shok_ebasit_hissra | Chess is the struggle against the error

Playing chess in the park with Nina had become a strange, regular ritual. The Bull liked rituals, though, and having somewhere to be once or twice a week help him set other parts of his life in order. He liked chess, too: it kept his mind active. Playing against Nina did that two-fold, as she tended to try to cheat in one way or another. He didn't blame her, but it kept him on his toes.

"Check," she said triumphantly, her green eyes bright.

Bull surveyed the board and moved his king to protect it. She moved a knight; he took it with his rook. Nina pouted.

"All out of horsemen," she sighed as she propped her head on her hand, elbow on the table. She made what seemed to be a reckless move with a bishop and Bull reacted with staid calm to defend his king.

"Checkmate!" Nina declared. Bull blinked and had to look at the board, wondering what he had missed. In her quick move withe bishop, she'd drawn his attention away from her queen. He surveyed the board, but she was right: there was nowhere to move his king that would be safe.

"You're getting better," he said as he sat back. Nina looked very pleased with herself. "Another game?"

"Sadly I have a few clients lined up for this afternoon," she said as she rose, smoothing out her coat. "Same time next week?"

"Of course." Bull rose with a quiet grunt. He wore a metal brace on his left leg, and the old pain bothered him more in the cold. He accepted a hug from Nina and kissed the top of her head. She was a kind girl.

As she left, Bull carefully sat back down, using the stone table for support. He stretched his bad leg out and started setting the board up again. He was wearing more clothes than he ever had in Thedas, mostly at Dorian's and Krem's insistence. Krem tailored everything for him. Today it was a long-sleeved v-neck sweater. He'd brought his coat with him, but for now it sat under him to protect him from the chilly stone bench.

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Anthony remains silent for a little while as he studies the board and considers his next move, but the Bull’s answer brings a smile to his lips. “I take it these were not innocent illusions, then,” he says finally, moving one of his pieces.

"No," he said with his own small smile. "The Ben-Hassrath are complicated, and I shifted between specialties about mid-way through my life. For ten years I tried to keep the peace on Seheron. That island is a sack of cats, duty rotations are usually only two years at a time to avoid burnout. I was there for eight."

When Anthony moved a piece, Bull's counter-strike was quick.

"After that, I shifted specialties. I was sent to the south to spy."

Anthony’s knows far too little about the Bull’s world to understand most of what he describes, but he does know what a spy is. He smiles faintly.

“Keeper of illusions,” he muses. “A rather elegant name for a messy business."

The Bull's last move has left Anthony in check. He studies the board for a long moment before moving his king away.

Bull bobbed his head one way and then the other, like he was trying to decide if he agreed on calling it messy business.

"Tangled," he decided as he surveyed the board. "It only gets messy if you lose track of the pieces. Getting information, passing it along, that was easy. Most of the people in the south look like you, they're human. Most of them were impressed I could speak, never mind read or write."

“Spoken like a spy,” Anthony quips. He doesn’t disagree with the Bull’s assessment of intelligence work, really—what he likes about it is just how neat it can be, in fact—but speaking dismissively of such things still comes as a knee-jerk reaction to him.

“Those in the south think poorly of you people?” he surmises.

"Dogmatic, unintelligent ox-men," he answered. "Most of the people in the south have only seen - or heard of - our army. There are a handful of Qunari colonies along the northern coast and there are Tal-Vashoth - those that have left the Qun or were born outside of it - but there aren't many. We can be a difficult people to understand if you grow up outside of our way of life."

Bull shrugged and looked across the table. "But I made it a point to try to understand humans. Even if half of what you do is strange to me."

“Plenty of what we do seems strange to me as well,” Anthony quips. As he considers his next move, he muses, “Though I would argue that the particularities of our strangeness are rather varied. The English are strange in a way very different from the Chinese.”

He chooses a bishop. “And both might be quite different from the humans you know."

"But there are fundamental parts of human society that I had no concept of until I was older. Families, for example," he said as he watched Anthony move the bishop. "I was raised in a cohort of children roughly my age. The Qunari do not have family units - no mother, no father. I have no idea who bred me or birthed me, and it doesn't matter."

He moved another piece, a knight. Chevalier.

Anthony thinks about what the Bull has said for a moment, though he seems to be studying the board. “That is unusual,” he concedes, speaking without judgement. “I suppose there may be some isolated tribes who forswear family bonds, but I am no anthropologist.” He smiles for a brief moment and captures his opponents knight with one of his own.

“I am not certain our attachment to relations does us much good,” he concedes, quoting mildly, "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb"

Bull wrinkled his nose when Anthony took his knight. "Under the Qun, there are no higher loyalties. No one and nothing comes before your people. Not having families or romantic relationships is an easy enough way to solve that. And one of the harder parts for most converts to grasp, but they get used to it."

He moved a bishop into line with Anthony's knight.

“Well, presumably your people come before someone else’s people,” Anthony observes with a touch of a smile. He is being pedantic, yes, but not without reason. By the sound of it, the Qun remain loyal to their own people the same way that the virulently patriotic remain loyal to their nation.

“Converts?” he wonders aloud. “That makes you sound more like a religion than a race of people."

"Mm, all people, ideally. But there are some disagreements regarding how that should look in the wider world," he mused.

"Yes, and no," he said regarding the idea of religion. "The Qun is a philosophy. It governs our entire way of life. The Qunari are followers of the Qun, but also a race of people. You are not, and could never be, Qunari. Just like I, no matter how hard I try, could never be human."

“Then who are these converts?” Anthony asks. Perhaps it is really the fierceness of the Bull’s appearance, but he wonders if what the Bull calls converts are actually those his people have conquered. Anthony is an Englishman: he knows very well how empires expect their colonists to conform to a way of life while still treating them as something other.

"Many of them are former slaves of the Tevinter empire. Others are humans or elves that decide the Qun offers a better way of life. I saw one old woman convert because of how we treat our elders. Gatt, who worked under me, converted because we liberated him from his Tevinter master and offered him equality. Life under the Qun isn't always easy for Viddathari, it's often a lot of adjustment."

Bull shrugged. "It's not a good way of life for everyone."

“But it is a better way of life for some,” Anthony says, thinking that he begins to understand. Radically different ways of life can offer much to some people, particularly those who are given very little by the rest of society. And the Qun, as strange as they sound, have a way of life whose rationality appeals to him.

He moves his knight. “Check."

Chess is the struggle against the error

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