The Eight: The Fire Part 19

(Two women have given us the first examples of greed: Eve, in eating an apple in Paradise; Persephone, in eating a pomegranate in h.e.l.l.) Alexandre Dumas, Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine.

I was awakened by the loud warblings of a male wren just outside my bedroom window. I was familiar with the drill. This same guy showed up each spring, always singing the same old tune. He was hopping around excitedly, trying to convince his spouse to check out a potential nest location just under my eaves where he'd shoved some twigs and gra.s.ses into a cubbyhole and was coaxing her to come rearrange the furniture herself, so he could nail down the mortgage before somebody else spotted this prime piece of real estate one of the few locales on the ca.n.a.l that roving cats couldn't get at.

But suddenly, it dawned on me that if this wren was awake, singing his head off, it must already be well past dawn. I sat up in bed to check the time, but my alarm clock was nowhere to be seen. Someone had removed it.

My head was throbbing. How long had I slept? How had I gotten here, into my own pajamas and my own bed? All recollection seemed to have been wiped.

But then yesterday's events started to trickle back into my addled brain.

Rodo's strange behavior yesterday, from Euskal Herria to Sutalde. That dinner, ushered in by SS officials and hosted by my least favorite personae on the planet, the Livingstons. Finally, Nim's unexpected appearance inside my apartment, and our post-midnight stroll across the bridge. When he'd shown me that photo The whole thing returned and hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks.

That mysterious blond woman at Zagorsk, the woman who'd tried to warn me she was my grandmother!

That was the last thing I remembered telling my uncle last night before all went blank. The woman in his weathered family photo was the woman who'd given me that card ten years ago, only moments before my father's death.

At this particular moment, however, that warbling wren outside jarred me into dealing with more pressing issues. I suddenly recalled that my boss, Rodo, was supposed to phone me this morning to make arrangements to meet him for breakfast, so he could give me whatever urgent information he had left unsaid last night. I'd better phone him But when I glanced around, I saw that my bedroom phone had disappeared, too!

I was about to jump from bed when the bedroom door swung open. There was Nim with a tray in his hands and a smile on his face.

'A Russian-Greek bearing gifts,' he said. 'I hope you slept well. I took every precaution that you should. Oh, and my apologies I laced your soup last night with half a bottle of grappa. Enough fermented grape pulp to ensure that an ox would get a good night's sleep. You certainly needed it. I barely managed to get you home and upstairs on your own steam and make myself a bed on that lumpy sofa. You need to eat this now, though. A good breakfast will help what lies ahead.'

So at least I'd still been conscious last night, despite how unconscious I was right now of what else we may have discussed.

Much as I needed to speak with Rodo under my nose just now was that steaming pot of coffee and another of hot milk, a tumbler of fresh juice, and a stack of my uncle's famous b.u.t.termilk pancakes along with a crock of sweet b.u.t.ter, a bowl of fresh blueberries, and a beaker of warm maple syrup. It smelled even better than it looked.

Where had Nim found all these ingredients in my barren larder? But I didn't need to ask.

'I've had a word with Mr Boujaron, your employer,' Nim told me. 'He phoned here earlier, but I'd removed the phone from your room. I refreshed his memory of who I was the princ.i.p.al reference on your contract with him. And I explained that after your taxing week you needed some rest. He came to see the wisdom of giving you the day off work. And he sent over a minion with a few ingredients I'd requested.'

'It looks like you made him an offer he couldn't refuse,' I said with a grin, tucking the big napkin into the neck of my pajama top. It was one of the good damask ones from Sutalde. G.o.d bless Nim.

Then I tucked into the wonderful food, as well. My urgent need to hear the rest of Rodo's story from last night began to wane. My uncle's prized flapjacks, as always, had that thin, delicate crust that kept the syrup on the outside, so they never got soggy, and the insides stayed lighter than froth. He'd never disclosed his secret of making them that way.

As I relished this fare, Nim sat on the edge of my bed in silence, gazing out the window until I'd finished my meal and wiped the last bit of maple syrup from my chin. Only then did he speak.

'I've been doing a lot of thinking, my dear,' he told me. 'After our conversation last night on the bridge once you'd told me you'd actually seen the woman in the photo, and she'd given you that card, I could scarcely sleep. By dawn, however, I believe I'd resolved a great deal. Not only what may have motivated your mother to do as she's done with that party, but more important, I think I've discovered the secret behind the appearance of that chessboard, as well as the puzzle of the second Black Queen.'

When Nim saw my alarmed expression, he smiled and shook his head.

'I swept your place for bugs first thing this morning,' he a.s.sured me. 'I've removed them all. They were amateurs, whoever placed those detection devices some in the telephones and one in your alarm clock the first places one would think to look.' He stood, picked up the breakfast tray, and headed for the door. 'Happily, we're now free to speak without further resort to alfresco meals at midnight on Key Bridge.'

'Maybe these guys here were amateurs,' I said, 'but the guys last night on the footbridge guarding the restaurant both had Secret Service badges. They were certainly pros. My boss seemed pretty chummy with them, too, though he made sure they couldn't overhear us when he told me, just before that private dinner, what he knew about the Basque version of the story of the Montglane Service.'

'And what, precisely, was that?' Nim had halted at the door.

'He said he'd tell me the rest this morning,' I said, 'but thanks to you and your grappa, I overslept. Last night Rodo gave me the Basque scoop on the Chanson de Roland; that in fact it was Basques and not the Moors who'd defeated Charlemagne's rear guard at the Roncesvalles Pa.s.s; that the Moors gave Charlemagne the chess set in thanks; and that he then buried it a million miles from his palace in Aachen, right back in the Pyrenees at Montglane. Rodo told me what Montglane really means: "Mountain of Gleaners." Then, just before the others arrived, he was explaining about sowing and reaping, and how it related to my birthday being the opposite of my mother's-'

But I stopped, for Nim's bicolored eyes had grown cold and faraway. He still stood in the doorway holding my breakfast tray, but suddenly he looked like a different person altogether.

'Why did Boujaron mention your birth date?' he demanded. 'Did he explain?'

'Rodo said it was important,' I said, unnerved by his intensity. 'He said I might be in danger because of it, that I should keep my eyes and ears peeled for clues during last night's dinner.'

'But there must have been something more,' he insisted. 'Did he say what it might signify for these people?'

'He told me that the people coming last night knew that my birth date was October 4, opposite my mother's birthday and the party she threw this past weekend. Oh, and then he said something even stranger, that they thought they knew who I really was.'

'And who was that?' asked Nim, his expression so grim it almost made me tremble.

'You're sure no one can hear us?' I whispered.

He nodded.

I said, 'I'm not sure I understood it myself. But Rodo said, for some reason, they imagined that I was the new White Queen.'

'Good Lord, I must be going completely mad,' Nim said. 'Or perhaps I'm just growing inattentive as I grow older. But one thing is clear to me now: If Rodolfo Boujaron told you that much, then someone knows more than I'd imagined. Indeed, they've managed to gather a great deal more insight than I myself had understood until this very moment.

'But combining what you yourself have told me with what I came to grasp just last night,' my uncle added, 'I think I now understand everything. Though it will take some explanation and examination.'

Quel relief, I thought, at last somebody understands. But it no longer sounded like news I longed to hear.

Nim had insisted that I get dressed and put down another cup or two of his java before he began to fill me in on the epiphanies he'd had since just last night. Now, in my living room, we both sat on the sofa where he'd bedded down last night. The wallet with its weathered photo was propped open between us. Nim touched the image carefully with one fingertip.

'Our father, Iosif Pavlos Solarin, a Greek sailor, fell in love with a Russian girl and married her our mother, Tatiana,' he told me. 'He built a small fis.h.i.+ng fleet on the Black Sea and never wanted to leave. As boys, my brother, Sascha, and I thought our mother to be the most beautiful woman we'd ever seen. Of course, on the isolated tip of the Crimean peninsula where we lived, we hadn't seen many women. But it wasn't just her beauty. There was something magical about our mother. It's hard to explain.'

'You don't have to. I made her acquaintance at Zagorsk,' I reminded him.

Tatiana Solarin. Privately, I could hardly bear to look at this color-tinted photo. Her image alone brought back all the pain of these past ten years. But now that that first question Who was she? had been answered, it only gave rise to an unstoppable onslaught of further questions.

What had her warning that day really meant? Danger, Beware the Fire? Did she know about the Black Queen that we would soon find inside the treasury? Did she know the risk to my father the moment he saw it?

Had my father recognized her on that bleak wintry day at Zagorsk? He must have after all, she was his mother. But how could she still look the same then, just ten years ago, as she did in this faded photo before me that had been taken when my father and uncle were little boys? Furthermore, if everyone had been a.s.suming she was dead all these years, as Nim a.s.sured me, then where had she been hiding? And what or who had prompted her to resurface only now?

I was about to find out.

'When Sascha was six years old and I was ten,' Nim began, 'one night at our isolated house on the coast of Krym, there was a terrible storm. We boys were asleep in our room downstairs, when we heard a tapping at the windows and we saw a woman in a long dark cape standing outside in the storm. When we let her in through the window, she introduced herself as our grandmother Minerva, who'd come from a distant land on an urgent mission to find our mother. This woman was Minnie Renselaas. And from the moment she stepped through that window, all our lives were instantly to change.'

'Minnie she's the one that Aunt Lily told us had claimed to be Mireille,' I said, 'the French nun who lived forever.'

But I swiftly cursed myself for interrupting, for Nim had something more important to reveal.

'Minnie told us we must all flee at once,' he went on. 'She'd brought with her three chess pieces a golden p.a.w.n, a silver elephant, and a horse. My father was sent ahead through the storm with these pieces, so he could prepare the boat for the rest of our family's escape. But soldiers arrived at the house before we made our exit, and they captured our mother, while Minnie fled through the upper windows with us children. We hid on the cliffs in the rain until the soldiers were gone, then tried to reach Father's s.h.i.+p at Sevastopol. But little Sascha couldn't climb quickly enough. I was sent ahead, alone, to my father at the s.h.i.+p.'

Nim looked at me gravely. 'I'd reached my father's s.h.i.+p at Sevastopol. We waited for hours for Minnie and Sascha to arrive. But at last when they didn't appear, per my father's promise to Mother, we were forced to depart for America. Many days later, Minnie had to place Sascha in an orphanage so she could return to try to find our mother and rescue her. But all seemed lost.'

It's true I had known that my father was raised in a Russian orphanage, but he'd always refused to discuss it any further. Now I understood why. Mother wasn't the only one of my parents trying to protect me from the Game.

'Cat is the only other one who ever knew the rest of our story,' Nim told me. 'Sascha and I who were parted at that moment in Krym did not know it ourselves until many years later when, thanks to your mother, we met at last and we told it to each other and to her. Father had died shortly after he and I reached America. I'd lost my mother, my brother, and Minnie all in one night, with no way to trace them. As far as I knew until many years later, none of them had survived.'

'But now we both know that your mother is alive,' I said. 'I can understand, if she'd been captured and put in prison as you thought, why she might have been incommunicado all those years. But she was there at Zagorsk ten years ago: She gave me this card. And now you think she sent you the chessboard, too. How did she get her hands on it? And why wait so long?'

'I haven't all the answers yet,' Nim admitted. 'But I do have one answer, I believe. To understand it, you would have to know the famous fable of The Firebird that appears on your card, and what it means to us Russians.'

'What does the Firebird mean?' I said, though I thought I had my first inkling.

'It might explain why my mother still lives, how she survived,' Nim told me. When I looked surprised, he added, 'What if Minnie did manage to locate our mother after leaving Sascha in that orphanage? What if Minnie found her in prison just as we'd all supposed about to be sacrificed by the Soviet authorities as another casualty of the Game? What would Minnie have exchanged to secure our mother's release?'

I didn't have to ask. There was only one item I knew of that was definitely in the hands of the Russians.

'The Black Queen!' I cried.

'My thinking exactly,' said Nim with a pleased smile. 'And this would especially make sense if Minnie had managed to create a copy of the queen and had retained the original herself! It would explain the double-queen gambit you've discovered.'

'But then, where did your mother disappear after her release? And how did she get that drawing of the chessboard you said she'd sent you?' I asked. 'You said you thought you'd solved that puzzle, too.'

'That drawing of the chessboard by the Abbess of Montglane was a piece of the puzzle that we know, according to the nun Mireille's journal, she had in her possession,' Nim explained. 'But it was never pa.s.sed on to Cat with the other pieces. Therefore, Minnie must have given it to someone else for safekeeping.'

'To your mother!' I said.

'Wherever our mother has been all these years,' said Nim, 'there's one thing that's clear. That card she gave you and your father contained both a phoenix and a firebird. But it said Beware the Fire. The Firebird is nothing like the Phoenix, which bursts into flame each five hundred years and rises from its own ashes. The tale of the Phoenix is one of self-sacrifice and rebirth.'

'Then what does the Firebird mean?' I said, breathless enough with antic.i.p.ation that I was at risk of pa.s.sing out yet again.

'It gives up its golden feather something of enormous value, just like Minnie's Black Queen in order to bring Prince Ivan, who's been killed by his ruthless brothers, back to life. When the Firebird appears, the message to be understood is: Recalled to Life.'

Recalled to Life.

This is a secret service altogether. My credentials, entries and memoranda, are all comprehended in the one line, 'Recalled to Life'...

Charles d.i.c.kens, A Tale of Two Cities.

Remembering is for those who have forgotten.

Plotinus.

Brumich Eel, Kyriin Elkonomu.

(Fire Mountain, Dwelling Place of the Dead).

The sounds of rus.h.i.+ng water seemed to have been with him always, night and day. Dolena Geizerov, the Valley of Geysers, the woman had told him. Healing waters created by fires beneath the earth. Waters that had brought him back to life.

Here in the meadow, high atop the cliffs, lay those steaming, silent pools that he'd been bathed in by the elders. Their milky, opaque waters from deep in the earth, variously colored by the layers of dissolved clay, shone in rich tones, vermillion, flamingo, ocher, lemon, peach, each with its own medicinal properties.

Far beneath him on the sheer rock cliff water bubbled within the sinkhole, growing more and more agitated until suddenly, Velikan the Giant erupted in a steam explosion, shocking him as it always did, spewing its powerful rainbow of steaming water thirty feet into the air. Then on down the canyon as far as the eye could see, one by one they went off as if synchronized by clockwork and gushed over the sides, their boiling waterfalls tumbling into the torrential river far below that rushed onward to the sea. This constant throbbing, deafening roar of the explosive surge of waters was nonetheless somehow strangely soothing, he thought rhythmic like life, like the breath of the earth itself.

But now as he moved diagonally up the uneven slope to higher ground, he took care to follow in the woman's tracks so he wouldn't fall. One couldn't maintain footing across this slippery slope of mud and wet rock. Though his highlaced moccasins were made of bearskin for a better grip, and the oiled fur tops kept them warm, snow was sifting through the limpid sunlight. The tumultuous clouds of steam from below melted the flakes even before they touched the ground, turning the wet mosses and lichens to a gummy paste.

He'd walked these ravines every day for months until he was strong enough for this trip. But he knew he was still weak for so long a trek as today's would be they'd already come seven versts through the canyon of geysers, and higher still lay the tundra, meadowlands, and the taiga, a tangle of slender birch, scrub spruce, and pine. They were now moving into terra incognita.

As they left the roaring waters behind, climbing higher into the mountains, into the silence of a new and snowy world, he felt the fear begin to grip him the fear that comes with emptiness, uncertainty about the unknown.

It was foolish of him to feel that way, he knew, when after all, to him everything was part of the void, that greater unknown. He'd long ago stopped asking where he was, or how long he had been here. He'd even ceased asking who he was. She'd told him that no one could provide that answer for him that it was important he should discover it on his own.

But as they reached the end of the steep ravine, the woman stopped and side by side they gazed out across the valley. He saw it there in the distance across the valley floor their destination: that enormous cone far across the valley, all dressed in snow, which seemed to arise from nowhere like a mystical pyramid viewed across an ancient plain. The volcano had deep runnels in the sides and the top was crushed in, with smoke pouring out as if it had recently been struck by lightning.

He felt a kind of fascinated awe at the sight, a mixture of terror and love, as if a forceful hand had just gripped his heart. And the blinding light had suddenly, unexpectedly returned.

'In the Kamchal tongue, it is called Brumich Eel Mountain of Fire,' the woman beside him was saying. 'It is one of more than two hundred volcanoes here on this peninsula, called apagachuch, the excitable ones, for many of these are always active. A single explosion of one has lasted for twenty-four hours, pouring lava, destroying trees, and followed by earthquake and tidal wave.

'This one, Mount Kamchatka, Klyutchevskaya in Russian, erupted just ten years ago, raining ash and embers more than one vershok deep over everything. The Chukchi shamans to the north of here believe it is the sacred mountain of the dead. The dead live inside the cone and they hurl rocks down at anyone who should try to approach them. They plunge beneath the mountain, under the sea. The summit is covered with bones of the whales they have devoured.'

He could barely see across the valley, the fire in his head had grown so bright nearly obliterating everything else.

'Why did the elders believe that you must bring me to that place?' he asked her, squeezing his eyes shut.

But the light was still there. And then he began to see.

'I am not taking you there,' she said. 'We are going together. Each of us owes our own tribute to the dead. For we have each been recalled to life.'

On the summit, at the very lip of the collapsed cone, they could look down within to the molten lake of hot lava that bubbled and seethed inside. Sulfurous fumes floated skyward. Some said they were poisonous.

It had taken two days to reach this spot, fifteen thousand feet above the sea. It was now after twilight, and as the moon rose above the waters of the ocean in the far distance, a dark shadow slowly began to creep across its milky white surface.

'This eclipse of the moon is why we have come here tonight,' the woman spoke beside him. 'This is our gift to the dead the eclipse of the past for those in this pit, that they may sleep in peace. For they shall never again have a present or a future, as we ourselves shall.'

'But how will I have a future or even a present,' he asked in fear, 'when I can remember nothing at all of my past?'

'Can you not?' the woman said softly. She'd reached inside her fur-lined vest and extracted something small. 'Can you remember this?' she asked, holding it out to him in the palm of her hand.

Just at that moment, the last of the moon was eaten by shadow and they were cast temporarily into darkness. There was only that awful red glow from the pit beneath.

But he'd seen that flash of fire again in his head and he'd suddenly seen something else. His glimpse had been long enough that he knew exactly what that object had been in her palm.

It was the black queen from a chessboard.

'You were there,' he said. 'There at the monastery. There was going to be a game and then just before-'

The rest he couldn't remember. But in that flash, as he'd looked at the black queen, he had caught just a glimpse of his own past as well. And now he knew one thing beyond doubt.

'My name is Sascha,' he said. 'And you are my mother, Tatiana.'