At sea I’d adopted the sailor practice of going barefoot, given the summer’s heat. As I prepared to lie in my bunk, my mind swirling, I noticed that my boots were missing. This was disturbing, given how I’d used them as a hiding place.
I poked anxiously around. Malraux, already in bed, muttered something in his sleep and swore. I shook Talma.
‘Antoine, I can’t find my shoes!’
He came awake blearily. ‘Why do you need them?’
‘I just want to know where they are.’
He rolled over. ‘Maybe some bosun gambled them away.’
A quick search of late-night card and dice circles did not locate my boots. Had someone discovered the hollow compartment in my heel? Who would dare violate the possessions of the savants? Who could even have guessed my hiding place? Talma? He must have wondered about my calm when asked the whereabouts of the medallion, and probably speculated where I might be hiding it.
I came back to the cabin and looked across at my companion. Once more he slept like an innocent, which made me all the more suspicious. The more the medallion grew in importance, the less I trusted anyone. It was poisoning my faith in my friend.
I retreated to my hammock, depressed and uncertain. What had seemed a prize in the card salon was feeling like a burden. A good thing I hadn’t kept the medallion in my shoe! I put my hand on the touch-hole of the twelve-pounder next to my hammock. Since Bonaparte had forbidden target practice to conserve powder and keep our passage quiet, I’d wrapped my prize in an empty powder bag and used tar to stick it to the inside of the muzzle plug. The plug would be removed before combat, and my plan had been to retrieve the medallion before any sea battle, but meanwhile not risk having it stolen from my neck or boot. Now, with my shoes gone, my distance from the prize made me nervous. Come the morrow, when the others were on deck, I’d fish it from its hiding place and wear the thing. Curse or charm, I wanted it round my neck.
The next morning, my boots were back where I had left them. When I inspected them, I saw the sole and heel had been pried at.
CHAPTER SIX
I almost drowned in the surf of Alexandria because of Bonaparte’s fear of Admiral Nelson. The English fleet prowled like a wolf somewhere over the horizon, and Napoleon was in such a hurry to get ashore that he ordered an amphibious landing. It wasn’t the last time I’d be wet in the driest country I’d ever seen.
We arrived off the Egyptian city on July 1 ^ st, 1798, staring in wonder at minarets like reeds and mosque domes like snowy hillocks, all shimmering under the brutal summer sun. There were five hundred of us crowded on the main deck of the flagship, soldiers, sailors, and scientists, and for long minutes it was so quiet you could hear every creak of rigging and every hiss of wave. Egypt! It wavered in distortion like a reflection in a curved mirror. The city was dust brown, dirty white, and looked anything but opulent, almost as if we’d arrived at the wrong address. The French ships slowly wallowed in a rising wind from the north, each Mediterranean swell a topaz jewel. From the land we could hear blowing horns, the boom of signal cannon, and the wails of panic. What must it have been like to behold our armada of four hundred European ships which seemed to fill the entire sea? Households were stuffed onto donkey wagons. Market awnings deflated as the valuables they shaded were secreted in wells. Arab soldiers strapped on medieval armour and mounted cracked parapets with pikes and ancient muskets. Our expedition artist, the Baron Dominique Vivant Denon, began drawing furiously: the walls, the ships, the epic emptiness of North Africa. ‘I’m trying to capture the form of the solid buildings against the desert’s peculiar volume of light,’ he told me.
The frigate Junon came alongside to make a report. It had arrived at the city a day earlier and conferred with the French consul, and the news it brought jolted Napoleon’s staff into a frenzy of activity. Nelson’s fleet had already been at Alexandria, hunting for us, and had left just two days before! It was pure luck they hadn’t caught us unloading. How long before the English returned? Rather than risk running the gauntlet of the forts at the entrance to the city’s harbour, Bonaparte ordered an immediate amphibious landing with longboats at the beach of Marabut, eight miles to the west. From there, French troops could march along the beach to seize the port.
Admiral Brueys vehemently protested, complaining the coast was uncharted and the wind was rising toward a gale. Napoleon overruled him.
‘Admiral, we’ve no time to waste. Fortune grants us three days, no more. If I don’t take advantage of them, we’re lost.’ Once ashore, his army was beyond the reach of the British warships. Embarked, it could be sunk.
Yet ordering a landing is easier than accomplishing it. By the time our ships began anchoring in the heavy swells off the sand beach, it was late afternoon, meaning the landing would continue through the night. We savants were given a choice of remaining on board or accompanying Napoleon to watch the assault on the city. I, with more adventure than sense, decided to get off L’Orient. Its heavy roll was making me sick again.
Talma, despite his own queasy misery, looked at me as if I were mad. ‘I thought you didn’t want to be a soldier!’
‘I’m simply curious. Don’t you want to watch the war?’
‘The war I can observe from this deck. It’s the bloody details you need to be on the beach to see. I’ll meet you in the city, Ethan.’
‘I’ll have picked us out a palace by then!’
He smiled wanly, looking at the swells. ‘Perhaps I should hold the medallion for safekeeping?’
‘No.’ I shook his hand. Then, to remind him of ownership: ‘If I drown, I won’t need it.’
It was dusk by the time I was called to take my place in a boat. Bands had assembled on the larger ships and were playing the ‘La Marseillaise’, the strains shredded by the rising wind. Toward land, the horizon had turned brown with sand blowing from the desert. I could see a few Arab horsemen dashing this way and that on the beach. Clinging to a rope, I took the ladder down the warship’s side, its tumble-home shape swollen like a bicep and its guns bristling like black stubble. The longrifle I carried across my back, its hammer and pan wrapped in oil skin. My powder horn and shot pouch bounced against my waist.
The boat was heaving like a bucking saddle. ‘Jump!’ a boatswain commanded, so I did, striving for grace but sprawling anyway. I quickly clambered to a thwart as told, clinging with both hands. More and more men dropped aboard until I was certain we could hold no more without swamping, and then a few more piled in as well. We finally pushed away, water sloshing over the gunwale.
‘Bail, damn you!’
Our longboats looked like a swarm of water beetles, crawling slowly toward shore. Soon nothing could be heard above the thunder of the approaching surf. When we dipped into the wave troughs, all I could see of the invasion fleet were the mast tops.
Our helmsman, in normal life a French coastal fisherman, at first steered us expertly as the waves mounded toward the beach. But the boat was overloaded, as hard to manoeuvre as a wine wagon, and it barely had freeboard. We began to skid in the rising surf, the stern slewing as the helmsman shouted at the rowers. Then a breaker turned us sideways and we broached and flipped.
I didn’t have time to take breath. The water came down like a wall, driving me under. The roar of the gale was cut to a dim rumble as I skipped along the bottom, tumbling on the sand. My rifle was like an anchor, but I refused to let it go. The submersion seemed like a black eternity, my lungs near to bursting, and then at a lull in the surge I sank enough to crouch on the bottom and push off. My head broke the surface just before I was ready to swallow, and I gasped with desperation before another wave broke over me. Bodies bumped in the dark. Flailing, I fastened onto a loose oar. Now the water was shallow, and the next wave carried me in on my belly. Sputtering, choking on seawater, nose draining, eyes stinging, I staggered onto Egypt.