August 5, 2004

• As promised:
  
  The Wintersgate Assassins’ Guild
  
  versus the
  
  Red-haired Women

  The
  Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), for those who don’t already
  know, is divided into local groups within which and among which there
  is strong competition.  Competition is what the SCA is all about,
  for those who participate and aren’t just spectators.  It can be
  contests of strength and skill in battle with rattan swords and
  aluminum armor, or quieter competition in cooking, brewing, designing
  and constructing costumes, telling stories, singing, dancing, playing
  musical instruments and anything else a member can think of that was
  done in the Middle Ages.  If human beings did it then, the SCA will make a
  contest of it now.  I frankly don’t know if the “poisonings” that
  took place in the mid-1980s in the Principality of Oertha (a part of
  the Kingdom of the West) were a competition among members of the guild, or just a schoolboy lark.

  Prior to the beginning of the series of dosings with drugs, the
  Assassins’ Guild had engaged in an ongoing game since even before I
  joined the Society.  At feasts and tourneys, they would drop diced
  carrots into the drinks of the unwary.  Those who got to the
  bottom of a drink and found carrots knew they’d been “poisoned.”

  As the first victim in the series, I was hit entirely without
  warning.  Even though I had gotten some electric watermelon 
  from Merry Pranksters at a Fourth of July picnic in Eugene in 1970, I
  knew the Pranksters and their pranks, expected the acid in the melon,
  and handled it pretty well when that high came on.  In Fairbanks
  at the Winter Tourney, when I started getting off on whatever the drug
  was, I wasn’t expecting it.  A normal busy day of cooking and
  serving three meals to a big crowd turned weird around
  breakfast time.

  First, there were intense emotional undercurrents in the kitchen. 
  That wasn’t unusual, but my sensitivity was extraordinary and all those
  hostile vibes, the covert dirty-looks-behind-another’s-back, and the overblown anxiety were creeping me out.  I
  took care of my immediate appointed task and got out of the kitchen,
  saying truthfully that I had an upset stomach.

  I watched the fighters for a while, and flinched a little more than
  usual when they got hit.  When one match was over, and the men
  took off their helms in the -55°F cold, the vapor coming off their hair
  and the crackly sound the sweaty hair made as it froze amazed me. 
  I was worried, in my typically maternal way, that the guys would get
  chilled.  Atypically, I mentioned it to one of them.  Here’s
  little me all bundled up and looking up at this almost seven-foot-tall
  fighter who was one of the two who had alternated as Prince of Oertha
  since the Principality had been formed, suggesting that the big guy dry his hair and put
  his helm back on or go inside.  In my ordinary state of
  consciousness, I usually leave such matters up to the individual adults
  involved.

  I still hadn’t a clue that anything was wrong with me, but I couldn’t
  sit down and couldn’t stand still for more than a few seconds.  I
  walked around tidying up, looking very closely at a number of
  interesting things, and forgot who and where I was.  First, my
  brat went missing.  That’s a garment/blanket, a big rectangle of
  wool tartan that can be draped around the shoulders as a cloak, rolled
  up into for sleeping, or folded lengthwise and gathered onto a belt for
  a kilt.  My SCA persona, Faianna ni Kenneth na Dunlioscairn, is a
  12th Century Gall/Gael from the Dal Riada.  Anyhow, I dropped my
  brat somewhere and when Charley (Fergus MacGown) asked me where my brat
  was I got pissed at him for calling our child a brat and started
  looking around to see just where the little monster (Doug, AKA Dougal
  “Doogle” MacFergus) had gotten off to. 

  Then the lights in the hall (a fairgrounds exhibit building the size of
  an aircraft hangar) went off.  I called out and asked someone,
  anyone, where the light switch was, because I knew that was where
  Dougal MacFergus was.  Sure enough, the lights came back on and
  there he was and then he turned them off again and on again… we
  didn’t have electric lights at home and he was fascinated with
  them.  Fergus and I collected our kid, and the event proceeded,
  but I was getting more and more confused and my face was flushed. 
  It dawned on Charley that something was wrong, especially since I still
  hadn’t found my brat, and even more telling, I wasn’t in the
  kitchen.  I’d never shirked a job that way in all the years he
  knew me.

  I babbled and wandered around the big building and interacted in odd
  ways with people and things.  On one of my crossings of that
  immense floor, I passed a small knot of young men all in black cloaks,
  and one of them said to me, “Thank you for the entertainment.”  I
  shrugged and said, “You are welcome, I suppose, but what…?” 
  Then one of his companions shushed him, they all turned away from me, laughing, and
  I continued my endless walk back and forth.

  By then Charley and the rest of our little party from the Shire of
  Selveirgaard had realized that I was involuntarily psychedelicized, and
  they ganged up on me.  One of the women found my brat in the rest
  room.  They wrapped me in it and made me sit down in a
  corner.  I protested.  They told me that someone had
  apparently dosed me with psychedelics, and the penny finally
  dropped.  Oh… yeah.

  But the rest of that evening and all the long ride back to the Su
  Valley from Fairbanks, I kept forgetting, and tripping, and then
  realizing I was tripping….  It was a while, a few weeks, before
  I felt entirely “myself” again, and I had a lot of anger over the
  incident.  I wasn’t just angry at the kids who poisoned me. 
  It pissed me off that everyone from the Eskalyan Chatelaine who
  micromanaged everything in the Anchorage group (and later did some jail
  time for having embezzled funds from her job at Girl Scouts to pay for
  the feasts and tourneys she autocratted, her trip to Ireland, her
  significant other’s hospital bills, etc.) to those at the Kingdom level
  wanted to sweep it under the rug.    I wrote an
  impassioned letter to the editor of the newsletter, but it never saw
  print.  Over the next few years, as at least four more red-haired
  women got the same treatment, the official stance was HUSH.

  I recall a chance meeting with one of them, a couple of years after my
  incident.  She was shopping with her husband when I ran into
  them.  She told me that after two more women were poisoned in
  Fairbanks, both of them redheads, she had become very watchful of her
  drinks while at SCA events.  We had figured out that the drug was
  probably slipped into my coffee before breakfast as I either chased
  Dougal or went to the bathroom.  It remained an isolated incident
  for six months or so, and then someone else was drugged, and then
  another. 

  No one knew whether I’d been a chance target of opportunity and the
  “red-haired series” had developed from that, or if they had planned a
  red-headed serial poisoning spree all along.  They had gotten to
  my friend at a summer tourney in Anchorage, with a hallucinogen
  injected into an orange.  She was diabetic, and started wearing an
  insulin pump shortly after the drugging incident.  Her husband
  expressed anger at the Assassins, but admitted that they couldn’t be
  sure what effect the dosing had on her diabetes.  After her death,
  he was still angry over it, confused, with unresolved doubts.

  Through the years I’ve encountered many of my former associates from
  the SCA.  Except with the redheads, I don’t bring up the
  poisoning.  I asked around and learned that within a few years
  there had been five in all.  I’ve had no news more recent than
  that, nothing since the end of the ‘eighties, so I don’t know if the
  game continued.  One of the redheads who lived in Fairbanks found
  out from a friend of a friend who was responsible.  It really
  wasn’t hard to figure out, with those black clad Assassins hanging
  around watching and chuckling over their victims’ behavior.

  My friends told me that there was a division of opinion within the
  Society on whether these poisonings were crimes or harmless
  pranks.  Pranks they may have been, but harmless they were
  not.  Since possession of the drugs themselves is a crime, it’s
  fairly clear in my mind that giving them to an unsuspecting other would
  be an even greater crime.  But given the nature of the events and
  the absence of any prompt legal complaints, or any preserved evidence,
  I don’t suppose it would have been a prosecutable crime.

  It’s definitely against the Commandments:
  Timothy Leary’s
  Two Commandments for the Molecular Age
  Thou shalt not alter the consciousness of thy fellow men.
  Thou shalt not prevent thy fellow man from altering his or her own
  consciousness.

  But there are so many ordinary everyday things that run counter to those
  commandments, from tricky subliminal advertising to stringent anti-drug
  laws, that the Commandments are almost laughable… almost.
  

  • 12:02 am
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