Napoleon's Pyramids (15 page)

“Journalist!” the captain shouted at Talma, “Stop scribbling and take the wheel!”

Talma blanched. “Me?”

“I need to bind my arm and serve the cannon!”

Our scribe sprang to obey, excited and scared. “Which way?”

“Toward the enemy.”

“Come, Claude-Louis!” Monge shouted to Berthollet as the mathematician clambered forward to take over another unmanned gun. “It’s time to put our science to use! Gage, start using your rifle, if you want to live!” My God, the scientist was past fifty and seemed determined to win the battle himself! He and Berthollet ran to the forward cannon. Meanwhile I finally fired, and an enemy sailor tumbled out of his rigging. A fog of cannon haze rolled down on us, Arab boats gauzy in its murk. How long before we were boarded and cut to ribbons by scimitars? I noticed dimly that Astiza had crawled forward to help the scientists haul on the gun tackle. Her admiration of Greek marksmanship had apparently been overcome by her instinct for self-preservation. Berthollet himself had rammed home a charge and now Monge aimed the gun.

“Fire!”

The cannon belched a sheet of flame. Monge sprang up on the bowsprit and stood on his tiptoes to judge his aim, then leaped back disappointed. The shot had missed. “We need bearings to accurately calculate distance, Claude-Louis,” he muttered, “or we’re wasting powder and shot.” He snapped at Astiza. “Sponge and reload!”

I aimed my rifle again, squeezing carefully. This time a Mameluke captain pitched out of sight. Bullets pattered around me in return. Sweating, I reloaded.

“Talma, hold a steady course, damn you!” Monge shouted back.

The scribe was clutching the wheel with pale determination. The Ottoman fleet was drawing steadily closer, and enemy sailors bunched at their prows, ready to board.

The scientists, I saw, were taking bearings on points ashore and sketching intersecting lines to get an accurate estimate of distance to the enemy flagship. Water was blasting into fountains all around us. Chips of debris buzzed through the air.

I primed my pan, shot a Greek Ottoman gunner through the brain, and ran to the bow. “Why don’t you fire?”

“Silence!” Berthollet cried. “Give us time to check our arithmetic!” The two scientists were elevating the gun, aiming it as precisely as a surveying instrument.

“One more degree,” Monge muttered. “Now!”

The cannon barked once more, its ball screamed, I could follow the shadow of its passage, and then—wonder of wonders—it actually struck the Mameluke flagship perfectly amidships, punching a hole into the vessel’s bowels. By Thor, the two savants had actually figured the thing.

“Hooray for mathematics!”

A moment passed, and then the entire enemy boat blew up.

Apparently the scientists had made a direct hit on the magazine. There was a concussive roar that radiated out a cloud of shattered wood, broken cannon, and human body parts, arcing outward and then sluicing into the opaque surface of the Nile. The clap of air sent us sprawling, and smoke roiled into the blue Egyptian sky in a vast mushroom. And then there was just disturbed water where the enemy flagship had been, as if it had vanished by magic. The Muslim fire immediately went silent in stunned consternation, and then a wail went up from the enemy flotilla as its smaller boats tacked to flee upriver. At the same moment the Mameluke cavalry, forming for a second charge after their first failed, suddenly broke and retreated southward at this seeming sign of French omnipotence. In minutes, what had been a swirling land-and-sea battle turned into a rout. With that single well-placed shot, the battle of Shubra Khit was won, and the wounded Perree was promoted to rear admiral.

And I, by association, was a hero.

W
hen Perree went ashore to receive Bonaparte’s congratulations he generously invited the two scientists, Talma, and me, giving us full credit for the decisive shot. Monge’s precision was something of a marvel. Despite the Greek expertise, the new admiral later calculated that the two fleets had exchanged fifteen hundred cannon shots in half an hour and his flotilla had come away with just six dead and twenty wounded. Such was the state of Egyptian artillery, or ordnance in general, at the close of the eighteenth century. Cannon and musket fire was so inaccurate that a brave man could put himself at the forefront of a charge and actually have a decent chance of survival and glory. Men fired too soon. They fired blind in the smoke. They loaded in panic and forgot to discharge, ramming one bullet atop another without shooting at all, until their musket burst. They shot off the ears and hands of their comrades in the rank ahead of them, broke eardrums, and jabbed each other when fitting bayonets. Bonaparte told me that at least one out of ten battle casualties came from one’s own comrades, which is why uniforms are so bright, to prevent friends from killing each other.

Expensive rifles like mine will someday change all this, I suppose, and warfare shall devolve into men groping in the mud for cover. What glory in murder? Indeed, I wondered what war would be like if savants did all the aiming and every bomb and bullet hit. But this, of course, is a fanciful notion that will forever be impossible.

While Monge and Berthollet were the ones who had laid the key gun, I was applauded for having fought with fervor for the French side. “You have the spirit of Yorktown!” Napoleon congratulated, clapping me on the back. Again, the presence of Astiza enhanced my reputation. Like any good French soldier I’d attached myself to an attractive woman, and a woman moreover with the spirit to haul on cannon tackle. I’d become one of them, while she used her skill or magic—in Egypt, the two seemed to be the same—to help bind the wounded. We males joined Napoleon for dinner in his tent.

Our general was in a good mood from the outcome of the brisk fight, which had settled both him and his army. Egypt might be alien, but France could become its master. Now Bonaparte’s mind was full of plans for the future, even though we were still more than a hundred river miles from Cairo.

“My campaign is not one of conquest but of marriage,” he proclaimed as we dined on poultry that his aides had liberated from Shubra Khit, roasting them on the ramrods of their muskets. “France has a destiny in the East, just as your young nation, Gage, has a destiny in the West. While your United States civilizes the red savage, we’ll reform the Muslim with Western ideas. We’ll bring windmills, canals, factories, dams, roads, and carriages to somnolent Egypt. You and I are revolutionaries, yes, but I’m a builder as well. I want to create, not destroy.”

I think he truly believed this, just as he believed a thousand other things about himself, many of them contradictory. He had the intellect and ambition of a dozen men, and was a chameleon who tried to fit them all.

“These people are Muslim,” I pointed out. “They won’t change. They’ve been fighting Christians for centuries.”

“I’m Muslim too, Gage, if there is only one God and every religion is just an aspect of central truth. That’s what we must explain to these people, that we are all brothers under Allah or Jehovah or Yahweh or whomever. France and Egypt will unite once the mullahs see we are their brothers. Religion? It’s a tool, like medals or bonus pay. Nothing inspires like unproven faith.”

Monge laughed. “Unproven? I’m a scientist, general, and yet God seemed quite proven once those cannon balls began whizzing by.”

“Proven or wished, like a child wishes for his mother? Who knows? Life is brief, and none of our deepest questions are ever answered. So I live for posterity: death is nothing, but to live without glory is to die every day. I’m reminded of the story of an Italian duelist who fought fourteen times to defend his claim that the poet Aristo was finer than the poet Tasio. On his deathbed, the man confessed he’d read neither one.” Bonaparte laughed. “Now
that
is living!”

“No, General,” the balloonist Conte replied, tapping his wine cup. “
This
is living.”

“Ah, I appreciate a good cup, or a fine horse, or a beautiful woman. Look at our American friend here, who rescues this pretty Macedonian, finds himself in the commander’s tent, and is about to share in the riches of Cairo. He’s an opportunist like me. Don’t think I don’t miss my own wife, who is a greedy little witch with one of the prettiest pussies I’ve ever seen, a woman so seductive that I went at her one time without even noticing that her little dog was biting me on the ass!” He roared at the memory. “Pleasure is exquisite! But it is history that is lasting, and no place has more history than Egypt. You’ll record it for me, eh, Talma?”

“Writers thrive with their subjects, General.”

“I will give authors a subject worthy of their talents.”

Talma lifted his cup. “Heroes sell books.”

“And books make heroes.”

We all drank, to what, exactly, I cannot say.

“You have great ambition, General,” I remarked.

“Success is a matter of will. The first step to greatness is to decide to be great. Then men will follow.”

“Follow you where, General?” Kleber asked genially.

“All the way.” He looked to each of us in turn, his gaze intense. “All the way.”

After dinner I paused to say a good-bye to Monge and Berthollet. I’d had quite enough of river boats, having seen one of them explode, and Talma and Astiza wanted to be ashore as well. So we gave temporary farewells to the two scientists, under a desert sky ablaze with countless stars.

“Bonaparte is cynical but seductive,” I remarked. “You can’t listen to his dreams without being infected by them.”

Monge nodded. “He’s a comet, that one. If he’s not killed, he’ll leave his mark on the world. And on us.”

“Always admire but never trust him,” Berthollet cautioned. “We’re all hanging onto the tiger’s tail, Monsieur Gage, hoping we won’t be eaten.”

“Surely he won’t eat his own kind, my chemist friend.”

“But what are his own kind? If he doesn’t quite believe in God, neither does he quite believe in us: that we are real. No one is real to Napoleon but Napoleon.”

“That seems too cynical.”

“No? In Italy he ordered a group of his soldiers to a sharp skirmish with the Austrians that left several men dead.”

“That’s war, is it not?” I remembered Bonaparte’s comments on the beach.

“Not when there was no military need for the skirmish, or the deaths. A pretty Mademoiselle Thurreau was visiting from Paris and Bonaparte was anxious to bed her by demonstrating his power. He ordered the fight solely to impress her.” Berthollet put his hand on my arm. “I’m glad you’ve joined us, Gage, you are proving brave and congenial. March with our young general and you’ll march far, as he promised. But never forget that Napoleon’s interests are Napoleon’s, not your own.”

I
’d hoped that the remainder of our journey to Cairo would be a stroll down avenues of date palms and through the irrigated greenery of melon fields. Instead, to avoid the bends in the river and the narrow lanes of frequent villages, the French army left the Nile a few miles to the east and hiked through desert and dry farmland once more, crossing sun-baked mud and empty, axle-breaking irrigation canals. The alluvial valley, which the Nile flooded each wet season, sent up a cloud of dry, clinging powder that turned us into a horde of dust men, marching south on blistered feet. The heat in the middle of July routinely exceeded one hundred degrees, and when a hot wind blew the brilliantly azure sky turned milk on the horizon. Sand hissed over the top of sculpted dunes like an undulating sheet. Men began to suffer ophthalmia, temporary blindness from the ceaseless glare. So fierce was the sun that we needed to wrap our hands to pick up a rock or touch a cannon barrel.

It didn’t help that Bonaparte, still fearing a British strike in his rear or more organized resistance to his front, scolded his officers for every pause and delay. While they focused on the march of the moment his mind was always on the greater picture, ticking off the calendar and strategically roaming from the mysterious whereabouts of the British fleet to ally Tippoo, in distant India. He tried to hold all of Egypt in his eye. The genial host we’d seen after the river fight had once more reverted to anxious tyrant, galloping from point to point to urge more speed. “The faster the pace, the less the blood!” he lectured. As a result, all the generals were sweating, dirty, and frequently cursing each other. The soldiers were depressed by the bickering and by the bleakness of the land they’d come to conquer. Many cast off equipment rather than carry it. Several more committed suicide. Astiza and I passed two of their bodies, left by our path because everyone was too hurried to bury them. Only the trailing Bedouin discouraged more men from desertion.

Our torrent of men, horses, donkeys, guns, wagons, camels, camp followers, and beggars flowed toward Cairo in an arrow of dust. When we halted to rest in the farmlands, muddy from sweat, our only amusement was to throw rocks at the innumerable rats. In the desert fringe the men shot at snakes and played with the scorpions, tormenting them into contests against each other. They learned that the scorpion bite was not as deadly as initially feared, and that crushing the insect against the sting released a goo that worked as a salve to help soothe the pain and hasten the healing.

There was no rain, ever, and rarely a cloud. At night we did not so much camp as sprawl, everyone collapsing in the sequence with which we’d marched, the lot of us immediately assaulted by fleas and midges. We ate cold food as often as hot because there was little wood for fuel. The night would cool toward dawn and we’d wake wet with dew, only half recovered. Then the cloudless sun would rise, remorseless as a clock, and soon we’d all be baking. Astiza, I noticed, lay steadily closer to me as the march went on, but we were both so swaddled, filthy, and exposed in this horde that there was nothing romantic in her decision. We simply sought each other’s warmth at night, and then bemoaned the sun and flies by noon.