The Queen's Play (11 page)

Even though the queen lost this time, she was hardly displeased. For here was everything she had once wished for. Speed, agility, daring. What with the dice would have taken at least half a day to
finish, now could be accomplished inside of an hour, maybe even faster. Sufficient encouragement then to take matters in your hands, and to rid yourself forever of such double-faced notions as chance, destiny, fatalism. The mind alone was real, the will in itself every- thing.

But here one was already skirting the solipsistic abyss. Whose mind, whose will, you would ask? Weren't there already two wills clashing over the board, two minds begetting their own distinct realities? Was not chance already at play, if it had ever vanished?

Of all the achievements, of all the inventions, the queen bestowed to the erstwhile game, there was one crucial development that did not come from her. The chequered pattern of the board. Beset with general confusion as the play progressed and to ease their memory of the forever changing positions of the pieces, many a player had even in the older game adopted chequered boards to their great relief and advantage, a pattern both overfamiliar and archetypal, stamped in our psyche by the eternal roll of nights and days, by the shadow at our feet, by the subtle gradations of form in a colourless void, by our innate love of, indeed our inability to do without contrast. Boards such that they, our players, themselves had seen in the past but not made much of, boards that were now indis- pensable aids for the complex moves and wide sweeps of the game, boards that at once helped the game and added yet more symmetry, more nuance to its design. Two teams, two colours, as above so as below.

And yet where would her ambition be, had the thought come to the queen before the match? For it is sometimes better to err, to overlook slight faults in others than to bring them to task and never yourself stray from the open road. Sometimes it is better to discover only belatedly.

The cold untouched teacups have been replaced with fresh ones. Amid these carefully ordered lawns, the shuffling peacocks fluting in the wind, the tenuous spray of fountains and snaky banners humming like sails from bastions and rooftops, and surrounded by
attendants silent as phantoms, the players sit quiet and content over the empty wooden board, relishing their drink in a speechless communion.

BY AND BY the serpentine of the army reached the horn of the southern peninsula. From here a chain of islets issued out into the sea to eventually merge with the sprawling archipelago that held in its cradle the vast kingdom of the demon king to which we were bound. From the top of the bluff where we stood at the head of the troops sloping down behind us straight into the jungle, you could not have known where the grey of the beach ended and the china blue of the sea began, where a patch of land rose above water and where it lay a few feet beneath the swells. In truth, there existed an unbroken, if treacherous, passage up to enemy borderlands across sandbanks and limestone shoals rich in pearly shells which could be fished out in fistfuls wherever you dug under water, or came stuck in the cavities of your toes every few steps. Opalescent clouds drifted in slow groups toward a burning sun, and dark specks arced in the sky that were suddenly vultures cutting huge swoops on the air to attack their prey, while far beyond a half-moon like an inverted boat calmly sailed in the blue ether. The glare of the sun, the heat, the humidity after the cool of the forest would have been stifling were it not for the gusts of wind that rose from the ocean every now and then and lashed the sweat clean off our skins. I had travelled far up north, I had gone east and west, but not once had I come south. This when I had lived all my life hardly a few hundred miles inland. And now south it was that awaited us. The south. So calm and enchanting, with not a whiff of the sinister about it. The sense of the sinister came not from beyond but from behind, from
the unceasing murmurs of our men, from the rumours relating the demonic, preternatural powers of the enemy spreading through the ranks like a plague.

We had come upon lately the news of the demon king flying away with his abductee in a strange craft shaped like a gigantic bird that none could have envisioned in his wildest dreams. And what we cannot envision, we fear. Although the king's influence was not unknown on our earth, he had not waged a campaign against any kingdom on the peninsula in several years, and had been even then mostly content to leave the control of occupied territories in the hands of those he had defeated, simply adopting them as his vassals and receiving an annual tribute in return for his generosity. Great and powerful though he was, that was not the real cause of worry to our soldiers. It was the airship, and the other nameless armaments and contrivances, past our strangest fancies, which would come in its wake.

But the two princes, god-incarnates that they were, observed the vista with admirable sangfroid, eyes clear, brows clean. So did I, the third in line. My friend, however, the chief of the tribe who had barely had the time to enjoy his chiefdom, looked askance, now at the sea and now at one or another of us, in pitch with the thoughts of his men and worried about the morale of the army in general.

Could our information be right? Could the word we had received be trusted? Was it wise to lead the troops into the enemy heartland without first confirming the details of the story?

Before long it was decided that at first I alone would make a covert journey to the island, and see with my own eyes if indeed the princess was held captive in the demon king's palace, and, if so, to reach her without attracting notice and assure her that rescue was near. Part of the plan was also to find the least perilous way to transfer our men across the sea so that they did not suffer great harm and could be ready for battle at short notice. Thus while the rest of the company descended the bluff to bivouac into the forest, I ventured forth toward the beach and thence toward the south where
I had never been.

From the start, it was not as easy as it looked. True, the water was not deep enough to cause any great trouble, but here and there were strange whirlpools that sucked you in if as much as your shadow fell over them, for by this time you were already unwit- tingly caught in their current. Alas, no enchantress lying in wait underneath with mouth wide open to swallow you whole whom you may have slain in a contest worthy to be sung in a legend.

The first of the islets were bare and uninhabited with not a rill, not a pond or an abandoned well in the crags and rocks to quench one's thirst. Here, rain fell on the stony landscape and quickly drained out into the sea. Maybe there were to be found swales or hollows in rocks where water had collected, but I was no dowser prospecting for hidden springs, bound as I was on a swift delicate mission, obliged to cut the shortest path to my destination. Yet I did not fail to make a note of this, for lacking enough to drink, the majority of our men would have perished of thirst without once sighting the enemy.

Pale brown landscape and dark blue-grey water alternating for miles on end like a secret pattern wrought in wood. Wading through the sea, then soil and rock beneath the feet, then back into water creaming with salt, undrinkable. Then more patches of dry, sandy, rocky land, with next to no trees or wildlife. Then the sea again, by now turquoise and teeming with life such as I had never seen before, pink and yellow and electric-blue fish, molluscs, corals, and periwinkles.

At last I came upon an isle which appeared noticeably green, the beginning of shrubs and short prickly trees, foxes pricking their ears in a tussock of grass. Soon I found a waterhole and, falling to my knees, lapped up the water greedily in company of crows and herons crowding around its bank or perched on serrated boulders. After the sunset, the temperature dropped and the wind came in fierce howls. But I kept moving. What was here to hold one back? To hunt for a cave in the rocks and light a fire seemed a pointless task.

Without knowing it, I had been for some time skirting the border of the enemy lands. Suddenly, in the distance, I saw clusters of huts surrounded by fields and orchards, mud paths through the fallows and into the trees. And then more fields, more trees, more hills, until I reached the cliff face rising over the forest, affording a most spectacular view of my destination, the seat of the demon king's empire.

It was a bewitching sight, so the child told the puma, for once all beings spoke a common tongue, a speech through which sound and light passed together. Twinkling blue, green, red, and golden lamps rising in tiers from escarpments of buildings and premises up to the royal citadels, outstripping the beauty of the dense starry night above them. My first sighting of a city, and what a splendour it was. Not the work of men, but of giants, of gods even.

Covered in soot, wrapped in a cloak, I slipped into its streets late at night, a picture in contrast, though there were many not unlike me spilling out in the streets from ill-lit public houses and opium dens. How to find the captive princess? Where to search for her? Everything lay coated in gold, releasing a dull, hazy gleam in the darkness. I noticed that even the most modest of dwellings had palisades wrought in bronze with tips of gold. In time I was able to slip behind the palace walls where I moved under the cover of trees in the gardens that surrounded the majestic colonnades from whose blue shadows countless alert eyes kept watch. Thinking where to begin my search, a low sweet voice came to me from a nearby grove, and I instantly intuited that my search was at an end.

Later, relieved by the successful completion of the task handed to me, and curious to see more of the lives of the city's inhabitants, primarily of the royalty, of which the abducted princess had hinted in our brief, furtive conversation while distractedly nibbling a pear, I jumped the fence into the main palace and, hiding from the sentries, soon reached the upper storeys of the building.

Richness and decadence that could have made one's head spin. Murals and tapestries that contained every design and colour, every
myth betokening our common heritage, the roots of our perennial disputes and powers. From the first incest and parricide to the oceanic churning that brought forth not only Indra's elephant, Airavata, and the seven-headed flying horse, Uccaihśravas, he who neighs loudly, he the rumble of heavens, but rare and precious jewels that were also the sun, the moon, and the asteroids gyrating in the celestial vaults, and then the nymphs, and lastly, the ambrosia, the sweet nectar of immortality that made gods and demons drool alike, the very thing for which the parties had in the first instance taken the trouble of raising up from the seas their hidden treasures, like butter from milk.

Room upon room with verses of scriptures bursting forth in song through splashes of paint and pigments, silk curtains billowing from the wind, sandalwood carvings, gold idols of kings and sages and terrible divinities, patterned shades, incense sticks going up in whorls of fragrant smoke. A dizzying profusion of colour, perfumes, goblets, bodies drifting against lamps and lettering, yellow on crimson, feasting and carousing amidst untold magnetic objects. All this charm and opulence, while on the opposite shore countless men waiting to explode out of the forest, cross the sea, and precipitate a crisis in the heart of this endless celebration…

In another wing, on the far side of the palace, where rooms were bigger and emptier, I found a woman, the queen?, with her back to the window. I did not chance, in any of the chambers, upon the king, whom I had half-knowingly most wanted to see, but my wish was soon to come true, as all wishes in time do, for the thought itself is the key. So beware of wishing lest what comes in its wake catches you unaware, unprepared, at your wits' end. Wave upon wave of desire breaking against the shore of the world that is also the mind, retreating, collecting, colliding again, forming and reforming its very landscape beyond wish, beyond recognition.

Passing from frame to frame, I suddenly encountered a most fascinating sight, bewitchment of all bewitchments, if bewitchment by then had not lost its meaning, and here to my annoyance I
stopped. A man and a woman were bent over a strange kind of activity. A chequered wooden board with what appeared to be two diminutive armies, black and white, mirroring the very pattern of the board, each with its horses, ships, and elephants, waging war upon one another. Were the two simply amusing themselves at an evening game, and what a peculiar game!, or had they by chance got a whiff of our plan to mount an attack, and were devising and testing different strategies of defence and combat? It was unlikely. Why would the man, even if he were high enough in the ranks to decide such things, involve a young woman in formulating battle tactics? What could she know of war? Moreover, our army was mostly on foot, at most a chariot or two, a few horses or elephants, but nothing to equal the meticulous fourfold symmetry of the enemy forces, as seemed to be the case on the board. Intricately beautiful and organic though it looked, there was about it something abstract, something merely artistic. Yet I watched the moves carefully to understand their operation, and soon I was itching to touch and hold the pieces, so handsomely designed, to push and shift them from this to that dark or pale square, picking along the way moves, rules, combina- tions, how certain pieces stood frozen in the vicinity of others, while some pounced upon the enemy the moment they caught sight of him. Lines of threat and safety shifted perpetually and completely at every step. The black at all times looked vulnerable, and looking up from the hand directing it I understood why this was so. The man had only one eye on the game, his attention solely concentrated on his adversary and rarely on her moves. It was clear to me that he was in love, though from his cautious stance and silence, the way his eyes scarcely met the other's or flitted across her person, his slight nervousness plainly visible, it was not difficult to deduce that these were still early times of courtship.

The woman was of a type I had never seen before. Certainly not born on the island, not even on our peninsula, but from someplace else. Skin so pale and smooth, gestures so subtle, a touch so light. Prominent cheekbones that lent a deep stillness to her small black
eyes with spots of shine in them, and a most delicate chin and nose, not a pinch of flesh anywhere more than was necessary, even if it was the slight fleshiness in places that gave her face its striking elegance. A slow ache rose in my heart, a feeling not of love, or what passes for love in the world, but of something infinitely higher, heavy without being heavy, at once substantial and light, gathered and fell in my throat like a lump, like a bite of peach I had forgotten to chew. I could well understand why the man had fallen for her. The man unable to search the face of his beloved for long and gladly suffering for it, the woman with eyes only for the game unfolding before her and of which she was in no small part the cause, the game with its symmetry and fluidity, the dance of light, colour, and shadow, the breeze flowing in from the sea, the distant shimmer of stars, and the softly glowing palace walls, triangle upon triangle, held me in a complex, manifold geometry.