SAMIA SERAGELDIN

The Naqib’s Daughter

For Kareem and Ramy

contents

Prologue

PART I: The First Hundred Days

1 The Enemy at the Gates

2 The Battle of the Pyramids

3 The Savants of the Nasiriya

4 Aboukir

5 The Banquet

6 The First Insurrection

PART II: The Reversal of Fortune

7 The Plague

8 The Tivoli

9 The Second Insurrection

10 The Assassination

11 The Dangerous Liaison

12 The Beginning of the End

13 The Evacuation

PART III: The Aftermath

14 The Trial

15 Quarantine

16 The Emissary

17 The Letter

18 The Citadel

PART IV: The Journey in Reverse

19 A Rock in the Middle of the Sea

20 The Great Metropolis

21 The Spy

22 Windsor Castle

23 The Hand of Providence

24 The Eagle’s Feather

Epilogue

GLOSSARY

HISTORICAL NOTES

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Acknowledgments

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

‘Soldiers! You are about to undertake a conquest of incalculable consequences for civilization and commerce! You will deal the English a blow to the heart.’

Napoleon Bonaparte exhorting the army before the invasion of Egypt

‘Egypt was once a province of the Roman Republic, it must become a province of the French Republic.’

Minister of Foreign Affairs Talleyrand to the Directoire,

14 February 1798

Quartidi, 4 Messidor, Year 6 (22 June 1798) On board L’Orient

Ah, but they were a brave sight upon the sea! Nicolas Conté’s lungs swelled like the sails ballooning in the wind above him. Their ships covered the horizon: thirteen warships, six frigates, a corvette, and over three hundred cargo ships. And what precious cargo! Such as never accompanied an armada in all of history – even a printing press with Arabic characters.

For it was to be Egypt, after all. After all this secrecy and all these months of rumours, after all this talk of India, it was to be Egypt, definitely. Bonaparte had just announced it officially, after weeks at sea. Even so, in spite of all the secrecy, Nelson might well have caught wind of their destination and might even now be chasing the French fleet around the Mediterranean. But Conté trusted in the destiny of their mission; they could not fail. In Egypt they would bring the light of Liberty to an ancient civilization buried in the sands of ignorance and Oriental despotism.

For this expedition was surely unique in the annals of history: Bonaparte’s Army of the Orient was accompanied by over one hundred and fifty savants, scientists and artists, including Nicolas Conté and his corps of military engineers. They were overwhelmingly young, the members of the Scientific Commission, and Conté sometimes felt quite the elder at the command of his balloonist brigade, many of whom regarded him with the unflattering awe normally reserved for a relic. Perhaps, he thought ruefully, it was his eye patch that impressed them so. But then again, he reminded himself, our General Bonaparte himself is not quite thirty!

Bonaparte, it was known, had read every treatise he could lay his hands on about Egypt’s religion, history, philosophy and science; he had even found the time to pen a novella called The Mask of the Prophet. Never, Conté marvelled, had an enterprise been undertaken in such a lofty spirit, or a campaign so carefully prepared, or a dream cherished for so long.

Now Bonaparte was exhorting his men from the deck of L’Orient: ‘The people among whom we will live are Muhammadans. Their first article of faith is that there is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet. Do not contradict them … Show the same tolerance for the mosques and the rituals of the Koran as you did for the convents and synagogues, for the religions of Moses and Jesus Christ. You will find different customs, you must get used to them. Their way of treating women is different. But in any culture he who rapes is a monster.’

Conté had no doubt they would be welcomed by the Egyptians, to whom they would come as liberators rather than conquerors, bearing the incomparable gift of the Rights of Man. As for the vaunted Mamlukes who oppressed the people of the Nile, favouring English merchants at the expense of the French, the blood had run thin in that warlike race. All they knew was cavalry, and the age belonged to cannon and musket. Foreign-born, strangers in their own land, they lived as parasites on the natives. Nothing should be easier than to turn the people against them.

And what incomparable discoveries awaited the French Scientific Commission! The Sphinx itself would no longer have any secrets for them. Conté chafed with impatience to see the coast of that ancient land appear over the horizon. What a long way he had come from his humble little village of St-Céneri-le-Gérei, Nicolas-Jacques Conté, the self-taught son of peasants, promoted rapidly in the Republican ranks by the sheer merit of his genius, the Director of the first Engineering School in France; and here he was now at forty, launched on the adventure of his lifetime, of all their lifetimes – an expedition for the ages.

‘Land ho!’

Conte’s heart leapt in his chest. Egypt, at last! The great adventure had begun.

PART I

The First Hundred Days

ONE

The Enemy at the Gates

For only the second time in her forty years of life, Lady Nafisa the White dreaded the dawn. Sleep had eluded her all night, but she lay quietly in order not to disturb her maids in the adjoining room. They would have risen, bleary and heavy-limbed with sleep, and hovered around her bed, offering to bring mint tea, or to massage her feet.

Nafisa knew where her husband was tonight, and wished it were with another woman.

She glanced at the gold-mounted ormolu clock with the rose faience face that she could not make out in the dark. It had been a present from the French consul, Magallon, in happier times. The irony struck her: how the world had changed! But she did not need a clock to tell the time; she could smell the dawn in the air before the first bird stirred, before the muezzin cleared his throat to chant the call for prayers; long before the watchmen unlocked the heavy wooden gates that secured each neighbourhood for the night against robbery and mischief. She knew the exact order in which the gates to the quarters were drawn back: first the Moroccan quarter, then the Jewellers Lane, then the Nasiriya quarter where most of the European merchants lived, then the Ezbekiah Lake and the Alley of the Syrians, and finally the gates to the Citadel. Cairo was her city; she could take its pulse at any moment.

The first time Nafisa had lain sleepless had been her wedding night – her first wedding night, thirty years ago now, to Ali Bey. Her awe of her husband-to-be had been complete. As a child she had seen his image struck on coins: Ali Bey the Great, sole master of Egypt. She had watched from the latticework shutters of the harem windows as he rode past at the head of his army, on one campaign or another, to Syria and the Sudan and the borders of Egypt. When his choice had fallen on her for his second wife, the honour had been overwhelming.

Her hair had been long and thick like a curtain then, the colour of light molasses where it sprung at the roots, grading down to the clearest honey where it slapped against the back of her knees. The first time she had undressed before Ali Bey, she had shaken her hair about her in a shudder of modesty, cloaking herself with her own tresses. He had thrown his head back and laughed, and her dread had begun to melt around the edges.

She had been little more than a child at the time. Over their long years together she had grown from child-bride to trusted consort, consulted and cultivated by the powerful in Egypt and abroad. Until the day Ali Bey had been betrayed and assassinated. Nafisa tensed and held her breath, listening for the clatter of horses’ hooves, for the night watchmen dragging open the heavy wooden gates that closed off her neighbourhood. But it was only her overwrought imagination, and she lay back, winding a thick strand of hair around her palm. When the muezzin called for dawn prayers she would clap her hands and her maids would bring the mint tea she drank first thing every morning to keep her breath sweet all day. Even when she had gone on the pilgrimage to Mecca, two years ago, one of the camels in her caravan had carried nothing but pots of live herbs: mint, but also caraway for digestion, basil to stimulate appetite, and chamomile to rinse her hair. A cow plodded along, ensuring her diet of fresh milk and cheese. The Prince of the Pilgrimage leading the caravan from Egypt that year had made sure her every whim was accommodated.

Nafisa threw off her bedcovers; she was naked but for her fine silk shift. She was still beautiful, and still desirable. Was she not the same age as Khadija had been when she proposed to the Prophet Muhammad, and he a young man fifteen years her junior? Like Khadija, Nafisa had chosen a husband. A widow as young and wealthy as she could not remain without a husband and protector, and so she had opted for Murad, with his curly red bush of a beard heralding his choleric temperament like a banner. Among the senior Mamlukes, Murad had stood out by his ambition, but it was her status as the widow of Ali that raised him to the rank of co-regent of Egypt.

Today, Murad would be tested as no one could have imagined.

Until a week ago, her world had turned steadily on its axis. Her days were spent supervising the trading operations of her wikala, the caravanserai at Bab Zuweila, and overseeing construction of the charitable waterworks she was erecting nearby on Sugar Street. And along with the rest of Cairo she followed avidly reports of the rise of Elfi Bey’s new palace on the Ezbekiah Lake, and gauged the rise of his ambition as warily as the city leaders watched the peaking of the Nilometer before the summer flood.

Then came the news that English warships had dropped anchor off the port of Alexandria, looking for the French fleet. They had left, not finding their prey, but Egypt held its breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It had not been long in coming. The French fleet landed at the Bay of Alexandria two days later.

Last night her husband had gone to the judge’s house with old Ibrahim Bey and Elfi and the senior Mamluke commanders to devise a strategy. And Nafisa had lain awake, unable to sleep for only the second time in her life.

Nafisa started at the clatter of horses’ hooves followed by a shouted command and the scramble of the night watchmen to unlock and open the gates to the lane as her husband and his retainers approached. The servants bestirred themselves and fumbled to light torches with the haste bred by dread of their master’s temper. Nafisa’s maids hurried to her and she motioned for her Damascus silk slippers and robe. She slipped from room to room down the narrow, winding stone staircase, her robe sweeping the steps behind her, till she reached the mezzanine gallery with its arcades where, standing behind the wooden latticework mashrabiyya, she could look down on the central hall without being seen.

Murad had not come alone, there were two Mamlukes with him. As the servants scurried about, torches in hand, to fetch cushions for the wooden banquettes, Nafisa recognized Sennari, her husband’s right-hand man, by his great height and his ramrod posture, even before she caught a glimpse of his coffee-brown face with the tribal markings of his native Sudan etched deep into the cheek and chin.

The other Mamluke commander had his back to her, but something about his bearing, arrogant and wary at once, struck a familiar chord. At that instant he glanced over his shoulder and she recognized in his gesture that sixth sense that alerted him that he was being watched. It was Elfi himself.

The first time she had laid eyes on Elfi, Nafisa had been standing in this very spot. All of Cairo had buzzed about the peerless young Mamluke her husband had paid an extraordinary price for; it was said there was none to rival him for beauty or spirit, so wilful he had forced his first master to part with him, although no one knew exactly what he had done. She had waited behind the filigreed mashrabiyya for Murad to arrive with his latest acquisition, and peered down at the handsome blond Circassian. Murad had looked up at her triumphantly, and the blond head had tilted up, following his gaze. The Circassian had shot her a sharp glance from hard blue eyes, then faced forward again, impassive.

Murad had looked into the unflinching eyes of the young Mamluke and seen in him the prize racehorse of his stable; perhaps he had even seen in him his heir-in-arms, the heir he would never have from his own loins. For what Mamluke would wish upon a son of his flesh and blood to live by the sword and to die by the sword? For that they bought Mamlukes and trained them. Was it any wonder if they sometimes grew closer to them than they were to their own kin? Closer, sometimes, than they were to any woman.

Murad had looked into the hard eyes of the young Circassian and seen courage and intelligence. Nafisa had looked and seen a disquieting ambition. She had recognized a kindred spirit, she who had once been, like him, the possession of others, depending on beauty and wits for the favour of those who held her fate in their hands.

Twenty years later, Elfi Bey had earned envy and enemies with his fearsome reputation, his thousand Mamlukes and his half-dozen homes. The latest palace he had just completed on the Ezbekiah Lake was the talk of Cairo, with French chandeliers, an Italian marble fountain in the courtyard, and a library bidding to rival that of the venerable Azhar University itself. Nafisa had been proved right about Elfi’s ambition; she hoped Murad would be proved right about his loyalty.

Murad ushered his guests up the steps to the loggia with its arched colonnades, where the servants were laying out cushions and setting up round brass trays on wooden tripods. The men seemed to be arguing intensely, Murad’s blustery voice rising above Elfi’s deeper tones and Sennari’s laconic interjections.

Nafisa clapped her hands for the chief eunuch, and gave orders for breakfast to be prepared. The big brass pot of Yemeni coffee was to be brewed stronger than usual, as she suspected no one had slept that night. The cook was to begin baking the flaky butter pastry right away; if he had any sense, he would have lit his oven an hour ago. As she gave the eunuch the keys to the larder to bring out the day’s allotment of honey, butter and spices, she asked him, in an offhand tone, as if it were an afterthought, to report to her on the state of household stocks: how many sacks of wheat, rice, barley, lentils; how many jars of oil and clarified butter; how many bags of coffee, tobacco, sugar, nuts, spices; how many days’ worth of fodder for the horses and mules. Later she would send her chief eunuch to check the larder stocks in Murad’s three other houses around the city, and the Giza estate. Discreetly, of course; any rumours of a possible siege of Cairo would set the shopkeepers to hoarding goods and the residents to panicking.

Nafisa rather welcomed these mundane details; they would occupy her restless mind till Murad’s guests were gone and she could find out what course of action had been decided against the French advance.

* * *

Seventeen days. Elfi counted them. Seventeen days since he had occupied his brand-new Ezbekiah palace, and not even as many nights. He walked out on the terrace in the tepid morning breeze and inhaled the sharp scent of lemon trees mingled with the softer perfumes of jasmine and apricot. In a month the Nile would flood, and the parched lake basin before him would rapidly fill with water, and the Ezbekiah would come alive every night with torchlight and music, the boats gliding back and forth, the shopkeepers’ kiosks doing a bustling business in iced syrups and stuffed pancakes. Only seventeen days ago it had given him satisfaction to think that none of the houses around the Ezbekiah could compare, indeed no house in all of Cairo. Not one of the mansions of the great old man, Ibrahim Bey, nor those of Murad Bey, the master of Cairo, and his grand Lady Nafisa with her French friends and fancy furniture.

Elfi turned back to the downstairs hall and slipped off his shirt. He splashed his face repeatedly in the large marble fountain with its brass jets, trying to clear his head. Looking at his reflection in the water he saw a face he had not seen in many years: a boy called Shamil.

Growing up in a stone hut on the side of a mountain in the Caucasus, the boy he had once been could no more have imagined this Ezbekiah mansion than he could have dreamed of the Sultan’s Top Kapi Saray in Istanbul. But tonight, Elfi was blindsided by a stab of homesickness for the sharp, clean mountain air of his native Tcherkessia. He longed for the taste of snow in summer, for the echoing silence, for the horizon that stretched on and on at a dizzying distance. Yet as a boy he had felt hemmed in by the vast emptiness of those mountains, and spent his time peering into the distance for a glimpse of the glittering Black Sea, dreaming of the ship that would one day carry him away.

Then, one summer day, as he watched his mother ladle yogurt into squares of cheesecloth that she hung in the sun to drip into soft balls of cheese, something in him turned. He went into the hut and threw his sheepskin-lined winter cloak over his shoulder, and stood for a moment at the door till his mother raised her worn face, tossed her long blonde plait over her shoulder, and put down her ladle. Then he turned away and jogged down the mountain, never looking back. He was fifteen years old.

The boy Shamil was buried in him now; there was only Muhammad Bey Elfi. Elfi thought of the first master who had bought him in Egypt: the Majnoon – the crazy one – had brought him home to a large, pleasant mansion with running fountains in the courtyard. That very evening he had invited a score of revellers to a lavish banquet. One of the servants had brought perfumed ointment and silk garments for Elfi to wear, and motioned for him to follow the sound of raucous laughter to the central hall where men lounged on cushions smoking long pipes and downing goblets of wine. His entrance had been greeted with a moment of admiring silence, then bawdy remarks in an Egyptian dialect he could not follow. The Majnoon had beckoned him and, removing a finely wrought gold chain from the several around his own neck, had tipped Elfi’s head forward and slipped the chain over his head, patting the links flat against his bare skin with a smile.

That night Elfi had carried his drunken master to his couch, then taken up vigil in front of the window open to the night air. At dawn he heard the muezzin’s chant, followed soon after by the desultory calls of the night watchmen across the city as they dragged open the gates of the neighbourhood alleys. From the stables across the lake there rose the mingled shouts and laughter of young voices, the sounds of horses neighing and rearing, of swords clashing: the young Mamlukes-in-training were engaging in their morning exercises in the horse ring across the way.

Elfi had walked over to the Majnoon’s couch and, coming behind him, had lifted his slack body into a half-sitting position, supporting him against his chest, an arm drawn across the man’s neck. His master had snorted awake, eyes wide with alarm, and Elfi had given him a moment or two to gather his sodden wits before whispering: ‘By law, either the master or the slave has the right to take the other to court to rescind the contract of sale within the first two weeks. I did not become a Mamluke to be the house-pet of a buffoon. Sell me now, or you will wake up one night to find your throat slit.’

The Majnoon had been so terrified he could not sell Elfi fast enough; he had given him to Murad Bey in exchange for a thousand ardabs of wheat – an unprecedented sum – and from that moment on he was known as Elfi, ‘he of the thousand’. Murad Bey had taken him into the greatest Mamluke house of them all, and had trained him well. He had been taught to think of his master as his father, and of Murad’s other young Mamlukes-in-training as his khushdash, his brothers. Recognizing Elfi’s merit, Murad had manumitted him in record time. Elfi had risen rapidly in the ranks from kashif to amir, commander. Today he owned a thousand Mamlukes of his own and commanded forty kashifs under him with a militia of thousands more. He owed much to Murad, and tonight he needed to remind himself of that debt.

Elfi ducked his head under the water and held his breath. As a boy he had trained himself to hold his breath in the cold, pure streams of his mountains, for as long as it took a hawk to circle seven times. From time to time he still practised this skill; he did not know why – only that it might come in handy, one day. He timed himself, counting.

The first house Elfi owned he had bought from the Majnoon, his former master. Then he had built the mansion at Old Cairo opposite the Nilometer, and one between the Gate of Victory and the Damurdash, in addition to the two houses he had bought in Ezbekiah. But this palace he had just completed was the culmination of his heart’s ambition. He had had it built from the ground up, razing the site, and sketching out the plans himself on a large sheet of paper. Day and night, kilns fired stones and churned out lime, and mills turned to crush gypsum, and large stones were quarried and transported by ship down the Nile to be sawn into slabs for floors, stairs and courtyards. Various kinds of woods, of marbles and columns, were imported, as well as the chandeliers and the indoor and outdoor fountains. The French had given him an enormous marble fountain with carved figures of fish that sent out jets of water, and that he had put in the garden, under the long vaulted roof he had built for shade and privacy.

He had installed latticework screens with inlaid coloured glass on the windows overlooking the lake, the gardens and the square, so that his women could enjoy the views in privacy. There were two bath halls with pools, one upstairs and one downstairs. He had the house built on different levels, with courtyards, doors and steps separating his private apartments from the apartments on the outer periphery of the courtyard where his Mamlukes would live.

He thought he had rid his nostrils forever of the sour smell of the goat cheese his mother made in that hut on the side of the mountain. But a hunger still gnawed in him, a hunger he could not satisfy with fine houses or sensuous women or hordes of servants or great power. He had grown up illiterate, but in his prime he discovered in himself a hunger for knowledge. Now he bought every book he could, even in languages he did not speak, and sought out the company of scholars and historians. His pride in the new mansion was the library, stocked with books on history and the sciences, particularly those that fascinated Elfi: astronomy, geometry and astrology. Were it not for the unassailable reputation for hard living he had earned in his youth, he would have lost face among his peers.

The first week after Elfi moved in, the house blazed every night with chandeliers and the courtyard and gardens sang with lanterns to greet the throngs of visitors who came to congratulate and envy. He owed it all to Murad. But on this day Elfi felt his loyalty tested as it had never been.

Elfi whipped his head out from under the jets of the fountain, taking in big breaths, and splashed the water under his arms and over his chest. He shook himself like a dog emerging from a pond. He could still hold his breath for as long as it took a hawk to circle seven times.

He had spent the night in council at the judge’s house, with the assembled Mamluke amirs and the civilian notables. Old Ibrahim Bey, the senior Mamluke and Prince of the Pilgrimage; Murad, Master of Cairo; Elfi, Tambourji, Bardissi, and the two other Beys who governed the main provinces of Egypt – the seven of them were the ruling Mamlukes. The senior kashifs immediately under their command were also present, along with Papas Oglu, the Greek captain of Murad’s river flotilla. The leading scholars and clerics of the Azhar University, headed by the judge, represented the notables. The heads of the guilds and the chief merchants rounded out the council and represented the commercial interests of the city.

Before them all, Murad had laid out his strategy: to split their cavalry forces in two, with Ibrahim Bey and his men camped on the east bank of the Nile and Murad and Elfi on the west. This plan had immediately seemed disastrous to Elfi. In vain he had argued that they should mass all their forces on the far bank of the river, where they would have the advantage of forcing the French to cross over to meet them. Murad had dismissed this on the grounds that the French might advance along either bank or both at once. Elfi countered that any doubts regarding the direction from which the French were advancing could be settled by sending out Bedouin scouts. But Murad had remained immovable and maddeningly dismissive of the enemy’s forces. Elfi had even ridden back with Murad to his house at dawn to try to change his mind, but Murad had refused to see reason.

And this morning, as Elfi gave the order to his Mamlukes to prepare for battle and to gather at the Citadel, he was thinking that his oath of fealty to his former master might never cost him, or the city, dearer.

Sitt Nafisa heard Murad’s heavy tread on the stone steps leading to her rooms and dismissed her maids with a quick flicker of her fingers. Murad was in full battle regalia, splendidly attired in vivid tunic and pantaloons, his chest festooned with gold chains, his fingers encrusted with precious stones, bejewelled sword hanging at his side and burnished pistols tucked into his scarlet sash. Nafisa guessed that his shaved head must be perspiring under the turban, and that the sable-lined cloak over his shoulders must weigh on him unbearably in the July heat. The French consul Magallon – in the days when he and his wife used to call on Nafisa regularly – had once asked her why Mamlukes made themselves such a rich prize in battle, giving the enemy incentive to kill them expressly to pillage the corpses. ‘Truly, à la guerre comme à l’amour, hmm?’ Magallon had smiled quizzically. It was just the Mamluke custom, she had explained; they were a military caste. Perhaps it was their way of defying fate.

To a casual observer, Murad might not appear to be a man preoccupied by thoughts of an imminent meeting with destiny, but Nafisa could read him under his bluster. The scar from a sword slash across his face had turned livid, as it did whenever he was in the heat of argument or battle.

‘We set off from the Citadel at noon, and we will cross the river and wait for the French at Imbaba. Ibrahim Bey has already made camp on the eastern bank.’

Nafisa nodded. All morning she had heard the kettledrums booming and the shrill pipes playing as the cavalcade of horsemen pranced through the winding streets on their way uphill to the Citadel.

‘The French won’t reach Cairo.’ Murad’s red beard bristled like a burning bush. ‘They may have taken Alexandria, but they won’t reach Cairo, nevertheless you may leave if you wish. Ibrahim Bey is evacuating his women; you can join his train. I can spare a small Mamluke escort for you, and of course you can take your maids and eunuchs.’

‘I won’t leave Cairo, whatever happens. Who will be left if I do?’ She had been brought to Cairo as a two-year-old and sold into a great house; she remembered nothing else. ‘I know Ibrahim Bey’s daughter Adila will stay also, and many of the other women. Don’t worry, about us – this is not the Mongols sacking Baghdad. But I’ll move some of the coffers of coins and jewels to our other houses in Cairo for safe-keeping, just in case there is any lawlessness – or if we need to pay a ransom.’

He nodded. ‘Send some valuables to the Giza estate,’ he said, turning to go.

‘Wait. What about the European merchants? A mob might attack them; people are restless in the streets, and fear makes them dangerous. We should take the Europeans into our houses for protection.’

‘You and your precious Franj! It’s your friend Magallon who has been agitating for this war against us.’ He turned on his heel. ‘Take the Europeans into our houses if you want – you won’t have room for all of them.’

‘I’ll ask Sitt Adila to open her doors to them also; between us we can try to accommodate anyone who seeks refuge.’

‘Do as you please.’ Murad was already at the door, his mind on other matters. ‘May I next see your face in good health.’ He raised his hand in farewell.

As she heard the familiar formula of leave-taking, Nafisa shuddered with a premonition that she would not see his face again. She dismissed it instantly; she was not the type to heed such intuitions and she had much to do.

‘Bilsalama. Go with God, and return safely.’

Outside the window the murmur of the city was turning to a dull roar of alarm.

TWO

The Battle of the Pyramids

‘This was the first year of the fierce fights and important incidents, of the multiplication of malice and the acceleration of affairs; of successive sufferings and turning times.’

Abdel Rahman El-Jabarti’s Chronicles of Egypt,

15 June, 1798

‘Are you writing, child?’

Zeinab raised her head from the page and looked up at Shaykh Jabarti. How old was the venerable historian, she wondered. At least as old as her father, Shaykh Bakri, and he was two score years; she herself, at twelve, was her parents’ second youngest child and only unmarried daughter. As she was serving her father pomegranate juice one evening last month, he had suddenly looked at her and turned to her mother. ‘Is she a woman yet?’ he had asked. And her mother had blushed and murmured that she was indeed, had been for four cycles of the moon now.

‘Then we should get her married,’ her father had pronounced, pinching Zeinab’s cheek where it dimpled. ‘Let me think on it.’

Zeinab had wondered whom he might have in mind, and hoped it would not be someone as old as the man her sister had married. But of course her father had not had time to think on it, with the news of the English ships off Alexandria, and now the French advancing to the outskirts of Cairo.

Shaykh Jabarti’s dictation trailed off; he was staring out of the window and stroking his beard, a world away. Zeinab waited quietly, chewing on the end of the ribbon tied around her thick, long black plait. She bent over the silver bowl of rose-water set on the table in front of her and studied her wavering reflection. Like the princesses of fairy tales, her face was as round and white as the full moon, but her eyes were large and dark and her fine black brows arched over them like birds winging over a still pool in moonlight. She blew at the rose petals in the water and the image dissipated.

‘Are you writing, child?’ Shaykh Jabarti said again, absent-mindedly, and she picked up her quill and waited. She had a fine hand, and for that reason, and because he had tired eyes and preferred to dictate his chronicle, Shaykh Jabarti tolerated her presence as his pupil and scribe. It was very unusual for a girl to be so honoured, and in fact it had been her younger brother, originally, who had been sent to learn at Shaykh Jabarti’s feet, but her brother was only interested in spinning a wheel around a stick, as he was doing right now outside the window. It was Zeinab, sent with him as an afterthought, who had proved an apt pupil. She wondered how much longer her father would allow her to receive instruction from Shaykh Jabarti. Once she was married, of course, it would be out of the question.

She had heard that the French had brought a new invention that could make calligraphy and scribes obsolete, a machine that could make many, many copies. As they advanced south towards Cairo, they had distributed countless thousands of copies, in Arabic, of their chief general’s proclamation. Shaykh Jabarti was holding a copy at that very moment and snorting as he parsed the words for hidden meanings and for lapses in Arabic grammar and syntax.

‘Egyptians, they will tell you that I come to destroy your religion; it is a lie, do not believe it. Answer that I have come to restitute your rights, punish the usurpers; that I respect, more than the Mamlukes, God, his prophet Muhammad and the glorious Koran … Tell the people that we are true Muslims.’

‘Who translated this?’ Jabarti grumbled as he peered at the sheet in his hand, and continued reading.

Zeinab ventured a question. ‘My esteemed teacher, do you think these French are Muslim as they say?’

‘They say they agree with every religion in part, and with no religion in the whole, so they are opposed to both Christians and Muslims, and do not hold fast to any religion. In truth some hold their Christian faith hidden in their hearts, and there are some true Jews among them also. But for the most part they are materialists. They say the creed they follow is to make human reason supreme; each of them follows a religion which he contrives by the improvement of his own mind.’

Zeinab was distracted by a sudden swell of noise and ran to the window: a procession of dervishes and men in the robes of the Sufi orders were piping and drumming their way down the street. ‘Look, my teacher, they have brought down the Prophet’s banner from the Citadel!’

‘It is all done to calm the fears of the common people. Many were so alarmed they were prepared to flee, had the amirs not stopped them and rebuked them. The rabble would have attacked the homes of all the foreigners and Christians if the amirs had not prevented them; Sitt Nafisa and Sitt Adila took them into their houses.’

‘Surely the French will not reach Cairo?’ Zeinab was alarmed.

‘God alone knows. Murad Bey has had a heavy iron chain forged; it is stretched across the Nile at the narrowest point, to prevent the French ships from passing, while his own flotilla is moored below the chain. Ibrahim Bey and Murad Bey have assembled their troops and now sit in their respective camps across the river from each other, waiting for the French to arrive. Immovable as the Sphinx! Blinded in their arrogance!’ Suddenly aware of her alarm, the old man attempted to reassure her with a verse from the Koran: ‘Yet thy Lord would never destroy the cities unjustly, while as yet their people were putting things right. Amen.’

‘Amen,’ Zeinab repeated under her breath.

* * *

Nicolas Conté squinted in the sun as the Army of the Orient came to a halt along the western bank of the Nile and prepared to engage in the battle for Cairo. Ten thousand Mamlukes faced them on horseback, in full battle regalia, turbaned or helmeted, blazing in the sun with their muskets and lances, their splendid Arabians as richly caparisoned as the riders. The commanders flew back and forth along the lines, turning and wheeling their mounts on a hair, and brandishing their glittering sabres at the heavens.

‘There can be no finer animal than a Mamluke-trained horse,’ Dr Desgenettes observed, reining in his mount abreast with Nicolas.

‘A brave sight indeed,’ Conté concurred. ‘Let us take a moment to admire them before we cut them to pieces.’ He spoke with more bravado than he felt; the siege of Alexandria had been harder than anyone had anticipated, but it was the terrible, four-day forced march south across the desert with its sun of lead and its intolerable heat that had sapped every man’s strength and spirit. And the Bedouin! Even the most romantic among the French, thought Nicolas, even Geoffroy St-Hilaire, had lost all illusion about Rousseau’s Noble Savage. Like vultures, the Bedouin hovered on the horizon, ready to swoop down on stragglers who succumbed to heat, thirst, sunstroke or despair. There were many among the troops who took their own lives.

But now the ordeal of the desert march was behind them, and the great Army of the Orient was camped before the Nile at Imbaba in preparation for the Battle of the Pyramids, as Bonaparte referred to it.

‘Can one even see the pyramids from here?’ Dr Desgenettes remarked wryly to Nicolas. ‘But I admit it sounds a good deal more memorable than the Battle of Imbaba; our general ever has his eye on the history books.’

Ah yes, thought Conté, but what the history books would record about the French expedition to Egypt was yet to be written. Would this battle go down as the great triumph of the Army of the Orient? And what of his own epitaph, Nicolas-Jacques Conté, Chief Engineer and Commander of the Balloonist Brigade? Would it say that he had survived to see his native shore again one day, to be reunited with his sweet Lise, and his three children? He was a true son of the Revolution and the Republic, and as such he was not a praying man, but at times like these he almost wished he had faith.

‘Soldiers!’ Bonaparte raised his arm and every ear strained to hear him. ‘Go, and think that from the height of these monuments forty centuries observe us.’

At these words a great shout rang from the ranks and Nicolas’ heart leapt in his chest. As if at the signal, the Mamluke cavalry charged at a full gallop against the stationary and unshakeable square formation of the French infantry. The fantassins held their ground with supernatural discipline till at twenty paces Bonaparte gave the order to fire cannon and musket, and the first wave of the fine cavaliers fell. Amazingly, the next wave charged right behind them, but the carré held again, and the cannon fired again from the corners, and the Mamlukes were cut down again, and this went on until those that survived threw themselves in the river and tried to swim back to the opposite shore, where their confreres were massed, helpless to come to their succour. The French then turned their fire on the eastern bank.

Elfi felt the horse buckle under him as it was hit, and leapt free of the saddle before the beast hit the ground. It was the third horse that had been shot out from under him in this battle. As he landed, the bodies of men and horses beneath him broke his fall, and he lay motionless, concussion blanking out his mind.

When his senses returned, he knew time had passed, but he did not know how long. Hours? Minutes? It was dark. The din of the cannon had abated somewhat and seemed further off, as if directed at the eastern shore; or perhaps the blood in his ears and eyes was dulling his perception. He was bleeding profusely from his head, but head wounds tended to bleed disproportionately; he worried more about the wounds to his right hand and his thigh. He was in no immediate agony, so he did not think he had broken any bones. His sense of smell was undiminished, and the stench of the slaughterhouse made him retch; in all his years, he had not experienced carnage on such a massive scale.

Then he heard them – the buzzards who circled after any battle, come to pick the corpses clean of booty. If they found him alive, they would kill him. If he played dead, they would cut off his fingers for the rings, slash off his ears, then kill him anyway. He began to crawl on knees and elbows over the corpses, towards the river that was now a blazing lake of fire. Either the French had set light to Murad’s river flotilla, or Murad himself had given Papas Oglu the order to burn his ships as they retreated. As Elfi watched, the fire reached the gunpowder magazines and before his eyes the ships exploded like a thousand fireworks, sailors throwing themselves into the river in a bid to escape. Still, he slithered on his belly over the foul, blood-slick matting of human and animal dead and dying, towards the flaming water.

He did not look at the bodies he crawled over. Some of the fallen may have been his khushdash, men he had grown up with, like Tambourji and Bardissi … or they may have been his own Mamlukes and kashifs, boys he had raised to manhood, trained, manumitted, married to his slave girls and set up in fine houses. Elfi did not spare them a downward look or a moment’s prayer; there would be time for mourning, later – if he survived.

He reached the bank and unbuckled his belt and removed his scabbard and the pistols tucked into his sash; the firearms would be useless once wet. He took off his tunic and his soft leather boots, all his clothing but his shirt and pantaloons. He unwound his turban and ripped off strips of it to bandage the wounds on his head and hand and thigh. He removed his rings, the other jewels on his person, and his dagger, wrapping them carefully in the folds of the remaining length of his turban and tying the ends around his middle. Then, taking a deep breath, he slid into the water as smoothly as a crocodile.

His only chance would be to swim downriver and resurface as far from the scavengers as possible; assuming he could avoid being shot out of the water by snipers on the banks, or being caught in the floating flames. He was less concerned about crocodiles this far downriver. Elfi took another deep breath and filled his lungs. Perhaps, he thought, some alignment of his stars had kept him practising the art of holding his breath underwater for as long as a hawk took to circle seven times. The time had come when he would be tested. He plunged further into the black water.

From the city beyond the flames a terrible wailing rose in the smoky air and rolled across the water like thunder.

Zeinab’s fingers trembled so much she couldn’t manage to hook the loops around the gold-braid buttons of her tunic. Her wet-nurse was having almost as much trouble trying to dress Zeinab’s younger brother, who was whining and snivelling into his nightshirt; he had been asleep when the nurse had come into their room in the middle of the night. Zeinab herself had been wide-eyed, kept wakeful by the sound of the cannons in the distance, and then, even more terrifying, the wailing as the people of Bulaq and the bank of the Nile surged towards the city.

‘God preserve us, God preserve us!’ the nurse repeated. ‘Sitt Zeinab, hurry! They say the French have set fire to Bulaq and that the vanguard has reached the Iron Gate! They say they are burning and killing and raping women! God only knows. Your father says we must leave, we must leave right away. He is trying to find donkeys for us, but every donkey and horse in the city has already been commandeered. What will become of us?’

By dawn donkeys had been bought, at an exorbitant price, to carry Zeinab and her mother and youngest brother; the men and the servant girls would have to walk. Shaykh Bakri had stayed behind, heading for the Azhar where the ulema had congregated.

Zeinab looked around her as they tried to thread their way through the thronged streets; it seemed as if all the citizens of Cairo were on the move, most on foot, carrying what they could. As their slow procession approached the outer gates of the city they were met by a terrible sight: people returning, wailing, bloody, half-naked, the women tearing their hair and screaming: ‘The Bedouin! The Bedouin! They fell upon us as soon as we left the city walls. Turn back! Turn back!’

‘Bring me my jewellery coffer.’

‘Sitt Nafisa?’ Fatoum looked up from brushing Nafisa’s hair. The maid’s consternation was apparent. ‘Shouldn’t we be hiding the jewellery?’

‘No, fetch it as soon as you finish dressing me.’ If she was to meet the emissary of the French, she wanted to inspire respect for who she was: Murad’s wife and Ali’s widow. Human nature being universal, she knew that an appeal to esteem and cupidity would be a more reliable card than appealing to pity. But what cards were left for her to play in the face of this overwhelming defeat? Her mind buzzed like a trapped bee. What would the French exact of her? How did they mean to deal with her and with the wives and children of the amirs? The worst fears of the city had been laid to rest the morning after the battle when it transpired that the French had not burned and pillaged the eastern shore; it was the fire on the ships that had given rise to that rumour.

But where was Murad? She made an effort to concentrate on her dressing. She stepped into the rose pantaloons Fatoum held out for her, then slipped the embroidered violet tunic over her sheer white chemise and let the girl tie a rose-and-gold sash round her waist, cinching it in. Nafisa smoothed her thick braid over one shoulder and fixed a small toque on her head, then let a filmy veil float down over it.

‘Sitt Nafisa, the jewellery.’

‘Let me see.’

She rifled through the tooled leather casket the maid held before her, selecting two thick ropes of pearls and winding them around her neck. She picked two ruby drop-earrings and threaded the fine gold hoops through her earlobes, then slipped the matching bracelet and ring on one hand, and an emerald-and-diamond bracelet on the other wrist. She hesitated, then carefully took a large yellow diamond ring out of a velvet pouch and slipped it on her middle finger; it was as big as a pigeon’s egg and sparkled like the sun reflecting off ice.

She wondered if the looters who had raided Murad’s house in Qawsun had found the coffer her eunuch had hidden under the planks of the second-floor loggia. Ibrahim Bey’s house in Qawsun had been raided too, and several houses belonging to the other amirs, abandoned in their rout.

She had had no word from Murad, but he was alive, that much she knew. The servants on their estate in Giza had reported that their master had appeared and disappeared like a whirlwind, dismounting barely long enough to snatch up the coffers of treasure hidden for that eventuality – and then he was gone.

For the last time, but not the first, she allowed herself a moment of regret. Regret that Murad had not turned out to be the worthy heir of Ali Bey the Great that she had hoped he would become, with her help, when she married him. Seeing in Murad an energetic, domineering temperament that brooked no rival, she had chosen him for a mate. But his instinct to dominate others was not matched by the ability or the judgment to govern them. In their years together, she had learned to handle him with the finesse of a spider weaving a web, but he was ever conscious of the long shadow of Ali Bey. Sensing that he did not measure up to her first husband, he became bitter and intractable, resentful of her interference.

Shaking off that final moment of regret, Nafisa got to her feet. The emissary of the French was at her door. General Bonaparte had sent his own stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais, as a gesture of goodwill.

With as convincing a show of calm as she could muster, Nafisa waited for him to come up to the second floor reception hall. She had ordered the finest Bukhara carpets laid on the stone floor and the most sumptuous, gold-embroidered silk pillows spread over the wooden banquettes. Within a few moments she heard a springy step on the staircase; her first impression was of a smooth-cheeked boy in skin-tight breeches and a short, close-fitting blue coat. He hesitated for no more than a moment before advancing towards her.

‘Madame.’ He gave a crisp bow. ‘Eugène de Beauharnais, delighted to make your acquaintance.’

She inclined her head in acknowledgement, momentarily disconcerted by the sight of the man who had followed Beauharnais up the stairs: Bartholomew – or Fart Rumman, ‘pomegranate seed’, as people called him derisively in the street. She was astonished at his appearance: he wore a fur stole, a preposterous plumed red silk hat, and a new air of presumption. A Greek mercenary known for his dishonesty and brutality, he had been a simple artillery man of Elfi’s who made money on the side selling glass bottles in the souk. That the French had been ill-advised enough to choose a man of such low standing and unsavoury reputation for translator or agent did not bode well. Behind Bartholomew, her chief eunuch Barquq had taken up his post by the door, arms crossed, his expression unreadable.

Nafisa gestured to the French emissary in the direction of the banquette against the wall. ‘You are welcome in my house, sir. Please, take a seat.’ She noted that he waited for her to be seated before flipping his coat-tails to sit down, his sword clanging at his side.

She clapped her hands for the eunuchs to bring refreshments, and they appeared promptly, carrying big brass trays that they set up on folding wooden tripods. They offered the Frenchman silver goblets with a choice of syrups: almond milk, pomegranate, carob, tamarind. The emissary picked the pomegranate, lifted the goblet in her direction and sipped; an odd expression went over his face and he set it down hastily.

‘Madame, allow me to convey the compliments of Consul Magallon and most particularly of Madame Magallon, who desire to be remembered to you warmly. They speak of you as a lady of great heart and superior intellect, a person of the utmost influence in this city. In the absence of your husband and the other Mamlukes, we count on you to be our first interlocutor and intermediary.’

Though Nafisa understood enough French to follow the gist, she allowed Bartholomew to translate. She gestured to the eunuch to offer the young ambassador plates of sweetmeats: nuts, Turkish delight flavoured with rose-water, dates stuffed with almonds and preserved in syrup. He politely picked a square of the Turkish delight and tasted it, then put it down, discreetly trying to brush the powdered sugar off his fingers, swallowing and licking his dry-looking lips. Barquq immediately went to him with a pitcher of water, a basin and a napkin.

‘Ah,’ Beauharnais exclaimed in palpable relief, raising his goblet in the direction of the pitcher. The eunuch concealed his surprise at this gesture and impassively kept the basin under the guest’s hands till he understood and held his hands out to have the eunuch pour water from the pitcher over his fingers and dry them with the folded napkin.

Beauharnais’ attention was drawn to the rose faience clock in the corner and he smiled. ‘Madame, I congratulate you on your good taste.’

‘A present from Monsieur Magallon.’

‘Indeed. But does it not tell the time?’

‘Not for a long while now. The dust from the sandstorms here during the khamaseen season must have spoiled the mechanism.’

‘I am sure we can find someone in our entourage of savants who would know how to repair it; they are geniuses at everything! I must remember to send you someone.’

At last the emissary came to the purpose of his visit. ‘General Bonaparte would like to assure you, madame, that you yourself, and the wives and children of the other Beys, are in no danger for your lives or honour.’

Nafisa inclined her head. ‘Forbearance in victory is the mark of the noble. Please assure your general of our eternal gratitude.’ She embroidered on these compliments, waiting for the other shoe to drop, which it soon did.

‘Naturally, the property of the amirs, whether in houses, gardens, farms, land or goods, must be considered the property of the French State, just as we confiscated the property of our own French émigrés. All of this property will be duly inventoried and evaluated, in due course, and you may redeem part of it for your own use – one of your residences, for instance. In return for a certain sum, of course. We will consider you our privileged interlocutor, madame, in our regrettable but necessary efforts to raise a levy on the citizens of Cairo in general, each according to his station and his means. Beginning, naturally, with yourself and the wives of the Mamlukes.’

At this point Bartholomew, whom she had not invited to sit down, began unrolling what looked like a long list, but Beauharnais raised a hand. ‘Not now, my good Bartholomew, not now, surely. There will be time enough for that later. My visit today is only to reassure you, madame, of our good intentions.’

‘Thank you, sir. May I ask how I am to proceed in collecting this ransom?’

‘We leave that to your discretion, madame. But official tax collectors will be appointed and assisted by worthy gentlemen like Monsieur Bartholomew here, the new chief of police –’

Nafisa caught her breath; Fart Rumman – chief of police! Might as well set the hyena to guarding the henhouse.

Bartholomew cleared his throat. ‘Malti the Copt will be at the head of the tax collectors,’ he offered.

‘In the meantime, madame, we know we can count on you to set an example to calm the spirits of those who do not yet know the forbearance and the generosity of the French Republic. I thank you for your hospitality, madame.’ Beauharnais had risen from his seat.

‘One moment, sir. If my husband is alive – and I have had no word from him – on what terms may he hope to sue for peace?’

‘That, madame, is not within my competence to discuss. But the appropriate emissary will be sent you at the right time, I am sure. I bid you good-day.’ He bowed again.

Nafisa rose in her turn, and then on impulse twisted the yellow diamond ring off her finger and handed it to Beauharnais. ‘For your general, with my compliments, as a gauge of good faith.’

Beauharnais bowed and took his leave. Nafisa remained standing as he descended the spiral staircase, Bartholomew on his heels. She stared at the lovely rose faience clock in the corner, making a mental note that it would be the first item she would render as part of the levy the French were imposing. Then she looked at her finger where the pigeon’s egg diamond was no more. What was it that Amr, the Arab conqueror of Egypt, had said? ‘If there were no more than a thread linking me to a people, it should not break; if they tightened their grip, I would slacken, and if they slackened, I would tighten.’ Nafisa would try to keep the thread of civility between her and the French from snapping; but for how long?

And where was Murad? At least he was alive. But Elfi? Of him there had been no word.

Dusk fell for the third night since Elfi had emerged from the river, and he welcomed the respite from the relentless sun over the desert. He was riding in a north-easterly direction, away from the delta, skirting the villages and the cultivated land and sticking to the sand dunes as he headed towards the Red Sea and the Sinai.

Ibrahim Bey and his retinue were heading for Istanbul. Elfi had learned this when he traded his diamond turban pin for a horse at a village in Sharkia, the seat of the eastern provinces that had been his fief only a few days earlier. He had not been recognized in his altered state, but the diamond pin had given him away as a Mamluke, and he had not tarried beyond buying the horse and a pistol and a leather skin of water. He still felt dizzy every now and then, but the wound to his head had stopped bleeding and the cut on his thigh was healing. His right hand continued to worry him, oozing yellow pus and throbbing constantly, yet he could not risk seeking attention at one of the estates he owned, for he could not trust even his own servants.

His plan was to keep moving towards Gaza and on to Syria, and eventually regroup with those of his Mamlukes who had survived. He spurred the horse, and it picked up pace for a desultory mile. Water, he thought, licking his cracked lips; he would have to find water, and soon, for the horse was thirsty, and he had already let it lick the last drops from his water skin. He debated the risk of approaching a village or a Bedouin encampment.

In the desert dusk before him, something was shimmering like a slender column of dust in a sandstorm. Elfi blinked. If he was starting to hallucinate with thirst, it was a bad sign. He shook his head and his vision came into focus: a Bedouin woman, standing upright, quivering like a reed, her sequined veil and her silver necklaces and bangles glittering in the fading light. He spurred his horse but the animal whinnied and held back, teeth bared, as if it had seen a Jinn. The woman, if that was indeed what she was, gave no sign of having heard his approach. There was something eerie about her, as if she were in a sort of trance, her large brown eyes dilated and staring at the empty air.

Then Elfi saw what transfixed her gaze: on a mound not two feet in front of her was a large snake, half-erect, hissing, flicking its tongue, preparing to strike; in its malignant concentration it seemed as mesmerized by the woman as she was by it. If he moved fast enough, Elfi calculated, he might be able to save her; if he did nothing, the snake would strike within seconds.

Transferring the reins to his bandaged right hand, Elfi spurred the horse into a gallop, snatched the woman up with his good arm and carried her that way for a few yards before slowing his horse to a trot and setting her down.

She stood blinking up at him and shuddering as the fear released her from its grip. He could see that she was young, about fifteen, and lithe in the way of desert women.

‘What are you, a Jinniya? What are you doing out here alone? Where are your people?’ His voice rasped hoarse with thirst. Yet, thirsty as he was, he knew the wisest thing to do would be to head in the opposite direction rather than risk an unpredictable encounter with the Bedouin. Her people were more likely to kill him for his horse than offer him water for saving their daughter. He turned his horse’s head and spurred its flanks, then, changing his mind, wheeled around and came to a halt before her. In his life, Elfi thought, he had regretted acts of mercy more than those of cruelty, and he might yet live to regret saving this girl from the terrible death of thirst in the desert.

‘Are you lost? You’d better answer, my girl, for I’d just as soon leave you here to die on your own. What tribe are you? Abbadi? Muwaylih?’

The girl hesitated, then pointed east beyond the dunes.

‘All right then, come on.’ He winced as he transferred the reins to his throbbing right hand, and held out his good hand to her. She hesitated, then reached up, grasped his hand and leaped, barely tapping his foot with hers as he hoisted her into the saddle behind him. Her body settled warm and pliant against his back and he twisted round to look at her. Whatever she thought she read in his eyes made her pupils dilate as they had when she had stared at the snake. Elfi quickly clamped both her hands in a vice with his left hand; Bedouin women were taught to carry daggers, and to use them, as soon as they reached puberty. ‘I won’t hurt you. I’m thirsty enough to cut your throat just to drink your blood, but I won’t rape you.’

With his free hand he fumbled at her waist and found the dagger in her wide belt of embroidered cloth, and took it and tucked it into his sash. Then he pointed the horse towards the dunes. Another night spent under the stars, he thought; would he see the day when he could lie under the roof of his Ezbekiah palace?

THREE

The Savants of the Nasiriya

‘Cairo is an immense city. The Saint-Honoré quarter is at one end, the faubourg Saint-Victor is at the opposite end. But in this faubourg there are four Beys’ palaces side by side, and four immense gardens. This is the location we were assigned. All the French, as you can imagine, live near the General in the Saint-Honoré quarter, but they are obliged to come visit us to take part in our promenades and our delights. That is where the real Champs Élysées are!’

Geoffroy St-Hilaire, Lettres écrites d’Égypte par Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire

Zeinab stood on the terrace of her father’s house and looked across the Ezbekiah Lake – still dry in this season – at Elfi Bey’s palace on the opposite shore, looming behind its high walls. The French had crossed to the Cairo side of the Nile on Tuesday and their chief general, whom they called Bonaparte, had taken up residence in Elfi’s palace, all newly furnished as it was. Her tutor Shaykh Jabarti had remarked grimly, ‘Just as if the amir had had it built expressly for the commander of the French. Let that be a lesson for you, Zeinab,’ he added. ‘Men of understanding should not waste their efforts on the perishable things of this world.’

Jabarti and her father, Shaykh Bakri, along with the chief ulema and other city leaders, were at that very moment at Elfi Bey’s palace responding to a summons from the French commandant. Zeinab had watched her father set off in the morning, wearing his grandest turban and his best kaftan. Now she peered through the lattice of the mashrabiyya window overlooking the street side of the house, ostensibly on the lookout for her father’s return, but secretly hoping to catch a glimpse of a Frenchman; her curiosity about the Franj was insatiable.

Dada, her wet-nurse, told her that the French walked about the markets without arms and without aggression, smiling at people and offering to buy what they needed at the prices they were used to paying in their own country: one would offer to buy a chicken for a French riyal, another an egg for a silver half-penny, and in that manner they were winning the confidence of the populace.

‘The shopkeepers go out to them with stuffed pancakes, roast chicken, fried fish and the like,’ Dada reported. ‘The markets and the coffee houses have all reopened. Some dishonest bakers have even started to cheat by mixing chaff into the flour for their bread. And the Greeks have begun opening up taverns wherever the French have moved in. The Franj have taken over the houses of the amirs, not only here in the Ezbekiah but also in the Elephant Lake district, where they have seized Ibrahim Bey’s house. Today Consul Magallon took up residence in one of Murad Bey’s houses – and to think he and his wife used to be such friends of Sitt Nafisa! And if it were only the Franj! Even Bartholomew Fart Rumman has helped himself to Ismail Kashif ’s house, and what is a hundred times worse, to his wife as well. Poor Sitt Hawa! God only knows what will happen to her if Ismail Kashif ever returns.’ The wet-nurse finished braiding Zeinab’s long black tresses and rubbed a drop of almond oil between her palms to smooth the fly-away strands.

‘Dada, what manner of men are they? Are they reported to be very beautiful?’

‘Just listen to the child! Some are, some aren’t, like the sons of Adam everywhere. They shave both their beard and moustache; some leave hair on their cheeks. The barber tells me they do not shave their head or pubic hair. They have no modesty about their bodies. They mix their food and drinks. They never take their shoes off and tread with them all over precious carpets and wipe their feet on them. But you will see them soon enough, Sitt Zeinab; more and more of them are entering the city every day.’

The clanking of the gate alerted Zeinab to her father’s return and she ran to greet him in the inner courtyard. On the way she snatched the washcloth a servant was dipping in rose-water and proffered it herself to her father to wipe his face and hands. She stood by, shifting from foot to foot in her impatience, while her father took his time to sit on the wooden bench in the shade of a eucalyptus, remove his shoes, cross his legs under him, turn back the voluminous sleeves of his kaftan and perform his ablutions with the perfumed washcloth. Zeinab’s mother made her appearance, a little breathless with hurrying; she was a plump woman and easily winded.

‘Well, Shaykh Khalil?’ She offered her husband a cup of carob juice and took a seat beside him. ‘What news, inshallah? How did the French receive you?’

‘With all proper regards – even if they are a people who come to the point rather more promptly than we would think courteous. After the preliminary compliments conveyed by the translator, their commander in chief addressed us and consulted us concerning the appointment of ten shaykhs to form a diwan, a council that would govern local affairs.’

‘A diwan of clerics! God be praised.’

‘Indeed. It bodes very well that the French seem disposed to recognize our position among the people. Shaykh Sharkawi was chosen to head the diwan, as the most prominent of the ulema, and after him, I myself was nominated, along with Sadat and Mahruqi, as is proper. Three French commanders were also appointed, including their daftardar who has commandeered my house on the Elephant Lake. But no matter … It was when the affair was concluded that the trouble began.’ He paused to take a sip of juice.

‘What trouble, Father?’ Zeinab blurted.

Her father frowned. ‘Learn to control your curiosity, child, or you will be sent back to your nurse.’ He took a long drink of carob juice. ‘It was when we rose to take our leave that the chief general went to Shaykh Sharkawi and kissed him on both cheeks, then with a flourish draped a blue, red and white shawl around his neck. The shaykh immediately removed it and flung it on the ground. “I will not forfeit this world and the next,” he exclaimed. Bonaparte flushed with rage and remonstrated with him through the interpreter. “The commander in chief intends to exalt you by bestowing his attire and emblem on you. If you are distinguished by wearing it, the French soldiers and the people will honour and respect you.” Sharkawi replied: “But our good standing with God and our fellow Muslims will be lost.”’

Her father clapped his hands for his pipe. ‘This infuriated Bonaparte. I tried to soothe him and asked exemption from this measure, or at least a delay in its implementation. Bonaparte retorted: “At least you must all wear the rosette on your chest.”’

‘What is this thing they call a rosette, Father?’

‘It is an emblem made of three concentric colours of ribbon – the same blue, white and red as their flag and their shawl. As soon as the shaykhs left the council, they each in turn, starting with Shaykh Sadat – how that man loves to grandstand before the common folk! – removed the rosette and flung it on the ground, in front of the assembled crowd outside. I had no choice but to follow suit. Shaykh Jabarti told me privately that he does not himself hold that wearing such an emblem is against Islam, particularly when it is imposed and harm can result from disobedience; but he knows that the people hold it to be sacrilege. It will remain to be seen how this matter is resolved. As the proverb goes: If you wish to be obeyed, command that which is feasible.’

‘Mabruk, Shaykh Khalil, congratulations on your appointment to the diwan.’ Zeinab’s mother signalled to the servant to light the apple-scented tobacco in the small clay cup at the top of the glass hookah. ‘Having the ulema and the French on the same footing in the diwan … it’s more than the Mamlukes ever did for the clerics. When does the council meet for the first time?’

‘Next week. We have our work cut out for us in the first session: we have to appoint officials to replace the Mamlukes and their retainers in all the functions they performed. The one stipulation the French laid down was that no member of the Mamluke caste would be allowed to hold any position, official or otherwise. Jabarti told the French the common folk feared no one but the amirs, so they allowed some descendants of the ancient houses to assume certain posts. Elfi Bey’s khatkhuda, Zulfikar, was appointed to be khatkhuda to Bonaparte. But there is another matter of more immediate concern to me … an opportunity to advance my position with the French …’

‘Really, Shaykh Khalil? God be praised!’ Zeinab’s mother leaned in eagerly.

Shaykh Bakri blew rings of apple-scented smoke in the air. ‘The French commandant also announced that Omar Makram, the Naqib, who fled the city, would be replaced as chief of the syndicate of the House of the Prophet. Naturally, they will be nominating a successor …’

‘Oh! Shaykh Khalil! I see where you are going with this: you yourself are of the lineage of the Prophet. God be praised!’

‘Now don’t get ahead of yourself, wife. But I am indeed one of the most prominent, and head of the Sufi guild of the Bakris besides, so it is not out of the question.’

‘There is no one worthier!’

‘But I have many enemies among the ulema who will no doubt undermine my candidacy. If there were a way to consolidate my position with the French …’ He drew Zeinab towards him and looked at her speculatively. ‘A marriageable daughter, now… perhaps an alliance?’

Zeinab spared no more than a moment’s attention to her father’s musings. She twisted the end of her braid in her fingers, waiting for the opening to ask the questions that really piqued her curiosity: Were the commandants handsome? Were there any French ladies in sight? What did they look like? Was it true they walked about unveiled and bare-bosomed?

Nicolas Conté stopped in his tracks momentarily to listen to a street urchin singing his wares. The boy’s soprano reminded him so much of his son Pierrot’s pure soprano when he still sang in the choir that he was cut to the quick with a pang of longing for his son, for the sweet chant of choir boys, in this city where the only choir he heard was that of the muezzins chanting the call to prayers from dawn to dusk.

The urchin’s cry died away in the Cairo air and in two long strides Conté caught up with his companions in the dusty alley. He was brimming with impatience to discover Cairo, finally. Ambassador Magallon had offered to guide him and St-Hilaire to their new accommodations, the mansion commandeered for the Scientific Commission.

‘The mansion you will be occupying is in the Nasiriya district – the name means victory in Arabic – to the south-west of town,’ Ambassador Magallon was saying. ‘You will be taking the house of Hassan Kashif, and the adjoining beys’ palaces and their gardens. An excellent location, I should say, but for the disadvantage of being so far from the Ezbekiah where the generals have made Elfi Bey’s palace their headquarters.’

‘Ah! One wonders if this is entirely by chance?’ Geoffroy raised an eyebrow. ‘I heard General Bonaparte say once that scientists were much like women for gossip and rivalries and squabbling. A fine opinion our general holds of us!’

But Nicolas was absorbed in the street theatre around him. His senses were disoriented by the assault of the unfamiliar, and his eyes needed an interpreter as much as his ears. His first impression of Cairo was overwhelming. The city seemed immense, sprawling and bewildering, a maze of narrow streets and blind alleys; the houses in general – apart from the palaces and mansions of the amirs and notables – turning blind facades and cold shoulders to the street. Most were one or two storeys high, with the exception of the houses in the market, which were narrow and rose two or three storeys above the shops on the ground floor.

Nicolas had never encountered as cacophonous and mixed a city, a veritable Tower of Babel spoken on the street; the people a mixture of races and religions from all over the Ottoman empire and Europe: Turks, Circassians, Egyptians, Bedouin, Moroccans, Italians, Muslim, Copt, Greek Orthodox, Syrian Catholic, Jewish. The men seemed generally well-made and fine-figured, with skin so tanned by the sun as to resemble leather. Women were rare, and veiled in robes from head to foot.

‘There are several of these large covered markets around the city – wikalas, as they are called,’ Magallon explained. ‘Each specializes in a particular kind of trade: dates, fabric, camels, slaves … and they have done so for centuries. Sitt Nafisa’s wikala at Bab Zuweila, for instance, specializes in coffee and spices, since that is where the caravans from Arabia unload their wares.’

‘Ah! Speaking of Sitt Nafisa, Citoyen,’ Nicolas interjected. ‘I had promised my wife to report to her at the earliest opportunity on the interior of the harem, as she is most curious to know how Muslim ladies entertain chez elles. I understand Madame Magallon was one of this lady’s intimates?’

‘It is not a simple matter to arrange an invitation to the harem,’ Magallon demurred. ‘The Oriental idea of home and privacy is very different to ours.’

‘Indeed! Look around you – the houses and doors we pass remain resolutely closed in our faces,’ Geoffroy St-Hilaire gestured broadly to both sides of the street.

‘Apparently we have been preceded by the reputation of our troops for zeal in making the acquaintance of the fairer sex,’ Nicolas suggested dryly. ‘But our exemplary behaviour here will soon dispel suspicion and open hearts and hearths to us, I am persuaded.’

At that moment a fleeting motion above made him look up and he caught a glimpse, through a crack in the wooden lattice of a small balcony, of a young girl’s enormous dark eyes avid with curiosity in a round, pale face. When her eyes met his she withdrew behind the shutters like a squirrel up a tree. For some reason, Nicolas made no mention of this unique sighting to his companions.

As they headed away from the souk and along another canal, Geoffroy looked around him in despair. ‘But this city is bewildering! I will never learn my way around here!’

‘To get your bearings,’ Magallon suggested, ‘it helps to think of the Nile running on a south to north axis, with the city on the eastern bank, and Giza and the pyramids to the west. One point of reference you can see from anywhere in the city is the Citadel up on the Mokkattam hills.’ He pointed to a vast walled complex built around an ancient fort overlooking the city from the east. ‘The fort dates back to Sultan Yussef Salah al-Din, the Saladdin of the crusades. That is where our garrison is now housed.’

‘These streets are too narrow for a carriage, let alone our heavy cannon,’ Nicolas observed as they headed down another narrow, winding alley.

‘They weren’t designed for them. In fact, in some cases two persons on horseback cannot meet and pass each other without some difficulty. It used to be, when one of inferior rank became aware of a Bey or powerful figure approaching, he was obliged, out of respect and regard for his personal safety both, to take shelter in some cross lane or doorway, till the other with his numerous attendants had passed. Before our invasion, no Christian or European traveller was permitted, except by special favour, to mount horses in Cairo – only asses.’

With his military engineer’s eye, Nicolas could not help noticing other impediments to the proper circulation of troops: within the city walls, each quarter, indeed each lane and alley, seemed to have fortified gates at the entrance that were locked at night – Magallon estimated their number at seventy. Decorative as some of these gates were, their presence, along with the absence of streetlights, would hinder the circulation of French troops after nightfall, and would complicate quelling any uprising by the citizenry, should one occur. For the moment, though, the glances in their direction seemed more curious than hostile.

In another half-hour they reached the Nasiriya. ‘Aha! The Faubourg Saint-Victor! Finally!’ Geoffroy exulted. Magallon led them into a spacious mansion.

‘This is the palace of Hassan Kashif. I present to you the new location of the Institute of Egypt!’

Nicolas and Geoffroy looked around the mansion with its high ceilings, its graceful colonnaded arches and its intricate decorative woodwork. Geoffroy declared it superior to the finest academic institution in France.

‘The main salon will serve as your assembly hall –’ Magallon gestured around the arcaded hall. ‘I must tell you that it served quite a different purpose originally, as the salon for the ladies of the harem.’

‘A titillating detail that, alas, will not suffice to lend piquancy to the predictably tedious deliberations of our august commission!’ Geoffroy lamented.

Nicolas was more interested in the house next door, also formerly owned by said Hassan Kashif, that was allocated to him for his balloonist brigade and their workshops. Here he would recreate the École nationale aérostatique de Meudon! His heart rose in his chest with the thrill of anticipation. He and his confreres would form a true elysium of savants here in the Nasiriya. The secretary of the Institute, Fourier, was lodged in the house of Sennari, Murad Bey’s Sudanese Mamluke. Nearby would be the naturalists St-Hilaire and Savigny, the architects Balzac and Lepère; the geographers, the pharmacists, the mineralogists; and the painters Rigo and Redouté. Nicolas had already designated the perfect spot for their informal gathering place of an evening: the large garden of an adjoining house, that of Qassim Bey, with its gigantic sycamore tree and fragrant acacias.

His reverie was interrupted by the appearance of Dr Desgenettes.

‘Ah, Docteur, welcome! Have you been to inspect the quarters you were allocated for the hospital?’

‘I have indeed, on the Elephant Lake. I am also to set up another hospital in the Citadel. We have just been touring the premises with General Bonaparte. You will never guess what our general is writing urgently to request from the Directoire.’

‘What could that be?’

‘Prostitutes.’

‘Did you say prostitutes?’

‘Precisely. Bonaparte is writing urgently to Paris to request that the Directoire ship out at least a hundred prostitutes on the next available ship. The shortage of women is beginning to pose a serious problem to the health and morale of our troops. After all, with thousands of Frenchmen here, and only a couple of hundred women – and those not even filles publiques but wives – where are our men to seek le repos du guerrier? And in this one crucial instance we cannot hope to live on the land, as the general has warned most sternly against offending local sensibilities, and Muslims are most punctilious in these matters.’

‘Surely there must be local filles de joie?’

‘Few, and those are joyless indeed, with figures flabby from childbearing. And as for hygiene …’ He shrugged. ‘No, it is a serious problem, and Bonaparte has written to the Directoire demanding a hundred prostitutes immediately; we shall see what comes of it.’

Through the open window a chant rose like a plume of smoke, and was echoed from first one, then a dozen minarets around the city, till the sultry sunset air swelled with the chants of the muezzins and the twittering of the birds going to roost in the trees. Nicolas stood before the window, enchanted by the purity and light of the achingly graceful minarets soaring into the hazy mauve sky.

‘Ah, Docteur, if monuments are windows into the soul of a civilization, then these Mamlukes, whatever they are today, must once have been a race that valued beauty and balance above all.’

Zeinab stared out of the mashrabiyya window at two French soldiers in the street below, fascinated by the long, floppy brown hair that hung to their shoulders and the skin-tight white breeches that moulded their legs and outlined their crotches and loins; she had never seen men walking about looking naked before. But what the soldiers were doing worried her. They were tearing down and breaking up the great wood and leather gates that protected the neighbourhood at night, and loading the dismantled doors on carts.

‘My teacher, is it true what Dada says? That the reason the French are tearing down the gates to the neighbourhoods all around the city is so they can murder us all while the men are at Friday prayers?’

‘Your wet-nurse repeats whatever rumours she picks up in the marketplace. No, the French are tearing down the gates so that their carriages and troops can enter the neighbourhoods unhindered in case of an uprising against them. They decree that the streets are not wide enough for the passage of their troops and particularly for their general’s carriage – which requires six horses to draw it – so they intend to demolish anything that extrudes into the street in front of the houses, including the small steps and benches that shopkeepers sit on.’

‘Even the earthenware jars for thirsty passers-by?’

‘Even those must go, no matter what hospitality dictates.’ Shaykh Jabarti shook his head. ‘They do not understand our ways. They tear down the gates, and then they force each householder to keep a lantern lit before his door all night, and fine him if it goes out or if some lout deliberately extinguishes it, as if people had nothing better to do than stay awake all night making sure that their lamps do not go out. Nothing will come of this but ill-feeling.’

It was true, thought Zeinab, a sullen silence reigned in the city. The shops closed early, people kept to their homes. Festivities went uncelebrated, by tacit consent. The heads of the guilds, who would normally be vying at this time to put on the showiest parade for the upcoming festival of the Nile flood – particularly as it coincided this year with the birthday of the Prophet – would have nothing to do with it, in protest at the occupation. And the French would be none the wiser.

FOUR

Aboukir

‘The enemy is before you and the sea is behind you. You will fight or die. There is no retreat.’

Tariq bin Ziyad, Moorish Conqueror of Spain.

Nicolas Conté looked up from his code book and blinked at the brilliant sky above him. From the ramparts of the white medieval Mamluke fort the bay of Alexandria stretched out before him, reverberating in the blue glare. The sun had begun to set, streaking the sky glorious mauve and orange, and a sweet breeze blew across the bay. Nicolas was glad his mission – to build the optical telegraph that was to relay messages between the city and the fleet – had brought him to the seashore, away from the stifling heat of Cairo in August. His engineers were supervising the building of the wooden rods, painted black, to be mounted as the arms of the semaphore, and training operators to set them at the proper angles to represent 196 symbols. Nicolas himself was concentrating on combining symbols to yield words and phrases; he had already devised two thousand out of a possible eight thousand plus – when a watchman cried the alarm and he looked out to sea. With the sun low in the sky, they saw a fleet of ships over the horizon, black sails deployed to the fullest, and to a man they leapt to their feet, hoping against hope that it was reinforcements from Spain.

But it was Nelson; this time he would not miss the French fleet trapped in Aboukir Bay to the east of the city. A cry of frustration escaped Nicolas: the semaphore would at least have allowed him to warn Admiral Brueys and the other captains on the ships, but the system was not yet up and running. As Nicolas watched in helpless agony from the top of the fort, and the entire city and garrison watched from rooftops and terraces, the English fleet opened fire with fourteen hundred cannons at once. The blare was indescribable, the superiority of English firepower stunning. As the sun set, the flagship of the French fleet, L’Orient, exploded when its gunpowder magazines caught fire. Nicolas knew the terrible sight would be seared in his brain for as long as he lived.

As nightfall turned the bay into a lake of fire, the guns fell mercifully silent. But there was no time to waste; he knew he had to prepare for the eventuality of an attack on the city itself. He set his engineers to work outfitting ovens with reflectors to heat cannonballs and improvising a floating fire pump. All night they laboured at their hellish tasks, dripping sweat, until with the dawn the English resumed firing, to complete the devastation they had started the night before. The pitiable sights that daylight disclosed were unspeakable: the thousands of dead, drowned or burned alive.

Finally the English ships withdrew. The city had been spared; apparently Nelson had decided that the Army of the Orient was no threat to him at the moment, trapped as it was in Egypt.

Two weeks later Nicolas stood in the great hall of Elfi’s palace in Cairo listening to the commandant addressing the assembled commanders. Bonaparte had just returned from a skirmish with Ibrahim Bey in Gaza, and learned the terrible news of Aboukir for the first time. He took the blow with a sang-froid that impressed Nicolas.

‘We are called upon to do great things, and we shall do them,’ Bonaparte reiterated simply at the conclusion of his speech. ‘Destiny has called upon us to build an empire, and we shall build it.’

As Nicolas turned to leave, Bonaparte called out to him. ‘Citoyen Conté! A moment. Come, take a turn with me in the garden.’

As they strolled in the welcome shade of the gazebo, Bonaparte laid a hand on Nicolas’ shoulder. ‘I need you for a matter of considerable urgency and some delicacy.’

‘At your service, Commandant.’

‘How soon can you put on a balloon demonstration?’

Nicolas could not hide his astonishment.

‘We must impress the populace,’ Bonaparte explained. ‘We must put on a very grand show, something to take their breath away, to inspire them with admiration and dread in equal measure, and impress on them indelibly the superiority of French military science. We must try to keep the sinking of the fleet a secret from Cairo for as long as possible, but we cannot hope to do so indefinitely, and when the news comes out we must have something spectacular to divert attention. I feel the mood in the city turning sullen and dangerous, and we must reverse that. Besides, a grand celebration will combat despondency in our own troops; we must guard against that, I have seen disquieting signs of it from the beginning of this campaign. So, I am counting on you and your balloonists! It is a very important mission I am confiding in you. How soon can you be ready?’

‘We have not yet unpacked our matériel, or ascertained its condition; some of it has been lost or destroyed. Our priority has been to complete the semaphore and extend it from Alexandria to our garrisons in the Delta – and eventually to Cairo. Surely that should be the first order of business? The news of Aboukir took two weeks to reach you, Commandant, because couriers sent overland are routinely assassinated.’

‘I know, my dear Conté,’ Bonaparte insisted, clapping Nicolas on the shoulder. ‘But make the balloon your first priority nonetheless. Believe me, it is more important. One hundred days – remember, a campaign is won or lost in the first hundred days. And we must win these people’s hearts and spirits. Now that we have lost the fleet, this is one battle we cannot afford to lose. You understand me? How soon can you set up a demonstration?’

‘I cannot guarantee success for several weeks – even months. My equipment for producing hydrogen has been lost with the sinking of the fleet, and the alternative – to try to fly a Montgolfière – is far less reliable. I would be very reluctant to essay a hot-air balloon publicly.’

‘No matter, fly a Montgolfière then, my dear Conté; it will do very well to impress the Cairenes and raise the morale of our troops. Much is riding on this. I will have it announced for the Prophet’s birthday, whenever that is. I have heard, through my spies, that it is normally a very festive occasion, but the citizens of Cairo are not celebrating it this year, in silent protest at our presence. I will command that it be celebrated with all due pomp, whether they like it or not. And to make sure to bring out the crowds for that occasion, I will announce that there will be a great exhibition of a flying ship such as they have never seen. A ship that can transport the French army across the sky and from which they can attack their enemies! That will go far to stamp out the regrettable impression left by the destruction of our fleet.’

With that, Bonaparte turned and strode back to the palace, leaving Nicolas with one thought: to ascertain the extent of the deadline he had been given. He tracked down Magallon in the courtyard.

‘The date of the Prophet’s birthday?’ Magallon looked puzzled. ‘Well, it changes from year to year – the Muslims follow a lunar calendar, you know. But at any rate it must be this month. Why?’

Nicolas groaned; that very month! He was not ready, but as Bonaparte would have already put the word about, there was no help for it. His commandant seemed not to have considered the consequences of a fiasco, he thought grimly; but then it would be Nicolas who would bear the brunt of a disaster. He could not allow the balloon demonstration to be a failure.

‘What manner of woman is it?’

‘I do not know, mistress. She is cloaked from head to toe, and insists on speaking to you herself; she will not uncover her face or so much as her eyes. She will not disclose her business and I do not trust her. There is something threatening about her manner. Should I try to dismiss her?’ said Barquq, the head eunuch, looking flustered.

Nafisa hesitated. The fact that the eunuch had not yet dismissed the stranger meant that he had been intimidated or his palm had been greased, and that indicated that the woman was not here for charity. Her curiosity was piqued. ‘Send her to me.’

She sat back down on the window seat and let her maid continue to brush her hair. Her eyes were drawn to the corner of the room where the French clock had once taken pride of place; it was empty now.

The eunuch reappeared with a black-cloaked figure close on his heels. The woman was unusually tall, and her coarse style of dress, her bearing, and what could be surmised from her build and the size of her feet under the long robes, suggested that this was not a lady, and probably not a woman from the city at all. The silver coins sewn on to her veil, and the style of the veil itself – opaque, black, and covering the entire face – was characteristic of the Bedouin of the eastern desert, except that Bedouin women tended to be small and thin. Nafisa had never seen a woman of this build, apart from the rare African tribeswomen from the upper reaches of the Nile. The woman inclined her head and stood by the stairs, silent.

‘Come, mother,’ Nafisa beckoned with some impatience, ‘you are among women now and may unveil. What is your business?’

The woman bowed again and made a gesture in the direction of the maids and the eunuch, indicating that she wished to speak with Nafisa alone.

‘Now really, you go too far,’ Nafisa sighed. She flicked her fingers, dismissing her attendants. ‘All right, then, but be brief, I have little time.’

The woman took a step forward, and whispered in a strange, high voice: ‘What I have to say is for your ears alone. I bring you news from your husband.’

‘You?’ Nafisa snorted. ‘Who are you?’

‘I will tell you, by and by. Have the French approached you with terms for Murad Bey?’ The high voice cracked, like a falsetto.

Nafisa stiffened and ice water ran in her veins. ‘You will tell me who you are, this minute, or I will call out, and you know my eunuchs are behind the door.’

The woman raised her hand, palm up, in a gesture to stop her, then approached. ‘I will uncover, but pray do not cry out. I mean you no harm.’ It was no longer the high falsetto voice. The veil and shawl were cast off to reveal a blond beard flecked with grey and hard blue eyes in a sunburned face.

Nafisa’s shock and alarm gave way to astonishment as she recognized the man before her. ‘Elfi Bey?’

‘Hush.’ He looked over his shoulder in the direction of the door. ‘Forgive my intruding on you this way. If the Franj capture me within the city walls they will kill me outright. This disguise was the only way to go unrecognized.’ He seemed more amused than mortified by his ignominious appearance. ‘There are only too many people on the street who would have turned me in for the price on my head.’

He turned away discreetly as Nafisa snatched a Damascus silk shawl off the window seat and wound it around her head and shoulders.

‘It is good to see that you are alive and well, Elfi Bey,’ she said, regaining something of her composure. ‘The rumours have been flying around the city that you have taken refuge with the Bedouin, that you have been seen in the western desert, but also that you raid the French convoys in the east, and then again that you were seen in the north near the Syrian border with Ibrahim Bey. Some reports even had you sighted on foot, with a lion on a leash. One cannot know what to credit and what to dismiss.’

‘It is all true – even the lion. I have been moving around constantly, never spending two nights in one place. But I have established rear camps with the Abaddi in the eastern desert, and another in Kharja oasis in the Libyan desert.’

‘The Bedouin? Surely they are not to be trusted?’

‘We shall see. They have their own sense of honour; when they give a stranger safe conduct, the whole tribe, every man, woman and child – will stand behind their pledge to the death. But no outsider can trust them completely.’

‘And Murad? What news of him?’

‘Murad Bey is headed south, and keeps just a step ahead of the Franj.’

‘Magallon came to see me yesterday – with Rossetti. All smiles and compliments, as if nothing had changed.’ Rossetti, the ex-consul and long a resident of the Venetian quarter of Cairo, had been a confidant of her husband’s and had frequented the house almost as often as Magallon. Before the two men left, she had made a point of handing – with a smile and a regal inclination of her head – the French clock to Magallon as part of the ransom she had been asked to pay. The pained look on his face had been the one fleeting moment of satisfaction she had derived from that humiliating meeting.

‘Rossetti said they were authorized to offer Murad the province of Girgeh up to the first cataract in return for acknowledgement of the suzerainty of the Franj and paying them tax on the land. And he is to keep no more than five hundred cavalry. In other words, he would be a tax farmer under the Franj. I replied that I would have to hear from my husband first.’

‘They would have not heard the news from Alexandria yet. Bonaparte himself has not heard the news, he is in the north chasing Ibrahim Bey.’

‘What news is it you speak of?’

He stopped suddenly and drew the veil across his face, holding up a finger.

She heard her eunuch outside the door. ‘Mistress, you called for me?’

‘No, not yet. I will call you in a few minutes.’

‘I must hurry.’ Elfi lowered the veil. ‘The French fleet was destroyed last night in the bay of Alexandria; without it they are trapped in Egypt. I was with Ibrahim Bey near the Syrian border and we were able to hold off Bonaparte’s cavalry – on horseback they are no match for Mamlukes, so they must rely on their great advantage in infantry and artillery, and that slows them down. Ibrahim Bey was able to escape to Syria with all the booty from the Mecca caravan. He will make for Istanbul and plead with the Sultan for reinforcements. The English are allies of the Porte and if he asks them to come to his aid that will be a sufficient excuse for them to intervene. This is not the time for Murad Bey to accept terms of surrender. That is what I came to warn you. Hold them off any way you can. Make a counter-offer on behalf of Murad Bey, offer monies in exchange for evacuation … I must go now.’

‘But why put yourself in danger by coming here in person? Why did you not send an emissary?’

‘I could have taken that risk on my account, but not on yours. There was no one I could trust not to betray you if he was caught.’

He covered his face and head completely and there stood before Nafisa the veiled Bedouin woman. ‘May I see your face in good health, Sitt Nafisa.’

FIVE

The Banquet

‘A universal man, with the passion, the knowledge and the genius for the arts, precious in a far away country, capable of turning his hand to anything, of creating the arts of France in the desert of Arabia.’

Napoleon Bonaparte on Nicolas-Jacques Conté

Zeinab took the tiniest lick off the arm of her doll, and the sweetness of the spun sugar titillated her tongue. This would be the last year she would be given a sugar-paste doll for the mulid of the Prophet, she thought with equal regret and satisfaction: after all, as she had grumbled to her mother, she was a girl of marriageable age now, no longer a child. But she had secretly rejoiced in the particularly gorgeous doll with the bold black eyes painted on the almond-paste face, and the pleated, pink tissue skirt fanned out around her.

Only a few days ago it had seemed as though there would be no mulid dolls this year, and no sugar-paste horse for her younger brother, either. No one was in the mood to celebrate with the Franj occupying Cairo, and so many families in the city mourning their dead. But then the Franj had decreed that the mulid would be celebrated as usual, as would the ceremony of the Nile flood; fines would be levied on merchants who did not keep their shops open and festoon them with garlands, and on any guilds that did not organize a parade.

But it was not thoughts of the parades or the musicians, the dervishes or the dancers that excited Zeinab to the point of sleeplessness: it was the prospect of witnessing the Franj’s flying ship. They had posted signs all over town announcing that after the annual ceremony of the Nile flood, and after the mulid parade, they would demonstrate a special flying ship that could fly over the houses and the trees and the city walls and, who knew, perhaps over the Red Sea itself; a flying ship in which people could ride over the clouds like the magic carpets in the stories of the Thousand and One Nights. The French claimed they had used these flying ships in battle to spy on their enemies and defeat them. The soldiers had distributed posters printed on their Arabic press announcing that this great French invention would take off from Ezbekiah Square that Friday.

Zeinab’s excitement had been roused to fever pitch by the sight of preparations on the Ezbekiah esplanade not far from her house, where for several days the French engineers had been seen building a platform and setting up their equipment. She had begged to be allowed to attend the great spectacle, and her father had promised, but she fretted that he might forget all about it or change his mind.

All morning Zeinab looked out of her mashrabiyya window at the mulid procession passing in the street below: the drummers and the shrill pipers, the dancing women swaying their hips, the tumblers, the shrieking monkeys and chained bears, the serpent handlers, the puppeteers with their vulgar cries, the singers and the female poetesses. The street sellers hawked their wares: tamarind, carob and liquorice juice, roasted peanuts and ruby-red watermelon, date-and-nut-filled pancakes. Then the guilds, each in turn, parading with their banners: scissors for the tailors; a net for the fishmongers; bracelets for the jewellers; a gun for the barudis, the gunpowder manufacturers. The Sufi orders followed, preceded by the dervishes whirling their capes in rhythm with the chanting and drumming. The float in the shape of Noah’s Ark came next, heralded by a resounding fanfare.

Zeinab could hardly bear to wait for word from her father. Shaykh Bakri himself had gone ahead earlier in the morning with other notables accompanying the commandant of the French to the Nilometer for the annual ceremony of the breaching of the dam. An hour or so later the floodwaters of the Nile had come rushing through the khalig canal, and the firing of cannon and the shouts of rejoicing had carried all the way to the Ezbekiah. By now, Zeinab calculated, there would have been ample time for the commandant and his party to ride back for the demonstration of the great flying machine.

Dada burst into the room, holding Zeinab’s younger brother by the hand.

‘Yallah, Sitt Zeinab, Shaykh Bakri sent for us. Let us hurry or we will miss the flying of the airship!’

Zeinab jumped up and let her wet-nurse dress her, for the first time, in a long black cloak and a small, transparent white yashmak veiling the lower part of her face. She felt very grown up.

They hurried down to the Ezbekiah esplanade, where the sun had crossed its zenith. A bevy of Frenchmen with their shirtsleeves rolled up were hurrying up and down the steps leading to the great wooden platform. Tall masts had been set up at each of the four corners of the platform, and an enormous sail was stretched out between them. It looked like no other sail Zeinab had ever seen: the fabric was of silk in the dark blue, white and red that everyone had come to associate with the French, and it was encircled by a design featuring a golden crown and an eagle. The ends of the gigantic sail were being drawn in and attached with cords to a large basket that sat in the middle of the platform.

Zeinab never took her eyes off the head engineer who was clearly in charge: a dark, curly-haired man with an eye patch who gave orders right and left and occasionally stood back to mop his brow with the scarf tied round his neck. In the manner of the French, he was clean-shaven and bareheaded, and did not disdain to put his own hands to the task in his impatience. From time to time he sat down and brought out a leather-bound stack of papers and began sketching rapidly.

Her curiosity to see inside the mysterious cane basket at the centre of this bustle was like an unbearable itch. She grabbed her brother’s hand and edged as close as she could, despite her nurse’s remonstrations. Then she saw Shaykh Jabarti, completely engrossed, standing very close to the platform, and that encouraged her to advance till she could speak to him.

‘My esteemed teacher, what is in that basket?’

Shaykh Jabarti turned and looked down at her in astonishment, then recognized her through the transparent yashmak.

‘Ah, so they dress you as a woman now, do they, little monkey,’ he grumbled. ‘Well, perhaps we can obtain permission for you to see.’

Shaykh Jabarti spoke to one of the translators, who spoke to the chief engineer; he nodded, in a harried manner, hardly glancing at them.

With Shaykh Jabarti leading the way, Zeinab and her brother climbed the stairs to the platform and approached the basket. Close up, it was sturdier and larger than it looked, easily accommodating two or three standing men, and high enough to reach the armpit of a man, so what the French had claimed about sending soldiers up in the air could be true. But would there be air to breathe that high?

She could not see all the way inside the basket, but there seemed to be some sort of large lamp or stove with a wick, and straw and other stuff around it. Presently the chief engineer gave the order and fire was set to the wick in the lamp. The crowd exhaled in alarm as the flames shot up, and then went speechless in awe as the sail began to fill up like a balloon, the cords tying it down to the masts taking the strain.

A fanfare announced the arrival of the procession of the commandant and the accompanying notables, and Shaykh Jabarti signalled to Zeinab that it was time to get off the platform and to return to her nurse, who was standing further back.

The great assembly of the French arrived, officers and gentlemen and the laughing ladies in their finery. She had never seen women like them, with their bosom-baring wisps of gowns, and their cascades of curls under high-brimmed, feathered bonnets. Zeinab absorbed every novel detail of their attire: gloves and fans, reticules and parasols, down to the embroidery on the hem of a shawl and the lace trim of a bonnet. One lady in particular stood out with her fluty laugh and her hair of spun gold; the feathers and ribbons on her bonnet, her gloves and slippers were all dyed a shade of delicate mauve that offset the palest pink of her gown. The commandant of the French noticed her and stopped to speak to her for a few minutes, and she tossed her head and laughed till he moved on.

Zeinab watched the commandant approach the platform and greet the chief engineer and his helpers. They seemed to be having an argument, the man with the eye patch shaking his head repeatedly and mopping his brow, the general making encouraging gestures and waving to the assembled crowd.

By now the balloon had formed an egg-like globe, tapering down to the basket, and straining alarmingly against the cords whenever a breeze blew, like a marid struggling against his chains. A cannon was fired to announce the launch, and everyone held his breath. Zeinab was disappointed that no Frenchmen would be climbing into the basket after all. Then the chief engineer gave the sign, the cords holding it down on all four sides were cut simultaneously, and the great sphere rose in the air, greeted by a deafening cheer from the crowd. Zeinab held her breath, her eyes fixed on the airship rising in the sky, lurching slightly as it caught in a breeze.

The French clapped and called ‘Bravo!’ The Egyptians gasped and exclaimed ‘God is great!’ The flying ship rose still higher, leaning in the lazy wind, then seemed to stall as the wind died down. For a few minutes nothing happened; the great sphere hung in the air. The spectators began to fidget, while the French officers continued to nod and smile, encouraging the crowd to wait and see.

Then suddenly the basket detached itself from the sphere and came crashing down in flames. The crowd shouted in alarm and dispersed as the great balloon deflated and came floating down, scattering a quantity of printed leaflets.

Zeinab’s eyes went to the chief engineer, who was standing with his hands on his hips, shaking his head, circles of perspiration staining his shirt at the armpits. His frustration was unmistakable even at that distance, and for some reason she felt a pang of sympathy for that total stranger.

‘Come,’ she heard Shaykh Jabarti say, ‘this was no flying machine for transporting soldiers great distances. This was no more than a very large kite of the sort knaves at street fairs fly to entertain children.’

Then her maid was calling her and her brother. ‘Sitt Zeinab, come quickly, we must return to the house. Shaykh Bakri has invited the commandant of the Franj and his generals to a banquet tonight. And he has ordered that you make yourself ready should he require you to make an appearance.’

‘Me? I am to be called into their presence? Why?’

‘He must have a purpose in this, and it is not our place to question it. Now hurry!’

Nicolas headed on foot for the Ezbekiah, where he had been invited to attend the banquet given by Shaykh Bakri in honour of the commandant; the generals and the heads of the Scientific Commission were also invited. He was walking in the company of Geoffroy St-Hilaire, Dr Desgenettes and Ambassador Magallon, colleagues whose company he appreciated under ordinary circumstances, but on this occasion he was lost in his own gloomy thoughts, chewing over the disappointing outcome of the Montgolfière demonstration. He had worked like a conscript for the past two weeks – ever since Bonaparte had given him the order – and he had worked his loyal workshop heads nearly as hard, to get the balloon ready for the appointed date, the fateful festival of the Prophet. His heart had risen as the handsome new aérostat had inflated before his eyes, an imposing balloon thirteen metres in diameter, decorated with the inscription The Battle of Rivoli, and ringed with a civic crown and laurel wreaths. Ah, but would it fly and would it be stable?

He had not hidden his misgivings when the commandant and the generals returned from the ceremony of the Nile flood; he had told them flatly that he could not vouch for the performance of the hot-air balloon.

‘Could we not send up a soldier or two in the basket?’ Bonaparte had inquired. ‘There will be no lack of volunteers, I am sure of it.’

‘I refuse to risk the life and limb of any man.’

‘My dear Conté! At least let us send up a sheep or other animal, as the Montgolfier brothers did with their first experiments?’

Thank God he had stuck to his guns, Nicolas thought now as he was ushered into the double gates of the Moorish-style house where they had been invited; the much-vaunted airship had come undone and descended ignominiously, much to the alarm of tout Caire, all assembled for the spectacle, agog and agape. No one could claim he had not warned Bonaparte, but he expected his reception by the commandant to be rather chilly all the same.

So he was considerably surprised, after he and his party had been greeted in the outer courtyards by a gauntlet of servant boys proffering rose-water, and then had penetrated into an inner courtyard where most of the guests were already assembled, to be hailed from a distance by an unexpectedly good-humoured Bonaparte.

‘Conté! Come join us!’ Bonaparte beckoned him over to the head table, where he sat with his host, the chief generals and two other clerics. ‘This is the man of the hour, Shaykh Bakri. Let me introduce you to our chief engineer. Citoyen Conté, this is our host.’ A pale, lean-faced man, black of beard and brow, inclined his head and brought a well-tended hand to the front of his crimson kaftan in a gesture of welcome. Nicolas was struck by the sardonic eyes under the black turban.

‘And these are Shaykh Sharkawi, the head of the diwan; Shaykh Jabarti, the eminent historian; and the judge,’ Bonaparte continued, presenting the other three clerics at table. ‘Sit down, Citoyen.’

Nicolas took a seat between General Menou and Ambassador Magallon. He looked around the banquet hall: the hundred or so guests were seated on low benches lined with carpet cushions, and enormous brass trays were brought in and set up on tripods to serve as low tables for each group of ten or twelve guests. Serving boys came around with pitchers of rose-water and basins in which the guests rinsed their hands.

Bonaparte attempted some badinage with his hosts through the translator, Venture du Paradis, but it was heavy going; the Egyptian clerics sat sober as judges under their enormous Kashmir turbans. That, and the absence of wine, made for a decided lack of ambience. Ambassador Magallon, noting Nicolas’ discomfiture, whispered: ‘This Ottoman gravity is so antithetical to our French gaiety, is it not, Citoyen? But it is the rule on formal occasions, I am afraid.’

Meanwhile a procession of servants laid the large brass trays with plates of salad vegetables and flat rounds of bread. Before the guests could do more than contemplate sampling these aperitifs, they were pre-empted by the rapid succession of courses brought in by the servers and laid before them: meats in unfamiliar sauces, vegetables, pastries, creams, all generously seasoned with a variety of exotic spices. Conversation was abandoned altogether in the attempt to do justice to this bewildering and disorganized abundance. Some of the Egyptian convives dispensed with cutlery, using pieces of bread to scoop up mouthfuls of the various dishes; others, like Shaykh Bakri, attempted to wield spoon and knife in the European manner, no doubt in honour of their guests.

In the pause that followed, as the guests leaned back against the pillows, Bonaparte attempted to engage the notable clerics at table on the marvels of science – somewhat inopportunely, Nicolas felt, given the miracle-manqué of that morning – and exhorted them to revive the study of the sciences as their ancestors had done in the days of the Caliphs.

Shaykh Sharkawi, the head of the diwan, replied – through Venture du Paradis – that the Koran encompassed all knowledge.

‘Ah, but does the Koran teach you to cast a cannon?’ Bonaparte retorted.

He looked disconcerted by the solemn nods in the affirmative from the shaykh and his confreres. But Nicolas was not at all sure that they were all as gullible as they would appear. Bakri gave the impression of a sharp and worldly man under his pious airs. As for Jabarti, Nicolas had seen his dour face nearly every day at the Institute, peering with ill-concealed avidity at French instruments and poring over the Arabic translations in the library for hours on end. During the preparations for the aérostat exhibition he had been a constant presence, even if he deigned to ask few questions.

‘You know so much about Islam and Muslims, Commandant,’ Shaykh Bakri remarked, through the translator. ‘You should become a Muslim.’

Bonaparte seemed to take this in good spirit. ‘My dear Bakri, were you to issue a fatwa dispensing me from circumcision, and allowing me to indulge in alcohol and pork, I would consider it!’

Nicolas shifted in his uncomfortable position on the low bench; he was developing a cramp in his left leg, and hoped the banquet was drawing to a close. But the pièce de resistance was still to come. To each table was brought, on an enormous platter carried by two servers, a whole spit-roast lamb on a mound of rice with nuts and raisins. Then each lamb was carved open to reveal, stuffed inside it, a whole goose, and that in turn was stuffed with a duck, and the duck was stuffed with a whole chicken, and the chicken was stuffed with pigeons, all cooked together. By then Nicolas, and he suspected the other French guests as well, had lost all appetite, but out of politesse they applauded this culinary tour de force extravagantly.

The barely touched stuffed lamb was no sooner removed from the table than a succession of sweet pastries was proffered, and that was followed by another ritual of finger rinsing. Throughout, only water had been offered to drink. Nicolas found the local water, drawn from some three hundred public fountains around the city, to be quite acceptable. Finally the excellent Yemeni coffee was served, strong and thick as syrup, along with the long water pipes that were ubiquitous in the country. Nicolas noticed that the Egyptians seemed to take little delight in the pleasures of the table but were addicted to their coffee and tobacco.

Nicolas shifted again in his seat and rubbed his cramped left leg discreetly; Magallon, noticing his discomfort, invited him to take a stroll on the terrace to admire the view over the shallow lake. By now the Nile water that had been released with the breaching of the dam in the morning had come rushing through the khalig, the main canal, and was beginning to fill the Ezbekiah esplanade.

‘A pretty sight, is it not,’ the Consul smiled.

‘Rather like Venice,’ Nicolas concurred. ‘The Ezbekiah esplanade must be easily three times the size of the Place de la Révolution in Paris, wouldn’t you say?’ He breathed in the scented air and identified the separate fragrances of carob, eucalyptus, sycamore and lemon. A few slender boats with gay paper lanterns languorously crisscrossed the water, steered by gondoliers. ‘It must be a good sign that the locals are in a festive mood.’

‘Ah, but exactly – this scene before you is far more subdued than would typically be the case on such an occasion. There are very few Muslim people of quality among the revellers, other than the members of the diwan who are more or less constrained to be here. And it was the same this morning at the ceremony of the breaching of the Nile dam; mostly Ottoman Greeks, Syrian Christians, Copts. Not many Muslims, other than the street mob. And out here on the Ezbekiah; on a summer night, and a major festival, you would have seen many more boats, lights, music playing, and all the riverains would be out escaping the summer heat in the cool of the evening. Veiled Muslim ladies as well as men.’ Magallon made an expansive gesture that encompassed the view from the terrace as well as the banquet hall behind them. ‘All of this has the feel of a staged play to me.’

At that moment, as if marking the end of the first act of a play, General Bonaparte stood up and raised his hands and every head turned to his table. Bakri stood up as well. Nicolas and Magallon hurried back to their seats while the commandant prepared to speak.

‘As you know,’ he announced, ‘the post of chief syndic of the Prophet’s descendants is unoccupied.’ Given the circumstances under which the late holder of that title had been relieved of his duties, Nicolas was not surprised that Bonaparte made no reference to them. ‘I hereby invest an honourable member of that order, Shaykh Bakri, as the new Naqib Ashraf.’ Bonaparte beamed, kissed Bakri on both cheeks, draped a sable pelisse around his shoulders and bestowed a diamond ring upon him.

The fact that the interpreter did not feel the need to translate was an indication that the news did not come as a surprise to those in attendance; but not knowing the customs of the country better, Nicolas could not gauge the sober nods of the ulema. He did, however, catch a particularly dour, not to say sarcastic, twist of the lips on the face of Jabarti. Bakri seemed gratified and looked as if he had every intention of keeping the sable-trimmed red velvet pelisse on his shoulders, in spite of the stupefying August heat.

Bonaparte then sat down, somewhat anticlimactically, and Shaykh Bakri followed suit, clapping his hands, at which signal half a dozen young women filed into the hall, eyes downcast, carrying lutes and castanets. The French applauded with unfeigned enthusiasm. The Mamlukas, as white female slaves were called, took turns playing the instruments and dancing: a slow, sinuous, suggestive rolling of the hips and belly, although with none of the practised lasciviousness of the almées, the professional dancing girls, whom Nicolas had seen during the parade. Two of the girls who entered the banquet hall balanced four-branched candelabras on their heads as they danced, keeping the posture of their heads and necks absolutely still as their arms and hips swayed and the candles flickered. They were comely enough, Nicolas thought, fair complexioned if somewhat too generous in form, the chief attributes of beauty in the eyes of the Oriental, he had heard.

‘Rather opulent, don’t you think?’ he murmured to Magallon, under cover of the music.

‘Indeed. But you must know that some of our countrymen have developed a taste for these Mamlukas, faute de mieux. Lepère’ – he referred to the Director of Bridges and Pavements – ‘yesterday bought a Caucasian just arrived from Constantinople for three thousand six hundred pounds.’

Nicolas grimaced at the thought of a French Republican – and an engineer, at that! – purchasing a concubine in the slave market. But he had heard that although the troops frequented the filles publiques, officers and civilians of any rank spared themselves that unappetizing and insalubrious recourse and had been known either to buy Mamlukas in the open market or more often procure them during raids on the houses of the Mamlukes. Nicolas found such proceedings distasteful, but at least, he thought, it was some consolation that the women would surely be treated better by a Frenchman than they had been by their former masters.

‘General Dugua,’ Magallon whispered, ‘has taken a Mamluka from Murad Bey’s household, Fatoum by name, a lithesome beauty, apparently. But I will wager our Bonaparte is at no risk of succumbing to the charms of an odalisque. Did you not notice that little encounter that took place under your nose this morning?’

‘This morning I noticed nothing, I confess, but the rips in my balloon and the direction of the wind.’

‘No, of course. But everyone else noted that the general was quite taken with the delicious blonde Pauline Fourès. A milliner’s apprentice from Carcassonne by trade, and the wife of a lieutenant of the 22nd Chasseurs. But since she has a reputation pour avoir la cuisse légère, and we know how urgent our general is in matters of the heart, it would not surprise me if a first assignation had been planned for this very night.’

This casual gossip on the part of a diplomat like Magallon surprised Nicolas, but the ambassador’s indiscretions, regarding matters that were more or less public knowledge, seemed to be the tactic of an astute man seeking to gain the confidence of his interlocutor. Magallon’s comment explained the unexpected good humour of the commandant that evening. It was rather amusing to imagine Bonaparte dying of ennui as he reclined by Bakri’s side, his thoughts on an entirely more pleasant prospect awaiting him in his chamber in Elfi’s palace.

Shaykh Bakri clapped his hands and the dancers filed out. Bonaparte stretched his legs and showed signs of bringing the evening to a close. But then the third act, as Nicolas thought of it, came to a startling conclusion. A last cup was to be served, apparently, at a signal from the host. A young girl of about twelve or thirteen entered, carrying a tray with cups of the honeyed concoction called almond milk, and Shaykh Bakri introduced her as his youngest daughter.

A little chubby in the cheeks and under the chin, in the manner of children, she had enormous liquid eyes, with eyebrows like a bird in flight. She gave off a strong perfume of gardenia, and no doubt had been sprinkled liberally with the essence before being sent before the guests. Intimidating as the occasion must have been for the child, she nevertheless could not resist darting curious glances at the French from under the impossibly long, thick lashes some Egyptians had. Nicolas found himself reminded of one of his own children – not his blonde and languid Madelon, not in the least, but rather irrepressible little Cola with his bold black eyes.

Bonaparte seemed aware of the compliment the shaykh paid him by bringing a member of his family out of the seclusion of the harem to greet him, and showed his pleasure accordingly. ‘What a sweet child! And I am delighted to hear she is receiving an education with Shaykh Jabarti. You are the rare enlightened man among your peers, my good Bakri, and must set a fine example, particularly when it comes to the emancipation of women. I congratulate myself on my choice of Naqib of the Prophet’s House.’

After that the confusion started. Shaykh Bakri said something to Venture du Paradis, the gist of which seemed to be that he would be honoured to have Bonaparte ally himself by marriage to the house of the Prophet, through his daughter Zeinab. He was referring, improbably as it seemed, to the bright-eyed little person who had just served them nectar and had by then returned, Nicolas presumed, to her mother.

There was some consternation among the French at table. Bonaparte protested: ‘I am sensible of the honour, my dear Bakri, very sensible, but I cannot consider it. To begin with, I am married!’

That argument, Nicolas thought, would carry no weight at all with the shaykh, who undoubtedly had more than one wife and any number of concubines, as Bonaparte must know.

‘Besides, your daughter is too young, surely?’ the commandant added.

The rather involved answer was that the girl was of marriageable age, according to her mother, but, if he wished, Bonaparte could contract the alliance now, take her into his household and only consummate the marriage when he felt the time was right, as custom allowed.

Shaykh Bakri’s expectant expression was beginning to take a grim turn, and conversation had died down at the tables all around. Magallon and Venture du Paradis wordlessly communicated their concern to the commandant. Bonaparte immediately grasped the full sensitivity of rejecting an offer of political alliance with his single most reliable collaborator in a hostile city, and, what was more, with the house of the Prophet among a people of a different faith.

‘In that case, my dear Bakri, in that case, why, it would be an honour, of course, to be allied to the house of the Prophet!’

A collective sigh of relief rose from the hall, like a hiss of steam escaping from a kettle. Everyone rose – the French bowed, the Egyptians followed suit. Nicolas headed for the door along with the other guests, attended by a host of serving boys sprinkling them with attar of roses and showering them with petals till they had crossed the courtyard and exited out of the double gates to the street.

‘What a remarkable evening!’ Nicolas exclaimed to Magallon as they erupted into the tepid night air. But no sooner had they taken a few steps towards headquarters than Bonaparte was waylaid by a grim General Dugua.

‘Bad news, Commandant. The Ottoman Sultan has just declared war on France, and declared it the duty of every Muslim to resist what he calls “the sudden and unjust attack” of the French in Egypt.’

Bonaparte took the setback in stride. ‘It was to be expected, sooner or later. We couldn’t maintain the fiction that we were in Egypt with the Grand Seigneur’s blessing for much longer. But we must be prepared to deal with the population on a hostile footing from now on; sedition must be avoided by any means necessary.’

‘It has started already, Commandant.’ Dugua handed Bonaparte a scrolled letter. ‘We have intercepted two couriers with a letter from Ibrahim Bey in Gaza addressed to the ulema – the very shaykhs we have just dined with.’

Bonaparte handed the scroll to Venture du Paradis, who scanned it and translated. ‘This is the gist of it: “Stay calm, take care of yourselves and the people. His Majesty the Sultan in Istanbul has dispatched troops to come to our aid. God willing, they will arrive soon.”’

The commandant nodded. ‘Have the two couriers beheaded, and announce that this is the punishment awaiting anyone who carries letters from the Mamlukes or to them. I mean to have five or six heads cut off in the streets of Cairo every day. So far we have dealt with them gently to counteract the terrifying reputation that preceded us. Today, on the contrary, we must take the proper tone with them to make these people obey; and for them, to obey is to fear.’

As he watched Bonaparte and the generals depart for headquarters, Nicolas could see that events had driven the incident at Shaykh Bakri’s out of the commandant’s mind entirely; whether it would have any consequences for the young girl in question, he knew too little of the culture to so much as hazard a guess.

SIX

The First Insurrection

‘We governed blindly a country unfamiliar to us in its customs and language.’

G. Rigault, Le Général Abdullah Menou et la dernière phase de l’expédition d’Égypte

‘Sitt Zeinab, come speak to your father, he has asked for you.’

Normally Zeinab would have obeyed such a rare summons with alacrity, but she was glued with horror to the mashrabiyya window that overlooked the street. The cortège of the new police chief wound its way along the street in the direction of French headquarters, carrying something on the ends of pikes. As they approached she was able to make it out: human heads. She spun away from the window and hid her eyes in her shawl.

‘Sitt Zeinab, did you not hear me?’ the nurse repeated, arms akimbo. ‘Shaykh Bakri himself is asking for you!’

‘Dada, I can’t bear to look! Who are they?’

‘Who are who?’ The nurse came to the window. ‘What are you watching? Oh, it is that God-forsaken Fart Rumman. God preserve us! Those poor heads! Why are you watching these horrors?’

Zeinab brought her head out from under her shawl but kept her back to the window. ‘Were they spies for the Mamlukes, Dada? Or Bedouin raiders?’

‘They don’t look like any Bedouin I’ve ever seen; nor Mamlukes either, they don’t have moustaches. They’re poor fellahin, most like. Whenever Fart Rumman is sent out on patrol to catch spies and marauders, he rounds up anyone he can find and beheads them and brings the heads back to please his French masters, and they are none the wiser. Come down now or your father will have my head if you keep him waiting.’

Zeinab found her father sitting on the bench in the inner courtyard, his hookah bubbling beside him, quill in hand, drafting a document. Her mother, reclining alongside, brought a finger to her lips in warning to Zeinab. ‘It’s a very important letter that the French have entrusted your father to write on behalf of the diwan and all the ulema of Cairo,’ she whispered. ‘It will be addressed to the Sultan in Istanbul himself, and the Sharif of Mecca! Many copies will be made of it and it will be posted all over the city.’

Zeinab tiptoed to her father and peeked over his shoulder. The French are the friends of the Ottoman Sultan and the enemies of his enemies. Coinage and Friday prayers are in his name and the rites of Islam are kept as they should be. She had time to read no more before her father leaned forward to write and the wide sleeve of his kaftan obscured her view. When he straightened up again, she read: They are Muslims respecting the Koran and the Prophet, and they have provided for the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday with such worthiness and splendour as would bring joy to believers.

Shaykh Bakri leaned back, shaking his head. ‘The French think words are enough to dampen down sedition … but I can feel it running through the streets like the precursor to the plague.’

‘I am sure your wording is inspired, Shaykh Khalil,’ his wife soothed him.

‘The drafting of it is not so difficult. Getting it signed by the other ulema will be the hardest part, and without them the letter has no credibility.’ He put down his quill. ‘But never mind that now. Come here, Zeinab, sit before me. I have great news for you, child.’

‘Yes, Father?’

‘You are to be married this month.’

‘Married, Father? Who –?’

‘It is a great honour, a very great honour. You are betrothed to the commandant of the French – Bonaparte himself.’

Zeinab felt the world spin around her, and then her mother sprinkling her face with rose-water and laughing. ‘The child is overwhelmed. Praise be to God, Zeinab! Thank your father! You are the luckiest girl in Cairo today.’

Zeinab nodded, still speechless. She was indeed the luckiest girl in Egypt. The commander of all the French! And an avowed Muslim! Even if he had been old and ugly, it would have been a great honour, but he was young and beautiful as an angel: she had peeked at him through her lashes at the banquet.

Her mother put one hand to the side of her mouth and threw back her head to ululate with rejoicing, but Shaykh Bakri stopped her with an upraised hand. ‘Not now, woman! It is not the proper time. Wait until I get this letter signed! Can you imagine if the news gets about! I have too many enemies in the diwan as it is.’

What did the happy news of her betrothal have to do with her father’s enemies in the diwan? Zeinab wondered. But only for a moment.

‘Please take a seat, Sitt Nafisa,’ Ambassador Magallon offered. ‘We are listening.’

Sitt Nafisa inclined her head and sat down, tucking her sheer yashmak more securely behind her ear. She took a deep breath as she faced the three men on the bench before her in the west courtyard of Elfi’s palace: Magallon, and the two other Frenchmen who had been appointed directors of the newly created Registry of Civil and Commercial Affairs. Malti the Copt sat beside them as legal expert, which was surprising enough in itself, for he was a tax collector by profession and entirely ignorant of Islamic law.

‘Thank you.’ She cleared her throat. She reminded herself of her vow: to maintain the ties of civility with the French at all costs. She was reluctant to put those fragile ties to the test so soon, but the suits she had come to plead could not be postponed. She began with the obligatory compliment: ‘May my request fall on the ears of justice and magnanimity. I have come today with three suits, one of which is my own, and two more on behalf of others.’ She looked at the translator, Venture du Paradis, who conveyed her meaning.

‘Proceed, madame,’ Magallon nodded.

‘As you may know – at least Ambassador Magallon knows – my sabil on Sugar Street –’

‘A charitable waterworks, with a public fountain and baths for the poor,’ Magallon explained to his colleagues.

‘Thank you, sir. Concerning my sabil, then; taxes have been imposed on the religious endowment that supports it, although all such purely charitable works – sabils, mosques, hospices, almshouses, orphanages and the like, have from time immemorial been exempt from taxes – as Ambassador Magallon, who knows our ways, can attest.’

‘Indeed, madame,’ Magallon concurred. ‘But that is not the way of the Republic.’

‘Sir, you know the poor depend on these charities, and it would mean great hardship for them if they were cut off. Not to mention the ill will that will accrue to the French as a result of these measures.’

‘Surely, madame, the revenue from your caravanserai at Bab Zuweila – the commissions the merchants pay you to use the trading floor and the store rooms, the workshops, the lodgings and baths – those revenues alone must come to a considerable sum.’

‘They did, sir, and every piaster was dedicated to support the sabil. But the income from my wikala at Bab Zuweila has plummeted since the invasion. As you know, the caravans from Mecca are disrupted, trade and pilgrimage are down to a trickle, and what little revenue there is, is entirely consumed in paying the taxes you impose.’

‘You are a very wealthy woman, madame, and I am sure you will find the means to continue to fund your charity.’ It was one of the other two Frenchmen – Tallien – who spoke. He made as if to rise.

‘Sir, you have confiscated my estates!’

‘That, madame, is the fault of your husband, Murad Bey, and of his amirs, who continue to wage war against us and lead the insurgency in the south.’ Tallien’s tone was acrimonious. ‘Will that be all?’

Nafisa took a deep breath. Clearly, she would get no sympathy for the plight of her sabil. Mindful of her pledge to herself, she knew that the wiser course would be to withdraw. But she had promised to bring two other suits, and she could not disappoint those who relied on her. She forced herself to continue with her supplication.

‘I will not trouble you much longer, sir. But I promised to speak on behalf of Sitt Adila, Ibrahim Bey’s daughter.’ She paused, looking directly at Magallon and Malti the Copt, hoping to remind them that Adila had taken the Franj and the Christians into her home for protection before the French entered Cairo. ‘Sitt Adila’s husband was killed in the Battle of Imbaba, and she is now trying to recover some of his property. But she is being told that she should have declared this inheritance within twenty-four hours of his death, and that it is too late now, the property is impounded for the benefit of the French Republic. Surely it was not possible for her to know for a certainty when her husband died in battle?’

‘We cannot take all these circumstances into consideration, and in any case the property of the renegade Mamlukes is considered forfeit, as you know. Is there anything else, madame?’ Magallon made as if to rise.

‘One last suit, sir, I beg of you. Believe me, I would not stand here before you,’ she added, trying to keep the bitterness out of her voice, ‘if it were not on behalf of someone even more helpless than I. It concerns my Mamluka, Fatoum, whom I have raised since childhood. I had sent her with my chief eunuch, Barquq, to run an errand for me at my Giza estate – unwisely, I realize, in these lawless times.’ Nafisa had sent Fatoum to recover a coffer of jewellery buried under the planks of the hall at the Giza house; there had been no one but Fatoum and Barquq whom she could trust with such a task. There was no need to go into these details, however. ‘As I said, sir, on the route to Giza they were attacked by a band of soldiers and the girl was abducted. My eunuch, who was severely injured by a blow to the head but managed to return home, says the soldiers were French or belonged to a French militia. Since then I have had no news. What has become of Fatoum? I would be most grateful if you would make inquiries.’

‘We will make inquiries, madame. If the girl was injured or killed, the perpetrators will be hanged, even if they turn out to be French.’

‘Thank you, sir! I knew I would not appeal in vain to French justice. And thank you for your patience in listening to me.’ She rose, gathered her abaya about her, bowed, and exited the hall.

Did the French even realize how unpopular the measures they were taking would make them, imposing taxes on the very charities the poor relied on for shelter and water, schooling and hospice care? They should not be surprised if there were an uprising of the people.

As she rode back towards her house in the Red Quarter, her chief eunuch on the mule before her and a maid on the donkey behind her, people in the street recognized Nafisa in her white veils and greeted her with cries of, ‘God bless you, Sitt Nafisa the White.’ She nodded to Barquq to hand them a coin or two, discreetly; it pained her not to be able to give more.

The poor and the weary travellers who came to fill their jars at her fountains; how could she let these people down? But the dream that was closest to her heart was to build a school, a kuttab for orphans. God had not seen fit to give her children, so the young of the poor and abandoned would be her consolation.

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