On the Twenty-and-Third Triumph of the Dallas Wingfolk, and Other Wonders I Could Not Fathom

By my troth, I have seen a great many strange things since I woke in this age, but never before did I see a company of women march onto a polished floor of wood, in the light of ten thousand candles that burn without wick or tallow, and joust for a place in what the criers call the "postseason," which I take to be some manner of second harvest set aside for the hardiest of the realm. The Dallas Wingfolk — for so I have named them, having no better word for their device, which is a great bird stitched upon their tunics — did win their three-and-twentieth victory of the season, and the crowd did roar as though the plague itself had lifted, and I confess I roared with them, though I understood perhaps one turn in ten of what I watched.

I am told this is called "basketball," though I saw no baskets, only a hoop of iron bolted high upon a post, through which the players did hurl a leathern moon with great violence and greater joy. I have decided, after long study, that it is a form of quintain — the game the squires play at the manor fair, riding hard at a swinging target and praying not to be struck by the sandbag on the far end — save that here there are no horses, and the squires are all women, and swifter of foot than any destrier I ever saw plow a field. When the leathern moon passed through the iron hoop, the abacus worked by unseen hands — a great glowing tapestry hung above the floor, taller than the church tower back home — did add two marks, or sometimes three, and once, gloriously, a single mark, for what the man beside me called a "free throw," which I understood to be a penance shot granted when one knight had sinned against another and the priests of the game, dressed all in black and white stripes like magpies, blew upon a little horn to mark the transgression.

I will say this plainly, as I have been asked to say only true things about what I did not understand: the Dallas Wingfolk have now secured their place among the final companies of the realm, the ones permitted to contest for the great silver trophy when the second harvest comes, and this is their three-and-twentieth such triumph this year, which the criers say has never before been done by any wingfolk of Dallas, and so it is a chronicle-worthy thing, and I set it down faithfully, though I could not tell you the name of a single knight who scored, for I was, in truth, watching the man who sold the meat-tubes.

Ah, the meat-tubes. Good reader, I must speak of the meat-tubes, for they occupied a full half of my attention and I will not apologize for it, as a serf's stomach does not care one whit for sport. There was a fellow beneath the great tapestry pushing a little wheeled stall, and from it he drew forth tubes of meat, pink and glistening, and laid them in soft bread, and upon them he heaped a yellow unguent and a red one besides, and sold them to the crowd for coin that seemed to me a small fortune — more, I should think, than I would earn threshing a full acre of barley. I watched a boy no older than my own eldest purchase one of these meat-tubes and devour it in four bites, and I thought: here is a marvel greater than any leathern moon through any iron hoop. Here is a boy who need not fear the winter granary, for there is meat-in-a-tube whenever he wishes it, sold by a man who need not slaughter the beast himself, nor smoke it, nor salt it against the cold months. I stood transfixed a full quarter of the contest watching this trade and only remembered the jousting when the whole hall rose up bellowing at once, and I bellowed too, out of fellow-feeling, though I had missed entirely whatever had caused it.

There was also a great painted ox, or perhaps a wolf — I could not settle the matter, for it wore both horns and fangs, which no beast of my acquaintance does — that danced upon the sidelines between bouts of play, flinging small woven sacks into the crowd, which the people fought over like starving dogs over a thrown crust, though when I later inspected one that landed near my feet I found it held nothing but a kind of puffed grain, sweetened, of no nutritive value whatsoever. The dancing ox-wolf did not till, did not tithe, did not appear to labor in any fashion I could recognize as honest, and yet the crowd loved it more, I think, than they loved the knights, for it made the children shriek with a joy I have not heard since the mummers came through at Candlemas.

And the horn! I must speak also of the horn, or rather horns, for there were several — a great low blast that sounded whenever the sabbath-rest was called (I believe they name it a "timeout," which I take to mean a pause granted so that the merchants of meat-tubes and woven grain-sacks might do further trade before the contest resumed), and a sharper blast when a quarter of the contest ended, and a third, most terrible of all, when the whole match was decided, at which the crowd did erupt as though the King himself had been crowned anew. I am given to understand this third blast marked the moment the Dallas Wingfolk secured not merely this one contest but their place in the second-harvest tournament entire, and so I set down, with the gravity the moment deserves, that it was a great victory, hard-fought, and thoroughly deserved, though I could not tell you the manner of its fighting beyond the general impression of much running and much shouting and a great deal of very tall women moving with a speed that would shame any courser in my lord's stable.

I did notice, toward the contest's end, a man in a striped tunic who did nothing but blow his little horn and point at a spot upon the floor, over and over, and I took him at first for a kind of holy man, marking sins as they occurred, and I still believe this to be roughly accurate, for the crowd treated his pronouncements with the same mix of dread and grudging obedience they might show a visiting bishop. When he pointed and blew thrice in succession near the contest's close, the whole hall groaned as one, and I groaned with them, out of solidarity, though I had not the faintest notion what sin had been committed nor against whom.

The seats, I should mention, were shaped most curiously — not benches such as we have at the manor court, but each a private cup for a single pair of haunches, in rows climbing so high toward the rafters that a man at the very top must have felt himself nearer Heaven than the game. I sat rather low, and so cannot speak to what the view affords a soul among the angels, but I am told it costs a full week's wages merely to sit there, which strikes me as a poor bargain when a man might instead purchase seven meat-tubes and feed his whole household.

The Dallas Wingfolk have won, then, and won greatly, and will fight on into the second harvest, and I am glad of it, though the light is failing now and I hear, or believe I hear, my own field calling — the turnips will not pull themselves, and the reeve marks absences most severely. I must away.

— Hodge o' the Field, who saw a great deal and understood a very little of it, and is grateful all the same