The Rosetta Key

by William Dietrich

  I cursed, but I had no means of stopping her. Heartsick, I turned and sprinted for Acre, fully upright now, gambling that speed would make me an elusive target.

  If a longrifle were quicker to reload, Najac might have picked me off even then. But it would take him a full minute to get off another shot, and other bullets flew blind. I was beyond the forward French trenches now, to the point where the aqueduct’s end crumbled into rubble before reaching the walls of Acre, and even as cannon fire rippled on both sides I swung over its broken lip and dropped to the sand. Dust puffed from my boots.

  I heard the thunder of hooves and turned. Najac’s Arabs were riding down the length of the aqueduct for me, I saw, bent over their steeds and heedless of English fire.

  I sprinted for the moat. It was fifty yards away, the strategic tower looming like a monolith, soldiers on Acre’s ramparts pointing at me.

  It would be a near-run thing. Legs pumping, I ran as I’d never run before, hearing the pursuing horsemen closing the distance. Now men up and down the Acre wall were firing over my head, and I heard horses neighing and crashing as some went down.

  At the moat’s end I slid over its edge like a Maine otter on a snow bank, tumbling to the dry bottom. The stench was nauseating. There were rotting bodies, broken ladders, and the abandoned weapons that make up the detritus of war. The breach in the tower had been sealed and there was no way up the wall. Men were peering down at me, but none seemed to realize yet who I was. No rope was offered. Not knowing what else to do, I ran down the moat’s dusty course toward where it joined the Mediterranean. I could see the masts of British ships, and guns continued to go off above my head. Hadn’t Smith said they were building a reservoir of seawater at the moat’s head?

  New shouts! I looked back. The damned Arab daredevils had spurred some of their horses down into the moat with me and now they were galloping along, heedless of the soldiers overhead trying to shoot them, determined to take me. Silano clearly knew I had the book! Ahead was the ramp over the moat by the Land Gate, and a black, moist seawall of the new reservoir beyond it. Trapped!

  And then there was another explosion, straight ahead. A roar, pieces flying, and the black wall dissolved in front of me. The blast knocked me backward, and I stared stupefied as a wall of green seawater turned to foam and began rushing down the moat at me and my pursuers. I got to my knees just as the flood hit. It knocked me back the way I’d come, carrying me like a leaf in a gutter.

  I was in a tumble of foam, unable to get proper breath, unsure what was up and down. I tumbled. The water swept me into a tangle with my pursuers and something big struck me, a horse I guessed, fortuitously knocking me toward air. We were being washed down the moat back toward the central tower, all of us tangled with half-decayed corpses and the flotsam of siege debris. I thrashed, coughing.

  And then I saw my chain! Or a chain, at any extent, drooping down the tower wall like a garland, and when we swept by I grabbed it.

  It plucked me out of the water like a well bucket and began dragging me up the rough tower walls, scraping like sandpaper.

  “Hang on, Gage. You’re almost home!”

  It was Jericho.

  Now bullets began banging off the wall around me and I realized I was a hanging target for the entire French army. One lucky shot and I’d fall off.

  I tucked into a ball. If I could have shriveled any smaller I’d have disappeared.

  Cannon boomed, and a ball that seemed big as a house crashed into the masonry a few yards from me, dissolving to shrapnel. The entire tower shuddered and I swung like a bead on a string. Grimly, I held on. Then another ball, and another. Each time the entire tower shook and the chain swayed, me dangling. Was this ever going to end?

  I looked down. The flow of water was slowing but the Arab horsemen were gone, washed to who knows where. Wreckage dotted the water’s surface. A man floated belly up, like a fish.

  “Heave!” Jericho cried.

  And then strong hands were grabbing me and I was dragged, wheezing, over the crenellation and onto the Acre battlements, half drowned, scraped, burned, cut, bruised, heartsick at the love and companions I had lost, and yet miraculously unpunctured. I had the lives, and bedraggled look, of an alley cat.

  I sprawled, chest heaving, unable to stand. People clustered around: Jericho, Djezzar, Smith, Phelipeaux.

  “Bloody hell, Ethan,” Smith said in greeting. “Whose side are you on now?”

  But I looked beyond them to the one who had instinctively caught my eye, hair golden, eyes wide and stunned, dress smeared with smoke and powder.

  “Hello, Miriam,” I croaked.

  And then the French guns really started up.

  In my experience, it’s when you need to collect thoughts most carefully that there are the greatest distractions. In this case it was a hundred French artillery pieces, venting frustration at my survival. I stood and looked out shakily. There was a lot of activity in Napoleon’s encampments, units forming and moving to the trenches. I had, it seemed, something Bonaparte wanted back. Badly.

  The wall was trembling under our feet.

  Miriam was looking at me with an expression that was a cross between shock and relief, with a rising tide of indignation, a tributary of confusion, a reservoir of compassion, and more than a pitcher of suspicion. “You left with no word?” she finally managed.

  It sounded worse the way she put it. “It was difficult to explain why.”

  “What was the Christian running from?” Djezzar wanted to know.

  “It appears to be the entire French army,” Phelipeaux observed mildly. “Monsieur Gage, they do not appear to like you very much. And we were thinking of shooting you as well, for desertion and treachery. Do you have any friends at all?”

  “It’s that woman, isn’t it?” Miriam had developed a way of getting to the point. “She’s alive, and you went to her.”

  I looked back. Was Astiza alive? I’d just seen my Muslim friend killed by my own gun, and Astiza turn back toward that villain Silano.

  “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.”

  “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!”

&nb
sp; 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.

  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!”

  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.

  Then the rolling ram reached the lip of the moat and flew straight across, its snout crashing against the base of the tower.

  The soldiers who’d been pushing ran, one pausing long enough to yank a lanyard. A fuse flared.

  A few seconds, and then the device exploded with a roar so cacophonous that it blotted out my hearing. The air erupted with smoke and flame, and chunks of stone flew higher than the top of our tower, rolling lazily.

  The edifice had shuddered under previous attacks, but this time it swayed like a drunk on Drury Lane. Miriam and I fell, me grabbing her in my arms. Sir Sidney held on to the tower’s rear crenellations.

  And the front of the edifice dissolved before my eyes, sheering off and slipping into a hellish abyss. Phelipeaux and Jericho fell with it.

  “Brother!” Miriam screamed, or at least that’s the sound I interpreted her mouth making. All I could hear was ringing.

  She ran for the lip until I tackled her.

  Crawling over her squirming body, on a platform that was now half gone and dangerously leaning, I looked down into wreckage that was boiling smoke like the throat of a volcano. The front third of this strongest tower had simply peeled away, the rest of it exposed like a hollow tree and stitched together by half-destroyed floors. It was as if our clothes had been ripped away, leaving us naked. Bodies were entwined with stone in the rubble below, the moat filled to the brim with wreckage. A new sound impinged on my abused ears, and I realized that thousands of men were cheering, their roar just detectable in my addled state. The French were charging for the breach they had made.

  Najac, I bet, would be with them, looking for me.

  Smith had recovered his balance and had his saber out. He was shouting something the ringing in my ears made inaudible, but I surmised he was calling men to the breach below. I wriggled backward and hauled Miriam with me. “The rest of it may come down!” I shouted.

  “What?”

  “We have to get off this tower!”

  She couldn’t hear either. She nodded, turned toward the attacking French, and before I could stop her leaped off the edge I’d just crawled back from. I lunged, trying to grab her, and slid once more to the brink. She’d dropped like a cat to beams jutting from the tower floor below, and was climbing down the edges of the collapse toward Jericho. Swearing soundlessly to myself, I started to follow, certain the entire edifice would go over at any moment and bury us in a rock grave. Meanwhile bullets were bouncing like fleas in a jar, cannonballs were screaming in both directions, and ladders were reaching up like claws.

  Smith and a contingent of British marines had half galloped, half bounded down the partially wrecked stairs behind us, and got to the breach when we did. They collided with French troops surging across the rubble in the plugged moat, and there was a blast of musket fire from both sides, men screaming. Then they were on each other with bayonet, cutlass, and musket butt. The French division commander Louis Bon went down, fatally shot. The aide-de-camp Croisier, humiliated by Napoleon when he failed to catch some skirmishers the year before, hurled himself into the fray. Miriam dropped into this hell shouting frantically for Jericho. So there I dropped too, dazed, nearly weaponless, black from powder smoke, face-to-face with the entire French army.

  They looked ten feet tall in their high hats and crossed belts, throwing themselves at us with the fury and frustration that comes from weeks of fruitless siege work. Here was the chance to finish things, as they had at Jaffa! They were roaring like surf in a storm, stumbling forward over carnage, the end of the shattered cedar log splayed outward like an opened flower. Yet even as they pressed they came under a deluge of iron, rock, and bomblets hurled by Djezzar’s Ottomans above, which dropped them like wheat. If the French were determined, we were desperate. If they punched through the tower Acre was lost and all of us would certainly be dead. Royal Marines ran at them screaming, shooting, and chopping, the red and blue a mosaic of struggling color.

  It was the most ferocious fight I’d been in, as hand-to-hand as Greek and Trojan, no quarter asked or given. Men grunted and swore as they stabbed, choked, gouged, and kicked. They surged and struggled like bulls. Croisier sank in the melee, shot and stabbed in a dozen places. We could see nothing of the wider fight, just this scrim on a hillock of rubble with the tower about to come down on top of us. I saw Phelipeaux, half buried, his back likely broken, somehow drag out a pistol from beneath himself and fire into his revolutionary enemies.

  A half-dozen bayonets entered him in reply.

  Jericho had not just survived the fall, but dragged himself clear of the wreckage. His clothes were half burnt and blown off and his skin was gray with stone dust, but he’d found an iron bar, slightly bent, and strode into the oncoming French like Samson. Men backed from his maniacal energy as he whirled the staff. A fusilier came up behind with aimed musket, but Miriam had somewhere found an officer’s pistol which she held with two hands and fired point-blank. Half the fusilier’s head was blown away. A grenadier was coming from
the other direction. I remembered my tomahawk and threw it, watching it spin before burying in the attacker’s neck. He dropped like a cut tree and I pulled it back out. Then both Miriam and I managed to get hold of Jericho’s arms and drag him backward a pace or two, out of the reach of the bayonets he seemed desperate to impale himself on. As we did so, fresh troops from Djezzar surged past to engage the French. A hedgerow of bodies was building. Smith, hatless, head bloodied, was slashing with his saber like a man possessed. Bullets whined, pinged, or hit with a thunk when they found flesh, and someone new would grunt and go down.

  My hearing was back, dimly, and I shouted to Jericho and Miriam, “We have to get back behind our lines! We can help more from on high!”

  But then something hummed past my ear, as close as a warning hornet, and Jericho took a bullet in his shoulder and spun like a top.

  I turned and saw my nemesis. Najac was cursing, my own rifle planted butt first on the rubble as he began to reload, his bullyboys hanging back from the real fight but popping away over the heads of the struggling grenadiers. That shot was meant for me! They’d come for my corpse, all right—because they knew what was likely tucked in my shirt. And so I was seized with my own combat madness, an anger and awful thirst for vengeance that made me feel like my muscles were swelling, my veins engorged, and my eyes suddenly capable of supernatural detail. I’d seen the flash of red on the bastard’s finger. He was wearing Astiza’s ruby ring!

  I knew in an instant what had happened. Mohammad had been unable to resist the temptation of the cursed jewel Astiza had flung away in the Crusader court. When we were sleeping he had pocketed it, ending his periodic demands for money. And so it had been he, not I, who’d been slain by Najac’s longrifle shot as we fled along the aqueduct. The French brigand had checked to make sure the Muslim was dead and then seized the stone for his own, not knowing its history.

  It was a confession of murder. So I picked up Jericho’s iron bar and started for him, counting the seconds. It would take him a full minute to load the American long rifle, and ten seconds had already passed. I had to fight through a thicket of French to be on him.