Solarin nodded politely to Vartan Azov and crossed the room in a few swift strides. He took Xie by the hand and headed for the door.
‘Papa,’ said Xie in confusion, ‘where are we going?’
‘To see that lady,’ he said cryptically, ‘the lady who gave you the card.’
‘But what about the game?’
She would forfeit if she wasn’t there when they started the clocks. She would lose everything they had worked so long and hard for. But he had to know. He stepped outside, holding her hand.
From the top of the Vestry steps, he saw her across the park. The woman was standing at the gates, looking across the space at Solarin with love and understanding. He had been right about her. But then her look changed to one of fear, as she glanced up toward the parapet.
It was only another instant before Solarin followed her gaze and saw the guard, perched on the parapet high above, the gun in his hand. Without thinking, Solarin shoved Xie behind him for protection and glanced back at the woman.
‘Mother,’ he said.
And the next thing he saw was the fire in his head.
At the beginning of every spiritual realization stands death, in the form of ‘dying to the world.’…At the beginning of the work [‘The Albedo’ or ‘Whitening’] the most precious material which the alchemist produces is the ash…
– Titus Burckhardt, Alchemy
You must consume yourself in your own flame; how could you wish to become new unless you had first become ashes!
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (Kaufmann translation)
Pray to Allah, but hobble your camel.
– Sufi saying
Janina, Albania
January 1822
The odalisques, chambermaids of Ali Pasha’s harem, were crossing the icy footbridge through the marsh when they heard the first screams.
Haidée, the pasha’s twelve-year-old daughter, clutched the hand of the nearest of her three escorts – none of them older than fifteen – and together they peered into the darkness, afraid to speak or breathe. Across vast Lake Pambotis, they could make out the torches that flickered along the far shore, but that was all.
The screams came faster, harsher now – hoarse, panting cries, like wild animals barking to one another in the forest. But these were the cries of humans – and not those of hunters, but of the hunted. Male voices, raised in fear, blowing across the lake.
Without warning, a lone kestrel flapped up from the stiff cattails before the clustered girls, winging past them in silence, hunting its prey in the predawn light, and then the cries and the torches vanished as if swallowed by the fog. The dark lake lay in silvery silence – a silence more ominous than the cries that had gone before.
Had it begun?
Here on their floating wooden bridge, protected only by the thick marsh grasses that surrounded them, the odalisques and their young ward were unsure what to do: retrace their steps back to the harem on its tiny isle, or continue across the marsh to the steamy hamam, the bathhouse at the edge of the shore, where they’d been ordered – urgently, under pain of severe punishment – to deliver the pasha’s daughter before dawn. An escort would be waiting near the hamam, to bring her – on horseback, under cover of darkness – to her father.
The pasha had never issued such a command before. It could not be disobeyed. Haidée was dressed for the trek, in thick kashimir pantaloons and fur-lined boots. But her odalisques – frozen here in indecision upon the bridge – were trembling more from fear than from the cold, unable to move. Sheltered as she’d been in her twelve years, it was clear to young Haidée that these ignorant country girls would prefer the warmth and relative safety of their harem, surrounded by fellow slaves and concubines, to the icy winter lake with its dark and unknown dangers. In truth, she’d prefer it herself.
Haidée silently prayed for a sign of what those terrified screams had meant.
Then, as if in answer to her unspoken request, through the dark morning mist across the lake she could make out the fire that had flamed up like a beacon, illuminating the massive form of the pasha’s palace. Projecting into the lake on its spit of land, its crenellated white granite walls and pointed minarets shimmering in the mist, it seemed to rise from the waters: Demir Kule, the Iron Castle. It was part of a walled fortress, the Castro, at the entrance to the six-kilometer lake and it had been built to withstand the onslaught of ten thousand troops. In these past two years of armed siege by the Ottoman Turks, it had proven impregnable.
Just as impregnable was this strip of craggy, mountainous terrain – Shquiperia, the Eagle’s Country – a wild, unconquerable place ruled by a wild, unconquerable people who called themselves Toska – ‘coarse’ – after the rough, volcanic pumice that had formed this land. The Turks and Greeks called it Albania – the White Land – for those rugged, snowcapped mountains that protected it from attack by land or sea. Its inhabitants, the most ancient race in southeastern Europe, still spoke the ancient tongue – older by far than Illyrian, Macedonian, or Greek: Chimaera, a language comprehended by no one else on earth.
And the wildest and most chimaerical of these was Haidée’s father, red-haired Ali Pasha – Arslan, ‘the Lion,’ as he was called from the age of fourteen, when, alongside his mother and her band of brigands, he’d avenged his father’s death in a ghak, a blood feud, to recover the town of Tebelen. It would be the first of many such ruthless victories.
Now, nearly seventy years later, Ali Tebeleni – Vali of Rumelia, Pasha of Janina – had formed a sea power to rival Algiers and captured all the coastal towns down to Parga, once possessions of the Venetian Empire. He feared no power, east or west. He himself was the most powerful force in the far-flung Ottoman Empire, after the sultan in Constantinople. Too powerful, in fact. That was the trouble.
For weeks now, Ali Pasha had been sequestered, along with a small retinue – twelve of his closest supporters and Haidée’s mother, Vasiliki, the pasha’s favorite wife – in a monastery at the middle of the enormous lake. He was awaiting his pardon from the sultan, Mahmud II, in Constantinople – a pardon now eight days overdue. The only insurance against the pasha’s life was the hard, stony fact of Demir Kule itself. The fortress, defended by six batteries of British mortar, was also packed with twenty thousand pounds of French explosives. The pasha had threatened to destroy it, to blow it to the skies – along with all the treasures and lives within its walls – if the sultan’s promised pardon was not forthcoming.
Haidée understood that it must be for this very reason the pasha had ordered her to be brought to him, under cover of darkness, at this final hour. Her father needed her. She vowed to quell any fears.
But then in the deathly silence Haidée and her chambermaids heard a sound. It was a soft sound, but infinitely terrifying. A sound borne very close by, only meters from where they stood, sheltered here among the high grasses.
The sound of oars, dipping into the water.
As if with one thought, the young girls held their breath and focused upon that lapping sound. They