Authors: Katherine Neville
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Historical, #General
At last they reached the end of the long line of waiting women. As Solarin and Xie curved back to head toward the Vestry, a stooped old woman in a babushka and threadbare sweater and carrying a tin pail left her place in the queue and brushed past them – still crossing herself fervently.
She bumped into Xie, bowed an apology, and continued across the yard.
When she’d passed, Solarin felt Xie tugging his hand. He glanced down to see his daughter extracting a small embossed cardboard placard from her pocket – a ticket or pass to the Palekh exhibit, for it bore the same picture as the banner.
‘Where did this come from?’ he asked, although he was afraid he knew. He glanced after the woman, but she’d vanished across the park.
‘That lady put it into my pocket,’ Xie was saying.
When he looked down again, his daughter had flipped over the card, and Solarin snatched it away. On the back was pasted a small illustration of a flying bird set inside an Islamic eight-pointed star, and three words were printed in Russian:
Reading these words, Solarin felt the blood pulsing in his temples. He glanced quickly in the direction the old woman had gone, but she seemed to have vanished. Then he saw something flicker at the far periphery of the walled fortress; emerging from the copse of trees, she was vanishing again around the far corner of the Tsar’s Chambers – a distance of more than one hundred paces.
Just before she disappeared, she turned to glance over her shoulder directly at Solarin, and he – who had been about to follow her – halted in shock. Even at this distance, he could make out those pale blue eyes, the wisp of silvery-blond hair escaping from her scarf. This was no old crone, but a woman of great beauty and infinite mystery.
And more. It was a face he knew. A face he had imagined he would never see again in this life.
Then she was gone.
He heard himself speak. ‘It cannot be.’
How
could
it be? People do not rise from the dead. And if they did, they would not look the same after fifty years.
‘Do you know that lady, Papa?’ Xie asked in a whisper so no one could hear.
Solarin dropped to one knee in the snow beside his daughter and tossed his arms about her, burying his face in her muffler. He felt like weeping.
‘For a moment she looked familiar,’ he said to Xie. ‘But I’m sure I do not.’
He squeezed her harder, as if he could wring her out. In all these years, he had never lied to his daughter. Not until now. But what could he tell her?
‘And what does her card say?’ Xie whispered in his ear. ‘The one with the flying bird?’
‘
Apahsnah
– it means “danger”’ Solarin told her, trying to pull himself together.
For God’s sake, what was he thinking? This was a fantasy
brought on by a week of stress and bad food and miserable cold. He must be strong. He got to his feet and pressed his daughter’s shoulder between his fingers. ‘But perhaps the only danger here is of
you
forgetting your practice!’ He gave a smile that Xie did not return.
‘What do the other words say?’ she asked.
‘
Byrihgyees pahzhar,
’ he told her. ‘I think it’s just a reference to the firebird or phoenix in this picture here.’ Solarin paused and looked at her. ‘In English, it means, “Beware the fire.”’ He took a deep breath. ‘Now let’s go inside,’ he said, ‘so you can beat the pants off of that Ukrainian
patzer
!’
From the moment they entered the Vestry of Sergiev Lavra, Solarin knew something was wrong. The walls were cold and damp, depressing like everything else in the so-called Women’s Summer. He thought of the woman’s message. What did it mean?
Taras Petrossian, the dashing nouveau capitalist tournament organizer, in his expensive Italian suit, was handing a large wad of rubles as a pourboire to a skinny monk with a big ring of keys, who’d unlocked the building for the game. Petrossian, it was said, had made his fortune through under-the-table dealings in the several designer restaurants and nightclubs he owned. There was a colloquial word for it in Russian:
blat.
Connections.
The armed thugs had already penetrated the inner sanctum – they lurked everywhere in the Vestry, leaning conspicuously against the walls, and not just for warmth. Among other things, this low, squat, unobtrusive building served as the monastery’s treasury.
The glut of the medieval church’s gold and jewels were displayed on pedestals in brightly lit glass cases scattered around the floor. It would be hard to concentrate on chess, thought Solarin, with all this blinding glitter – but there was
the young Vartan Azov, already seated beside the chessboard, his large dark eyes focused upon them as they entered the room. Xie left her father and went to greet him. Solarin thought – not for the first time – that he would like to watch Xie wipe the board with the arrogant brat.
He had to wipe that message from his mind. What did the woman mean? Danger? Beware the fire? And that face he could never forget, a face from his darkest dreams, his nightmares, his worst horrors –
And then he saw it. In a glass display case far across the room.
Solarin walked as in a dream across the wide-open floor of the Vestry and he stood looking down at the large glass case.
Within was a sculpture he had also thought he would never see again – something as impossible and as dangerous as the face of that woman he’d glimpsed outside. Something that had been buried, something long ago and far away. Yet here it was before him.
It was a heavy gold carving, caked with jewels. It portrayed a figure dressed in long robes and seated in a small pavilion with the draperies drawn back.
‘The Black Queen,’ whispered a voice just beside him. Solarin looked down to see the dark eyes and tousled hair of Vartan Azov.
‘Discovered only recently,’ the boy went on, ‘in the cellar of the Hermitage in Petersburg – along with Schliemann’s treasures of Troy. They say this once belonged to Charlemagne and was hidden – perhaps since the French Revolution. It may have been in possession of Catherine the Great of Russia. This is the first time it has been shown in public since it was found.’ Vartan paused. ‘It was brought here for this game.’
Solarin was blinded by terror. He could hear nothing further. They had to depart at once. For this piece was theirs
– the most important piece of all those they had captured and buried. How could it be surfacing here in Russia, when they had buried it twenty years ago, thousands of miles away?
Danger, beware the fire? Solarin had to get out of this place and get some air, he had to escape with Xie right now, the game be damned. Cat had been right all along, but he couldn’t see the whole picture yet – he couldn’t see the board for the pieces.
Solarin nodded politely to Vartan Azov and crossed the room in a few swift strides. He took Xie by the hand and headed for the door.
‘Papa,’ said Xie in confusion, ‘where are we going?’
‘To see that lady,’ he said cryptically, ‘the lady who gave you the card.’
‘But what about the game?’
She would forfeit if she wasn’t there when they started the clocks. She would lose everything they had worked so long and hard for. But he had to know. He stepped outside, holding her hand.
From the top of the Vestry steps, he saw her across the park. The woman was standing at the gates, looking across the space at Solarin with love and understanding. He had been right about her. But then her look changed to one of fear, as she glanced up toward the parapet.
It was only another instant before Solarin followed her gaze and saw the guard, perched on the parapet high above, the gun in his hand. Without thinking, Solarin shoved Xie behind him for protection and glanced back at the woman.
‘Mother,’ he said.
And the next thing he saw was the fire in his head.
At the beginning of every spiritual realization stands death, in the form of ‘dying to the world.’…At the beginning of the work [‘The Albedo’ or ‘Whitening’] the most precious material which the alchemist produces is the ash…
– Titus Burckhardt,
AlchemyYou must consume yourself in your own flame; how could you wish to become new unless you had first become ashes!
– Friedrich Nietzsche,
Thus Spake Zarathustra
(Kaufmann translation)
Pray to Allah, but hobble your camel.
– Sufi saying
Janina, Albania
January 1822
The odalisques, chambermaids of Ali Pasha’s harem, were crossing the icy footbridge through the marsh when they heard the first screams.
Haidée, the pasha’s twelve-year-old daughter, clutched the hand of the nearest of her three escorts – none of them older than fifteen – and together they peered into the darkness, afraid to speak or breathe. Across vast Lake Pambotis, they could make out the torches that flickered along the far shore, but that was all.
The screams came faster, harsher now – hoarse, panting cries, like wild animals barking to one another in the forest. But these were the cries of humans – and not those of hunters, but of the hunted. Male voices, raised in fear, blowing across the lake.
Without warning, a lone kestrel flapped up from the stiff
cattails before the clustered girls, winging past them in silence, hunting its prey in the predawn light, and then the cries and the torches vanished as if swallowed by the fog. The dark lake lay in silvery silence – a silence more ominous than the cries that had gone before.
Had it begun?
Here on their floating wooden bridge, protected only by the thick marsh grasses that surrounded them, the odalisques and their young ward were unsure what to do: retrace their steps back to the harem on its tiny isle, or continue across the marsh to the steamy
hamam,
the bathhouse at the edge of the shore, where they’d been ordered – urgently, under pain of severe punishment – to deliver the pasha’s daughter before dawn. An escort would be waiting near the
hamam,
to bring her – on horseback, under cover of darkness – to her father.
The pasha had never issued such a command before. It could not be disobeyed. Haidée was dressed for the trek, in thick kashimir pantaloons and fur-lined boots. But her odalisques – frozen here in indecision upon the bridge – were trembling more from fear than from the cold, unable to move. Sheltered as she’d been in her twelve years, it was clear to young Haidée that these ignorant country girls would prefer the warmth and relative safety of their harem, surrounded by fellow slaves and concubines, to the icy winter lake with its dark and unknown dangers. In truth, she’d prefer it herself.
Haidée silently prayed for a sign of what those terrified screams had meant.
Then, as if in answer to her unspoken request, through the dark morning mist across the lake she could make out the fire that had flamed up like a beacon, illuminating the massive form of the pasha’s palace. Projecting into the lake on its spit of land, its crenellated white granite walls and pointed minarets shimmering in the mist, it seemed to rise
from the waters: Demir Kule, the Iron Castle. It was part of a walled fortress, the Castro, at the entrance to the six-kilometer lake and it had been built to withstand the onslaught of ten thousand troops. In these past two years of armed siege by the Ottoman Turks, it had proven impregnable.
Just as impregnable was this strip of craggy, mountainous terrain – Shquiperia, the Eagle’s Country – a wild, unconquerable place ruled by a wild, unconquerable people who called themselves Toska – ‘coarse’ – after the rough, volcanic pumice that had formed this land. The Turks and Greeks called it Albania – the White Land – for those rugged, snowcapped mountains that protected it from attack by land or sea. Its inhabitants, the most ancient race in southeastern Europe, still spoke the ancient tongue – older by far than Illyrian, Macedonian, or Greek: Chimaera, a language comprehended by no one else on earth.
And the wildest and most chimaerical of these was Haidée’s father, red-haired Ali Pasha – Arslan, ‘the Lion,’ as he was called from the age of fourteen, when, alongside his mother and her band of brigands, he’d avenged his father’s death in a
ghak,
a blood feud, to recover the town of Tebelen. It would be the first of many such ruthless victories.
Now, nearly seventy years later, Ali Tebeleni – Vali of Rumelia, Pasha of Janina – had formed a sea power to rival Algiers and captured all the coastal towns down to Parga, once possessions of the Venetian Empire. He feared no power, east or west. He himself was the most powerful force in the far-flung Ottoman Empire, after the sultan in Constantinople.
Too
powerful, in fact. That was the trouble.
For weeks now, Ali Pasha had been sequestered, along with a small retinue – twelve of his closest supporters and Haidée’s mother, Vasiliki, the pasha’s favorite wife – in a monastery at the middle of the enormous lake. He was awaiting his pardon from the sultan, Mahmud II, in Constantinople – a pardon
now eight days overdue. The only insurance against the pasha’s life was the hard, stony fact of Demir Kule itself. The fortress, defended by six batteries of British mortar, was also packed with twenty thousand pounds of French explosives. The pasha had threatened to destroy it, to blow it to the skies – along with all the treasures and lives within its walls – if the sultan’s promised pardon was not forthcoming.
Haidée understood that it must be for this very reason the pasha had ordered her to be brought to him, under cover of darkness, at this final hour. Her father needed her. She vowed to quell any fears.
But then in the deathly silence Haidée and her chambermaids heard a sound. It was a soft sound, but infinitely terrifying. A sound borne very close by, only meters from where they stood, sheltered here among the high grasses.
The sound of oars, dipping into the water.
As if with one thought, the young girls held their breath and focused upon that lapping sound. They could nearly touch its source.
Through the dense, silvery fog, they could just make out three longboats slipping past them in the waters. Each slender caique was rowed by shadowy oarsmen – perhaps ten or twelve shadows per boat, more than thirty men in all. Their silhouettes swayed rhythmically.
In horror, Haidée knew there could be no mistake where these boats were headed. There was only one thing that lay beyond the marsh – out there in the middle of the vast lake. These boats and their clandestine oarsmen were headed for the Isle of Pines, where the monastery lay: the island refuge of Ali Pasha.
She knew she must reach the
hamam
at once – she must reach the shore, where the pasha’s horseman was waiting. She knew just what those terrified screams had meant – what the silence, and the small beacon fire that followed it, must
signify. They were warnings to those awaiting the dawn, those who were waiting on that isle across the lake. Warnings by those who must have risked their lives just to light such a fire. Warnings to her father.
It meant that the impregnable Demir Kule had been taken without a single shot. The brave Albanian defenders who had held out for two long years had been defeated, by stealth or treachery, in the dead of night.
And Haidée understood what that meant: These boats slipping past her were no ordinary ships.
These were Turkish ships.
Someone had betrayed her father, Ali Pasha.
Mehmet Effendi stood in darkness, high in the bell tower of the St Pantaleon monastery on the Isle of Pines. He held his spyglass, awaiting his first glimpse of dawn with uncustomary anxiety and trepidation.
Such anxiety was uncustomary to Mehmet Effendi due to the fact that he had always known what each next dawn, in a long succession of dawns, was going to bring. He knew such things – the unfolding of future events – with a sharp precision. Indeed, ordinarily he could time them to within the fragment of a moment. This was because Mehmet Effendi was not only – in his civil role – Ali Pasha’s chief minister, he was also the pasha’s chief astrologer. Mehmet Effendi had never been wrong in predicting the outcome of a maneuver or a battle.
The stars had not been out last night, and there’d been no moon to go by, but he hardly needed such things. For in these past few weeks and days, the omens had never been clearer. It was only their interpretation, right now, that still gave him pause. Though why should it? he chastened himself. After all, it was all in place, wasn’t it? Everything that had been foretold was coming to pass.
The twelve were here, weren’t they? All of them – not just the general, but the shaikhs, the Mürsits of the order – even the great Baba himself, who’d been brought here from his near-death bed, by litter-bearers, over the Pindus range of mountains, to arrive just in time for this event. This was the event that had been awaited for more than one thousand years, since the days of the caliphs al-Mahdi and Harun al-Rashid. All the right people were in place – and the omens, too. How could it possibly go wrong?
Waiting beside Effendi in silence was the general: Athanasi Vaya, head of the pasha’s armies, whose brilliant strategies had held the Ottoman armies of Sultan Mahmud II at bay these past two years.
To accomplish this, Vaya had employed the freebooting Klepht banditti to guard the high mountain passes against intrusion. Then he’d deployed Ali Pasha’s crack Albanian Palikhari troops, in Frankish-style guerrilla warfare and sabotage. At the end of last Ramadan, for instance, when Sultan Mahmud’s officers were inside Janina’s White Mosque at their
Bairam
prayers, Vaya had ordered the Palikhari to demolish the place by cannonade. The Ottoman officers, along with the mosque, had been reduced to charcoal. But Vaya’s real stroke of genius involved the sultan’s own troops: the Janissaries.
The degenerate Ottoman sultans – ensconced in their harems in the ‘Golden Cage’ of the Topkapi Palace at Constantinople – had always raised armies by imposing upon their outlying Christian provinces a levee called the
Devishirme
– the ‘Tax of Children.’ Each year, one in every five Christian boys was removed from his village, then taken to Constantinople, converted to Islam, and enrolled in the sultan’s armies. Despite the injunctions of the Qur’an against forcible conversion to Islam, or against selling Muslims into slavery, the
Devishirme
had existed for five hundred years.
These boys, their successors, and their descendants had grown into a powerful, implacable force that even the Sublime Porte at Constantinople could not control. The Janissary troops, when not otherwise employed, did not blanch at setting the capital city aflame, robbing civilians in the streets – nor even removing sultans from their thrones. The sultan Mahmud II had lost his own two predecessors to such Janissary predations. He’d decided it was time to put a stop to it.
But there was a twist to the plot – and it lay right here in the White Land. That problem was precisely why Sultan Mahmud had sent his armies here over the mountains, why they had laid siege to these lands for the past two years. Why their vast armies had been waiting outside the Castro to bombard the fortress of Demir Kule. But this problem also explained why they had not yet been successful – why the Janissaries had not demolished the fortress. And it was this problem that gave Chief Minister Mehmet Effendi and his companion more than a small bit of confidence tonight, as they stood here now, watching, in the bell tower of St Pantaleon, in the predawn light.
There was only one thing on earth that the all-powerful Janissaries truly venerated – something they had continued to revere, over all the past five hundred years of their military corps’ existence. This was the memory of Haji Bektash Veli – the thirteenth-century founder of the mystical Bektashi order of Sufi dervishes. Haji Bektash was the
Pir
of the Janissaries – their patron saint.
This was, in truth, why the sultan feared his own army so. Why he’d had to replenish the forces fighting here with mercenaries drawn from other pashiliks, elsewhere throughout his far-flung empire.
The Janissaries had become a true menace to the empire itself. Like religious zealots, they swore an oath of allegiance
drenched with secret mystical codes. Worse, they swore allegiance only to their
Pir
– not to the house of Osman or its sultan, trapped in his Golden Cage on the Golden Horn.
I have trusted in God…
(so began the Janissaries’ oath)
W
e are believers of old. We have confessed the unity of Reality. We have offered our head on this way. We have a prophet. Since the time of the Mystic Saints we have been the intoxicated ones. We are the moths in the divine fire. We are a company of wandering dervishes in this world. We cannot be counted on the fingers; we cannot be finished by defeat. No one outside of us knows our state.The Twelve Imams, the Twelve Ways, we have affirmed them all: the Three, the Seven, the Forty, the light of the Prophet, the Beneficence of Ali, our
Pir
– the head sultan, Haji Bektash Veli…
It gave Mehmet Effendi and General Vaya relief to know that the greatest Bektashi representative here on earth – the
Dede,
the oldest Baba – had traveled over the mountains to be here tonight. To be present for the event they had all awaited. The Baba, who alone knew the true mysteries and what the omens might portend.
But despite all the omens, it seemed something may have gone wrong.
Chief Minister Effendi turned to General Vaya in the darkened bell tower of the monastery. ‘This is an omen I do not understand,’ he told the general.
‘You mean, something in the stars?’ General Vaya objected. ‘But my friend, you’ve assured us that all is well in that department. We’ve followed your astrological injunctions to the closest. It’s as you always say:
Con-sider
means “
with
the stars”;
dis-aster
means “
against
them”!
‘Furthermore,’ the general continued, ‘even if your
predictions are completely wrong – if the Castro is destroyed, with its millions in jewels and thousands of barrels of powder – as you know, we are all Bektashis here, including the pasha! They may have replaced their leaders with the sultan’s men, but even they haven’t dared to destroy us yet, nor will they attempt it, as long as the pasha holds the “key” that they all covet. And do not forget – we also have an exit strategy!’