Hodge's Last Dispatch from the Field of the Silver Cup

I am bid to watch the great contests of this loud age and set down what passes before mine eyes, though God knows I have not the learning for it, and so I set to my labor as any honest man must, be it turnips or tourneys.

They told me a champion of the southern lands had laid down his lance for good and all, having but lately won the Silver Cup of All Nations, and that I was to watch him do it and write it true. I confess I did not see the laying-down itself, for I was much occupied with a fellow at the edge of the field who sold hot meat-tubes from a little wheeled stall, and I judged this a marvel worth close study, him working his tongs over the coals with the solemnity of a priest at the host, and I set down three full lines upon the manner of his bun before I recalled myself to the business at hand.

The contest, as I have come to understand it — and I own I understand it poorly — is fought not with lance nor mace but with a ball driven along the ground by the feet alone, which strikes me as a great and needless hardship, God having given men hands for good reason, but I do not question the customs of foreign shires. The champion of whom I write is called Messi, a name I am told is spoken with reverence from here to the eastern sea, and he has this year quit the field of nations altogether, his shire having lifted the Silver Cup under his captaincy, and he departing the company of champions a great deal richer in glory than when he arrived.

They tell me — and I set it down as told, for I have not the ciphering to check it myself — that across the long span of his service to his home shire he drove the ball past the guarded wicket one hundred and five-and-twenty times, which is a harvest of scoring such as I have never heard tell of, not from the miller's son who once put an arrow through the reeve's hat at forty paces and was spoken of in three villages for a year after. One hundred and five-and-twenty! I said this aloud to a woman beside me selling little painted flags and she looked at me as though I were simple, which I own I may well be, being a farmer a very long way from his field.

I did not see much of the ball itself, for my eye was drawn instead to a great glowing tapestry hung high above the multitude, upon which numbers and small moving figures of men chased one another about, and I took this at first for a species of sorcery, a spirit-mirror showing the true contest in miniature for the benefit of those too far back to see, and indeed I believe I was not far wrong, for the crowd watched it more than they watched the field proper, which tells a man something about where the true magic lies. There was also a man in black who went among the players blowing upon a shepherd's whistle at his own pleasure, and none dared gainsay him, and I took him for a sort of reeve or bailiff set over the game, empowered to halt all commerce with a single breath, and I confess I admired him more than any player, for it is a fine thing to see a man so feared for so small an object.

The champion himself I saw only at a great remove, a small dark-haired figure among many, and when the horns sounded — for there were horns, and a great singing beforehand, a hymn I think, sung by the whole multitude standing with hands upon their hearts, which put me greatly in mind of Sunday mass though the words were foreign to me and the tune had no priest in it — when the horns sounded he was borne about upon the shoulders of his fellows, and men wept, actual tears, grown men in the manner of women at a wake, and I understood then that whatever this game truly was, it mattered to them as much as harvest or plague or the lord's justice matters to us, which is to say entirely, and I felt a great tenderness toward them all despite understanding not one particle of what had occurred.

I am told this Messi first took up the ball for his home shire when he was yet a stripling, younger than the miller's boy, and served it without fail across near a score of years, through many contests, until this, his last and greatest, when the Silver Cup came home with him at last after long and famous disappointment, and having won it he laid the whole business down and will not do it again, choosing instead, I suppose, some quieter life, though what a man does with himself after such glory I cannot fathom, no more than I can fathom what I shall do come Michaelmas when the tithe is paid and the fields lie fallow.

There was, besides, a great deal of business I could make no sense of whatsoever: a painted beast in the likeness of some creature I do not know, neither ox nor hound nor anything of God's honest creation, that danced along the boundary and embraced small children, to their great delight and their mothers' apparent unconcern, which I set down without comment, for who am I to judge the customs of the south; and a man who stood before a bright standing mirror and spoke at great length to no one I could see, extolling at length the virtues of a cart, or perhaps a draught of some liquor, I could not tell which, and I gave him near as much of my ink as I gave the champion, for he held forth with such conviction that I took him, for a good while, to be some manner of herald reading the shire's proclamation, and only later understood him to be selling something, though what, God alone knows.

The crowd sang once more at the end, and wept again, and threw down small strips of colored parchment from on high like a strange dry snow, and the champion was borne off, and that, near as I can reckon, was the whole of it — a man who fed his shire five-and-twenty-and-a-hundred victories over the wicket across the better part of his life, and who has now set down his tools for good, honored and wept over as he went, which is more than most men get, myself included, and which I do not begrudge him, having spent the day right happily among tapestries and tube-meats and painted beasts, understanding almost none of it, and content, on the whole, to have seen it.

The light is going now and I am wanted back at the hedgerow, for the truth does not tend itself, however grand men's games may be.

Yours in bafflement and duty, Hodge