Lying flat on his back gave him the useful insight that there was a layer of clear air riding just above the floor. He pulled his soaked tunic off, tied it over his mouth and nose, and began crawling on his naked belly. The place was a maze of haystacks and corpses, but light was shining in through a huge stone archway. He dragged himself through it, and out into the open—and into battle.
Monsieur Arlanc got his attention by pelting him in the head with a small rock, and beckoned him to safety behind an overturned cart. Jack lay amid scattered gold bars for a while, just breathing. Meanwhile Monsieur Arlanc was crawling to and fro on his belly, gathering the bullion together and stacking it up to make a rampart. The occasional musket-ball whacked into it, but most of the fire was passing over their heads.
Rolling over onto his belly and peering out through a gun-slit that the Huguenot had prudently left between gold bars, Jack could see the large floppy hats characteristic of French musketeers. They had formed up in several parallel ranks, completely blocking the street that ran down to the canal where the Cabal’s means of escape was waiting. These ranks took turns kneeling, loading, standing, aiming, and firing, keeping up a steady barrage of musket-balls that made it impossible for the men of the Cabal to advance, or even to stand up. This human road-block was only about forty yards away, and was completely exposed. But it worked because the Cabal’s forces did not have enough muskets, powder, and balls left to return fire. And it would continue working for as long as those musketeers were supplied with ammunition.
Meanwhile the stable continued to burn, and occasionally explode, behind them. The situation could not possibly be as dire as it seemed or they would all be dead. Between volleys of musketeer-fire Jack heard the whinny of horses and the rattling bray of camels. He looked to the left and saw a stable-yard, surrounded by a low stone wall, where several of Nyazi’s men had gotten their camels to kneel and their horses to lie down on their sides. So they had a sort of reserve, anyway, that could be used to pull the carts down to the boat—but not as long as those carts were forty yards in front of a company of musketeers.
“We have to outflank those bastards,” Jack said. Which was obvious—so others must have thought of it already—which would explain the fact that only a few members of the Cabal were in evidence here. The left flank, once he looked beyond that embattled stable-yard, looked like a cul-de-sac; movement that way was blocked by a high stone wall that looked as if it might have been part of Cairo’s fortifications in some past ?on, and was now a jumbled stone-quarry.
So Jack crawled to the right, working his way along the line of gold-ramparts and immobilized carts, and spied a side-street leading off into the maze of the Khan el-Khalili. At the entrance of this street, a Janissary was pinned to a wooden door by an eight-foot-long spear, which Jack looked on as proving that Yevgeny had passed by there recently. A hookah jetted arcs of brown water from several musket wounds. Once he had entered the street, and gotten out of view of the musketeers, Jack got to his feet and threw his weight against a green wooden door. But it was solider than it looked, and well-barred from the inside. The same presumably went for every door and window that fronted on this street; there was no way to go but forward.
He rounded a tight curve and came to a wee square, the sort of thing that in Paris might have, planted in its center, a life-size statue of Leroy leading his regiments across the Rhine, or something. In place of which stood Yevgeny, feet planted wide, arms up in the air, manipulating a half-pike that he had evidently ripped from the hands of a foe. Yevgeny was holding it near its balance-point and whirling it round and round so fast that he, and the pike, taken together, seemed and sounded like a monstrous hummingbird. Three Janissaries stood round about him at a respectful distance; two, who’d ventured within the fatal radius, lay spreadeagled in the dust bleeding freely from giant lacerations of the head.