The Testament Of Yves Gundron. Emily Barton

ONE

      THE FIRST INVENTION¹

       magine the time of my grandfather’s grandfather, when the darkness was newly separated from the light. Society was only a shadowy image of what it would soon become. This was Mandragora before my invention and all that it set in motion. People spoke to one another, but their habits of thought were coarse. People lived in fear. Our forefathers farmed, but with great difficulty; a man used a sharp stick to dig a hole for each seed, and furrowed his fields by dragging his fingernails through them and picking out each small stone. Often a whole spring passed in preparing the ground, and families went hungry or died come winter. They had fire, but they had no candles, nor did they have proper looms—when a woman made cloth for her household, she wound the woof through each strand of warp, and tamped down each row of weaving with her fingers. It took so long to make a bolt of cloth that growing children went about in tatters because their mothers could not keep pace. Men knew how to count and keep tally, but they had no numbers bigger than twenty. Twenty acres was the size of Mandragora’s largest farm (my grandfather’s, which I cultivate still), and twenty sheep the size of its largest flock; what need had they to reckon the infinite? Men’s faculties may have been as well developed as ours, but they spent so much effort scratching their existence from the soil that they had no time for ideas or contemplation. What sufficed sufficed; and however much men might have profited from introspection, their days were full of drudgery that kept it at bay.

      Such darkness persisted nigh unto the present day, and might nearly have persisted ever, had not a glimmering seed of an idea taken root in my mind and beckoned me out of the night. I wish it had been an idea of philosophical profundity, one that could explain to men where God resides or what happens to our essence after death, but it was only a workaday idea, the kind a farmer such as myself might have about his farming. Of all the events to set the process of history in motion, mine was a realization about my horse. Had I known then what terrors my invention would bring us along with its joys, perhaps I would have allowed the idea to drift off like a thousand other daydreams. I could not have envisioned myself, two winters later, spending these long nights writing in my barn, writing against what seems the inevitable outcome: that I, and all that I have wrought, will be forgotten utterly as the future gallops forth to devour us. At the time I knew nothing but the perfect beauty of what I imagined.

      I have already gone ahead of myself, however, for you do not yet even know what I accomplished. Perhaps you will best come to understand the deed’s magnitude by its first outward sign: because of my invention, I was able to name my horse. I called her Hammadi. My neighbor Ydlbert von Iggislau named his horse Thea. These names had weight for us beyond their intrinsic beauty, because these two work-weary horses were the first anyone had ever named. No horse before Hammadi lived long enough to need a name. It was enough that God had given us the beasts to serve us; we had never spent enough time with a single one to come to know its soul. We named our other animals—sheep and billy goats, for example, performed no labor and had fair chances of survival. My cow, who had provided me milk even before I married Adelaïda, had always been called Sophronia, and seemed worthy of such a name. We loved our horses nonetheless, as we loved our crops and loved the gentle spring. In their infancy we patted their soft ears and watched their first, faltering steps with the same fear and pride we felt in watching our own growing babes. We had little to spare, but the horses performed important duties, and we thanked them when we could with windfall apples or carrots that had gone early to rot. And in times of trouble, we prayed for our horses, sure.

      But we could not risk giving a horse a name. They were subject to all manner of plagues, maladies of the tooth, hoof, and digestion, sometimes a dread illness that turned a healthy horse to a deranged beast, choking on its own frothy spittle, spewing blood from every orifice. Because God is merciful, such a horse rarely lived longer than a day. Horses died young, as all creatures die young—like hatchlings in the nest or children yet unable to speak, foals were delicate, without sense, and held always in a balance that desired to tip against them. Sometimes God spared a foal its childhood torments, and it grew to be a strong adult, suitable for work. The seasons could not turn round upon a workhorse, however; they often died in their first few months of service. Even the smallest human error could bring a horse to its knees. I hitched my third horse, a beautiful chestnut mare whose white socks I brushed down of mud each night, to a full cart of grain one August morning—a cart only slightly more full than that she had pulled the week before—and she strained too hard under the load. Before I could loose the choking strap from her neck, she stood quite dead at the edge of my farthest field, her eyes popping and her tongue aloll. Her pained and frozen visage struck terror into my heart, and I let much of the shocked wheat go to rot in the field because I dreaded to approach the dead horse. After a few days I enlisted the help of my closest companions—my brother, Mandrik le Chouchou, and my neighbor Ydlbert von Iggislau—to drag the stinking, stiffened carcass away. “Fear not,” Mandrik told me, bowing his head of fine brown curls before the sight. “The multitudes depart our presence thus, but the few escape intact.” Ydlbert set his hat on the ground, revealing his balding pate to the hot sun, spat in his two strong hands, and set to hacking off the edible sections and the horse’s skin. I could neither think long on the commentary nor bear to watch the flaying, so I returned to our house, where we wintered in poverty and want, except for copious lots of salted horse meat.

      I am not certain I have conveyed the direness of our situation. We could not produce horses fast enough to make use of them—the chances of bringing both a male and a female to healthy adulthood were few, and when they mated, the spirit often left the foal before it left its mother’s womb. Horses—like even the bravest of women, my first wife, Elynour, among them, may she rest in peace—often died in giving birth, and a foal would languish on the diet of sugar and water it suckled in its mother’s absence. A foal that persevered to its adulthood was prone to the aforementioned afflictions of the body; those beasts we acquired from Andras Drck, the dealer, were healthier, but often dearer than their short lives made worthwhile. Watching a horse in my barn at night, I sometimes saw in its trusting downcast eyes a premonition of the death that the weight of its suffering would surely and eventually bring. Our ancestors dreamed up a thousand spells to save them, but though a man might studiously recite his it only worked when the spirits were willing. When the horses did not die of their sundry natural maladies, they strangled pulling loads.

      Day be bright,

      Load be light,

       Bring this horse safely

       Back home tonight

      I and my countrymen desired the plight of the horses to be otherwise, but we knew no way to bring about the change except through ardent prayer, in which we engaged together each Sabbath, and in which many of us engaged alone in the dreary hours before sleep. It is by such meditation, as well as by luck, that eventually I came upon the solution, a solution so simple yet so unknown that we did not have a name by which to call it. Though human vanity convinced me that the invention was the product of my mind, I soon came to realize that I had received both a vision and a blessing; only much later did I begin to see the terrors such a blessing can wreak. That first night I gave the longest prayer of thanks I have ever found it within me to offer, and thus, with a heart full of devotion, did I learn the thing’s Heaven-given name: Harness.

      Before we had the harness, we would tie a piece of flaxen rope or leather thong around the neck of the beast, secure the two traces to the swingletree of the cart (which at that time had but one wheel, square in the center of the load), and hope for successful drayage. If the horse was strong and the cart half laden, the burden arrived with its bearer intact, but the more weight we placed on the cart, the more likely it would strangle the horse. God is merciful, but he does not remove weights from around the necks of beasts, and we lost many horses in this manner. We gambled accordingly on each load; if it arrived safely, then we could eat, and if ill befell it or the horse, we couldn’t. The material loss was, however, only part of the grief when our horses died. Even before we dared name them, we grew accustomed to their wants and ways. When