The Red Guild Ploughed a New Furrow, and Now Must Hawk the Turnips

I am sent again to the great field where the contests are held, that loud flat meadow ringed all about with benches stacked to the sky and folk packed upon them like herring in a barrel, and I confess to you plainly, as I confess every time, that I do not know what manner of contest I have seen, only that I saw it, and I set it down true, for that is my labor and I do not shirk it though the light fails and my supper waits.

This day's business, as best I could reckon it, was not a match at all but a great wrangling among the guild-elders of the Red Team — the ones who wear the red as the Blue Team wears the blue, though I have never once seen them come to blows upon the field itself, which puzzles me greatly, for what is a guild without its blows. The word that went round the crowd, from the man selling meat-tubes to the woman minding the little painted stall of drinks-in-a-cup, was that the Red Guild's own headman had gone and changed the manner of the plough. Not the field, mind — the plough. He had taken up the old furrow his guild had sown time out of mind, the one where the coin stays close in the strongbox and the lord's men keep their hands off the miller's scale, and he had turned it clean over, so that now the guild sows a different grain altogether, thick with tariffs upon the foreign wheat and a loosening of the purse for the common man's larder, and I am told this is accounted a very great change indeed, of the sort that makes the guild elders go pale and clutch their ledgers.

And here is the part I could follow, for it is a trouble any man who has stood in a market square would know: having changed the grain, the guild must now sell it. This seemed to me the whole of the day's contest, though the crowd around me kept hollering as though something else entirely were toward, some business with a ball or a stick or a checkmate, which I could not find no matter how I craned my neck. But the guild's trouble was plain as a broken cartwheel. The old customers — the ones who have bought the Red Guild's turnips every market day since their grandfathers' grandfathers — are accustomed to a certain turnip, small and hard and honest, the sort that keeps the strongbox shut and the lord's reeve off the road. Now the cart rolls up heavy with a different turnip altogether, big and strange-colored, dressed up with talk of tariffs and largesse, and the old customers stand there scratching their heads same as I did, wondering if they have wandered to the wrong stall.

Worse, I am told, the guild's own coin-counters — the rich patrons who fund the guild's banners and its trumpeters and keep the whole grand pageant rolling from one market day to the next — do not care at all for the new turnip, and mutter among themselves that the old furrow suited them better, seeing as it kept the tax-man's hand light upon their own overflowing granaries. So the guild elders stood there this day, as near as I could puzzle it, caught between the crowd that wants the new turnip explained to it in words a plain man can chew, and the coin-counters up in the high seats who would sooner the whole plough be turned back the way it was. A guild cannot sell to both the field-hand and the lord of the manor with the same cry, and yet cry it must, or lose the market entire. That is honest trouble, the kind I know in my bones, and I set it down with the respect it is due.

But I will not pretend, as God is my witness, that this was the whole of what passed before me, for a very great deal else occurred that I cannot account for and will report regardless, since it is not given to a serf to sort the wheat of the matter from its chaff, only to gather both into the same sack and carry it home.

There was, hard by the guild elders' bench, a man in a black tunic who did nothing the whole match through but blow upon a little silver whistle and fling his arms about, and once he cast a yellow cloth to the ground with tremendous solemnity, at which the whole field groaned as one, though I could not say what the cloth had done to earn such scorn. I took him for a sort of herald, crying penalties upon whichever guildsman displeased him, and I record that he did his office with great vigor.

There was also, high above the field, a tapestry of light taller than any cathedral window, worked all over with glowing numbers that changed by unseen hand, faster than any abacus I have watched a reeve work, and I do believe this tapestry is what the crowd truly came to see, for every time its numbers shifted the whole meadow roared fit to wake the dead, guild business be hanged.

And there was, near the gate where I first came in, a cart — oh, a fine cart, better tended than any I have seen since I left my own field — selling meat cut thin and folded into little bread, with a fire built right into the cart's own belly so the meat cooked as it rolled, which I call sorcery and no man there disputed me. I spent a goodly portion of the afternoon at this cart, for its keeper was kind and did not ask what manner of coin a wandering serf carries, and I confess more of this dispatch is given to him and his wondrous fire-cart than to the guild's turnip troubles, for he, at least, I understood entire. He was selling a good thing plainly, at a fair price, to whoever stood before him, red guild or blue guild alike, and made no wrangle of it whatsoever. There is a lesson in that I lack the learning to name.

Toward the end there was a painted ox, or a creature got up to seem one, dancing upon its hind legs before the benches, tending no plough and pulling no cart, only capering, and the children loved it above all else that day, more than the whistle-man, more than the tapestry, more, I daresay, than the guild's whole grand trouble over its turnips. Perhaps that is wisdom too great for me.

I left before the matter was settled, for I do not think such matters settle in a single market day, and besides the light was going long and gray over the meadow and I have a field of my own, unseen but never far from my thought, that wants tending whether Red Guild or Blue Guild carries the day. A serf's furrow does not wait on any man's turnip cart.

I am, in all humble service and no small bewilderment, Hodge o' the Field