Three Emperors (9780062194138) (24 page)

“What the devil?” I asked my wife, not for the first time.

“Piss and gold make a fine explosive,” she said. “I'll explain in the mines, but Harry and I have been working on this for months.”

Her makeshift bomb had blown through the cellar wall, into a mine tunnel. We were going to flee into the labyrinth of Kutná Hora.

There was just one problem. According to the guards, it was a flooded death trap with no way out.

Could Harry swim? Getting an idea, I grabbed the black cauldron.

Chapter 30

T
he smoky tunnel angled downward—not a good sign. It was narrow as a coffin and low as a gun deck on a warship. I banged my head twice, and the cauldron I'd snagged gonged as it hit walls of rock. The three of us held hands, our beacon Astiza's lone candle. Behind, a glimmer showed where fire still burned in the ruined laboratory. The flames should slow pursuit, but they might also consume our air. We could hear shots and great crashes as Richter and his men rammed the door we'd blocked.

“I can't see, Papa.”

“I've brought more candles,” Astiza said. “Let's get further out of sight and I'll light another.”

With better illumination, I saw that the shaft was unevenly hewn from pick and shovel, twisting like a worm into the earth.

“What happened back there?”

“Christian Rosenkreutz made such an explosion in another prison,” Astiza explained. “I discovered his formula in old books. It's called fulminating gold, and it has killed more than one alchemist. To make a volatile mixture, you dissolve gold in aqua regia, a form of nitric acid that can be gleaned from urine.”

“I peed to make it, Papa.”

“We all work together, don't we?”

“We do now that you're home.” That Harry called a maze a home shows how low I'd set his expectations. I resolved to do better, should we survive.

“The urine salts have to putrefy for forty days, and then are distilled into crystals,” my wife said. “The result, when mixed and purified, is a powder that explodes when struck. I refined enough to fill that clay egg and rigged the bookcase to spill the hammer onto it.”

“You're as odd and dangerous as my friend Robert Fulton.”

“Useful in other ways, too.” She gave me a kiss, hot and hurried. Her lips were soft, her waist taut as a bowstring, and her hair fanned across my cheek like salve. I kissed back, mashing mouths with a colt's enthusiasm, but my son gave an impatient kick as we heard the door give way. There were shouts of dismay as our enemies stormed into the room and discovered Auric. “Later,” I gasped. We hurried on.

Astiza led, Harry was in the middle, and I was the rear guard, Auric's pistols in my belt and the sword and cauldron handle clutched awkwardly in my one free hand. My wife selected twists and turns as decisively as if walking a path to her front door, even though we had no map. I didn't argue, taking heart when we seemed to be climbing toward the surface and despair when our flight took us deeper into the earth. I'd already experienced being buried and had no desire to be permanently entombed.

Shouts from our pursuers echoed to tag us. Some of the Invisibles apparently turned the wrong way, and we heard cries of “I'm lost!” reverberate down the mine shafts. Others spotted the faint light of our candles before we turned a corner and they began to sprint toward us. “It's them!”

“Go faster,” I ordered.

“We can't go faster.”

“Go as fast as you can while I make them hesitate.”

“I have chalk,” Astiza said. “If we make a turn, I'll make a mark.”

Clever girl.

I crouched at an elbow in the mine, my candle in a crevice to minimize its light. Auric's pistols were small, women's guns to fit a dwarf, but lethal enough at close range. Richter's gang came heedlessly on, remembering us helpless and cursing in order to keep up their courage. A torch lit four who drew near. When they got within ten paces, I fired.

A man screamed and pitched backward. Auric's pistol had a pretty punch. Smoke filled the tunnel, the others fell flat, and I fled, the other gun still ready.

I'd no means to reload.

My shot stalled the pursuit. A chalk mark led me to a new branch that curled down into blackness. I dreaded more descent, even while hoping that our bold plunge into the heart of the mines would lose them. Water dripped everywhere, and I splashed through puddles.

I caught up with Astiza and Harry in a few hundred yards.

“Did you shoot the bad men, Papa?”

“One of them.”

“I want to go outside.”

“As soon as we get away.” Yet I could hear running water and feared we were fleeing into a dead end. If the bottom of the mines were drowned, why were we going that way?

“Did they give up?” Astiza asked.

“Perhaps.”

Then we heard dogs barking.

“Or not.”

“I don't like dogs,” Harry contributed.

Someday I'm going to get the boy a nice puppy, but no time for that now. We began to trot. Richter had fetched hounds.

A distant murmur rose to a rumble, and then a roar. We soon saw the cause. Our passage joined another tunnel half-filled with an underground river. It plunged from a cliff upstream, the waterfall meaning there was no chance of ascending. We'd have to plunge into black water and float downstream.

It was hopeless, but so was surrender. The dogs were getting closer.

“Harry, can you swim?”

“I'm scared.” He looked miserably at the current.

“I taught him to float,” Astiza said. “But he needs something to hold on to.”

The baying of the hounds grew louder. Harry was crying. I crouched. “Horus, listen to me. I'm going to shoot one of the dogs, and then we're going to leap into the water. Dogs can't smell us there.”

“Can doggies swim?”

“Yes, but they won't follow, I promise.” Dogs have too much sense. “You must hold tight to Papa.”

He was shaking, cheeks wet, but he looked at me with trust. “Don't let me die.”

I hugged him. “I won't.” Then, “Astiza, take the cauldron for a moment.”

“Ethan, why did you bring that thing?”

“You'll see.”

I put my candle on a rock shelf, strapped Durendal to my back, cocked the second pistol, and put my left arm around Harry. I could feel him shake. The baying of the hounds was amplified by the mines into a great echoing clamor of canine excitement. Then there was a blur of movement as they spied our light and charged in excitement, snapping and yowling.

I fired.

The lead animal somersaulted. I hurled both pistols, hearing yips as they struck. Then I plunged with Harry into swift, waist-deep water, my boots sliding on the slippery bottom. Astiza was wading ahead of us, dress dragging, gamely holding a candle in one hand and the cauldron in the other. I eased in to float on my back, gasping from the chill, and held my son to my chest. “Easy, boy. Now we get away from the hounds.”

He shivered.

The animals had halted, confused and wary, sniffing the body of their dead companion. Some came to the edge of the water, barking. Harry clutched me as tight as he could. One dog jumped in and Harry shouted in terror, but then the hound thought better of it, turned, and paddled to heave himself out. I heard men's voices, and then shouts of frustration. We floated out of sight.

The water deepened. Astiza was swimming, too, trying to keep the candle alight. I floated like an otter, Harry on my chest.

Then a splash as my wife's candle finally went under, and it was dark—not just dark but as black as it is possible to be. The three of us were carried deeper into the underworld. I reached up and brushed rock. The water was closer to the ceiling. We swirled at the speed of a trot, blind and cold.

“Astiza, are you there?”

“Yes.” Her voice was small, with a tremble to it.

To think that medieval miners came into this hell every day of their lives.

“Ethan, the air disappears! Stop!”

I bumped up against her, legs drifting down to find a precarious hold. “Here, take Harry.” We were all shivering. I felt past her and ahead. As she said, the ceiling dipped so that there was no air between it and the rushing river. If we went farther, we'd drown. If we went back we'd be tortured and killed. I could still hear the dogs, barking in frustration.

“This is just like old times,” I gasped in encouragement, fighting the cold and my own fear of the dark. “We've done this before.”

“That pyramid path was engineered. This is a drowned mine. We've no idea how long this river goes. And Horus can't hold his breath very long.”

“Somewhere this river will emerge.”

“Miles from here.”

“You're scaring Harry.”

“I don't like the dogs!” he shouted, the sound bouncing.

“We don't have a choice,” I insisted. “It ends here, or life has a purpose for us. Do you have the cauldron?”

“It's an anchor, filled with water.”

“Empty it.”

I could hear the pour as she did so, holding it against the low rock ceiling.

“I'm going to take Harry with me, using the cauldron like the diving bell in the Caribbean. If we invert it, we trap air and give him a little to breathe.”

She moaned. “My Goddess, why are you testing me so cruelly?”

“You go first, and we'll follow.”

“No,” she pleaded, her strength exhausted. “I can't do this to Harry. What if he drowns? We go back and beg for mercy. Beg for him. Our lives for his.”

“Don't be foolish, Astiza. There is no mercy. You know that.”

“Ethan, I can't . . .”

“Follow your son.” And I grabbed the cauldron, took a huge breath, put the cauldron over my little boy's head before he could even ask what I was doing, let go the rock wall, and let us be swept into oblivion.

I had to hope, and dread, that she trusted me enough to follow.

Harry squirmed like a terrier as we rushed, but I held him with one arm and the cauldron with the other, listening to him cough and scream as he choked on the air. I held my breath, silently ticking off seconds as we traveled. I wanted to know, just before we drowned, how long I'd made it.

Thirty seconds. We caromed off a rock wall, I almost sucked in water, and then we were swirling along again, the walls slick as ice. I kicked to hurry us.

A minute. The pressure to breathe was building now, Harry alarmingly slack. Had he fainted? I had no idea if my wife had followed.

Ninety seconds. My chest was a slow burn.

Two minutes. I banged my head against a rock, but the agony in my body worked to keep me from blacking out. Pain arced from skull to heart to lungs.

Eternity ticked on. My body seemed to swell, my nerves crying not so much for air to be sucked in but for what I'd consumed to be released. I let out a train of bubbles.

Two minutes twenty, and I couldn't do it more. I hadn't trained for this.

Two-thirty, then, and I'd agree to be dead. I counted, endlessly.

Two-forty, every fiber screaming, floating upward . . .

My head broke clear and my lungs exploded in release, and then I sucked in another breath, went down, fought up, shoved Harry toward the ceiling so the cauldron clanged but the air was refreshed, then down again in eerie blackness, gulping in a pocket of air. I floated on my back and the cauldron rolled off us and was lost in an instant, my boy frighteningly still, as if dead. I felt the worse but could see nothing in the dark.

Surely my wife couldn't have lasted that long.

“Ethan!” It was almost a scream, and then a cough.

“Here! With Harry!”

By thunder, we'd done it.

And then the ceiling dipped and we were under again, hurled along in a nightmare, but this one was shorter, the length of a room, and with joy I felt Harry tighten against me with a fearful clutch like a cat's. He was alive!

We came out in the dark again, gasping, but suddenly there was a feeling of space above the water, as if we'd slid from old mine tunnel to broader cave. The current slackened.

“Astiza, where are you?”

“Here.” She was splashing, trying to find us.

Harry was hacking, proof of life that made me weep.

Far, far away—as far as the stars—I saw a glimmer of light. I thought I was hallucinating for a moment, but the illumination slowly grew. Escape!

We drifted out the cave exit to a forested ravine, branches bare and snow drifting down. Too exhausted to do anything but stare at the cloudy daylight—we'd no idea what time it was—we drifted in a pool for a moment, numb and reprieved, nearly frozen, until our leaden legs grounded in shallows. We numbly stood, shaking with exhaustion and cold. Had we escaped Astiza's prison, only to freeze to death?

“Ethan!”

A miracle appeared. It was Gideon, rising from winter underbrush and stumbling across a rocky bar to help us stagger to shore. He hadn't deserted me after all! Somehow he'd even anticipated our emergence and waited for us.

“How, how . . .” I couldn't even make a coherent sentence. But maybe he could get my boy to a fire. I was weeping with gratitude, so grateful for this second reprieve. Astiza and I dripped, teetering from shock, amazed we were all still in this world. The three of us held one another.

Then other figures emerged from the brush and joined Gideon, pistols and muskets aimed. One was gigantic, another blond, and several looked like French secret police.

“Hello, Ethan,” said Catherine Marceau. “At last we are reunited.”

Chapter 31

C
atherine wore a hooded cloak of midnight blue with fur ruff, snow flecking her golden hair like diamonds. Her riding dress was maroon. She wore a dark stone at her throat, brown leather boots with silver spurs, and kid gloves, and she carried a riding crop in her left fist. She was beautiful, clever, persistent, and wicked. French agents pointed half a dozen guns. I was annoyed that I was shaking, but it was from cold, not fear. Mostly.

“I've enjoyed every moment of separation,” I replied.

While I'd lusted after Catherine Marceau as any man would, given her voluptuous figure and seductive habit, she'd not only foiled my plan to disrupt Napoleon's coronation but had taken a shot at me with a pistol that, with rare foresight, I'd loaded with black pepper. I got a satisfying sneeze from her, but it was still Catherine who tore our family asunder by forcing Astiza and Harry to prematurely flee from Notre Dame.

She'd later had the cheek to write me at Cadiz, offering alliance to hunt for the Brazen Head, under her own conspiratorial control. “Who is it you work for at the moment?” I asked her now. “Royalists, Napoleon, Talleyrand, or the Invisible College? It's difficult to keep track.”

“You know me better than that. Catherine works for Catherine.”

I looked at Gideon. “Did you betray us, too?”

“They captured me. I'm sorry, Ethan. I followed you to save you, but I'm failing my half of our partnership.”

So I'd dragged him into her web, too. “It's my debt that is mounting.”

“We followed from Prague,” said Pasques, the gigantic French policeman. He was thick as a wine barrel, had arms nearly the diameter of my legs, and carried the disposition of a tax inspector mated to a paddock bull. “We caught this one lurking at Kutná Hora, sly and sinister like his kind.”

“You mean discreet and observant.”

“We were far from surprised that you'd fallen in with Jews and deserters, Gage.”

“I live to meet your expectations, Pasques.”

He grinned with the satisfaction of a cat that has stalked a mouse. “It's taken a great deal of trouble to find you. Yet here we are.”

“It does seem serendipitous, does it not? And yet not entirely coincidental. Catherine, I'm guessing you reached Rabbi Abraham before we did?”

“Ethan, you're not always so astute.”

“We were directed to the Star Summer Palace after our host consulted a book that was left with a long golden hair. I presume you studied the ancient texts?”

“The good rabbi was persuaded that his interests lie with France. He became an instrument to once more bring us together.”

Astiza glanced at me, no doubt wondering about my faithfulness this past year, as I had wondered about hers, given Richter's leering. We'd been imperfect, lonely, loyal, and merely tempted. Or so I hoped.

“Napoleon knew you wanted to go to Prague and recognized you at the end of the Battle at Austerlitz,” Catherine related, relishing her triumph. “Did you notice his glance? His eye is an eagle's. Officers made inquiries to find your unit and your friend. It wasn't hard to guess you'd flee to the biggest ghetto in Europe—and be easily manipulated once you arrived.”

The cold water that hadn't dripped off me was beginning to freeze. “But how did you know we'd emerge here?”

“Your Jew told us that your witch had a plan to break out.”

“Gideon has a name, Catherine.”

“He eavesdropped on your meeting with the Invisible College in the Golden Lane. You left Prague with Baron Richter, you didn't emerge from the cells in Kutná Hora, and this is the only known outlet of the underground river that floods the mines. It was far from certain, but then, I'm very lucky, aren't I?”

I looked about the wintry ravine. “Standing with us, still poor, cold, single, and childless, in a muddy dell in the snow.”

She refused to react. “Rumor is that you copied the ingenuity I invented in Paris by pretending to be dead in Venice. You flatter me with imitation, Ethan.”

“Except the Comtesse Marceau is truly dead.” Years before, Catherine had taken a strangled girl's identity and shipped to England pretending to be a refugee royalist, while actually operating as a French spy. It was nothing to be proud about. In fact, I wondered if she'd done the throttling herself.

“And I'll keep you alive, but only if your wife takes me to the Brazen Head.” She smiled at my family. “Work with me and I will make you rich and powerful. Defy me and I will debate whether to execute you or give you back to Richter to be tortured. All this trouble would have been avoided if we'd remained partners from the beginning.” And to emphasize her goodwill, her agents gestured with their gun barrels to move us off the riverbank and into the cover of the woods.

I felt exhausted. To emerge from drowning to the muzzles of guns? To escape one set of tormentors, only to fall in with another cabal of lunatics? To desert the French army and be recaptured by Napoleonic agents? Astiza and I knew too much, and were cursed by our usefulness.

“This was destined to happen,” Catherine went on as we shambled stiffly toward her party's horses. “We were always meant to be together. Weren't we, Astiza?”

My wife, drenched, frozen, exhausted, and defiantly erect, was dangerously calm. “Should it serve the gods.”

“We're a partnership,” Catherine insisted. “You need clothes, food, and protection from Richter's gang of mystic cutthroats, who are no more true Rosicrucians than the Borgias were saints. Fear not! We represent the French government and the power it projects. Cooperating with us will restore you to Napoleon's good graces. Give him a machine that tells the future and you'll share that future. Always we give you opportunity, Ethan.”

I looked at Astiza, who was not only wet and shivering but wasted, cut, and half-poisoned from her long months underground. Yet her dark eyes were bright, and she could be as calculating as Catherine. I'd just seen my wife blow her way through a rock wall, and I wouldn't underestimate her now.

“Our nanny is right,” Astiza said to me, not even giving Marceau the courtesy of “governess” in reminding her of our household roles in Paris the year before. “We need help to keep from freezing and to keep Richter at bay. Do you have extra horses, Comtesse Counterfeit?”

She ignored the gibe. “Yes. And money. And tools.”

“Then indeed, let's be partners. My clue is a castle that Christian Rosenkreutz may have fled to. It's an educated guess, not a certainty, and I've no idea if the Brazen Head is there. But let's try to find it together.”

I was surprised at her acquiescence. Catherine was not.

“Astiza has always been more sensible and practical than you, Ethan. It's a mother's trait. And our destination, Madame Gage?”

“If I told you that, you'd have less need of us. I'll be our guide, but my price is the survival and freedom of my husband, my son, and his Jewish friend. For now, we need to get north across the Elbe River before nightfall.”

“When we get to this castle, do you have a key?”

“Ethan does.”

This was news to me.

“My husband is more useful than you think,” she added to Catherine.

“Oh, I think he's useful.” She turned to her six French policemen. “Pasques, take that sword he has and any other weapons. Give the family dry clothes and tie Ethan to his saddle. Jew, I am feeling magnanimous, and have no more use for you. Scuttle back to your ghetto and do not stray into great affairs again.”

“I'd prefer to stay and serve my friends.”

“And I'd prefer you work with Rabbi Abraham Stern for French interests. Be gone, before I change my mind. Tell him we are near success.”

Her agents grinned evilly at Gideon, making plain he had no choice.

“I brought rope for climbing,” he finally said. “Can I leave it with Ethan? It may prove useful.”

“You may leave it with Pasques. Quickly. Oh, and, Monsieur Dray?”

“Yes.”

“Not a word to the other side. I don't wish to have to hunt you down again and kill you next time.” Dismissing Gideon, she turned to the rest of us. “Let's get well away from the Invisible College before making camp. How many miles, Madame Gage?”

“Perhaps a hundred to the castle.”

“Then there's no time to waste.”

We changed out of our sodden clothing, fought our shivers with brandy and sausage, left Dray abandoned on the riverbank, and climbed onto the horses provided by our new escort, Harry riding in front of me. As I watched my new friend fade from view through the light snow, I felt even more helpless. My shoulder ached, my heart was embarrassed by failure, and my son looked despondent. We set out to the north, crossing the Elbe at a ford and trotting through flurries. At least we warmed as we rode.

Catherine eventually slowed her horse to drop back alongside me. “You think me a Fury, Ethan, because I'm a capable woman.”

“A dogged one, I'll give you that.”

“I do not give up. I can be ruthless, but ruthless only as men taught me. I'm not a comtesse, no. My father was a solicitor, Pierre Avalon, who rose in the Assembly after the Revolution and made too many enemies. Then he fell afoul of the Terror and they imprisoned all of us except my brother, who managed to run and disappear. You think me a spy and impostor. But my parents were beheaded, and I was given the choice of following them or using my beauty to serve the Revolution as a spy. I've only done what I had to do.”

“Killing the real Comtesse Marceau.”

“No one killed her. That was a foul rumor. She died in her cell of disease. I was an orphan, her title was vacant, and my jailers would have raped me first if I'd chosen the guillotine. So I took her name, fled to London, and pretended to be a royalist. I survived, loyal to myself.” She turned to stare me in the eye. “Are we really any different, you and I?”

“I live for my family.”

“I had the beauty to marry, but not the stupidity. The last thing I wanted was to be chattel of an aristocratic twit, either an exiled Frenchman or a haughty Englishman. I had many offers! But I wanted more.”

“You're lonely. I've seen it in your eyes.”

“I decided on power, and then Bonaparte brought sanity to chaos.”

“Dictatorship.”

“Order. He and I are alike, too. Survivors. Opportunists. So I was told of a woman researching ancient secrets, told to ally with her wayward husband and get them to Paris. Yet it wasn't I who rebuffed friendship. It was you.”

“I'm married. You tempted me like a courtesan.”

“Like another opportunity, which you ignored. Don't be priggish with me; I know you too well. Now you're in my power. Your wife is fond of fate, but where has fate delivered you? Back to me. Why? Think about that.” She leaned in close. “We ride to find an oracle of the future. But think of your own future, Ethan, and which woman promises you more.”

Then she kicked her mare with her silver spurs and trotted ahead. Yes, she wanted me, I knew. But only for the triumph of possession. I also knew she would become bored of any man, like a spoiled child with toys, and toss them away. She had been aloof to intrigue me with challenge, and seductive to undermine my wife. And what did she really desire? To win, but what, and why, she had no idea. Her manipulations were a drug to forestall her own deep dissatisfaction. The most driven are the most cursed.

We avoided any highway and followed farm lanes without inns, so Catherine bargained for a barn where our group could bed in the hayloft. Astiza, Harry, and I made a nest in the straw, with Catherine and Pasques to one side and three rough-looking French agents on the other. A few yards' separation gave meager privacy. Two more stood guard below.

I had one ankle shackled to a barn post.

It was, however, my first opportunity for conversation with my family. I hugged them fiercely and inspected my son's recovered hands, and we briefly reviewed a year of journeying since Napoleon's coronation. Harry said, “Stop going away, Papa,” which both warmed my heart and broke it. He was relieved to be out of the cell, profoundly happy that we were reunited—he credited his escape to my appearance, since I'd shot a bad man and a bad dog—and fearful of what was to come. He was old enough to know that bulky men with big guns meant trouble, and young enough to think I could still protect him.

Finally, he fell into exhausted and troubled sleep.

My wife and I kissed again, but our passion was held in check by tension and the proximity of our enemies. I showed her my bullet wound with odd pride, as if being shot in the back was a mark of honor. She touched both scars, front and back, with fascination. Reminders of mortality hypnotize us.

“What's your plan?” I whispered, since I had none of my own.

“I've made a guess from fragmentary hints in old books and the markings on a dungeon wall at Český Krumlov,” my wife murmured. “There's no certainty the Brazen Head still exists, but there's a peculiar castle that could have attracted a seeker such as Rosenkreutz. Its architecture is symbolic.”

“Gideon and I found the old sword blade in a tower built in the shape of Solomon's seal. The palace was built as a place to speculate.”

“Like an astronomical tower,” my wife said.

“Yes, except this one looked inward instead of outward.”

“What is within is without. What is above is below.”

“So what do the stars tell you now?”

“I haven't seen them in many months. It's cloudy tonight. But our destination has a shape that reminds me of the Egyptian hieroglyph for ka, or soul. What better place for our medieval mystic to rest?”

“You think Rosenkreutz is buried there, too?”

“We'll shortly find out.”

“And if not?”

She looked at Catherine and Pasques, who were watching our whispering. “Then our usefulness will be at an end. Be ready for a final fight.”