The Eight

by Katherine Neville

Here was the ritual of the triple goddess Car, to whose name ancient tribute was paid from Carchemish to Carcassone, from Carthage to Khartoum. In the dolmens of Karnak, in the caves of Karlsbad and Karelia, through the Carpathian mountains, her name rings even today.

  The words that sprang from her name flooded my mind as I held the light and looked at her monolithic form towering above me on the wall. Why had I never heard these names before? She appeared in carmine, cardinal, and cardiac, in carnal, carnivorous, and Karma—the endless cycle of incarnation, transformation, and oblivion. She was the word made flesh, the vibration of destiny coiled like kundalini at the heart of life itself—the caracole, or spiral force, that formed the very universe. Hers was the force unleashed by the Montglane Service.

  I turned to Lily, the flashlight shaking in my hand, and we hugged each other for warmth as the cold moonlight poured over us like an icy bath.

  “I know what the spear is pointing toward,” she said weakly, gesturing to the painting on the wall. “She’s not aiming at the moon—that’s not the sign. It’s something the moonlight is falling on, atop that cliff.” She looked as frightened as I felt about climbing up there in the dead of night. It must have been four hundred feet straight up.

  “Maybe,” I replied. “But we have a saying in my business: ‘Don’t work hard; work smart.’ We got the message—we know the pieces are around here somewhere. But there’s more to the message than that, and you figured out what it was.”

  “I did?” she said, looking at me with wide gray eyes. “What was it?”

  “Look at the lady on the wall,” I told her. “She’s riding the chariot of the moon across a sea of antelope. She doesn’t notice them—she’s looking away from us and pointing her spear at the sky. But she’s not looking at the sky.…”

  “She looking directly into the mountain!” cried Lily. “It’s within that cliff!” Her excitement calmed a bit as she looked again. “But what are we supposed to do, blow the cliff apart? I forgot to pack my nitroglycerine.”

  “Be reasonable,” I told her. “We’re standing in the Forest of Stone. How do you think those lacy, spiral stones got to look so much like trees? Sand doesn’t cut stone that way, regardless of how hard it blows. It wears it down smooth, polishes it. The only thing that cuts rock into precise shapes like that is water. This whole plateau was formed by underground rivers or oceans. Nothing else could make it look like that. Water cuts holes in rock.… Are you getting my drift?”

  “A labyrinth!” Lily cried. “You’re saying there’s a labyrinth inside that cliff! That’s why they painted the moon goddess as a labrys on the side! It’s a message, like a road marking. But the spear still points up. The water must have come in and formed it from the top.”

  “Maybe,” I said, still grudgingly. “But take a look at this wall, how it’s cut. It curves inward, it’s been scooped out like a bowl. Exactly the way the sea cuts into a cliff. That’s the way all sea grottoes are formed. You see them along every rockbound coastline from Carmel to Capri. I think the entrance is down here. At least we should check before we kill ourselves climbing that rock.”

  Lily took the flash, and we groped our way along the cliff for half an hour. There were several crevices, but none wide enough for us to slip through. I was beginning to think my idea was a bust when I saw a place where the smooth rock face took a slight dip. Fortunately I ran my hands into the dip. Instead of joining, as it appeared, the front portion of the rock kept sliding back. I followed it, and it kept swinging around as if curving back to join the other rock—but it never did.

  “I think I’ve got it,” I called to Lily as I disappeared into the darkness of the cleft. She followed my voice with the flashlight. When she arrived, I took the light and ran it over the surface of the rock. The cleft kept sliding back in a spiraled curve, deeper and deeper into the cliff.

  The two sections of rock seemed to curl around each other like the spirals of a chambered nautilus, and we kept with them. It grew so dark that the weak beam of our flashlight hardly illuminated more than a few feet ahead.

  Suddenly there was a loud noise, and I nearly jumped in the air. Then I realized it was Carioca inside my satchel, letting out a bark. It echoed like the roar of a lion.

  “There’s more to this cave than it appears,” I told Lily, fumbling to let Carioca out. “That echo went a long way.”

  “Don’t put him down—there may be spiders in here. Or snakes.”

  “If you think I’m going to let him pee in my bag, you’re mistaken,” I told her. “Besides, when it comes to snakes, better him than me.” Lily glared at me in the faint light. I set Carioca on the floor, where he instantly did his business. I looked at her with raised eyebrow, then checked the place out.

  We walked around the cave slowly; it was only ten yards around. But we didn’t find a clue. After a while, Lily set down the blankets she’d been carrying and sat on the floor.

  “They have to be here somewhere,” she said. “It’s too perfect that we found this place, though it isn’t exactly the labyrinth I had in mind.” Suddenly she sat bolt upright. “Where’s Carioca?” she said.

  I looked around, but he’d disappeared. “My God,” I said, trying to be calm. “There’s only one way out—the way we came in. Why don’t you call him?” So she did. After a long, painful moment we heard his little yelps. They were coming from the curlicue entrance, much to our relief.

  “I’ll go get him,” I told her.

  But Lily was on her feet at once. “Not on your life,” she said, her voice echoing in the gloom. “You’re not leaving me here in the dark.” She was right on my heels, which probably explains why she fell down the hole right on top of me. It seemed to take a long time to hit bottom.

  Just near the end of the spiral entrance to the cave, hidden from view when we’d entered by the curve of the wall, was a steep rock slope that went thirty feet into the plateau. When I extracted my bruised body from beneath Lily’s weight, I turned the beam upward. Light glittered everywhere off the crystallized walls and ceilings of the biggest cave I’d seen so far. We sat there looking at the myriad colors as Carioca bounced playfully around us, unfazed by his fall.

  “Good work!” I cried, patting him on the head. “Once in a while it’s lucky you’re such a klutz, my furry friend!” I stood up and brushed myself off as Lily collected the blankets and the scattered items that had tumbled from my bag. We gaped at the enormous cave. No matter where we turned our beam, it seemed to go on forever.

  “I think we’re in trouble.” Lily’s voice came from the darkness behind me. “It occurs to me this ramp we slid down is too steep to get back up without a crane. It also occurs we could get terribly lost in this place unless we leave a trail of breadcrumbs behind.”

  She was right on both counts, but my brain was now working overtime.

  “Sit down and think,” I told Lily wearily. “You try to remember a clue, and I’ll try to figure out how we can get out of here.” Then I heard a sound—a vague whispering like dried leaves blowing across an empty alleyway.

  I started to flash the light around, but suddenly Carioca was jumping up and down, yapping hysterically at the ceiling of the cave, and a deafening scream like the screeching of a thousand harpies assaulted my ears.

  “The blankets!” I screamed at Lily over the noise. “Get the fucking blankets!” I grabbed Carioca, who was still bounding off the floor, pinned him under my arm, and made a dive for Lily, grabbing the blankets from her hands just as she started screaming. I threw a blanket over her head and tried to cover myself, crouching on the floor just as the bats hit.

  There were thousands of them, by the sound of it. Lily and I hunkered down on the floor as they hit the blankets like tiny kamikaze pilots—thunk, thunk, thunk. Over the sound of their beating wings, I could hear Lily’s screams. She was getting hysterical, and Carioca was wriggling frantically in my arms. He seemed to want to take on the entire bat population of the Sahara single-handedly, and his high-voiced
yapping, combined with Lily’s screams, echoed from the high walls.

  “I hate bats!” Lily yelled hysterically, gripping my arm as I raced her through the cave, peeking out from beneath my blanket to get a glimpse of the terrain. “I hate them! I hate them!”

  “They don’t seem too fond of you,” I yelled over the racket. But I knew bats couldn’t hurt you unless they got tangled in your hair or were rabid.

  We were running in a half crouch toward one of the arteries of the big cave when Carioca wriggled loose from my grasp and hit the floor running. Bats were still soaring everywhere.

  “My God!” I screamed. “Carioca, come back!” Holding my blanket above my head, I released Lily and went tearing after him, waving the flashlight around in hopes I’d confuse the bats.

  “Don’t leave me!” I heard Lily cry. Her footsteps were pounding after me across the broken rubble of the floor. I was running faster and faster, but Carioca turned a corner and disappeared.

  The bats were gone. A long cave stretched before us like a hallway, and the bats were nowhere within earshot. I turned to Lily, who was huddled behind me trembling, her blanket draped over her head.

  “He’s dead,” she whimpered, scanning the place for Carioca. “You turned him loose, and they killed him. What should we do?” Her voice was feeble with fear. “You always know what to do. Harry says—”

  “I don’t give a damn what Harry says,” I lashed out. The rising wash of panic was gripping me, but I fought it down with deep breaths. There was really no point in going crazy. Huckleberry Finn got out of a cave like this, didn’t he? Or was it Tom Sawyer? I started laughing.

  “Why are you laughing?” said Lily frantically. “What are we going to do?”

  “Turn off the flashlight, for one thing,” I told her, switching it off. “So we don’t run out of batteries in this godforsaken—” And then I saw it.

  From the far end of the hallway where we stood, there was a faint glow. Very faint, but in the pitch-black darkness it was like the beacon of a lighthouse shining across a wintry sea.

  “What’s that?” Lily said breathlessly. Our hope of salvation, I thought, grabbing her arm and moving toward it. Could there be another entrance to this place?

  I’m not sure how far we walked. In the dark you lose all sense of time and space. But we followed the dim glow without a flashlight, moving through the silent cave for what seemed a very long time. The glow grew brighter and brighter as we approached. At last we came to a room of magnificent dimensions—a ceiling perhaps fifty feet high and walls encrusted with strangely glittering forms. From an open hole in the ceiling poured a wonderful flood of moonlight. Lily started to cry.

  “I never thought I’d be so happy just to see the sky,” she sobbed.

  I couldn’t have agreed more. The relief washed through me like a drug. But just as I was wondering how we were going to pull ourselves fifty feet up through that hole in the roof, I heard a snuffling sound that was hard to mistake. I switched the flashlight on again. There in the corner—digging in the ground as for a bone—was Carioca.

  Lily started to rush to him, but I grabbed her arm. What was he doing? We both stared at him in the eerie light.

  He was digging frantically through the mound of rock and rubble on the floor. But there was something odd about that mound. I turned off the light so only the dim wash of moonlight lit the room. Then I realized what it was that bothered me. The mound itself was glowing—something underneath that rubble. And just above it, carved into the wall, a gigantic caduceus with a figure eight seemed to float in the pale moonlight.

  Lily and I were on our knees on the ground, tearing at the stones and rubble alongside Carioca. It was only a few minutes before we unearthed the first piece. I pulled it out and held it in my hands—the perfect shape of a horse, rearing on its hind legs. It was about five inches high and much heavier than it looked. I switched the flashlight back on and handed it to Lily as we examined the piece more closely. The detail in the work was incredible. Everything was precisely tooled in a metal that seemed to be a very pure form of silver. From the flaring nostrils to the delicately wrought hooves, it was obviously the work of a master craftsman. The fringed trappings of the horse’s saddle were picked out thread by thread. The saddle itself, the base of the piece—even the horse’s eyes—were of polished uncut stones that glittered in luminous colors in the small spotlight.

  “It’s incredible,” whispered Lily in the silence that was broken only by the sound of Carioca’s continued digging. “Let’s get the others out.”

  So we kept clawing through the mound until we’d extracted them all. Eight pieces of the Montglane Service sat around us in the rubble, glowing dully in the moonlight. There was the silver Knight and four small pawns, each about three inches high. They wore strange-looking togas with a panel down the front and carried spears with twisted points. There was a golden camel with a tower on its back.

  But the last two pieces were the most amazing of all. One was a man sitting on the back of an elephant, its trunk upraised. It was all in gold, and similar to the picture of the ivory one Llewellyn had shown me so many months ago—but minus the foot soldiers around the base. He seemed to be carved from life, from an actual person rather than the stylized faces usual on chess pieces. It was a large, noble face with a Roman nose, but flaring nostrils like the Negroid heads found at Ife in Nigeria. His long hair tumbled down his back, some of the locks braided and flecked with smaller jewels. The King.

  The last piece was nearly as tall as the King, about six inches. It was a covered sedan chair with draperies drawn aside. Within sat a figure in a lotus position, facing outward. It wore an expression of hauteur—almost fierceness—in the almond-shaped emerald eyes. I say “it,” for though the figure had a beard, it also had the breasts of a woman.

  “The Queen,” said Lily softly. “In Egypt and Persia, she wore a beard, indicating her power to rule. In olden days, this piece had less power than in the modern game. But her strength has grown.”

  We looked at each other in the pale moonlight, across the glowing pieces of the Montglane Service. And we smiled.

  “We did it,” Lily said. “Now all we have to do is figure out how to get out of here.”

  I ran the flashlight up the walls. It seemed difficult, but not impossible.

  “I think I can get handholds on this rock,” I told her. “If we cut these blankets into strips, we can make a rope. I can lower it once I get up there. You can tie it to my shoulder bag, and we’ll haul out Carioca and the pieces.”

  “Great,” said Lily. “But what about me?”

  “I can’t pull you,” I said. “You’ll have to climb yourself.”

  I took off my shoes as Lily shredded the blankets, using my nail scissors. The sky was getting light above us by the time we’d cut the thick wool blankets.

  The walls were rough enough to get good toeholds, and the crevice of light extended all the way to the sides of the cave. It took nearly half an hour for me to climb up with my rope attached. When I emerged, panting, into the light of day, I was on top of the cliff through whose base we’d entered the night before. Lily tied the bag below, and I hauled first Carioca, then the pieces, to the ledge. Now it was Lily’s turn. I caressed my raw feet, for the blisters had opened again.

  “I’m afraid,” she called up to me. “What if I fall and break my leg?”

  “I’d have to shoot you,” I told her. “Just do it—and don’t look down.”

  She started up the steep cliff, feeling with her bare toes for the solid spots in the rock. About halfway up, she froze.

  “Come on,” I said. “You can’t freeze up now.” She just stood there, cleaving to the rock like a terrified spider. She didn’t speak or move. I started to panic.

  “Look,” I told her, “why, don’t you imagine this as a chess game? You’re pinned in a spot and can’t see your way out. But there’s got to be a way out, or you’ll lose the game! I don’t know what you call it when all th
e pieces are pinned without a place to move … but that’s where you are now unless you find another place to put your foot.”

  I saw her move her hand a little. She released her hold and slipped a bit. Then slowly she started moving up again. I heaved a big sigh of relief but said nothing to distract her as she continued her upward course. After what seemed aeons, her hand clutched the top of the ledge. I grabbed the rope I’d had her tie around her waist, and tugging it, I hauled her over the top.

  Lily lay there panting. Her eyes were closed. For a long time she didn’t speak. Finally she opened her eyes and looked at the dawn, then at me.

  “They call it Zugzwang,” she gasped. “My God—we did it.”

  There was more to come.

  We put on our shoes and hiked across the ledge, shinnying to the bottom. Then we passed back through the Forest of Stone. It only took two hours on the downhill hike to return to the hill that overlooked our car.

  We were both punchy from exhaustion, and I was just telling Lily how much I’d like fried eggs for breakfast—an impossible delicacy in a country like this—when I felt her grab my arm.

  “I don’t believe this,” she said, pointing down at the road where we’d left the car behind the bushes. There were two police cars parked at either side—and a third car I thought I recognized. When I saw Sharrif’s two thugs crawling over the Corniche with a fine-toothed comb, I knew I was right.

  “How could they get here?” she said. “I mean, it’s hundreds of miles from where we shook them.”

  “How many blue Corniches do you think there are in Algeria?” I pointed out. “And how many roads through the Tassili that we might have taken?”

  We stood there for a minute looking down through the brush at the road.

  “You haven’t blown all of Harry’s pin money, have you?” I asked her. She looked on her last legs as she shook her head.

  “Then I suggest we hoof it to Tamrit, that village of tents we passed. Maybe we can buy a few donkeys to take us back to Djanet.”

  “And leave my car in the hands of those villains?” she hissed.