Three Emperors (9780062194138) (12 page)

A woman with a great mane of golden hair sat fifty yards away by a campfire, facing away, knees pressed primly together, a riding cloak pulled tight against the cold, her slim hands holding a parasol. Next to her was a man as big as a bear. Pasques was leaning close and murmuring something. She was looking into the fire. “She does catch the eye,” I managed.

“The pair is thrilled that fate brought you to my headquarters.”

“I suppose they are.” I'd kicked and shot at Pasques, sabotaged Catherine's pistol, and shoved her across an altar, but not before I'd seen her in the bath.

Napoleon smiled wolfishly. “Always you find attractive companions. You're as bad as Murat. Shall I summon her?”

I had to think quickly. “I ate unwisely.” My face had conveniently turned gray at his news, but now I could use that to my advantage. “Before I say hello to a pretty lady, I'm afraid I must visit the latrine.” Not the most dignified of escapes, but the only one I could think of.

“Now?”

“Unless you'd lend your chamber pot.”

“I think not.” His tone was dry.

“Can your guards point the way? I remember at Boulogne you said how hard it was to hold your piss during ceremonies.”

He tapped his foot and gestured with his head. “In the ravine behind. Leave by the back of my tent, but be quick. Catherine Marceau is impatient, and I am busy.”

“I will run.”

And I did.

Chapter 13

Astiza

A
lchemy comes from the Arab name for Egypt,
al-Khemia
, and embodies mankind's oldest quest, the desire for transformation. The Egyptians mummified for their journey to the afterworld. The Norse believed the rainbow was a bridge to the gods. The Babylonians and Persians speculated about angels, or feathered men who pass through star gates from one realm to the other. Francis of Sicily had a criminal locked in a box to watch him die, hoping to see the man's soul emerge.

No such sight was recorded.

Prophets have foretold the future. Mediums have communed with the dead. Astronomers have mapped the sky. Pythagoras believed that geometry reflected divine wisdom. Gothic architects put such wisdom into stone. The Neoplatonists believed numbers were the key to the cosmos, while the Cabalists deciphered sacred texts, believing that one revealed word actually means another. Artists portray hell far more vividly than heaven. Shamans speak to nature. Scientists weigh and measure.

I believe history is deeper than we remember. A great embryonic civilization flourished and failed ten thousand years ago, leaving our imperfect remnant. In ancient ruins are enigmatic clues to what we lost. The clothing of First Beings shone, legends say. They soared through the air. They walked through walls.

As I read in the Klementinum library, I took painstaking notes. Sometimes Primus Fulcanelli looked over my shoulder like an indulgent father or husband. He stood closer than necessary, and I failed to push him away. He's a strangely compelling man, his mind as handsome as his body. I remain faithful, but he disturbs me in ways that shame. He's an intellectual partner very different from my irreverent husband.

It's my blessing and my curse to wonder. If you're a woman, simply asking questions means being called a witch, a sorceress, or a heretic. I don't care. The furnaces of new factories make ever more intricate instruments to take ever more precise measurements, in the faith that truth can be calibrated instead of grasped like a hot coal. I believe truth looks like magic. I believe reality looks like dreams. I believe the stars scribe our lives. I believe that prayer talks to one's self, but that the self is eternal and sacred; that God is within as well as without. I believe that life has purpose, but it is hidden from all but the purest.

So I climbed the creaking, ladder-steep wooden stairs of the Astronomical Tower, deep in the heart of the Klementinum. I was persuaded to leave Harry in the care of a nun and followed Fulcanelli's black boots and wine-colored robe upward, floor after floor, the walls plaster and the beams dark and cracked.

“Are the answers in the stars or in our soul, priestess?” my host called down genially as we climbed. “I'd hate to pant this hard for nothing.”

“As above, so below,” I recited. “As within, so without. All is one, and one is all. We study the sky to discern events on earth. We search the cosmos to understand ourselves.”

“So the view from this cold tower becomes a mirror?”

“The stars burn within us. Day needs night, and sun casts shadow. Understanding will come when we comprehend it whole and see the essential unity behind all things. Death is but a door to understanding, I hope. But I want to comprehend while still alive.”

“The Church says the Bible contains all you need to know.”

“Yet I understand that the library of the Vatican is greater than any on earth.”

He looked down with a smile, and my heart skipped a beat. “Beware, Astiza. You are Icarus, flying close to the sun.” He thought me a falcon on his wrist, controllable yet able to fly where he could not.

“I'm a wanderer in the desert, Primus, in the spirit of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. Knowledge is my water.”

“Forbidden fruit.”

We climbed past brass instruments that precisely measure the angles to the planets, because astronomers use parallax to calculate their distance. The tower has astrolabes, quadrants, a pendulum, clocks, and telescopes mounted so high that wooden ladders are used to bring the astronomer to the eyepiece. Fulcanelli told me that savants stand there eight hours at a time, freezing or sweating, to measure the position of stars.

To find order, we look for cycles. There's an astronomical clock on Prague's city hall that is four centuries old. It measures time, the phases of the moon, the calendar, and the zodiac. Mechanical figures appear on the hour, representing vanity, miserliness, death, and pleasure. Harry has made us wait three times already for the figures to rotate into view. He's frightened by the skeleton but fascinated, too.

The Astronomical Tower of the Klementinum is less whimsical, illustrating how the world has turned from mystery and astrology to calculation and fact. Ethan's savant friends swear by the new methods, but I fear that the more we measure, the less we understand. Facts obscure comprehension.

After 172 steps—I had been warned how many—we came at last to a balcony that circles the tower, both of us breathing heavily. On the cupola above, Atlas held a globe topped by a weathervane. From the observation deck I could count the city's hundred towers, punctuating a folded range of red tile roofs. The fading winter light was yellow on the western horizon, lanterns lighting and stars popping out. They appeared from nothing, like a code. Why is a star in this place, and not that one?

“This is God made manifest, is it not?” asked Primus.

“And us made small,” I replied. “How far are the stars, my wandering bishop?”

“No one knows for certain. Huygens calculated trillions of miles, and some have suggested that the universe is infinite. If God is infinite, why not?”

“How God must laugh at our strivings.”

“I don't think so. He wants us to understand.”

“She
wants us.”

He laughed, indulging me. “Blasphemy again, if one believes in the Trinity. But you believe in a pantheon, don't you, pretty pagan? How you flirt with heresy even in our liberal age. How you test our partnership!”

I smiled at this mutual teasing. “Yes, I have my own pantheon of goddesses, but each godly being is but a manifestation of the One. We're not far apart, you and me. Or the pope and me. And Bishop Fulcanelli would be uncomfortable indeed in any church council, I suspect. You have your own goals and, I deduce, your own creed.”

He shrugged. “I speculate. Creation has produced marvelous books, momentous clues, and inquiring minds. We simply have to pay attention. I want to know what everything means. So, yes, we're alike, Astiza. Doomed by curiosity. Fate has brought us together.”

It was a compliment to my mind, but I knew he meant more than that, despite his vows. Men and women can't have simple partnerships. His was the kind of comment I dared not answer if I was to remain faithful. Yet how I was tempted! I looked skyward instead. “I like nights when the stars seem close enough to touch. I want to believe that all of them would fit inside our hearts, and that all the eons of history are but a moment. If we had perfect insight, we'd understand that everything there is here, and everything past and future is now.”

“Unity!” It was so dark that Fulcanelli wasn't embarrassed to stare at me. “It is what lovers seek.” His face was a mask of shadow, but I could feel his intensity like a stove and took a proper half step away. But only a half step. I was using him while remaining confused about my motives. My desire.

“Friends seek unity, too,” he amended. He shifted closer, and this time I let him.

Surely I could trust his pledge of celibacy. But he was a man, as wayward priests have proven again and again. I told myself: I must enlist him but be careful; I need an ally but must be faithful. I am lonely, but I dare not trust too much. I am a woman, with a woman's vulnerability and calculation, and must pretend to be only a seer. “Christian Rosenkreutz described an allegorical wedding that joined the sun and moon, symbols for sulfur and mercury. A royal couple are ritually killed, and then brought back to life by the blood of the phoenix.”

“Centuries-old superstition,” Primus said.

“Tales of death and resurrection are as old as Egypt. Older. Magic is older than Christianity, and in fact the Romans accused the first Christians of being magicians. They persecuted them because they feared them, as some people fear alchemy today. The alchemists promise power. Science responds with doubt. Yet the gold of alchemical tales is not just bright metal; it's the gold of spiritual understanding. It's the promise that with enough study, and enough steps, one can learn the reason of all existence and purify not lead but our own souls.”

“We do that by answering for our deeds.”

I ignored this Christian platitude. “Tell me, Bishop: Astronomers can chart the sky and predict the movement of planets. Do you think medieval man made a machine to chart the human character and predict the movement of people? Do you think the Brazen Head really exists?”

“Astronomers prove prediction is possible. Perhaps perfect knowledge allows perfect foreknowledge. Yet I tremble if such a thing is true. I think it would bring great evil.”

“But what if we knew of future tragedies and could avoid them?”

“Yes,” he conceded, “this automaton could be a mercy as well as a curse. But I don't think you'll find it in the clarity of a winter night, madame.”

“I'm trying to imagine where Rosenkreutz might hide it.”

“I think your real hope is a necromancer's old manuscript.”

“An alchemist. Or astrologer.”

“It sounds like you're an alchemist yourself.”

“I've studied the theory,” I told him. “Teachings about the unity of matter go back to Greece and Egypt. Paracelsus taught that salt, sulfur, and mercury could change one element to another. The alchemist Basilius Valentinus wrote how lead antimony could become a chariot of fire. Hugo Alverda and the Comte de Saint-Germain were said to be hundreds of years old, having achieved purities that allowed immortality. These are the kinds of men Rosenkreutz would have confided in.”

“You're mad, priestess, like Joan of Arc. Could you conduct alchemical experiments?”

“If I had to. It's dirty, dangerous work.” The sky was bright with stars now. “Read the sky, Primus. To the untutored eye it has no pattern, and yet to an astronomer or shepherd it tells stories like a book.” I turned to him, his smell like wood, his shoulders broad. I did not forget Ethan, but he felt very far away. “We were brought together for a purpose, you and me. You're as curious as I am. What question would you put to the android?”

He laughed. “How to build another like him!”

“I would ask how to achieve unity.” I was being shameless. Or did I simply yearn for human comfort? How dashing was this churchman!

Fulcanelli cleared his throat. He knew he was being used. He wanted to use me, in as many ways as he could. “In the precincts of the castle are wizards who live on the Golden Lane, an alley where goldsmiths gild and chemists heat cinnabar to make mercury, hoping it will dance its way to gold. Perhaps they know something of the Brazen Head and the mystery you pursue. Are you brave enough to let me take you there? It's a strange, heretical place.”

“Discovery requires journeys. Tell me who to seek, Primus.”

Now he moved very close, both of us so cold this winter evening that I could feel his heat. “There's one peculiar craftsman, a dwarfish warlock named Auric Nachash. He's studied the
Book of Secrets
of Albertus Magnus. I don't know how much to believe or trust him, but he claims to know fantastic tales of power and sorcery. He might have heard something. He might point you to Rosenkreutz. And he likes children.”

I clasped the bishop's arm. A thrill went through us both. I could talk to this man so easily. “Then take me to him. I can master my fears.”

“Of him, or me?”

“Why would I be afraid of you?”

In answer he kissed me, and I let him, and then broke free. “Please don't.”

He didn't try again. Our arms had dropped away. But I could feel his intensity in the dark and was encouraged, not defeated. “I'll take you on one condition,” he said.

“What's that?”

“That you take me with you when you go to find the Brazen Head.”

Chapter 14

T
rying to thread through Napoleon's army in civilian clothes, with no papers and French agents in pursuit, invited execution. So I decided to desert Napoleon's headquarters by joining Napoleon's army. If this seems nonsensical, consider that Catherine Marceau was the last woman I wanted to see, and her ally Pasques was the size and weight of a bulky armoire. Whether they denounced me or joined me in the search for Astiza and the Brazen Head, it would be disaster. Better to find refuge in the anonymity of the ranks and creep away when battle provided confusion.

After fleeing Napoleon's tent, I followed my nose, leaped the stinking trench of the headquarters latrine, and felt my way through the night woods until I came out on a lane a safe distance from the nucleus of command. Then I strode like a Big Hat, my erect posture discouraging challenge. I'd heard a headquarters rumor that Marshal Nicolas Soult might be held in reserve, so his corps sounded like the safest place to be: closest to the rear and convenient for desertion. I'm no coward, but I'm too clever by half to stand in line under fire for a fight that isn't mine.

Or so I thought.

Coming upon the 88th Line Regiment, I asked for directions to the medical tent by saying I had an urgent message. Two wagons were parked outside the field hospital, their teams picketed for the night. Napoleon's surgeon had come up with the novel idea of “flying ambulances” to evacuate the wounded. The hope of getting help when shot had done wonders for French morale. This genius glued soldiers to Napoleon's leadership and made men braver.

A battle casualty was not yet available, but I'd seen French troops contract plague in the Holy Land and yellow fever in Saint-Domingue. Sickness always fells more men than bullets. There is no shortage of corpses, even before the shooting starts. Those who succumb are mourned, or at least regretted, or at the minimum noted in ledger books, but armies are expert at closing ranks and picking over the effects of the dead.

Two women were boiling the uniforms of victims to rid them of lice so they could be reissued or cut up as patches. A new infantry uniform costs 250 francs, is issued once, and is mended to last a campaign; thus, empty clothes are prized. The length of any war can be judged by the raggedness and filth of uniforms. Additionally, everyone stole civilian blankets, cloaks, and scarves to supplement official garb.

The laundresses were members of that small legion of female camp followers that had trailed the Grand Army all the way from the Channel coast. The wives, cooks, prostitutes, and washerwomen were prized, for they sustained morale, cared for the sick, bound the wounded, and did camp chores. Most were tough as mules and sensible as mothers. In battle, many formed an irregular rear rank to fetch ammunition and shout encouragement, dragging wounded lovers to safety, while the pregnant ones looked after the babes that tended to appear during a march, slung on backs like haversacks.

The hospital washing was hurled onto bushes to steam in the dark, making it easy for me to creep and liberate a uniform. The army tagged the clothes in case friends wanted to make first claim, and so I learned I was about to temporarily become the unfortunate Francois Digeon of the 88th Line, Colonel Curial commanding. Digeon had succumbed to influenza.

I'd find a unit far from Digeon's friends.

Digeon apparently came near to my own five feet eleven. The uniform was clammy, but I'd already crawled into a casket, so putting on a dead man's clothes seemed a minor expediency. I took linen shirt, woolen waistcoat, socks, blue coat, woolen capote, and bicorne hat—Digeon didn't have the newer shako—while keeping my civilian boots, since they were far superior to infantry issue. I'd sleep with them either on my feet or under my knapsack pillow, to prevent their being stolen.

I pulled on the dead man's pants. By the grace of Isis, his unit had converted from the constricting knee breeches and stockings of the last century to the trousers of modern times. Most men look better without their legs on display, and pants are far more comfortable than breeches, even with gaiters to keep rocks out of shoes.

Digeon's crossbelts were made of bull hide that was clayed white, one supporting his cartridge belt and the other a sheathed bayonet. There was no musket or pack deposited with his clothes, so I crept through nearby companies to pilfer a gun, the standard cartridge box, a cowhide knapsack, and a leather canteen. My civilian clothes I stuffed into my newly stolen haversack with my mess tin and cup. I'd draw rations and cartridges from my new company.

I also stole a tonnelet of brandy from one of the snoring sutler women. It would work better than money to buy me new friends.

My uniform made me safely anonymous in the vast hive of the army. Should Catherine come looking, I'd be one of thousands of infantrymen. She and I would have our reunion someday, but on my schedule and my terms.

Or so I thought.

I learned immediately that it's uncomfortable being an infantryman. The cloth is rough and the equipment heavy, the gun alone a cumbersome ten pounds. I wandered a good two miles in the dark to seek the safest refuge, finally sneaking into the bivouac of the 14th Line, Colonel Jacques Mazas commanding.

It was midnight when I picked a likely campfire, its
ordinaire
of eight men lying in their greatcoats around it like spokes on a wheel, some asleep and others smoking and quietly talking. This was the basic French infantry squad that had occupied each hut at the vast military camp at Boulogne, where soldiers were paired two to a bed for warmth and economy.

There's a mood to armies, from exhalation to defeatism. Napoleon's Grand Army had quiet confidence. It had trained in the Channel camps for three years. It had overrun half the Austrian empire. Casualties had been light. Now this rugged professionalism was overlaid by the subdued seriousness that comes before a major battle. Men were increasingly absorbed by thoughts of mortality or, should fortune favor them, victory, plunder, or a convenient wound to send them home. While the Russians fantasized that Napoleon was on the brink of retreat, his own soldiers knew better. There would be a ferocious fight on a scale not seen for centuries. This they must win.

I'd seen the reverse at sea, with British confidence and French fatalism.

A sergeant challenged me. “Are you lost, Private?”

“And found, I hope.” I had to lie persuasively, lest I be asked too many questions. “I'm separated from Davout's corps. I was knocked unconscious in the fighting near Melk and have been trying to catch up ever since. I've been wandering for a week.”

“Davout! He's in Vienna. What's your unit?”

“Saint Raymond's 33rd.” I'd heard this colonel briefly mentioned.

“You've still got a concussion if you think you're near that regiment. I haven't heard of them for a month. So you're a straggler? Or a deserter?” He gave me a challenging scowl in the firelight, to see if I'd blink or glance away.

I stoutly focused on his eyes. “I'm trying to avoid an accusation of desertion, Sergeant. François Digeon, reporting for duty.” Having practiced looking doggedly earnest, I snapped to attention and gave a salute. My interrogator seemed less impressed by my military bearing than by my tonnelet of brandy. Besides, every unit was understrength. “Can I spend the night here? Perhaps I can march back to Vienna in the morning.”

“We're about to fight a battle, imbecile. We don't have time for you to stumble about like a postman looking for an address.”

I squatted without asking. “The army is spread for miles and miles. It's hardly my fault I can't find the part that is mine.”

The sergeant eyed the width of my shoulders like a trader evaluating horseflesh. “You're big enough for the Imperial Guard. Can you shoot?”

“I'll match any man in this company. Not a great cook, but a scrounger.” I nudged the brandy keg. “And my wife tells me I don't snore. Much.”

“If so, you're the only soldier in the army who doesn't. To hell with the 33rd—welcome to the 14th Line. We've got stragglers of our own, two dozen men sick, and the enemy on our neck. Fight with us until the army sorts itself out after battle. I'll vouch for you if you stand like a man.”

“Thanks to Mother Mary that I've found a good sergeant like you. I won't let you down.” Until I desert, I silently amended.

“You must carry your share, Digeon. I'll not have shirkers.”

“I am the most reliable of men. You are Sergeant . . .”

“Hulot. Martin Hulot.” He gestured to the marmite, the campfire's kettle. “You can dip from the pot if there's brandy in that keg of yours. Have some bread and captured chicken. We spitted it on a bayonet.”

“I'm starving.” I held forth my tonnelet. “To new comrades.”

“Ha, here's a soldier!” He took the gaily colored keg.

“A half-frozen one,” I said, rummaging for my tin. “Why war in the darkest part of the year? I've considered the matter at great length, Sergeant, and concluded that our generals are as stupid as our commissary is corrupt, our doctors incompetent, and our whores diseased.” Complaint is the badge of the enlisted man.

“We haven't gone into winter quarters because the Austrians keep fleeing instead of fighting,” Hulot replied. “But the Russians want a battle, I think. They're barbarians, bred to the snow and as brave as they are stupid. We've learned to bayonet the wounded, because they'll shoot you in the back if you don't. Their princes preen like Oriental despots, but their men are slaves. We'll bring the Revolution to them, all right.”

I'd no doubt he would, and planned to read about it in the newspapers. So I let myself become a temporary infantryman until battle actually commenced, playing the role, and in that way found an unlikely friend.

The camaraderie of an emperor's battle staff is male and rough, but its manners are genteel compared with the crass society of line soldiers. My new companions were cynical, foulmouthed, and obsessed with food and sex, given that they got too little of the former and almost none of the latter. I was in a fraternity that would remain dirty, cold, and hungry until the campaign ended. They also had fanatical loyalty to company and regiment, and respect for discipline. They hated malingerers, because a man who slacked put their own lives at risk. They slept closer than lovers, scrounged like bandits, and could outmarch a horse in rough country.

But while there was loyalty in the pack, there could also be cruelty. The strong tended to pick on the weak like pups in a litter and were suspicious of anyone too different. So a brutish corporal named Cheval stole a cloak from a private named Dray, and cursed him as a Jew, a moneylender, and a Christ killer when Dray dared protest.

I'm no knight, and know it's best to avoid the quarrels of others. What the devil, for example, was I doing in a war between three emperors? It was all bad luck and capricious fate. But to take a man's cloak on the first of December struck me as more murderous than prankish, and possible only because the corporal was half a head higher and fifty pounds heavier than the man he'd decided to persecute.

Army conscription had swept up some of France's forty thousand Jews, most of whom live either in Bordeaux, where they work as sailors, or in Alsace and Lorraine, near the Rhine, where they are craftsmen and shopkeepers. Until the Revolution, the Jews sustained a government within a government, living by their own laws and customs. But they also paid taxes and were renowned for their skill in provisioning armies. Citizenship was granted in 1791, to end riots against the Jews in Alsace—some three thousand had been injured—and integrate them into the national economy. Suddenly they could migrate, settle in new cities such as Paris, or be drafted.

Napoleon had shocked Europe by throwing open the gates of ghettos he conquered. To him, the problem of Jewry would be solved by assimilation and emigration. He'd contemplated creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine when he campaigned in Syria in 1799. I'd helped put a stop to his Israel plans at the Siege of Acre, forcing his retreat, but I had no quarrel with the idea of a Jewish state. It seemed likely to eliminate friction all around, creating a permanent island of peace in the heart of the Ottoman Empire.

Napoleon had told me once that Jews were clever and industrious, and thus a resource to be coveted instead of a plague to be quarantined. Within his armies, anti-Semitism was discouraged.

The French army had shed its Catholicism with the Revolution, and little had been done since to restore religion. While the slander that the French were an invasion of atheists was untrue, matters of faith were of considerably less interest in our company than the physical charms of rumored milkmaids (somehow we never encountered these beings in the flesh) or the gold that might be salvaged from a dead Russian count or general.

But tolerance of minorities was grudging. Decrees did not end prejudice. So Gideon Dray found himself without support when he demanded the cloak back.

“Who says it's yours?” Cheval demanded.

“Every man recognizes it as mine, scoundrel.”

“Is that so?” Cheval put the question to his comrades, and several laughed. But an older soldier called out, “Give it back, Cheval.”

The bully shrugged. “Now I remember. You stole it from a millinery shop on the march in Linz, Dray, and bragged afterward. It's hardly yours, hoarder. You've still got a stolen blanket, greedy Jew, when some of us have nothing.”

“That's because you gambled your own blanket away last night,” Gideon replied, “and would have done the same with your greatcoat if your friends hadn't stopped you. Now, in addition to being a fool and a drunk, you're a thief of a fellow Frenchman. Give it back.”

“Or what? You'll petition the Sanhedrin? You're no more a real Frenchman than a Turk. Eat shit, Jew.” It was safe defiance. Several men had formed up behind Cheval.