‘Napoleon would find that hard to believe, at your price.’
‘I’m a double agent, my naïve friend. If you are really that naïve.’ He belched, and drank again. ‘While I report, I spy, and then cross the lines to report and spy again. Why not keep everyone informed? Now Bonaparte is going to get a surprise.’
‘What do you mean?’ I took a more vigorous swallow and lightly reinserted the cork, eyeing the pistol he kept in his lap.
‘The Austrians are not running. They’re concentrating. Napoleon has split his forces to catch an army massing against him.’
‘But you told him the opposite!’
He shrugged. ‘If he wanted the truth, he should have paid more than Melas.’
‘Men will die!’
‘You think they won’t die otherwise? Bonaparte believed what he wanted to believe. He remembers the clumsy Austrians of four years ago and gives Melas no credit. That old man is a fox, let me tell you. Fox enough to outbid Bonaparte for me. So I tell the French what they want, and the Austrians what I’ve told the French. Now the little despot will get his comeuppance.’
He massaged the butt of his pistol, making me feel safe as a goose at Christmas. Why was he telling me this? I rocked my bottle, considering.
‘Yes, American, Napoleon is about to get his nose bloodied. When he loses, I’ll sell him still more advice – he’ll be desperate enough to pay double – and then I’ll go back and sell what I sold him to the Austrians for triple. This is how to make money in our business.’
‘Our business?’
‘Bringing people together.’ He laughed.
‘You’re very candid.’
He shrugged. ‘Just half-drunk. And confident of your discretion.’
‘Because I’m a spy, too?’
Now he looked at me seriously. ‘Of course not! You’re a man like me, American, able to see the value in what you’ve been told. You’d betray me in an instant just as I’ve betrayed Bonaparte, and count your thirty pieces of silver as I swing from a tree. No, no, don’t deny it … I’d do the same if our positions were reversed. This is the way of the world.’ Lazily he raised his pistol. ‘So you’ll go to your grave with a secret! Ah, don’t touch your rifle!’ He smiled. ‘You must realise by now that I was sent to find you, not Bonaparte. My true employers remember your crimes.’
‘True employers?’
He pulled the hammer back. ‘Do you think the Rite forgets?’ He aimed for my heart.
So I shot him with my cork.
He was a little too confiding and too confident, see. I’d seen reptiles like him before, so I got up some pressure in my bottle of bubbly and popped the cork just as he pulled to fire. The bottle gushed, cork and spray flying in his face, and it was enough of a surprise that the pistol jerked as I rolled. The ball whined past and thudded into the wall behind, raising a little puff of dust. He heaved up, pulling out a second pistol, but I beat him with a sidearm throw of my tomahawk. There was a crack as it struck between chin and teeth, enamel flying, and then I brought up my rifle. We fired at the same time, but it’s even harder to aim with a hatchet in your face. He missed, and I didn’t.
The bullet slammed him backward and he jerked as he died. I reloaded as I watched, ready to club him, then yanked my tomahawk out of his face and cleaned its steel on his coat. His split lips were fixed in a snarl. It was a nasty business, but after the events of the past two years the extermination of his kind of vermin didn’t bother me overmuch.
The Rite? Now I understood my own apprehension. I dragged him through his own blood to the doorway for better light and ripped open his coat and shirt. Burnt into his chest was a small tattoo of a pyramid wrapped with a snake. Apophis, the snake god! I shivered. Was this spy in the same confederacy as my old nemesis Silano, another branch of the perfidious Egyptian Rite that had pursued me in Egypt? And now, thanks to this serpent, Napoleon was dividing his forces as the Austrians were massing. Even if I hurried back to Napoleon this instant, it would be too late to pull in Desaix and Lapoype. The French centre would be overwhelmed.
Damn Renato!
No, there’d be no quick exit to Paris. I’m not exactly steadfast, but I’m no traitor either, even if it wasn’t my country. The only thing to do was to gallop after Desaix, who I faintly knew from Egypt, and get him hurrying back to the battle about to erupt in his rear. It would be a near-run thing, but if I rushed there might just be time enough!
I glanced down at the lifeless body. As I said, don’t boast. And me? Not only was I occasionally useful, I might be developing integrity as well. By the saints, how had Napoleon guessed I might be worth betting on?
The spy stared upward with the surprised gaze of the dead, his body in a widening pool of gore. I buttoned his bloody shirt to hide his mark and wearily mounted my horse to go off and save the battle. And did I see the flicker of someone else, sinking back into a hedgerow, from the corner of my eye?
CHAPTER SIX
The whole world knows what happened next. It dawned bright, the air scrubbed by recent rain, and by afternoon we had a high, hot Italian sun, the kind of weather that allows cavalry to actually charge, cannons to actually deploy, and dry muskets to actually fire. If you want to kill each other, there’s nothing like a sunny day.
As Renato had predicted, the Austrians attacked in force at Marengo, long lines of white pushing through fields and cow pens in irresistible numbers. They took terrible casualties as they plunged across the moat-like Fantanone River, but they were drilled to obedience and didn’t falter. There were a hundred heroic charges on each side, men dying for a vineyard or goat paddock, the battlefield a fog, and by the time Napoleon realised he’d stumbled into the full Austrian army and was desperately outnumbered, his troops were in reluctant, bloody retreat. Bonaparte had twenty-two thousand men and forty guns against thirty thousand men and one hundred cannons, and the Austrians sprayed grapeshot at every French rally. Hannibal had allowed himself to be outwitted, and Napoleon’s career as leader of France was about to end before it had properly began.
I arrived by midday with the bad news that Renato had been a double agent, and the better news that Desaix was coming. Then I watched the battle, its discipline filling me with appalled wonder. I’d seen war in Egypt and the Holy Land, but nothing like this drilled European slugging. Regimental formations marched shoulder to shoulder like automatons, stopped, and blasted each other in ferocious, unflinching determination. How gloriously gaudy they looked, infantry shakos topped with plumes, flags a beacon in gun smoke! The front rank knelt, the second fired over their head, and the third passed up freshly loaded muskets, soldiers leaning into opposing volleys as if weathering sleet. Men coughed, yelped, went down, and new ones stepped smartly up like puppets. Dead and wounded sprawled everywhere, the green grass stained with red, but the living gave ground only grudgingly. Entire companies disintegrated rather than yield. Why did they endure? The individual soldier had little idea how his sacrifice was affecting the whole, but was acutely aware how his courage helped the small universe of friends and comrades. Men fought for their standing among men. The ranks would actually ripple as the bullets tore into them, sagging, and then stiffen until a charge with bayonet would push them back another fifty yards. Back and back the French fell, Napoleon finally committing his Consular Guard in hopes of a final, decisive blow. His elite folded under withering musket and cannon fire like paper curled by heat, pride and power ground down in a few hot minutes. An Austrian cavalry charge scooped up four hundred prisoners.
The battle was lost.