Of a Battle Fought Beneath the Angry Eye of Heaven, and the Ox Who Danced Regardless

By my troth, I have seen plague year and drought year and the year the river took the lower field, and I tell you true: I have never seen a sun sit so low and so mean upon a crowd of God's own people as it sat yesterday upon the men of Indiana and the men of North Texas, may their harvests be spared what theirs was not.

I was sent to watch the great contest and set it down plain, and plain I shall set it, though I confess I do not know the rules of it, nor the shape of the field, nor why grown men in armor plate would choose to labor so beneath a sky that hateful. I have tithed under a cruel sun myself, stooped over barley with my back screaming and the reeve watching from the shade like the miller's cat watches a mousehole, and I tell you it is no labor for the fainthearted. These men had it worse, for they wore steel and padding thick as a winter cloak, and still they went at one another like men who owed the lord money.

The two hosts came onto the field — Indiana, which I take to be a shire or perhaps a minor dukedom, and North Texas, which by its name I reckon a northern march of some larger Texas, the way our own Upper Hollow answers to the manor at Lower Hollow — and they arranged themselves in long lines facing one another, the way soldiers do before a parley goes wrong. I confess my heart was in my mouth, for I thought we should see a proper battle, pikes and all, but no pikes came. Instead there was a great deal of crouching and shouting of numbers, which I took for a kind of counting-charm against ill luck, the sort the wise-woman mutters over a birthing, and then all at once the lines would crash together like two flocks of sheep startled by the same dog, and a man would run very fast carrying an egg-shaped stone, and the crowd would either roar with joy or fall silent as a graveyard, and I could never once tell you in advance which it would be.

I will say this plainly, because it is true and I do not exaggerate facts, only my understanding of them: the day was cruel hot, and the men suffered for it. I saw them bent double at the sidelines with cloths of ice pressed to their necks like a fever patient waiting on the physic, and I saw more than one carried off who did not walk back on, and my heart went out to every one of them, for I know what a body costs when the sun means to collect. It put me in mind of the harvest of the year of the great heat, when old Wat the thresher dropped in the stubble and did not rise till the priest came, God rest him, for he did rise, only slowly, and cursing. These men rose the same way, slow and cursing, I'd wager, though I could not hear them from where I stood.

And yet — here is the wonder of it, and I set it down faithful though I cannot account for it — for all the suffering, the men of Indiana, at the day's long end, were declared to have won. I do not know the manner of the winning. I believe it has to do with the egg-stone crossing a line painted at the field's far edge, which strikes me as a poor sort of prize for so much bleeding, but who am I, a man who has never owned a line of paint in his life, to judge how lords keep their score. I heard it shouted that this was their first such victory over these particular North Texas men, which pleased the home crowd mightily, the way a village takes joy the first year its new bull finally covers the neighboring herd's cows and nobody died of it.

Now I must speak on what I truly watched, for in honesty it was not the battle at all, and I own that freely, being a man who cannot follow a contest with no plough in it. There was, along the field's edge, a cart on wheels from which a fellow sold long pink meats stuffed into soft bread, and he did brisker trade than any miller I have known, and I watched him a good long while, marveling at how a man might grow rich selling tubes of meat to people who could surely have salted their own at home for a fraction the coin. I gave him a coin myself, for scholarship's sake, and found the meat tube a strange soft thing, not unlike a sausage that has lost an argument, though not unpleasant.

I watched also the great glowing tapestry that hung above the field, taller than any cathedral window, upon which numbers and small moving pictures of the very same men played out again, as though God himself kept a second, smaller field up in the sky for reviewing purposes. I could not say why this was needed when the true field lay directly beneath it, but I found it a marvel regardless, and twice I mistook the tapestry-men for real men and shouted encouragement at the wrong ones entirely.

There was a beast, too — a great painted ox, or something got up to resemble one, that pranced along the field's border on two legs, which no honest ox of my acquaintance has ever managed, and it embraced small children and did not gore a single one of them, which I count as either very good breeding or very good sorcery. And there came, betwixt two portions of the contest, a great company of musicians in matching coats who marched in patterns upon the field like a plough team gone mad, blowing horns fit to summon the dead, and I confess I enjoyed this more than the contest proper, for it at least I could follow: they walked, they played, they made a shape, the shape ended. Would that the rest of the day had been so plain.

The heat did not break, not once, not for a moment of it, and I marveled that any of them finished at all, painted ox and meat-cart man and armored soldier alike, all baking together under that furious sky like a manor's worth of bread shoved into one oven. But finish they did, and Indiana stood the victor, bloodied and wrung out and grinning fit to burst, and North Texas trudged off toward whatever northern march awaited them, and I understood perhaps one part in ten of what I had seen, and wrote down all ten parts regardless, as is my duty.

The light is going now and the shadow of the hedgerow falls long across where I sit, and somewhere a field of mine wants tending that exists only in a life I no longer quite recall having, and so I must away before the dark takes the road from me entirely.

— Hodge o' the Field, who saw it, and swears it happened