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.
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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.”
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“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 t h e
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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.”
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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.
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Fleeing 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 faith-less 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.