The Half-Sown Field of Troy

I am bid by my betters to watch the great contests of this shining age and set down what I see, though as God is my witness I do not have the learning for it, and so I set it down anyway, for that is the whole of my labor and I do not shirk labor, having been raised to it since I could carry a pail.

Yesterday I was sent to a vast stone bowl, bigger by far than any manor I have known, bigger than the church at Whitminster and the church at Aldby put together and set atop one another, and told that within it two bands of young men in leather and metal would contend for a thing called a season-opening, which I took at first for some manner of harvest rite, on account of the word "opening," and was not wholly wrong, for there was indeed an opening — a great and terrible opening, all down one whole side of the stone bowl, where by rights an entire second village's worth of souls ought to have been sitting and were not.

I confess my heart misgave me at the sight of it. In my own country an empty field at the turning of the season means one thing and one thing only, and that thing is dead cattle or a dead lord, and I said as much to the man beside me, a kindly stranger in a jerkin the color of dried blood who was himself hollering something about a school called Troy, which I know from the priest's stories to be a city that was burned entire by treachery of a horse, and I own I grew afraid, thinking we had come upon the very same horse-treachery replaying itself in this new age, the empty seats being those already carried off and slaughtered by the beast. But no beast came. Only more empty seats, patient as fallow ground, and a great low grumbling from those who had come, of the kind a village makes when the miller is known to be cheating the scales.

I heard one man call the whole business "pathetic" and another call it "absolutely embarrassing," and I nodded gravely, as I nod at anything said with enough heat behind it, though privately I could not see the shame of it. An empty field is no sin where I come from. An empty field is Tuesday. I have stood at the edge of my lord's own strip of barley and watched it lie half-sown for want of hands, on account of the plague, or the levy, or the simple fact that men would rather drink than plant, and no herald ever came round to call it embarrassing. He called it Tuesday too. So I set it down honestly: the good folk of this Troy-city were sorely wroth that not enough of their own number had troubled to come and watch their own number contend, and I did not have it in me to tell them that where I am from, we would count that a mercy, on account of it meaning more bread for them as did show up.

I will say the horse redeemed the whole afternoon for me, and here I must be honest and say the horse is the only part of the day I understood clean through, without confusion, without a moment's fumbling, for a mounted man in white in fine trim riding out before a host is a sight as old as the world and needs no translating. Here at last was a thing I knew — a knight upon a charger, sent ahead of the battle to hearten the men and put the fear of God into whosoever watched from the walls, and I confess I wept a little, from sheer gladness at recognizing something, the way a man lost three days in fog weeps at the smell of his own chimney-smoke. I do not know why the knight did not then take up a lance and settle the whole contest by himself, man and horse against the other side entire, which is how I am given to understand these things were properly done in the old days, but I set it down that he did not, and rode off instead, his work seemingly finished, and nobody thought this strange but me.

The rest of the afternoon I confess passed me by in a kind of fog, for the true business of the field — men running, men falling, a leather bladder thrown and caught and thrown again — happened always at the far edge of my sight, small as a beetle on a plowshare, while directly before me, close enough to touch, close enough to smell, stood a cart from which a man sold meat packed into a kind of pale casing no bigger than my thumb, and this I watched with my whole soul, for it seemed to me the nearest thing to true sorcery I had witnessed since coming into this age. He would take the meat-tube from a steaming trough, wrap it in soft risen bread the like of which no village oven has ever turned out so white and so quick, and hand it to a stranger for a coin, and the stranger would eat it standing, without grace said, without a knife, walking all the while, and none thought this remarkable, and I stood transfixed a full quarter of an hour merely watching the trough steam, so that I missed — I am ashamed to write it — whatever great deed it was that made the whole east side of the stone bowl leap up howling as one man. When I asked the fellow beside me what had happened he said a word I did not catch, something like "touchdown," which put me in mind of a plough striking a buried stone, sudden and jarring and cause for a great deal of noise from everyone standing near, and I have elected to believe that is exactly what it was, and no one has yet convinced me otherwise.

There was also a great tapestry hung in the sky itself, taller than any cathedral window, upon which numbers changed by unseen hand as though God's own account-book were being read aloud in light, and beneath it a company of minstrels in matching coats blew upon horns all together and beat upon drums, marching in patterns so exact I took them at first for a plough-team trained to some new and terrible precision, until I understood they made only noise and pictures on the grass, and no furrow at all, which seemed to me a great waste of good marching but who am I to say, I who have not the learning for it.

Of the empty seats I will only say this last thing: toward the day's end, as the light went long and gold across that half-sown field of stone benches, I found I no longer minded it, and indeed came near to loving it, for it put me forcefully in mind of my own country at dusk, the far unplanted end of the lord's field standing quiet while the near end still rings with labor, and a man come from tilling might look on such a sight and feel not shame but only the plain accounting of a hard season, and go home to his supper regardless, and thank God he has supper at all. Whether that is comfort or excuse-making I leave to wiser heads than mine, of which there are a great many in this age and precious few in mine own village.

The light is going now and I am called back, though to what field I could not tell you, this one having no crop in it I recognize, and no plough I could lift with these two hands. But the work is the work, and a serf does not choose his contests, only watches them, faithfully, and writes down what he saw, wrong as he is like to have gotten every last bit of it.

Yours in bafflement and duty, — Hodge o' the Field