‘General! Are you all right?’ a colonel cried.
As if in reply, a second shot rang out, and then a third, so close to the first that there were either two marksmen or the former was having his hands steadily filled with reloaded muskets. A sergeant standing a few paces ahead of Napoleon grunted and sat down, a bullet in his thigh, and another patch of plaster exploded behind the general’s boot.
‘I’ll be more right behind a post,’ Bonaparte muttered, pulling our group under a portico and making the sign of the cross. ‘Shoot back, for God’s sake.’ Two soldiers finally did so. ‘And bring up an artillery piece. Let’s not give them all day to hit me.’
A lively fight broke out. Several grenadiers began blasting away at the house that had become a doughty little fortress, and others ran back for a field gun. I took aim with my rifle, but the sniper was well screened: I missed like everyone else. It was a long ten minutes before a six-pounder appeared, and by this time several dozen shots had been exchanged, one of them wounding a young captain in the arm. Napoleon himself had borrowed a musket and fired a shot, to no better effect than the others.
It was the artillery piece that excited our commander. This was the arm he’d trained in. At Valence his regiment was exposed to the best cannon training in the army, and at Auxonne he had worked with the legendary Professor Jean Louis Lombard, who had translated the English Principles of Artillery into French. Napoleon’s fellow officers had told me on L’Orient that he’d had no social life in these early posts as a second lieutenant, instead working and studying from four in the morning until ten at night. Now he aimed the cannon, even as bullets continued to peck around him.
‘It’s exactly as he did at the battle of Lodi,’ the wounded captain murmured in appreciation. ‘He lay some guns himself, and the men began calling him le petit caporal – the little corporal.’
Napoleon applied the match. The gun barked, bucking against its carriage, and the round shot screamed and hit just below the offending window, buckling the stone and blowing apart the wooden grill.
‘Again.’
The gun was hastily reloaded and the general trained it at the house door. Another report and the entry blew inward in a shower of splinters. Smoke fogged the street.
‘Forward!’ This was the same Napoleon who had charged Arcola Bridge. The French advanced, me with them, their general with his sword out. We burst through the entry, firing at the stairs. A servant, young and black, came rolling down. Leaping over his body, the assault team surged upward. On the third floor we came to the place that the cannonball had struck. The ragged hole looked out on the rooftops of Alexandria and the chamber was strewn with rubble. An old man with a musket was half-buried with broken stone, obviously dead. Another musket had been hurled against a wall, its stock broken. Several more were scattered like matchsticks. A second figure, perhaps his loader, had been pitched into a corner by the concussion of the cannon shot, and moved feebly under a shroud of debris.
No one else was in the house.
‘Quite a fusillade from an army of two,’ Napoleon commented. ‘If all Alexandrians fought like this, I’d still be outside the walls.’
I went to the dazed fighter in the corner, wondering who the pair might be. The old man we’d killed didn’t look entirely Arab, and there was something strange about his assistant, too. I lifted a section of shattered sash.
‘Careful, Monsieur Gage, he might have a weapon,’ Bonaparte warned. ‘Let Georges here finish him with the bayonet.’
I’d seen quite enough bayoneting for one day and ignored them. I knelt and lifted the dazed assailant’s head to my lap. The figure groaned and blinked, eyes unfocused. A plea came out as a croak. ‘Water.’
I started at the tone and fine features. The injured fighter was actually a woman, I realised, smudged by powder residue but otherwise recognisable as young, unwounded, and quite fine-looking.
And the request had been stated in English.
A search of the house revealed some water in jars on the ground floor. I gave the woman a cup, as curious as the French what her story might be. This gesture, and my own voice in English, seemed to earn some small measure of trust. ‘What’s your name, lady?’
She swallowed and blinked, staring at the ceiling. ‘Astiza.’
‘Why are you fighting us?’
Now she focused on me, her eyes widening in surprise as if I were a ghost. ‘I was loading the guns.’
‘For your father?’
‘My master.’ She struggled up. ‘Is he dead?’
‘Yes.’
Her expression was inscrutable. Clearly she was a slave or a servant; was she sad that her owner had been killed or relieved at her liberation? She seemed to be considering her new position with shock. I noticed an oddly shaped amulet hanging from her neck. It was gold, incongruous for a slave, and shaped like an almond eye, black onyx forming its pupil. A brow curled above, and there was an extension below in another graceful curve. The entire effect was quite arresting. Meanwhile, she kept glancing from her master’s body to me.
‘What’s she saying?’ Bonaparte demanded in French.
‘I think she’s a slave. She was loading muskets for her master, that man there.’
‘How does an Egyptian slave know English? Are these British spies?’
I put his first question to her.
‘Master Omar had an Egyptian mother and an English father,’ she replied. ‘He had merchant ties with England. To perfect his fluency, we used the language in this house. I speak Arabic and Greek as well.’
‘Greek?’
‘My mother was sold from Macedonia to Cairo. I was raised there. I am a Greek Egyptian, and impudent.’ She said it with pride.
I turned to the general. ‘She could be an interpreter,’ I said in French. ‘She speaks Arabic, Greek, and English.’
‘An interpreter for you, not me. I should treat her as a partisan.’ He was grumpy from being shot at.
‘She was following the instruction of her master. She has Macedonian blood.’
Now he became interested. ‘Macedonia? Alexander the Great was Macedonian; he founded this city, and conquered the East before us.’
I have a soft spot for women, and Napoleon’s fascination with the old Greek empire builder gave me an idea. ‘Don’t you think that Astiza’s survival after your cannon shot is a portent of fate? How many Macedonians can there be in this city? And here we encounter one who speaks my native tongue. She may be more useful alive than dead. She can help explain Egypt to us.’
‘What would a slave know?’
I regarded her. She was watching our conversation without understanding but her eyes were wide, bright, and intelligent. ‘She’s had learning of some kind.’
Well, talk of fate always intrigued him. ‘Her luck, then, and my own, that you’re the one to find her. Tell her that I have killed her master in battle and thus have become her new master. And that I, Napoleon, award her care to my American ally – you.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
Victory is sometimes more untidy than battle. An assault can be simplicity itself; administration an entangling nightmare. So it was in Alexandria. Bonaparte quickly accepted the surrender of ruling sultan Mohammed el-Koraim and swiftly unloaded the rest of his troops, artillery, and horses. The soldiers and scientists rejoiced for five minutes upon reaching dry land, and then immediately began grumbling about the lack of shelter, shortage of good water, and confusion of supply. The heat was palpable, a weight one pushed against, and dust covered everything with fine powder. There were three hundred French casualties and more than a thousand Alexandrian dead and wounded, with no adequate hospital for either group. The wounded Europeans were tucked into mosques or confiscated palaces, the comfort of their regal surroundings marred by pain, heat, and buzzing flies. The Egyptian injured were left to take care of themselves. Many died.