The Queen's Play (2 page)

When he next stirred, he could not say whether it had been a few hours, a day, a month, or a year. It was all the same, for who was here beside him to object out of boredom? Outside it was light. Already a child as he stepped out of the hut, he was now hurriedly climbing the adjoining hill. Soon he was on the slope of the mountain that towered over the surroundings, behind which, in the distance, were visible those brown peaks smeared with snow.

Sitting weightless, dangling his legs, he took stock of the distance he had covered. He stretched his arm, and a mango, a delicious yellow and red in colour, appeared in the hollow of his palm. He bit into the mango, spat the skin, and began to suck, pressing it gently with both his thumbs and index fingers. Out of nowhere a baby monkey landed on the branch, which shook under its weight, forcing the child to glance sideways, to see it watch him with watery eyes. He turned away and made as if to suck again, but then threw the mango toward the little one, that leapt in the air to catch the half-eaten fruit, fell through the green cover, and was seen no more.

There now appeared in the child's hand a peach, which he promptly put into his mouth. Awhile he sat thus, but then, on a whim, let himself fall from the branch, hanging upside down, like those sages hanging from trees for months and years, dead to the world, dust crusting their taut, reptilian skins, ash caking in streaks across their face, green snakes crawling in their entangled hair, staring into unknown dimensions with unblinking fiery eyes. Blood began to rush to his head from every part of his body, and his sight seemed to recede as all the world's shadows poured into his eyes,
darkening them, from red to maroon to slate-grey to coal-black, calling forth the night.

THE QUEEN is in a temper. She has summoned her help, who is now approaching the royal chambers at the edge of the gold palace with a shuffle in her step. In a moment she will enter those rooms where countless little flames are quivering in the breeze, marking the walls with dark arabesques. But amid this net of light and shadow, the queen will not be seen. For the queen is out in the balcony, standing deep in its curve and watching the darkness which is the sea.

A glance into these calm depths, and you will never be yourself again. The lady-in-waiting knew this all too well, so the moment the queen turned to look at her, she made as if to bow. Better it was to avoid the mercurial eyes resting on her, not their usual ash-green tonight, but of a black that bespoke a despair which comes only after you have quelled extreme rage inside you. Clearly the queen was beside herself, floating above the void she returned to often these days. Prepare the bath, she ordered, and the help retreated to see to the task. Behind, the sea had turned choppy, and a moon of burnt crimson was lifting from its waves.

A scent of myrrh and jasmine filled the air. Pale green water poured out from horse and lion heads into the round pool, smooth like the inside of an egg. She stepped into the pool parting the petals and quickly slipped to its bottom. Water, always water, could give the oblivion she so desired at such moments. One by one thoughts released her from their hold, and a sky vacant and pale green, as if a star had burst or some flower had blossomed, filled her vision.
Then in the distance a dark spot took shape, moving toward her, first slowly and in time urgently, but unable to go much further lost flight and fell straight into her cupped hands. There it lay helplessly beating its wings, suffocating from thirst and fatigue. The queen felt the bird's agony like a shooting pain numbing her heart and spreading outward. She rose suddenly to the surface, catching her breath and laughing softly. Colour rose in her face. Colour, too, crept back in her eyes, gently pushing the black in whose shade the palest of green was beginning to emerge.

Do sounds ever die? The queen's voice is down to a whisper as she dabs herself behind the wood-filigree partition. Surely they outlive the moments of their birth, like these sounds that grow sharper with each clash of the scimitars. And here she is, alert and perspiring, moving with agility to avoid the weapon that is many weapons at once, that covets her flesh. The sun is getting stronger and the wind has fallen. From each corner of the yard elephants watch the contest. These are the king's favourite beasts, having led him to victory in many a battle. Yet this is no battle, regardless of the dust that fills the air or the smell of the hunt that circles the combatants.

A draught from the sea sweeps past the palace courtyard, and the queen moves inside it, takes the king by surprise.

The king lets his weapon fall. It meets the ground with barely a sound, as befitting a lost ambition, unnecessary and forgettable. Although her heart has not yet settled in her breast, the thrill of the game, the delight of success, is leaving her. Something salty stings her tongue. Is it her sweat, or is it the taste of the sea the current has left there? Drops have trickled down her brow and spoilt the kohl that rings her eyes. Drops have collected on her back and hips, making the dress stick to her figure.

Scimitars clashing under the morning sun. These sounds will never die. Now and then they will please and upset me by turn. I will continue to be on this island until the sea is inside me, while he annexes one princedom upon another. She will petition him no
more. That was her resolve this noon when the king departed to crush an uprising in the Blue Mountains. She was again refused permission to accompany him. Instead the prince of the serpent clan, a protectorate on the southern edge of the continent across the sea, was to be his ally.

Now she stands fighting the last bit of despair and thinking of the king relieving his fatigue of battle in the impassioned embraces of foreign women. And she can almost feel his eyes on the youngest of them, beneath whom having first slid a feather cushion with one hand, he has, with the other, bunched her hair so as to open with the slightest of tugs, the successive depths of her neck and chest, which are heaving frantically, leaving somewhere in the extremity of her toes a hint of pain. Meanwhile, from the four corners of the tent, others take in the suppressed moans of this young initiate with a mixed look of jealousy and lasciviousness, twitching at their colourful quilts, and waiting to claw and pinch her at the slightest opportunity. The daily petty rivalries of the harem.

The queen left the room and walked over to the balcony. The moon shone, white and serene, high up in the dark dome, and a soft, sinister wind rose up from the sea. Flashes from time to time brightened the sky's edges. Were these the fiery dragons, the island's guardian spirits, out on patrol? Dragons or comets, the queen doesn't give them another look. She is elsewhere, perhaps nowhere at all.

NIGHT HAS fallen from the sky. It is pale and vacant and airless. A shadow moves in it slowly, perhaps with difficulty, having journeyed this far only to dip its beak in the river, which is calm now that the lands are flatter and the hills round and low. Unable to ride the wind any more, the river in its eyes, the fall happens quickly when the overwhelming weariness has ejected the last remaining strength, and the milk-white water is the bird's grave.

The vision shook the child. Raising his tongue, he let the stone of the peach slip past his lips, and suddenly felt free of a burden. Light had returned to his eyes, but he knew that the comfort of mortality, of belonging only to
this
time, was leaving them.

The child rose to the tree's crown as before. At his feet and far beyond, the mountains opened into a valley where tall conifers stood in never ending ranks, like soldiers holding their breath before the bugle-horn of battle.

And then the horn sounded. A collective sigh escaped from the ranks that spread like a wave and was carried away on the updraught. For the moment, a weariness came over the army, a moment which returns at the start of battle each day to confound every soldier, a moment that must be wrestled with and overcome, a moment in which the uselessness of his enterprise fills every soldier with despair, a despair, nonetheless, to be tamed swiftly into a resolve. To draw the enemy's blood and to fulfil one's duty to the king, one's debt to the gods, regardless of the fact that such duties and debts had been written in the stars long ago and he who moved
so close to earth was essentially powerless to shake their yoke from his flesh, so that to return home alive and be joined once more to his woman was reward enough.

Yet many will not fulfil this resolve, certainly not that noble warrior who stands in the second row set to meet the adversary, head firm and high, muscles flexed, the left hand gripping the weapon lightly, breathing into the charnel void that awaits him. Like so many others, he will go down under the blows of the enemy, cloven by its large axe-blades that glitter in the morning sun, ready to strike.

Anjaneya ran at the head of the brigade straight into the enemy formation. From a distance the prince-in-exile observed the scene phlegmatically, standing in his three-horse chariot, having not yet lifted his bow. Then the enemy forces closed around the first batch of his army, and, for a moment, the sea's fluid silence covered everything.

A clap of thunder made the prince look up. But the sound had not come from above. The sky was light and clear though he could see the gods keenly watching the scene with their heads between their legs. It was the first roar of the hovering doom. The spear skidding against the shield, the sword meeting the axe, the ribcage breaking beneath the skin, the kick in the groin, the blood on the ground, the contact of a club driving the cone of a soldier's helmet down into his very skull to settle in the space between the eyes, which were already bidding farewell to the elements, Earth, Water, Wind, Fire were for him coalescing into a thin coolness that for another was still the ether where the visible was made invisible, where the dreamer dreamt his life again and again, where, just this moment, the dead soldier was sinking into the earth, and where dust freely swirled in the rising heat past the swinging limbs, shouts, curses, sweat, and blood.

High above, in the sky that was beginning to be dotted by vultures, the ominous sounds from the field did not reach. And without these sounds where was the spectacle of battle? What more
could this be than a game opening between two rival forces facing each other, played on a field of alternating dark and light spaces, not fixed but shifting, little more than a motif of trembling shadows, wresting from light at one place what they returned at another, moving yet unmoving. Not so different was this then from the chequered board of smooth ebony and maple woods where, with a faint scent of pine needles on the air and the calls of the peacocks breaking into a sudden dance, with water from the fountains softly plashing in glowing pools of colour, the dark foot soldier had taken its first slight step, pushed ever so gently from behind by a pale slim hand.

By noon the sea's rhythm itself had permeated the battle. Each hour, the round of fatalities grew and fell with the periodic revival and ebbing away of the strength of its warriors. The initial rush of energy had departed the thick and fast of war, for the soldiers on either side, now that the first sudden terror of losing their lives had somewhat abated, had taken a more reasonable view of the situation and had settled on a longer span of combat, stretching over days, maybe months. Thus, both sides had adopted a defensive strategy, and deaths occurred more from oversight or a failure of strength than sustained initiative. Incredible as it seemed, hope had taken root even here, indeed it was thriving in every soldier's breast, who would not have put past him the mugs of stout and tales round the campfire, a generous fare, and six hours of deep, unbroken sleep on the other side of sundown. But between sundown and the first drink there yet remained the cruel, backbreaking task of clearing the ground for the next day, moving away and cremating the dead, lighting vast funeral pyres all along the coastline, wood crackling, bones bursting from heat, blue ashes.

When the sun sank into the waves, Anjaneya was opening his arm for a swing at his opponent, but just then the moan of the conch shells signalled a close of the day's battle, and his hand slowed in mid air, but in the infinitesimal space born outside time, a space in which forms dissolve into one another, where the club touched the
chest the bones bayoneted the heart, the victim falling to the ground as the first banners heralding the night's rest were going up.

At last a bone-white moon rose slowly over the trees, where the forest suddenly opened onto the vast beach, the very theatre of this
danse macabre
. Here and there embers glowed in dying campfires about which bodies lay huddled together for warmth, traversing a darkness deeper than night, a spectacular stillness born of drink, food, and an excruciating fatigue. Near the grove where he had retired with his two aides, the fire was still burning. Moonshine was returning valour to their faces, causing glints in the lesions over them. Somewhere someone was crying from toothache, one misery gaining ground on another. Polishing the round fruit on his tunic till it shone red and golden, catching the fire in its skin, he sat unwashed in the shadow of a fig tree, black with grime, beard matted, hair clotted with blood, the metal guard still fastened to the left leg. The fruit was slowly transmitting its fire to his eyes, in their dark depths a tiny flame was now blazing. From the far side of the world came a slow sound of a hollowed-out antelope horn being played.

WHEN THE final betrayal had taken place, when one act of honour had been traded for a second, when the death-dealing arrow had been delivered to the enemy by the king's own brother, when the iron tip had pierced the king's navel at twilight, when the lord of three worlds lay writhing on the ground, spattering the sap of his hard-won immortality everywhere, when our confused, weary troops had been eventually routed, the war was at last over. Then I climbed down the back of my wound-ridden elephant into an immense lake of silence. A curiously fluid world from before the birth of sound. For days, I carried this emptiness in me, and the emptiness carried me in it.