The Doctor looked down at the board, sighed, and gently knocked over the king with one finger. Lost again. That was the problem of playing chess with yourself. You always lost. And he wasn't playing Bobby Fischer again. That had gone very wrong. Very wrong indeed. He hated it when people bandied about phrases like "brought the world to the brink of nuclear war". The Doctor frowned to himself. What he really needed was someone to play chess with who wouldn't take it too seriously. Someone who wouldn't get really upset when he beat them. Henrik and Annar stared hard at the board. They were trying to keep it sheltered high up on the prow. where there was a little space just underneath the dragon's neck that decorated the front of the longship. away from the bosun's prying eyes. If he knew they were playing with his second most precious piece of cargo, there'd be trouble. But there wasn't much else to do nearly a full moon's turn out from land, once your rowing stint was over and you'd talked about as many girls as you could mention in one breath, and the meat was turning green and you could scarcely remember a world where the horizon didn't move up and down constantly: where your clothes weren't wet from dawn to dusk, and you at the same dry bread.