The Giant's Almanac Andrew Zurcher (books to read fiction TXT) 📖

a master, the possible moves are so well understood that the first motion implies the last. The master knows how the adversary will respond. Nothing is left to chance, and in this way the game has no true middle. The purpose of learning this mansūba, you who would be Master in my place, the purpose of learning all mansūbat, is to control the middle. The master who understands the middle, destroys it. And then the game is already ended.’

The Master began with Dilaram, but he taught many other problems as well. Each, like Dilaram, was not just a configuration of pieces on the board, not just a set of strategies for ending the game, but a story, too, by which the problem and its associated moves could be understood. In ad-Dulabiya, the waterwheel, two emerald horsemen chased the ruby shāh around the board in two or even three large circles, before capturing him on his own home square; this, said the Master, recalled the history of the campaigns of Tamburlaine, whose armies circled the world like a great scythe, reaping men, until the day that Tamburlaine himself died of a fever not far from his home. Or, again, he showed them the Arrow, a problem in which the ruby rokh, the chariot, struck across the length of the whole board, removing a single emerald sarbaz, or foot soldier, and so set the stage for the conclusion of the game. This problem the Master illustrated with the story of a strange coincidence, in which a man crushed with debt fired a single arrow into the clouds, which, carried by the winds across his city, over many houses and across the river, struck the malicious creditor who was bent on ruining him, and so saved both him and his family from destruction. Day after day, problem after problem, the Master unfolded the predicament on the board, narrated the story that lay behind it, and explained its meaning before showing his two pupils how to bring the game to a close.

Given the origins of shatranj in warfare, it was not surprising to Fitz that these problems – many of which he already knew – should recall famous battles or bear the name of the kings who had fought them. One, which the Master called al-Nadirah, described a situation where one player – unable to penetrate the defences of the other, and locked into repetitive and circular play – at last seemed to relent in the attack, giving up his wazir, or counsellor. The purpose of this sacrifice was only to open the second player’s fortified defence, after which, despite the loss of his wazir, the first player was able quickly to pick off his opponent’s pieces and force his shāh to his knees. The Master told them how Shapur, crown prince of Persia, had been playing shatranj outside the gates of the city of Hatra during a long siege. Able neither to win the game nor to penetrate the city, but advised that the daughter of the city’s king, known as al-Nadirah, had fallen passionately in love with him, he sent her a messenger promising to marry her if she should defy her father and open the gates. When later that night the gates were opened, Shapur stood up from his game, saying that he had seen how both the game and the city could be won, and that the tale of both was ended. He destroyed the city of Hatra and executed its king; but the daughter he married, as he had promised, before he executed her, too, as a punishment for betraying her father.

On other afternoons, the Master showed them mansūbat of a less bloody character. One problem that Fitz particularly loved was the story of the wren’s love for her mate. The Master began with a tabiyya in which one player had layered the shāh with two perimeters of defensive protection. ‘This,’ said the Master, ‘is the nest of the wren.’ The pieces were so configured that no side could attack the other without sustaining unacceptable losses, but the Master showed Fitz and Dina how the first player, safe in the ‘nest’, could exploit the mobility of the wazir to lure the other player to launch feeble attacks with petty pieces, trifles the loss of which appeared to pose no risk. Again and again these pawns were sent forward, and again and again the first player nibbled them up with little twitches of the shāh. Eventually the wazir had fed its mate so many of these little pieces that the shāh was able to fly from the nest, attack the second player, and end the game.

Fitz delighted in these afternoon sessions with the Master. He forgot that he was not at home; or, he felt that he was again at home. He committed to memory every one of the hundreds of problems – those that he knew already, and those that he did not – and by night he rehearsed them in his head, lying in his bed in the dark tower with the pieces arranged on an imaginary board. Quite naturally, the problems presented on the board began to stand as symbols not only for the stories that the Master told to explain them, but also for all the other things he had encountered in the day, in each of his lessons. The movement of the tides and the currents of the world’s oceans, the circulation of populations within the walls of a city, the spread of a virus throughout the human body, the charging and discharging of a battery, the flow of green in a painting or the gesture of the body in a model he had worked from clay – no matter what it was, it began to meld with the structure and the strategies of the problems that the Master presented each afternoon, in the quiet withdrawal of his study in the north tower of the Mastery. This, this was the master language that controlled and