by Claire North
As I settled into the cargo hold of a ship carrying tin towards Batumi, a car bomb detonated in Cheltenham, killing three GCHQ staff and seven strangers. Of the three, only one had been my piece, but I imagined the killers hadn’t been able to narrow it down so precisely and thus settled on eliminating the most likely suspects. My pieces were falling, and I was no closer to bringing the Gamesmaster down.
In a park in Vologorad, where stood a monument to the children who had died in war and who now played for ever in mutual delight, I launched a tentative assault against the sometime colonel, now general of the PLA who had replaced a deposed piece of mine in Beijing. A few careful enquiries revealed that yes, he had sometimes been seen to enjoy a game and yes, his fortunes had seemed to decline and then soar again, indicative, perhaps, of an outside party helping him through a difficult time. I circled round him slowly, slowly, a little poke at his finances here, a gentle exploration of his family life there, before finally setting a careful but thorough agent (yet not so thorough that he had not lost when we played mah-jong) in the Ministry of State Security against the general and his affairs.
Contacts unfolded, information blooming like a flower. I let it all come to me as I slipped through southern Russia, riding an ancient rusted bus and clattering, wheezing train along the banks of the Volga until my agent whispered that the newly formed general suspected something, and if I was going to strike, the time was now.
Go forth, I replied. Take him down.
In the operation that followed, the general, two colonels, a major, three senior politicians and their aides and, to my delight, a high-ranking delegate of the Communist Party who had been tipped for senior office, all tumbled, all fell, and were sent away either to prison or vanished into the unknown realms of re-education. How many had been in the Gamesmaster’s hand, I couldn’t say, but China certainly seemed a more hospitable place at their fall.
In a wooden shack that served as a garage, in the middle of a forest of dark pine and lazy flies—fat things that sat like fluff in your hair and bumbled through the air like wind-blown feathers—I played dominos with Leonid and Oleg. A wood-stove burned in the corner of the room, and you could buy for a small consideration tins of salty fish, tins of beans, rice cakes, black bread, tins of fermented vegetables and, from a rack proudly displayed behind the counter, a shotgun, a fireman’s axe and a genuine—if you believed their oaths—Cossack’s sword which had been wielded in the greatest battles of the Crimea.
“Russians are getting soft,” complained Oleg as pieces spread across the table, a mathematical sprawl of battles won and skirmishes lost. “They’ve been blinded by foreign ideas. Everyone says, ‘liberty’, ‘freedom’, ‘tolerance’ but it is not ‘freedom’ if you’re being oppressed by people you don’t agree with, by capitalists and Jews. And ‘tolerance’. You want me to tolerate homosexuals? Why? They don’t respect me, they don’t respect my values, and my values say that all homosexuals are fucking child-molesting pigs, that they’re offensive in the eyes of God, and actively—yes, actively—want to destroy this blessed society I live in. You want me to tolerate them? They don’t tolerate me! They call me ‘backward’ and ‘redneck’ and other things and I say yes, yes! If ‘backward’ means I honour the traditions of my fathers, if ‘redneck’ means I love the earth and this land and would shed my blood for it, then I am all of this, and your ‘freedom’ is just a prison to put men like me in, but worse—worse! You, with your words and your talking, you want me to imprison myself. The only advantage we have is that they, those Jews and those faggots, they are too cowardly to take up arms. We aren’t. We believe in something more than they do. That’s why we’ll always win.”
I listened to his words, and watched him lay a bad piece on the table, and saw a way to win the game, and considered my hand and, very slowly, and very carefully, lost.
In the evening, Oleg slapped me on the back and said, “You’re all right, for a stranger,” and invited me to join him in the hot cabin in the woods, where burning rocks were carefully lowered into sizzling steam, and the air seared our lungs, and we lay naked on wooden planks and beat each other with birch branches, skin gleaming, oil and moisture and sweat, and where Oleg slapped his naked thighs and proclaimed, “This is what men do!”
When I left the next morning, hitching a ride on the back of a truck busy with squawking chickens, Leonid took me to one side.
“Oleg’s a good man,” he whispered, “but he’s never left this place. On this road, in this forest, he is a king. He’s frightened of what he’ll be if he goes somewhere else.”
“What about you?” I asked. “Aren’t you afraid?”
He shrugged. “I went as far as Kazan once, and stayed in the house of a Jew. He seemed all right. He liked to watch the TV too loud, but always turned it down when his wife came home. One day, I think, the world will be full of people; that is all.”
I thanked him for his hospitality, climbed up between a pallet of chickens and waved goodbye as the truck drove on. Oleg and Leonid stood side by side, waving back until we were out of sight.
Chapter 20
Beneath the white arches and faux-chandeliers of Novosibirsk Trans-Siberian Railway station, I drank terrible coffee from a cardboard cup, knees cramped in a chair too low to sit in, and listened to the talk of two women waiting for their train.
He said that?
He said that.
Barbarian.
He thought it was funny.
Does he think it’s funny?
He thinks it’s funny.
It’s not funny.
No.
Guys like that think you’re a prude when you say no. You’ve led them on by looking like a woman, by being who you are, by being there, by being at all, they blame the women, because women are strong and men are weak and so if you say no…
… it’s your fault.
It’s your fault.
Or you’re saying “no” to be a tease.
Because you want to…
… though you don’t…
… in their minds…
… in their minds everyone wants to…
With them.
Because all of this, all of it, it’s always about them, isn’t it? You have no freedom.
Because you’re a woman. Hard-wired to look at a man and want him, hard-wired to be happy when they… so that’s it. That’s all we are. That’s where the logic leads. And me, I’ve looked at men and I’ve thought… but I’ve heard their voices, I’ve seen them laugh and smile, I’ve assumed they will say no because they can, because they will, because that’s life, but he…
Exactly. He doesn’t see you, just himself reflected.
It’s not funny.
No. It never was.
The trains in the station ran on Moscow time, three hours behind the local zone. A woman behind the ticket counter, her face collapsed like a muddy cliff, fossilised features revealed beneath the falling loam of her skin, grudgingly sold me a ticket to Krasnoyarsk. “Twelve hours,” she snarled. “No food on train.”
“That’s fine.”
Her lips curled downwards at this, as if to say that whatever my naïve assumptions now about my ability to endure twelve hours on the train, time would prove them wrong.
In the station toilet, a woman handed out grey toilet paper one sheet at a time, studying intently the faces of those who purchased this proffered good, wondering perhaps what manner of waste product we might produce and whether, as the consequence of a bad meal perhaps, or a hard night of drinking, we might come back for more paper in a moment, desperate and vulnerable, and if a tip would be on offer should she oblige.
I sat alone on the Eastbound 002M from Moscow and willed my eyes to shut.
They closed, they opened again. A sound, a terror, an unnamed fear.
Sleep, I said, for God’s sake, sleep.
You sleep, I replied. You leave yourself vulnerable and exposed, alone in the night with strangers. You sleep, if you’re so tired.
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I laughed at that, and wondered when my own company had become so unpleasant to me.
A long time ago, I whispered. I started to hate you the day you started playing for the sake of the game, rather than the cause.
It’s not true, I replied. It’s not true.
It’s not true.
The train rattled on through the Siberian night.
Chapter 21
At Ulan-Ude, I sat on my bag in the car park outside the station and waited for my Mongolian visa to clear. An official in a dark uniform with shiny cufflinks inspected my passport, examined my face, examined my passport again, turning it this way and that as if some embedded secret might be found in reading the writing right to left, bottom to top as well as through more conventional means, before laying it aside and saying, “How did you get to Russia?”
“Through Georgia.”
“I didn’t think that was possible at the moment.”
“It is if you’re not Russian or Georgian.”
“What is the purpose of your trip?”
“I’m a teacher.”
“What do you teach?”
“History.”
“Why are you coming to Mongolia?”
“For the history.”
“What history?”
“All of it.”
“What bit of history are you interested in?”
I sighed, and considered any number of smart answers that would have slowed my journey before saying the two words that he needed to be said. “Genghis Khan,” I sighed. “I’m interested in Genghis Khan.”
The customs man perked up considerably at this. “You must visit Ulan Bator!” he exclaimed. “And take the bus to Tsonjin Boldog. They have a statue of the Khan there that is a hundred metres tall!”
I thanked him courteously as he returned my documents, and did indeed visit Tsonjin Boldog. The statue, a monstrosity all in metal, wasn’t a hundred metres, but was at the top of a hill in the middle of nowhere, which may have helped create an impression. The stern face of the Khan glared out from the back of his rugged, long-tailed pony, a golden whip encased in his fat-fingered hand, the whole edifice erected on a strangely European-looking visitor centre which proclaimed proudly that Mongolia was finally ridding itself of the shackles of oppression to become proud in its own identity, and the history of its Khans.
I caught the onward train that evening, heading south across open grasslands beneath an endless sky towards Beijing.
Two hours before we were scheduled to cross the Sino-Mongolian border, my phone rang.
The caller was a member of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service whose fealty I’d won in a game of Old Maid, and who, as the last pathogenic vector was eliminated from the field between us, threw her hand in with a shrug and a merry cry of, “Shucks, I guess this is a game-changer, yeah?”
“I’m a good player,” I replied. “I never sacrifice a piece unless I have to.”
Now she was on the phone and there was a satellite delay between us, but she kept to the point. “You in Mongolia?”
“What makes you think I am?” I asked carefully.
“Got a hit on you crossing the Russian-Mongolian border. Some bright spark thought you looked a little suspect, did some digging, now half the intelligence services of the world have got their guys descending on you, not to mention a whole bunch of folks I’ve never even heard of. Might not be you, might be a hiccup, but I figured if it was you, you should know that you’re probably fucked.”
“Thanks for the warning—I’ll call back.”
I hung up, threw my phones and my laptop out of the window of the still-moving train, gathered my bag and walked for three carriages before bumping into a Chinese tourist and his wife heading the other way, whereupon I stole his phone.
Eight minutes later, the train slowed for a long curve towards an ancient bridge, and as it dropped to near running speed, I creaked open a door between two interconnecting carriages, threw my bag onto the tracks and jumped out after it, rolling, knees to chest, as I fell.
Chapter 22
Mongolia is one of the most sparsely populated countries on Earth. Her beauty changes with the eye of the beholder. To a man freshly flung from a still-moving train, it is flat, vast, terrifying, a desert of grass where you might roam for ever, still bleeding, still stinging, and see barely another soul. To a tired wanderer, it is a blessed place, rolling hills and dry shrub where you might start a fire, a warning of mountains in the distance, but an infinite space between you and them. To a thirsty man, it is a damned place, bare and infertile, until you find a little stream running down from a stony hill, when Mongolia becomes again the most beautiful place on the surface of the earth, a hallowed sanctuary from the intrusion of brutal men, an uninhabited wilderness built only for pilgrims and the sky.
I saw in Mongolia all these things, but mostly I saw danger. The irritating customs official on the Mongolian border had known someone, or said something to someone, which now put me in danger, and so I walked from the railway line only far enough to find a little cover, and on my purloined telephone called the only suitable piece I had in play within the Mongolian steppe.
Batukhan, when he answered, bellowed, “Who’s this? What do you want?”
“It’s Silver. I want you to make a move for me.”
He fell very quiet then, and breathed a long while before he said at last, “What do you need?”
“A pickup, and a lift across the Chinese border.”
“I’m very busy right now, very busy…”
“Your soul is mine,” I replied. “I won it and gave you your freedom where other men would have sucked you dry. Now I claim my debt.”
Silence again. Then an overdramatic groan, a flustered sound to cover the terror he would not permit himself to feel. “Tell me where you are.”
“I’d say about a hundred miles north of Erenhot.”
“That’s eleven hours’ drive from here!”
“Then I suggest you get going.”
He drove; I walked.
I walked with my stolen mobile phone turned off until it would be needed. I had crunched something in my ankle and, while it wasn’t unbearable, the discomfort slowed my pace. I could see no trees for miles save for a single scrubby thing of white bark and no leaves which hung in the far distance like a signpost to a hidden cemetery. I walked through a landscape of no roads, no fields, no farms, no people, only sky, until I came at last to a dirt track, no wider than the width of my left foot, near-overgrown save that the odd unnamed animal (my mind leapt to predators and creatures of sharp temperament) had kept it clear. Where there were animal tracks, there was some thin hope of water, so I followed it to a downward curve in the landscape I hadn’t observed coming, and then down a little more to a soft gully where a stream flowed and where, set to one side of the water, stood a low grey wall, half tumbled to obscurity, the land risen to meet its stones so now a man could climb over it in an easy step. Within, a few more broken walls, places where once words and names had been scratched into stone, gone, only an echo in the dust. I wandered through it as the sun began to set, until my eye caught a glimmer of metal beneath the earth. Kneeling down, I brushed away a little dirt to see the corner of a bell of bleached brass, ancient characters still visible on it, cradled by what at first seemed to be a mound of clay, but which, when I pushed a little deeper, I found to be a human arm, dry-grass bone shrouded in faded cloth, and following the line of this stick which still embraced the bell, I saw that the mound I had took for soil was in fact a skull, shrouded also in fabric, a second arm pulled across its face as if the unknown stranger in this place had pulled the cloth across his eyes to shield himself and his precious possession from a storm, and died just so, too weary to live longer.
I left the corpse and the bell, and sat by the stream instead, thumbing my mobile phone back on as the sun set so that Batukhan could find me in the dark.
Chapter 23
Batukhan, five foot two, smuggler, gamble
r, petty crook, dealer in used cars and bad horses, would-be player who lost on his very first game, (“I don’t know how I lost—perhaps it wasn’t me losing; perhaps it was just you who won?”) and whose life I acquired and spared, drove a monster of a truck with the casual ease of a teenager on a bicycle. One hand on the steering wheel, another gesturing in the air, a bad Chinese cigarette hanging out of his mouth, all windows down and the speed gauge hitting sixty miles an hour despite the total lack of roads as we bounced across the midnight steppe, he exclaimed:
“You’re in real trouble! Real trouble, Silver, like trouble I haven’t seen before, and I’ve seen trouble!”
“What kind of trouble?”
“The Chinese closed the border crossing three hours ago—no trains, no cars, no planes, no nothing! Then two hours ago, the Russians closed their borders too! The government is panic; everyone says we’re about to be invaded, the PLA sent helicopters into Mongolian airspace, denied it of course but we know what we saw—every pony-riding nomad’s on Sina Weibo these days anyway, posting pictures of special forces guys, armour, guns, the whole works, getting on the train and threatening to shoot anyone who looked even slightly Western, slightly like you! They stopped Dae Jang Geum to show a picture of your face—I nearly died! My mother was on the phone to me: ‘They’ve interrupted Dae Jang Geum,’ she was screaming, I tell you, screaming, ‘They’ve interrupted it, just when we were going to find out if it was exile or death—what am I supposed to do?’ ‘Mother,’ I said, ‘they’ll resume broadcasting in a second, just you wait,’—my mother, you see, my mother—but I love her, of course I do—your face on TV! You’re famous, you are.”
“I could do with anonymity.”
“Is this a game?” he asked abruptly as we bounced our way across a surge of stones. “Are you playing a game?”
“Yes. It’s a game—the game, in fact. She’s putting me in check again, removing options, forcing me to…” I hesitated. He was too frightened to hear the words left unspoken. What pieces could I sacrifice to protect myself? Was Batukhan more useful to me dead or alive?
