The Reeve Is Called Home From the Little Folks' Field, and I Do Not Like the Look of It

I was sent this day to watch a contest they call Head Start, and by my troth I confess I have not yet worked out what manner of game it is, though I watched the whole of it with my own eyes and wrote down every particular, as is my charge.

It is played, as near as I can tell, by the very smallest of folk — mites of three and four summers, no taller than a hay rake, set loose upon a soft floor strewn with colored blocks and a great many pictures of beasts that do not exist in my own shire. I took it at first for a wrestling match, on account of the shrieking, but no man was thrown, and I have since come round to thinking it is closer to a hunt, save that the quarry is a wooden puzzle shaped like a duck and no one seems much fussed whether it is ever caught. There is porridge served at the midpoint, same as at half-time in the bowling, and a woman with a bell who I believe is the whistle-man of this particular sport, though she blows no whistle and only claps her hands twice and says a name I could not catch.

I will own plainly I could not find the scoreboard. I looked a good while. There is no glowing tapestry here as there is at the great matches, no abacus worked by unseen hands ticking off the runs or the checkmates. Instead there is a man — several men, in fine dark coats such as reeves wear when they come to count a lord's grain — who walk the edges of the field with a little book, and every so often they crouch down and peer beneath a table, or hold their hand flat above the porridge as though blessing it, or measure the width of a doorway with a length of string. I took these men for the officials of the game, the ones who judge whether a goal is fair struck or the ball has crossed the line, and I settled in to watch them close, since a serf who cannot read the players can at least read the men who keep them honest.

And here is the strange turn of the day, and the thing I must set down truest of all, though I understand it least: word came down from very high — from the King's own hall, as I understood the shouting — that the reeves are to be sent home. Not chased off in disgrace, mind, but formally released from their post, their little books taken from them, on the reasoning that a game watched too closely runs slower than a game left to run itself, and the treasury groans under the weight of paying so many men to walk about with string and porridge-blessing hands. I heard this called, by more than one man in the crowd, a lightening of the yoke — fewer rules writ down, fewer forms to be filled by candlelight, the field left to govern its own play. A fine notion, said in that tone men use when they wish a thing to sound like mercy.

But here is what troubled even my poor understanding, dull as it is in these matters: not all the King's own barons cheered the reeves' going. I marked several of them — men who by their dress and their proximity to the high table I took for lords loyal to the King's own faction, the same faction that ordered the reeves sent home — standing off to one side with their arms folded, muttering that the string and the little books had their uses after all. One asked, plain enough for even me to catch it, who now would measure the width of the doorway, and who would bless the porridge, and whether a field so young and so small ought to be left wholly to its own governance at all. I confess I do not understand a game where the men who rule it argue against their own decree even as the decree is cried. In my shire, when the lord says the fences come down, the fences come down, and no reeve of his own household stands muttering beside him that the sheep will wander. Yet here they did, and openly, and the game went on around them regardless, the small folk none the wiser, still chasing their wooden duck.

I fixed for a good while on the porridge-cart, I will admit, more than on the reeves or the barons both. There was a fellow behind it, not part of the game proper as I could tell, ladling out a grey mash to the little ones with great ceremony, and I found myself wondering — as I did not with the reeves, who at least had books and purpose — whether he too might one day have a man in a dark coat come round to bless his ladle, or whether that duty too was being lifted from the field this very hour, along with the string and the measuring of doorways. No one would answer me plainly on this point, being much occupied with the shouting from the high table, and so I set it down here unresolved, as a farmer must sometimes leave a furrow half-turned when the light goes.

I could not, in all my watching, work out who had won, or indeed whether winning was any part of the design. The small folk seemed content enough with their duck and their porridge, unbothered by reeves come or reeves gone, which I suppose is its own kind of grace — that the game may still be sweet to those too small to know it is being argued over above their heads. It is only the tall folk, the barons and the King's men both, who seemed unable to agree whether the field was better served watched close or left loose, and that argument, near as I could reckon, was the true contest of the day, far realer than any duck.

I do not know what a checkmate is worth in this sport, nor an inning, nor which team wore which colors, for in truth I never did find two sides at all — only small folk at their play, tall folk at their arguing, and a cart of grey mash between them that no one thought to ask me about, though I asked plenty about it myself. The light is going now and my own field wants tending, turnips do not turn themselves while a man stands gawping at other men's porridge, so I must away and leave the rest of this contest, whatever it was, to those better suited to judge it.

By my troth and the mercy of the harvest, I remain your faithful watcher — Hodge o' the Field.