Work Text:
Demetrius and Philo and Enobarbus are playing at dice. The Egyptian courtiers look on, curious; but none of the Roman soldiers invites them to join the game, nor so much as explains it.
“Do you not have dice in Egypt?” asks Mark Antony.
“We use casting-sticks instead, my lord,” Iras explains.
“What are those?” Antony’s curiosity has been piqued, as it always is by Egyptian things that they do not have in Rome.
The soothsayer takes out his senet-board and shows Antony the four sticks that go with it. “If one of them lands with the marked side up, you have cast a one. The same if they land with two, or three, or four of the marked sides up; it is a two or a three or a four. If all four of the sticks land with the marked side down, we count that as a five.”
“Ah.” Antony’s attention has been caught by the senet-board, which is a beautiful one, made of ebony and blue-green faience. “Is this an Egyptian game? I have never seen it before.”
“Yes, my lord,” says the soothsayer. “We call it senet. That means the game of passing.”
“I should like to learn it. Will you play a game with me, good sir?”
Iras bursts out laughing; so do Cleopatra and Charmian and Alexas and Mardian.
“You must not play with him, my love,” says Cleopatra. “He is a soothsayer; he will know which way the sticks will fall before you cast them.”
“I may as well play with Caesar, then!” says Antony. Iras supposes this is a jest, for he is laughing; but she does not understand it, and she thinks there is something rueful about the laugh. “Do you play only with other soothsayers, then, sir?”
“He plays with the dead,” Cleopatra explains, “it is how he talks with them.”
“You must teach me, then.”
“I find senet a tedious game. Perhaps Charmian or Iras would teach you.”
But Charmian is half-Greek, and she also finds senet tedious; it is Iras, Egyptian to the core, who explains the game to Antony. “The object is to move all of your stones through the board, and off of it. The journey across the board represents the places the soul must pass through after death; that is why soothsayers use it to talk to the dead.”
“Is that why it is called the game of passing?”
“No, it is called that because you may pass the other player’s stones by leaping over them; or, if you throw the right number to land on a house where the other player has already placed a single stone, the two stones change places, so that you move his further back on the board. But you may not do this if he has placed two of his stones together in consecutive houses, and if there are three, you may not pass them at all.”
Each of the thirty squares on the soothsayer’s senet board has a symbol on it, and she does not know the meaning of them all. She points out the only ones that matter, the ones that were marked on the board she and her brothers and sisters had when she was a child. “The fifteenth house is the House of Repeating Life; this is a safe space where your opponent cannot remove your stone, and it is the one you must return to if you land on the Waters of Chaos. The twenty-sixth is the House of Beauty, another safe space where none may touch you; you must land here before going on. The twenty-seventh is the Waters of Chaos; you must cross over the water but not fall into it, or you return to the House of Repeating Life. The twenty-eighth is the House of Three Truths; this is a safe space, but you must throw a three to move on. The next one is the House of Two Truths; you must throw a two. Last of all is the House of Re-Horakhty, where you must throw a one. This is not a safe space; if another player lands on it while you are awaiting your lucky throw, you will be pushed into the Waters of Chaos, and from there you must return to the House of Repeating Life. If you can move any of your stones with the number you have thrown, you must move it, and if you cannot, your opponent may throw the sticks again. Do you understand?”
“I think so,” says Antony, a bit doubtfully. “Let us play for a stake; ‘tis always better sport that way.”
He sets down one silver denarius. Antony and Cleopatra wager for much higher stakes when they bet on anything, but with Iras Antony is courteous, as he always is with women. He will not make her play for more than she can afford to lose. Iras has no coins, so she removes one of her hairpins. It is lighter in weight than the denarius, but the filigree work makes it worth at least as much.
They play. Antony grasps one strategic principle at once: there is strength in numbers, and if he keeps three of his stones together Iras cannot leap over them or knock them back. It is a very Roman way of playing, Iras thinks. Egyptians do not care so much about strategy, they enjoy the jumping and bumping. But it works. When Antony has maneuvered his first stone to the House of Beauty, he keeps it there until he throws the five that will move him off the board. Iras is blocked, and she never catches up with him afterward. Antony wins the first game.
“I must needs grow my hair longer,” he remarks, as he sweeps up his winnings, “so I can make use of my new hairpin.”
Iras giggles. “No, you must play again, and let me win it back. Double the stakes?”
Antony sets down two more denarii, and tries the same strategy the next time. It takes him a long time to throw a five. “Such a one as you could make me content to linger forever in the House of Beauty,” he says. The words sound like they are flirting with Iras, but his upward glance is for the queen. Cleopatra knows this, and does not mind.
Iras has been jumping and bumping her stones into place behind him, and when he moves on at last from the House of Beauty, she is well-positioned to land in it on her next throw. She moves her stone off the board, and then another; Antony moves another of his; and then he discovers that at the end of a game of senet, everything depends on the casting-sticks. The fewer stones you have left on the board, the fewer choices, and the more you are at the mercy of chance. They trade the advantage back and forth for a few minutes, and then, with a lucky last throw, Iras wins.
“’Tis a curious game. It seems, at the first, to be a game of tactics, like our ludus latrunculorum; but in the end, we have fewer and fewer choices and it all comes down to luck. ‘Tis a mirror for our lives, in its way.”
“What does ludus latrunculorum mean?” Iras tries to shape her tongue around the peculiar-sounding Latin name; it makes her laugh. Antony usually speaks Greek with them, except when he tries out a word or two of Egyptian.
“‘The game of brigands.’ Much different from ‘passing.’ Can you really use senet to speak with the dead?”
“The soothsayer can. I cannot.”
“Ah.” Antony glances over to where the soothsayer had been standing, but he has vanished. He comes and goes, without any regard for court protocol.
“Do the dead ever speak in Rome, my lord?”
“I have heard they do sometimes. Never to me.” He seems sadder, as he sometimes does when he speaks of Rome, and Iras wishes she had not asked him. She recalls that Antony is really much older than he seems; he has had a whole other life there. “They speak more often to their enemies than their friends, I think; and never through games. Your Re-Horakhty is a very powerful god, is he not? He is like our Apollo.”
“Aye, but also somewhat like your Hades. The dead dwell with him when they come to the end of their journey; that is why his is the last house on the board.”
“We have nothing like this in Rome. Fortuna is the only one of our gods who takes any interest in games at all, and she is not a very important one, though for my part I am fond of her.”
* * *
It is very late; the queen has taken Antony off to bed, and Iras counts her winnings. Antony has kept one of her hairpins and a silver ring that she wagered on a later match, but she is several denarii richer in exchange.
“I thank you for taking your queen’s place,” says a voice behind her, “our general would wager away countries and kingdoms if he were playing with someone who could match the stakes.”
Iras turns. It is Enobarbus, of course; the only one of the Roman soldiers who deigns to notice the queen’s ladies at all. Iras is never sure whether he loves or hates the Egyptian court; perhaps both at once, like that jealous Roman poet whose verses Antony is fond of reading and translating for them. Demetrius and Philo have made no secret of the fact that they hate it, but they are nowhere to be seen; the dice-game has evidently ended. She wonders how long Enobarbus has been watching them play senet instead.
“Would you like to play, sir?” she asks.
“I thank you, no,” says Enobarbus. He sits at the board and studies it, though, after he has taken some more wine, watering it less than the Romans usually do. Iras refills her own goblet from the jug of Egyptian beer, which she prefers.
“I have been thinking about your casting-sticks,” Enobarbus remarks. “They are not quite like our dice, after all.”
“No,” says Iras, “your dice have six sides to them; we cannot throw more than five.”
“It is more than that.” Enobarbus takes a die from his coin-purse, which is noticeably heavier than it was before; Demetrius’s and Philo’s must be very much lighter. “Look you; if the dice be not false, we have an equal chance of throwing any of the six numbers.”
“Aye, that is so.”
“But with your casting-sticks it is not so.” Enobarbus takes up the sticks in his hand and examines them. “There is but one way to throw a four – all four of your sticks must land with the marked side up – and but one way to throw a five, for they must all lie with the marked side down. But it is much easier to cast a one or a three, for any one of the four may differ from the others, so there are four different ways to do it. And easiest of all to throw a two. Look, there are six ways.” He demonstrates.
Iras has not thought of this before. Of course, she does know that it is exciting when the casting-sticks fall so that she can move one of her stones four or five houses; she also knows that it is rare. She had not thought this signified anything except, perhaps, that the gods willed that mortal men and women be patient. Romans, it seems, think differently.
She recalls the last game she played with Antony; first she had thrown a two and bumped his stone back two spaces, and then he had done the same to her, the two of them changing places three or four times before at last he threw the three that would allow him to enter the House of Beauty. And from there, he had never thrown the five that would have allowed him to leave the board. When all his other stones were too blocked to move, he was at last constrained to fall into the Waters of Chaos.
When she reminds Enobarbus of this, he says, “One can, after all, linger too long in the House of Beauty. For my part, I would advise our general to dwell in the House of Two Truths, instead.”
“I think he would not take your advice. He would rather stake all on the least likely of throws.” This is part of the pleasure of the game for Antony, Iras sees now, just as jumping and bumping the stones is for her.
“Aye,” says Enobarbus, “do I know it!”
“Are you sure that you do not care to play?” she asks him. She thinks that she will likely lose, after everything she has just heard this man say, but she also thinks he enjoys lingering in the hall with her, whether he will own it or not. Queen Cleopatra has preserved some measure of autonomy for Egypt by seducing one and then another of its conquerors; Iras, in her small way, might be able to do the same.
“No.”
“Perhaps that is as well.” She looks at him and smiles, as she has seen Cleopatra do when she dispenses a compliment to one of her admirers. “I think that playing with you would be almost as bad as playing with the soothsayer.”
He does not smile back. “Perhaps. I have never sought to know the future, but sometimes the knowledge comes unlooked-for.” He tidies up the casting-sticks and places them in Iras’s hand, and says, with unexpected gentleness, “Keep your denarii safe, Iras; there may come a time when you have need of them.”
She watches him leave the hall, feeling as chilled, suddenly, as if she had fallen into the Waters of Chaos.