The Eight: The Fire Part 9

The chessboard provides the key.

Remove the Veil from Evils.

As Above, So Below.

And if the chessboard provided the key to removing that veil, as Mother's message suggested, then whatever it was that I revealed or discovered, here in the high country like that ancient map we'd found must be connected, just as I'd suspected, with that earthly chessboard 'below.'

For as I knew, there was only one city in all of history that had been specifically created to resemble the perfect square of a chessboard: the city that I called home.

That's where the next move of the Game must take place.

The Veil.

Shall we write about the things not to be spoken of?.

Shall we divulge the things not to be divulged?

Shall we p.r.o.nounce the things not to be p.r.o.nounced?.

Emperor Julian, 'Hymn to the Mother of the G.o.ds'

The Royal Harem.

Dar el-Makhzen Palace.

Fez, Morocco.

Winter Solstice, 1822.

Haidee pulled on her veil as she hastened across the vast inner courtyard of the royal harem. She was escorted by two burly eunuchs she had never seen before this morning. Along with the rest of the harem inmates, she'd been awakened at dawn, aroused from slumber by a cadre of palace guards who'd ordered them all to dress and prepare themselves as quickly as possible for evacuation from the premises.

Haidee herself was peremptorily singled out by the chief of the guard, who had notified her that she was summoned at once to the outer court connecting the harem with the palace.

There'd been pandemonium, of course, when the women had understood the reason for this terrifying command. For Sultan Mulay Suliman, descendant of the Prophet and scourge of the faith, had just died of apoplexy. He was succeeded by his nephew, Abdul-Rahman, who would surely possess a harem and courtiers of his own to occupy the palace quarters. As everyone knew, in earlier such changes of succession there had been widespread auctions of human flesh, even ma.s.s carnage to eliminate all threat from the outgoing retinue.

Hence, as the concubines, odalisques, and eunuchs had dressed within the warm coc.o.o.n of the harem embraced by familiar scents of rosewater, lavender, honey, and mint, in the only home most of them had ever known there'd been frightened speculation among them regarding just what this shocking turn of events might mean to any or to each. Whatever it was, they could hold little hope.

Haidee, as a captive with no relations.h.i.+p to the royal family, didn't have to speculate about what fate held in store for her. Why would she be called to the outer court, and she alone among all the harem's occupants? It could mean but one thing. Somehow they'd discovered who she was and worse, what that large lump of black coal was, which, eleven months ago, had been found in her possession and seized by the sultan.

Now as she crossed the open-roofed courtyard with her muscular escorts at each side, they pa.s.sed the fountains of heated waters that splashed into basins as they did all winter, to protect the pools of fish. The filigreed white fretwork of the Moorish porticoes around the court had retained its lacy resilience for six hundred years, it was said, because the original plaster was mixed with the pulverized bones of Christian slaves. Haidee hoped this was not the fate that lay in store for her at this most critical juncture. She felt her heart pounding between excitement and fear of the unknown.

For nearly a year now, Haidee had been held here as an odalisque or chamber servant, in obscure captivity, surrounded by the sultan's eunuchs and slaves. The royal palace of Dar el-Makhzen was sprawled across two hundred acres replete with magnificent gardens and pools, mosques and military barracks, harems and hamams. This wing of the palace, its chambers and bathhouses connected by courtyards and gardens with roofs open to the winter skies, could accommodate one thousand wives and concubines, along with an enormous staff to provide support.

But to Haidee, open as it might seem, it had been stifling beyond imagining. Locked away among hundreds of others here in the harem with its iron grilles, its doors and windows shuttered against the world, she was isolated, yet never alone.

And Kauri the only protector and friend she'd had on earth, the only person who might find her imprisoned here in this landlocked fortress had been seized by slave traders, along with all of their crew, the very moment their captured s.h.i.+p had been hauled into port. She could still vividly recall the horror of the event.

Off the Adriatic coast just before Venice, their s.h.i.+p was skirting the seaport of Pirene 'The Fire' where an ancient stone lighthouse had stood since Roman times warning s.h.i.+ps off the rocky point. It was here that the last of the rogue corsairs, the notorious Pirates of Pirene, still plied their evil trade: selling European slaves into Muslim lands, where they were called White Gold.

From the moment when she and Kauri had first realized their plight, that their s.h.i.+p was about to be boarded by the Slovenian corsairs, they had known too well that this unexpected turn could prove a horror beyond all imagining.

The s.h.i.+p's small crew and their two young pa.s.sengers would certainly be pillaged of their goods, then sold at auction in the slave markets. Girls like Haidee were sold into marriage or prost.i.tution, but the fate of a boy like Kauri could be far worse. The slavers drove such boys into the desert where they castrated each with a knife and buried him in the hot sands to stanch the bleeding. If the boy lived he would be highly coveted and later could be sold at a premium throughout the Turkish Empire as a eunuch harem guard, or even into the Papal States to be trained as a castrato musician.

Their one hope had been that the Barbary Coast of Africa, after decades of bombardment by the British, the Americans, and the French, was now closed to all such trafficking. Five years ago under treaty eighty thousand European slaves had been released from North African bondage and Mediterranean lanes were again open to normal sea trade.

But there was still one place that accepted such human booty, the only Mediterranean land that had never been controlled by either the Ottoman Empire or Christian Europe: the sultanate of Morocco. A land of complete isolation its capital tucked away from the coast, between the Rif and the Atlas mountains, at Fez Morocco had suffered for thirty years under the iron rule of Sultan Mulay Suliman.

After the months she had spent as a captive servant in his harem, Haidee had by now learned much of this sultan's rule, none of which had calmed her constant fears.

Though himself descended from the Prophet, Suliman had early embraced the ideals of the Sunni Islamic reformer, Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab of Arabia. Wahhabi zealots had succeeded in helping the ruler of Arabia, ibn-Saud, briefly s.n.a.t.c.h back large swaths of Arabian lands captured by the Ottoman Turks.

Although this triumph was short-lived, Wahhabi zeal had ignited a fire in the heart of Mulay Suliman of Morocco, who'd ruthessly purged his religious house, without and within. He'd cut off trade with the decadent Turks and the atheistic French with their ill-fated Revolution-c.u.m-Empire; he'd suppressed the cults of saint wors.h.i.+p among the s.h.i.+'a and dismantled the Sufi brotherhoods.

Indeed, there was only one people that Mulay Suliman had been unable either to control or suppress in these past thirty years of his rule: the Sufi Berbers on the other side of the mountains.

This was what had terrified Haidee most in these many months of her imprisonment. And after this morning's revelation, she feared the worst. For Kauri, wherever he might be if it had ever been discovered that he was both a Sufi and a Berber wouldn't have been maimed or sold. He'd have been killed.

And Haidee, who all this time had carefully guarded the secret Ali Pasha had entrusted her with, now would have not even the glimmer of hope that she'd ever again see the outside world as a free person. She would never be able to locate the Black Queen that was seized, recover it, and place it into rightful hands.

But despite her despair at this moment, as she pulled up her veil more tightly and pa.s.sed with her escorts through the long open gallery that led to the outer court, she could not help clinging to the one thought that had run over and over in her mind these past eleven months: When she and Kauri had first realized where their s.h.i.+p had been brought just before they'd touched dock on Moroccan soil, perhaps to be parted forever Kauri had told her that there was but one man in Morocco who might help them if they could ever reach him, a man highly regarded by the Baba Shemimi himself a master of the Tarik'at, or Secret Path. He was a Sufi recluse known as the Old Man of the Mountain. If either of them managed to escape their captors, they must seek this man.

Haidee prayed now that in the few brief moments she might be permitted to spend outside this cloistered s.p.a.ce, she could think and act quickly in her own behalf. Or all would truly be lost.

The Atlas Mountains Shahin and Charlot reached the final descent of the last mountain range just as the setting sun touched the high peak of snowcapped Mount Zerhcun in the distance. It had taken three months to complete the difficult journey to this spot from the Ta.s.sili deep in the Sahara, across the winter desert into Tlemcen. There, they'd traded their camels for horses, more adapted to the wintry climate and mountainous terrain that lay ahead here in Kabylia, home of the Kabyle Berbers in the high Atlas Mountains.

Charlot, like Shahin, wore the indigo litham of the Tuareg, whom the Arabs called Muleththemin, the Veiled People, and the Greeks called Glaukoi, the Blue Men, for the pale blue tint of their fair skin. Shahin himself was a Targui, a n.o.ble of the Kel Rela Tuareg who had for millennia controlled and maintained the roads that crossed the vast Sahara they'd dug the wells, maintained pasturage for livestock, and provided armed security. From ancient times, the Tuareg had been the most highly revered among the desert dwellers, by traders and pilgrims alike.

And the veil here in the mountains as in the desert had protected both men from far more than just the weather. By wearing it, the two travelers had remained always dakhilak, under the protection of the Amazigh, or Berbers, as the Arabs called them.

In their thousand-mile journey over often uninhabitable terrain, Charlot and Shahin had acquired far more from the Amazigh along their path than fodder and fresh changes of steeds. They'd also acquired information, enough to cause them to alter their intended path north toward the sea and to divert west toward the mountains.

For there was but one land where Shahin's son and his comrade might have been taken to Morocco and but one man who might help them in their quest a great Sufi master, if only they could find him. He was called the Old Man of the Mountain.

Here on the bluff Charlot drew his horse to a halt beside his companion. Then he unwound his indigo litham and folded it into his saddlebag as Shahin did, too. So close to Fez, it was best to be prudent in case they were sighted. The veil that had served as protection in the desert and the mountains might prove a great danger now that they had crossed the high Atlas into Sunni lands.

The two men gazed across the vast valley, sheltered by the high mountains, where birds circled below. This magical spot lay at the center of a rare confluence of waters: creeks, waterfalls, springs, rivers. There beneath them, surrounded by vegetation, spread a sea of tile roofs, lacquered a brilliant green and glittering in the slanted winter light, a city submerged in time as in fact it was.

This was Fez, the holy city of the Shurafa true descendants of the Prophet and a sacred spot to all three branches of Islam, but most especially to the s.h.i.+'a; here on the mountain lay the tomb of Idris, great-grandson of Muhammad's daughter Fatima and the first of the Prophet's family to reach the Maghreb, the western lands, more than one thousand years before a land of great beauty and dark omens.

'There is a proverb in Tamazight, the Kabyle language,' Shahin said. 'It is Aman d'Iman Water is Life. Water explains the longevity of Fez, a city that is in itself almost a sacred fountain. There are many ancient caves cut by the waters, concealing ancient mysteries the perfect place to shelter what we are seeking.' He paused, then added quietly, 'I feel certain that my son is here.'

The two men sat beside the flickering fire within the open cave above Fez in which they'd taken shelter at nightfall. Shahin had set aside his talac stick, which marked his n.o.ble rank among the Kel Rela drum group, and he'd removed his double-crossed baldric, the fringed goatskin bands the Tuareg wore crisscrossed over each shoulder. They'd dined on a rabbit they'd caught and cooked.

But what was left unspoken now, as it had been throughout their long journey, still lay just beneath the surface, whispering like s.h.i.+fting sands.

Charlot knew he had not completely lost his gift, but he could not command it, either. Crossing the desert he'd often felt the Sight tugging at him like a tattered waif at the hem of one's burnoose. At those moments he'd been able to inform Shahin which men in the marketplace were trustworthy, which were rapacious, which had a wife and children to support, which had an ax to grind. All this was possible to him, as it had been from birth.

But of what real value was such limited foresight, given the daunting task that faced them just ahead? When it came to finding Shahin's son, the Sight had been blocked by something. It wasn't that he couldn't see anything it was more like an optical illusion, a s.h.i.+mmering oasis of palms in the desert, where you know there is no water. When it came to the boy Kauri, Charlot could catch a glimmering vision but he knew it wasn't real.

Now, in the flickering firelight, as they watched their horses nearby munching at the fodder provided from saddlebags, Shahin spoke.

'Have you wondered why only the Tuareg men wear the indigo litham, yet the women go unveiled?' he asked Charlot. 'Our veil is a tradition older than Islam; the Arabs themselves were surprised to find this custom when they first arrived in our lands. Some think the veil provides us protection against desert sands; others believe it is against the evil eye. But the veil is quite significant to the history of our drum groups. In ancient times it was spoken of as the evil mouth.'

'The evil mouth?'

'It refers to the ancient mysteries: "those things that must not be spoken of by mouth." These have existed in every land and culture for all time,' Shahin said. 'However, among the initiated these mysteries may be communicated by drum.'

From Shahin, Charlot knew that the Tuareg tribes, known as drum groups, each was descended from a female progenitor. And each drum chief, often also a woman, kept the tribe's sacred drum, believed to be endowed with mystic power.

The Tuareg, like those Sufi Janissaries who controlled most of the Ottoman lands, for hundreds of years had used their secret drum language to send signals across the vast expanses of their dominions. So powerful was this drum tongue that in lands that kept slaves, the drum itself was forbidden.

'And these ancient mysteries of the Tuareg the evil mouth and the veil these are connected with your young son?' Charlot asked.

'You still cannot see him?' Shahin said. Though his face bore no expression, Charlot could hear the thought: Even when he must be so close by?

Charlot shook his head, then rubbed his hands over his face and ran his fingers through his red hair, seeking to stimulate his addled brain. He looked up at Shahin's face, carved like an ancient bronze. Shahin's golden eyes were trained intently upon him in the firelight. Waiting.

Forcing a small smile, Charlot said, 'Tell me about him. Perhaps it will help us to find him, like giving the scent of water to a thirsty camel in the desert. Your son is called Kauri. It's an unusual name.'

'My son was born on the Bandiagara Cliffs,' he said. 'Dogon country. Kauri is the Dogon word for cowrie, a marine mollusk indigenous to the Indian Ocean, a sh.e.l.l that we Africans have used as our monetary currency for thousands of years. But among the Dogon this small sh.e.l.l, the kauri, also bears deep meaning and power. It connects with the hidden meaning of the universe, for the Dogon symbolizing the source of both numbers and words. My wife chose this name for our child.'

When he saw Charlot's dark blue eyes observing him in amazement, he added, 'My wife Kauri's mother was very young when we married but already she held great powers among her people,' Shahin said. 'Her name was Bazu in the Dogon tongue it means "the female fire" for she was one of the Masters of Fire.'

A blacksmith!

Charlot felt a shock in grasping just what this revelation meant. Blacksmiths everywhere throughout the desert lands and elsewhere were an ostracized profession, though it was true that they bore enormous powers. They were called Masters of Fire, for they created weapons, pottery, tools. They were feared, for they possessed secret skills and spoke a secret language known only to themselves; they commanded both hidden techniques of the initiate and diabolical powers attributed to ancient spirits.

'And this was your wife? Kauri's mother?' said Charlot in amazement. 'But how did you come to meet or to marry such a woman?' And without my knowing it! Charlot felt weakened with exhaustion by these revelations.

Shahin was silent for a moment, his golden eyes clouded. At last he said, 'It had all been foretold, just as it came to pa.s.s both my marriage and the birth of our son, as well as my wife Bazu's early death.'

'Foretold?' said Charlot. His creeping terror had returned in force.

'Foretold by you, Al-Kalim,' said Shahin. I foretold it. But I cannot remember it.

Charlot stared at him. His mouth was dry with fear.

'This is why, when I found you three months ago in the Ta.s.sili, I felt the shock of loss,' said Shahin. 'Fifteen years ago, when you were but a boy of Kauri's age just at the brink of manhood, you saw what I have just told you. You said I would produce a son who must be kept hidden, for he would be descended from a Master of Fire. He would be trained by those who possess great wisdom of the ancient mysteries those mysteries that lie at the heart of the chess set we know as the Montglane Service, a secret that is believed to hold the power to create or to destroy civilizations. When al-Jabir ibn Hayyan designed the chess set one thousand years ago, he called it the Service of the Tarik'at the Sufi path, the Secret Way.'

'From whom did your son learn these mysteries?' asked Charlot.

'At the age of three, when Kauri's mother died, he was raised under the tutelage and protection of the great Bektas.h.i.+ Sufi Pir, the Baba Shemimi. I've learned that when the Turks attacked Janina in January, my son was called upon to help rescue an important chess piece held by Ali Pasha. When Janina fell, Kauri was headed with an unknown companion for the coast. This was the last we have heard of him.'

'You must tell me what you know of the history of the service,' said Charlot. 'Tell me now before we descend the mountain at dawn to find your son.'

Charlot sat staring into the fire, watching the molten heat as he tried to feel his way within himself. And Shahin began his tale.

The Tale of the Blue Man In the year 773, by the Western calendar, al-Jabir ibn Hayyan had been hard at work for eight years. With hundreds of skilled artisans a.s.sisting, he was creating the chess Service of the Tarik'at for the first caliph of the new city of Baghdad, al-Mansur. No one knew of the mysteries contained within it except Jabir himself. They were based upon his great Sufi alchemical work, The Books of the Balance, dedicated to his late shaikh Ja'far al-Sadiq, the true father of s.h.i.+'a Islam.

Jabir believed he was nearly finished with his masterpiece. But in the summer of that year, the caliph al-Mansur was surprised by the arrival of an important Indian delegation from the mountains of Kashmir, a deputation that ostensibly had been sent to open avenues of trade with the newly established 'Abbasid dynasty at Baghdad. In fact, these men were on a special mission whose purpose no one might ever have guessed. They had brought with them a secret of ancient wisdom, disguised beneath the veil of two gifts of modern science. As a scientist himself, al-Jabir was invited for the presentation of these treasures. This experience would change everything.

The first gift was a set of Indian astronomical tables that recorded the movements of the planetary bodies over the past ten thousand years celestial events that were scrupulously recorded in the oldest of Indian sagas, such as the Vedas. The second gift was a puzzlement to everyone but the official court chemist, al-Jabir ibn Hayyan.

These were 'new numbers' new to the West. Among other innovations, these Indian numbers had positional value, that is, instead of two lines or two stones representing the number 'two' if placed side by side, they represented one plus ten, or 'eleven.'

More clever still was a place-holding figure that we now call a cipher from Arabic sifr, meaning 'empty' and which Europeans call a zero. These two numerical innovations today called 'Arabic' numerals would revolutionize Islamic science. Though they would not reach Europe via North Africa for another five centuries, they had already existed in India for more than one thousand years.

Jabir's excitement knew no bounds. He instantly understood the connection between these astronomical tables and the new numbers, in providing deep and complex calculation. And he understood both with respect to another ancient Indian invention that already had been embraced by al-Islam: the game of chess.

It took al-Jabir two more years, but in the end he was able to build these Kashmiri mathematical and astronomical secrets into the chess Service of the Tarik'at. Now the chess set would contain not only Sufi alchemical wisdom and the Secret Path, but also awa'il 'in the beginning,' or pre-Islamic sciences the ancient wisdom upon which it all was based from the earliest times. It would be, he hoped, a guidebook for those in coming ages who might seek the Way.

In October of 775, only months after Jabir had displayed the service before the Baghdad court, Caliph al-Mansur died. His successor, Caliph al-Mahdi, hired the powerful family of Barmakids to be his viziers, prime ministers of his reign. Originally a Zoroastrian priestly family of fire wors.h.i.+ppers from Balkh, the Barmakids were only lately converted to Islam. Jabir convinced them to revive awa'il, the ancient sciences, by bringing experts from India to translate the earliest Sanskrit texts into Arabic.

At the very height of this brief revival, Jabir dedicated his Hundred and Twelve Books to the Barmakids. But the ulama, religious scholars, and the chief councils of Baghdad protested. They wished to return to the fundamentals by burning all such books and destroying the chess set that, in its depiction of animal and human forms, seemed close to idolatry.

The Barmakids, though, recognized the importance of the service and all its symbols. They saw it as an imago mundi, a world image, a representation of how multiplicity is cosmically generated from Unity from the One.

The very design of the board replicated some of the earliest structures that had been dedicated to the mystery of transformation of spirit and matter, heaven and earth. Among these was the design of the Vedic and Iranian fire altars even of the great Ka'ab itself, which existed before Islam, built by Abraham and his first son, Ishmael.

Fearing that such a powerful record of wisdom might be destroyed for secular or political reasons, the Barmakid family arranged with al-Jabir to smuggle it to a safe place: to Barcelona, on the sea close to the Basque Pyrenees. There, they hoped that the Moorish governor Ibn al-Arabi, himself a Sufi Berber, might protect it. It was just in time, for the Barmakids themselves fell from power soon after, along with al-Jabir.

It was Ibn al-Arabi of Barcelona who would send the chess set, only three years after receiving it, over the mountains to the court of Charlemagne.

That is how the greatest tool that ever united the ancient wisdoms of the East came to enter the hands of the first great ruler of the West from whose control it has never truly been relinquished over these past one thousand years.

Shahin paused and studied Charlot in the waning light of the fire, which had burned down to reddish coals. Though Charlot sat upright and cross-legged on the ground, his eyes remained closed. It was nearly dark within the cave now; even the horses were asleep. Just outside the entrance the full moon cast a silvery blue pallor upon the snow.

Charlot opened his eyes and regarded his mentor with an expression of great attentiveness familiar to Shahin for it had often presaged one of the young man's prophetic insights as if he were straining to see something partly hidden behind a veil.

'Sacred wisdom and secular power have always been in conflict, have they not?' Charlot said, as if feeling his way. 'But it is the fire that seems to me especially haunting. Jabir was the father of Islamic alchemy. Fire must be counted the essential ingredient in that process. And if his own protectors at Baghdad, the Barmakids, were descended from Zoroastrian priests or magi, surely their ancestors had once maintained the fire altars with their eternal flame. The word that exists in nearly every tongue, that designates all of these trades the blacksmith, the shaman, the cook, the butcher, as well as the priest who performs the sacrifice and burns the offering on the altar all the works in sacrifice and fire that in ancient times were one. This word is Mageiros: the Magus, the Grandmaster, the 'Thrice-Great' Master of the Mysteries.

'These fire altars, just like the Indian numbers, the astronomical tables, the awa'il sciences you spoke of like the game of chess itself all originated in northern India, in Kashmir. But what connects them all together?'

'I hope your gift can answer that question for us,' said Shahin.

Charlot regarded him soberly, this man whom he regarded as his only father. 'Perhaps I've lost that gift,' he said at last, the first time he'd truly admitted the idea, even within the confines of his own mind.

Shahin shook his head slowly. 'Al-Kalim, you know that your coming was foretold among our peoples. It was written that one day a nabi or prophet would come from the Bahr al-Azraq the Azure Sea one who could talk with spirits and follow the Tarik'at, the mystic path to knowledge. Like you, he would be a za'ar, one who has fair skin, blue eyes, and red hair; he would be born beneath the eyes of the 'G.o.ddess,' the figure painted on the Ta.s.sili cliffs that my people call the White Queen. For eight thousand years she has waited for you are the instrument of her retribution, just as it was foretold. It is written: I will rise again like a phoenix from the ashes on the day when the rocks and stones begin to sing...and the desert sands will weep bloodred tears...and this will be a day of retribution for the earth...

'You know what has been foretold of you, and what you have foreseen about others,' Shahin added. 'But there is one thing no man can ever know one thing that no prophet, regardless how great, can see for himself. And that is his own destiny.'

'Then you believe that whatever has affected my vision actually may have to do with my own future?' said Charlot, surprised.