The Fire (37 page)

Around it were four tall stakes embedded in the ground, with woven wreaths attached. The tree itself, just beyond, was festooned with red bags that had been tied on with red ribbons – hundreds and hundreds of them.

‘Tobacco pouches,’ said Key. ‘Tributes to honor the dead.’

For the first time all morning, Mr Tobacco Pouch spoke up. ‘For your father,’ he said, handing me a small red cloth pouch that fit in my palm, as he gestured toward the red cedar tree. Key must have clued him in.

I went over to the tree, a bit choked up, and searched a moment before I could locate a branch that was unladen, where I could tie on my gift. Then I inhaled the scent of the tree. What a wonderful tradition: sending smoke rings up to Heaven.

Key had come up behind me. ‘These spirit posts with the wreaths are here to protect this place from evil,’ she told me. ‘They mark the Four Quarters – the four cardinal directions. It all connects together, as you see, right here at this spot.’

She meant, of course, the precise layout of Washington, D.C., a city whose very first stone marker had been laid just due north of this place. Some things were definitely coming together – the four corners, four quarters, four directions, the chessboard form of the ancient altars, the ancient rites –

But there was one thing I still really needed to know.

‘You told me that the “Virgin Isles” is a code word for
the city of Washington, D.C.,’ I said to Key and the others. ‘I can see why George Washington – as the founder of a new country, as a pretty religious guy himself, and maybe even as a Mason – would want to create a fresh new capital city just like the one in the Bible. Why he’d design it this way, bridging the river, to bring the two Christianities together. As you said – two virgin queens, hands across the waters, two kernels of corn in a pod.

‘But what I don’t get is this: If your mission is to follow the “Original Instructions,” to go with the natural flow, then what’s the point of going over to the enemy? I mean, as you yourselves have just pointed out, all these religions have been battling over their symbols and rites for hundreds of years. How could signing up with that embattled agenda possibly help Mother Nature spin spiderwebs or grow corn? Is this an example of “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”?’

Key stopped and looked at me seriously for the first time. ‘Alexandra, in all these years have I taught you
nothing
?’ she said.

Her words struck home. Hadn’t Nim asked exactly the same question?

Red Cedar took my arm. ‘But those
are
the Original Instructions,’ he told me. ‘The “natural order,” as you choose to call it, shows that things only really grow and change from
within,
by achieving a natural balance. Not through external force.’

Clearly, my three companions had blanked on a few historic memories of their own. ‘So you’re impregnating the Church with Native rules of order?’ I said.

‘We are merely demonstrating,’ said Red Cedar, ‘that Mother Corn, like Mother Earth, existed long before any other virgins or mothers. And with our help, she will long outsurvive them. We plant corn and harvest as we do, because that’s how the corn is happiest and produces the most offspring.’

‘As they always say,’ added Key, ‘“As ye sow, so shall ye reap.”’

Where had I just heard that?

Tobacco Pouch – who’d been studying the sky – turned to Key. ‘He’ll be here just now,’ he told her, motioning across the meadow.

Key glanced at her watch and nodded.

‘Who’ll be here?’ I said, following his gesture.

‘Our ride,’ Key said. ‘There’s a parking strip there, just off the back road. Someone’s picking us up for the airport.’

I saw a man emerge from a copse of trees at the far side of the meadow, just opposite where we’d entered ourselves.

Even at this great distance, as he came through the unmowed grass, I recognized him at once by his tall, slender form and lanky gait – not to mention that trademark mop of dark curls, blowing in the breeze.

It was Vartan Azov.

 

I am ashes where once I was fire, And the bard in my bosom is dead, What I loved I now merely admire – And my heart is as grey as my head.

– Lord Byron, ‘To the Countess of Blessington’

 

It were better to die doing something than nothing.

– Lord Byron, March 1824

Missolonghi, Greece

Easter Sunday, April 18, 1824

It was raining; it had been raining for days. It seemed the rains would never end.

The Sirocco had arrived from Africa two weeks ago and struck with the terrible force of an unleashed animal, ripping and clawing at the small stone houses along the coast, leaving the rocky shores strewn with odious debris.

Within the Capsali house, where the British and other
foreigners were quartered, all was silence just as Drs. Bruno and Millingen had ordered. Even the cannonade, for the traditional Greek celebration of Easter Sunday, had been marched by the militia to a site just beyond the town wall, and the townsfolk were encouraged to follow it, despite the inclement weather.

Now the only sound that could be heard within the emptied house was the frenzied racket of the unrelenting storm.

Byron lay beneath the covers of his Turkish sofa on the top floor. Even his great Newfoundland, Lyon, lay quietly beside the settee, his head between his paws. And Fletcher the valet stood across the room in silence, pouring water in order to thin the ever-present carafe of brandy.

Byron studied the walls and ceiling of this drawing room, which he’d decorated himself upon his arrival – was it just three months ago? – with trappings from his own private arsenal. This display of suspended swords, pistols, Turkish sabers, rifles, blunderbusses, bayonets, trumpets, and helmets had never failed to impress Byron’s boisterous and violent private brigade of Suliote bodyguards, who’d camped out below on the ground floor – that is, until he’d finally paid up the dangerous hooligans and sent them off to the front lines.

Now, as the raging storm battered against the shutters, Byron wished – in one of his rare lucid moments – that he might still possess the strength to stand and cross the room, to throw open the windows to the fury of the storm.

Better to die in the wild embrace of a natural force, he believed, than this slow draining away of one’s spark of life with repetitious applications of plasters and leeches. He’d tried his best, at least, to resist all those bleedings. He could never bear the loss of blood. More lives had been lost to the lancet than to the lance – as he’d repeatedly told that incompetent fool, Dr Bruno.

But by the time that the Greek administrator Mavrocordato’s own physician, Luca Vaya, had been able to defy the storm and achieve the beach at Missolonghi, just yesterday, Byron had already suffered the racks of chills and fever for more than a week – ever since that ride, April 9, when the elements had caught up to him, and he’d first taken ill.

And in the end, ‘Bruno the Butcher’ had gotten his way – opening Byron’s veins repeatedly to extract pound after pound of blood. Sacred Heaven! The man was worse than a vampire!

Now, with the life force ebbing from Byron moment by moment, he still retained enough awareness to realize that he’d been, in these past days, more than half the time delirious. And he also retained enough of sober consciousness to know that this illness of his was no mere dose of the cold or the chilblains.

It was, in all likelihood, the same ‘illness’ that had seized Percy Shelley.

He was being carefully killed.

Byron understood that if he didn’t act quickly, if he didn’t reveal what he knew to the one person who needed to know, and who could be trusted, it might well be too late. And all would certainly be lost.

His valet, Fletcher, was now beside his bed, waiting with the bottle of watered cognac that provided Byron’s only relief: Fletcher, who in hindsight may have been the wise one from the very beginning. He’d long been reluctant to accompany his master to Greece, and had begged for Byron to reconsider whether his commitment to the cause of Greek independence might not be better served by merely providing financial assets that the patriots required – but without such direct personal involvement. After all, they’d both seen Missolonghi before, just after their visit, thirteen years ago, to Ali Pasha.

But then, nine days ago when Byron had ‘fallen ill’ with this mysterious, unsolvable disease, the normally stoic Fletcher had nearly gone to pieces. The staff of servants, the military men, the doctors all spoke different languages.

‘Like the Tower of Babel!’ Fletcher had cried, pulling his hair in frustration. It had required three translations merely to request, on the patient’s behalf, a cup of broth with a beaten egg in it.

But at least, thanks to God, Fletcher was here at this moment – and they were, for once, alone. Now, like it or not, the trusted valet must be pressed into one last duty.

Byron touched Fletcher’s arm.

‘Sire, more brandy?’ said the latter, with a countenance so grave and pained that Byron would have laughed – if it hadn’t required quite so much effort.

Byron moved his lips, and Fletcher bent his ear to his master.

‘My daughter,’ Byron whispered.

But he instantly regretted having spoken those words.

‘You wish me to record a personal letter from you to Lady Byron and to little Ada in London?’ asked Fletcher, fearing the worst.

For this kind of exposure could only reflect the last wish of a dying man. The world knew that Byron loathed his wife, and only sent her private communiqués, to which she rarely replied.

But Byron shook his head slightly, among the pillows.

He knew that his valet would understand, and that this man who had been his servant for so many years and through so many tribulations, the only one who knew of their true relationship, would reveal this last request to no one.

‘Fetch me Haidée,’ Byron said. ‘And bring the boy.’

It pained Haidée to see her father lying there, so pale and wan, whiter – as Fletcher had warned, just before they saw him – than down beneath the wing of a newborn chick.

Now, as she and Kauri stood before the tattered Turkish bed, where Fletcher had plumped up cushions, she felt like weeping. She had already lost the one man whom she’d believed all her life was her father – Ali Pasha. And now, this father, whom she had known for little more than a year, was draining away before her eyes.

In the year since they’d found each other, as Haidée well knew, Byron had risked everything and exercised every subterfuge to keep her near him while keeping their relationship a secret.

In support of this subterfuge, only months ago, on Byron’s thirty-sixth birthday, he told her he’d written a letter to his wife, ‘Lady B,’ as he called her, saying he’d found a lovely and lively Greek child, ‘Hayatée’ – just a bit older than their daughter, Ada – who’d been orphaned by the war. He’d like to adopt her and send her to England, where Lady B might look out for her proper education.

Of course, he had never received a word back on the subject. But the spies who opened the mail, as he told Haidée, would believe this pseudo-adoption to be just another of the great lord’s well-known foibles.

Haidée’s ‘relationship’ with Byron had now been established through rumor, which, in Greece, never lied. And now that he was dying – at a moment when it was imperative that they speak – they both knew it was more important than ever that no one must know the truth of why she’d been brought here.

The Black Queen lay hidden in a cave on an island off the coast of Maino where Byron had once told Trelawney he’d like to be buried – the cave where he’d written
The Corsair.
Only the three of them – Haidée, Kauri, and Byron – knew where to retrieve it. But what good was it now?

For the Greek War of Independence, begun in force three years ago, had now gone from bad to worse. Prince Alexander Ypsilántis – former head of the Philiki Eteria, the society pledged to free Greece – had led the charge but been renounced and betrayed by his former master, Tsar Alexander I of Russia, and was now rotting in an Austro-Hungarian jail.

The Greek factions were bickering among one another, vying for supremacy, while Byron, perhaps their last hope, lay dying in a squalid room in Missolonghi.

Even worse, Haidée could read the anguish in her father’s face, not just from the poison they’d undoubtedly been feeding him, but anguish at leaving this earth, at leaving her, his daughter, with their mission yet undone.

Kauri sat in silence near the bed, with one hand on Lyon’s head, while Haidée stood beside her father and took his feeble hand in hers.

‘Father, I know how gravely ill you are,’ she said softly. ‘But I
must
know the truth. What can our hopes be now, for the salvation of the Black Queen – or the chess service?’

‘As you see,’ whispered Byron, ‘it was all quite true, everything we feared. The battles and betrayals of Europe will never end until
all
are free. Napoleon betrayed his allies as well as the French people – and even his own ideals, in the end – when he marched into Russia. And Alexander of Russia, in destroying all hope for uniting the Eastern churches against Islam, betrayed those ideals of his grandmother, Catherine the Great. But what use is idealism when the ideals are false ones?’

The poet had leaned back into the pillows, closing his eyes as if he could not go on.

He moved his hand slightly, and Haidée intuitively reached for the cup of
tisane,
a strong infusion of tea that, at Byron’s
request, Fletcher had made up for his master before departing. Haidée saw that the valet had left a water pipe as well, with the tobacco already burning, to provide the infusion of strength that Byron
himself
would need, to tell what he had to say.

Byron sipped the tea from the cup in Haidée’s hand, then Kauri placed the hose from the water pipe between the poet’s lips. At last, Byron found the strength to continue.

‘Ali Pasha was a man with a great mission,’ he told them in his weak voice. ‘It was more than uniting East and West, it was about uniting underlying truths. Meeting him and Vasiliki changed my life, at a time when I was not much older than the two of you. Because of this, I wrote many of my greatest tales of love: the story of Haidée and Don Juan’s passion;
The Giaour
– “The Infidel” – of love for Leila by the non-Muslim hero. But
giaour
does not really mean “infidel.” The oldest meaning – from Persian
gawr –
was a worshipper of fire, a Zoroastrian. Or a Parsee of India, one who worships Agni, the flame.

‘It was this that I learned from the pasha and the Bektashis – the underlying flame that is present in all great truths. From your mother, Vasiliki, I learned love.’

Byron motioned to them for another strong tea infusion and tobacco to provide the strength he needed. When this was done to his satisfaction, Byron added, ‘Perhaps I shan’t live to see another year,’ he said, ‘but at least I shall see the dawn tomorrow. Enough time to share with you the secret of the Black Queen that the pasha and Vasiliki, so many years ago, once shared with me. You must know that the Queen now in your possession is not the only one. But it is the
real
one. Lean closer, my child.’

Haidée did as he’d asked, and Byron spoke so quietly into her ear that even Kauri had to strain to hear what was said.

The Poet’s Tale

In the town of Kazan in central Russia, sometime in the late 1500s, lived a young girl named Matrona who repeatedly dreamed that the Mother of God had come to her to tell her of an ancient buried icon that possessed tremendous powers. After following the many clues given by the Virgin, the icon was at last located within a demolished house, in the ashes beneath the stove, wrapped in cloth.

It was called the Black Virgin of Kazan. It would become the most famous icon in the history of Russia.

Shortly after its discovery, in 1579, the Bogoroditsa convent was built in Kazan to house the icon – Bogodoritsa meaning ’Birth-Giver of God,’ from Bogomater, Mother of God, the title of all such dark figures connected with the earth.

The Black Virgin of Kazan protected Russia over the past two hundred and fifty years. She accompanied the soldiers who freed Moscow from the Poles in 1612, and even from Napoleon as recently as 1812.

In the 1700s, Peter the Great brought her from Moscow, her second home, to his new city of St Petersburg. She became patron and protectress of that city.

The moment the Black Queen of Heaven was installed at St Petersburg in 1715, Peter the Great unfurled his master plan: to drive the Turks from Europe. He declared himself Petrus I, Russo-Graecorum Monarcha – king of Greece and Russia – and vowed to unite the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches. Though he did not succeed in this quest, Peter’s ambition would inspire another successor, nearly fifty years later, with similar zeal for the same cause.

She was Tsarina Ekaterina II, Empress of all the Russias, whom we know as Catherine the Great.

In 1762, when Catherine – with the help of her lover, Grigory Orlov – overthrew her husband, Tsar Peter III, in a
palace coup, she swiftly joined the Orlov brothers at the Cathedral of Kazan Bogoroditski to officially declare herself empress.

To commemorate the event she had a medallion cast of herself as that other virgin, Athene or Minerva, and she commissioned a copy of the icon of the Black Virgin of Kazan, with a bejeweled
oklad,
a frame cast by master goldsmith Iakov Frolov, which would be hung in the Winter Palace directly above Catherine’s bed.

The Russian Church threw its impressive support – the Church owned more than one-third of all Russian land and Russian serfs – behind Catherine’s aspirations to drive Islam from the eastern reaches of the continent and unite the two Christian churches. They enthusiastically helped fund exploration, expansion, and warfare: Grigori Shelikov, the ‘Russian Columbus,’ established the first Russian colony in Alaska and a trading company in Kamchatka and also mapped eastern Russia, part of western America, and the islands in between.