endgames
endgames
The King’s Pawn is almost gone. By now he’s bones and skin, fingernails crooked, hands thin and twisted, blue veins surfacing the brown paper of his wrists. He’s too old for this shit, skulking through the forest with the blue bubble of moon overhead to guide him, branches whipping at his hair, nipping his nose, clipping his waist. He knows, in his stomach heart brain, that he should be somewhere else, somewhere far away from the eve of his end, but where that other place is, he has never known.
Somewhere in the world, his son is dying, another King’s Pawn in another forest staring up at the same sky. Snow begins to fall, on the old man Pawn and his son faraway, flakes melting on their lashes and moistening their numbing fingers (his numb with age and arthritis and cold, his son’s with the blood ebbing from his body). The King’s Pawn does not know that he is soon to be the last of the last (and then, not for very long), he only knows that the frost is biting into his weather-beaten face and his leathery hands, and that somewhere in the bottom of his bones, dread is blooming in a hard steady ache.
He can hear the Queen’s Pawn crashing in the underbrush (inhaling/exhaling panic and fear as fast as his lungs will let him), his boots grinding up dirt and stones, his gear smacking unsteadily against his thighs. He’s not going to be around for too long.
And sure enough: the thud-crush-crash, armour clanking, a body falling. In a heartbeat, it is over. In a heartbeat, there is someone else in the forest with the King’s Pawn.
His ears begin to thrum.
Twigs crack. He does not breathe. Snow skates around him, gathering in his thinning hair, in the wool of his coat, on his ancient boots. Armour clinks closer and closer. A bishop. Not one of theirs.
He should pray, but he has not been a man of God for a long time now. Tries to hold his breath in, but it spills from his lips in grey steam. He thinks of his son who is a King’s Pawn (and whose corpse is now cooling at the edge of a forest faraway, but he does not know that), he thinks of the woman who was his wife, who lives in snatches of memory in the corners of his mind. Brief impressions: red lips, dark hair, hips swollen with child (then unswollen then swollen). A smile, burning bright in his periphery.
The bishop moves forward. The King’s Pawn can see him, now, his outline ridged with armour, breath clouding from the grooves in his helmet. In his bones, the ache of dread grows. The figure inches closer and closer. He wants to move, to run, to fight, to get away, but he cannot: that is not the world works. Not for him.
He can see the bishop now, which means the bishop can see him.
“Hello,” he says, into the silence and the cold.
The bishop stops before him.
“Hello,” he says from behind his mask. A pause. “You’re the King’s Pawn.”
“Yes.”
The bishop considers him. “You may be the oldest fellow I’ve ever seen, you know that?”
He tries to smile. “That’s something.”
“It is.” The bishop lifts his faceguard so that they can look at each other, eye to eye, the old Pawn and his young angel of death. He’s dead serious. “I’d like to be as old as you someday.”
“Not likely, kid.” He smiles this time, a real one that cracks his cheeks and crinkles his eyes, a friendly smile.
The bishop brings his sword down.
*
Underneath the night sky, he dies. One moment the bishop is leaning over him, saying something, his forehead creased in sympathy, and in the next moment he is alone, alone as he has always been. He dies beneath the same swell of moon that his son died under, listening, snowflakes gathering in the hollows of his eyes and the palms of his hands. Winter burial.
Somewhere in the world, another King’s Pawn is born as this one slips away.
Going, going, gone.