The Brants manor was governed by a ruthless lord.
The lord knew by the breakfast time which workers had been loitering upon their duties in the threshing shed and which had been labouring to the lord’s pleasure.
The threshers marvelled at their lord’s wondrous omniscience.
By and by, the threshers resolved to seek to the causes of such divination.
Before the threshing was to begin, two workers climbed up on the threshing-shed’s loft and there they concealed themselves well.
Soon enough, the lord, too, made his way up to the loft and he lay close to the trapdoor.
The threshers commenced the flailing..
The lord, in order to have a clearer view, leaned over the trapdoor yet he was still unable to see all he wished.
The lord stooped ever further.
The workers who had been hiding on the loft now pushed the lord over and the lord fell right in the stalks.
The threshers leaped at him at once and they starting beating him with the flails.
The lord howled, ‘It is me – thy lord!’
But the threshers responded, ‘This cannot be our lord – vells, vells, vells it must be!*’
The threshers kept striking until their blows rendered the lord quite bent and crooked.
At last, half-dead, half-alive – the lord bolted and out of the threshing-shed he fled.
Not long thereafter, the lord died.
Before his death, the lord behested to be buried where no rooster might crow after him.
And that was why the lord become buried in the Brantu pine forest.
The tale is said to have been truer than true.
Even in these days, a mound can be seen by the lakeside where the Bent Lord was buried.
***
*Vells (velns) – the deity of fertility and the chaotic, disruptive aspect to nature and creation in the Latvian mythology, also Christian devil.
Latvian Folk Tales 