He smiled, uncomprehending; his teeth were worn down from more than thirty years of good use. “What do you mean, you named her?”
I said, “She’s not going to die now. I gave her a name, as we’d name any other thing.”
“What name?”
“Hammadi.” The name still rippled like the faint echo of bells over my ears.
Ydlbert nodded and looked at Hammadi, for the first time thinking of her by her own name. Knowing this gave me joy. “Yves,” he said. “We’ve been friends since childhood.”
“Yes.”
“Please make me a harness, for my horse, also.”
“With pleasure,” I said.
Ydlbert continued to nod, and looked off toward his ancestors’ land. “Then I name my horse Thea,” he said.
“And my three guilders?”
He smiled broadly. “I’ll pay you anon.”
“I don’t want it. Come,” I said, steering him toward the barn to begin on the second harness.
By Monday morning, then, two horses in our village had names. I cannot overstate the importance of this development. In Mandragora, we do not even name our children when they first emerge from the womb; we call them “daughter” or “son” until they have lived a full year. On the first anniversary of a child’s birth, we name it, for by then it has weathered the most difficult season of its life, and we can pray for the child once it has shown us the light of its soul. But in reality children, like horses, die all the time, for the strangest of reasons. Each morning as I wake, I wonder when Elizaveta will be taken from me.
What a mark of our faith, to name our horses as we would name a year-old child. Our neighbors thought we’d gone mad—except for my brother Mandrik, the one man in our village who understands more than the ordinary workings of machines and of God, the one man I defer to in judgment, however odd my countrymen think him. The villagers had not yet witnessed what the harness could do; how could we expect them to believe without any visible sign?
We grow what we need to survive—a crop of wheat, smaller crops of oats, rye, or barley in rotation, and a row of flax in the vegetable garden. My brother keeps an orchard of trees that produce many fruits of his own invention—strange, succulent things of rare colors, which require his constant gentle care and provide one of our chief pleasures. We preserve what we can for the dark days of the year. We give some to the Archduke’s4 household and bring the rest to market, where the townspeople buy the goods to feed their families.
When the horse could bear little weight, we loaded some of the fruits of the land onto our one-wheeled carts, carried the rest in our wood slings, and prayed each minute of the five-mile journey to town. Thankfully, we went to market only once a week, each of us bearing the choicest of his produce, peas, parsnips, or pears. If such a one as Gerald Desvres, who owned a great tract of meadow, had surplus hay, he would bring that to feed the town horses. Ydlbert, who is, after all, a sap, sometimes loaded his cart with wildflowers—then he could load it high, because they weigh almost nothing. His brother Yorik, who bordered the forest, sometimes brought a load of firewood. As the sun rose we began to lead our horses up the road. Mandrik has the best voice among us, clearer than the first birdsong of spring, and so he often accompanied us singing ballads of events in the times of our miraculous grandmother5 sprung from the sea; and when we were lucky, he sang to us from the repertory of his many adventures in Indo-China.6 Those tales, weird and fantastical, filled us with wonder and delight.
The journey to market was grueling, despite that the terrain was smooth and gently sloped. Many a man could be heard saying spells for safe drayage under his breath, especially at the crossroads. Horses always managed to slip free of their burdens—not my Hammadi, mind you, even before she had her name—or lose their shoes. And when finally we arrived at the city, we had to pass single-file through the gate and the fetid streets, which were closed to the sunlight, full of the odors of refuse and garlic. If a townswoman had hung her laundry in the street, the passing horses would knock it down, but it hardly mattered—even on the line, the linens were far from clean, and their descent to the gutter seemed, sadly, a return to their natural state. The younger sons, Ydlbert’s and Desvres’s especially, covered their noses in disgust. We wove between crumbling buildings until we arrived, quite abruptly, at the church steps, where we spread our wares. The horses and carts blocked off most access to the tight, oddly shaped apron of stone, even crammed as they were nearly atop one another, and the residents of the town always cursed us, spilling their slop buckets on us, kicking our horses in the shins as they struggled past.
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