The Eight

by Katherine Neville

  Saying this, he reached over and plucked Euler’s formulaic chess map from the piano. With a nearby quill he scratched two words across the top: Quaerendo invenietis. Seek, and ye shall find. Then he handed the Knight’s Tour to me.

  “I do not understand,” I told him in some confusion.

  “Herr Philidor,” said Bach, “you are both a chess master, like Dr. Euler, and a composer, like myself. In one person, you combine two valuable skills.”

  “Valuable in what way?” I asked politely. “For I must confess, I’ve found neither to be of great value from a financial standpoint!” I smiled at him.

  “Though it is hard to remember sometimes,” Bach said, chuckling, “there are greater forces at work in the universe than money. For example—have you ever heard of the Montglane Service?”

  I turned suddenly to Euler, who had gasped aloud.

  “You see,” said Bach, “that the name is not unfamiliar to our friend the Herr Doktor. Perhaps I can enlighten you as well.”

  I listened, fascinated, while Bach told me of the strange chess service, belonging at one time to Charlemagne and reputed to contain properties of great power. When the composer finished his summary, he said to me:

  “The reason I asked you gentlemen here today was to perform an experiment. All my life I have studied the peculiar powers of music. It has a force of its own that few would deny. It can tranquilize a savage beast or move a placid man to charge in battle. At length, I learned through my own experiments the secret of this power. Music, you see, has a logic of its own. It is similar to mathematical logic, but in some ways different. For music does not merely communicate with our minds, but in fact changes our thought in some imperceptible fashion.”

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked. But I knew that Bach had struck a chord within my own being that I could not quite define. Something I felt I’d known for many years, something buried deep inside me that I felt only when I heard a beautiful, haunting melody. Or played a game of chess.

  “What I mean,” said Bach, “is that the universe is like a great mathematical game that is played upon a tremendous scale. Music is one of the purest forms of mathematics. Each mathematical formula can be converted into music, as I’ve done with Dr. Euler’s.” He glanced at Euler, and the latter nodded back, as if the two shared a secret to which I was not yet privy.

  “And music,” Bach continued, “can be converted into mathematics, with, I might add, surprising results. The Architect who built the universe designed it that way. Music has power to create a universe or to destroy a civilization. If you don’t believe me, I suggest you read the Bible.”

  Euler stood in silence for a moment. “Yes,” he said at last, “there are other architects in the Bible whose stories are quite revealing, are they not?”

  “My friend,” said Bach, turning to me with a smile, “as I’ve said, seek and ye shall find. He who understands the architecture of music will understand the power of the Montglane Service. For the two are one.”

  David had listened closely to the story. Now, as they approached the fretted iron gates of his courtyard, he turned to Philidor in dismay.

  “But what does it all mean?” he asked. “What do music and mathematics have to do with the Montglane Service? What do any of these things have to do with power, whether on earth or in the heavens? Your story only serves to support my claim that this legendary chess service appeals to mystics and fools. Much as I hate to tie such appellations to Dr. Euler, your story suggests he was easily prey to fantasies of this sort.”

  Philidor paused beneath the dark horse chestnut trees that hung low over the gates of David’s courtyard. “I have studied the subject for years,” the composer whispered. “At long last, though I’ve never been interested in biblical scholastics, I took it upon myself to read the Bible, as Euler and Bach had suggested. Bach died soon after our meeting, and Euler immigrated to Russia, so I was never again to meet the two men to discuss what I had found.”

  “And what did you find?” said David, extracting his key to unlock the gates.

  “They’d directed me to study architects, and so I did. There were only two architects of note within the Bible. One was the Architect of the universe. That is, God. The other was the architect of the Tower of Babel. The very word ‘Bab-El’ means, I discovered, ‘Gate of God.’ The Babylonians were a very proud people. They were the greatest civilization since the beginning of time. They built hanging gardens that rivaled the finest works of nature. And they wanted to build a tower that would reach to heaven itself, a tower that would reach to the sun. The story of this tower is the one, I felt sure, that Bach and Euler alluded to.

  “The architect,” Philidor continued as the two men passed through the gates, “was one Nimrod. The greatest architect of his day. He built a tower higher than any known to man. But it was never completed. Do you know why?”

  “God smote him down, as I recall,” David said as he crossed the court.

  “But how did He smite him down?” asked Philidor. “He did not send a bolt of lightning, a flood, or a plague, as was His custom! I shall tell you how God destroyed the work of Nimrod, my friend. God confused the languages of the workers, which until then had been one language. He struck down the language. He destroyed the Word!”

  Just then David noticed a servant running across the courtyard from the house. “What am I to take it that all this means?” he asked Philidor with a cynical smile. “Is this how God destroys a civilization? By making men mute? Confusing our language? If so, we French will never have to worry. We cherish our language as if it were worth more than gold!”

  “Perhaps your wards will be able to help us solve this mystery, if they truly lived at Montglane,” replied Philidor. “For I believe that it is this power, the power of the music of language, the mathematics of music, the secret of the Word with which God created the universe and struck down the empire of Babylon—this, I believe, is the secret that is contained within the Montglane Service.”

  David’s servant had rapidly approached and stood, wringing his hands, at a respectful distance from the two men as they crossed the court.

  “What is it, Pierre?” asked David in surprise.

  “The young ladies,” Pierre said in a worried voice. “They have disappeared, monsieur.”

  “What?!” cried David. “What do you mean?”

  “Since nearly two o’clock, monsieur. They received a letter by the morning post. They went into the garden to read it. At luncheon we sent to look for them, but they were gone! Perhaps—there is no other way to explain it—we think they ascended the garden wall. They have not returned.”

  4:00 PM

  Even the cheers of the crowd outside l’Abbaye Prison could not drown out the deafening screams from within. Mireille would never again be able to erase the sound from her mind.

  The crowd had long grown weary of battering at the gates of the prison and had taken seats atop the carriages that were splashed with the blood of the massacred priests. The alley was littered with torn and trampled bodies.

  It had been close to an hour now that the trials had been going on inside. Some of the stronger men had boosted their compatriots up onto the high walls surrounding the prison court, and these, scrambling over, had tugged the iron spikes from the stone buttresses to use as weapons and dropped down into the courtyard.

  A man standing on the shoulders of another cried out, “Open the gates, citizens! There is justice to be done today!”

  The crowd had cheered at the sound of a bar being shot back. One of the massive wooden gates swung open, and the crowd, throwing their full force against the gate, had crushed inside.

  But the soldiers with muskets had kept back the bulk of people and forced the gates closed again. Now Mireille and the others waited for reports from those who sat on the walls watching the process of the mock trials and reporting the carnage to those who, like Mireille, waited below.

  Mireille had pounded upon the prison gates and tried to
scale the wall along with the men, but to no avail. She waited in exhaustion beside the gates, hoping that they would open again even for a second so that she could slip through.

  Her wish was at last fulfilled. At four o’clock Mireille looked up to see an open carriage in the alley, the horse carefully picking its way over the broken bodies. The women citizens who sat on the abandoned prison wagons set up a cheer as they saw the man who sat in the back, and again the alley was alive with noise as the men jumped from their high perches on the walls and the hideous old hags clambered from the carriage tops to swarm over his coach. Mireille leaped to her feet in astonishment. It was David!

  “Uncle, Uncle!” she cried, clawing her way through the crowd with tears streaming down her face. David caught sight of her, and his face grew grave as he stepped from the carriage and plowed through the crowd to embrace her.

  “Mireille!” he said as the throng moved about him, patting him on the back and setting up cheers of welcome. “What has happened? Where is Valentine?” His face was filled with horror as he held Mireille in his arms and she sobbed uncontrollably.

  “She is inside the prison,” cried Mireille. “We came to meet a friend … we … I do not know what’s happened, Uncle. Perhaps it is too late.”

  “Come, come,” David said, making his way through the crowd with his arm around Mireille and patting several of those whom he recognized as they fell back to open a path for him.

  “Open the gates!” cried some of the men from the walls into the courtyard. “Citizen David is here! The painter David is outside!”

  After several moments one of the massive gates swung open and a rush of unwashed bodies crushed David against the gate; then they were swept inside, and the gates were forced shut again.

  The courtyard of the prison was awash in blood. On a small grassy stretch of what had once been the monastery garden, a priest was held to the ground, his head bent backward over a wooden block. A soldier whose uniform was splashed with blood was chopping ineffectively at the priest’s neck with a sword, attempting to sever the head from the body. But the priest was not yet dead. Each time he tried to raise himself, blood spurted from the wounds at his throat. His mouth was open in a silent scream.

  All around the courtyard people were scurrying back and forth, stepping over the bodies that lay twisted in horrifying positions. It was impossible to tell how many had been butchered there. Arms, legs, and torsos were tossed into the manicured hedges, and entrails were heaped in piles along the herbaceous borders.

  Mireille clutched David’s shoulder and began to scream and gasp for breath, but he grasped her forcefully and whispered harshly in her ear, “Contain yourself, or we are lost. We must find her at once.”

  Mireille fought for control as David looked with haggard eyes around the courtyard. The sensitive painter’s hands shook as he reached out to a man beside him and tugged at the fellow’s sleeve. The man wore the tattered uniform of a soldier, not a prison guard, and his mouth seemed to be smeared with blood, though he bore no visible wound.

  “Who is in charge here?” said David. The soldier laughed, then motioned to a long wooden table near the entrance to the prison, where several men were seated. A crowd milled about the table facing the men.

  As David helped Mireille across the courtyard, three priests were dragged down the open steps from the prison and hurled onto the ground in front of the table. The crowd jeered at them, and the soldiers used their bayonets to drive the jeerers back. The soldiers then dragged the priests to their feet and held them facing the table.

  The five men seated behind the table spoke one by one to the priests. One man glanced through some papers on the table, jotted something down, then shook his head.

  The priests were turned around and marched toward the center of the courtyard, their faces deathly white masks of horror as they saw what awaited them. The crowd within the courtyard set up a deafening cheer as they saw fresh victims being dragged to the sacrifice. David clutched Mireille tightly and propelled her toward the table where the judges sat, blocked now from view by the crowd that waited, cheering, for the execution.

  David came to the table just as the men upon the walls called out the verdict to the mob outside.

  “Death to Father Ambrose of San Sulpice!” was the first cry, greeted by screams and cheers.

  “I am Jacques-Louis David,” he cried to the nearest judge, over the noise that echoed off the walls of the courtyard. “I am a member of the revolutionary tribunal. Danton has sent me here—”

  “We know you well, Jacques-Louis David,” said a man from the far end of the table. David turned to face him and gasped aloud.

  Mireille looked down the table at the judge who sat there, and her blood ran cold. This was the sort of face she saw only in her nightmares, the face imagined when she thought of the abbess’s warning. It was a face of purest evil.

  The man was hideous. His flesh was a mass of scars and suppurating sores. A filthy rag was tied about his forehead, dripping with a dirty-colored liquid that trickled down his neck and matted his greasy hair. As he leered at David, Mireille thought that the pustulating wounds that covered his skin must have oozed up from the evil that lay within him, for here was the Devil incarnate.

  “Ah, it is you,” David was whispering. “But I thought that you were …”

  “Ill?” the man replied. “Yes, but never too ill to serve my country, citizen.”

  David worked his way down the table toward the hideous man, though he seemed to fear coming too close. Pulling Mireille in his wake, he whispered in her ear, “You must say nothing. We are in danger.”

  Reaching the end of the table, David leaned forward to the judge and spoke.

  “I’ve come at Danton’s wish, to help with the tribunal,” he said.

  “We need no assistance, citizen,” snapped the other. “This prison is only the first. There are enemies of the State confined in every prison. When we’ve dispatched these judgments, we will move on to the others. There is no lack of volunteers where the bringing of justice is concerned. Go tell Citizen Danton that I am here. The matter is in good hands.”

  “Fine,” said David, tentatively reaching out to pat the filthy man upon his shoulder as another cry went up from the crowd behind them. “I know you are an honored citizen and Assembly member. But there is just one problem. I’m certain you can help me.”

  David squeezed Mireille’s hand, and she stood silently, holding her breath for his next words.

  “My niece happened to be passing the prison here this afternoon, and was accidentally brought inside in the confusion. We believe … I hope that nothing has happened to her, for she is a simple girl with no understanding of politics. I must ask to search for her inside the prison.”

  “Your niece?” said the other, leering at David. He reached into a bucket of water that sat beside him on the ground and withdrew a wet rag. He tore away the rag that was already circling his brow, tossing it into the bucket, then wrapped the dripping rag about his brow and knotted it. Water ran down his face, trickling over the pus that oozed from his open sores. Mireille could smell the rot of death within this man more strongly than the stench of blood and fear that pervaded the courtyard. She was weakened by it and thought that she might faint as another cheer went up behind her. She tried not to think what each chorus of cheers must mean.

  “You need not bother to search for her,” said the horrid man. “She is next before the tribunal. I know who your wards are, David. Including this one.” He nodded toward Mireille without looking at her. “They are of the nobility, offspring of the de Remy blood. They were from the Abbey of Montglane. We have already interrogated your ‘niece’ within the prison.”

  “No!” cried Mireille, tearing free from David’s grasp. “Valentine! What have you done with her?” She reached across the table and clutched at the evil man, but David pulled her back.

  “Don’t be a fool,” he hissed at her. She was breaking away again when the foul judge ra
ised his hand. There was a commotion above as two bodies were thrown down the steps of the prison behind the table. Mireille tore away and ran behind the table and across the walks as she saw Valentine’s blond hair tumble free, her frail body rolling down the steps beside that of a young priest. The priest picked himself up and helped Valentine to her feet as Mireille threw herself into Valentine’s arms.

  “Valentine, Valentine,” cried Mireille, looking at her cousin’s bruised face and cut lips.

  “The pieces,” whispered Valentine, her eyes wild as she looked about the courtyard. “Claude told me where the pieces are. There are six of them.…”

  “Do not worry about that,” Mireille said, cradling Valentine in her arms. “Our uncle is here. We are going to have you released.…”

  “No!” cried Valentine. “They are going to kill me, my cousin. They know about the pieces … you remember the ghost! De Remy, de Remy,” she babbled, mindlessly repeating her own family name. Mireille tried to quiet her.

  Just then Mireille was grasped by a soldier, who held her struggling in his arms. She looked wildly toward David, who had leaned over the table and was speaking frantically to the horrible judge. Mireille struggled and tried to bite the soldier as two men came and picked up Valentine, hauling her before the table. Valentine stood before the tribunal, held by both soldiers. For a moment she looked across the distance at Mireille, her face pale and frightened. Then she smiled, and her smile was like a burst of sunshine through a dark cloud. Mireille stopped struggling for a moment and smiled back. Then suddenly she heard the voice of the men behind the table. It rang like a whip crack against her mind and echoed off the walls of the courtyard.

  “Death!”

  Mireille tore against the soldier. She screamed and cried out to David, who had crumpled upon the table in tears. Valentine was dragged across the cobbled courtyard in slow motion to the grassy stretch beyond. Mireille fought like a wildcat against the iron arms that bound her. Then, suddenly, something struck her from the side. She and the soldier fell to the ground together. It was the young priest who’d tumbled down the prison steps with Valentine, and who had come to her rescue, barreling into them as the soldier held her. As the two men wrestled upon the ground, Mireille made her escape and ran to the table where David was a crumpled wreck. She grabbed the filthy shirt of the judge and screamed into his face: