Six Towers for a Road
A FABLE ABOUT GIVING GROUND
Two cities of crystal chessmen stood at the far ends of a long bridge, and the bridge was always under snow. The cities did not touch. Nothing joined them but the bridge, and the bridge belonged to the game — a game so old that nobody remembered its opening move, and so shaped that it had no closing one. The winter played one side, and the winter is not an opponent you checkmate.
When the winter wished to declare itself, it set its king down among the pawns: a giant’s hand out of the grey, placing the tall piece in the front rank, as if to say, there is nothing on this board I need to fear.
The other side had crystal towers, crystal knights, crystal pawns — and one small walker in a red robe, the only warm color the snow had failed to bury. She was not the strongest piece on the board. She was the piece that kept moving.
Every turn, the winter took something. That is what winters do. The hand came down, and a tower crumbled — beautifully, the way crystal crumbles, into more snow. The cities gasped and kept an honest ledger of all they lost. The walker did not gasp. She took one step along the bridge and let the tower go.
Taking is not the same as catching.
Six towers she spent that winter — six! mourned the ledger — and every one of them bought the same small, priceless thing: the hand came down where she had been, and she was somewhere else. The winter never missed, and never once hit her. It was winning every exchange and losing every turn, and it could not tell the difference, because the ledger it read was the cities’ ledger, and her account was kept in steps.
A crystal knight asked her, near the end of the season, how she intended to win.
“I don’t,” said the walker. “There is no winning in this game. The winter is too large to corner and too old to tire. But there is no catching in it either, so long as I pay for my road as I go. The towers were the price of the road. The road is where I live.”
And the game went on, as it always had and always would. The winter kept taking; the walker kept walking; and if you ask who was ahead, the ledger says the winter, and the bridge says the walker — and the game is played on the bridge.
The moral, scratched in the frost: in a game without an end, the score is movement — ground given for a road is not ground lost, and nothing has beaten you while you can still choose your step.
