The Rosetta Key

And then Colonel Phelipeaux died. Did he really comprehend his victory as life leaked out his body? I don’t know. But maybe he had a glimmer that it hadn’t been in vain, and that in the violent insanity of this worst day of the siege, something fundamental had been won.

I went back to Najac’s body, stooped, and took my rifle, my tomahawk, and the ring. Then I walked back through the rubble of the half-ruined tower. Shouting engineers were already beginning to lever aside stones, ready beams, and mix mortar. The tower would be patched yet again.

I went in search of Jericho and Miriam.

Fortunately, I didn’t see the ironmonger’s body among the long rows of defenders being laid mournfully to temporary rest in the pasha’s gardens. I glanced up. The birds had disappeared in the cacophony, but I could see the veiled eyes of Djezzar’s harem women looking down from their grilled windows. Splinters had been knocked from some of the woodwork, leaving yellow gashes in the dark-stained design. The pasha himself was strutting up and down his wall like a rooster, clapping his exhausted men on the shoulder and shouting 2 5 8

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out at the French. “What, you do not like my hospitality? Then come back and get some more!”

I drank at the mosque fountain and then walked dully through the city, smeared with blood and powder smoke, huddled civilians looking at me warily. My eyes, I supposed, were bright in the blackness of my face, but my stare was a thousand miles away. I walked until I reached the jetty with its lighthouse, the Mediterranean clean after the squalor of battle. I looked back. Cannon were still rumbling, and smoke and dust had created a pall in that direction, backlit to stormy darkness by a declining sun.

How had so much time passed? We’d sprinted for the wall in the morning.

I took out the pharaoh’s ring that had meant grief for every person who’d touched it. Do curses really exist? Franklin the rationalist would doubt it. But I knew enough not to finger its ruby as I waded into the cool sea, to my knees, to my waist, the chill seizing my crotch, my chest. I bent and sank underwater, opening my eyes in the green gloom, letting the sea wash out some of the grit. I held my breath as long as I could, making sure I was finally ready to do what must be done. Then I surfaced, shaking the water from my wet, uncut hair, cocked my arm, and threw. It was a red meteor, heading for the cobalt that marked deep water. There was a plop and, simple as that, the ring was gone.

I shivered in relief.

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I found Miriam in the city hospital, its rooms jammed with the freshly wounded. Sheets were bright red, and pans of water pink.

Basins held chunks of amputated flesh. Flies buzzed, feasting, and there were smells not just of blood but of gangrene and lye and the charcoal of braziers where surgical tools were heated before cutting.

Periodically, the air would be pierced by screaming.

The building quaked from continuing artillery fire. As Smith had predicted, Napoleon seemed to be throwing everything he had at us t h e

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in a last outpouring of frustration. Maybe he hoped to simply flatten what he couldn’t take. Saws rattled on tables. Dust sifted down from the tile roof into wounded men’s eyes.

Miriam was, I saw with relief, attending to a brother who was still alive. Jericho was pale, his hair greasy, his shirt gone, and the upper half of his torso wrapped in stained bandages. But he was alert and energetic enough to give me a skeptical glare as I came up to his pallet.

“Can’t anything kill you?”

“I got the man who shot you, Jericho.” My tone was dull from emotional overload. “We held the breach. You, me, Miriam, all of us.

We held.”

“Where in Hades’ name did you go when you left the city?”

“It’s a long story. That thing we were looking for in Jerusalem? I found it.”

They both stared at me. “The treasure?”

“Of sorts.” I reached inside my shirt and pulled out the golden cylinder. Sure enough, it was dented and nearly punctured where the ramrod had hit. My chest had a bruise the size of a plate. But both the book’s metal sheath and my own body were intact. Their eyes widened at the gleam of metal, which I shielded from other hospital eyes. “It’s heavy, Jericho. Heavy enough to build twice the house, and twice the forge, you left in Jerusalem. When the war’s over, you’re a rich man.”

“Me?”

“I’m giving it to you. I have bad luck with treasures. The book inside, however, I intend to keep. Can’t read a word, but I’m getting sentimental.”

“You’re giving me all the gold?”

“You and Miriam.”

Now he scowled. “What, you think you can pay me?”

“Pay you?”

“For crashing into our lives and taking not just our home and live -

lihood but my sister’s virtue?”

“It’s not payment! My God, she didn’t . . .” Wisely, I didn’t finish.

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“Not payment, nor even thanks. Just simple justice. You’d be doing me a favor to take it.”