On the Emptying of the Great Quiver, and What I Saw of the Persian War-Tourney

Well now. I have been three days at my letters getting this down proper, for the reeve wants his report and I do not like to shirk a labor once it is given me, so here is what I saw, true as I saw it, though God knows I have not the learning for half of it.

I was set before the great glowing tapestry — the one that hangs in every hall now and never goes dark, showing pictures of far places as though a wizard had trapped the whole world inside a box of light — and told: watch the war-tourney betwixt our champions and the Persian host, and write me down what happens. So I watched. And I will tell you true, it was the strangest tourney I have yet seen, for I never once saw a man draw a bow.

What I saw instead were arrows without archers. Great long shining lances, taller than a church spire laid on its side, fired up out of iron carts far across the sea, and every man in the hall went quiet and grave when they spoke of it, the way the priest goes quiet when he speaks of the Last Things. And the herald — a stern woman in a fine blue coat, sat behind a table with no ale on it, which I thought passing strange for a herald — she said the thing that turned my blood cold in my own chest, though I do not fully know why, only that grave men speaking softly of empty stores has always meant a hard winter coming, in field or in war alike. She said: the great quiver is near empty. The long-reaching arrows, the ones that fly the farthest and strike the hardest, the pride and treasure of the whole armory — spent. Near all of them, spent, in this one tourney against the Persian host. A man does not loose his whole quiver at one deer and expect a fat winter after.

I confess I do not understand what manner of contest this was. I have watched the games of this age a full season now and I know how a tourney ought to go — the two sides take turns, they trade blows, the crowd roars, and at the end the abacus worked by unseen hands tells you who has won. But nobody told me who won this one. They only told me the quiver is empty. That is no way to end a match! A joust does not conclude with "and then one knight ran out of lances," it concludes with a man on the ground and a man still ahorse. And yet here was the whole hall, grave as Lent, discussing not who had triumphed but what would happen when the next challenger came and found the armory bare. I began to wonder if this was a tourney at all, or something graver dressed in tourney's clothes — the way a mummers' play can turn, mid-jest, into something that is not a jest any longer, and the children are hurried out before they see it. I did not care for that thought, so I set it down and returned to my watching, for that is the work, and a serf does the work.

I will say this: the little box in the corner of the tapestry, the one that keeps changing its numbers even while the herald speaks of graver things — I studied that very close, for it seemed to me the truest heart of the whole business. It is a small square that shows, I believe, the count of arrows left in the quiver, ticking down like sand in a glass, though it may also have been the price of grain in some distant shire, the letters were too small and my eyes are a farmer's eyes, made for judging the weather and not for reading a wizard's tapestry at three fathoms. Whichever it was, I watched it longer than I watched the herald, for numbers going down of their own accord, silent, with no hand to stop them, is a most unchancy thing to see, and I could not look away from it, the way you cannot look away from a wasting beast.

There was also, I must record, a man who came on after the herald to speak of a cart. Not a war-cart — a common cart, the kind a man drives to market, save that it required no oxen and, near as I could tell, drove itself while its master sat back with his boots up, which I took at first for some fresh miracle of the tourney, a new engine of war perhaps, until I understood he was only trying to sell it to the hall, the way the miller's boy hawks apples at the Michaelmas fair. I set this down dutifully alongside the matter of the quiver, for I cannot tell the tourney from the market-stall in this box of light, they are given to me side by side with the same grave voice and I have not the learning to sort which is the true business and which is the chaff. I will let wiser men than me decide. I only report what passes before my eyes.

But I return, because my conscience will not let me leave it, to the matter of the empty quiver, for it sat on me heavy the whole watching, heavier than the cart, heavier even than the ticking numbers. A lord who spends his whole store of long arrows in one tourney, however great the tourney, is a lord who has no arrows left should a second host come over the hill behind the first. Any reeve could tell you this. Any man who has ever spent his whole winter grain on a single feast, thinking the harvest would see to the rest, and then watched the frost come early, could tell you this. It is not a matter of learning, this — it is only a matter of counting what is in the barn, and I did not need the herald's grave blue coat to tell me that a barn shown empty on the great tapestry, before the whole watching hall, is a barn some other lord now knows is empty too. That seems to me a poor thing to have let slip, tourney or no tourney, war or no war. Even a serf knows you do not let the miller see the bottom of your grain-sack before you go to bargain with him again.

I do not know who won. I do not know if there is a "who won" to this one, or if it is the kind of tourney that simply goes on, season after season, until one side or the other finds its barn full again or does not. I only know that I watched the great glowing tapestry a long while, and marked the numbers ticking down, and marked the man selling his cart, and marked the herald's grave blue coat, and wrote it all down as I saw it, true and side by side, and let wiser heads than mine sort the wheat of it from the chaff.

The light is going now and there is a field wants tending that exists nowhere I could point to on a map, and yet it calls me all the same, so I must away.

— Hodge o' the Field, watching still, and understanding less than ever