The sun had
already begun disappearing behind the horizon when Heron reached Carter’s
house. Carter was nearly a year younger than Heron, but just as tall and in
some ways more mature. He was the youngest of several children, mostly boys.
All his brothers were taller than the average for boys of that province, and it
was possible that Carter might grow up to be taller than all of them.
One look at
Heron’s face and Carter could tell something was up. “Let’s have a game.” he
said, nudging one of his eldest brothers aside to get a lamp from off a shelf
by the side door of the house. Handing the lamp to Heron, Carter muttered to
his brother that they were going to the barn, and ran inside to the bedroom he
shared with a couple of his brothers to collect a game board and box of pieces.
As soon as he was back outside, he slapped Heron on the shoulder and nodded to
his brother, who nodded back and resumed the carving he was working on.
Carter and Heron
shoved each other jovially as they walked to the barn, heading for the hayloft.
With the size of family he had, Carter’s house was no place for a quiet focused
strategy game. But after chores were done for the day and the horses were all
taken care of and settled into their stalls for the night, the barn was a good
place to go in order to not be disturbed. At the house, they’d have Carter’s
brothers always leaning over his shoulder to suggest where they thought he
should move his game pieces, and every five minutes or so be disturbed by
Carter’s mother offering Heron something to eat, Carter’s father asking him how
things were today over at his family’s ranch, or the younger of Carter’s
sisters winking and trying to get Heron to notice her while also trying to act
like she would never do such a thing on purpose. Which, of course, would cause
the elder of his sisters to alternately laugh and roll her eyes with a
harrumph.
Focusing on the
game wasn’t their only reason for the friends not wanting to be disturbed. It
was something of an unspoken agreement between them, that if either of them
needed to talk or get the other’s advice on something serious, they would do it
over a game of Zar. Of course, neither boy ever said to the other, ‘I need to
talk to you about something that’s bothering me’ – no, instead one or the other
would suggest they have a quiet game off by themselves, and once they were
settled in comfortably moving the familiar pieces around the board, their
conversation would drift to whatever was most on their minds. There had even
been a few times they had worked out disagreements with each other or hurt
feelings over some insult, by first trying to defeat each other with aggressive
moves in the game and secondly by expressing their anger in words, and lastly
coming to some sort of understanding even if they still didn’t agree, all while
playing Zar. It would be reasonably accurate to say that their friendship with
each other was more firmly cemented than with their other friends, because of
all the hours they had shared talking over a game they both enjoyed.
Carter was
generally better than Heron at strategy, so he won most often, but when his
mind wasn’t really on the game, sometimes Heron would come up with a
surprisingly good move that he didn’t see coming.
And then there
were times like tonight. Heron’s mind wasn’t on the game at all, though he was
trying as hard as ever to come up with a win. Carter was winning easily, even
though he was not really focused on the game either.
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