I went with Shahin and Chariot to Grenoble with the eight pieces, the cloth, and the drawing the abbess had made of the board. There, in the south of France not far from where the Game had first begun, we found the famous physicist Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier, whom Chariot and Shahin had met in Egypt. Though we had many pieces, we did not have the whole. It was thirty years before we deciphered the formula. But we did it at last.
There at night in the darkness of Fourier’s laboratory, the four of us stood and watched the philosophers’ stone forming in the crucible. Through thirty years and many failed attempts, at last we’d moved through all the sixteen phases as they were meant to be. The marriage of the Red King and the White Queen, it was called—the secret that had been lost for a thousand years. Calcination, oxidation, congelation, fixation, solucion, digestion, distillation, evaporation, sublimation, separation, extraction, ceration, fermentation, putrefaction, propagation—and now projection. We watched the volatile gases rise from the crystals in the glass that shone like the constellations in the universe. The gases formed colors as they rose: midnight blue, purple, pink, magenta, red, orange, yellow, gold … The peacock’s tail, they called it—the spectrum of visible wave lengths. And lower, the waves that could only be heard, not seen.
When it had dissolved and vanished, we saw the thick residue of reddish black coating the base of the glass. Scraping it away, we wrapped it in a bit of beeswax to drop it into the aqua philosophia—the heavy water.
Now only one question remained: Who would drink?
It was the year 1830 when we completed the formula. We knew from our books that such a drink could be lethal as well as life giving, if we’d done it wrong. There was another problem. If what we had was in fact the elixir, we must hide the pieces at once. To this end, I decided to return to the desert.
I crossed the sea again for what I feared might be the last time. At Algiers, I went with Shahin and Chariot to the Casbah. There was someone there I thought would be of use to me in my mission. I found him at last in a harem—a large canvas before him, and many women, veiled, reclining about him on divans. He turned to me, his blue eyes flashing, his dark hair disheveled, just as David had looked so many years before when we’d posed for him in his studio, Valentine and I. But this young painter resembled someone else far more than David—he was the very image of Charles Maurice Talleyrand.
“Your father has sent me to you,” I told the young man, who was only a few years younger than Chariot.
The painter looked at me strangely. “You must be a medium.” He smiled at me. “My father, Monsieur Delacroix, has been dead for many years.” He twirled the paintbrush in his hand, anxious to get on with his work.
“I mean your natural father,” I said as his face darkened into a glower. “I refer to Prince Talleyrand.”
“Those rumors are quite unfounded,” he told me curtly.
“I know differently,” I said. “My name is Mireille, and I’ve come from France on a mission I need you for. This is my son, Chariot—your half brother. And Shahin, our guide. I want you to come with me to the desert, where I plan to restore something of great value and power to its native soil. I want to commission you to do a painting marking the spot—and warning all those who come near that it is protected by the gods.”
Then I told him the tale.
It was weeks before we reached the Tassili. At last, in the secret cave, we found the place to hide the pieces. Eugene Delacroix scaled the wall as Chariot directed him where to draw the caduceus—and outside, the labrys form of the White Queen, which he added to the existing hunt scene.
When we’d completed our work, Shahin withdrew the vial of aqua philosophia and the pellet of powder we’d wrapped in beeswax so it would dissolve more slowly, as prescribed. We dissolved the pellet, and I looked at the vial I now held in my hand, as Shahin and Talleyrand’s two sons looked on.
I remembered the words of Paracelsus, that great alchemist who once believed he had discovered the formula: “We shall be as gods,” he said. I put the vial to my lips—and I drank.
When I’d finished reading this tale, I was shaking from head to foot. Solarin gripped my hand, his knuckles white as he sat beside me. The elixir of life—was that the formula? Was it possible something like that could exist?
My mind was racing. Solarin was pouring us brandy from a decanter on a nearby table. It was true, I thought, that genetic engineers had recently discovered the structure of DNA, the building block of life that, like the caduceus of Hermes, formed a double helix resembling the Eight. But nothing in ancient writings suggested this secret was known before. And how could something that transmuted metals also alter life?
My mind moved to the pieces—where they’d been buried. And I was more confused. Hadn’t Minnie said she herself had placed them in the Tassili, beneath the caduceus, deep in the wall of the stone? How could she know precisely where they were, if Mireille had left them there nearly two hundred years ago?
Then I remembered the letter, the one Solarin had brought out of Algiers and given me at Nim’s place—the letter from Minnie. With fumbling hand, I reached in my pocket and pulled it out, slashing it open as Solarin sat silently beside me, drinking his brandy. I could feel his eyes on me all the while.
I yanked the letter from the envelope and looked at it. Before I’d even started reading, cold horror ran down my spine. The handwriting of the letter and the journal were the same! Though the first was in modern English and the second in antique French, there was no way to duplicate those flowery scrolls of the sort that hadn’t been used in hundreds of years.
I looked up at Solarin. He was staring at the letter in horror and disbelief. Our eyes met, then slowly we turned again to the letter. I pressed it open on my lap, and we read:
My dear Catherine,
You now know a secret few people have ever learned. Even Alexander and Ladislaus have never guessed that I am not their grandmother at all, for twelve generations have passed since I gave birth to their ancestor—Chariot. Kamel’s father, who married me only a year before his death, was in fact descended from my old friend Shahin, whose bones have lain in dust for over a hundred fifty years.
Of course, you may imagine if you choose that I’m simply a mad old woman. Believe as you wish—you are the Black Queen now. You possess the parts of a secret both powerful and dangerous. Enough parts that you can solve the riddle, as I did, so many years ago. But will you? That is the choice you must now make, and make alone.
If you want my advice, I suggest you destroy those pieces—melt them down so they’ll never again be the cause of such misery and suffering as I’ve experienced all my life. What might be a great boon to mankind could also be a dreadful curse, as history has shown. Go forth, and do as you wish. My blessings go with you.
Yours in God,
Mireille
I sat with my eyes closed as Solarin pressed my hand in his. When I opened them, Mordecai was standing there, his arm wrapped around Lily protectively. Nim and Harry, whom I’d not heard return, were just behind him. They all came over, taking seats around the table where Solarin and I sat. At center were the pieces.
“What do you think of it?” asked Mordecai quietly.
Harry leaned over and patted my hand as I sat there shaking. “What if it were true?” he said.
“Then it would be the most dangerous thing imaginable,” I said, still shaking. Though I didn’t care to admit it, I believed it myself. “I think she’s right. We should destroy those pieces.”
“But you’re the Black Queen now,” said Lily. “You don’t have to listen to her.”
“Slava and I have both studied physics,” Solarin added. “We have three times as many pieces as Mireille had when she deciphered the formula. Though we don’t have the information contained in the board, we could solve it, I’m sure. I could get the board.…”
“Besides,” Nim chimed in with a grin, holding his injured side, “I could use some of that stuff just now, to heal m
e of all my wounds.”
I wondered how it would feel—to know you had the power to live two hundred years or more. To know that whatever happened to you, short of being dropped from an airplane, your wounds would heal, your diseases all be remedied.
But did I want to spend thirty years of my life trying to solve that formula? Though it might not take that long, I’d seen from Minnie’s experience it had quickly turned to an obsession—something that ruined not only her life, but the lives of everyone she knew or touched. Did I want a long life at the expense of a happy one? By her own testimony, Minnie had lived two hundred years in terror and danger, even after she’d found the formula. No wonder she’d wanted to leave the Game.
It was my decision now. I looked at the pieces on the table. It would be easy enough to do. Minnie hadn’t chosen Mordecai just because he was a chess master—he was a jeweler, too. Doubtless he had all the necessary equipment right here to analyze the pieces, find out what they were made of, and turn them into bijoux fit for a queen. But as I looked at them, I knew I could never bring myself to do it. They glowed with an inner life of their own. There was a bond between us—the Montglane Service and I—that I couldn’t seem to cut.
I glanced up at the expectant faces watching me in silence. “I’m going to bury the pieces,” I said slowly. “Lily, you’ll help me; we make a good team. We’ll take them somewhere—to the desert or the mountains—and Solarin will return to get the board. This Game has got to end. We’ll put the Montglane Service away where no one will find it again for a thousand years.”
“But in the end, it will be found again,” Solarin said softly.
I turned to look at him, and something deep passed between us. He knew now what must happen—and I knew we might not see one another again for a very long time, if we carried out my decision.
“Maybe in a thousand years,” I told him, “there’ll be a nicer crop of humans on this planet—who’ll know how to use a tool like this for the good of all, instead of a weapon for power. Or maybe by then scientists will have rediscovered the formula anyway. If the information in this service were no longer a secret, but common knowledge—the value of these pieces wouldn’t even buy you a subway token.”
“Then why not solve the formula now?” said Nim. “Make it common knowledge?”
Now he had cut to the bone—to the very heart of the matter. The problem was, how many people did I know whom I wanted to give eternal life? Not just evil people like Blanche and El-Marad, but ordinary crooks like those I’d worked with—Jock Upham and Jean Philippe Petard. Did I want people like them to live forever? Did I want to make the choice of whether they would or not?
Now I understood what Paracelsus had meant when he’d said, “We shall be as gods.” These were decisions that had always been out of the hands of mortal men, whether you believed they were controlled by the gods, the totem spirits, or natural selection. If we were the ones with power to give or withhold something of that nature, we’d be playing with fire. And no matter how responsible we felt about its use or control, unless we kept it a dark secret forever as the ancient priests had done, we’d be in the same position as the scientists who invented the first “nuclear device.”
“No,” I said to Nim. I stood up and looked at the pieces glowing on the table—the pieces I’d risked my life for so often and so recklessly. As I stood there, I wondered if I could really do it, put them in the ground and never be tempted—never—to go searching for them and dig them up again. Harry was smiling at me, and as if he’d read my thoughts, he stood and came over to me.
“If anyone could do it, you could,” he said, giving me a big bear hug. “That’s why Minnie chose you above all. You see, darling, she thought you had the strength she never had—to resist the temptation of the power that comes with knowledge.…”
“My God, you make me sound like Savonarola, burning books,” I told him. “All I’m doing is putting them out of harm’s way for a while.”
Mordecai had come back into the room with a big platter of delicatessen food that smelled delicious. He let Carioca out of the kitchen, where, from the appearance of the platter, he’d been “helping” with the food preparations.
We were all standing, stretching, moving about the big room—our voices resounding with the buoyancy that comes of being held down under insufferable pressure for so long and suddenly released. I was near Solarin and Nim, picking at the food, when Nim reached out and put his arm across my shoulders again. Solarin didn’t seem to mind this time.
“We’ve just had a chat, Sascha and I,” Nim told me. “You may not be in love with my brother, but he’s in love with you. Beware of Russian passions—they can be all-consuming.” He smiled at Solarin with a look of genuine love.
“I’m pretty hard to devour,” I told him. “Besides, I feel the same way about him.” Solarin looked at me in surprise—I don’t know why. Though Nim’s arm was still around me, Solarin grabbed me by the shoulders and planted a big kiss on my mouth.
“I won’t keep him away for long,” Nim told me, ruffling my hair. “I’m going to Russia with him, for the board. To lose your only brother once in life is enough. This time, if we go—we go together.”
Mordecai came around, handing everyone a glass and pouring us champagne. When finished, he picked up Carioca and raised his own glass in a toast.
“To the Montglane Service,” he said with his wizened smile. “May it rest in peace for a thousand thousand years!” We all drank to that, and there were cries of “Hear, Hear” from Harry.
“To Cat and Lily!” said Harry, raising his glass. “They’ve braved many dangers. May they live long in happiness and friendship. Even if they don’t live forever, at least let every day be filled with joy.” He beamed at me.
It was my turn. I raised my glass aloft and looked at their faces—the owlish Mordecai; Harry with his doglike eyes; Lily, tanned and toned; Nim, with the prophet’s red hair but strange bicolored eyes, smiling at me as if he could read my thoughts. And Solarin, intense and alive, as he was beside a chessboard.
Here they all stood around me—my closest friends, people I genuinely loved. But people who were mortal, like me, and would decay in time. Our biological clocks would keep on ticking; nothing would slow the years. What we accomplished, we would have to do in under a hundred years—the span allotted for man. It had not always been that way. There were giants in the earth in those days, said the Bible: men of great power who lived seven or eight hundred years. Where had we gone wrong? When had we lost the knack?… I shook my head, held up my champagne glass, and smiled.
“To the Game,” I said. “The game of kings … the most dangerous game: the eternal game. The Game we’ve just won—at least for another round. And to Minnie, who battled all her life to keep these pieces from the hands of those who’d use them wrongly, toward their own ends—evil and power over their fellow men. May she live on in peace wherever she is, and with our blessings.…”
“Hear, Hear,” Harry called again, but I hadn’t quite finished.
“And now that the Game is finished, and we’ve decided to bury the pieces,” I added, “may we have the strength to resist all temptation to dig them up again!”
Everyone applauded wholeheartedly, and there was much backslapping as people downed their champagne. Almost as if we were trying to convince ourselves.
I put my glass to my lips and tipped it toward the sky. I felt the bubbles sliding down my throat—dry, stinging, perhaps a little bitter to swallow. As the last drops fell from the glass to my tongue, I wondered—only for an instant—what perhaps I’d never know. What would it taste like, what would it feel like, if that liquid sliding down my throat was not champagne. But the elixir of life.
END GAME
A Biography of Katherine Neville
Katherine Neville (b. 1945) is an American author, best known for her spellbinding adventure novels The Eight, A Calculated Risk, and The Magic Circle.
Neville was born in the Midwest a
nd from an early age spent many of her summers and holidays in the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Northwest. She would listen with fascination to the yarns of cowboys, miners, lumberjacks, riverboat folks along the Mississippi, Native Americans, and the legendary Mountain Men of the Rockies. These tales sparked her early desire to have adventures and to become a storyteller herself. However, that desire was to be deferred for quite a while.
While growing up, Neville disliked having to sit in stuffy classrooms, listen to lectures, and take exams. She preferred to be outside climbing trees. Instead of reading the dull texts assigned in her history, geography, and social studies classes, she escaped into sagas like The Odyssey and Jason and the Argonauts, swashbuckling adventure tales like Rafael Sabatini’s pirate novels Scaramouche, The Sea Hawk, and Captain Blood, and Jules Verne’s fantasy adventures 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days. When she was sixteen, she saw a movie that changed her life: Lawrence of Arabia. The film thrilled Neville more than all those imaginary tales combined and inspired in her a yearning to live in a wild and remote foreign land one day.
Throughout high school and college, Neville earned money by drawing and painting people’s horses, dogs, and grandchildren and by teaching art classes. Later on, during years of economic boom and bust, she turned to modeling to support herself. Not only did she get to meet interesting new people, she had an opportunity to work with highly skilled photographers and learn the art of photography. Eventually, she saved enough money to buy a Nikon F and a set of lenses, and she started snapping shots of everything and everyone.
When Neville graduated from college, she found that job opportunities for women were limited. After searching for work in several cities, she took a national exam for a new field called data processing, scoring in the top one percent nationally. It landed her a job in New York at IBM in the Transportation and Utilities industries, automating businesses for clients like Con Edison and Long Island Railroad. She became a devotee of early computer wizards Admiral Grace Hopper and Alan Turing and discovered a passion for code making and breaking. This was the inspiration for her first novel, A Calculated Risk, which she would complete nearly twenty years later.