Vale the Wayclearer

Cricket was six, and rode up front on old Bellow's great wagon, and one morning the wagon stopped dead because a long birch had come down across the road in the night.

Bellow shouted at the horses. The horses strained. The wagon did not move an inch, because you cannot pull four horses' worth of anything through a birch tree.

Then Vale came walking up with her rope, hooked the birch, and hauled it off into the ditch — a small hare moving a small log — and the moment it was gone, the great wagon rolled forward as if it had never stopped at all.

Cricket stared. "You did more than the horses," she said. "There's four of them and one of you."

"The horses were never the problem," said Vale, coiling her rope. "The horses were fine. The road was the problem. All that pulling power was stuck behind one little log. I didn't add anything. I only took the log away — and then the power that was already there just… arrived."

Cricket looked from the tiny hare to the enormous wagon. "You cleared the way," she said. "You got the thing out of the road so the big one could come through."

Vale leaned on her stick and, for once, allowed herself a small smile.

"Cleared the way," she said. "That is my whole trade in three words. I move the small thing so the great thing can arrive."

Some winters later, a chunky cheerful rook in a brass-buttoned waistcoat found her levering a boulder off the Long Cart Road.

Captain Castle introduced himself and said he ran an academy where children learned the game of sixty-four squares, and that his students had a curious blind spot: they would line up a powerful rook or bishop aimed straight at a winning square, and then never fire it, because one of their own pieces stood in the way — and it never occurred to them to simply move their own piece aside, even at a cost, to clear the shot.

Vale set down her lever.

"I have spent my life," she said, "hauling small logs off roads so that greater things could roll. A board of sixty-four squares must have roads too, and logs on them. Often, I'd wager, logs of your own."

The chessboard, Vale found, was the Long Cart Road folded into a square.

She met her first class on a raw morning. Captain Castle set a position: a white rook stood on a file aimed dead at the black king's back rank — a winning shot — except that a white bishop of their own sat squarely in the file, blocking it.

The children groaned. "Our own bishop's in the way," said a fox in a green scarf. "The rook can't see the king. Nothing to do."

"Nothing?" said Vale. "The rook is aimed perfectly. All its power is pointed at exactly the right square. There is only one small thing between it and the win — and it is ours." She picked up the blocking bishop. "So I move it. I send it off the file — even somewhere it can be captured, I don't much mind — because the instant it steps aside, the road is clear." She set the bishop down on a square where it gave check itself, then, on the next move, slid the freed rook down the open file to the king's back rank. "There. I didn't make the rook stronger. The rook was always strong. I only cleared its road — and the power that was already there arrived."

"But you put your own bishop in danger," said the fox.

"I did," said Vale, evenly. "A cleared road is worth a small log. The bishop's job was to get out of the way of the greater piece — and it did that job perfectly, whatever happens to it next."

The fox in the green scarf wrote sometimes the thing in the way is your own — so move it in her notebook, and underlined "your own." Captain Castle nodded from the road-side.