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saint of peace, to stay by him, and to make the war end soon.
    I was not to have much time to worry, however. Diplomatic duties did not end with my father’s absence. Instead, I was required to attend even more of them. My father’s mother, Anna Dalassena, commanded my presence whenever dignitaries were in attendance. My father owed his throne, at least in part, to her intelligence, and he trusted her more than anyone else. My mother never showed any interest in statecraft, so it was to Anna Dalassena that the emperor turned when in need of counsel.
    The war lasted far longer and was more complicated than anyone had thought, and was grandly called a Crusade, or war for the Holy Cross. This Crusade would turn out to be just the first of several, although we did not know that at the time. Foreign soldiers, rulers, ambassadors, and traders of all sorts flooded the city as theyprepared to join my father’s troops, and we were forced to deal with them.
    My grandmother sat in my father’s high throne, wearing imperial robes. The differences between them became even more obvious when I saw her in my father’s accustomed place. She was tall where he was short, and she had large, slanted eyes, where his were round and open. His hair was short, and simply dressed, as befitted a soldier, whereas her long black hair was arranged in the most complicated coils and braids I had ever seen. I would spend long minutes during these audiences trying to trace one strand of hair as it wound through a braid, across her head, down a tress, behind her ear. I would always lose the strand and have to start over. This practice would make me so sleepy that I would have to stop and pay attention to the speeches in an attempt to keep awake.
    One day the baron of some small province had come to ask my grandmother for a reduction in taxes. As I listened to his pleas, and to my grandmother’s skillful way of rejecting them, I began to see the encounter as a kind of game. A new game called chess was wildly popular in the palace. The rules were not very complicated, but there were endless strategies for dealing the death blow to the opponent’s king. I pictured the baron, dressed in his shabby best, as a weak little pawn on a chessboard as he pled his pitiful case.
    “Your Majesty,” he said, facedown on the floor, “the crops have been poor after a long drought in our province. My people have been starving. Most of the men have left for the war, and there are few to work the fields. The foreignershave brought illness with them, and many of my people have died. What little they have managed to grow, they have eaten, with nothing left over to pay taxes.”
    “This is not the emperor’s concern,” responded my grandmother. “Your farmers must have committed some sin for God to punish them by withholding the rain.” Aha, I thought—her bishop has attacked the pawn.
    “Indeed not,” protested the baron, daring to look up. “We are a God-fearing folk.”
    “Then why do you ask me to reduce your taxes at a time when the emperor needs all the funds he can raise to win the Holy City of Jerusalem back from the infidels?” she questioned him. Now her knight was on the attack. The baron was silent. I wondered if, like me, he could see chess pieces, one by one, being swept off the board.
    “And besides,” added my grandmother, “I have no power to reduce the taxes. This is in the emperor’s hands, and I would be stealing from him if I allowed you to pay less than your requirement.”
    Shah mat,
I thought. Checkmate. The king is dead. The baron probably knew as well as I did that whenever my father left the country, he signed a proclamation giving my grandmother imperial powers. But the baron did not dare contradict her to her face, so he left defeated.
    After this I started looking forward to the audiences, to see what weapons my grandmother would pull out. Sometimes she was a chess player, and other times she reminded me of a fencer, probing the