Chapter One
THE BLACK LAND
Wyrd oft nereth unfaegne eorl, ponne his ellen deah.
(Unless he is already doomed, fortune is apt to favor the man who keeps his
nerve.)
–Beowulf
Mesa Verde, Colorado Spring 2003
BEFORE I’D EVEN REACHED THE HOUSE, I KNEW SOMETHING was wrong. Very wrong. Even
though on the surface, it all seemed picture-perfect.
The steep, sweeping curve of drive was blanketed deep in snow and lined with
stately rows of towering Colorado blue spruce. Their snow-covered branches
sparkled like rose quartz in the early morning light. Atop the hill, where the
driveway flattened and spread out for parking, I pulled up my rented Land Rover
in front of the lodge.
A lazy curl of blue-gray smoke rose from the moss rock chimney that formed the
center of the building. The rich scent of pine smoke pervaded the air, which
meant that-although I might not be warmly welcomed after all this time-at least
I was expected.
To confirm this, I saw that my mother’s truck and jeep were both sitting
side-by-side in the former horse stable at the edge of the parking area. I did
find it odd, though, that the drive had not yet been plowed and there were no
tracks. If I were expected, wouldn’t someone have cleared a path?
Now that I was here at last, in the only place I’d ever called home, you would
think I could finally relax. But I couldn’t shake the sense that something was
wrong.
Our family lodge had been built at about this same period in the prior century,
by neighboring tribes, for my great-great-grandmother, a pioneering mountain
lass. Constructed of hand-hewn rock and massive tree trunks chinked together, it
was a huge log cabin that was shaped like an octagon-patterned after a hogan or
sweat lodge-with many-paned windows facing in each cardinal direction, like a
vast, architectural compass rose.
Each female descendant had lived here at one time or another, including my
mother and me…. So what was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I ever come here
without this sense of impending doom? I knew why, of course. And so did my
mother. It was the thing we never spoke about. That’s why-when I had finally
left home for good-my mother understood. She’d never insisted, like other
mothers, that I come back for familial visits.
That is, not until today.
But then, my presence today hadn’t exactly been by invitation-it was more of a
summons, a cryptic message that Mother had left on my home phone back in
Washington D.C., when she knew very well I’d be off at work.
She was inviting me, she said, to her birthday party.
And that, of course, was a big part of the problem.
You see, my mother didn’t have birthdays. She’d never had birthdays.
I don’t mean she was concerned about her youth or appearance or wished to lie
about her age-in fact, she looked more youthful each year.
But the strange truth was, she didn’t want anyone outside of our family even to
know when her birthday was.
This secrecy, combined with a few other idiosyncracies-like the fact that she’d
been in hermetic retreat up on top of this mountain for the past ten years, ever
since … the thing we never spoke about-all went far to explain why there
were those who may have perceived my mother, Catherine Velis, as a pretty
eccentric duck.
The other part of my current problem was that I hadn’t been able to contact my
mother for an explanation of her sudden revelation. She’d answered neither her
phone nor the messages I’d left for her, here at the lodge. The alternate number
she’d given me was clearly not right-it was missing some final digits.
With my first true inkling that something was really wrong, I’d taken a few days
off work, bought a ticket, caught the last flight into Cortez, Colorado, in a
blizzard, and rented the last four-wheel-drive vehicle in the airport lot.
Now I left the engine running as I sat here for a moment, letting my eyes graze
over the breathtaking panoramic view. I hadn’t been home in more than four
years. And each time I saw it afresh, it smacked the wind out of me.
I got out of the Rover in knee-deep snow and let the engine run.
From here on the mountaintop, fourteen thousand feet atop the Colorado Plateau,
I could see the vast, billowing sea of three-mile-high mountain peaks, licked by
the rosy morning light. On a clear day like this, I could see all the way to
Mount Hesperus-which the Diné call Dibé Nitsaa: Black Mountain. One of the four
sacred mountains created by First Man and First Woman.
Together with Sisnaajinii, white mountain (Mt. Blanca) in the east; Tsoodzil,
blue mountain (Mt. Taylor) in the south, and Dook’o’osliid, yellow mountain (San
Francisco Peaks) in the west, these four marked out the four corners of
Dinétah-“Home of the Diné,” as the Navajo call themselves.
And they pointed as well to the high plateau I was standing on: Four Corners,
the only place in the U.S. where four states-Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and
Arizona-come together at right angles to form a cross.
Long before anyone ever thought to draw dotted lines on a map, this land was
sacred to everyone who ever walked across it. If my mother was going to have her
first-ever birthday party in the nearly twenty-two years I had known her, I
could understand why she wanted to have it here. Regardless of how many years
she had lived abroad or away, like all the women in our family she was part of
this land.
For some reason, I knew that this connection with the land was somehow
important. I knew that was why she had left a message strange enough to bring me
to this spot.
And I knew something else, even if no one else did. I knew why she’d insisted I
come here today. For today-April fourth-actually was my mother, Cat Velis’s,
birthday.
I YANKED MY KEYS FROM THE IGNITION, GRABBED MY hastily packed duffle bag from
the passenger seat, and plowed my way through the snow to our hundred-yearold
front doors. These huge doors-two massive slabs of heart pine ten feet high, cut
from ancient trees-were carved in bas-relief with two animals that seemed to be
coming right at you. On the left, a golden eagle soared straight at your face.
And from the right door burst an angry, upright female bear.
Despite the weathering of these carvings, they were pretty realistic-with glass
eyes and real talons and claws. The early twentieth century had loved clever
inventions, and this one was a doozy: If you pulled the bear’s paw, her jaw
dropped open to reveal very real and frightening teeth. If you had the nerve to
stick your hand into her mouth, you could twist the old-fashioned door chime, to
alert those within.
I did both and waited. But even after a few moments, there was no response.
Someone must have been inside-the chimney was active. And I knew from practice
that stoking that fire pit took hours of tending and a Herculean effort to haul
the wood. But with our hearth, which was capable of receiving a log of fifty
caliper inches, a fire could have been laid days ago and still be burning.
My situation suddenly dawned on me: Having flown and driven a few thousand
miles, I was standing in the snow on top of a mountain, trying to get access to
my own house, desperate to know if anyone was inside. But I didn’t have a key.
My alternative-wading through acres of deep snow to peep through a window-seemed
a poor idea. What would I do if I got wetter than I already was and still
couldn’t get inside? What if I got inside and no one was there? There were no
car tracks, ski tracks-even deer tracks-anywhere near the house.
So I did the only intelligent thing I could think of: I yanked my cell phone out
of my pocket and dialed Mother’s number, right here at the lodge. I was relieved
when her message machine picked up after six rings, thinking she might have left
some clue as to her whereabouts. But when her recorded voice came on, my heart
sank: “I can be reached at …” and she rattled off the same number she’d
left on my D.C. phone-still missing the very last digits! I stood before the
door, wet and cold, and fuming with confusion and frustration. Where did one go
from here?
And then I remembered the game.
My favorite uncle, Slava, was famed throughout the world as the noted technocrat
and author Ladislaus Nim. He’d been my best friend in my childhood, and though I
hadn’t seen him in years, I felt he still was. Slava hated telephones. He vowed
he would never have one in his house. Telephones, no-but Uncle Slava loved
puzzles. He’d written several books on the topic. Through my childhood, if
anyone received a message from Slava with a phone number where you could reach
him, they always knew it wasn’t real-it must be some kind of encrypted message.
That was his delight.
It seemed unlikely, though, that my mother would use such a technique to
communicate with me. For one thing, she wasn’t even good at deciphering such
messages herself, and she couldn’t invent a puzzle if her life depended upon it.
More unlikely still, was the idea that Slava had created a message for her. As
far as I knew, she hadn’t talked to my uncle in years, not since … the thing
we never spoke about.
Yet I was sure, somehow, that this was a message.
I jumped back up into the Land Rover and switched on the engine. Decrypting
puzzles to locate my mother sure beat all hell out of the alternatives: breaking
into an abandoned house, or flying back to D.C. and never learning where she’d
gone.
I called her machine again: I jotted down the phone number she’d left there, for
all the world to hear. If she was in real trouble of some kind and trying to
contact only me, I prayed that I would decipher it first. “I can be reached at
615-263-94 …” my mother’s recorded voice said.
My hand was shaking as I wrote out the numbers on a pad. I’d been provided eight
numbers, rather than the ten numbers required to make a long-distance call. But
as with Uncle Slava’s puzzles, I suspected this had nothing to do with phones.
Here was a ten-digit code, of which the final two numbers were missing. Those
two numbers themselves were my hidden message.
It took about ten minutes to figure it out-much longer than when I was running
neck and neck with my crazy but wonderful uncle. If you divided the string of
numbers into twos (hint: we were missing the last two digits), then you ended up
with:
61-52-63-94
If you reversed those numbers, as I quickly saw, you ended up with two-digit
square numbers, starting with the square of four. That is, the products of four,
five, six, and seven when multiplied by themselves:
16-25-36-49
The next number in the sequence-and the missing number-was eight. So the missing
last two digits of the series were the square of eight-that is, 64. In the real
puzzle, of course, if you reversed the number, the answer would have been 46-but
that wasn’t it.
I knew-and so did my mother-that 64 had another meaning for me. It was the
number of squares on a chess board, with eight squares on each side.
In a nutshell: the thing we never talked about.
My distraught and intractable mother had refused ever to speak of the game of
chess-even to permit it into her house. Since my father’s death (the other thing
which we never talked about), I was forbidden ever to play the game-the only
thing I’d ever known how to do, the only thing that helped me connect with the
world around me. I might as well have been ordered, at the age of twelve, to
become autistic.
My mother was opposed, in every way imaginable, to the idea of chess. Though I’d
never been able to follow her logic-if indeed, it was logic-to my mother’s mind,
chess would prove as dangerous to me as it had been to my father.
But now it seemed that by bringing me here on her birthday, by leaving that
cryptic phrase with its encrypted message, she was welcoming me back to the
game.
I TIMED IT: IT TOOK ME TWENTY-SEVEN MINUTES AND-since I’d left the engine
running-a gallon of hog-guzzling gas, until I figured out how to get inside.
By now, anyone with half a brain would have guessed that those two-digit numbers
were also combinations on a tumbler. But there were no locks on the house.
Except there was one in the barn. On a lock box. The keys to the cars were kept
there.
Would I be justified in saying “Duh”?
I switched off the Rover, plowed through the snow to the barn-and voil !-a few
tumblers dropped, the door to the lock box opened, and the door key appeared on
a chain. Back at the house, it took a moment to recall that the key was inserted
into the eagle’s left claw. Then the ancient doors groaned open a crack.
I scraped my boots on the rusty old fireplace grille we kept beside the
entrance, shoved open the heavy front doors of the lodge, and slammed them shut
behind me, causing a flurry of sparkling snowflakes to sift through the slanted
morning light.
Within the dim interior of the mud room-an entry not much bigger than a
confessional that kept the cold winds out-I kicked off my dripping boots and
pulled on a pair of the fuzzy sheepskin apr s-ski booties that always sat there
atop our frozen-food locker. When I’d hung up my parka, I opened the inner doors
and stepped into the vast octagon, warmed by the giant log that was burning in
the central hearth.
The octagon was a room perhaps one hundred feet across and thirty feet high. The
fire pit took up the center, with a copper hood above it, hung with pots, rising
to the moss stone chimney that pulled smoke upward to the sky. It was like an
enormous teepee, except for the massive furniture scattered everywhere. My
mother had always been averse to things one might actually sit on, but there was
our ebony parlor grand piano, a sideboard, an assortment of desks, library
tables, and revolving bookcases, and a billiard table that no one ever played
on.
The upper floor was an octagonal balcony that overhung the room. There were
small chambers there where people could sleep and even, sometimes, bathe.
Molten light poured through the lower windows at every side, glittering across
the dust that draped the mahogany. From the ceiling skylights, rosy morning
light sifted down, picking out the features of the colorfully painted heads of
animal totems that were carved into the enormous beams supporting the balcony:
bear, wolf, eagle, stag, buffalo, goat, cougar, ram. From their lofty
perspective, nearly twenty feet high, they seemed to be floating timelessly in
space. Everything seemed to be frozen in time. The only sound was the occasional
cracking of fire from the log.
I walked around the perimeter, from one window to another, looking out at the
snow: There was not one print to be seen, anywhere. I went up the spiral stairs
to the balcony and checked each partitioned sleeping space. Not the slightest
trace.
But how had she done it?
It appeared that my mother, Cat Velis, had vanished into thin air.
A jarring noise broke the silence: A telephone was ringing. I dashed down the
steep, twisted stair and snatched the receiver from atop mother’s British
campaign desk, just before the machine kicked in.
“Good Lord, what were you thinking, darling, choosing this god forsaken spot?”
came the throaty voice, tinted with a bit of British accent, of a woman I knew
only too well. “And for that matter, where on earth are you? We’ve been driving
around this wilderness for what seems like days!” There was a pause, when she
seemed to be speaking to someone else.
“Aunt Lily?” I said.
For it was surely she-my aunt, Lily Rad-my first chess mentor, and still one of
the top women grandmasters in the game. Once, she’d been my mother’s best
friend, though they hadn’t touched base in years. But what was she doing calling
here now? And driving around-what on earth did that mean?
“Alexandra?” said Lily, confused. “I thought I was phoning your mother. What are
you doing there? I thought you and she weren’t … on the best of terms.”
“We’ve reconciled,” I said hastily, not wanting to open that can of worms again.
“But mother doesn’t seem to be here right now. And where exactly are you?”
“She’s not there?! You can’t be serious,” Lily said, fuming. “I’ve come all the
way from London just to see her. She insisted! Something about a birthday party-God
knows what that means. As for where I am right now, it is anyone’s guess!
The satellite positioning system on my automobile keeps insisting that I’m in
Purgatory-and I’m fully able to accept that judgment. We haven’t seen anything
resembling civilization for hours.”
“You’re here? In Purgatory?” I said. “That’s a ski area; it’s less than an hour
from here.” But it seemed crazy: The top female British-American chess champion
came from London to Purgatory, Colorado, to attend a birthday party? “When did
mother invite you?”
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Fire
by Katherine Neville
Copyright © 2008 by Katherine Neville.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Ballantine Books
Copyright © 2008
Katherine Neville
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-345-50067-0
