Nana the Sowing Elder

Nana had not always been the elder of the board. Once she had been the smallest, most impatient child at it, and she remembered — vividly — a teacher of her own who had done exactly what she now did, and how maddening she had found it at the time.

"Which sow captures, little one?" that long-ago teacher had asked her, when all young Nana wanted was to be told. She'd huffed and guessed wrong and huffed again — and then, forced to actually look, actually count, actually think it through under the teacher's patient questions, she'd found the move herself. And she still remembered, seventy years later, the particular bright feeling of that finding — how it had been hers in a way a told answer never could have been, how she'd never once forgotten that move because she had grown it instead of swallowing it. Every child she'd ever taught since, she'd tried to give that same feeling: the feeling of arriving at the answer on your own two feet, led by good questions, and knowing it belonged to you.

The hardest test of Nana's whole life as a teacher came the day a clever, frustrated girl named Amara slammed her hand on the board and cried, "Just TELL me! Why won't you ever just tell me?"

Nana did not scold her. She sat quietly a moment. Then, very gently, she asked one more question. "Amara — the game you are learning. Where do you think it came from?"

Amara, thrown, muttered that she didn't know. "It came a very long way, and a very long time, through many hands, to reach yours," Nana said. "Every one of those hands could have kept it and let it die with them. Instead they taught it on — the slow way, the asking way — because that is the only way it truly lives in the next person. If I simply told you, I would be handing you a dead thing to carry. When I ask, and you find it, the game becomes alive in you — and one day you will ask some child the same questions, and it will pass on again, still living." She slid the board back toward the girl. "So. Which sow captures? Don't let me tell you. You'd only be robbing yourself of the one thing I'm actually here to give."

Amara looked at the board a long, long moment. Then she counted. And her face changed. And she reached out and made the move — and it was right — and the bright, ancient feeling of finding lit her whole face, the same feeling Nana had felt seventy years before. Amara did not ask to be told anything, ever again.

Years on, Nana watched that same Amara — grown now, patient now — sitting across the board from a stuck, huffing little one of her own, and she heard the words drift over: "How many seeds in that far house? ...Good. And if your last seed lands there, what does it make it? ...So which of your pits sends it exactly there?"

Nana's old heart filled up like a store at the end of a winning game. There it was: the asking, passed on. The child across from Amara wrestled, and counted, and then said "Oh!" and made the move themselves, glowing — and Nana knew the game had jumped safely into another pair of hands, still alive, still learning to teach itself onward. All around the village, in the cool of the evenings, the same patient questions were being asked at a dozen boards by children she had taught and children they had taught, the whole long chain of it stretching back along the grasslands into a past she could not see the end of, and forward into a future she would not live to watch.