The Rosetta Key

“I’d roast you right now if Bonaparte and the master didn’t want you alive,” Najac snarled. He let the Arabs amuse themselves by using their daggers to flick embers on my arms and legs, but not much more. Time enough later to make me scream.

So I finally lapsed into exhausted blackness until I was yanked painfully awake the next morning for a breakfast of chickpea paste and water. Then we continued down a trace from the Jerusalem hills to the coastal plain, the horizon marked by columns of smoke.

The French army was hard at work.

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Despite my captivity, I had an odd sense of homecoming when we reached Napoleon’s camp. I’d marched with Bonaparte’s army and encountered Desaix’s division at Dendara. Now, pitching white tents before the walls of Jaffa, were men in European uniforms again. I smelled familiar food, and once more heard the lilting elegance of the French tongue. As we rode through the ranks, men looked curiously at Najac’s gang and a few pointed at me in surprised recognition. Not long before I’d been one of their savants. Now here I was again, a deserter and a prisoner.

Jaffa itself was familiar, but viewed this time from the vantage of the besieger. Canopies and hanging carpets had disappeared, its ramparts bearing the fresh bite of cannonballs. Similarly, many of the orange trees that sheltered Napoleon’s army showed raw wood where Ottoman fire had smashed their tops. Fresh earth and sand were being thrown up for siege works, and long lines of French cavalry horses shifted nervously where they were picketed in the shade, whinnying and shuffling as cannon popped. Their tails flicked at flies like met-ronomes, and their manure had that familiar sweet scent.

Najac went inside Napoleon’s broad canvas pavilion while I stood hatless in the Mediterranean sun, thirsty, dazed, and feeling fatalistic.

I’d fallen once on a cliff above the St. Lawrence River, pivoting endlessly, and felt this same vague sense of sickening regret that time—

only to bounce off a bush, over the rocks, and into the river.

And here, perhaps, came my savior bush. “Gaspard!” I called.

It was Monge, the famed French mathematician, the man who’d helped solve some of the puzzle of the Great Pyramid. He’d been a confidant of Napoleon since the general’s triumphs in Italy and had mentored me like a wayward nephew. Now he was accompanying the army into Palestine.

“Gage?” Monge squinted as he came closer, his civilian dress increasingly shopworn, his knees patched, coat ragged, and face rough 1 0 4

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with stubble. The man was fifty-two, and tired. “What are you doing here? I thought I told you to go home to America!”

“I tried. Listen. Do you have word of Astiza?”

“The woman? But she went with you.”

“Yes, but we were separated.”

“Took a balloon, the two of you did—that’s what Conte told me.

Oh, how furious he was at that prank! Floated away, how the rest of us envied you . . . and now you’re back in this asylum? Good God, man, I knew you weren’t a true savant, but you seem to have no sense at all.”

“On that point we can agree, Doctor Monge.” Not only did he know nothing of Astiza’s fate, he clearly didn’t know of our entry into the pyramid, and I quickly decided it best not to tell him. If the French ever became aware there were things of value down there, they’d blow the edifice apart. Better to let Pharaoh rest in peace.

“Astiza fell into the Nile and the balloon eventually came down in the Mediterranean,” I explained. “Is Nicolas here too?” I was a little nervous at meeting Conte, the expedition’s aeronaut, having stolen his observation balloon.

“Fortunately for you he’s back in the south, organizing the shipment of our siege artillery. He had a rather brilliant plan to construct multiwheeled wagons to carry the guns across the desert, but Bonaparte has no time for new inventions. We’re risking bringing the train by sea.” He stopped, realizing he was relating secrets. “But what are you doing here, with your hands tied?” He looked puzzled. “You’re filthy, burned, friendless—my God, what’s happened to you?”

“He’s an English spy,” said Najac, emerging from the tent. “And you risk suspicion too, scientist, simply by talking to him.”

“English spy? Don’t be ridiculous. Gage is a dilettante, a hanger-on, a dabbler, a wanderer. No one could take him seriously as a spy.”

“No? Our general would.”

And with that Bonaparte himself appeared, the tent flap billowing grandly as if infused with his electricity. Like all of us he was browner than when we’d left Toulon nearly a year before, and while he was t h e

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