The Fire (48 page)

It was the year 1830 when I discovered the secret of making the formula, just as it had been prophesied.

I was in the south, living at Grenoble, when France once more fell into the throes of a revolution that began, as always, in Paris. Our country was again in turmoil, just as it had
been at the time of my conception so long ago – when my mother, Mireille, had run the barricades to flee to Corsica with the Bonapartes, and my father, Maurice Talleyrand, had fled to England and then to America.

But in this revolution, things would soon prove to be far different.

By July of 1830, our restored Bourbon monarch Charles X – after six years in power, having revoked civil liberties and disbanded the national guard – had infuriated the people once more by dismissing the magistrates and closing all independent newspapers. That July, when the king quit Paris to go on a hunting trip at one of his country estates, the bourgeoisie and the masses of Paris called upon the Marquis de La Fayette, the only noble of the old guard who seemed still to believe that the restoration of our liberties was plausible, and they charged him to reconstitute a new national guard in the name of the people and to scour the countrysides of France for additional troops and munitions. Then, in swift succession, the people appointed the duc d’Orléans regent of France, voted to restore the constitutional monarchy, and sent a missive to King Charles demanding that he resign his crown.

But as for I myself, living in happiness at Grenoble, none of these politics meant anything. As I foresaw things, it seemed that my life was only just beginning.

For at age thirty-seven – the exact age that my father was when he had first met my mother – I was filled with joy, I was on the brink of complete fulfillment. My vision had returned along with my powers. And, as if fate itself had intervened, things were coming together in a most extraordinary way.

Most astonishing of all, I was deeply in love. Haidée – now twenty years of age, and more ravishingly beautiful than when I’d first met her – was now my wife and was expecting
our first child. I was certain in my confidence that we would soon possess that idyllic life and love that my father had so craved and yearned for during all his own. And I had a great secret that I’d kept, even from Haidée, as a surprise. If I completed this great work, for which I knew I’d been born and destined, impossible as it might seem, Haidée’s love and my own might even survive the grave.

All seemed perfect.

Through my mother’s efforts, we now possessed the drawing of the chessboard and the bejeweled cloth that covered it, both of which the Abbess of Montglane had rescued for us, and we had the seven chess pieces that were once captured by my stepmother, Mme. Catherine Grand. We also held the Black Queen that had been given to Talleyrand by Alexander of Russia, which – thanks to the abbess’s last communiqué to Letizia Bonaparte and Shahin – we now knew was only a copy that had been made by Tsar Alexander’s grandmother, Catherine the Great. My mother, with Shahin and Kauri, were still off in quest of the other pieces, as they had been for some time.

But I also possessed the
real
Black Queen – minus one emerald – that had been protected for so many decades by the Bektashis and Ali Pasha. This Haidée and I, with Kauri’s help, had rescued from where Byron had hidden it upon a rocky, deserted isle off the coast of Maino.

Each afternoon now at Grenoble I spent in our laboratory with Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, the great scientist whom I’d known since my childhood in Egypt. His protégé, Jean-François Champollion, had recently made a tour, at the Duke of Tuscany’s expense, of those Egyptian antiquities already scattered throughout collections of Europe, and only last year Champollion had returned from a second tour of Egypt itself, from whence he’d brought us back vital information.

Therefore, despite the limited number of pieces in our
hands at this moment, I foresaw that I was now on the very brink of the great discovery that had so long eluded me – the secret of eternal life.

Then, toward the end of July, La Fayette sent a young man to us in Grenoble in support of the coup d’état that was still under way in Paris. This emissary was the son of a great deceased military commander, General Thomas Dumas, who, under Napoleon, had been general in chief of the army of the western Basque Pyrenees.

The son, twenty-eight-year-old Alexandre Dumas, now a popular playwright in Paris, cut a romantic, Byronic figure with his exotic Creole features and mass of cotton-wool hair, his jacket of military cut dashingly offset with a long, flowing foulard about his throat. He’d purportedly been sent hither by La Fayette to bring back magazines of weapons, powder, and shot from the south. But in fact, he was sent to bring back information.

The scientist Monsieur Fourier had long been world-famous as the author of
The Analytic Theory of Heat,
which over the years had already led to better designs for cannon and other gunpowder weapons. But his old friend and ally La Fayette, it seems, had somehow got wind of another project. The general, visualizing France at the dawn of a renewed hope for a restored republic or a constitutional monarchy, himself held new hope for a different sort of breakthrough – one having nothing to do with warfare or its materials – a discovery that had been spoken of since time immemorial.

La Fayette’s young emissary Alexandre, however, did not expect what he found when he came to Grenoble. How could he? No one could know what the future was destined, quite soon, to bring to all of us – no one, that is, except myself.

But there was one thing my vision still could not encompass.

Haidée herself.

‘Haidée!’ the youthful Dumas exclaimed the moment he
met my extremely beautiful and very pregnant wife. ‘
Ma foi!
An adorable name! Are there, then, really women who bear the name Haidée anywhere but in Byron’s poems?’

In short, he was besotted by her charms, as anyone might be, and not only those who were admirers of her father’s verses! Alexandre spent days, weeks, doting upon my lovely Haidée and hanging upon her every word. She shared her life with him. They grew to love each other as friends.

Little more than a month elapsed after Alexandre’s arrival, before Fourier – an aging revolutionary himself of sixty-two – felt we must share with Alexandre our secret, all of it, including Byron’s involvement, to take back and share in turn with La Fayette.

We were so close to the truth.

We had completed the first stage – the Philosopher’s Stone, as it was known in alchemy – the reddish powder that led to everything else, as I had believed since I was ten years old. This would create the perfect human being, perhaps the first step in manifesting the perfect civilization that the chess set was designed to create. We had wrapped the stone in beeswax and gathered the heavy water at just the right time of the year.

I knew the time had arrived. I stood on the threshold of extending my perfect present into an infinitely perfect future.

I took the powder.

I drank.

Then something went horribly wrong.

I looked up. Haidée was standing in the laboratory doorway, one hand to her heart. Her silvery eyes were large and luminous. Beside her, clutching her hand in his, was the very last person I expected to see: Kauri. ‘No!’ my wife cried.

‘It is too late,’ said Kauri.

His expression of awful anguish I shall never forget. I stared at the two of them across the room. It seemed an
infinity before I could bring myself to speak. ‘What have I done?’ I said in a choked voice, as the horror of my private action slowly began to dawn.

‘You have destroyed all hope,’ Haidée whispered.

Before I could realize what she meant, her eyes rolled back and she fainted. Kauri caught her in his arms to lower her to the ground, and I raced across the laboratory to assist him. But no sooner had I got there than the potion over-came me. Overcome by dizziness, I sat on the floor beside the silent form of my prostrate bride. Kauri, in his long robes, hunkered beside us.

‘No one ever imagined you would do this,’ he told me gravely. ‘You were the one who was foretold, as even my father knew. He believed that you and your mother – White King and Black Queen – might accomplish the task that
The Books of the Balance
calls for. But now, I fear, the most we can hope for is to scatter the pieces – to protect them by again hiding at least those that we have until someone else appears who can stop this Game. But you yourself cannot solve it, now that you’ve drunk, now that you have succumbed to the hunger within that overpowers reason. It must be someone who is prepared to protect them for an eternity, if necessary, without any hope of reaping the rewards of the service for themselves.’

‘An eternity?’ I said, confused. ‘You mean, if Haidée drinks the elixir as I’ve done, we’ll have to wander the earth forever, protecting these pieces until someone else comes along who can find the deeper answer to the mystery?’

‘Not Haidée,’ Kauri told me. ‘She will never drink. From the moment that she accepted this commission, when we were only children, she has taken no action that served herself, or even those she loved. All has been in service of that higher mission for which the Service itself was originally intended.’

I looked at him as the horror overwhelmed me. My dizziness was almost nauseating. What had I done?

‘Would you even wish it upon her,’ Kauri asked me softly, ‘this future that you face yourself? Or will you place this in Allah’s hands?’

Whether it was Allah or fate or kismet, the choice would not be mine to make. For within less than one month, my mother and Shahin returned under urgent request.

My son, Alexandre Dumas de Remy, was born.

And three days later, Haidée died.

The rest, you know.

When he’d finished reading this, Vartan set the letter down gently as if he might bruise the past somehow. He looked at me.

I was still slightly in shock.

‘God, what an awful thing,’ I said, ‘to find at your happiest moment that you’ve actually created a formula for tragedy. But he’s spent a very long lifetime trying to atone for that mistake.’

‘That’s why Mireille drank it herself, of course,’ Vartan said. ‘That’s what Lily told us from the very beginning in Colorado – that this was what Minnie had said in her letter to your mother, that it caused misery and suffering. Your mother called it an obsession, that it had ruined the lives of everyone Minnie had known or touched. But most of all it was her own son, by driving him for thirty years, ever since his childhood, toward solving the wrong formula.’

I shook my head and hugged Vartan. ‘If I were you I’d be very careful,’ I told him. ‘You may be getting mixed up with the wrong chick here – after all, I seem to be related to all these obsessive people. Maybe these compulsions have been genetically transmitted.’

‘Then our children might get these?’ said Vartan with a grin. ‘I propose, then, that the sooner we try to find out the better.’ He ruffled my hair.

He picked up the spaghetti plates and I carried our glasses to the kitchen. When we’d washed up, he turned to me with the most beautiful smile.

‘
Jaisi Karni, Vaise Bharni,’
he said. ‘I’ll have to remember that – “Results are the fruits of our actions.”’ He glanced at his watch. ‘It’s nearly midnight; if we want to follow that map of your mother’s, we should be up and going by dawn, leaving us only six hours. Exactly how many seeds do you think we can sow tonight, before we have to get up and start reaping?’

‘Quite a few,’ I told him. ‘As I recall, the place where we’re going doesn’t even open until two in the afternoon.’

Opposite pairs working in harmony: this has become a theme of our quest to perfect decision-making. Calculation and evaluation. Patience and opportunism, intuition and analysis, style and objectivity…strategy and tactics, planning and reaction. Success comes from balancing these forces and harnessing their inherent power.

– Garry Kasparov,
How Life Imitates Chess

Vartan and I, as seasoned chess players, had effectively utilized our time within the constraints allotted by both our biological and chronological clocks. We had fourteen hours until our appointment with destiny – of which we spent seven ‘fruitfully,’ as Rodo had recommended – and the only thing competitive about it was which of us could give the other more pleasure.

When I finally awakened, the sun was well up and Vartan’s curly head was lying on my breast. I could still feel the warmth of his hands from last night, his lips moving over my body. But when I finally roused him from sleep, we still
weren’t any readier to see dawn than Romeo and Juliet were after
their
first night out. He groaned, kissed my stomach, and rolled out of bed just after I did.

When we were finally bathed and changed and had wolfed down a bit of dry cereal, some yogurt, and coffee, I grabbed my mother’s valuable list of chess coordinates, shoved it into an empty backpack from my coatrack, and we went downstairs.

Obviously, when Mother had said we could contact her for ‘further instructions,’ she hadn’t been talking about something as sensitive as what she had transferred into my hands under this multilayered cover. When it came to the Black Queen and the number of folks still seeking her and the other pieces, it was clear that Vartan and I must be on our own.

‘You say you know this place,’ said Vartan, ‘so how exactly do we get there?’

‘We walk,’ I said. ‘Oddly enough, it’s not far from here.’

‘But how could that be?’ he objected. ‘You said it was high up on a hill, and we are now coming from the lowest place – the river.’

‘Well, the city’s not laid out in your usual fashion,’ I said as we trekked straight uphill through the steep, serpentine, and crisscrossed streets of Georgetown. ‘People always believe that Washington, D.C., was built in some kind of swamp – many books say it’s true. But there’s never been any swampland around here – just some cattail marshes that they dredged to build the Washington Monument. In fact, it’s much more like that sacred “City on the Hill” that Galen and the Piscataway were talking about – the high place, the altar, the sanctum, the temple of man. The hill that we’re climbing up now was one of the original land grants given out by the British in these parts – maybe even the first one – named after a famous battle at the Rock of Dumbarton in Scotland. The place we’re now headed – where the arrow
points on my mother’s map, about twelve blocks from here – is called Dumbarton Oaks.’

‘I know it, of course,’ said Vartan, which came as something of a surprise to
moi.
He added, ‘It’s famous. Everybody in Europe and around the world must know it. It’s where, before the end of World War II, the first meeting was held – with the United States, the UK, the USSR, and the Republic of China – the conference that first created the United Nations. The meeting just after that one was held at Yalta, in Krym, near where your father was born.’

When he saw my blank expression, Vartan looked at me oddly, as if Americans’ ignorance of great historical events in their own backyards might prove contagious. He said, ‘But how will we get in? Isn’t such a place under close security?’

‘It’s open to the public most days at two p.m.,’ I told him.

By the time we reached the top of Thirty-first, where it dead-ends into R Street, across the way the big iron gates of Dumbarton Oaks were already open. The broad drive swept uphill between the massive oak trees up to the steeper steps leading to the mansion. Just inside the gates to the right, at the small ticket carrel, we got a map of the sixteen-acre park and a brochure that told some of the place’s history, which I handed to Vartan.

‘Why would your mother hide something in so well-known a spot where she might have been observed?’ he whispered to me.

‘I’m not sure it’s actually
here,
’ I told him. ‘Her map just shows an arrow pointing toward the gates and leading into the grounds. That suggests to me that whatever Mother left here, it would be somewhere within the park instead of the house or any other buildings.’

‘Possibly not,’ said Vartan, who’d noticed something in his brochure. ‘Why don’t you have a look at this picture?’

On the inside flap of the brochure was the illustration of
a colorful tapestry with the figure of a woman surrounded by what looked like cherubs and angels, all wearing halos. The woman at the center seemed to be handing out Christmas gifts to the crowd. Beneath her was a caption in Greek.

‘
Hestia Polyolbos,
’ said Vartan, translating, ‘
Full of Blessings.
’

‘Hestia?’ I said.

‘She is the most ancient Greek goddess, it seems,’ said Vartan, ‘the goddess of fire. She’s almost as ancient as Agni in India. They say here that this tapestry is very rare – early Byzantine made in Egypt in the fourth century and a masterpiece of this collection – but that it’s even rarer because Hestia is almost never depicted at all. Like Yahweh, she’s only ever appeared as the fire itself. She’s the “
focus
”
–
that means the hearth of a house, or more important, of a
city.
’

He glanced up at me with a significant look.

‘Okay,’ I agreed. ‘Then let’s go inside first and have a look.’

The mansion, the
orangerie,
and the Byzantine room were completely deserted. Though it was already afternoon, we appeared to be early birds.

Our first glimpse of the wool tapestry was astonishing. It was about six feet high by four feet wide and oozing surreal colors: not only red, blue, gold, and yellow, but greens of every hue from dark to light, saffron, pumpkin, teal, and midnight blue. Surely this beautiful ancient queen was connected with the Queen that
we
sought, but how?

Vartan read aloud from the larger catalog nearby:
Young men, praise Hestia, the most ancient of goddesses –
that was the invocation to her prayer. It seems this is an icon that was used in worship, like that Russian Black Virgin of Kazan that we read about. They say Hestia was the tutelary goddess in every
prytaneum
– that’s the hearth where the eternal flame
burned at the heart of every city throughout the ancient Greek world.

‘The form of this tapestry, it says – this layout with all the eight figures, six putti, and two attendants staring right out of the frame at some midpoint toward the viewer – is not Greek, but far older. It comes from ancient pagan Babylon, Egypt, and India. And there’s something else here written in Greek – let me see.’

I couldn’t take my eyes from the enormous tapestry with its fresh flowers floating in the background, the beautiful Queen of Fire, covered in extravagant jewels – just like the Montglane Service. How was she connected? Her two attendants at either side looked like angels. The male held some sort of parchment scroll in his hand, while the female to the right held a book with a Greek word on the cover. The gifts that Hestia was passing out to the cherubs around her looked like wreaths that also had words written inside.

As if he’d read my mind, Vartan translated, ‘The wreaths are the gifts of the fire – those are the “blessings” – wealth, mirth, praise, abundance, merit, progress. Her hearth at the
prytaneum
is where the communal banquets were held; she was the patroness of cooks! At the Panathenaia, the great festival of Athene, there were torch races where they carried the eternal flame from her hearth to rejuvenate the city. But wait – she’s connected with Hermes, too. As goddess of the hearth, Hestia represents the interior, the strength of the city,
civitas
. Hermes is the god of travel, strangers, nomads, the circulation of wealth.’ He looked at me. ‘She’s the square and he’s the circle – matter and spirit.’

‘And,’ I reminded him, ‘Galen’s story said that Hermes himself, who was called Thoth in Egypt, was also the Greek god of alchemy.’

‘And Hestia, as the fire herself,’ said Vartan, ‘is the source of all the transformations that take place in that process,
regardless of where they happen. It says everything in this tapestry is symbolic. But the symbols your mother is referring to she would want to mean something specifically to
you.
’

‘You’re right,’ I told him, ‘The key my mother was pointing at
has
to be in this image somewhere.’

But if just for me, why did Rodo say he’d guessed where we might be going? I studied the tapestry before me and racked my brain, trying to think of all we had learned in just one week about everything connected with the fire and with what it must have meant to al-Jabir, a man who, twelve hundred years ago, had created a chess set that contained the ancient wisdom of all time – which, if used for one’s own ends alone, could be dangerous to yourself and to others, and yet, in the larger scheme, might be so beneficial to all.

Hestia was looking out of the tapestry, straight at me. Her eyes were a strange, blue-green color, not Egyptian at all. They seemed to see inside my soul. She seemed to be asking
me
an important question, instead of my asking her. I listened for a moment.

And then I knew.

The chessboard is the key.

As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

I grabbed Vartan by the hand. ‘Let’s go,’ I said. And we left the building.

‘What is it?’ he whispered behind me, as he tried to keep up with my stiff pace.

I took him back down near the gates where we’d come in, where I’d noticed a narrow stone path that seemed to disappear between some boxwoods. Now I found it and dragged Vartan between them and behind me, down a long path that led around the perimeter of the acreage. When I was sure we were well away from any possible eavesdroppers – though all was so silent it seemed there was no one within miles –
I stopped and turned to him. ‘Vartan, it isn’t
where
or
what
that we’re supposed to be looking for. It’s
how.’

‘How?’ he said, with a mystified expression.

‘Did that tapestry of Hestia remind you of anything?’ I asked him. ‘I mean the layout of it.’

Vartan glanced at the small image on his brochure.

‘There are
eight
figures surrounding her,’ he said, glancing back at me.

‘I mean the chessboard,’ I told him. ‘It wasn’t the chessboard drawing by the abbess or the chessboard in my apartment – it was all three – but especially
this
one. What if you took this little chessboard drawing of my mother’s here in my backpack and you placed it smack in the middle of the tapestry – right in Hestia’s lap?’ When he stared at me, I added, ‘I think that Mother either moved the pieces, or else she had them buried from the very beginning in keeping with the theme of that tapestry. How many bunches of lines on our map? Six. How many cherubim – or whatever they are – on that tapestry? Six. How many gifts are the little boys receiving from Hestia? Six.’

‘Six-six-six,’ said Vartan. ‘The Number of the Beast.’

The other part of my mother’s original coded message.

‘The first gift she gives on the tapestry that you translated from Greek was “wealth,”’ I added to Vartan. ‘And the first chess piece where Mother put a star and an arrow to here was the Black Queen, represented by Hestia herself here at center board. What better place to hide the most precious piece of all for that higher order than here – the birthplace of the United Nations, the wealth of nations, so to speak.’

‘Then there must be another pointer in this park to help us find the real Queen,’ said Vartan.

‘Right,’ I agreed, sounding more confident than I felt about actually finding what I thought we were looking for. But where else could it be?

Behind the mansion, steep stone steps descended the back of the mountain. The landscaping within the sixteen-acre park was beautiful and mysterious, like a secret garden. Each time we emerged from an arch, a wall of huge bushes, or turned a corner, a surprise of the landscape greeted us – sometimes a high, splashing fountain, at others a vista spread before us of an orchard, a vineyard, or a pool. At last we came through an arcade with high trellised walls that had ancient fig trees trained up the sides, twisting thirty feet toward the sky. When we passed through the last arch of this arcade, I knew I’d found what I’d been looking for.

Before us spread an enormous pool of swirling gravelly waters that resembled a wide, babbling brook, but so shallow you could cross it almost without wetting your feet. The bottom was made of thousands of round, smooth pebbles set into the concrete in a wavy design. At the far end were enormous fountains of galloping metallic horses that seemed to be rising from the sea, spraying their lacy waters high into the sky.

Vartan and I walked to the river’s opposite end and we looked across the vast expanse toward the fountains. From this perspective, those wavy patterns of stones beneath the shallow waters merged, like an optical illusion, to form a design that must be exactly what we were looking for: an enormous sheaf of wheat that seemed to be waving in a hidden breeze just beneath the rippling surface of the water.

Vartan and I stood for a moment without speaking, then he touched my arm and gestured down toward where we stood. Just at our feet, carved into the rock at the edge of the pool, was a motto:

Quod Severis Metes

As ye sow, so shall ye reap

The top of the sheaf of wheat was pointing toward the frothing sea horses across the pool – due north: the same compass direction that pointed away from Piscataway and Mount Vernon – toward the very top point of Washington, D.C.