It is my considerable honour to publish here a document recently uncovered by noted academician Mr Urban Feaks, best known as editor-in-chief of the remarkable
Enclyclopædia of the Bohemian Empire.
With great condescencion Mr Feaks has permitted me to reproduce, with links to his inestimible
Encyclopædia, the full text of an open letter by one B
ēnpod Caunt, a noted Mensurian pit-fighter. It is a fascinating insight into the
mœurs of Bohemian society at the time of the Empress Alexandra and I hope will be followed by more material in the same vein. AOM.
The Life of Bēnpod Caunt
by B. Caunt
The following tale of minor celebrity, being a potted and selected history of myself, Bēnpod Caunt, up to this time, is not a tale of particular wonders or particular tragedies. I have, to be sure, lived a more interesting life than most, but my memoirs do not make fascinating reading. We live in civilised times, run according to dirigible timetables. We fret that our children will be bullied at school if we cannot afford the finest tweeds for them. We feel twinges of guilt at breakfast with our wives after a night spent enjoying the affections of Burlesque dancers. We are civil and civilised and feel the tedium of modern life. Is there nothing more than this?
My very first memory was the arrival of a Viennese trading convoy. Slow carts rolled in and exotic people flooded the village. They came at the end of each summer to buy wine and especially tobacco but they haggled badly and my father charged them twice what he could have accepted. We lived modestly.
Intermittently throughout the year, working to their own strange rhythm, these itinerant traders passed through. If they arrived from the north, they sold luxuries such as soap, mirrors and the latest Viennese fashions. From the southwest, they sold olives and from the east, arquebuses. Every East-Anglian peasant-boy could hunt and, although the last serious attack on our village was almost out of living memory, we also learned to fight. Those skills are hard-learned and not easily forgotten.
When I was 17 years of age, everyone we knew became suddenly rich. Trading carts had given way to convoys of small dirigibles held up by balloons of hydrogen. They were unbelievably fast. If, on a Saturday, Viennese high fashion dictated that hair should be worn in vertical spikes then, by Monday, the ladies of East-Anglia would saturate their hair in sugar water and hang upside down until it set solid. These convoys were also cheap to run until the Salzburg Guild of Engineers and Prospectors quadrupled diesel prices overnight. Our glorious nation was plunged instantly into recession until Empress Alexandra personally staked a 60 000 Guinea reward for the secret of diesel production.
Three months later, Rudolf Ramersson of Budapest invented biodiesel which could be produced cheaply, via an alchemical process, from Canola Seed oil. East-Anglia alone of the 5 provinces of Bohemia had the correct conditions for the cultivation of Canola Seed. Within one year food production on our native farmland had dropped to zero. Every peasant family produced biodiesel and the average wage quadrupled. East-Anglia became temporarily rich.
That winter, however, while my family feasted, a cross-discipline research team, jointly headed by the renowned alchemist Rudolf Ramersson and the then unknown but academically brilliant young Theoretical Poet, William Gates-Williamsson, invented the Biodiesel Combustion Golem. Unlike previous golem models which relied exclusively on magic to function, the Biodiesel Combustion Golem was easy to program, 100% reliable and could be inexpensively produced in factories.
In 1153rd year of our lord Karolus Magnus my family was evicted from our lands. The absentee landlord had purchased a golem which, without human intervention of any kind after initial installation, could grow and harvest 6000 Guineas-worth of Canola Seed annually. It came with a 101-year parts-and-labour guarantee. My family, following the tide of suddenly destitute ex-peasant farmers, emigrated to Vienna in search of work.
It is, however, a truly ill wind that blows nobody any good. I never had the patience or willpower to be a farmer. I spent much of my adolescent life drunk, angry and, in the finest East-Anglian tradition, settling petty arguments with the brutal and ritualistic duelling we call Mensur. Evenings spent at my family’s homestead invariably ended in a pointless and ill-considered argument by which means I imposed my misery upon my parents. The next morning I would awake ashamed but my family ignored my excesses and patiently allowed me to continue on my path. And, as luck would have it, alcoholism and finely honed aggressive tendencies left me perfectly suited to life in Vienna. I learned to replace my unsophisticated rural speech patterns with the strangled, nasal Viennese vowel sounds. I left my family wallowing in their ghetto and moved on. Within one month I had embarked on an illustrious career as a Pit-Fighter.
Very few foreigners ever take the time to fully understand the complex rules and traditions of Mensurian Pit-Fighting but, contrary to the belief commonly held outside of Bohemia, it is extremely rare for participants to die or be maimed in the course of a match. It is, however, even since the introduction of the modern LBW rule, very common for both participants to suffer severe head trauma.
At my peak I was undefeated in over 420 matches (outstripping even the great Bendigo Tomsson) but I had my fair share of concussions and, if that wasn’t enough to render my memory somewhat blurry, I could always finish the evening drunk and unconscious on the floor at any one of a number of post-match parties. At these parties, with dried blood from the fight encrusted on my coat, I could enjoy brandy and marijuana with the highest names in high-society and the brightest young things of the Burlesque scene.
I even met the landlord who had evicted my family. He was a pleasant man who could trace his ancestry back to the founding of the Bohemian Empire. Years later I learned that he was killed defending his lands during the Mechano-Homunculus Uprising of 1165. This, I suppose, is Kismet and, at the very least, means that William Gates-Williamsson never had to make good on the 101-year parts and labour guarantee. It truly is an ill wind that blows nobody any good.
Of course, this level of celebrity could not be sustained. Every sportsman begins to lose his edge and it becomes harder as each year passes to maintain the necessary peak level of fitness. I am now a veteran at the age of 38 and confined strictly to the senior leagues but my yearly tours of the Bohemian Provinces are still attended by hundreds and I earn twice what my parents made even in that golden year when biodiesel was first invented. Occasionally, after a particularly unsuccessful gambling binge or disastrous run on the stock market, I will temporarily run out of money and have to supplement my income with after-dinner speaking engagements (which I loathe).
I offer this potted history of myself, the moderately famous Bēnpod Caunt, in the hope that the dear reader will share with me the yearnings of a dreamer. Modern life with its golems and sanitised dirigible travel is, by consensus, intolerably dull. In my youth I read with passion the books of H.G. Wells and I find myself returning to those childish things. I would have preferred to be a character in one of his Fantastic novels: a barbarian riding into the wilderness to kill Elves, a deranged scientist harnessing the power of lightning or a Morlock taking on the form of men to seduce their wives and steal their treasures. Life would have been brutal and almost certainly short but at the very least it would have been an adventure and preferable to the oppressive existence which we are obliged to live in Alexandrine Bohemia.
I write this article as a form of open letter. I respectfully request of any reader who considers that he (or even she) can tell a true tale of adventure to submit it to me, care of the eminent publishers of this journal. Anything considered worthy of the great fiction writers of the Fantastic or Scientifiction genres will be considered for publishing.
B. Caunt
(c) E. O'Mahony All rights reserved
