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

explained all the other languages, the world of pure symbols that offered a key to all other knowledge. Fitz began to think that, if he but understood these problems and memorized them, he would know everything that he needed to know about the world, and how to act within it. Any new discovery, thereafter, would be nothing more than a recognition, like saluting a trusted friend.

The Master’s study was a round room, the top storey of a round tower that rose from the north-east corner of his court. This turret was taller than the court’s other tower, the square tower in which Fitz’s room was located, and it was also a great deal more substantial. Four round windows, set high in the high walls, allowed very little light to the large space; the Master worked, instead, by the glow of a small gas lamp, and – Fitz supposed – in the winter by the light of a fire. The room was lined with bookshelves, which transformed the large circular space, at least at eye level, into a twelve-sided, wooden frame; the bays, each containing eight shelves, were numbered on plaques at each head, giving almost the impression that the room was a large clock. The bookshelves themselves appeared to be largely filled with manuscripts; the Master waved to them carelessly at one of their meetings, in answer to a query of Fitz’s, saying only, ‘the works of my predecessors in the Office of Master’. Fitz wondered if the Master had read them. His desk he always kept bare, anyway when the children were there, nor did Fitz ever see him open one of the many drawers that, on his side, made up the desk’s pedestals. In short, unlike the other Officers of the Heresy, who seemed to thrive on presenting the children with art, instruments, books, manuscripts, designs, models, visual puzzles, even weapons – the Master appeared to be much happier working with words, ideas, and the sorts of questions that Fitz and Dina could conjure in their own imaginations.

Except for the board – the gilt and silvered, jewelled, and finely carved board, over-written with ancient verses and set with pieces each one of which might have purchased a kingdom. But what made it more precious, by far, was that Fitz knew that it was his, that in taking it from the cupboard on that first afternoon, and setting it on the table before them, the only object of any interest to the Master in the whole room, the Master was making a gesture to Fitz not only clear, but secret. In the simple laying of the board on the table, it was as if he told him, ‘You and I will communicate, now, silently, in this language, and everything that we say to one another on this board will be significant.’ In that single moment and in that simple gesture, he laid the foundations for a poetry of understanding with which Fitz could struggle each night, running over the individual moves and the patterns that they created as if they were so many verses, so many lines or stanzas, the constituent coordinates of a complex song that spoke to him of fate, of love, of war, of hope, of patience, of ambition, of daring, of understanding. He saw that the board was an endlessly capacious and precise instrument for thinking, on which one could calculate and conclude solutions for every problem faced by the human mind or heart; moreover, if the board was an instrument in that sense, in another sense, too, it worked like an instrument – that is, like a violin, or a harp, some rhapsodic medium through which the most beautiful music could be created and enjoyed.

Fitz was thus not surprised when, one afternoon about a fortnight after the afternoon sessions with the Master had begun, he interrupted their discussion of mansūbat somewhat early, with a strange question.

‘Why, my Apprentices, do masters sit down opposite one another at the board to play?’

‘To win,’ said Dina, immediately.

‘But if the tabiyya is as we have shown it to be, and if each of the players knows the skill and knowledge of the other, then the game is already ended before it can begin.’

‘That is correct,’ said Dina.

‘So why bother playing at all?’

‘To prove that the game is as it should be. To prove that one is the best.’

‘There are mansūbat that I have not yet shown you. These are intractable and insoluble problems. They lead to situations in which neither player can win the game. The Spider’s Web, the Whirlpool, the Desolation – these problems describe situations where the play cannot continue because it must always continue. Would two masters sit down opposite one another, if they believed that the game would end in this way?’

‘Never. No general would lead an army into a field where neither side could claim the victory. Even a poet would not begin to tell a story that had no end. The general would choose another field. The poet would choose another story.’

The Master sat back in his tall chair. He took off his tall hat and set it on the desk by his side. Fitz had rarely seen him without his hat. For the first time, he noticed that the Master’s thick, black hair had a streak of grey growing through its centre. He regarded the children quietly for a few moments.

‘And you, little brother?’ he asked, a wry smile on his face as he called Fitz by Dina’s preferred epithet. ‘What do you think?’

‘A true master loves the game for its own sake. To the true master,’ said Fitz, ‘the movements of the pieces on the board speak the language of birds in flight, or the stars in motion. Like the constellations they whisper the secrets of things that grow and die and grow again. A true master longs to hear this language, and if the true master wins at a game, it will not be long before the game begins