Sir Sidetrack

The badger's name was Ora, and she was seven, and she caught him at it.

She had watched, from behind a barrel, as Sir Sidetrack tipped his hat to the watchman, mentioned — ever so gently — that smoke seemed to be curling from the guardhouse window, and then, while the watchman bolted off to save his supper, walked a squeaking wheelbarrow of turnips clean across the bridge.

"You made him leave," said Ora, stepping out. It was not quite an accusation. She was too interested for that.

"I did," said Sir Sidetrack, setting down the wheelbarrow. He did not lie to children; he found it beneath him. "The bridge is his to guard. But he cannot guard the bridge and save his supper. I only reminded him about the supper."

"That's cheating."

"Is it?" said Sir Sidetrack. "I did not push him. I did not fight him. I gave him a job he could not refuse, and he chose it himself. His feet did the rest." He considered the little badger. "The watchman was doing two jobs at once — mind the bridge, mind the guardhouse. A body cannot do two jobs at once. So I picked the one I wanted him to do, and left him to it."

Ora chewed on this. Then she said, slowly, "You sidetracked him. You pulled him off onto the other track."

Sir Sidetrack removed his hat entirely, which for him was a great honour.

"Sidetrack," he said. "I have wanted a word for it for twenty years. That is precisely the one."

Three winters on, a chunky cheerful rook in a brass-buttoned waistcoat found him mending a satchel by the brook.

Captain Castle introduced himself and said he ran an academy where children learned a game of sixty-four squares, and he said his students were forever crashing head-on into a defender — trading, forcing, shoving — when there was a gentler way that they never seemed to see.

"They think a guard must be beaten," said Captain Castle. "It need not be beaten. It need only be called away. And I have looked a long time for someone who understands that a defender with two duties has, in truth, no duty it can keep."

Sir Sidetrack finished his stitch and bit off the thread.

"I have spent my life," he said, rising and bowing, "giving busy people something better to do. I should be glad to teach a child the courtesy of it."

The chessboard, Sir Sidetrack decided at once, was a village full of bridges.

He met his first class on a bright cold morning. Captain Castle set a position and the children fell on it, trying to bludgeon a stubborn black knight that guarded a key square — trading pieces, hurling pawns, getting nowhere.

Sir Sidetrack let them batter away for a while, because he was patient. Then he raised one paw.

"That knight," he said, "is guarding two things. It watches the square you all want. But look — it is also the only piece defending its own rook, back here in the corner." He pointed, unhurried. "Now. Attack the rook."

"But we don't want the rook," said a fox in a green scarf. "We want the square the knight is standing near."

"I know," said Sir Sidetrack, and something in the softness of it made the whole room lean in. "But the knight does not know that. Attack its rook, and the knight faces a terrible little choice: keep guarding the square, and lose the rook — or run to save the rook, and leave the square wide open. It cannot do both. A guard with two duties can keep only one." He moved the piece that menaced the corner. "Watch. It must choose. And whichever it chooses — it has let go of the other."

The knight, forced to save its rook, stepped aside. The square it had guarded stood open and undefended, exactly as Sidetrack had said it would.

The fox in the green scarf wrote a guard with two duties can keep only one in her notebook, and stared at it for a long moment as if it explained several things beyond chess. Captain Castle, in his corner, nodded once.