TWO

“The game is called Chaturanga,” Alison said across a two-top table over the rustling din of the lunch crowd. Paige Hall offered only a blank stare. Alison gave her a minute. She wanted this conversation to be shrouded in mystery, bubbling with dramatic flair– as it was when Tony first explained it to her. She steepled the tips of her fingers together, both elbows secured on the table, and nodded slightly.

“Chaturanga,” Paige repeated.

“It’s named after an ancient Indian board game: an early predecessor to chess.” Paige was silent. Her mouth tightened and her brow furrowed a bit as a short strand of auburn hair fell out of her pixie cut and into her face. Alison continued. “It means ‘four factions.’”

“I thought it meant ‘four feet,’” Paige interrupted.

Alison was impressed, a smirk curling on her lip. She changed posture as if to ask “How do you know that?”

Paige answered the unspoken question, or perhaps the awkward silence. “It’s a yoga pose.”

Alison wasn’t sure how to process that knowledge. It somehow made the whole thing seem silly for the moment. Perhaps it was a bit silly. In any case, the game was very serious and important to her, and from what she could tell, anyone else in play. She continued.

“The original rules of Chaturanga are mostly lost to history. We know it was played on an eight by eight board and that the game revolved around the movements of four divisions of units: footmen, cavalry, chariots, and elephants.” Alison paused a moment to take a sip of her tea. It sputtered through the straw, chipping away slightly at the moody ambiance she was attempting to evoke. “Each unit had a unique move-set. Its own way to gain position against an opponent. There’s also a Raja, a king, which we assume was to be defended, and a Mantri, his counselor.”

“Like the queen,” Paige’s eyes were more engaged now. She was intrigued. “So, what’s the deal at Brown? What’s the game?”

“Pizza Margherita and two plates,” Paige jumped as the waiter dropped the meal on its rack in the center of the table, steam swirling in elegant patterns between them. “Anything else I can get for you?”

Alison gave a little smile. “This looks great, thanks.”

The two made an unspoken agreement not to touch the pizza until it or the conversation had cooled sufficiently. Alison took the interruption as an opportunity to briefly study Paige. She was compact in stature and spoke with a bubbly spark. An All-American gymnast in high school. She was quick-witted and thoughtful. Alison could picture her dropping from an air-duct on an unsuspecting Elephant asset, a look of dread and confusion on his agape, privilege-chiseled jaw. Paige went for a sort-of grungy look these days. Acid-washed 501s. Tattered brown canvas bomber, a mauve hoodie peeking out from beneath. Piercings. Alison had never considered herself posh before, but next to Paige she felt posh. And tall. She was losing focus. She clapped her hands and started in on Paige’s question.

“Chaturanga is a game of position and capture played between four factions, in this case representing specific university departments, over the course of the academic year at Brown. Each faction may recruit nine assets, essentially field agents, to engage in tactical espionage missions to improve their positions toward the prime objectives.”

“The prime-”

“Each faction defends a small, ivory statuette of a Raja: actual artifacts from the Gupta Empire,” Alison was on a roll. She felt like Ewen McGregor’s Obi Wan explaining the ways of the Jedi to young Anakin, which is to say slightly hokey, but leaning into it. “A Raja must be displayed in plain sight in a faction’s territory. If captured and held until the end of the second term, it’s worth nine points.”

“So it’s Capture the Flag,” Paige intuited in a low, lengthy tone, her brain engaged in a light mental-gymnastic tumbling pass.

“Essentially, yeah,” she shrugged. “But with a few important differences. I think of Capture the Flag as a game about running. Chaturanga is more about planning, talking, thinking one step ahead of your opponent. It’s slower, more methodical. Missions can take weeks to develop. Position is gained and lost. Alliances are made and broken.”

“Do you wear little football flags around all year?” Paige posited through a giggle.

“We do,” Alison said, leaning out of an ambient shadow and gesturing to her coat. “Assets wear university pins on their right lapel. The pin is affixed to its base with a magnet. Pull the magnet off an asset and she’s dead. Your faction receives one point for eliminating an opposing asset.”

“Out of the game? For the rest of the year?”

“That’s right. And they can no longer talk about the game. No sharing intelligence, no plotting, no planning, no warning teammates of impending danger. Dead people don’t talk.”

Alison produced a second pin from her pocket and slid it under the pizza rack toward Paige, who started idly examining it. On its front face, a beautiful relief of the Brown University seal. Paige pulled on the seal, releasing it from its base. It was heartier than she’d imagined, requiring a forceful tug. The hidden side had an etching, equally beautiful, of an infantry soldier at attention.

Alison went on. “The underside depicts your faction’s symbol. Ours is the Footman. They actually change each year depending on how your team ranks.”

“So is that last place?”

“Sure is. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, AKA the Theatre Department, is very much the underdog these days.”

Paige was ready for pizza. She pulled three slices to her plate and started voraciously demolishing the nearest one. Alison was glad to have a friend who could eat and didn’t have any baggage about it. A fair share of her high school crew would give her judgy looks over their kale salads when Alison so much as thought about a carb. She smiled as she grabbed a slice and continued talking through mouthfuls of Buffalo mozzarella.

“Engineering won last year, so they received the coveted rank of Elephant. Psychology earned the rank of Chariot, the English department came in third to become the Cavalry, and that leaves us, the humble Footmen.”

Paige looked contemplative as she noshed away at a second slice. She abruptly pulled the top off her Dr. Pepper and wolfed down a massive gulp, leaving a trace of the black cherry elixir at the edge of her mouth. She toweled down with an errant sleeve and looked Alison in the eye. “Why?” she asked, finally. “Why do you do this?”

“I mean, there is a technical answer to that question,” Alison started. She tried for another swig of tea but was denied by the cruel sputter of straw against empty vessel. Paige tore the top off Alison’s cup and decanted a helping of Dr. Pepper from her own. Alison nodded in appreciation and continued. “There is an undergraduate prize awarded each year: The Thomas Carpenter Prize for Elocution. University departments vote on the winner. But there’s no actual contest, and the whole thing seemed arbitrary to the various academic leads. So, years ago, four department heads proposed a chess tournament to determine the winner of their collective votes. And, over time, the ante kept getting upped until we have what we have today: Chaturanga, the secret abomination.”

Paige threw an eyebrow. “But there are like 40 departments now.”

“Yeah. Stacking four votes is now functionally a hollow gesture. I don’t think it ever really mattered, actually. I interpret it as a sort of grand protest to the pomp and circumstance that academia is always putting on completely meaningless things.”

Paige smiled. It was a bright, mischievous, smile. She was getting it. “So, it’s a big, inconsequential, secret underground club that does cloak-and-dagger spy missions, but just for fun?”

Alison put a finger to her lip and considered how silly it all sounded in Paige’s concise summary.

“Yes.”

***

Alison took a beat to absorb the lush, gothic beauty of the campus as she and Paige veered off George Street past the steps of Rhode Island Hall and onto the main mall. Fall foliage lit the oaks and maples aflame, a few crimson stars spiraling down toward the base of the massive Ionic columns that guarded the egress to John Carter Brown Library. The columns sent the eye upward, toward the heavens, where the structure was embellished by a dramatic Hellenistic frieze, complete with Zeus’s eagles to protect the coveted knowledge within.

The sheer heft of the concourse reminded Alison of how fortunate she felt to be studying at Brown, and by extension, her deeply rooted passion for theatre. Anchored by an early love of language and literature, accented regularly by the whirlwind of nervous commotion pervasive to her mind and body in performance, theatre charged her every particle with love and joy and fear and epinephrine. Theatre demanded that she take in the language, to embody it and become it: to channel its eldritch energy through the conduit of her body and release it in a rogue wave. She breathed in sharply. I am so stupid lucky, she thought.

Alison was on full scholarship. She balanced a full course load with work as a carpenter in the scene shop, and occasional moonlighting as a bartender at a hipster spot downtown called The Eddy. Even then, she had to take out student loans to keep up. Contrary to popular belief, there are poor neighborhoods in Providence. Aly grew up sharing a one-bedroom apartment with her mom in Smith Hill. She got the room– her mother would sleep on a pull-out in the living room. Sometimes she told herself that a BFA in theatre was a bit of a fool’s gambit if she had any notion of changing her stars. But then, looking out at the neatly-trimmed mall, its crisp, baleful New England architecture in full bloom, she was tidily reminded that “I went to Brown” was something of a skeleton key to many of life’s sternly-guarded gates.

The autumn-touched deciduous trees lining the mall looked like torches adorning an ancient corridor. She looked over at Paige. Her legs were ridiculously short compared to Alison’s somewhat lanky frame, and she took nearly twice as many steps to move at the same pace. She had her hands in her pockets, which she occasionally removed to crack a few contemplative knuckles.

“I have some questions,” Paige blurted, breaking several-minutes’ silence. Alison nodded her forward. “First, why are you recruiting so late? The game’s been going since August.”

Alison smiled. “The Lord Chamberlain’s Men are often targeted early in the game. Theatre majors are seen by the other divisions as weak-willed, lacking in mental faculty. We’re trying something new this year: running a short roster.”

“How does that work?” Paige inquired, gears spinning behind her light brown eyes.

“The first few months typically involve gathering intelligence on opposing factions. Figuring out their rosters, whereabouts, movements. We figure running a short list will keep them guessing, maybe drive them crazy trying to unveil the identities of operatives that don’t exist.”

Paige gave an approving chuckle. “How many are you running?”

“Six. We want to keep it there. So, in the unfortunate but inevitable event of an asset’s demise, we have the elbow room to swap out for a fresh soul. Believe it or not, dear Paige, I was the first of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to draw blood. So I’ve been given the honor to select my new partner. I should also mention at this point that I very much got my last partner killed. I’m a wild card, Paige!”

Paige let out a hearty laugh at that. Alison’s energy was infectious. But after a moment’s respite, her face fell in hesitation. “Okay, that brings me to my next question: why me?”

Alison was startled to think that Paige had even an inkling of self-doubt. To her, Paige was an obvious choice. Sharp, ambitious, athletic. She was completely trustworthy and good company to boot. Though they didn’t have much social contact outside of school, Paige and Alison bonded last spring semester during a production of King Lear. They played sisters Reagan and Goneril, whose vile aspirations drove them to gouge out the eyes of the lecherous Lord Gloucester. They had spent many loopy, twilight hours together in Lyman Hall, memorizing lines and working intricate blocking. They had also taken Stage Combat Two together, required for the roles, and found trust in each other as sparring partners. Her somersault-takedown of Malibu Ken had, in fact, been pulled right out of Paige’s playbook.

While there is no bond greater than the one shared by two undergrads gouging a man’s eyes out with four-inch heels, that wasn’t Alison’s angle on this pass. “The game,” she began, “has become a bit of a boy’s club. There’s too many, they’re too smug, and they’re incredibly patronizing: even the ones on your own team!”

“So you just want another girl,” Paige offered.

Alison could see traces of skepticism start to creep into Paige’s expression. “Just another girl isn’t going to cut it. It’s gotta be you, pumpkin. You’re fast. You can fight. You think for yourself. And I trust you.”

Paige scrunched her face. “I don’t know, Aly. It’s just– kind of weird.”

“Paige, listen.” Alison stopped walking and squared her shoulders to face Paige directly. The sun was starting to fall beneath the Doric colonnade that ran across the ingress of Manning Hall. A streetlamp flicked on overhead, illuminating Alison in warm amber light. She paused to gather her thoughts, perforated by a sharp gulp. “Everything I’ve ever fought for, I had to fight harder. Privilege, disadvantage– they’re irrevocably woven into society, and I get it. I can accept that. I can work with that. And it’s fine. Well, it’s not fine, but it’s the canvas we’re dealing with.”

Alison crossed her arms and looked south as the last of the sunlight faded rapidly on the lush, trim grass beyond. She exhaled deeply and looked back at Paige. She went on. “This game is the first thing I’ve experienced with any semblance of an even playing field. As much as they talk down and condescend, they don’t cheat. So, if I’m at my best, I can, for the first time in my life, face the world with a pinch of objectivity. Without wondering about the role of my circumstances on my outcomes. And you know what, Paige? I think you and I could be the real deal. Being underestimated– it might actually put us at an advantage. We could change the whole picture!”

The sun was gone, now. A few more streetlamps snapped to life, breathing soft light onto the long walkway between Hope College and Arnold Lab, parallel to the sweeping red brick architecture of Waterman Street. A long shadow came into focus across their path as a light popped into existence to the west.

“Okay,” said Paige. “Let’s– let’s beat up some boys.”

“That’s the spirit,” Alison cried with a wave of ribaldry. “Good timing, too.”

Paige looked up as Alison bestowed a silver pin onto her lapel. She followed Alison’s eyes westward.

“Because that guy’s been following us for twelve blocks.”