Q by Luther Blissett (poetry books to read txt) 📕

During a pause, the pig questions me: ‘What’s a fine little gentleman like you doing in a pig-sty like this?

His full mouth dribbles. He wipes it with his hand and then burps.

Without looking at him, I say, ‘The horse needs to rest and I need to eat.’

‘No, my little chap. What you’re doing in this shithole of a fucking war.’

‘Defending the princes from the rebels…’ I haven’t time to go on.

‘Ah… Right, got you, got you… from a few flea-ridden bums,’ he chews, ‘from a gang of beggars,’ he swallows, ‘ what times we live in, young boys defending the lords from the peasants,’ he burps again. ‘I tell you, my little fellow, this is the shittiest of all the shitty wars that I’ve seen with my one eye. It’s all money, my friend, nothing but money and business as far as those pigs in Rome are concerned. The bishops with all their whores and children to support! Hard cash, listen, the princes, the dukes, the lucky sods, they don’t think about anything else. First they take everything the yokels own, and then they send us in to thrash the living daylights out of anyone who gets pissed off . Maybe I’m too old for all this bollocks. Fucking arseholes! But this time we should’ve turned the cannons on the princes and the Pope’s lickspittles. They really showed what they were made of, the hayseeds did: they burned down the castles and� everything in them, they fucked the countesses up the arse, disembowelled the priests, fuck’s sake! Oh, they’re always going on about God, but they smashed everything, I was that close to joining in as well, but I knew how things would turn out, the poor always get it in the neck. And we always end up with thruppence. This is for that lot.’ He farts, sniggers, swigs. ‘Fuck it!’

�I stop eating, somewhere between surprise and distaste. I like this fat guy, he’s got a mouth like a sewer but he hates the lords. I’m encouraged: they’re made of flesh and blood, not just hard, honed iron.

‘And where were you?’ I ask him.

‘In Eisenach, then Salza, then I got fed up breaking my arms over the backs of the poor creatures. It was really disgusting. I’ve got too old for all that bollocks, I’m forty years of age, fuck’s sake, twenty of them spent on this shit. And what about you, young sir?’

‘Twenty-five.’

‘No, no: where have you been?’

‘Frankenhausen.’

‘Bloody hell!!! You’ve been in the middle of the Last Judgement? From what I hear, there’s never been anything like it.’

‘That’s right, mate.’

‘So tell me… That preacher, that prophet, that, um, the tough bloke, what’s his name…? Oh yes: M�ntzer. The Coiner. What happened to him?’

Careful.

‘They got him.’

‘He’s not dead?’

‘No. I saw him being carried away. A member of the troop who caught him told me he fought like a lion, getting him was difficult, the soldiers were intimidated by the look on his face and the words he was coming out with. While they were carrying him away on the cart you could still hear him shouting, “Omnia sunt communia!”’

‘And what the fuck does that mean?’

‘Everything belongs to everyone.’

‘Shit. What a man! And you know Latin?’

He sneers. I lower my eyes.

A few hours’ travel and the hills of the Thuringian Forest were already a luminous patch in the deep grey of the sky behind me. I had just passed the fortress of Coburg, and was making for the inn in the town of Ebern. Another two days of marching, three at the most, along the wooded valleys of High Franconia that were beginning to spread out before me. A wide road, normally crowded with merchants’ carts between the Itz and the Main. That evening in Ebern, the next day in Forschheim, to avoid the prying eyes of Bamberg, then to Nuremberg and finally on to Bibra.

For the first time I felt I’d be able to do it. That exhaustion that’s starting to flood back into me, I’d forgotten it, it was cancelled out by that strength that can drag us over the brink of defeat.

*

They came towards me from the distance, while the sky was filling with clouds: sorrowful, tattered, tragic. A thin mist advanced ahead of them, faint, greyish light mixed with the drizzle that blurs vision and breath, in the clearing in the narrow valley that I was hoping to have passed through by sunset.�

They were moving slowly, they might have covered several hours since dawn, after a night pitched in some unimaginable camp somewhere, and ahead of them lay the unbearable darkness of a journey with no destination.

They had no carts, or oxen or horses. Bags over their shoulders. A torrent of refugees, a deluge of misery passing through the splendid towers of Coburg.

That column of massacred humanity crept onwards, crushed under Heaven’s massive heel. Exhaustedly dragging furniture with them, invalids groaning under sweat-drenched bandages, old people laid on improvised stretchers. Ceaseless litanies and the howls of babies wailing out their woes.

A few women tried to give the shambling bodies some kind of direction: they would pass up and down the wretched line, comforting the wounded or encouraging people to go on whenever they sank beneath the weight of their misfortune. Always with children bound to shoulders, arms and laps; tragic, proud faces. That unimaginable, solemn strength had breathed life into the wretched flesh of who knows what villages, perhaps the very one I passed through days ago, or another one, or another still. Is there a single scrap of the world that has escaped the cataclysm?

I followed the exhaustion of their footsteps, keeping my distance, a few yards away on the right, motionless for a while, an eternity. Every now and again a glance, an imploring lament would pierce me to the quick. Hundreds of men under a single soldier: not a gesture of contempt, not a sign of reaction. Exhausted, all of them, stupefied in the face of their ruin. And it was to me, a runaway got up like a murderer, that they addressed the prayer of the dispossessed.

Then, out of the lifeless mass, a woman’s face turns towards me. Vivid, in its terrible exhaustion, detaching itself from the weeping column, entrusting to other arms the two starving children she was bringing with her.

‘We have nothing, soldier. Nothing but the wounds of the cripples and the tears of our children. What else can you steal from us?’

I had no words to soothe the remorse I feel for my powerlessness and the guilt of being alive, as I stared into those proud eyes, nails driven into my flesh. I should have got down from my horse, picked up her children, given them money and help. I should have helped my people, the army of the elect, lost in mud that they had no way out of. I should have got down and stayed there.

I struck my horse’s flanks, hard. Almost blindly.