Captain Castle

He was on his usual square at the corner of the board, eighth rank, white side, exactly the place where rooks are expected to belong before any reasonable person has decided what to do with them, and he was thinking, with some quiet alarm, about how he had not moved in eleven consecutive games. Eleven games, in fairness, is not a long time for a rook. Some rooks do not move once in their entire careers. The Captain personally knew rooks who had occupied the same single square for forty years and considered themselves, by their own account, extremely busy. But on that particular Wednesday, in that particular position, the Captain found himself thinking, in a voice he could not quite ignore:

If I never move again, what exactly will I have done?

Now, this is not the sort of thought a rook can un-think, once it has presented itself. Once a rook starts asking what he has actually done with his life, the answer tends to be approximately: moved in a straight line, occasionally, and almost always at the request of someone else. That is the rook's job. It is an honourable job. The Captain had never resented it for an instant. But on that particular Wednesday afternoon, the question sat down in the square beside him and made itself comfortable for what looked like a long stay.

He looked across the board with what he hoped was idle curiosity. The opposing rook was sitting in the same kind of corner, performing the same kind of nothing. Down the file, a pair of pawns were having a small and almost shy argument about which of them would advance first. A bishop sailed past on the long diagonal, looking inexplicably pleased with himself. Two knights leapt over each other in opposite directions, both convinced they had ambushed something.

And the Captain thought, with no particular drama: I have watched all of this for a very long time.

He had watched, by his own careful count, eleven thousand games. He had been a participant in three thousand of them. In the other eight thousand, he had simply sat — in a box, on a shelf, in a tournament hall, in the back room of a tea-house in a village whose name he could no longer correctly pronounce. He had heard explanations of moves he himself was making, given by old players to younger ones. He had heard the same explanations given badly, given well, given with kindness and given with impatience. He had once watched a child weep over a lost knight, and then two games later watched the same child win with a knight, and watched the parent across the table fail to notice the small private triumph in the child's face.

He thought: I know more stories than I have told.

He thought: That seems wrong.

He moved that turn — a tidy a8 to a1, picking off a careless bishop on the way — and the game ended four moves later in what was, all things considered, a fair result. The pieces were boxed up. The board was folded for the evening. The light in the room turned to that particular evening colour that boards take on after a game has finished, which is a colour Captain Castle had loved for as long as he could remember.

He sat in the box that night with his three closest neighbours — two bishops named Marigold and Marrow, and a knight named Ferret — and he said, quietly, in the dim:

"I think I would like to talk about chess, rather than play it."

Marigold (who was sensible) said: "Talk to whom?"

The Captain said: "To children. I would like to tell them about the pieces. Not the moves. The pieces themselves. Who they are. Why they do what they do."

Marrow (who was less sensible but kinder) said: "Like what?"

The Captain considered the question. He said: "Like — there is a librarian I have heard of, in the Slow Lake village. He sees pins in books that nobody else can see. I would like to bring him to a chessboard and show the children how he sees things."

Marigold said, after a long pause: "He sees pins. In books."

The Captain said: "Yes. Exactly."

Ferret, who had not been listening properly all evening, said: "Will there be snacks?"

The Captain, who had a longstanding soft spot for Ferret, said: "Yes. There will be snacks."

He did not announce his retirement at a great gathering. He did not give a speech, which would have surprised everyone who knew him. He simply did not turn up for his next scheduled tournament, and when his tournament-bag came looking for him three days later, the Captain was already walking down the road towards the Slow Lake, slowly, in the way rooks walk when they have decided to take their time about something.

It was a long road, and he took longer than the road required. He stopped to talk to a baker about why his bread always rose more in the corners. He stopped to listen to a child explain a knight's tour she had invented in chalk on a stone bridge. He stopped, almost by accident, in a meadow and watched a flock of geese for nearly an hour without thinking about chess at all. None of these things were chess. All of them, the Captain privately felt, were somehow the same shape as chess. He could not yet explain why. He thought he might be able to explain it later. He was, in fact, beginning to suspect that explaining things later was going to be his entire new job.

He arrived at the library door on the seventh day of walking. He knocked.

Pinwell answered the library door slowly, the way he answered everything. He was holding a small teacup. He said: "Yes?"

The Captain said: "I have come to ask if you would consider teaching children about the pin."

Pinwell said, very quietly: "I suppose I should bring my notebook."

And the Captain, who had been steady on his square for eleven consecutive games without so much as a flinch, felt for the first time in a very long while that he was about to do something interesting.

The academy was not, in those first months, much of an academy at all. It was a converted tea-house at the edge of the village. The first class had four children in it. The first lesson lasted twenty minutes, which was about ten minutes longer than the Captain had planned for, because the children kept asking follow-up questions. He had forgotten about follow-up questions. He had been on the board too long, and the board does not interrupt.

Pinwell taught the pin in the second half of that first class. The Captain, after introducing him with what he hoped was the right amount of dramatic restraint, stepped to the side of the room, folded his short rook-arms behind his back, and watched the proceedings with growing interest.

He watched the children watch Pinwell.

He watched the precise moment — and there was a moment, definite and locatable — when the fox in the green scarf wrote a sentence in her notebook that she did not strictly need to write. She was writing it because she wanted to remember it. The Captain had seen that kind of writing eleven thousand times in his career, in the hands of older players, in the corners of tournament halls. He had never been the one teaching the writer of it.

After the lesson, when the children had left and the lamps had been turned down for the evening, he sat with Pinwell on the front step of the tea-house. The light had turned that colour again, which the Captain had begun to think of as the teaching colour.

"Pinwell," said the Captain, slowly. "Would you mind if I asked the other librarians? The ones I have heard about?"

Pinwell considered the question. "Other librarians?"

"In other villages. Each one sees something different. The lady in the southern village sees skewers — front piece smaller, back piece bigger. The twin foxes in the hills see forks. A grandmother in the eastern marsh sees the line behind the line, what I am told the players call an X-ray. And there is a winter ranger who arrives at outposts before anyone expects her to — she does not yet know it, but I think she sees the queen."

Pinwell took a small sip of tea. He said: "I think they would come, if you asked them properly."

The Captain wrote letters that night. He wrote them slowly, because he had not written letters in a long time, and his handwriting was rusty from disuse. He addressed them, one by one, to a librarian, to a southern bookseller, to twin foxes in a hill village, to a marsh-dwelling grandmother, and to a post office in a small town called Marrowmile. Each letter said roughly the same thing in slightly different words: I have heard of you. I would like you to come and tell the children what you see.

He licked the stamps. He posted the letters at the village postbox. He went home to the tea-house and considered, for the first time in his life, what he himself would say at his own first lesson.