The Two Champions and the Long Waiting of the Field

I was bade this day to watch a great contest between two houses of champions, one liveried in red and gold like the banners of a harvest feast, the other in a blue so deep it minded me of a sky before hail, and I set down here what mine eyes beheld, though God is my witness I understood perhaps a tenth part of it.

The house in red and gold is called the Chiefs, and the house in blue is called the Broncos, which I am told is a word for a wild horse, though I saw no horse the whole day, only men in great padded harness running to and fro upon a field marked out in white lines like a strip-farmer's furlongs, each furlong ten paces wide, though what crop they meant to raise there I could not say, for the ground was a strange green that never once looked trod nor turned.

Word had gone round the manor, as such word does, that the golden champion of the red house, a man called Mahomes, had taken a grievous wound to the leg but a season past — a tear in the very sinew behind the knee, such as would lame an ox for a twelvemonth and see it sold for stewing — and yet here he stood, restored, and pronounced fit to enter the lists. By my troth, I have seen the barber-surgeon set a leg with hot iron and prayer and watched the man limp the rest of his days, so whatever physic they practice in this age, upon this man it answered well. The blue house's own champion, called Nix, had likewise suffered a hurt to the ankle and was likewise returned to the field, walking sound, and the crowd made a great noise of gladness at the both of them, which I thought fitting, for a lord's champion who rises whole from a wound is a thing worth ringing the church bell for, and here they simply cheered, which I suppose serves.

I confess I lost the thread of the contest itself early on, for no sooner had the two houses arrayed themselves than my eye was taken by a man some way off tending a little wheeled stall from which he drew forth tubes of hot meat, pink and glistening, and laid them into soft bread and passed them to all who came, for coin. I watched this man a full quarter of an hour. He worked with the calm of a good miller, never hurried, never idle, and I marked that his queue never once grew shorter, so that I came to think of him as a kind of patron saint of the whole affair, more constant than any player on the field, who came and went and fell down and rose again in a way that unsettled me.

There was, too, a beast — I know not what to call it otherwise — got up all over in shaggy fur the color of a red house's banner, with a great round head and no visible eyes, that capered and danced along the edge of the field and embraced small children and made no sound at all. I took it at first for a mummer's ox brought out for the crowd's delight, of the sort we keep for Plough Monday, and indeed it tended nothing and pulled no cart, yet it danced without cease the whole time I watched it, which I found somewhat holy and somewhat frightening in equal measure, and I said a small prayer for it, as one does for things one does not understand.

The field itself was watched over by men in black and white stripes, like magpies, who carried a little whistle of the sort a shepherd uses to call his dog from the far hill, and when they blew it the whole company of players would stop dead where they stood, as if struck by a spell, and stand about in a great muddle until some matter was settled among them that I could not follow, something to do with a yellow cloth thrown upon the ground, the meaning of which I take to be an accusation of witchcraft, for after it was thrown the men would gather round a little glowing box at the field's edge and stare into it as into a scrying-glass, and upon whatever they saw there the play was sometimes undone entire, the runners set back to where they had started, as though time itself had been made to run backward for their sole convenience. I have not the learning for it. I only note that no priest was called to bless the undoing, which in my own country would have been thought a very grave oversight indeed.

Above it all hung a tapestry vaster than any I have seen in the grandest hall, worked all over not in thread but in light, showing the two champions' faces twenty feet high and numbers that changed themselves without any hand to move them, an abacus worked by unseen clerks, forever tallying something I could not make out the meaning of, though the crowd seemed to read it like Scripture and groaned or cheered according to what it told them. Before the contest proper began, a woman stood alone upon the field and sang a long and difficult song about a flag, unaccompanied by any minstrel, and every soul present rose and removed their caps and stood silent but for her, which was, I will say plainly, the one part of the whole day that felt to me like proper reverent observance, and I stood with them and was glad of it.

Of the game itself — the running, the throwing, the great pile-driving collisions of men who fell upon one another like sacks of grain tipped from a cart — I can tell you only that it went on a very long while, that the red house and the blue house each in turn seemed to gain ground and lose it, like two armies contesting a hedgerow that neither can hold, and that the two healed champions, Mahomes and Nix, both stood tall and threw their leather ball with great vigor and no sign at all of the wounds that had lately laid them low, for which I say again: God be good to whatever surgeon mends men so.

I could not tell you who prevailed, for the light began to go long before the abacus in the sky had finished its tallying, and I am a serf bound to his hours same as any other, and the field wants tending, and the beasts do not feed themselves for wonder at a red house or a blue one. So I laid down my quill and left the great glowing tapestry still burning behind me, the meat-tube man still dealing out his wares to a queue that had not shortened one whit, the painted ox still dancing to no music I could hear, and went home to my own small dark field, which asks nothing of me but the plow.

Yours in mud and wonder, Hodge o' the Field