The Council of the Turnip-Colored Banners

By my troth, I have seen strange councils in my time — the manor court when two brothers quarreled over a strayed goat, the great assize when the bishop's man came to count our pigs twice in one winter and call it fair — but never have I seen a gathering so given over to arguing with itself as the one I was set to watch this week, out on the flat cold plains they call Minnesota, which I am told means something in the tongue of the old peoples there but which sounds to my ear like a place where the wind has personally wronged someone.

I was told this was a **tourney**. I did not see lances. I did not see horses, though there was a great deal of talk of "running," which confused me greatly, for no man present appeared to run anywhere, they mostly sat in folding chairs of a kind we do not have and drank a black bitter brew from little paper cups, which I am reliably told is not ale, though I confess I do not know what else a man drinks that makes him talk so fast.

The matter before this council, as best I could gather from the shouting and the pamphlets and the man with the glowing slate who read numbers off it as though the numbers themselves were prophecy, was this: **who shall wear the guild's colors into the great autumn contest.** And here is where I must confess my confusion runs deepest, for in my village there is no such choosing — a man ploughs the strip his father ploughed, and that is the whole of the matter, and no one holds a council about it, certainly not one with so much bunting.

But it seems among the guildsmen of this Minnesota — and I use "guild" for lack of a better word, for they wear no matching aprons but do seem bound by a common oath, sworn, I think, to a red banner — there is a rift. Some among them wish to send into the contest only their strongest and best-loved champion, a man they hold in something close to the reverence we hold for the old king across the sea, whom I have never met but whose name is invoked here so often and with such heat that I took him at first for a local saint. Others — and these, I gather, are the elders of the guild, the ones with the ledgers and the tally-sticks — say plainly, and I paraphrase only slightly: *never mind who is loved; send the man who can actually win the joust.* This struck me as sound counsel, of the sort my own father gave me when I wished to enter the strongest ox in the plough-race and he pointed out, not unkindly, that the strongest ox was also the slowest, and a race is not won by strength but by finishing first, which is a lesson I have carried through three harvests and one very embarrassing Michaelmas.

I spent the better part of an hour trying to determine which of the men in the hall was the "electability" and which was the "loyalty," for they were spoken of as though they were two separate combatants, and I do wonder if I simply missed them entering the lists. I did see a man in a fine coat stand and speak at great length about "the base," which I took to mean the soil, the good dark earth from which all things grow, and I nodded along most sympathetically, for a man who speaks lovingly of his base is a man after my own heart, until I realized some minutes later he meant a crowd of people and not dirt at all, and I felt a fool, though not for the first time this week and likely not for the last.

There was a woman near the back selling small paper cones of shaved ice doused in colored syrup from a cart with a bell upon it, and I will say plainly that she held my attention rather more than the council itself, for her wares were cheap, her manner was kind, and she alone among everyone present seemed to have a clear notion of what she was doing and why. I bought a red one. It tasted of nothing I have a word for. I do not regret it.

The council's business, such as I could follow it, seemed to turn on a great fear of the "primary," which I understood — incorrectly, I am sure, but I set it down as I understood it — to be a kind of first shearing, wherein the flock is culled early so that only the fittest sheep go on to face the wolves of the general contest in autumn. Some elders fretted that if they chose only the sheep most beloved by the shepherd — that is, the old king across the sea again, whose portrait I did see hung in more than one tent — they would send out a sheep too proud and too singular to survive the wolves, however fine its wool. Better, they said, a plainer sheep that lives, than a glorious one that does not reach the far pasture at all. I confess I have culled a flock myself with less agonizing than this, but then I have never had a flock with opinions.

There was, at the center of the hall, a great glowing tapestry — taller than three men, throwing off a cold blue light — upon which numbers changed of their own accord, unbidden by any hand I could see, and I took this for sorcery of a mild and civic sort, the kind the priest would tut at but not burn anyone over. I understand now, having asked a kindly stranger with a badge upon his coat, that it was merely a means of showing how the guild's coffers stood, or some such — a tally-board worked by hidden clerks, I suppose, in a cellar somewhere, adding furiously. I still hold that it is sorcery. A tally-stick does not glow. I know a tally-stick.

What became of the great debate, whether they should send the beloved sheep or the surviving sheep, I could not say with certainty by the time the light began to fail and the hall to empty, for the guildsmen seemed disinclined to settle it in one sitting, preferring instead to adjourn to smaller circles and mutter, which is, now that I write it, very much how such things are settled in my own village too, so perhaps I understood more than I credited myself. I did note that the elders with the ledgers seemed, on the whole, to be winning the muttering, which gladdened something practical in me, for I have never in my life met a ledger that was wrong for long.

The shaved-ice woman had gone by the time I looked for her again, cart, bell, and all, off down some lane I could not follow, and I own I thought of her rather more on my walk back than I did of the guild and its sheep and its glowing tapestry, for she at least had made something and sold it honest, and that I understood down to the bone. The rest of it — the loyalty, the electability, the wolves, the far pasture — I will set down as faithfully as I saw it and leave the sorting of wheat from chaff to wiser heads than mine, of which, in that hall, there seemed to be no shortage and no agreement either.

The light is going now and the strip by the hedgerow will not plough itself, so I must away, as ever, no wiser than I came but no worse for the trying.

— Hodge o' the Field, who has never sheared a sheep for glory and does not intend to start