It was as if he’d read my mind. “War and politics makes necessity,” he said. “It is too bad we have to kill you, but there it is.”
“There what is?”
“I feel as if I’m being driven toward an unknown goal, Ethan Gage, and that you represent as much of a dangerous obstacle now as you did assistance when I brought you to Egypt. Neither of us planned you’d end with the damned English, but there you were at Acre with your electricity. And now you’ve attacked Rosetta.”
“Only because of Silano. He was the one with the crocodile . . .” Bonaparte stuck out his hand. “Au revoir, Monsieur Gage. Under different circumstances we might have become firm partners. As it is, you’ve betrayed France for the last time. You’ve proven yourself entirely too much of a nuisance, and too able an enemy. Yet even cats have only nine lives. Surely you’ve used yours up by now?”
“Not unless you put it to the test,” I replied morosely.
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“I will leave it to Silano to be creative with you and your woman.
The one who shot at me so long ago, in Alexandria.”
“She shot at me, general.”
“Yes. Why are the bad ones so beautiful? Well. Destiny awaits.” And having disposed of us, off he marched, his mind on his next project.
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Adecent man would simply shoot us, but Silano was a scientist. Astiza and I had crossed him enough that he thought we deserved some pain, and he was curious to use our environment. “Do you know sand alone can mummify a carcass?”
“How erudite.”
So we were buried after midnight, but only to our necks.
“What I like about this is that you can watch each other burn and weep,” he said as his henchmen finished packing sand around our bodies. Our hands had been tied behind our backs, and our feet bound. We had no hats, and were already thirsty. “There will be a slow increase in torment as the sun rises. Your skin will fry, and eventually crack. The reflected light and dust will slowly induce blindness, and as you watch each other you will gradually go mad. The hot sand will leach out any liquid you retain, and your tongues will swell so much that you will have difficulty breathing. You will pray for snakes or scorpions to make it faster.” He stooped and patted me on the head, like a child or dog. “The scorpions like to go for the eyes, and the ants crawl up the nostrils to feed. The vultures will hope to get to you before you’re completely eaten. But it is the snakes that hurt the most.”
“You seem to know a lot about it.”
“I’m a naturalist. I have studied torture for many years. It’s an exquisite science, and quite a pleasure if you understand its refine-ments. It’s not easy to keep a man in excruciating pain and yet coher-ent enough to tell you something useful. What’s interesting about this exercise is that the body below the neck should be baked dry and t h e
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preserved. It is from this natural process, I’m guessing, that ancient Egyptians got the idea of mummification. Do you know that the Persian king Cambyses lost an entire army in a sandstorm?”
“Can’t say that I care.”
“I study history so as not to repeat it.” He turned to Astiza, her dark hair a fan on the earth. “I did love you, you know.”
“You’ve never loved anyone but yourself.”
“Ben Franklin said the man who loves himself will have no rival,” I chimed in.
“Ah, the amusing Monsieur Franklin. Certainly I’m more faithful to myself than either of you have been to me! How many chances for partnership did I give you, Gage? How many warnings? Yet you betrayed me, again and again and again.”
“Can’t imagine why.”
“I’d like to watch you beg before the end.” And I would have, if I thought it would do a lick of good.
“But I’m afraid that destiny tugs at me, too. I’m accompanying Bonaparte back to France, where I can study the book more deeply, and he’s not a man to sit still. Nor is it safe to stray from the main army. I’m afraid we will not meet again, Monsieur Gage.”
“Do you believe in ghosts, Silano?”
“I’m afraid my interest in the supernatural does not extend to superstition.”
“You will, when I come after you.”
He laughed. “And after you give me a good fright, perhaps we’ll play a game of cards! In the meantime I’ll let you turn into one. Or a mummy. Maybe I’ll have someone dig you out in a few weeks so I can prop you in a corner like Omar.”
“Alessandro, we do not deserve this!” Astiza cried.
There was a long silence. We could not see his face. Then, quietly,
“Yes you do. You broke my heart.”
And with that, we were left alone to fry.
Astiza and I faced each other, me south and she north, so that our cheeks could be equally roasted between dawn and sunset. It’s cold in the desert at night and for the first few minutes after the sun broke 2 9 4
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the horizon, the warmth was not unpleasant. Then, as pink left the sky and it turned to summer’s milk, the temperature began to rise, accentuated by the reflecting sand. My ear began to burn. I heard the first rustlings of insects.
“Ethan, I’m afraid,” whispered Astiza, who was six feet from me.
“We’ll black out,” I promised, without conviction.
“Isis, call to me our friends! Give us help!” Isis didn’t reply. “It won’t hurt after a while,” I said.
Instead, the pain increased. I soon had a headache, and my tongue thickened. Astiza was quietly moaning. Even in the best of circumstances the summer sun in Egypt hammers one’s head. Now I felt like Jericho’s anvil. I was reminded all too sharply of the flight that Ashraf and I made into the desert a year before. That time, at least, we’d been mounted and my Mameluke friend had known how to find water.
The sand grew hotter. Every inch of skin could feel the rising heat, and yet I couldn’t wiggle. There were sharp pricks, like bites, but I couldn’t tell if something was already eating me or it was merely the heat gnawing into my sensations. The brain has a way of amplifying pain with dread.
Did I mention that gambling is a vice?
Sweat had half blinded me, stinging, but soon was leached out, leaving salt. My entire head felt like it was swelling. My vision blurred from the glare, and Astiza’s own head seemed as much a blob as someone recognizable.
Was it even noon yet? I didn’t think so. I heard a faint rumble.
Was the fighting starting again? Maybe it would rain, as at the City of Ghosts.
No, the heat rose, in great shimmering waves. Astiza sobbed for a while, but then fell silent. I prayed she’d passed out. I was waiting for the same, that slow slide into unconsciousness and death, but the desert wanted to punish me. On and on the temperature climbed. My chin was burning. My teeth were frying in their sockets. My eyes were swelling shut.
Then I saw something scuttle by.
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It was black, and I groaned inwardly. Soldiers had told me that scorpion stings were particularly painful. “Like a hundred bees at once,” one had said. “No, no, like holding a hot coal to the skin!” chimed in another. “More closely like acid in the eye!” offered another.
“A hammer to the thumb!”
More scuttling. Another one. The scorpions were approaching us, then backing off. I couldn’t hear any signaling, but they seemed to pile into packs like wolves.
I hoped their assault would not wake Astiza up. I pledged to try as hard as I could not to scream. The rumbling was getting louder.
Now one arthropod came near, a monster in my ruined vision, as huge as the crocodile from this perspective. It seemed to be contemplating me with the dull, cold instinctive calculation of its tiny brain.
Its cocked tail twitched, as if aiming. And then . . .