The Lost Books of the Odyssey - By Zachary Mason Page 0,59

in the tall grasses. Then it is night, the hills are gone. The table lies in a warm, shallow, unmoving sea. It is perfectly silent (except now and then a distant intimation of worried voices). There is no moon. The stars are dim, as though behind a layer of high clouds. But now they are approaching, and are brighter. Now brilliant. Fireworks.

*The Eighteenth Nile Dynasty of Egypt had an expansionary phase in pre-Classical times and planted colonies on many islands in the Mediterranean. These flourished briefly but ultimately withered due to a lack of support from Egypt, which was racked by a sequence of civil wars. By the time of the Trojan War only ruins and the occasional place name survived.

RECORD OF A GAME *

We look at a chess set and see a medieval king, some thin-blooded English Henry sitting in state next to his wanton termagant sorceress wife. Flanking them are machiavel abbés with thin upper lips, all masters of casuistry, elegant courtiers and confirmed atheists. To either side of the cathedral doors (in the checkered board we see first the elongated black-and-white cruciform of a cathedral’s floor plan and then the meticulously delimited plantations of a feudal estate) knights stand guard with hands resting on the pommels of zweihänders, plate mail gleaming. At the edges of the kingdom castellans stroll through winter and summer palaces, pulling white sheets from century-old furniture and airing tower bedrooms in preparation for a royal visit. Originally built as fortifications (with arrow slits and battlements to prove it), the palaces are now country châteaux, their portcullises overgrown with the vines of grapes and tiny, aromatic roses. Hardly worth a mention are the serfs who tend to their betters and their betters’ gardens—brave fellows, always ready to drop teapots and shears to take up long pikes for a headlong charge at the enemy.

If our discernment were keener, we would see an altogether more ancient and chaotic battlefield. Four-handed chatarang, the progenitor of modern chess, was created in India for the soldier castes two millennia before Christ with pieces that are, in some cases, hardly recognizable. The queen, now the terror of the board, was then a politic vizier who hovered by the king’s side as though fearful of offending. The bishops were war elephants, tusked monsters trampling infantry while the mahouts on their backs shot sling stones and spears. The knights were a cavalry of mounted archers (in the centuries before the stirrup was invented there were no lances), striking swiftly and galloping away. The rooks were not fortresses but war chariots, terrible weapons racing over the battlefield pell-mell, rattling over stones and corpses, wheel-mounted scythes slashing through the legs of men and horses.

The Katishya caste, who were the warriors and rulers of Indian society at the time, believed deeply in the innate elegance of rectilinear order. Their image of paradise was a perfectly level green field bisected north to south by one cold, blue river and east to west by another. Their gardens matched this ideal as closely as possible and, perversely, so did their maps. It was considered self-evident that the earth, an emanation of the mind of god, was arranged in arrays of adjacent, geometrically perfect squares—the failure of the observed geographical world to match this mathematical ideal was easily accounted for by the sinfulness of man and the decadence of the times. The Katishyas’ military science resembled their gardening and their cartography—a small repertoire of battlefield maneuvers was drilled into troops and petty officers until they could be executed with repeatable precision, and the mastery of this lexicon and its combinatorics was considered the essence of generalship. The Katishyas considered it the epitome of strategy to take the dust-shrouded confusion of the battlefield and reduce it to a set of symbols on a grid from which could be derived a concise sequence of moves leading inevitably to victory.

Chatarang radiated out from the subcontinent and begat many descendants—it is said that there are as many variations of chess as there are Indo-European languages. Not least among its issue was a game immensely popular in the Achaean societies of the Attic peninsula and the culturally similar islands of the Cyclades in the thirteenth century before Christ. The sum total of the source material for the Achaean variant consists of two complete and three partial game sets (all but one of which were excavated on Chios, known for producing the greatest chess masters), a reference in Hesiod and a primer that was a