Hodge Watches the Tsar's Great Net-Casting Match

I am bid again to sit before the glowing tapestry and set down what passes there, and by my troth I have tried, though the game tonight bewildered me worse than any I have yet watched, and I have watched a man argue with a horse.

It began, as these things do, with the great hall filled with murmuring folk and a woman in a coat the color of a ripe plum standing before a map so vast and so lit from within that I took it at first for a stained-glass window fallen sideways into the world. She spoke gravely of ships. I settled in, for I know ships — I have seen the wool barges go down the river at Michaelmas, heavy and slow, and I thought, here at last is a contest I might follow with some confidence.

I was wrong within the minute, as I so often am.

The Tsar of the frozen east — for so I understood him, a lord of vast and snowy holdings, sat upon some manner of throne though I never once saw it, only heard his voice reported by others, which is a strange way to hold court but I am a serf and who am I to say how a Tsar ought to sit — had issued a challenge. Not a challenge of lances, nor of hounds, nor of wrestling in the mud after the harvest, which are the challenges I know and trust. No: he had declared that if the merchant-lords of the western countries continued to press their sanctions upon him — and I confess I do not know what a sanction is, only that it seems to be a kind of tithe one country lays upon another without ever once touching coin, a very ghostly sort of tithe — then he would seize their vessels. Take them right off the water, as a fox takes a hen off the roost, quick and clean and without so much as a by-your-leave.

Now this I understood! This is a fine old game, the seizing of ships, and I settled deeper into my stool, for I thought I should finally see it plainly: nets cast, hulls boarded, banners torn down and new ones run up the mast, the whole grand business of a naval joust. I have never seen a naval joust but I have imagined one many long evenings while the sheep would not settle, and I pictured it exactly so — two galleys running hard at one another across the grey water, oars flashing like the legs of a beetle, until the grappling-hooks fly and the deck becomes a wrestling-ground.

I did not see this. I want that set down plainly, because I sat a full hour by the sun outside my window and I did not see one single ship taken. What I saw instead was the plum-coated woman standing before her window of light, and then a man in a narrow grey coat standing before a different window of light, and then, God be good, a full quarter-hour given over to a fellow selling a device that chops onions without the weeping, which I watched with far greater attention than I ought to have, for I have wept over more onions than any man in this shire and if such a device is real and not sorcery I should dearly like one.

The sanctions themselves, near as I could puzzle out, are the true field of contest — a slow siege laid not with trebuchets but with restrictions upon trade and coin, the merchant-nations of the west starving the Tsar's treasury the way a lord starves a rebellious town by closing its gates, save that here it is the town's neighbors doing the closing, at a great distance, without so much as raising a pike. It is, I think, a very patient sort of war, the kind fought by clerks and reeves rather than knights, and the Tsar's threat against the ships is his answer to it: if you will not let my goods pass, says he, I shall not let yours pass either, and I shall take the ships themselves as forfeit. A fair enough principle by the law of the manor, though I own I have never seen my lord seize a whole barge over a disputed tithe. A goat, once. Never a barge.

I confess my attention wandered sorely to the ticking band of words that crawled forever along the bottom of the great tapestry, like a procession of ants too proud to stop marching even for their own funeral. I could not make sense of it and yet I could not look away from it, and I am ashamed to say I spent longer puzzling over why the words never once paused to rest than I spent on the Tsar's own threat, which is, I am told, the very heart of the match.

There was also — and here my dispatch must grow strange, though I promise I report it true — a moment where the plum-coated woman held up her hand and the whole window of light behind her folded itself away like a tablecloth being shaken out, and a new map sprang up in its place, this one marked all over with little ships no bigger than a barley-corn, scattered across the blue like seeds flung by a careless sower. I do not know what magic does this. I have asked no one, for I fear the answer would only frighten me further, and a serf who is already frightened of the plague and the reeve and the Tsar's ghost-tithes has little room left in him for being frightened of tablecloths that fold themselves.

Near the end — and I mark this because it is the only true blow I saw struck in the whole match — a herald came forth, a man from the merchant-nations' own side, and said flatly that the Tsar's threat changed nothing, that the sanctions would go on regardless of how many ships he seized or threatened to seize. This I understood as well as I understood anything all evening: it is the answer a smith gives when a customer threatens to take his custom elsewhere. Go on, then, says the smith, and keeps hammering. I liked the herald for this. He did not flinch, and there is a kind of dignity in not flinching even when I could not tell you which of the two men held the stronger hand, for I do not know how many ships the Tsar truly commands, only that he says he shall use them, and words are cheap enough that I have heard my own lord threaten to hang three villages' worth of poachers and hang, in the end, not one.

What troubles me most, if I am honest, and I try always to be honest even when I do not understand what I am being honest about, is that no ship was actually taken this whole evening. A great deal of threatening, a great deal of mapwork, a great deal of a man selling an onion-device, and not one hull boarded, not one sail struck. I do not know if this means the match has not yet truly begun, or if this — the standing, the map-folding, the ticking band of ants — is the match entire, and the taking of ships, should it ever come, will happen off in some hour I am not permitted to watch. It is a strange kind of tournament that is fought all in threats and never once in blows, and I own I preferred the wrestling after harvest, where a man knows within the hour whether he has won or lost, and goes home either way with mud on him as proof he was there at all.

The light is going now over the far hedge and I am called back, for the turnips do not tend themselves on account of a Tsar's temper, however grand his tapestry.

— Hodge, who saw no ship taken, and remains, as ever, a farmer