Bahubali: The Beginning (2015) Clip 2

Likewise in Medham, a city noted for its lovely girls, a man sat in a tavern who had tried scores of them and recounted how expert he was at seduction.

"Ah, if I had a quart of ale for every one, I'd hardly be sober again in this life!" he hinted to his listeners, turning over his purse and finding it void of coin. "Why, did not the lady Fretcha come to me on hands and knees, saying I'd ruined her for life? Haw-haw! Begged me, on my oath-literally begged me-to make an 'honest woman' of her! Haw-haw-haw! And then there was the lady Brismalet; she did the same-what impudence! And the lady Thespie, and then Padovine... Ho! As I say, did I but have a quart of ale for each-"

"As you wish, so be it," said his neighbor, a person in black with an unusual staff, and rose. No one

noticed him depart. All were too taken aback at the spectacle of the boastful philanderer, belly distended like a hogshead, vomiting disgustingly because he could not hold ale amounting to twenty-six quarts.

"You stupid brute!" cried a carter in a hamlet hard by Acromel, and lashed his horse across the hindquarters with a steel-barbed whip. Violent though was the blow, it barely drew blood-he'd employed the whip so often, the horse's back and legs were cicatrized with impermeable scars. Nonetheless the poor beast whinnied and cringed. Therefore he beat it again, and harder still.

"Ho, that you were blessed with more sense!" he roared. "Would you could learn how not to spill my load crossing a rut!"

Still grumbling about the horse's lack of wit, he went to the back of the cart to retrieve the ill-stowed sack of grain which had tumbled off.

"As you wish, so be it," said the traveler, and the horse reared up, tipping the whole ton-weight of bags on the stooping carter. Then it chewed intelligently through the traces and took its leave, to enjoy lush upland grass and roam free.

"By your favor, sir," said a boy of ten or twelve years, hunting a hedgerow near the village Wyve, "are such plants poisonous or wholesome?"

Offering for inspection a glabrous brownish fungus.

"Wholesome," said the traveler. "They may be fried."

With a moue, the boy tossed the toadstool aside.

"Are you not glad to have found that it's edible?" asked the traveler. "I took it you were gathering food."

"No, sir," said the boy. His voice and eyes were older than his years. "I seek poisons to give to my mother; she rules me unkindly and will not let me do whatever I like."

He sighed enormously. "Ah, that I might recognize instanter what may be relied on to entrain death!"

"As you wish, so be it," said the traveler, and went on, leaving the boy weeping because he realized: no matter what diet is chosen, sooner or later death ensues.

Thus, pretty much as might have been expected, the way of the traveler wound on, until that night which overtook him deeper than other nights on the flank of Rotten Tor, in which he discovered why the honest working-man from Gander's Well had carefully sought tinder to bear on a journey a mere hour in length.

And why the tinder had to be of a tree which once had drunk a marvelous spring far underground.

And also one thing far more important: why, when all about him he saw the triumph of the homely commonplace virtues, the prevalence only of the everyday vices such as laziness and greed-earnest, if any were to be had, of the impending conclusion of his task-he first should learn the flavor of that bitter new edge acquired by apprehension, which turns it into something cruder.

Fear.