The Piece on the Board

"A dying man sees clearly for the length of one breath. It is the cruelest gift the gods allow."

It did not hurt as he had expected.

He had been wounded eleven times in his life, and he knew pain as a farmer knows weather: the bright hot lash of a sword-cut, the dull sick throb of a broken rib, the long slow burning of the whip across the shoulder-blades in a stone cell in Rome. This was none of those. There was a great weight under his ribs, a pressure, a strangeness, as though a stranger's hand had reached inside him and closed round something he had not known he owned. Then a warmth that spread. Then cold at the edges, in the fingers and the lips, creeping in like water over sand. He thought, with a kind of mild surprise: So that is how it is. He had seen so many men die. He had wondered, sometimes, what they saw. He had never imagined that it would be so quiet.

He was kneeling. He knew that, though he could not feel his knees. The sun was on the back of his neck and the white dust of the plain was under his palms, and the boy's face was before him, a hand's breadth away, unbelievably clear. Every detail stood out with the sharpness of a carving. The fine pale line of the scar along the jaw. The sweat in the hollow of the temple. The brow, his father's brow, heavy and straight above the eyes. And the eyes themselves, which were not black like his own but a deep warm hazel-brown, her eyes, with the same long lashes and the same inward watchfulness, fixed on him now with an expression of horror so complete that it looked almost like rage.

He is afraid, thought Jabari. He thinks that he has killed a monster, and he is afraid because I do not look like one.

He wanted to tell him it did not matter. He wanted to say: You did what you were taught. You did it well. It was a clean stroke, low and quick, and I did not see it until it was done. He wanted to say that he was proud. It was a foolish, tender, ridiculous thing to feel, with the boy's dagger in his belly, but it was true: the stroke had been perfect. Not a wasted movement. Not a flicker of hesitation. He himself could not have done it better. I made that, he thought, with a weak dim wonder. Without ever touching him. I made that.

He tried to speak. What came out was a bubble of blood, and a sound, and the boy flinched.

…

It was then that he looked up.

He did not mean to. His head had begun to droop, and he lifted it, with an effort that seemed to take all the strength that remained, because he wished to see the sky once more. It was blue, a pale high desert blue, empty of everything but the glare. He looked at it a moment. Then, because the boy's shoulder was in the way, and because the line of his gaze fell naturally across it and on towards the north, he saw the stand.

It stood on its little rise of ground behind the Roman lines, very small and very far, hung with purple, like a toy. There was a figure at the rail. She wore a dark cloak and a long veil that streamed out behind her on the wind. He could not make out her face at that distance. But he did not need to. He knew the way she stood. He knew the set of her shoulders, the lift of her chin, the stillness of her hands on the wood. He had watched her stand like that in the doorway of a cell, with a lamp held high, on the first night. And as he watched, she raised her right hand from the rail, and held it open in the air a moment, and brought it slowly down across her throat.

He did not understand. He tried. His mind, which had been so clear a moment ago, was growing slow and thick, and it laboured over the gesture as over a word in a foreign tongue. She is telling him something, he thought. It is a sign. A sign for…

And he remembered the boy's eyes. The quick glance upward, in the very instant he had spread his arms. The way the young man had looked past him, for a heartbeat, over his shoulder, to see what he should do. As a dog looks to its master. As a child looks to its mother. He had not seen the sign then. He had seen only the boy's face, and been too full of joy to think. But he saw it now, in the cold clear light of the last minutes, and the whole of it dropped into place with a soft final click, like a bolt sliding home.

She told him to.

The plain seemed to tilt. The sky swung. He felt it, though the hand he put out to steady himself found nothing but blood.

She told him. Last night, in the tent. He was waiting for the signal, and she gave it, and he struck, because she told him to. He did not know the words she had used. He did not need them. He knew who she was, the cleverest woman in Rome, who could arrange a thing so that no one would ever know it had been arranged. And I walked out. Unarmed. I took off my sword. I took off my armour, and my captains wept, and I told Zuberi it was nothing but love.

…

The knowledge came with a clarity that was almost beautiful.

It came as a vision comes to a man in fever, whole and complete, with all its parts displayed. He saw the board as she must have seen it. He saw himself, a black stone, the strongest piece on it, the only one she could not take by force. A hundred thousand spears behind him. A banner of fire. Eleven years of the long hard patient war that had bled Rome white and brought her to her knees. There was no way to beat him in the field, for her son had tried nine times and failed. And a clever player does not waste a general on a piece that cannot be taken. She finds the other way. She finds the single square on the board where the piece is weak, and she puts a woman there.

She never wanted peace. It was strange how simply it came. She never wanted a treaty. She never wanted a king in Carthage and a king in Rome. She wanted one thing, and she wanted it in the cheapest coin. She wanted the Tyrant dead without another Roman legion paid for it. And she knew exactly what would do it.

She knew I would lay down my sword.

He saw the dungeon. He saw himself on the ledge, in the dark, with the chain at his wrist, saying to a Roman girl in a white gown: I am not afraid of you. And her face. And her hands, which had trembled so beautifully on the lock. He saw the arena, the bronze lamps, the two hundred faces, the silver cup. Is it poison? he had said. And she had said, in that low exquisite voice, with the tears bright on her face: It is mercy. And he had believed it. Even afterwards. Even in the cart, in the fever, in the black cold of the first winter, a voice in him had whispered: She did not mean it. She could not have meant it. He had kept the sun. He had kept it for twenty years.

Half a sun stays with you.

He had said that. He had said it to her, in Kavanu, at the cup, knowing she would not understand. It had meant: I will not forget you. Whatever you have done, a piece of me stays with you. It was the finest and most foolish thing he had ever said, and he heard it now across all that time like the creak of a rope on a sinking ship.

He wanted to laugh. He thought that he might have, if he had the breath. For he saw it so clearly now, the great pattern of it, how it had all been built. A girl in a house with a whip. A man in a cell. A little fumbling kindness, a drop of water, a clumsy joke, and then the long slide into love, which had been, he supposed, real enough on his side. And then the cart. And then the twenty years of silence, in which a clever woman had grown a child into a weapon and left a lonely man to build an empire out of hatred, so that when the time came and the two of them stood face to face on a plain she would have both of them in her hand. She had not made one trap. She had made two, one inside the other. And he had walked into the second while he was still congratulating himself on having escaped the first.

I was never loved, he thought.

It was a very small thought. It did not seem large enough to hold the weight of what it meant. He turned it over, wonderingly, as a man turns a coin he has been paid and finds is false. He had been a lover and a tool, a slave and a king, a god, a monster; and in the end he was only a piece, to be moved from one square to another, and taken, and swept from the board. Not a man. Not even a man to be hated. Only the one obstacle that stood in the way of a woman's design.

And the boy?

The thought came after the others, slowly, from a long way off, and it was the worst. He looked at the face before him, the white appalled young face, the hazel eyes. And the boy. She did it to him too. She made of him a knife, and put the knife in my breast, and he does not know. He does not know what he has done.

A tear ran from the corner of his eye and into his beard. He did not feel it. He felt only that, whatever else was true, whatever else she had lied about, that one part was real. The brow. The walk. The knee a little loose. I have held my son, he thought. At the end. For a moment. I have held him. It was a small mercy. It was perhaps the only one the gods had left him.

…

He looked once more at the stand.

The figure at the rail had not moved. The veil was still streaming out behind it. But the hand that had made the sign was no longer at her throat. It had gone up, slowly, to her face, and covered her mouth. He watched it. He watched with the dim wide patience of a dying man, and as he watched the hand came away, and the distance seemed to shrink, as it does in dreams, until he could see her quite clearly: the white oval of the face, the dark steady eyes, the curve of the lips.

They were smiling.

It was a small smile. It was soft, and tremulous, and a little crooked at the corner, the smile of one who has finished a long difficult labour and set down the load. He had seen it before. He had seen it in the dark, on a stone ledge, in the middle of the night, when she was happy, and thought he was asleep. He had thought then it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

So it was real, he thought. All of it. She is happy.

The darkness came up from below.

It came quite gently. It came up through his legs, and his belly, and his chest, a slow soft tide, and the white glare of the plain began to dim and recede. The boy's face blurred and swam. The sound of the drums grew thin and distant, then the sound of his own heart, then the sound of his name, which someone, somewhere, was crying in a high broken voice. He was falling, or floating, and it did not trouble him. He thought of the river. He thought of the place where the Mahali ran down through the reeds at evening, brown and slow and warm, and the women washed their cloth at the edge, and the children ran in the shallows, and his mother stood at the door of the house with her hand over her eyes, looking for him.

Mahali, he thought. The place where one comes home.

There was a name for what he felt, but he could not find it.

He raised his hand. It seemed to take a very long time. It crept up across his chest, slow and heavy and cold, through the sticky wet cloth of his tunic, until it found what it was looking for. The cord was warm. The little disc of ebony lay in its hollow beneath his collarbone, smooth and dark, the copper pin gleaming faintly, its jagged edge pressed to the skin. His fingers closed on it. They closed tightly, tighter than he had known he could close them, as a child's fingers close on a rope when the water is rising. He held it. It was all that he had.

Half a sun, said the last voice he would ever hear in his own head. Stays with you.

And whether it spoke to her, or to the boy, or to no one at all, he did not know, and the darkness took him before he could decide.