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“All that matters, humanchild, is that you came. You came and you will make us whole, you will mend what he built, give with both hands what he held back from us. He knows you will, he knows. That’s why he snarls at us, who never hurt him.”
I looked helplessly at the inscrutable Monkey, his eyes like rosary beads, glinting dangerously between the shield-lines of crystal figures, his little copper body like a smoking hookah. I fell between their words, clinging to cliff-phrases, slipping on the algae of predicate nominative, tearing my fingernails to the quick. I could not understand.
“Ignore them, continue on. We must stay on the Path. Forward motion, endless if, but still we must. You know the Door lies behind us. They are foolish.” He was already walking away, leaving me, expecting me to follow—how soon had he come to believe me a loyal child, an acolyte, a modest student with the moon-scalp between her braids illuminating humility! I straightened my scarlet spine and called out to his back, “Are you what they say? Did you make them? Who are you?” I whispered the last. His warm, autumn shoulders slumped, and he spoke to the wind, without turning towards me.
“I am myself and no other. But in the beginning, before the Walls and the Road, beyond the beforetime, before and after the name traveled through me, I was also myself. Do not interfere with them. They are, that is enough. Let it be.”
I waited for a friendly hoo, but it did not come. In the press of the desert I was cold. I turned back up to the watery shapes.
“The tooth-hand is indolent. It does not speak. He carries the Stone, but it slithers in your veins like a sidewinder. As long as he walks beside you, you are not free. He keeps you mad for purposes none can divine. The right and the left. He conceals like a Door. He left us like this, and will leave you. But you can help us, you can, you can. With your red mouth you can show us the Way.” They seemed to beg, to implore.
The Monkey had given up and leaned against
a large adobe Wall some space away, chewing on a cactus-thorn lazily. His glance spoke of resentment, do-what-thou-wilt, bemused sorrow. I closed my eyes, swam in the fresco of light on my inner lids.
“How? I cannot help anyone. All I can hold in my hands is Death, red and bright.”
“No, no, humanchild,” the chrysalis-voice of the pieces whispered, faint with anticipation, “You can give us the great silver chariot, the reins and the moon-bellied mares. You can move us, you can Play.”
Stutteringly, I began to see. “You cannot move yourselves?”
“We are the Game,” came the bell-like answer. “We stand forever at the beginning-place, where he put us, stiller than rain, and we cannot move the smallest iris. We are forever tilted towards action, never within it, never thrilling to Purpose. We were made, we cannot be. We do not know what Game we are, we do not know our name. We do not know Rules or Stratagems. We see into the hallways of your bones, but we cannot see a Path across the Board. No one can be both the Player and the Game, no one can hold both ends of the sword in his hand and yet part the flesh of his enemy. No one can be both the Man and the Bar.”
“You want me to teach you to play chess?”A silken rustle, smelling of mint and new basil on a grandmother’s windowsill passed through them, sibilant and sighing.
“Chesssss . . . is that what we are? Are we Chess? Tell us what Chess is, child, tell us how it tastes. Tell us, tell us, and we will give you a thing you desire.” My heart began to flutter like a sparrow within. “We will give you a Vision, a Vision of the beforetime. You may look into the glass belly of our Queen and see a landscape of notnow. We are poor oracles, our eyes cast not forward but backwards and within. But we can show you this small thing. Trade us for it, beautiful, blessed redwoman.”
“There was no beforetime. I have always been here.”
“And yet in the oracle’s eye you extend both forward and back. Perhaps you are right. We have been known to lie. It does not really matter, of course. Your want speaks loudly and in perfect verse.”
The Monkey was frowning now, but he was a gold blur in the darkness of my tears. I held on so frailly to the Road and the now, I feared to look even an inch beyond it. One madness had become comfortable—could I bear another? The serrated edge of unlearning my own singularity? But my Will had long ago become flotsam, curiosity a plank which had forgotten the shape of its galleon. If a thing was offered, I could not refuse. It was not the Way.
I sighed, drying my tears on my wrists, walking onto the Board, listening to the dull pad of my bare feet on the squares. The pieces seemed to lean in like glass towers, listening with their crystal veins. (But how do I know these Rules, how can I know them, who never learned them?)
“The King,” I began, sniffing, “can move one square in any direction. But the Queen can sail the Board like a dreadnaught, can move anywhere she wants . . . ”
20
The Board thrummed with its new word: CHECKMATE.
They were ready to move, leaning into the sun like wind sprinters, finding the shape of strategy in their glassy bodies. But they were honest pieces after all, and would keep their bargain. A high, clear voice like an amethyst trumpet trilled down the battle-lines, and this time it was the great Queen’s alone, her powerful shoulders squared and assured now of her position, hips flared provocatively, thighs in a feline crouch. “Come, humanchild, come here.” Her tone had grown leaves of command and the language had lost its surreality—she knew now she was royalty. I walked through the forest of erect glass, mirrored in the limbs, a bleed of woman through perfected flesh. They towered, crackling with silence.
I knelt before her, because that is what one does in the presence of Queens. Headless her beauty seemed more annihilating and lightning-edged, full now of new power and surety, knowledge that she was the key piece in the precious Game. Though she had no hands to stroke my face, her voice nevertheless caressed me like a favorite daughter, smoothing my hair and drying my face of tears like blood.
“Darling, it is not so dreadful as that. Oh, my dear, my dear one,” she crooned, as though rocking a sweet-faced princess to sleep after a nightmare. “Look into me, now, into the canvas of my belly, see what you have purchased, yourself and no other. Look deep, downdowndown. It is yours, our sight is yours. Don’t cry, don’t cry, my precious girl.”
I placed my hands on the vase-curved of her waist and stared into the curved mirror of her stomach, the crystal womb within, and a strange fog was there, forming into a scene, projected against her uterine Wall like an amorphous child, slowly sprouting fingers and organs like a night-lily. This is what I saw in the Queen’s womb, with the anointment of oracular sight on my brow as I pressed against the coolness of her skin:
A girl and a boy, sitting lazily cross-legged under a pale green willow, picking at the grass. She is lying with her head in his lap, long red hair fanned against his knee. Her skin is not my unnatural red but like honeyed cream. She grins up at him, his eyes the color of an evergreen forest, of dragonfly wings, his corn-gold, too-long hair falling over his forehead. And she laughs. When she does her back, her throat arches slightly, and he blushes. He smells of wheat fields and fallen autumn apples soft against the earth, and it is a smell she knows like her own. Under the filmy reed-curtain of the old willow tree, they hold hands and talk quietly, shoes discarded like peach pits. The sun is low in the sky, warm and orange-gold on their young faces, their strong white smiles and freshly washed hair. The light spills onto their shoulders like water from a well. There are sharp-smelling rosemary branches braided into her hair, with their little blue blossoms, and the oil is on their brown fingers. The boy whispers something in the girl’s ear, and she closes her eyes, lashes smoking cheekbones like bundles of sage.
They rise from the thick grass. They lean, arm in arm against the tree, that melting sun illuminating their youthful forms, her smallish hips, his long legs all rimmed in summerlight. Just before the image fades into the looking-glass womb again, I can see him tenderly brush a strand of hair from her face, full of uncertain care. And then they are gone. They know nothing of any aftertime, any night in the long line of nights ahead, and they are beautiful, simply. I cry after them, hands and face flush against the crystal-ball belly of the Queen. I choked and sobbed, clawing after the vanished watercolor, trying to hold it to me like a doll.
“There, there,” the Queen murmured. “It is what you came for, after all. To know that you are more than you were. Poor thing. But you must go now, for we are ready to Play at last, and we are terribly excited.” Indeed, she seemed to wriggle in her space.
Stumbling across the Board I blindly sought the edge, and as I passed the last Pawn with his flowing hair, I heard him whisper sorrowfully, “I think you were very beautiful when you were young—”
And then they were lost in a rush of light as a Knight leapt over the row of Pawns and the Game commenced, so swift and violent that a sharp-paged wind was thrown up by the whirring movement of the pieces. I could not even see them, only their phosphor-trails, streaming glasslight behind them as they looped threads of infinite patterns over the Board. Knight to take Bishop, Pawn to become Queen, Rook streaming across his straight highways.
