The Eight

by Katherine Neville

  “I think we should try to outrun it,” I announced firmly, as if I knew what I were talking about.

  “What direction’s it coming from?” said Lily.

  I shrugged. “Can’t see it, smell it, or feel it,” I told her. “Don’t ask me how, but I know it’s there.” So did Carioca, who was scared out of his little wits. We couldn’t both be wrong.

  I started the car again and hit the gas as hard as I could. As we tore through the miserable heat, I felt real fear gripping me. Like Ichabod Crane fleeing the horrible headless ghost of Sleepy Hollow, I raced ahead of the storm I could neither see nor hear. The air grew more and more oppressive, smothering like a scalding blanket of fire closing over our faces. Lily and Carioca were in the front seat beside me, staring ahead through the sand-pocked windshield as the car barreled on into the relentless red glare. And then I heard the sound.

  At first I thought it was my imagination, a sort of whirring in my ears that might have been caused by the sand that tore constantly against the metal car. The paint on the hood and grille had been sheared away—the sand had eaten it down to raw metal. But the sound grew louder and louder, a faint droning like a buzzsaw or a fly. I kept moving, but I was afraid. Lily heard it, too, and turned to me, but I wouldn’t stop to discover what it was. I was afraid I already knew.

  As the sound intensified it seemed to drown everything around us. The sand beside the road was lifting in little puffs now, whipping slight flurries across the pavement, but still the sound grew louder and louder, until it was almost deafening. Then suddenly I took my foot off the gas as Lily gripped the dashboard with her blood-red nails. The sound ripped violently over our heads, and I nearly ran off the road before I found the brakes.

  “A plane!” Lily was screaming—and I was screaming, too. We were grasping each other, the tears stinging our eyes. A plane had come right over our heads and was landing before our very eyes, not a hundred yards away on a landing strip in the desert!

  “Ladies,” said the fonctionnaire of the Debnane Airstrip, “you were fortunate to find me here. We receive only this one flight a day from Air Algérie. When no private flights are scheduled, this post is otherwise closed. It’s over a hundred kilometers to the next petrol, and you would not have made it.”

  He was replenishing our gas and water from pumps out near the runway. The huge transport plane that had buzzed over our car sat idle on the tarmac, heat melting up into the air from the hot propeller engines. Lily stood with Carioca in her arms, looking at our burly little savior as if he were the archangel Gabriel. He was, in fact, the only person within eyeshot as far as you could see. The plane’s pilot had gone inside the metal quonset hut for a quick nap in the miserable heat. Dust blew across the runway; the wind was rising. My throat was aching from dryness and relief at my salvation. I decided I believed in God.

  “What’s this landing strip here for, out in the middle of nowhere?” Lily asked me. I communicated her question to the fonctionnaire.

  “Mail delivery,” he said, “supplies for some natural gas development crews working in trailers west of here. They just stop en route to the Hoggar, then shuttle back to Algiers.” Lily had understood.

  “The Hoggar,” I told her, “are volcanic mountains in the south. I think they’re near the Tassili.”

  “Ask him when they’ll get this crate off the ground,” said Lily, heading for the hut with Carioca trotting behind her on tippy-toe, lifting the pads of his feet gingerly off the scalding asphalt.

  “Soon,” the man replied to my question in French. He pointed to the desert. “We have to get her up before the sand devils hit. It won’t be long.” So I’d been right—there was a storm coming.

  “Where are you going?” I called after Lily.

  “To find out how much it’ll cost to bring the car,” she shot over her shoulder.

  It was four in the afternoon when our car was lowered down the ramp from the plane onto the tarmac at Tamanrasset. The date palms waved in the tepid breeze, and the blue-black mountains twisted into the sky around us.

  “It’s amazing what money will buy,” I told Lily as she paid the cheerful pilot his commission and we climbed back into the Corniche.

  “Don’t you forget it,” she retorted, pulling out through the steel mesh gates. “And the guy even gave me a frigging map! I’d have coughed up another grand for that, back there in the desert. Now at least we’ll know where we are when we get lost again.”

  I didn’t know which looked worse, Lily or the Corniche. Her pale skin was shredded from the sun, and the blue paint on the entire front half of the car had been stripped down to gray metal from the abrasion of sand and sun. But the engine was still purring like a cat. I was amazed.

  “Here’s where we’re going.” Lily pointed to a spot on the map she’d unfolded across the dashboard. “Add up the kilometers and convert them for me. Then we’ll figure out the quickest route.”

  There was only one route—450 miles of it—and it was mountains all the way. At the junction to Djanet we stopped at a roadside moulin for our first meal in nearly twenty-four hours. I was ravenous and wolfed down two plates of creamed chicken soup with vegetables, sopping it up with chunks of dry baguette. A carafe of wine and a big helping of redfish and potatoes helped ease the stomach agony. I bought a quart of syrupy coffee for the road.

  “You know, we should’ve read this diary earlier,” I told Lily when we were back on the winding two-lane road headed east toward Djanet. “This nun Mireille seems to have camped all over this turf—knows everything about it. Did you know that the Greeks named these mountains ‘Atlas’ long before the ones up north were given that name? And the people who lived here, according to the historian Herodotus, were called Atlanteans? We’re driving through the kingdom of lost Atlantis!”

  “I thought it sank under the ocean,” said Lily. “She doesn’t mention where the pieces are hidden, does she?”

  “Nope. I think she knows what happened to them, but she’s gone off to look for the secret behind them—the formula.”

  “Well, read on, my darling. Read on. But this time tell me where to turn.”

  We drove through the afternoon and evening. It was midnight when we reached Djanet, and the batteries in the flashlight were exhausted from my reading. But now we knew exactly where we were headed. And why.

  “My God,” said Lily as I put the book away. She’d pulled the car over to the side of the road and turned off the engine. We sat, looking up at the star-spangled sky, the moonlight dripping like milk over the high plateaus of the Tassili to our left. “I can’t believe this story! She crossed the desert by camel in a sandstorm, climbed these plateaus on foot, and gave birth to a kid in the middle of the mountains at the feet of the White Queen? What kind of broad is this?”

  “We haven’t exactly been tiptoeing through the tulips ourselves,” I said with a laugh. “Maybe we should catch some shut-eye for a few hours until it’s light.”

  “Look, it’s a full moon. I’ve got some more batteries for that flashlight in the trunk. Let’s drive up the road as far as we can until we get to the gap, then hit the trail. I’m wide awake from all that coffee. We can bring the blankets just in case. Let’s go for it now, while no one else is around.”

  A dozen miles after Djanet we came to an intersection where a long dirt road branched off into the canyons. It was marked “Tamrit” with an arrow and beneath it five camel prints that read “Piste Chameliere.” Camel Track. We headed up it anyway.

  “How far in is this place?” I asked Lily. “You’re the one who committed the trip to memory.”

  “There’s a base camp. I think that’s Tamrit, the village of tents. From there, the touristas go on foot to the prehistoric paintings—she said about twenty kilometers. That’s thirteen miles or so.”

  “A four-hour hike,” I told her. “But not in these shoes.” We weren’t exactly prepared for the rigors of cross-country travel, I thought ruefully. But it was too late to check our local directo
ry for the nearest Saks Fifth Avenue.

  We halted on the dirt trail at the turnoff to Tamrit and left the Corniche beside the road behind a clump of brush. Lily replenished the batteries and grabbed the blankets. I stuffed Carioca back in the bag, and we headed along the footpath. About every fifty yards there were little signposts by the road with lacy Arabic words and French translations beneath.

  “This place is better marked than the freeways,” Lily whispered. Though the only sounds for miles were the chirping of crickets and the dry crunch of gravel beneath our feet, we were both tiptoeing and whispering as clandestinely as if we were about to break into a bank. That was, of course, pretty close to what we were doing.

  The sky was so clear, the moonlight so intense, we didn’t even need the flashlight to read the signposts. The flat path gradually inclined as we moved southeast. We were walking through a narrow canyon alongside a gurgling stream when I noticed a cluster of signs all pointing in different directions: Sefar, Aouanrhet, In Itinen …

  “What next?” I said, letting Carioca free to run around. He scurried instantly to the nearest tree and baptized it.

  “That’s it!” said Lily, jumping up and down. “There they are!” The trees she pointed to, which Carioca was still sniffing, grew from the very riverbed—a clump of gigantic cypresses at least sixteen feet around that rose so high they blackened the night sky. “First the giant trees,” said Lily, “then there should be some reflecting lakes nearby.”

  Sure enough, not fifteen hundred feet ahead we saw the little pools, their limpid surfaces mirroring the luminous moon. Carioca had whipped ahead to one of the pools to drink. His lapping tongue broke the surface of the water into a million ripples of light.

  “These point the direction,” Lily said. “We continue down this canyon past something called the Stone Forest.…” We were moving briskly down the flat streambed when I saw another sign, pointing uphill to a narrow defile: “La Forêt de Pierre.”

  “This way,” I said, grabbing Lily’s arm and starting up the hill. There was a lot of loose slag on the incline of the defile that crumbled beneath our feet as we headed up. I heard Lily whisper “ouch!” every few yards as a stone bruised through her thin slippers. And every time a piece of slag broke loose, Carioca went tumbling head over heels—until finally I picked him up again and carried him to the top.

  It was a long steep road that took us over half an hour to negotiate. At the top the canyon widened into a high, flat plateau—a valley on top of a mountain. All across the vast sweep, washed by moonlight, we could see the spiral needles of rock rising from the plateau floor like the long, twisted skeleton of a dinosaur stretched across the valley.

  “The Forest of Stone!” whispered Lily. “Just where it was supposed to be.” She was breathing heavily, and I was panting too from the uphill climb over loose rubble, and yet it all seemed too easy.

  But perhaps I spoke too soon.

  We walked through the Forest of Stone, whose beautiful twisted rocks took on hallucinogenic colors in the moonlight. At the far end of this plateau was another cluster of signs pointing in various directions.

  “What now?” I said to Lily.

  “We’re supposed to look for a sign,” she told me mysteriously.

  “Here they are—half a dozen of them, at least.” I pointed at the little arrows with names on them.

  “Not that kind of sign,” she told me. “A sign that will tell us where the pieces are.”

  “What’s it supposed to look like?”

  “I’m not sure,” she told me, looking around in the moonlight. “It’s just after the Stone Forest—”

  “You’re not sure?” I said, stifling my desire to throttle her. It’d been what you might call a rough day. “You said you had this all laid out in your brain like a game of blindfold chess—a landscape of the imagination, as you described it. I thought you could visualize every nook and cranny of this terrain?”

  “I can,” said Lily angrily. “I got us this far, didn’t I? Why don’t you shut up and help me solve this problem?”

  “So you admit you’re lost,” I said.

  “I am not lost!” cried Lily, her voice echoing back from the sparkling forest of monolithic stones that surrounded us. “I am looking for something—something specific. A sign. She said there’d be a sign that would mean something, just beyond this point.”

  “Mean something to whom?” I said slowly. Lily looked at me dumbly in the moonlight. I could see the peeling skin on her tilted nose. “I mean, a sign like a rainbow? Like a thunderbolt? Like the handwriting on the wall—Mene, mene, tekel …”

  Lily and I stared at one another. It occurred to us both at once. She flicked on the flashlight, turning it toward the cliff before us at the end of the long plateau—and there it was.

  A gigantic painting filled the entire wall. Wild antelope fleeing across the plains, in colors that seemed brilliant even in the unnatural light. And at their midst, a single chariot flying at top speed, bearing a huntress—a woman dressed completely in white.

  We looked at the painting for a very long time, running the flashlight across the magnificent panorama to pick out each of the delicately wrought forms. The wall was high and wide, curved inward like the fragment of a broken bow. Here at the center of the wild stampede across the ancient plains was the chariot of the sky, its body shaped like a crescent moon, its two wheels of eight spokes, pulled by a troika of leaping horses, their flanks splashed with color: red, white, and black. A black man with the head of an ibis knelt at the front, holding the reins tightly as the horses bounded forward over the tundra. Behind, two serpentine ribbons streamed out, twisting together in the wind to form a figure eight. At center, towering over the figures of man and beast like a great white vengeance, was the goddess. She stood motionless while all was frenzy about her—back to us, hair flying in the breeze, her body frozen like a statue. Her arms were raised as if to strike at something. The long, long spear she held aloft was not aimed at the antelope that fled madly everywhere, but pointed upward into the starry sky. Her body itself cut the shape of a harsh, triangulated figure eight that seemed carved from stone.

  “That’s it,” said Lily breathlessly, gazing upon the painting. “You know what that shape means, don’t you? That double triangle shaped like an hourglass?” She brushed the wall with a splash of the flashlight to pick out the shape:

  “Ever since I saw that cloth at Minnie’s, I’ve been trying to think what it reminded me of,” she went on. “And now I know. It’s an ancient double-headed axe called a labrys that’s shaped like a figure eight. It was used in Crete by the ancient Minoans.”

  “What does this have to do with why we’re here?”

  “I saw it in a chess book Mordecai showed me. The most ancient chess service ever discovered was found at the palace of King Minos on Crete—the place where the famous Labyrinth was built, named after this sacred axe. The chess service dates to 2000 B.C. It was made of gold and silver and jewels, just like the Montglane Service. And in the center was carved a labrys.”

  “Just like Minnie’s cloth,” I interjected. Lily was nodding and waving the flashlight around in agitation. “But I thought chess wasn’t even invented until six or seven hundred A.D.,” I added. “They always say it came from Persia or India. How could this Minoan chess service be so old?”

  “Mordecai’s written a lot himself on the history of chess,” said Lily, turning the light back to the woman in white, standing in her moon-shaped chariot, her spear raised to the heavens. “He thinks that chess set in Crete was designed by the same guy who built the Labyrinth—the sculptor Daedalus.…”

  Now things were beginning to click into place. I took the flashlight from her hands and ran it over the face of the cliff. “The moon goddess,” I whispered. “The ritual of the labyrinth … ‘There is a land called Crete in the midst of the wine-dark sea, a fair rich land begirt by water.…’” An island, I recalled, like the others in the Mediterranean—that was settled b
y the Phoenicians. That was, like the Phoenician, a labyrinthine culture surrounded by water—that worshiped the moon. I looked at the shapes on the wall.

  “Why was this axe carved on the chessboard?” I asked Lily, knowing the answer in my heart before she spoke. “What did Mordecai say was the connection?” But though I was prepared, her words brought the same cold chill as that white form towering above me on the wall.

  “That’s what it’s all about,” she said quietly. “To kill the King.”

  The sacred axe was used to kill the King. The ritual had been the same since the beginning of time. The game of chess was merely a reenactment. Why hadn’t I recognized it before?

  Kamel had told me to read the Koran. And Sharrif, on the very eve of my arrival in Algiers, had mentioned the importance of my birthday to the Islamic calendar, which, like most ancient calendars, was lunar, or based upon cycles of the moon. But still I hadn’t made the connection.

  The ritual was the same for all those civilizations whose survival depended on the sea—and hence upon that moon goddess who pulled the tides, who caused the rivers to rise and fall. A goddess who demanded blood sacrifice. To her, they chose a living man to wed as king, but the term of his reign was set by strict ritual. He ruled for a “Great Year,” or eight years—the time required for the lunar and solar calendars to cycle back together, a hundred lunar months being equal to eight solar years. At the end of that time the king was sacrificed to appease the goddess, and a new king was chosen with the new moon.

  This ritual of death and rebirth was always celebrated in the spring, when the sun was smack between the zodiacal constellations of Aries and Taurus—that is, by modern reckoning, April fourth. It was the day on which they killed the king!