The Trojan Icon (Ethan Gage Adventures Book 8) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Russians.”
    “The Polish Spartacus.”
    “But no foreign armies came to his aid. Now Kosciuszko is a crippled old man in Paris, still petitioning Napoleon to liberate Warsaw.”
    “Do you trust Napoleon?”
    “Of course not. Five thousand Poles fought for Napoleon in Italy in hopes he’d become Poland’s champion, and instead he shipped them to suppress the slave revolution in Haiti. All died or deserted. Napoleon the liberator has always been Napoleon the oppressor. But who is surprised? I don’t trust Napoleon, but Franklin said that if you want to persuade, appeal to interest rather than intellect. Napoleon’s interest and mine coincide.”
    “Do you trust me?”
    “No, I just told you—we’ve the same interests. You want a title. I want a country. Your advice to Alexander might serve to get both. So I conspire to use you and you conspire to use me, and we Poles conspire to use Bonaparte, as he will conspire to use us. Vesuvius, I warned.”
    I like cynics. It seems honest, somehow. “And I’m an American who knows Napoleon, Jefferson, Red Indians, and Haitian slave generals, and is now working with a Pole.”
    He smiled. “Exactly.”
    “Which means I accumulate enemies the way a dog attracts fleas.”
    “Sometimes enemies testify to character. Your shifting alliances make you judicious. Most men assume, but you consider.”
    “You want me for my wisdom! I thought it was my looks.”
    He laughed. “Our friendship does give me a chance to admire your pretty wife and yes, I’ve seen the ladies give you glances. But no, I’m intrigued first because you’re American, and thus have a natural affinity for liberty. Yet that’s not your utility either. There are many freethinkers in Alexander’s court.”
    “St. Petersburg has as much heated idealism as the salons of Paris.”
    “As much hot air, at least.” Czartoryski’s sense of humor was much like my own. “Russians love to talk of life and death, love and fate. In many ways they’re medieval. Their onion domes represent the shape of divine flames. They believe in religious miracles and the devil. Do you believe in evil, Ethan?”
    The question surprised me, since Adam Czartoryski didn’t seem very religious. I was cautious. “Most men are complicated. Greedy, and even cruel, but they justify it to themselves. What’s common is temptation and betrayal. True evil, unfeeling evil, is rare.”
    “One hopes so. Yet it still exists in the dark places of the world and emerges at times to seize men’s minds. It abides in foggy mountains, old castles, and deep caves. The Russian peasant knows this and prays. Russia’s mystics and hermits practice self-flagellation, self-castration, and self-burning. Mary is their God-bearer, a goddess herself, and
their
holy trinity isn’t Rome’s, it’s reason, feeling, and revelation. The haughtiest intellectual believes the witch Baba Yaga, Old Mother Boney Shanks, might live in the dell next-door. It’s night in Russia for half the year. Morana, the ancient goddess of darkness, reigns here.”
    I felt a chill. “You don’t sound like a man of the Enlightenment.”
    “I am. But I’m also a man of Eastern Europe, where Chernobog is the god of evil and the dead.”
    Odd to have this educated minister—a student in inquisitive England, and an ambassador in sunny Italy—talk like this. There was hope in him but sadness too, and his idealism was tempered by disillusion. “Russia is beautiful in its own way,” I offered, warding off his somberness as if making the sign of the cross. “All this snow. And endless light in summer, I’m told.”
    “Have you heard of the
upyr
?”
    “The what?”
    “A Tartar word for a malevolent spirit—a witch, or a vampire. Even today, graves are opened after seven years to make sure the dead are truly dead.”
    That sounded ghoulish, but I went along. “In the West, many fear being buried alive because doctors can diagnose death too eagerly. Corpses have woken from