrayed France for the last time. You’ve proven yourself entirely too much of a nuisance, and too able an enemy. Yet even cats have only nine lives. Surely you’ve used yours up by now?”
“Not unless you put it to the test,” I replied morosely.
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“I will leave it to Silano to be creative with you and your woman.
The one who shot at me so long ago, in Alexandria.”
“She shot at
“Yes. Why are the bad ones so beautiful? Well. Destiny awaits.” And having disposed of us, off he marched, his mind on his next project.
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Adecent man would simply shoot us, but Silano was a scientist. Astiza and I had crossed him enough that he thought we deserved some pain, and he was curious to use our environment. “Do you know sand alone can mummify a carcass?”
“How erudite.”
So we were buried after midnight, but only to our necks.
“What I like about this is that you can watch each other burn and weep,” he said as his henchmen finished packing sand around our bodies. Our hands had been tied behind our backs, and our feet bound. We had no hats, and were already thirsty. “There will be a slow increase in torment as the sun rises. Your skin will fry, and eventually crack. The reflected light and dust will slowly induce blindness, and as you watch each other you will gradually go mad. The hot sand will leach out any liquid you retain, and your tongues will swell so much that you will have difficulty breathing. You will pray for snakes or scorpions to make it faster.” He stooped and patted me on the head, like a child or dog. “The scorpions like to go for the eyes, and the ants crawl up the nostrils to feed. The vultures will hope to get to you before you’re completely eaten. But it is the snakes that hurt the most.”
“You seem to know a lot about it.”
“I’m a naturalist. I have studied torture for many years. It’s an exquisite science, and quite a pleasure if you understand its refine-ments. It’s not easy to keep a man in excruciating pain and yet coher-ent enough to tell you something useful. What’s interesting about this exercise is that the body below the neck should be baked dry and t h e
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preserved. It is from this natural process, I’m guessing, that ancient Egyptians got the idea of mummification. Do you know that the Persian king Cambyses lost an entire army in a sandstorm?”
“Can’t say that I care.”
“I study history so as not to repeat it.” He turned to Astiza, her dark hair a fan on the earth. “I did love you, you know.”
“You’ve never loved anyone but yourself.”
