Siren Lyra

ATTRACTION — offer bait a piece cannot refuse to lure it onto the exact square where your next move wins it

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01 Opening

In the reed-woods along the Slow Lake there was a nightingale named Lyra whose voice was so lovely that the whole wood tilted toward it, and she had learned, over many singing years, a small and gentle power that she used only for good.

Lyra could bring anyone anywhere.

Not by pushing. Lyra never pushed. She simply sang from the branch she wanted them at. If she wished the young rabbits gathered at the old willow for a story, she sang from the old willow, and the rabbits came, because who would not come toward the loveliest sound in the wood? If she wanted the shy grey heron to leave his hiding-reeds and stand in the sun where everyone could admire him, she sang from the sunny bank, and out he came. She did not command. She offered something no one wished to refuse — her song, a shining berry held out on a twig, the warmest patch of morning light — and she offered it from exactly the spot she meant them to stand.

She had noticed, in all this, a thing that pleased her deeply: you did not have to move a creature to move a creature. You had only to make one particular place the most wonderful place to be, and then wait, and the creature would carry itself there on its own two feet, happy the whole way. The wanting did the walking.

She had never named this. Naming felt like the wrong verb for something so soft. She simply chose her branch, and sang, and let the wood come to her.

It would take a small otter named Bib, in the end, to name it.

02 Siren Lyra

Bib was seven, and Bib was clever, and Bib had noticed that whenever Lyra wanted the picnic held by the flat rock, the picnic somehow always ended up by the flat rock, even though nobody had ever decided on the flat rock.

"You keep getting everyone to go where you want," Bib accused, cheerfully. "How do you do it? You never even tell us to."

"No," said Lyra, "I never tell you to. Telling doesn't work — you'd just do the opposite for fun." She smiled. "I only make the flat rock the nicest place to be. I sing there. I put the honey-cakes there. And then all of you decide, all by yourselves, to come to the flat rock — and you're pleased about it, because you chose it."

"But we only chose it because you made it worth choosing."

"That," said Lyra, "is the entire secret. I don't move you. I make the spot worth coming to, and your own feet do the rest."

Bib thought hard about this, swishing his tail. "You lure us," he said at last. "You draw us in. It's like — you attract us to the branch."

Lyra's song rose half a note in pleasure.

"Attract," she said. "Draw them to the spot. Yes, little one. That is the truest word for it I have ever heard."

03 Siren Lyra

Some seasons on, a chunky cheerful rook in a brass-buttoned waistcoat rowed a small boat into the reeds to listen to her sing.

Captain Castle introduced himself and said he ran an academy where children learned the game of sixty-four squares, and that his students were brave and bold but frightened of one thing: giving a piece away. "They will never offer anything," he said. "So they never learn the loveliest trick of all — that you can hand the enemy a gift so tempting it must be taken, and in the taking, the enemy walks its own piece straight onto the square where you wanted it, where your very next move wins."

Lyra dipped her head, and the reeds swayed.

"I have spent my life," she said, "bringing creatures to the branch I choose, by making the branch worth coming to. A board of sixty-four squares is only a wood with sharper edges. I should love to sing a piece where I want it."

04 Siren Lyra

The chessboard, Lyra found, was a reed-wood with the branches ruled in ink.

She met her first class on a soft morning. Captain Castle set a position where the black king sat safe behind its pawns, and the children sighed, because a safe king is a dull king.

"There's nothing," said a fox in a green scarf. "The king's tucked away. We can't get at it."

"Can't we?" said Lyra. She pointed to a square one step in front of the king — a fine square, if only the king would stand on it, for a knight of hers was waiting to leap and check from a place it could not otherwise reach. "That square there. If the king stood there, I would win. But of course the king will not simply go there for me." She let the pause hang, the way she let a note hang. "So I must make that square worth going to."

She placed her rook, boldly, right on the square in front of the king — where the king could capture it for free.

"You just gave up your rook!" said the fox.

"I offered it," said Lyra, gently. "A whole rook, sitting there, free for the taking. What king could refuse? And so the king reaches out, and takes my rook, and steps — happily, greedily — onto exactly the square I wanted it on. And now —" she lifted her waiting knight and set it down with a soft click — "my knight leaps in with check, from the one square it needed the king to be. The gift was never a gift. It was a branch. And the king flew to it, singing."

The fox in the green scarf wrote don't move the king — make the square worth coming to in her notebook, and looked up at Lyra with new eyes. Captain Castle, in his little boat, applauded softly.

05 Closing

She still sings from the branch she chooses. She still never pushes.

But when the lessons end and the children have gone home, Lyra sits by the folded board and studies it the way she studies the wood at dawn — not asking how to move the enemy piece, but asking which square she wishes it stood on, and what gift, offered from that very square, it could not bear to refuse.

Sometimes the fox with the notebook stays behind, and asks, "Why give a whole piece away, Lyra? Isn't that a loss?"

And Lyra will fold her wings, and let a note settle, and say:

"You cannot order a proud piece to stand where you want it. But you can make that square the most tempting square on the board — offer it something it cannot refuse — and it will carry itself there, pleased to go. A piece given up on purpose is not a loss. It is a branch. Choose the square first. Then sing the piece to it."

The fox writes it down. Lyra watches her, and feels — in a way she would never say in plain words — the warm hush of a wood that has come, once again, exactly to the branch she chose. She closes the board. She flies home over the reeds.

The GambitTales ensemble

Siren Lyra is part of GambitTales's distributed-narrative cast. Each character embodies a different curricular primitive; together they teach the full subject.