Hussade

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Hussade is a team game played throughout the Alastor Cluster, ‘a whorl of thirty thousand stars in an irregular volume twenty to thirty light-years in diameter’, colonized by humans in a far-future age imagined in three novels by the American science fiction writer Jack Vance. Play is most fully described in Trullion: Alastor 2262 (pub. 1973) where the game is an important element of the plot. It is also glancingly referred to in some of his ‘Gaean Reach’ novels, which may be presumed to take place in an adjacent region of space in about the same era.

The object of the game is to strip the opposing team’s shierl: a girl of striking beauty regarded as mascot, trophy and inspirer by her side. When a player reaches the shierl, play stops while his team demands a ransom from the shierl's team; either the ransom is paid and the game resumes, or the shierl is stripped (and, deprived of symbolic virginity, disqualified from acting as shierl in future games) and the game ends.

According to Vance:

The hussade field is a gridiron of 'runs' (also called 'ways') and ‘laterals' above a tank of water four feet deep. The runs are nine feet apart, the laterals twelve feet. Trapezes permit the players to swing sideways from run to run, but not from lateral to lateral. The central moat is eight feet wide and can be passed at either end, at the center, or jumped if the player is sufficiently agile. The 'home' tanks at either end of the field flank the platform on which stands the sheirl.

Players buff or body-block opposing players into the tanks, but may not use their hands to push, pull, hold, or tackle. The captain of each team carries the 'hange' - a bulb on a three-foot pedestal. When the light glows the captain may not be attacked, nor may he attack. When he moves six feet from the hange, or when he lifts the hange to shift his position, the light goes dead; he may then attack and be attacked. An extremely strong captain may almost ignore his hange; a captain less able stations himself on a key junction, which he is then able to protect by virtue of his impregnability within the area of the live hange.

The sheirl stands on her platform at the end of the field between the home tanks. She wears a white gown with a gold ring at the front. The enemy players seek to lay hold of this gold ring; a single pull denudes the sheirl. The dignity of the sheirl may be ransomed by her captain for five hundred ozols, a thousand, two thousand, or higher, in accordance with a prearranged schedule.

(Trullion: Alastor 2262, [Frogmore: Granada Books, 1973], footnote pp.64-65)

(The ozol, mentioned in the last sentence, is a monetary unit that appears in many of Vance's books, not confined to the Alastor and Gaean Reach novels.) Hussade has some similarities to Kosho, the martial-arts game featured in the cult 1960s TV series The Prisoner, which may conceivably have given Vance the idea (though Kosho is not a team game).