“I thought you French put food above art, or even love,” Smith said.
“But when it comes to expenditures, our accountants have the taste of the English.”
I didn’t complain. I was aware that I was riding in a coach, with no assignment but to get somewhere, when so many people were not. We’d pass long rows of peasants scything at dusk, or stable boys mucking out horse stalls with sunburned shoulders, or a maid parting a sea of chickens that closed up behind her as she left a trail of scattered grain. I thought how different, how safe and how dull, to be tied to one place and have one’s days dictated by the turn of the seasons. I’d walk to stretch in the evenings, eating a piece of fruit, and if I came upon a boy who seemed smart or a mademoiselle who was pretty, I might show them my longrifle and even help by shooting a crow out of a tree. They treated such a diversion like magic, and me like an exotic visitor from another world.
The savants were apprehensive but excited. They’d see a geologically dramatic island at the edge of the Ottoman Empire, dabble in political intrigue, and maybe make an archaeological discovery or two. Certainly our mission was more thrilling than academic meetings. The truth was that I still had some reputation as a hero, and the scholars hoped a little of my dash might rub off. I couldn’t blame them.
We settled into roles: I the not-entirely-trusted-yet-redoubtable guide, Cuvier our paymaster and skeptical supervisor, Smith the make-the-best-of-it dogged Englishman always ready to shoulder more than his share of luggage or responsibility, and Fulton our tinkerer, who proved fascinated by every waterwheel and canal lock. The inventor helped pass the time by sketching out schemes to improve the suspension of our coach, all of which the driver dismissed as impractical or too expensive.
We also discussed, from boredom, the need to rewrite the history of the world.
“What we know is that rocks have been laid down and worn away over eons,” Smith said. “But how? By catastrophe, like a volcano or great flood, or the patient erosion of wind and rain? And why all that fuss at all, before we humans even appeared in Creation? What was God’s point?” He picked up rocks at every way station, marked their type on his map of France—the stones all looked the same to me, but he told them apart like a drover picks out his cattle—and then tossed them out the coach window.
“We also know that there were many creatures alive on earth that no longer exist,” Cuvier said, “many of them gigantic. Did Creation start with more variety and greater grandeur that has since been thinned and shrunken by time? That seems a peculiar kind of progress. Are we the pinnacle of Creation, or its shrunken fruit? Or have animals actually changed from one kind into another, as suggested by Saint-Hilaire? I find his proposal ridiculous for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that we have no idea how such a mutation could occur.”
“He told me that odd idea in Egypt,” I put in, cradling my longrifle between my legs. It wasn’t just nervous habit; I’d been robbed on the stage before. “More interesting to me is the question of how civilization got started, and whether marvelous things were once known and then forgotten after the fall of the Roman Empire. Some of my acquaintances have suggested that myths of the ancient gods actually refer to early beings who somehow taught mankind how to grow, build and write, and by doing so lifted us out of the mud. The Egyptian Rite thinks the knowledge of such ancestors, if relearned, could provide terrible power. I’ve seen some things to make me suspect they might be right.”
“What things?” Cuvier asked. He’d brought a red-leather notebook and pen to record our discoveries, a tin officer’s field kit with scissors, comb, and toothbrush, and a combination clock and compass in a copper case. He’d write down our remarks and mark our direction with every entry, as if no one had ever mapped the highway before.
“A book that caused nothing but trouble. And a tool, a hammer, that was even worse.”
“And now we’re off to find an ancient weapon,” said Fulton, “with Bonaparte, Fouché, and those lunatics in Madame Marguerite’s bordello curious about it, too. Why Napoleon is so anxious about forgotten weapons, when he won’t give a proper hearing to my modern ones, is beyond me.” He was amusing himself by taking apart his own pocket watch for the pleasure of putting it back together, but kept losing sprockets and springs when the coach went over bumps, making us have to look for them on the vehicle’s dusty floor. Cuvier took care to keep his own compass-clock out of the inventor’s reach.
“It’s human nature to see the flaws in what you have and perfection in what you don’t,” I said. “Besides, buying your submarine or steamboat means uncomfortable change, Robert. Sending us on a treasure hunt to conspire with a Greek patriot risks nothing.”
“Except us,” Smith said. “It’s the man on the lip of the canal who wants it dug deeper, not the man at the bottom.”
“The man at the lip will argue he can see farther, and better measure the necessary depth,” Cuvier said.
“And the one at the bottom should reply that he’s the one who can weigh the rock and soil, and count the blisters.”
At Venice we ferried across a limpid lagoon to that fabled, crumbling wedding cake of a city that was still buzzing from Bonaparte’s brief occupation in 1797. French troops had torn down the gates of the Jewish ghetto (many Jews had enlisted in Napoleon’s army as a result) and ended a thousand years of Venetian independence with a flurry of decrees declaring republican ideals. The revolution had been brief, since the Treaty of Campo Formio had given the city to Austria a few months later, but the ghetto hadn’t been reestablished and the population was still debating the merits of the frightening freedoms the French had promised. They discussed as well contrary warnings that French reform ultimately meant tyranny. Was Napoleon promise or peril? Was he liberator, or lord?
I was tempted to linger in the city by the decadent beauty of Venice: the mysterious twisting of its fetid canals, the iceberg majesty of its sinking, leaning houses, the rhythmic song of its lyrical gondoliers, its arched, weather-stained marble bridges, its baroque balconies pouring out cascades of flowers, and its dark-haired beauties weaving through the pillars at the periphery of Piazza San Marco like duchesses at a dance, their silks shimmering like butterfly wings. The queen city of the Adriatic rang with bell, song, lush opera, and echoing church choir, and smelled of perfume, spice, charcoal, urine, and water. Sunlight burned on the wavelets, and candles beckoned when it was dark.
But I’d reformed, I reminded myself, and thus resisted the temptation to peek at pleasure, indulgence, and wickedness. Instead, I begged my companions for just enough time to hunt down a fine Venetian rapier in an armory shop, given the reputation of Italian cutlery. A Venetian sword was renowned for its slim and supple balance and elegant curved guard, and yet it carried a shave more weight and sturdiness than its French counterpart.
“All the best duelists have one,” I justified.
A naval cutlass would be more practical for alley fighting, but the rapier was elegant to the feminine eye, giving me a certain swagger. I felt dashing when I buckled one on and studied myself in the store’s cracked antique mirror, deciding I looked quite the courtier. So I spent twice the money I should have, and learned when I tried to walk that the weapon banged so annoyingly on my thigh that I eventually took it off and tied it across my back like Magnus Bloodhammer’s old ax, lest I tangle my own legs. This was the new nineteenth century, I reasoned, and I assumed that in the unlikely event I actually needed a weapon as antique as a rapier, I’d have warning enough to unstrap, unsheathe, give it a whet and a polish, and get into some kind of proper stance. Besides, I still carried my habitual tomahawk and longrifle, the latter marred by an annoying crevice in the stock where Cecil Somerset had broken his sword in my last adventure. The gun was so banged about that it retained little of its original elegance when forged in Jerusalem. Still, it shot well, and I looked like a little arsenal with everything strapped on. Women eyed me with wary interest behind their splayed fans, wondering just what kind of rogue I might be, and men edged around me in narrow lanes as if I were balmy as a butcher. Venetians are used to all sorts of visitors, but whispers began about Ethan Gage, the frontier American. That secretly pleased me.