On the Falcon-Men's Champion Struck Low by an Ill Humour of the Side

Hearken, and I shall tell it true, as I saw it, though God knows I understood but a mote of it.

I was bid by my betters to watch the great contest of the Falcon-men, a proud order who wear the bird upon their breast and do battle in a field marked out square as a tithing-map, and to set down what I saw so that those who cannot attend might know of it. I went gladly, for it is honest work, and a serf does not question the labor set before him, only bends his back to it. But I confess, good reader, that within the first hour I had understood less of the contest than a ox understands of Latin, and yet I pressed on, for that is my calling.

The word came down through the crowd like a bad wind through the barley: their champion, one called Tua, a name I take to be foreign and princely, had been struck low — not by lance nor mace nor any weapon I could name, but by an ill humour that has settled in his *oblique*. Now I asked the man beside me, a stout fellow selling meat upon a stick from a little wheeled cart, what manner of affliction this oblique might be, whether a demon or a growth or a curse laid upon him by a rival witch, and he looked at me as though I were the mad one, which I thought uncharitable, as I am but trying to understand the age I have been thrown into. He told me it is a muscle of the side, the kind a man uses in the twisting and the throwing, and that it has gone soft or torn within him like a wet rope, and that the healers of the Falcon-order have looked upon it and confirmed the affliction with their own mouths, which I take to be a solemn and official thing, like the reeve confirming a blight upon the wheat.

I will say this plainly: I wished the man Tua no ill. I know nothing of him save that he leads his order and now cannot, and that is a sorrow any serf can understand, for I too have known the season where the body will not do the labor the lord demands of it, and there is no remedy but rest and prayer and the mercy of them above you, who in this case I take to be a council of physics and coaches rather than any bishop. I hope he mends. I hope the ill humour passes from his side as fever passes from a child, and that he returns to his post among the Falcon-men before the frost sets in proper.

But oh, reader, the *spectacle* of the place where I learned this news — I must tell you of it, for it ate up the better part of my watching and I cannot in honesty pretend otherwise.

There was, hung above the field like the very firmament brought low and set to work, a great glowing tapestry worked all in silver fire, upon which numbers and letters and the faces of men appeared and vanished as if by the hand of some tireless clerk-spirit who never sleeps and never blots his ink. I watched this tapestry near an hour and confess I understood the games of light upon it better than I understood the game below it, for at least the tapestry held still long enough to be studied, while the men on the field would not.

And there was a beast! A great shining ox, or beast fashioned in the shape of a bird — I could not settle which, for its plumage was painted iron-grey and its beak was fierce as a hawk's, yet it walked upon two legs like a dancing man and made no cry at all — and this creature went up and down before the multitude waving its wings and causing the small children to shriek with a joy I did not myself share, for I have seen enough strange beasts in this age to have lost my taste for shrieking, and mostly now I simply write it down and let my hand shake a little after.

There was also a man dressed all in black and carrying a small silver whistle, who walked among the Falcon-men and their rivals with the gravity of a bishop at an excommunication, and when he blew upon his whistle the whole multitude of players would stop dead as if struck by the same ill humour that felled the champion Tua, and stand about looking at their own feet, and I took this whistle-man to be some manner of ecclesiastical judge sent to adjudicate sins committed upon the field, though what sins a man commits by running with a leather bladder under his arm I could not say, not being learned in the new canon law of this age.

And there was the meat-cart man, whom I have already mentioned, and who I confess occupied more of my dispatch than the contest itself, for his meat came on a stick, hot and dripping and smelling of a spice I could not name, and he sold it for coin stamped with faces I did not recognize, and around him a whole village of lesser stalls had sprung up selling drink in great vessels of a substance neither glass nor clay, thin as a beetle's wing and yet unbreakable, which struck me as the finest sorcery of the whole afternoon, finer even than the glowing tapestry, for a man could drop it upon the stone steps and it would only bounce and roll, laughing at gravity itself.

Of the actual match, I can tell you only this: that the Falcon-men play a game in which a leather bladder is thrown and carried and occasionally kicked, that their champion Tua's side has betrayed him and he could not do the throwing, and that this news struck the meat-cart man and the whistle-man and the shrieking children and indeed the whole shining multitude with a gravity I did not expect from a game whose principal drama, as far as I could tell, is men falling down upon soft grass with great ceremony and then rising again unharmed, save, it seems, for the champion's side, which does not rise so easily.

I hope he mends. I hope the reeve of the Falcon-order — whoever that solemn body of physics may be — tends him gently and does not send him back to the field before the humour has properly passed, for I have seen what comes of working a torn thing too soon, and it does not go well for the ox nor the man.

The light is going now and the shadows lie long across the page, and somewhere behind me I can feel the field I was meant to till this day calling for its due, though I cannot say where that field is nor how I shall find my way back to it. But the report is made, true as I could render it, and now I must away.

*Yours in bafflement and honest labor — Hodge o' the Field*