w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h
this book apparently tells us how to do. And when all things are possible, stones can be shifted, lives lengthened, enemies reconciled, and wounds healed.” His eyes gleamed.
I looked at his hip. “Made young again.”
“Exactly, and in charge of a world finally run on reason.”
“Bonaparte’s reason?”
Silano glanced at Najac. “I am loyal to the government that commissioned me. And yet politicians and generals only understand so much. It is scholars who will rule the future, Ethan. The old world was the plaything of princes and priests. The new will be the responsibility of scientists. When reason and the occult are joined, a golden age will begin. Priests played that role in Egypt. We will be the priests of the future.”
“But we’re on opposite sides!”
“No, we’re not. All things are dual. And we are linked by Astiza.” His smile was meant to be seductive.
What an unholy trinity. Yet how could I accomplish anything without playing along? I looked at her. She was sitting at Silano’s side, not mine.
“She hasn’t even forgiven me,” I lied.
“I will if you help us, Ethan,” she replied. “We need you to call down fire from the sky. We need you to harness heaven, like your Benjamin Franklin.”
c h a p t e r
1 8
The entrance to the City of Ghosts was a slit of sandstone canyon, tight and pink as a virgin.
The sinuous passageway was no wider than a room at its base, the sky a distant blue line above. The walls rose as high as six hundred feet, at times leaning in like a roof, as if closing like a crack in an earthquake. The embrace was disquieting as we walked with packs down its shadowed floor. Yet if rock can be voluptuous, this rose and blue barbican was a seraglio of rolling flesh, carved by water into a thousand sensuous forms as pleasing to the eye as a sultan’s favorite.
Much of it was banded into layers of coral, gray, white, and laven-der. Here rock dripped down like frozen syrup, there it puffed like frosting, and in yet another place it was a lace curtain. The sand and rock wadi formed a crude road that dipped downward toward our destination, like a causeway to some underworld in a satyr’s dream.
And nature wasn’t the only sculptor here, I saw when I looked closely.
This had been a caravan gate, and a channel had been carved into the canyon wall, its dark stain making clear that it had once been an aqueduct for the ancient city. We passed beneath a worn Roman arch that marked the canyon’s upper entrance and strode silently, in 2 0 2
w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h
awe, past niches in its walls that held gods and geometric carvings.
Sandstone camels, twice life-size, sauntered with us as bas-relief on the sandstone walls. It was as if the dead had been turned to stone, and when we turned the canyon’s final corner this ghostly effect was redoubled. We gasped.
“Behold,” intoned Silano. “This is what is possible when men dream!”
Yes, here the book must reside.
¤
¤
¤
We’d been traveling to this place several days from Nebo. Our party had followed the Jordanian highlands, skirting green pastures on the high plateau and passing by the brooding ruins of Crusader castles, as forsaken as the Templars. Occasionally we dipped down into deep and hot mountain canyons that opened to sandy yellow desert to the west. Tiny streams were swallowed by the dry-ness. Then we’d climb up the other side and continue south, hawks wheeling in the dry thermals and Bedouins shooing their goats into side wadis, watching silently from a safe distance until we passed. The siege at Acre seemed a planet away.
As we rode I had plenty of time to think about Silano’s Latin clue. The part about the angels pointing seemed somewhat plausible, though what forces were at play was beyond me. What had jarred my memory, however, were the words “snail shell” and “flower.” The same imagery had been used by the French savant, and my friend, Edme François Jomard when we climbed the Great Pyramid. He’d said the pyramid’s dimensions encoded a “golden number” or ratio—1.618, if I recalled—that was in turn a geometric representation of a progression of numbers called the Fibonacci sequence. This mathematical progression could be represented by an interconnected series of ever-growing squares, and an arc through the squares produced the kind of spiral seen in a nautilus shell, or, Jomard said, in the arrangement of flower petals. My comrade Talma had thought the young scientist half addled, but I was intrigued. Did the pyramid really stand for t h e
r o s e t t a k e y
2 0 3
some fundamental truth about nature? And what, if anything, did that have to do with where we were going now?
I tried to think like Monge and Jomard, the mathematicians. “Then at last the clear light reveals a certain part which formerly was both unknown, nor was it cognized in your estimation,” the Templars had written. This seemed like nonsense, and yet it gave me a wild idea.
Did I have a clue that would allow me to snatch the Book of Thoth out from under Silano’s nose?
We camped in the most defensible places we could find, and one evening we climbed a hillock to spend the night in the limestone remains of a Crusader castle, its broken towers orbited by swallows.
The ruin was yellow in the low sun, weeds growing from the crevices between stones. We rode up through a meadow of wildflowers that waved in the spring wind. It was as if they were nodding at my sup-position. Fibonacci, they whispered.
As we bunched at the half-fallen gate to lead our horses into the abandoned courtyard, I managed a whisper to Astiza. “Meet me under the moon, on the battlements as far from where we sleep as possible,” I murmured.
Her nod was almost imperceptible and then, acting as if irritated, urged her horse ahead of mine to cut mine off. Yes, to the others we were bitter ex-lovers.
Our own trio had made a habit of sleeping a little apart from Najac’s gang of cutthroats, and when Ned was deep into his lusty snores I crept away and waited in the shadows. She came like a ghost, wrapped in white and luminous in the night. I rose and pulled her into a sentry post out of sight of any others, milky moonlight falling through the arrow slit. I kissed her for the first time since our reunion, her lips cold from the chill, her fingers knotting in mine to control my hands.
“We don’t have time,” she whispered. “Najac is awake and thinks I’ve gone to relieve myself. He’ll be counting the minutes.”
“Let the bastard count.” I tried to embrace her.
“Ethan, if we go too far it will spoil everything!”
“If we don’t I’ll burst.”
2 0 4
w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h
“No.” She thrust me away. “Patience! We’re close!” Damnation, it had been hard to stay on keel since leaving Paris.
Too much exercise and too few women. I took a breath. “All right, listen. If this lightning trick really works, you need to help me separate from Silano. I need time to try something on my own, and then we must rendezvous later.”
“You know something you haven’t told us, don’t you?’
“Perhaps. It’s a gamble.”
“And you’re a gambler.” She thought. “After we harness the lightning, tell him you’ll trade your share in the book for me. Then I’ll pretend to betray you, and go with him. We’ll abandon you. Act frustrated.”
“That won’t be hard. Can I trust you?”
She smiled. “Trust has to come from within.” And with that she slipped away. We took care that the rest of the time we were as prickly as porcupines. I hoped it was truly a ruse.
We followed the old caravan tracks and I feared Ottoman patrols, but it was as if the clash at Mount Tabor had temporarily made Turkish forces disappear. The world seemed empty, primeval. We were trailed once by native tribesmen, tough little men on camels, but our party looked tough too, and poor to boot, hardly worth robbing. Najac rode to talk with them with his toughs, and they disappeared.