Napoleon's Pyramids (14 page)

“Must have been a convenient endorsement to have.”

“It was his delight with this prophecy that convinced him to found the great city of Alexandria. He marked out its limits with peeled barley, in the Greek custom. When birds flocked to eat the barley, alarming Alexander’s followers, his seers said this meant that newcomers would migrate to the new city and it would feed many lands. They were right. But the Macedonian general needed no prophets.”

“No?”

“He was a master of destiny. Yet he died or was murdered before he could finish his task, and his sacred symbols from Siwah disappeared. So did Alexander. Some say his body was taken back to Macedonia, some say to Alexandria, but others say Ptolemy took him to a secret, final resting place in the desert sands. Like your Jesus ascending to Heaven, he seems to have disappeared from Earth. So perhaps he was a god, as the Oracle said. Like Osiris, taking his place in the heavens.”

This was no mere slave or serving girl. How the devil had Astiza learned all this? “I’ve heard of Osiris,” I said. “Reassembled by his sister Isis.”

For the first time she looked at me with something resembling true enthusiasm. “You know Isis?”

“A mother goddess, right?”

“Isis and the Virgin Mary are reflections of each other.”

“Christians wouldn’t care to hear that.”

“No? All kinds of Christian beliefs and symbols come from Egyptian gods. Resurrection, the afterlife, impregnation by a god, triads and trinities, the idea a man could be both human and divine, sacrifice, even the wings of angels and the hooves and forked tail of devils: all this predates your Jesus by thousands of years. The code of your Ten Commandments is a simpler version of the negative confession Egyptians made to profess their innocence when they died: ‘I did not kill.’ Religion is like a tree. Egypt is the trunk, and all others are branches.”

“That’s not what the Bible says. There were false idols, and the true Hebrew god.”

“How ignorant you are of your own beliefs! I’ve heard you French say your cross is a Roman symbol of execution, but what kind of symbol is that for a religion of hope? The truth is that the cross combined your savior’s instrument of death with our instrument of life, the ankh, our ancient key of life everlasting. And why not? Egypt was the most Christian of all countries before the Arabs came.”

By the ghost of Cotton Mather, I could have paddled her for blasphemy if I hadn’t been so dumbfounded. It wasn’t just what she was claiming, but the casual confidence with which she claimed it. “No Biblical ideas possibly came from Egypt,” I sputtered.

“I thought the Hebrews escaped from Egypt? And that the infant Jesus resided here? Besides, what does it matter—I thought your general assured us yours is not an army of Christians anyway? Godless men of science, are you not?”

“Well, Bonaparte puts on and takes off faiths like men do a coat.”

“Or faiths and sciences have more unity than Franks care to admit. Isis is a goddess of knowledge, love, and tolerance.”

“And Isis is
your
goddess.”

“Isis belongs to no one. I am her servant.”

“You truly worship an old idol?” My Philadelphia pastor would be apoplectic by now.

“She is newer than your last breath, American, as eternal as the cycle of birth. But I don’t expect you to understand. I had to flee my Cairo master because he finally didn’t either, and dared corrupt the old mysteries.”

“What mysteries?”

“Of the world around you. Of the sacred triangle, the square of four directions, the pentagram of free will and the hexagram of harmony. Have you not read Pythagoras?”

“He studied in Egypt, right?”

“For twenty-two years, before being taken by the Persian conqueror Cambyses to Babylon and then finally founding his school in Italy. He taught the unity of all religions and peoples, that suffering was to be endured bravely, and that a wife was a husband’s equal.”

“He sounds like he saw things your way.”

“He saw things the gods’ way! In geometry and space is the gods’ message. The geometric point represents God, the line represents man and woman, and the triangle the perfect number representing spirit, soul, and body.”

“And the square?”

“The four directions, as I said. The pentagon was strife, the hexagram the six directions of space, and the double square was universal harmony.”

“Believe it or not, I’ve heard some of this from a group called the Freemasons. It claims to teach as Pythagoras did, and says the ruler represents precision, the square rectitude, and the mallet will.”

She nodded. “Precisely. The gods make everything clear, and yet men remain blind! Seek truth, and the world becomes yours.”

Well, this scrap of the world, anyway. We were well into the Nile, that wondrous waterway where the wind often blows south and the current flows north, allowing river traffic both ways.

“You said you fled Cairo. You’re an escaped slave?”

“It’s more complicated than that. Egyptian.” She pointed. “Understand our land before you try to understand our mind.”

The pancake plainness of the country outside Alexandria had changed to the lush, more biblical picture I had expected from stories of Moses among the reeds. Brilliantly green fields of rice, wheat, corn, sugar, and cotton formed rectangles between ranks of stately date palms, as straight as pillars and heavy with their orange and scarlet fruit. Banana and sycamore groves rustled in the wind. Water buffalo pulled plows or lifted their horns from the river where they bathed, grunting at the fringe of papyrus beds. The frequency of chocolate-colored mud-brick villages increased, often topped by the needle of a minaret. We passed lateen-rigged felucca boats moored on the brown water. Measuring twenty to thirty feet long and steered by a long oar, these sailing craft were omnipresent on the river. There were smaller paddle skiffs, barely big enough to float an individual, from which fishermen tossed string nets. Harnessed and blindfolded donkeys drudged in a circle to lift water into canals in a scene unchanged for five thousand years. The smell of Nile water filled the river breeze. Our flotilla of gunboats and supply craft paraded past, French tricolor flapping, without leaving any discernible impression. Many peasants hardly bothered to look up.

What a strange place I’d come to. Alexander, Cleopatra, Arabs, Mamelukes, ancient pharaohs, Moses, and now Bonaparte. The entire country was a rubbish heap of history, including the odd medallion around my neck. Now I wondered about Astiza, who seemed to have a more complicated past than I’d suspected. Might she recognize something in the medallion that I would not?

“What spell did you cast back in Alexandria?”

It took a moment before she reluctantly replied. “One for your safety, as a warning to another. A second for the beginning of your wisdom.”

“You can make me smart?”

“That may be impossible. Perhaps I can make you see.”

I laughed, and she finally allowed a slight smile. By listening to her, I was getting her to let me inside a little. She wanted respect, not just for her but for her nation.

That languid night, as we lay at anchor and slept on the deck of the
chebek
under a desert haze of stars, I crept close to where she was sleeping. I could hear the lap of water, the creak of rigging, and the murmur of sailors on watch.

“Keep away from me,” she whispered when she woke, squeezing herself against the wood.

“I want to show you something.”

“Here? Now?” She had the same tone of suspicion Madame Durrell used when we discussed payment of my rent.

“You’re the historian of plain truths. Look at this.” I passed the medallion to her. In the glow of a deck lantern it was just discernible.

She felt with her fingers and sucked in her breath. “Where did you get this?” Her eyes widened, her lips slightly parted.

“I won it in a card game in Paris.”

“Won it from whom?”

“A French soldier. It’s supposed to come from Egypt. Cleopatra, he claimed.”

“Perhaps you
stole
it from this soldier.” Why would she say that?

“No, just outplayed him at cards. You’re the religious expert. Tell me if you know what it is.”

She turned it in her hand, extending the arms to make a V, and rubbed the disc between thumb and forefinger to feel its inscriptions. “I’m not sure.”

That was disappointing. “Is it Egyptian?”

She held it up to see in the dim light. “Very early, if it is. It seems primitive, fundamental…so
this
is what the Arab lusts for.”

“See all those holes? What do you think they are?”

Astiza regarded it for a moment and then rolled on her back, holding it up toward the sky. “Look at the way the light shines through. Clearly, they are supposed to be stars.”

“Stars?”

“Life’s purpose is written on the sky, American. Look!” She pointed south toward the brightest star, just rising on the horizon.

“That’s Sirius. What about it?”

“It’s the star of Isis, star of the new year. She waits for us.”

W
hen the well runs dry we know the worth of water,” old Ben Franklin had written. Indeed, the French army’s march to the Nile had been an ill-planned fiasco. Companies trampled each other at every good well and then drank it dry before the next regiment arrived. Men quarreled, collapsed, became delirious, and shot themselves. They were tantalized and tormented by a new phenomenon the savants dubbed a “mirage,” in which distant desert looked like shimmering lakes of water. Cavalry would gallop toward it at full charge, only to find dry sand and the “lake” once more on the horizon, as elusive as the end of a rainbow. It was as if the desert was mocking the Europeans. When troops reached the Nile they stampeded like cattle, plunging into the river to drink until they vomited, even as other men tried to drink around them. Their mysterious destination, fabled Egypt, seemed as cruel as the mirage. The shortage of canteens and the failure to secure wells was a criminal oversight the other generals blamed Napoleon for, and he was not a man to readily shoulder blame. “The French complain of everything, always,” he muttered. Yet the criticism stung because he knew it was just. In his campaign in fertile Italy, food and water was readily obtained on the march and army clothing fit the climate. Here he was learning to bring everything with him, but the lessons were painful. Tempers frayed in the heat.

The French army began marching up the Nile toward Cairo, Egyptian peasants fleeing and reforming behind it like displaced fog. As a column approached each village, the women and children would drive livestock into the desert and hide amid the dunes, peeping over the lip like animals from burrows. The men would linger a little longer, trying to hide food and their meager implements from the locustlike invaders. As the tricolor entered the village boundary they would finally run for the river, straddling bundles of papyrus reed and paddling out into the water, bobbing offshore in the Nile like wary ducks. Division after division would tramp past their homes, a long caterpillar of dusty blue, red, white, and green uniforms. Doors would be kicked in, stables explored, and anything of use taken. Then the army would march on and the peasants would come back to take up their lives again, scouring our track for useful pieces of military litter.

Our little fleet paralleled the land force, bearing supplies and scouting the opposite bank. Each evening we’d land near Napoleon’s headquarters company so that Monge, Berthollet, and Talma could make notes about the country we were traversing. It was dangerous to roam away from the soldiers’ protection, so they would interview officers on what they’d seen and add to lists of animals, birds, and villages. Their reception was sometimes grumpy because we were envied our place in the boats. The heat was enervating, and the flies a torment. Each time we landed the tension between the army’s officers seemed worse, since many supplies were still back on the ships or docks at Alexandria and no division had all it needed. Constant sniping from the Bedouin marauders and lurid stories of capture and torture kept the troops uneasy.

The tension finally boiled over when a particularly insolent group of enemy warriors managed to penetrate near Napoleon’s tent one evening, whooping and firing from their splendid Arabians, their colorful robes like a taunting cape. When the furious general dispatched some dragoons and a young aide named Croisier to destroy them, the masterful Egyptian horsemen toyed with the troop and then escaped without losing a man. The small desert horses seemed able to run twice as far on half the water as the heavy European mounts, which were still recovering from the long sea voyage. Our commander went into a rage, humiliating the poor aide so badly that Croisier vowed to die bravely in battle to make up for his shame, a promise he would keep within a year. But Bonaparte was not to be mollified.

“Get me a real warrior!” he cried. “I want Bin Sadr!”

This enraged Dumas, who felt the honor of his cavalry was being impugned. It didn’t help that the shortage of horses meant that many of his troopers remained without mounts. “You honor that cutthroat and insult my men?”

“I want flankers to keep the Bedouin away from my headquarters, not aristocratic dandies who can’t catch a bandit!” The grim march and jealous seniors were wearing on him.

Dumas was not cowed. “Then wait for good horses instead of rushing into the desert without water! It is your incompetence, not Croisier’s!”

“You dare to challenge me? I will have you shot!”

“I will break you in half before you do, little man…”

The argument was cut short by the galloping arrival of Bin Sadr and half a dozen of his turbaned henchmen, reining up between the quarreling generals. Kleber took the opportunity to drag the hotheaded Dumas backward while Napoleon fought to get himself under control. The Mamelukes were making fools of us.

“What is it, effendi?” Once more, the Arab’s lower face was masked.

“I pay you to keep the Bedouin and Mamelukes off my flanks,” Bonaparte snapped. “Why aren’t you doing so?”

“Maybe because
you
aren’t paying as you promised. I have a jar of fresh ears, and no fresh gold to show for it. My men are bought men, effendi, and they’ll go to the Mamelukes if the enemy promises quicker coin.”

“Bah. You’re afraid of the enemy.”

“I envy them! They have generals who pay when they promise!”

Bonaparte scowled and turned to Berthier, his chief of staff. “Why isn’t he paid?”

“Men have two ears and two hands,” Berthier said quietly. “There’s been disagreement over how many he’s really killed.”

“You question my honesty?” the Arab shouted. “I will bring you tongues and penises!”

“For God’s sake,” Dumas groaned. “Why are we dealing with barbarians?”

Napoleon and Berthier began muttering with each other over money.

Bin Sadr scanned the rest of us with an impatient eye and suddenly his gaze fell on me. I could swear the devil was looking for the chain around my neck. I scowled back, suspicious that it was he who’d dropped a snake in my bed. His eye also strayed to Astiza, his look deepening to hatred. She remained impassive. Could this really be the lantern bearer who had tried to betray me in Paris? Or was I succumbing to fear and fantasy like the common foot soldiers? I hadn’t really taken a good look at the man in France.

“All right,” our commander finally said. “We pay you for the hands to date. There’s double for all your men once we conquer Cairo. Just keep the Bedouin away.”

The Arab bowed. “You’ll not be bothered by those jackals again, effendi. I pluck out their eyes and force them to swallow their own sight. I geld them like cattle. I tie their intestines to their horse’s tail and whip the animal across the desert.”

“Good, good. Let word of that spread.” He turned away, done with the Arab, his frustration spent. He looked embarrassed at his outburst, and I could see him mentally chastising himself for not maintaining control. Bonaparte made many mistakes, but seldom more than once.

But Bin Sadr was not done. “Our horses are swift but our guns are old, effendi. Might we have some new ones as well?” He gestured toward the short-barreled carbines that Dumas’s cavalry carried.

“The hell you will,” the cavalryman growled.

“New?” Bonaparte repeated. “No, we have none to spare.”

“How about that man with his longrifle?” Now he pointed at me. “I remember him and his shot at the walls of Alexandria. Give him to me, and together we’ll send the devils who harass you to hell.”

“The American?”

“He can shoot the ones who flee.”

The idea intrigued Napoleon, who was looking for a distraction. “How about it, Gage? Do you want to ride with a desert sheikh?”

My attempted assassin, I thought, but didn’t say that. I wasn’t about to get near Bin Sadr except to strangle him, after I’d questioned him first. “I was invited as a scholar, not a sniper, general. My place is on the boat.”

“Out of danger?” Bin Sadr mocked.

“But not out of range. Come down to the river bank sometime and see how close I can come to hitting you, lantern bearer.”

“Lantern bearer?” Bonaparte asked.

“The American has had too much sun,” the Arab said. “Go, stay on your boat, thinking yourself out of danger, and maybe soon there will be some new use for your rifle. You may wish you had come with Achmed bin Sadr.” And with that, taking a sack of coins from Berthier, he turned to gallop off.

As he did so the fabric that covered his lower face slipped briefly, and I got a glimpse of his cheek. There was an angry boil, covered by a poultice, at the same point that Astiza had lanced her wax figurine.

W
e were already halfway to Cairo when word came that a Mameluke ruler named Murad Bey had assembled a force to oppose our passage. Bonaparte decided to seize the initiative. Orders were issued and troops departed on the evening of July 12 for a surprise night march to Shubra Khit, the next major town on the Nile. At dawn the French approach surprised a still-organizing Egyptian army of some ten thousand men, a thousand of them splendid Mameluke cavalry and the rest an unformed rabble of
fellahin
—peasants armed with little more than cudgels. They milled in uncertainty as the French formed battle ranks, and for a moment I thought the whole mass of them might retreat without a fight. Then some encouragement seemed to stiffen them—we could see their chiefs pointing up the Nile—and they braced for battle as well.

I had a fine grandstand seat on board the anchored
Cerf.
As a golden sun rose to the east, we watched from the water as a French army band struck up the “Marseillaise,” its notes floating out across the Nile. It was a tune that made troops shiver, and under its inspiration the French would come near to conquering the world. There was a throat-catching efficiency to the way the soldiers assembled into their hedgehog squares again, regimental standards tugged by the morning breeze. It is not an easy formation to master, and even harder to hold during an enemy charge, when every man is facing outward and relying on men behind him to hold. There’s a natural tendency to want to back, threatening to collapse the formation, or for shirkers to drop their weapons to drag back the wounded. Sergeants and the toughest veterans man the rear ranks to keep those in front from quailing. Yet a square that is firm is virtually impregnable. The Mameluke cavalry circled to find a weak point and couldn’t, the French formations clearly baffling the enemy. It appeared this battle would be another lopsided demonstration of European firepower against medieval Arab courage. We waited, sipping Egyptian mint tea, as the morning turned from pink to blue.

Then there were warning shouts and sails appeared from a bend upriver. Cries of triumph came from the Mamelukes on shore. We stood on our deck uneasily. The Nile was carrying an armada of Egyptian river craft from Cairo, their lateen triangles filling the river like a yard of laundry. Mameluke and Islamic banners flew from every masthead, and from hulls crowded with soldiers and cannon came a great clamor of trumpets, drums, and horns. Was this the use of my rifle that Bin Sadr had slyly warned me about? How had he known? The enemy strategy was obvious. They wanted to destroy our little fleet and take Bonaparte’s army by flank from the river.

I emptied my tea over the side and checked the load of my rifle, feeling trapped and exposed on the water. I wasn’t to be a spectator after all.

Captain Perree began snapping orders to raise anchor as the French sailors in his little fleet sprang to their cannon. Talma got out his notebook, looking pale. Monge and Berthollet grasped the rigging and boosted themselves up on the gunwale to watch, as if at a regatta. For some minutes the two fleets slowly closed with stately grace, great swans gliding. Then there was a thud, a blossom of smoke from the prow of the Mameluke flagship, and something sizzled past us in the air, throwing up a geyser of green water off our stern.

“Don’t we get to parley first?” I asked lightly, my voice more unsteady than I would have preferred.

As if in reply, the front rank of the entire Egyptian flotilla thundered as its bow cannon fired. The river seemed to heave and splashes erupted all around us, wetting us with warm mist. One ball landed directly on a gunboat to our right, kicking up a rain of splinters. Screams echoed across the water. There was that strange thrumming sound made by passing round shot, and holes opened in our sail like expressions of surprise.

“I think negotiations have ended,” Talma said tightly, squatting by the wheel and scribbling notes with one of Conte’s new pencils. “This will make an exciting bulletin.” His fingers betrayed his tremble.

“Their sailors seem considerably more accurate than their comrades at Alexandria,” Monge remarked admiringly, jumping down from the rigging. He was as imperturbable as if viewing a cannon demonstration at a foundry.

“The Ottoman sailors are Greek!” Astiza exclaimed, recognizing her countrymen from their costume. “They serve the bey in Cairo. Now you shall have a fight!”

Perree’s men began firing back, but it was hard to swing against the river current to make a proper broadside, and we were clearly outgunned. While we luffed our sails to keep from closing with the enemy too quickly, the rival fleets were inevitably converging. I glanced ashore. The start of this naval cannonade had apparently been the signal for the land-based Mamelukes. They waved their lances and charged toward the picket of French bayonets, galloping straight into hissing sheets of French fire. Horses dashed against the squares like surf against a rocky shore.

Suddenly there was an enormous bang and Astiza and I were thrown from our feet, landing in an ungainly tangle. Given more ordinary circumstances I might have enjoyed this moment of unexpected intimacy, but it had been caused by a cannonball slamming into our hull. When we rolled apart I was sickened. The round had skipped along the main deck, clipping to pieces two of our gunners and spraying the forward half of the vessel with gore. Splinters had wounded several more men, including Perree, and our fire slackened even as that of the Arabs seemed to be increasing.