The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [111]
“What’s the matter with you, Russell?” he complained. “Your mind’s not on the game.”
“It is, you know, Holmes,” I said mildly, and reached forward to move a pawn, and with that move the entire haphazard disarray fell into a neat and deadly trap that depended on two pawns and a bishop. In three moves I had him mated.
I wanted to whoop and leap into the air and kiss Captain Jones on his bristly cheek for the sheer joy of seeing Holmes’ consternation and amazement, but instead I just sat and grinned at him like a dog.
He stared at the board like a conjuror’s audience, and the expres-sion on his face was one of the biggest prizes I have ever won. Then it broke, and he slapped his knee with a short bark of delighted laughter and rearranged the pieces to replay the last six moves. At the end of it he wagged his head in appreciation.
“Well done, Russell. Deucedly clever, that. More devious than I’d have given you credit for. My children have bested me,” he quoted, somewhat irreverently.
“I wish I could claim credit for it, but the move came up in a game with my maths tutor a few months ago. I’ve been waiting for the op-portunity to use it on you.”
“I’d not have thought that I could be tricked into overlooking a pawn,” he admitted. “That’s quite a gambit.”
“Yes. I fell for it too. Sometimes you have to sacrifice a queen in or-der to save the game.”
He looked up at me, startled, and then back to the board, and his face changed. A tightness crept slowly into his features until he looked pinched and pale beneath the brown of his skin’s surface, as someone does who is stricken by a gnawing pain in the vital organs.
“Holmes? Holmes, are you all right?”
“Hm? Oh, yes, Russell, I am fine. Never better. Thank you, Russell, for such an interesting game. You have given me much food for thought.” His hard visage relaxed into the gentlest of smiles. “Thank you, my dear Russell.” He reached out, but his fingers did not quite touch my cheek before he pulled them back, stood, and turned to go below. I sat on the sun-drenched deck and watched his back disappear, the victory turned to ashes in my mouth, and wondered what I had done.
I did not see him again until we arrived at Jaffa.
Excursus
A Gathering Of Strength
Umbilicus Mundi
...it will serve a useful purpose by restoring our courage and stimulating research in a new direction.
had not realised how greatly I desired Palestine until one of its towns leapt out at me from the list of places offered us, and the name was on my lips. I had no doubt that some day (next year) I should make my pilgrimage to the birthplace of my people, but a pil-grimage is a planned and contemplated event of the mind and, per-haps, the heart, which this most emphatically was not. When I was beset by fear and confusion, when no ground was sure beneath my feet and familiar places threatened, this foreign land reached out to me, called me to her, and I went, and found comfort, and shelter, and counsel. I, who had neither family nor home, found both there.
Palestine, Israel, that most troubled of lands; robbed, raped, ravaged, revered for most of four millennia; beaten and colonised by Sargon’s Akkadians in the third millennium b.c.e. and by Allenby’s England in the Common Era’s second millennium; holy to half the world, a narrow strip of marginally fertile soil whose every inch has felt the feet of con-quering soldiers, a barren land whose only wealth