The Fire

In AD 782, the emperor Charlemagne received a fabulous gift from Ibn al-Arabi, the Moorish governor of Barcelona: a gold and silver, bejeweled chess set that today we know as the Montglane Service. The service was rumored to contain a secret of dark, mysterious power. All those obsessed with power were determined to obtain the pieces. In order to prevent this, the Montglane Service was buried for nearly a thousand years.

In 1790, at the dawn of the French Revolution, the chess set was exhumed from its hiding place, Montglane Abbey in the Basque Pyrenees, and the pieces were scattered across the globe.

This move launched a new round in a deadly game, a game that threatens – even today – to light the match that will set the world aflame…

The only goal in chess is to prove your superiority over the other guy. And the most important superiority, the most total one, is the superiority of the mind. I mean, your opponent must be destroyed. Fully destroyed.

– Grandmaster Garry Kasparov, world chess champion

Zagorsk Monastery, Russia

Autumn 1993

Solarin gripped his little daughter’s mittened hand firmly in his own. He could hear the snow crunch beneath his boots and see their breath rise in silvery puffs, as together they crossed the impregnable walled park of Zagorsk: Troitse-Sergiev Lavra, the Exalted Trinity Monastery of Saint Sergius of Radonezh, the patron saint of Russia. They were both bundled to the teeth in clothes they’d managed to forage – thick wool scarves, fur cossack caps, greatcoats – against this unexpected onslaught of winter in the midst of what should have been
Zhensheena Lieta:
the Women’s Summer. But the biting wind penetrated to the core.

Why had he brought her here to Russia, a land that held so many bitter memories from his past? When he was just a child himself, when Stalin had reigned, hadn’t he witnessed the destruction of his own family in the dead of night? He’d survived the cruel disciplines of the orphanage where he’d been left in the Republic of Georgia, and those long, bleak years at the Palace of Young Pioneers, only because they’d learned how very well the young boy, Aleksandr Solarin, could play chess.

Cat had begged him not to risk coming here, not to risk bringing their child here. Russia was dangerous, she’d insisted, and Solarin himself had not been back to his homeland in twenty years. But his wife’s biggest fear had always been not of Russia but of the game – the game that had cost them both so much. The game that, more than once, had nearly destroyed their life together.

Solarin was here for a game of chess, a critical game, the last game of the weeklong competition. And he knew it did not bode well that this, the final game, had suddenly been relocated to this particular location, so far from town.

Zagorsk, still called by its Soviet name, was the oldest of the
lavras,
or exalted monasteries, forming a ring of fortress-monasteries that had defended Moscow for six hundred years, since the Middle Ages, when, with the blessing of Saint Sergius, they had driven back the Mongol hordes. But today it was richer and more powerful than ever: Its museums and churches were packed with rare icons and bejeweled reliquaries, its coffers stuffed with gold. Despite its wealth, or perhaps because of it, the Moscow church seemed to have enemies everywhere.

It was only two years since the bleak, gray Soviet Empire had collapsed with a
pouf
– two years of glasnost and perestroika and turmoil. But the Moscow Orthodox Church, as if born again, had risen like a phoenix from the ashes.
Bogoiskatelstvo
– ‘the Search for God’ – was on everyone’s lips. A medieval chant. All the cathedrals, churches, and basi-likas around Moscow had been granted new life, lavished with money and a fresh coat of paint.

Even sixty kilometers out here in rural Sergiev Posad, Zagorsk’s vast park was a sea of newly refurbished edifices, their turrets and onion domes lacquered in rich, jewel-like colors: blue and cranberry and green, all splashed with gold stars. It was, thought Solarin, as if seventy-five years of repression could no longer be contained and had suddenly exploded in a confetti of feverish color. But inside the walls of these bastions, he knew, the darkness remained.

It was a darkness Solarin was all too familiar with, even if it had changed its hue. As if to reinforce this truth, guards were stationed every few yards along the high parapets and the interior perimeter of the wall, each wearing a black leather jacket with high collar and mirrored sunglasses, each with a bulging gun strapped beneath his arm and a walkie-talkie in hand. Such men were always the same, regardless of the era: like the ever-present KGB who’d escorted Solarin everywhere, back in the days when he himself had been one of the greatest of Soviet grandmasters.

But the men here, Solarin knew, were the infamous Secret Service belonging to the ‘Mafia Monks of Moscow,’ as they were called throughout Russia. It was rumored that the Russian church had formed a less-than-holy alliance with disaffected members of the KGB, Red Army, and other ‘nationalist’ movements. Indeed, that was Solarin’s very fear: It was the monks of Zagorsk who had arranged for today’s game.

As they passed the Church of the Holy Spirit and headed across the open court toward the Vestry, where the game would soon take place, Solarin glanced down at his daughter, Alexandra – little Xie – her small hand still grasping his.
She smiled up at him, her green eyes filled with confidence, and his heart nearly broke with the beauty of her. How could he and Cat have created such a creature?

Solarin had never known fear – real fear – until he had a child of his own. Right now, he tried not to think of the armed and thuglike guards glaring down at them from atop each wall. He knew he was walking with his child into the lion’s den and he was sick at heart at the thought of it – but he knew it was inevitable.

Chess was everything to his daughter. Without it, she was a fish taken out of the water. Perhaps this was his fault, too – perhaps it was in her genes. And though everyone had opposed it – most especially her mother – he knew this would surely be the most important tournament of Xie’s young life.

Through it all, and through a week of abysmal cold, snow, and sleet, the awful tournament food – black bread, black tea, and gruel – Xie had remained undaunted. She seemed not to notice anything outside the domain of the chessboard itself. All week, she’d played like a
Stakhanoviste,
raking in point after point in game after game, a hod carrier stacking up bricks. In the week, she’d lost only one game. They both knew she must not lose another.

He’d had to bring her here, hadn’t he? It was only at this tournament – here at Zagorsk today, where the last game would take place – where his young daughter’s future would be decided. She must win today, this last game at Zagorsk. For they both knew that this was the game that could make Alexandra ‘Xie’ Solarin – who was not yet twelve – the youngest grandmaster of chess, male or female, in the history of the game.

Xie tugged her father’s hand and unwrapped her muffler so she could speak. ‘Don’t worry, Papa. I’ll beat him this time.’

The one she referred to was Vartan Azov, the young chess wizard from Ukraine, only a year older than Xie and the only player in the tournament so far to have defeated her. But he hadn’t really defeated Xie; Xie had lost on her own.

Against young Azov, she had played the King’s Indian Defense – one of her favorites, Solarin knew, for it allowed the valiant Black Knight (in the guise of her father and tutor) to leap to the front over the heads of the other pieces, and take charge. After a daring Queen sacrifice that brought murmurs from the crowd and gave her the center board, it appeared that Solarin’s fearlessly aggressive little warrior would – at the very least – go over the Reichenbach Falls and take young Professor Azov with her in a deathlike embrace. But it wasn’t to be.

There was a name for it:
Amaurosis Scacchistica.
Chess blindness. Every player had experienced it at one time in his career. They preferred to call it a ‘blunder’ – the failure to spot a truly obvious danger. Solarin had experienced it once, when really young. As he recalled, it felt like falling down a well, tumbling in free fall with no sense of which end was up.

In all the games Xie had ever played, it had happened to her only once. But
twice,
Solarin knew, was one time too many for a mistake like this. It could not happen again today.

Before they reached the Vestry where the game would take place, Solarin and Xie encountered an unexpected human barricade: a long line of drab women in threadbare over-clothes and babushkas, who had queued up in the snow awaiting the perpetual daily memorial services, outside the charnel house of the famous Troitsky Sobor – the Trinity Church of Saint Sergius, where the saint’s bones were buried. These pitiful creatures – there must have been fifty or sixty of them – were all crossing themselves in the compulsive
Orthodox fashion, as if seized by a mass religious frenzy, as they gazed up at the portrait of Our Savior high on the outer church wall.

These women, as they moaned and prayed in the whirling snow, formed a barrier nearly as impenetrable as the armed guards posted high on the parapets. And in the old Soviet tradition, they refused to budge or part ranks to let anyone pass through their queue. Solarin could scarcely wait to get past them.

As he picked up his pace to skirt the long queue, over the women’s heads Solarin glimpsed the facade of the Art Museum, and just beyond, the Vestry and treasury, where they were headed for the game.

The museum’s facade had been festooned with a large, colorful banner displaying a painting and hand-printed words that announced, in Cyrillic and English:
SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS OF SOVIET PALEKH ART.

Palekh art were those lacquered paintings that often depicted scenes from fairy tales and other peasant themes. They’d long been the only primitive or ‘superstitious’ art acceptable to the Communist regime and they adorned everything in Russia, from miniature papier-mâché boxes to the walls of the Pioneers’ Palace itself, where Solarin – with fifty other boys – had practiced his defenses and counterattacks for more than twelve years. As he had had no access all that time to storybooks, cartoons, or films, the Palekh illustrations of these ancient tales had been young Aleksandr’s only access to the realm of fantasy.

The painting on this banner was one with which he was well acquainted, a famous one. It seemed to remind him of something important. He studied it carefully as he and Xie picked their way around the long line of zealously praying women.

It was a rendering of the most famous Russian fairy tale,
the story of the Firebird. There were many versions that had inspired great art, literature, and music, from Pushkin to Stravinsky. This picture on the banner was the scene where Prince Ivan, hiding in his father the tsar’s gardens all night, finally sights the luminous bird that had been eating his father’s golden apples, and he tries to capture her. The Firebird escapes, leaving just one of her fabulous magical feathers in Ivan’s grasp.

This was the well-known work of Alexander Kotukhin that hung in the Pioneers’ Palace. He was one of the first generation of Palekh artists from the 1930s, who was said to have hidden secret messages within the symbols he used in his paintings that the State censors couldn’t always easily interpret – though the illiterate peasantry could. Solarin wondered what this decades-old message had meant, and to whom.