Chapter XXI:
The Pilgrims

MY CONCLUDING WORK with regard to restoring the fortunes of the Odiham Ogres lay in disbanding the hogs—I mean, the original players—and sending them off to other teams where they might better continue honing their skills. I inquired of Sandy as to which of the Knights’ farm teams would be best.

“For which players, Boss?”

“All of them.”

“Great Scot! All of them?”

“Am I hearing an echo? Yes, all of them.”

My very special assistant stroked his chin a moment and gave me a cautious look. “All… relocated to the same team?”

I cannot be certain why it seemed as if I was speaking to a wall this particular morning—not the thin, crumbly ones I have watched Sandy punch a fist through, mind, but the six-foot-thick, protect-the-castle-from-invaders sort. Perhaps his wits were befuddled by our all-night… session.

I stifled a sigh as well as the urge to roll my eyes. While not prohibited by the Royal Rules Committee, eye rolling most often appears gauche, droll, or otherwise unattractive; and none of those facial traits are meet for public display by a lady of my breeding and rank. I said:

“La, of course they do not have to all go to the same team, Sandy, you dear chucklewit! Move the pitchers to teams where they can learn their art from good pitching coaches, the infielders to mentor with retired infielders, and so forth. Why, scatter them to the four winds, if that be what is needful!”

“Ah, yes, of course, Boss. Right away, Boss. We can send…” followed by a meandering ramble of which players ought to be shipped where, and why. I did not care to hear these particulars, but since Sandy had demonstrated difficulty in focusing on my request, I let him proceed in his verbal wanderings in the hope that he would recall at least some of it when it came time to issue the reassignments.

As for the other farm teams, Sandy knew my standards, physical as well as economical, and what I wanted to accomplish with regard to team and facility improvements. I sent him on his quest to visit the other clubs with my blessing and a strict admonition to ring me whenever he had any questions about the manner in which to proceed, and to ring me at least once a day with an update of his progress, even if he had no questions.

’Twas an excellent parting for both of us. I confess that our night sessions were beginning to wear on me a trifle, too. Can you blame a lady of more than sixteen hundred winters for not being quite as young as she once was?

Sandy’s last official duty before embarking upon his quest was to advise me regarding which 1A players to pull from the other farm clubs for reconstituting the Ogres. I wheeled and dealed to put together the best team I could, presided proudly over the first Free Beer Friday game featuring the newly minted team playing to a capacity crowd in their newly minted ballpark (the Ogres thrashed the Liverpool Puddles, farm club of the Stirling Bravehearts, 10–2), and pronounced the entire effort “Good”… if a bit lonely.

As satisfying as that victory was, however, I was glad to have the matter of the Odiham Ogres settled so that I could return full attention to my Knights.

They, too, were a newly minted team following the infusion of talent during spring training and the vigorous competition for positions that sparked. Sometimes competition was not the only thing that sparked between players as the stress of the season mounted and tempers soared. As with my knightly retainers in Gore of old, these London Knights ballplayers did not always function together as harmoniously as I might wish, and their win-loss record showed it like a pencil poking taut tissue.

Thus was the case when I returned from Odiham to find my Knights in a nine-game slump heading into an extended road trip throughout France, beginning at Nîmes, home of the Crocodiles and former home of our starting center fielder. I remained true to my promise to Sandy to refrain from magically meddling with the players’ performances, and contented myself with delivering a rousing speech to them inside the team’s steel dragon on the way over, heating up my allure to entice them to play better. Heaven alone knew how much good it would accomplish, but the players appreciated my attentions,—and I, theirs.

I had not set foot in Nîmes since I was a very young bride. Uriens had taken me there after our nuptials—the realm of Gore was about as quiet as it ever got, with relatively few brigands and invaders lurking or plotting to lurk, and Uriens possessed a fair cadre of veteran knights he could trust to look after the kingdom’s affairs in our absence. We took ship to Nîmes and enjoyed the best romp of our lives. Our son Uwaine was conceived on that expedition, and my marriage—and life, in retrospect—was all downhill after that.

So I had stored up a pleasant memory or two of Nîmes, but by now I had sojourned in this century going on a double handful of years and knew better than to expect familiar sights.

Being “The Wise” means I am rarely wrong—and when it occasions that I am, I am loath to admit it. And yet I have never felt so delighted to be wrong, and admit it within the pages of this chronicle, than the day I arrived with the Knights in Nîmes and found it to be nearly untouched by the relentless centuries! Oh, it had its modern amenities—VRTV and flying limos and all the other techie conveniences to which I had become accustomed, and in fine French tradition so many public eating establishments that a patron could not take three steps outside one without stumbling into the next.

On closer inspection of the people, I could see the ultra-mega-modern differences: audio devices concealed within the ears, computing devices strapped to wrists, tinted visors with heads-up video feeds doubling as sunglasses, portable VRTV-like advertising boards being lugged by those paid to bombard the public with these continually switching slogans.

However, a huge—literally—reason for my initial impression lay in the fact that the old Roman amphitheatre, weathered by the intervening millennium and a half, still dominated the cityscape, complete with all its crocodile-and-palm-tree statuary (the latter I always fancied looked more like an up-gushing fountain). Even to this day, all the other Roman structures—baths and barracks and towers and temples—and their far newer counterparts, lap reverently round the amphitheatre like ripples in a pond. When King Alain had ruled here during my first visit, he had staged for Uriens and me a tournament featuring a grand melee of more than a hundred knights, in addition to the one-on-one jousting lists inside the amphitheatre. I can still feel the cold of the stone benches seeping through my thin gown and, like any silly young bride, shifting closer to my husband for warmth, and he indulging this unqueenly behavior by wrapping his strong arm around my shoulders.

To-day only visitors holding tickets for the economy seats are obliged to perch on comfortless stone, or import their own cushions for the event, or pay an arm and half a leg to buy a Nîmes Crocodiles souvenir cushion, or half an arm for the privilege of hiring a frayed, flattened, faded, and forlorn plain one for the duration of the game. These pilgrims are a noisy, cheery lot of all ages and levels of the social spectrum, from the shabbily dressed man escorting his son, who is sporting a crisp Crocodile jersey two sizes too big, for what is clearly, for both of them, a once-in-a-lifetime event, to the shoal of sharply suited businessmen and -women whose merits have earned them an afternoon’s respite from the demands of their trade. To judge by the way these latter folk continued nattering away into their communication devices or swiping fleet fingers across said devices’ screens, solemn-faced even as they inched through the line toward the ticket takers, perhaps their respite was not as long as they might deserve.

Those of my rank—as queen or WBF club owner, take your pick—may enjoy well-appointed luxury boxes as at any other big league stadium, if not quite so well appointed as the boxes at my own New Wembley Ballpark.

En route to the Visiting Owner’s Box, however, I chanced to encounter an altogether different stratum of society. The clear windows of my conveyance gave me full view of many dozens of unfortunate souls who appeared to be scraping out an existence in the amphitheatre’s shadow. The local police had forced them farther away from the stadium; as I passed, I saw more than one beggar offering resistance to the command and being wrestled away in response. I had seen such things in Gore; but in this shiny new century, with all its shiny new opportunities, the tableau struck me as odd. I queried my assistant (not Sandy, who remained occupied with the farm teams) as to whether such things happened near New Wembley, for my private limo possessed darkened windows and its own landing pad inside the complex, so I had never considered what might be happening outside.

“Yes, Boss. Ballpark Security does a fine job on game day keeping ’em away from the ticket holders, so that’s why you’ve never heard about ’em.”

“Have these people no homes? No livelihoods? No gainful employment?”

“Some pocket a few quid to clean up the seats and grounds after games, or to hand out souvenir merch for special promotions. Once in a while, one of the blokes’ll get lucky scalping a dropped ticket. Otherwise, yeah, no gainful employment to speak of.” He paused a moment, scratching his chin. “I’d say they’re better off than the Yanks holed up in those wretched Sanctuary districts of theirs, though.”

It took me a moment to shift from “Yanks” the ballplayers of Connecticut to “Yanks” the generic British term for Americans. “Sanctuary” in this context was a word I had not heard since my days as Campaign Boss—and only in the severest of cautionary tones; as in, never set foot within those chaotic walled borders, upon peril of life. In those days, I had accepted the caution and not given those districts another thought. To-day my mind trod a different path.

 

Wretched Sanctuary

 

 

Such things should not be. A kingdom—or ball club, or any other organization of individuals—is only as strong as its weakest subject. In my Gore, the poor were the infirm of body and mind, those physically or mentally incapable of providing for themselves and thus obliged to depend upon the mercy of others, Church or Crown. Here, in Nîmes, London, Washington, and everywhere else in this lunatic century, “lazy” had become an accepted synonym for “infirm.”

I vowed to change that. As a divinely appointed ruler, whose sacred duty lay in protecting her people—even if said duty had been thrust upon her by magical mishap rather than by birth or marriage—I could do no less.