The Rosetta Key

“I had to get something before Napoleon did,” I told them.

“And did you?” Smith asked.

I pointed at the massing troops. “He thinks so, and he’s coming to get it.” Realizing an attack might be imminent, our garrison’s leaders began shouting orders, bugles sounding over the din of cannon.

I addressed Miriam. “The French sent me a sign that she might be alive. I had to find out, but I didn’t know what to say to you—not after our night together. And she was alive. We were coming here together, to explain, but she’s been recaptured, I think.” 2 4 8

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“Did I mean anything to you? At all?”

“Of course! I fell in love with you! It’s just . . .”

“Just what?”

“I never fell out of love with her.”

“Damn you.”

It was the first profanity I’d ever heard Miriam use, and it shocked me more than a tirade of abuse from someone like Djezzar. I was searching for a way to explain, making clear that higher causes were at stake, but each time I started a sentence it sounded hollow and self-serving, even to me. Emotion had carried us away that night after the defense of the tower, but then fate and a ruby ring had drawn me off in a way I didn’t anticipate. Where was the wrong? Moreover, I had a golden cylinder of incalculable value tucked in my shirt. But none of this was easy to put when the French army was coming.

“Miriam, it was always about more than just us. You know that.”

“No. Decisions hurt people. It’s as simple as that.”

“Well, I’ve lost Astiza again.”

“And me too.”

But I could win her back, couldn’t I? Yes, men are dogs, but women take a certain feline satisfaction in flogging us with words and tears.

There is love and cruelty on both sides, is there not? So I’d take her scorn and fight the battle and then, if we survived, plot a strategy to paper over the past and get her back.

“They’re coming!”

Grateful to have to face only Napoleon’s divisions instead of Miriam’s hurt, I climbed with the others to the top of the great tower. The plain had come alive. Every trench was a caterpillar of hurrying men, their advance fogged by the gun smoke of the furious cannonade.

Other troops were dragging lighter field pieces forward to engage if a breach was effected. Ladders rocked as grenadiers crossed the uneven ground, and galloping teams hauled fresh cannonballs and powder to the batteries. A group of men in Arab robes had clustered near the half-destroyed aqueduct.

I snapped open my glass. They were the survivors of Najac’s gang, by the look of it. I didn’t see Silano or Astiza.

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2 4 9

Smith hauled on my shoulder and pointed. “What the devil is that?” I swung my glass. A horizontal log was trundling toward us, a massive cedar jutting from a carriage bed with six sets of wheels. Soldiers pushed from the sides and behind. Its tip was swollen, like a gigantic phallus, and coated, I guessed, with some kind of armor. What the devil indeed? It looked like a medieval battering ram. Surely Bonaparte didn’t think he could start knocking against our ramparts with weapons centuries out of date. Yet the device’s pushers were trotting forward confidently.

Had Napoleon gone mad?

It reminded me of the kind of makeshift contraption that might have delighted Ben Franklin, or my American colleague Robert Fulton, who prowled Paris with dotty ideas for things he called steamboats and submarines. And who else did I know who was an inveterate tinkerer? Nicolas-Jacques Conte, of course, the man whose balloon Astiza and I had stolen in Cairo. Monge had said he’d invented some kind of sturdy wagon to get heavy guns to Acre. This trundling log had all the markings of his makeshift ingenuity. But a battering ram?

It seemed so backward for a modernist like Conte. Unless . . .

“It’s a bomb!” I suddenly cried. “Shoot at its head, shoot at the head!” The land torpedo had reached a slight downward incline leading to the moat and was beginning to accelerate.

“What?” Phelipeaux asked.

“There are explosives at the end of the log! We’ve got to set them off!” I grabbed a musket and fired, but if I hit the contraption at all my bullet bounced harmlessly off the metal sheathing at its tip.

Other shots were fired, but our soldiers and sailors were still aiming for the men pushing alongside the wheels. One or two were hit, but the monster simply ran over them as they fell, the torpedo gathering speed.

“Hit it with a cannon!”

“It’s too late, Gage,” Smith said calmly. “We can’t depress the guns far enough.”

So I grabbed Miriam, brushing by her astonished brother, and pulled her to the rear of the tower before she could protest.

“Get back in case it works!”

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Smith, too, was backing away, and Djezzar had already left to strut along the walls and cow his men. But Phelipeaux lingered, gamely trying to slow the rush of Conte’s contraption with a well-aimed pistol shot. It was madness.