The Rosetta Key

He bit his lip. “I’ve already had your felucca and wretched captain searched. They even hauled the boat to check its keel. Nothing!” Again, some of that impatient frustration I’d glimpsed the year before in Egypt broke through his urbane mask.

I smiled. “Such trust, Count Silano.”

He turned to Astiza. “Do you agree with his condition for you?” It was the second proposal I’d made in a month, I realized. Neither of them had been terribly romantic, but still . . . I must be getting old to want commitment from a woman, which meant commitment from me. “Yes,” she said. She was looking at me with hope. I felt happy and panicked at the same time.

“Then damn it, Gage, where is it?”

“Do you agree to my conditions?”

“Yes, yes.” He waved his hand.

t h e

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“On your honor as a nobleman and a savant? These soldiers are your witness.”

“On my word, to an American with more treacheries than I can count. The important thing is to break the linguistic code and translate the book. We’ll enlighten the entire world! But not if you don’t have it.”

“It’s on the boat.”

“Impossible,” Bouchard said. “My men searched every inch.”

“But they didn’t raise sail.”

I led them out of the fort and down to the Nile. The sun was drawing low, warm light spilling through date palms that waved in the hot breeze. The green water looked soupy, egrets standing in its shallows.

My boat captain had crawled into one corner of his beached craft, looking as if he expected execution any second. I couldn’t blame him.

I have a way of bringing bad luck to companions.

I snapped an order and the sail, bordered top and bottom by wooden booms, was cranked up the mast until it filled and turned in the wind.

“There. Do you see it?”

They looked close. Faint, in the horizontal light, was a strip from the bottom to the highest point of the sail with faint, odd characters.

“He sewed the thing into the cotton,” Menou said with a certain admiration.

“It was on display all the way upriver,” I announced. “Not one person noticed.”

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We had two tasks. One was to use the Rosetta Stone to translate the symbols of Thoth’s scroll into French. The second, even more time-consuming job, was to then actually translate the book and make sense of it.

Now that he had his hands on a scroll he’d been seeking for years, Silano exhibited some of that genteel charm with which he’d seduced the ladies in Paris. Lines disappeared from his face, his limp became less pained, and he was eagerly animated as he began charting symbols and trying to find connections. He had charm, and I began to understand what Astiza had seen in him. There was a courtly intellectual energy that was seductive. Even better, he seemed content to concede Astiza to me, even though I caught him looking at her longingly at times. She too seemed accepting of our treaty. What an odd triumvirate of researchers we’d become! I didn’t forget the death of my friends at Silano’s hands, but I admired his diligence. The count had brought trunks of musty books, and each educated guess would send one of us to another volume to check the plausibility of whether this grammar might work or that reference made sense. The dim pret h e

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history when this book was supposedly written was slowly being illuminated.

Laboriously, we puzzled out chapter titles on the scroll.

“On the diaphanous nature of reality and bending it to one’s will,” read one. The disturbing promise excited me, despite myself.

“On Freedom and Fate,” read another. Well, there was a question.

“On Teaming Mind, Body, and Soul.”

“On Summoning Manna from Heaven.” Had Moses read that? I didn’t see any sections on parting the sea.

“On Life Everlasting, in Its Various Forms.” Why hadn’t that worked for him?

“On Underworld and Overworld.” Hell and heaven?

“On Bending Men’s Minds to One’s Will.” Oh, Bonaparte would like that one.

“On Eliminating Ills and Curing Pain.”

“On Winning the Heart of a Lover.” Now that could be sold faster than Ben’s Almanac.

“On the Forty-Two Sacred Scrolls.”

That last was enough to make me groan. This book, apparently, was just the first of forty-one other volumes, which my Egyptian mentor Enoch had claimed were but a sampling of 36,535 scrolls—one hundred for each day of the year—scattered around the earth. They were to be found only by the worthy when the time was right. Thank the saints that I wasn’t particularly worthy! Just getting this first one had nearly killed me. Silano, however, was dreaming of new quests.

“This is astonishing! This book I’m guessing is a summary, a list of topics and first principles, with knowledge and mystery deepening with each volume. Can you imagine having them all?”

“The pharaohs thought even this one needed to be sealed away,” I reminded.