The Fire (51 page)
Authors: Katherine Neville
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Historical, #General
| 4 | 9 | 2 |
| 3 | 5 | 7 |
| 8 | 1 | 6 |
‘What does it say, just underneath here?’ I asked Vartan.
He translated,
‘The most ancient Magic Square, which is represented here, existed thousands of years ago in India, and in Babylonia under the Chaldean Oracles.’
Vartan paused to add, ‘This seems to be some medieval commentator speaking, not al-Jabir himself.’
He went on. ‘
In China, this square was used to lay out the eight provinces of the land with the emperor living at center. It was sacred because each number had esoteric significance; also, each row, column, and diagonal adds up to 15, which, if added in turn, reduces to the number 6.’
‘Six-six-six,’ I said, glancing up over my shoulder at Vartan.
He released me from behind, and together we took the book closer to the window, where he continued.
‘However, it was al-Jabir ibn Hayyan, the father of Islamic alchemy, who made this square renowned, in
The Books of the Balance
, for its other important properties of “correct proportions” that lead to balance. If the four squares in the southwest corner are carved out as shown, they add to 17, providing the series 1:3:5:8 of perfect Pythagorean musical ratios by which, according to Jabir, “everything in the world exists.” The remaining numbers in this magic grid – 4, 9, 2, 7, 6 – add up to 28, which is the number of “mansions” or stations of the moon, and also of letters in the Arabic alphabet. These are the numbers most important to al-Jabir: 17 adds to 8, the esoteric path, which provides the larger “Magic Square of Mercury” made of 8 by 8 squares. This is also the layout of a gaming board
with 28 squares around the outside – the exoteric or outer path.’
‘The chessboard is the key,’ I told Vartan. ‘Just as my mother said.’
Vartan nodded. ‘But there is more:
Al-Jabir invested this ancient wisdom in the symbol of Mercury. Mercury is the only both astronomical symbol of “above” and alchemical symbol of “below” that contains all three important sigils for both: the circle representing sun and the crescent representing moon of spirit, and the cross or “plus” sign, representing the four aspects of matter: four directions, four corners, four elements, four aspects – fire, earth, water, air – hot, cold, wet, dry…’
‘Put them together,’ I said, ‘and you have Basque mathematics – “four-plus-three-equals-one.” The square of earth
plus
the triangle of spirit equals “One.” Unity. Wasn’t that the first gift of Hestia on the tapestry?’
‘It was wealth,’ said Vartan.
‘Wealth,’ I said, ‘like the “Commonwealth of Virginia,”
wealth
or
weal,
it means “
whole
” – whole, healthy, holistic, holy. It all means “Unity.” “
In order to form a more perfect Union.
” That’s what George Washington, Tom Jefferson, Ben Franklin, what all of them wanted – the marriage of heaven and earth, those “spacious skies and amber waves of grain.” What al-Jabir had already built into the Service of the
Tarik’at. That’s
the illumination they were all looking for, that New City on the Hill. Not
possessing
power.
Creating
balance.’
He said, ‘That’s what you meant earlier, when you said what you thought the message was? When you said it’s not
when
or
where,
it’s
how
?’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘It’s not a
thing,
where once you’ve grabbed it and deployed it, you’ll get nuclear weapons, power over others, eternal life. What al-Jabir set down in the chess set is actually a
process.
That’s why he called it the Service of the
Tarik’at
– The Key to the Secret
Way.
These
are
the
Original Instructions – like trail markers on a path, just as the Sufis and shamans and Piscataway have been saying all along. And if we put all those pieces together and follow those instructions, nothing is impossible. We can set ourselves and the world onto a better path – a “way” of illumination and joy. My parents have risked their lives to save this chess set so that it could be used for that higher purpose.’
During this, Vartan had set down the book. Now he took me into his arms once again.
‘In my case, Xie, if truth is what we’re looking for – the truth is that I’ll do whatever you believe is right. The truth is that I love you.’
‘I love you back,’ I said.
And I knew that – though we would certainly recover the pieces – at this moment I didn’t care what else any of the others wanted, I didn’t care about the Game, what it had cost people in the past, or how it might profit us all in the future. I didn’t care what roles others might have chosen for Vartan and me to play, White King or Black Queen. It didn’t matter what they dubbed us, because I knew that Vartan and I were the real thing – the alchemical marriage everyone had been looking for these past twelve hundred years, yet couldn’t see when they found it right before them. We ourselves
were
the Original Instructions.
And for the first time in my life, I felt as if all those ropes that had bound me for so long had been completely cut free, that I could soar into the skies like a bird.
A firebird, bringing light.
In the 1980s, I was living in a six-hundred-square-foot tree house in Sausalito, California. Above a sea of acacia trees I had a wraparound view of San Francisco Bay, with Tiburon and Angel Island in the distance; eucalyptus trees grew through my front deck; my landlord’s terraced orchid gardens lay on the hill behind me; a thirty-foot-high hedge of night-blooming jasmine bordered the steep drive. That’s where I wrote
The Eight
, at night and on weekends, on my vintage IBM Selectric typewriter (which I still have in my memorabilia cupboard), while working days at the Bank of America.
I kept asking my friends, ‘Don’t you think this is the perfect setting for writing a swashbuckling bestseller?’ Likely they thought that it was an ideal spot for writing a book that no one would ever buy or read.
But my original literary agent, Frederick Hill, recognized the moment he read
The Eight
that there were no other books like it. With two interwoven stories set two hundred years apart; sixty-four characters, all pieces in the chess game that was the plot; tales-within-a-tale; Sherlock Holmesian encryption; magic puzzles like Dr. Matrix,
The Eight
looked
more like an intergalactic map of relationships in the universe than a novel. But fortunately, Fred also knew that the publishing team at Ballantine Books, the premier paperback publisher in America, had been looking for a literary property to launch its first-ever hardcover line of books. They wanted something unique – neither standard ‘literary’ nor standard ‘bestseller’ fare, something that couldn’t easily be pigeonholed.
The Ballantine team members with this vision were: president Susan Peterson; VP of marketing Clare Ferraro; and editor in chief Robert Wyatt. They acquired
The Eight
, half completed, in 1987. On March 15, 1988, my editor, Ann LaFarge, and I completed the edit. The book was presented at the American Booksellers Association convention in May. We were all surprised by its instant reception, how everyone embraced it as if they’d discovered it on their own. In swift succession, translation rights were acquired by eleven countries; the Book-of-the-Month Club selected the book, author interviews were conducted by
Publishers Weekly
and the
Today
show – all before the book had even been published here in the United States.
Still, no one knew how to describe it. It was reviewed as a mystery, science fiction/fantasy, romance, thriller, adventure, literary, esoteric, and/or historical novel. As author, I was called the female Umberto Eco, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, and/or Steven Spielberg. Over the years
The Eight
has been a bestseller in forty or fifty countries and has been translated into more than thirty languages – largely, to judge from reader opinion,
because
it is unique.
Readers often asked when I would reprise the plot and characters. But given the interwoven nature of the plot, the kinds of surprises and secrets revealed in
The Eight
about the characters and the chess set, I thought the only way for the book to remain unique was
not
to make it into a sequel
or a series. But my book, it seems, had a mind of its own; it wasn’t yet through telling its story.
As events in real life unfolded following 2001, as they involved more of the elements of my first novel’s plot – oil, the Middle East, terrorism, Arabs, Berbers, Russians, the KGB, chess – I knew that I had to revisit the part of the world where the Montglane Service had originally been ‘invented’ by al-Jabir in
The Eight
: Baghdad.
In 2006, my literary agents, Simon Lipskar in America and Andrew Nurnberg abroad, together convinced me to write the first three chapters of what I’d told them I was planning for the plot and characters in the sequel to
The Eight.
And the Ballantine team that ‘lit the match’ that brought
The Fire
to life were: Random House Publishing Group president Gina Centrello; publisher Libby McGuire; and the wonderful Kimberly Hovey, who began twenty years ago as my original publicist for
The Eight
, who has been publicity director for my other Ballantine books over the years, and who is now Ballantine’s director of marketing.
Finally, I’d especially like to credit my editor, Mark Tavani, for yanking the rug out from under me, in July of 2007, by telling me that I could not just ‘rest on my backstory’ (as we say in fiction) but that I must dive deeper and soar higher.
So I did.
The course of a true book never did run smooth.
As a novelist who would never recognize a smooth path if she saw one, I find that often when you stub your toe against a rock, beneath it you find a pot of gold you’d never have discovered had you been rushing along smoothly, as originally planned. Here I thank as many as possible of those pots of gold who’ve provided passion for their work, surprises, and more fascinating knowledge than I ever expected I could squeeze into one novel.
These are listed in alphabetical order by topic.
ALBANIA: Thanks to Auron Tare, director, Albanian National Trust, for our five-year discussion and research on Ali Pasha, Vasiliki, Haidée, Haji Bektash Veli, and the Bektashi Sufi order, the secret weapon that Byron procured for the Pasha; his colleague Professor Irakli Kocollari, for a last-moment synopsis and translation of his landmark book
The Secret Police of Ali Pascha,
based on original archival sources; Doug Wicklund, senior curator, National Firearms Museum of the NRA, for running to earth the Kentucky repeating rifle, the likely candidate for the ‘secret weapon’ Byron sent Ali.
AVIATION, ALEUTIANS: Thanks to Barbara Fey – friend of thirty years, member of the Explorers Club and of the Silver Wings Fraternity (those who’ve flown more than fifty years), who has solo-flown the North Atlantic, Africa, Central America, and the Middle East and has helicopter-skied the Himalayas – for the Bonanza and all the technical and fascinating eyewitness input about areas I’ve flown through but have never really seen, and for finding me Drew Chitiea – bush pilot extraordinaire and trainer of National Outdoor Leadership School (whose mother, Joan, ran the Iditerod at age sixty-six) – who convinced me it should be Becky Beaver, not the Otter, and gave me all the great technical, fuel and refueling, and flight and landing info in which Key is so well-versed; Cooper Wright, who works in Attu for detailed maps and descriptions of flying in the Aleutians and for the great Brian Garfield book
The Thousand-Mile War,
which describes the weather conditions in World War II.
BAGHDAD: Special thanks to Jim Wilkinson, chief of staff of the U.S. Treasury, for casually mentioning over lunch one day – just when I thought I was in the home stretch of writing this book – that he’d learned to play chess in Baghdad while he was serving as one of the advance group into Iraq in March 2003. What others think of as serendipity, we in fiction regard as the research writing on the wall. Jim’s valuable input was a critical turning point both for my heroine and for her author. Thanks also for those e-mail addresses!
BASQUES: Thanks to the wonderful Patxi del Campo, former president, World Congress of Music Therapy, for making me familiar with the Basque Pyrenees and a people I thought I already knew; to Agustin Ibarrola, for painting all those trees in the forest of Oma; to Aitziber Legarza, for feeding and housing us; to my late great friend Carmen Varela, for making me spend so much time in northern Spain.
CHESS: Thanks to Dr Nathan Divinsky, past president of
FIDE Canada, for finding the chess game upon which this book is based (played by a fourteen-year-old Russian, later world champion) and also for having found that previous game (accurate to the period) played by Rothschild in my book
A Calculated Risk;
Marilyn Yalom, for conversations about her book
Birth of the Chess Queen;
Dan Heisman, for being a big support in connecting me with recent goings-on within the chess world – and, when
Amaurosis Scriptio
(writer’s blindness) kept me in the dark about one of my characters – for introducing me to Alisa Melekhina (twelve years old at the time) who helped give me rare insight into a child chess competitor’s perspective on what it feels like to play international competition chess.
COOKING: Thanks to the late Kim Young, who won the right to be a chef in Talleyrand’s kitchen at a charity auction (she appears as ‘the young Kimberly’) and who became a lifelong friend – sending me gobs of notes on historic kitchens she visited from Brighton to Curacao; Ian Kelly, for chats about his book
Cooking for Kings
and his fascinating one-man play on Talleyrand’s chef Carême; William Rubel, for his excellent presentation at the French embassy in D.C., his advice on open-hearth cooking, and his marvelous book,
The Magic of Fire,
the best treatment I know of in English of the topic; and my friend Anthony Lanier for renovating Georgetown’s Cady’s Alley, creating a great restaurant and a club there that (by serendipity) looks so much like the secret basement of Sutalde
.
