by Claire North
Then she was gone.
Chapter 29
The time had come to castle.
In chess, this is the action of moving the king behind the protection of a rook, and hunting the Gamesmaster, I had the growing suspicion that she had already made this move, was fortified in some permanent base from which she could easily coordinate assaults against my still vulnerable, wandering self. Was castling safety or a trap? Perhaps both.
I had an ongoing project. As the game turned and pieces fell, I fortified one corner of the board, transformed it into a little castle of my own, quietly, quietly, so she wouldn’t see it until it was ready to play. I set it up in Kyrgyzstan, near enough to the Chinese border that I could call on PLA air support, if I needed it. Seven years it took me to get it into place, but still one piece was missing.
On the ninth anniversary of the commencement of the Great Game, the Gamesmaster launched an all-out assault on Jammu. In the fifteen hours in which battle raged, she poured the Indian army into the city, hunting me through every alley and down every dirty hole, and I launched mercenaries, separatists, criminals, idealists and extremists at her. The sound of gunfire blasted through the cold night, tracer bullets picking across the sky, and three times I made a break for the edge of the city, desperately seeking escape only to encounter tanks, squads of hard-faced soldiers, blockades, helicopters – the full might of India’s military – turned against me. The government said they were pacifying domestic extremism, and army trucks blared out commands to stay inside, co-operate, as men with faces hidden by metal helmets, shotguns in hand, went door to door looking for me.
In the end, my pieces merely held the line; it was the Pakistani military, acting on its own initiative, which saved me. They put fifty thousand troops on the Kashmir border, and enough of the Indian government believe the threat to pull back from Jammu, leaving eight hundred and seventy-one people dead, and a single, plain-clothes hit squad which managed to take out the convoy I was fleeing on as it heads down the Sunderbani Road.
I crawled from the wreckage of my overthrown vehicle to the sound of submachine gunfire, the scream of men, the smell of petrol, the splatter of flames and the dull pulsing of shrapnel embedded in my shoulder, and survived by hiding under the corpse of my driver long enough for the following convoy to arrive and draw the enemy off.
A man and a donkey helped me over the mountains between Sunderbani and Kotla Arab Ali Khan. I remembered very little of the end of the journey, and woke in a dentist’s studio to find a man with a surgical mask and the largest pair of tweezers I’d ever seen pulling bits of embedded metal from my torn flesh. He wasn’t a piece, wasn’t a player.
“I help people,” he said with a shrug. “That is my duty; that is what I do.”
I struggled to understand his words, and blamed fatigue for my confusion.
For two days I hid in the dentist’s basement living room, eating rice cakes and mutton, until at last he found me a mobile phone and I called in a piece in Lahore who owned seventeen hotels, one TV station and, most importantly, a plane, and who smuggled me onto a flight carrying frozen sheep sperm to Ho Chi Minh City.
Five days later, I was in the USA, arm in a sling, the lacerations to my face and neck fading to pink scars, and India is in turmoil. Like China before, I attempted to propel my pieces into the vacuum left by the fall of those pieces the Gamesmaster had expended on my capture – but this time, my every move was blocked, and I lost seven pieces to arrest and assassination before I was forced to conclude that the pieces she’d played in Jammu represented merely a part of her Indian assets, and I simply didn’t hold enough pieces to make the assault worthwhile in the subcontinent. The realisation was a bitter one: the Gamesmaster had unsuccessfully invaded Kashmir and still had pieces to play.
I couldn’t match that kind of power.
Cold and weary, I rode the Greyhound bus down Route 15, listening to the screaming of the baby, the snoring of the great fat salesman in the seat next to mine, and knew with an absolute certainty that her strength exceeded mine. I could not defeat the Gamesmaster – not on these terms.
I closed my eyes and considered other plans.
Chapter 30
A stop in the desert.
There was no town to the north, no town to the south. Sunlight and dust, as far as the eye could see. A sheriff in an oversized hat and brown shirt boarded the bus, asked folks to stay calm, walked down the aisle inspecting every face, stopp at my seat.
“Can I see your ticket, sir?” he said, his hand on the butt of his gun.
I showed him my ticket.
“Could you get off the bus, please?”
I got off the bus.
“Can I make a phone call?”
“No, sir, sorry.”
“What’s going on?” I asked, as the sheriff’s deputy took away my bag, found my six mobile phones inside, looked askance at me, and one by one pulled their batteries out.
“Nothing to be worried about, sir; we just need to take you to in.”
“What for?”
“Routine enquiries.”
“You just stopped a bus in the desert – that doesn’t seem routine.”
He smiled, a smile which proclaimed, not unkindly, that I was right and this was wrong, and there was nothing to be done about it save be civil in my obedience. Then the deputy found the gun at the bottom of my bag, and asked if I had a licence, and I said sure – at my destination. Let me call my lawyer, and I’m sure he’d sort it out.
That’s when they handcuffed me and put me in the back of the car.
Chapter 31
A dusty road in a dusty nowhere, where somehow, incredibly, people chose to live. We drove for two hours, passing through eight towns on our way, and one drive-through burger joint where the sheriff was greeted by name. He ordered a double with double of everything for himself, a single without the onions for his deputy and a cheeseburger and fries for me. I ate without complaint, hands still locked in front of me and, as we pulled away, asked again why they’d arrested me.
They just chuckled – a paternal amusement at youthful ignorance rather than a thing sinister unto itself – and said it’d all be sorted out in town, just be patient. I leant my head back against my seat and wondered if this was it, if this was how I died, and felt in my pocket for a little Roman coin which they hadn’t bothered to take away from me, rolled it between my fingers and wondered if things were desperate enough yet to give it a throw.
Then the road widened and widened again, and there were lights ahead where there should have been none, too bright, too colourful, an explosion of neon and traffic, declaring bigger, brighter, better. Low houses in grubby straight streets grew taller, whiter, burst up in a sudden leap of concrete and glass, and then grew brighter still, a thousand bulbs glistening above hotel doors, gold and brass on every handle, all real vegetation chopped down to be replaced by shimmering metal facsimiles, fountains lit from below and fireworks above, the stench of petrol fumes and the chatter of voices, aeroplanes circling overhead in a queue to land, the prostitutes and the punters jostling each other in the doors of restaurants and bars and of course, in the centre of it all, the casinos, the churning stomach of this city, for this was Las Vegas, impossible place in the desert, where impossible things almost never happened, and fortune and life was lost in the hope that the mathematics lied. It was a city of flesh and drink, of dollars, dollars, dollars, of loud, frantic hopes and smiles that stretched to the tips of every sunburnt ear, of quiet desperation and the little shuffling men that others avoided, lest their bad luck rubbed off and dragged them into the shallow dark places from which there was no escape. On a street corner, a lone voice proclaimed that vice would bring about the end of the world, and the police were already moving him on, young officers in ironed shirts that stuck darkly to their backs and armpits. Cabbies hurled abuse at each other from across the street, and that was fine because this was a city of winners and it didn’t matter how you won, what force you deplo
yed or what loses you suffered, as long as you were victorious.
Into the heart of this place we went, riding the freeway to Frank Sinatra Drive, where billboards three storeys high proclaimed wonders of musical performance by last year’s pop divas, boxing bouts between had-been giants, celebrity glamour and the kind of life that you had only ever dreamed about – you, you little people, stuck in your little lives reading glossy magazines. This, said the signs, this was where the writers of those magazines came to get their inspiration, this was the heart of hope, the centre of your aspiration, so lay down your cash roll that dice and be the star.
So said every palatial casino/hotel we passed, but we didn’t stop at the front – but we drove through smaller streets to the back of one such giant to where a service door designed to admit two lorries at a time stood open, and men in white hairnets and rubber gloves shouted familiar abuse at each other and unloaded crates of fish on beds of ice, bottles of champagne and loafs of bread in their plastic packaging, boxes of oranges and bags of potatoes, flung from arm to arm like flimsy balls, before being sent down a service shaft to the unseen bowels below.
A few of these men glanced at us as the sheriff pulled up, but they’d worked there long enough and seen enough to ask no questions, expect no replies. They pulled me through a concrete maze of service corridors, past catering units banging food onto crystal plates, laundry rooms smelling of starch and soap, staff locker rooms stinking of sweat, maintenance offices with tools hanging from homemade racks on the wall, until at last we came to lift with a plain metal door and only one option for where it might go – up – and only two floors it could go to. As they pulled me inside, I felt the coin in the palm of my hand, and felt that this was it, the last moment, the final call, and stayed still and quiet between my captors, though my breath came faster than I could contain.
I wondered if I was ready to die, and discovered that I was.
I wondered if I was ready to become a slave of the white, a piece of the Gameshouse, for ever nothing, for ever no one, trapped beneath the veil, and found that the idea paralysed my very thoughts.
The lift rose a long time. When it stopped, we were inside a bookshelf. The bookshelf was pushed back, revealing itself to be no more and no less than a crude, painted thing, ugly in its pretentiousness, crude in its concealment of the lift. Beyond the bookshelf was an office. I counted twenty-three steps between the door and the single desk set in the centre of its pink marble floor. Water ran quietly down the back wall, a crinkled surface of polished copper and brass, flecked with green, draining into a small pool whose bottom was lined with polished pebbles of silver and gold. Down one side of the office ran more painted books; down the other was a window which looked out across the entire city, lit up at night in all its grid form, like a firefly net or, a chess-board.
Behind the desk, a chair of white leather was draped with a tiger’s skin. Opposite it, two far smaller leather chairs were bedecked with the remnants of slaughtered bear. Into one of these I was pushed, my hands were freed and, without so much as a “so long, sonny” my two captors turned and went back the way they’d come, and I was left alone.
I waited.
The city went straight ahead or left and right beneath me, a million lives clinging to the roads, red lights one way, white the other. A helicopter landed on the roof of a casino nearby, disgorging wealth in high heels. A police car whizzed by below, silent in the darkness. I waited. The desk in front of me was empty, save for a set of two bright green plastic dice, a single chip valued at five thousand dollars and a spikey-haired troll doll no bigger than my hand, its frock of straight pink hair shaved to no more than stubble against its plastic skull, a smile drawn on its already smiling face in red felt-tip pen.
I waited.
Silence in the office.
Water fell and I waited.
Did not move.
Felt eyes watching me.
Waited.
Want to talk about it? I asked.
No, I replied, squeezing my eyes tight. No. Just…No.
Behind the blackness of my eyelids, faces came unbidden. Van Zuylen, dead at the end of the bed. A dying man playing cards; a singer on the ferry from Saint-Malo. A doctor who helped out of duty; children laughing on a beach by the sea. Tracer fire over the city of Jammu; a hit squad shooting down at me as I fled through Tehran.
Go away, I sighed. Go away.
Two Chinese policemen gunned down in a nowhere place, in the desert near a town which produces nothing but rubble.
I refuse them. They are not my orders; they are not orders I recognise within the boundaries of the law.
A pair of Russians cheerfully beating each other with birch in the woods, proclaiming hate as they smiled warmly over the dominos set. We believe in something more than they do. That’s why we’ll always win.
Dead pieces played for small gains. I’m fucking getting out of here before they get my wife and kids, fuck you, Silver, fuck you!
“Get on with it,” I snapped, and was surprised to hear my own voice ring round the room. “For God’s sake, just end it!”
I felt something bite into my hand and, looking down, saw the Roman coin I had been clutching all this time pressed so hard into the skin that it was starting to bruise; and then there he was, striding into the room from behind his ridiculous painted bookcases, white cowboy boots pulled up to his knees, pink shirt, white tie and a black suit. The suit was pinstriped, though so subtly as to be almost imperceptible to the naked eye. The thin threads of not-black that ran through the silken material were gold; threaded gold, I realised, as the owner of it perched, one leg across the corner of his own too-large desk, and beamed at me. I added up the value of the thin metal embedded in the silk and concluded it was probably worth more than a small house in downtown LA, and wondered if you could put it in the washing machine. I considered this question long and hard, as in thinking about it, I could avoid looking at the face of the man who wore it – the smiling, grinning face – until at last he said, “Have you gone and got blood on my chair?”
I realised that the wound in my shoulder was very gently bleeding, seeping through the fabric of my shirt.
“It’s okay,” he said as I made to cover the wound with my hand. “It’ll add a certain character.”
I closed my eyes tight, turned my head away, then opened my eyes fast and looked into the face I had longed not to see again.
“Hello, Bird,” I said.
“Hello, Silver,” he replied, then smiled and pressed one hand against his lips. The fingernails were long, brown, ragged, curving to the end like claws, though the rest of him was perfectly pressed and pampered. “Shit,” he chuckled. “I nearly called you by your real name.”
Chapter 32
There is a story told.
It is only one of many, but isn’t that always the case where the Gameshouse is concerned?
It is the story of a brother and a sister a long, long time ago. He was wild, brave, strong, adventurous; she was quiet, learned, studious and wise. They loved each other with the kind of tussling love that siblings have, and one day, as they were walking by the sea, they had an argument.
Said the brother, “People are savage, reckless, governed as the animals are. Instinct and the will to survive, power and the scent of blood– these are what drives people in everything they do. Love is power; kindness is selfish; society is a tool that is used by the strong to grow stronger, a system of ascendency and might, no more. Pierce through the pretty clothes of civilisation, and you will find blood beneath, just as it has always been, as it must always be.”
Said the sister, “I do not think so. I believe that humanity betters itself every day. We formulate laws to govern our behaviour, aspire to reach beyond ourselves in imagination and deed. We overcome our animal needs, our base emotions, and become creatures of reason, and in reason we find a definition of that which may be ‘good’.”
“Poppycock!” exclaimed the brother, though this being many
thousands, thousands of years ago, he may have used a different word to convey his meaning.
“Very well,” she replied. “I will prove it to you!”
So a conflict ensued, the brother and sister each trying to prove their point, and in time they both grew old and they both grew great, and when they should have died they would not, for there was still this battle to be won, and as they were now both very powerful, they lived, gathering to themselves the means to victory, until, after a few centuries had gone by, it was almost as if they could not remember the point they had to prove. So it was that the sister withdrew to a perfect place, a house where logic, reason and the rules of law could be deployed by great minds to overcome any problem, and where the power of human thought could be shown to be greater than any petty emotional need. Some naïve philosophers argued that she was an embodiment of some sort of “order” or “law” or even finer notions as a “yin” which opposed a “yang”, but in truth, these were markers that spoke more about the men who applied them, than her.
“The house,” she once said, “proves that it is reason, intelligence and logical minds which shape the destiny of humankind.”
For his part, the brother retreated to a valley in the mountains and gathered to him the wild people, the dancing people, the people who fed on human flesh because they were hungry and drank blood because it was rich, and who learned hunting from wolves and lusted to be masters of the sun and moon, and screamed in the darkness when it could not be so, and raged at the world. Again, philosophers attempted to apply their ideas to him, calling him chaos and barbarism, but he just laughed.
“Take your proofs somewhere else! Can you prove love? Can you prove passion? Can you prove humanity? We are the wild things that need no words, and you shall never imprison us with your language.”
Thus it was, when I first met Bird. His people beat me as they dragged me through the valley because they could, and because I could not stop them, and because there were no laws save strength and blood. They threw me at his feet, and as I begged for my life he tutted and said if I was too weak to win it, I was too weak to have it.