Alone, the man sits on the knoll above the swaying sea of grass and watches the foals chase one another around in circles in earshot of the older, wiser horses. The man undoes the twine tying his hair behind his head and feels the relief of its lightness as it tumbles to his shoulders and he feels the breeze catch in their dark strands, softly blowing them about his head like snaking kites.
He takes this chance to let out a long sigh and lower his tensed shoulders. His hands and thighs ache from the day of riding, feeding, brushing, and cleaning. He runs his fingers between the waxy grass, then his fingertips dance along the petals of wildflowers. He feels the strains of the day ebbing away, as they pass through his body and back into the wide world around him.
But the pain in his heart struggles to find its way back out into the world from where it came. He knows this small, evening moment will not last long and soon he will take the horses back to his home and the village beyond that. Though there are many things there that make the man happy - his wife, their children, his brother, his father, and his uncle, and the kinsmen of the village who are for the most part his friends - there is something about returning to them all that gives this hour a peculiar dread. He feels it more in his stomach than his heart. A lump that makes him think he has to go relieve himself.
His worry is tied to a few problems that dangle like heavy beads on a necklace. The coins are the most pressing concern. When he was a boy there was no money in the village; it was the nation that brought gold here. Before that, the people of the village swapped things, or borrowed things, and when someone needed a house building - they all built a house. When they needed looking after - they took turns tending to their wounds and ailments. This is no longer the case. When you want something, you must give a person gold for it. If you don’t have the gold then, well, you might still get it, but you will owe that person something. It puts a terrible feeling into the air. A feeling of something unfinished. Like a hand hovering over you, ready to slap.
The man’s father, and other elders of the village, cannot conceive of such things. They struggle to understand this new way of living - that you can no longer simply build a house without the exchange of gold and the agreement of many deals. They understand that the timber and the game in the forest at the edge of their homes is not theirs, but that of the noble house that lives far away in the city. That they have understood for generations as they are a conquered people. But they cannot fathom why their yearly offerings to the great house, that which allows them to chop their own wood and hunt their own game, no longer allows them to build houses without further offerings given to not just the tradefolk in the city, but also to their own kin in the village. And this has caused the elders to start saying some very unusual things. Ideas the man would rather not think about. Ideas that threaten all this - the house, his family, the horses - even this knoll.
But as a fish that leaps from the river must return to the current, the man reties his hair up, whistles his horses, and rides home with the foals cantering clumsily alongside the herd.
What awaits him curls its knuckles around that knot in his stomach. Outside his house, soldiers stand talking to his wife and eldest son. At this distance, he cannot make out much about their appearance, or see the expression on their faces, let alone hear what they are saying. But one mounted soldier carries a banner and upon it are three flags - the lowest is the three-striped flag of their nation, above it is the largest of the flags, a blue field with a white horse which belongs to the noble house that rules this village and many others, and above all, on a long, thin flag of white and gold, an imperial gryphon. That tells him who these soldiers are and why they have come.
He swallows his fear and rides up to the house, fortifying his shaking heart to bear what he already knows he will hear.
Paddy Dobson
11th April 2022