followed Hammadi to the end of the row. She wasn’t going straight, exactly, but she pulled the plow with ease; I could certainly make it larger. I then returned to my friend and sat down in the dirt beside him, and we talked of the idyllic life to come. Ydlbert was right—we would have time now to patch the holes in our roofs and our children’s shoes, to dig wells, perhaps even to help our wives tend the herb gardens and spin wool. Ydlbert wanted to go to the glassmaker to learn to blow vessels. All my life Mandrik had pestered me to write down tales, but I had never the time nor the inclination, particularly as he was no help with quotidian labors. Now, who knew what I might find time for? I did not know then that I would find myself writing this history, but I knew that my world had changed such that something might get written. Hammadi stood gently munching the grass at the end of the row, for she did not know to turn around and work the next piece of land. It hardly mattered. She could be trained.
I admit that at this moment a small stone of doubt lodged in the bottom of my stomach, for I realized that this vast plot—these twenty acres, as big as any plot of land had ever needed to be—this land to which my father and his forebears had given their lives dutifully and without complaint, these strips of land they had leveled stone by stone and tended until they were among the finest in the valley, would no longer suffice.
The harness in its various forms has changed our lives in many ways for the better. We grow more food than our families can eat, more than we can sell to the town. Our soil is rich, and our farming advanced—each generation has made some improvement in the methods of husbandry, but none so remarkable as ours. We have money as we never did before, and our city, which was a stinking gutter, now glitters like the stars in the great dome of the sky. That first paved path was only the beginning—now the city has long, wide roads stretching toward the four cardinal points of the horizon, all paved in gray stones, so that even Andras Drck, the horse dealer at the far northern edge of town, is as easy to reach as my nearest neighbors. Suddenly, where there once was squalor, there is light, air, and free passage. The Archduke soon issued an edict to name these paved passageways as one would name a child or a place—they won’t be knocked down, these paths, they won’t shift with the rain. The roads will then be like our horses—once so temporary we hardly thought about them, they will now endure.
Finding our way in the city is different with these roads. In my youth we navigated as do, my brother says, the sailors at sea—we fixed the positions of the sun, towers, and steeple, and hoped to find our destination. Later we had my south-pointer, but it told only if one was facing south. Going anywhere in town was trouble—it made the breath come short and the eyes sting. Now everything is flooded with light, and we go straight from one place to another, knowing our location at all the places in between. The city is half as large as once I thought. It only took so long to get anywhere because one had to circumvent so many buildings, gardens, and walls.
I have built already a storeroom onto my home, and rethatched the roof, and I would like to buy a second cow next spring. I bought Adelaïda eight yards of pale blue linen, like a noblewoman’s, and a vast array of spices. Because of one invention, the city, my city, is outgrowing its walls.
All of this change is wondrous, no doubt; and yet I must admit that when I invented the harness, I did not imagine that it would bring hardship along with all this bounty. I did not know that the whole world would change when I made Hammadi her first harness. I did not know that I might someday want the old world, or some of its ways, back.
If this one tiny bit of human ingenuity, the contribution of a man with no title, hardly a name—if so little can change so much, then I fear for our future. I fear the things our children will know, the things of which we can only dream. My prayer, my ardent prayer, is that we are moving forward, and toward the path of God.
1 In editing this manuscript for the general readership, I have regularized Yves Gundron’s spelling and punctuation—for example, by setting off reported speech in double quotation marks. In rare instances in which Gundron appeared to have misused a word, I have made the necessary corrections. All chapter and section divisions and footnotes are mine. (Ed.)
2 Aficionados will recognize the structural similarity between some of Adelaïda’s and Mandrik’s songs and the blues, which otherwise do not exist in Mandragora. Many of the songs Mandrik and Adelaïda compose extemporaneously are simple ballads, as one might expect in such a community; but the blues aesthetic which marks some of the songs seems to have been brought to the village by Mandrik and Yves’s grandmother (who was also Adelaïda’s grandaunt), Iulia Gansevöort Gundron, the only stranger ever recorded as having visited the village before me, and widely believed to have been a silkie, or half-human spirit of the sea. All other music in Mandragora consists of devotional chants in the diatonic scale.
3 A primitive compass Yves called a south-pointer.
4 Urbis of Nnms.
5 The aforementioned Iulia.
6 Mandrik reported to his countrymen that during a three-year absence he traveled to Indo-China via India and the great Silk Road.
7 None of these alleged recipes has survived.
8 Man tell a woman lies,
’Spect her kiss his feet.
Yes, a man tell a woman lies,
’Sped her kiss his feet.
But when Judgment Day acomin’, man,
You be sorry you’s so indiscreet.
CHAPTER TWO
THE ARRIVAL
Then, two years to the day after the advent of my wonderful invention, the stranger came up out of the east.
My harness had changed Mandragora,
