It was too late. Imbaba had become a charnel house. Murad Bey was already fleeing for the desert. The makeshift Mameluke armada of boats sailed toward a shore lined with French infantry, a watery charge even more hopeless than that of the Muslim cavalry. They sculled into a storm of bullets. Even worse, the entire battlefield was being swallowed by an oncoming wall of sand and dust, as if God, Allah, or Horus had decided on a final intervention. The boats were reaching into the teeth of the wind.
The storm was like a wall, blotting out the west. The light was growing dim as if from an eclipse of the sun. The western sky had grown black from the oncoming sandstorm, and the mighty pyramids, stupefying in their size and simplicity, were enveloped in brown fog. Toward this tempest rowed Ibrahim Bey and his bravest followers, their overloaded boats leaning farther and farther in the rising wind, the Nile frothy with whitecaps, and long lines of dusty French infantry drawn up on the bank with a storm of sand hammering their backs. The French fired again and again, in steady, disciplined volleys. Egyptians screamed, grunted, and toppled out of the boats.
The dust storm drew higher and higher, an infinite cliff, blotting out of the sky. Now I could see nothing of the fleeing Arabs on the western bank, or of the pyramids, or even of Napoleon and his staff. It was like the end of the world.
‘Get down!’ Ashraf cried. He, Astiza, Talma, and I crouched together, drawing up clothing to cover our mouths and noses.
The full power of the wind hit like a punch, shrieking, and then came sand like stinging bees. It was bad enough for the French, who crouched with their backs to the tempest, but the oncoming Mamelukes were face to it and caught on small, unstable boats. The arena went dark. The wind consumed all other noise. The battle stopped. The four of us held each other, trembling and praying to an assortment of gods, reminded at last that there are powers higher than our own. For several long minutes the sandstorm beat at us, seeming to rob our chests of air. Then, almost as quickly as it had come, it snuffed itself out and the noise died. Dust sifted down from the air above.
Slowly, shakily, thousands of French soldiers rose back up from their shallow graves of sand, seemingly resurrected but entirely brown. To a man they were speechless, overwhelmed, horrified. Overhead, the sky cleared. To the west, the sun was red as a ripped heart.
We looked out at Cairo and the river. The water was swept clean of boats. All the Mamelukes who had tried to attack us by water were drowned or shipwrecked on the eastern bank. Every boat had capsized. We could hear the wails of the survivors, and Astiza translated. ‘Now we are slaves of the French!’ They fled into the city and through it, gathered wives and valuables, and disappeared into the growing dusk. The strange storm, supernatural in nature, had seemed to erase one group of conquerors and install another. The wind had extinguished the past and introduced a strange European future.
Flames flickered along the waterfront of the city as the few feluccas still moored there began to burn. Someone was hoping to delay the French crossing by firing the boats, a futile hope given the other craft available up and down the Nile. The feluccas flamed into the night, illuminating the city we were about to occupy like the lamps of a theatre, the fantastic Moorish architecture flickering and dancing with the light of conflagration.
The French soldiers, having survived both battle and storm, were triumphant, exhausted, and filthy. They crowded into the Nile to wash and then sat in melon fields to eat and clean their muskets. Clumps of naked Arab dead were everywhere, stripped for booty. The French had suffered a few score dead and two hundred wounded; the Arabs countless thousands. Ordinary French soldiers were newly rich with loot. Napoleon’s victory was complete, his hold on the army confirmed, his gamble rewarded.
He rode among his troops like a triumphant lion, receiving their accolades and bestowing congratulations in turn. All the disgruntlement and acrimony of the past weeks had disappeared in the joy of victory. Napoleon’s intense fury appeared to have been sated by the day’s intensity, and his wounded pride over his wife’s betrayal had been assuaged by slaughter. It was as merciless a battle as I could imagine, and it had spent all emotion. Josephine would never know the carnage her games had unleashed.
The general found me sometime that evening. I don’t know when – the shock of such a huge fight and storm had blurred my sense of time – or how. His aides had come looking specifically for me, however, and I knew with certain dread what it was he wanted. Bonaparte never gave himself leave to brood; he always thought ahead to the next step.
‘So, Monsieur Gage,’ he said to me in the dark, ‘I understand you have captured yourself a Mameluke.’
How did he know so much so quickly? ‘It seems so, General, by accident as much as intention.’
‘You have a knack for contributing to the action, it seems.’
I shrugged with modesty. ‘Still, I remain a savant, not a soldier.’
‘Which is precisely why I’ve sought you out. I’ve liberated Egypt, Gage, and tomorrow I will occupy Cairo. The first step in my conquest of the East is completed. The second hinges on you.’
‘On me, General?’
‘Now you will unravel the clues and discover whatever secrets these pyramids and temples hold. If there are mysteries, you will learn them. If there are powers, you will give them to me. And as a result, our armies will become invincible. We will march to unite with Tippoo, drive the British out of India, and seal the destruction of England. Our two revolutions, American and French, will remake the world.’
It is difficult to exaggerate what the emotional effect of such a call can have on an ordinary human being. It’s not that I cared a whit about England, France, Egypt, India, or making a new world. Rather that this short, charismatic man of emotional fire and blazing vision had enlisted me in partnership with something bigger than myself. I’d been waiting for the future to start, and here it was. In the day’s carnage and supernatural augury of weather I’d seen proof, I thought, of future greatness: of a man who changed everything about him for better and worse, like a little god himself. Without thinking through the consequences, I was flattered. I bowed slightly, in salute.
Then, with my heart in my throat, I watched Bonaparte stalk away, remembering Sydney Smith’s dark description of the French Revolution. I thought of the heaps of dead on the battlefield, the wailing of Egyptians, and the disgruntlement of homesick troops joking about their six acres of sand. I thought about the earnest investigations of the scholars, the European plans for reform, and Bonaparte’s hope for an endless march to the borders of India, as Alexander had marched before him.
I thought of the medallion around my neck and how desire always seems to defeat simple happiness.
It was after Bonaparte had disappeared that Astiza leant close.
‘Now you will have to decide what you truly believe,’ she whispered.
CHAPTER TEN
The home of Ashraf’s oddly named brother was in one of Cairo’s more reputable sections, which is to say it was in a neighbourhood marginally less dusty, disease-ridden, rat-infested, stinking, and crowded than the city’s norm. Just as in Alexandria, the glories of the East seemed to have eluded Egypt’s capital, which had little provision for sanitation, garbage removal, street lighting, traffic management, or corralling the marauding dog packs that roamed its lanes. Of course I’ve said much the same of Paris. Still, if the Egyptians had marshalled their dogs instead of their cavalry, our conquest might not have been so easy. Scores of the mutts were shot or bayoneted each day by annoyed soldiers. The executions had no more impact on the canine population than swatting had on the incessant flies.