‘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.’
‘Oh, I like that, Roger,’ Mr Giles grinned. ‘I like that a lot.’
‘Either way, my friend, this is going to be a most challenging match.’
MR GILES VERSUS DRAGAN
ONCE AGAIN, MY TEACHER turned out to be correct in his prognostication: Mr Giles’s match against Dragan of Wallachia was a most torrid battle.
And the Wallachian was at his most aggressive. He threatened Mr Giles in both his native tongue and in Greek. He glared at Mr Giles in between moves and spat filthy challenges at him when he would take one of Mr Giles’s pieces, including the constant exhortation, ‘Fuck your mother, Englishman!’ and the sophisticated extension of it, ‘Fuck her again!’ He also scorned Mr Giles’s moves: ‘Now why the fuck would you do that!’ or ‘I didn’t know Englishmen were fucking fools as well as fucking dandies!’ When he won the first game, Dragan yelled, ‘Ah-ha! Dragan is doing what all of France’s armies wanted to do but couldn’t: bend an Englishman over a barrel and fuck him up the arse! Ah-ha!’
Yet all the while, Mr Giles remained unflappable.
Whenever Dragan insulted him, Mr Giles just smiled happily back at the brute—and he quietly won the next two games.
It should also be noted that the Wallachian did not fight fair. After the fourth game (which Dragan won, levelling the contest at two games apiece), Mr Giles complained to Mr Ascham of a severe headache. We arranged for a calming brew of tea to be brought to him, which seemed to help—but then, during the next game, both my teacher and I observed a strange glinting of light that appeared to strike Mr Giles in the eyes at crucial moments in the game.
Mr Ascham searched the hall and found the source of the glinting: a small female gypsy holding a shard of mirror and angling it in such a fashion that the sunlight was reflected into Mr Giles’s eyes. She did not do it overtly or for long periods, but just enough to subtly irritate Mr Giles.
My teacher quietly called over a palace guardsman and indicated the mirror-wielding woman and the offender was discreetly removed from the hall—but not before Dragan had won that game and taken the score to three games to two, putting that beastly man only one game away from victory.
With the removal of the distraction, however, Mr Giles regained his focus and his play stepped up a notch. In the face of Dragan’s increasingly coarse insults, Mr Giles displayed almost unnatural calm, which—as my teacher had hoped—finally caused Dragan to start cursing himself (‘What were you thinking, Dragan!’ ‘You should have beaten this English fool two games ago!’).
He also started looking up at Giles after hurling his insults, searching for some kind of reaction, any kind of reaction, but when he got none, Dragan would just move his piece sullenly, slamming it down on the board. Mr Giles did not even blink. The Wallachian continued to curse himself even more.
Thus Mr Giles won the sixth game, taking the match to a seventh and deciding game.
To my surprise, Mr Giles took control of this final game early on and with uncharacteristic ruthlessness. (He created a powerful wedge of pawns that Dragan simply could not penetrate, and using them as a foundation, starting launching devastating attacks with his knights and a bishop.)
By this time—he t
old me later—Mr Giles had figured out the Wallachian’s main tactics and in that final game, Mr Giles saw them coming and thus anticipated every attack and returned it twofold, removing the Wallachian’s major pieces from the board one at a time until the brute had only his king and some pawns up against Mr Giles’s full rank of knights, bishops, queen and rooks.
Then Mr Giles swept a rook all the way down the board and said something to the Wallachian that no-one but the two of them could hear.
The move mated Dragan, although Mr Giles clearly said more than ‘Checkmate’. The match was over and the giant Wallachian stomped off the stage, muttering and gesticulating with a profound lack of grace.
When Mr Giles joined us later, smiling wearily, I asked him what exactly he had said to Dragan when he’d mated him.
Mr Giles shrugged bashfully. ‘I said, “Checkmate, you bastard, and go fuck your mother.”’
Whilst Mr Giles’s match had gone to seven games, it was over long before the other quarter final match being played on the second stage, that of Nasiruddin and Ibrahim.
Despite the unsporting tactics and crude insults, strategically speaking, Mr Giles’s match with Dragan had been a very direct affair with many bold moves and forced exchanges of pieces. Nasiruddin and Ibrahim’s match was a more intricate and tortuous duel. In the same time it took Mr Giles and Dragan to play seven games, Nasiruddin and Ibrahim had completed only four, with each player sitting on two wins apiece.
Leaving Mr Giles to accept the hearty congratulations of the other delegations (Mr Giles also wanted to watch the remainder of the other match), Mr Ascham, Elsie and I left the Hagia Sophia. My teacher had decided to use the afternoon to carry out further investigations.
Specifically, he wanted to speak with Darius the wrestler.
We spent the entire afternoon searching the palace for him, moving from courtyard to courtyard, asking guards, servants and guests if they had seen the famous wrestler.
But not a soul had seen him or knew of his whereabouts.
Darius had disappeared.
THE WORLD BENEATH
THAT EVENING, AFTER THE excitement of Mr Giles’s victory during the day and our afternoon search for Darius, my teacher retired immediately after supper, quickly falling into a deep slumber. Mr Giles did likewise, his mind exhausted from his battle against the Wallachian.
Which left me in Elsie’s charge, and Elsie had only one goal that night.
‘Come, Bessie! Come and see with your own eyes one of the Crown Prince’s gatherings. Tonight, I have word that he is holding a party in his father’s private bath. I am meeting Zubaida over by the entrance to the Harem shortly. Come! Tonight is the night I give the future sultan a taste of my English rose!’
And so off I went with Elsie, wrapped in a hooded cape, my mind hopelessly caught somewhere between innocent trepidation, hidden excitement and sheer curiosity. It was one thing to listen to Elsie speak of her frolics but another thing entirely to see them for myself. I hurried to keep up with her, my small legs pumping to match her long purposeful stride.
We met Zubaida at the main entrance to the Harem. Zubaida wore a light cloak buttoned at the top—every now and then it blew open with the breeze and I saw that beneath it, she wore a very short dress made of a flimsy, almost translucent, cloth with long slits up both thighs. The three of us approached the guards.
Elsie gave that night’s entry phrase but the guards did a strange thing: they said that they would admit only her.
‘Prince Selim was most specific,’ one of the guards said to Elsie. ‘This evening only a special few are to be granted admittance. You are one of the few, but they’—he jerked his head at Zubaida and me—‘are not.’
Elsie turned to face us, a stricken look on her face. Loyal as she was to her friends, she had intentions that night, and she needed us to let her go so that she could carry them out.
‘Go on, Elsie,’ I said. ‘I shall have to see the Crown Prince’s activities some other time.’
Zubaida seemed less keen to let Elsie go in without her, especially given that it was she who had granted Elsie access to these exclusive gatherings in the first place.
‘Zu-zu?’ Elsie pleaded. ‘Do you mind—?’
‘Oh, go,’ Zubaida said stiffly. ‘Just go.’
Elsie squeaked with delight. ‘I shall tell you both everything tomorrow!’ Then she hugged us and dashed past the guards into the secret world of the Harem.
I was left standing at the guardhouse with Zubaida, disappointed and deflated.
But then Zubaida pulled me away from the guards, out of earshot. ‘You know, there are other ways to gain access to the sealed areas of the palace. Come with me.’
We hurried off into the night.
Zubaida led me to a small garden at the northern end of the Fourth Courtyard.
This somewhat remote region of the palace was known for its many groves and gardens, all arranged in an extending sequence of lattice-walled miniature courtyards. Most of the flower arrangements were of tulips but this little garden was devoted to roses. A small fountain in the garden’s centre gurgled happily away.
Zubaida looked around furtively before guiding me into the rose garden. Once inside she snatched a flaming torch from a bracket on the wall and quickly knelt on the ground by the fountain, where she extracted a small square grate set into the paved stones.
‘I grew up inside this palace and as a little girl, the older children introduced me to its underworld,’ she said. ‘Like all children, we loved playing in the palace’s old Roman sewers and cisterns. The tunnels and chambers down here pass directly underneath the Harem.’
Darkness yawned beneath the opening. I could hear the sigh of moving air down there: a large space.
Zubaida stepped down into the hole, descending a ladder of some sort just below the rim.
‘Not afraid of the dark are you, little princess?’ she taunted before she disappeared into the hole, holding the torch with one hand, her echoing voice adding, ‘Make sure you replace the grate behind you.’
I hesitated a moment, unsure and a little frightened, but ultimately pride and curiosity got the better of me and I hastened into the hole after Zubaida.
At the bottom of the ladder was a downward-curving spiral staircase of stone. Staying close to Zubaida, I descended those stairs until, unexpectedly, they plunged into water. I stopped short and found myself looking out over an enormous man-made cavern.
A forest of columns stretched away from me, two dozen of them, all in perfect alignment, holding up the high ceiling. They were of the Roman style: made of chiselled marble and featuring at their tops and bottoms heads carved in the shape of Artemis, Aphrodite and (on a few of them) Medusa. They all rose up out of a wide subterranean lake.
‘A cistern,’ Zubaida whispered. ‘For storing fresh water. The Romans built scores of them around the city, to hold the water that they funnelled here from the mountains. In the centuries since, Constantinople has been built and rebuilt over the top of them. But the Roman cisterns are so sturdy that they still stand today and, indeed, still collect groundwater. To this day, many city dwellers hammer out holes in the floors of their cellars and lower buckets into the ancient cisterns to gather water. Don’t worry, it’s not deep.’
Zubaida stepped out into the lake and sure enough, the water came only to her knees. She sloshed away from me, heading into the darkness, the glow of her torch creating a small corona around her head. I hurried to keep up with her.
That first cistern was also filled with many small mountains of rubbish and debris—discarded iron gates and pipes, wooden planks, doors with hinges still on them and old sandstone blocks—all heaped against the columns in a very ugly manner. Narrow alleys had been carved through the heaps and many of the piles leaned precariously over me as I passed by them.
‘The entrance used to be wider,’ Zubaida informed me, ‘so palace dwellers would bring their refuse down here. To stop the practice, the entry was reduced in size to that
small grate in the rose garden.’
There were other dangers. In the second cistern we came to, hidden underneath the knee-deep water, were a series of irregularly-spaced deeper holes into which the unfamiliar explorer could suddenly drop bodily. I almost fell into two of them.
‘These are all actually smaller cisterns,’ Zubaida said. ‘There’s an immense one over by the Ayasofya that dwarfs these.’
I tried to stay close to my guide and I was glad I did: after those first two chambers, Zubaida led me through a veritable labyrinth of tight passages and magnificent cisterns, a subterranean maze worthy of Minos himself.
We passed through soaring chambers that had not seen the light of day for over a thousand years—some had arched doorways and high windows (now bricked in) and even steps and staircases leading to other levels.
Zubaida seemed to use these chambers as reference points in the underground maze.
‘Hmmm,’ she said, pausing in one such chamber. Three archways branched off it in three different directions. ‘Now. This one is underneath the queen’s quarters, which means we must take that passageway to get to the Sultan’s private bath . . .’
We continued in this fashion for some time until Zubaida stopped suddenly in a new cistern. Evidently, she had taken a wrong turn somewhere because when she stopped, she spun around with a confused and angry look on her face.
‘Damnation. I must have . . . oh . . . oh—’
Her face went pale as she saw something over my shoulder.
‘I’m terribly sorry . . . I didn’t mean to—’
I turned . . .
. . . to find myself confronted by several pairs of eyes emerging from the darkness, malevolent eyes that belonged to some residents of these caves, all of them dressed in rags and advancing menacingly toward us.
THE INHABITANTS OF THE UNDERWORLD
THE GROUP OF DANGEROUS-LOOKING souls stepped into the light of Zubaida’s torch and I was shocked to discover that they were children.
The Tournament Page 20
