The Testament of Yves Gundron (4 page)

The townspeople were niggardly with their pennies, but they needed everything we brought them; if we could have produced twice as much, they would gladly have bought it to feed their families. Still, in those days it might take six months before a farmer could save enough money for a new earthenware jug or a hundred well-made nails.

But that all happened in the past, which with impunity I can tell you ended on a spring Saturday, when I stumbled upon the miracle that changed our lives. On that April day the present as we know it began.

Can you imagine the changes this single innovation has already wrought? At first it merely staved off the death of my horse, which was in itself a miracle. But after I showed Ydlbert my invention that fateful Sabbath, we retired to the barn to make a harness for his Thea—a black horse, not as proud of stature as my Hammadi, but nearly her equal in intelligence, and with a similar spot upon the forehead. The next morning was Monday, and we hitched our horses to our carts, loaded them fuller than any carts had ever been loaded before, and began our walk to town on our way to the city. Before we had reached the shrine, all our countrymen were abuzz. Wido Jungfrau was shaking his balding head, his thin lips pursed in disapproval, as ever. Jude Dithyramb simply stood with his mouth agape. My brother Mandrik, who in his haste had forgotten his shoes, ran up beside Hammadi on the road and tried to look into her eyes. “Halt!” he commanded her. “I pray you, sister horse, halt!” Hammadi, who had always been obedient, quit walking. “Why do you not expire under your heavy load?”

“I made her a harness, Mandrik!” I shouted. “She bears the burden with ease!”

“Hush, my brother. I have asked your beast a question; I await her reply.” Mandrik bowed his head respectfully while Hammadi flicked her face to the side twice, shooing off bugs, and worked her black lips together as if in speech. Then my brother, unshod but steady on his long, bare feet, made a slow circuit of inspection around the horse and cart, testing the strength of the harness at all its junctures. Mandrik
smiled so wide he showed his strong yellow teeth down to the roots and turned up the corners of his soft blue eyes. “What a miraculous thing you have made, Yves. We must offer thanksgiving.”

I bowed my head to him; since earliest childhood he had manifested his superiority in matters of the spirit. “I have offered it moment by moment since.”

“But we must all thank Providence, for now that you and Brother von Iggislau have this wondrous—what did you call it?”

“A harness,” I said.

“This harness is a boon, but may also sow the seeds of unrest in our midst. You must provide them for all your brethren, lest the fabric of the community be rent. And you must thank our grandmother, in case any of this was her influence.”

“That old witch,” said Wido Jungfrau.

“Hold, Wido,” I warned him.

Ydlbert's Dirk, who hadn't eaten since breakfast and already was growing cranky, said, “Mandrik, why can't you go about shod, like other people?”

My brother, who had perhaps not yet remarked upon the nakedness of his toes, looked down.

Ydlbert swatted his son's arm. “You'll learn to respect visionaries and holy men.”

He flicked his curly hair out of his eyes. “As you say, Father. I was but asking after his shoes.”

Wido Jungfrau said, “I don't know why we need this thing. We always got on fine before.”

“Then suit yourself,” said tall Jepho Martin, nodding vigorously to his own elder brother, Heinrik, “because I want one.”

Said Heinrik, with reverence, “It is one of the loveliest things I have ever beheld.”

“We are all equals when we are born from our mothers' wombs and when we return to God's dark earth,” said Mandrik, “and we must strive always to maintain our balance in between. To market with you, for the nonce, and Godspeed.”

The two harnesses created quite a stir among the townsmen, who as a result were more willing to pay a fair price for our goods. We were all pleased with the outcome of the day. After market, then, I traveled to
the edge of my northern fields with barley ale and a bunch of flowers to offer up at my grandmother's cairn. The story went that when she was a young woman, my grandmother Iulia washed up in the tide with sea vegetables and fish, naked as the day God made her, with her dark auburn hair in a salty tangle behind. Some fisherman, his name long since lost, brought her the long journey inland to our village—which I am told sits in the very center of our island, a single verdant dip in the surrounding mountains—during which time she would nor speak to him nor eat. As it happened she spoke English, but in a strange, harsh voice, which made everyone think her a changeling or at best a thing of the sea; yet old Matthias Gansevöort took pity upon the poor wretch, and accepted her into his crowded house as daughter. There she surprised him with her industrious weaving and her knack for concocting dishes more varied than porridge;
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and soon enough, she began to compose music, bending the syntax of our tired old language to her will to make the sad, syncopated songs which eventually she passed on to my brother, and with which talent my wife was also blessed.
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Iulia never lost her memory of the sea, nor quit telling tales of a great land beyond it, nor rid herself of the peculiar frankness of demeanor that marked her when she was first dredged up, and so was always somewhat feared among the villagers, who would not have her buried in the churchyard. There she was then, looming large above my land. I thought she would be glad for ale and flowers, though wildflowers grew all around; and I asked her to bless my invention. The next day Ydlbert and I brought our neighbors to my barn and instructed them in the manufacture of harnesses, and of long reins that we might stand in the carts behind the horses. Gerald Desvres brought a jug of fermented barley to share around the threshing floor, and recited the briefest blessing:

It having thus been rendered safe, by nightfall our horses were all be-harnessed and our heads wobbly with liquor. We decided to meet thus every month on the new moon, if not to discuss inventions, then for the drink.

At next market, my whole village—even those I disliked—had harnesses, and it became clear that our carts were now insufficient. Previously we had chosen among our weekly crops and loaded the carts tamely; now we loaded them to breaking with vegetables and fruits, and even then the horses, though tired, seemed little troubled by the journey. The carts needed to be different somehow, but every cart I had ever seen had been exactly like the one Hammadi now pulled; how was I to imagine a different way? One man cannot change everything in his lifetime.

My brother, however, has an ability I do not understand to see things anew; this is, he tells me, a result of his wide journeys and of his lapsing into his states, and also perhaps explains why he has such gifts in singing and in grafting new trees but no real ability to work the soil. Mandrik retreated to a high-up crook in an oak tree for a day, taking with him only a gourd full of water, a slate, and a chalk rock, and when he returned, he brought me a drawing of the new cart. It had, as no cart had before,
two
wheels, one on either side of the axle log in the middle of the cart. With two wheels for balance we could make the carts longer, wider, and able to bear more than twice as much weight. Mandrik's design, which he explained to me again and again as I cut wood and assembled the contraption with nails, also called for higher sides, to keep stray carrots from spilling over.

Mandrik and I loaded all my goods onto my new cart the next Market Day, and still it was not full; and when we drove Hammadi through our town, imagine the astonishment this new invention aroused. “Crikes,” Jepho Martin said, the only man tall enough to peer well over the high sides and into the marvelous machine. “I'll give you five rounds of cheese if you'll help me and my brother make carts like this one. I can only imagine how happy it'd make old Heinrik. We could let the children sleep in them, in good weather.” Within two weeks, every man in the village had a Two-Wheeled Cart to accompany his harness, and our meager incomes began to seem less bleak besides. The townspeople had surely been hungry all the years of their lives, because as much food as we brought them, they were able to eat.

But since Adam's fall it has been our lot for circumstances to try our intelligence and faith. And look you: we had been satisfied until that time, but as soon as the prospect of a better fortune became manifest, we pursued it with all our hearts and minds. Over the summer and fall we built larger, stronger carts, capable of increasing our material wealth; and their increased size did not make them unkind to our precious beasts, all of whom now bore names. When at last we perfected our new carts—when they were as big as we desired them, and as sturdy—we had had our fill of inventing. One Market Day that winter we arrived at the gates of the city as the Prime bells began to ring in the dark morning. Ydlbert was at the front of the line, leading the proud black Thea by her reins. We heard a thump, then Thea's whinnying complaint. She stamped her feet for punctuation.

“Ydlbert?” I called to him, leaving Hammadi's reins in Mandrik's idle hands. “Brother von Iggislau, what ails you?” My breath left me in a chill cloud.

Jungfrau said, “Bad news, I'll wager. It's about time the Devil caught up with us.” I had lately noticed that small children kept their distance from him.

As I approached the gate, I could see only the rear of the cart, protruding. Ydlbert and his horse appeared to be already somewhere inside. The cart began to shake, and first Ydlbert's hands, then his whole head and torso appeared atop his carrots and turnips. “The blasted thing's stuck. It's stuck in the bloody gate.”

Jungfrau let out a hoot, and good Ion Gansevöort hushed him. Some of the boys were giggling, though.

I said, “That can't be.”

Ydlbert tumbled over the vegetables and landed solidly on the ground. “Look, then.” He wiped himself clean, then blew into his hands, as he led me to the front of the cart. Indeed, the cart had caught both sides of the narrow gate. At least two hands' width of cart would not fit through.

We backed the horses up and led them to the side of the road while we conferred—the townsmen treated us bitterly when we left horses near the church, so we did not want to block their ingress and egress through the Great West Gate. It was a bitter chill, though thankfully without snow, and every moment's delay made us more impatient. We had brought our tarpaulins to cover the ground before the church; now
each of us lay his on the hard ground, filled it with as many vegetables as he could hoist, and carried the load into town, just as it was in the days of our grandfathers' grandfathers, who knew not how horses could be made to do a man's labor. The Martin brothers, Heinrik and Jepho, were bent so far under the weight of their burdens that their spectacular height was reduced to that of ordinary men. The sun was well up when finally we set our goods out to market; the townsfolk quibbled over the freshness of the food, and we left with numb fingers, half our goods still in the carts, and light pockets.

A while past dark, I reached Ydlbert's home. The middle boys, who'd come with us, ran to the warm hearth; the smallest were strung up dreaming in their hammocks; and the elder two were not to be seen, though likely out lifting the skirts of Heinrik Martin's and Desvres's nubile daughters. Anya, weary-eyed, plunked bowls of porridge onto the table, then retired to her fireside chair, where she wound yarn from her distaff into a ball. At her feet an infant cat unwound yarn from another ball, but Anya worked more quickly, ensuring that the progress of the yarn was overall for the good.

“Was it a good day at market?” she asked. Her thin lips scarcely moved when she spoke, so tired was she from her days of rearing sons.

Ydlbert poured us milk from the bucket. “The new carts are too wide to fit through the city gates, and we had to carry the vegetables on our backs.”

“Monkeys, all,” Anya said, though we knew monkeys only from my brother's stories of abroad.

“It was dreadful, wife.”

“Now you know what it's like to trudge about with seven bairns inside you,” she said, and stood up to check the smaller children's placement in their hammocks.

Ydlbert ladled more porridge into our wooden bowls. “We have to do something about that gate, is all,” he said.

“Cast a spell?”

“Talk to the Archduke.”

When I arose the next morning at sunup, Ydlbert was crouched on my stoop, holding a baked potato, that miraculous and most nourishing food my brother so providentially brought back with him from the Beyond, for warmth. The dog eyed his provisions greedily. “For the sake of the Lord God,” I said, “you can come in, man.”

“No time,” he said.

“We've got hot porridge, and some fine pickles.”

“And no time to eat it. This matter cannot wait.”

I wrapped myself up in my warmest garments, and we detoured up the side path to fetch my brother from his simple hut. We found him cutting back the dead vines in his winter arbor. Mandrik was the only man in the village besides myself and Father Stanislaus who could write, and had a fairer hand than I for drafting a petition. Besides, if nothing else, good luck followed him like the stink follows a stuffed cabbage; and he brought along his psaltery, and sang a song of his own devising to while away the walking time and to ease our restless spirits.