The Fire. Katherine Neville

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СКАЧАТЬ fact, my all-consuming job at Sutalde, that my uncle had so prudently locked me into, now provided me exactly the same structure – the practice, the tension, the time clocks – that had been woefully lacking in my life ever since my father had died and I’d had to abandon the game of chess. The task of preparing and maintaining the fire for a full week of cooking each week required all the diligence of minding an infant or tending a flock of young animals: You couldn’t afford to blink.

      But if that mirror told me the unblinking truth about myself, I’d have to admit that my job, these past four years, had provided me a lot more than structure or diligence or discipline. Living with the fire as I did – looking into those flames and embers day after day so I could manage their height and heat and strength – had taught me a new way of seeing. And thanks to Rodo’s recent vituperous rantings, I’d just seen something new: I’d seen that my mother might have left me another clue – one that I ought to have noticed the very moment I walked in the door.

      The fire. Under the circumstances, how could it be here at all?

      I hunkered down beside the hearth for a better look at the log in the pit. It was a seasoned white pine of at least thirty caliper inches – a log that would burn faster than a denser hardwood from a broadleaf tree. Though it was clear that my mother, as a mountain girl, knew plenty about building fires, how could she have created this fire without prior planning – not to mention without loads of assistance?

      In the hour or so I’d been here, no one had applied fresh kindling, enlivened the embers with a bellows or blowpipe – nothing to speed the intensity of the heat. Yet this fire was a pretty mature one with flames six inches high, which meant that it had been burning for three hours. Given the steady, even nature of the flame, somebody had stayed around tending this fire for well over an hour until it was really established.

      I checked my watch. This meant that my mother must have vanished from the lodge even more recently than it had first appeared – perhaps only half an hour before I’d arrived. But if so – vanished to where? And was she alone? And if she – or they – had departed by a door or a window, why were there no tracks, other than mine, in the snow?

      My head was aching from this cacophany of clues that all seemed to lead toward nothing more than background noise. But then, yet another sour note leapt out at me: Just how had my boss Rodo known that I’d left to attend a ‘boum anniversaire,’ as he called it – a birthday party? Given Mother’s lifelong reluctance about even mentioning her birth date, I’d told no one why I was leaving or where I was going – not even Leda the Swan, as Rodo’s message said. No matter how contradictory things might appear, I knew there must be a theme to my mother’s disappearance hidden here somewhere. And there was one more place that I hadn’t yet searched.

      I plunged my hand into my pocket and grabbed the wooden chess queen I’d rescued from the billiard table. With my thumbnail, I scraped off the bottom circle of felt. Within the hollowed-out queen, I saw that something hard and firm had been inserted. I jimmied it out: a tiny bit of cardboard. I took it over to the window light and pried it open. When I read the three words printed there, I nearly fainted.

      Beside it were the faded traces of the phoenix – just as I remembered from that bleak, awful day at Zagorsk. I remembered that I’d found it in my pocket then, too. The bird seemed to be flying up to heaven, enshrined in an eight-pointed star.

      I could scarcely breathe. But before I could come to grips with anything – before I could fathom what in God’s name this might mean – I heard the sound of a car horn outside.

      I looked out the window and saw Key’s Toyota pulling up into the snowy parking space, just behind my car. Key emerged from the driver’s side, followed by – from the backseat – a man dressed in furs who helped out my aunt Lily, similarly attired. All three of them were headed straight for the front door.

      In panic, I shoved the cardboard back into my pocket, along with the chess piece. I raced to the mudroom; the outer doors were just swinging open. Before I could speak, my eyes flashed past the two women – right to the ‘gigolo’ of my aunt Lily.

      As he stepped over the threshhold, he was shaking loose snow from the high fur collar of his coat. His eyes met mine, and he smiled – a cold smile, a smile filled with danger. It was no more than an instant before I understood why.

      Standing there before me, in my mother’s isolated mountain retreat, as if we two were completely alone in time and space, was the man who had killed my father.

      The boy who had won the Last Game. Vartan Azov.

       Black and White

      It is here that the symbolism of black and white, already present in the squares of the chess board, takes on its full value: the white army is that of light, the black army is that of darkness…each of which is fighting in the name of a principle, or that of the spirit and darkness in man; these are the two forms of the “holy war”: the “lesser holy war” and the “greater holy war,” according to a saying of the prophet Mohammed…

       In a holy war it is possible that each of the combatants may legitimately consider himself as the protagonist of Light fighting the darkness. This again is the conse-quence of the double meaning of every symbol: what for one is the expression of the Spirit, may be the image of dark “matter” in the eyes of the other.

      – Titus Burckhardt, The Symbolism of Chess

       Everything looks worse in black and white.

      – Paul Simon, Kodachrome

      Time had stopped. I was lost.

      My eyes were locked with those of Vartan Azov – dark purple, nearly black, and bottomless as a pit. I could see those eyes as they gazed at me across a chessboard. When I was a child of eleven, his eyes hadn’t frightened me. Why should they terrify me now?

      Yet I could feel myself slipping down – a kind of vertigo, as if I were sliding into a deep, dark hole where there was no way out. Just as I’d experienced so many years ago, in that one awful instant in the game when I’d understood what I had done. I could feel my father then, watching me from across that room as I had slowly plummeted into psychological space, out of control, falling and falling – like that boy with wings who’d flown too near the sun.

      Vartan Azov’s eyes were unblinking now, as always, as he stood there in my mudroom looking over the heads of Lily and Nokomis, looking directly at me as if we were completely alone, as if there were only the two of us in the world, in an intimate dance. With the black-and-white squares of a chessboard in between. What game had we been playing then? What game were we playing now?

      ‘You know what they say,’ Nokomis announced, breaking the spell as she tilted her head toward Vartan and Lily. ‘Politics makes strange bedfellows.’

      She’d kicked off her boots, tossed off her parka, yanked off her cap – releasing that waterfall of black hair that tumbled to her waist – and she was marching from the mudroom past me in her stocking feet. She plopped down on the hearth wall, shot me a wry smile, and added, ‘Or perhaps the motto of the United States Marine Corps?’

      ‘‘Many are called but few are chosen’?’ I guessed gamely, knowing my friend’s compulsive СКАЧАТЬ