The Muster of Twelve Knights, as Called by the Reeve Snedeker

I am bid again to watch the great contests of this shining age and set down what passes before mine eyes, though God is my witness I do not know one measure of it from another, and have long since stopped hoping to. Today it is told to me that a fellow named Snedeker, who I am given to understand holds some manner of reeve's office over the yeomanry of this land, has gone about the calling of his muster — the choosing of twelve knights who shall ride forth under his banner to some grand and distant tourney called, in the tongue of these people, the Presidents Cup. I confess the name confuses me greatly, for I have seen no president, nor any cup neither, only a great deal of solemn talk about "picks," as though the reeve were out gleaning turnips from a field of men.

It is put to me that this Snedeker did not simply take whosoever stood nearest the hedgerow, as a lesser lord might in a lean year, but went instead among "his pool of elite competitors" — a phrase which I take to mean a fishpond stocked entire with champions, each one presumably gilled and glistening and eager to be hauled up onto dry land and pressed into service. I have never myself seen a fishpond that bred knights, but I am a very long way from my field, and I have learned this year not to marvel overmuch at what marvels I am shown, only to write them down faithfully and let wiser men than I sort out the sense of it.

The choosing itself, as it was told to me, is called the "captain's picks," and I own I spent the better part of the telling turning that phrase over like a coin I did not trust. In my own village the picking is done by the reeve at Michaelmas, and it is turnips he picks, or else the fattest of the lord's swine for slaughter, and there is weeping about it either way. Here it seems a man is picked not for slaughter but for glory, and is glad of it, and there is a great deal of clapping where in my village there would be a great deal of crossing oneself. I do not fully credit that any twelve men could be so pleased at being singled out by their better, having known singling-out my whole life to go the other direction entire, but I set it down as I heard it, for that is the whole of my office.

I am told further that this muster rides not for our own lord but is set against another team entire, foreign in nature, and that the contest between them shall be reckoned across many days upon a great long field kept unnaturally green, tended, I am given to understand, by beasts that crop no grass and give no milk but merely ride back and forth upon little wheels, driven by boys who seem to enjoy the labor a very great deal more than any ox-boy I have ever known. I confess I could watch these little wheeled beasts the whole day through and count myself well entertained, and I did in fact linger upon the report of them a good while, for they are, of all the wonders set before me, the one I understood the most completely, which is to say not at all, but pleasantly.

Of the actual contest I am told less, save that it involves a stick and a small white stone, which the knights strike at with great ceremony and greater silence, the crowd about them holding its breath as though at a hanging, and then erupting all at once into noise when the stone comes finally to rest in a little cup sunk into the earth — and here, I think, is the cup they spoke of before, though I had pictured it silver and brimming with mead, and am disappointed to learn it is merely a hole. I do not understand why twelve knights and their reeve should travel so far and be chosen with such solemnity merely to knock a stone toward a hole, when any boy in my village accomplishes the same with a marble and a rabbit-warren before breakfast and is cuffed about the ear for his trouble rather than clapped. But I have long since given up demanding that the customs of this age answer to the customs of mine own, and I set the marvel down plain, as I saw it, and let the reader — who I am assured is cleverer than I by a wide margin — make of it what sense he can.

There was also, hard by the field, a man selling meat pressed strange and long into a soft white trencher, and passed to the waiting crowd for coin, and I watched this exchange with a fascination I am not wholly proud of, for it seemed to me a finer piece of commerce than half of what passes at our own manor fair, the meat-man never once having to answer to a bailiff nor pay a toll to any lord that I could discern, though I daresay one exists somewhere unseen, as they always do. I watched him a long while. Longer, in truth, than I watched the knights, though I do not think this a failing so much as a plain accounting of where the wonder actually lay.

What I am certain of, and will swear to on the good Book, is that the muster is now called, the twelve are chosen, the reeve Snedeker has done his choosing and his men are glad of it, and that some great reckoning now awaits them upon the green field against the foreign team, the outcome of which I cannot foretell, having no gift of prophecy, only of transcription. I wish the twelve knights well in their contest, whatever contest it truly is, and I wish the reeve wisdom in his captaincy, and I wish the little wheeled grass-beasts long service and gentle boys to drive them. I do not know when the great tourney itself shall be run, only that it is coming, as all things in this age seem to come — suddenly, loudly, and without the courtesy of explaining themselves to a man who only wants to get home before the light fails and the real field, the one with my own name on the boundary stone, goes untended another day.

The dark is coming on now and the reeve's business is not mine to keep watching — my own strips want turning before the frost, and no glowing tapestry of numbers has ever yet plowed a furrow for me.

— Hodge o' the Field, who saw the choosing and understood the half of it, and that being generous to himself