As if by the most terrible, god-like magic, two of the Great Khan’s siege towers exploded, disintegrating and catching fire. The men inside tumbled fearfully to the ground, if they were lucky enough to still be alive.
This one war elephant alone would be a challenge to defeat. And if the city had more of them? Well, the Great Khan’s army would have no choice but to retreat.
The jewels alone spoke of a city of immense power. Even if his army beat this elephant on the field, how long could such a fabulously wealthy city hold out, how prolonged would the siege have to be?
As the terrifying beast drew closer, it became evermore obvious that it was not of flesh and blood after all, but one of the most ingenious construction. And this only added to even the Great Khan’s already considerable fear: flesh and blood could be brought down, but a mechanical monster wouldn't be so easy to wound. Worse still, a people possessing such ingenuity would have other weapons, weapons that might wipe out a whole legion of men in the blink of an eye.
He would sue for peace, for maybe even an alliance; he swung around, his eyes seeking out his standard bearer, preparing to give the order to raise the banner of negotiation – only to be distracted from his purpose by a shocked cry that rose up from his men.
The war elephant had halted its advance.
The standard of negotiation was fluttering from one of its innumerable portholes.
Fools, he thought, with a malicious, satisfied grin.
You’ve just lost your precious city!
*
The underbelly of the great war elephant opened up, a door swinging open, a metallic ladder ingenuously descending.
An ornately dressed man clambered down the ladder, his expression, when he turned, one of a man flustered by the inconvenience and humiliation of having to make his entrance in such an undignified way.
The Great Khan smiled all the more.
Not a military man, then, but an ambassador.
A man impressed by his own intelligence.
A buffoon, in other words.
Things were getting better by the minute.
*
Naturally, the ambassador refused to bow before the Great Khan.
‘You should tremble, barbarian,’ he sneered, ‘before the wealth of a city that can bedeck an instrument of war with such unimaginable riches!’
‘Far from it,’ the Great Khan nonchalantly declared, ‘it simply exhibits the immense wealth that shall be mine once I take over your kingdom!’
‘Then you should take note, my lord,’ the ambassador pointed out, ‘of the inventiveness of our people; creating weapons of war beyond most other people’s wildest imaginings!’
‘Indeed I have!’ the Great Khan declared. ‘Such remarkable ingenuity will be a great attribute to my own war aims, when I capture your city!’
‘Then may I make a plea, Great Khan,’ the ambassador humbly requested, ‘that you accept our offer of this war elephant, as a demonstration of the friendship that naturally exists between us?’
‘But I already own such an elephant!’ the Great Khan replied, indicating with a casual wave of an arm that his men had already sallied in through the war elephant’s open doorway and killed its crew. ‘Naturally, we couldn’t risk suffering the treachery inherent within the offer of a Trojan Horse!’
‘I can reassure your eminence that we are not a people who would ever resort to treachery,’ the slighted ambassador assured him. ‘We see no need to lower ourselves to utilising such measures.’
‘Good for you; you must be ever so proud of reaching such great heights of morality!’ the Great Khan warmly chuckled. ‘I hope your remarkable innocence holds you all in good stead when I sell you all into slavery.’
The ambassador fell to his knees and bowed low before the Great Khan in submission.
And the Great Kahn severed his head with the great sword infamously called Whispering Death.
*
There was an abrupt cry from the men who were still searching and studying the great war elephant.
They had found another yet much smaller door within the elephant’s vast sides, one possibly used as a means of observation or entry point into its clockwork interior. From this small opening they were pitilessly dragging out a raggedly dressed man.
With no lessening of their brutality towards him, they pushed, shoved and pulled the emaciated man until he was bowing before the Great Khan.
‘I was assured that your city is incapable of treachery!’ the affronted Great Khan stormed.
‘I was a stowaway: no one knew I was there,’ the man insisted, shivering with perhaps fear, even though his skin was covered in a sticky sheen of sweat. It was also laced with innumerable scars. ‘But yes, my people are indeed capable of treachery: for I have little doubt, oh Great Kahn, that they will hold me responsible for the deaths I’ve caused if I don’t escape that cursed place!’
‘Escape? Cursed?’ the great Khan repeated curiously.
‘I’m a humbled man, oh Great Khan of the World,’ the man admitted, scratching irritably at a painful looking rash on his shoulders. ‘I just wish to be on my way, to be free at last of that plagued city.’
Taking his great sword, the Khan brought Whispering Death’s blade up under the man’s chin, forcing the man to bring his head up until his face was more plainly in view. It was a gaunt face of yellow, taut skin, of scabs and leeching boils, and red, watery eyes.
With a gasp of fear, the Great Khan hurriedly tried to wipe his blade clean in the dirt, only to suddenly cast it aside in revulsion; it would never be cleared of the contagion it had undoubtedly already picked up from this diseased man.
*
The man was killed with an arrow as, indeed, were all the men who had touched or even been near the war elephant.
Their dead bodies were left, completely untouched, around the war elephant.
Naturally, when the Great Khan and his terrifying hordes began to hurriedly withdraw, lifting their siege of the city, the relieved citizens let out a great cheer.
Their amazing war elephant had succeeded in scaring off an army that had seemed destined to bring the entire world to waste!
Of course, as part of their celebrations, they brought their wonderful war elephant back within the city’s great walls.
And everyone flocked to jeer the infamous Whispering Death, laughing at a blade they had feared would kill them all yet hadn’t yet claimed a single life.
*
Chapter 4
‘Our strengths and our weaknesses are not as clear cut as we suppose them to be,’ the empress explained to Helen as she brought her tale to an end. ‘How our enemies regard them can have a far greater effect than our own presumptions.’
‘A weakness can be a strength: a strength a great weakness,’ Helen stated assuredly to demonstrate that she had understood the meaning behind the tale, that it was yet another lesson for her to dwell upon.
The empress nodded.
‘My great grandson is nothing but the weakest of babes,’ she said, nodding again, but this time towards the still silent cot, ‘and yet he remains the greatest weakness in the machinations of my son’s second wife to ensure the succession of her own children.’
‘So he must be killed.’ Helen said it with no hint of horror.
‘As his father has already been killed, executed on the emperor’s orders; even though he was my son’s eldest child, from his first marriage.’
‘This second wife; she falsely accused him of something?’
‘Good, good child,’ the empress agreed with an admiring smile. ‘You are swiftly learning the brutal ways of this world!’
‘My father told me that you were similarly displace– I’m sorry, my lady: please forgive me for my impudence.’
Helen gave a sharp nervous bow of her head.
The old empress chuckled.
‘Displaced? That was the word you were about to use, yes?’
‘As I say my lady, I apol–’
‘Apologies from you aren’t necessary, my dear. I freely return the respect I know your father has for me, and he only speaks the truth: my husband had to make a more politically convenient marriage, one to the stepdaughter of the then emperor of the eastern empire. Our son was being held as a virtual prisoner, tying our hands.’
‘We are pieces to be played within the great game,’ Helen pronounced sagely, studying once again the carved pieces on the board.
The empress nodded once more, her eyes narrowing with an obvious sense of grave acceptance; she had taken great pains to make Helen aware of this undeniable, unchangeable fact of life.
Her eyes abruptly widened, glittering with unease. She drew Helen’s attention to the empty place on the third side of the board.
A piece had moved forward.
‘She’s here,’ the empress stated flatly yet firmly. ‘She’s found us.’
*
Chapter 5
Urgently rising from her seat, the empress picked up the lantern and headed for the tent’s opening once more. She warned Helen to stay close, assuring her that she shouldn’t worry about getting dressed just yet.
Outside in the whirling snow, Helen was surprised to find that she didn’t feel either the cold or the biting wind as she had expected. Even her bare feet, treading through the crisp layer of fresh snow, could have been warmly shod, going by the lack of the presence of any cold she felt.
The empress spoke to the legionaries, telling them to beware of anything they thought unusual, even if it seemed in many other ways perfectly innocent; she would rather, she assured them, be woken up for some foolhardy overreaction than to end up dying in her bed.
As she and Helen made their way back inside the tent, the empress scowled miserably.
‘It’s not usually wise to panic your men, as I just had to do,’ she admitted miserably, ‘but these are no longer usual times.’
When they approached the game board once more, the pieces on the new queen’s side had all completely changed, for they had not only grown in size, but also grown in number. They had become, too, leaping wolves, sly hawks, evil-eyed owls, along with even trees and waterfalls. There were men too, some armed, some on horseback, but even these were often stunted, as if goblins or dwarves.
The queen was magnificent, beautiful, rising up on a pillar of swirling snow, her arms spread out as if in the action of casting far-reaching spells.
‘Hah; so she has the arrogance and confidence to already make her play known to us!’ the empress snorted bitterly. ‘So be it; let things be more out in the open then!’
The pieces on her own side of the board began to transform, also taking on the form of creatures, of elements of nature, of armoured knights. Yet each one of these was far smaller than those of her rival’s, and there were far fewer of them, some of the original pieces even disappearing completely. Her queen was also more gracious, sage-like, seated on a throne as if contemplating wise advice as opposed to spurring herself into urgent action.
‘Fausta now knows that we’re aware of her presence.’
The empress didn’t say this with any hint of triumph; rather, it was said with a resigned sigh, a hint of regret.
Previously when the old empress had talked of Fausta, she had mentioned to Helen that the younger empress had increased her power by aligning herself with Satan rather than Christ: and of course, the young girl had merely assumed the older woman was exaggerating. Now that she saw the changing of the game’s pieces, however, she recognised that there might have been a great deal more truth than she had supposed behind the old empress’s comment.
Seeing the creatures lining up on the side of the young empress, she now also understood the old empress’s supposedly crazy attitude to hawks and wolves; no wonder she had regarded their every action as being worthy of suspicion.
Helen’s father had told her to grant the old empress respect. ‘You can learn more from her,’ he had added, as he had sent her off with a small band of his men to greet the empress’s arrival on the coast, ‘than you could learn from a whole host of so called teachers.’
‘She’s already here: this Fausta?’ Helen asked worriedly, resisting the instinctive temptation to anxiously glance everywhere about her.
‘An essence of her power is already here,’ the old empress replied, ‘and that presence will gradually increase now that she knows we are here; until, one day, yes – she may decide to grace us with her actual, physical presence.’
She chuckled harshly, her eyes alighting on Helen’s unchanged pieces.
‘She knows that you’re not ready yet; she will strike as soon as possible.’
‘She has a similar board?’ Helen quickly cast her own eyes over the game, having quickly worked out the real meaning behind the empress’s words. ‘She sees the pieces as we do?’
‘As you, too, must have your own board one day,’ the empress said with a slight nod of her head. ‘Though the game doesn’t control things, as you might suppose; it simply replicates the usage of the darker forces that surround us.’
‘Darker forces?’
That sounded worryingly dangerous to Helen.
‘There’s another form of matter, a darker matter that remains invisible to us: and yet it flows through and links everything, connecting even the planets themselves. It’s these strands that we must learn to control: and you, my dear, must learn particularly quickly if we are to survive Fausta’s imminent attacks!’
*
Chapter 6
Helen reached out to move one of her pieces across the board: only for the old empress to stop her with a touch of her own fingers on the back of her hand.
‘No, not like that anymore.’
‘Then how, how do I use the game?’ Helen asked with a snap of frustration. ‘This is what you’ve been teaching me.’
‘Teaching you how to think strategically: I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to introduce you to all this; hoped that we could arrive safely without Fausta discovering us. Besides, if I had begun to teach you, it would have registered on her board, led her to us; while now that she has engaged us, it’s only added to the overall malleability of the forces – meaning they’re more accessible to you.’
‘How can I move a piece without touching it?’
‘If I shouted out “Help”, what would happen?’ the empress curiously asked Helen.
‘The guards would come running: they might even kill me, if they believed it was me endangering you.’ She glanced over towards the cot, where Magnus was still asleep. ‘You’d also wake your grandson,’ Helen added with a playful smile.
‘And yet I wouldn’t be the one who had actually moved either Magnus, or the guards, would I?’
Helen wasn’t quite sure whether she should nod or shake her head to show that she agreed with the empress’s statement. Ignoring Helen’s lack of response, the empress continued.
‘And yet they moved for me, when I used the power of speech.’
This time Helen nodded in agreement.
‘Now think of the power of the written word: for this can work over centuries, a certain powerful phrase motivating men to aspire to greater things, or to go to war. Yet, of course, it is not the scrawl of ink that inspires these men, just as it not the spoken word itself that persuades a guard to kill: it is the chosen words.’
As she said this, the empress touched her temple, an indication that she was speaking of thoughts, of the mind.
‘Those words possess their intention because they have ultimately come from here; for it is our consciousness that ultimately controls everything. Speech is simply a means of bringing our thoughts forth into the real world: as, indeed, is writing. And yet how can you use speech to teach it to someone who has never spoken, or put down a scrawl and hope those incapable of reading can understand its power?’
Helen moved to touch one of the pieces again, this time intending only to twist it free of the matching, interlocking notches that held it in place on the board.
&nb
sp; ‘No,’ the empress insisted once more. ‘You don’t need to free it.’
‘Then I really don’t understand: how can speaking to it, or even writing instructions down, have any hope of moving a piece?’
‘I didn’t ask you to try and move a piece; as for speaking, writing, I mentioned those only to explain how, on the most basic of levels, they help us see that we have brought our thoughts into being – and the game merely does that too, ensuring the novice doesn’t become frustrated because she can’t otherwise detect any effect she’s having.’
Turning, the empress strode over to her bed. It was surrounded by hanging sheets of fine lace that had originally served as mosquito nets, but here spared her from being surrounded by annoying clouds of midges.
Helen followed, watching in renewed admiration for the empress as a mere tracing of her finger down a strand of the lace’s weave caused it to ripple into life. It threw out swiftly burgeoning shoots that created other sheets of lace, until they formed what could be a chequered board possessing height as well as length and width.
‘This is life, the connecting strands of the dark matter of life,’ she said. ‘Which pass through us daily without anyone realising they’re there.’
Within all of this a large fish appeared, alive and casually swimming, as if within a milky-white pool. It effortlessly passed through the strands of lace, as if they hardly existed; yet the fish’s movements caused the lace to undulate gently, much as water would ripple after a fish’s passing.
‘The game detects these waves,’ the empress added, ‘but it’s up to us to use the wrinkles to alter things to our advantage.’
She pushed on the lace, the shivering she caused within the other sheets causing the startled fish to swim in a new direction: then she sharply pulled on the lace, dragging the caught fish towards her much as fishermen haul in nets.
‘And when you use the finer links of your own consciousness,’ she added, the network of lacing becoming even more minutely delicate, streaming through what could be the mind of the fish, ‘then you can dictate how a creature thinks!’