The Rosetta Key (37 page)

Then I bent back to work. So many choices! I marveled at the symbols, noticing suddenly how they seemed to shift and slide, rotate and tumble. I blinked, the words blurry. I was more tired than I realized! But if I could decipher where the sentence ended, or whether Thoth used sentences in the modern sense at all…

Now the scroll was wavering. What was going on? I looked over to the corner. The mouse, as big as a small rat at home, had flopped onto its side and was quivering, its eyes wide with terror. Foam was at its mouth.

I shoved my plate away and stood.

“Astiza!” I tried to cry, but it was a throttled mumble from a thick tongue, heard by no one but myself. I took a tottering step. That bastard Silano! He figured he didn’t need me anymore! I remembered his threat of poisoned pig in Cairo, the year before. Then I was falling, not even sure what had happened to my legs, and hit the floor so hard that lights danced before my eyes. Through a haze I could see the mouse dying.

Men stole in the room to scoop me up. Yet how was he going to explain this murder to Astiza? Or did he plan to assassinate her too? No, he still wanted her. They hoisted, grunting, and carried me between them like a sack of flour. I was dizzy, but conscious — probably because I’d barely tasted the dish. They assumed I was dead.

We went out a side gate and down to the river and garrison privy, watered by a canal. Beyond it was a small lagoon off the main river, redolent of lotus and shit. With a swing back and forth they pitched my body, helpless as a baby.

With a splash, I went under. Did they mean to make it look like a drowning?

Yet the shock of the water revived me a little, and panic gave my limbs some motion. I managed to flop back to the surface and take a breath, treading water. The shallow dose was wearing off. My two would-be executioners watched me, curiously not very alarmed by my resilience. Didn’t they realize I hadn’t eaten enough poison? They were making no move to shoot me, or wade in after to finish me off with sword or ax.

Maybe I could paddle and find help.

It was then that I heard a big splash behind me.

I turned. There was a low dock in the lagoon, and with a rattle a chain was unreeling, its links snaking toward me. What the devil?

My escorts laughed.

Coming toward me in the dark were the protruding nostrils and reptilian eyes of that most loathsome and hideous of all beasts, the Nile crocodile. This prehistoric nightmare, armored in scales, thick as a log, a torpedo of muscle, can be astonishingly quick in and out of the water. It is old as dragons, as unfeeling as a machine.

Even in my fuddled state their plot came to me. Silano’s scoundrels had chained the predator in this lagoon to dispose of me by eating me. I could hear the count’s story. The American had used the privy, walked to the Nile to wash or gaze out at the night, the croc came out of the water — it had happened in Egypt a thousand times before — and snick, snack, I was gone. Silano would have stone, scroll, and woman. Checkmate!

I’d just processed this disagreeable scenario, acknowledging its ingenious perfidy with dull admiration, when the animal struck. It snatched me under, clamping my leg but not yet chewing it, and rolled us, in its time-honored habit of drowning its prey. The perfect horror of that vise, its long mouth of overlapping teeth, its mossy scales, the dim blankness of its expression, all somehow registered in my mind and shocked me into action despite the pain and poison. I freed my tomahawk from my belt as we whirled and struck the beast on his snout, no doubt surprising him with my little sting as much as he’d surprised me. His jaws snapped open, as if on a spring, releasing my leg, and I chopped again, hitting the roof of his mouth where the tomahawk lodged. The lagoon erupted as the crocodile writhed, and as it twisted I felt its chain slithering by me. Instinctively I grabbed. The animal and its chain carried me upward, my head broke water, and I seized breath. Then we dove again, the croc trying to turn to bite me, even as each snapping of its jaws must have driven the tomahawk painfully deeper. I dared not let his mouth get close. I pulled myself frantically forward on his chain until I got to where it made a necklace around the monster’s neck, just before its forelegs. I hung on. Twist as it might, it couldn’t bite me.

We dove, so I jabbed at its eyes. Now it thrashed like a bucking horse as I barely held on. We’d break surface and then submerge, wallow in the mud of the shallow bottom, and then surge upward again. I could hear the dock cracking and squealing behind as the beast yanked furiously on its chain. The laughter of my captors had stopped. My leg was bleeding, the blood making the crocodile’s thrashing even more frantic as he smelled. I had no way to kill the beast.

So when our writhing brought us near the dock I let go and swam for it. No man has ever left the water that fast. I flew to get up on the wood.

The croc turned, wrapped in its own chain, and came after me, its snout crashing into the splintery dock. It bit, grunting at the pain of my tomahawk as it did so, snapping boards in two. The dock began to sink toward its snout as I scrabbled up its slope. I heard confused shouts from the men who’d thrown me in. Then I spied the post where the chain was wrapped and when a surging charge slacked the tension, I lifted its loop to release the animal, hoping it would swim away up the Nile.

Instead the crocodile exploded half out of the water, the loose chain singing like a whip. I ducked as it whickered by. The animal fell back into the lagoon, realized it was free, and suddenly was charging full tilt, but not toward me. His agonized eyes had spied the men on shore watching our struggle. The crocodile came out of the water after them, great feet splayed out as it charged, spray flying. Screaming, they ran.

A crocodile can gallop short distances as fast as a horse. He took one of my tormentors and broke him nearly in two with a furious snap of its jaws, then dropped that one and chased the next, straight toward the fort. The man was shouting a warning.

I didn’t have much time.

I was damned if I’d leave it all to Silano. I’d kill him if I could, and if not I’d torment him with what he’d lost. I’d take the scroll and throw it into the deepest hole in the Mediterranean. Wounded by the animal’s teeth, dripping blood, I limped up the path, following the trail of swept sand where the crocodile’s mighty tail had thrashed. Cautiously, I paused at the small sally gate we’d come out of. The crocodile had smashed right through and was in the courtyard, men beginning to shoot. A cannon went off in alarm. I went inside myself but kept to the shadows, creeping around the perimeter to my quarters. There I grabbed my longrifle and peeked out the door. The crocodile was down, a hundred men blazing at it, chunks of another human trapped in its colossal jaws. Then I aimed, but not at the beast. Instead I put the sights on a lantern in the stables across the courtyard, which in turn weren’t far from the magazine.

I was going to set the fort on fire.

It was one of the prettiest shots I ever made, breath held, finger squeezing. I had to fire the length of the parade ground, through an open window, and pluck down the lantern without extinguishing its wick. It fell, broke, and flames began to dance in the hay. A weird light began to illuminate the scales and saber-like teeth of the monster, even as men began shouting, “Fire, fire!” Horses were screaming.

No eyes were on me.

So I limped again and got back to the room where I’d been poisoned. Along the way, I seized one of the picks used for construction of the fort.

The scroll, damn him, was gone.

I glanced out. Flames were shooting higher and neighing horses were stampeding from the stable, adding to the chaos. I could hear officers shouting. “The magazine! Wet down the magazine!” I loaded and fired again, hitting someone trying to organize a chain of buckets from the fort’s well. When he fell the bucket brigade scattered in confusion, not knowing what was going on. Shots went off as sentries fired in all directions.

Astiza burst in dressed in her nightclothes, her hair undone, eyes wide with confusion. She took in my bloody leg, soaked clothing, and the empty table where I’d had the scroll.

“Ethan! What have you done?”

“You mean, what has your ex-lover Silano done! He poisoned me and tried to feed me to that reptile out there! Don’t think you wouldn’t have been next, once he’d had you and tired of you. He wants that book all for himself. Not for science, not for Bonaparte, and certainly not for us. It’s driven him mad!”

“I saw him running for the lookout tower with Bouchard. They slammed the door and locked themselves in.”

“He’s going to wait and let the garrison finish me. Maybe you, too.” More shouting, and now bullets began pattering the headquarters building where we huddled.

“We can’t let him disappear with that book!” she said.

“Then why did we find it in the first place?”

“Why do people learn anything? It’s our nature!”

“Not my nature.” I grabbed her. “Are you with me?”

“Of course.”

“Then if we can’t have the scroll, we’ll break the key that translates it and give him a worthless book. Is there a way out of this rat hole?”

“There’s an officer’s armory behind that other door, and some powder inside.”

“You think we can fight the whole garrison?”

“We can blow a hole through the back wall.”

I smiled. “Lord, you are beautiful under pressure.”

It was a heavy locked door but I fired once and then swung the pick. It gave way. This was not the main magazine, just the officers’ arms, but by Thoth there were two kegs of powder. I uncorked one and set a trail of powder to the main room, then put both kegs against the outer wall. “Now we take the stone for ourselves.”

“You can’t take that! It weighs too much!”

I hefted the rolling pin I’d put in my satchel as a decoy and grinned.

“Ben Franklin says I can.”

Publishing always seemed a messy trade to me, but Franklin claimed it was like printing money. I slung my rifle over my shoulder and limped back to the room with the Rosetta Stone, lurid firelight outside throwing shadows. Soldiers in the courtyard had formed a long chain all the way down to the river, buckets passed over the tail of the dead crocodile. The shooting had slackened.

I took Silano’s experimental paints from his pots and smeared some on my rolling pin. Then I ran it over the top part of the Rosetta Stone, coating the surface with paint but leaving the incised symbols paint-free. I did the same to the Greek.

“Strip to the waist, please.”

“Ethan!”

“I need your skin.”

“By the grace of Isis, men! Is that all you can think about at a time like…”

So I took her nightgown by the shoulders and tore, ripping it down her back as she shrieked. “Sorry. You’re smoother than me.” Then I kissed her, her rags held against her breasts, and backed her against the stone.

She twitched. “What are you doing?”

“Making you a library.” I pulled her off and looked. Not perfect, some symbols lost at the indent of her spine, but still, a mirror image had been painted there. I pressed her again against the Greek, some carrying down onto the top of her buttocks. It was oddly erotic, but then women have quite lovely backs, and I did like the swell of the fabric draped on her hips….

Back to work! While she stood there, too shocked to be angry yet, I attacked the monument, not to deface it but to truncate it. I had to aim for the middle of the hieroglyphics, hoping some savant wouldn’t curse me years later. One blow, two, three, and then the granite began to crack! I took final aim and swung with all my might, and the top quarter of the Rosetta Stone broke free, taking all of Thoth’s script and a portion of the hieroglyphics with it. The fragment crashed to the floor.

“Help me drag it.”

“Are you completely mad?”

“We have the key script on you. We’re going to destroy this piece. We can’t move the whole stone, but we can get this into the armory.”

“And then?”

“Blow it up when we blow the wall. It will make the book worthless until we steal it back!”

The stone was heavy, but we managed to tug, shove, and scrape it across the entry room and into the armory on the far side. I wedged it against the gunpowder kegs, figuring it would help direct their blast against the wall.

Then I retreated, took a candle, and lit the train of powder. I glanced back. Astiza was crouched by the window, looking out. Men were shouting and running. The flames were growing brighter.

“Ethan!” she warned. Then the whole world erupted.

Fort Julian’s magazine went first, a thunderous explosion that shot flaming debris hundreds of feet into the sky. Even sheltered as we were inside, the concussion knocked us sprawling. A moment later there was a second boom from the armory and debris rained out from it, too. Bits of the Rosetta Stone flew like shrapnel. Astiza’s lovely torso would be the only record of Thoth. I touched her.

“The paint is already dry.” I smiled. “You’re a book, Astiza, the secret of life!”

“You’d better get this book a cover. I’m not running around Egypt naked.”

I fetched an officer’s cloak. My tomahawk I had to leave in the dead crocodile. With my rifle we pushed through the wreckage of the armory. The mud fort wall had breached, and we climbed over its rubble to the streets of Rosetta. Down at the end of the lane some laundry hung by a donkey cart, not far from a corralled and very frightened donkey.

F
leeing at the pace of a donkey cart is not the swiftest way to avoid one’s enemies, but it has the advantage of being so ridiculous as to be overlooked. Liberation of laundry allowed us to be more or less in Egyptian dress, my leg wound throbbing but tightly bound. My hope was that in the confusion caused by a rampaging crocodile, stampeding horses, and an exploding magazine, we might slip away. With any luck, the faithless Silano might assume I was in the belly of his gigantic reptile, at least until someone thought to slit open its stomach. If not that, he’d assume we were trying to slip by the patrol boats on the Nile. My vague plan was to slip by the French into the Ottoman camp, go to Smith’s squadron offshore, and bargain from somewhere safe. If we’d lost the book, Silano had lost the ability to continue deciphering it.