The Tournament (38 page)

She lay spreadeagled on the gigantic bed in the centre of the elaborately decorated bedchamber, on her back, her hands tied to the bedhead, her feet tied to the footposts but spread wide so that a customer could easily enter her. Her inner thighs were red raw.

She looked like a battered sexual plaything, a toy for the beastly men of Constantinople to occupy however roughly they liked.

The sign above her read:

And suddenly I understood its awful meaning. Of course, my teacher had deciphered the foul phrase long before I had, which was why he had brought us here.

It was like the royal endorsements displayed by the silk sellers in the Grand Bazaar: ‘As used by the Sultan!’

Only this was a more sinister endorsement.

Having grown a little more accustomed to the local script in recent days, I was able to translate the sign above Elsie’s bed:

AS USED BY THE CROWN PRINCE!

My teacher hurried inside the bedchamber, closing the door behind him, mercifully cutting off my view. He emerged moments later carrying Elsie in his arms. She gazed at him in a daze. She was alive but she did not have her wits about her; she appeared drunk or drugged.

‘Who would do this?’ I asked as he marched past me.

‘The Crown Prince,’ my teacher said. ‘The callous Crown Prince. I imagine he finds this humorous, bedding and then discarding a foreign beauty. Perhaps he and Afridi are friends; perhaps they have an arrangement. No sooner does he pluck Elsie than he hands her to the whoremonger who sells her at a premium price to other men because of the prince’s endorsement. I wouldn’t be surprised if the prince takes a cut from Afridi.’

It was as if the mention of his name had summoned him forth: as we strode away from the golden bedchamber, we were confronted by Afridi, dressed in a shiny gold suit today and flanked by two very large bodyguards bearing scimitars. The three of them blocked the exit.

‘Just where do you think you are going with my prize girl?’ Afridi asked in a low voice.

‘She is not yours to sell,’ Mr Ascham retorted. ‘She is a subject of the King of England.’

‘We are not in England. The Crown Prince himself gave this girl to me. She is mine. And she turned over a tidy sum last night. The Crown Prince’s recommendation is very lucrative in my trade. She was my most popular girl. Selim was right: English roses make for fine fucks.’

‘You will let us pass,’ my teacher said evenly.

‘No.’

My teacher handed Elsie to me. She slumped over my shoulder, barely able to stand.

‘You will let us pass . . . now,’ my teacher said, extracting the bow from his cloak. Beside him, Mr Giles drew his sword.

Mr Ascham drew his arrow back and aimed it squarely at Afridi’s head. ‘I am a fine shot and you will be dead before your thugs can even take a step toward us.’

Afridi smiled quickly, stepping aside, raising his hands. ‘Of course, on the other hand, I might be open to some bargaining.’

‘No bargains,’ my teacher said as we moved slowly and cautiously around the whoremonger and his thugs. The whole time he kept his arrow trained on Afridi’s nose, while Giles eyed the two thugs.

We stepped through the arched doorway and onto the street outside that awful establishment, emerging into welcome sunshine.

Afridi watched us from the door. ‘Leave this city quickly, Englishman. For I shall have my people on your tail within the hour.’

My teacher paused, as if suddenly struck by a thought.

He jerked his chin at the whoremonger. ‘I am taking this girl whether you like it or not. But in exchange for you
not
sending anyone after us, I will offer you some information.’

‘What kind of information?’ Afridi asked coolly.

‘I imagine that the whoremongers and the gamblers are quite close in this town,’ my teacher said. ‘You have associates who take wagers? Perhaps on the chess match being played today?’

‘I do, yes,’ Afridi said warily. ‘I myself have taken many bets.’

‘Who do most of the gamblers bet on?’

‘The people
like
Ibrahim but they bet on Zaman. If Zaman wins, I will lose a substantial sum.’

‘Zaman will win,’ my teacher said. ‘Of that there is no doubt. The information I offer you is this: during the match, find a way to observe the Sultan’s private worshipping balcony inside the Hagia Sophia. There you will see Zaman’s advantage.’

Afridi’s eyes narrowed.

He was a creature of the street and he seemed to realise that the information being offered him now was worthy of his attention.

‘Go, Englishman. I may well investigate what you say, and if I find that you have lied to me, I will make sure that you are hunted down like a dog.’

‘I accept those terms,’ my teacher said, and with those words, we left.

By the time we arrived at the outer walls of the city an hour later, the rumours had already overtaken us, for while we had travelled on foot, they had travelled by voice from balcony to balcony, rooftop to rooftop.

There was great unrest at the Hagia Sophia.

Zaman had taken an early lead in his match against Ibrahim, but then—so the rumours said—the well-known whoremonger, Afridi, had arrived at the Great Hall and spotted Zaman receiving signals from a group of five men up in the Sultan’s private worshipping balcony. Afridi raised an indignant shout, pointing them out, and accused Zaman of cheating. The crowd started hissing and booing.

The sadrazam called for calm, but the crowd, angered that the Sultan’s man was cheating against their champion, rose up in anger and demanded that the men on the private balcony be brought down to the floor of the hall.

The Sultan seemed taken aback. He did not know what to say. The crowd started throwing food and then shoes at Zaman. Some started yelling at the royal stage, calling for justice. The few royal guards in front of the Sultan’s stage drew their weapons and commanded the surging, angry crowd to stay back.

But it was too late. The mob was unleashed.

The furious crowd rushed the playing stage.

A melee ensued and the crowd invaded the stage, overcoming the four guards on it before grabbing Zaman and hurling him off the platform into the roiling mass of people. Punches were thrown and Zaman fell to the ground where he was trampled to death in the stampede. The chessboard was flung into the air, the priceless gold and silver pieces scattering among the crowd, and there was an ungodly rush as people scrambled to grab them.

Then another enraged group of spectators overturned the huge sign showing the draw for the tournament, while Afridi shouted, ‘It’s a sham! The whole thing is a sham!’ and with that the entire crowd began to riot.

The playing stage was upturned and smashed to splinters by the crowd. Fires were lit. The people rampaged.

Seeing the chaos, the Sultan fled, dashing off his royal stage, heading for the safety of the palace. The last rumour had his palace guards storming the Hagia Sophia with swords and shields, trying to disperse the crowd and restore order.

Thus the Moslem sultan’s invitational chess championship of 1546 ended: in ignominy, with allegations of subterfuge and favouritism, without a winner being declared. History would never know of it.

We rejoined Mr and Mrs Ponsonby and our English guards at the village outside the Golden Gate and immediately commenced the long journey home.

Mrs Ponsonby had not wholly recovered from her poisoning, but she was looking much better. Upon seeing us, she was well enough to opine, ‘I do hope you protected the princess’s morals while you were in that city, Mr Ascham.’

‘I did my level best, madam,’ my teacher replied, and I think, like me, he was glad to see Mrs Ponsonby behaving like her old self again.

Elsie lay curled in a tight ball in the back of one of our wagons, wrapped in a blanket, saying nothing. She would never be the same again. Her coltish spirit had been broken, her reckless taste for the pleasures of the flesh destroyed. I don’t know if she ever lay with a man again.

As I sat with her in that wagon, with her head in my lap, stroking her hair, I pulled out the scarlet envelope that had been pushed under our door during the previous night.

I cracked the Sultan’s wax seal and found a letter inside, written in English in the Sultan’s own hand:

Dear Elizabeth
,

It was my great pleasure to meet you.

There is something I wish to tell you as you leave my lands. By now you will have heard that every delegation that came to my tournament had to bring me a chest of gold or face invasion.

Of all the delegations to send a player, only one did not send a chest. Yours.

Instead of a chest of gold, I received a note from your father, King Henry. In that note, he wrote: ‘Good sir, I do not pay blood money to anyone. There are kings in this world and there are Kings of England. I am a King of England. If you wish to invade my lands, put on your armour and try your best. Henry VIII Rex.’

I bid you good fortune, young Elizabeth, but I don’t think you will need it. With your clever teacher at your side and your father showing you how a true king should act, I imagine that, if God wills it, you will become a most formidable queen.

Suleiman

Caliph and Sultan of the Ottoman Lands

With a sad smile, I folded the letter, placed it in my luggage and settled in for the journey.

All the way home, my teacher, the great Roger Ascham, rode out in front on his mare with an arrow notched in his bow.

MY QUEEN FINISHED SPEAKING
.

She would be dead a few weeks later.

But now I knew: knew of her secret journey to that faraway land, of the tournament held there, of why Elsie had come home a shadow of her former self, and how my friend, Bessie, had come home hardened, made of sterner stuff.

She was also different in other ways.

From the moment she returned, she treated me with greater kindness, constantly telling me what a valued friend I was, even when I did not feel I deserved such praise. Her kind words would continue for the rest of our lives, even after she became queen.

I had often wondered what had caused this profound change in my friend and now I knew. Sometimes we must go away to discover things about ourselves. Sometimes we go away with the wrong people. Sometimes we go away with the right teachers.

As Queen of England, she would look after Roger Ascham to the end of his days, granting him property and even a canonry, despite the fact that he was not a minister of religion. And she called on him for advice. I know of at least two occasions when she did so—I was even present when in 1559 she called him at short notice to St Michael’s Mount to settle a most grim and frightening matter, but that is another tale for another day.

I also recalled a time, much later in her life, when she dispatched a delegation of ambassadors to Constantinople to meet with the Sultan Suleiman. She had done it quite suddenly and for no apparent reason. At the time, no-one at court knew why.

But when her men returned, I overheard one of them report to her: ‘The Sultan is a spent force, ma’am, broken and bitter. He is solitary and distrustful, even to members of his own family, and has become prone to long melancholy moods. The city, too, has fallen into disrepair.’

Elizabeth asked about the palace and the Catholic embassy there. ‘It no longer exists. The Sultan ordered the Church’s embassy to be razed to the ground. Shortly after that, he expelled all representatives of the Holy See from his lands.’

‘So would I be correct in the opinion that Suleiman is no longer a threat to Europe?’ my queen asked.

‘He is not, ma’am.’

The day after that conversation, I noticed a new ornament on the desk in her private study: a golden chess piece, inlaid with rubies and emeralds.

It was a pawn.

I now believe that Elizabeth sent that delegation to Constantinople not only to see what had become of the Sultan and his empire but also to trawl its stalls and bazaars for any piece of the chess set that had been scattered during the riot.

For the rest of her life, that golden pawn carved by Michelangelo himself sat on her desk, a physical reminder of one of the great formative experiences of her life, an event that no-one knew of till now: her secret journey to the lands of the Ottomans in the year 1546 to witness a great tournament that has forever been lost to history.

MANY OF THE CHARACTERS
in this novel actually lived in 1546. Their fates were as follows:

SULEIMAN THE MAGNIFICENT
would rule over the Ottoman Empire for the next twenty years. His reign would mark the high point of Islamic civilisation. The Ottoman Empire would remain in steady decline for the next four hundred years until it was dismantled after the First World War.

In 1566, he would be succeeded as sultan by his son,
SELIM
, who was renowned for his decadent lifestyle and his indifference to matters of state. He became known as Selim the Drunkard. Later in his life, Selim’s armies would face off against his northern neighbours, the Rus people. Under Ivan IV, the Russians completely outwitted and outmanoeuvred Selim’s army, forcing him into a humiliating treaty in 1570.