The Eight

by Katherine Neville

  Solarin sat bolt upright, clinging to the side of the cockpit, and glanced around quickly taking in the situation.

  “Get the sails down at once.…” He grabbed my hands and put them on the wheel. “Cut it to the starboard!” he cried as he struggled to stand.

  “Is that left or right?” I screamed in panic.

  “Right!” he screamed back, but he collapsed back onto the seat beside me, his head bleeding profusely as water washed over us and I clung to the wheel.

  I cut the wheel as hard as I could and felt the boat dip sickeningly into the water as we fell. I kept turning as hard as I could until we lay completely on our side. I was sure we’d turn over—there was nothing but gravity pulling us down and down as the wall of water loomed over us, blackening the muddy brown light of the morning sky.

  “The halyards!” cried Solarin, grabbing me. I looked at him a second, then shoved him forward onto the wheel, which he clutched with all his strength.

  I could already taste the fear in my mouth. Solarin, still steering the boat into the base of the approaching wave head on, grabbed an axe and shoved it into my hand. I crawled over the top of the cockpit straight for the front mast. The wave above us was growing higher as the plume at the top began to curl inward upon itself. I couldn’t see a thing as water closed over the ship. The roar of thousands of tons of water was deafening. Erasing all thoughts from my mind, I half slid, half crawled toward the mast.

  Grabbing it with all my strength, I hacked at the halyard until the hemp lashed free in a spiral like a ball of rattlesnakes cutting loose. The rope broke free, and I threw myself flat as the onslaught struck like a railroad train plowing into us at full force. Sails were everywhere, and I could hear the sickening sound of cracking wood. The wall of water crashed over us. Pebbles and sand were forced up my nose; water was being shoved down my throat as I fought to keep from coughing or gasping for air. I was ripped from the mast and tossed backward so I couldn’t tell which way was up or down. Whatever I hit, I tried to grab hold of with all my strength, as the water kept on coming.

  The front of the ship popped into the air, then down again. Dirty gray spray showered the boat as we rocked violently in and out of the waves—but we were still afloat. Sails were everywhere, dragging in the sea and flopping over the deck, some lying heavily across my legs as I pulled myself out. I started back to the rear mast, grabbing the axe embedded in a pile of sail not three feet away. It might have been my head, I thought as I ran along the side, gripping the rail for balance.

  In the cockpit, Solarin was pulling sails away as he gripped the wheel. Blood splashed his wet blond hair like a crimson badge and trickled down into his collar.

  “Get that sail tied down!” he bellowed after me. “Use anything you can find—just batten it down before we’re hit again.” He was yanking at the front sails as he stood in the cockpit. They lay sprawled everywhere like the skin of a drowned animal.

  I hacked the rear halyard from the cleat, but the wind was so hard I was having quite a battle trying to get the sail down. When I’d dragged down and tied up as much as I could, I ran in a low crouch across the deck, my bare feet slapping in the water as I dug my toes in like running cleats. I was soaked to the skin, but I hauled the front jib, yanking it with all my might as it slapped in the sea and pulling it from the water that ran off the deck. Solarin was pulling in the main boom, which was dangling loose like a broken arm.

  I jumped into the cockpit as Solarin wrestled with the wheel. The boat was still bobbing about like a little cork across the dark muddy void. Though the sea was rough and violent, flinging spray about and tearing us back and forth, there were no more waves like the one that had just smashed us. It was as if a strange genie had risen from a bottle on the dark sea floor, had one brief burst of wrath, then disappeared. At least I hoped so.

  I was exhausted—and amazed I was still alive. I sat there still trembling with cold and fear, watching Solarin’s profile as he watched the waves. He looked as intent as he had before that chessboard, as if that too were a matter of life and death. “I am a master of this game,” I remembered him saying. “Who’s winning?” I’d asked him, and he’d replied, “I am. I always win.”

  Solarin struggled in grim silence with the wheel for what seemed like hours as I sat there cold and numb, my mind empty. The wind was dropping, but the waves were still so high we moved as on a roller coaster. I’d seen these storms that came and vanished on the Mediterranean, throwing waves ten feet high up the steps of the port at Sidi-Fredj, then disappearing as if sucked off into a vacuum. I was praying that this would be one of the same.

  When I could see the dark sky over us clearing to muddy brown in the distance, I spoke at last.

  “If we’re okay for a while,” I said to Solarin, “I should go down and see if Lily’s still alive.”

  “You can go in a moment.” He turned to me, the side of his face smeared with blood and water, water dripping from his matted hair down his nose and chin. “But first I’d like to thank you for saving my life.”

  “I think you saved mine,” I told him with a smile, though I was still shaking with cold and fear. “I wouldn’t have begun to know what to do.…”

  But Solarin was looking at me intently, his hands still on the wheel. Before I could react, he bent over me—his lips were warm, and water dripped from his wet hair to my face as a burst of spray came across the bow, drenching us again with stinging, whiplike fingers. Solarin leaned against the wheel, pulling me to him, his hands warm in the places where my wet shirt clung to the skin. A chill went through me like an electric current as he kissed me again, longer. The waves rolled up and down. Surely that explained the strange feeling deep in my stomach. I couldn’t move as I felt his warmth penetrating deeper and deeper. At last he drew away and looked into my eyes with a smile.

  “We’ll drown for certain if I keep this up,” he said, his lips still inches from mine. Reluctantly he put his hands back on the wheel. His brow was furrowed as he turned his attention to the sea. “You’d better go below,” he said slowly as if thinking of something. He didn’t look back at me.

  “I’ll try to find something to fix your head,” I said, angry because my voice felt so weak. The sea was still wild, dark walls of water moving all around us. But that didn’t explain the way I felt as I looked at his dripping hair, the places where his wet torn shirt clung to his lean, muscled body.

  I was still shaken as I clambered downstairs. Of course, I thought, Solarin had embraced me in gratitude—that was all. So why did I have this strange feeling in my stomach? Why could I still see his translucent green eyes, so penetrating in the second before he’d kissed me?

  I felt my way across the cabin in the dim light from the porthole. The hammock had ripped loose from the wall. Lily was sitting in the corner, holding the bedraggled Carioca in her lap. He had his paws on her chest and was trying to lick her face. He perked up when he heard me plowing through the brackish water on unsteady feet, tossing back and forth between the galley and the beds. As I moved, I plucked things out of the wash and tossed them in the sink.

  “Are you okay?” I called to Lily. The place reeked of vomit. I didn’t want to look too closely at the water I was wading through.

  “We’re going to die,” she moaned. “My God, after all we’ve been through, we’re going to die. All because of those goddamned pieces.”

  “Where are they?” I said in sudden panic, thinking my dream might have been a premonition after all.

  “Here in the bag,” she said, extracting the big satchel from the water she sat in. “When the ship took that big plunge, they came crashing across the room and hit me—and the hammock fell down. I have bruises all over.…” Her face was streaked with tears and dirty water.

  “I’ll put them away,” I told her. Grabbing the bag, I stowed it under the sink, then shut the cupboard door. “I think we’re going to make it. The storm’s dying down. But Solarin got a nasty whack on the head. I’ve got to find
something to clean up his cut.”

  “There were some medical supplies in the loo,” she told me weakly, trying to rise. “My God, am I sick.”

  “Try to get back into bed,” I told her. “Maybe the upper bunk’s drier than the rest of this place. I’m going back up to help.”

  When I came back from the little toilet with the waterlogged box of medicaments I’d salvaged from the debris, Lily had crawled into the upper bunk and was lying on her side groaning. Carioca tried to burrow beneath her looking for a warm spot. I patted them each on their wet heads, then struggled back up the creaking steps as the ship rolled and bucked beneath me.

  The sky was lighter now—the color of chocolate milk—and in the distance I could see what looked like a puddle of sunlight on the water. Was it possible the worst was over? I felt relief flooding through me as I squished onto the seat beside Solarin.

  “Not a dry bandage in the house,” I told him, opening the leaking tin box of medical supplies and reviewing the soggy contents. “But there’s iodine and scissors.…” Solarin glanced down and plucked out a fat tube of lubricating ointment, handing it to me without looking up.

  “You can smear that on, if you would,” he told me, turning his eyes back to the water as he started to unbutton his shirt with one hand. “It will disinfect and stanch the bleeding a bit. Then, if you’d shred my shirt for binding …”

  I helped him pull the wet shirt free from his shoulder and extract his arm as he kept his eyes on the sea. I could smell the warmth of his skin only inches away. I tried not to think of it as he spoke.

  “This storm is calming down,” he said as if speaking to himself. “But we’ve worse problems yet. The boom is cracked, and the jib is torn to shreds. We’ll not make it to Marseilles. Besides, we’re way off course—I’ll have to get bearings. As soon as you’ve fixed me up, you can take the wheel while I have a look at the charts.”

  His face was a mask as he stared at the sea, and I tried not to look at his body, only inches away as he sat there naked to the waist. What was wrong with me? I thought. My mind must have been wobbly from the recent terror I’d undergone, but all I could think of as the ship moved over the waves was how warm his lips had been, the color of his eyes as he looked into mine …

  “If we don’t make it to Marseilles,” I said, forcing my mind back, “won’t the plane leave without us?”

  “Yes,” said Solarin, smiling strangely as he continued to watch the sea. “What an awful plight—we might be forced to put in at some remote spot. We could be stranded in complete isolation for months, with no transportation.” I was up on my knees, smearing goo on his head as he spoke. “How terrible … what would you do, stuck with a crazy Russian who could only amuse you by playing chess?”

  “I guess I’d learn to play,” I told him, starting to wrap the bandage as he winced.

  “I think the bandages can wait,” he told me, grabbing me by the wrists, my two hands full of medicine and strips of his shirt. He lifted me to my feet and, as I stood on the seat, wrapped his arms around my legs and tossed me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, stepping up on the seat out of the cockpit as the ship continued to roll through the waves.

  “What are you doing?” I laughed, my face muffled against his back as the blood ran to my head.

  He slid me down across his body and set me on the deck. Water was running over our bare feet as we stood there facing each other, our legs absorbing the constant movement of the boat over the water.

  “I’m going to show you what else Russian chess masters can do,” he said, looking down at me. His gray-green eyes were not smiling. He pulled me to him so our lips and bodies met. I could feel the heat of his naked flesh through the wet cloth of my shirt. Salt water dripped from his face into my open mouth as he kissed my eyes, my face. His hands were buried in my wet hair. Through the cold wet fabric that clung to me, I could feel my own heat rising, melting me inside like ice in a hot summer sun. I gripped his shoulders and buried my face in the hard skin of his bare chest. Solarin was murmuring in my ear as the boat swayed up and down, rocking us as we moved together.…

  “I wanted you that day in the chess club.” He pulled my face back to look into my eyes. “I wanted to take you there on the floor—with all those workmen standing by. The night I went to your apartment to leave that note, I nearly stayed behind hoping you’d come home early by mistake and find me there.…”

  “To welcome me to the Game?” I smiled.

  “To hell with the Game,” he said bitterly, his eyes dark green pools of passion. “They told me not to come near you—not to get involved. I haven’t slept a night without thinking of this, without wanting you. My God, I should have done this months ago.…” He was unfastening my shirt. His hands moved over my skin as I felt the surge of power pass between us like a terrible force, washing through me and leaving me empty of all but one thought.

  He lifted me in a long sweep and placed me upon the wet and crumpled sails. I felt the spray strike us with every dip of the waves. The masts above us were creaking, the sky was pale with a yellow wash. Solarin was looking down at me, his head bent over me, his lips moving over my skin like water, his hands moving over the wet places where he’d pulled my clothes away. His body melted into mine with the heat and violence of a catalyst. I clung to his shoulders as I felt his passion sweeping me.

  Our bodies moved with a power as fierce and primal as the sea that rolled beneath us. I felt myself falling—falling as I heard Solarin’s low moan. I felt his teeth sinking into my flesh, his body sinking into mine.

  Solarin’s body lay over mine in the sails, one hand tangled in my hair, his blond head dripping water on my breast that streamed down into the hollow of my belly. How strange, I thought as I put my hand on his head, that I should feel I’d known him all my life, when we’d only met three times—now four. I knew nothing of Solarin but gossip from Lily and Hermanold at the club and what little Nim had recalled from his chess journals. I hadn’t the vaguest clue about where Solarin lived, what sort of life he had, who his friends were, whether he ate eggs for breakfast or wore pajamas to bed. I’d never asked him how he’d evaded his KGB guards or why they were with him in the first place. Nor did I know how it happened that he’d met his own grandmother only once before.

  Suddenly I knew why I’d painted his portrait before I’d ever seen him. I might have noticed him lurking about my apartment building on that bicycle without it consciously registering. But even that was not important.

  These were things I didn’t really need to know—superficial relations and events that are the pivotal center of most people’s lives. But not mine. In Solarin I saw beneath the mystery, the mask, the cold veneer—to what lay at the very core. And what I saw was passion, an unquenchable thirst for life—a passion to discover the truth behind the veil. It was a passion I recognized, because it matched my own.

  That was what Minnie recognized and wanted in me—this passion, channeled by her, into a quest for the pieces. That’s why she’d cautioned her grandson to protect me but not to distract me, not to get “involved.” As Solarin rolled over and pressed his lips to my stomach, I felt a delicious chill move through my spine. I touched his hair. She was wrong, I thought. There was one ingredient she’d overlooked in the alchemical brew she was cooking up to defeat evil forever. The ingredient she’d forgotten was love.

  The sea had died to gently rocking waves of muddy brown when at last we stirred. The sky had grown a bright flat white, glaring without the sun. We searched about for our cold wet clothes and fumbled to put them on. Without a word, Solarin picked up some scraps of his former shirt and used them to wipe the places where his blood still stained my body. Then he looked at me with his sea-green eyes and smiled.

  “I’ve some very bad news,” he said, slipping one arm around me as he raised the other to point out across the flat dark waves. There in the distance, shimmering against the glare of water, rose a miragelike form. “Land ho,” he whispered in my
ear. “Two hours ago, I’d have given anything to see a sight like that. But just now, I’d rather pretend it wasn’t real.…”

  The isle was called Formentera, in the southern curve of the Balearic group just off the eastern coast of Spain. This meant, I calculated quickly, we’d been driven by the storm 150 miles east of our original course and were now at a spot equidistant from Gibraltar and Marseilles. To reach the plane on that landing strip near La Camargue was now patently impossible, even if we had a boat that was seaworthy. But with our cracked boom, torn sails, and the general carnage on deck—we needed to stop for an inventory and make extensive repairs. As Solarin brought us limping on our stalwart little engine into an isolated bay at the south end of the island, I went below to roust Lily so we could form an alternate plan.

  “I never thought I’d feel relieved to spend a night rolling about in that watery coffin,” Lily gasped when she caught her first glimpse of the deck. “But this place looks like a battle zone. Thank God I was too sick to witness the catastrophe.” Though her face was still sickly, she seemed to have recovered most of her former strength. She crossed the battered deck covered with debris and soggy canvas, gulping down fresh air.

  “We have a problem,” I told her as soon as we sat down for a pow-wow with Solarin. “We’re not going to make that plane. Now we have to figure out how to get to Manhattan without taking those pieces through Customs, while bypassing Immigrations as well.”

  “We Soviet citizens,” Solarin explained to Lily’s questioning look, “don’t exactly have carte blanche to travel everywhere. Besides, Sharrif will be watching all commercial airports, including, I’m sure, those at Ibiza and Majorca. Since I promised Minnie I’d return you both safely—with the pieces—I’d like to suggest a plan.”

  “Shoot—I’m game for anything at this point,” said Lily, pulling knots out of Carioca’s wet and matted hair as he struggled to escape from her lap.

  “Formentera is a small fishing island. They’re used to the occasional visitor sailing over from Ibiza just for the day. This cove is very sheltered—we’ll never be noticed here. I suggest we go into the local town, buy fresh clothing and supplies, and see if we can’t get a new sail and the tools I’ll need to repair the damage. This might be costly, but in a week or so we’d be seaworthy and could simply leave as silently as we’ve come, with no one the wiser.”