The Rosetta Key

The government and religious area occupies the northeastern quarter of the city, and the land walls face north and east, their corner joined at a massive tower. This would be so key to the ensuing siege that it would eventually be called by the French la tour maudite: the accursed tower. But could Acre be defended?

Clearly, many thought not. We took Mohammad’s little boat ashore, following the Tigre’s longboat, and when we reached the quay the waterfront was jammed with refugees anxious to flee the city.

Smith, Mohammad, and I pushed through a crowd close to panic.

Most were women and children, but not a few were rich merchants who’d paid Djezzar steep bribes to leave. In war, money can mean survival, and stories of slaughter had raced up the coast. People clutched the few belongings they could carry and bid for passage on the mer-chantmen offshore. A sweating woman cradled a silver coffee service, her toddlers clutching at her gown and howling. A cotton merchant had stuffed loaded pistols into a sash sewn with golden coins. A lovely dark-eyed girl of ten with trembling mouth held a squirming puppy.

A banker used a wedge of African slaves to push his way to the fore-front.

“Never mind this rabble,” Smith said. “We’re better without them.” 1 3 0

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“Don’t they trust their own garrison?”

“Their garrison doesn’t trust itself. Djezzar has spine, but the French have crushed every army they’ve met. Your cannon will help.

We’ll have bigger guns than Boney has, and we’ll put a battery of them right at the Land Gate, where the sea and land walls meet. But it will be the corner tower that’s the nut the devil cracks his tooth on.

It’s the farthest from the support of our naval artillery, yet the strongest point in the wall. It’s Acre’s bloody knuckle, and our real secret is a man who hates Boney even more than we do.”

“You mean Djezzar the Butcher.”

“No, I mean Napoleon’s classmate from the Ecole Royale Mili-taire in Paris. Our Louis-Edmond le Picard de Phelipeaux shared a desk with the Corsican rascal, believe it or not, and the aristocrat and provincial kicked each other’s legs blue when they were teens. It was Phelipeaux who always bested Bonaparte on tests, Phelipeaux who graduated with higher honors, and Phelipeaux who got the best military assignments. If the revolution hadn’t occurred, forcing our royalist friend out of France, he’d likely be Napoleon’s superior. He slipped into France as a clandestine agent last year and rescued me from Temple Prison, posing as a police commissioner who pretended he was transferring me to a different cell. He’s never lost to Napoleon, and won’t this time. Come and meet him.” Djezzar’s “palace” looked like a transplanted Bastille. The Crusader keep had been remodeled to include gunports, not charm, and two-thirds of the Butcher’s ordinance was aimed at his own people, not the French. Square and stolid, the citadel was as implacable as Djezzar’s iron-fisted rule.

“There’s an armory in the basement, barracks on the ground floor, administrative offices in the next, Djezzar’s palace above that, and the harem at the very top,” Smith said, pointing. I could see grilled harem windows, like the cage of pretty birds. As if in sympathy, swallows flitted between them and the palms below. Having broken into a harem in Egypt, I had no desire to explore this one. Those women had been scary.

We passed hulking Ottoman sentries and a massive wooden door t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

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studded with iron, and entered the gloomy interior. After the dazzling light of the Levant, the inside had the air of a dungeon. I blinked as I looked about. This was the level that was quarters for Djezzar’s loyal-ist guards, and there was a military sparseness about it. The soldiers looked at us shyly from the shadows, where they were cleaning muskets and sharpening blades. They looked about as cheerful as recruits at Valley Forge. Then there were quick footsteps from the stairs and a lithe and more energetic Frenchman bounded down, in a rather stained and careworn white uniform of the Bourbons. This must be Phelipeaux.

He was taller than Napoleon, elegant in his movements, and with that languid self-confidence that comes with high birth. Phelipeaux gave a courtly bow, his wan smile and dark eyes seeming to measure everything with an artilleryman’s calculation. “Monsieur Gage, I am told you may have saved our city!”

“Hardly that.”

“Your captured French guns will be invaluable, I assure you. Ah, the irony of it. And an American! We are Lafayette and Washington!

What an international alliance we are forming here: British, French, American, Mameluke, Jew, Ottoman, Maronite . . . all against my former classmate!”

“Did you really school together?”

“He peeked at my answers.” He grinned. “Come, let’s peek at him now!”

I liked his dash already.