“Ready!” A thousand musket hammers were pulled back.
Napoleon’s henchmen had accused me of being a spy and a traitor, which was why I’d been marched with the other prisoners to the beach. And yes, circumstance had given a grain of truth to that characterization. But I hadn’t set out with that intent, by any means.
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I’d simply been an American in Paris, whose tentative knowledge of electricity—and the need to escape an utterly unjust accusation of murder—resulted in my being included in the company of Napoleon’s scientists, or savants, during his dazzling conquest of Egypt the year before. I’d also developed a knack for being on the wrong side at the wrong time. I’d taken fire from Mameluke cavalry, the woman I loved, Arab cutthroats, British broadsides, Muslim fanatics, French platoons—and I’m a likable man!
My latest French nemesis was a nasty scoundrel named Pierre Najac, an assassin and thief who couldn’t get over the fact that I’d once shot him from beneath the Toulon stage when he tried to rob me of a sacred medallion. It’s a long story, as an earlier volume will attest.
Najac had come back into my life like a bad debt, and had kept me marching in the prisoner rank with a cavalry saber at my back. He was anticipating my imminent demise with the same feeling of triumph and loathing that one has when crushing a particularly obnoxious spider. I was regretting that I hadn’t aimed a shave higher and two inches to the left.
As I’ve remarked before, it all seems to start with gambling. Back in Paris, it had been a card game that won me the mysterious medallion and started the trouble. This time, what had seemed a simple way to get a new start—taking the bewildered seamen of HMS Dangerous for every shilling they had before the British put me ashore in the Holy Land—had solved nothing and, it could be argued, had actually led to my present predicament. Let me repeat: gambling is a vice, and it is foolish to rely on chance.
“Aim!”
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I, Ethan Gage, have spent most of my thirty-four years trying to keep out of too much trouble and away from too much work. As my mentor and onetime employer, the late, great Benjamin Franklin, would no doubt observe, these two ambitions are as at odds as positive and negative electricity. The pursuit of the latter, no work, is almost sure to defeat the former, no trouble. But that’s a lesson, like the headache that follows alcohol or the treachery of beautiful 6
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women, forgotten as many times as learned. It was my dislike of hard labor that reinforced my fondness for gambling, gambling that got me the medallion, the medallion that got me to Egypt with half the planet’s villains at my heels, and Egypt that got me my lovely lost Astiza. She in turn had convinced me that we had to save the world from Najac’s master, the French-Italian count and sorcerer Alessandro Silano. All this, without my quite expecting it to, put me on the wrong side of Bonaparte. In the course of things I fell in love, found a secret way into the Great Pyramid, and made the damndest discoveries ever, only to lose everything I held dear when forced to escape by balloon.
I told you it was a long story.
Anyway, the gorgeous and maddening Astiza—my would-be assassin, then servant, then priestess of Egypt—had fallen from the balloon into the Nile along with my enemy, Silano. I’ve been desperately trying to learn their fate ever since, my anxiety redoubled by the fact that my enemy’s last words to Astiza were, “You know I still love you!” How’s that for prying at the corners of your mind at night? Just what was their relationship? Which is why I’d agreed to allow the English madman Sir Sidney Smith to put me ashore in Palestine just ahead of Bonaparte’s invading army, to make inquiries. Then one thing led to another and here I stood, facing a thousand gun muzzles.
“Fire!”
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But before I tell you what happened when the muskets blazed, perhaps I should go back to where my earlier tale left off, in late October of 1798, when I was trapped on the deck of the British frigate Dangerous, making for the Holy Land with her sails bellied and a bone in her teeth, cutting the frothy deep. How hearty it all was, English banners flapping, burly seamen pulling at their stout lines of hemp with lusty chants, stiff-necked officers in bicorne hats pacing the quarterdeck, and bristling cannon dewed by the spray of the Mediterranean, droplets drying into stars of salt. In other words, it was just the kind of militant, masculine foray I’ve learned to detest, t h e
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having narrowly survived the hurtling charge of a Mameluke warrior at the Battle of the Pyramids, the explosion of L’Orient at the Battle of the Nile, and any numbers of treacheries by an Arab snake worshipper named Achmed bin Sadr, who I finally sent to his own appropriate hell. I was a little winded from brisk adventure and more than ready to scuttle back home to New York for a nice job as a bookkeeper or a dry goods clerk, or perhaps as a solicitor attending to dreary wills clutched by black-clad widows and callow, undeserving offspring. Yes, a desk and dusty ledgers—that’s the life for me! But Sir Sidney would hear none of it. Worse, I’d finally figured out what I cared about in this world: Astiza. I couldn’t very well take passage home without finding out if she’d survived her fall with that villain Silano and could, somehow, be rescued.
Life was simpler when I had no principles.
Smith was gussied up like a Turkish admiral, plans building in his brain like an approaching squall. He’d been given the job of helping the Turks and their Ottoman Empire thwart the further encroach-ment of Bonaparte’s armies from Egypt into Syria, since young Napoleon’s hope was to carve an eastern empire out for himself. Sir Sidney needed allies and intelligence, and, after fishing me out of the Mediterranean, he’d told me it would work to both our advantage if I joined his cause. It was foolhardy for me to try to return to Egypt and face the angry French alone, he pointed out. I could make inquiries about Astiza from Palestine, while simultaneously assessing the various sects that might be lined up to fight Napoleon. “Jerusalem!” he’d cried. Was he mad? That half-forgotten city, an Ottoman backwater encrusted by dirt, history, religious lunatics, and disease, had—by all reports—survived only by foisting obligatory tourism on the credible and easily cheated pilgrims of three faiths. But if you’re an English schemer and warrior like Smith, Jerusalem had the advantage of being a crossroad of the complicated culture of Syria, a polyglot den of Muslim, Jew, Greek Orthodox, Catholic, Druze, Maronite, Matuwelli, Turk, Bedouin, Kurd, and Palestinian, all of them remembering slights from each other going back several thousand years.
Frankly, I’d never have ventured within a hundred miles of the 8
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place, except that Astiza was convinced that Moses had stolen a sacred book of ancient wisdom from the bowels of the Great Pyramid and that his descendants had carried it to Israel. That meant Jerusalem was the likeliest place to look. So far this Book of Thoth, or the rumors of it, had been nothing but trouble. Yet if it did hold keys to immortality and mastery of the universe, I couldn’t quite forget about it, could I? Jerusalem did make a perverse kind of sense.
Smith imagined me a trusted accomplice, and in truth we did have an alliance of sorts. I’d met him in a gypsy camp after I’d shot Najac.
The signet ring he gave had saved me from a yardarm noose when I was hauled before Admiral Nelson after the fracas at the Nile. And Smith was a genuine hero who’d burned French ships and escaped from a Paris prison by signaling one of his former bedmates from a barred window. After I’d picked up a pharaoh’s treasure under the Great Pyramid, lost it again to keep from drowning, and stolen a balloon from my friend and fellow savant Nicolas-Jacques Conte, I’d crash-landed into the sea and found myself wet and penniless on the quarterdeck of the Dangerous, fate putting me face-to-face with Sir Sidney once more, and as much at the mercy of the British as I’d been the French. My own feelings—that I’d had quite enough of war and treasure and was ready to go home to America—were blithely ignored.