Napoleon's Pyramids (11 page)

The Mamelukes, now unencumbered by their own peasantry, attacked again. Their cavalry charged at full tilt, thundering down the beach in a spray of sand and water, the men shouting war cries, silken robes billowing like sails, feathers and plumes bobbing on fantastic turbans. Their speed made no difference. The French fired again and the Mameluke front rank went down, horses screaming and hooves churning. Some of the horsemen just behind collided with their stricken comrades and somersaulted as well; others managed to dodge or jump them. Yet no sooner would their cavalry form a newly coherent front than the French would fire again, a ripple of flame, bits of wadding spitting out like confetti. This advance too would be torn. The bravest of the survivors came on anyway, hurtling the corpses of their comrades, only to be met with swathes of grapeshot or balls from the field cannon. It was simple slaughter, as mechanical as Bonaparte implied, and even though I’d been in scrapes during my fur-trapping days, the ferocity of this massed violence shocked me. The sound was cacophonous, the fired metal shrieking through the air, and the human body contained more blood than I’d thought possible. Great plumes of it sometimes geysered when a body was severed with round shot. A few horsemen stumbled all the way to the French lines, probing with lance or raising their swords, but they couldn’t get their mounts to close with the hedge of bayonets. Then the command would ring out in French, another volley would be fired, and they’d go down too, riddled with balls.

What was left of the ruling caste finally broke and galloped for the desert.

“Now!” Napoleon roared. “To the wall, before their leaders regroup!” Bugles sounded and, with a cheer, a thousand troops formed column and trotted forward. They had no ladders or siege artillery but had little need for them. Under the naval bombardment the walls of the old city were coming apart like rotted cheese. Some of the houses beyond were already in flames. The French approached within musket range and a brisk fire broke out on both sides, the defenders showing more courage in the face of this furious onslaught than I’d have expected. Bullets whined like hornets and a few of the Europeans at last fell over, barely balancing the carnage left in their wake.

Napoleon followed, I by his side, the pair of us stepping past still or groaning bodies of the enemy, great dark stains in the sand beneath. I was surprised to see that many of the Mameluke slain had much fairer skin than their subjects, their bared heads revealing red or even blond hair.

“White slaves from the Caucasus,” the gigantic Dumas growled. “They’ll couple with the Egyptians, it is said, but won’t have pups by them. They also lay with each other, and prefer their own sex and race to any kind of contamination. Fresh boys eight years old are bought every year from their home mountains, creamy pink, to continue the caste. Rape is their initiation, and cruelty their school. By the time they’re full-grown they’re grim as wolves and contemptuous of anyone who’s not a Mameluke. Their only loyalty is to their bey, or chief. They also recruit the occasional exceptional black or Arab, but most view darkness with contempt.”

I looked at the general’s own racially mixed skin. “I suspect you’ll not allow Egypt to sustain that prejudice, General.”

He kicked at a dead body. “
Oui.
It’s the color of the heart that matters.”

We stayed just out of range at the base of a mammoth solitary pillar that jutted up outside the city walls. It was seventy-five feet high, thick as a man is tall, and named for the old Roman general, Pompey. We were on the rubble of several civilizations, I saw: an old Egyptian obelisk overthrown to help make the pillar’s base. The column’s pink granite was pitted and warm to the touch. Bonaparte, hoarse from shouting orders, stood on the rubble in the pillar’s meager shade. “This is hot work.” Indeed, the sun had climbed surprisingly high. How much time had gone by?

“Here, take a fruit.”

He glanced at me with appreciation and I thought perhaps this small gesture seeded friendship. Only later was I to learn that Napoleon valued anyone who could do him a service, was indifferent to those of no use, and implacable toward his enemies. But now he sucked greedily like a child, seemingly enjoying my company while showing his command of the tableau before us. “No, no, not that way,” he’d occasionally call. “Yes, that gate over there, that’s the one to force!”

It was Generals Kleber and Jacques François Menou who were at the forefront of the attack. The officers fought like madmen, as if they believed themselves invulnerable to bullets. I was equally impressed by the suicidal courage of the defenders, who knew they had no chance. But Bonaparte was the grand choreographer, directing his dance as if the soldiers were toys. His mind was already beyond the immediate fight. He glanced up at the pillar, crowned by a Corinthian capital that supported nothing. “Great glory has always been acquired in the Orient,” he murmured.

The Arab fire was slackening. The French had reached the foot of the shattered walls and were boosting each other up. One gate was opened from within; another collapsed after being battered by axes and musket butts. A tricolor appeared on a tower top, and others were carried inside the city walls. The battle was almost over, and soon came the curious incident that changed my life.

I
t had been a savage scuffle. The Arabs had grown so desperate when they ran out of powder that they’d hurled rocks. General Menou, hit by stones seven times, came away so dazed and battered that it took him several days to recover. Kleber received a grazing bullet wound over one eye and stormed about with his forehead wrapped in a bloody bandage. Yet suddenly, as if instantaneously communicating to each other the hopelessness of their cause, the Egyptians broke like a ruptured dam and Europeans flooded in.

Some of the inhabitants hunkered down in abject fear, wondering what barbarities this tide of Christians would perform. Others crowded into mosques. Many streamed out of the city to the east and south, most returning within two days when they realized they had no food or water and nowhere to go. A handful of the most defiant barricaded themselves in the city’s tower and citadel, but their shooting soon slackened from lack of gunpowder. French reprisal was swift and brutal. There were several small massacres.

Napoleon entered the city in early afternoon, as emotionally impervious to the wails of the wounded as he’d been to the thunder of the guns. “A small battle, hardly worth a bulletin,” he remarked to Menou, bending over the litter that carried the bruised general. “Although I will inflate it for consumption in Paris. Tell your friend Talma to sharpen his quill, Gage.” He winked. Bonaparte had adopted the certain wry cynicism all the French officers exhibited since the Terror. They took pride in being hard.

As a city, Alexandria was disappointing. The glories of the East were contradicted by unpaved streets, scurrying sheep and chickens, naked children, fly-spotted markets, and murderous sun. Much of it was old ruins, and even without the battle it would have seemed half-empty, a shell around former glory. There were even half-sunken buildings at the harbor’s edge, as if the city was slowly settling into the sea. Only when we glimpsed the shadowy interiors of fine houses through smashed doorways did we get a sense of a second, cooler, more opulent, and more secretive world. There we spied splashing fountains, shaded porticoes, Moorish carving, and silks and linens gently billowing in currents of dry desert air.

Random gunfire still echoed across the city as Napoleon and a cluster of aides made their way cautiously down the main avenue for the harbor, where the first French masts were now appearing. We were passing a fine section of merchant homes, with fitted stonework and wood-grilled windows, when there was a whine like an insect and a section of plaster exploded in a little geyser of dust just past Bonaparte’s shoulder. I started, since the shot had barely missed me. The grazing had made the cloth fiber of our general’s uniform suddenly stand erect like a file of his troops. Looking up, we saw a puff of white gun smoke at a screened window being wafted away by the hot wind. A marksman, firing from the shadowy shelter of a bedroom, had almost hit the expedition’s commander.

“General! Are you all right?” a colonel cried.

As if in reply, a second shot rang out, and then a third, so close to the first that there were either two marksmen or the former was having his hands steadily filled with reloaded muskets. A sergeant standing a few paces ahead of Napoleon grunted and sat down, a bullet in his thigh, and another patch of plaster exploded behind the general’s boot.

“I’ll be more right behind a post,” Bonaparte muttered, pulling our group under a portico and making the sign of the cross. “Shoot back, for God’s sake.” Two soldiers finally did so. “And bring up an artillery piece. Let’s not give them all day to hit me.”

A lively fight broke out. Several grenadiers began blasting away at the house that had become a doughty little fortress, and others ran back for a field gun. I took aim with my rifle, but the sniper was well screened: I missed like everyone else. It was a long ten minutes before a six-pounder appeared, and by this time several dozen shots had been exchanged, one of them wounding a young captain in the arm. Napoleon himself had borrowed a musket and fired a shot, to no better effect than the others.

It was the artillery piece that excited our commander. This was the arm he’d trained in. At Valence his regiment was exposed to the best cannon training in the army, and at Auxonne he had worked with the legendary Professor Jean Louis Lombard, who had translated the English
Principles of Artillery
into French. Napoleon’s fellow officers had told me on
L’Orient
that he’d had no social life in these early posts as a second lieutenant, instead working and studying from four in the morning until ten at night. Now he aimed the cannon, even as bullets continued to peck around him.

“It’s exactly as he did at the battle of Lodi,” the wounded captain murmured in appreciation. “He lay some guns himself, and the men began calling him
le petit caporal
—the little corporal.”

Napoleon applied the match. The gun barked, bucking against its carriage, and the round shot screamed and hit just below the offending window, buckling the stone and blowing apart the wooden grill.

“Again.”

The gun was hastily reloaded and the general trained it at the house door. Another report and the entry blew inward in a shower of splinters. Smoke fogged the street.

“Forward!” This was the same Napoleon who had charged Arcola Bridge. The French advanced, me with them, their general with his sword out. We burst through the entry, firing at the stairs. A servant, young and black, came rolling down. Leaping over his body, the assault team surged upward. On the third floor we came to the place that the cannonball had struck. The ragged hole looked out on the rooftops of Alexandria and the chamber was strewn with rubble. An old man with a musket was half-buried with broken stone, obviously dead. Another musket had been hurled against a wall, its stock broken. Several more were scattered like matchsticks. A second figure, perhaps his loader, had been pitched into a corner by the concussion of the cannon shot, and moved feebly under a shroud of debris.

No one else was in the house.

“Quite a fusillade from an army of two,” Napoleon commented. “If all Alexandrians fought like this, I’d still be outside the walls.”

I went to the dazed fighter in the corner, wondering who the pair might be. The old man we’d killed didn’t look entirely Arab, and there was something strange about his assistant, too. I lifted a section of shattered sash.

“Careful, Monsieur Gage, he might have a weapon,” Bonaparte warned. “Let Georges here finish him with the bayonet.”

I’d seen quite enough bayoneting for one day and ignored them. I knelt and lifted the dazed assailant’s head to my lap. The figure groaned and blinked, eyes unfocused. A plea came out as a croak. “Water.”

I started at the tone and fine features. The injured fighter was actually a woman, I realized, smudged by powder residue but otherwise recognizable as young, unwounded, and quite fine-looking.

And the request had been stated in English.

A
search of the house revealed some water in jars on the ground floor. I gave the woman a cup, as curious as the French what her story might be. This gesture, and my own voice in English, seemed to earn some small measure of trust. “What’s your name, lady?”

She swallowed and blinked, staring at the ceiling. “Astiza.”

“Why are you fighting us?”

Now she focused on me, her eyes widening in surprise as if I were a ghost. “I was loading the guns.”

“For your father?”

“My master.” She struggled up. “Is he dead?”

“Yes.”

Her expression was inscrutable. Clearly she was a slave or a servant; was she sad that her owner had been killed or relieved at her liberation? She seemed to be considering her new position with shock. I noticed an oddly shaped amulet hanging from her neck. It was gold, incongruous for a slave, and shaped like an almond eye, black onyx forming its pupil. A brow curled above, and there was an extension below in another graceful curve. The entire effect was quite arresting. Meanwhile, she kept glancing from her master’s body to me.

“What’s she saying?” Bonaparte demanded in French.

“I think she’s a slave. She was loading muskets for her master, that man there.”

“How does an Egyptian slave know English? Are these British spies?”

I put his first question to her.

“Master Omar had an Egyptian mother and an English father,” she replied. “He had merchant ties with England. To perfect his fluency, we used the language in this house. I speak Arabic and Greek as well.”

“Greek?”

“My mother was sold from Macedonia to Cairo. I was raised there. I am a Greek Egyptian, and impudent.” She said it with pride.