Of the Joust at the Manor Gate, Where the Mild Knight Unhorsed the Fiery One

They sent me down to the guild-hall on the far edge of the shire, where I am told a great contest was to be run before the true tourney later in the year, and God be good, I have never in my life seen a stranger field of combat, nor understood less of what passed upon it.

I had thought, walking in, that I knew the shape of a contest. A lord's man plants two banners at either end of a green, the champions ride at one another with lance and shield, and whichever knight remains ahorse at the end has the right of it. I have seen this done at three separate manor fairs and I did not think there was more than one way to run such a business. But this contest, they told me, was of a "primary," which I take to mean the first and lesser joust run before the grand one, a sort of Lent before the feast, wherein the guild — for it seemed a guild of some kind, all wearing one color of ribbon though quarreling something fierce among themselves — chooses which of its own knights shall be permitted to ride in the great tourney come autumn.

There were two champions put up for this guild's favor, and I am given to understand — for I asked three separate men and got three separate answers, which is itself the mark of an honest contest — that one of these knights was of the mild and even temperament, a steady hand, the sort who would win a plowing contest by never once looking up from the furrow, while the other was of a hotter blood entirely, a fiery sort, the kind of knight who at a manor feast would stand upon the table to make his toast rather than simply raise his cup like a Christian. I do like a hot-blooded knight, in truth. I have known men like that in my own village — the miller's second son is such a one, all shouting and no patience, and he has twice set his own barn alight through sheer enthusiasm for the harvest. But a barn is not a shire, and I gather the guild had similar thoughts.

Now here is where my report must grow strange, because I could not, for the life of me, find the lists where this joust was run. There was no green, no lance, no barrier down the middle of a field. Instead there was a great hall filled with tables, and upon each table a small black rod that a man would speak into, and his voice would come out of the walls themselves at a volume fit to knock a man's hat off, though the man was but ten paces distant and could easily have simply spoken up. I took this rod at first for a sorcerer's wand, of the sort the priest warns us against at Michaelmas, but no one seemed alarmed by it, so I set my fears aside and watched instead the great glowing tapestry hung upon the far wall, upon which numbers appeared and changed and grew of their own accord, as though worked by unseen hands at a loom too fast for any mortal weaver. I could not say what the numbers counted — sheep, perhaps, or the guild's stores of grain — but the hall grew very quiet whenever they changed, and men leaned toward the tapestry the way a man leans toward a well to see if it has finally run dry.

There was, too, a man in a fine dark coat who stood before the two knights and put questions to them, one after another, in the manner of a reeve questioning two men who both claim the same strayed goat. I confess I lost the thread of the actual questioning almost at once, on account of a most marvelous vendor working the edge of the hall who had rigged a cart to keep meats warm without any visible fire beneath them — sorcery again, I am fairly sure of it, though a gentler and more useful sort than most, and I spent a good long while trying to work out where the coals were hid before I remembered I was meant to be watching the joust and not the sausages. I am not ashamed of this. A man must eat, and the two knights, so far as I could tell, did not offer to share.

What I can tell you, in good conscience and as God is my witness, is how the contest ended, for that much even I could follow. When all the villagers of the guild had cast their lots — and this too was done strangely, each man alone in a little wooden stall no bigger than a confessional, folding a paper and dropping it into an urn, which struck me as a very quiet way to settle a matter I had been told was fierce — the tapestry's numbers stopped their churning, and it was declared that the mild knight, the steady one, the furrow-watcher, had unhorsed the fiery one clean, and would ride on alone toward the greater tourney in his stead.

There was no crowd roar such as I have heard at the true jousts, no dancing painted ox, no man with a shepherd's whistle to call foul or fair. There was only a great deal of murmuring among the guild members, some pleased and some sore aggrieved, and much talk — of which I understood perhaps one word in ten — about what this meant for the guild's banner and which way it now leaned, as though a guild were a wagon that could be tipped by the placing of a single sack of grain. I gathered, dimly, that this was thought a large matter indeed, larger than the two knights themselves — that other guilds elsewhere were watching this one small joust to see which way the wind stood before the great weathervane turns for good in the autumn tourney. I cannot say if that is true. I am a serf, not a weathercock. I only watched the two knights, and marked that the mild one is riding on, and the fiery one is not, and that the sausages, whatever devilry warmed them, were very fine indeed.

I will say this much for the mild knight, having watched him through the whole strange afternoon: he did not once stand upon a table. That is a mark of character in a man, in my village or any other, guild-banner or no.

The light is going and my own field wants tending, so I must away, but I set this down true as I saw it.

— Hodge, who tends the north furrow, and who still does not know what the black rods were for