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The Rosetta Key

Chapter One

Eyeing a thousand musket barrels aimed at one's chest does tend to force consideration of whether the wrong path has been taken. So I did consider it, each muzzle bore looking as wide as the bite of a mongrel stray in a Cairo alley. But no, while I'm modest to a fault, I have my self-righteous side as well—and by my light it wasn't me but the French army that had gone astray. Which I could have explained to my former friend, Napoleon Bonaparte, if he hadn't been up on the dunes out of hailing distance, aloof and annoyingly distracted, his buttons and medals gleaming in the Mediterranean sun.

The first time I'd been on a beach with Bonaparte, when he landed his army in Egypt in 1798, he told me the drowned would be immortalized by history. Now, nine months later outside the Palestinian port of Jaffa, history was to be made of me. French grenadiers were getting ready to shoot me and the hapless Muslim captives I'd been thrown in with, and once more I, Ethan Gage, was trying to figure out a way to sidestep destiny. It was a mass execution, you see, and I'd run afoul of the general I once attempted to befriend.

How far we'd both come in nine brief months!

I edged behind the biggest of the wretched Ottoman prisoners I could find, a Negro giant from the Upper Nile who I calculated might be just thick enough to stop a musket ball. All of us had been herded like bewildered cattle onto a lovely beach, eyes white and round in the darkest faces, the Turkish uniforms of scarlet, cream, emerald, and sapphire smeared with the smoke and blood of a savage sacking. There were lithe Moroccans, tall and dourSudanese, truculent pale Albanians, Circassian cavalry, Greek gunners, Turkish sergeants—the scrambled levies of a vast empire, all humbled by the French. And me, the lone American. Not only was I baffled by their babble; they often couldn't understand each other. The mob milled, their officers already dead, and their disorder a defeated contrast to the crisp lines of our executioners, drawn up as if on parade. Ottoman defiance had enraged Napoleon—you should never put the heads of emissaries on a pike—and their hungry numbers as prisoners threatened to be a crippling drag on his invasion. So we'd been marched through the orange groves to a crescent of sand just south of the captured port, the sparkling sea a lovely green and gold in the shallows, the hilltop city smoldering. I could see some green fruit still clinging to the shot-blown trees. My former benefactor and recent enemy, sitting on his horse like a young Alexander, was (through desperation or dire calculation) about to display a ruthlessness that his own marshals would whisper about for many campaigns to come. Yet he didn't even have the courtesy to pay attention! He was reading another of his moody novels, his habit to devour a book's page, tear it out, and pass it back to his officers. I was barefoot, bloody, and only forty miles as the crow flies from where Jesus Christ had died to save the world. The past several days of persecution, torment, and warfare hadn't persuaded me that our Savior's efforts had entirely succeeded in improving human nature.

"Ready!" A thousand musket hammers were pulled back.

Napoleon's henchmen had accused me of being a spy and a traitor, which was why I'd been marched with the other prisoners to the beach. And yes, circumstance had given a grain of truth to that characterization. But I hadn't set out with that intent, by any means. I'd simply been an American in Paris, whose tentative knowledge of electricity—and the need to escape an utterly unjust accusation of murder—resulted in my being included in the company of Napoleon's scientists, or savants, during his dazzling conquest of Egypt the year before. I'd also developed a knack for being on the wrong side at the wrong time. I'd taken fire from Mameluke cavalry, the woman I loved, Arab cutthroats, British broadsides, Muslim fanatics, French platoons—and I'm a likable man!

My latest French nemesis was a nasty scoundrel named Pierre Najac, an assassin and thief who couldn't get over the fact that I'd once shot him from beneath the Toulon stage when he tried to rob me of a sacred medallion. It's a long story, as an earlier volume will attest. Najac had come back into my life like a bad debt, and had kept me marching in the prisoner rank with a cavalry saber at my back. He was anticipating my imminent demise with the same feeling of triumph and loathing that one has when crushing a particularly obnoxious spider. I was regretting that I hadn't aimed a shave higher and two inches to the left.

As I've remarked before, it all seems to start with gambling. Back in Paris, it had been a card game that won me the mysterious medallion and started the trouble. This time, what had seemed a simple way to get a new start—taking the bewildered seamen of HMS Dangerous for every shilling they had before the British put me ashore in the Holy Land—had solved nothing and, it could be argued, had actually led to my present predicament. Let me repeat: gambling is a vice, and it is foolish to rely on chance.

"Aim!"

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I, Ethan Gage, have spent most of my thirty-four years trying to keep out of too much trouble and away from too much work. As my mentor and onetime employer, the late, great Benjamin Franklin, would no doubt observe, these two ambitions are as at odds as positive and negative electricity. The pursuit of the latter, no work, is almost sure to defeat the former, no trouble. But that's a lesson, like the headache that follows alcohol or the treachery of beautiful women, forgotten as . . .

The Rosetta Key. Copyright © by William Dietrich. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.