The High Room
A sage is born to a nation, and by custom is walled up in a high room, never to see another human's face. Through a slot in the wall comes food, a water-bowl, and day and night the strange babblings of messengers.
At first the child cannot comprehend their speech. But by the nature of a child's mind and the raw power of exposure, night after day after night after day over the years of his youth, he comes to recognize their repeated words, hill and river, dell and forest, and lacking anything else to do he begins to construct in his prison a model. He forms highs and lows from water and the fibrous sheets the messengers slip through the slots, and from the coals in the fireplace he has learned to light, he marks the paper terrain. At first it bears no resemblance to what the messengers speak of beyond the crudest, near-incidental correspondences, but over long years he begins to understand the messages as references to his own model, and slowly he begins to refine it. He hears of a mountain and builds it up, he hears that a river has jumped its banks and redraws a course. He learns to read the strange scratches on the sheets the messengers slip through the slots, realizing they map to their speech, and he consults old reports, poring over their contents to form the topography to better correspond to their descriptions.
As the child grows into his teenage years, changes to his map slow, the densest area filled almost to completion, and reports on the edges sparse. But the messengers come less with updates on the land now - they speak of men on the march, swords and fire, and their reports change not by the month or the year but by the day. The boy, with nothing else to do, dutifully fashions paper chariots and armies and arranges them on the terrain, and tracks their motions over the course of campaigns.
Over months of tracking their movements, he realizes that while many groups come and go, charging in from the unknown edges before limping away, one group stays in the land, circling, sometimes hunkering down, sometimes charging ahead, but never leaving the area he has mapped. The interloping groups push against them, and sometimes they are forced to move towards an edge, but always they make their way back, either by force or dispersal. He sees that to push back by force is better - keeping the army together means it can push again - and that pushing is made to succeed by certain configurations, certain advantages in size or in positioning.
Soon he begins to predict how the armies will move in advance, moving his paper armies not in response to today's messages, but in anticipation of tomorrow's. Often his predictions are incorrect, and he is forced to jump an army an impossible distance to respond to a surprising message, but sometimes the messengers are quiet now as the boy sits moving his paper figures, and over time the surprising messages come less and less. The armies move in predictable ways, the interlopers driven off by the defending forces.
Until one day. The boy is now a young man, no older than 25, and the edges of the room are crowded with stacks upon stacks of moldering papers, in one place formed into a crude bed, in another twisted into bundles to use as fuel for the fireplace. Two decades of reports have sustained the man. But as if passers-by peering and craning to see into a fenced garden, no cantilevered stacks intrude on the center of the room where his territory lies. It is a vast and intricate terrain of papier mâché hills and valleys, dells and forests, and over them he has positioned the armies. The defenders lie in wait on a flat plain, shielded to the right and to the left by rivers. This is a narrowing zone, where their chariots will feign retreat before wheeling around and driving their approaching enemy into the bowl formed by the infantry and the rivers. It is an excellent technique, and certainly what the defenders will do, the young man predicts. Their enemies will fall into the trap, because they must - there is no other escape from the valley, their only hope to fall against the defenders and hope to break them before the jaws of the trap can spring.
Except their enemy is not where he placed them the previous night. They are not driving at the trap. A messenger's report reveals those forces have wheeled to the right, and they now bear along the river towards an unassuming citadel that lies on its banks.
The young man is surprised. He does not understand.
He has predicted years of victories for the defenders now. He has not needed to move an army unexpectedly in 327 days, by his reckoning. Yet he cannot explain this movement, which will leave these forces open to an attack from behind for no reasonable objective - only a small structure that has never figured into his calculus before.
Suddenly a thought comes into his mind, a strange thought, a thought that had perhaps long bubbled unanswered just below the surface of his awareness. He pulls back from the map, poring over old reports, reading them now not for their content but for their sequence, which rivers were crossed, which hills were seen in which order, tracing the path each message took through the land. The messengers through the slot are silent, and he senses their eyes peering through as, taking up his charcoal, he plots paths over the territory, charting the worldlines taken over many years, tracks converging. In a moment, he understands.
He dips into the day's water a torn sheet of paper and begins to form a small human figure. He fashions it a torso and legs, two arms and a head, before finally - a crown. Then, the steadiness of his practiced hands unshaken by the seismic shifts in his mind, he carefully lifts the structure's fragile paper roof and places himself in the high, walled-up room of the besieged citadel.