On the Muster of Padded Knights Bound for the Antipodes

I have this day sat upon the low wall by the practice yard of the men they call the Forty-Niners, whose device I am told is a golden numeral upon red, though I confess I took it at first for the mark of a toll road, and wondered what manner of lord charges a man to cross his own field. It is a strange thing to watch men train for a battle that has not yet come, and stranger still to be told, by a boy with a device that speaks pictures, that on the morrow these same men shall be borne across the whole of the ocean to a land called Australia, there to do combat with I know not whom, for the boy could not say, and I did not ask twice for fear of showing my ignorance, which by my troth I have never in my life managed to hide.

I have not the learning for it, this game of theirs. But I am set to watch and write down what I see, and so watch and write I shall, though God be good to whoever must read it after.

The field itself is a marvel, close-cropped and striped like a lord's best cloth laid flat upon the earth, and I marked how the padded men ran up and down upon it in lines, not fighting at all, but merely running, as a man might run from the reeve on quarter-day, except that here no one was chasing them, and they ran anyway, again and again, until a whistle-man blew his little horn and they stopped and drank from bright bags hung upon poles, which I took for a kind of communion, administered most solemnly, though I saw no priest and no bread, only water and much slapping of one another upon the rump, which is not a custom of any Mass I have attended, but who am I to say what rites this new world keeps.

There was a machine there, low and thick and stuffed with what looked like straw beneath its hide, and men ran at it and threw their shoulders against it and it did not fall, and I understood at once that this was a siege engine of some old design, a battering ram gentled down to man-height, kept upon the field so the knights might practice their charge before the true wall is met. I marveled at the ingenuity of it. Where I come from we throw ourselves at the manor gate perhaps once in a generation, and badly, and mostly by accident, drunk on Michaelmas ale. These men do it a hundred times before their nooning meal and call it Tuesday.

Half were dressed in armor the like of which I have never seen — hard shells upon the shoulders, hard shells upon the skull, and a cage across the face such as a falconer's hood, though I could not say what hawk is kept behind a man's own teeth. The other half wore soft grey, and to these I paid the closer study, for they moved among the armored men with baskets and bags and rolls of white cloth, binding up ankles and wrists that were not even wounded, which struck me as either the finest physic I have ever witnessed or the worst waste of good linen in Christendom, and I could not for the life of me decide which, so I set down both opinions and let the reader choose, as is only fair, since I cannot.

But it was the cart that held me longest. A great cart, low and open, was wheeled along the sideline bearing tubs of ice, and into these tubs, one by one, the armored men lowered their bare legs, up to the knee, and sat there grimacing while their fellows walked past unbothered, as though this were the most natural thing in the world, a man boiling his own legs backward in a horse-trough of winter. I have salted meat in brine barrels that looked more comfortable than this. I asked the boy with the picture-device what affliction required such treatment, and he said it was for their health, and I wrote that down too, though I do not believe it, not for one moment, and I think in my heart these are penitents, doing some manner of hard penance before God allows them to sail.

For sail they must, and soon, for Australia is spoken of on that field as a thing already decided, a place across the great water where they are called to give battle, and I have heard men speak of it the way we spoke, in my village, of Jerusalem — a far and holy field, terrible to reach, glorious to arrive at, and no man quite sure what waits there but everyone certain something must. I asked whether they should sail by cog or by galley and was told they should go by "charter," a word I do not know, though it sounded to me like the name of a ship, and a fine one too, and I hope she is stout, for I am told the sea between here and Australia is wide enough to swallow a kingdom, and I would not have these padded knights, penitent and iced as they are, go down beneath it for want of a good hull.

What the battle itself shall be, upon arrival, I cannot say, for I did not see it, only the practicing of it, which is to say I watched men run and strike a stuffed ram and sit in ice and drink from bags and be bound up in linen by the soft grey company, over and over, beneath a sun that seemed in no hurry at all, while somewhere behind me a horn sounded three notes I did not understand and no man around me flinched at, which told me it was ordinary, though it sounded to my ear like the last trump itself. I am told there is a rival host they mean to meet upon that far field, and that the contest between them has some name I did not catch and would only mangle if I tried to set it down, so I shall leave it be and let wiser heads than mine record the manner of the melee, if melee it proves to be. My eye is only for what stands before me, and what stood before me today was practice, and ice, and linen, and a ram that would not fall, and a boy who told me of ships called charters, and knights who do their true fighting, it seems, only after crossing an ocean I could scarce imagine crossing myself, save perhaps in a dream, or a fever, or on the far side of too much bad cider.

I do not know if they shall prevail in Australia. I do not know, in truth, what prevailing would even look like, or whether the ram-machine travels with them, packed somehow into the belly of their great charter-ship, or whether Australia keeps rams of its own for visiting knights to strike. I hope, if it does not, that they build one swiftly upon arrival, for I have grown fond of watching it take a beating and refuse to yield, which is more than I can say for most walls I have known, including the one behind the miller's, which fell over entirely last Martinmas after nothing worse than a strong wind and my uncle leaning on it.

The light is going now, and gone with it whatever understanding I came here hoping to find, which was none, and I am not surprised, and I do not mind. There is a field somewhere that wants me, and beasts that do not care one whit for Australia or its charters, and I must away to them before dark takes the road entire.

Yours in honest confusion and fair report, Hodge o' the Field