“I only know it will hurt if that bastard who shot at us gets it first.” And with that, I decided to kiss her.
It was a stolen kiss that took advantage of our emotional turmoil, and yet she didn’t immediately pull away, even though I was hard against her thigh. I couldn’t help my arousal, the action and intimacy had excited me, and the way she kissed back I knew it was recip-rocated, at least a little. When she did pull away it was with a little gasp.
To keep me from pressing against her again, she looked from my eyes to my temple. “You’re bleeding.” It was a way to not talk of what we’d just done.
Indeed, the side of my head was wet and warm, and I had the t h e
r o s e t t a k e y
5 7
damndest headache. “It’s a scratch,” I said, more bravely than I felt.
“Let’s go talk to your brother.”
¤
¤
¤
We’d better finish this rifle of yours,” Jericho said when I told him our story.
“Capital idea. I might get you to forge me a tomahawk, too. Ouch! ” Miriam was dressing my wound. It stung a little, but her strong fingers were wonderfully gentle as she wrapped my head. The pistol ball had only grazed me, but it shakes a man to come that close. Truth to tell, I also enjoyed being nursed. The woman and I had touched more in the last hour than the previous four months. “There’s nothing more useful than those hatchets, and I lost mine. We’re going to need every advantage we can get.”
“We’ll need to stand watch in case these ruffians come around.
Miriam, you’re not to leave this house.” She opened her mouth, then closed it.
Jericho was pacing. “I have an idea to improve the gun, if the rifle is as accurate as you claim. You said it is difficult to focus on targets at its farthest range, correct?”
“Once I aimed at an enemy and hit his camel.”
“I’ve noticed you peer around the city with your spyglass. What if we used it to help you aim?”
“But how?”
“By attaching it to the barrel.”
Well, that was a perfectly ridiculous idea. It would add to the weight, make the gun clumsier, and get in the way of loading. It must be a bad idea because no one had done it before. And yet what if it would really help to see distant targets up close? “Could that work?” Franklin, I knew, would have been intrigued by this kind of tinkering.
The unknown, which frightens most men, lured him like a siren.
“We can try. And we need allies if that gang of men is still in the city. You think you killed one?”
“Stabbed him. Who knows? I shot their leader in France, and here 5 8
w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h
he is, big as life. I seem to have a hard time finishing people off.” I thought of Silano and Achmed bin Sadr in Egypt, who both kept coming at me after various wounds. I not only needed that rifle, I needed practice with it.
“I’m going to send word to Sir Sidney,” Jericho said. “The French agents here may be important enough for the British to send help.
And Miriam said all this has something to do with that treasure you keep promising. What’s really going on?” It was past time to bring them into my confidence. “There may be something buried here in Jerusalem that could affect the course of the entire war. We hunted for it in Egypt, but decided in the end that it must have come to Israel. Yet every time I find a stair or a ladder leading downward, I come to a dead end. The city is a rubble heap.
My quest may be impossible. Now the French are here, undoubtedly after the same thing.”
“They asked about you,” Miriam reminded.
“Yes, and did they just discover my presence or hear of it from afar?
Jericho, could the people who asked about Astiza in Egypt have let slip my own existence?”
“They weren’t supposed to . . . but wait. Find what, exactly? What is this treasure you seek?”
I took a breath. “The Book of Thoth.”
“A book?” He was disappointed. “I thought you said it was treasure.
I’ve spent the winter making a rifle for a book?”
“Books have power, Jericho. Look at the Bible or the Koran. And this book is different, it’s a book of wisdom, power and . . . magic.”
“Magic.” His expression was flat.
“You don’t have to believe me. All I know is that people have shot at me, thrown snakes in my bed, and chased me on camels and boats to get this book—or rather a medallion I had that was a clue to where the book was kept. It turned out the medallion was a key to a secret door in the Great Pyramid, which Astiza and I entered. We found an underground lake heaped with treasure, a marble pavilion, and a golden repository for this book.”
“So you already have the treasure?”
t h e
r o s e t t a k e y
5 9
“No. The only way to escape the pyramid was to swim through a tunnel. The weight of the gold and jewels threatened to drown me.
I lost it all. The Jews might have hidden a different treasure here in Jerusalem.”
He had the same skeptical look I used to get from Madame Durrell in Paris when I explained the lateness of my rent. “And the book?”
“The repository was empty. All that was left was a shepherd’s crook lying next to it. Astiza convinced me that the crook had been carried by the man who stole the book, and that that man must have been . . .” I hesitated, knowing what this all must sound like.
“Who?”
“Moses.”
For a moment he simply blinked, in consternation. Then he laughed, a scornful bark. “So! I have been hosting a madman! Does Sidney Smith know you are insane?”
“I haven’t told him all this, and wouldn’t tell you if we hadn’t seen that Frenchman. I know it sounds odd, but that villain was allied with my greatest enemy, Count Silano. Which means time is short. We have to find the book before he does.”
“A book Moses stole.”
“Is it that impossible? An Egyptian prince kills an overseer in a fit of rage, flees the country, and then comes back after conversations with a burning bush to free the Hebrew slaves. All this you believe, correct? Yet suddenly Moses has the power to call down plagues, part the waters, and keep the Israelites fed in the wilderness of Sinai. Most men call it a simple miracle, a gift from God, but what if he discovered instructions to tell him how to do so? This is what Astiza believed.
As a prince, he knew how to get in and out of the pyramid, which was but a decoy and a marker to protect the book from the unworthy. Moses takes it, and when Pharaoh discovers it gone, he pursues Moses and the Hebrew slaves with six hundred chariots, only to be swallowed by the Red Sea. Later, this tribe of ex-slaves enters the Promised Land and proceeds to conquer it from its civilized, estab-lished inhabitants. How? By an ark with mysterious powers or a book of ancient wisdom? I know it sounds improbable, and yet the French 6 0
w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h
believe it too. Otherwise, these men wouldn’t have seized your sister.
This is a crisis as real as the bruises on her arms and shoulders.” The blacksmith looked at me, drumming his fingers. “You are mad.” I shook my head in frustration. “Then why do I have these?” And I reached in my robe to bring out the two golden seraphim, each four inches long. Miriam gasped and Jericho’s eyes went wide. It wasn’t just the brilliance of the gold, I knew, still vivid after thousands of years.
It was the fact that these kneeling angels, their wings outstretched toward each other, were a tiny model of the ones that had once decorated the top of the Ark of the Covenant. This wasn’t a cheap trick I could have had made up in an artisan’s shop. The workmanship was too good, and the gold too heavy.