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    The tales of



    or, a Michigan Wolverine in the Lands of the Dragon






    By the Petition of Friends
    An extraordinary surprise from my Cynnabar friends at Kingdom 12th Night, 2005


    As told in another forum

    The traditional end of the holiday season, in both Medieval Europe and the modern SCA, is 12th Night, twelve days, give or take, after Christmas, and has been for a long time an important holiday here in Pentamere. Each year one of Pentamere's great Baronies plays host to a day of art classes and dancing classes, competitions and displays, and all kinds of celebration and merriment. Gathered are the entire region's nobles and gentles, entire troupes of Court and Landed Barons, Peers, Knights, all the way up to the Crowns of the Middle Kingdom themselves, third most senior of the eighteen crowns of the SCA. Many are the legends, and many are the legendary men and women, who have served in succession as the King and Queen of the Midrealm, a few of those -- like those of Michael "Moonwulf" Longcor -- I here before have told, and to Pentamere, on 12th Night, do they come.

    The day of 12th night, I was lucky enough to be able to slip out of lab in the early afternoon, thanks to a ride from the rapierist Javier, Parsla's fiancee. Got to the 12th Night site, already overflowing with SCAdians in their finery, comfortably appointed day-camps with furs and chairs and chests spilling over in every hallway and nook, merchants hawking their wares, instructors teaching classes. It was a whirlwind day, from performing with the Cynnabar Collegium Musica, to chatting with friends, to helping out in the kitchen preparing feast -- through all fifteen presented dishes of it. When SCAdians feast, they *feast*. :-)

    I like doing stuff with my hands; I like keeping busy; I like working with folks; and usually my friends are the folks running the show, so I like helping out with this or that. We spun around the kitchen in the last stages of preparing the feast and then I stripped off my temporary apron and we servers rolled wave after wave of food out to the packed feasting hall. In between courses, Parsla and I traded out of the kitchen and back with the rest of the merry choir folk to sing for the gathered Assembly and the head table of our Baron/Baroness, Their Royal Highnesses, and Their Royal Majesties: the last who thanked us kindly and presented us with small tokens of their appreciation: in the case of us two guys, cast pewter medallions bearing the royal initials: BR, Brannos and Rebekah, Rex and Regina of the Middle Kingdom. And then back to the kitchen, clearing tables, keeping pitchers topped off, rolling out the next course -- there's a certain challenge, a certain comraderie amongst the folks dancing through the kitchen or whirling in and out of it, a certain excitement. It's fun. :-)

    And the tables were hurridly cleared, and tablecloths rapidly stripped, the dishware swept back into the kitchen, the tables shuffled aside, the chairs slapped down in rows, and the grand court of His and Her Majesties, all the nobles of Pentamere in attendance, came to pagentry-filled attention, and I slipped out the front to get some water, take a breath, and lend a hand to the pell-mell cleanup-re-setup that was already underway, racing against a evening deadline by which the whole elementary school we were using had to be restored to normal. It was by sheer luck I happened to be passing back through the lobby from one side of the building to the other when some of my friends excitedly shouted to me that Their Majesties, the King and Queen of the Midrealm, had called me up to their thrones right at that moment.

    ( ! ) Me?!?





    I've only been in the SCA for a little over two years. I haven't the time, alas, to attend many major events; I've never been to a major War, never even left the state on SCA adventures, never held a formal office, never did much with the formal side of the SCA, and in fact know probably a lot less than I should about how all that works. I have a lot of friends who *do* hold formal office and high and higher title, but Cynnabar is a very relaxed, low-key, not too big on formality, unsnobby kinda place. We're not too big on stuffy pompery and politics and more into just having a good time, a place where the newcomers and the folks who wear the neat brass hats/crowns hang out together routinely instead of forming separate cliques. Where you wouldn't know the Lord or Lady instructing you in the rapier or the reprezza was a titled Peer until an event where you suddenly realize they're wearing an awful lot of neat jewelry. Which is among the reasons Cynnabar is such a neat place. :-)

    I'm personally pretty clueless about the deep and complex formal side of the SCA, and paid a lot less attention than I probably should have to how all that works. I sing, I dance, I pack, unpack, and move stuff, I have a lot of fun with a lot of neat folks, I'm just an ordinary guy having fun somewhere about fifty zillion levels below the throne. I'd heard stories about the Crowns at War and the Crowns at Tourney, even seen them at a distance at events, bowed as their processions passed, and were, as all in the Middle Kingdom are, their subjects, but I'd never even been within a spear-length of the Crowns of the Middle Kingdom, and to me the crowns were something theoretical I never really thought about. I mean, it wasn't as if there was going to be some reason why an ordinary guy like me would have to appear before the ruling King of the Midrealm. Which meant the very first time I ever asked myself the question of "Hey, what *do* you do when summoned before the King and Queen?" was, well, the ten seconds it took for me to run in from the lobby, up through the packed rows of seats filling the gym for Court, and up to the Dragon Thrones...

    The good news was that, as far as what I *do* understand, there is never a *bad* reason to get called up in public in the SCA. That is, nobody is ever called forth in a baronial or royal Court for anything other than a good reason. More importantly, the many Cynnabar folks who rushed me into the room were grinning from ear to ear, "Gotcha!" style, so even if *I* didn't have a clue what was happening, *they* all obviously did, and they all were quiet happy about it, so I felt safe.

    I also was doing the panic-autopilot thing. :-)

    See, there's a big, *big* difference between that moment, and speaking in front of an scientific session, an administrative board, or an activist meeting -- in the latter cases, you know why you're there, what you're supposed to do, what topics are being discussed and how the protocol works. Nothing to get nervous about. Nobody suddenly walks down the hallway and gets pulled to the front of the House of Delegates for the first time in their life to speak under Robert's Rules of Order, or thrust into a scientific meeting in a field you don't work in. But I had literally never thought about, and never asked anyone, just what is it you're supposed to do when the King summons you to Court. The only thing I'd had to go on was the few Courts I *had* attended, and I had about ten seconds from gym side door to the foot of the thrones to pull those memories up from memory. While also drawning a complete blank about *why* I was being called up -- I couldn't remember what it was I could theoretically be called up *for*. Which is why in my hurried, brain tripping-over-it's-own-thoughts I regrettably didn't mentally process which of the many friends of mine rushed me into the hall, or were on stage with Their Majesties, or standing guard alongside it. My brain really was in deer-in-headlights, miss the details mode. :-)

    I can't even remember if I took off my hat. I really, really hope I remembered to do that. I do remember dropping to my knees at the base of the stairs to the dias. Which was about three feet too far away. Err, oops. The King, with a smile, had to wave me up to the cushion before their thrones. Even more flustered, I clamored up and knelt, as the King, with some of my friends from Cynnabar grinning over his left shoulder, said many very kind things. And then His Majesty presented me this:





    Wow. Like, *wow*.


    My camera and lack of photographic skill eliminate a lot of the fine detail, but in real life it is every bit as impressive as can only be hinted at in picture. Those are gold highlights, which shine in real life even as they look tarnished in my photo. If you look really closely at the red and blue portions of the frame, you can see that each red and blue part is a different pattern. You can see the leaves and flowers scroll with detail, and even weave their way framing the inside of the box. And unlike other Kingdoms, in the Middle Kingdom, each scroll is done on heavy-weight paper by hand. (Which is why there are smears -- computers and xerox machines are inhumanly,impersonally perfect. Handcraft is not -- but far, far more impressive.) It's really quite beautiful, a work executed with the same skill and care as the Middle Kingdom's Crown treasures, the Great Book of the Midrealm, a tale about which I told once before. It's far more beautiful than the scrolls for either of my in-progress degrees will be. I've enquired in the past to find out how much it would cost to hand-commision a scroll like this. Answer: quite a lot. To have recieved such a thing from the hands of the Baron would have been a humbling honor. My friends from Cynnabar got together to arrange for me to recieve it personally from the hands of the *King*. So, on multiple fronts, like, *Wow*.

    And for what the scroll actually says -- the very, very first entry level of the SCA nobility is the Award of Arms, the right to the formal designation of Lord/Lady and to a formal Coat of Arms. It is the lowest rank recognized by the formal hiearchy of the Order of Precedence and it, frankly, is higher in the SCA than I ever thought I'd get. And it was this that a whole group of my friends in Cynnabar, singers and dancers, so I later found out afterwards, decided to as a group petition the Crown for me. And that is as stunning to me as the beauty of the scroll itself.

    On one important level, in friendly, life's-too-short-to-take-too-seriously Cynnabar, where Barons and Peers dance and fight and joke around with newcomers and nobody insists on anybody else's title except when absolutely required in formal circumstance, this award doesn't actually change anything, which is quite a relief to me. I mean, I've never had to use anyone else's formal title at singing or dance, and would be just as happy not to have anyone use mine. On another equally, if not even more, important level, it's a very deep gift from a lot of very kind folks, almost all of whom have far deeper and far longer committments to the SCA than I have been able to have. It is standard practice that you *cannot* find out the names of all those who were responsible, and thus there's regrettably no way for me to ever really be sure I gave thanks to all those to whom it was due. That they would think kindly enough of me as a friend to go out and get this for me -- and arrange for it to be conferred by the King himself -- that means a lot, and I wish there was some way I could make sure I thanked them all.

    The Queen added kind words as well, and presented me with a bronze-and-silver wire-wrapped torc -- which can be seen curving through the left of the photograph, along with the royal token presented earlier in the evening. Still flustered and stunned, I *think* I stammered out a thank you -- I really hope I remembered to do that. I think I seriously breached protocol *again* by forgetting that you're not supposed to turn your back on the King and Queen when you descend from the dias, but back down and bow. I saw a lot of friends grin and wave and thumb-up, and then in the back, where many more folks were waiting, there were a lot of hugs, and more afterwards...

    A year earlier, as told in Gift of an Elephant, my friends in Cynnabar had gotten together to spring a surprise for me from the Baron. This time, they'd upped the ante by an order of magnitude -- and this time, they didn't need to ask me what my SCA name was, thus making sure the surprise they hoped for was total.


    My story in the SCA is the same as my story in so many other settings, from the fiercest clashes in activism to the most grand acts of conspiratorial mass mischief. Everywhere I've ever been, everywhere I've ever gone, I've been tremendously humbled that so many folks would kindly share their friendship with me, and I am who I am and what I've done because of what they -- you -- all have given. It's as Yeats said in a quotation that is one of my favorites: Say that my glory / Was I had such friends.







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All materials copyright Jeffrey Huo, 2005
jeffshuo@alumni.northwestern.edu