BOG OR NOT

A Tale of Sogmarsh — being the rules of the silliest game in the realm, and the afternoon an old man broke them on purpose.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

The children of the fen play a game called Bog or Not, and it is the most idiotic game in the Kingdom of Sogmarsh, and it is also the reason so many of them grow up.

The rules — and there are a great many rules, all enforced by seven-year-olds with the ferocity of a Chancery — are these. One child is the Caller. The Caller points at a patch of ground and shouts a name for it: green, or black, or singing, or the wrong green, which is a real category and the most feared. The other children shout back "Bog!" or "Not!" And then — this is the part the grown-ups pretend they cannot watch — the Caller has to go and stand on it.

If it holds, the Caller wins, and gets to be Caller again, and is insufferable.

If it does not hold, the Caller goes in, to the knee or the thigh depending on the ground, and is hauled out by the ankles by the others, and loses, and is wet, and everybody laughs, and the wetness is the whole of the punishment because in Sogmarsh being wet is a thing that happens to you fourteen times a day and carries no shame whatever.

That is the game. Point at mud. Argue about the mud. Stand on the mud. It has no ball, no score worth keeping, and no point that any adult will admit to, and children have played it on the edge of the Drownings for longer than anyone can say.

Now. Here is the thing about Bog or Not that no adult in that parish will tell you, and that every adult in that parish knows.

The children who are good at it do not drown.

The categories are not nonsense. Green holds. The wrong green — the green that is a shade too bright, too even, too pleased with itself — does not, and will take a grown man with a cart, and every child who has played Bog or Not for a season can tell the wrong green from the right one across a field, in poor light, without thinking, the way you or I know a friend's walk. Singing ground is ground with water moving under it and it is never, ever safe, and a child who has lost the game on singing ground three times learns it in the body in a way no warning from a mother ever teaches.

The game is a drill. It has always been a drill. Some ancestor whose name is long gone looked at a fen that kills the careless and made the not-being-careless into the best afternoon a child can have — so that the lesson goes in as laughter, and stays in for life, and the child never once feels it being taught.

The parish knows. The parish invented it. And the parish will go to its grave calling it a silly game, because the moment you tell a child this game keeps you alive, it stops being a game, and a lesson a child is enduring is a lesson half-learned, and half-learned is exactly the amount that drowns you.

The afternoon this tale is about, there was a new child in the game — a Poxbury child, dry-country people lately come to the edge of the fen, who did not know the ground and was, for that reason, the most cheerful Caller anybody had seen in years, because he was not frightened of anything, having nothing yet to be frightened of.

And the older children, in the cruelty and the kindness that live so close together in the young, were about to let him win.

They were going to call Not on a patch he had named — a lovely patch, a bright even green, the wrongest green on the whole edge — and let him march out onto it triumphant, and go in over his head, because that is how you learn the wrong green, and they had all learned it that way, and the wetness teaches better than any words.

Except the wrong green there was not knee-deep. The older children knew the field the way they knew their own names, and they knew that particular patch went down a long way, and a dry-country child who could not swim and did not know to spread flat and did not know the ground would let go of him if he stopped fighting it — that child, on that patch, was not a lesson. That child was a funeral.

They knew it. You could see them know it, the whole ring of them going quiet at once, the game teetering on the edge of the thing it exists to prevent.

And old Fenwick Sedge, who was cutting withies at the field's edge and had not appeared to be watching anything, said, without looking up:

"Not that one, lad. Wrong green. Call another."

Which is against the rules. It is the one unbreakable rule of Bog or Not that no grown-up ever, ever plays — the game is the children's, the ground is the children's teacher, and an adult who calls the ground has spoiled it.

Fenwick Sedge had not called the ground in sixty years. He had learned the game on that same edge as a boy and he had taught it, silently, by being wet in front of the next lot, and he believed in it the way you believe in a thing that saved your life, which he did, twice.

And he broke it, in one sentence, for one child, because a drill is a beautiful thing and a drowned boy is not a lesson to anybody, and there is a point past which a rule that exists to keep children alive must give way to the actual living child in front of you — and knowing exactly where that point is, and not one inch before it, is the whole of what it means to be the old man at the edge of the field.

The boy called another patch. It held. He won, and was insufferable, and learned the wrong green the next week, in the ordinary way, knee-deep, laughing, the way you are supposed to.

A game that keeps you alive stops working the instant anybody admits that is what it is for — so a whole parish will call its most important lesson a silly game, and mean it, and only the oldest hand at the field's edge is allowed to know the one afternoon the game must be broken to do the thing the game was built to do.