Monday, June the 13th, 2005

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Those Gubernatorial Bells

O how they clanged, those gubernatorial bells! It is eighty years now since their peals sounded, but still I hear them in my head. They clanged ceaselessly, all day and all night, deafeningly loud, for years on end. Cows stood dazed in the fields around the bell-tower, many, many cows, too many cows to count, all dazed and stunned, and in those days no cowherds came to give them succour.

In your tongue, “gubernatorial” refers to governorship, but in my land at that time the gubernatorial bells were the ever-clanging bells of the ferocious tyrant known variously as the Gub or Guber or Gubernat. Some said the Gub was a fiend in human form, but none had ever seen it, so how could they be so sure, muttering darkly in the corner of the tavern, professing a knowledge they did not have, rewarded with a refilled tankard by some credulous foreign person on an ill-advised visit to our bell-blasted village?

Dobson came here once. He crashed through the tavern doors, a clumsy adventurer—for he was young then—and jabbered at anyone who would listen that he wanted to go up the hill to the castle, to meet the Gubernat face to face.

“And what do you think you'll find?” sneered an old frogman in the last stages of drunken despair. Within seconds he keeled off his stool and lay insensible in the sawdust. Dobson answered him regardless.

“I know not what I shall find, old man,” he announced, “I know only that if those benighted bells are ever to stop clanging, the Gubernat must be dragged from its perch in the castle atop the hill. Then you will know peace, as will the countless cows in your pretty fields, who now are dazed and stunned.”

“Our fields are indeed pretty,” muttered someone lurking in the gloom, “As is your speech, young Dobson. But the Gub will never allow you into its presence. The last swashbuckling foreign person who came here on a mission such as yours ran away gibbering along Hollyhock Lane. They recovered his corpse from the duckpond a week later. When our Necropod Woman made her examination, do you know what she found? His brain had been sucked out into space!”

There is an art to saying “Pshaw!” with conviction. Later in life, as you know, Dobson was one of the great pshawers, but back then he was callow and shallow, and the “pshaw” he pshawed was a pitiful pip on his lips. In truth, he was unnerved by this news. He resolved to obtain a letter of introduction from the Gubernat's solicitors, Buttercups and Tod, whose office he had passed on his way from the railway station. He pranced out of the tavern and retraced his steps.

Neither Buttercups nor Tod was available, he learned. Cow business kept them fully occupied, for there were numberless cows and only the pair of them, the one greasy, the other mute. Dobson sat on a lump of stone in the market square, biting his fingernails and praying for the insane clanging of the gubernatorial bells to stop. That is how I found him, so many years ago, on that gorgeous day when first we met, when still the cowherds shunned the cows, when the bells still clanged, in that village far away, where I plied my trade as the Necropod Woman, fruitlessly searching for brains sucked into space, and for a pamphleteer whose pamphlets were not yet written, not yet read.