Nambag is the most popular sport in Theknus, and in particular in Yantra, where a championship is played between the teams of the districts and neighborhoods. The name in kudamaf simply means “efficiency”: the winner is neither the strongest nor the fastest team, but the one that carries its load to the top of the ramp while spending the fewest heartbeats.
In this entry, numbers are expressed in Earth’s decimal notation; where needed, the Solarian notation in base 7 is highlighted, as in 10.
The field
The game is played on two identical stone ramps, side by side, each formed by three terraces rising from the starting level to the arrival bench. On the bench is carved the dima, a shape marking the exact spot where the load must be set down. The ramps are surrounded by stands, and on one side stands the scoreboard: a tower with rotating drums that add up, in real time, the heartbeats of each team.
The load is a block of stone bound with iron, of the same weight for both teams.
The teams
Each team is made up of seven athletes (10): six work on the load, and the seventh is the ramp captain, who may never touch it. His only task is to decide: how to set up the equipment, who pulls and who pushes, when to stop and when to start again.
All teams are given the same equipment, fixed and unmodifiable: three levers, five rollers, a rope, a pulley, and two wedges. How to arrange them is part of the game, and much of a ramp captain’s fame depends on the setups he has invented.
The score
Each athlete wears a wristband that counts their heartbeats from the starting signal to the placement of the load. At the end, the heartbeats of the team’s seven members are added together, and penalties are added for the scarto (“deviation”), that is, the distance between the point where the load was set down and the center of the dima. The lowest total wins. The match has a maximum time of one Solarian hour.
From this rule stems the character of the game. Running is not worthwhile, because it raises the heartbeat; stopping is not worthwhile either, because the heart keeps beating even at rest and the beats keep accumulating. What pays off is thinking: a good lever, a pulley set up at the right point, an effort distributed so that no one tires more than necessary. In nambag, fatigue is a resource to be spent carefully, and wasting it is considered, even before being a technical mistake, a form of carelessness toward one’s teammates.
The ring championship
In Yantra the championship is played between the teams of the ring’s districts and neighborhoods (the Chiuse Basse, the Distretto Energetico, the Officine Antiche, the fifth sector, and others) in the arena of the Terrazze. Each win is worth two points. The match reports fill the last page of the Rasha, the city’s newspaper, which publishes the standings, the heartbeat margin, and the deviation from the dima.
In Theknus culture
Nambag is considered one of the clearest expressions of the idea that in Theknus sport is, like any other activity, a transformation of matter through work: in this case the matter is the body, and the work is the thought that governs its effort. Observers from the Northern Alliance often cite the name of the game as proof of the Theknusian character, with an irony that is not always shared in Yantra.