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thecrenellations · 8 months

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me running around in circles about the parallels that come together at the end of Checkmate:

(yeah)

what it says on the tin, below. Contains maximum spoilers.

(also contains references to themes of suicide, sexual violence, live chess, etc, because everything is connected.)

and because everything is connected, this is something like how it flows together in my brain. I’m not sure if it makes sense outside of it, and it’s certainly not exhaustive. I was mostly thinking about Marthe and Francis vs Kuzúm and Khaireddin. Bringing Sybilla, for example, more directly into it is a whole other spiral…

anyway:

As Francis decides whether Khaireddin or Kuzúm will die, Jerott asks, Which? The one who had experienced love and a modicum of happiness, or the one who had not.

Lymond said, “Marthe.” Marthe is the piece that takes Khaireddin. I think about Khaireddin as Marthe, sacrificed, while Francis and Kuzúm, loved by Philippa, are saved. Strangers switched as infants; siblings switched at death. In Amiens, Marthe convinces Sybilla to bully her son back to life. In Edinburgh, Philippa convinces Francis to spare Gabriel in order to save the son he has just learned exists. “I will not fail you, ever.”

Which child? The one whose life had been innocent, or the one who had been earliest corrupted and whose first uncertain steps had just been taken towards his birthright of friendship and joy?

Philippa rides to St. Mary’s with information that will destroy Joleta and Gabriel. Francis lets Gabriel kill Joleta when he could have died in her place, and I think about it as a sacrifice of his sixteen-year-old, vilified self. Like how Francis lets Khaireddin die to finally kill Gabriel. Khaireddin is Marthe, but he’s also another version of Francis, whether or not he’s his son. And the knight was the child who had not yet known happiness; the child Lymond had drawn to himself. Who is corrupted, and who is innocent? Who gets to know happiness?

“Then allow me to take the child’s place. I have no objections.” Roxelana and Güzel refuse, Khaireddin dies, and Philippa makes Francis promise to live. Marthe has told her he will not want to and told her brother that Philippa will not be thinking of herself. The marriage holds longer than the promise, but he still lives.

When Güzel is dead and Francis has made a new promise to his mother to live and return home, Marthe rides to Philippa’s home with news that would destroy Richard. Richard tries to save Marthe, but Austin destroys her, and they both do so thinking she is Francis. Depending how you count, there are four Crawford siblings and two of them are bastards. “Your father’s two sons will never meet again.”

“Like your son, I am a bastard.” “No, my dear. Forgive me, but I think you are a bastard like nobody else.” Marthe comes to England and dies before reaching Scotland. Francis tries to leave Scotland forever, to keep his brother safe. He fails. “Richard will be safe.” For the sake of someone he is just beginning to love, he does not let himself drown. The irony of “not yet.” He fails that Richard, too. It is an impossible task. The Crawford brothers take turns riding through the night to find each other alive and fracture again. Richard can never learn why Francis left, because that is the truth that would destroy him. And the sacrifice Francis made was unnecessary.

"Five years—even five such as these—can’t tear me drop by drop from your blood." Francis thinks of 1547-8 as the year he fought his brother. Richard’s sole, desperate purpose is to kill Francis, and he saves him instead. Francis’s purpose is to save Richard, and he tries, so hard, to kill himself. “I’m here to help you. You’re going to be free.” What can ten years tear apart?

Ten years later, Marthe says, “I am going to move the pieces. I am going to direct the end of the game.” Nostradamus tells her her part is still to come. In Constantinople, Francis is king and Marthe is queen. But Roxelana watches, and Güzel watches, making sacrifice necessary. In Dumbarton, the father of one pawn finds the mother of the second in his room. Adam watches, and then Richard finds them both. “So this is the outcome of it all. This is why Tom Erskine preserved you; why Christian Stewart died and Gabriel has worked to redeem you … for this. Francis, I would sooner have discovered you dead.” Richard doesn’t mention what he did that year, himself. The year he saved his brother. “Francis! I can’t let you take your own life.”

Lymond screamed once with agony, and then screamed and screamed again.

Joleta screamed three times, a thin, breathy kind of scream, with her hands spread rigid, like shining, flesh-eating plants before her.

In Volos, Francis will not let himself scream. He recites, and Marthe joins him. “I called you sister. Was I right?” “Yes. What made you sure?” “The luggage of poetry you carry.” In the sweet summer’s dell north of Hexham, Richard tells stories of everything but their father and does not want Francis to explain about Eloise. But, before that, it’s Richard who brings her up minutes before Francis stabs himself with his brother’s knife. God, Francis had screamed.

"My sister … Who will speak for her? ... Are you so short of rods that you must despoil young trees: so short of stones that you need to walk the very graveyards for them...?"

It’s a series bookended by dead sisters, dead by powder. Francis asks those questions when his own trial drags up rumors. If they were about Gabriel’s abuse of Joleta, they would be true. In Moscow, the night Francis comes to her room, Güzel says, “I too have had my Margaret Lennox and my Agha Morat and my child-whore Joleta Reid Malett.” But who is she? I think of Joleta, Míkál, and Philippa in his rooms in Dumbarton, Thessalonika, Constantinople, and Paris. Those are four very different nights. On one, he calls out to Eloise.

“I am going to call on Philippa, when we get to London. What will you do if I take her straight to my lodging and rape her?” Austin was very white. “Kill you,” he said. “If I can.”

Is Joleta innocent or corrupted when her brother kills her on the stairs? How much does it change the meaning of what Francis did to her at Dumbarton? That year, Philippa’s moves in the game are to tell Trotty Luckup’s version of Joleta’s story and to spare Gabriel to save Khaireddin. Which child?

Two great women who play with fate steer Philippa towards Kuzúm and towards Francis. In Algiers, a pawn’s mother dies and Oonagh turns to fire. Lymond was dedicated. And she…she was the sacrifice. He doesn’t know she is alive, and then he doesn’t know that he will find her dead. To Francis Crawford, this unknown son was a tragedy of which he must never learn. But he does learn. He sees her, but she will never see him again.

There were other children, and nothing to tell her whether the bubbling purr she heard at night, of a baby full and content, was his. … She did not know Khaireddin’s scream, or the sound Francis Crawford might have made when once he too was branded for the galleys.

This child; this unknown son of his blood, was worth one life: his own. … This, one felt of one’s son. Was it not also true of Gabriel’s?

In the chess game, who knows whose child is whose? Who makes sure they are there? Kiaya Khátún, with her whims, switches children and lovers. Marthe and Jerott marry each other as substitutes for Güzel and Francis. Philippa marries Francis because he promises to preserve his own one life. Francis believes that to live and return would be to kill his brother. Forced to go home, he believes he will return to Güzel.

Güzel, who was dead.

Francis reminds Archie that Philippa has released him from his promise. Archie has saved him so many times before. So has Jerott, who knocks the opium out of Francis’s hands and turns it to powder. So Francis decides to die joyfully, in fire and flood, ground by a burning mill on a river. Jerott pulls him from the river anyway, and holds him in his arms as he faces his mother and comes back to life, surrounded by love and tapers burning like Oonagh’s. "My life has a rudimentary value in that you were moved to preserve it." In Amboise and Blois, Oonagh leaves his survival to chance, but she also saves him.

“No. Oh Christ, no. It should have happened long ago.” Jerott knows that he has taken away a death Francis wanted. He stops Richard from intervening and lets Austin kill the rider none of them know is Marthe. “Don’t stop it. No one else could do it for him.” Jerott kills Austin without knowing whose death he’s avenging. It is the death of Marthe, who wanted her own life. The words from the garden in Djerba come to Jerott once he knows, as Francis and Philippa embrace. My beloved is dead.

As he aims, Austin is so sure he’s the only one who sees the real Francis Crawford, rotten and arrogant and undeserving of life. “Is it for this thou wast created?” thinks Philippa, who first saw Marthe as a shadow and a voice and mistook her for Francis. For Marthe, the answer to that question is yes. “Poor sister. A pawn more helpless even than…”

They had used a knife, so the child’s face was not distorted.

He aimed into the fair, weary, rancourless face, and then at the heart, and both balls found their mark and brought death in the end.

“Consider: who — stretching the imagination, of course, to its most grotesque outer limits — might be taken for my younger brother.”

Acting and not acting, Marthe speaks with the voice of the woman who created both of them, a dead chessmaster who won’t be silent. “You will harm her,” Francis warns Camille. Marthe tells Jerott, “I enjoy acting, as he does. The human scene is well rid of us both.” Many agree. Richard says to his brother, “My dear, you are only a boy. You have all your life still before you.”

“God damn you both. You summon and you throw away. You treat love like a bird for the table… Like a pawn, now in frankincense, now discarded and thrown in the dirt. You don’t know what love is, either of you. And God help us and you, if you ever find out.”

“Whatever made you think you were free? But because of you there will be something, I promise you, by which men will know Francis Crawford has been.”

“There’s an unnatural conspiracy to keep me alive, that’s all.”

“How do you take leave, for all time, of a brother?”

They set off that evening to take Marthe Crawford to the home of her fathers, which she had never known.

And they bury her in the dirt of Midculter, which her brother owns and will never own, where Kuzúm knows happiness.

#stringboard vortex of themes #I rest my case #it’s been fun to poke at over the last few weeks #quote fun unquote #lymond chronicles #checkmate #dorothy dunnett #francis crawford #and company #something i #lymond #lymond chronicles spoilers #marthe

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