The Tournament (28 page)

‘If you maintain my secret from my husband, then you have nothing to fear, Englishman.’

‘Consider your secret safe,’ Mr Ascham said. ‘I am, however, intrigued by one thing: Darius was
also
being extorted by Cardinal Cardoza. You act directly, swiftly, without the need for subterfuge, but Darius may not have been so free to act. It might have been he who attempted to poison Cardoza and mistakenly killed Farnese.’

The queen glanced at my teacher and nodded. ‘That could indeed be so,’ she said. Then, abruptly, she waved us away. ‘I am wearying of this conversation and the match is reaching a critical stage. Please, leave me.’

We returned to our original places where we resumed our observations of the match and found that it had indeed reached a pivotal and most unexpected juncture.

AS ZAMAN’S MATCH AGAINST
Vladimir unfolded, it quickly became apparent that it was not unfolding according to plan.

Vladimir was not only beating the Sultan’s champion, he was thrashing him. The Muscovite had just won the second game and had now—as the Sultan returned from his meeting and resumed his place on his throne—taken an early lead in the third.

The Sultan’s brow furrowed with concern. The match could be over by mid-morning and his champion humiliated.

The crowd seemed to sense this, too. Every time Vladimir took one of Zaman’s pieces, they cast nervous glances at the royal stage and whispered animatedly.

Having survived his bristly conversation with the queen, my teacher now watched the game with renewed interest. I noticed that his eyes narrowed curiously as he followed each move.

And so as that third game progressed, I followed it in an unusual way: by glancing alternately from the playing stage to my teacher’s face and back again—like someone watching one of my father’s tennis matches. For, yes, Mr Ascham was watching the game but I sensed he was seeing something else in it that the other five thousand people in that hall were not.

Then, most abruptly, my teacher excused himself. ‘Stay here. I shall return shortly,’ he said before leaving the royal stage.

I shrugged and kept watching the match, my eyes fixed on the forlorn, helpless-looking figure of Zaman.

Head bent over the board, he was clearly flustered and confused, bamboozled by his opponent’s strategies. Beads of sweat glistened on his forehead. Every now and then, he sat back in his chair and looked skyward, searching the domed ceiling of the hall as if he were looking to Allah himself for aid. But today it seemed that Allah was elsewhere.

After a time, Mr Ascham returned to the stage and resumed his seat beside me.

‘How goes the match?’ he asked.

‘Zaman is down both knights and a bishop,’ I reported. ‘But he is countering the Muscovite’s attacks a little better in this game.’

‘Hmmm,’ my teacher said.

As it happened, that third game lasted much longer than the first two—Zaman, behind from the outset, battled valiantly and in a few daring moves almost recouped his early losses—but the result was the same: Vladimir won.

The Muscovite was now up three games to none. If he won the next game, he would take the match, provide the first big upset of the tournament, and do some considerable damage to the Sultan’s pride.

‘I have a strange suspicion that Zaman is about to stage a remarkable comeback,’ Mr Ascham whispered to me as the pieces were reset for the fourth game and Zaman and Vladimir conversed with their respective supporters (players were forbidden to speak with their entourages during games but in between games it was allowed).

I snorted. ‘I should think not. The Muscovite is far too good for him.’

‘Watch and see.’

The fourth game began and Vladimir opened boldly, moving his pieces firmly and with confidence. On one occasion, he glanced over at his patron, the young Ivan, and threw the youth a cocksure wink.

Then Zaman took Vladimir’s leading knight.

In none of the previous three games had the local champion taken one of the Muscovite’s major pieces first.

Vladimir frowned, refocused, moved a few other pieces, only for Zaman to suddenly check him, forking his king and queen with one of his own prancing knights: the very move Mr Giles had warned me about during our journey to Constantinople.

Vladimir moved his king out of check and Zaman thumped his knight on top of the Muscovite’s queen and five thousand spectators erupted with cheers and applause and the entire hall sizzled with excitement.

The local champion was coming back.

Just as my teacher had predicted.

When Zaman won that fourth game half an hour later—to the evident delight of the Sultan, the consternation of Vladimir and the utter rapture of the crowd—I threw a questioning glance at Mr Ascham.

He just nodded and said, ‘Keep watching.’

I did, and to my astonishment, Zaman won the next game and the next and suddenly the match was all square: three games apiece with the seventh and deciding game to be played.

It was almost lunchtime and the other match had long ago finished (the Church’s man, Brother Raul, had defeated his fellow Spaniard, Montoya, four games to one, proving, some said, that God is still more powerful than the Holy Roman Emperor) but few in the hall had much interest in that match. The crowd only had eyes for this enthralling struggle between the skilled Muscovite and the surging local champion.

As it unfolded, I heard several people on the royal stage comment that the seventh and final game of their match might go down in history as one of the greatest games of chess ever played.

Zaman took Vladimir’s queen early, but the Muscovite levelled the score a few moves later, and so they battled queenless, slowly removing pieces from the board until all that remained was a perilous endgame of pawns and kings.

The audience, both on the royal stage and among the masses, was on the edge of their seats. Every move caused loud intakes of breath, open applause or terrified gasps.

But then Zaman—after an utterly daring play that involved sacrificing one promising pawn—promoted a seemingly isolated pawn to queen and with a few swift brutal sweeping moves, promptly cleared the board, and Vladimir—stunned at being so suddenly and ingeniously outwitted—toppled his king and the Hagia Sophia shook with deafening applause, the entire crowd rising to their feet in appreciation of the epic contest they had just witnessed.

I stood and clapped, too, but as I did so, I saw that my teacher—alone in that crowded hall—remained rooted in his chair. He did not stand, nor did he clap.

Indeed, as the raucous cheering subsided and the Sultan went over and shook the exhausted Zaman’s hand, my teacher said flatly, ‘Come, Bess. Let us go and have some lunch with Giles before his important match this afternoon. I have seen enough of this.’

Confused, I followed him out of the Hagia Sophia.

I had thought we would take lunch in our rooms, but Mr Ascham decided that we would eat picnic-style on a blanket out in the sunshine on the main lawn of the First Courtyard.

Mr Giles ate in silence, contemplating, thinking, calming his mind for his upcoming match. Elsie kept looking about herself to see who passed by, hoping no doubt for a glimpse of the Crown Prince.

I asked my teacher why we were eating in such a manner: out of doors and in our own company.

‘The walls of our living quarters have ears,’ he said. ‘And some of them have eyes, too. The Sultan knew of the secret note I found in Maximilian’s shoe-heel and yet I am certain Latif never saw it. The only time I mentioned its existence to anyone was to you in our rooms and I am certain you did not tell anyone about it.’

‘Absolutely not!’ I said, suddenly trying to think of what else might have been spoken in what we had thought was the privacy of our own rooms. Elsie’s tales of her nocturnal adventures came to mind.

‘We sit out here,’ Mr Ascham said, ‘because I do not want the Sultan to hear the answer to the question I know you want to ask me about the chess match we just witnessed.’

I asked the question to which he was alluding. ‘How did you know that Zaman would win? He was so far behind and had lost the first three games roundly.’

Mr Ascham nodded. ‘Zaman had help. From above.’

I cocked my head in disbelief. ‘Divine aid? From the Moslem god?’

‘No, nothing so miraculous. He had human aid. You may have noticed how, in between moves, he often sat back and scanned the heavens. Zaman was not seeking divine assistance but rather signals from a team of local chess experts sitting up in the Sultan’s private worshipping balcony. Five men were up there, hidden behind its lattice screens—out of sight from the crowds on the floor and up in the galleries—watching and analysing the match.’

‘Zaman was cheating . . . ?’

‘Yes. When I left the royal stage halfway through the match, I strolled to a vantage point over by the Sultan’s entrance from which I could just see up into the Sultan’s balcony—and there they were, five of them, huddled over a chessboard of their own, the pieces of which were laid out in replication of those in Zaman’s and Vladimir’s game, their heads bent together in furious discussion and debate.

‘And Zaman needed all the help he could get. Vladimir is a very strong player and I don’t think either Zaman or his helpers anticipated just how quickly the Muscovite would win the first game. You’ll remember that Zaman lasted a little longer in the second game and longer still in the third—his helpers needed that time to figure out defences and counter-strategies to foil Vladimir’s attacks.’

‘But this is outrageous,’ I said. ‘We must tell someone—’

‘You will do no such thing. Besides, who would we tell? The Sultan? Zaman’s helpers sit in his own private balcony. They clearly act with his express knowledge and consent. We are aware that the Sultan rigged the draw in Zaman’s favour. We suspect he tried to have Mr Giles poisoned on the way here—and, who knows, maybe other players, too: that Wallachian, Dragan, said that he had been feeling poorly since arriving in Byzantium. And now we know that the Sultan will go to great lengths to ensure that his man wins the tournament in front of his subjects.’

‘What of our rooms?’

My teacher sighed. ‘I imagine there is someone listening to our conversations behind the thin walls or perhaps through the ceiling. We must be circumspect about what we say when in our lodgings from now on.’

I shook my head. My teacher was brilliantly clever sometimes.

‘In the end,’ Mr Ascham said, ‘Zaman’s cheating is of no matter to us unless Giles here reaches the final, since according to the draw he will not meet Zaman unless they both make it to the deciding match. And that is a long way off, for this afternoon Giles must overcome a most daunting opponent, Dragan of Wallachia.’

As they had done before the match with Talib, Mr Giles and Mr Ascham began strategising about the match ahead.

They discussed Dragan’s previous effort against the Venetian, Marko, which the Wallachian had won without dropping a game and while drinking, belching and cursing liberally.

‘That Dragan is the crudest brute I have ever seen,’ I offered. ‘It surprises me that one so boorish and uncouth could have
any
talent whatsoever at a game as intricate as chess.’

‘Now, now,’ my teacher said. ‘Dragan may indeed be harsh and coarse, but that does not mean he is unintelligent. Cleverness is not the exclusive domain of the wealthy and the cultured, Bess. Don’t confuse someone’s outward appearance with their inner acumen; just because a man is well spoken and well tailored does not mean he has a brain. Incidentally, and with respect, this is an error I believe your father makes at court regularly and one you would do well to avoid should you ever sit on the throne. Employ competent people: the state of their mind matters far more than the state of their clothes.’

‘If Dragan is so smart, why must he be so belligerent?’ I asked. ‘If one is clever, one need not be hostile.’

‘I would not be surprised to learn that Dragan has had a hard life in Wallachia and perhaps a brutal upbringing. Whatever the cause, he is aggressive. Further, he knows this and at the chessboard, he uses his natural hostility and his imposing physical presence to his advantage. His crude insults are not idle slurs: they are deliberate attempts to intimidate and rattle his opponent, to make his opponent worry more about Dragan and think less about the game at hand.’

‘Likewise his drinking at the table,’ Mr Giles said. ‘I have seen this sort of thing before. It is a distracting technique, designed to make his opponent underestimate Dragan and believe that he may be prone to foolish drunken moves. Throughout his match against the Venetian, during which Dragan drank happily and loudly, Dragan did not make a single errant move and his eyes were always sharp. He can indulge in his liquor and yet still be very precise in his chess play.’

I leaned back in surprise. Where I had seen a common dirty thug, my teacher and Mr Giles had seen much, much more.

‘So how do you beat him?’ I asked.

At first, silence answered me.

Then Mr Ascham turned to Mr Giles. ‘There’s an Oriental saying I like: “If aggression meets empty space it tends to defeat itself.” Let Dragan’s aggression meet empty space. Whether it is a king in a court or a thug in a tavern, a bully gains strength from seeing a reaction. They enjoy seeing their victim squirm and this only makes the bully more confident. If you just smile back at him when he insults you, Giles, there’s a good chance that this will infuriate him and he will then turn his aggression back on himself.’