The Rosetta Key

The British sailors, in contrast, sobered. A long succession of naval victories had made them cocky about “facing the frogs.” The courage of the French soldiers, however, was noted. Bonaparte had not retreated. Instead his trenches were being dug forward more vigorously than ever. The seamen felt trapped on land. The French used scarecrows to draw our fire and dug out our cannonballs to fire back at us.

It didn’t help that Djezzar was convinced the Christians in Acre must be plotting against him, even though the attacking French were from a revolution that had abandoned Christianity. He had several dozen, plus two French prisoners, sewn into sacks and cast into the sea. Smith and Phelipeaux could no more stop the pasha than Napoleon could have stopped his troops at the sack of Jaffa, but many English concluded their ally was a madman who could not be controlled.

Djezzar’s restless enmity was not limited to followers of the cross.

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Salih Bey, a Cairo Mameluke and old archenemy, had fled Egypt after Napoleon’s victory there and came to make common cause with Djezzar against the French. The pasha greeted him warmly, gave him a cup of poisoned coffee, and threw his corpse into the sea within half an hour of his arrival.

Big Ned told his fellows to put their trust in “the magician”—me.

The same trickery that had allowed me to defeat him, a man twice my size, would help us prevail against Napoleon, he promised. So at our direction, the sailors built two crude wooden capstans on either side of the tower. The chain would be hung like a garland across its face, the elevation controlled by these hoists. Next I moved my Leyden jars and cranking apparatus to a floor halfway up the tower, which contained the sally door from which I’d challenged Big Ned. A smaller chain with a hook would link with the larger one, and that chain in turn would be touched by a copper rod connected to my jars.

“When they come, Ned, you must crank like the very devil.”

“I’ll light the frogs up like a fire at All Hallows, guv’nor.” Miriam helped set the apparatus up, her quick fingers ideal for linking the jars. Had the ancient Egyptians known such sorcery, too?

“I wish old Ben was here to see me,” I remarked when we rested in the tower one evening, our metal sorcery gleaming in the dim light from the tower’s arrow slits.

“Who’s old Ben?” she murmured, leaning against my shoulder as we sat on the floor. Such physical closeness no longer seemed remarkable, though I dreamt of more.

“An American wiseman who helped start our country. He was a Freemason who knew about the Templars, and some think he had their ideas in mind when he made the United States.”

“What ideas?”

“Well, I don’t know, exactly. That a country is supposed to stand for something, I guess. Believe in something.”

“And what do you believe, Ethan Gage?”

“That’s what Astiza used to ask me! Do all women ask that? I ended up believing in her, and as soon as I did, I lost her.” She looked at me sadly. “You miss her, don’t you?” t h e

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“As you must miss your betrothed who died in the war. As Jericho misses his wife, Big Ned his Little Tom, and Phelipeaux the mon-archy.”

“So here we are, our circle of mourning.” She was quiet a moment.

Then, “Do you know what I believe in, Ethan?”

“The church?”

“I believe in the Otherness the church stands for.”

“You mean God?”

“I mean there’s more to life’s madness than just madness. I believe that in every life there are rare moments when we sense that Otherness that is all around us. Most of the time we are sealed up, lonely and blind, like a chick in its egg, but occasionally we get to crack the shell for a peek. The blessed have many such moments, and the wicked not one. But when you do—when you’ve sensed what is truly real, far realer than the nightmare we live in—everything is bearable.

And I believe that if you can ever find someone who believes like you do, who strains against the egg that constrains us—well, then the two of you together can smash the shell entirely. And that’s the most we can hope for in this world.”

I shivered inwardly. Was the monstrous war I’d been trapped in the past year some false dream, some enclosing shell? Did the ancients know how to crack open the egg? “I don’t know if I’ve ever had even a single moment. Does that make me wicked?”

“The wicked would never admit it, not even to themselves.” Her hand felt my stubbled jaw, her blue eyes like the abyss off the reef at Jaffa. “But when the moment comes you must seize it, to let in the light.”

And so she kissed me, fully this time, her breath hot, her body straining against mine, her breasts flattened against me, and her torso trembling.

I fell in love then, not just with Miriam, but with everyone. Does that sound insane? For the briefest of breaths I felt linked to all the other troubled souls of our mad world, a weird sense of community that filled me with heartbreak and love. So I kissed her back, clinging.