The Tournament (21 page)

‘So, Giles, what do you know of this Talib?’

‘Only that he has been playing chess for nearly sixty years,’ Mr Giles said, ‘and that his prodigious memory of past contests is famous. His mind is said to be a repository of chess matches that he can call upon at will.’

‘A powerful strength,’ Mr Ascham said.

‘But also, I think, a potential weakness,’ Mr Giles said.

‘How so?’

‘Talib has written much on the subject of chess. He loudly praises the classical strategies—openings, pawn formations, attacks—while scorning newer methods of play. Talib is trapped in the old ways. If I use some of the more unusual recent techniques, I think I might be able to unsettle him, bamboozle him.’

I said, ‘Play the man, not the board.’

‘Correct.’ Mr Giles grinned as he then said, ‘You know, Bess, I think we should call this new strategy the “Ascham Gambit” since it involves using unorthodox techniques to achieve one’s goal.’

Mr Ascham cracked a rare smile, not taking the bait. ‘Why, thank you, Giles. I am honoured.’

They both laughed and for a brief moment, I was actually happy. In that strange city, under the constant shadow of our grim investigation, I enjoyed seeing two good friends smiling.

Mr Ascham became his serious self once again. ‘Be watchful for any accelerating or delaying tactics he might employ. I hear he is wily.’

‘Yes, yes. Good point . . .’

‘What do you mean, accelerating or delaying tactics?’ I asked.

My teacher said, ‘Some chess players are known to subtly control the pace of a game through certain stratagems: sometimes they move quickly, immediately after you have moved, rushing you, making you feel as if they know every move you can make before you do. Others play excessively slowly, even when they only have one or two possible moves, to the point where you want to reach over and move the damn piece for them. Their goal is to frustrate you, put you off your game.’

‘Because if you are annoyed,’ Mr Giles said, ‘then you are not thinking about the game at hand. An angry mind does not play good chess.’

‘An angry mind does not do anything well,’ Mr Ascham said. ‘Many a king has lost his kingdom because of decisions made in anger. We’re lucky this is only chess.’

And so it was that just before noon that day Mr Giles faced off against the hunched and gnarled figure of Talib of Baghdad, while on the other stage the great unshaven brute, Dragan of Wallachia, played Marko of Venezia.

The other match was over long before Mr Giles’s—the dirty Wallachian made short work of the Venetian. Whenever he took one of his opponent’s pieces, Dragan would shout something in his Slavic tongue. Word spread quickly that he was saying: ‘Take that and fuck your mother!’

The spectators on the royal stage and in the upper galleries of the hall exchanged embarrassed glances at his exclamations, but the enormous crowd of regular citizens cheered with delight whenever he spat the crude phrase.

Dragan, it should also be said, happily drank mugs of mead while he played, belching loudly, wiping his mouth with his sleeve, and at one point, stomping out of the hall to urinate in an alley outside, in full view of the crowd.

Mr Giles had a far tougher time of it against the little librarian from the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. Talib was indeed a seasoned and wily player who set many traps and oftentimes would groan sadly after a move—only to leap forward three moves later and pounce on one of Mr Giles’s pieces, revealing his groan to have been but a ruse.

He also, I noticed, engaged in the exact delaying tactics my teacher and Mr Giles had discussed that morning. He took an excessively long time to make even the simplest move, but Mr Giles just sat back in his chair, as if enjoying the extra time this gave him to admire the details of the Hagia Sophia’s nave.

Their match was poised at two games apiece when Dragan finished off his Venetian opponent (‘Take that and fuck your mother twice!’). The final score was four games to nil in Dragan’s favour. The spectators around that table applauded appreciatively before turning their attention to the other playing stage.

As Mr Giles’s match became the centre of attention in the vast hall, a familiar white-bearded figure appeared beside my teacher: Michelangelo.

‘Roger,’ he said. ‘Your man plays well. He drew a difficult opponent in the first round.’

‘He most certainly did,’ my teacher replied. ‘Unlike others in the draw.’

Michelangelo didn’t seem to notice the barb. He said, ‘During the afternoon session, I will be venturing into the city for lunch with Ignatius. Would you like to join us?’

My teacher turned in his seat. ‘Why, that would be splendid! But—’ He shot a concerned look at me.

Michelangelo saw it. ‘Bring the young princess, too. I like the sharpness of her eyes and, who knows’—he winked at me—‘she might even learn something.’

They arranged to meet in the square outside the Hagia Sophia at the conclusion of Mr Giles’s match.

As it turned out, that did not take very long: in the next two games, Mr Giles employed some very unorthodox tactics (including a daring sacrifice of one of his knights after it went on a bloody rampage through Talib’s carefully arranged pawns) which threw Talib completely. He blinked excessively and frowned at the pieces as if he were looking at a three-eyed man and not a chessboard. Mr Giles’s tactic had rattled him and it caused Talib to commit some small but fatal errors and Mr Giles pounced, closing out the match, winning it four games to two.

It was now early in the afternoon and while the royal stage cleared for the luncheon intermission, none of the citizens dared move from their places: their hero, Ibrahim of Constantinople, would be playing in the final session of the day and they did not want to lose their spots.

Mr Giles joined us on the royal stage. I noticed perspiration on his forehead and his gaze seemed to be fixed at a length of about two feet—the distance between his chair and the chessboard. The intensity of the match had taken a physical toll on him and I recalled my argument with my teacher about chess not being a sport unless one perspired while playing it. Clearly, I had been wrong.

‘Nicely done, Giles,’ Mr Ascham said. ‘A fine effort in forward planning.’

Mr Giles nodded in acknowledgement. ‘Goodness, I need a rest.’

He retired to our quarters to take a nap, accompanied by Elsie who, in desperate need of sleep herself, said she would do the same.

As for Mr Ascham and me, we ventured out into the mighty crowd massed on the wide plaza outside the main entrance to the Hagia Sophia, where we found Michelangelo and Ignatius waiting for us.

That afternoon, while the last two matches of the first round were played—the Moghul prince Nasiruddin versus Lao from the Orient, and Ibrahim of Constantinople versus Wilhelm of Königsberg—my teacher and I chatted and discoursed with two of the most celebrated minds of the age.

And what a discussion it was!

We dined at a small establishment on a hill about half a mile from the palace. With Constantinople spread out before us in the dusty afternoon light—its streets and minarets veiled in the perpetual haze, the great dome of the Hagia Sophia looming behind us—my dining companions talked about all manner of diverse and interesting things.

Their conversation ranged from a detailed examination of the sensational assertions made by the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus in his recent publication,
De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium
, to fabulous stories of galleons overflowing with silver returning from the New World to Spain . . . and the privateers who had taken to plundering them; and of course, to matters of religion, including Luther’s
Ninety-Five Theses
and the future of a bejewelled Catholic papacy in the face of this grassroots reform movement and, naturally, the exotic Moslem faith that surrounded us in Constantinople.

‘Islam is a most beautiful religion but sometimes it saddens me,’ Michelangelo said as a veiled Moslem woman passed us by, walking obediently behind her husband, two young girls skipping happily beside her. ‘See that veiled woman. Islam does not in any way command that she be veiled. And see her little girls, so delightful and gay: in a few years, their smiling faces will be hidden behind gauze veils, too, and yet that need not be so. For in early Islam, it was only the Prophet’s wives who had to be veiled, not all women.’

‘Then how did it come to be that all Moslem women now do so?’ I asked.

‘Interestingly, it is more about the nature of fashion than faith,’ the great artist said. ‘Let me ask you this: your father, Henry, the King of England. He is a handsome man?’

‘He is.’ In his youth, my father had been positively dashing, a sportsman-king. As he aged now, he grew wider in the paunch, but I was not going to admit that.

‘And a fashionable fellow?’

‘Most assuredly.’

‘When he wears a new item of clothing, do others in the court and in the streets of London mimic him?’

‘All the time,’ I said. ‘It is said that if he wears a new design of paned breeches—to further display his manly calves, of which he is ever so proud—within a week every man at Whitehall is wearing similar breeches.’

‘So it is with Moslem women and their veils,’ Michelangelo said. ‘When they saw Muhammad’s wives wearing veils, they sought to imitate them, and so now nearly all Islamic women wear veils even though there is no stipulation in their Holy Koran that they do so.’

‘Now, now, Michel,’ my teacher interjected. ‘That’s not the whole of it. As with many other faiths—including our own Christian one—a small group of zealots have distorted Islam to further their own agenda. When many women took to imitating the fashions of the Prophet’s wives, some Moslem men saw an opportunity to put
all
women under their thumb. They espoused foul laws like those allowing a man to beat his wife or force her into his bed.’

‘But why?’ I asked innocently. ‘Why do these men seek to dominate women? I mean, what have they to fear from women?’

‘From the mouths of babes . . .’ Michelangelo said wistfully.

‘Indeed,’ my teacher agreed, smiling at me kindly.

I noticed, however, that Ignatius said nothing on this matter.

Mr Ascham said, ‘Bess, not all men seek to dominate women. Only small-minded ones. Such men do so because it is a woman’s choice whether or not she grants her body to a man. Small-minded men hate this, perhaps because at some time in their lives their advances were rejected by women. And so these men design laws that give them power over women. The shame of it all is that they do so in the name of God.’

Ignatius raised his finger. ‘But what of someone like me, a member of an order composed exclusively of celibate men. I devote my entire being, including my sexual being, to my Church and my God. That is why I distance myself from women, not because I am one of your “small-minded” men.’

‘You most certainly are not one of those.’ My teacher bowed his head. ‘And I respect you, your vows and the self-restraint you display in living in accordance with them. But your faith’s attitudes to women are not so worthy. For instance, why can a woman not be one of your Jesuits or a priest in the Catholic Church? Can a woman not also devote her entire being to God?’

‘Well, the early Church was composed almost entirely of men . . .’

‘In a male-dominated ancient world. My good sir, times and customs have changed over a thousand years. In these times, queens rule, women own property, young maidens walk the streets unaccompanied.’

‘Christ himself had only male disciples.’

‘And yet the majority of those who had the courage to stay by his side when he was nailed to the cross were women,’ Michelangelo pointed out.

My teacher said, ‘The Church’s war against women occurred not under Christ—who by all accounts held women as equals to men—but through the writings of St Irenaeus and Tertullian, and that most cruel woman-hater of them all, St Paul, whose hostile views on women were unfortunately included in the Bible. But let me be clear, it is not only a Catholic problem; it is a
Christian
one: Martin Luther, the scourge of the old Church, shares its views on women. He once wrote: “Girls begin to talk and to stand on their feet sooner than boys because weeds always grow up more quickly than good crops.” Weeds!
Weeds!
’

I had not heard of this. I quite favoured Luther’s views on the Christian faith over those of the Church in Rome. But I did not like being thought of as a weed.

I was also, I must say, captivated by what they were saying. I had never heard
anyone
discuss so boldly and forthrightly the topic of women or religion, let alone a group of minds as distinguished as this one. I listened intently, determined to remember every word.

Mr Ascham went on. ‘Consider Islam’s promise of seventy-two round-bosomed maidens “whom no man will have deflowered before them” to any man who martyrs himself in defence of the faith. To whom can that appeal
but
a small-minded man?’

‘A most odd promise,’ Ignatius admitted, ‘and one that my translators of Islamic texts have struggled with.’

Michelangelo said, ‘Indeed, for only a fellow who is a failure in the bedchamber would require virgins in heaven, as only virgins would be ignorant of how poor a lover he was. This also raises the question: do Moslem
women
who martyr themselves in the name of their faith encounter seventy-two strapping young virgin men in heaven? This I do not know but I doubt it.’

Later, the topic turned to the Sultan and the strength of his Moslem empire.

‘
Is
Europe in danger of an Islamic invasion?’ my teacher asked. ‘This Sultan openly calls the Holy Roman Emperor the “King of Spain”, he treats the Habsburgs with contempt, his forces hold Buda, he considers another attack on Vienna, and his navies recently defeated the Spanish at Preveza. Can the West stop this Islamic wave? Will we in England soon be reading the Koran at prayer times?’

The two great thinkers sitting with us contemplated this.

Ignatius said, ‘I foresee only one outcome: a great pan-European war to settle this. A new Crusade; not one fought in the Holy Land but rather at the gates of each and every capital in Europe, as we fend off this ever-expanding empire. While the West has bickered about popes, faiths and royal divorces, the Moslems have been rising and now they advance.’