“Leave your wagon when you go, cur,” Mad Gus tells him, very quietly indeed. “I will have that with the barley for your insolence.”
“But ... but without the cart, how am I to bring you next year’s harvest?” Gundar stammers.
“Shut your bung hole, peasant,” Mad Gus answers as quietly as Gundar has ever heard him speak, “and leave here. Now. Or I will have your worthless head to decorate the cart with.”
Well, as you might imagine, Herr Halifax, all this distressing banter has finally cleared Gundar’s mind enough to understand that it is time to run—and not back to his farm where who knew what fate might await him. Where Mad Gus was concerned, displays of quiet restraint were never known to be propitious.
RH: Very ominous indeed. But since you’re here today, I must assume your ancestor survived this misstep.
GD: Indeed, for, though Gundar did not realize it, he had just induced Mad Gus to a commit an even greater misstep of his own.
Unsure that anywhere within the village would be safe for him, Gundar slept out in the forest, wrapped in his cloak against the cold. Early the next morning, he snuck back, hoping to find sanctuary underneath the inn kept by his friend Horner Brock. There was a secret second cellar there, you see, dug out just spoonfuls of dirt at a time over many years by a wide conspiracy of barroom patrons. This small space was used to hide important things or people in times of extraordinary need if Brock deemed it could be done without arousing suspicion in the castle. We will never know whether Brock would have deemed Gundar’s need sufficient, for he arrived to find an hysterical mob gathered in Brock’s barroom.
“Gus’s men have emptied all the brewing vats, and carted off the beer!” they cry when Gundar enters. “Every barrel, bottle, and bota bag in the entire village!”
“Gott in Himmel!”[39] Gundar exclaims, quite hungry by that hour, and having hoped to get a stein or two of breakfast there, if not even a potato to scrub it down with. “Why would they do such a thing?”
“They came last night,” he is angrily informed, “claiming you’d spat into Mad Gus’s face and told him no one ought to pay his grain tax anymore! He thinks we are ungrateful now!”
Gundar gapes at them in utter disbelief, then slaps his forehead.
“Can this be true, Gundar?” Brock asks him. “Were you so insane?”
“I do vaguely remember that Mad Gus and I misunderstood each other when I went to offer up my harvest,” Gundar tells them. “That much is true, I think. But if I’d spat at any part of him, would I be living now to speak of it? And why would I have dragged a whole cart full of barley up that Gottdamn hill just to tell him I’d not pay his tax? I was certainly not that drunk.”
“It does sound hard to swallow,” someone in the mob concedes.
“Everything is hard to swallow now,” someone else complains, “without our beer.”
“They burned your farm last night, you know,” Brock tells Gundar gently.
“I’m not surprised,” sighs Gundar.
“Well, we’re not just going to stand for it, are we?” someone else insists.
“Please, don’t cause yourselves more trouble on my account,” Gundar replies stoically. “Winter’s not for several weeks yet. I can build another farm.”
“Who cares about your farm?” protests the other man. “I meant our beer! Winter’s only weeks away, as Herr Barrel Mouth has just observed, and that beer’s all we had to eat!”
This remark is met with cheers of outrage from the mob.
“With winter upon us and all our grain already tucked away up in the castle granaries, we have no way of brewing more!”[40] complains another man.
“And even if we could,” someone else groans, “how would we survive the months required to brew it?”
“Where’s he keeping it all?” asks another man. “That’s what I want to know. Mad Gus can’t stand beer, so he won’t have many barrels up there.”
“I have it from Hans Schloser, the carpenter,” one man confides, “that Mad Gus has turned one of his granaries into a giant vat!”
“So that’s why they tore down my barn last night!” exclaims another fellow. “Without a word of explanation when they carted off the lumber!”
“Same with my tanning shed!” complains the village taxidermist.
“They’ve made a beer vat from your tanning shed?” someone asks, aghast.
“He’s poured all our different kinds of beer into a single vat?” gasps the man behind him.
“Has he no conscience?” cries a balding man with bandied legs.
“Has he no taste buds?” demands another.
“He has no soul!” booms out another man.
“It’s... sacrilege!” sputters yet another.
“It’s psychotic sociopathy!” shrills a young man.[41]
“It’s just too much!” shouts a nearly toothless geezer near the front. “For decades now, that monster steals our cattle with impunity! He burns our barns and houses! He drags our very wives and children from their beds at night and sells them into slavery! Okay, we can live with that stuff; life is never easy. But marching in and grabbing our beer? That crosses the line! I say the time—has come—to take—this FÜCHENMEISTER[42] DOWN!!!”
[Sudden silence, punctuated after some time by a spate of quiet throat clearing from Mr. Dourtmundschtradel.]
My ... apologies, Herr Halifax, for that ... outburst. Always, at this point in the story, I... This is the moment of liberation awaited by my longsuffering forefathers since even before their own births. The emotion... It is ... rather distressing, ja? I ... hope you will consider, possibly, deleting this embarrassing lapse in discipline from your recording?
RH: I will certainly consult my superiors, Herr Dourtmundschtradel, but I assure you, there’s no need of apology. I sympathize completely.[43]
GD: Danke,[44] Herr Halifax. Your understanding does you credit.
RH: The honor is mine, sir. Shall we continue?
GD: Of course, of course. Where were we?
RH: Er ... at the, uh, dawn of Durn’s liberation, I believe?
GD: Ja, ja. Well. A respectable civic leader like Herr Brock would, of course, have found that old man’s disturbing emotional outburst as unseemly as you and I do, Herr Halifax, and perhaps have worried also about potential consequences for himself and his establishment should any of Mad Gus’s men happen to be lurking near enough to overhear the indecorous display of seditious sentiment developing inside. He quite properly insisted that the discussion be suspended immediately and taken “elsewhere”.
Now, everyone in Durn, except, of course, for Mad Gus and his various agents, knew very well what “elsewhere” meant. In times of extremis, one was likely to hear that so-and-so had gone “elsewhere” for a while, or that “the thing in question” might be looked for “elsewhere.” In Durn, “elsewhere” meant that secret second cellar, which I have mentioned, underneath Herr Brock’s inn. Thus, with knowing looks and crafty nonchalance, the hysterical mob sidled furtively down Brock’s cellar stairs, and passed in single file through the slyly sequestered slot behind the curtain, cleverly concealed inside a false-backed barrel into Brock’s secret second cellar to resume their rabble-rousing in greater safety.
Unfortunately, this space is said to have been no larger than eight feet in any direction, so one must assume the hysterical mob was packed inside quite tightly. The smell alone of all those rustic fellows jammed together in the darkness must have been appalling,[45] though they were likely far too angry at that moment to care much about such trivialities, ja?
At any rate, once all were pressed inside, their rebellious conversation was resumed.
“So,” Brock commences sensibly, “how exactly do you bravos think that we, without any weapons, can hope to overthrow Mad Gus with all his henchmen and that cannon he is always polishing?”[46]
“Anybody ever seen him fire it?” asks a voice from near the back. “I’ll bet it doesn’t even work, or he’d have fired it at us lo
ng ago.”
“You are volunteering, then,” Brock counters, “to stand between it and the rest of us while we find out?”
“Our cause is just!” cries the old man with hardly any teeth. “God will surely supply us with whatever weapons are required.”
I do not doubt Brock rolled his eyes, though no one would have seen it in the darkness. “And what kind of weapons do you imagine God would send us?” he asks wearily, having watched this kind of theater come and go in Durn too many times before.
A consternated silence fills their crowded refuge.
“Beehives!” someone exclaims.
“Beehives?” Brock asks. “Mad Gus’s beekeepers will have many more of those up at the castle than we’re likely to assemble here. What would we do with them anyway?”
“Doesn’t matter,” says another voice. “Don’t need the hives—just a couple tubs of honeycomb, and take it to the castle as an offering to make amends for Gundar’s blunder.”
“I told you,” Gundar protests. “I did nothing!”
“Hold your tongue, Gundar,” scolds the first voice. “I’m not finished yet. Being such greedy bastards, I bet they’ll tear into that honey right in front of us and shove it all into their faces while we look on, hungry, ja?”
“Which will accomplish what of any help to us?” asks someone else.
“Nothing,” says the first voice, “’til we set the bears loose on them!”
“What bears?” asks Gundar, backed by many a concurring grunt.
“The woods are full of hungry bears this close to winter,” he replies. “We just catch five or six of them, and sic ’em on Mad Gus and his collaborators when their greedy faces are all covered in our honey. They’ll be torn to pieces.”
“How are we to trap these bears without being mauled ourselves?” scoffs Gundar.
“And how are we to sneak them up into the castle?” asks another voice as scornfully. “Shall we hide them in our breeches while presenting Mad Gus with the honey, or just whistle for them once he has indulged this bestial sweet tooth you describe?”
“We could use weasels, then,” says a new voice. “They’re easier to catch, and small enough to hide—even in our breeches, if we have to.”
“Are you seriously proposing that we kill Mad Gus with weasels?” Brock asks crossly.
“Just ’cause they’re small don’t mean their claws and teeth aren’t just as sharp as any bear’s,” says this latest idiot, near drowned out by boos and raspberries from the others.
“Weasels care for sausage, not for honey,” Gundar laughs. “So I think we know what they will use their teeth on first if any of us tries hiding them inside their pants.”[47]
“A peace offering of goats then,” says yet another voice, “with beehives stuffed inside them,[48] so that when the castle butcher cuts them open—”
“—all the kitchen staff is stung to death!” Gundar roars with mirth. “That will show Mad Gus who’s boss in Durn. And how are we to get these beehives into goats?”
“Just wrap them up in trash, and leave them in the goat pen,” says yet another man. “There’s nothing goats won’t eat.”[49]
“Are we finished with this nonsense?” Brock snaps. “It’s getting rather close in here.”
But they weren’t even near to finished, Herr Halifax. Someone next suggested they send a cauldron of soup up to Mad Gus, filled with poisoned parsnips, but everyone agreed that no one in the valley, least of all Mad Gus, could stand parsnips,[50] so not only would Mad Gus not eat them, but the village would be punished further just for sending him such an insulting vegetable. Another man suggested they persuade Mad Gus’s own henchmen to insurrection by offering up the village women as a bribe. But a brace of others reminded him that the only women in their village not already kidnapped were the very ugly ones, suggesting he’d have thought of that if his own wife were not still safe at home.
It didn’t help their progress any that with every passing hour each man there was becoming soberer than he had likely been in years. As things got hotter under everyone’s collars, Brock began to fear they’d simply kill each other right there in the secret cellar without anyone’s being the wiser. His only reassurance lay in the fact that there wasn’t room to draw so much as a butter knife—which Durn’s peasants were allowed to own and carry.
It was then that Gundar finally bellows, “Silence!” And, to Brock’s amazement, silence falls. “Men of Durn,” Gundar growls, “is it not time we all stopped living like Mad Gus’s children here?” The silence stretches. “You know as well as I that there’s no silly circus act by which to overthrow Mad Gus. If we truly care about our beer, then we must make whatever weapons we are able from our farming implements and from the branches of our trees and the sharp stones of our fields. Then we must march as one to Gus’s gates, and fight like men until not one of his hired scoundrels is left standing to defend him. Are there not many more of us than there are of them?”
None of them were skilled enough at math to provide him with an answer. But, remembering, perhaps, how handily Gundar had managed to drag a fully loaded barley wagon clear across the valley and up to Gus’s castle—or moved by how he’d walked away alive after whatever insult he had offered Gus to cause them all of these problems—they enthusiastically declared Gundar leader of their imminent rebellion.
Thus inspired, everyone rushed home and quickly fashioned bludgeons out of tree limbs, slingshots out of harnesses, scythes and pitchforks out of, well, scythes and pitchforks, and reassembled early the next morning at the village inn, where Gundar got them all formed up in rows, as befits a fighting force that fancies itself fearless in the face of any foe. When this was done, he shouted, as any good commander must, “Forwaaaaard march!” Whereupon, they all turned sharply, if in numerous directions, and, after just a few collisions and a minor shouting match or two, managed to get headed all in more or less the same direction.
Probably because they hadn’t taken care to march up to the castle quietly enough, they arrived to find Mad Gus’s gates shut tight against them. Atop the walls stood Gus himself, flanked by several dozen henchmen armed with swords and cudgels. Frowning down at them, Mad Gus yelled, “Whatever are you nitwits doing now?”
Gundar stepped forward and called up with great ferocity, “We’ve come for our beer, Your Lordship.”
“No, seriously,” Gus called back down. “What are you up to?”
Gundar exchanged uncertain glances with his men, unable to think of any answer clearer than the one he had just given. Looking back up at Mad Gus, he called, “With due respect, Your Lordship, you tend to make even the simplest conversations very complicated.”[51]
“Well, let me try to be a little clearer then,” Gus said. “What...” he started making bizarre hand gestures, which may have been some proto-attempt at sign language—or at Italian—“are ... you ... NITWITS,” he cupped both hands around his mouth for added volume, “UP TO?”
Gundar rolled his eyes, having had it up to here by then with Gus’s poor communication skills. Instead of answering again, he grabbed a four-foot length of tree branch from a stout lad nearby, walked to Gus’s lavish gates, and started pounding on them with it.
“Stop that!” Mad Gus shouted. “Stop that immediately! You’re damaging the finish!”
Gundar kept on banging, having already knocked some impressive chips out of the fancy carving there.
“I said—” Gus started to repeat.
“I heard you,” Gundar cut him off. “Did you hear me? We’ve come to get our beer back! Now open up this gate, Your Lordship, or we will knock it down—one small chip at a time, if that’s what it takes. Could make it very hard to sleep in there tonight!”
“Open my gates?!” Mad Gus shrilled. “Is that your wish, you lout? My gates open?” He directed an outraged wave at his henchmen, who turned as one and disappeared. “Fine then, I’ll be glad to open up my gates, moron! Hope you’re ready! Here it comes!”
Of course
, Mad Gus could just have had his henchmen fire arrows down at Gundar’s band, and slaughtered everyone in minutes, had he not years earlier declared bows illegal in his kingdom, even in the hands of his own men, fearing any weapon with the speed to reach him faster than he felt able to react. Given his own laws, however, it was now necessary for Gus’s men to come down in person to dispatch the rabble.[52] Gundar and his men braced themselves as Gus’s gates swung open and dozens of men in mismatching armor[53] swarmed out with a mighty hue and cry, bristling with weapons in various states of repair, but still more than equal to the job.
After decades of encountering nothing but the flaccid[54] resignation of hopeless, half-drunken serfs, however, Mad Gus’s men were not at all prepared for the inconceivable sobriety and determination which Mad Gus’s misstep had suddenly engendered. Nor, it turns out, is a standard, pre-owned sword or cudgel as effective as you’d think against heavy branches two or three feet longer, wielded by men who’ve been required, lo those many years, to use their arms for work more strenuous than drinking wine and whoring.[55] Gundar and his men were increasingly mystified by the strange clumsiness of all these so-called “seasoned fighting men”, until they started noticing the stench of stale beer on their breath.
“Why, they’ve been making free with all our stolen beer!” somebody shouted, which made the village men even more irate and formidable. Before the castle’s tipsy henchmen quite had time to realize how badly they were losing and retreat, Gundar and his peers had forced their way inside the gates, and moved the brawl into Mad Gus’s courtyard.
Once inside, strangely little effort seemed required to fend off half-assed feints and forays aimed tentatively at them from time to time by Gus’s discombobulated force, now trying—rather badly, it seemed—to improvise guerrilla tactics inside their own stronghold. More urgent for Gundar and his band was the blessedly bitter, yeasty smell of beer that hung upon the air around them. Their heads swam with it, their mouths salivated, as they gazed about, trying to triangulate the lovely odor’s source. It took their veteran noses hardly any time at all to home in on the second of Mad Gus’s three huge granaries, built against the courtyard’s farthest wall.
Eastlick and Other Stories Page 24