Being Christian, Gerbert was not an educated man. His knowledge of games was limited to playing dice made of lambs' bones he'd carved himself. But he wasn't going to let that deficit of his upbringing stop him from humiliating the glowering, towering man across the qirkat board from him.
Qirkat – the name alone infuriated him, let alone the rules, how the game started so slow, so obvious, until all of a sudden it exploded into a myriad of possibilities, traps, subterfuges, and unlimited potential for disgrace. He choked when he tried to pronounce the "q", which sounded like a swallowed "k". He would have to call it something else when he got back home, to civilized, uneducated Christendom.
His opponent, Abū l-ʿĀs al-Mustansir bi-llāh al-Hakam ibn ʿAbd ar-Rahmān (you can call me al-Hakam), Caliph of Cordoba, was the last man on Earth who knew everything, at least until Johann Wolfgang von Goethe graduated from law school exactly eight hundred years to the day later and subsequently realized that the concept of everything was indeterminate and could never be known by anyone, let alone a man or God or the Devil.
Al-Hakam jumped over yet another of Gerbert's pieces, placing it with a flick of his emerald-and-ruby-bejeweled wrist next to the qirkat board, which, unlike its owner's apparel, was quite plain, just a rough-hewn piece of wood made from a fallen orange tree in the courtyard of the mosque, the masjid, which Gerbert one day would pronounce meschita, and his successors cathedral. The pieces looked like shriveled oranges.
Gerbert was down five pieces to three, two games to one in a series watched by assembled courtiers and courtesans and ambassadors alike, his sad little oranges smooshed together into a corner without any hope of overpowering al-Hakam's elegant onslaught, their open ranks and files and diagonals diminishing as Gerbert wiped the sweat off his forehead, sweatier even than usual because of the turban he'd donned out of courtesy to his host, and because of the brain power he was draining, trying to figure out the algorithms that al-Hakam seemed to wield with such ease, and because of the frustration that he had only learned all these concepts – algorithm, brain, myriad, orange, qirkat, indeterminacy – over the past few weeks, thanks to the exasperated tutelage of al-Hakam's scholars. Frankly, the only relevant concept he'd learned at the monastery in Ripoll before coming here was humiliation, which now, as the game progressed, he was increasingly trying to avoid rather than inflict. He heard a courtesan snicker.
Al-Hakam did not sweat, and if he did, he didn't let it bother him. Al-Hakam was not prone to humiliation, and even when he humiliated, he did it with grace and style. One day, sadly and surprisingly soon, his brain and body would shrivel like one of his oranges, he'd become a husk of himself, manipulated and outmaneuvered by his enemies, his advisors, the grifters he would surround himself with as he lost confidence in his own brilliance and curiosity. But not today.
The eight remaining pieces on the board made a funny little pattern, a mocking smiley face, the true meaning of which only one of the two men could divine. Gerbert was tempted to pray, to God of whatever name, to the Devil, really to anyone who could help him out of this self-inflicted mess of a qirkat position and religious-geopolitical defeat. Instead, he tried to put to use all of the knowledge he'd acquired in this place, so far from the backwater hamlet of Belliac he'd called home, knowledge that, until recently, he hadn't known even existed. Instead of agonizing over his opponent's moves, he studied his opponent himself, the red Navarrese beard framing a Syrian-Berber face, the twitching half-smile, the squint and wink of his blue eyes – irony being another concept Gerbert had just learned to understand and appreciate – the connection between whatever currents were coursing through al-Hakam's brain, face, wrist to the pieces on the board between them, whatever turned an orange tree into a game board into brilliance. Gerbert tried to imagine what it was like to be al-Hakam, the ruler of al-Andalus and of his own intellect, and with humility, Gerbert realized that, while he still wanted to win, he loved the man across from him who was teaching him even now that a courtesan's laugh and a game well fought, even if lost, were far from cruel, anything but humiliating.
Gerbert won that game, and when he did, he caught a flash of anger in al-Hakam's eyes, but that anger quickly and graciously made way to a smile, a slight bow, a hand on his heart, and the offer of a tiebreaker, a game in which al-Hakam feigned a sacrifice and crushed Gerbert like a baby grape.
When Gerbert d'Aurillac finally made it to Rome as Pope Sylvester II, nobody wanted to play qirkat with him. He was lucky to find anyone who would even play dice with him – dice made of ruby, dice made of emerald – and even then, they'd always let him win. When he wasn't busy ruling Christendom and ushering it into the millennium it would dominate, he invented clocks and musical instruments, tried to teach his advisors astronomy and philosophy, Greek and Arabic, the basics of neurology and robotics, he cried when his ambassador told him of al-Hakam's death, and when he tried to rid Rome of grifters selling indulgences, five hundred years to the day before Martin Luther entered university, his papacy collapsed, his ideas laughed at, his opponents accusing him of being in league with witches and magicians, Muslims, the Devil himself, and they might have had a point. Gerbert's last thought was that if he'd moved his last piece straight down the board instead of falling for al-Hakam's sacrifice, he would have won the last game.