Of Iron Oxen and the Reading of the Bones, Being a Friday at the Great Circuit of Spain

I am bid this day to watch practice at a place called Spain, where they say a grand contest is soon to be run, though what manner of contest it is I confess troubles me exceedingly, for I have looked upon it a good long while and seen no ball, no goal, no wicket, nor any beast set to race against another beast, only men seated low in iron shells that scream like a hundred smiths' forges all struck at once, going round and round a black ribbon of road that goes nowhere and yet is raced upon with the gravest ceremony, as though it led somewhere holy. By my troth, I do not understand it, yet I have been set to watch it and report it true, and so watch and report I shall, God be good to me.

They call this day's labor "practice," which I take to mean a rehearsal before the reeve arrives to collect the tithe, for there is a great deal of counting and weighing and murmuring over ledgers, and men in matching tunics — plainly a guild, though of what trade I cannot say, perhaps farriers, for they are forever crouched at the feet of the iron chariots doing something to the wheels — stand about with slates held up bearing numbers too fast for any Christian eye to follow. I am told these numbers tell of "sessions," of which there are two, held across the one day, the first in the cool of the morning and the second when the sun stands higher and the black road itself grows hot as a bread-oven, so that the iron shells sit differently upon it, gripping the ribbon of road more or less as a cart wheel grips mud that is either dry-baked or freshly churned. This much I understand, for I have known mud my whole life and mud, at least, does not lie to a farmer, however much it may lie to these men in their little glass towers.

The chariots themselves are a marvel and a horror both. They have no oxen, no horse, no mule, and yet they move faster than any beast I have ever seen flee a dog, and this I put down plainly to sorcery, for there is no other honest word for a cart that races itself without a single hoof to push it. The men who ride within are strapped down tight as a man bound for the ducking stool, and wear upon their heads great smooth helms, and their chariots bear a curved bar above the rider's crown like the yoke of an ox turned backward, which the wise men in tunics call by a foreign word I cannot render, but which I am certain exists to keep the rider's soul from flying out of the top of his skull when the chariot goes fast enough to outrun a hawk.

What struck me most, and what I set down here with the greatest care, was the matter of the shoes. Four times and more across the day, a chariot would come rolling into a little walled yard, and a full dozen men would fall upon it as locusts upon a barley field, and in less time than it takes to say a single Pater Noster they had pulled off all four of its wheels and clapped on four new ones and sent it away again, and I tell you, good reader, I have watched a farrier shoe a temperamental mare and it has taken him the better part of an hour and cost him two fingers of skin, and here were a dozen men reshoeing an iron ox in the time it takes to sneeze. I do not know what covenant these men have made nor with whom, but I should very much like to hire them for my own beasts, tithe or no tithe.

There was also, hard by the yard where the chariots are shod, a stall selling a sort of meat rolled tight in bread and dressed in a red sauce the color of a fresh wound, and the man who sold it wore a hat shaped like nothing in nature and called out his wares in a voice that carried further than the chariots themselves, and I will say plainly that I watched this man work his stall with more fascination than I watched the practicing, for here at last was honest commerce I understood — a man selling meat to hungry pilgrims — and I bought two of the rolled meats myself and found them good, though the sauce stung my lip something fierce, and I set this down as the finest report I can give of the whole day's proceeding, for a full belly is a full belly whether the age be mine or this one.

Behind the chariots, wheresoever they went, there travelled a great glowing tapestry hung high upon poles, taller than any cathedral window, upon which numbers and pictures of the chariots themselves flickered and changed without any hand to paint them, and I confess I crossed myself twice at the sight of it, for I have seen mystery plays put on by the finest players my lord could hire and none of them conjured a moving picture from empty air the way this tapestry did, showing a chariot from above as though some great bird were watching it, and then showing it again from beside, all in the space of a breath. The men in the tunics call the numbers upon it "sector times" and speak of them the way our priest speaks of the names written in the book of judgment, with great solemnity, as though a man's whole worth might be read off in three parts and a decimal, whatever a decimal is.

Of the actual racing, such as I could follow it, I am told the ribbon of road grew "quicker" as the day wore on and the black stone of it warmed, so that the chariots gripped it better in the evening session than the morning, much as a good ox pulls truer on dry ground than on ground softened by rain, and this I understood well enough, and was glad of it, for it is the one thing all this day that made plain sense to a man who has walked behind a plow his whole life. They spoke also of "tyres," which I take to be a species of boot the chariot wears, and of which there are softer boots and harder boots, the soft ones swift but soon worn through, the hard ones slower but more enduring, which again is no different from choosing whether to send a man to market in his good boots or his working boots, and I marvelled that after all their glowing tapestries and their witch-carts, these lords of the circuit had arrived, by a very long road indeed, at wisdom my own grandmother could have given them for free.

I did not see who "won," for practice, they tell me, crowns no one, which puzzles me more than anything else I saw all day — a full day's labor, a dozen men shoeing iron oxen, meat rolled in bread, a tapestry that speaks in numbers, and at the end of it, nothing decided at all, only more numbers carried off to be studied further. It is a strange age that labors so mightily and calls it nothing. But the light is going now, and the real field wants tending, whatever field that may be, and so I must away, as I always must.

Hodge o' the Field, who saw the iron oxen shod and understood perhaps one part in ten, and is grateful for the meat.