The Rosetta Key

“Jerusalem is that way,” Mohammad said, pointing west. Then, swinging his arm in the opposite direction, he said, “Mount Nebo.” Mountains rose precipitously from the Dead Sea shore as if in a hurry to get away from the brine. The tallest was as much a ridge as a peak, speckled with scrub pine. In rocky ravines, which would run with water only in a rain, pink oleander bloomed.

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Najac, who’d said little in our journey, took out a signal mirror and flashed it in the morning sun. We waited, but nothing happened.

“The damn thief has gotten us lost,” Ned muttered.

“Be patient, thickhead,” the Frenchman snapped back. He signaled again.

Then a column of signaling smoke rose from Nebo. “There!” our escort exclaimed. “The seat of Moses!”

We kicked our horses and began to climb.

It was a relief to get out of the Jordan Valley and into less cloying air. We cooled, and the slope began to smell of scrub pine. Bedouin tents were pitched on the mountain’s benches, and I could spy black-robed Arab boys tending wandering herds of scrubby goats. We followed a caravan track upward, hooves plopping in the soft dirt, horses snorting when they passed camel dung.

It took four hours, but finally we breasted the top. We could indeed see the Promised Land back west across the Jordan, brown and hazy from here, looking nothing like milk and honey. The Dead Sea was a blue mirror. Ahead, I saw no cave promising to hold treasure. Instead there was a French tent in a hollow, green grass next to it indicating a spring. The low ruins of something, an old church maybe, were nearby. Several men waited for us by a wisp of campfire smoke, the remains of the signal fire. Was Silano among them? But before I could tell I spied a person sitting on a rocky outcrop below the ruined church, away from the men, and guided my horse out of our file and dismounted.

It was a woman, dressed in white, who’d been watching our approach.

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She stood as I approached on foot, her tresses long and black as I remembered, falling from a white scarf to keep off the sun. Fabric and hair blew slightly in the mountain breeze. Her beauty was more tangible than I was prepared for, vivid in the mountaintop light. I’d turned her into a ghost and yet here she was, made flesh. I’d braced for disappointment, having polished her in my memory, but no, what I’d 1 8 8

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imagined was still here, the poised litheness, the lips and cheekbones worthy of a Cleopatra, the lustrous dark eyes. Women are flowers, giving grace to the world, and Astiza was a lotus.

She’d aged, however. Not poorly—it’s a mistake to think age an insult to women, because her beauty simply had more character—but her eyes had deepened, as if she’d seen or felt things she would prefer she hadn’t. I wondered if I’d changed the same way: how long since I’d looked in a glass? I touched my hand to stubble and was conscious, suddenly, of my travel-stained clothes. Her own gown was dust-dyed, and divided for riding. She wore cavalry boots, small enough that perhaps they’d been borrowed from some drummer. She was slim, a dancer’s body, but again, we’d all narrowed. Her waist was cinched by a silk rope, holding a small curved dagger and a leather pouch. A water skin was on the rock.

I hesitated, my rehearsals forgotten. It was as if she’d risen from the dead. Finally, “I sent men asking.” It sounded like an apology, awkward and without eloquence—but I was embarrassed, having floated away in the balloon when she hadn’t. “They told me you’d disappeared.”

“Do you have my ring?”

It was a cool way to begin. I took it out, the ruby bright. She plucked like a bird and slipped it quickly into the pouch at her side, as if it were hot. She still thinks it cursed, I thought.

“I’ll use it as an offering,” she said.

“To Isis?”

“To all of Them, including Thoth.”

“I feared you dead. It’s like a miracle. You look like a spirit or an angel.”

“Do you have the seraphim?”

Her distance was disconcerting. “I find you through hell and high water and all you want is jewelry?”

“We need them.” She was straining not to show emotion, I realized.

“We?”

“Ethan, I was saved by Alessandro.”

Well, there was a sharp little knife in the ribs. She’d been cling-t h e

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ing to the balloon’s trailing tether, Silano locked around her so she couldn’t climb, and finally she had cut the rope with my tomahawk so the airship could float out of musket range. I’d failed to haul her into the basket, or get rid of the nobleman-sorcerer who’d once been her lover. So were they a couple again? If so, I was damned if I could understand why they’d sent for me. If all they wanted were gold trin-kets, I could have mailed the things. “You were almost killed by that bastard. The only reason you didn’t get away is because he wouldn’t let go.”