The Fire. Katherine Neville

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ called upon to do.

      Despite the warmth of the many fires in her chambers, Letizia felt that all too familiar chill from the depths of her own past as she read the fateful lines once more:

       The Firebird has arisen. The Eight return.

      Tassili n’Agger, The Sahara

      Autumn Equinox, 1822

       We are immortal, and do not forget, We are eternal, and to us the past Is, as the future, present.

      – Lord Byron, Manfred

      Charlot stood on the high mesa, surveying the vast red desert. His white burnoose flapped about him in the breeze like the wings of a large bird. His long hair floated free, the color of the coppery sands that stretched before him. Nowhere on earth could one find a desert of this precise hue: the color of blood. The color of life.

      This inhospitable spot, high on a cliff in the deepest Sahara, a place where only wild goats and eagles chose to live. It had not always been so. Behind him on the fabled cliffs of the Tassili were five thousand years of carvings and paintings – burnt sienna, ocher, raw umber, white – paintings that told the story of this desert and those who had peopled it in the mists of time, a story that was still unfolding.

      This was his birthplace – what the Arabs called one’s watar, or homeland – though he had not been here since he was a babe in arms. Here was where his life had begun, Charlot thought. He was born into the Game. And here, perhaps, was where the Game was destined to end – once he had solved the mystery. That’s why he had returned to this ancient wilderness, this tapestry of brilliant light and of dark secrets: to find the truth.

      The desert Berbers believed he was destined to be the one to solve it. His birth had been foretold. The oldest Berber legend spoke of a child born before his time, with blue eyes and red hair, who would possess the Second Sight. Charlot closed his eyes and inhaled the scent of this place, sand and salt and cinnabar, evoking his own most primal physical memories.

      He’d been thrust into the world early – red and raw and screaming. His mother, Mireille, an orphan of sixteen, had fled her convent in the Basque Pyrenees and journeyed here across two continents, into the deep desert, to protect a dangerous secret. She had been what they called a thayyib, a woman who had known a man only once: his father. Charlot’s birth, here on the cliffs of the Tassili, was midwifed by an indigo-veiled Berber prince with blue-tinted skin, one of the ‘blue men’ of the Kel Rela Tuareg. This was Shahin, the desert falcon, who was to serve as parent, godparent, and tutor for this chosen child.

      Across the vast desert before him now, as far as Charlot could see, the silent red sands shifted as they had for untold centuries, moving restlessly, like a living, breathing thing – sands that seemed a part of him, sands that erased all memory…

      All but his own, that is. Charlot’s terrible gift of remembering was always with him – even the memory of those things that had not yet come to pass. When he was a child, they had called him the Little Prophet. He’d foreseen the rise and fall of empires, the futures of great men, like Napoleon and Alexander of Russia – or like that of his true father, whom he’d only met once: Prince Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand.

      Charlot’s memory of the future had always been like an unstoppable wellspring. He could foresee it, though he might not be able to change it. But of course the greatest gift could also be a curse.

      To him, the world was like a chess game, where each move that one made generated a myriad of potential moves – and at the same time revealed an underlying strategy, as implacable as destiny, that drove one relentlessly onward. Like the game of chess, like the paintings on the rock, like the eternal sands – for him, the past and the future were always present.

      For Charlot had been born, as it was foretold, beneath the gaze of the ancient goddess, the White Queen, whose image was painted in the hollow of the great stone wall. She’d been known across all cultures and throughout all times. She hovered above him now like an avenging angel, carved high on the sheer stone cliff. The Tuareg called her Q’ar – ‘the Charioteer.’

      It was she, they said, who had spangled the nighttime sky with glittering stars. And she who had first set the Game upon its adamantine course. Charlot had journeyed here from across the sea to lay his eyes upon her for the first time since his birth. It was she alone, they said, who might reveal – perhaps only to the chosen one – the secret behind the Game.

      

      Charlot awakened before dawn and tossed off the woolen djellaba he’d used as a cover against the open night air. Something was terribly wrong, though he couldn’t yet sense what it was.

      Here in this spot – a difficult four-day hike over treacherous terrain from the valley below – he knew he was well protected. But there was no hiding from the fact that something was amiss.

      He rose from his makeshift bed for a better view. Away to the east, toward Mecca, he could make out the thin ribbon of red that ran across the horizon, portending the sun. But he did not yet have enough light to make out his surroundings. As he stood there in the silence atop the mesa, Charlot heard a sound – only meters away. First, a soft footstep on gravel, then the sound of human breathing.

      He was terrified to make a false step, or even to move.

      ‘Al-Kalim – it is I,’ someone whispered – though there was no one within miles to hear.

      Only one man would address him as Al-Kalim: the Seer. ‘Shahin!’ cried Charlot. He felt the strong, firm hands press his wrists – the hands of the man who’d always been mother and father, brother and guide.

      ‘But how have you found me?’ said Charlot. And why had Shahin risked his life to cross the seas and the desert? To come through this treacherous canyon by night? To arrive here before dawn? Whatever had brought him to this place must be urgent beyond imagining.

      But more important: Why hadn’t Charlot foreseen it?

      The sun broke over the horizon, licking the rolling dunes in the distance with a warm pink glow. Shahin’s hands still firmly grasped Charlot’s in his own, as if he could not bear to let him go. After a long moment, he released Charlot and drew back his indigo veils.

      In the rosy light, Charlot could see the craggy, hawklike features of Shahin for the first time. But what he saw in that face actually frightened him. In the twenty-nine years of his life, Charlot had never seen his mentor betray any emotion at all, under any circumstance, much less the emotion that Charlot could see written on Shahin’s face right now, which terrified him: pain.

       Why could Charlot still not see inside?

      But Shahin was struggling to speak: ‘My son…’ he began, nearly choking on the words.

      Although Charlot had always thought of Shahin as his parent, this was the first time that the elder man had ever addressed him in this fashion.

      ‘Al-Kalim,’ Shahin continued, ‘I would never ask you to use that great gift that was bestowed upon you by Allah, your gift of the Vision, if this were not a matter of the gravest importance. A crisis has occurred that has driven me to cross the sea from France. Something of great value may have fallen into evil hands, something I learned of only months ago…’

      Charlot, with fear gripping his heart, understood that if Shahin had come for him here in the desert with such urgency, СКАЧАТЬ