Pawn in Frankincense

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Jerott let out his breath very slowly as the two moves were accomplished and stood, his heart like a drum in his chest, for Gabriel’s following move.

  His next ones were also attacking, and Lymond’s defensive. Gabriel’s Rook moved up the board, harmlessly, and Jerott himself moved down, towards Gabriel’s end of the files. It was while he was there that, suddenly, he found himself under attack from an unexpected quarter. Gabriel had moved up one of his Pawns.

  It was the Queen’s Pawn, Kuzúm. He had no wish to go, and stood crying in the middle of his square until Philippa lifted him and carried him bodily to the one next to Jerott. Where, thought Jerott, he threatens me, if he only knew it, with death. And looking round for his succour, saw suddenly, standing guard at the end of the line, Lymond’s Queen Marthe looking at Lymond.

  He had only to order the move, and Gabriel’s Pawn would be swept off the board. Lymond smiled at his Queen and said, ‘Rather a drastic way to end two-year-old tantrums.… Jerott, you’ll have to get out of it. Knight to Queen’s Bishop’s fifth …’ and the moment was over.

  For the time being, Jerott found himself left alone after that. There was a move by Gabriel’s Queen which forced Lymond on to a white square but otherwise didn’t do any harm. Then there followed some play between Marthe and Gabriel’s Bishop, which brought Archie also into the game and gave the Bishop an anxious time until Gabriel sent his Queen over and, next to Archie, the Rook. Lymond’s answer was to send Archie straight down the board to check Gabriel’s King.

  There was only one move Gabriel could make, and he made it. Lymond moved Jerott on one of his staggered moves forward, and said, ‘Check.’

  Gabriel couldn’t resist it. By moving up, he threatened Jerott as well as moving out of check. Lymond let him do it, and then removed Jerott, neatly exposing Gabriel to attack by his Queen. Gabriel had a choice of two squares, and he chose the wrong one. On the eighth square Archie the Rook, alone and forgotten, confronted Gabriel’s Knight over four empty spaces, and Gabriel’s Knight was no longer protected. ‘Rook to Queen’s Knight’s eighth,’ said Lymond’s voice quietly. ‘Rook takes Knight.’ Except for Archie, everyone stood very still. Archie Abernethy walked along the four empty squares and, on reaching the fifth, laid his hand on the shoulder of the man standing there.

  Even then, Gabriel’s Knight did not quite understand. When he did, he made the mistake of trying to run for it; and the mutes, surrounding him near the door, were not able to exercise their usual skill. He made a queer noise, within the circle of men, and the carpet rucked where his falling foot dragged it. The Kislar Agha said, ‘Take him away,’ and the mutes returned to their places, while the Janissaries saw to the body. They all stared after it, thought Jerott, as if no one until now had really believed it would happen.… It had happened. Philippa, he saw, was kneeling talking, her arms round the children. Lymond said, ‘Your move,’ his eyes very bright. Gabriel, his jaw firm, brought on his Pawn.

  It was a little time before Jerott realized what he was doing. Until that, he saw the two pawns as a bitter obstruction. He had watched Lymond forgo move after move where he might have taken a piece except for the infinitesimal risk that Gabriel might attack first, throwing away his own man in order to make sure of Lymond’s. The lines of attack open to Lymond were therefore not many, and made even fewer by presence of the two sacrosanct Pawns. Whenever he made an opening, it seemed a Pawn stood in his way, a Pawn belonging to Gabriel, which could take Lymond’s pieces quite freely but which Lymond himself could never remove, because the part was played by a child.

  Khaireddin had recognized Francis Crawford by now. White and docile under the fingers of Philippa and the other strangers who pushed him about, and told him when to stand still, he paid no attention to the other child or the woman, but set himself gamely to please and pacify the men, the dark circles under his blue eyes, which smiled starkly on, although his mouth visibly trembled.

  He smiled at them until in the seventh square he came face to face with Francis Crawford: so close that in a normal game, he would have been lost. Then Lymond, looking down at him, said conversationally, ‘Hullo. A strange game, isn’t it? I don’t enjoy it much either. But we have to finish it. Then you choose what we play next.’ And a smile broke over Khaireddin’s face: a genuine smile; the first one, thought Jerott, that anyone there had probably seen. Then he said something in the little voice, so much less fluent than Kuzum’s; and Lymond said, ‘Of course, your shells are still there. Supper first, and then you shall play with them. Goodbye. I have to move, now.’

  And indeed he had, for Gabriel’s Rook had moved up to threaten him, and there was no one to mask him who would not instantly be taken. Then Gabriel moved his Pawn to the eighth square and said coolly, triumph barely concealed in his voice, ‘I claim the return of the Knight.’

  It was, of course, the rule. Take your Pawn, step by step, from one side of the board to the other and you receive a commensurate privilege: you may replace the Pawn with any missing piece that you wish. For a Pawn, slow, restricted and vulnerable, such a journey was not normally easy. For Gabriel’s two untouchable Pawns, it was the simplest series of moves he could wish. Lymond, turning to the Kislar Agha, said only, ‘May we have the Sultana’s ruling?’ And the Sultana’s articulate voice in return said briefly, ‘The move is permitted.’

  So Khaireddin, who had been a Pawn, became a Knight, and Gaultier, suddenly threatened, had to be moved, allowing Gabriel’s Queen to put Lymond in check, from which he could escape in only one direction. It cleared the way, as Gabriel intended, for the advance of the other Pawn, Kuzúm. Jerott said, ‘Francis …’ and then stopped, for there was nothing he could say that Lymond did not already know. And in any case, a moment later, he was on the move, for Lymond sent him, in one simple move, to check Gabriel’s King, and Gabriel, escaping and threatening at once, moved into the next square to Jerott.

  The most nightmarish aspect for Jerott of the whole brutal game was this proximity. Enemies and friends passed one another in silence or stood side by side, as he and Gabriel were doing, awaiting Lymond’s next words. You stood in silence because dignity forbade you to canvass. You stood with your eyes elsewhere in case, catching Lymond’s eyes, you found yourself signalling, I am in danger. I am in danger, and unless you abandon your design and help me, in the next move I shall die.

  Then Lymond’s quiet voice said, ‘Knight to King’s Bishop’s fifth’; and Jerott was saved; and whatever plan Lymond might have, had again been obstructed, for Gabriel used the freedom of his next move to shift Kuzúm one square nearer the eighth. And Jerott wondered again, as he had wondered all through the game, what would have happened if, reaching out, he had seized Gabriel and, before help could reach him, had managed to kill him. But they had no weapons, and Gabriel was a powerful man, and the mutes very near. He risked failure, and he risked death then, he supposed, for them all. Jerott thought, then, that if Lymond lost and he himself were still alive, between them they might manage it before they were halted. It gave him, in a way, a little fugitive strength.

  Philippa stood between the two children. The one she did not know, the boy called Khaireddin, stood, smiling still, without really looking at her: she wondered when he was going to break, and what they would do with a blindly hysterical child on their hands. On her other side, her own Kuzúm was quiet and a little tremulous, but she knew now that he would manage, unless the game went on too long.

  She had explained as much as she could in her friendly voice, and her warm, firm clasp of his shoulder, helping him from one square to the next, had steadied him: when she moved him, he pulled her head down for a kiss. She had looked at the other child then, smiling, and touched his bright hair with her hand and felt him flinch like an ill-treated horse. The desperate smile did not alter. Marthe’s eyes were on her then, Philippa found. And across half the board, Marthe sent her a smile like her brother’s: light and cool and encouraging. Philippa, her hands shaking, smiled back.

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nbsp; There was a long pause. In a moment, thought Jerott, Gabriel’s remaining Pawn would reach the eighth square and would be exchanged, as had his first, for a piece of infinitely greater power. Thus Gabriel would have not merely two Pawns, but two attacking pieces played by the children which could not be taken. And one piece more on the board than Lymond possessed. Then Lymond said, ‘Rook to King’s Bishop’s sixth: check’; and Jerott knew he was going to try and prevent Kuzúm’s reaching the eighth square by attacking Gabriel’s King and engaging him until somehow checkmate could be achieved. Jerott moved; and so did Gabriel, threatening Archie; his face expressionless, who stepped forward and put Gabriel for the third time in check.

  Then Gabriel escaped, as he had done before, by threatening Jerott; and, as had happened before, the manœuvre had to cease so that Jerott might be saved, lifting the pressure from Gabriel’s King for the one necessary move. Gabriel, smiling, said ‘Pawn to Queen’s eighth;’ and Kuzúm made his last move as a Pawn after all, with little gained for Lymond, Jerott thought, but the repositioning of his Rook. Jerott put up his hand and moved his fingers slowly over his brow, which contained a ringing headache such as he had never experienced before in the whole of his life. He had stopped wondering what Lymond felt because he could not conceive him at the moment as flesh and blood: a man of frivolity, who had outraged the fat bathers of Baden; a man who had slept at his side on the Dauphiné; a man he had drawn from the waves at Zuara: a volatile exhibitionist who had shared with him that crazy display of trick riding in Djerba. For all of them now, even Gaultier, grey-faced absorbing the moves, Lymond was only the disembodied voice of a disembodied intellect, the last Fate controlling their lives.

  Kuzúm had become, unsuitably, a Bishop. For a moment Jerott wondered why, until he realized that by his position Lymond himself was now in check and, having to move, was presenting Gabriel with yet another chance of free action.

  Gabriel took it. He put Lymond in check to his Queen. He turned him down the board, using Bishop and Rook and, all the time, his two invulnerable pieces: his Knight and his second Bishop, which could take any square with impunity, for no one would touch them. Once, Lymond was able to move Marthe to the eighth square and for a moment to challenge Gabriel’s King, forcing him to move up the board. A little later Gabriel in turn brought down his Queen, and for an instant both Queens confronted one another, and Gabriel’s seemed at Lymond’s mercy. Then Jerott saw that Archie stood in the next diagonal to Gabriel’s King, totally vulnerable, and it seemed instead that Marthe or Archie must be lost. Lymond moved his Queen quietly to the square behind Archie, shielding him; and Gabriel abandoned it, and returned to his smooth and brilliant game.

  One would imagine, thought Jerott, that in any case they were well matched: Francis Crawford and Graham Reid Malett. They both had the capacity, the imagination and the concentration which this game of all games demanded. Gabriel, the older man, perhaps possessed more experience; but Lymond’s sharp-witted mind Jerott had seen sometimes take logic and soar without explanation beyond it, on what power of intuition or inspiration or guesswork Jerott had never decided. And because the two men were on the whole evenly matched, and because of the unusually small number of pieces, it now became obvious what should have been clear all along: that the handicap for Lymond had always been incredible; and that with the transformation of the two Pawns, it must now be too great.

  None of Lymond’s team had yet been taken. But pursued by Gabriel, Lymond’s King was now driven too easily from his consorts, and the breathing-spaces he could snatch out of check in which he might make some move other than one of defence came along less and less often.

  From Lymond’s voice and manner, no one could have told that the tide against him had turned. Archie’s face was unreadable but Jerott thought Marthe knew it, walking silently, straight and steady when she was required, her eyes often on Philippa, moving gently from one child to the other. Once, when Khaireddin came near her, Marthe guided him instead.

  Gaultier had begun to breathe heavily. To himself, Jerott made a calm promise that if the old man broke into supplications or sobs, he would kill him with his own hand. Then he caught Archie’s eyes on the clock.

  The afternoon was growing old. The mild sunlight outside the bright-coloured windows would soon drain away; and so would the strength of the drug on which all their Uves now depended. Suddenly all Jerott’s fears pooled in a moment of suffocating anger with Lymond, that he should have harboured and failed to conquer by now this essential weakness; and he began to watch Francis Crawford for the first time, with deliberate scrutiny, as with angry pain a woman might watch her false lover for the first signs of a plague.

  He saw nothing. Lymond’s voice was unchanged. His hands, tucked into his over-robe, were quite invisible. His face, shadowed against the dimming light from the windows, was the colourless etching it had been from the start: pure emotionless lines drawn by needle and acid. At rest for the moment, Jerott stood between Archie and Gabriel’s Rook and watched Lymond from two squares away until, feeling it, Lymond turned. For a moment, he looked at Jerott and Archie. Then, too quietly to be overheard, he said, ‘Pray now, if you want to pray. And don’t look round.’

  Don’t look round at what? Guarding his eyes, Jerott tried frantically to compose the board in his mind. Behind him was Gabriel, in the red corner-square, with one of the children, Kuzúm, just taking a new place before him, and the other, the Knight played by Khaireddin, in the Queen’s place a few squares along. Lymond, Archie and he were together, and one of Gabriel’s Rooks had shifted behind him, he remembered, to the same side as Gabriel. There was a Bishop of Gabriel’s in the same region, and his Queen somewhere there in the middle. On the far side Marthe was standing alone, where she had been for some time at the edge. He had an impression that Gaultier, playing Lymond’s Bishop, was in a corner too, not far from Marthe and opposite that occupied by Gabriel himself.

  The impression was right. Just as the thought struck him, Gaultier screamed, and Jerott whirled round. At first he thought it was perhaps checkmate, the final disaster; the locking of Lymond’s King by Gabriel so that no escape was possible and the game therefore lost. Instead he saw, face to face in opposite corners, the figures of Georges Gaultier’s Bishop and the newly arrived Kuzúm, Gabriel’s Bishop, ready to take it.

  Don’t look round, Lymond had said. Don’t look round, Jerott thought, so that Gaultier might not notice his fate; might not observe death about to cross the long line of squares there towards him. But Gaultier had observed; and Gaultier screamed and, swinging round, began uttering hoarse protestations and demands to the calm veil on the throne, which surveyed him in its turn and then lifted to look at Graham Malett. And Graham Malett laughed aloud, and said in his beautiful voice, ‘He’s a pretty sight, isn’t he? Calm him, dear Francis. Tell him that it is your move to follow, not mine. You have liberty, this time, to lead him away from the slaughter.’

  The mocking voice; the cruel, pointless move were more than Jerott’s lacerated nerves could stand. His anger rose and this time exploded, not against Gabriel but Gaultier, of the loud, high-pitched voice, fastening on to his reprieve; demanding of Lymond the move which would take him away from that threatening Bishop. Jerott started to move; whether to rush at Gaultier and to fell him, or merely to shout, he hardly knew yet himself. But Lymond’s hand closed on his wrist, and held it with a pressure which squeezed it, bone to bone and muscle to muscle, as if a machine had opened and snapped shut its jaws. Then Lymond said, his voice very soft, ‘Don’t hurt him. He’s only a goat tied to a rock, to occupy our attention until Gabriel makes his next move.’

  ‘What move?’ said Jerott.

  ‘The last move,’ said Lymond, and he smiled at Gabriel as he spoke. ‘King’s Bishop to King’s fourth: checkmate in one.’

  ‘… You can avoid it,’ said Jerott.

  ‘This time,’ said Lymond. He was speaking, it seemed, less to Jerott than to himself, or to Gabriel or to some bodiless
interrogator, combing his mind. ‘Next time, no.’

  ‘And so?’

  ‘And so,’ said Francis Crawford; and for the first time he lifted his eyes and looked full at Jerott. ‘Look at the board.’

  Jerott turned. So did Archie and Philippa, but Gaultier did not look. He was intent on Lymond: willing Lymond to utter the words which would take him to safety, and he signed, from time to time, in his anxiety: a sigh caught with a sob. Presently even that died away, and the profound silence in the room made itself felt: a silence which continued until Jerott himself could have shouted, or fallen down on his knees, with the ache of it. The cool triumph on Gabriel’s handsome face faded, and a shadow crossed the magnificent brow. Then he looked at Francis Crawford, and Lymond said, ‘You were too intent on your own slaughter; too ruthless; too greedy. You have pushed me until I have no alternatives left. You must take the consequences of that.’

  Gabriel did not speak. But Philippa made a queer sound, suddenly, on a too-sharply intaken breath, and beside Jerott, Archie the phlegmatic, the stoical, said in a high sudden whisper, ‘Oh, Christ! Oh Christ, the bairns.’

  Oh Christ, the bairns. When the orphan weeps, his tears fall into the hand of the beneficent God. Gabriel had planned it, this delicate checkmate, with Lymond’s King locked in his place, with no possibility of escape; with every possible route filled or covered by an enemy piece, or by the two children.