On the Shortening of the Fourth Field, and the Mercy Shown Therein

I am sent again to watch the great games and set down what I see, and I have done it, though as God is my witness I do not know what a single moment of it meant. My lord — I know not which lord, only that men in yellow stripes seemed to answer to him — set me upon a hard bench above a field of cut grass so green and so exact that I took it at first for a tapestry, until I saw men standing upon it, which no tapestry permits.

The teams were called Arizona State and Morgan State, and I am told this is a game of foot-ball, though I saw precious little kicking and a great deal of running and falling down, which any bailiff could tell you is not a sport but simply Tuesday. Above the field hung a vast glowing tapestry worked by hands I could not see, showing the players again upon its face even as they stood before me in the flesh — a doubling I do not care to think on too closely, for it smacks of the sort of mirror-magic the priest warns against, the kind that steals a portion of your soul each time it copies you.

I will tell it as I saw it, in the order I saw it, and you may sort the wheat from the chaff, for I confess I cannot.

The first thing I marked was a man near the gate selling meat sealed inside a long pale tube of bread, no bone in it anywhere, which struck me as either great butchery or great sorcery, and I did not ask which for fear of the answer. He wanted coin I did not have and would not have understood regardless, being stamped with faces of men who are surely all dead now and yet still made to guard the realm's purse from their little metal prisons. I watched him work his cart for the better part of an hour. He is, I believe, a man of some importance, for the line before him was longer than the line to see the game itself, and a wise reeve knows to watch where the common folk actually spend their labor and their pence, not where the lords tell them to look.

Eventually I turned my eyes to the field proper, where the match itself was under way, and here I must be honest and say the game bewildered me entire. Men in armor of a padded and unfamiliar cut ran at one another and fell, and this was cheered. A ball, oblong as a fine goose egg, was thrown and caught and occasionally dropped, and this too was cheered, though sometimes it was groaned at instead, and I could discern no rule by which the crowd chose one response over the other, save that they seemed to already know, the way a flock knows to turn before the hawk is seen. One side, called Arizona State, appeared by every measure I could take to be winning by a margin so vast that I began to wonder if the other side, Morgan State, had perhaps wandered onto the wrong field entire, the way a man might stumble drunk into the wrong parish on market day and find himself married before he understands his error.

And it was here that the strangest and, I think, the finest thing I witnessed all evening came to pass. For the match is divided, I am told, into four quarters, as a field is divided into four furlongs for the crop rotation, and when the third of these was done and the rout was plain to every eye in the yard, the men in authority over both sides — their reeves, I must suppose, or perhaps their very lords, for they wore no armor and did not run — came together and agreed between them, in full sight of the crowd, to cut the fourth and final quarter down from its full twenty minutes to a mere ten.

I confess I wept a little at this, though quietly, and turned my face so the man beside me would not see. For I have known what it is to labor a field long past the point where the labor means anything — to keep tithing grain from ground already stripped bare, to keep a man's nose to the plow after the frost has already taken the crop, simply because the almanac says the day is not yet done. And here were two lords, watching one side ground into the dirt with no hope of remedy, and rather than let the full twenty minutes grind on for cruelty's own sake, or for the crowd's amusement, or because "the standard" demanded it, they simply — stopped early. They halved the suffering by decree and let both sides go to their supper the sooner for it. I have begged mercy of harder men than these for a great deal less, and been refused, and here it was granted freely, between two houses that owed each other nothing, over a matter of ten minutes of grass.

I do not fully understand why a fourth quarter can be shortened by simple agreement when I have watched whole villages starve because no one had the standing to say the third bad harvest in a row need not be endured to its bitter, technical end. But I mark it down as a kindness, whatever its name, and kindnesses are rare enough in any field, plowed or painted, that a man ought to note them when he sees them, and not ask too hard after the mechanism.

The painted ox — I am told it is called a mascot, and that it is neither an ox nor painted, precisely, but a man inside a costume shaped like some other manner of beast, which is a distinction I will accept on faith and not comprehend besides — capered along the sideline throughout, tending nothing, herding nothing, and yet everyone seemed pleased by it, the way a village is pleased by a fool at a fair even though the fool grows no wheat and mends no fence. I liked him best of anyone on the field. He alone seemed to know exactly what he was for.

The shortened quarter came and went in what felt, from my bench, like no time at all — which I suppose was rather the point of shortening it — and the men in yellow stripes blew their little shepherd's whistles one final time, and the abacus worked by unseen hands settled on its last sum, and it was done. Arizona State had won, greatly and without much doubt, and Morgan State went to whatever supper awaits a beaten house, and I hope it was a good one, for they had earned an early one if nothing else.

I do not know what I have seen tonight, not truly, save that men who could have prolonged another's misery chose instead not to, and that somewhere behind me a man is still, even now, selling meat from tubes to a line that has not gotten any shorter. I must away. The light is going and there is a field at home wanting my hand upon it, tithe or no tithe, and no lord here has agreed to shorten that.

— Hodge o' the Field, who saw mercy done in ten minutes where twenty were owed, and calls it a good omen for the harvest