She nodded. ‘Precisely. The gods make everything clear, and yet men remain blind! Seek truth, and the world becomes yours.’
Well, this scrap of the world, anyway. We were well into the Nile, that wondrous waterway where the wind often blows south and the current flows north, allowing river traffic both ways.
‘You said you fled Cairo. You’re an escaped slave?’
‘It’s more complicated than that. Egyptian.’ She pointed. ‘Understand our land before you try to understand our mind.’
The pancake plainness of the country outside Alexandria had changed to the lush, more biblical picture I had expected from stories of Moses among the reeds. Brilliantly green fields of rice, wheat, corn, sugar, and cotton formed rectangles between ranks of stately date palms, as straight as pillars and heavy with their orange and scarlet fruit. Banana and sycamore groves rustled in the wind. Water buffalo pulled ploughs or lifted their horns from the river where they bathed, grunting at the fringe of papyrus beds. The frequency of chocolate-coloured mud-brick villages increased, often topped by the needle of a minaret. We passed lateen-rigged felucca boats moored on the brown water. Measuring twenty to thirty feet long and steered by a long oar, these sailing craft were omnipresent on the river. There were smaller paddle skiffs, barely big enough to float an individual, from which fishermen tossed string nets. Harnessed and blindfolded donkeys drudged in a circle to lift water into canals in a scene unchanged for five thousand years. The smell of Nile water filled the river breeze. Our flotilla of gunboats and supply craft paraded past, French tricolour flapping, without leaving any discernible impression. Many peasants hardly bothered to look up.
What a strange place I’d come to. Alexander, Cleopatra, Arabs, Mamelukes, ancient pharaohs, Moses, and now Bonaparte. The entire country was a rubbish heap of history, including the odd medallion around my neck. Now I wondered about Astiza, who seemed to have a more complicated past than I’d suspected. Might she recognise something in the medallion that I would not?
‘What spell did you cast back in Alexandria?’
It took a moment before she reluctantly replied. ‘One for your safety, as a warning to another. A second for the beginning of your wisdom.’
‘You can make me smart?’
‘That may be impossible. Perhaps I can make you see.’
I laughed, and she finally allowed a slight smile. By listening to her, I was getting her to let me inside a little. She wanted respect, not just for her but for her nation.
That languid night, as we lay at anchor and slept on the deck of the chebek under a desert haze of stars, I crept close to where she was sleeping. I could hear the lap of water, the creak of rigging, and the murmur of sailors on watch.
‘Keep away from me,’ she whispered when she woke, squeezing herself against the wood.
‘I want to show you something.’
‘Here? Now?’ She had the same tone of suspicion Madame Durrell used when we discussed payment of my rent.
‘You’re the historian of plain truths. Look at this.’ I passed the medallion to her. In the glow of a deck lantern it was just discernible.
She felt with her fingers and sucked in her breath. ‘Where did you get this?’ Her eyes widened, her lips slightly parted.
‘I won it in a card game in Paris.’
‘Won it from whom?’
‘A French soldier. It’s supposed to come from Egypt. Cleopatra, he claimed.’
‘Perhaps you stole it from this soldier.’ Why would she say that?
‘No, just outplayed him at cards. You’re the religious expert. Tell me if you know what it is.’
She turned it in her hand, extending the arms to make a V, and rubbed the disc between thumb and forefinger to feel its inscriptions. ‘I’m not sure.’
That was disappointing. ‘Is it Egyptian?’
She held it up to see in the dim light. ‘Very early, if it is. It seems primitive, fundamental… so this is what the Arab lusts for.’
‘See all those holes? What do you think they are?’
Astiza regarded it for a moment and then rolled on her back, holding it up toward the sky. ‘Look at the way the light shines through. Clearly, they are supposed to be stars.’
‘Stars?’
‘Life’s purpose is written on the sky, American. Look!’ She pointed south toward the brightest star, just rising on the horizon.
‘That’s Sirius. What about it?’
‘It’s the star of Isis, star of the new year. She waits for us.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘When the well runs dry we know the worth of water,’ old Ben Franklin had written. Indeed, the French army’s march to the Nile had been an ill-planned fiasco. Companies trampled each other at every good well and then drank it dry before the next regiment arrived. Men quarrelled, collapsed, became delirious, and shot themselves. They were tantalised and tormented by a new phenomenon the savants dubbed a ‘mirage’, in which distant desert looked like shimmering lakes of water. Cavalry would gallop toward it at full charge, only to find dry sand and the ‘lake’ once more on the horizon, as elusive as the end of a rainbow. It was as if the desert was mocking the Europeans. When troops reached the Nile they stampeded like cattle, plunging into the river to drink until they vomited, even as other men tried to drink around them. Their mysterious destination, fabled Egypt, seemed as cruel as the mirage. The shortage of canteens and the failure to secure wells was a criminal oversight the other generals blamed Napoleon for, and he was not a man to readily shoulder blame. ‘The French complain of everything, always,’ he muttered. Yet the criticism stung because he knew it was just. In his campaign in fertile Italy, food and water was readily obtained on the march and army clothing fit the climate. Here he was learning to bring everything with him, but the lessons were painful. Tempers frayed in the heat.
The French army began marching up the Nile toward Cairo, Egyptian peasants fleeing and reforming behind it like displaced fog. As a column approached each village, the women and children would drive livestock into the desert and hide amid the dunes, peeping over the lip like animals from burrows. The men would linger a little longer, trying to hide food and their meagre implements from the locust-like invaders. As the tricolour entered the village boundary they would finally run for the river, straddling bundles of papyrus reed and paddling out into the water, bobbing offshore in the Nile like wary ducks. Division after division would tramp past their homes, a long caterpillar of dusty blue, red, white, and green uniforms. Doors would be kicked in, stables explored, and anything of use taken. Then the army would march on and the peasants would come back to take up their lives again, scouring our track for useful pieces of military litter.
Our little fleet paralleled the land force, bearing supplies and scouting the opposite bank. Each evening we’d land near Napoleon’s headquarters company so that Monge, Berthollet, and Talma could make notes about the country we were traversing. It was dangerous to roam away from the soldiers’ protection, so they would interview officers on what they’d seen and add to lists of animals, birds, and villages. Their reception was sometimes grumpy because we were envied our place in the boats. The heat was enervating, and the flies a torment. Each time we landed the tension between the army’s officers seemed worse, since many supplies were still back on the ships or docks at Alexandria and no division had all it needed. Constant sniping from the Bedouin marauders and lurid stories of capture and torture kept the troops uneasy.
The tension finally boiled over when a particularly insolent group of enemy warriors managed to penetrate near Napoleon’s tent one evening, whooping and firing from their splendid Arabians, their colourful robes like a taunting cape. When the furious general dispatched some dragoons and a young aide named Croisier to destroy them, the masterful Egyptian horsemen toyed with the troop and then escaped without losing a man. The small desert horses seemed able to run twice as far on half the water as the heavy European mounts, which were still recovering from the long sea voyage. Our commander went into a rage, humiliating the poor aide so badly that Croisier vowed to die bravely in battle to make up for his shame, a promise he would keep within a year. But Bonaparte was not to be mollified.