The czarina did not speak but stood near the doorway, her eyes fastened on the chessboard.
“How much do you think he overheard?” she asked at last, reading the abbess’s thoughts.
“We must assume that he heard all,” said the abbess. “We must act at once.”
“What, because a foolish boy has learned he’s not the man who will be king?” Catherine said with a bitter smile. “I’m certain he’s guessed that long before now.”
“No,” said the abbess, “because he has learned about the service.”
“But surely it’s safe enough until we’ve formed a plan,” Catherine said. “And the one piece you’ve brought here is in my vaults. We can dispatch that, if you’d like, to a place where no one would ever think to look. Workmen are pouring another concrete base for the last wing of the Winter Palace. It’s been under construction these last fifty years—I dread to think of the bones that must already be buried there!”
“Could we do it ourselves?” said the abbess as the czarina crossed the room.
“Surely you’re jesting.” Catherine took her seat beside the chessboard once again. “What, the two of us—sneak out in the dead of night to hide a little chess piece only six inches high? I hardly think there’s cause for such alarm.”
But the abbess was no longer looking at her. Her gaze rested upon the chessboard that sat between them, scattered with their half-played game, a gaming table of black-and-white tile that she had brought with her from France. Slowly she raised her hand and, with a brush of her arm, swept the pieces aside so a few toppled to the soft Astrakhan carpet beneath. She rapped on the board with her knuckles. There was a dull, thick tone as if padding lay beneath the surface—as if something were separating the thin enamel tiles from something buried underneath. The czarina’s eyes widened as she put out her hand to touch the surface of the board. She rose from the table, her heart pounding, and stepped to a nearby brazier whose coals had long ago crumbled to ashes. She picked up a heavy iron poker and, lifting it over her head, brought it down with all her might across the chess table. A few of the tiles cracked. Casting aside the poker, she ripped out the broken pieces with her bare hands and the cotton batting that lay under the tiles. Beneath the wadding, she saw a dull glow that seemed to radiate with an inner flame. The abbess sat on her chair beside the board, her face grim and pale.
“The board of the Montglane Service!” whispered the czarina, staring at the carved squares of silver and gold that showed through the gaping hole. “You’ve had it all this time. No wonder you’ve been silent. We must remove these tiles and wadding, pry it loose from the table so I may bathe my eyes in all its radiance. Ah, how I ache to see it!”
“I had imagined it in my dreams,” the abbess said. “But when at last it was raised from the earth, when I saw it glowing in the dim light of the abbey, when I felt the chiseled stones and strange magical symbols with my fingertips—I felt a force run through me more terrifying than anything I’d known. Now you understand why I wish to bury it—tonight—where no one will find it again until the other pieces can be retrieved. Is there anyone we can trust to help us in this mission?”
Catherine looked at her for a long moment, feeling for the first time in many years the loneliness of the role she’d chosen for her life. An empress could afford no friends, no confidants.
“No,” she said to the abbess with a mischievous, girlish grin, “but we’ve engaged in dangerous caprices long before this—have we not, Helene? Tonight at midnight, we can sup together—and perhaps a brisk walk in the gardens will do us good?”
“We may wish to take several walks,” agreed the abbess. “Before I ordered this board built into the table, I had it cut carefully into four pieces—so it could be moved without the aid of too many assistants. I foresaw this day.…” Using the iron poker as a crowbar, Catherine had already begun to crack loose the fragile tiles. The abbess lifted the pieces away to reveal larger portions of the magnificent board. Each square contained a strange mystical symbol, in alternating silver and gold. The edges were embellished with rare uncut gems, polished like eggs and set into oddly sculpted patterns.
“After we dine,” said the abbess, looking up at her friend, “we will read my … confiscated letters?”
“Of course—I’ll have them brought to you,” said the empress, looking with marveling eyes at the board. “They weren’t very interesting. They’re all from a friend of yours of years ago—mostly chatting about the weather in Corsica.…”
THE TASSILI
APRIL 1793
But Mireille was already thousands of miles away from the shores of Corsica. And as she came over the last high wall of the Ez-Zemoul El Akbar, she saw before her, across the sands, the Tassili—home of the White Queen.
The Tassili n’Ajjer, or Plateau of Chasms, loomed from the desert, a long ribbon of blue stone running three hundred miles from Algeria into the kingdom of Tripoli, skirting the edge of the Ahaggar Mountains and the lush oases that dotted the southern desert. Within these plateau canyons lay the key to the ancient mystery.
As Mireille followed Shahin from the bleak desert into the mouth of the narrow western defile, she felt the temperature drop rapidly—and for the first time in nearly a month, she smelled the rich scent of fresh water. Entering the defile with its high rock walls, she saw the narrow trickle of flatwash over broken stone. The banks were thick with pink oleander whispering in the shade, and a few sparse date palms dotted the riverbed, their feathery fronds reaching up toward the shimmering fragment of sky.
As their camels climbed through the narrow gorge, the neck of blue rock slowly widened into a rich and fertile valley where high rivers fed the orchards of peach, fig, and apricot trees. Mireille, who’d eaten nothing for weeks but lizard, salamander, and buzzard baked in coals, plucked peaches from the trees as they moved among the thick branches, and the camels filched big mouthfuls of dark green leaves.
Each valley opened into dozens of other valleys and twisted gorges, each with its own climate and vegetation. Formed millions of years ago by deep underground rivers cutting their way through many-colored layers of rock, the Tassili was sculpted like the caves and chasms of a subterranean sea. The river cut gorges whose lacy walls of pink-and-white stone resembled coral reefs, wide valleys of spiral needles thrusting toward the sky. And surrounding these castlelike mesas of petrified red sandstone were the massive plateaus of blue-gray, fortresslike walls, hurtling from the floor of the desert a mile into the sky.
Mireille and Shahin encountered no one until, high above the ledges of Aabaraka Tafelalet, they came to Tamrit—the Village of Tents. Here, thousand-year-old cypresses towered over the deep, cold riverbed, and the temperature dropped so drastically that Mireille could scarcely remember the 120-degree heat of their month in the dry and barren dunes.
At Tamrit they’d leave behind their camels and proceed on foot with only the provisions they could carry. For now they’d entered that portion of the Labyrinth where, according to Shahin, the switchbacks and ledges were so treacherous that even wild goats and mouflon rarely ventured there.
They made arrangements for their camels to be watered by the People of the Tents. Many had come out to stare wide-eyed at Mireille’s red tresses—now turned to flame by the setting sun.
“We must rest here for the night,” Shahin told her. “The Labyrinth can only be negotiated in daylight. Tomorrow we start. At the heart of the Labyrinth is the key.…” He raised his arm to point to the end of the gorge, where the rock walls swept away in a curve already hidden in blue-black shadow as the sun slipped under the rim of the canyon.
“The White Queen,” whispered Mireille, looking up at the contorted shadows that made the twisted rock seem to writhe with motion. “Shahin, you don’t really believe there’s a woman of stone up there, do you—I mean, a living person?” She felt a chill pass over her as the sun dipped down and the air became palpably cold.
“I know it,” he whispered back, as if someon
e might be listening. “They say sometimes at sunset, when no one is near, she has been heard from a great distance—singing a strange melody. Perhaps … she will sing for you.”
At Sefar the air was cold and clear. Here they encountered their first rock carvings—though these were not the oldest—small devils with horns like goats, frisking about the walls in bas-relief. These were painted about 1500 B.C. The higher they climbed, the more difficult the access became and the more ancient the paintings—the more magical, mysterious, and complex.
Mireille felt she was moving back in time as she ascended the steep ledges that were carved from the sheer canyon walls. As they turned through each curve of canyon, the paintings splashed across the dark rock face told the story of the ages of men whose lives had mingled with these chasms—a tide of civilization, wave after wave—going back eight thousand years.
Art was everywhere—carmine and red ocher and black and yellow and brown—carved and crayoned on the steep walls, burned with wild color into the dark recesses of fissures and caves—thousands and thousands of paintings, as far as the eye could see. Unfolded here in the wilds of nature, painted at angles and heights that could only be reached by an expert mountain climber or—as Shahin had said, by a goat—they told the story not only of man—but of life itself.
On the second day they saw the chariots of the Hyksos—the sea people who’d conquered Egypt and the Sahara two thousand years before Christ, and whose superior weaponry—horse-drawn vehicles and body armor—had helped them prevail over the painted camels of the indigenous warriors. The tableaux of their conquest read like an open book as they passed across the canyon walls like predators across the vast red desert. Mireille smiled to herself, wondering what her uncle Jacques-Louis would think, gazing upon the work of all these anonymous artists, whose names were buried in the dim mists of time yet whose works had endured these thousands of years.
Each night when the sun sank beneath the canyon rim, they had to seek shelter. When there were no caves nearby, they wrapped themselves in wool blankets that Shahin tacked into the canyon with tent pegs—so they wouldn’t roll over the cliffs in their sleep.
On the third day they reached the caves of Tan Zoumaitok—so dark and deep they could only see by the light of torches made from scrub brush they pulled from the cracks of the rock. Here in the caves were colored pictures, perfectly preserved, of faceless men with coin-shaped heads, speaking with fish that walked upright on legs. For the ancient tribes, said Shahin, believed their ancestors had moved from the sea to land as fish, walking on legs from the primeval ooze. Here too were depictions of the magic they’d used to appease the spirits of nature—a spiral dance performed by djenoun, or genii who seemed to be possessed—moving counterclockwise in ever-narrowing circles about the central shape of a sacred stone. Mireille looked at the image for a long time, Shahin standing beside her wordlessly, before they moved on.
On the morning of the fourth day, they approached the summit of the plateau. As they rounded the bend of the gorge, the walls expanded and opened into a wide, deep valley completely covered with paintings. Everywhere, on every face of rock, was color. This was the Valley of Giants. More than five thousand paintings filled the walls of the gorge from top to bottom. Mireille stopped breathing for a moment as her eyes wandered over the vast array of art—the most ancient they’d seen—washed with a color, rendered with a clarity and simplicity, as if they’d been painted only yesterday. Like the frescoes of the great masters, they were timeless.
She stood there a long time. The stories on these walls seemed to enfold her, to draw her into another world, primitive and mysterious. Between the earth and the sky was nothing but color and form—color that seemed to move in her blood like a drug as she stood on the high ledge, suspended in space. And then she heard the sound.
At first she thought it was the wind—a high-pitched hum like air blowing through the narrow neck of a bottle. Looking up, she saw a high cliff—perhaps a thousand feet above—that jutted out over the dry, wild gorge. A narrow crack seemed to appear from nowhere in the rock face. Mireille glanced at Shahin. He too was looking at the cliff where the sound was coming from. He drew his veils over his face and nodded for her to precede him on the thin ribbon of trail.
The trail ascended sharply. Soon it became so steep, and the ledge itself so fragile, that Mireille—well past seven months—struggled to keep both her breath and her balance. Once, her feet slipped out from under her, and she toppled to her knees. The pebbles that crumbled beneath her pitched three thousand feet into the gorge below. Swallowing with a dry throat, she picked herself up—for the ledge was so narrow Shahin could not help her—and continued on without looking down. The sound became ever louder.
It was three notes, played over and over in different combinations—higher and higher pitches. The closer she came to the fissure in the rock, the less it sounded like the wind. The beautiful, clear tone resembled a human voice. Mireille continued to pick her way up the crumbling ledge.
The shelf was five thousand feet from the valley floor. Here, what had appeared from below as a narrow crevice in the rock was in fact a gigantic fissure—the entrance to a cave, or so it seemed. Twenty feet across and fifty feet high, it ran like a huge rip in the stone, between the ledge and the summit. Mireille waited for Shahin to catch up with her, and, taking his hand, they stepped through the opening.
The sound became deafening, swirling around them from all sides and echoing off the enclosing walls of the fissure. It seemed to move through every particle of her body as Mireille forged through the dark crevasse. At the end, she saw a flicker of light. She plowed through the darkness as the music seemed to swallow her. At last she reached the end, still holding on to Shahin, and stepped out.
What she’d thought was a cave was in fact another small valley, its ceiling open to the sky. Light flooded from above, illuminating everything with a wash of eerie white. On the sweep of curving concave walls were the giants. Twenty feet high, they floated above her in pale, ethereal colors. Gods with spiral rams’ horns growing from their heads, men in puffy suits with hoses running from mouth to chest, their faces concealed beneath globular helmets with only grates where their features should have been. They sat on chairs with strange backs that supported their heads; before them were levers and circular gadgets like the dials of clocks or barometers. They all performed functions strange and alien to Mireille, and at their center floated the White Queen.
The music had stopped. Perhaps it had been a trick of the wind—or of her mind. The figures shone brilliantly in the wash of white light. Mireille looked at the White Queen.
High on the wall loomed the strange and terrible figure—larger than any other. Like a divine nemesis, she rose upon the cliff in a cloud of white—her strong face barely suggested with a few violently slashed lines—her hooked horns like question marks that seemed to spring forth from the wall. Her mouth was an open wail, like a tongueless person struggling to speak. But she did not speak.
Mireille stared at her with a numbness approaching terror. Surrounded by silence more frightening than sound, she glanced at Shahin, who stood motionless beside her. Swathed in his dark haik and blue veils, it seemed he too had been carved from the timeless rock. In the brilliant wash of light, surrounded by the cold walls of the gorge, Mireille was terrified and confused as she turned her eyes slowly back to the wall. And then she saw it.
The White Queen’s upraised hand held a long staff—and around this staff were twined the forms of serpents. Like the caduceus of healing, they formed a figure eight. She thought she heard a voice, but it did not come from the curved stone wall—it came from within. The voice said, Look again. Look closely. See.
Mireille looked at the figures ranging across the wall. They were all figures of men—all but the White Queen. And then, as if a veil had been torn from her eyes, she saw it all differently. It was no longer a panorama of men engaged in strange and indecipherable acts—it was one man. Like a moving p
icture that began in one place and ended in another, it showed the progression of this man through many phases—a transmutation from one thing to another.
Beneath the transforming wand of the White Queen, he moved across the wall, passing from stage to stage just as the round-head men had come as fish from the sea. He dressed in ritual clothing—perhaps for protective purposes. He moved levers in his hands, as a navigator steering a ship or a chemist grinding at a mortar. And at last, after many changes, when the great work was complete, he rose from his chair and joined the White Queen, crowned for his efforts with the sacred spiral horns of Mars—god of war and destruction. He’d become a god.
“I understand,” said Mireille aloud—and the sound of her voice echoed back and forth from the walls and floor of the abyss, shattering the sunlight.
It was at that moment she felt the first pain. She doubled over as it seized her, and Shahin grasped her and helped her to the ground. She was cold with sweat, and her heart beat frantically. Shahin ripped off his veils and put his hand to her stomach as the second contraction wrenched her body.
“It is time,” he said softly.
THE TASSILI
JUNE 1793
From the high plateau above Tamrit, Mireille could see twenty miles across the outer dunes. The wind lifted her hair so it floated out behind her, the color of the red sand. The soft fabric of her caftan was unlaced, and at her breast the child was nursing. As Shahin had predicted, he’d been born beneath the eyes of the goddess—and it was a boy. She’d named him Charlot, after her falcon. He was now nearly six weeks old.
Against the horizon she saw the soft red plumes of rising sand that marked the riders from Bahr-al-Azrak. When she narrowed her eyes she could make out four men on camels, sliding down the inside curl of a massive feathered dune, like small chips of wood sucked into the curve of an ocean wave. Heat baked off the dune in hot patterns, obscuring the figures when they moved into its path.