The Fire (22 page)

When I came back with the gear, he took it and put it into the giant refrigerator. Then he turned to me and took my two hands in his.

‘I want you to sit on this stool while I tell you a small story,’ he said.

‘I hope it’s going to answer some of those questions I asked you this morning,’ I told him, ‘that is, if you’re really sure that no one can hear us speaking.’

‘They cannot, which is why we arranged for tonight’s dinner to be held down here as well. However, that phone you were speaking on, and my house, Euskal Herria, are perhaps a different matter. More of that later,’ he said. ‘There is something first, more important – the reason why we are here. Do you know the story of Olentzero?’

When I shook my head in the negative, taking my seat on the high stool, he added, ‘With a name like Olentzero, of
course he was Basque. It’s a legend that we reenact each year at Epiphany. I myself often dance the part of the famous Olentzero, which requires very many high kicks in the air. I will show you sometime.’

‘Okay,’ I said, thinking,
Where on earth is this going?

‘You know,’ said Rodo, ‘that the Roman Church tells us that the baby Jesus was discovered by three Magi – those Zoroastrian fire worshippers who traveled from Persia. But we think this story isn’t quite true. It was Olentzero, a Basque, who first saw the Christ child. Olentzero was a – how you say – a
Charbonnier,
a Charcoal Burner – you know, one of those who traveled through the lands, cutting and burning wood to sell as charcoal for cooking and heat. He was our ancestor. Which is why we Basques are famous for being great cooks—’

‘Whoa,’ I said. ‘You dragged me back from Colorado through a raging blizzard – and down to this cellar with no food or sleep – just to get me alone and tell a story about some mythical two-thousand-year-old Basque kick-dancer who sold coal?’

I was in a complete fury, but trying to keep it under my breath since I still wasn’t sure we couldn’t be overheard.

‘Not entirely,’ Rodo said, unperturbed. ‘You are here because it was the only way I could arrange for us to speak alone before tonight’s dinner. And it is critical that we must do so. You do understand that you are in great danger?’

Danger.

That did it. That word again. I felt as if the wind had been knocked out of me. All I could do was stare at him.

‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘For once, a little payment of the attention.’

He went over to the hearth and stirred the bouillabaisse for a moment, then returned to me with a grave expression.

‘Go ahead now, ask your questions again,’ he said. ‘I will answer them.’

I decided I had to pull myself together; it seemed it was now or never. I gritted my teeth.

‘Okay. Exactly how did you ever learn that I’d gone to Colorado in the first place?’ I asked him. ‘What is this
boum
that’s happening tonight? And why do you think I’m in some kind of danger about it?
What does this all have to do with me?
’

‘Perhaps you don’t know exactly who these Charcoal Burners are?’ Rodo changed the topic, though I had noted that he’d said who they
are,
not
were
.

‘Whoever they are,’ I said, ‘how would that answer any of my questions?’

‘It may answer
all
of your questions. And some that you do not even know of just yet,’ Rodo informed me quite seriously. ‘The
Charbonniers
– in Italy they were called the
Carbonari
– it’s a secret society that has existed for more than two hundred years, though they themselves say they are far more ancient. And they claim they still have tremendous power. Like the Rosicrucians, Freemasons, the Illuminati, these Charcoal Burners also say they possess a secret wisdom only known by the initiated such as themselves. But it is not true. This secret was known in Greece, Egypt, Persia, and even earlier in India—’

‘
What
secret?’ I said, though I was afraid I already knew what was coming.

‘A secret knowledge that was finally written down more than twelve hundred years ago,’ he said. ‘Then it was in danger of no longer being kept a secret. Though no one could decipher its meaning, it was hidden in plain view within a chess set created in Baghdad. Then for a thousand years it was buried in the Pyrenees – the Fire Mountains, Euskal Herria – home of the Basques who helped to protect it.
But now it has surfaced once more, only weeks ago, which may place you in great danger – unless you can understand
who you are
and what role you shall play tonight—’

Rodo looked at me as if that should answer all my questions. Not a chance.

‘What role?’ I said. ‘And who
am
I?’

I felt truly ill. I wanted to crawl under my high stool and weep.

‘As I’ve always told you,’ said Rodo with a strange smile. ‘You are
Cendrillon –
or
Neskato Geldo,
the Little Cinder Girl, the one who sleeps in the ashes behind the stove. Then she rises from the ashes to become the queen – as you may find out, only hours from now. But I shall be with you. For it’s
they
who are dining here with all this secrecy tonight. It’s they who requested that you be present, and they who knew that you’d gone to Colorado. I only learned of your departure too late.’

‘Why me? I’m afraid I still don’t get it,’ I said, though I was a great deal more than afraid that I actually
did.

‘The one who organized this meal knows you quite well – or so I understand,’ said Rodo. ‘The name is Livingston.’

Basil Livingston.

Of
course
he was a player. Why would I be surprised? But might he not be
more
than that, given his suspicious long-term connections with the recently murdered Taras Petrossian?

I was, however, astonished that I found myself here, buried in this dungeon-cellar with my crazy Basque boss, who seemed to know more than
I
did about the dangers posed by this even crazier Game.

I resolved to hear more. And exceptional though it was, for once Rodo seemed more than ready to open up.

‘You perhaps know of the
Chanson de Roland,
’ he began,
as he started setting a dozen or so clay pots on the hearth, ‘that medieval story about Charlemagne’s famous retreat through the Roncesvalles Pass in the Pyrenees – it contains the key to everything. You are familiar with the
Chanson
?’

‘I’m afraid I haven’t read it,’ I admitted, ‘but I know what it’s about. Charlemagne’s defeat by the “Saracen,” as they called them – the Moors. They wiped out his rear flank as his army retreated from Spain back into France. His nephew Roland, hero of the song, was killed there on the pass, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes, that’s the story they’ve told,’ Rodo assured me. ‘But hidden underneath is the real mystery – the true secret of Montglane.’ He’d dipped his fingertips in olive oil and was oiling the insides of the pots.

‘So what do Charlemagne’s retreat and this “secret of Montglane” have to do with tonight’s mysterious coven? Or with that chess set you mentioned?’ I asked him.

‘You understand, Cinder Girl, it was never the Islamic Moors who destroyed Charlemagne’s rear flank or who killed his nephew Roland,’ Rodo told me. ‘It was the Basques.’

‘The Basques?’

Now he unwrapped the
boulles
of shepherd’s dough from their damp cloths and carefully set one
boulle
in each pot. I handed him the long-handled shovel to push the pots back into the firebox.

Once Rodo had shoveled the ash up around the pots, he turned to me and added, ‘The Basques had always controlled the Pyrenees. But the
Chanson de Roland
was written hundreds of years
after
the events it tells us about. When the retreat through Roncesvalles Pass actually happened, in AD 778, Charlemagne was not yet powerful or famous. He was still merely Karl, king of the Franks – uneducated northern peasants. It was more than twenty years before he would be anointed Holy Roman Emperor – “Carolus Magnus” or
Karl
der Grosse,
as the Franks call him, Defender of the Faith – by the pope. Karl the Frank
became
Charlemagne because by then he was already the possessor and defender of the chess set that was known as the Montglane Service.’

I knew we were definitely on to something. This supported my aunt Lily’s story of the legendary chess set and its fabled powers. But Rodo’s additions still hadn’t answered all my questions.

‘I thought that the pope made Charlemagne Holy Roman Emperor in order to get his help defending Christian Europe against incursions by the Muslims,’ I said, racking my brain for all the medieval trivia I could recall. ‘In the mere quarter century before Charlemagne’s arrival, hadn’t the Islamic faith conquered most of the world, including Western Europe?’

‘Exactly,’ Rodo agreed. ‘And now, only four years after Charlemagne’s roust at Roncesvalles, the most powerful possession of Islam had fallen into the hands of Islam’s worst enemy.’

‘But how had Charlemagne been able to get his hands on this chess set so fast?’ I asked.

In my interest, I’d temporarily forgotten that I had a job to do and that we were soon to be descended upon by a bevy of undesirable ‘diners.’ But Rodo hadn’t. He passed me the crate of eggs and a stack of nested copper bowls as he went on.

‘It’s told that the Service was sent to him by the Moorish governor of Barcelona, though for reasons that are still quite unclear,’ Rodo told me. ‘It certainly wasn’t for Charlemagne’s “aid” against the Basques, whom he’d never defeated and who were nowhere operating in the vicinity of Barcelona, anyhow.

‘It’s more likely that the governor himself, Ibn al’Arabi, had some important reason for wanting to hide the set as far from al-Islam as possible – and the Frankish court at Aix-la-Chapelle, or Aachen, was more than one thousand kilometers north, as the bird would fly.’

Rodo paused to review my egg-separation technique. He always insisted it be performed single-handed, with the yolk and whites dropped into separate bowls and the shells flipped into the third. (For the compost heap: Waste not, want not, as Key would say.)

‘But why would a Spanish Muslim official want to send something to a Christian monarch more than six hundred miles away, just to keep it from Islamic hands?’ I asked.

‘Do you know why they called this chess set “the Montglane Service”?’ he replied. ‘It’s a revealing name, for there never was such a place in the Basque Pyrenees back then named Montglane.’

‘I thought it was a fortress and later an abbey,’ I said. But then I bit my tongue, for I recalled that it was Lily who’d told me that, not Rodo.

I’d caught myself just in the nick of time. In my distraction, I’d nearly gotten a fleck of egg yolk into the bowl of whites and ruined the whole batch. I tossed the shell – yolk and all – into the compost bowl and wiped my sweaty hands on my butcher’s apron before resuming my task. When I glanced over to see if Rodo had noticed my faux pas, I was relieved to see that he was beaming with approval.

‘They say that women cannot concentrate on two things at one time,’ he told me. ‘And yet here you have done it! I am happy on behalf of the future existence of my famous meringue.’

Rodo was the only person I’d ever heard of or even imagined who would attempt a soufflé or meringue over an open hearth. But his pièce de résistance
–
the
Béret Basque
, that rich
gâteau au chocolat –
called for both. Rodo remained forever undaunted, even delighted, by such ‘small challenges.’

Now I had a challenge of my own: how to get back to the topic. But Rodo beat me there.

‘So you do know something of the story,’ he said.
‘Yes, Charlemagne named the place Montglane, and he also created the fortress and a title of nobility to go with it. But all were located extremely far from Barcelona and the Mediterranean in the south, and also very far from his capital in the north at Aachen.

‘Instead, he chose the impossible-to-penetrate terrain of the Basque Pyrenees, atop a high mountain. And strangely, this location was not so very far from that exact place of his own disastrous retreat. And he named this spot where he put his fortress:
Montglane
– it means
Le Mont des Glaneurs,
the Mountain of, how you say, the Gleaners. Like the famous painting by Millet.’

Rodo demonstrated the gesture with his hands, as if he were swinging a scythe.

‘You mean the Reapers?’ I said. ‘The Mountain of Reapers? Why would he call it that?’

I’d set down my copper bowl of yolks in preparation for whipping the whites. But Rodo took the bowl of whites, stuck his finger in it, and shook his head – not ready yet. It had to be the right temperature. He set the bowl down again.

‘To each thing its time,’ he told me. ‘It’s from the Bible. This includes all things, as well as the egg whites. And so is the other, the one about the Reapers. It says, “Whatever seeds you sow on the earth, that also you shall, ah –
recolte
– collect.” But I can say it much better how it is written in Latin:
Quod Severis Metes.
’

‘As ye sow, so shall ye reap?’ I guessed.

Rodo nodded. Something about that rang a strange bell in the back of my mind. But I had to let it go.

‘Clarify for me,’ I asked him. ‘What do sowing and reaping have to do with Charlemagne and that chess set? Why does anyone even want it if it’s so dangerous? What does any of it have to do with the Basques, with tonight, or with why
I’m
supposed to be here? I just don’t get it.’

‘Yes, you certainly
do
“get it,”’ Rodo assured me. ‘You are not
complètement folle
!’

Then briefly testing the egg whites with a finger once more, he nodded, tossed in a handful of tartar, and passed the copper bowl with its whisk to me.

‘Think of it!
’
he added. ‘More than one thousand years ago this chess set was sent to a remote place; it was guarded so carefully by those who owned it – those who understood and feared its power. It was buried in the ground just like seeds, for they knew it was something that one day would surely bear fruit of a good or an evil kind.’