Hodge Reports the Weighing of the Two Champions, and Finds It the Strangest Contest Yet

I am bid write down what I saw, and God be good, I shall try, though I confess before I begin that I do not know what a scale has to do with a fight, nor why two grown men would stand upon one before a crowd as though it were the assize and they the accused. But I am a serf set to watch these things and set them down true, and so I watched, and here is what I saw, in good order as it happened, near enough.

There is to be, I am told, a great championship clash between one Conor Benn and one Ryan Garcia — two mighty men of the fighting trade, each said to be champion of something, though of what exactly nobody troubled to tell a farmer such as myself. And before this clash, which I gather comes later and which I am sorry to say I did not witness, there was first a weighing. A weighing! As though the two men were sacks of barley brought to market and the miller's man come to see they had not been salted with stones to cheat the scale. I have seen such weighings a hundred times at the autumn fair, my lord's reeve standing over the beam with his little ledger, and never once did I think to see it done to a man, and with such ceremony besides, torches and shouting and a crowd pressed in as though it were the harvest tithe itself.

They stood him first, the one called Benn, upon the great scale, and by my troth he made his mark — he came in at the weight required of him, exact as a good miller's measure, and the crowd roared as though he had thrown a plow-ox over a hedge. I did not understand the roaring. A man standing still upon an iron plate is not, to my eye, a feat of arms. But I set it down as I saw it: Conor Benn weighed true, and the men around him seemed to think this a fine and manly thing, and who am I, a stranger to this age, to say otherwise.

Then came the other, Ryan Garcia, and here is where I confess myself lost entire, for he did not make his weight — he came in over the mark, as a farmer's pig comes in over the mark when you have fed it too well through a soft winter — and the crowd's roar turned to another sound, half a jeer and half a groan, the sound my own village makes when the harvest is thin and the reeve must go back and tell the manor so. I understood this part better, in truth, for I have stood on the wrong side of a bad tally myself, and I know the look a man wears when the number comes in against him. Garcia wore that look. I will say no more of it than that, for it is not my place to mock a man for coming up short upon a scale, any more than I would mock a neighbor whose oats fell light in a dry year. The scale is the scale. It does not lie, and it does not care whose feelings it bruises.

So: Benn beat Garcia to the scale. This much I am certain is true, for I saw the numbers with mine own eyes, though I own I cannot read the little glowing marks upon the beam and had it told me by a man standing near who seemed to know his letters. What this means for the actual clash — the fight itself, the great championship contest I am told is still to come — I cannot say, for a weighing is not a fight, whatever these people seem to believe. It is passing strange to me that so much is made of who stands lightest upon an iron plate before the real business is even begun. In my village we do not parade the plow-horses through the square and cheer the one who has eaten least before we so much as hitch the plow. We simply plow. But this is a grander age than mine, and grander ages, I have learned, love a ceremony before the labor more than the labor itself.

I will confess, too, that my eye wandered from the scale itself, as it does, for there was near the great hall a fellow selling meat cut thin and rolled in a paper wrapping, and a line of men waited on him longer, I daresay, than they waited on the weighing, and I found this the more honest spectacle of the two, for a man buying his supper understands exactly what he is about, and I could not always say the same of the crowd around the scale. I watched this meat-seller a good long while. He worked a little fire no bigger than a cook's hearth and turned his wares with a practiced hand, and I thought, here is a tradesman I understand, here is labor I can set my own labor beside and call it kin. The champions upon their scale were a mystery to me. The man with his meat-cart was not.

There was also, I must record, a great deal of shouting between the two champions before ever they stepped down from the platform — faces brought close, fingers pointed, men in dark coats holding them apart as the reeve holds apart two villeins quarreling over a boundary stone. I have seen this before too, in my own field, over whose furrow ran where, and I confess it comforted me somewhat to see that even champions of this shining age quarrel the same as plowmen do, over lines and marks and who has crossed what. It is, perhaps, the one thing in this whole strange spectacle I understood entire.

And so the weighing ended, Benn triumphant upon the scale and Garcia found wanting, and the crowd dispersed into the night still shouting of a fight that has not yet even happened, which strikes me as no different from a village arguing over next year's harvest before the seed is even in the ground. I do not know who will win the true contest when it comes, the actual clash of the two champions, whatever form that takes — whether fists or staves or some manner of combat I have not yet been shown. I know only that one man made his weight true and honest as a miller's sack, and the other did not, and that the crowd cared for this more than I would have thought a crowd could care for the reading of a scale.

I have set it down as I saw it, and no more, for that is my charge and I do not stray from it. The light is going now and there is a field somewhere wanting my hands upon it, though I could not tell you where that field has got to in this loud and shining place. I must away all the same.

By the plow and the scale both — Hodge o' the Field.