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

sharp, so old that they can pick out those hidden flows of nothing that current all around us. They are the riders on dreams. There is hope yet, child.’

When the dawn came, and the air around them had begun to furze and felt with tiny dew, when the heather and grass of the meadow below them cupped its wide, grey hands like a prayer offered to the paling sky, then Fitz stood and shook off the pain and cold that had pinned him, as it had the Master, all night to the rock. He dropped down the hillside, boulder by boulder, and ran across the faint trail that divided the valley. With the last strength of his arms he pulled himself over the Gate of Resignation, stumbled over the lawns, and tripped through the wicket into the Heresiarch’s court.

The Jack, passing in the dawn like a monk meditating his own mysteries, did not recognize him. But the great albatross had coursed the meadow beside Fitz, feathering the wind rising at his back; and now it landed on his shoulder, and – broad, regal, intelligent – it spoke in a single shriek the whole history of the night the boy had passed beneath the cliffs, the horror of the man shackled to the rock, and the long suffering of his ordeal by the tombs. Then the Jack collected the crumbling child in his arms, and Fitz – passing almost out of this world – lay swaddled in his tower bed, and dreamed of nothing for days but of a rising white wing, spreading in pale air.

shãh mãt

As he pushed open the door to the library, the boy noticed that he had dirt on the sleeve of his cotton shirt – a little clod and an autumn burr that had attached themselves to him while he was playing in the wood beyond the garden outside. He was embarrassed to have brought dirt into this open, clean and silent house, and hesitated to carry it into the room. Picking it from his sleeve, he put it into his pocket.

‘Come in, my eyes, come in,’ the old man called from his chair. He was not alone. A long figure with a white beard sat at his side. Though he was the taller of the two, the low stool on which he lightly perched made him seem small, humble, as if he were a supplicant. Beneath a light grey, hooded cloak, he was impossibly gaunt, weathered as a saddle ridden many years beneath the sun. His eyes moved to the boy’s face as a cat might pounce on a bird.

‘This is the boy I was telling you about,’ said the old man to his guest. His voice had grown even feebler since they last met, when the boy had sat by his side to study mansūbat on the board, and to listen to his tale. Perhaps he had already been speaking for some time.

‘My friend Hožir is just leaving, child,’ said the old man. ‘Pour me a glass of water, and come, and take his place.’

The visitor stood up. He still had not let the boy slip from his gaze, but watched him intently. The boy was reluctant to turn aside and go to the table, where the pitcher stood, until the eyes had released him. In a few strides, these eyes had crossed the room: blue, and of an exhausting depth, they lay stirred before him like an evening sea. The visitor had clasped his hands before him as a monk might, or a solemn teacher, but now he took the boy’s chin between his thumb and forefinger, and raised it, so that he could search his eyes. What he sought in his eyes the boy didn’t know.

‘We will meet again, child,’ said the man, ‘but you will know me then by another name.’ The corners of his mouth, beneath the wisps of white beard, turned slightly as his eyes kindled with kindness. ‘Meanwhile, do not allow yourself to forget what you have seen.’

And then he slipped from the room. He had offered the old man no goodbye, and he made no sound on the stairs.

The boy poured water from the pitcher into a glass and brought it to the old man, who thanked him and drank. For several hours they sat together in silence before the ornate shatranj board, the old man laying out problems, and the boy first considering them, then proposing solutions with deft turns of his wrist and decisive twitches of his fingers.

At length the old man sat back and closed his eyes.

‘You see many things, my child. Never have I known a child to notice so much, so readily.’

The boy pulled the table into the corner of the room, moving slowly and with precision so as not to disturb the pieces in their arrangement on the board; their long game remained in play, and many days might yet pass before they should finish it. He retook his seat on the stool before the old man, and waited for him to continue his story. The old man seemed to doze for some time.

‘The playing of shatranj,’ he said very suddenly, his eyes still closed, ‘is nothing but the telling of a story. I have told you, my eyes, how many years ago I travelled to a far country to buy and sell merchandise, how I set up my wares in a certain city at the bazaar there and, as was my custom at that time, traded my store in three parts over three days. I told you also how I befriended a merchant in the bazaar, and how this merchant invited me to his house on the first night of our acquaintance, and told me the tale of a king and his brother, of a conspiracy, and of a great treasure. Lastly – it has not been many days – I told you how on the second day I