The Fire (44 page)

Vartan was looking at his map again. ‘Is this one of the “Islands of Four Mountains”?’ he asked Key. ‘It says one of them is six thousand feet.’

She glanced at her GPS reading and nodded as her eyes lit up. ‘Chuginadak,’ she replied. ‘And beyond it, the Carlisle volcano that created the birthplace of the Aleut peoples – the place where the mummy caves still are.’

‘Then,’ said Vartan, ‘this inlet between them, it’s protected by the mountains?’

Vartan was being a better sport about all this than I’d imagined. Despite our water-repellent thermal gear, we got pretty wet standing in thigh-deep water to lash Becky among the rocks in a safe enough spot. We toweled off as best we could once we were back inside the plane, and we all donned whatever dry clothes we could dig out.

The storm – a
mild
one, according to Key – only lasted six hours. All the while we were locked in a cabin with screaming winds, fifteen-foot waves, pelting pebbles, sand, tundra grass all howling to get inside. But it gave us the chance to rethink. If we doubled back to an island we’d just passed, we could top off our fuel tanks again at Nikolski airstrip near the water. And living under the volcano like this had given Key the chance to agree that if we found ourselves in another jam, she might condescend to blow our cover – at least long
enough to roust a volcanologist or a wildlife botanist on her radio for an assist.

‘Why didn’t I think of this place in the first place?’ Key was asking herself aloud, just after we’d taken off from Nikolski early on Saturday morning.

It was the only village in these parts, as Vartan and I had just learned, to have survived intact under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act for restoration of land. And Key, being an obvious descendant of
some
tribe or other, had appeared here just before dawn, descending from the skies in latent stardust like some rare, long-lost native bird that had surprised everyone by itself surviving extinction.

Not only were we lavished with breakfast and gifts by the locals – eel fritters and small, hand-painted totem poles, carved with our own distinctive totem animals – but Key also was given a hand-drawn map showing all the hidden inlets with private, waterside refueling spots – open only to local native trappers, hunters, and fishermen – from here up to Attu, at the end of the island chain.

Now
she
was ebullient, and Vartan actually hugged her just before we took off.

Five hours and our second and final fuel stop later came the trickiest leg of our trip: Attu, just this side of the international date line from Russian waters, which would be crawling with navy and coast guard, patrol ships and submarines, floating satellite monitors and radar, all of it constantly scanning the sea or pointed at the sky.

But as Key pointed out, like the infant Zeus in his suspended hammock, nobody ever looked for something that touched the boundaries of neither earth nor sky. So she switched off our GPS and radar to enhance our invisibility, then dropped our altitude to sixty feet above sea level. We sliced through that illusory membrane that only
appears
to separate east from west, water from sky.

It was two o’clock on Saturday, April 12, when we left America behind and crossed the international date line. Then all at once, it was noon on Sunday, April 13, and the waters and sky we were sailing between were now Russian.

Vartan looked at me in amazement. ‘You do realize what we’ve done?’ he said. ‘If they bring down this plane and capture us, I’ll be shot for treason and you’ll both be captured as American spies.’

‘Oh, why all this pessimism?’ said Key. ‘We’re as good as there.’

She was undoubtedly still giddy from euphoria over this morning’s tribal conspiracy granting her secret navigational paths over water and land, for she added, ‘What totems did they give you two? I got raven and beaver, which I guess is the closest you could get to how Becky Beaver and I arrived and departed this morning: the magic bird from the moon, and the animal that knows the best escape routes from the pond! And what about our smuggled traitor?’

Vartan pulled the little animal totems he’d been given from his pocket. ‘Mine are the bear and the wolf,’ he said.

‘The insignia of a natural-born chess master,’ said Key approvingly. ‘The bear hibernates in his cave and spends half his life in silence, meditation, and introspection. Wolf comes from the dog star, Sirius, worshipped by many cultures. Even if he’s a lone wolf, he’s still the teacher of concerted and concentrated effort, of how to focus on what the pack’s trying to achieve.’

I looked at my carved totems, a whale and an eagle painted in four colors, bright red, yellow, teal, and black. ‘The eagle’s the thunderbird, right?’ I asked Key. ‘But what’s the whale?’

‘The thunderbird is also the firebird, or the lightning,’ said Key. ‘He signifies balance because he soars high and touches Great Spirit, but he also brings heaven’s fire and energy down to earth in the service of man.’

Vartan said, ‘They’re very good at this, aren’t they, this assignment of totems? My wolf and Alexandra’s firebird – these are the two animals that come to the rescue of Prince Ivan in our famous Russian folktale, and they restore him to life.’ He smiled at me, adding to Key, ‘And what of Alexandra’s whale?’

‘Ah, that’s the most mysterious totem of them all,’ Key told him, still watching ahead as we soared across the wide, open waters of the Pacific. ‘The whale’s an ancient mammal with an encoded genetic memory. Nobody knows how long he’s traveled down there alone, deep beneath the surface we’re skimming across right now, tucked away on the ocean floor like an enormous library of ancient genetic wisdom. Like the drumbeat of the shaman. Like a heartbeat carrying the oldest knowledge of the ancient wisdom…’

She glanced at Vartan and me with a mischievous grin, as if she knew what we both were thinking.

‘Like the Original Instructions?’ Vartan suggested, smiling back.

‘Whatever the instructions may be,’ said Key, ‘it seems we’re just about to find out.’

She gestured toward the sea spread before us. On the horizon lay a long green coast with high white mountains just beyond. Key added, ‘I believe the appropriate aphorism would be “Land ho.”’

The soul is bound by the City of Eight that resides in the mind, intellect and ego, and consists of the arising of the five subtle elements of sensory perception.

–
The Stanzas on Vibration

(Translated by Mark S. G. Dyczkowski)

What is that intermediate universe? It is the…world, fully objective and real, where everything existing in the sensory world has its analogue, but not perceptible by the senses, is the world that is designated [in Islam] as the
eighth climate.

– Henri Corbin,
Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam

All things are eight.

– Thomas Taylor, quoting a Pythagorean maxim

Ust Kamchatsk

Kamchtkan Peninsula

A light snow sifted through the filtered sunlight above the river. The day was beautiful.

Aleksandr Solarin knew who he was. He was able to remember some of what lay behind him and had learned much more about what might lie just ahead.

He also knew that this might be the last time he would see this view, the river he’d come from, rushing down from the high valley, those glittering obsidian mountains, capped with snow, steaming their rosy and dangerous fumes into the sky.

He stood beside his mother, Tatiana, aboard his ship that lay at anchor here in the bay, and here he awaited his future, the future that was soon to take him to another world, a world and a future where she would not go with him. He’d lost her once, when a boy – that scene he remembered so vividly. That night, the rain, his father, his brother, his grandmother – and the three chess pieces. He remembered it all as if an enormous light shone on every instant and every detail.

And he remembered playing chess. He could feel the cool, smooth touch of the pieces; he could visualize the board. He could remember games he’d played, so many of them. That’s what he was, that’s what he had always been: a chess player.

But there was another game, a different game – a kind of secret game, almost like a map – where the pawns and the pieces were all hidden, not on the board, where one had to have some special kind of vision, some trick of memory, to be able to look beneath the surface and see them. He had even begun in his mind to be able to make out where some of them were…

But there was one thing he could never see. That day when it happened. Whenever he thought of it the explosion returned in force. The pain.

And what of his daughter? Alexandra, her name was, Tatiana had told him. And what of his wife? He would soon see them both. Then surely he would know.

But there was one thing he did know.

They were an important part of his pain.

Key never failed to amaze me.

It was nearly four hundred miles from Kamchatsky to our departure point in Chukotskiy to cross the Bering Sea, but bad as our rusty, battered trawler looked, Key said it would make it in under six hours.

We’d found the trawler – a former dragnet fishing vessel converted to marine observation – lying at anchor awaiting us in the Ust Kamchatsky harbor, moored at such an angle that it blocked any view of Becky Beaver from within the port when she came putt-putting from where we’d touched down just outside, and we slipped right into the open bay of the ship, where they used to bring in their netted hauls of fish.

‘I seem to observe,’ Key informed me, ‘that you’re starting to believe what I first told you, about what a bitch this little junket was for me to orchestrate. Even though glasnost may have been tossed out with the bathwater in these parts – and even if there’s no honor among thieves, as they say – I can tell you that cooperation among wildlife researchers, volcanologists, and native peoples has reached an all-time high, not to mention insane levels of complexity and risk. If I ever again volunteer to help reunite a family like yours, just shoot me in the foot, so I’ll have some recovery time to give it a second thought.’

I confess, now that I was really about to see my father, I was having many of the same reservations. My heart felt as if it were shuddering like Becky’s engine. I knew nothing of his condition, how ill he had been all this time, how much or little he might have recovered. Would he even remember me? Vartan and Key, reading my mind, had each placed a hand on my shoulders as we went up on deck together.

There, at the far end, stood the tall blond woman, her hair shot with a few wisps of silver, whom I now could recognize as the grandmother I’d never met. And beside her stood the man whom I’d believed that, over all these past ten years, I’d never see again.

My father was watching the three of us as we approached along the flat deck. Even from here, perhaps thirty feet away, I could see how much weight he’d lost, the strong, clean lines of his face and jaw against the dark, open collar of his pea jacket. As we came nearer, I couldn’t help observe that his pale, shaggy hair, though it tumbled over his forehead, barely concealed the scar.

When we three arrived, his silvery-green eyes, the color of bottle glass, focused just upon me.

I started to cry.

My father opened his arms and I walked into them without a word.

‘Xie,’ he said, as if remembering something crucial he thought he’d forgotten forever, ‘Xie, Xie, Xie.’

Where Chukotskiy Poluostrov, the Chukchi Peninsula, juts out between the Chukchi and the Bering seas, if you look due west across the Bering Strait you’ll find you’re so close that a cat could spit and it would hit the good old U.S. of A.

Our trawler was headed for a reconnaissance mission with Chukchi marine biologists who were concerned about declining cormorant populations on the northern and eastern shores. We five were just along for the ride. Tatiana would return with the Kamchatkans and reunite with Chukchi shamans after we and our plane had been dropped at a suitable locale where we could take off without too much fanfare. Once we were over U.S. waters, said Key, we’d refuel at Kotzebue in Alaska for our flight with my father back to Anchorage.

Twilight came fast at this time of year. We sat on the trawler deck around a small brazier that Key’s cronies had set out for us. We drank kvass, we roasted potatoes, and we braised chunks of marinated reindeer meat, the staple diet in these parts, on wooden skewers that we set among the coals. My father had his arm wrapped tightly about my shoulders. He looked down at me from time to time to be sure I was still there beside him – almost as if he feared I would fly off into the night sky like a bird.

My gorgeous grandmother, Tatiana, seemed both exotic and ageless, with her high cheekbones, her costume of embroidered, fringed reindeer skin, and that silvery blond hair shimmering in the firelight before us. But she could only speak to us in broken English with a thick Slavic accent, so Vartan offered to help in the translation. She took the floor to tell us what we’d all been waiting so long to hear.

‘I was captured in Krym one night in autumn of 1953 and taken by boat to the Gulag. One cannot imagine it – many died on those boats, deprived of water and food and even heat – and had it been winter when I was transported, I might have frozen to death, just like thousands of others. The forced labor camp system in all has killed tens of millions.

‘I do not know how long I remained in the Gulag camp, eating slops, drinking filthy water, working the permafrost soil to help build roads until my hands were raw and bleeding. Less than a year. But I was lucky, for my escape was bought. And more fortunate still – for although the local Kamchatkan and Koryak tribes, along with their children, had been slaughtered in the past when they were found to be harboring “political prisoners” like me, I was given shelter among a group farther north. They themselves had been hunted almost into extinction. Most of those who remained were women – the Chukchi shamans. It is they who saved Sascha’s life,
as well. The man who arranged for our salvation calls himself “Galen March.”’

Once he’d finished the translation for us, Vartan asked her, ‘Calls himself?’

‘If you spell it the Gaelic way,’ I explained, ‘it’s an acronym for Charlemagne.’ But then to Tatiana, I added, ‘I don’t understand. How could Galen have rescued you, too – fifty years ago – when the man I met can’t be more than in his early thirties?’

Vartan translated.

Then Tatiana turned to me and replied in her limited English, ‘No, he is older. His name is not Charlemagne, not Galen March. I give you something from him that explains all – how you say? All things.’

She reached into her reindeer robes and extracted a small packet. She handed it to Vartan and motioned for him to give it to me.

‘He writes this for you, who is the next Black Queen, and—’

I had felt my father’s arm tightening about me, almost trembling, as he cut in on her. ‘What do you mean?’ he demanded.

Tatiana shook her head and spoke quickly to Vartan in another language I didn’t recognize – perhaps Ukrainian. After a moment he nodded, but when he looked back to me he wore an expression I couldn’t read.

‘What Tatiana insists I tell you, Xie,’ Vartan said, ‘is that this packet from Galen is important for all of us to read right now, and most especially critical for you and me. She says that Galen March is the White King but won’t be for long – it seems he hopes to replace himself with
me.
But the crux of the matter, she says, is
why
he’s leaving. He can’t accomplish the mission at all, she says – only
we
can.’

Vartan looked at all three of us, seeming very confused.
Then he turned his eyes to my father. ‘Perhaps this will mean little to you, sir, until more of your memory has returned,’ Vartan told him. ‘But your mother, Tatiana, says that the man we are speaking of, Galen March, is actually your ancestor. He’s the son of Minnie Renselaas, the nun called Mireille. And his name is Charlot de Remy.’

‘Your mother must have known all along,’ said Key. ‘That’s the only explanation of why she would trust Galen that way from the moment she first met him, why she’d agree to move back to Four Corners, with him as backup should the need arise. I guess the need
did
arise when she learned that your father was able to remember things. It might have put all of you in danger if “someone we know” found out where he was and got their hands on him before
we
did. That’s when she decided she had to move Galen physically into place as a buffer in Colorado, and why she got Vartan and me aboard the train as well.

‘It also makes sense why Cat would want to keep you and your uncle and Lily Rad in the dark about what she knew and her plans, until the last possible moment. They were players the last time around and this was a brand-new ball game. Besides, all three of you are such risk-taking chess players, just like your father, she was likely afraid one of you might go off on your own like a cannon. So she arranged it all herself. She’s a tough chick, that babe.’

Durn tootin’,
I thought.

It was agreed to be simpler if Vartan and I read Galen’s packet of papers first, and we could fill in the others afterward as needed. So we sat alone in the light of the brazier, unfolded the packet, and read the tale of Charlot de Remy.

The White King’s Tale

I was not yet seven years old when I returned from Egypt
to London along with my mentor, Shahin, who had raised me as more than a father – truly as both father and mother – from my infancy. It was foretold that I would be the one to solve the mystery, and my mother, Mireille, believed this. The Game had seized possession of her own life at the time when, even before I was born, it had taken the life of her closest companion, her beloved cousin Valentine.

Shahin and I, arrived in London from Egypt, learned that during our absence my mother had spent months in Paris with my father, from whom she’d received seven pieces of the service captured from the White Team – with the promise of even more if my father could obtain them.

As the fruit of this rare meeting that occurred between my parents, we learned that my mother, just before our arrival from Egypt, had given birth to my little sister, Charlotte. For four years, as Charlotte grew into a healthy child, my mother, Shahin, and I labored over the papers of Isaac Newton in the Cambridge rooms overlooking the kitchen gardens that had once been his. It was there that I made a discovery: The secret everyone had fought over for centuries was more than transmutation of base metals, it was the very secret of immortality –
al-Iksir,
the Arabs called it – the elixir of life. But I did not yet know all.

I was ten years old and Charlotte was already four when we first met our father, Charles-Maurice Talleyrand, at the baths of Bourbon-l’Archambault. My mother, resolved to finish the Game that so possessed her, had brought us with her to help collect on Father’s promise to secure more of the pieces.

After that night at the baths of Bourbon, when I was ten, I would not see my father for another twenty years. Though he’d prevailed upon my mother to let him raise little Charlotte as his own adopted daughter – with which Mother concurred – she could not yet part with me. I was the prophet who
was foretold, she said. I was born beneath the eyes of the goddess in the desert. I was the one who would solve the mystery of the Montglane Service.

And in this one truth, she was right.

For nearly twenty years, we labored, first in London and then in Grenoble, but for years we made little progress beyond that initial discovery of what we believed the secret actually was.

At Grenoble was the Académie Delphinale, of which Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, author of
The Analytic Theory of Heat,
had been an instrumental founder. It was Fourier whom Shahin and I had spent so much time with during our foray into Egypt in Napoleon’s campaign, when I was just a child, an expedition that had brought back a stone from Rosetta that required as much time to decipher as our project on the Montglane Service had consumed – and would soon be connected to it in a most important way.