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The Chess Player (standard:other, 1584 words) | |||
Author: Rattan Mann | Added: Oct 26 2007 | Views/Reads: 3362/2308 | Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes) |
A shepherd vs a king in a game of chess | |||
The Chess Player Rattan Mann Once upon a time there was a simpleton who in his innocence loved Christ. So he became a shepherd and loved his job. But he had another secret love. He also loved chess because the chessboard always reminded him that Christ was also a carpenter. Unfortunately, these two love did not mix well. He took the sheep to the mountains, but there he would start playing chess against himself and forget all about the sheep. The sheep would wander away and get lost forever. Some were even eaten by wolves. This made the owners mad and they stopped trusting their sheep with him. Thus they took away half of Christ inside him. After losing the only job he loved, he just sat in his hut the whole day, watching sheep from a distance, playing chess, and talking to Christ. Sometimes when he became tired of these three things he cried because he felt very lonely. As chess was now the only thing that reminded him of Christ, he decided to become very good at it. But no chess-master in the village would teach him good moves because they all were in the payrolls of the sheep-owners, and the sheep-owners were all hell-bent in punishing him for not looking after their sheep. So he decided to learn from the sheep things that man would not teach him, make sheeps' rules his rules, and play chess as no man had ever played before. And very strange rules they were indeed. As he played chess, he would look at the sheep roaming in the mountains. Whenever the sheep went up the mountains, he would move up on the chess-board, whenever they moved down, he too would move down. When he saw the sheep moving along the left bank of the river, he too moved left on the chessboard, and when they moved on the right bank, he too went right. Whenever he couldn't see the sheep because they were on the other side of the mountain or hidden in fog, he moved diagonally on the chessboard. He called them Christ's Moves because he was sure this is the way Christ would have taught him chess. And with those simple rules learned from Christ, he became a very great chess-player. Not even the best chess-masters in the village could defeat him. Everybody was surprised. Nobody could understand how he became so good without a guide. But nobody liked it either. Everybody became so jealous of him that they decided to get rid of him by hook or crook. Soon they found a way to get rid of him and take away the other half of Christ inside him. One day the grand chess master of the village came to the simpleton with good tidings. The king had offered a huge reward and his daughter in marriage to anyone who would defeat him in chess. Actually they were evil tidings because the king was a very evil king and a very poor chess player. It was child's play to defeat the king. But instead of getting a reward, the winner was put to death immediately. That was the kings way of satisfying his lust for innocent blood. Every chess player in the kingdom knew this secret except the simpleton because he was Christ's man and so he heard or saw no evil. He readily fell into the trap. He started towards the king's capital, singing, and dancing, and telling everybody on the way that he was going to defeat the king in chess and marry his daughter. On hearing this, people would hide their faces to muffle their screams, bow to him in deep reverence, and invited him to dine with them because they knew that this was the poor guy's Last Supper for he was heading towards betrayal and death. But this unexpected reverence and kindness only increased his confidence and fuelled his desire to defeat the king because he was the only guy in the kingdom who was unaware of his fate. When he reached the capital, he was shocked to see that there were no animals, no sheep, no cattle, no trees, no fresh air in the city - just smoke and smog, tall buildings, and the king's palace looming in the Click here to read the rest of this story (97 more lines)
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