The Beulah Law

Chronicle Entry

Recorded by Brother Wyn of Caermynach, Anno Domini 923

Welsh Name: Cyfraith Beulah
Date of Event: Winter, 627 BC (Late Bronze Age)
Location: Borderlands between Powys and Brycheiniog
Status: Observed to present day

In the borderlands between Powys and Brycheiniog, goat pens hold their numbers with mathematical precision. One animal for every five people. Never more. Farmers teach this ratio to their sons before they teach them their letters, and when children ask why, the answer comes in two words that carry the weight of fifteen centuries: Remember Beulah.

The Record

The measure took shape in the winter of 627 BC, though it was not called law then. It was simply what remained when smoke cleared and snow covered the ashes of a village that chose wealth over wisdom.

Beulah sat in the gap between the chiefdoms, paying tribute to both Powys and Brycheiniog for the privilege of being ignored. The tribute bought peace, and peace let forty-three people grow barley and raise children and live quiet lives where two powers met and decided not to fight.

When ox-sickness emptied their pens in the autumn of 628 BC, Geifryn ap Meirion turned to goats as replacement. Hardy creatures that thrived where cattle failed, breeding fast enough to replace tribute stock in a single season rather than three years waiting for oxen to mature. A practical solution to an immediate problem.

Practicality became prosperity. Prosperity became ambition. Ambition, as it will, saw no natural limit to its increase.

Within three years, five goats had multiplied to sixty-eight. The village that once smelled of cooking fires and turned earth grew thick with ammonia reek and the musk of too many animals pressed into too little space. Bleating never stopped. Fences creaked under constant testing. Children wore the smell like a second skin, and mothers hung washing further from the pens with each passing month.

Geifryn saw none of this. He counted only the path to power, measuring wealth in goats the way other men measured it in bronze or grain. The elders spoke. Geifryn's wife pleaded. The village druid warned that some hungers, once fed, forget how to stop. All counsel went unheard by a man who could see his reflection in calm water and mistake it for kingship.

History

Winter came hard that year. The goats, pressed beyond the land's capacity to sustain them, began to die. Geifryn, rather than cull the herd to save the remainder, slaughtered what survived for meat. Then, when meat ran low and madness had taken full root in his mind, he ceased to distinguish between what bleated on four legs and what walked on two.

The men from Garth found him three days after the last smoke rose from Beulah's ruined roundhouses. He moved on his hands like hooves, body low to frozen ground, and when they called him by name he answered with sounds half-bleat, half-speech. He fled into the hills and was never seen again, though some nights when wind carries voices from the west, people claim to hear something moving through those ruins yet.

The survivors told the story exactly as it happened. Within one generation, every village in the borderlands knew what befell Beulah when goats multiplied beyond wisdom's counsel. Within two generations, it had become the manner of story told on winter nights when fire burned low and parents needed their children to understand that some lessons are bought with other people's blood.

In Practice

The measure that emerged was plain enough for any to grasp. One goat for every five people. Never more. Those who spoke of increasing their herds beyond this measure were met with two chilling words that ended all argument: Remember Beulah.

The law holds to this day. I have walked through villages between Powys and Brycheiniog where goat pens maintain their numbers with the precision of ritual, and though men no longer speak openly of why, they teach their sons to count their animals carefully and to recognize when enough has become too much.

The bards claim that wisdom bought with other people's suffering should never be refused. The borderlands have taken that lesson to heart.

The saying "stubborn as an old goat" has its roots here as well, in Geifryn's refusal to heed his wife's plea, in his dismissal of druidic warning, in his choosing to grasp after visions while all he held crumbled to nothing in his hands. The phrase carries weight in these valleys in ways it does not elsewhere, for here everyone knows what stubbornness costs when appetite mistakes itself for understanding.

Present State

The ruins of Beulah lie in the borderlands where valleys run green and hills rise grey with stone. Fine grazing land, the sort that seems blessed, yet no one has built there since the burning. The ox-masters of Garth graze their cattle there, but never for long and never in numbers that might take too much. Never in winter. Never past sundown.

Scholar's Note

I have not walked those ruins myself, though I am told that on certain nights when wind comes from the west and the air grows heavy, you can hear it: a sound that might be a goat screaming in darkness, or something that was once a man who learned too late that growth without limit is merely another name for destruction.

The church says Beulah is simply empty, that Geifryn died of exposure in the hills and the law emerged from natural caution. The druids, when they dare speak at all, suggest otherwise. They say some transformations, once begun by madness and hunger, do not reverse simply because the man has died. They say some appetites outlast the body that first fed them.

I keep no goats myself. At my age this seems a reasonable precaution, though I cannot say whether I fear the work of tending them or the lesson they teach. Both seem burdensome to a man whose hands shake more with each passing winter and who finds himself counting things that should not be counted: the coughs that wake him in darkness, the number of pages left unwritten, the distance between what he meant to do and what he has done.

Perhaps that is what Beulah teaches in the end. Not that we should fear excess, but that we should recognize when we have become what we were trying to avoid. When we have multiplied our purposes beyond our capacity to sustain them. When the thing we reached for has begun consuming everything we already held.

One goat for every five people. Never more. Some ratios are worth remembering.

Brother Wyn of Caermynach
Anno Domini 923