The Queen's Play Read Free

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 nomore. 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.

III
    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