The Fire (8 page)

If this were to prove impossible, then in the pasha’s final hours on earth, he would destroy himself inside the great fortress of Demir Kule – along with his treasure, his followers, and even the beloved and beautiful Vasiliki – before letting anything fall prey to the Turks.

But now Ali Pasha was dead, and by all reports the fortress of Demir Kule had been seized intact. Despite Byron’s repeated attempts to discover any news of the fate of Vasiliki or the others who’d been taken to Constantinople, there was as yet no word. Nor had Byron received the object that was intended to be protected by himself and by the Carbonaria.

Percy’s book of poems seemed to hold the only clue. If Byron had read correctly, only half of his message was contained in the triangle he’d drawn. The other part was the poem itself: the passage Percy had marked in Keats’s ‘Fall of Hyperion.’ Putting those two clues together, the full message would read:

The old Solar God will be destroyed by a far more dangerous flame – an eternal flame.

If this was correct, then Byron had grasped at once that it was he
himself
who had most to fear. He must act, and quickly. For if Ali Pasha was dead without the promised bombast – if there was no word from survivors who’d been closest to him – Vasiliki, his advisers, his Secret Service, the Bektashi sheikhs – if Percy Shelley had been pursued from Byron’s Pisan palazzo and driven into that storm, to his death – all this could mean just one thing: Everyone believed that the chess piece had reached its appointed destination, that Byron had received it – everyone, that is, except whoever had escaped from Janina.

And what had become of the missing Black Queen?

Byron needed to get away and think, and to lay a plan before the others arrived aboard his ship with Percy’s ashes. It might already be too late.

Byron crumpled in his hand the page containing the message. Adopting his customary expression of detached disdain, he rose from his seat and limped painfully across the hot sands to where Trelawney still tended the fire. The dark, wild features of the ‘Cockney Corsair’ were blackened further by soot from the blaze, and with those flashing white teeth and trailing mustachios, the man appeared more than slightly mad. Byron shuddered as he tossed the crumpled paper indifferently into the flame. He made sure that the paper had caught and burned before turning to speak to the others.

‘Don’t repeat this farce with me,’ he said. ‘Let my carcass rot where it falls. This Pagan Paean to a dead poet, I confess, has quite undone me – I need a bit of a sea change, to cleanse my mental image of this horror.’

He went back to the shore – and with a quick nod toward Captain Roberts to confirm their prior agreement
to meet afterward on the ship, Byron tossed his wide-brimmed hat aside, stripped off his shirt, and dove into the sea, cutting through the waves with strong and powerful strokes. The water was warm as blood already at mid-morning; the sun scalded ‘Alba’s’ fair skin. He knew it would be a short mile swim to the
Bolivar
– nothing to a man who’d already swum the Hellespont, but a long enough one that it would let him clear his mind to think. But though the rhythm of his strokes, the salt water lapping over his shoulders, helped to calm his agitation, his thoughts kept returning to one thing: No matter how he tried – and wildly improbable though it might seem – there was only one person Byron could think of to whom Percy Shelley’s message might refer, one individual who might hold the critical clue to the fate of Ali Pasha’s missing treasure. Byron himself had never met her, but her reputation preceded her.

She was Italian by birth – a wealthy widow. Beside her vast riches, Lord Byron knew that his own considerable fortune would pale by comparison. She had once been world renowned, though she now was living in semi-isolation here in Rome. But in her youth, it was said that she’d bravely fought on horseback with guns for the liberation of her land from foreign powers – just as Byron and the Charcoal Burners were essaying to do right now.

Despite this woman’s personal contributions to the cause of freedom, however, it was she who’d given birth to the world’s last Titan-like ‘solar god’ – as Keats had described it: Her son was an imperial tyrant whose short-lived reign had terrorized all of Europe, and then swiftly burned itself out. Like Percy Shelley. In the end, this woman’s son had succeeded only in replanting the virulent seed of monarchy back into the world in force. He’d died barely one year ago, in anguish and obscurity.

As Byron felt the sun burning into his naked skin, he strove harder through the teeming waters to reach his ship. If he was right, he knew he had little time to lose in order to set his plan in motion.

And it was no small irony to Byron that, had this son of the Roman widow lived, today, August 15, would have been his birthday – a day commemorated throughout Europe, in his behalf, those past fifteen years until his death.

The woman whom Lord Byron believed might hold the key to locating the missing Black Queen of Ali Pasha was Napoleon’s mother: Letizia Ramolino Bonaparte.

Palazzo Rinuccini, Rome

September 8, 1822

Here [in Italy] there are as yet but the sparks of the volcano, but the ground is hot and the air sultry…there is a great commotion in people’s minds, which will lead to nobody knows what… The “king-times” are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it, but I foresee it.

– Lord Byron

It was a warm and balmy morning, but Madame Mère had arranged to have all the fires flickering in the hearths throughout the palazzo, candles lit in each room. The costly Aubusson carpets had all been brushed, the Canova sculptures of her famous children had all been dusted. Madame’s servants were attired in their finest green-and-gold livery and her brother, Cardinal Joseph Fesch, would soon arrive from his nearby Palazzo Falconieri to help greet the guests to whom she always opened her home on this one day each year. For today was an important day in the holy
calendar, a day that Madame Mère had vowed she would never ignore and always honor: the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin.

She’d been performing this ritual for more than fifty years – ever since she had taken her vow to the Virgin. After all, hadn’t her favorite son been born on the Feast Day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin into heaven? That weak little baby whose birth had come so suddenly and unexpectedly early, when she – young Letizia, only age eighteen – had already lost two previous infants. So she’d made a vow on that day to Our Lady that she would always honor
Her
birth without fail, and that she would consecrate her children to the Blessed Virgin.

Though the child’s father had insisted upon naming the new infant Neapolus after an obscure Egyptian martyr instead of Carlo-Maria, as Letizia herself would have preferred, Letizia had made sure to christen all her daughters with the prenom of Maria: Maria Anna, who would later be known as Elisa, the Grand Duchess of Tuscany; Maria Paula, called Pauline, the Princess Borghese; and Maria Annunziata, later called Caroline, Queen of Naples. And they called
her
Madame Mère – Our Lady Mother.

The Queen of Heaven had indeed blessed all the girls with health and beauty, while their brother, later known as Napoleon, had given them wealth and power. But none of it was to last. These gifts had all dissipated, just like those roiling mists she still could recall surrounding her native isle of Corsica.

Now, as Madame Mère moved through the flower-filled, candlelit rooms of her vast Roman palazzo, she knew that this world would not last either. Madame Mère knew, with a palpitating heart, that this tribute to the Virgin today might prove to be her last in a very long time. Here she was, an old woman left nearly alone, her family all dead or scattered,
dressed in perpetual mourning attire and living in an environment so alien to her, surrounded only by transitory things: wealth, possessions, memories.

But one of those memories may have suddenly come back to haunt her.

For only this morning Letizia had received a message, a hand-delivered note from someone whom she had neither seen nor heard from in all these many years, throughout the rise and fall of the Bonaparte Empire – not since Letizia and her family had departed the wild mountains of Corsica nearly thirty years ago. It was from someone whom Letizia had come to believe, by now, must be dead.

Letizia slipped the note from the bodice of her black mourning dress and read it again – perhaps for the twentieth time since she’d received it this morning. It was not signed, but there could be no mistaking who had written it. It was written in the ancient Tifinagh script, the Tamasheq tongue of the Tuareg Berbers of the deep Sahara. This language had always been a secret code used by only one person in communiqués with her mother’s family.

It was for this reason that Madame Mère had sent urgently for her brother the cardinal to arrive here at once before the other guests. And to bring the Englishwoman along with him – that other Maria who’d just recently returned to Rome. Only these two might be able to help Letizia in her dreadful plight.

For if this man whom they called the Falcon had indeed arisen as if from the dead, Letizia knew precisely what she herself would be called upon to do.

Despite the warmth of the many fires in her chambers, Letizia felt that all too familiar chill from the depths of her own past as she read the fateful lines once more:

The Firebird has arisen. The Eight return.

Tassili n’Agger, The Sahara

Autumn Equinox, 1822

 

We are immortal, and do not forget, We are eternal, and to us the past Is, as the future, present.

– Lord Byron,
Manfred

 

Charlot stood on the high mesa, surveying the vast red desert. His white burnoose flapped about him in the breeze like the wings of a large bird. His long hair floated free, the color of the coppery sands that stretched before him. Nowhere on earth could one find a desert of this precise hue: the color of blood. The color of life.

This inhospitable spot, high on a cliff in the deepest Sahara, a place where only wild goats and eagles chose to live. It had not always been so. Behind him on the fabled cliffs of the Tassili were five thousand years of carvings and paintings – burnt sienna, ocher, raw umber, white – paintings that told the story of this desert and those who had peopled it in the mists of time, a story that was still unfolding.

This was his birthplace – what the Arabs called one’s
watar,
or homeland – though he had not been here since he was a babe in arms. Here was where his life had begun, Charlot thought. He was born into the Game. And here, perhaps, was where the Game was destined to end – once he had solved the mystery. That’s why he had returned to this ancient wilderness, this tapestry of brilliant light and of dark secrets: to find the truth.

The desert Berbers believed he was destined to be the one to solve it. His birth had been foretold. The oldest Berber legend spoke of a child born before his time, with blue eyes and red hair, who would possess the Second Sight. Charlot closed his eyes and inhaled the scent of this place, sand and
salt and cinnabar, evoking his own most primal physical memories.

He’d been thrust into the world early – red and raw and screaming. His mother, Mireille, an orphan of sixteen, had fled her convent in the Basque Pyrenees and journeyed here across two continents, into the deep desert, to protect a dangerous secret. She had been what they called a
thayyib,
a woman who had known a man only once: his father. Charlot’s birth, here on the cliffs of the Tassili, was midwifed by an indigo-veiled Berber prince with blue-tinted skin, one of the ‘blue men’ of the Kel Rela Tuareg. This was Shahin, the desert falcon, who was to serve as parent, godparent, and tutor for this chosen child.

Across the vast desert before him now, as far as Charlot could see, the silent red sands shifted as they had for untold centuries, moving restlessly, like a living, breathing thing – sands that seemed a part of him, sands that erased all memory…

All but his own, that is. Charlot’s terrible gift of remembering was always with him – even the memory of those things that had not yet come to pass. When he was a child, they had called him the Little Prophet. He’d foreseen the rise and fall of empires, the futures of great men, like Napoleon and Alexander of Russia – or like that of his true father, whom he’d only met once: Prince Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand.

Charlot’s memory of the future had always been like an unstoppable wellspring. He could foresee it, though he might not be able to change it. But of course the greatest gift could also be a curse.

To him, the world was like a chess game, where each move that one made generated a myriad of potential moves – and at the same time revealed an underlying strategy, as implacable as destiny, that drove one relentlessly onward.
Like the game of chess, like the paintings on the rock, like the eternal sands – for him, the past and the future were always present.

For Charlot had been born, as it was foretold, beneath the gaze of the ancient goddess, the White Queen, whose image was painted in the hollow of the great stone wall. She’d been known across all cultures and throughout all times. She hovered above him now like an avenging angel, carved high on the sheer stone cliff. The Tuareg called her Q’ar – ‘the Charioteer.’

It was she, they said, who had spangled the nighttime sky with glittering stars. And she who had first set the Game upon its adamantine course. Charlot had journeyed here from across the sea to lay his eyes upon her for the first time since his birth. It was she alone, they said, who might reveal – perhaps only to the chosen one – the secret behind the Game.

Charlot awakened before dawn and tossed off the woolen djellaba he’d used as a cover against the open night air. Something was terribly wrong, though he couldn’t yet sense what it was.