The Tournament

by Matthew Reilly

  The crowd went into delirium. They cheered and clapped. Their man was up one game to nothing.

  And Mr Giles just glanced again at Mr Ascham and me on the royal stage.

  During the break between games, Mr Ascham and I went over to Mr Giles.

  ‘Giles, are you all right?’ my teacher asked. ‘You look pale. Are you unwell?’

  Mr Giles blinked away his perspiration. ‘I’m . . . fine, thank you, Roger. Fine. Perfectly all right.’

  But he did not play like a man who was fine.

  He lost the next game in short time and only managed to win the third game when Ibrahim castled at a poor moment and Mr Giles sallied forth with his signature queen-and-bishop checkmate. Yet still he appeared greatly unnerved, perspiring and generally looking very uncomfortable.

  He lost the fourth game in a tense endgame tussle.

  He was now down three games to one.

  Once again, in between games, my teacher and I met with him by the playing stage. My teacher handed him a cup of tea.

  ‘Giles, whatever is the matter?’ Mr Ascham whispered. ‘I doubt anyone in the crowd here can see it but I can. You are not yourself. You are not playing like yourself—’

  ‘I have been told they will kill you and Elizabeth if I win, Roger,’ Mr Giles said softly.

  Mr Ascham stiffened. ‘What? Who said this?’

  ‘The sadrazam, this morning, as I took my seat on the playing stage. Your new guards’—Mr Giles threw a look at our guards up on the royal stage—‘they are not here to protect you. They are assassins. They are here to kill you—and later, me—should I beat Ibrahim today.’

  My teacher bit his lip in outright fury, looked back at the Sultan on his throne. ‘First the poison on our journey here, and now this. The scoundrel. The dirty scheming scoundrel.’

  He turned back. ‘Does Ibrahim know of this?’

  ‘I do not think so. But he must suspect something. He knows he is winning too easily.’

  Mr Ascham’s eyes narrowed in thought. ‘This has probably gone on in all of Ibrahim’s matches: his opponents have all had their companions’ lives threatened, so they have deliberately lost.’

  ‘Are you saying the Sultan wants Ibrahim to win?’ I interjected. ‘That doesn’t make sense. The Sultan wants his man Zaman to win.’

  ‘That is not entirely true,’ Mr Ascham said. ‘It would suit the Sultan if either Zaman or Ibrahim won this tournament: in both eventualities, a Moslem wins and the Ottoman Empire emerges as the home of the greatest player in the world. Remember this, Bess: all rulers act to please their subjects at home, not to impress other nations. If Zaman or Ibrahim wins, the Sultan’s subjects are thrilled, for the world will have been beaten. Thus if the Sultan can contrive an all-Moslem final, he cannot lose.

  ‘Having said that, I wouldn’t be surprised if he were to aid Zaman in that final, just to make sure that a Moslem of royal lineage wins. This was why he rigged the draw—to ensure that his two local players did not meet until the final. Then he helped Zaman win by cheating and he assisted the unknowing Ibrahim by extorting his opponents.’

  ‘What do I do, Roger?’ Mr Giles said desperately.

  Mr Ascham bowed his head in thought for a very long time. Then he looked up at Mr Giles and me.

  ‘Whether it be in war or in a game,’ he said seriously, ‘the outcome actually does not matter. Winning or losing is incidental. The brilliant Greek general, Pyrrhus, won the Battle of Asculum, but at such a cost, he has gone down in history as a fool—while the three hundred Spartans who fought to their deaths against an impossibly large force of Persians at Thermopylae are still honoured two thousand years after the event. What matters both in war and in sport is that you exhaust yourself in the effort. That is all. You have done this, Gilbert, so you can hold your head high. But when you come up against an opponent who does not respect the game—an opponent who only desires to win and who will do any foul act to achieve victory—then the game loses any value it had and your efforts are wasted.

  ‘Gilbert, my good friend, you’ve played a marvellous tournament. You’ve beaten two genuinely talented opponents in two genuinely difficult matches. You have nothing more to prove—to me, to Elizabeth, to King Henry or to yourself. Let us not waste your efforts any further. Give the Sultan what he wants and let us be done with his doctored tournament.’

  Mr Giles nodded silently.

  I glanced at my teacher and I knew that he was right.

  And so Mr Giles lost that last game and thus the match. The crowd was ecstatic. They rushed the stage and hoisted Ibrahim onto their shoulders. Their champion was in the final but they were acting as if he had won the whole tournament. And, lo and behold, our new bodyguards vanished as quickly as they had appeared.

  A break was held during which the Sultan left the hall to take his lunch. Again, no-one in the crowd moved.

  As our party was leaving the Hagia Sophia, a messenger from the Crown Prince—I believe it was his friend, Rahman—came over and asked Elsie if she would like to join the Crown Prince for lunch in the city.

  Elsie, of course, was completely ignorant of the machinations behind Mr Giles’s loss and the danger that had been hanging over our heads. She threw Mr Ascham a beseeching look. He just nodded wearily: ‘Do as you wish, Elsie.’

  With an excited squeal, Elsie dashed off and once again I was left to dine with my adult companions and not my friend.

  After the lunch break, the playing stage was reset and the combatants in the second semi final, Zaman and Brother Raul, ascended the stage and took their places at the board. I returned with my teacher and Mr Giles. Mr Ascham was particularly keen to see if Zaman received help from on high again.

  By the time play commenced, Elsie had not returned from her lunch with the Crown Prince.

  As the first game between Zaman and Raul entered a tense middle period, I again found myself watching my teacher rather than the chess.

  Whenever it was Zaman’s move, Mr Ascham would gaze closely at Zaman and then look up at the Sultan’s private balcony. I myself saw shadows moving up there.

  On other occasions, my teacher would look down the length of our stage at Cardinal Cardoza. The burly cardinal seemed bored. His loyal manservant, Sinon, stood alertly behind him, also careless of the chess but watchful of everything else. Even though the Church’s representative was playing, it was as if the cardinal was watching the match out of duty, not interest, as if it were keeping him from other matters. From time to time, he would lash his face lightly with his little horsehair whip.

  ‘That whip . . .’ my teacher whispered.

  I alone heard him and looked over at it, too. I saw its multicoloured strands: brown, black, blond . . .

  Mr Ascham was staring at it intently when it dawned on him. ‘The chef’s younger son, Benicio, had blond hair. Snow-white blond hair. Oh, God. That’s not horsehair. That’s human hair. Cardoza keeps a lock of hair from every boy he violates.’

  I now saw the little whip in a horrifying new light. My eyes narrowed on the section of snow-white hair among the many other different colours.

  ‘Cardoza, you monstrous bastard . . .’ my teacher said, his mind clearly moving very fast now.

  Just then, however, a palace guard appeared at the cardinal’s side and whispered something in his ear and the cardinal quickly left the Hagia Sophia, followed by Sinon, all the while observed by my teacher and me.

  This sent Mr Ascham into a trance of even more intense thought. He stared blankly into the near distance, ignoring the match, his face set in a frown of concentration.

  Then abruptly he stood. ‘Come, Bess. This match has some time to run. There is still a mystery to solve, and the broad interest in this match will give us an opportunity to visit your underworld unnoticed and seek out the elusive Pietro.’

  ‘Pietro?’

  ‘Yes. I want to ask him one question, a single question that will end this matter once and for all.’

  PIETRO

  T
HUS WHILE NEARLY THE entire citizenry of Constantinople was massed in and around the Hagia Sophia to watch Zaman do battle with Brother Raul, my teacher and I returned to the deserted palace, shadowed as ever by our eunuch, Latif. Not far ahead of us, we saw Cardinal Cardoza and Sinon, guided by the guard who had fetched them, pass through the Gate of Felicity and head in the direction of their embassy.

  ‘Latif,’ my teacher said. ‘I need you to keep watch over the cardinal for me whilst I visit a secret place.’

  ‘My orders are to accompany you at all times,’ Latif said, ‘especially to secret places.’

  ‘If you want to help me solve this riddle, you will watch over the cardinal now. If I’m right, everything that has happened here has happened because of Cardinal Cardoza, and he himself has blood on his hands. I believe this matter is about to come to a head and we will need to know his whereabouts when it does.’

  Latif hesitated. ‘But—’

  ‘Good God, man, let me solve this thing! Help me solve this thing! Surely you realise by now that I seek only the truth! I do not wish to embarrass your master or his tournament. I seek only the truth! Please, just help me!’

  Latif seemed to soften at that. He nodded slowly.

  Mr Ascham said, ‘Keep track of the cardinal. If he goes to his embassy, go to our observation balcony from the other night and make sure he stays there. If he ventures elsewhere, follow him. Bess, where is the entrance to your underworld?’

  ‘It’s in the rose garden in the Fourth Courtyard.’

  ‘Latif, meet us there in half an hour,’ my teacher said. Latif nodded and then, still somewhat hesitantly, left us.

  Mr Ascham and I found Zubaida lounging beside a fountain with some of the younger harem girls and, after a little exhortation on the part of Mr Ascham (and his threat to inform the Sultan if she refused to assist us), she agreed to guide us through the labyrinth and take us to Pietro.

  After a brief stop in the kitchens—at my suggestion—we made our way to the rose garden where we would begin our descent, my second, into the underworld of Topkapi Palace.

  As it turned out, the cistern world was a far different place in daylight than it was at night.

  While it was still a dank and dark maze, it was less sinister. This was largely thanks to small cracks in the ceilings of its many chambers—from these cracks tiny shafts of sunlight lanced into the gloom like diagonal lengths of thread pulled taut. While Mr Ascham and Zubaida still carried flaming torches aloft, these thin shafts of light gave off enough extra illumination to actually make certain chambers seem familiar. Finding one’s way back out through the maze would certainly be easier so long as it was done while the sun was still shining outside.

  Led by Zubaida, we navigated the early chambers—including the first two with their piles of rubbish and dangerous submerged holes—until after a time the three of us came to the cistern where Zubaida and I had encountered the feral children.

  Of course, they were nowhere to be seen.

  I called out, ‘Pietro! Pietro! Do not be afraid, this man means you no harm! He is my teacher, the one I told you about, and he has a question for you! I have also brought’—I held up the sack of roasted chickens we had taken from the kitchens—‘some food.’

  Heads appeared from the various shanties and rubbish burrows in the cistern. The children edged forward, tentative at first—they eyed Mr Ascham with much fear—but the smell of freshly cooked chicken was too much for their starving bellies.

  Pietro appeared from behind a column.

  ‘Why have you returned here? What do you want?’

  Mr Ascham stepped forward. ‘Blame me for this intrusion, young man. It was I who compelled these girls to bring me here. I have one simple question for you: on those occasions in the past when Cardinal Cardoza took his meals in his embassy, was it your little brother Benicio who delivered them to him?’

  Pietro’s eyes snapped up.

  He looked as if my teacher had slapped him in the face.

  But then—taking me completely by surprise—his entire face crumpled.

  ‘Yes, yes he did,’ Pietro said, before he fell to his knees in front of my teacher and broke down entirely, sobbing. ‘Oh, sir! Good sir! That cardinal, that cruel bastard Cardoza, he did things to my brother! And Benicio was a dullard, slow but sweet and as innocent as the day is long. And that wretched cardinal had his way with him, night after night, and Benicio, sweet little Benicio, slow little Benicio, not even comprehending that these perversions were not of his doing, did not tell me what had happened until the night I found him dying in a puddle of his own blood, distraught and ashamed, his wrists slashed by his own hand.’

  I shot a look at Mr Ascham but he shook his head.

  ‘Did you tell your father?’ Mr Ascham asked.

  ‘What could I have told him! Should I have told my father that, night after night since we had arrived in Byzantium three months ago, he himself had dispatched his weak-minded son into the hands of a rapist? No, I didn’t tell him. I took matters into my own hands and on the night of the grand banquet I delivered a fateful meal to the cardinal, but then . . .’

  Mr Ascham said, ‘But while you left the poisoned meal in Cardinal Cardoza’s private rooms, it wasn’t Cardinal Cardoza who ate it, it was Cardinal Farnese. You killed the wrong man.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You didn’t know Cardinal Cardoza had been delayed?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you didn’t know the visiting Cardinal Farnese was staying in Cardoza’s private rooms?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And when you went to check a short time later to see if your plan had worked, you found the wrong man dead, and so in an attempt to throw off any investigators, you mutilated Farnese’s face in the manner of the insane fiend known to be on the loose in this city and hurled the body into the reflecting pool.’

  The boy nodded sadly. ‘Yes.’

  Mr Ascham said, ‘You told Elizabeth here that your father argued with Cardinal Cardoza about the cardinal’s refusal to bury Benicio with holy honours.’

  ‘It was the height of hypocrisy. The monster drove my brother to suicide and then he himself denied Benicio a Christian burial on the grounds that by killing himself Benicio had offended God. It was the final insult.’

  ‘It surely was,’ Mr Ascham said quietly. ‘It was also, I believe, the reason why the cardinal had your parents killed.’

  ‘The cardinal did what—?’

  ‘It is my theory that Cardinal Cardoza—having realised that the poison that killed Cardinal Farnese was actually intended for him—erroneously believed that your father, having somehow learned of Cardoza’s sodomising of your brother, had poisoned his meal, and so Cardinal Cardoza had both your father and mother murdered.’

  The boy looked horror-struck as he realised the depth of his error: his failed attempt on the cardinal’s life had led to his parents’ deaths.

  ‘Oh, Lord in Heaven . . .’ he breathed, his eyes staring downward but seeing nothing.

  My teacher gazed at him with a look of great kindness. ‘You couldn’t have known this chain of events would happen, Pietro. You couldn’t.’

  The boy said nothing.

  ‘You understand, I must tell the Sultan about all of this,’ Mr Ascham said. ‘Which means staying within the palace walls could be dangerous for you. It might be wise for you to leave this place and disappear into the larger city for a time.’

  Still Pietro said nothing. He just stood there, head bent.

  ‘I am truly sorry, Pietro,’ my teacher said. ‘Be at peace.’ And with those words Mr Ascham led Zubaida and me out of the cistern.

  As we made our way back through the maze of high-ceilinged chambers, Mr Ascham said to me, ‘I made the same mistake Cardinal Cardoza did: I thought that Brunello had attempted to poison him. But it wasn’t the furious father who had laced his meal with poison, it was the furious brother.’

  Sloshing through the water, we came to the second-to-last cist
ern.

  ‘I need to speak with the Sultan,’ Mr Ascham said. ‘Cardinal Cardoza must be arrested for the murder—or at least for ordering the murder—of Brunello and his wife. I will tell the Sultan that it was the boy Pietro who was responsible for the visiting cardinal’s death.’

  ‘Will the Sultan want to arrest Pietro as well?’ I said.

  ‘I would imagine so,’ Mr Ascham said.

  As we were passing through that second-to-last cistern with its dangerous submerged holes, so engaged was I in the conversation with my teacher that I made a misstep and my right foot went plunging into one of those concealed holes.

  My foot struck something. Something soft.

  Something that felt like . . .

  I squealed. ‘There’s something down there!’

  Zubaida and Mr Ascham grabbed my arms and righted me. Then we all looked down into the hole that had swallowed my errant foot. It was illuminated by a thin shaft of outside light, just enough to enable us to see what it was I had touched.

  The drowned face of Darius the wrestler stared up at us with wide unblinking eyes.

  He stood upright in a seven-foot-deep hole, his hands bound behind his back, his hair floating in the watery haze, his feet presumably weighted down with chains or something similarly heavy.

  ‘Darius . . .’ Zubaida gasped.

  ‘So this is where he went,’ Mr Ascham said.

  ‘Is the wrestler’s death connected with our puzzle?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he replied firmly. ‘His death is another matter. But that can wait. Now it is time to confront the cardinal.’

  Mr Ascham strode into the last cistern, toward the steep stone stairs at the far end that led up and out into daylight. I hurried after him and we arrived at the base of the stairs together, only to stop short as we were suddenly confronted by a figure blocking our way.