Read Online Napoleon's Pyramids by William Dietrich - Free Book Online Page B

world. Their barrel-roofed wagons with paint-box colors created an elfin village amid the trees. I smelled smoke, incense, and cooking spicy enough to be exotic, heavy with garlic and herbs. Women in colorful dresses, with black lustrous hair and golden hoops in their ears, glanced up from steaming pots to evaluate us with eyes as deep and unfathomable as ancient pools. Children crouched by the colored wheels like watching imps. Shaggy gypsy wagon ponies stamped and snorted from the shadows. All was cast in amber by the glow from their lamps. In Paris all was reason and revolution. Here was something older, more primitive, and free.
    “I am Stefan,” said the man who’d disarmed us. He had dark, wary eyes, a grand moustache, and a nose so shattered in some past fight that it was as rumpled as a mountain range. “We do not care for guns, which are expensive to buy, costly to maintain, noisy to use, tedious to reload, and easy to steal. So explain yourselves, bringing them to our home.”
    “I was en route to Toulon when our coach was accosted,” I said. “I’m fleeing from bandits. When I saw your wagons I stopped and heard him”—I pointed to Smith—“coming up behind me.”
    “And I,” said Smith, “was trying to speak to this gentleman after helping save his life. I shot a thief who was about to shoot him. Then our friend ran like a rabbit.”
    So that had been the other shot I’d heard. “But how?” I objected. “I mean, where did you come from? I don’t know you. And how could you be Smith? Everyone assumes you escaped to England.” In February, the flamboyant British naval captain, scourge of the French coastline, had with female help escaped from Paris’s Temple Prison, built from a former castle of the Knights Templar. He’d been missing since. Smith had originally been captured while trying to steal a French frigate from the mouth of the Seine, and was so bold and notorious a raider that the authorities had refused to ransom or exchange him. Engravings of his handsome likeness were sold not just in London, but in Paris as well. Now, here he claimed to be.
    “I was following in hopes of warning you. That I came upon your coach shortly after the moment of ambush was no coincidence; I’d been trailing all day at a mile or so behind, with plans to contact you at your inn tonight. When I saw the brigands I feared the worst and crept up on the group. Your work at getting away was brilliant, but you were outnumbered. When one of the villains took aim, I shot him.”
    I remained suspicious. “Warn me of what?”
    He glanced at Stefan. “People of Egypt, can you be trusted?”
    The gypsy straightened, his feet planted as if ready to box. “While you are a guest of the Rom, your secrets stay here. As you protected this fugitive, Englishman, in like manner we protected you. We, too, saw what unfolded, and we make a distinction between criminals and their victims. The thief who attempted to follow the pair of you will not return to his fellows.”
    Smith beamed. “Well, then, we are all fellow men at arms! Yes, I did escape from Temple Prison with royalist help, and yes, I fully intend to soon reach England. I’m simply waiting for the necessary documents to be forged so I can slip out of a Normandy harbor. New battles wait. But while held in that hideous edifice I whiled away some of my time talking with the prison governor, who was a student of the Templars, and was told all kinds of stories of Solomon and his masons, of Egypt and its priests, and of charms and powers lost in the mists of time. Pagan nonsense, but interesting as all hell. What if the ancients knew of powers now lost? Then, while I was in hiding after my escape, royalists brought rumors that French forces are being gathered for some expedition to the East, and that an American had been invited to join them. I’d heard of you, Mr. Gage, and your expertise in electricity. Who would not have heard of a confederate of the great