‘Yes, yes.’ He waved his hand. ‘What’s the situation of Bonaparte’s army?’
‘It has defeated the Mamelukes and is in possession of Cairo.’
There was a murmur of disappointment in the cabin.
‘And yet he now has no fleet,’ Nelson said, to his officers as much as me. ‘Which means that while we can’t get at Boney, quite yet, Boney can’t get to India. There will be no linkup to Tippoo Sahib, and no threat to our army there. He’s marooned.’
I nodded. ‘It would seem so, Admiral.’
‘And the morale of his troops?’
I considered. ‘They grumble, like all soldiers. But they’ve also just conquered Egypt. I suppose they feel like sailors who have conquered Brueys.’
Nelson nodded. ‘Quite. Land and sea. Sea and land. His numbers?’
I shrugged. ‘I’m not a soldier. I know his casualties have been light.’
‘Humph. And supplies?’
‘He resupplies from Egypt herself.’
He slammed his hand down. ‘Damn! It will be like prying out an oyster!’ He looked at me with his one good eye. ‘Well, what do you want to do now?’
What indeed? It was dumb luck I hadn’t already been killed. Bonaparte was expecting me to solve a mystery that still baffled me, my friend Talma was suspicious of my friend Astiza, an Arab cutthroat no doubt wanted to drop more snakes in my bed, and there was a baffling heap of pyramidal stone built to represent the world, or God, or who knows what. Here was my chance to cut and run.
But I wasn’t done figuring out the medallion, was I? Maybe I could get a fist of treasure, or a share of mysterious power. Or keep it from the lunatics of the Egyptian Rite and the Apophis snake cult. And a woman was waiting, wasn’t she?
‘I’m no strategist, admiral, but perhaps this battle changes everything,’ I said. ‘We won’t know how Bonaparte will react until news reaches him. Which I, perhaps, could bear. The French know nothing of my connection to Smith.’ Go back? Well, the battle and the dying boy had shaken me to the core. I had a duty too, and it was to get back to Astiza and the medallion. It was to finish, finally, something I’d started. ‘I’ll explain the situation to Bonaparte and, if that doesn’t move him, then learn what I can in coming months and report back to you.’ A plan had formulated in my mind. ‘A rendezvous off the coast near the end of October, perhaps. Just after the twenty-first.’
‘Smith is scheduled to be in the region then,’ Nelson noted.
‘And your own self-interest in doing this?’ Hardy asked me.
‘I have scores of my own to settle in Cairo. Then I’d like passage to a neutral port. After L’Orient, I’ve had enough of war.’
‘Three months before you report back?’ Nelson objected.
‘It may take that long for Bonaparte to react and form the new French plans.’
‘By God,’ objected Hardy, ‘this man served on the enemy flagship and now he wants to be put ashore? I don’t trust a word he says, ring or no ring.’
‘Not served. Observed. I didn’t fire a shot.’
Nelson thought, fingering my ring. Then he held it out. ‘Done. We’ve smashed enough ships that you hardly make a difference. Tell Boney exactly what you observed: I want him to know he’s doomed. However, it will take months for us to assemble an army to get the Corsican out of Egypt. In the meantime, I want you to make a count of his strength and gauge the mood. If there is any chance of surrender, I want to hear about it immediately.’
Napoleon is about as likely to give up as you are, Admiral, I thought, but I didn’t say that. ‘If you can get me ashore…’
‘We’ll get an Egyptian to put you on the beach tomorrow to erase any suspicion you’ve been talking to us.’
‘Tomorrow? But if you want me to notify Bonaparte…’
‘Sleep and eat first. No need to hurry, Gage, because I suspect the preliminary news has gone ahead of you. We chased a corvette that slipped into Alexandria just ahead of the battle, and I’m sure the diplomat on board had a rooftop view of our victory. He’s the kind of man to already be on his way. What was his name, Hardy?’
‘Silano, the reports said.’
‘Yes, that’s it,’ Nelson said. ‘Some tool of Talleyrand named Alessandro Silano.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
My first task, upon hearing this disturbing news, was to reunite with Talma, who likely assumed me dead once word of the explosion of L’Orient reached Alexandria. Silano here? Was that the ‘help’ that Bonaparte had hinted at?
The battered British fleet did not attempt to force the repaired forts at Alexandria’s harbour. Instead they began patrolling in blockade. As for me, an Arab lighter deposited me on the beach at Abukir Bay. No one took particular note of my landing, as dhows and feluccas were sweeping the water to salvage debris and rob the dead. French and British longboats were also retrieving bodies in a makeshift truce, and on shore, wounded men lay groaning under crude canvas shelters. I splashed up the beach looking as ragged as the rest, helped carry some wounded to the shade of a shell-pocked sail, and then joined a desultory procession of French sailors straggling toward Alexandria. They were sullen in defeat, quietly vowing revenge on the English, but also had the hopeless look of the stranded. It was a long, hot hike in a pillar of dust, and when I paused and looked back, I could see columns of smoke where some of the beached French ships were still burning. As we marched we passed the rubble of long-vanished civilisations. A sculpted head was toppled on its side. A royal foot as big as a table, with toes the size of pumpkins, peeked from debris. We were a ruin trudging past ruins. I didn’t reach the city until midnight.
Alexandria buzzed like a disturbed hive. It was by going from lodging to lodging, asking for news of a short, bespectacled Frenchman with an interest in miracle cures that I finally discovered that Talma had lodged in a dead Mameluke’s mansion that had been turned into an inn by an opportunistic merchant.
‘The sickly one?’ the proprietor responded. ‘He’s disappeared without taking his bag or his medicine.’
This didn’t sound good at all. ‘He left no word for me, Ethan Gage?’
‘You’re a friend of his?’
‘Yes.’
‘He owes me one hundred francs.’
I paid his debt and claimed Talma’s luggage as my own, hoping the journalist had rushed back to Cairo. Just to be sure he hadn’t sailed away, I checked the docks. ‘It’s not like my friend Talma to go off by himself,’ I told a French port supervisor worriedly. ‘He’s really not very adventurous.’
‘Then what is he doing in Egypt?’
‘Seeking cures for his ailments.’
‘Fool. He should have taken the waters in Germany.’
This supervisor confirmed that Count Silano had indeed arrived in Egypt, but not from France. Instead, he’d sailed from the Syrian coastline. He reportedly had disembarked with two enormous trunks of belongings, a monkey on a golden chain, a blonde mistress, a cobra in a basket, a pig in a cage, and a gigantic Negro bodyguard. If that were not conspicuous enough, he had adopted an Arab’s flowing robes and added a yellow sash, Austrian cavalry boots, and French rapier. ‘I am here to decipher the mysteries of Egypt!’ he’d proclaimed. With lingering gunfire still grumbling as the sun rose over the ruins of the French fleet, Silano had commissioned a caravan of camels and set off for Cairo. Could Talma have gone with him? It seemed unlikely. Or had Antoine trailed the count to spy?
I joined a cavalry patrol to Rosetta and then took a boat to Cairo. From a distance the capital seemed curiously unchanged after the apocalypse at Abukir, but I soon learnt that news of the disaster had indeed preceded me.
‘It’s like we’re clinging to a rope,’ said a sergeant who escorted me to Napoleon’s headquarters. ‘There’s the Nile, and this narrow band of green that follows it, and nothing but empty desert on either side. Fall into the sands and they kill you for your buttons. Garrison a village, and you might wake to a knife sawing your windpipe. Bed a woman, and you might find your drink poisoned or your balls gone. Pet a dog, and you risk rabies. We can march in only two dimensions, not three. Is the rope to hang us?’