The Trial Bout of the Golden House

I am bid watch the great games and set down what I see, and so I have done, though I confess before God and this page that I understood perhaps one turn in ten of it, and I set down the rest anyway, as is my duty.

It was told to me this was not yet the true tourney but a trial bout — a testing of the lances before the harvest melee proper begins, when the standings shall count for something and the lord's steward shall care who wins. I am glad of this, for it means no soul need grieve overmuch at what I am about to relate, though relate it I shall, true and entire, for that is the office given me.

The house of the Golden Ones — red and gold their banners, and a fine bold color for a house, I thought, near the color of good harvest ale held up to firelight — did contend against the black-caped company, and when the whistle-man called the bout done, the Golden Ones had claimed eighteen tallies against their foe's twelve. Eighteen to twelve. I set it down twice so as not to err, for numbers are a slippery fish in a hand such as mine, and I would not have it said I cheated any man of his rightful score.

Now here is a wonder I must confess I have not the learning to untangle: at no point did I see a lance, nor a sword, nor any beast ridden into the field, and yet grown men in armor did run at one another with a fury I have seen only in boar hunts gone wrong, and did fall upon the turf and rise again, over and over, as if the falling itself were half the sport. I took this at first for a penance the two houses had agreed between them, some manner of trial by ordeal to settle an old grudge over grazing rights, but no man near me in the stands seemed troubled by it, so I set my worry aside and watched on, as a serf must, without complaint, for that is the whole of my training in this life.

The armor itself I marveled at greatly. Great domed helms, and padded like a miller's coat in deep winter, and I thought — here is a wise house, to armor its men so, for the falling they do is a terrible thing to witness, and I would not wish it on the reeve himself, who is a hard man but does not deserve a boar-hunt's worth of grown men landing upon him thrice a minute.

But I will tell you true, reader, where my eye truly caught and held, and it was not upon the armored men at all. Beneath the great glowing tapestry that hung in the sky above the field — a marvel I cannot account for, numbers and letters chasing themselves across it like fireflies bound to a loom, showing the tally and the turning of some invisible hourglass — beneath this tapestry there stood a man with a little wheeled stall, and from this stall he sold tubes of meat, pink and glistening, tucked into soft bread and dressed with a yellow paste the color of mustard-flower in June. I watched this man work for the better part of a quarter-hour. He was, I judge, the finest craftsman on that whole field. Swift of hand, unhurried of face, and never once did he drop a tube of meat to the dirt, though the crowd around him surged and roared without warning, like a flood breaking a mill-dam, and any lesser man would have lost his footing and his whole stock besides. I did not catch his name. I hope he prospers. A man who can hold a trade steady while the world convulses about him is worth ten lances, in my accounting, and I do not say this lightly, having held a hoe steady myself through worse.

There was also a beast, I must note, though I did not see it clearly — some manner of golden ox or hound, I could not say which, that pranced along the edge of the field in the manner of a court fool, and did no work I could discern, and tended no flock, and yet the crowd loved it dearly and made much noise whenever it capered. I have turned this over in my mind and concluded it must be kept for luck, the way some manors keep a black cat by the granary door, and who am I, a stranger to this whole shining age, to say the golden dancing ox does not in fact ward off blight. Perhaps it does. Perhaps that is why the harvest here seems always so plentiful, for I have never in my life seen so much meat-in-a-tube sold in so short a span, nor so many drinking-vessels the size of a christening font, and someone must account for such abundance, and I have only the ox to blame it on.

The whistle-man in his black-and-white robes was, I gathered, the arbiter of all disputes, and a braver soul I have not met, for grown men twice his breadth would gather round him hollering their grievances not two hand-spans from his face, and he would simply raise his arm and make a shape with it — a bird, I thought, or perhaps a blessing — and the hollering would cease, more or less, and the bout resumed. I would not have his post for all the fallow land in the shire. The reeve himself does not command such obedience, and the reeve has the lord's own seal behind him.

At the bout's mid-turning there came a great pause, and men with instruments marched in patterns upon the field entire, blowing horns in a manner most stirring, and I confess I wept a little, not knowing why, only that it seemed the sort of noise a man ought to weep at, the way one weeps at a wedding whose bride and groom are strangers to him. I do not know if this marching counted toward the eighteen tallies or the twelve. I suspect not. I set it down regardless.

By the bout's close the Golden House had held their lead, eighteen to the black capes' twelve, and the crowd dispersed well satisfied, and the meat-tube man had, by my rough reckoning, sold out entire, and packed his stall onto its wheels and trundled off into the dusk like a tinker after a good fair-day, which is, in the end, the only soul on that whole field I understood completely and without confusion, and I wish him well, and I hope the Golden House's next bout — the true one, when the harvest tourney begins in earnest — treats him as kindly as this one did.

The light is going and I am wanted back at the hedgerow, for the sheep do not know it is a trial bout and care nothing for tallies.

— Hodge, who saw much and grasped little, and remains Your Servant